Sons (4 page)

I began my backcut.

Maybe I could help Nancy to see it my way. There was talk around, I’d tell her, that they were going to lower the age to eighteen by June, so what difference would a few months make? Wasn’t it better to get into the thing now, and help get it over with, so we could later go on with our normal lives? Wasn’t that better, Nance?

Bert, she would say, they can kill you clear up to your navel, is that what you want them to do?

I was using the bow saw for my backcut, but I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake, she was much too big to fell this way. What I needed was a crosscut saw with two men on it. At least, that’s the way it looked to me now, with darkness fast coming on and the bow saw sinking into the trunk far too close to its frame without getting anywhere near enough to my undercut. I needed only an inch or two of holding-wood to serve as my hinge when the tree fell, but here I was almost up tight against the frame of the saw now, and still three inches away from my undercut; nope, it wasn’t going to work. I eased the saw free and wondered what I should do. Suppose I left her this way, and a strong wind came along and toppled her over tomorrow morning when some poor fellow was out honing his ax and never suspecting somebody had left a tree hanging? I decided to try poling her over, and if that didn’t work, I’d head back for the bunkhouse and get some help.

I hadn’t even told my mother yet, that was going to be still another fracas. I could see us all sitting around the table Sunday after church, and Papa saying the blessing, while Harriet and Fanny and little brother John fidgeted and squirmed, and then Mama would come in from the kitchen carrying our usual Sunday meal — corned beef, boiled for almost two and a half hours, after which carrots, onions, turnips, cabbage, and potatoes were added to the pot to simmer in the meat juices for another half hour or so. Harriet would rise immediately to go into the kitchen for the freshly baked loaf of bread and Fanny would only reluctantly follow, coming back with the ironstone pitcher full of milk in one hand, and the butter urn in the other. We would eat silently and gratefully, the huge table (which Papa had made himself from an oak on our own land) clinking and clattering with the sound of silver and china, and me with a secret to tell. I’d probably wait until the girls and Mama had cleared the table and were bringing in the Queen’s pudding, which she would dish out to us from her place opposite Papa, ladling the pale tart lemon sauce onto each moist coconut-shredded mound. I would tell her then. There was nothing she could do about it: I was eighteen, and Papa had given me written consent.

The pole was twelve feet long, with a metal spike on one end. I planned my getaway and then braced the pole against my hip and began shoving. The tree wouldn’t budge. I didn’t know whether or not I had time to rig a killing, but it looked as if I’d need one, and I figured I ought to try before going back to the bunkhouse. I cut myself a long hardwood pole, the light fading fast now, a wolf howling somewhere off against the approaching night, notched one end of it and made a wedge point on the other end. I reached up as high as I could then, and cut a notch into the tree trunk with my ax. I’d left my peavy over by the bow saw, and I went to get it now, and then fitted the pointed end of the pole into the notch I’d just cut in the tree, and then braced the wedged end of the pole against the thick wooden handle of the peavy, just above the hinge. I shoved the pick end of the tool deep into firm ground, through the crusting layer of snow. My killig was ready. I shoved forward on the handle, just testing, seeing if I’d get enough leverage to fell her this way. She began to groan a little, and I nodded silently, the sun was all but gone now, the air seemed suddenly very cold. I shouted “Timberrrrrrr,” knowing I was the only soul in the woods, but remembering what Tiny, the camp’s wood butcher had told me about it being better to feel a little foolish yelling to nobody than to look around later and find a man squashed flat under the tree you’d just knocked down. I shoved forward on the peavy handle.

There was, as always, that moment when she seemed to resist, seemed to cling to whatever slender fiber still connected her to life. And then she trembled, and I could hear her groan again, almost as if she were in pain, and suddenly she began to topple, the weight of her upper branches pulling her down toward the earth. I dropped the peavy and ran back toward the cord of pulpwood, and behind it, and I heard the huge spruce whispering through the icy air, and then she hit the ground and snowdust billowed up from her branches and there was a long heavy shudder and then a hundred echoing crackings, and then there was silence.

There was never much doing in Eau Fraiche on a Friday night, except for the first Friday of every month, when a dance was held at the Grange Hall on Buffalo Street. Anybody who owned a car, though, usually drove into Eau Claire, twelve miles to the west, or preferably made the trip down to La Crosse, which was about sixty miles away due south, on the Minnesota border. The trip to La Crosse, figuring on a top speed of about thirty miles an hour on a road like Route 12, took at least two hours, but it was worth it once you got there. La Crosse wasn’t Madison either, but it was a darn sight more interesting than Eau Fraiche.

