The Chalk Line

There was a chalk line on the sidewalk in front of the National Hotel, two feet out from the curb, and Isaiah Fortune respected it the way you respect a state border.

The line had been drawn by the police in the spring and redrawn three times since. Wheels were to stay outside it. Horses were to stay outside it. Officer Dooley came by twice a day, a man from the Sixth Precinct with a belly and a stick, and he said nothing to the white drivers who encroached by six inches. To Isaiah he had said, once, in June, tapping the rim with his stick:

"The chalk, boy."

Since then Isaiah pulled up two and a half feet out. The margin cost him the best place and spared him the stick, and he had done that particular sum so often in his life that he no longer did it: he knew the answer.

That morning he had been on the stand since six.

The weather had cleared. The mud had frozen in the night and now formed hard ridges that lamed the horses, and by nine the sun had returned them to mud. There was a continual movement of quartermaster wagons along the avenue, six-mule teams heading north loaded with hay, and twice that morning a convoy of ambulances had gone by at a walk, their canvas down, without a sound from inside.

Isaiah had taken three fares. A Treasury clerk as far as Fifteenth. Two ladies to Center Market, with fourteen parcels and not a word. An old man to the church on Sixth, who had asked him whether he could read and had seemed disappointed to learn that he could.

The fourth stopped at his wheel.

He was a man of about forty, in a gray overcoat, with a leather trunk that the hotel porter had just carried down. He looked at the carriage. He looked at the horse. Then he raised his eyes to the box, and Isaiah saw pass over that face the thing he had seen pass a thousand times, a very small drawing-back, barely a movement of the shoulders, nothing you could put a name to.

The man took two steps and got into the next carriage.

Isaiah did not move. The driver of the next carriage was an Irishman named Mulvaney who had nothing to do with it and who, going by, gave him an embarrassed nod. Isaiah returned it. You did not get angry at Mulvaney. You did not get angry at anyone in particular; it was like getting angry at the rain.

He lost the fare, and the morning with it, because the place he had held since six was now third and he would have to wait for the other two to go.

He climbed down, went round the carriage, lifted the horse's near forefoot and scraped out the frog with his knife. There was nothing in it. He knew there was nothing in it. He set the foot down, ran his hand along the neck, and got back on the box.

The carriage was not his. Neither was the horse.

They belonged to a man on Fourteenth Street named Kearns, who owned eleven carriages and rented this one to Isaiah by the day. What was left at the end of the day was Isaiah's. Some days something was left. Others, when it rained too hard or the horse went lame, nothing was left and Isaiah paid all the same, because that was the arrangement, and because ten men were waiting for his place.

A decent horse cost more this year than last. The government was buying everything with four legs, and paying cash. For a sound draft animal, not young, without a blemish, you had to reckon on more than in the spring, and more again than at Christmas. A carriage was another matter; you could find them secondhand at the carriage-makers on Sixth, and a secondhand one, if you knew how to look at the axles, could last ten years.

Isaiah knew how to look at axles. It was about all he had.

Around eleven the hotel's service door opened and a woman came out with a parcel.

He knew her by sight. She came out that way two or three times a week, always in a hurry, always with something in her arms, and she went up toward Seventh on foot. She was one of the hotel's people — not an ordinary chambermaid, by the way the others stepped aside when she passed, but not one of the proprietors either, because she carried her own parcels.

That morning the parcel was too big.

She braced it on her hip, nearly lost it, caught it with her chin. A string had given way and the paper was gaping. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, looked around, and saw the rank of carriages.

She went straight to the first, which was Mulvaney's — no, Mulvaney had gone; it was old Prentiss's now — hesitated, then went down the rank and stopped at Isaiah's wheel.

"Are you going north?"

"I go where I'm told, ma'am."

"I can't pay for a fare."

Isaiah got down.

"Then I won't charge you for one."

He took the parcel. It was more bulky than heavy — linen, something soft and awkward that slid about on its own. He squared it up, passed a turn of string round it from his pocket — he always had string, a driver always has string — pulled it tight, knotted it, and gave it back to her tied.

She watched him do it without saying anything.

"There you are, ma'am."

"You don't want anything."

"No, ma'am."

"Why?"

Isaiah got back up on his box, because a man standing on a sidewalk talking to a white woman is noticed, and a man sitting on a driver's box talking to a white woman is not noticed.

"Because tying up a parcel isn't a fare."

She stayed a moment longer, the parcel against her hip, with an expression he could not read — not gratitude, not embarrassment, something more like annoyance.

"Thank you," she said at last.

Then she went on up the avenue.

Isaiah watched her go until she turned the corner, which was a thing he never did, and he realized it at the moment she turned.

He took up the reins. The rank had moved along one place. He was second now, and in ten minutes he would be first, and there were still six hours of daylight.