“Mr. Leighton sent two more men,” Pierre told him. “His son, Jamie, and Gerrit Hawkes, lately from England.”
The thick-set man with black hair and beard nodded at them, a twinkle in his brown eyes. He held out a large hand. “Got your way at last, Jamie?” Giving the young man a pump of his hand, he turned to Gerrit. “A Brit, eh? We got another o’ your kind in the company.”
His hand kneaded Gerrit’s for a second before letting it go.
“Cookee here is the most important man in the camp after the foreman,” Pierre told him.
“I’ll remember that,” Gerrit said.
The cook indicated the far end of the bunks. “You’ll have to make room for yourselves down yonder. The rest of the men will be along soon and you can have supper. There’s tea on the fire if you want something hot.”
They accepted the offer. After drinking down the strong tea liberally laced with sugar, they went back out into the biting cold to unload the provisions and put away the canoe in the ox hovel.
“We’ll need to cut some fresh fir to place on your bunk,” Pierre told them. “It’s best to use the sweet-smelling balsam.” He showed Gerrit how to identify the fir tree by its needles and scent. “Camp’ll get mighty smelly after a short while and this will help ward off the stink.”
That night when the hungry men came back from a day of chopping, the small cabin became a noisy, tumultuous place as they shed boots and wet clothes. Soon every nook of the roof was hung with drying pants, shirts and coats, and boots were grouped around the roaring fire. The men sat in their underclothes as the cook passed around the few plates. Most men shared a dish. Gerrit sat by Jamie and Pierre and spooned up the hot dish of beans and broke off pieces of Johnny Cake—a crumbly yellow cornmeal flat bread that he found coarse and gritty but not unpleasant. The beans, too, were different from what he was used to and he found out it was the molasses they were cooked in.
“Bean-hole-beans,” one of the loggers told him with a satisfied smack of his lips. “Best food on earth. Cooked all day in the ground,” he said, pointing with his spoon to the pit dug by the fire, where the bean pot had been buried under coals.
Gerrit soon met the other Englishman.
“They call me Weasel,” the slight, slim man with red hair and darting green eyes told him. “Cause I can shimmy up a spruce so fast.”
Gerrit learned most of them went by nicknames. The foreman was named Bull, after a bull moose. An Irishman was Carp.
“So, where you ‘ail from?” the Englishman asked him.
“London.”
“You ever been in the woods?” He eyed him with the superiority of someone who is confident of his abilities.
“Never.”
Before he could stop him, Jamie blurted out, “He’s been fighting the French.” Then he stopped, his face reddening, remembering that Gerrit had asked him not to say anything of his military career.
Weasel’s shifty eyes roved over him. “In the army was ya?”
Some of the other men, ranged on the long log that Pierre had told him was called the deacon seat, stopped their conversation to listen. Gerrit set down his spoon. “Yes.”
“Ye sound like a gent,” Weasel said, disdain edging the words. “What rank?”
Gerrit eyed him steadily. “Suffice it to say I was an officer.”
“A redcoat,” a man beside them grunted.
Jamie turned to him. “But he fought the French, not us.”
“A redcoat is a redcoat,” another spat out. “We don’t need any ’round here.”
“What’s Leighton mean putting a lobsterback in our midst?” the first man demanded.
Jamie stood. “My father thinks highly of Major Hawkes and so you’d better treat him right.”
“Sit down, Jamie,” Gerrit said quietly, but the boy didn’t heed him.
Jamie fisted his hands. “Anyone that wants to make trouble with him will have to answer to me.”
The men roared with laughter. “Ready to take us all on?” a large man at the far end of the deacon seat asked.
The foreman brought his plate up to the fire for a second helping of salt pork. “The only proving ground we have here, men, is the forest. Remember it’s how many logs we bring in for Leighton that counts. Nothing else. When we total our logs down in the boom in spring, that’ll prove the worth of our crew compared to every other crew in the territory.”
The men cheered his words, their hostility forgotten, at least for the moment.
Gerrit resumed eating although he had no more appetite. He wondered if this first evening would foretell his reception in the woods. Would he be thwarted out there because of his background?
The other Englishman soon moved away from him, muttering, “We don’t need no Mayfair maidens here in the woods.”
