Things continued in the deep woods, with the teams left in.
But then another man made his way to Jameson’s camp one night out of the dark on the last day of the trial—that is, about the last week of March 1947. There was a window of respite from the weather, and he managed to get in and out.
They thought it was Innis, but it wasn’t. Innis had decided he could not or would not get in from his depot at the talons—a place where four streams into Arron Brook joined. It was a man from Sloan, Blind Andre, who had been fired from his cut after everything halted.
He had walked all the way from the Tabusintac cut in the storm, wearing as many men did then, a Russian fur hat and fur-lined boots. He was disheveled at five-foot-six with a black, full beard and forearms almost twice the size of his biceps. He sat in squat fashion in the corner, his gray coat missing three buttons and tied together with twine, and among every other patchwork of clothing, a silk scarf given to him by his girl who conceived a child every year he was away.
He coughed, took the tattered coat and his hat off, and said: “This is a danger here—so you lads be on guard.”
“Why is that?” Richardson asked. He had just come in from laying down his skid load and putting the horses away. His face was haunted, as were those of the other men because they had driven themselves beyond exhaustion now. In this smoky camp they looked every bit like explorers cut away from the herd. Blind Andre had some tea.
“There is a man here sent to steal half your work,” Blind Andre said, saluting them as he stirred the sugar in.
“How?” Trethewey said.
Blind Andre said he did not know.
“Who is the man here?” Curtis said.
Blind Andre looked about, passed Tomkins’ face with no more than a glance, and said that he didn’t know. He said it was a rumor that he took seriously. He said no one could have foreseen what would be happening in the woodlots in this age. That this year 1947 would be a watershed year for the men, and that in ten years—Blind Andre would predict that in ten years not one of these men would be working the way they were today, and many wouldn’t have jobs at all.
“So it don’t matter what it is we say, do, or don’t do—we is up against her—and the world will change for us—forever.”
Sloans on the Tabusintac, Andre told them, had a thing called a buzz saw that cut out trees faster then Bartlett, pared trees down faster then Pitman. That in a year or so, these buzz saws would get better and better and faster and faster, and put scores of men out of work, and great roads would be built for trucks and heavy claws that would do the work a hundred men could. The horses would become piddling and meaningless, and the mountains they were on would be bulldozed to nothing—the water table would dry—all they saw would be changed. This great mountain would be nothing in the coming years. The beavers that had made this great stand of cedar would be trapped out of existence, and the world would become one of factories and smoke.
The men sat mute and careful in the way they moved and spoke, as if asking for details carefully would relieve them of the burden of the knowledge being entrusted.
“They’ll always need horses,” Curtis blurted.
“No they won’t, son,” Blind Andre said. Though things had frozen up this year, and oil in the trucks had solidified, new years were coming—and no one would look back. Their history would be forgotten. Their smiles in pictures, holding the halters or pots and pans or axes in the shine, would be seen only in museums by men who could not last a day working with them.
The little spruce books they made for their children forgotten.
The songs they wrote about men like Will Jameson and Peter Emberly—now as popular with the men as the Grand Ole Opry—forgotten.
The crazy wheel forgotten.
The two sled rotten and left to wither along roads that would be overgrown, near rivers no longer traveled so arrogant historians would believe they could track the measure of these men by finding a rotted jab pole in the sun.
Curtis, at twenty-two a professional teamster and perhaps the best young teamster in the world, would not be needed. His hands, which bore the traces and marks of the reins, would no longer be needed. His ability to defy death would be considered nothing at all. Not when a truck could do ten times the work in an eighth of the time.
They sat stultified at the possibility that what they did, and why they lived, would no longer be required.
“Why do you think union is coming?” Blind Andre said. “The barons themselves are to be forgotten—all of you together will drown in the new world, and companies will come in to make these trees soft arsewipe for pretty girls. That’s why union is coming—in ten years they will have sold out to large companies and made themselves new empires.”
They were silent for almost an hour, drinking from a bottle of Captain Morgan rum.
And then, finally, someone spoke.
“We promised to get the wood below—and we will,” Richardson said.
“And since the old world is changing so fast—we are all damned anyway. If nothing we do matters, let’s make a stand here,” Nolan said.
“We will stay and work,” Trethewey said.
The other teamsters agreed.
Tomkins said nothing. It seemed his die was cast. And he was playing Judas. But he had to, for Solomon Hickey had been his only friend.
The next day the men could not work. Tomkins stayed in his bunk. By afternoon, when he woke, he discovered Blind Andre had gone, with Meager leading him out to the top of little Hackett Brook.
The drifts were now as high as the roof, the hovels buried. The only thing he could see from the near hovel was Duff Almighty’s tail, and some wet horseshit in the snow.
“Will we die here?” Tomkins said to Meager after he got back that night.
“No,” Meager whispered, “I promise for your dad’s sake, I will keep you alive here.” He said this, and Tomkins shuddered. “You have a fever,” he said, “but I will get you tea—and I will put an herb in it to stop your runs.”
Each man was down to two cups a day. This would be Stretch Tomkins’ fourth. And he had snuck four of the last dozen donuts that had so happily come in a barrel a few months ago.
Tomkins turned his face to the wall and prayed, even though he was an atheist.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Tomkins,” Meager answered, bringing him over a cup of tea. “Only three more weeks now, and we’ll be off cut and home to cause mischief—won’t that be a fucker’s fun?”
“Well,” Tomkins said peevishly, his face to the wall, “how can we be happy on Good Friday?”
Meager smiled, nodded, and patted his shoulder: “Well, sometimes in this old world we only have benefits the boundaries of which are established by my name.”