by Patrick Lane
THE SAWMILL SPRAWLED BESIDE THE CNR railway that ran north to Jasper, south to Kamloops. A pockmarked gravel road crawled out of the mill yard. It crossed the railway siding and the mainline tracks, reaching past the three-room CNR station, circling round the cookhouse at the first bend of the road by the swamp where the three bunkhouses lay side by side. The long, low buildings squatted at the edge of a bog, the line of six windows under the eaves propped open with cedar kindling sticks in the faint hope of a breeze to move the fetid air. The screens that tried to cover them were rusted, cut, and torn, prickled edges bound back together with threaded haywire and woven butcher string. The gaps and holes let in the flies and the mosquitoes in seething streams. In the lines of bunks along the walls the sleeping men turned their bodies over and over as insects settled to feed on their bare arms, their chests and shoulders. The men’s faces stared blind into the dark, a rare hand rising vaguely into the night, brushing at the whining air as if to drive the sound of darkness away.
Joel lay awake on a thin mattress at the bottom end of the last bunkhouse. His bed was the one closest to the bog. The musk from the still waters eased across the floor, a thin mist creeping. The welded iron bed he’d been given a year ago had been pushed three feet from the corner by the back door and there it had stayed. There was no window above his bed, only an apple box nailed to the wall with his weekly towel draped across it. The box held the little he called his own, a safety razor with the rusting blade he used for two weeks, a bar of soap in a cracked saucer with bits of sawdust and grit embedded in its scored surface, and a plastic comb with the tail sharpened to a point. Under his bed was a small cardboard box where what clothes he’d scavenged were stuffed, two shirts, one with its tail torn off, the other missing buttons, his other pair of work pants, some assorted socks of different kinds, and the blue wool coat Art gave to him that winter night he’d been dragged off the train.
The twelve men he shared the bunkhouse with lay stretched out beyond him in a row of army bunks, their bodies barely covered, damp sheets coiled around their shanks. They had long ago fallen into restless sleep, their snores and grunts breaking below the nag of the mosquitoes. Joel lay naked, his yellowed sheet drawn across his legs, his pants and shirt slumped on the floor by his boots. He refused to let his hands wander his body, keeping them clenched into fists at his sides. His hard cock stood stiff from the wisps of blond hairs matted with sweat in the crutch of his legs. On his belly lay a slug trail of semen. His penis obeyed only itself. A drool of spunk shone in an oval pearl at the end of it.
He lay there deep in an empty place as he tried to take his mind off Alice sleeping in the lean-to behind Rotmensens’ store. Myrna too, up at the farm, her blond muff glistening. He opened his eyes and stared at the smoke-streaked boards above him, seeing in the twists of blackened wood the outlines of the land he had left behind, the bush along the creek behind his father’s barn where deer and cattle slept through the heat of the day. The Arrow Lakes glinted in the distance, a stretched pool of beaten iron. The wraiths of his two sisters drifted toward him across the waters and then the three of them were sitting silent at the table as they waited for their father to rise from his bed, the Bible clutched in his hand, prayers stumbling from his mouth: There shall the great Owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow: there shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate. His mother hovered at the stove, the morning mush seething, the coffee clearing with the eggshells she’d saved for its steep. Joel remembered those coffee-stained shells. They lay cupped like brown nests in the bottom of the iron pot.
“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty.”
His father loomed behind Joel’s eyes as a bat careened past their kitchen window, a pale moth in its delicate jaws. Demented weather poured over the mountain crest to the west, a boil of cloud across the rimrock below the stars, his mother warning against the bad luck of a single bat at dawn.
Joel blinked, the clapboard bunkhouse ceiling still there, grains of sawdust, ash, and insect corpses swaying in the drooped nets of old webs. Joel kicked at the yellowed sheet, swung his legs off the mattress, and sat on the edge of the narrow bunk, wiping at his arms and chest. He didn’t want to think of his mother or his sisters. His father had told him God wanted Joel to stay on the land. The old man had knelt by the back door and, staring across his mown fields to the mountains, begged the moon and the stars and the god who lived among them to keep his son in the valley.
