Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (17 page)

They passed between low white hills and distant gray tree lines. Jack headed west out of Vaughn toward a new stand outside Eutis, not far from the Maine-Quebec border. Pete hadn't seen it yet, but according to Jack it was supposed to have a slope of ten degrees, no more, up from the road; there was very little birch or alder and no stumpage to the owner, as long as they pum-yarded, burning the brush as they worked. The owner, some guy from Massachusetts, was going to put
a hunting camp in and just wanted part of it cleared. They'd get a lot of sixteen-fours out of those trees for boards, the rest for stud, Jack had said. Even if they paid someone to skid the logs to the road, they'd come out double their usual take, and Jack was going to give him a share this time instead of paying him by the hour. Jack thought he was taking Pete on as a partner, but if Pete could bank enough, this would be his last job. After a year of sleeping up in his old bedroom and eating his mother's eggs across from his father every morning, he could leave Vaughn for good and move down to Portland.

The land rose toward the White Mountains. The snow was deeper up here, and the sky lightened as they passed through Eutis, turned down a dirt road, and after a few minutes, stopped. A southerly breeze moved through the woods, and though it wasn't even April yet, the air was warmer than it had been since last September. They all stood next to the truck looking at the sky and up the slope of the hill where they had to go. It didn't seem like a 10 percent grade, not from down here. Fifteen, at least, or twenty. Doug tied the arms of his snowsuit around his waist and, following Jack's lead, Pete stripped down to his T-shirt. One way or another, Pete thought, Doug was going to cut into his share. There were only two saws, and he sure as hell wasn't going to get stuck yarding all day on a sucker's cut.

There was deep sloppy snow at the bottom, but up above it dried out in the duff. Jack set his load down and waved his hand to the west. Pete dropped to his knees, filled the saw with gas and chain oil, tightened the chain on the bar, and headed out half a dozen paces to start limbing the large pines and spruce while Jack walked in a widening circle around their gear, blazing most of the bigger trees with his axe. If a tree didn't need to come down, he wasn't going to take it down just to make it easier to fell the big ones. Jack was supposed to be one of the best in the woods, the great-grandson of a Finnish stonecutter from Hurricane Island, who used to timber cruise for Great Northern up in the Kingdom before he got sick of working for people and became a small-time jobber between the Saint John and the Dead Rivers. Jack would do all the felling after Pete and Doug ran the saw up and down the outside of the trunks, stripping off the lower limbs. Pete was sure Doug knew not to limb pulling the saw up (the chain could easily snag and pitch the bar back into your face), but he did it anyway. Jack took the saw from Doug and face cut and back cut out a wedge so there would be no split in the butt of the log. Pete waited for the first tree to fall. For some reason, no one had done any high-grading here over the years. Everywhere else they had worked over the last six months had been stripped of the best wood every twenty-five years for the last hundred and fifty, leaving the cull of each generation to reproduce for the next.
Pete felt an unexpected excitement as he took his finger off the trigger of the saw and looked up at the long straight trunks hurling through the pale sky. They'd be able to use all the log—no blue stain or red rot. These weren't old growth trees, but old growth was often useless—spike topped and full of heart rot. These trees were tall and straight, in their prime. There was some hackmatack up the hill mixed in with useless popple, but hardly any puckerbrush to fight through. The owner had no idea what kind of wood he was giving away, and Pete felt a certain pleasure in his knowledge of the woods, though it had been hard won in the last year.

Jack had taken Pete to his first AA meeting, and a few months later given him work. Pete didn't want to tell Jack he was leaving after this job. He felt guilty about it, because Jack would just end up going it alone, and he was too old for that. Maybe Doug would keep working with the old man, though Pete doubted it.

A shudder passed up the trunk of the first tree and the top swayed for a moment before falling along the path Jack had chosen for it. Pete dragged the bar of the saw along the flanks of the trunk, stripping off the limbs. At four lengths of the saw and the orange tail sticking off the back, he bucked a log at sixteen-four and rolled it over with his heel to limb the underside. Doug picked up the logs and tossed them into piles as if they weighed no more than two-by-fours. At this
pace, they could level the stand in three weeks, maybe a month.

