Sins of Summer

by Dorothy Garlock

  “By God, I bought the best cable money could buy. Steel cable. Milo wanted me to use manila rope, but I said no siree. When it’s wet it stretches and is too hard to handle for hauls of more than two hundred feet. With steel cable I have the pulling range of over a thousand feet. Ain’t that right, Waller?”

  “If the cable doesn’t kink and snap.” Ben had an unexpected urge to douse the man’s enthusiasm.

  “I expect you to see that it don’t. I’ll pay you good wages to oversee the building of the flume.”

  “I’ll set up the engine and teach your men to run it and that’s all.” Ben helped himself to the bread platter when Dory passed it across to him, her eyes shining with amusement and awareness that Louis wanted to argue but didn’t dare.

  “This coffee is as weak as a man’s pecker after a week in a whorehouse. It don’t have no life a-tall,” Louis said, after taking a deep gulp from his freshly filled cup. He stared at his sister with a smirk on his thick lips.

  Ben watched color come up to flood Dory’s cheeks and felt a deep contempt for the man who so obviously enjoyed tormenting his sister. His dislike for Louis was rapidly intensifying into downright loathing, and he wondered if he would be able to stomach him long enough to set the machinery and train men to operate it.

  “Such talk is for the bunkhouse, not in front of womenfolk, Callahan.” Ben spoke quietly.

  “Harrumpt! What’er ya gettin’ in a snit for? Ya said the gal can’t hear.”

  “Your sister can.” Ben’s voice held a note of irritation that went unnoticed by Louis.

  “Like I done told ya, she ain’t no untried woman. Ain’t nothin’ ’bout a man she don’t know. Huh, Dory?”

  Dory kept her eyes on her plate.

  In the silence that followed, Louis continued to scoop food into his mouth and Ben began to wonder if his decision to stay here had been a wise one. He glanced at Odette. She was smiling at Jeanmarie, happily unaware of the conversation and the tension. His common sense told him that it was better for his daughter to stay here than to make the long, cold ride to the Malones with him not knowing what to expect when he got there.

  Odette’s mother had been such a woman as Dory Callahan. Perhaps he had helped to set the woman’s feet on the path she had taken. He had not been her first, of that he was sure. Before she died she had told him that she had been very protective of their child and begged him to see her settled with a good man who would love and cherish her as she herself had wanted to be.

  Ben came to a decision. This was a better place for Odette than in a logging camp, even if they had a cabin to themselves. He would work here through the summer. By that time, if things went right, he’d have the money to start his own business.

  CHAPTER

  * 4 *

  Dory held herself in rigid control, afraid she would do or say something that would cause Louis to come up with a plan to house Ben Waller and Odette up at the timber camp or in one of the shacks at the sawmill. Not even when Jeanmarie upset her stool as she left the table, and Louis shouted an obscenity, did Dory retort. As usual Jeanmarie was terrified, and she scurried to hide behind her mother’s skirt as Dory began filling the dishpan from the hot water reservoir on the stove.

  “Goddamn brat! A man can’t have peace and quiet in his own house. Come on out to the bunkhouse, Waller.” Mumbling a string of oaths, Louis shoved back his chair, reached for his mackinaw and waited impatiently for Ben to get up from the table.

  Odette watched Ben anxiously. She could tell by the frightened look on Jeanmarie’s face that her uncle was angry. Ben put on his coat, went to her and placed his hand on her shoulder.

  “You’ll be all right here with the lady.” He mouthed the words slowly. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  She nodded and watched him walk out the door behind the ugly-faced man who seemed so angry.

  Dory sighed with relief when the men left the kitchen. She thought she had become used to Louis’s treatment of her and Jeanmarie, but his actions tonight in front of Ben Waller had been especially vicious and humiliating. Usually Louis was satisfied with ignoring her and her daughter. Once Dory had glanced up and found Ben looking at her with eyes so narrow and so shielded with thick dark lashes that she couldn’t tell if what she saw in them was pity or contempt.

