The storm blew itself out, and the cold hovered and stayed, and then slowly dissipated and the wind died, and the cedar along the ridges was once again being pulled up by rope, horse, and men, their muscles strained and bleeding. The horses once again went into the cut with wild eyes, Butch and Missy and Duff Almighty, and the great Percherons, and each teamster felt as if they had been given a reprieve—or more than this, as if they had been sanctioned by some divinity to recreate the greatest haul of lumber in the world. Recreate because they felt it had been done already in olden time.
They worked more furious because they knew the other mills were down. They worked because they knew their lives as teamsters were coming to a close. They cut with bucksaw for the same reason—Pitman and Fraser were on the mountain, and so was Nolan and Trethewey—all for the same purpose. The purpose; well, in five years they would no longer need to use double ax or bucksaw or hitch horse.
The great moon allowed them now to work late into the night, so at times a lonely two sled would be seen way down on the flat after 11 p.m.—not coming back with a load but leaving with one—while the moon bathed down on huge glowing craters of soundless, glittering ice.
Stretch (Tomcat) Tomkins, all six-feet-two of him—so you had to dress him twice to keep him alive once, as the men said—went back to chaffing on the downhill, and Meager went back to cooking, and Gibbs treated the horses to sweets he had hidden, and Bartlett wisely determined which great section would be the last he ever cut.
A fine wind came too, but not too harsh, and lingered in the breath of the men. It was now April 1947—the very last of their world—and yes, forty thousand horses this year in the woods doing the same harsh work as Missy and Butch.
With the white moon on Monday and a bright sky, even the fellers worked after dark, and even the horses themselves believed they would survive. The snow felt warm, and undulated through the glens and valleys of the spruce, and hung on boughs all the way out to Toomey’s Quarry. So the men began to sing again the praises of their world.
A’s for the axes as youse well know
B’s for the boys that can chop ’em down
C’s for the cutting about to begin
And D’s for the danger that we live in
And there are none so happy as we
No mortal on earth is as happy as we
Hi me hi deary deary hi deary down
Give the shanty boys whiskey and nothing goes wrong
Tuesday morning the portager came in with a store of provisions, and new socks and boots, and told them that they might not know that Owen Jameson was found guilty but that his order was to get in on the first clear day and bring the men boots.
Innis said this as the first trickle of water ran over the first frozen rock, and the very first scent of earth broke free in a smell of fir bough and spruce. And the great cedar in the shape of a cross that was the inspiration for Good Friday’s name, and that was born the very year of the prophecy, was killed by Bartlett’s ax.
Innis spoke about the look of the jury—Hamilton, and Urquart, and Butler, Peterson, McLean, McGregor—all honorable men who had a duty to perform and performed it to the best of their ability. All honorable men who had done what people expected them to. Nothing more, nothing less.
“Oh, there were handshakes but not so many—and there were some smiles and jokes, but none too much.”
The men decided to work until the end of their contracts. They were down five teamsters and behind thirty loads, and knew they’d be hauling on gravel soon.
On this day Richardson turned his big Clydes and, starting with that large cedar Bartlett had just cut as his first base, went down into the yards and waited upon what would become his championship load. (They needed championship loads now to catch up on their wood.)
These were the largest trees seen here since 1850, when the Cunard line was at its prime, before it was sold to those in England who forged the Titanic. And everyone on the river had heard of this great wood—and someone said there would be a photographer here, to show Richardson coming down.
“Take yer time, boys,” he said, biting into a cold apple, “this mountain’s not going anywhere—and we go downhill fast enough.”
The horses stood still in petrified silence, just as the air was blue silent at minus ten, as the two sled was loaded painfully by men who had been loading sled for years. They would take a log on a chain hoist and roll it up on the other logs forming the base, men under it to help the three men above on the sled. If the hoist gave way and the men who strained on the sled couldn’t hold the giant timber, it would roll back on the men underneath. Peter Emberly was killed this way, a boy of seventeen. And so too was Curtis’s uncle.
As they worked, other horses were channeled around them on the sides of the hill, and hauled their ragged two sleds to other yards, where the same work took place. The smell of horsehide in the wind, the bedeviled smell of human sweat and hair, of snow and the sweet earthen smell of piss.
On Richardson’s load, when they had no logs left but tiny ones, Butch was unharnessed and brought down into the shine, to be chained to the devil’s mount, bringing the hardiest logs ahead for the two sled. The logs down below were cedar, and heavy and wide. This is what Richardson had dreamed of. The biggest load on a sled hauled since
So far down in the valley Butch went that Pitman, standing upon a branch of a hemlock he was cutting (for you often had to climb the hemlock to get above the rot), could only see the tips of his seared black ears.
Each log was marked and scaled in the shine before it was brought up, and every log was huge—the diameter of two or three men.
The scaler would be in now until the logs busted free in the water, so sure of his millions of board feet and his bonus of four hundred dollars for the extra time he spent.
The scaler said he had never seen trees this fine in thirty-two years.
“Take yer time, boys,” Richardson said, chewing another apple, “I will find better logs and take it down when I have 330. I will not rush my last load—we will be out of here next week and home on a budget of wine and fucking.”
Here he grabbed Gibbs, for he had found a broken birch runner and they tore it off, remounted the sled track, and reattached it by heating steel strips and bending them over and along the birch, so it would run smooth along the ice track.
But little Gibbs was unsure about the job—not that it wasn’t done well, but that the weight of this load might cause a sled to bound.
