Port Argent: A Novel

by Arthur Colton

The Boulevard was another spasmodic vision of a forgotten commissioner. It was planned to run somewhat in the shape of a half circle, around the city, from a river-bank park on the north to a river-bank park on the south, with Wabash Park midway. Hennion tried to fancy himself a landscape gardener. He stood a long while staring down at the creek, which was brimful with the spring rains. Pools of brown water lay all about the bottom lands and in the brush.

To build a bridge as it should be built, to shape a city as it should be shaped, to make Port Argent famous for its moonshaped Boulevard, to accomplish something worth while, to make a name—it looked like a weedy road to travel in, and no small trick to keep out of the mud. Still, after all, the mud was mostly in the ruts. People said you couldn't get ahead there without splashing through the ruts. Maybe not. There would be blackguarding probably. But Macclesfield had been handled anyway.

Wabash Park was a scrubby-looking place now. Beckett would have to be sent after the Park Board, to tell them to clean it up. By the way, Macclesfield was on that effortless, or otherwise busy Park Board. The rest of the commissioners didn't know a landscape from a potato patch. Macclesfield was the man. He might be persuaded to have a sentiment on the subject.

Hennion followed the creek out of the park to a lately macadamised road. A wide, straight, half-made highway started from the other side of the road and stretched a half mile across country, with small maples planted regularly on either side. It was all of the Boulevard and the spasmodic commissioner's vision that had ever been realised. So it remained a fragment, of no use to anyone, one of Port Argent's humourous civic capers.

Beyond this, following the surveys, he came through a rough and noisy neighbourhood—factories, and unkempt streets, empty lots strewn with refuse—and came to the canal, the great Interstate Canal, built by Hennion the elder. It was idle now. The water splashed musically from its lock gates, and the towpath was overgrown. Then followed pastures with cattle in them, and fields where men were ploughing. He came to the river bank at last, where Wyandotte Park lay, popular already for Sunday afternoons, popular somewhat on any afternoon in spring and summer for picnics and boating. It was dotted with stalls of the sellers of hard drinks and cigars, sellers of soft drinks and chewing gum. It possessed a band and an incipient menagerie, a merry-go-round, a boathouse, and several flamboyant restaurants. It was the cheerfullest place in Port Argent on a Sunday afternoon.

The day was almost gone. Hennion's notebook was half-full of mysterious jottings, and his shoes caked with clay, the slimy blue mud that sticks and stains and is the mother of harvests. The river had a swifter current here than lower down, and there were marshy islands, steep bluffs on either side, and up-stream a vista of deeply-wooded shores.

He stood near the merry-go-round and watched the crowd. He wondered if it were not peculiar for a man to know so many people as he did, to know almost everyone in Port Argent. It had always been a fact to some extent. But Port Argent was getting to be a large city. Still, he had an impression that strange faces and unnamed were rather an exception. Most faces that he saw were familiar. He looked around him in the park.

Here were three young girls sipping soda water. He did not know them. Wait! They were all three daughters of Kottar, the baker on Maple Street. They'd been growing up. And here came Kottar himself with the rest of the flock, taking an afternoon's pleasure. Here were two men getting on the trolley car. They appeared to be mainly drunk. No use! He knew them too. One of them was Jimmy Shays, shoemaker, on Muscadine Street, east side; the other was Tom Coglan, one time a drayman, another time one of a batch of John Murphy's, which batch Hennion had helped John Murphy to get jobs for with the Traction Company. Coglan and Shays lived in a house on Muscadine Street, with an outside stairway. Hicks, who shot Wood, used to live there too; grocery store underneath, grocer named Wilson. Names of Kottar's children, remembered to have once been so stated by Kottar, Nina, Katherine, Henry, Carl, William, Adela, and Elizabeth. One appeared to remember things useful, like the price per gross of three-inch screws at present quoting, as well as things useless, like the price three years ago. Hennion thought such an inveterate memory a nuisance.

Coglan and Shays appeared to be happy. Everybody appeared to be happy in Wyandotte Park. Hennion concluded that he liked Wyandotte Park and its people. When you knew them, you found they differ little for better or worse from Herbert Avenue people, Secors and Macclesfields—all people, and a mixed, uncertain article to deal in.

He sat down on the roots of a tree. It grew on the edge of a bluff over the river, a survival of that fraternity of trees which had covered the whole section but a few generations back.