by Patrick Lane
“He is,” said Joel. He looked out at the mountain beyond the river. Back at the farm on the Arrow Lakes, Joel’s family had toms like Myrna’s brother, barn cats that were never fed and never tamed though sometimes when he was small Joel tried, the scars on his hands evidence of their desperation and fury, a kitten, stray, and not yet grown, but just waiting till it was.
And the boy turned to him, still sitting there, his head turned slight, but his eyes holding aslant to the bunks where Reiner had gone, the man’s body a bulk fading.
“She told me to tell you to come, so you gotta come.”
“You go on,” said Joel. “Tell her I’ll meet her in the field. She knows where. First I got to go to the café.”
“Nope,” said the boy turning full around and sitting a careful three feet away. “She told me you’d say that about going to the café and she said not to. And she ain’t up in the field and she ain’t up in the rocks neither. She told me to get you and that’s what I got to do.”
“I guess so,” said Joel, Myrna suddenly in his head, her belly and breasts, and him not wanting her right then to be there, her white rump, the half moons of her butt raised up, the thatch of hair between her legs wet with his jism, and her hollering, fists holding on to rocks so tight he wasn’t sure if she held the earth or the earth held her.
Letting go his fingers locked together, he stretched his hands out backward, palms to the bunkhouse doorway. He had to move or soil himself with his own seed, the boy staring sideways at him.
“Rise up and I’ll follow you,” and saying that, Joel watched the boy named Emerson come up out of his squat, his body a slip of muscle moving without effort on slender, threadbare bones. Joel barely had his last boot wrapped and tied when he saw the boy slide away along the faint trail forty feet in from the margin of the bog, a trail Joel thought only he knew was there. He got up and went quickly after this Emerson who’d watched him rut with his sister and probably stroked his own little cock while he was doing it. When he caught up to Emerson he was leaning on a boulder. The boy didn’t seem frustrated. He was just waiting.
And they went on, a bit more slowly. The railway was far off to the left of them. They were fading steady away from the tracks and river. Joel figured as he ran that if Emerson kept on they’d end up on the low flank of the mountain and there begin a climb to where the farm was.
This was Emerson’s swamp, bog, and creek, his hollows, valley, mountains, and river, the earth of this place bred into his bones, just as the Arrow Lakes country was Joel’s, the slow reaches of the Monashee Joel’s, the mountains’ soft peaks that rarely rose to rock, and the high walls of the far Purcells to the south, their peaks snow-bound and rising steep out of Kootenay Lake. The draws and gullies, hidden meadows and creeks, the valleys where he had run, ridden, walked, clambered, crawled, and climbed had been his and, sudden, irrevocable, he almost faltered, knowing the land he’d left behind was lost to him except his remembering it. Joel at his run said to himself the word was, and said too that’s when I was younger, young, his outcry such the boy ahead of him stopped and turned, looked back at him, and called out: “What’s wrong?”
And, “Nothing,” Joel cried back, his running slowed to a steady pace. “Nothing,” he said, and looking up saw Emerson stopped.
Joel stood now on the other side of the swamp copse and glanced down at a red-shafted flicker lying on its back between two chunks of cedar, its belly torn open, the viscera gone. The bird had flung its wings apart when it fell from the sky, the salmonberry feathers cupped as if in supplication, the beak stretched open, a fly perched watchful on its long tongue. There were no maggots and he thought perhaps they’d eaten the viscera entire and fled leaving the meat. Willow leaves had gathered in the lee of one wing, a light breeze stirring them, the wing as if alive, still moving.
Myrna’s brother was thirty feet away squatted in the lee shadow of a boulder the size of a dump truck. Joel watched as the boy reached out and pulled two hips off a mountain rose, the brief cardinal swell of the fruit disappearing one at a time between his lips, his narrow jaws clenching down, the seed fuzz slipping from between his lips as he chewed them away.
Joel knew where he was now. In the mouth of a meadow at the mountain’s foot was an old, deserted one-room shack of a church. He’d never got to it by going through the swamp, only by following the overgrown track that led down from the high road. It’d been months since he’d been anywhere near. It didn’t look any better than the last time he’d passed it by, the roof shakes withered, the glass in a pointed window by the door gone but for a few shards sticking up out of the old putty like knives pointed heavenward.
