The Friends of Meager Fortune (35 page)

“We have a long draw of wood,” the scaler, Claire Mutterly, wrote, “and I have no doubt that I assure you at least eight million board feet—what I have already figured, a prime quality especially in the cedar, hemlock plenty, and good running spruce for sleepers and tracks. It is the men’s ability to cut in spite of difficulty that I am proud of. And here they are only nine or ten good men left—but I graciously tell you they are the best of the good men. The weather is still crisp, with a minus fifteen registered today, but the men are in good spirits. I do not know how this wood was not cut out before you came home, I can only tell you I have not witnessed a raw stick bad. Signed, Claire Mutterly, talons of Arron Forks depot, March 15, 1947.”

Owen had read that letter over and over. The scaler was taking a chance in his pride and his principal authority to elaborate on the board feet. But Mutterly was a certain man.

TEN

Things continued in the deep woods, with the teams left in.

But then another man made his way to Jameson’s camp one night out of the dark on the last day of the trial—that is, about the last week of March 1947. There was a window of respite from the weather, and he managed to get in and out.

They thought it was Innis, but it wasn’t. Innis had decided he could not or would not get in from his depot at the talons—a place where four streams into Arron Brook joined. It was a man from Sloan, Blind Andre, who had been fired from his cut after everything halted.

He had walked all the way from the Tabusintac cut in the storm, wearing as many men did then, a Russian fur hat and fur-lined boots. He was disheveled at five-foot-six with a black, full beard and forearms almost twice the size of his biceps. He sat in squat fashion in the corner, his gray coat missing three buttons and tied together with twine, and among every other patchwork of clothing, a silk scarf given to him by his girl who conceived a child every year he was away.

He coughed, took the tattered coat and his hat off, and said: “This is a danger here—so you lads be on guard.”

“Why is that?” Richardson asked. He had just come in from laying down his skid load and putting the horses away. His face was haunted, as were those of the other men because they had driven themselves beyond exhaustion now. In this smoky camp they looked every bit like explorers cut away from the herd. Blind Andre had some tea.

“There is a man here sent to steal half your work,” Blind Andre said, saluting them as he stirred the sugar in.

“How?” Trethewey said.

Blind Andre said he did not know.

“Who is the man here?” Curtis said.

Blind Andre looked about, passed Tomkins’ face with no more than a glance, and said that he didn’t know. He said it was a rumor that he took seriously. He said no one could have foreseen what would be happening in the woodlots in this age. That this year 1947 would be a watershed year for the men, and that in ten years—Blind Andre would predict that in ten years not one of these men would be working the way they were today, and many wouldn’t have jobs at all.

“So it don’t matter what it is we say, do, or don’t do—we is up against her—and the world will change for us—forever.”

Sloans on the Tabusintac, Andre told them, had a thing called a buzz saw that cut out trees faster then Bartlett, pared trees down faster then Pitman. That in a year or so, these buzz saws would get better and better and faster and faster, and put scores of men out of work, and great roads would be built for trucks and heavy claws that would do the work a hundred men could. The horses would become piddling and meaningless, and the mountains they were on would be bulldozed to nothing—the water table would dry—all they saw would be changed. This great mountain would be nothing in the coming years. The beavers that had made this great stand of cedar would be trapped out of existence, and the world would become one of factories and smoke.

The men sat mute and careful in the way they moved and spoke, as if asking for details carefully would relieve them of the burden of the knowledge being entrusted.

“They’ll always need horses,” Curtis blurted.

“No they won’t, son,” Blind Andre said. Though things had frozen up this year, and oil in the trucks had solidified, new years were coming—and no one would look back. Their history would be forgotten. Their smiles in pictures, holding
the halters or pots and pans or axes in the shine, would be seen only in museums by men who could not last a day working with them.

The little spruce books they made for their children forgotten.

The songs they wrote about men like Will Jameson and Peter Emberly—now as popular with the men as the Grand Ole Opry—forgotten.

The crazy wheel forgotten.

