Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  Bruno found it pathetic that Slade should begin poking among the many dozen identical pails, picking them up and rattling them in hopes of finding his lunch. He must have forgotten to take it with him because he was worried about the new man, threatened by him. That this should be so was a surprise to Bruno; he didn’t like Slade, and hoped he would be ground into the earth in some kind of contest with Chason, but still, it was not like Slade to go to pieces so fast, before the new man had so much as breathed on him.

  “Where is it?”

  Slade was looking at him. “Where’s what?” said Bruno.

  Slade thrust an empty lunch pail at him. Bruno pretended not to understand. “Where is it?” Slade said again. “I want it.”

  “It’s gone,” Bruno told him.

  Slade looked at the stacked pails beside him, then began hurling them around the room, pulling down the clattering tin boxes, even kicking and stamping on some of them in his fury.

  A lunch pail in flight almost hit the camp boss as he entered. Slade stopped and glared at him. The boss was carrying a pail. Another audience might have found this amusing. Slade, and Bruno and his assistants, all looked at the pail; even the boss looked down at it before offering the thing to Bruno. “Found this,” he said. “Still got food inside.”

  Bruno accepted the pail and opened it. A beef sandwich was inside, still wrapped in greaseproof paper.

  “What’s the problem here?” the boss asked, looking at the mess Slade had created.

  “He was looking for his lunch.”

  “Well, that’s it there. I found it near where he’s working. This your pail, Slade?”

  Slade nodded. He knew it was the new man’s pail, and was annoyed with himself for not having spotted it earlier and enjoyed a good lunch.

  “You never saw the man I sent out to be working with you? Never seen him once?”

  Slade shook his head. He wanted to hit the camp boss for having sent the fool out to pester him. It was the boss’s fault the man was dead. The boss was a fool to try and make Slade work with someone when he knew very well Slade worked alone. It was too late to tell him that now, though. Slade wanted to eat something, but it would have made them suspicious if he demanded food before supper, when he apparently hadn’t even bothered to eat his lunch. The best thing would be to go away, and that is what he did, and lay on his narrow bunk to try and ignore the pain in his stomach. It was a long while before the dinner bell clanged.

  While he ate, Slade was aware that everyone was looking at him. He pretended not to notice. Soon everyone would quit wondering where the new man went, and life would be the same as it had been before the new man arrived to change things with his stupid bullying. He’d picked the wrong man to push around, that was for sure. Anyone talked like that to Slade, he had to expect trouble, and that was what he got, all right, the new man. It served him right.…

  “He asked for it!”

  Slade looked up. The cookhouse was silent, everyone staring at him again, more intensely than before. He realized he had spoken out loud. Would they know who he was talking about? Would his face give him away? He looked down at his plate and continued eating. If he concentrated hard, everyone would forget the words he had shouted. It had been a foolish mistake to let the words out that way, but no harm would come from it if he just concentrated hard enough to wish away the day now almost done, erase it and everything that had happened in it, leap from yesterday to tomorrow with a fierce clenching of the brow and be done with fear.

  He was afraid. The admission was frightening in itself. Slade could not recall ever having been afraid before. The newness of this emotion almost returned Slade’s dinner to his plate. He was afraid. What might happen now that his heart understood what other men felt; would he become weak, as they were? Was that what fear did, even to someone like himself? He would defeat fear, beat it down, choke it off. Fear was not for him, not now or ever. He looked up at the men, still watching him, and made himself laugh in their faces. If they expected his fear to show, he would disappoint them all, and their staring be damned!

  When Slade suddenly stood and left the cookhouse, the buzzing of opened conversations followed him out into the night. He began walking to the cabin where his bunk lay waiting. Slade felt very tired, and his stomach hurt because he had bolted his first food since breakfast, too hungry to restrain himself. He would pay the price for that without complaint, but he would never admit he had done something wrong to the new man the camp boss had flung at him. That was none of Slade’s doing, and he wouldn’t confess to a thing, not a goddamn thing, nossir, not him, not to a soul, not while he lived.

