Wild Life (8 page)

There being as yet no sign at all of the steamboat, I retrieved Margaret from where she leaned at the front of the post office and we pushed on around the sawmill and behind the mess hall and the office of the
Skamokawa Eagle
to the bridge. When you have come around the end of the island to face Nasset Point, then you can see that
Skamokawa is laid out in a rather pretty way, built on pilings over the water and meandering along the several river sloughs and up the several forks of Skamokawa Creek.

All the business buildings face their fronts to the water so that, without a street between, the waterways are the streets, and the high wharfs the sidewalks. Narrow wooden causeways, railed to save drunkards from falling off, span the low places between the pilings, and on the mainland a string of boardwalks run upward from the waterfront to houses on the higher ground behind the stores. Little Venice, people are wont to call this town, which I believe is from an excess of civic pride. Nevertheless, whenever fair weather graces a Regatta day, I find I must shout “Huzzah!” with the rest of them when the decorated boats parade up the little bright harbor into the water streets.

The Skamokawa anchorage is both deep and sheltered; log booms lie in the sloughs in bad weather, and there are a few small hand-logging outfits who skid down to the river and hang their booms in the Columbia River, east and west of the town. We are long in years, as Western towns go, and in the self-conscious manner of the logging West, much is made of the “old days” before the donkey engine—the days of ox teams and bull-whackers and monstrous trees so immense as to challenge the imagination. Now the big trees have all been cut for miles around, and there is a packet that stops daily on a westbound trip to Astoria, and another on an eastbound to Kalama, Ridgefield, and Portland, and we get every kind of local river traffic—tugs and trawlers as well as rowboats and barges. We are, if not entirely civilized, entirely modern, and consider ourselves at the center of Western commerce and industry.

The walks this day were overrun with men. The first day of April, which might be considered at the outside edge of the logging season, had brought to town an early swarm of loggers and millmen, cruisers and pulp-concession men, and this rare spate of sun had brought them out of the saloons and promenading along the wharfs. I had put on wool pants and lace-up boots, together with a collarless logger's shirt and woolly vest, and outfitted thus, pedaling muddy Margaret over the bridge and into town, I was gawkingstock. There's not much point in dressing outlandishly if it goes unnoticed, is my belief, and so I've refrained from cutting short my hair, which has been
advocated by certain Feminists as being both liberating and sensible. I have a big and squarish sort of face, very strong around the chin, and my eyebrows, by a woman's standards, ought to be plucked, as they're thick and dark without the least delicacy of an arch; in men's clothes I would fear being taken entirely for a man if not for my hair, which is a womanly crown, thick and with an inclination to wave, and of a chestnut red not yet gone to gray. When I put on men's clothes, I pin up my hair in a proper Psyche knot, loose and charmingly curled at the nape, so there's no mistaking my sex, and this gains me the desired effect when displayed against the cigar and clothes of a workingman. On the wharf, men who had newly come to town just stood and took a long look. Skamokawa people are hardened to my ways, though, and as a sign of their Western liberalism will make a show of imperturbability. Shopmen and farmers I knew tipped their hats with aplomb; which courtesy I returned by briskly dipping my lit cigar with my clenched teeth.

There are two bootmakers on the wharf, one a Swede named Orvil Jurgensen and one a Chinaman whose name is unknown to everyone and believed irrelevant, since he has always answered to China Sam. China Sam is the only Celestial in Skamokawa who does not come and go with the cannery season, a distinction sufficient in itself to inspire my confidence. When I had left Melba's shoes with him, and gone to Thatcher's for the needles and matches and baking powder on her list, and wandered in and out of the confectioner's on my own account, and put the little paper packages of notions and candies in the basket at Margaret's head, we went (merry as a cricket, I'm afraid) down again to the wharf to await the
Lurline.

And when the packet came and went without news of any kind, well, it took me aback. Of course, we will get a favorable letter this afternoon—I am fairly sure of it. But watching the
Lurline
steam away without word at all from Yacolt—just for that moment—I suffered a sudden terrible misgiving as to how this adventure might come out. And I suppose that moment of misgiving is to blame for my poor behavior afterward.

