Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

  He wasn’t a kid anymore, no matter Ernie Reiner telling everyone he was. He had a real job, just like all the other men at the mill.

  He looked along the row of beds to see if anyone was awake. No one moved. He slipped from the cot, grabbing his shirt hanging off the nail on the wall, and pulled on the socks and pants that were piled on the floor. He cinched his belt, picked up his boots and hat, and stepped out onto the weathered porch. Drawing the boots over his feet, he bound the laces tight around his ankles.

  Joel sat on the round of fir on the back porch of the bunkhouse and looked up at the narrow band of stars between the mountains, the moon rising low in the east. The dark clouds that had poured over the mountain’s rim earlier had flown into the Selkirk Range and were gone past the Rockies to the prairie where he’d wandered only months before. He lifted his head to Orion tilted in the southern sky and drew some cool air into his chest. Alice would be sleeping in her lean-to back of the store. He could almost smell her. He thought of what it would be like to put his face into the bend of her neck and breathe her in. He sniffed at the fusty air lifting off the bog, his cock rising hard as he breathed the thickness of the swamp. He bent his cock back down, gripping it between his legs, the pain dwindling, his cock going slowly limp.

  He clenched his fists to stop himself from thinking of Alice that way. Even just to talk to her would be enough. Even just to hold her hand. But he couldn’t stop his body wanting her.

  Behind him in the bunkhouse the men slept on. The second bunk from the front was Cliff’s and the third bunk was Ernie Reiner’s. He was lying on his back snoring. Through the wheezes and sighs of the sleeping men Joel could hear the wet in Reiner’s throat and mouth, a choking as if the man was trying to swallow something thick that would not go down no matter his sucking on the clutch of phlegm stuck there.

  It was Ernie who ragged Joel from his seat in the cage above the trim saws. Joel would be under the sloped saw bank late in the lunch break cleaning up fallen trim ends, sweeping up sawdust, and gathering into his wheelbarrow the scraps of bark and broken wood fallen from the trim saw chains. Ernie would sometimes come back early when Joel was working the lunch downtime. Joel never knew for sure when he’d show up. For a big man Reiner could be quiet as a thin cat on narrow paws. He’d wait until Joel was in a spot where the chain bank was low and then Ernie would pull a lever and send a saw down, the sting of the teeth biting the air just above Joel’s head. He’d sit and watch Joel work, Reiner’s hands playing with the saw levers, touching one and then another, laughing as Joel moved hunchbacked across the floor to fill the barrow, his body flinching each time a blade cried in the air above him. He always laughed at Joel jumping away. Every few days it would be the same. Ernie would be up there with his hard face and that black hair of his sticking out like a wrecked wire brush from under his hard hat.

  Joel thought of the .308 Browning hung on padded spikes above Reiner’s head as he slept. On a shelf above the rifle were the bear skulls he’d boiled clean, long yellow teeth jutting from heavy jaws. Beside them were three-and-a-half boxes of shells stacked in a neat pile. The skulls were from bears Ernie had shot up the river on the alder flats, two of them just that spring, the bears feeding on roots, young grass, and Columbia lily bulbs. They were easy prey in the meadows.

  Ernie was a solitary hunter except for a few times he’d hunted with Jim McAllister, the new sawyer at the mill. Joel had seen the two of them take off in McAllister’s black pickup a couple of times with their rifles. Jim had shot a moose earlier in the summer on one of their hunts, but no one on the mill crew said anything about it being out of season except to wonder why they left most of the kill behind. Jim and Ernie had packed the hindquarters back to the road across their shoulders and left the rest. That was good meat they left out there in the bush, Joseph told Joel. He said people up on the hill farms could’ve used that meat instead of just leaving it for bears. But Jim McAllister was the top sawyer. No one was going to say anything about what he did or didn’t do.