The two sled rotten and left to wither along roads that would be overgrown, near rivers no longer traveled so arrogant historians would believe they could track the measure of these men by finding a rotted jab pole in the sun.

Curtis, at twenty-two a professional teamster and perhaps the best young teamster in the world, would not be needed. His hands, which bore the traces and marks of the reins, would no longer be needed. His ability to defy death would be considered nothing at all. Not when a truck could do ten times the work in an eighth of the time.

They sat stultified at the possibility that what they did, and why they lived, would no longer be required.

“Why do you think union is coming?” Blind Andre said. “The barons themselves are to be forgotten—all of you together will drown in the new world, and companies will come in to make these trees soft arsewipe for pretty girls. That’s why union is coming—in ten years they will have sold out to large companies and made themselves new empires.”

They were silent for almost an hour, drinking from a bottle of Captain Morgan rum.

And then, finally, someone spoke.

“We promised to get the wood below—and we will,” Richardson said.

“And since the old world is changing so fast—we are all
damned anyway. If nothing we do matters, let’s make a stand here,” Nolan said.

“We will stay and work,” Trethewey said.

The other teamsters agreed.

Tomkins said nothing. It seemed his die was cast. And he was playing Judas. But he had to, for Solomon Hickey had been his only friend.

The next day the men could not work. Tomkins stayed in his bunk. By afternoon, when he woke, he discovered Blind Andre had gone, with Meager leading him out to the top of little Hackett Brook.

The drifts were now as high as the roof, the hovels buried. The only thing he could see from the near hovel was Duff Almighty’s tail, and some wet horseshit in the snow.

“Will we die here?” Tomkins said to Meager after he got back that night.

“No,” Meager whispered, “I promise for your dad’s sake, I will keep you alive here.” He said this, and Tomkins shuddered. “You have a fever,” he said, “but I will get you tea—and I will put an herb in it to stop your runs.”

Each man was down to two cups a day. This would be Stretch Tomkins’ fourth. And he had snuck four of the last dozen donuts that had so happily come in a barrel a few months ago.

Tomkins turned his face to the wall and prayed, even though he was an atheist.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Tomkins,” Meager answered, bringing him over a cup of tea. “Only three more weeks now, and we’ll be off cut and home to cause mischief—won’t that be a fucker’s fun?”

“Well,” Tomkins said peevishly, his face to the wall, “how can we be happy on Good Friday?”

Meager smiled, nodded, and patted his shoulder: “Well, sometimes in this old world we only have benefits the boundaries of which are established by my name.”

ELEVEN

The storm blew itself out, and the cold hovered and stayed, and then slowly dissipated and the wind died, and the cedar along the ridges was once again being pulled up by rope, horse, and men, their muscles strained and bleeding. The horses once again went into the cut with wild eyes, Butch and Missy and Duff Almighty, and the great Percherons, and each teamster felt as if they had been given a reprieve—or more than this, as if they had been sanctioned by some divinity to recreate the greatest haul of lumber in the world.
Recreate
because they felt it had been done already in olden time.

They worked more furious because they knew the other mills were down. They worked because they knew their lives as teamsters were coming to a close. They cut with bucksaw for the same reason—Pitman and Fraser were on the mountain, and so was Nolan and Trethewey—all for the same purpose. The purpose; well, in five years they would no longer need to use double ax or bucksaw or hitch horse.

The great moon allowed them now to work late into the night, so at times a lonely two sled would be seen way down on the flat after 11 p.m.—not coming back with a load but leaving with one—while the moon bathed down on huge glowing craters of soundless, glittering ice.

Stretch (Tomcat) Tomkins, all six-feet-two of him—so you had to dress him twice to keep him alive once, as the men said—went back to chaffing on the downhill, and Meager went back to cooking, and Gibbs treated the horses to sweets he had hidden, and Bartlett wisely determined which great section would be the last he ever cut.

