Sins of Summer

by Dorothy Garlock

  “Get away from this door, Sid!” Dory demanded in a strident shout.

  “Air ya jealous cause she’s prettier an’ younger’n ya are? It makes no never mind to me. Yo’re still my woman.”

  “You… varmint! Weasel! Filthy hog! Stinking polecat—” Dory reached for the water bucket to fling at him. When he stepped back, she slammed the door and dropped a bar across it.

  “There’ll come a time when I’ll learn ya to keep a civil tongue in yore head.” Sid’s angry voice sprang boldly through the closed door.

  Dory stood in troubled silence looking at Odette’s quizzical face. She forced herself to laugh. “He’s just… a rejected suitor. He’s leaving.” There was a note of desperation in her voice that Odette couldn’t hear.

  Odette smiled. The smiled faded as she went into a fit of coughing. The girl had had a persistent cough for days. Dory had made a syrup of equal parts of honey, vinegar and whiskey and every so often had given her a spoonful. It was only a temporary relief.

  The next afternoon, with Jeanmarie skipping along between them, they explored the woods behind the house to get a breath of fresh air and to look for early spring flowers. The days were getting longer, the sun warmer. Two deer at a salt lick were startled by their approach and darted into the dense stand of trees.

  “Come back! Come back!” Jeanmarie ran after them. “We won’t hurt you.”

  Dory ran to catch her daughter before she went deeper into the woods. The child squealed with laughter as she was caught and pinned to her mother’s side with an arm looped around her middle. As Dory turned to go back to Odette, she saw Milo coming out of the woods behind the girl.

  “Boo!” he said, his mouth close to Odette’s ear.

  Unaware of his presence, Odette stood watching Dory and Jeanmarie as they walked toward her. The child had stopped laughing and hid her face against her mother’s shoulder.

  “She really is a dummy,” Milo said, and moved around to peer into Odette’s face. He laughed when the girl, realizing a man was standing close beside her, jumped back. “Scared ya, did I?”

  “Stay away from her, Milo,” Dory said sharply. “She can’t hear, but she can read lips. She’ll tell her father—”

  “Sid told me she was pretty and… ripe. He was right as rain.” He chuckled and reached to touch the blond curl that lay on Odette’s cheek. She jerked her head away from his hand. “Always did like light-haired women.” Milo grinned, showing a space between his big square front teeth.

  Milo was not as tall as his brother Louis and had the same heavy features. He wore the clothes of a lumberjack: heavy duck pants, flannel shirt and caulked boots. He was exceedingly proud of his thick dark hair and the heavy mustache that drooped down on each side of his mouth. Dory suspected the reason he let his hair grow to cover his ears was to taunt Louis, who was bald except for the fringe of coarse springy hair that grew around the lower part of his head.

  Odette’s fearful eyes looked up at Dory. Dory took her hand.

  “Stay away from her, Milo,” Dory warned again. “She’s very shy. One word from her and Ben Waller will pull out, leaving you and Louis high and dry.”

  Ignoring the warning, Milo stood in front of them when they attempted to pass. “Don’t be in such a hurry. Does she talk?”

  “Yes, she talks. I’m warning you, Milo—”

  “Make her say something. I’ve never heard a dummy talk.”

  “Don’t call her that… and get out of the way.” Dory pulled on Odette’s hand and they went around him.

  “I’ll be in for supper,” he called as they headed for the house.

  “Eat in the bunkhouse,” Dory yelled back.

  “I said, I’ll be in for supper, dammit! I’ll sleep in my bed too.”

  Dory whirled around. “It’ll be pretty crowded. All three of us will be sleeping in that bed.”

  “It’ll not be no chore a-tall to get rid of two of you.” He laughed nastily as Dory sneered at him with disgust.

  “Damn lecher!” Dory muttered to herself.

  As soon as they were inside the house, Odette put her hand on Dory’s arm to get her attention.

  “What he say, Dory?”

  “Nothing for you to worry about,” she replied slowly. “He’s my brother… and he likes to… tease.”

  “He’s mean, like Louis.” Odette covered her mouth with her hand and coughed.

