The Wanigan (4 page)

Sure enough, when he cut one open, there was a tiny fly.

“You don't know everything” was all I could think to say.

And he didn't, because the next day, even though I warned him not to, he took a stick to a hornets' nest that was hanging from a tree. When the hornets took off after us, we had to jump into the river to get away.

Another afternoon we found a little stream that ran into the river. A dam of sticks and mud was built across it, making a small pond.

“Beavers,” Jimmy said.

We crawled up on the dam and began poking around. The dam was wonderfully fashioned. Though the sticks were helter-skelter, the beavers had glued them together with mud. Behind the dam the stream's river was backing up, making a lake and flooding the shore. Suddenly there was a terrible boom behind us. I jumped a mile. It was two beavers slapping their tails against the water. They were angry at our nosiness. Back and forth they swam, slapping their tails until we left.

It was already the middle of June. Every day there was something new to see. One day a yellow bird, another day a blue bird. The spring flowers were gone now, and in the dappled shade I gathered bouquets of field daisies and bouncing Bets for Mama.

I could see Mama was growing more and more tired. She could hide it from Papa because Papa slept in the bunk shack. He didn't see how gratefully she dropped onto her bed at night or how hard it was for her to get up in the dark mornings. When the weather was warm and the woodstove fired up, as it nearly always was, the wanigan was hot as Hades. Mama often had me dip cold water from the river into a bucket so that she could splash some over her face and hands. In the evenings she had always had a bit of mending or stitching in her hands, but now she sat quietly, watching the others, her hands idle in her lap.

One morning Mama suddenly collapsed onto the chair, too weak to get up. Her face was flushed and she was coughing. Frightened, I started to call to Jimmy, who was on the shore, to run for Papa. Mama stopped me.

“Papa will only worry,” she said. “And, Annabel, they might take my job as cook from me. If we are ever to have our own roof over our heads again, we need every penny.” After a moment she took my hand in hers. Her hand was warm and dry, and I could feel the roughness from all her work. I recalled how when I was little, her hands were smooth and soft.

“You're quick at things, Annabel. You must cook the supper.”

My heart sank. I hung on to her. “But, Mama, I don't know how.”

“You've helped me all these weeks. You'll manage very well. I'll tell you what to do. First you must finish cutting up the meat.” The day before the men had shot a deer and butchered it for the kitchen. “Tie my apron around you, dear, and watch how you handle that knife.”

It turned my stomach to touch the grisly, bloody meat. When she put the meat on our plates, Mama would call it venison. Now it was all deer. Handling the raw meat, I remembered the shy and graceful animals Jimmy and I had seen so often in the woods. When the horrible work was finished, I put the pieces of meat along with potatoes, onions, and carrots into the big iron pot. Next I filled the pot with water and sprinkled in some salt and pepper and a couple of bay leaves that Mama kept in a jar. I was trying to roll out the crust for an apple pie when Jimmy climbed onto the wanigan and walked into the kitchen. I put my fingers to my lips and pointed to Mama, who was asleep on her cot.

The pie crust was sticking to the pastry board and my fingers. There was more dough on my hands than there was on the board. When I moved my hands, sticky strings of dough followed my fingers. I was ready to give up. Jimmy pointed to the flour barrel. I scooped up some flour and worked it into the dough. When it held together, I started rolling. Jimmy fitted the crust into the pan and filled it with apples. Because I knew he was trying to help, I kept quiet about his dirty hands, which had made the dough gray. In a half hour we had three pies in the oven. Unfortunately, I put them too close to the top. When they came out, the crust was burnt. Jimmy got a knife and scraped off the scorched part. I covered the tops with lots of sugar.

I swore Jimmy to secrecy and woke Mama just minutes before the men appeared. Only Papa noticed something was wrong with Mama. The other men were busy with the stew, which was a little watery, and the pies, which were raggedy.

The spring flood was over and the river level was going down. More and more logs were stranded along the shore. As soon as dinner was over, the men pulled on their boots again and went off to work in the long, light evening.

Jimmy begged to go along and his father said he could. “Just this once. Only you're not to get in our way,” Teddy McGuire warned.