Joel took off his hat and wiped his face. His breaths were ragged from the long journey from the bunkhouse. He walked out into the open, reached down for a rock, quartz freckles across its face aglitter. He licked it once to see the sparkle and then threw it sidearm at the boulder face above the boy. The rock struck where he’d been aiming it, a foot or so above the boy’s head, the rock clicking as it caromed off in a whisper faint as a sparrow’s cry. Emerson didn’t turn, but raised his hand to him palm out.
He was unsure of whether to join the boy at the boulder or stay where he was. The church looked deserted as always. The grasses in the dry bog at his feet had tilted their stalks south, their heads twisting, last seeds flashing into the dusty air as Joel brushed them with his boot. A high wind moved across the mountain’s face across the river, a thin band of cloud against the peaks, white feathers frayed and tattered like troubled wings across the sheer rock and gone, and the wind too fleeing along the mountain face and flanks, firs and hemlocks suddenly astir, needles seething with the sound of cracked grain thrown violently across sheets of tin. Jays and crows lifted from branches in the forest marge and flew out to join the rise of the wind, the murderous bands black and blue shards stark against the grey wall of rain that appeared as if conjured from nothing, pouring down the valley from the north.
It would be upon them in no time, a few minutes, no more. Joel glanced at Emerson but the boy did not move, only stared across the last of the bog at the shack everyone in the hills and village called the Someday Church, laughing when they said it, the boy looking out over the swamp to the river and the eastern range, the church standing in a raised meadow where the trees and rocks started their climb up the mountains.
Joel pulled on his hat and stepped over a fallen aspen trunk, thinking to find shelter, the sudden cold from the storm rolling down the valley wrapping itself in coils around him. As he went around a thick hummock, the door of the church creaked open and he looked up as Myrna stepped out onto the worn porch, her pale hand holding the door ajar. She gazed at him, her eyes even at a distance wide in her pink face. Joel glanced over to see if Emerson was still there, but as he did the boy gave him only a bare and fleeting glance as he slipped around the great boulder and was gone back into the swamp.
The blunt clouds were over Joel now and a cold rain began to pelt down in heavy drops, dust spurting up from the dust at his feet. He held his arm up to shelter his eyes and heard his name in the sudden thrash of wind and water, Myrna crying: “Joel, Joel,” her voice high and wild in the swirl. He stood for a moment, thinking almost everything, Art, Irene McAllister who’d cut herself, Joseph and Cliff and Reiner, the smell of the dream smoke in Wang Po’s basement, all that had happened in a part day and night away, and then Alice, how he’d watched her at the end of the night. He turned his head away thinking to run back into the swamp but something, he did not know what, made him look again at the church and he saw Myrna’s wild and frantic waving, her one arm sweeping like a tree limb in the wind. She called his name as if it were some kind of crazed fragment from a song stuck in a record’s scratched groove, some kind of Joel tick Joel tick Joel, and as he heard his name he took a step and, clothes soaked from the violence of the rain, ran toward the church, all the time thinking, No, and again, No, and knowing it was the word Yes he was saying, and cursing himself fo
r saying it.
Myrna slipped inside when he neared and he followed her, leaping up onto the porch and through the open door and into the room where he stopped, breathless, water running down his face, his hair plastered to his neck. What he saw were two crippled chairs, the back of the worse one wired on to the seat, a scarred three-legged table propped under a back window, a stack of old cedar shakes taking the place of the missing fourth leg, the whole thing teetering, and in one corner a stained mattress on the floor, the cotton worn, torn in places and the tears taped down, the mattress threadbare and plagued with bits of straw and dust. At the mattress’s foot lay folded what were sheets and a spare blanket sticking out of a single pillowcase.