  Dory had just about made up her mind to leave the homestead. She didn’t think she could endure another long winter here alone with just her daughter for company. Women were scarce in the timber country. She had no doubt that she could get work cooking in a lumber camp or go down the mountain to a town and find work. James would help her if she decided to go, but he wanted her to stay and hold on to what was rightfully hers. Of course, he didn’t know what she had to put up with when he was away from the house.

  “Louis and Milo would get too much satisfaction if you pulled out,” James explained. “It’s what they want. Stick it out, Sis. Give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself, as Papa used to say.”

  “I don’t know if I can wait that long. Living here with Louis and Milo has had an unsettling effect on Jeanmarie. She gets all tense and big-eyed when they are near.”

  James was right, Dory thought now; but he wasn’t the butt of abuse from both his half-brothers. Both men were careful not to ride James too hard. James had a quick temper, a quicker fist, and was far too popular with the men. With just one shove of a cant hook, a disgruntled man could cause a monumental jam on the narrow river. It would take days if not weeks to find and pry or blast loose the “key logs.” It was a slow, dangerous process and many boom men unable to escape the sudden release of water and wood had been crushed to death or caught beneath the mass of logs and drowned.

  Louis and Milo just might have met their match in Ben Waller, Dory thought, as she reached for the bar of lye soap and worked up a suds in the dishpan. He wasn’t a handsome man; his nose was slightly off center in his strong-boned face. His blue-black hair and lashes were in sharp contrast to his steel-gray eyes. She had no doubt that he had seen rough, brutal action. Here was a man who would be able to hold his own with her brothers while he was here doing his job. She had dreamed of meeting such a man who would disregard her tarnished reputation and love her and her child. But it was a useless dream. Not even for her share in the business would a man like Ben Waller go partners with Louis and Milo.

  Dory was acutely aware that she would have to keep a careful watch on Odette when Milo was around. It was common knowledge that he favored young girls and that he used Indian girls in such a rough way that it was a wonder he hadn’t been found with a hatchet in his back. Dory had no doubt that Ben Waller would kill Milo without a second thought if he molested Odette. Although she despised her half-brother, she couldn’t bring herself to wish him dead.

  She turned to smile at Odette, who was clearing the table. Before the girl turned her head, Dory saw the shimmer of tears in her eyes. She quickly dried her hands and with a gentle finger turned Odette’s face so that the girl could read her lips.

  “He just went to the bunkhouse. He’ll be here in the morning before he goes to the woods.”

  Odette nodded.

  “Be happy here, Odette. Jeanmarie and I have been so lonely.”

  “Papa will come back.” Odette said as if to convince herself.

  “Of course, he will. He said you had new dress goods. We’ll make it up and surprise him.”

  “I sew… some.”

  “Do you like books?”

  “You have books?”

  “Upstairs.” Dory pointed toward the ceiling.

  “Books? Ahhh…” Odette smiled.

  “After kitchen chores”—Dory waved her hand toward the table, then the dishpan—“we’ll go up.”

  Jeanmarie tugged on Odette’s skirt. “I show you my picture book.”

  “Ahhh…” Odette said again. “You help with dishes, baby.” She handed a plate to Jeanmarie to take to her mother. Odette smiled at Dory. “Baby will help.”

  Dory nodded
happily and plunged her hands into the dishwater.

  The wind blew itself out in the night. It had swept the yard clean and piled the snow against the barn and the bunkhouse.

  When Dory went down to the kitchen to prepare breakfast, dawn was streaking the eastern sky and the day promised to be sunny. Wearing an old gray sweater and a yellow knit cap, she went out to the woodpile to get a few short pieces of firewood to add to the kindling already ablaze in the cook-stove.

  “Let me help you with that.”

  The voice behind Dory startled her. She turned so quickly that she almost dropped the wood she was stacking in the crook of her arm. Ben Waller, in his sheepskin coat, his brimmed hat pulled down low over his eyes, was close behind her.

  “Thanks, but this will be enough to get me by until after breakfast.”

  “I’ll fill the wood box before I go.” Ben filled his own arms from a huge pile of neatly cut slabs of wood.

