Читать книгу Over the Plain Houses - Julia Franks - Страница 13

CHAPTER SIX

A BOY GOT THE SAME KIND OF EDUCATION NO MATTER how it fit him. That’s the way the county did it anymore. But it had been different once. When he was Matthew’s age, there’d been a war on in Europe, and boys coming up a few years before him were boarding trains, and all the young men he’d ever looked to had disappeared in one season. All of a sudden Brodis was one of the oldest children in school, and the teacher set him to tutoring younger pupils, never mind the fact that his father was paying two dollars a month to send him there. But there were trains leaving town three times a day, and after they’d hauled out all the young men of the county, they went to hauling out the minerals and timber. And on the way back, they brought flossy fabrics and refrigerators and cast iron sinks. The world busted in, and the general stores filled with flower-painted china and factory dungarees and orange-colored crackers wrapped in cellophane. And Brodis, at the age of fourteen, went to logging.

He’d stepped off the company train into the Quinlan-Monroe camp with a letter in his pocket and a bedroll slung over his shoulder. Straight off, he’d stopped and stared. In front of him opened acres and acres. The only thing between him and the ridgeline were stumps, slash, deadfall, broken limbs, and treetop lops. Above his head, a machine with an enormous arm swung an oak trunk like a toothpick while a fellow in a wide-brimmed hat shouted curses and instructions, a gaggle of others craning their necks to follow the timber’s progress. It was a masterstroke of human industry.

But he’d been skinny then, and the foreman told him he was too green to work with the skidders or the road crew. Same as he would have told Matthew. Both father and son skinny and smart. The difference was that Brodis didn’t have what it took to conjure up a new straw man or train a pack of hound dogs to do half his chores for him.

The foreman had just grunted, assessing him with his eyes the way a fellow did a horse or a woman. “Dewey’s the only one wants youngsters. It don’t work out with him, then you come back next year and we’ll find you a place with the teamsters. Right now you’re too small.” Brodis stood as tall as he was able. “Can you swim?”

Swim? Brodis nodded on habit, though he wasn’t sure it was the right answer.

The next morning Dewey Lister searched him out as he was sitting down to table in the camboose. “You. New boy.”

Brodis turned.

The man was no bigger than him, spare and tight as a knuckle-joint, the growth on his cheeks flecked with gray. His shiny pate overcame the features of his knobby face. “Are you Brodis or are you Fletcher?”

“Brodis, sir.”

Dewey stepped back and gave him the same look the foreman had. “Can you swim?”

“Yessir.”

Dewey Lister made a dismissive sound in his throat. He was missing one of his front teeth. “Where’s Fletcher?” He reached into the front pocket of his shirt and withdrew a piece of oilcloth, unfolding it to reveal skinny papers and a tiny canvas pouch.

“I don’t know him, sir.”

“Well, find him. Then both of y’all meet me here in twenty minutes.” He tapped a pile of tobacco onto a paper and glanced quick at Brodis’s feet. “And get you some wool socks.”

Brodis watched him roll his cigarette. “Yes sir.” He wondered if he’d been dismissed.

Then Dewey Lister plugged the cigarette between his lips and jogged away in a queer forward-pitched gait, and Brodis saw that the man’s boots were thick-heeled and raised from the floor with something that looked like barbed wire. Gouges in the pine planking marked his leaving.

Fletcher turned out to be a diluted-looking boy with red-rimmed eyes and a light brown fur growing on his chin. Brodis never did ask how old he was. He didn’t want to give him the pleasure of saying, “I’m sixteen, how old are you?”

Dewey Lister was the walking boss, and he didn’t talk to either of them.

They started with two other crewmen at the bottom of Allen’s Creek. The bed was wide but the water a trickle. In place of picking their way up the bank, Dewey and the other crewmen clomped right up the middle, their cutter boots making spiked prints in the sand that caved in upon themselves the moment they lifted their feet. Brodis wondered how come they chose to be wet, but he didn’t ask. Instead he followed in the pooling impressions, and the cold of the water soaked straightways through to his feet. Behind him, Fletcher leapt from rock to rock and soon lagged behind.

