“You’re in charge, but I can’t see givin’ away free food when you’re wondering if you can pay the phone bill.” Lyle picked up the pie plates, carried them to the sink, and turned on the water.
“I know. Just thought it might be a way to prime the pump. If they’re gonna be working, they’ll need food.” Grace didn’t expect an immediate melting of the ice shrouding the Hoot Owl, but seeing those guys scarfing down her food had created a warm breeze of hope.
“Yeah? By the time those guys get a paycheck, you better pray they still remember your generosity.” Lyle pulled a soapy pan out of the sink and raked it with the scouring pad.
“You know what’s going on at the mill? They were talking about cutting at night.” Grace pushed open the swinging door and headed to the front of the café. She spoke to Lyle through the pass-through as she poured water into the coffeemaker and flipped the switch.
“Well, all I hear is that they’ve got a deal to cut on national forest land, but not much time to do it.” Lyle dried the pans and stacked them on the overhead racks. “The new regs are not making anybody happy. Guess we can hope a few of the guys will be so angry at the government they’ll forget about Jane and drift back in here.”
***
The next evening Sherrie Thomas knocked on the door of Grace’s cabin.
When her husband and child were killed in the truck accident, the whole devastated town had rallied around Sherrie. Grace had been just starting kindergarten. She’d offered Sherrie her childish condolences: “Jeremy is an angel with my mommy now. She’ll take care of him.” A look of distress had contorted Sherrie’s face and Jane had sent the little girl outside to play.
In fifth grade, Grace began spending more time at the café after school. Those were good days for Prosperity, and the café was always busy. Jane was able to hire Sherrie to help out. But when things started slowing down and the tables were more often empty, Jane told Grace that Sherrie wouldn’t be working at the Hoot Owl anymore.
Sherrie didn’t disappear, though. Jane insisted she come to the house for dinner at least once a week. Grace watched Sherrie gather a cloud of discouragement around her as she reported leaving one job after another. She helped out in the mill office, but that brought up too many memories and she had to quit; she tried doing daycare in her home, but folks couldn’t afford to pay her enough; the stint at Sherman’s lasted a bit longer and it looked like she’d finally landed in a spot where she could stay, but when the mill started cutting back and all the regulations made everyone in town jittery, that job dissolved too.
After Warren was killed and Jane started talking like an anti-logging fanatic, Sherrie stopped coming over and rarely showed her face at the café. Grace missed her, but she understood how Sherrie felt. The battle that had forced the split between Grace and Pat had wedged apart lots of relationships in Prosperity.
Just before Jane finally left, Sherrie’s financial plight had reached desperate proportions. In the last year, she’d been driving down to Cooper and working as an aide in the elementary school. Being around kids who reminded her of Jeremy gave her comfort and made her look forward to getting up in the morning, but it wasn’t enough to pay her mortgage. The bank was merciless.
The unexpected timing of Warren’s death, had left Jane with a mortgage-free home and no buyers, allowing her to do one more kindness for Sherrie. The irony of the town pariah throwing lifelines to the drowning as she exited was not lost on Sherrie.
Now Sherrie stood in front of Grace biting her lip, and looking more worried than angry. Grace invited her in, but she shook her head and looked back over her shoulder as if expecting someone to speak for her. When she turned back, Grace caught a whiff of desperation from her.
“We need your help.” She looked up at Grace, and the thin smile she offered tugged at Grace’s heart.
“Whatever you need.”
Sherrie’s withdrawal had spoken loudly of the bitterness Jane created. Her aunt had made herself a target for the town’s fear and anger. It had crossed Grace’s mind more than once that Jane had done an awfully good job of diverting everyone’s attention away from the actual activists who were making their voices heard in Olympia and DC and effectively slowing logging to a near standstill.
“We need to feed the men, Grace. They’ve got to meet this contract—it’s the last big one Jackson signed. The regulators are breathing down their necks. There’s no time for them to set up a kitchen on the mountain. We need to use the café.”