  Dory made no attempt to contradict. She sighed heavily. “I’m afraid so. But he won’t bother you. I wish we could get rid of that cough.”

  “Throat sore now.”

  “Sit down and I’ll fix you some hot tea.”

  “I wish Papa would come.”

  “So do I, honey.”

  Quietly the women went about the chore of fixing supper. Even Jeanmarie was subdued. The child sat on a stool beside the woodbox holding a doll her mother had made out of a stocking. Milo’s presence at the homestead was like a dash of cold water on their spirits. The meal was only half ready when he flung open the door and came into the kitchen.

  “Supper isn’t ready,” Dory said crossly.

  “I can see that. I ain’t blind.” He hung his coat on the rack beside the door, hooked a chair out from the table with his foot and straddled it, resting his arms on the back. A grin spread across his broad face as his eyes wandered over Odette’s slight body.

  Dory saw his lecherous gaze and read his thoughts. She made no attempt to hide her opinion of him.

  “You’re disgusting,” she snapped. “You’re old enough to be her father.”

  “I’m shore glad I ain’t. I’d say she’s ’bout the age you was when you got busted. Hey, pretty girl, pour me some coffee.” With her back to him, Odette continued stirring the chopped potatoes frying in the big iron skillet. “Shit! I forget she can’t hear. Don’t she hear anything a-tall? Hell, it don’t make no difference. I think I like it. I won’t get no back talk.” He laughed as if he had said something terribly funny.

  One brief glance at Dory’s tight-lipped mouth told Odette that she was angry at the man at the table. Had he said something about her? Some sixth sense told her that he was watching her and that his thoughts were less than honorable. Odette felt heat rush into her face and at the same time a cold chill traveled down her spine. She swallowed in an effort to ease the soreness in her throat.

  This man was of the same breed that sometimes had come to visit her mother before she had become so sick she could no longer “entertain” them. On these occasions her mother would tell her to go to a small room off the kitchen and would lock the door. Lying on a pallet, she would wait until her mother came for her.

  Odette watched Dory for her reaction to the man. She was unlike any woman Odette had ever known. Dory romped and played like a child with her and Jeanmarie, yet she was a grown woman, a mother. Odette had been delighted to know that Dory could make clay pots, and Dory had promised to show her how to form them and bake them in the outside oven Mr. Callahan had built for Dory’s mother. Although Odette missed the security of being with Ben, she had truly enjoyed being here with Dory and Jeanmarie.

  Odette made a wide circle around the man in the chair when she carried the bowl of potatoes to the table. On the way back to the stove she uttered a cry of alarm and moved quickly to evade the hand that snaked out to grab her skirt.

  “I’m warning you, Milo,” Dory said angrily, placing herself between Odette and her brother. “Keep your hands off her, or I’ll brain you with a stick of stove wood.”

  “Ohhh… I’m scared.” Milo held up his hands as if to protect himself.

  “You came down because of her, didn’t you?”

  “I sure didn’t come to get an eyeful of you, sister. Louis said she was a dummy. Sid said she was pretty as a buttercup. I ain’t ever had me no dummy and it’s been a month or more since I had me a woman that ain’t been broke into.” He laughed loud and long at the look of disgust on Dory’s face.

  “You’re sorry through and through. You make me
want to puke.”

  “Sorry? What’s sorry about doin’ what comes natural? I have myself a hell of a time. Sid’s got his eye on you. Know that?”

  “You and Sid Hanes are chips off the same rotten block.”

  “How long’s it been since you had a man? Not since that puny Malone kid got hisself killed, huh?”

  “Shut up!” Dory slammed a plate of fried meat on the table. “Eat and get out.”

  “I ain’t going nowhere… except up to my bed.” He reached out and pinched her on the thigh.

  She aimed at the side of his face with the back of her hand. He dodged the blow and laughed.

  “If I told James that you pinch and slap me, he’d tear your blasted head off.”

  “Go right ahead and tell him if you want to see him laid out on a slab. I might take him for a deer when I’m hunting. Better yet, I might lose control of a plank and knock him into the saw blade.”