His mother whispered daily to Joel of the neighbour’s daughter, Elsie Crapsey, the cripple-back one his father had chosen for him, a girl his mother called saintly, the one who would come with a virgin womb, a spit-thumbed Bible, a three-room shack, an outhouse, a tumbled barn, and eighty acres of woodland and fields north of his father’s land along the lake. But Joel wanted none of a girl with the Good Book between her legs. He wanted none of the farm she held out to him on a page from Revelation, the land title writ there in moans and lamentations: Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe. Joel’s mother admonishing him to gather up the land his father coveted, all of it to be his someday, his sisters getting nothing but a husband elsewhere.
A barred owl cried down by the river, the creature’s barks and hoots a comfort in the night. Moonlight stretched out from the bunk next to him, dust devils shivering. Joel gazed into the faint oblong of light on the floor. It seemed a shining trap door and for a moment he imagined stepping into it and following that light down into the earth. Ever since he was small he’d dreamed of finding some hidden treasure. When he was little he’d sit behind his father on the grey stallion as they rode down the shore to the post office in Nakusp. Why his father took him there he didn’t know. The only other times he was allowed close to town was to go to the church on the flats each Sunday. What schooling he had when he was small was from his mother’s teaching, her books the same ones she’d learned from when she was a girl down in Idaho.
The mornings he rode to town with his father he was told to wait outside the post office and watch the horse didn’t spook at some logging truck passing by. While he was outside one day he’d looked down through the cracks in the boardwalk and caught the glint of a silver dollar in the dirt. When he crawled out from under the boards with the shining dollar clutched in his fist his father stepped from the post office door, leaned down, and took the coin from him, flipping it into the sun, the King George face grim as he fell into his hand. He told Joel that the Lord giveth, and hoisted him onto the horse for the long ride home, Joel mumbling, and the Lord taketh away. He remembered it had been the new 1949 dollar, the Newfoundland one with the ship on the tail side. There were nights Joel dreamed of that wooden sidewalk in Nakusp and the dollar he’d held for a few moments, the silver ship floating on his palm, its sails unfurled, going somewhere across an ocean to another land. He wanted a life, but he was a little afraid of what he might find out there. He knew one thing: whatever it was he needed to find it wasn’t on Arrow Lakes.
Joel had never seen an ocean, his only journey the one he’d taken when he finally left home, a little bewildered, a little afraid. There were the rides he begged and bummed through the mountains and the plains, and the train he’d jumped last winter, the freight that brought him down from Edmonton through Jasper into the narrow valley canyons of the North Thompson River. He remembered the cold of that January journey in the open gondola car and the old man who shared his rolled newspapers, crumpling them and stuffing the papers into Joel’s pants and coat. The man had helped cover him with snow, telling him it was warmer than the winds that worked like withering fists inside the car. Joel ended up in a front corner in the lee of the wind and staring into the chimera of dark thunderheads. The two of them huddled against the iron, Joel in the old man’s lap with his back to him, thin arms around him holding tight. The other men in the open car curled up like fallen ghosts in their blankets and broken cardboard boxes. The old man behind him
wouldn’t let him sleep. He told Joel sleep would find him dead come Kamloops Junction far to the south.
It was Claude Harper, the big boss at the mill, who ordered Bill Samuels to bring him down. But it was Art Kenning who asked Claude to do it. The first-aid man had taken a long look at Joel, his words to Claude lost on the wind, Joel leaning out from the roofless car into the wind and blowing snow as he tried to hear them. When Claude raised his arm everyone stopped and waited to see what he wanted.
“The kid,” Claude said, pointing with his gloved fist. “Haul him down from there.”
Art had saved him, not Claude. Joel knew that even though Art always said he had nothing to do with it. Joel had been standing with the freezing men leaning over the iron lip of the gondola, the car a rectangular boat with no mast and them like lost sailors in a storm. The snow was falling heavy and thick around them. It was the hammer blows on the side of the car that had woken them from their numb sleep, Bill Samuels wielding his sledge, the boom boom boom of iron blundering in their heads as they rose from the snow and ice to see whose god was knocking at the wrong door.