“Of course we do.” Grace didn’t hesitate. Pulling together in tough times was what Prosperity did. Most of the men who cut the trees and ran the equipment that turned those trees into lumber, were unmarried or without families to send them off with the kind of hearty food they’d need to keep going. This town was what they had.
Early the next morning Grace began creating grocery lists and packable menus. Wives and daughters of the loggers, women she’d known all her life but hadn’t seen in weeks, started showing up at the café in pairs and small groups, bringing produce from their gardens and helping hands. Lyle jumped in and organized the brigade of cooks.
It took only a few hours to get them working like a well-rehearsed team. They cooked hardy soups, baked bread, set up a sandwich assembly station, and kept the coffee urns going. The café kitchen was overflowing with cooks who nudged one another like cattle heading to the barn.
Before pulling a tray of cookies out of the oven, Grace yelled over her shoulder, “Here comes something hot and sweet, watch out!” Mrs. G cried, “Ooo-whee! Make way for that hottie, Parrot Tillman.”
Ruth Nordeen took over the soup pot like the mother of seven that she was: “Get me more salt over here, Parrot. Who’s chopping those tomatoes? I need them in here now.”
Someone turned on the music and before long the women’s voices, singing, “Help! I need Somebody!” echoed off the metal counters.
The intense effort continued through the week. They spelled each other over the days and nights. More than once Grace prepared to leave the café at one or two in the morning, exhausted, as Marilee Sharp or Dorianne Travers came across the street from the Bullhook where they’d been tending bar to help out in the kitchen.
The mothers among the group rounded up all the teenagers who were too young to be cutting timber and organized them into a delivery squad. They hitched rides in the log trucks up to the landing and brought the food four times a day.
At night, the men worked by lights they’d strung from spars across the mountainside. The shadows cast by those unnatural beams, combined with the men’s fatigue, made the night work treacherous. Robbie Travers nearly lost a finger when it got caught under a choke chain, and Todd Sharp was hauled down the mountain on a stretcher after misjudging the angle of a falling hemlock.
A week of trying to keep up the pace around the clock, and the number of near accidents was too high to be ignored. The crew boss finally told them to stop cutting at night and just keep the landings lighted, so the trucks could be loaded and runs down the mountain could continue. The women managed to keep the food production going for ten days, but there was still a lot of standing timber to cut. Mrs. G showed up for her shift on the second Thursday morning saying, “If they can keep this pace, they’ll get it done. They’re getting their second wind up there.”
Grace looked at the calendar, “The government isn’t going to enforce the regulations on the stroke of midnight, anyway. Right?”
No one answered this. They put their heads down and got their hands moving.
“Let’s just keep it up, gals.” Mrs. G was a cheerleader at heart. “We can do this!” All that day, they pumped one another up, believing the men still had time. Their shared hope was like an epidemic of blindness. They were all caught off guard when Henry stumbled through the door of the café that evening carrying a load of reality and dropped it right in front of them.
“Time to quit, gals. The Feds sent an inspector. They’re pulling the plug on us.”
> ***
Once the big push in the woods was halted, the town deflated. No one was willing to say so out loud, but everyone knew that if they couldn’t fulfill the last contract, the mill wasn’t going to survive. Folks began to consider their options.
“You don’t know nothing about that mess someone left in front of the café a few weeks back, do you, son?” Burt Samson asked Patrick the day after they’d shut down the operation.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Pat laughed.
“There’s been some talk about how there was a cartoon painted on the café door or something. Rotten eggs. Mean stuff.” Burt tried to look into his son’s eyes, but Pat kept his gaze down.
“So what if it was me? I’m not sayin’ it was, but so what? Those Tillmans are a bunch of tree huggers and everyone in town knows it.”
“Yeah? And you let Parrot work her butt off to feed us all through that push? I don’t know what’s going on between you and that girl, but you need to remember how people talk around here. We can’t afford to look like a bunch of ignorant roughnecks who gotta thing for killin’ owls. Who knows but some reporter could get wind of what’s happening here. What do you think they’d do with that?”
