Washika (35 page)

“In there,” Armand said, pointing towards one of the smaller cabins. He had followed the students as they climbed the slope. “You can put your stuff in there and wash up. Be supper soon.”

They went inside, carrying packsacks, some of them hauling mattresses. It was cool in the cabin, and dark, and there was a strong smell of fly oil. When their eyes adjusted to the dim light, they could see that the wall logs had been peeled, and oiled, and the floorboards, although unpainted, were clean and well swept. There were bunk beds on both sides of the cabin. Only one of the beds had a mattress and blankets on it. There was a large trunk near the head of the bed, and the bed was neatly made with a clean, white pillowcase and a grey wool blanket stretched tightly and tucked in under the mattress. At the far end of the cabin was a thin wall of boards and an open doorway. Inside this little room they found a washstand with a full bucket of water, a washbasin and soap, and a small round mirror above them. There was a door leading out of the room, directly onto the slope of the hill. To the right of the mirror, a tall narrow window let in plenty of light. From outside, they had seen a stovepipe, like on the largest of the three log buildings, but there was no stove in the bunkhouse. Suspended from a set of rafters, a section of stovepipe descended, turned a sharp ninety degrees and stopped abruptly. Its opening was stuffed with burlap to keep the bugs out.

The students claimed their bunks by dropping their packsacks on the springs, and then they headed down to the
Madeleine
for their mattresses. François Gauthier, like several others, had carried his mattress up first, along with his bag of books. He chose the bunk bed adjacent to the washroom wall and dropped his mattress on the bottom bunk. Before returning to the
Madeleine
for his pack, François arranged his books in a neat row along the windowsill.

It was not long before every bunk had been claimed, packsacks dropped upon them, or mattresses. A continual stream of boys marched from the bunkhouse to the
Madeleine
and back again. Once they were settled in, the students untied the bundles of sheets and blankets and pillows and made their beds. At Washika, before leaving, some of the boys had tried rolling up their mattresses with the bedclothes in place; these were later untied aboard the
Madeleine
as they wanted a comfortable place to sleep during the trip to Cabonga Dam. Now, they hurried with the sheets and blankets, searched the walls for nails to hang their clothes on, or simply kicked their packs under the bed as André Guy had done without a moment's hesitation.

Suddenly, a large form appeared in the doorway. The man stood on the doorsill, looking at the new arrivals. He nodded politely and walked by the bunks to his own bunk where he dropped his hardhat and lunch pail on the trunk. The man looked up at Henri, stretched out on the bunk above his own. He pursed his lips tightly together and nodded a greeting to Henri.

“
Bonjour
,” Henri said. “We just came in from Washika. You work here?”

The man nodded, yes, and picked up a towel from a nail on the wall.

“Better hurry,” he said. “Be supper soon.”

“There's a bell?” Henri said.

The man smiled. “We're only five here.”

As the man spoke, a tall, thin man entered the bunkhouse. He walked quickly, with his head down, as if he had not noticed the students, or was shy and did not want to look at them. He went directly to the end bunk, opposite François Gauthier's, pulled a towel off the foot of the upper bunk and went into the washroom.

“He works here too?” Henri nodded towards the washroom.

“Yes,” the man answered. He looked over at the others, stretched out comfortably on their bunks and waiting for the supper bell to ring. “Better hurry,” he said to Henri.

As the man walked towards the washroom, Henri stared at the back of his large head, covered in a mass of sweaty curls. His shoulders, Henri noticed, touched both sides of the doorway as he entered the washroom. Henri looked at the lunch pail on the trunk, the black tin scratched and dented from use. The hard hat was yellow, like the ones they wore at Washika but it seemed smaller, rounder, an older model perhaps. A name strip had been glued to the front: C. Bernatchez.

So, there would be two other fellows with them in the bunkhouse. Henri had not noticed the other man's bunk at the far end of the room, or his towel hanging from the foot of the upper bunk. The two men came out of the washroom together, their hair wet and combed. They hung their towels from the top bar of their bunks and started to leave.