Joel was half-dead when Samuels climbed the ladder at the end of the car and hauled him over the iron, his feet near frozen, his hands so cold he couldn’t bend his fingers, couldn’t feel his face. His old stetson was bent and crushed like cheap plywood and stuffed tight under his arm.
“Please,” Joel managed to whisper. “Can you help save the old man too?”
But none of them heard him, his words half-frozen on his lips.
“Look at him, for Christ’s sake,” said Bill. “The kid managed to save his hat.”
“There might be something in him after all,” said Art.
Claude was already walking down the line of gondolas toward the boxcars. “Not bloody likely,” he said, the wind pulling him away. He shouted then: “Grab your sledge, Bill. I’m not paying you to stand around.”
Art Kenning was the one who had spoken to Claude and it was Art who started to lead Joel to the cookhouse along with two other men Samuels found in a boxcar farther down the line. But before Art could take him away Joel had begged Samuels to help the old man who’d taught him how newspapers and snow could keep him alive. Samuels had waited a moment for a nod from Claude, but he never got one.
The old man’s grey hair hung in frozen strands from the ledge of the iron parapet. He stared down a moment at Joel then fell away, his hands and face disappearing into the cold of the gondola, the sound of his lament a silence held in the flailing arms of the wind. Joel was the only one taken from the gondola, Bill backing off the others when they tried to climb out, Claude refusing them a place on the siding.
The muffled lights of the cookhouse had been a mirage that promised food and somewhere warm enough to eat it. In the kitchen that night Joel had sat in a chair right next to the stove, the fire warming him up enough to eat the food the Chinese cook placed on his lap, a bowl of hot soup full of vegetables, fried bread, and sausage. His feet and hands burned with pain as the frost went out of them.
Art had taken him then to Molly Samuels’ little house where she looked him over for what he didn’t know, asking him if he kept himself clean, giving him salve for his frostbitten hands. After her it was the bunkhouse, Art leading him to the bottom end past the beds where men lay on their bunks, some sleeping and others rolling awake and watching.
Ernie Reiner had woken as they came past his bunk. “Who you got there?” he asked. The question wasn’t a pleasant one. “This ain’t a place for boys, you know.”
“Shut up, Ernie,” Art said. “You don’t like it, take it up with Claude.”
Ernie said nothing to that, but he grinned and pointed one thick finger at Joel as if to tell Joel he was watching him.
Art said nothing as he gave Joel the iron bunk in the corner by the back door. When Joel lay down, Art covered him with a couple of grey army blankets.
At dawn that next morning Art came by and dropped off a pair of worn boots and some dry clothes. He waited for Joel to dress and then took him down the road to sign on to the crew. Art didn’t say much at first, just told him not to argue with Claude, not to explain. “You’re lucky to be alive,” he said.
“What about the other guys?” Joel said. “That old man really helped me. He stuffed newspapers inside my clothes, he kept me warm.”
“Everybody takes their chances in this life,” said Art. “He took his for you. Anyway, maybe he made it. He looked like a tough bugger.”
“He was old,” said Joel. “And what about the others?”
“Just count your lucky stars you’re here and breathing.”
“But—” said Joel, Art interrupting him.
“Never mind all that,” he said. “You’re going to see Claude. Just do as he says. He’s going to put you on the crew. That’s you having good luck twice. Keep that up you’re gonna run outta luck before you’re grown.” He laughed and said, “Just shut your mouth and start listening. It’ll take you a long way in this life.”
Saying that, he’d reached into his coat pocket and took out a short bottle of what looked to Joel like rum or maybe whisky, unscrewed the lid, and took a long draw on it before holding it out to Joel. When Joel shook his head Art smiled and said, “It’s a cold night. Just about as cold as yesterday and about to be as cold again tomorrow.” He looked long at Joel then took him by the shoulder of the blue wool coat he had found for him somewhere. “Hell,” he said, his voice gruff, “I’m not sure yet Claude should’ve pulled you out of that gondola.”
“But it was you who told him to,” said Joel.