Before they left, I saw Papa take Mama aside. Papa was saying something, but Mama was shaking her head. On his way out Papa gave me a hug. “I'm proud of you, Annabel,” he whispered.

When we were alone, Mama said, “What would I have done without you today, Annabel?” She took my hand in hers and we watched the evening mists gather over the river. As the river disappeared among the white veils, it looked like we were anchored in the clouds.

“Mama,” I asked, “will we ever have a proper home again, one that stays put?”

“I truly believe we will, Annabel. Your papa and I are saving all our wages from the lumber camp and the river drive. And there's the little we got from selling the farm. We want to go back to Detroit.”

“And will we have our own house there?”

“Yes, Papa hopes to find a job on the river and a place to live along it.”

“But not
in
the river?” I didn't want to spend the rest of my life floating along like a log or a duck.

“No, Annabel. Papa means to build a little house, and you'll have a room of your own.”

A room of my own, a place where I could open up a drawer and see my clothes all folded neatly. Perhaps Papa would build me a shelf for my books like he had built for Mama. Mama would hook a rug for the floor and make curtains. I'd help her make a quilt for my bed. And best of all, the room would have a door I could close. “Will I go to school?”

“There's sure to be a school nearby, Annabel.…”

Mama's voice trailed away. She was falling asleep. I stood alone for a moment on the deck of the wanigan. The moon was only a hazy shimmer through the mists. I thought of Mr. Poe's lines:

At midnight, in the month of June,

I stand beneath the mystic moon.

At last I went inside the wanigan. I couldn't help feeling a little proud that I had cooked supper and the supper had been eaten. I was so tired that for the first time ever I didn't bother turning up my hair in rag curlers. I closed my eyes and thought of Mama's promise that one day I would go to school. I smiled to myself, thinking that in a school I would be able to say poems and no one would laugh at me.

The next morning there was no lying in bed while Mama fixed breakfast. I hardly had time to splash water on my face before Mama was telling me how to mix the pancakes and grease the griddle. We had set the oatmeal to cook the night before, and now it was thick and bubbling. I had only to stir in some maple sugar. Mama managed to get the bacon in the oven and out of the oven when it was done. Jimmy, who had come with his morning load of firewood for the stove, helped me dump coffee grounds into the coffeepot. He filled the pot with water from the river and set it to boil.

“I watched my dad do it a hundred times,” he said.

When the men came, they plunged into breakfast. Papa had a worried look on his face, but apart from Frenchy, the other men seemed not to notice how pale Mama was. Frenchy frowned as he watched Mama support herself by hanging on to the stove.

As the men packed their lunch, I was alarmed to see there would be no bread left for supper. I did not know how I was going to knead a big mess of dough, for I had seen how much trouble Mama had with it. I knew Mama couldn't do it.

When the other men were ready to leave, Frenchy called out, “I catch up wit you fellows. Got to nail de sole of my boot back on.”

As soon as Papa and the other men were over the side, Frenchy took out the big wooden bread bowl, scooped up a pile of flour, and reached for the yeast jar, which Mama kept in the cooler, covered with a cloth. “My papa, he make de bread
chez nous
, at our house. He show me when I just a
petit garçon
, a little boy.”

I winced as grains of tobacco from the pouch Frenchy carried around his neck kept falling into the bowl. In minutes the dough was mixed. Frenchy picked up the dough and slammed it over and over against the table, kneading and punching. “Dis dough be soft as a
bébé's
bottom,” he laughed. “Dis bread, it be
trés savoureux
, plenty tasty. But no fat loaves, Annabel.” He stretched out his hands. “You make dem long and skinny like de tree branch.” He patted me on the head. “We have de secret,
oui
?” The next minute he was gone.

Mama and I looked at one another. For a moment the weariness left her face and she smiled. “What a good man,” she said.

What with the soaking of the beans and mixing them with molasses and ketchup and getting the fat pork back from Bandit, who had climbed up on the table and snatched it, and making enough frosting to fill the big crack that ran down the center of the cake I baked, the afternoon flew by. As I took the long, crusty loaves of bread from the oven, I felt sorry that I had once looked down my nose at Frenchy de Rossier and the way he talked.