  “I usually do it in the afternoon. It was too cold yesterday, and I had enough to last the night. Wiley cuts kindling for me,” she finished lamely.

  He walked beside her to the house. At the door he said, “Your brother is out in the smithy’s shed. Do I dare come in before he gets here?”

  She looked up to see an amused glint in his eyes.

  “A sure way to get him here in a hurry is for you to pass through that door.”

  “Betcha a nickel he’ll be here on a count of ten.” Ben threw open the door and waited for her to enter.

  “Make it fifteen and you’ve got a bet.” Dory laughed up at him. She was a tall woman, but Ben topped her by a good six inches.

  As soon as Ben stepped inside the door, he saw Odette. Her hair was brushed and tied at the nape of her neck, and she had a shawl around her shoulders. She waited beside the table for him to notice her. Ben went to her as soon as he dumped the wood in the woodbox.

  “Mornin’.”

  “Papa.” She mouthed the word.

  Ben nudged her chin with his fist. “Aloud, you rascal.”

  “Mornin’, Papa.”

  “That’s better. Sleep good?”

  “Warm featherbed. You?”

  “Mine wasn’t feathers, but I slept well.” Ben shrugged out of his coat and hung it and his hat on the hook. “I take it I’m to eat breakfast in here,” he said to Dory.

  Loud thumps sounded on the porch seconds before the door was flung open.

  “I counted to twenty-five,” Dory said so low that only Ben could hear. “He’s getting careless.”

  “What you mumblin’ about?” Louis’s loud voice bounced from wall to wall, making Ben wonder if the man was going deaf.

  “I asked him how many eggs he wanted,” Dory said irritably.

  “Hurry it up. Goddamn! I can hardly wait to see that monster work. The bull-whackers brought it in a month ago. After we set her up we’ll pull her up to the cutting camp. Heavy snow will be melting in the high range—”

  Ben only half-listened to the man’s ramblings. He wasn’t saying anything that Ben didn’t already know. He had studied the territory before he came here. The Saint Maries River passed through sixty miles of wild country to meet the Saint Joe, a torrent of tumbling icewater that flowed westward out of the rugged Bitterroot Range. The water below the merged rivers was calmer and boom men could sort out logs stamped on the ends with the names of the loggers upstream.

  Dory dished up eggs and slabs of meat while Odette poured coffee. Louis ignored the women and talked constantly about how, with the help of the steam donkey, his logs would hit the fast water before Malone’s.

  Without appearing to do so, Ben watched Dory with Odette. Patient and smiling, Dory motioned to the breadboard and to the loaf of bread ready to be sliced. Odette flashed her a knowing smile and picked up the cutting knife. There was something different about Odette this morning. She was more at ease. It would make his leaving her here easier.

  Ben couldn’t help but feel a bit uneasy about this job. This place seemed like a tinderbox ready to explode. When the blow-up happened, he wanted Odette to be as far away as possible. His eyes fastened onto Louis Callahan’s face. The man couldn’t possibly be Odette’s father. His features were large and coarse, while Odette’s were small and fine-boned. Now he was curious to meet Milo Callahan. He wanted to find out if one of the Callahans had fathered Odette, but, he said to himself again, it would make no difference in his feeling for the girl.

  In all his life Ben had never cared for anyone, nor had anyone cared for him, until Odette. It had taken him a while to get used to being responsible for a young girl. She had instantly become enamored of the idea that he was her father and had insisted on calling him “Papa.”

  Ben’s thoughts turned to Dory Callahan and her daughter. There had been a sparkle in Dory’s eyes this morning. A fascinating dimple appeared in her cheek when she smiled with her lips still pressed together. The woman had had a rough time, but it hadn’t broken her spirit. He wondered why she stayed here and took her brother’s abuse. Surely with her share of the company money she could live in town.

  Ben looked down at his plate. He couldn’t afford to feel any sympathy for Dory, but he couldn’t keep his eyes away from her tall, graceful body when she moved from the stove to the table. Her waist was small, her breasts rounded and swaying gently beneath the loose shirt. Her head, with its tangle of wild, tight curls, rode proudly on her slender neck. She was a handsome, capable woman. If what her brother said about her was true, he was sure to hear about it from the other men, although it didn’t matter to him what she was as long as she was kind to Odette.