  “Mistake him for a deer like you did Mick Malone?”

  “Mick Malone? Let’s see. Wasn’t he the little bastard’s pa? I might of took him for a red-headed woodpecker, but not a deer.”

  With her back to Milo, Odette touched Dory’s arm and mouthed, “Upstairs.”

  Dory shook her head. “Stay with me,” she replied, making her mouth work slowly.

  Odette nodded her understanding.

  “What’er you saying to her?” Milo demanded.

  “I’m telling her that you’re a mule’s ass and not to let you catch her alone.”

  “Well, now, if you’d a called me a horny billy goat, I wouldn’t have cared, but mule’s ass—that’s going to get you another pinch,” he said good-naturedly.

  CHAPTER

  * 5 *

  The mill camp, set in a scarred clearing of tree stumps, was larger than Ben expected. Besides the mill building, there were two large three-sided sheds, the bunkhouse, the cook shack, a sturdy barn and a network of pole corrals. Beyond the camp, surrounded by dense undergrowth and young saplings, was a neat log cabin with real glass windows.

  One of the buildings was a partial dugout—thirty feet long with walls scarcely four feet above the ground. A slanting ramp led down to a door on the south side of the structure. Logs reared up out of the ground to support a roof of shakes covered with evergreen boughs. From the squat stone smokestack in the center of the roof, heavy black smoke, the result of burning wood that was too green, billowed upward and hung over the camp.

  Ben had spent more years of his life than he cared to remember in such a building. This was where the crew lived and slept in a field bed that extended the full length of the building. The fifteen or more men slept in the communal bed with their heads toward the wall. At the foot of the bed, between the loggers’ feet and the fire, was a long flat beam called the “deacon’s seat.” The loggers sat on it before the blazing fire, joked and told stories to while away the long winter evenings. At bedtime each man mounted the deacon’s seat to get in and out of the neighborly bed that stood two or three feet above the hard-packed dirt floor. His belongings, wrapped in a tarp or in a canvas bag, were stashed underneath.

  The other fully enclosed building was the cook shack. A good cook was well paid in a lumber camp. He fed his men exceedingly well on what was the usual allowance of thirty cents a day per man. He baked, stewed, fried and roasted great quantities of meat and vegetables to assuage the appetites of men who worked hard all day in subzero weather and generated unbelievable appetites. The cook’s helper, known as “bull cook,” tended fire, carried water, peeled potatoes, and washed the dishes. It was also his duty to call the men to eat, which he did with gusto on cold frosty mornings.

  On the morning Ben arrived at the camp, a small bookish-type man named Steven Marz was having an argument with Milo Callahan. Milo was against paying the cook’s helper the wage owed him because the man needed to leave the camp without notice, having just received word that one of his children was seriously ill. Marz and Milo were not matched physically, but verbally Marz was far superior. His reasoning persuaded Milo, and the grateful bull cook left with his wages in his pocket. Marz then teamed up with the cook to prepare hot meals for the rest of the crew until another bull cook could be hired.

  Steven Marz lived in the cabin. Ben liked him the moment he met him. He was a serious-faced man; slightly built, with a head of thick brown hair streaked with gray, a V-shaped mustache and wire-rimmed spectacles. It was difficult for Ben to believe the soft-spoken, highly intelligent man who kept the company accounts in a cubbyhole of an office would stay and work for such a disagreeable employer. It didn’t take long for Ben to realize that the mill hands also liked and respected Steven.

  Late one afternoon several days later, Ben went into the mill. The steam-driven engine had been fired up and circular saws were eating into the peeled log that sat on the carriage that carried it to the blades. The howl of the machinery, like the cry of a banshee—which was merely noise to the average woodsman—was familiar music to Ben’s ears. He loved everything that had anything to do with milling lumber: the smell of the freshly cut wood, the challenge of handling the huge logs, the song of the blades and the steam-powered engine that drove them.

  He watched for a moment while the dogger, a man whose muscles bunched and strained, rode the sawdust-covered carriage and levered the massive log to rest against the plank gauge. With wide shoulders, narrow hips and long powerful legs, the man controlled the log from the instant the perfectly aligned steel teeth of the blades sank into the butt until a single four-inch slab fell from the carriage. Grinning with satisfaction at the near-perfect cut, he waved at the sawyer at the controls, and another log was levered into position while the saw blades continued to sing their hungry tune.

