Elaine Coffman - [MacKinnon 04] (22 page)

He laughed. “If you think I’m going to answer that with you
standing there waving that red-hot poker in my face, you don’t know me very
well,” he said.

How dare he laugh when she was serious. “Och! I ken you well
enough, Adrian Mackinnon…enough to see your brain rests at the bottom of
dullness. I dinna ken why I try to reason with you, to be civil. You’re
incapable of it. When will I realize it, that you are nothing but a gowk?”

Throwing the poker into the fire, she quit the room, hearing
his rolling laughter as she did.

Always a busy place, the logging camp was a beehive of
activity on payday. Loggers came and went all day, dropping in and out of the
office. Some came just long enough to pick up their wages; other used the few
free moments in camp to stop by the medicine hut to have a new injury or
infection looked after.

Despite Adrian’s order to stay away from the camp, Maggie
went anyway. Starched in a white cotton apron, she was the picture of
efficiency visiting with the loggers, giving advice on keeping a wound clean,
or sewing up a deep cut. Whenever there was a slump in the number of patients,
she would drift over to the window and lean her elbows on the sill to watch the
activity going on outside. “‘Scuseme, ma’am.”

Maggie turned to see a young boy of fifteen or so. His hair
was as white as flax, and his eyes were as blue as a Viking’s. Her eyes dropped
to the right leg of his trousers, which was soaked in blood.

“Och, laddie, this is no time to be polite,” she said.
“Dinna stand there bleeding to death.” Grabbing an armful of bandages, she
patted her working table. “Up here with you, now,” she said, taking his arm and
helping him.

He winced as he sat down, but Maggie was too busy cutting
away the leg of his pants to pay that much mind. “What have you done here, lad?
It looks like you’ve got six inches of splintered wood gouging into your
thigh.”

“And there’s at least six more inches below that,” the boy
said, leaning back, his voice quivering and unsteady.

Maggie looked up. His arms were trembling. “Here now,” she
said softly, cradling the boy’s head. “Take a sip of this, lad, then lie down
while I’m seeing to your leg.” She gave him a few sips of opium diluted in
water, and when he had finished, she held his head until he was lying flat.
While the opium eased him, she busied herself by gathering the things she would
need.

“You ain’t gonna cut off my leg, are you?” he asked, coming
up on his elbows.

Maggie stopped beside him and shook her head. “No, lad, I
willna do that.” She smoothed his unruly hair back from his face. “I ken you
couldna be chasing the lassies if I did that, now could you?” She pushed him
back down. “Now, you stay there, you ken?”

He nodded and smiled weakly. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“What’s your name, lad?” she asked as she began washing the
blood from the wound.

“Will Watkins.”

“Well, Will Watkins, tell me how you feel now.”

“Sleepy.”

“Then you sleep a bit, lad, and let me see to your leg.” She
picked up his hands and placed them over the edge of the table. “If it hurts,
you squeeze the table, you ken?”

“Yessum.”

Maggie looked at the huge shaft of wood imbedded deeply in
the muscle of Will’s leg. Blood oozed around it. Packing the area beneath it
with cotton sheeting to absorb the sudden flow of blood that would come when
she removed the splinter, she grasped the piece of wood with both hands and
began to pull.

Will’s hands gripped the table. Beads of sweat collected in
the peach fuzz over his lip. His breathing was short and gasping.

“Breathe deeply, lad. Dinna be ashamed to cry out if you need
to.”

With one tremendous burst of strength, Maggie pulled again,
this time using all the force she could muster. About the time she decided she
would have to send for Adrian or Big John, the splintered chunk of wood gave,
and Maggie fell back with the force of it.

Half an hour later, she had the wound cleaned of smaller
splinters and neatly closed with black thread. Will was sleeping when Clem
Burnside came to carry him back to the bunkhouse.

“I’ll need to remove the stitches in a week,” she said,
holding the door open for Clem.

She barely had time to put things in order when Big John
poked his grizzled head through the door and announced it would be getting dark
soon.

“If you hurry, you can go up to the house with your husband.
He quit the office no more than two minutes ago,” he said with a wink, and then
he was gone.