“You think the federal government is going to care what one reporter says about a town too small to even show up on those maps they got in DC?” Pat sat down hard on the desk, spraying papers all over the floor.
“Human interest.”
Burt stooped and picked up an invoice that had floated behind the desk.
“It’s what sells papers and it’s what gets folks paying attention. Right now those hippy kids are getting all the attention, cryin’ about how ugly the clear-cuts are. But for my money they look like a bunch of lunatics. We gotta stay out of the limelight. We do not want any inspectors poking their noses in our woods, do we?” Burt pointed his finger at Pat’s chest. “You got a responsibility now, son. You’re the face of the mill now, so don’t go adding fuel to the damn fire.”
“I’m going nuts in this office, Dad.” The men had had a meeting, back when Jackson had first presented his plan for turning the mill over to them. They’d agreed to keep the most experienced woodsmen in the woods. Let the younger guys rotate through the office, the mill, and finally the woods. Give them the bigger picture. Pat was put in the office to start. “I’m no good at this.”
“You’re a fresh face, son. Not rough and scaly around the edges like the rest of us. You could make us all look good if you had the right attitude.” Burt lifted his cap off his head and ran his hand over his thinning gray hair. “You’ve got history here. You know what me and your uncles feel about the forest. You’re the future. That’s what people need to understand.” He handed the invoice to Pat.
“And what are we doing with this?” He swept his hand around, taking in all the paperwork scattered across the floor. “Do I need to bring your momma in here to get this place organized?”
Pat raised his eyebrows. “Would she do it? That would be great!”
Burt laughed. “Are you kidding? She’d love to get her hands on this place. She’ll organize the life out of this place if we let her.”
***
After the intensity of working day and night to keep the crew fed, Grace felt more comfortable around folks in town. Business wasn’t any better at the café, but at least now she knew it wasn’t because they thought she had picked the other side. Who could afford to spend money when no one could be sure if they’d have work next month or even next week?
Grace’s bills wouldn’t wait, though. She’d bought a lot of food for the mill on Sherrie’s promise that once they got the wood cut and shipped, the mill would be able to pay her. But the men hadn’t cut enough to fill the whole order and Pat managed to be somewhere else whenever Grace stopped by the mill office. She suspected the money wasn’t coming any time soon.
She cut way back on her food orders and kept the lights on for the few wayward tourists or hikers who stumbled in for directions or to buy a cup of coffee or a burger. Lyle was a pretty low-maintenance guy, but he had to buy gas for his truck and pay his insurance. They talked about him moving on, finding another job where he actually got paid, but he was willing to hang in there living on his government check for a bit longer.
“Prosperity is kind of hard to leave,” he told her. “Even in bad times, it grows on you.”
She laughed. “Don’t I know it? Sounds like you have the same disease as I do.”
Grace had shelter and plenty of wood to keep her warm, but the situation wasn’t good. There were a couple hundred dollars left from Jackson’s bequest and she used that pretty quickly paying the most urgent bills at the Hoot Owl.
She began having dreams about repo men coming to take the stove out of the café and crows picking the red vinyl seats apart to make nests out of the stuffing. Usually when she was anxious she could calm herself by painting, but even that had stopped working. She couldn’t think of a way out. Early one morning, unable to sleep, she stood in front of the pile of bills stacked on the café counter. There was nothing left but to call Jane down in Seattle.
“It’s really bad, Jane. We can’t even pay the phone bill. I thought I’d better call before they cut us off. I don’t see any alternative. I’m going to have to shut down.” Grace could feel her jaw starting to quiver. She clamped her mouth shut. Couldn’t expect any comfort from Jane. Just give her the facts.
“Jesus, Parrot, it’s barely been a month. I seem to remember you bragging that you could make it pay in six months.”
“Yeah. That was before the mill lost this last contract.”