“This is great for me,” Doug yelled above the noise of the saw. “I need the money, and I need the money bad. There's a guy starting a garage over in Londonderry. I need a thousand bucks to go in with him. He's the surgeon, I'm the body man.”

Pete just stared at him for a minute. It was Jack's unspoken rule that they keep the talk to a minimum until it was time for coffee at ten thirty, and Pete liked the rules, he realized. He liked the predictability. Doug was the opposite of that.

“Hey,” Doug said. “You get high? You do, don't you?”

Pete glanced over at Jack, who was busy sizing up a big spruce.

“I'm gonna score a dime bag when we're done with this day. I'll have to get a ride up to Augusta for it, though. You got wheels?”

Pete shook his head and turned back to the tree, hoping Doug would shut up. The saw turned off (he had hit the kill switch by accident, which he often did when he wasn't paying attention), and Doug was right there again.

“He doesn't know half the shit I've been up to, Mr. AA,” he said, looking over at his father. “Let me take her for a spin.” He grabbed the saw away from Pete, holding it in his left hand and yanking on the cord with his right—another suicidal habit. He started limbing
one of the trees Jack had felled, but he left two-inch stubs and got bored halfway up the trunk and turned to the base of a standing tree. Pete started to throw the limbs into piles they could burn later. After he finished, he looked around and saw a fifty-foot hairball of a juniper smash through the upper limbs of a spruce to hang up fifteen feet over Jack's head. Jack stopped his saw, marched over to Doug, and started cursing at the top of his lungs.

“You,” he said, pointing his finger at Doug, “come with me.” Doug made a conspiratorial face at Pete and trundled after his father, giving an exaggerated wag to his blocky head. Jack was a hard driver but fair. Even in his cups, Pete's mother had said, Jack had never been a beater. “That's the one thing I know, from Phyllis herself, before she died. But when he was still drinking,” his mother had said, “he would take off for weeks, sometimes months at a time, and he never had any money with him when he came out of the woods, he wasn't there when Doug was born, and he wasn't there when Phyllis was sick. Everyone knows he never even so much as said happy birthday to that boy after the cancer took Phyllis. Doug lived with that awful woman, Phyllis's sister, until Jack got sober, and by then, I dare say, it was too late. But ever since Jack got sober, he's done everything he could.” Pete had heard people in AA talk of how Jack was always lending money to Doug, giving him cars and, in one case, his
own truck, which Doug drove into a graveyard and wrapped around a power pole.

Jack set Doug up pulling the brush together and trudged back over to Pete with his lips pulled straight and tight. He gave Pete his saw back, and they went to work limbing and bucking to log length, some to stud length, Doug piling them up. The noise of the saw was the closest thing to total silence. As he often did, Pete thought he heard a voice in the whine of the blade cutting through a trunk. He stopped to look around and remembered again what had happened.

Pete knew that a lot of people in Vaughn said the accident was exactly what they had expected of him, even though Jen had been the one driving. When he and Jen went up to Orono together to the state university, her parents tried to get her to break up with him, saying he had been no good from the beginning. At fifteen, he was kicked off the basketball team. A kid from Coney fouled him just before a layup, and when the ref didn't call it, Pete cuffed the kid in the side of the head. They went at it in the middle of the floor for a minute before the refs pulled them apart and threw Pete out of the game. Pete waited for the kid in the parking lot and jumped him from behind. “What kind of kid jumps someone from behind?” Coach Dawson asked his parents. Then his senior year he was caught cheating on a math test. He would have been expelled if his mother had not pressured his father, the senior math teacher, to step in. Pete failed the course but graduated anyway,
and everyone knew why. When he went to AA after the accident, people said (Jen's father said, anyway) that Pete hadn't really changed—he only went to meetings to get everyone off his back. Jen's father ran the branch of the Gardner Savings Bank; he could tell people the river ran north and they would believe it.

