Washika (10 page)

No one was listening. They looked at Alphonse for a sign but Alphonse just smiled and smoked his cigarette. What did he want? They had heard this kind of talk before, that first day at Washika as they got down from the bus. He was there that day, speaking in the same way. After lunch that day, they had had to go out on the
Madeleine
, pick logs off the shore and stand in brown stinking water with leeches sneaking in under their jeans, all that after the long, sweaty bus ride from Ste-Émilie to Washika.

“And in conclusion,” the man went on, “I'm sure that you will not disappoint us in this next endeavour.”

They looked up from the sand. They stared at Alphonse as if staring at him like that would somehow change things

“Well, my little ducks,” Alphonse smiled at his crew. “We have a new job for you today. You see, there's a fire started up on the Ottawa. It's been going strong for twelve days now. Men are tired and it's time for fresh meat up there. Leave your life jackets behind. The bus should be here any minute.”

The students left the circle without saying a word. There was nothing to say. They were not going out on the Cabonga today. That at least was clear. In the bunkhouse-and-office the guys were worried.

“I wonder if we should bring fly oil?” Pierre Morrow asked no one in particular. He was the youngest and the smallest person in the camp.

“Fly oil?” Lavigne turned on him. “You worry about fly oil at a time like this? Don't you realize what could happen to us?”

“You mean it's dangerous?”

“Dangerous? What's the matter with you anyway?”

“Leave him alone,” Henri interrupted.

Lavigne moved in closer. “Listen, my friend,” he said. “You know what day this is?”

“Thursday?” Morrow was not sure. He looked at the others sitting on their bunks.

“That's right. And do you know what week this is?”

“Sure, I know.”

“Well?”

“It's our week to go down; on Saturday, right after breakfast.”

Lavigne had made his point. He smiled at Morrow but Morrow did not return the smile. No one was smiling. They were looking at the grey plywood floor and taking long drags on their cigarettes.

“You think so, eh?” Lavigne continued.

“All right, Gaston,” St-Jean got up off the bunk. “That's enough.” St-Jean looked out the window to the yard where the bus would arrive. “For me, we've had it,” he said. “There'll be no going down this weekend. I've heard about these fires. We could get stuck a couple of weeks up there if it's a big one.”

“But they're expecting me at home,” said Morrow. “We have visitors coming. It's
maman
's birthday on Sunday.”

“Poor little one,” André Guy began. “He's lonesome for his
maman
.”

“Your mouth,
calis
!” St-Jean looked over at André.

“It's here!” Lavigne shouted.

They could hear the engine running. They looked out the window and saw the pencil-yellow bus with a black bar running along its length. The students picked up their lunch pails and their gloves and hard hats and went outside.

Outside, Alphonse stood talking to the driver. They stood by the open door of the bus. The driver reached into his shirt pocket and offered Alphonse a cigarette from a light blue package. Alphonse lit the driver's cigarette and then his own. He turned to the students gathered around him.

“All right now,” he said. “Everybody in the bus and if you're smoking be sure to butt them out on the floor. We have enough with one fire.”

The students lined up alongside the bus and, one by one, they stepped inside. The inside of the bus was pale green with a black rubber mat running down the aisle between the rows of seats. They were bench seats with leatherette covering and chrome bars above the backs. Everyone raced for a window seat. The boys placed their gloves and lunch pails in the racks above the seats and, as quickly, fought for a place next to a window. They fumbled with the latches and pulled at the glass until all of the windows of the bus were open.

Alphonse entered the bus and sat down beside François Gauthier in the front seat, to the right of the driver's seat. At last the driver appeared at the front of the bus. The students could see the back of his head in the mirror as he counted the passengers in his bus. The driver pointed an index finger towards each one of the students as he counted. Then, it was time. The driver reached over to the handle and swung the door shut. He shifted into gear and they were off.