The creek was like none he’d seen. What you marked most was the litter: the broken wood and twisted deadfall. Draped in the crooks and branches were clumps of wet-looking leaves, as if the stream had flashed high and then receded quick. The foliage on both sides had been swept clear and the laurel and rhododendron cut back twenty feet. The naked earth baked in the sun, and sumac and weeds and poison vine had already set root. A few young hemlock and walnut still stood, but most had been toppled in the mud. When they came across a beech tree fallen into the channel, Dewey and the other regulars took their packs off, and Brodis did too. Then Fletcher. Brodis couldn’t see what had caused the tree to fall, only that it seemed to have tired of holding onto the loosened earth. Now the roots tipped upward all naked and spindly against the sky, like a girl who’d tumbled from a porch and flipped her skirt to expose everything. It was exciting and disturbing at the same time. Dewey laid a band saw across the trunk of the tree and motioned for Brodis to take a position on the other side. “Here.” Brodis scrambled across the log. Then Dewey handed Fletcher the ax. “Get as many of them top branches as you can.” For a half an hour they chopped and sawed at the beech, the smell of winter-green whanging the air.

In the afternoon the creek rounded a sharp bend. A manmade wall of cedar and chestnut planking stood just inside the curve, upright in the dry bed as if by some accident of planning. Brodis couldn’t feature its purpose, even as the crew set to replacing one of its planks. His eye searched upstream and tried to imagine the creek with rushing water. Without the wall, the current would be forced to the outside of the bend, wouldn’t it? After a while that water would make an eddy, a dead place where you could wade or fish. So the wall—the boom—was supposed to get rid of the eddy and move the sticks along. Because. . . Brodis saw it then: dozens of logs piled up in the bend that in turn would trap more logs. A jam.

Fletcher was running his hand along the side of the boom. It was two board-widths taller at the deepest part of the curve than it was at either end. “What’s the wall for?”

Jackass. “Boom,” Brodis corrected. “A boom is something that makes the timber to go where you want.”

Fletcher ignored him and directed his question toward Dewey Lister, who was driving a nail into one of the bottom planks. “Sure, but what’s it for?”

Dewey Lister never looked up. He seemed not to hear.

Brodis answered louder than he needed. “Keeps the logs from piling up.”

And that was the difference right there. Matthew wouldn’t have done that way. Matthew would have figured it out just as quick if not quicker, but he would have covered for Fletcher. He would have made sure the other boy understood everything he did without rubbing his nose in it. He would have brought the other boy with him.

“Watch,” Dewey told the two boys one afternoon after they’d worked their way up Allen’s Creek to the splash dam. The new-formed lake was a depthless gray, the statues of broken stumps protruding through its mist, a field of timber floating motionless on its surface. Bracket booms like stationary rafts channeled floating sticks toward the sluiceway. “Don’t do nothing else either.” Dewey commenced unbuttoning his woolen shirt, and for a moment Brodis thought he was going to take a swim. Then he stepped onto a slanted rock and, without checking his pace, onto a peel-slick log. The wood dipped with his weight, but then he was in the middle, and then he’d already stepped onto a she-balsam. Now he footed from timber to timber, as nimble as strolling through a meadow in the morning gloom.

Fletcher shouted, “Hoo boy!”

Brodis said nothing. It couldn’t be as easy as it looked. Dewey’s feet never slipped, and his arms never waved at his sides for balance. Brodis tried to unriddle the secret. Both of Dewey’s knees were bent, always bent, that was one thing. Nor did he seem to reach out with the top of his body, not once, not ever. His chest was perched right there, just atop his hips. Dewey made a little leap from the log to the shore. It was the first time he’d extended any effort. The log bobbed once in the water and was still. “Who’s first?”

But Fletcher was already unbuttoning his jacket. He started from the same granite outcropping Dewey had, took a confident step onto a cucumber tree, and as he transferred his weight, the wood moved away, leaving him to straddle the open air between the moving timber and the rock. Then his rear foot crashed into the water and he fell.

Brodis laughed. But not too hard.

“Hold on,” said Fletcher. “Let me try again.”