The first time Pete went back to drinking, a week after he started AA, everyone knew about it the next day. The bartender at the Wharf had thrown him out at nine thirty at night. AA was anonymous but his drinking wasn't (after leaving the Wharf, he had walked up and down Water Street yelling at the dark windows of the shops). The people in AA took him back and told him to keep trying. They said the same thing two weeks later when he went out again, but after the third time people stopped coming up to him at meetings. They looked away when he walked into the room; they had given up on him, all except Jack who never once asked why Pete had gone back out.

“When you come to pick me up, if I'm not there I guess you know where I am,” Pete said to him once.

“Fair enough,” Jack said.

Jack kept taking Pete to meetings, and Pete kept going because he would have to move out of his parents' house right away if he stopped—that was the agreement. His parents said he wasn't trying hard enough; his father said Pete was trying to break his mother's heart. Pete was trying, though. It didn't help
that his mother could barely look at him when he came home at night.

It didn't take long for Doug to look bored. He stretched his arms out and craned his neck, surveying the trees with the same vacant smile he had been wearing all morning. He was stoned, Pete realized. Doug shouted something at his father, who shook his head that he couldn't hear. He shouted again and again until both Pete and Jack turned their saws off.

“Have you seen my butts?” Doug said, still shouting.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—how the fuck would I know?”

“Did you see them in the truck?”

“Did I see your cigarettes in the truck? Why don't you keep them with you?”

“Cause I'm trying to quit.”

Pete didn't want to say anything, but he could see the outline of the pack in the pocket of Doug's snowmobile suit.

“Go down there and look yourself, and when you come back bring the extra gas and the tea.”

Jack sat down on a stump and ran both hands over the top of his head.

“Jesus, that boy's gaumy,” he said after Doug had disappeared below. “I shouldna let him come. He's saving money to move out west, he said, work on the oil rigs in Wyoming. It's something different every time.”

“He's strong,” Pete said.

“I had to say yes, when he called,” Jack said, looking up at Pete. His eyes seemed uncertain. “I had to give him another shot, despite what happened last time.”

“What happened last time?” Pete asked, but Jack didn't answer.

Doug climbed back up the hill and stopped at one of the brush piles to turn the gas can upside down into the branches. The better part of five gallons soaked into the ground before Pete could get Jack to turn and look. Doug snapped off a match and tossed it into the pile. The fireball that rose into the trees knocked Doug onto his ass. He howled with pleasure and leapt to his feet.

“You see that?” Doug yelled.

There was still enough snow and slush around the pile to keep it from spreading, but it was burning so hot Pete could feel it on his face.

“We don't burn until the end of the day,” Jack said, clearly trying to restrain himself. “And we don't waste the gas. Use newspaper.”

“I was just trying to help.”

“If you want to help, start histing those logs over there and don't touch the gas and matches. You got that?” he said, and when Doug didn't answer: “You hear me?”

“Yes! Jesus. I don't see why we gotta burn brush anyway.”

“
Yhteishyva
,” Jack said.

“Finnish wisdom,” Doug grumbled and went off to the row of logs Jack had left.

“And because the owner wants it done, and the owner pays your salary. All right,” Jack said, nodding at Pete.

The high sun shone through the hole they had cut in the sky and warmed them as if it were June. Jack and Pete took off their T-shirts. It was too early in the season yet for midges and black flies, but robins and whip-poor-wills flitted through the air. Squirrels cut paths along branches from tree to tree, moss dampened the toes of their boots and the tattered cuffs of their cutting pants. They ate while they worked, forgetting the coffee. A day like this, a forerunner of spring, made the woods seem frantic with anticipation for the coming season, and Pete couldn't keep from thinking about the kind of life he would set up for himself in Portland, where no one knew anything about him. He would find an apartment up on the east end, on Munjoy Hill, with a view of the bay. Things were still cheap up there, people said, and it was walking distance to downtown where he'd get some kind of job in a restaurant. Something to start with until he found a better position. Part of him would miss the woods, the smell of timber, running his hand along the defined grain of a juniper stump, and the crisp air filled with scorched sap. He had better things in mind, though. He would always associate Jack with Vaughn, and with Jen, and
the accident. The longer he stayed in Vaughn, the more he felt time running out.