  Not much was known about McAllister or his wife, Irene. When he wasn’t sitting in the saw box Jim stayed close to home in his trailer. The first week he arrived he’d backed the trailer up into a hundred-foot track he cut into the bush at the edge of the village. You couldn’t see the trailer from the sawmill road. He told people his wife liked to be left alone too. He told people not to bother her and no one did except for Molly Samuels. Joel knew she’d been around to their trailer a couple of times to welcome Irene and partly too, she said, to find out a little about her, people saw her so rarely. Joel heard Molly say that Jim’s wife was a strange little thing half afraid of her own shadow. She told Art she’d asked Irene to come down to her place and have a coffee with some of the other women but Irene McAllister told her she liked being left alone. Molly thought that was kind of strange. Joel remembered exactly what Molly had said after that. “Alone? What woman doesn’t want her own kind with her? Women don’t want to be alone, not all the time.”

  Art had said nothing to that, only nodded like he mostly did when Molly got excited talking. Joel saw Irene at the store a few times when he was there but she never stayed long and spoke nothing to no one except for a nervous nod sometimes if she was cornered. She stayed her days and nights quiet, with Jim or without him there. The sawyer kept her close is what Joel knew. Some men were like that with their women.

  Ernie Reiner looked up to McAllister. The sawyer was the head of the line in the mill. Jim McAllister was the top sawyer and Claude made sure he got the finest fir and hemlock because Jim could get the best from a log. The sawyer on the other shift, Charlie Sangster, was good too, but not in the league of McAllister. After them came the gang sawyer, the edgerman, the trim sawyers, and then the rest of the men on down depending on whether they operated a machine or were straight bull labour like the green chain or the cleanup crew. The logs came up from the pond riding the chains and were rolled onto the head saw carriage, Jim setting the dogs to hold the logs fast to the carriage and then driving the log through the saws. The mill’s production depended on Jim and Charlie. They controlled what came out the end of the mill. If either one slowed down the mill slowed down and if that happened there’d be no bonus at the end of the month for the men.

  Ernie said what pleasure McAllister took from the one bear he shot was in the kill and nothing more. That Reiner pulled the claws and took the bear’s head to boil out the skull had meant nothing to Jim. Joel had heard Ernie telling Joseph that Jim was a cold hunter. Ernie seemed impressed by that. He said once the bear was down Jim didn’t even walk over to look at what he’d shot. To him the bear he’d killed was just something for crows and ravens to argue about, wolverines and wolves to fight over, a carcass, nothing more.

  When he heard Ernie say that, Joel looked at Jim McAllister differently than he had before. He asked Joseph one time what kind of man wouldn’t even bother to look at what he’d shot. Joseph told him he’d seen men in the war who were like that. They could walk past a pile of corpses and not even notice they were there. He said there was something missing inside men like that, why he didn’t know. “Just stay away from him and from Ernie too,” is what Joseph said and Joel did, though with Ernie it was harder seeing as how they shared the same bunkhouse.

  One night when Ernie was working Joel had taken one of Ernie’s bear skulls down from the shelf and a funnel spider crawled from one of the eye sockets. Joel stared into the cavity at the web where the bear’s brain used to be. Some nights he dreamed of being pulled into such a tunnel, a white weave filling his lungs. The nightmare always woke him, Joel lifting from his pillow as he tried to get air into his chest.

  Three black bear skulls and now Reiner going on about the grizzly he was going to shoot one day. He’d sit on his bunk and clean his rifle over and over, loading and unloading it, the brass shells falling onto his blanket, the jackets of the bullets gleaming. Each time Joel heard him go on about killing a grizzly Joel imagined one of the great bears biti
ng down on Reiner’s head, the man’s face peeling off, the huge teeth of the grizzly piercing his skull.

  Art Kenning had told Joel he shouldn’t pay Reiner any mind, just like Joseph had. Art said Reiner was a drifter, the same as a lot of the men in the bunkhouse. Joel asked him if Joseph Gillespie was a drifter. Art said Joseph was just older and a different kind of man than Reiner and the rest of them. He said Joseph had fought the last few months of the war in Germany. “War makes men different from the ones who weren’t over there,” said Art. When Joel asked him what the difference was, Art just said, “Joseph’s a good man.”