  His bed no longer held appeal, so Slade took himself into the shadows at the edge of the camp to watch what might transpire. Before long, it was obvious a search party was being assembled to look for the man Slade had killed. The teams were assembling in front of the supply shack to pass out lamps, and soon had dispersed among the trees in the direction taken by Slade that morning. He didn’t doubt that they would find the dead man before daybreak, maybe a lot sooner than that, and he knew with a cool burst of self-appraisal that no matter how hard he might deny being the one who had done the murder, they would see the truth in his face.

  He knew also that they wouldn’t bother taking him down to Ukiah for trial; they would lynch him right there in the camp. They would do it not because they had any love for the new man, who was a stranger among them, but because they had a powerful resentment of Slade. He had been the king for too long, he saw, and now they wanted him uncrowned, dethroned, beheaded by their sense of common resentment against him. They would do it if he let them, but he decided he would not let them.

  Cleaning up after dinner, Bruno was faced with more than the usual mess, since his assistants had joined the crowd out searching the woods for Chason. Not a man seriously doubted that Slade had done something bad, and their collective blood was up. Bruno knew they would devour an enormous breakfast because of their nighttime exertions, an even larger meal if they found the body, but would be too excited to eat at all if they were lucky enough to capture Slade himself. The man had walked out of the cookhouse like a fugitive, but no one had made any kind of move to halt him. Even as they suspected him of murder, they had allowed Slade the privilege of escape.

  They knew they were cowards, but would take their revenge for having been made to feel that way; Slade, when captured, would be unlike Slade the faller. No one would be afraid of him then, at least not while they surrounded him as a crowd. Before they killed him, they would make sure no individual spent time alone with Slade. The administering of justice would be a community affair, as it had to be. Bruno would be there at the end, along with the rest. That very morning, Slade had pushed him over without the least provocation. Watching the perpetrator die would be sufficient compensation. It was difficult, though, to imagine life at the camp without Slade around.

  Movement in the corner of his eye made Bruno turn. Slade seemed to have drifted like smoke from his thoughts, to coalesce as flesh and blood by the door. They watched each other for a moment. Bruno felt the hair along his neck standing up. “You’ll be wanting food,” he said.

  Slade nodded, and came closer. Bruno began backing toward the pantry. “Fix you up with something good,” he said, his voice surprisingly firm. Slade was still approaching. “Nobody here but me,” Bruno assured him. “They’re all out looking for you, you and the other man. You can get clear if you go now. You take some grub and go, and chances are you’ll get clear.”

  “You said to them I never took my lunch. That’s why they know. You told.”

  “No I didn’t. I never said a word to anyone, I swear. I’ll get you something to eat. I’ll fix it now, a couple roast beef sandwiches, huh? Easy to take along with you, not like soup.”

  It made Bruno feel cowardly to be talking that way, but his humiliation would be worthwhile if he was the one who brought about Slade’s capture. He pictured, briefly but intensely, the looks of appreciation that wou
ld be directed at him if he could only hurt Slade enough to delay his escape. There was a selection of knives near to hand; all it would take was some nerve and a skillful thrust or two. Slade was unarmed. Bruno told himself to wait until he had finished making the sandwich; he would have a legitimate reason for having a knife in his hand then, and Slade would be used to seeing it there. He could surprise him.

  “I’ll make it now, all right? The beef sandwich?”

  Slade was still moving toward him very slowly, never taking his eyes from Bruno’s face. “You got them started thinking,” he said, “about that lunch.”

  “No, I never mentioned about the lunch. I didn’t even know it was yours that got left behind. How could I know? They all look the same, those company pails.…”

  “Hadn’t been for that,” Slade continued, still approaching, “they never would’ve known, I bet.”