Meanwhile Butch, gelding from Missy off Byron’s Law, grunted under the weight of each log, so saving Missy they brought Duff Almighty to hook up with another mount, which caused his teamster, Curtis, to say he would give the horse over for a day, as long as Richardson did the same for him, for they were coming to the end of the year and Richardson would be done his haul.
These horses fearlessly strode uphill, disregarding the men guiding them until Butch’s huge feet broke the ice at the top of the skid and he came up in a roar of steam and pain, surrounded by glitters of ice and four twigs stuck in his tail.
All this while Richardson sat chewing an apple, and though it was still minus ten, waving his old civil war–shaped hat as if chasing away flies.
“Ya think ya’ll live?” Pitman asked.
“No matter,” Richardson said, lighting Fraser’s well-rolled smoke and thinking of everything he had lost in his entire life, “no matter ever no more.” For the McCord girl he had once loved and had not seen in years was no longer his, no matter what.
Far down across the ice flat, almost to Arron Brook proper, Tomkins stamped logs with the illegal and counterfeit stamp. Once in the water with thousands upon thousands of other logs, they would be recognized not as what they were—the fruit of Buckler’s mountain—but would be thought of as Estabrook’s prize. Tomkins, a man like ourselves, did this because he had not been given a team, because no one had treated him well, and because he had taken a bonus from Sonny to do what he was doing now.
And so he worked. He worked along this old skid road stamping the logs, far away from camp, as dutiful as a squirrel in fall, and did not notice Meager Fortune walking toward him with a Thermos of soup he had made. Meager had made it and decided to bring it to Tomkins because no one else would. And Tomkins was a muncher.
Tomkins had the ability to attract kindness to himself, though he himself never was kind.
“And anyway, he is not a bad lad,” Meager thought that morning, neglecting to think of all the things Tomkins had deliberately done to him.
Meager, having been in the woods all his life, thought others were like him. That is, he did not know and never considered that Tomkins wouldn’t know he was approaching. Even though he was as silent as a cat, even though he walked half hidden against the side of Arron Brook so you would see him one moment and then not see him for fifteen minutes, he simply thought no one would fail to detect him moving in and out of the old sprag trees and iced-over boulders in April of 1947. As he walked, he was thinking of Duncan and his wife Evelyn and how he loved them. Yes, they were fine people. And if what he had heard was true, that poor Evelyn had loved someone else when he was away, it didn’t matter now. He only felt sadness and love when he thought of her.
“Life is hard enough, anyway—and so many of us make mistakes—why, I have made a bunch myself and so why should I say nay to her?” Then he spoke to Evelyn; he said, “If you think you have to wait a long time for me, I believe you will be surprised. I think this world has just about done with old Meager Fortune—for as you know, the new world is here and by the 1950s there will be real fortunes to be made.”
He walked up toward Tomkins, smiling and almost ready—almost ready to wave—when he stopped and looked down at a large spruce, with its ragged beeled-back bark and its lumps where the branches came off, and he thought: “This is very strange.”
And then thought, “What is Estabrook’s timber doing up on Arron Brook side—did he take so much from his cut, he piles it in the freshets next to ours?”
Then he thought: “We have got down all the way to the old Jameson cut.” But then looking ahead in the sunlight, seeing the nodding mesmerized head of Tomkins—his elongated shadow seeming to make three people—Meager began to realize something very wrong. Then he thought of what Blind Andre had said. It was suddenly as if he was staring at someone alien with a small nodding head and stiff goatee.
“My God, what has he done to us?” he whispered. “If he is the one to claim our legitimacy, what in God’s name will happen?”
Meager turned and walked at an angle down through the yarded trees along a rut road, toward Arron Brook, and sat among some popals and talked to the birds that came around him, sitting at his feet like they had with Saint Francis some years before. If his feeling was right, what was he to do? Meager Fortune, who had caused nothing to befall anyone, really, in his life—whom God had played a great trick on, taking his wife and child away while he was running about killing Germans—this Meager Fortune now had to tell on someone. He had never told on anyone before. What was he to do?
The moose birds flew about him, softly about his knees and arms, and he took out bits of bread to throw at them. He did this for well over an hour. The sun began to disappear behind the wood, slowly and ominously, and he heard the two sled picking up Tomkins and heading back to camp, just as the sun was above some old sprag popals by the river. He got up and, walking up the pathway toward the skid road, seeing his old boot marks, realizing how happy he had been but a brief time ago, he said: “Evelyn, Evelyn, what am I to do—tell me what to say?”
The ground, slightly broken free of winter, was turning hard and cold again. And he turned down Arron Brook in the direction of the last logs Tomkins had stamped. Here he was, our Meager Fortune, wearing dark woolen pants and big heavy-toed boots three sizes too big, with huge buttons up his chest, walking about in the middle of nothing but a channel of wood and rock and ice, looking for a sign of betrayal.
It wasn’t hard for Meager to find the Estabrook stamp hidden under long logs right near where Tomkins had done his latest business.
It wasn’t difficult either for him to know what a crisis this was now.
“The men—” he thought suddenly, “the men will kill him if I tell he has tried to steal our work. Tomkins has tried to steal our work!”
These great logs—thousands of them now scaled and stamped with a wrong stamp—would simply be pushed into the river without anyone noticing what stamp they had, until they went into the great communal circular boom to be sorted by stamp for each mill.
If he, Meager, did not himself stop it. And if he did stop it—if he did, it would mean—well, it would be the death of Stretch Tomkins.
He held the Thermos of soup that he had made especially for his friend, and tears dazzled his eyes. Betrayal is such a vicious sin, worse than the cauldron Dante put his sinners in.