  Most of the single men at the mill were footloose, half-grown boys is what Art told him. In the early fall they followed the grain harvest on the prairie and later on picked fruit in the orchards along the mountain valleys. Some seasons they worked a winter at a mill or mine for a few months before moving on in the spring and other times they put in a month on the fish boats out of Prince Rupert. Like all their kind, Art said, in the end their wandering would take them to Edmonton or Calgary or Winnipeg, but winters they’d hole up down in Vancouver. They’d mostly end up in the East End, Chinatown, Japtown, Main and Hastings, the cheap hotels and dives along Cordova and Water Street, Powell and Pender. Joel knew it was trouble they looked for down in the city, just as it was trouble they were looking for at the store in the afternoon or at the Saturday night dances at the hall or at the beer parlours in Blue River and Clearwater. He didn’t need Art to tell him that. Reiner called their going to the bar “hunting poontang.” The first time Reiner said that word, Joel didn’t understand. Everyone at the cookhouse laughed when he asked what a poontang was.

  Joel knew who Reiner was from the first day. Art told him the trim saw man’s bullying came from the fear he was weak, that when it came time to be brave he’d somehow fail and people would know him for what he was.

  The bunkhouse was off limits to Reiner’s petty cruelties now. When Joel first arrived there, though, Reiner casually preyed on him there as much as he did at the mill. One day Joel got up and his boots were gone. Ernie laughed when he saw him looking for them in the bunkhouse. He told Joel he’d be better off looking out in the swamp. It took hours for Joel to find where Ernie had thrown them. Another night his sheets were soaked with swamp water and weeds.

  Ernie played his small miseries on Joel for as long as he thought he could get away with them. Joel didn’t like it but he knew he couldn’t tell anyone. He knew complaining was something you didn’t do. He knew Ernie was his problem and no one else’s. But one night Joseph saw Ernie trip Joel when he was passing. Joseph came down the line and told Ernie to stop. “Leave the kid alone,” he said. Reiner had blustered, but Joseph looked hard at him and Ernie backed off. That was the end of most of Ernie’s ragging him.

  Joseph Gillespie played guitar most nights out on the front deck of the bunkhouse after his shift was over and he was done with dinner. Sometimes too he’d sing. Old songs mostly, ones that made you feel lonely, tunes that were sweet and sad. “Wandering Boy” by the Carter Family, and another one Joel liked called “Way Down Home.” When he sang men got quiet. It was like his singing drove the fear out of them, the hate. Come a restless night, an argument or fight, it was often Joseph who brought everyone back into what a bunkhouse had to have to survive the weeks and months of men living together in a narrow space. Joseph Gillespie had a strength in him that even Reiner feared and respected.

  Still, Joel did his best to stay out of the trim saw man’s way. In his free time Joel would go off alone up the mountain or range the trails through the swamp and along the river. He knew a hundred secret places, caves and hollow trees, the deep root pits trees left behind when they fell into the river. Art had said once Joel would never be a drifter, but he sure as hell was a wanderer. When Joel asked him what he meant by that, Art just laughed.

  On Saturdays he’d climb to the ridges above the treeline, stopping at Arnold Turfoot’s hill farm in hopes of seeing Myrna. He’d always hang a red kerchief on a fence post to let her know he was there. Most times when he did she came running.

  She wasn’t quiet and shy like Alice. He could talk to Myrna, tell her his secrets, his dreams too. Alice left him unable to talk and he didn’t know why.

  But his need for Myrna always overcame him by the end of the week. He dreamed about Myrna too, but his dreams about her didn’t drive him crazy. Myrna was real.

  One thing Joel knew was Alice might be going to the dance tomorrow night and if it was true and Piet and Imma were going away and she somehow got to go then there might be a chance for him to maybe get close to her in some way, to dance with her and…and he didn’t know how to dance that well to the fast songs. He was better at the slow songs like Elvis’s “Love Me Tender,” and she’d said in the café she didn’t know how to dance, and he thought that maybe if he could dance the Elvis with her he might have a chance to teach her a little about slow dancing. But maybe he’d just be making a fool of himself trying to be with her at all.

  She wasn’t Myrna, she was someone else entirely.

  And then he couldn’t think any more about what it might mean to be alone together, on the dance floor or maybe somewhere else, maybe under the trees behind the hall, or maybe just walking together, him finally talking to her in the night.

  “Oh, damn,” he said, Myrna coming slow into his mind, her laughing as she wrapped her arms around his back.