  “It’s not my fault. You shouldn’t have come in here and kicked everything around like you did. That’s what got them started, not me.…”

  Slade lunged for him. Bruno grabbed for a knife, but missed; before he could reach again, Slade’s fingers were around his throat. Bruno immediately felt behind himself again for the knives, but Slade was drawing him away from the table, and the ease with which he did it told Bruno that physical resistance was not going to save him. Instead, he went limp. He had heard that this was the thing to do when attacked by a bear, so it might work with an unintelligent brute like Slade. He realized within a few seconds that it would not, and was still conscious as his windpipe collapsed, producing a steam-whistle sound inside his head as oxygen was cut off completely from his lungs. As the screaming in his ears intensified, Bruno knew he was dying, the sour smell of Slade’s breath hanging around his face like an invisible mist. He wondered how he could smell it if he could no longer inhale, and died with the question unanswered.

  The body was hidden beneath a pile of empty potato sacks, far back in Bruno’s pantry. Slade knew he had done the right thing, killing him. Bruno was linked somehow with the camp boss and the new man, all of them trying to do him harm, when all he wanted was to be left alone to be the best faller anyone in the woods had seen. Maybe he should have been less of a show-off; his trick of standing on the stump as a tree fell, daring the trunk to spring back and crush him, was probably too much for some men to take without getting jealous. That was at the heart of what had happened, but he couldn’t quite figure out the exact sequence that had led to his murdering two men. He recalled having thought, at some time during the day, that Bruno had most likely put something in his food to cause his blackout the previous evening. He’d never liked the cook; Bruno looked exactly like one of the guards in the territorial prison at Yuma, where Slade had served a number of years; a hateful little man. It was probable that Bruno and the guard were related, maybe even brothers, so it was good to have killed him after so long a time.

  He left the cookhouse and began walking across to the sheltering trees. No one saw him, and Slade saw no one; every man was out looking for the first one he had killed. He kept on till he came to the skid road, a raw gash cut through the woods, leading down to the sawmill. There was really only one direction he could take if he wanted to get away.

  When he reached it, the mill was in darkness but for a lamp in the watchman’s shack. Slade worked his way around to the flume, guided by the sound of its rushing waters. Its entire length of forty-three miles would be free of planks at that hour. He searched around for the flume boats, wishing he could remember where he had noticed them when he first came up through there to the logging camp. After some minutes’ blundering around, he found them with his shins, three narrow, V-hulled craft just inches less across their beam than the width of the flume’s wooden banks.

  He set the first two boats into the stream and watched them being whisked away by the strong flow. The third boat he set carefully in the water, then flung himself inside as he felt it snatched from his hands. The sense of acceleration was immediate, an intoxicating rush of water against wood, the slap and gurgle of the four-foot-wide channel inches from his ears as he lay sprawled along the flume boat’s length. The sheer speed of it frightened Slade for some minutes, then he raised his head to look over the flume’s low sides at the moonlit country flying by, and forgot his fear in the novelty of such dramatic conveyance.

  He sat up, being careful not to upset the boat, and squatted on one of the boards bracing the hull, to travel in some semblance of dignity. Mile after mile flashed by, and Slade began to appreciate the great work required to set up the flume. Its shallow bed of redwood snaked among the hills, supported on wooden trestles of lattice construction, their spindle legs and crossbeams appearing impossibly fragile. It curved and swooped, following the landscape, angled always downward by several degrees, sometimes plunging abruptly for a half mile or so where the engineers had calculated it could be done, and the flume boat fairly hummed along, with Slade clutching its sides, moving faster than the fastest train.

  No one would ever catch up, not with the only other boats racing ahead of him. He caught glimpses of them sometimes as they rounded a curve made silvery by moonlight, two darting sticks of blackness. He would arrive at the company’s lower mill at the end of the flume before they even found the first body back in the mountains. The planing sheds and drying yards where the timber was stacked were a stone’s throw from the ocean, the loading docks an easy route onto whatever ship lay waiting. Slade knew most of the lumber went south to San Francisco, a big enough town to lose himself in without fear of apprehension by the law. If no ship was loading, or he felt he couldn’t stow away without being discovered for a day or two, he would simply turn south and start walking along the coastline. It was a simple plan, and it would work.