  It was strange, Ben thought. A man can fornicate every day of the week, but if a woman does so one time, she is branded forever as a slut.

  “I said, how long will it take to get the donkey goin’?” Louis’s irritated voice broke into Ben’s thoughts.

  “Depends.” Ben drank the last of his coffee.

  “On what?” Louis insisted.

  “On a number of things. We can have the engine going in a week or two if you have the right tools. It’ll take longer to set it in place and anchor it. Longer yet to train the men to operate it. It’s a dangerous machine.”

  “Well, let’s get goin’.” Louis set his mug down on the table with unnecessary force. He stood and glared at Dory. “Don’t you be lettin’ in ever’ jaybird that comes by. Hear?” he growled.

  Although Dory felt as if her nerves were being ground to the raw ends, she ignored him and looked at Ben. “Don’t worry about Odette.”

  “Get her to talk aloud if you can. She’s real stingy with words. If there’s something she doesn’t understand, write it down. She reads and writes real good.”

  “I know. She read aloud to Jeanmarie last night.”

  Ben looked surprised. “She did? She’s not done that before that I know of. Of course, we’ve not had access to many books.”

  Had Louis not been there, she would have told him how glad she was to have his daughter’s company, but she didn’t dare for fear Louis would find a way to take this little bit of pleasure from her.

  Odette came to stand beside Ben, her face tilted up, her large cornflower eyes on his face. The small girl’s head barely came to her father’s shoulder.

  “I’ll be back in a few days.” Ben cuffed his daughter gently on the chin with his fist. “You can count on it.”

  “Be careful, Papa.”

  “I will. Bye, honey.”

  “Bye, Papa.”

  Louis stood scowling beside the door and jerked it open when Ben came toward him. The glance he threw his sister was malignant. Ben paused and spoke to Dory.

  “Thanks for the breakfast and for looking after my girl.” He spoke coolly and there appeared to be what she considered a warning glint in his eyes.

  “You’re quite welcome, Mr. Waller,” she replied just as coolly.

  As she watched the men leave, Dory pondered the coolness in Ben’s voice and decided the big man would make a formidable enemy. H
e had a quick mind and would be a match for men such as Louis and Milo who were filled with latent viciousness. He was shrewd and tough under that quiet exterior. He was the kind of man who remained alive by knowing what to expect and from what direction to expect it.

  She looked forward to seeing him again.

  The next ten days were boisterous and happy at the Callahan homestead. For the two women and the child they were carefree days of fun and laughter. Dory and Jeanmarie enjoyed Odette’s company so much that they were almost giddy. Dory taught her to crochet, to make bread, and to pop the corn she brought up from the cellar beneath the house. They made taffy candy one afternoon, and while pulling it, Odette laughed so hard she fell back into a chair, covering her face with her buttery hands—which evoked even more laughter. Odette taught Jeanmarie how to cut a string of paper dolls out of an old newspaper and how to lace her fingers to make a church and a steeple. In the evening after the child had gone to bed, she and Dory sewed on the new dress material.

  Sid Hancs, a mill worker and one of Milo’s cronies, knocked on the kitchen door one morning. He was a short man, stockily built with wide shoulders and long arms. When he came to the house with Milo, his faded blue eyes roamed over Dory like a dog salivating over a bone. She detested him.

  “What do you want?” Dory demanded in a scathing tone as soon as she opened the door.

  “Yore brother said stop an’ see if ya was all right.”

  “Liar.”

  “I’m hungry as a bear.”

  “Go eat with the hogs where you belong.” Dory attempted to close the door. His arm shot out and flung it open. Dory let out a muffled gasp of fury. “Step inside this door and I’ll fill your belly full of buckshot!”

  “I ain’t no fool. I ain’t comin’ in without no invite. Old Wiley’s got a shotgun pointed at my back. I jist want to see the dummy.” His eyes moved past Dory and settled on Odette. “Bugger! Louis didn’t say she was pretty as a blue-wing teal.”