The following Sunday afternoon, Maggie was in the library,
writing a letter to her father, when Molly came in. She handed Maggie a small
doeskin pouch drawn together with a rawhide string. Maggie took it, giving
Molly a questioning look.

“Big John asked me to give it to you. Seems Will Watkins was
too shy to do the honors himself.”

Maggie opened the pouch and poured a necklace of shells into
her hand.

“They’re dentalium shells,” Molly said. “Dentalium means
little tusks. They’re a measure of wealth among the Yuroks.”

Maggie examined the pale-hued shells. “I’ve never seen
shells like these before.”

“They’re found quite a ways north of here, fished out of the
water by the Indian tribes up there.” Molly reached out and lifted part of the
strand in her hand. “A strand this size could buy a wife for a Yurok brave,”
she said.

Maggie held the strand aloft, admiring the shells and
remembering the flaxen-haired young boy called Will Watkins.

The week that followed seemed to erupt with a rash of minor
accidents. Walking back from the cookhouse after lunch one afternoon, Maggie
gave an accounting to Big John and Adrian.

“Why, just this morning I’ve seen five mashed hands, one
broken finger, a rope burn, a broken nose, four saw cuts, and one foot badly
bruised by a clumsy ox.”

“Which clumsy ox was that?” Big John asked. “John Schurtz?”

Maggie laughed. “I dinna ken Schurtz was a clumsy ox, but
the one I was thinking of had four legs.”

Big John laughed, and Maggie joined him. She looked up, her
face bathed in sunlight, to find Adrian watching her with another one of his
odd expressions. This one lay somewhere between contemplation and curiosity.

“Dinna fash yourself. It’s called laughter,” she said to
him, disappearing through the door of the medicine hut as Big John gave a great
guffaw.

For the rest of the afternoon she treated patients
intermittently, for it always seemed the small room was either very full or
empty, but never in between. During one lull, Maggie was leaning against the
window, looking outside, when she noticed that everything in the camp seemed to
come to a standstill.

Opening the door, she stepped out onto the porch, suddenly
aware of the deadening quiet coming from the woods, where there was no sound of
whistles, axes, men shouting, or the creaking groan of massive trees as they
fell. The men in the camp had noticed it, too, for they had stopped milling
around and were standing in small groups, whispering, making speculations when
they saw a group of loggers coming down out of the woods, carrying something.
When they drew closer, Maggie saw it was Will Watkins, the flaxen-haired skid
greaser who swabbed the skids with dogfish oil to make the logs slide easier.

She started toward the men when a hand came out to stop her.
“He’s dead, Maggie,” Adrian said gently. “There’s nothing you can do for him
now.”

Maggie stood motionless. It seemed that somehow Will had
tripped into the path of the skid road and was crushed beneath ten thousand
pounds of timber.

“He never did come back to let me remove the stitches,” she
said, her voice faltering.

“He was just a boy,” Clem Burnside said, tears running down
his face.

With a strangled cry, Maggie covered her mouth with her hand
and turned away, stumbling back inside the medicine hut to cry.

She didn’t hear the door open and shut, or Adrian’s
footsteps as he entered the room, but she did hear the steady rhythm of his
heart when he took her in his arms, and held her head against his chest while
she cried.

After that day, a cloud of mysterious sorrow seemed to hang
over the camp. It wasn’t long before Maggie was convinced that Will Watkins’s
death was a herald of things to follow.

Late one afternoon, two weeks later, just before Adrian was
due home for dinner, Maggie took Israel for a walk along the cliffs to watch
the sunset. Only a few minutes before, he had wandered off with his nose to the
ground, and Maggie had walked on alone. Sometimes Israel seemed severely
lacking in character.

She smiled as she remembered her father telling her once,
“You can’t castrate character into a dog.” She would not try castrating Israel,
but there was someone else who might benefit from it.

She walked on until she reached an outcropping of rocks and
found one that looked perfect to sit upon. She sat down, staring out over the
water, wondering if she would be able to see any of the gray whales that Adrian
said wintered along the coast, often swimming quite close to shore.

