In the hospital my heart stopped four times as those peaveys were rolling those logs. People said it would be much better if I died, being as I was the love child of a disgusting union. Camellia needed a transfusion and people were so upset with her (thinking she’d orchestrated Owen’s escape) they milled about but did not give it. Until Hennessey himself walked into the crowd, stopped a woman who he knew had the same blood type as my mother, and took her inside.
“You don’t mind doing this, do you, dear?” he said, grabbing her by the arm and leading her up the long stairs in his powerful grip. “She is a human being after all.”
The transfusion was given or my mother would have been dead in ten minutes. And the woman’s name—Cora Auger. She had found her way to the hospital, secretly hoping for my mother’s death. So it was help unencumbered by joy.
“No matter,” my mother said, “it was Saint Jude who was helping us that day.”
It wasn’t until later that Hennessey heard of the tragedy. He left for the mountain with Buckler. There they saw Owen Jameson. As soon as Hennessey looked his way he said, “Get him to the cabin and get his pants cut open.”
And as soon as Owen heard this he said, “I will kill the first man who touches me—Dr. Hennessey, sir, you know that to be true.”
And no one touched him. He told them he was staying under his own care until the run was over—then, if they wanted, they could take him in again.
So by three o’clock the bodies were freed, pronounced dead, taken to the shelter of the camp, and placed on bunks and wrapped in blankets.
It was then that Owen did for them the same as was done for Will; a great vigil took place within that smoky, desolate room, with sky birds singing again. There was a reading from the bible, a psalm of David: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”
There was silence otherwise. A complete soundlessness as men stood about, not even whispering.
Little things amazed people. Richardson’s picture that he had of himself with two arms, thought lost in the fire in January, was sitting on the floor near his bunk. There was no way to know how it came to be there.
Curtis’s cup, which people were sure had been empty, was full of hot tea when they got back to the room, as if he had just poured it.
No one would say he hadn’t.
At six o’clock Saturday night, with lanterns showing the way in the evening light, the bodies were brought out to the sled of Gordon and Ronald’s Young and, with the Belgians dressed with plumes, taken away. By now it seemed as if the whole world was alive with their deaths.
By the next morning, still in spring rain, the rivers had swollen and broken free.
“It will be an early drive this year after such a winter, I do suppose,” Pitman said.
It came in an instant then, spring.
The logs were restamped by Fortune, by Bartlett and Gibbs, with Owen Jameson not sleeping and overseeing it all. Why, for the money had to go to the widows or families of these men, even if his business was doomed. This is what he pronounced.
So men from the other camps came over the next few days to help the run down. They cut the logs free of their chains, and rode them out along the rapids, dark swells of high tormented water, across the Arron Brook talons, where to fall was to die, and into the great river. Men like MacLeod and Curry stepped on those logs, cursed at them, and at anyone who would take a freshet from their piles, on timbers so fast and slick you would think they must all have God on their shoulders—all these men: Underhill, MacLeod, Curry, and Curtis’s brother. All the way down the river, from streams flowing against the budding trees, the snow still six feet deep in places in the woods and the raw birds singing, to Arron Brook with its danger, and on to Bartibog, where his brother died—none did a better job on the river, they said, than Owen Jameson. He was up day and night, went back to help the men get the stragglers and landings, made sure the food was hot on those cold days. All the while his lungs filled with fluid from the wound he had taken in the war that had turned septic by the punch of the comb. He unwrapped it on the third night to look—took a hot piece of stove wood and tried to lance it. But he did not sleep. He took out Camellia’s picture, which he had taken from his house, and stared at it most of the night. He had loved her as a child, and had not known. Someone once told me if Hennessey had not had to get back to make sure I lived, he would have stayed to make sure Owen did. It is not an easy thing to force a man to live with.
“There will be no rest until tomorrow,” was all Owen said.
On the fourth day he worked too hard, and stood on a hemlock in the bracing river. But then his fever hit. And he came in and lay down on the spot he and Will had stayed the day they stole the beaver. No one said a thing. Once again he had Camellia’s picture in his hand.
His leg was gangrenous, and raw poison was spreading into his chest.
He looked strangely angered by his incapacity—as if people had played some enormous trick on him. They gathered about him staring in strange, almost affixed wonder.
He was, after all, only twenty-six years old. He had, he thought, survived the war.
“Just the age of Keats,” he smiled at Simon Terri.
Unfortunately, most of the men didn’t understand. Some of them thought he was a murderer, but even those now had sympathy fill their hearts.
They made a place for him below Toomey’s Quarry. That is, half a mile from where Will had broken the cedar free.
“I must get up,” he said.
“No no,” MacLeod said, “you never mind that now, boy.”
Meager Fortune tried to give him rum-laced broth. Owen was going away from them and they knew it. He, the most solitary of men, tried to clutch someone’s hand.
They decided to keep his death a secret until the run was over. Half the province was still looking for him.
Little Meager Fortune said he would bring him out, planted on the center of one of Richardson’s fullest cedars. Fortune rode it down, with Owen before him clothed in white linen from Brennan’s farmhouse, Fortune speaking at certain intervals to his son and his wife.
“Why do you want me to stay here,” he said, tears in his eyes, “this old world. Why can’t I go home to you?”
By the evening of the fourth day of the run, a thousand logs were seen by women watching for their men, a thousand more—and then ten thousand after that. It was incomprehensible that four teamsters had done so much, they thought of them now as spirits, they thought of them now, and forever, as ghosts.
Men who became legends in spite of all that was held against them while they did what they now were legends for doing. They were spoken about in whispers.
“I remember when he lost his arm,” one said about Richardson. “ ‘I don’t need ‘er,’ he said; he said, ‘I do as much with one arm as any a you boys do with two.’ ”
Until that moment, none remembered Richardson ever having said that. Now a man would take his life in his hands to refute it.
Trethewey had knocked ten men out in one fight. His wife, they said, had come home, and was here for the funeral. They always loved each other—you could tell by her letters.
Nolan, a man they had dismissed for being washed up, old and silly, they now said was overall the greatest of the teamsters. All of them had done what they could. All of them had stayed with their horses.
They would go and build a monument to them on Good Friday Mountain.