All that he recognized of what had been the church was the board altar against the back wall with dead candle stubs burned into dry puddles, their wicks twisted and dry. Along the altar dishes and pots were arranged, a few pieces of cutlery, two knives, some spoons of various sizes, and a single fork, two tines missing. Under the altar was a stool with a wash basin and a galvanized pail dented and scraped from long use, streaks of tar gone hard in drips down the sides. In the far corner was a dented Queen heater vented out the back wall and likely to burn the whole place down if it was ever lighted, wood piled beside it, bits and pieces of sticks and limbs she must have gathered from the forest. A broom leaned against the wall in the corner, the floor swept clean. There were two cardboard boxes with what looked like clothes and other things, rags and towels, and part of a plastic clock sticking out from under what might be a sleeve, the ticking loud in the room.
And Myrna by the altar shelf, the window arched above her with a few cracked panes of old rolled glass still left, the holes for the missing panes covered with oiled butcher paper tacked to the frames.
There was the mattress and the thin quilt folded at its foot and her standing by the altar holding her belly with spread hands. He stood quiet in his boots, the wind blowing the door shut behind him with a dithering crack. What he wanted was to return to the storm, wondering why he was there, what he had come for, the nakedness of what she’d be when he wanted her to be, knowing it, and then his being in her and rutting as always, and yet there were her hands on her belly, the fingers splayed. And suddenly wanting her as he always wanted her from the very first time he saw her, there on the wagon back when she sat there looking at him down at the station, her riding away on the buckboard staring back at him, and then up by the caves at the top of the field where the trail led to the high country and the cold, clean mountain spring where all the water in the world began.
He stood in the ramshackle church unsure in his sureness, at last, at least, there. The boy, Emerson, had taken Joel exactly where Joel was supposed to be, just as Joel had known all along where he was going, and, yes, he didn’t turn back, no matter his wanting to, knowing Myrna was at the end of where he was going.
She said: “Joel, Joel, look.”
And he thought he was and did again.
And seeing him seeing her at last, she said, plaintive, proud in her joy, “I got your baby inside me, Joel. I got your baby.”
CLAUDE LISTENED TO HIS MILL, the Saturday morning cleanup crew almost done, the fire in the burner starting to gut out as the shards and shattered bits of wood and bark, the endless dust, fell into the desultory flames. He was discontent. He missed the workweek, the saws, the screams and chatter of the machines, the belts whining, and the rattle of the chains and cables, power diesels pulling down hard when a big log slammed into the head saw, the great slab carved off and falling away to be carried up the conveyor to the burner.
And he missed the whistles, the story of the mill. Familiar as breathing, they spoke through the shifts: one whistle to start up or shut down, two whistles for the millwright, three for the foreman, four for Claude himself, and five for the first-aid man. The whistles called their needs through the days and nights of the week, their shrieks coiling up and down the valley, the wailing echoes sounding along the river and mountains, moose, lynx, cougar, and bear no longer lifting their heads into the terrible outcries they endured, the beast they heard crying out in pain, the animal that never died.
Claude longed for the convulsive fury when the mill was working full throttle, the way it consumed everything leaving nothing behind but loaded boxcars, smoke, and ash. It wasn’t just the logs and the saws that tore them into lumber. It was the men on the mill floor. He loved the waste of his men’s bodies, their exhaustion when they walked off the floor. When the shift was over they passed below his window in clumps and clusters, no one talking, their lunch buckets hanging from their hands. Every shift the men tried for bonus, a few extra dollars twice a month, the difference between lard and butter, hamburger or chops, powdered milk or cream. The crew lived off the sawyer’s sweat. The sawyer set the pace in the mill and Claude’s best sawyer was Jim McAllister.
The only decoration in the room was last year’s calendar, a naked blonde wearing a Santa Claus hat sprawled on a red sheet, big tits, a great ass, and a crotch barely hidden by a wisp of satin pulled taut between her thighs. It didn’t matter what man came in, they always looked at the calendar. The months below her had long ago been stripped away. The dead days of 1959, last year’s December staring out the same window as the girl did, as he did. He had his desk, his chair, and a single old kitchen chair for whoever was asked to sit and that meant mostly no one except for right now, Art Kenning, who was sitting beside a four-drawer tin-can cabinet and an ancient hand-crank telephone in a wooden box screwed to the wall behind his shoulder. It was one of the three phones in the village—this one, one at the train station, and the last at Rotmensens’ store. Every time Claude cranked the phone to raise some operator in Kamloops he felt like he’d fallen back into the century before the Boer War. They all lived in this sawmill town beyond any civilized world, no television, radio static, newspapers always a day late, and on and on.