The main street of Eau Fraiche was called Chenemeke Avenue, and the name was supposed to have derived from an old Chippewa legend about an invisible bird messenger of the Great Spirit. I never did get the story straight, even though Nancy told it time and again, something about lightning flashing from the bird’s eyes, and retribution for deeds that were un-Christian — genuine Indian superstition sifted through her own Wisconsin background and temperament. In any event, Chenemeke (which we pronounced Chain-make; God knew how the Indians pronounced it) was a narrow street that cut a wandering path through the center of town. The railroad tracks were off to the east of Chenemeke, and beyond those and running parallel to them were the paper and pulp plants, the furniture factory, and the big rubber plant that covered two full city blocks and employed more than a thousand men at peak production. We had a state fish hatchery running along the base of the town’s southern bluffs, and off to the west there was a really good park named Juneau Park, with picnic grounds and tennis courts, baseball and football fields, and good swimming and boating off the peninsula. According to the 1910 census, there were 7000 people living in the town of Eau Fraiche, but I guessed that by now, in 1918, the figure was closer to 9000. Some of these people lived on the southern and eastern outskirts, but most of them preferred living right in town where, on a good day, you could see both the Eau Claire and the Chippewa Rivers from the upstairs bedroom of your house. Our own house, white clapboard and slate, was down near the peninsula overlooking Lake Juneau, which was a spring-fed body of water actually closer to Eau Claire than it was to Eau Fraiche, but nonetheless within the city limits.

There were two hotels in town, The United being the best of them, and there were at least a dozen very bad restaurants. The only halfway decent restaurant, in fact, was French, and was called Coin de Lorraine, which meant Corner of Lorraine. It was run by a man named Claude Rabillon, who used to be a cook at one of the big lumber camps. That was in the good old days when timber was truly a crop, and when fortunes were being made in the wilderness. Today, most of the sawmills had already packed up their machinery and moved to the West Coast, and we were cutting trees almost exclusively for the production of paper. Eau Fraiche used to be a livelier town when the industry was at its peak. In fact, the census for 1900 showed the town to be twice the size it later became in 1910, and most of those people were lumberjacks or people otherwise connected with timber — brawny two-fisted men who worked hard all day long, and then caught the wagons into town to drink half the night away. (You were
still
permitted to drink in Wisconsin, which continued to amaze many of us in Eau Fraiche, considering the fact that three-quarters of the states had gone dry, including nearby Iowa and everything west of the Mississippi — with the exception of California, where booze and bimbos were to be expected.)

The one movie theater in town was called The Chenemeke, and it was of course on Chenemeke Avenue. That week, it was playing Theda Bara in
Cleopatra,
which Nance and I had seen in La Crosse just before Christmas. There was another theater, called The Wisconsin, but it was strictly vaudeville. The Wisconsin was owned and managed by a Swede named Kurt Elfstrom, who was reputed to have earned four million dollars from his two theaters, the one here in Eau Fraiche and the other in Eau Claire. Personally, I couldn’t see how he’d made that much money, because whereas he charged some pretty good admission prices — a quarter for a box seat, and fifteen cents for an orchestra seat — he still had to pay his performers, didn’t he? And he booked some really good acts into the theater, too, considering the fact that this was just a dying little timber town in Wisconsin. I could remember my father taking me to see Charlie Chaplin, in person, in a thing called
A Night in a London Club,
even before Mr. Elfstrom renovated The Wisconsin and put in the red velvet seats. That must have been in 1912 or 1913, sometime around then, when I was still a little kid and before Chaplin got to be a famous movie star, of course. This week at The Wisconsin, Mr. Elfstrom was showing the Greater Morgan Dancers in a historical Roman ballet; Eddie Leonard
&
Co., who were blackface singers, dancers, and comedians; and Blossom Seeley with her “Jazz Melodical Delirium.” Nancy and I were keeping steady company, so I would probably take her there tomorrow night. Tonight, of course, was the monthly dance, and neither of us wanted to miss that. Besides, I had worked late at the camp (even though I’d never got close to starting my bucking), and it wouldn’t have paid to drive the tin Lizzie all the way down to La Crosse, not with the roads still pretty bad after the last snowfall.