  He was not afraid anymore, was even a little ashamed at ever having been. He could not bother his head with memories of what had occurred in one short day; it already seemed far behind him, a jumble of events that had happened to someone else, and been told to Slade by way of a third party. It meant nothing. He was speeding toward another future than the one he’d planned, but that was not a bad thing, he decided, not if it left him breathless with the rush of air against his face, his narrow craft like an arrow flying straight and true along its predetermined path, the target ahead a new life. Slade had begun a number of new lives, so the thought of doing so again held little regret. He could not recall in detail any of those previous lives, but knew he had done this several times before, cut and run to begin anew in some other place. It was a shame to leave behind him the redwoods, since his work among them had been the most satisfying of his many lives, but it was always possible that whatever lay in store for him would bring with it similar rewards. Slade knew he deserved them.

  15

  Omie learned her letters with a swiftness that put Zoe in awe of her ability. At five years she could read all the labels on the packets and jars in the pantry, and by the time she was six, Omie’s favorite exercise was reading the headstones her father inscribed. The family had their own house, and the yard at the rear was Bryce’s area of business. The slabs and tablets of stone were strewn around by the dozens, propped against each other in the open during the warmer months, stacked in regimental rows inside a stove-heated shack for the winter.

  Omie’s visits with Bryce during working hours were not a cause for vexation, since she never interfered with the projects in progress. She was content to wander among the stones, reading aloud, with surprisingly few mispronunciations. Bryce was proud of her. His own boy was not more loved than Omie. Patrick was two years old now, and nowhere near an understanding of the alphabet.

  “Emily Jo … Johonson,” said Omie.

  “Almost,” Bryce encouraged, “but the h is silent, so it’s Johnson.”

  “Johnson.”

  “Very good.”

  “Eighteen fifty-one, eighteen eighty. ‘She Shall Weep No More.’ Why was she weeping?”

  “I don’t know. I put the words on the ston
e that the customer says to put. They don’t always tell me what they mean by it.”

  She went on to the next. “Henry Rickers. Eighteen thirty-three, eighteen eighty. ‘At Peace with the Lord.’ That’s Jesus, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Wendy Orm … Ormagast. That’s a funny name. Eighteen seventy-eight, eighteen eighty. She was only little.”

  “Yes. It’s a shame when someone dies so young.”

  “Will I?”

  “No, you’ll get to be ninety-nine and a half years old and have long white hair down to the ground and fifty-seven grandchildren.”

  Omie giggled and moved on to the next stone. She stared at it while Bryce resumed his work. He turned around some time later to find her staring at the same stone.

  “Is that an interesting one?” he said, smiling. The stone was perfectly blank.

  “Patrick Aspinall,” said Omie. “Eighteen seventy-eight, eighteen eighty. ‘Beloved Son …’”

  Bryce stood abruptly, as if charged with electricity.

  “Don’t make silly jokes!”

  She turned to him, her face so ashen the blue birthmark seemed almost black. “It says it, Papa.…”

  “There’s nothing there! You stop this! Go in the house, and don’t you come back out here till you’re invited.”

  Omie was weeping as she went inside. Minutes later, Zoe came out and approached Bryce. “Why is she crying?”

  Bryce explained, too upset to resume work.

  “I’m sure she didn’t mean it, not seriously,” Zoe said.

  “She was serious. I know when she’s joking; there’s a little grin she puts on. She was serious, or pretending to be. What kind of a thing is that to say to me, that my son’s going to die? Is she jealous?”

  “She loves Patrick. You’ve seen the way she dotes on him like a little mother.”

  “Then why would she say it?”

  “I’ll talk to her.”

  Zoe returned to the house, then came out again.