“So, you come to your senses then? Well, hallelujah! You lock up that cabin and come on down to the city. I’ll find you a room and we can start the bankruptcy thing.”
“That’s not why I’m calling.” Once again, Jane’s bitter dismissal of Prosperity brought out a stubborn resistance in Grace. What came out of her mouth next surprised her more than it did Jane. “I’m not ready to give up, damn it. There’s got to be something else I can do. I’m not going to the city.”
Grace heard her aunt breathing into the phone. She pictured the scowl on Jane’s face. “OK, Miss Head-in-the-Sand, how about this? There’s some hungry people with a bit of change in their pockets camping out in the woods and trying to save the trees.”
“Oh, thanks. That’s a great way to get our windows shot out.” Grace would have hung up if she weren’t so desperate. “Why don’t I just hang out a sign saying ‘town traitor’? I can’t feed those protestors. This town is just getting over you. That’s all they need.”
“Sorry, sweetheart, but as I see it this is about the only option left that doesn’t involve insurance fraud. Unless you want to start going topless and offering other services behind the counter, you’re not going to pay the damn bills. Your name is on that bank account too. So either figure a way out of this, or I’m doing the decent thing and filing for bankruptcy.”
If she did what Jane was suggesting she might end up losing the very thing that made her want to stay in Prosperity in the first place. She belonged here, it was the only place she’d ever lived and the town was her family—these folks loved her and their love had gotten her through the loss of both her parents. Jane might be her biological family, but it was Prosperity’s enfolding arms that had always given Grace comfort.
“I just can’t,” she said. “There’s got to be another way.”
“Look, Parrot, those kids in the forest are there because they believe that cutting all the trees is ruining our planet. And I believe it too. We gotta change what we’re doing.” Jane could make it all sound righteous and brave. “Those damn loggers have got to get their heads out of their asses and start looking around. The industry is doomed. If they can’t see that… hell. Anyway, those kids need to eat, and you can feed them, and you just might be able to survive in the bargain. You know your way around in those woods well enough to get to the camp without anyone seeing you. Lyle’s certain
ly not going to go blabbing.”
“Shit.”
“They’ll keep it up with or without your food. It’s on you now. Six months.” Then the phone went dead.
That was all she could hope for from Jane. Grace was on her own. Clearly if she didn’t find a way to keep the café running, she’d have to leave town anyway and she’d be carrying a bundle of debt besides.
When she heard Lyle come in the back door, Grace picked up the pile of bills and walked into the kitchen. “We’re in a bad place. I talked to Jane and she had an idea.”
“Good morning, Grace.” Lyle hung his jacket on the coat rack by the door and grabbed an apron. “From the look on your face, I got a feeling I’m not going to like this idea.”
“Yeah. Well, I don’t like it either, but it might be our only hope.” She waited for him to stop acting like it was a normal work day and look at her. “Feeding the protestors.” She watched his eyebrows rise, his eyes get big. “We could hike up to their camp and bring them food. Like a catering service for hippies.” She laughed in spite of the miserable tangle in her stomach.
“Wow.” Lyle leaned back against the pantry door and folded his arms across his chest, and took this in. “You think it would work?” He grinned at her. “I mean, I don’t like it any more than you do, but those kids probably have money. And if we can stay alive here for a while, something just might change.” He nodded his head, dropped his arms, and pushed himself upright. “OK, Parrot. If it doesn’t work, leaving is always an option. That’s my motto.”
First, they had to make contact.
Lyle agreed that Grace presented less of a threat to a group of hippies expecting trouble in the woods than he did. Plus, it wasn’t unusual for her to put on a backpack and take a hike; people in Prosperity had seen her do that all her life. Lyle stayed out of the woods whenever possible.
The next morning, she packed up a bunch of sandwiches and cookies and headed up what the locals called “the middle trail.” This was one of the three hiking trails that led from Prosperity up through Jake’s preserve and into Mount Oren National Forest.
What We Take For Truth Page 10