I should have gone (of course) straightaway back to Melba with word that there was no word (and for not doing it, I have since been vehemently condemned). But I imagined she would come to this discovery on her own when the
Lurline
steamed past the house and I did
not come flying back at once with a wild look of triumph or of grief; and in my lowered mood, I frankly dreaded returning myself to the orbit of her overanxious hysteria. When I had stood some little while in disorder, watching the
Lurline
out of sight, I took it suddenly into my mind to go up the hill and see Joseph Sheets.

He has queer ways, old Sheets, and the common run of the rabble is that he is a lunatic. Since I am held to be something of a lunatic too, I consider the old man a confederate. He has a little shack on top of a high hill that overlooks the three forks of Skamokawa Creek, and the light from his cabin at the summit can be seen from nearly any farm up the left, right, or middle fork—a night beacon for travelers. He is a recluse in most respects, though he will come down from his hill to lay in rice and flour, and on those occasions has been known to involve himself in a card game or two and play on through the night. He grows tobacco and strawberries on a couple of acres he has cleared at the top of his hill, and will sell to anyone who comes up there to buy them. Mother sent Teddy and me up that steep trail every strawberry season, and it was old Sheets (though he must not have been old in those days; do you suppose he was forty?) who taught my brother and me to roll tobacco leaves and smoke them, the most vile kind of cigars.

It's always my intent to conquer Sheets's hill without dismounting, and I believe this is something I will one day accomplish; but it will have to be on a day when the mud is not sticky. In April, of course, it's a hopeless ambition. I went up resolutely, standing on the pedals, but after a short, sweaty exercise, I stood off and pushed Margaret heavily up through the long aisle in the trees. That trail of his, not being of Wahkiakum Indian origin, is laid out in the White Man's imperfect way, plunging almost directly up from the river bluff to the hilltop. The trees all grow straight from the sidehill, while the ground bears off sharply beneath them, and of course the rain gathers itself and shoots down the trail to the river just as if it were a log flume. In certain weathers, a person laboring uphill against the muddy stream can't stand and get her wind, or, standing, she'll begin to slide down again; and going down the hill the hind end of a bicycle is liable to slew around and pass the front end.

At the edge of Sheets's cleared field I put Margaret to rest against a tree and went on, as broken winded as an old horse, until I had come out on the highest point. I stood awhile getting back my breath,
and then I just stood and looked, because I had come up for the clear day, the view, as much as the old man. And here is the truth: I had come also for the irrational purpose of “looking” for Harriet, which doubtless some people will think is a species of prayer from a woman who does not believe in prayer, and which of course I deny.

From that certain point at the top of Sheets's hill, in limpid air, you can see the Columbia from Cathlamet Head to Grays Point, the bright water littered with islands and scalloped with little inlets. You can see the drift logs piled white along the narrow beaches, and the gray ribbons of the sloughs looping across the lowlands in a deep-laid design that from the water is unknowable. You can see bristling dead poles of burnt timber showing against bare mottled rock amid the immeasurable forests of the Nehalem Mountains as they break in long blue ridges southward across the sky; and the unapproachably distant peaks of Hood and St. Helens adrift like pyramidal icebergs at the edge of a purplish sea. From the top of Sheets's hill, if the weather is soft, you can hear the low moan of the Columbia River bar more than twenty miles to the west.

But in that immensity of woods and mountains and waters a person can also see the horses and men laboring on the fish-seining grounds at Welch's Island, and gillnet boats upon their drifts upstream and down, and salmon traps near Puget Island, and columns of smoke from a dozen sawmills and from the Altoona Cannery. There are cleared fields and the dark dots of houses all up and down the valley bottoms, and of course everywhere the high flaring stumps of cut trees and shattered small timber where the loggers have been at work. I was struck, suddenly, by the sense of a human presence upon the wilderness, which was a reassurance and comfort more rational to me than any prayer.