She was running out of time. Her children were due soon, and
still things between herself and Adrian weren’t as she wished them to be. Oh,
he was no longer angry about her previous marriage, but…Maggie paused. But
what? What was it about their situation that frustrated her so?
Because
you’re falling in love with him, and he hasn’t come close to telling you how he
feels. What would it be like,
she wondered,
if Adrian loved me?

She thought about that for a moment.
To love, and be
loved, is to feel the sun from both sides.

“Well,” she told herself, “you canna sit out here all day,
moping about the way things are. Worries are like bread crumbs in the bed. The
more you wiggle, the more they scratch.”

Maggie turned her thoughts back to the gray whales, but soon
she gave up on them and began watching the sun sinking into the ocean. It made
her wish she had brought her canvas to capture the Pacific as it looked now,
tinged with lavender and gilded with gold.

She heard Israel come up behind her and turned to give him a
scolding, but it was Adrian who approached.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked. “It’s almost dark.”

“I was looking for the gray whales,” she said, turning away
from him and staring out over the water.

“And did you see any?”

“No, I didna, so I began watching the sunset. It’s beautiful
this time of day. There are colors at gloaming that you canna see at any other
time.”

“Gloaming?”

“Twilight,” she said absently.

“Hmmm,” he said, coming around to sit down beside her,
giving her a studying look. “Are you becoming maudlin?”

“Aye,” she said softly, then with a shot of humor, she said,
“and hungry, too.”

“Why didn’t you come back to the house if you were hungry?”

“I’d rather watch the sunset.”

“And leave me to eat alone?”

“Aye,” she said, laughing and giving him a sideways look. “I
ken how you dote on my absence,” she said, her eyes brimming with humor.

Adrian did not smile.

“You dinna smile even out of politeness, do you?”

“I smile only when there’s a reason to.”

She shook her head. “There’s always a reason to smile,” she
said.

“Even when you’re thinking of Will Watkins?”

“Aye,” she said, her voice breaking. “He touched my life,
and I am richer for it. I canna smile now, when I think of him, but I ken there
will be a time that I can wear his necklace of shells and smile.”

“Maggie.”

“Dinna,” she said. She turned her head toward him, and he
saw her eyes sparkled more than before. “Sometimes I think the only brightness
in your life at all is the sunshine reflecting on the whites of your eyes.”

“That’s what I love about Scottish humor—its sarcasm,” he
said.

“Aye, and well you should love it. It’s a lot like you,
bitter and caustic.”

He looked at her, and she sighed. She had spoken more
sharply than she intended. Her steady gaze softened. “I’m sorry. I was thinking
about Will Watkins before you came, and the mention of his name like that…I was
a wee bit maudlin, as you said, and unsettled as well, but I ken it’s no reason
to be angry with you.”

He didn’t reply, only leaned forward, bracing his elbows on
his knees and staring out over the water. “Will’s death was only the beginning,”
he said after a while.

She turned her head to stare at him. “I dinna ken what you
mean, only the beginning. The beginning of what?”

“Death,” he said slowly. “Accidents.”

“There have been more?”

“Too many more. Too many to be just accidents,” he said. “In
the past week we’ve had three men injured, two killed. The week before, there
were two accidents, one death.”

Maggie leaned forward, putting her hand on his arm. “Why
dinna you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to worry you.”

She didn’t believe that for a minute. “What kind of
accidents?”

The usual kind—falls from trees, somebody being careless.
You know how accidents lie waiting at every stage of the lumbering process. We
have accidents in the mill or in the woods all the time, but never this many in
such a short time. The men are starting to talk.”

“About what?”

“They think someone is causing the accidents, and I think
they’re right.”

“Pope and Talbot?”

“More than likely.”

“But nothing you can prove?”

“Nothing we can prove,” he said tiredly. He looked at Maggie
and shook his head, coming to his feet. He gave her one of his rare attempts at
a smile. It was a rather helpless gesture. “I didn’t mean to unload all of this
upon you.”

“You couldna keep it from me forever,” she said.

He must have been thinking the same thing, to judge from the
look on his face and the hasty way he changed the subject.