MOUNTAINS TOPPLING EVERMORE

By the next week Mama was better. “You're not to worry, Annabel,” she said. “It was only a touch of flu that settled in my chest. I'm much improved, thanks to your and Jimmy's help and the help of dear, sweet Frenchy.”

I smiled as I thought of what Frenchy would think to hear himself called “dear, sweet Frenchy.”

Mama got up from her bed in the morning and climbed into it at night with no deep sighs. She was cross with Jimmy when he tracked mud into the kitchen and with me for leaning too close to the stove and scorching my apron, but she didn't have the strength for a severe scolding. Though Mama was cooking again, Jimmy and I still did a lot of the work. And each morning before he left, Frenchy started the bread.

With so much to do, there was no time to fret over my hard life. There was Mama to help, and Jimmy was forever dragging me off to show me something. Bandit was growing more and more mischievous each day. I could not even learn new lines of poetry but had to fall back on the ones I already knew.

It was the middle of July. Because the wanigan was so warm, I had taken to putting my cot out on the deck and sleeping outside. At first I was a little afraid of being right out in the open at night, but the moon was bright. Even on cloudy nights there were the small lights of fireflies among the grasses on the shore. One night I awoke to see veils of color sliding across the sky. It was the northern lights. They flashed on and off, lighting up first one part of the sky and then another. I thought of awakening Mama, but selfishly I wanted to keep it all to myself. Sometimes there was a falling star to wish on. I could not help but feel that like the falling star, I had dropped very far. I thought of Mr. Poe's words:

…
the comets who were cast

From their pride and from their throne

To be drudges till the last…

Was I to be a drudge to the last?

The men always took Sunday off. On this July Sunday, as on other Sundays, I looked forward to a peaceful afternoon surrounded by the thousands of logs that were our constant companions. Big Tom and Penti Ranta were fishing off the deck of the bunk shack. Papa, Teddy McGuire, and Frenchy sat near them sharpening their peaveys, poles whose sharp hooks and painted ends dug into the logs. Mama, Jimmy, and I were on the deck of the wanigan with our shoes and stockings off for coolness. Mama was mending Papa's shirt. I was brushing Bandit's fur and trying not to listen to Jimmy.

“Bet you don't know what traveling dandruff is,” he said to me.

“I don't
want
to know,” I said.

“It's lice. Bet you don't know what a crumb catcher is.”

I put my hands over my ears, and Bandit slipped away from my lap and headed for the kitchen and the pork barrel.

“A lumberjack pickin' lice out of his clothes.”

“Jimmy, that's enough,” Mama said. “If you have time on your hands, you can pick the pebbles out of the dried beans.”

I went after Bandit. While I was chasing him from the pork barrel to the lard bucket and back, I heard shouts. I cornered Bandit among the dried apples and, grabbing him by the scruff of his neck, put him in the cage Papa had made for him. We had rounded a bend in the river and ahead of us was an enormous pileup of logs. I could hardly believe how quickly the pileup was growing. I expected to see Paul Bunyan laughing to see what mischief he had done. The men jumped onto the wanigan from the bunk shack.

As soon as I could find enough breath to get words out, I asked, “What is it?”

“Logjam,” Papa said. His voice was hard, and close to angry, as if he were mad at the logs. “The logs are damming up the river. The high water on the other side is washing logs back over the dam, pushing one log on top of the other.”

Because of the dam, the logs had nowhere to go but up. The logjam was a giant monster growing and growing right in front of our eyes. Each time one log crashed against another, there was a terrible thudding sound. I reached for Mama's hand. It felt cold in mine.

The men pulled on their boots and grabbed their peavey hooks.

Teddy McGuire ordered, “Jimmy, you stay put, hear me?”

Papa said, “Augusta, you take Annabel and go inside.” Mama didn't move.

The men jumped over the side and scrambled along the shore toward the jam.

“What are they going to do, Mama?”

Mama didn't say a word. She was hanging on to my hand like she'd never let go. The other hand was grasping the rail so hard her knuckles were white.