A fine wind came too, but not too harsh, and lingered in the breath of the men. It was now April 1947—the very last of their world—and yes, forty thousand horses this year in the woods doing the same harsh work as Missy and Butch.

With the white moon on Monday and a bright sky, even the fellers worked after dark, and even the horses themselves believed they would survive. The snow felt warm, and undulated through the glens and valleys of the spruce, and hung on boughs all the way out to Toomey’s Quarry. So the men began to sing again the praises of their world.

A’s for the axes as youse well know

B’s for the boys that can chop ’em down

C’s for the cutting about to begin

And D’s for the danger that we live in

And there are none so happy as we

No mortal on earth is as happy as we

Hi me hi deary deary hi deary down

Give the shanty boys whiskey and nothing goes wrong

Tuesday morning the portager came in with a store of provisions, and new socks and boots, and told them that they might not know that Owen Jameson was found guilty but that his order was to get in on the first clear day and bring the men boots.

Innis said this as the first trickle of water ran over the first frozen rock, and the very first scent of earth broke free in a
smell of fir bough and spruce. And the great cedar in the shape of a cross that was the inspiration for Good Friday’s name, and that was born the very year of the prophecy, was killed by Bartlett’s ax.

Innis spoke about the look of the jury—Hamilton, and Urquart, and Butler, Peterson, McLean, McGregor—all honorable men who had a duty to perform and performed it to the best of their ability. All honorable men who had done what people expected them to. Nothing more, nothing less.

“Oh, there were handshakes but not so many—and there were some smiles and jokes, but none too much.”

The men decided to work until the end of their contracts. They were down five teamsters and behind thirty loads, and knew they’d be hauling on gravel soon.

On this day Richardson turned his big Clydes and, starting with that large cedar Bartlett had just cut as his first base, went down into the yards and waited upon what would become his championship load. (They needed championship loads now to catch up on their wood.)

These were the largest trees seen here since 1850, when the Cunard line was at its prime, before it was sold to those in England who forged the
Titanic
. And everyone on the river had heard of this great wood—and someone said there would be a photographer here, to show Richardson coming down.

“Take yer time, boys,” he said, biting into a cold apple, “this mountain’s not going anywhere—and we go downhill fast enough.”

The horses stood still in petrified silence, just as the air was blue silent at minus ten, as the two sled was loaded painfully by men who had been loading sled for years. They would take a log on a chain hoist and roll it up on the other logs forming the base, men under it to help the three men above on the sled. If the hoist gave way and the men who strained on
the sled couldn’t hold the giant timber, it would roll back on the men underneath. Peter Emberly was killed this way, a boy of seventeen. And so too was Curtis’s uncle.

As they worked, other horses were channeled around them on the sides of the hill, and hauled their ragged two sleds to other yards, where the same work took place. The smell of horsehide in the wind, the bedeviled smell of human sweat and hair, of snow and the sweet earthen smell of piss.

On Richardson’s load, when they had no logs left but tiny ones, Butch was unharnessed and brought down into the shine, to be chained to the devil’s mount, bringing the hardiest logs ahead for the two sled. The logs down below were cedar, and heavy and wide. This is what Richardson had dreamed of. The biggest load on a sled hauled since

So far down in the valley Butch went that Pitman, standing upon a branch of a hemlock he was cutting (for you often had to climb the hemlock to get above the rot), could only see the tips of his seared black ears.

Each log was marked and scaled in the shine before it was brought up, and every log was huge—the diameter of two or three men.

The scaler would be in now until the logs busted free in the water, so sure of his millions of board feet and his bonus of four hundred dollars for the extra time he spent.

The scaler said he had never seen trees this fine in thirty-two years.

“Take yer time, boys,” Richardson said, chewing another apple, “I will find better logs and take it down when I have 330. I will not rush my last load—we will be out of here next week and home on a budget of wine and fucking.”

Here he grabbed Gibbs, for he had found a broken birch runner and they tore it off, remounted the sled track, and reattached it by heating steel strips and bending them over and along the birch, so it would run smooth along the ice track.