Vin coasted down Main Street, reading the intersection signs. He was early so he turned onto Snyder’s Landing Road, which sliced through cornfields and wound down through woods to the Potomac River. Just before the road's terminus at a boat ramp, a wooden bridge spanned a broad ditch thick with undergrowth and trees. A sign confirmed what he already knew – this drained and abandoned artery was the C&O Canal, on the five-mile level of Sharpsburg above Lock 39. He drove a dirt-and-gravel spur alongside the canal until he noticed a cloud of dust in his wake, then reversed course and headed back to town.
At 117 Chapline, Betsy was knitting on her porch swing when he parked and crossed the street on foot, carrying a folding notepad. The clapboard house was painted a warm tan color that had been softened and dulled by the sun. He rapped his knuckles against a column to get her attention and smiled when she looked up from her knitting.
“Mrs. Reed?” She peered at him over her glasses and smiled back. “I’m Vin Illick. We spoke on the phone about…”
“Yes, of course,” she said, putting her knitting aside. “Hello.” She stood up and brushed the wrinkles from her slacks and patterned blouse, then pushed the octagonal frames back against her face to see him better. Her hair was swept away from her forehead and curled neatly behind her ears, its color somewhere between sand and gray. She looks closer to seventy than sixty, Vin thought, noticing the sagging skin on her cheeks and neck. But still petite, with a firm grip to her weathered hand. Aside from a hint of garnet on her lips, she didn’t seem to be wearing makeup.
“Please call me Betsy,” she said in the warm, fragile voice he’d heard on the phone. “Let’s go inside where we can sit. I’m afraid there’s not much room out here.”
He held the screen door open and followed her through. The entryway opened directly into the unlit living room, where a couch with faded upholstery sat against the far wall, framed by end tables and windows with blinds angled to let the sunlight in. Two colorless stuffed armchairs with draped lace doilies faced the couch across a central coffee table. The still air smelled like rarely-used furniture.
Betsy switched on the end-table lamps and offered Vin an armchair. As he eyed two stacks of leather-bound albums at the center of the coffee table, she retreated to the kitchen to pour lemonade, then returned with filled glasses and took the chair beside him. “I told my daughter you were visiting this afternoon,” she said. “And that you were writing an article about the canal days, so you wanted to know about Grandpa Em. Alison helped me get Dan’s albums out and we looked through them with the girls before they left.
“Of course, most of the photos are of Dan and me when we were younger, and of Alison, Tom, and Linda growing up.” She sat back and turned toward Vin with a half-smile. “It’s always funny to see children who can’t sit still for five seconds spend an hour looking at old pictures of their parents.”
Vin smiled back. “I enjoyed doing that as a kid.”
She pointed to the stack of three albums to his right, which looked newer than the others. “Those are mostly snapshots of our children. Alison was born in ’57, so that’s about as far back as those books go.”
Vin shifted in his chair. “I think it’s great that you and your husband found time to collect all your photos in albums. No one in my family was ever organized enough to do that. Most of ours are stuffed inside envelopes and buried in drawers.”
“Well, that was something Dan liked to do.” She pointed to the other albums, a black one on top of a brown one, both discolored and scratched. “Those two are older. Most of those photos came from Dan’s father, Jake. So there are pictures of Dan and Sarah as children, back in the thirties, and then some that came later. After Jake gave Dan and Sarah their first cameras, he didn’t take many pictures anymore. I guess that was his way of passing the torch.”
Vin listened with his eyes on Betsy while trying to unobtrusively settle his notebook in his lap and open the cover. She seemed to be relaxing into her chair and warming to the conversation. There was something about her, a straightforwardness that he first noticed when they spoke on the phone. He found it refreshing and didn’t recognize it right away. Sincerity – and an utter lack of pretense. Was that something that came with age, or was it something she carried forward from a different era?
“I think you told me that Emmert Reed was Jake’s father?”
“That’s right,” Betsy said. “Grandpa Em was Jake’s father and Dan’s grandfather.” She gestured to the albums again. “There’s a picture of Em and his family in that bottom album, back in 1909. The girls and I were surprised to find that there. It must have come from a box of Jake’s things that Ida gave Dan. We could only find a few pictures of him.”
“Ida was Jake’s wife?”
“That’s right. Ida lived to be eighty-seven. She died just three years before Dan.”
Vin sipped his lemonade and extracted his pen from the notebook. He sketched a rough family tree, with “Emmert + ” at the top and “Jake + Ida” on the next rung. On the rung below their names he wrote “Dan + Betsy.”
“What was Emmert’s wife’s name?”
“Helen.” He wrote “Helen” to the right of Emmert’s name.
“And you mentioned that your husband used to visit his grandfather when he was young, and Emmert would tell him stories about the canal days?”
Betsy nodded. “Mostly about how hard it was to run a canal boat. But how it was rewarding, too, since you were your own boss. You could run all night if you had the motivation. And there was always something to see or do along the canal.” She paused to look at Vin, who nodded reassuringly. “Dan used to pass that sermon along to our children. He wanted them to see the value of hard work. Of course, I suspect old Emmert maybe wasn’t quite the role model Dan made him out to be.”
“Do you mean after he gave up boating?”
“Probably both before and after,” she said. “Dan’s father used to say that Grandpa Em knew how to entertain himself in Georgetown. So some people called him M-Street. And then when he started tending lock down near Leesburg – was that at Edwards Ferry? I’m not sure – he had a good business selling barbecue. And maybe he sold a little whiskey as well. But that was Prohibition times, so lots of people were shaving the edges off the law.”
Vin thought about how to phrase his next question. “I know – from my research – that Emmert was quite familiar with Georgetown, and really with the whole canal, from captaining a boat. And then after 1913, he lived at Lock 25 at Edwards Ferry for about ten years during boating seasons. Is there any other location along the canal that you associate with him? Some other place he liked to spend time?”
Betsy stared at her folded hands before shaking her head. “No,” she said tentatively, looking up at Vin. “I don’t think so. Grandpa Em lived here in Sharpsburg when he retired from the canal. He had a house a couple miles from here on Harpers Ferry Road where they raised their children. Jake used to take Dan and Sarah over there for barbecue back in the thirties, though times were hard and sometimes they couldn’t afford meat. Emmert and Helen lived there until Emmert died. A few years later Jake and Howard helped her fix it up and sell it, and then Helen moved in with Alice until she died.”
“Alice?”
“Alice was Dan’s aunt. Jake’s younger sister. And Jake had an older brother Howard.”
Vin wrote the names down on his tree to the left of Jake’s. “And Emmert’s old house on Harper’s Ferry Road…that’s not near the river, is it?”
Betsy shook her head. “Well, the river bends around a lot here. I suppose the house was two or three miles away. The man who bought it knocked it down and built two new houses.”
She fell silent again, her gaze fixed on a point beyond the window. Maybe she was visualizing Grandpa Em’s old house. Vin glanced at the crow’s feet around her eye and tapped his pen on the paper but wrote nothing. He felt as if there was something he should be able to learn about Emmert Reed from Betsy, but the insight danced out of reach. She was Emmert’s grandson’s widow, and she couldn’t help him solve the puzzle by identifying the place that was well known by Emmert’s albino mule. Her memories could only offer a basic sketch of Grandpa Em. He glanced back at the albums on the table. Maybe seeing the photos again would trigger something more. “Would it be alright for me to see the pictures of Emmert?”