  The sawyer, Tinker Buck, a swarthy, ragged little man with a round black beard and a New England twang in his speech, handled the control levers of the huge engine. Considered to be one of the best sawyers in the Bitterroot Range, Tinker obviously enjoyed working with the man riding the carriage. A wide grin split his dark face from ear to ear, showing the gleam of a gold tooth. Through the deafening noise of the blades, he communicated with the “dogger”— the man positioning the log for the next cut—by using hand signals. The dogger watched Tinker’s signals and strained every muscle of his big body to lever the log an inch or two this way or that to position it on the carriage.

  Two men usually worked the carriage. Ben’s eyes swept the scene for the dogger’s helper and found a short, stumpy-legged man whose straw-colored hair hung beneath a leather hat. The brim was turned up in front and fastened with a feather. He stood leaning on his pike, making no move to lever the end of the log into place. The corners of his thin lips were lifted in a sneer. His eyes gleamed with hostility.

  Ben returned the man’s hostile gaze with no show of emotion. Beneath his calm expression his mind was working quickly. He had seen men of this caliber in every logging camp in the territory. The cruelty in the helper’s face seemed to spring from some inner source of malice and hatred. Milling was dangerous work even if the team worked in unison and every man knew every move his teammate would make. In this place there were two factions working against each other. Sooner or later a catastrophe was bound to happen.

  When Ben noticed that Steven had come out of his office and was trying to speak to him, he waved him toward the side door and the two walked out into the cool mountain air toward the sheds. As soon as they were far enough away from the screaming blades to hear each other, Steven spoke.

  “It sets my teeth on edge to watch James work the carriage. He takes too many chances and Tinker eggs him on.”

  “It was James Callahan handling the logs? I thought he was foreman up at the cutting camp.”

  “Most of his men have been with him through six cutting seasons. They are a loyal bunch and can carry on without him. You can never tell when James will show up. He came down with the names of the extra men he hired for the summer and the supply list. When he found out Milo was gone today
, he took a turn riding the carriage. There’s nothing James likes better than meddling in Milo’s operation here at the mill.”

  “It takes a powerful man to handle logs that size. He’s good, I’ll say that for him. I’ve never seen better. I take it he and the dogger’s helper don’t see eye to eye.”

  “You take it right. Sid Hanes is Milo’s man. They’re thicker than thieves and both are jealous of James because he can outdo Milo or Sid in everything they attempt to do without even breaking a sweat. It sticks in their craws like a burr.” When Ben failed to comment, Steven said, “How’s things going?”

  “I’ve gone about as far as I can go before I make a trip to the smithy.” He paused and waited. Somehow he knew Steven had something on his mind other than the new engine.

  “Old Wiley is as good a smithy as you’ll find. He was a hell of a man before he got crippled up.”

  “Logging is a dangerous business. It’s crippled many a good man.”

  “That it has. If you leave for the homestead now, you can make it down before dark. Milo went down this afternoon.” Steven’s eyes looked directly into Ben’s as he spoke.

  Ben stared at the other man for a long moment, then interjected in a deadly tone, “Are you telling me something, Steven?”

  “Only that Milo left the mill just as we were starting a two-hour run, which is unusual unless he’s got something urgent on his mind. I doubt it was Dory he was anxious to see.”

  “Are the tales Milo tells about his consorting with women a mere brag, or are they true?” Ben stood motionless, his gaze locked on the other man, the muscles working in his jaw.

  “I don’t know what all you’ve heard,” Steven said evenly. “But if I had a girl within fifty miles of Milo, I’d keep a close watch on her.”

  “Thanks.” Ben made a guttural sound of fury and picked up a rag to wipe his hands. The anger on his whiskered face was ice-cold. “I’ll tell you now”—he threw down the rag— “that if that bastard dishonors my girl, I’ll kill him quicker than I would a rattler coiled and ready to strike.”