They went around the bunkhouse-and-office. All of the students waved to Emmett Cronier as they crossed the truck scales. From there, they drove down the gravel road, past the infirmary and north to the Ottawa River. Henri had been careful to choose a seat by a window on the driver's side of the bus. He had raised the window up to its highest and he looked out onto the water of the bay as they went by the infirmary. Lise Archambault was not there. She was not on the verandah or even at the door. He remembered being able to see out through the curtains when he had been there with her. As they sped by the building, he gave a little wave towards the windows, just in case.

The engine groaned going up some of the hills and there was often a grinding sound as the driver downshifted at the start of a new hill. Some of the boys tried to sleep but the road was very rough. Mostly hey smoked and looked out the windows at the thick green forest, the swamps and beaver ponds in the lowlands. Once, going down a steep hill, they saw a moose standing in the water. The moose lifted its head to look at them. Water dripped off the large dewlap hanging from its throat.

At exactly ten o'clock they drove into a widening of the road. The bulldozer had cleared away a strip thirty yards wide on both sides of the road. At the end of the clearing on both sides were broken trunks and roots and a mixture of light sand and stones piled up where the tractor had pushed them. A narrow house trailer stood alongside the road with several Company trucks parked beside it. The trucks all had long steel antennas on their roofs and at one end of the trailer stood a thirty-foot pole with a radio antenna at the top. On the opposite side and further back from the road were two tractor-trailers with their low-beds empty and long lengths of chain lying on the sand beside them. They could hear the heavy machinery that the trucks had transported there on the low-beds and smell the burning forests through the open windows. To the northwest the sky was a grey-black and it had begun to rain softly. The bus stopped in front of the house trailer. Alphonse stepped down from the bus and walked towards the set of steps leading to the door. As he approached, the door opened and a tall, thin man with grey, curly hair waved to him to come inside.

The driver shut down the engine and sat at the wheel smoking a cigarette. The air was damp and heavy and drops of rain began to cover the windshield. Most of the windows were still open and the boys sat quietly, listening to the rain and the mosquitoes entering the bus.

Alphonse came out of the house trailer office followed by the tall, thin fellow they had seen earlier.

“That's it, then,” Alphonse said. “We should be there sometime around noon.”

“Oh yes,” the tall man answered. “No problem at all. We opened a new road in just yesterday.”

“How long do you think?”

“Well, that's hard to say. With the wind and the rain, who can tell, eh?”

Alphonse turned his back to the bus. No one could see him as he quickly winked at the tall man in front of him.

“At least three weeks, what?” Alphonse asked, loudly. He wanted all of his little ducks to hear.

“Oh yes, at the very least.” The tall man smiled and looked towards the bus and its open windows.

No one was speaking in the bus. It was quiet, except for the mosquitoes. The boys looked out at the man who had said, “Oh yes, at the very least,” and they hated him then, even if they didn't know him. They looked at his clean white shirt, freshly pressed trousers and clean work boots and they hated him again. When he lifted his hard hat to scratch his head through the thick grey curls, they hated him some more.

Alphonse waved good-bye to the man as he entered the bus. He spoke to the driver and they both laughed.

“Sometime tonight,” he said to the driver. “I have no idea what time. They'll reach you somehow, with their radios, probably.”

“You bet,” the driver said.

Alphonse turned to the students. They sat in the seats, some with their heads resting against the windows, others smoking, and all being very quiet.

“All right, you guys,” Alphonse began. “Here's how it is. The fire is sixteen square miles now. We'll be staying pretty much together but, if we do get split up, don't worry. At the end of each day, all the men are assembled at Camp 15. That's where we'll take our bus back to Washika at night.”

This was different. The students felt it as soon as Alphonse had begun to speak. Out on the Cabonga, on the sweep, Alphonse was in charge. If they had put in a good morning and it was especially hot in the afternoon, he would go easy on them. They might move to another shore, running the
Madeleine
at slow speed, or they might stop at a nice windy beach and roll out a log or two. There, it was Alphonse who decided, and he had always been good to them.