Saturday morning, ten o’clock, the sun high enough to reach over the lip of the mountain into the valley bottom, light struggling to get through the last of the rain clouds that were passing over. Even on a clear day the light mostly failed in here, the wet clot of sun barely seeping through the opaque patina of dust and charred smoke and oil on the window. Claude long ago figured it would require a chisel in the hands of a patient man to clean the years away.
He looked at his first-aid man, who hadn’t said a word since he sat down.
“What do you want, Art?” Claude said.
When Art didn’t move or speak, Claude spoke a little louder, his voice almost tired: “Gawdammit, Kenning, get off your ass and get a cuppa coffee. Get one for me while you’re at it. You know where the pot is.”
Art shook his head as he dragged himself to his feet and went out the office door to where the young company clerk sat doing unpaid extra hours adding log scale on a manual machine as he kept the minimal accounts the mill required, head office far away in Vancouver. The clerk looked demented as he pulled the crank for the ten-thousandth time that morning, adding up the numbers on the columns of figures that seemed to go on forever. The coffee pot was on a hot plate behind the clerk’s desk, the pot sitting on a coiled wire burner, the coffee cooked black by the hours.
Claude looked out the window and watched one of his Saturday cleanup crew cross the yard and disappear through a door’s maw into the mill, the wheelbarrow he was pushing full of bits and pieces of broken wood. The turban on the man’s head was black with soot from working around the burner, flecks of sawdust fretting his beard. Claude didn’t know what Sikh it was. To him they were all the same except for the one called Jaswant Singh. Claude didn’t know why they all had the same name Singh. This Jaswant was the leader of the green chain crew. The Sikh told him once he’d been a teacher back in India, but Claude figured he was lying. If he’d been a teacher then why was he working in the north on a green chain in a dead-end, spaghetti mill?
Art came back from the other room and set a cup of brackish coffee on Claude’s desk.
The first-aid man sat down again on the chair, his one hand turned up on a knee, the other holding a second cup.
Claude ignored him as he watched his mill yard.
The door the Sikh had gone through hung from one hinge, the bottom boards frayed from scraping the dirt, the sill rotted away. Everything in the mill needed fixing, the buildings falling apart, the nails holding the tin-can corrugated iron on the rafters rust-rotted, the iron panels skewed. What parts of the roof he’d had fixed were those above machines, rain and snow coming through most everywhere else. Scoops had been carved in the boards by the hobnail boots of workers. They reminded Claude of the stairways in old monasteries and castles he’d seen in France. The mill was on its last legs and he was under orders to run what was left of it into the ground, squeezing every nickel and dime out of it before it got sold to one of the big American outfits who wanted the timber quota. Whoever owned the quota owned the watershed. Claude had been high-grading Douglas fir and hemlock out of a big cutblock east of the river for two months. He’d told the fallers to take down the cedar and leave it to rot. The loggers dropped the cedars and crushed what there was with Cats, cutting or pushing over the trees, calling them widow-makers and blowdowns, there being no market in the States for the softwood. His fallers had been under orders since spring breakup to cream off the fir and trash the rest.
The guys from the Government Forest Service down in Kamloops had taken their money and turned their backs on what he was doing. The cash he’d passed out had been worth every cent. Money talks and bullshit walks. He’d learned that in the war.
When he was done with the cutblock there’d be nothing left but a few scattered pecker poles hanging over the carnage of stumps and limbs and crushed trees, the salmon creeks jammed with rocks and mud, the steep ground sliding toward the river, the bush roads waiting to wash out in the first runoff in the spring. It was as bad as the war. You slaughtered, slashed, and burned, and then you walked away, leaving what was left for the locals to deal with.