But Brodis had already planted his hindquarters on the get-in rock, both feet firm on wood. He drew the log as close as possible and eased his body over it. The timber didn’t give much when he transferred his weight. And then he was standing, edgy and parlous, yes, but standing. He took a step, and the wood spun under his feet. He looked to correct with the other foot, but it was too late. He leapt free of the log, and found himself standing in three feet of water. He chanced a glance at Dewey, but the man was already buttoning his shirt and didn’t look up. “Don’t drown yourselves.”

Brodis and Fletcher looked at each other. How?

Dewey picked up his rucksack. “And don’t get anywhere near the blessed dam.” He turned away and began walking up the bank, throwing out one more tidbit as he went. “Suck you under so fast you’ll be dead before you know what happened.”

When the rains began, the camp by the railroad tracks came to a halt, and the crews came to restless rest, gathering in the steel cars that served as camboose and bunkhouse, playing cards and rosining string-fiddles and arm-wrestling and rumpusing. But Brodis left his dry clothes under his cot and hiked back up to the headwaters in his woolen underwear. Wet was wet, and the air was cold enough that when he waded into the lake, the water felt warm. He pulled a hemlock trunk to him, still barked, and it was the surest purchase yet, scratchy under his palms. He hoisted himself to a sitting straddle, then to a shaky stance, feet wide, knees bent, not too stiff, and not too still.

All day the rain drubbed the surface of the lake, and all day he practiced. The idea wasn’t to stay put. It was to ready yourself to move. Now, whenever there was no one to show off for, he learned the textures of the trees, the wide easy plates of pine bark, the stringy slip of cedar skin, the striped grip of poplar and hemlock, and the sure fissured purchase of the bee tree. And yes, he’d done it because it was a job, but that wasn’t all. There was something in him did it for the same reason Matthew kept a notebook for pencilling the names of the plants and the salamanders. Just that Brodis didn’t believe in list-making. His notebook was in his head.

At night he listened to the patter of water on steel. On the fourth day, Dewey Lister appeared in the door flap with a fourteen-foot spruce pole. Attached to the end was a pipe like a large screw, at one side a hook.

Something in Brodis’s chest leapt up.

Dewey also brought a bundle wrapped in a rubber blanket, which he set upon the cot. “You’re gonna need these.”

Brodis unwrapped the rubber blanket. Inside was a pair of woolen pants, the same kind Dewey had worn to clear the creek bed. Everything except the pick pole was brand new. “Hot dang!” was all he could manage.

“Don’t get lumpy on me. They’ve took it out of your account already.”

“I’m gonna drive on the creek?”

“Hell, no. You’re gonna walk the creek, same as everybody else. This watershed don’t open till we get down to the Pigeon.”

“I’m gonna drive there?”

‘‘Hell, no. But as soon as you got the money you get yourself some Chippewa boots from supply, and tell Callahan you want the ones with the caulks. And get you some Neatsfoot oil too. Case you want them waterproof.”

They always did the splash dams in the mornings, whenever a ghosty mist hung above the water and the thousands of sticks of timber clogged the surface of the lake and stretched way to hell and gone into the steaming gorge. For some reason you always positioned yourself next to a group of other men, either standing at the edge of the lake or hunkering on an outcrop high above the splash dam. Two massive crossbars held a gate of wooden scantlings in place, while freshets of water shot straight out through the gaps in the timber and onto the rocks below. There, at the bottom of the creek bed, the powder man waded in, his woolen pants turning dark to the knees, a solitary figure in the shrouded air. The powder man did everything slow: attach the rust colored bundle to the crossbar with a piece of wire; then pack something—later Brodis knew it to be fabric and cardboard and waterproofing sulfur—around it. Then the powder man stopped and dragged a match across a rock. He lit the fuse.

The spark mesmerized you whenever you saw it up close, a spitting, fittified flame that wasn’t a flame at all but a live energy that danced and popped up the string. The powder man had already begun his climb out of the gorge by then, and you were torn, wanting to watch the dam for the moment of explosion, but unable to keep your eyes off the fellow hand-over-handing on the rocks below. Whenever he gained the bank, he put his fingers in his ears, and you did too.