“Is it time now?” Henri said to Bernatchez.

The man nodded. He held up a wide, muscled forearm and stared a moment at his wristwatch. “In five minutes,” he said. Bernatchez and the thin man who had waited for him went out through the front doorway of the bunkhouse.

Henri jumped down off the bunk. “Hey, you guys.” He hurried towards the washroom. “Hurry up. Supper in five minutes.”

“Go on.” Lavigne rolled over on his side. “It's only five o'clock.”

“That's it,” Henri yelled back from the washroom. “That's when they eat here.”

Slowly, the students dragged themselves from their bunks, stretching and scratching at their hair. François Gauthier was hurrying, trying to finish the last paragraph in a chapter.

“Hey!” A voice, loud but friendly enough. Alphonse stood in the open doorway. “Not hungry today? Last call for supper.”

Alphonse then left as suddenly as he had appeared. It was almost unreal. Supper at five o'clock. And no supper bell. The fellows were beginning to have doubts. What kind of place was this?

“
Calis
!” Lavigne jumped down off his bunk. “Morin was right. What an hour.
Sacrament
!”

Lavigne noticed the body on the lower bunk. The boy was curled up in sleep with several strands of hair standing straight up on his head. Lavigne reached beneath the mattress, getting a good grip on the edge, and pulled up sharply. André Guy rolled off the bed and onto the floor and, just as swiftly, he was sitting upright with his raised fists clenched and looking around him with half-opened eyes and jerking movements of his head.

“Come on, André!” Lavigne shouted over his shoulder. “Time to eat!”

I
t was the last thing in the world they expected to see. Inside the cookhouse, the log walls had been covered with Masonite and painted white. In addition to several lengths of sticky flypaper, there were naphtha lamps hanging from the two crossbeams spanning the width of the building. And there were two tables with long, narrow plank benches running the full length of the tables. But none of these things had interested the boys much. From the moment they had stepped onto the landing and smelled the odour of freshly baked bread through the screen door, from that very instant when they had stepped inside, there was one and only one thing on their minds. As the students marched past the opened screen door and into the cookhouse, their reaction was an openmouthed silence as they handed their meal tickets to the young girl.

The cook's daughter smiled and looked boldly into each of the students' eyes as he handed her his ticket. For the first time in their short lives, they were quiet, without comment, without the ability to utter a single phrase. François Gauthier blushed. No girl had ever looked at him that way.

When everyone was seated a short, pale man with thick, black hair combed straight back from his forehead stood in the centre of the room. He held his hands clasped together in front of him as he looked at the new arrivals.

“My name is Germain Laviolette,” he began. “I'm the cook here.” He looked down at his fresh, white apron. “Me and my daughter, that's my daughter Nicole,” the cook said pointing to the girl, standing, half-leaning against the open doorway that framed the roundness of her hips in the light from the kitchen, “we'd like to welcome you to Washika…I mean, Cabonga.”

Everybody laughed. The cook looked over at Armand Lafond. He chuckled then at his own unintended little joke. “If there's anything,” he continued. “Don't be shy. Just come and see me and we'll fix it up.”

The cook turned then and slipped by his daughter and went into the kitchen. The young girl stayed a moment in the doorway, fixing her eyes on the twenty students from the Collège de Ste-Émilie. It was not until she turned to leave that forty eyes scanned and remained focused on her beauty. Hungry as they were, most of the twenty students found it difficult to eat. The food was excellent. That was not a problem. And
Monsieur
Laviolette, the cook, seemed to be a good-natured person as he laughed and bantered easily with the older men.

Alphonse sat beside Armand Lafond and Bernatchez, the tugboat operator, and his deckhand. Télesphore Aumont sat alone, opposite Alphonse and the others. Behind him, the twenty students sat at one table, eating in silence as they had been taught at Washika, even though Alphonse and Armand and the other boatmen spoke freely throughout the meal.

