The woods are much changed, and how a good man lived then would try the best men now.
The next day Owen went out on the Tote Road with a team, packing in canned peaches and flour, pork and beef, and a barrel of doughnuts, to the camp far up on Good Friday Mountain. It took hours to get there, and so he slept the first night under the moon. By the time he reached higher ground, snow had fallen.
The next morning, in the crisp snow-filled air, he saw Good Friday Mount, and knew the teamsters would be hard pressed to get down a load. And on every foot up that mountain, he saw in his mind’s eye the horses stumble, and the loads come down upon their backs.
“Poor fuckin’ horses,” he thought, for unlike Will he had always thought a little more of horses than men—which even he considered a weakness. And Will would consider unforgivable.
Any qualms or weakness here would soon be known by men who cherished strength.
He reviewed his site—knew which teams of horses would come in, the men, the cutting they had done at the top of the hill where they would start in a week or so to haul it by horse to the riverbank, to block and chain it up until the spring drive. He needed dams built so the runoff would be great enough to carry the timber, and that very morning he ordered his men down to do it. He also ordered a road straight down over an embankment—the only place on the face of the mountain where one could possibly do it—and to have a bridge constructed at the bottom. They did what he said.
Still, even the loyal ones knew it was a harsh place.
“I know it is a harsh place,” Jameson said, “so go now if you need to.”
None did.
It was widely thought in the last week or two that Jameson would give over their holdings and sell out to Estabrook. And that Owen had come home as a war hero to get the best price.
Owen made it clear that this was not the case.
They would continue to cut upon Good Friday, and they would bring the wood to the mill in the spring.
Later that day he walked down into the shine and told the fellers that he knew it was a hard place—but they had been in hard spots before, hadn’t they. The way they would fashion the run down to Arron Brook would be the most dangerous run in the province. He told them this point blank.
One of the teamsters who had come in early, Gravellier, said there might be another way around. He asked Owen if he knew that.
“Yes I do,” Owen, who had looked at a map of the area, said, “but there is no time to trim another road so far away.”
They asked Owen if he had run out a team.
“Yes I have,” he said, “once or twice. I won’t lie, I am not a great teamster—but I will rely upon great teamsters here!”
They stood about him in the year’s first snow, with axes, draft horses, and chains, the “shine” they had cut looking like a tunnel into the future, bright with the bark-scalped trees and dark with the shadow of trees ready to be felled, some of the men like ghosts scattered here and there, wearing thick woolen shirts, Humphrey pants, and old coats, their beards scrapped with tree chips, ice, and snot, they breathed in the dense wood, the only world they knew—while the world at that moment in Toronto, New York, or London knew nothing or cared little for the millions of board feet these men had cut, skewered out of the earth for the benefit of those cities and city dwellers, who would think of them, if at all, as savages.
Owen sat that night in the smoky camp—where things were not much different than what he had seen as a boy. He saw the socks and woolen underwear sacked up to dry on poles above the stove, the arms and muscled backs of men making ready for the night in the sweet acrid smell of burning wood. He understood it was the last of the lumber baron years, and of his family’s operation (although he pretended not to). New companies as far away as the States would come in and create a new market, for tissue and toilet paper, for boxes to put trifles in. For commodities they did not even now know existed. They would haul by truck and not horse, they would cut by chainsaw and not ax, they would load by harvester and not hand—they would rid the world of the very woods they depended on. Owen could glimpse this future more than some others here, but it was an erstwhile glimpse, a glimpse he himself did not fully understand.
In twenty years this life, these men of almost two centuries, would be no more. They would be like Yeats’ dissatisfied ones. Unable, many of them, to exist in the world now—at this time, what would happen—what would happen to dreams still soft in the night air?
A man like many here would not live in the world to come. They would fight it—would fight the new world unto death. But the world would not lose. Just like the First People before them, these men, these tough, kind-hearted men, would lose. For that was the way of the world, and Owen knew it. That was why he was full of sadness when he saw these men scattered about the trees and imagined them ghosts, with their bodies still strong and hearts innocent. He knew if he told any of them to walk fifty miles into the wilderness they would turn and go, so anxious they were to prove themselves to those they worked and bled for. Already there was a great road being hacked out of the middle of the province by companies ready to use truck instead of horse and river, so in ten years horse and river would become obsolete, and truck and gas be the measure.
Owen’s objection to the world changing might be the objection of a good man—but what did that matter? Ten thousand good men could object and still the battle of Stalingrad happen.
He looked at these men and sighed. He certainly had brought them to a tough place.
But for him was another tougher place, not yet seen.
The tougher place was the blossoming opinion of the town. In this opinion, of the old woman who had seen them, and drinking men on the corner, Owen had lied to the men who did not want to cut on a dangerous mountain, and was having relations with Reggie’s wife—Reggie, who Owen had fired over a disagreement about this cut.
In the blossoming opinion of the town, which had so recently raised him up, “so not a foot touch the ground” Owen had snubbed his former sweetheart Lula, who had suffered a stroke and therefore suffered too much. This alone was the most disparaging rumor against him. He was obligated to marry her.
In the blossoming opinion of the town, Camellia was asking Reggie for a divorce, a very serious matter back then, especially for a Catholic girl.
This was the opinion of our town, which neither Owen nor Camellia had heard, but would have to face in the coming months.