When I had taken in about all the reassurance there was, I called for Sheets and walked down through the berry rows to his little place, calling again. He will come out to you with a tender grin or hide in the trees and wait until you've looked, and called, and gone; this is Sheets.

I had about given up and left a little folio of peppermints tucked into his door latch when he evidently made me out from his hiding place in the brush and broke cover at last. “Well, see who that is,” he said to the air, “it's Mr. Charlie Bridger,” which is an old childhood name he has always attached to me, and I replied, “Yes, it's me, Sheets, I'm glad to see you,” and I gave the peppermints into his hand.

He has a rank smell of tobacco about him, and I suppose it's tobacco to blame for the yellowing of his beard, but he is strongly built, his old features clean and angular, “shaped with an axe,” as my mother would say about him, and I believe he must have been catmint to women when he was young and sane. Skamokawa gossip has Sheets coming west as a result of a broken engagement, and though he is now quite unmarriageable, a thoroughgoing hermit of odd habits, I suppose there are women who would accept him nonetheless on the strength of rumors: he is thought to keep a box of gold coins buried in his yard.

I offered him one of my Kentucky cigars and lit my own stub again, and we smoked together companionably. “Well, Sheets,” I said, “here are your dry spring days,” for Sheets's foretellings of the coming year's weather have always been widely celebrated, and the
Skamokawa Eagle
annually has sent someone to ask after his predictions. Last January's clipping is still pinned to the wall of my kitchen. “
Sky'll clear up a good week in all, around the end of March,” pronounced the Skamokawa Weather Prophet, and upon being reminded that the town receives an average fifteen inches of rain in the month of March, replied, “Well I guess rain will fall hard on the other twenty-five of the days.
”

He solemnly pulled on the cigar while he considered my remark, and then, with a practiced slanting motion of his head, released a plume of smoke toward the sky. “It's a mystery of the Lord, I expect.”

I have heard of hermits more intent on their solitude than Sheets. There is a couple living eight miles up the Left Fork who grow their own garden, hay field, berries, and fruit, and have been to town only twice in anyone's memory, each time the wife arriving in her wedding suit and high-topped old shoes. And my dog, Buster, may be crazier than old Sheets: he is afraid of certain dread spots in the front hallway and the kitchen, and will go to any lengths to keep from stepping upon them. What I believe may be Sheets's singular glory is his raising of tobacco in a climate such as this one, where the sun arriving on the first of April must be pronounced a mythic creature, and a sign of God's wonders.

While we strolled up and down admiring his rows of strawberries, the small rosettes of new green growth among the brown and withered leaves of the summer past, I asked after his prospects for a good crop and listened as he told the coming weather and in his customary way tolled the names of the dead, among them his sisters and his mother and old acquaintances of his childhood. He lives alone, and I've always understood his lunacy to be a kind of loneliness. But when he walked me back across the hill to Margaret he began suddenly to give me his advice about the little witches who will come and live right under the floor of your house if you let them, and must be driven out by pouring boiling water through the cracks; and this brought me up a little.

In my childhood, if Sheets had carried a pistol in his belt and cited the old poets, I suppose Teddy and I would have made him over into a Hero, but as it was, we thought he was a holy oracle, a Wizard. Sitting with him at the top of his hill, the three of us soberly smoking, we would often ask for his prophesies on matters more momentous to us than the weather:
Will the flood get as high as our house? Will Pearl's calf be a heifer? Will Lester's runt puppy die?
And without knowing who Lester was, or any of the other circumstances of our question, he would simply take the cigar from his mouth and answer yes or no; and the future, we knew, would be sealed.

Of course, it's been years since I've asked for one of Sheets's divinations or believed in them. But walking back across his hill—I don't know why—I had meant to ask the old man whether Harriet would be safely found. And I suppose it was his quiet rant which closed my mouth; or I had a qualm of good sense, or of dread.

 

When anything in [my books] is rather strange and
outré,
it is probably drawn straight from nature as close as I could draw it; when it is plausible, there is probably no particular and especial foundation for it.