Henri was hungry. There were boiled potatoes and yellow wax beans that he covered with margarine and pork chops to which he added great globs of ketchup. There was plenty of steaming, hot tea and piles of thickly sliced warm bread which
Monsieur
Laviolette refurbished as soon as the stack had noticeably declined. And there was raspberry pie, made from fresh raspberries Nicole had picked that morning. The cook had told them about the raspberries.

The girl, Nicole, was not seen after her father's welcoming speech. She worked in the kitchen while her father rushed back and forth, keeping the tables well supplied. Then, they saw her moving past the open doorway, with her golden hair tied back tightly on her head and the rest falling leisurely in a thick wavy tail upon her back. And she wore nothing beneath the white T-shirt; there was no doubt in any of the students' minds about that. Despite the full apron that she wore, the fellows were certain about it. Even Gauthier, when he had blushed earlier at the door, had felt himself becoming aroused upon his observation of each mamma pushing forcibly against the thin cotton material of her shirt. The girl moved swiftly by the doorway each time but the boys were on the alert. They watched and waited for one more glimpse: the long, slender brown thighs culminating in the fire-engine red shorts, the slightly rounded belly and those eyes, those they could not avoid, the teasing, taunting, grey-green eyes staring out at them.

Henri was hungry. He was hungry and he filled his plate until it almost overflowed. He covered everything with ketchup and moved it all with a fork to his mouth, and his mouth worked, and molars ground against molars, and great gulps of tea flowed in to wash it all down, past the pharynx and into the esophagus. And then he filled half of his plate with two quarter sections of pie and felt the seeds lodge between his teeth and, through it all, through the potato and wax beans, and the pork chops and the pie, there was nothing on his mind, nothing but the tall, slim-legged Nicole, and how she stood with her back straight and, seeing her from the side, how her breasts hung like large, ripened pears over the rise of her chest and when she walked how the muscles moved, long slender brown thighs and when she turned her back on them, her buttocks stared right back at them, as round and as firm as her breasts.

 

G
authier was in love. For the first time in his life, he had taken notice of a girl. And she had looked back at him. Now, he was miserable. After supper, he had lain down on his bunk to read, as he was accustomed to doing at Washika, but he was unable to concentrate. Three times he had read the chapter heading, “Interference Phenomena; the superposition principle,” and each time the page blurred in front of his eyes and he found himself lowering the book and sliding down against the pillow and seeing her, standing before him with her soft hand outstretched and staring into his eyes. And the other part; he tried not to think about that, but he could not.

François placed the thick, black book on the windowsill and took down another, slim, aqua-blue, with black and purple circles on its cover. He opened the book and flipped rapidly through its pages. Finally, he leaned back and read, “Schematic sagittal section of the pelvic region of the female human being showing the organs of the reproductive tract…” He examined the illustration closely but it did nothing to arouse him as did the touch of her hand as he handed her his meal ticket, and her girl smell so close, and the firm roundness protruding from the interior of her shirt. It was all too much for him. That, and the way she had looked at him.

François was miserable and confused. Never before in his life had he been confronted with such feelings and no form of logic he had ever understood could explain it. He understood easily enough the concept of limits, the value of a particle approaching zero but never quite attaining it, and the logical evolution of the differential expressing a minute rate of change. At present, he was working on the idea of integration and even that part of the differential and integral calculus was clear to him. But this new sensation, this sudden lack of control of what and how he thought was most disturbing while, simultaneously, exposing him to a pleasure he had never known. François closed the biology text and placed it along the protruding windowsill with his other books and walked out of the bunkhouse.

“Hey Gauthier!” André Guy called out to François as he went by his bunk.

François did not look back. He stepped over the doorsill and disappeared from view.

“What's the matter with him?” André inquired. He looked up at Henri.

“I don't know,” Henri said.

“Who can tell with Gauthier?” Lavigne commented. “You know how he is with his books.”

“Maybe we should fix him up with Nicole for a night, eh?” André laughed. “
Sacrament
, he wouldn't read so much after that.”