With Cornelius gone, everyone assumes that the Dort estate will go to the nearest relative, a cousin living up in Phonecia. You can appreciate that young man’s surprise, not to mention everyone else’s, when who should reappear but Cornelius’s long-ago Guest, claiming the estate for his own. He must be well into his eighties, if not older, but the years have been kind to the man. Kind, they’ve been positively generous. Some say it’s as if the man hasn’t aged at all. Obviously, this can’t be the case. But he must dye his hair and beard, because they’re as black as the day he first came riding out of the west, and his face shows none of the lines you’d expect the decades to have carved onto it. The Guest declares that he has a copy of Cornelius’s will to support his claim, which, when the inevitable pack of lawyers descends on the situation, turns out to be the case. There is a will, and it’s legitimate. The cousin is outraged. While there’d certainly been no love lost between him and Cornelius, neither has he had any reason to suspect the old man was plotting a slap in the face like this. There’s a story that, once the lawyers have departed and the Guest retreated to his new property, the cousin sneaks into the house and takes everything he can lay his hands on, but, if that’s true, no charges are ever filed.
It’s going on twenty years since Cornelius’s Guest was last glimpsed by anyone. For younger folks, it’s as if a character from a storybook stepped off the page. For older folks, it’s as if someone you haven’t seen in years stepped from the last time you saw them to now, skipping all the years in between. With his return comes a change in the stranger’s behavior. No longer furtive, the man begins appearing all over the place, as if inheriting Cornelius’s fortune has given him substance he formerly lacked. He spends most of his time at the spring, conducting experiments that consist, so far as anyone can tell, of lowering different lengths of rope and chain into the water. Those who observe this activity assume the Guest is measuring the spring’s depth. But why he should be so concerned with such matters, when the spring is going to be at the bottom of the Reservoir, no one can guess. People assume he’s a scientist, or maybe a crack-pot inventor. He does the same thing at spots up and down the Esopus, casting the end of a length of rope or chain out into the water, waiting a couple of minutes, then hauling it back in. There are markings on the ropes and chains, which no one is close enough to read but which seem like units of measurement. A few folks say the man mumbles to himself all the while he’s doing whatever it is he’s doing. Keeping time, could be. If he notices anyone watching him, he tips his hat to them, then returns to his work. That gesture, that tip of the hat, bothers whoever’s on the receiving end of it. There’s mockery in the touch of hand to hat, not enough to be insulting, but more than enough to make a person self-conscious. There’s a kind of warning to it, too, as if the man is saying, “Okay, you’ve seen me: now run along.” There are few who see it who don’t leave off their viewing and go straight home.
Pretty soon, the Guest is once again the center of rumor. What with everything, people in the valley are under a lot of stress, so any behavior like the stranger’s is bound to set their imaginations, not to mention their tongues, running. More than one person claims they’ve seen the Guest walking around the spring late on a moonlit night with a tall, white-haired man they swear was Cornelius Dort. Old Otto Schalken’s brother, Paul, out for a walk one afternoon, sees the Guest strolling the Dort orchards, accompanied by a woman wearing a black dress and a long, black veil. The sight of her inspires such a rush of fear in Paul that he bolts for home, running all the way to his front door as if the very devil himself were after him. As far as anyone knows, the stranger is the sole inhabitant of the Dort house, the last of the servants having been dismissed once the lawyers upheld the man’s claim to the estate. There are nights, however, when every window in the house, from top to bottom and all around the sides, is ablaze with light that frames the silhouettes of men and women behind them. Voices drift across the open air. Though no one can make out what they’re saying, a few folks claim to hear Cornelius’s tones mixed in with them. Most likely, the fellow was just hosting a party or two, but no one sees the guests coming or going.
VI
Meanwhile, at long last, Lottie Schmidt’s family has started to settle into life at the camp. Rainer gets on well as a stonemason. Most of the other masons are Italian, some brought over from Italy expressly for this job, and Rainer speaks Italian with sufficient fluency to make a good impression on his co-workers — management, too, who appreciate his ability to translate. Clara decides what can’t be cured must be endured, and finds herself a job in the camp’s bakery. Lottie goes with her. Her sisters, Gretchen and Christina, attend the camp school. Rainer is making good money. A stonemason could bring home about three dollars a day; I don’t know what the modern equivalent of that is, but, apparently, for a man with a wife and three daughters to take care of, it’s all right. Between both parents’ jobs, the Schmidts are able to repay Clara’s sister, and then begin putting something away for the house they want to buy. Clara has dreams of returning to the City, to be close to her sister, while Rainer’s thinking that Wiltwyck might be nice to settle in. I doubt it’s the life either of them expected when they married, but they’re doing well at it.
Working on the Reservoir is not risk-free. Basically, the laborers are building a pair of enormous walls: the dam to hold back and contain the Esopus, and the weir that will divide the Reservoir into east and west basins. Once they’re done, and the valley floods, they’ll have constructed a lake roughly twelve miles long by three miles wide. There are a lot of unskilled men on the job. There’s a lot of machinery. Let’s face it, even skilled workers make mistakes. There are accidents. Men are hurt and killed. Medicine at this time isn’t like medicine, now. Say your arm is crushed by a block of stone: amputation’s going to be the procedure of choice. It’s the remedy to a wide range of problems. If you manage to avoid injury, you still have disease to worry about. The flu alone is a significant cause of death. I don’t think we really appreciate the difference a drug like penicillin’s made. There’s a hospital at the camp, but its facilities are limited. If you’re seriously hurt, or sick, you’re going to need to seek care in Wiltwyck — and you’re going to need to survive the trip there. And, of course, all this goes for the workers’ families as well. You might say that folks in general live much closer to death than do we.
When Lottie and her family have been at the camp about a year and a half, the woman who lives next to them is killed, trampled. There’s a mule barn at the camp, mules being the animal of choice for hauling the wagons used to transport pretty much everything. There are three mules hitched to a wagon, and they’re a pretty common sight. Every day at five, when the quitting whistle blows, the drivers of the wagons stage an impromptu race up the road leading to the mule barn. All the kids in the camp gather at the side of the road to watch the wagons roar by, the drivers standing up, one hand holding the reins, the other cracking the long whips they used, the mules’ legs churning. On the day of this particular tragedy, Lottie isn’t present — she’s finishing up at the bakery with Clara — but Gretchen and Christina are. Later, they’ll tell the rest of the family how, right as the teams were thundering down the final stretch of road before the barns, this woman, their neighbor, the Hungarian woman who never spoke to anyone, strode out in front of them. Her hair was unbound; she was wearing a plain blouse with the sleeves rolled up and a long skirt. It was as if she’d just stepped out of her kitchen. There was nothing any of the drivers could do. The wagons bore her down and crushed her. One of the drivers managed to turn his team around and race back to the spot where she lay broken and bloody. He leapt down from his seat, carried the woman to the back of his wagon, and made for the camp hospital like Mercury himself. The mule drivers are black, you see, and the woman they’ve run down is white. You can imagine what’s going through the fellow’s head.