Hostages to Fortune by William Humphrey Read Free Book Online

Frederick Church, Jason Thayer looked genteelly piratical.
    Lucky the man who had a spot of earth dear to him, that sustained and supported him as it did the primeval oaks rooted in the soil of Tony Thayer’s ancestral acres. Tony himself was a product of the river as surely as was one of its shad.
    The river dominated life along it, and helped somewhat to democratize that life. Without it the gulf between the haves and the have-nots there would have been as deep as the river was wide. Water seeks its own level and there all men, rich and poor alike, must seek it. Hudson river rats found one another out across the barriers of caste and class, and the boy from beside the tracks who poled the sports in their punts through the windings of Tivoli’s South Bay in quest of ducks, who knew which of the railway trestles to fish from for striped bass, who knew how to pickle and to smoke the ale-wives that, on their spring spawning run, paved from bank to bank the river’s tributaries, grew up to hobnob with the heirs of Astors, Livingstons, Van Rensellaers, and Thayers.
    You can never ascend the same river twice, we are told; the Hudson, being tidal (“the river that flows both ways,” the Indian name for it meant) was even more changeable than most. For those who lived along its banks its tides were an additional clock, regulating their activities from early childhood on. Riverbank children found their way down to the water with an instinct like ducklings. Christy Thayer was given a boat of her own almost as soon as she was trusted out of sight. She taught herself to sail in the bay, to run and when necessary to repair an outboard motor; only when the river was iced over was she to be seen out of a flotation vest, and all summer long she was as brown as toast. The river’s seasons dictated its people’s pastimes. In spring, when the ice broke up and floes of it drifted down and out to sea and left it open once more and the flights of wildfowl used it as their flyway, you went fishing. In summer there was boating and picnicking along its banks and on its islands. As the days began to shorten you built a duckblind to replace the one that had been broken up and swept away in the spring thaw. Then when, in the morning before the sun had touched it, there was rime at the water’s edge and thistledown from pollinating cattails like a hatch of insects on the surface, you punted in the shallows for snipe. When the season opened in late October you shot the ducks that had summered there, then wintry weather up north sent them south sometimes as thick as bees in swarm and long undulant ribbons of geese sounded like a pack of slow-footed hunting hounds high overhead. Then the river congealed and looked and sounded underfoot like steel and there were iceboat races on the bays and at night skating parties around big bonfires on the ice.
    The river instilled in its people not only a second clock and a calendar but also a compass. It compelled the eye. It was the river you looked out on the first thing in the morning, and finding it there was your reassurance that you were too. It was toward the river that on a summer evening with drink in hand you strolled out on the lawn to watch the sun sink in fire behind the cobalt and cerulean Catskills.
    To Tony his river and its bounty was the greatest gift within his giving. He was generous with it, expecting in return only that it be appreciated and respected. He responded to people in a measure by their response to it. For you to become an intimate part of his life the river had to become a part of yours. Of his best friend’s it had long since.
    It was in May when the herring made their run upstream to spawn in their native tributaries that the Hudson reawoke. In this annual rite honorary river rat Ben Curtis was an eager, an impatient participant. The sign to watch for was the blossoming of the shadblow. On a day soon after this event would come a call from Tony