There were, I guessed, about thirty Fords parked behind the Grange Hall, as well as one of the only two Pierce-Arrow touring cars in town, this one being yellow, which meant it belonged to Daniel Talbot, whose father owned the furniture company on Carey Avenue. Just to be perverse (and also so I’d be able to find the car again when I came out, all the other Fords being as black as my father’s), I parked directly alongside Mr. Talbot’s snazzy automobile, and then led Nancy carefully over the hard, rutted, frozen mud of the back lot, around to the front of the hall. There was music coming from inside the gray frame building, two bands having been hired as usual for the occasion; Red Reynolds’ local dance orchestra, and a colored jazz band from Chicago that called itself the “Original” something or other.

I still hadn’t told Nancy what I’d done that morning.

She looked about as pretty as a skyful of stars, her hair coiled at the back of her neck beneath a simple black velvet hat, glistening pale and gold above the high crushed collar of her coat. Picking her way delicately over the sidewalk, she skirted the patches of ice, one ungloved hand raising the hem of her skirt as she navigated the slippery pavement, her muffed hand resting on my bent arm. When we got inside, I checked our coats and then went into the main hall with her. Her dress was green, paler than her eyes, short, in keeping with the new fashion (Nancy got the
Delineator
from Chicago every month), its silk knotted fringe shimmering a good six inches above the floor.

The Grange was a fairly depressing place. Somebody had decided to paint it gray inside as well as out, so that you always had the feeling you were stepping into a smoke-filled room, even though smoking wasn’t permitted at any of the dances except in the men’s room down the hall. The window trim was supposed to be a sort of salmon color, I guess, but it looked more like a faded red which, together with the green window shades and the hanging red-and-green crepe paper decorations, gave the room the look of a discarded Christmas. There were eight windows on each long side of the room, and a tiny stage at the far end of the room, used by speakers whenever there was a meeting, but occupied now by Red Reynolds and his band. They were playing as we came in, but I recognized the tune as one of those new fox trots and I still didn’t know how to do that damn dance. I’d had enough trouble keeping up with Nancy and trying to learn all the steps that had come in with the war, as if everybody was trying frantically to dance away all the world’s troubles, a new dance every week: the bunny hug (Shall we bunny? No, let’s just sit and hug), the turkey trot (Everybody’s doin’ it), the grizzly bear, the snake, the kangaroo, the crab, and now the fox trot and the tango. What I wanted to know was what had happened to the waltz and the two-step which my older sister Kate had taught me to do before she’d run off with her Apache or whatever the hell he was? I was a very good waltzer, and a fair two-stepper, but this new stuff was all pretty much beyond me, and so I sat on my folding chair beside Nancy and took her hand in mine and began talking about the colored band which was getting ready to relieve Red’s boys on the stand. I asked Nancy if she knew where the expression “jazz” had come from, and she said she did not. So I told her it was originally a dirty expression, and she said, Bert, it was not. And I said, Really, Nancy, it was an expression used in Chicago, it was originally “jass,” spelled with a double-s instead of a double-z and she said Well what does jass mean, and I said It was an expression used in the red-light districts of Chicago, and she said What’s a red-light district? So I said It’s where, well, the prostitutes work, and Nancy said You’re making it up, and I said No, really, Nance, jass means to do it to a woman, and she said You always make up these things because you know they embarrass me.

The colored band came on about then and played something with a lot of clarinet and trumpet work intertwined, it was very difficult to keep track of the melody, I think it was “Tiger Rag” or maybe “Bugle Call Rag.” I couldn’t dance to the music
they
were making, either, so we sat through the next three or four tunes, and then Danny Talbot came over to say hello and to give Nancy the eye. Danny thought he was extremely handsome, which I guess he was, though I couldn’t stand the flashy way he dressed. Nancy didn’t pay him much attention, well not
too
much attention, though she did keep staring up at him all the while he told the latest Ford joke, which I’d only heard a thousand times already, the one about the man who was making out his will and insisting that the old Model T be buried with him when he died. “Jed,” his wife finally said, “why do you want the Ford buried with you, for land’s sake?” and the man answered, “Because I’ve never been in a hole yet but what that flivver couldn’t pull me out,” very funny, ha-ha, though Nancy did laugh more than politely, it seemed to me. Talbot finally wandered off, and I figured this was as good a time as any to tell her what I’d done that morning, but the jazz band stopped playing just then, and Red and his boys came back onto the stand, and began playing a waltz, thank God. So I asked Nancy to dance, and I led her out onto the floor and took her into my arms.