  Joel listened to the barred owl cry its hoodoo song down by the river. The owl always perched there on a dead cedar branch that hung out over the log pond. The owl had been hunting rats and mice in the grass tangle along the riverbank. He’d heard its cry for the past two weeks. He touched his cheek and felt the roughness there. There were times listening he thought he was as much feathers as skin.

  As the owl’s cry faded away he thought of the path through the bush that started across the mill road. At the end of it were the store and the lean-to where Alice slept. He’d go to see her as he always did.

  There were the mountains and the river and the shadows.

  He knew the night and the sickle moon.

  As he passed along the side of the bunkhouse he stopped at a window and listened for a moment to the glut of Reiner choking on the dark.

  THE SKY HAD BEEN GREY AND THE SEA TOO, grey, and the dust from the dunes thin whispers sliding over iron. The light was almost gone from Holland, the light wind steady out of the north. There was a dead bird on the tank’s front apron, the feathers drab, freckled streaks of brown on a paler brown. A skylark, a little bird he’d seen and heard when they were stationed in Kent waiting for the invasion that never seemed to come until it did, ferocious and terrible. He remembered thinking he’d read a poem about such a bird in a book some soldier left at an aid station. The end of the poem was about madness, and there were old-fashioned words at the beginning he hadn’t forgotten, Hail to thee blithe spirit, bird thou never wert.

  He’d never forgotten those strange words, wert and blithe. And then a bird fell from the sky, a small, brown, feathered thing plummeting down. It landed soft on the front of the tank, its wing catching on a seam of sharp weld and holding there. The feathers fluttered in the wind, the sea rough, the surf booming just over the crest of weed-choked sand. The birds he’d seen in Sussex had nested in the fields where they’d been bivouacked back in England. Maybe the skylark got tired of listening to the guns. Maybe that’s why it fell.

  They’d been a little east of Diksmuide in Belgium when he caught up with his unit after the medical leave Claude had given him in Paris. Their tanks were helping clear up the pockets of German soldiers left behind to defend the coastal approaches to the port of Antwerp. His group was pushing now to the Scheldt peninsula to catch up to the advance on the fortress of Walcheren island. He looked at the crooked line of weld where the bird had been caught and he remembered Marie reading his palm in her room above the café. He still couldn’t remember the explosion in Moerbrugge, the concussion having hurt something
deep inside his head, that day and other days too, gone.

  She’d showed him the line in his hand, scrolling her fingernail down the scrawled groove as she pointed out the break. Pauvre garçon, she said, poor boy, and she laughed. She said his lifeline was broken. He sat there staring into his cupped hand thinking obscurely of what it meant to have a broken life and not caring. Reading palms was just a game Marie played. It’s what lovers did. They played.

  But he’d seen people whose lives were torn apart. He’d seen them break into so many pieces you didn’t know it was a man anymore, or a woman.

  Tommy hadn’t joined their unit yet, but he was only days away. The Scheldt and Walcheren were only a day or two away.

  The treads of their tank tracked on scattered stones, grinding them to powder. Alvin down in the tank’s belly had jerked them to the right to get around an overturned truck and a crosswind caught at the bird, breaking it free from the iron. The brown feathers lifted and for a moment Art had thought the bird might take flight and give itself to the wind. Then Alvin pulled the tank back onto the narrow way and the bird slid across the apron and fell under the grinding treads. It was a grey day when they pushed along the lone and level sands, his tears drying in the wind coming in off the sea.

  It was quiet in the cabin. Art closed his eyes and saw again the long falling of the bird and he was crying just as he had cried back then, and he didn’t know why. A glint of yellow flame in the lamp chimney flickered on the wall, the far-off glow of a burning village. Strands of sunlight came through the dark slit between the worn Five Roses flour sacks hanging over the window. The whisky helped. He wrapped his arms around his knees, pulling them to his chest, his arms heavy. The clank clank clank of the great chain at the mill went on. Each night after the night shift crew went to their beds, the refuse chain kept banging. It was the last sound of night, iron on iron, dragging chips and sawdust, trim ends and slabs the cleanup men threw into the flume that went to the gaping hole in the top of the beehive burner at the mill. He could smell the acrid smoke on the wind from the south.