“What about you, Alphonse?” Lavigne spoke up.

“Yes? What about me?”

“Will we still be working for you?”

“Yes, in a way,” Alphonse smiled. “As long as you're with me. But there are a lot of foremen here. You may not be working with me.”

“How's that,
sacrament
!” Lavigne whined. “I didn't come here to fight forest fires. I came here to work on the sweep, same as everybody else.
Calis
!”

Alphonse did not answer him. He took a notebook and pencil out of his shirt pocket.

“There's a truck over there by the trailer,” he said. “The one with the caboose. Get ready to get on. It'll take us out to the fire.”

The students gathered their gloves and lunch pails from the racks above the seats. They came out of the bus, one by one, walked past Alphonse who was standing by the door, and headed towards the caboose. As Henri stepped down from the bus, Alphonse made a sign with his hand to come closer.

“Henri,” he said. “I have a little job for you if you want.”

Henri looked at him. Alphonse had changed. He was not like he had been on the Cabonga. This was not the
Madeleine
and they were not at Washika Bay. He could not say exactly what was different about the man, but he could feel it. And he was sure that Alphonse felt it also.

“Yes, of course,” Henri said.

“You see, Henri,” Alphonse held out the small, black notebook and pencil, “they have asked me to keep track of the hours. I'm not very good with numbers, you know. Just write down the names there and mark down the hours we work every day.”

“You want me to keep the book with me, Alphonse?”

“Well, I'd better keep it. They might not like that. At the end of each day, come and see me and enter the hours beside each name.”

Henri took the notebook from Alphonse. He pressed it against the hood of the bus and with the lead pencil wrote down the names of the students. At the top of the page he wrote the date and, just below the date, he underlined the word “HOURS” in capital letters. He folded the notebook and handed it and the pencil to Alphonse. Alphonse and Henri walked across the fresh sand, past the trailer office, to the caboose. As they reached the truck, Alphonse waved to the bus driver.

“Sometime tonight,” he shouted.

“You bet!” the driver called back as he started the engine.

They did not find it funny being told to board a caboose. There wasn't a railway line within at least a hundred miles, maybe more. Being loaded into a wooden box attached to the frame of a one-ton truck did not amuse them, nor did the fact that the box was called a caboose. They climbed the two steps at the rear of the truck and entered the caboose through the open doorway. When the last student had entered, the driver closed the door behind them. They could hear him securing it with an iron bar across the back. There were small openings about six inches by six inches covered by wire mesh on both walls of the caboose. The only other opening was a rectangle cut out of the wood panelling adjacent to the rear window of the truck. Sitting on the plank benches along the walls of the caboose, they could lean over and look through the rear window of the truck and the windshield and see the bulldozer road ahead of them. They could see Alphonse sitting in the truck, smoking and talking to the driver, but they could not hear what he said.

The road was very rough. The benches were not bolted down and the boys had quite a time trying to keep from sliding around inside the caboose. It was raining. They could not hear them but they could see the drops forming on the windshield between the sweeps of the wiper blades. It seemed endless. They swayed back and forth with the changes in the road, holding on to the plank benches as best they could. Suddenly they felt a change in the truck's speed as the driver geared down and finally came to a stop.

Up ahead, Company pick-up trucks were parked at different angles along the side of the road. Among the pick-up trucks there was a larger truck, dark green with a wooden rack and a light brown tarpaulin stretched over the top of the rack. Further up the road, past the truck with the tarpaulin, a bulldozer was parked with its blade resting on the sand, and roots and pieces of branches caught in the cogwheels of its tracks. Beyond the bulldozer the students could see the trail it had made through the bush. All along the trail they saw through the windshield lay long lines of grey, canvas hose. They could see where the hose crossed the road, entered the trail, and then disappeared behind the clumps of charred blueberry bushes and fallen jack pine.