“You never mind that,” said Art and told Joel to follow along, taking him to the mill. When they got there he shoved him into Claude’s office.
Joel stood just inside the room, not knowing what he was supposed to do.
Claude didn’t look up from what he was writing.
“I’m Joel,” he said into the silence. “I’m the one you…” but he never got another word out.
Claude held up his hand, his head bent, his eyes still on what he’d been looking at. “I know where I got you,” he said. “What’s the rest of your name?”
“Crozier.”
“You French or what?”
“No. English, I guess.”
“Sounds French to me. I never met a Frenchie yet who was worth a bent nickel.”
After he wrote Joel’s name in his ledger, Claude told him he’d be working cleanup on the day shift. “And don’t fuck up like those two out there are trying hard to do.” Claude pointed out the grease-streaked window at the other two men he’d got off the train. They were at the other end of the yard. The men were walking a narrow path around the log pond that was fed by the river. They shivered at the ends of their pike poles as they pushed logs through skim ice toward the iron dogs that would lift them on winding chains into the mill and the waiting saws.
“It’s likely I’ll regret the day I ever saw you hanging frozen from that gondola, kid,” Claude said. “You’re like a small fish snagged by a man who isn’t paying attention to the job at hand. Just remember, it’s easier to throw you back in than keep you. Don’t ever forget it.”
“No sir, I won’t,” Joel said as he backed out. “I mean I won’t forget it,” but Claude was looking at the paper in front of him, not at Joel.
“Shut the door after you,” Claude said.
The storm had held on through that night and knowing how frail the old man had been, Joel knew he’d never have made it to Kamloops alive. One of the men in the cookhouse said the railroad police threw any dead bodies they found into the river. They said the bodies always showed up drifting in Kamloops Lake. A guy who’d worked at the Savona sawmill said two floaters had come ashore when he was there. He laughed when he told the story. Those people in the railroad cars are just like us, Art had said, but the guy just laughed again. Joel didn’t say anything else. He remembered Art telling him to keep his mouth shut, so he did. Still, he thought, the same kind of poor
people wandered the road that passed through Nakusp on their way to the Okanagan looking for work in the orchards there. He’d met a lot more of them along the Alberta roads before he got to Edmonton. The old man in the boxcar was the same as all of them, and the other two men in the gondola too. Joel never knew their names. Poor people who lived everywhere and nowhere.
Poverty eats the heart. His father told him that often enough as he tried to warn Joel away from leaving the farm. “You go out into the world and sure as hell you’ll get trapped by the life of drifters,” his father had said. “Just remember, people without a house and home spend their days burying hope in alleys and under bridges in the cities. You can always eke out a living on a bit of land. And there’s eighty acres waiting for you right here and a woman too. Remember, women are all the same in the dark. Pretty or ugly, crippled or straight, they’re all the same.” When Joel said nothing to that, his father went on, saying, “A man needs satisfying and sometimes a wife’s not enough. You’ll learn that too someday. That land Elsie Crapsey’s father is offering is what you should be thinking of and not her crooked back.”
Joel wasn’t sure anymore that he wanted the wandering life his father had warned him against. The months he’d spent drifting through the mountains and the plains had left him feeling lost and lonely. And he liked working at the mill. There was Art and Joseph and Molly and he liked Wang Po, the cook, too. And especially Myrna up on the hill farm. And Alice too, even though he knew deep down she wasn’t ever going to be for him. Still, he knew his dreams were worth more than not having her at all. It was just whenever he saw her he lost his head.
He had saved most every penny from his dollar-twenty-an-hour paycheques. There were a hundred and ninety-seven dollars and forty-seven cents hidden in a green Export tobacco can buried under a boulder out in the bog. He hid it there for fear someone might steal it. The only person he could see doing that was Ernie, and that was enough for Joel to hide it. The money was a fortune to him who’d never known much more than nickels and dimes in his life. He’d grown up a lot since his father had tried to burn God into his head. Joel had sent the flimsy pages of the Bible flying away like crows the day he walked away from Nakusp into the dark folds of the Selkirk Range.