The explosion slammed straight up the gorge and into your spine. The gate’s crossbar buckled inward, and then the whole dam flung itself out and out and up and up in a torrent of splinters and water that leapt and crashed straight into the air before it stopped and hung, suspended, and then slowly, as if against its will, spumed toward the creek below. Logs rammed and bellowed their way through the sluice and then kept coming, thousands of them, some of them snapping like twigs whenever they hit the creek bed and some of them disappearing like pine needles in the great white foam. The torrent bucked and writhed with the force of a raging animal escaped from its captors so that you had to remind yourself you were standing far above it. After several seconds you realized you were covered in a thin mist, but by then you didn’t care. By then you were overtaken by the sheer audacity of men moving massive objects from one location to another without the aid of train nor skidder nor mule. You got it. Allen’s Creek had gathered itself from the ridgelines and the springs which in turn became rivulets cutting their way through gullies, one parallel to the next. It was a built-in transport system that Quinlan-Monroe was only improving. Nature was the one had invented it. She used gravity.

And at some point in there you realized you were grinning like a fool.

The water didn’t slow until it reached the bottom of the watershed. The drivers on Brodis’s team kept the timber moving. The pick pole was for balance first, for moving timber second. You didn’t plant, or you’d push yourself right off. Instead you used it like a finger to touch on a piece of wood or a rock. The banks and the bottom rushed past, and you couldn’t hear a thing but the sound of the river. Below, the water shifted and eased, flexed and thinned, contracted itself into a knot or disappeared into spray, moving like the muscled back of some giant serpentine beast. Brodis got to the place where he could separate himself into two parts, the lower half that attended to the contractions and flexions of the water below him, that steered and moved the vehicle he stood upon, and the upper half that stayed loose, controlled his weight, centered always over the place he wanted to be.

But it was the not-talking he liked most, same as it would one day be for his own son. You looked up the steep bank where a creek-branch tumbled from a mountain crevice, the water sheeting and leaping from the rock above, and the cascade so white and alive that you wanted to lay claim upon it, on this place and this moment, whenever this certain kind of freedom poured from the rocks above. Each day more wood floated into the river, bee tree and poplar and cucumber magnolia that the loggers called wahoo, from streams worked by other companies in other watersheds. They passed roads and houses, and the people waved or touched their hats or shouted hello. And then Quinlantown floated into view, the wooden structures yellow with newness, the mud streets crowded with young men. A giant flume dumped wood into a manmade pond at the side of the river. Beyond that was a steam-powered loader lifting still more timber from rail cars.

“They don’t use the river?” Brodis was dismayed that he’d asked the question before trying to sort it out for himself.

For once Dewey didn’t seem to notice. “It don’t work for every kind of tree. Some kinds waterlog. Your oak, for a sample, it likes to sink after a few days.”

“Same with your hickory?”

“Ash. Cherry. And anyway, it’s all about the trains. Everybody loves them some trains.” He sounded bitter. “In five minutes they’ll be using Shay engines to pull up their pants in the morning.” It was years before Brodis would understand that kind of unhappiness.

The mill paid the crew in cash. There were forty-seven dollar bills for thirty-two days’ work. For years after, Brodis had as much money as he wanted, and he lived in the camps where his needs were few. It was the kind of work that brought you to the top of your senses and then beyond, to a place that soaked you up into a bigger sort of grandeur. And a curious thing happened when the timber dropped over the edge of a pitch. If a fellow did nothing, the front end of the log dove straight down into the pile of foam, then straight out from under him, launching his body forward into the water like a slingshot. But if you shimmied straight back to the upstream end of the log fast enough that the front of the stick still looked over the ledge, then for a moment the back-weighted log sailed in the air, and you had to step back to center right quick to level the log as it hit the water flat and gentle with a pillowed boof. If you did it right, you had the timber and the air and the river by the balls. And, for a second, you flew.

But the industry had changed. Now they used the trains for everything, floaters and nonfloaters the same. Besides, a man couldn’t crouch without bending at the ankle. He couldn’t nimble from one stick of timber to the next, nor flex his feet against the plated bark, nor feel the live roll of water beneath him and pit his wit and his timing against the heave and boil of it. A man with a lame foot needed staying on land.