Gerrit noticed a large man who said little, sitting in a far corner of the room, but who eyed him from time to time. After the dishes were cleared, the task of washing fell to him and Jamie as the newest of the crew. The other men sat telling stories, smoking their pipes and sharpening their ax blades on the grindstone.
When the talking died down, one of them started singing. Most of the men joined in the logging song. When a few songs had ended, the man who’d sat observing Gerrit began to sing. The others fell silent as his strong bass filled the cabin.
Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing…
Gerrit sat at his end of the deacon seat, caught by the man’s melodious voice. When the hymn ended, the man stood and stretched. With murmured good nights, they watched him don his coat and exit quietly into the night.
Gerrit asked Pierre, “Who was that?”
“The teamster. He usually beds down with the oxen.”
Later as the men began claiming their bunks, a massive log was placed onto the fire, sending sparks flying. “That should last us through the night,” Cookee declared, standing back with satisfaction.
Gerrit put his coat on and opened the flimsy wood door. He stepped out into the frigid night. His breath immediately crystallized into a cloud of white vapor. He looked above him; the sky was pitch black, the blanket of stars bright pinpoints in the night.
Instead of silence, the air was filled with the sound of the cold-frozen trees crackling, branches creaking.
He didn’t dare wander far from the cracks of light visible through the door. The rest of the logs were chinked to keep in the warmth of the cabin.
After relieving himself, he paused a moment, glancing at the other building, the hovel. He walked toward it, his boots crunching on the dry snow. A thin line of light peered through a sliver in the door. His hand lifted to push open the door, but then he stopped and let it fall back to his side.
Shaking his head at his foolish need to seek out this quiet man with the deep, soothing voice, Gerrit turned back to the cabin. Perhaps tomorrow he’d have a chance to speak to him. For now, however, he had a few moments of quiet, alone with his thoughts of Hester.
Chapter Seventeen
The weeks that followed were filled with the hardest work Gerrit had ever known. He was made a swamper, a position he soon discovered was the lowest of the team. He spent the day whacking off the bark from one side of the great logs that were felled, so that they could be easily skidded across the snow and down to the lakeside.
He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed when Jamie was assigned to the forest with the choppers. He wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on him and he knew that was the more dangerous work, bringing down the great pines that sometimes reached up to a hundred and fifty feet. The ground shook beneath him whenever one came down.
From Jamie’s stories around the fire at night, the greatest danger came when the tree toppled. Although the experienced choppers could bring down a tree exactly where they wanted, without breaking any of the smaller trees in their midst, there was always the risk the tree would fall in another direction a
nd those beneath it would be crushed.
Each night Gerrit listened to harrowing stories of accidents other men had seen in their years in the forest. Although the men hardly talked to him, he heard from their accents that they were a mixed bunch: a few French, the Irish and Englishman, a couple of Penobscots in addition to Pierre, and the rest Mainers—proud men of English or Scotch descent but with little regard for their mother country.
The cabin became a steam-filled lodge of dirty clothes, with only the smell of frying salt pork to relieve it. One evening, about a week after they’d arrived, Gerrit contemplated another lonely few hours until bedtime. Only half-heeding the talk and song from his place at the fringes of the group, he decided he needed to fill his evenings with something more than sharpening his ax and washing up the dishes. The days stretched out before him as if they had no beginning or end. The hope of seeing Hester at the end of this sojourn seemed slimmer by the day. Finally, he rose and stretched, retiring to his bunk earlier than the others.
As he lay against the logs, softened only partially by the scented fir boughs, his hands clasped behind his head, he wondered for the dozenth time why he had come to these strange shores. He’d left behind a civilized life in London. Why hadn’t he done the sensible thing and married an heiress as Delia advised him? Right now, he’d probably be enjoying a plum pudding after a lavish holiday meal on some country estate. The men around him, following the tradition of their Puritan forefathers, hardly acknowledged the Christmas holiday.
Instead Gerrit was breaking his back to gain the approval of a lowborn tradesman, whom he’d never have give a second glance to in London, in the hopes that the man would allow him to court his daughter. Gerrit shifted on the bed, trying to dispel the negative thoughts. No matter what her father was or wasn’t, it didn’t matter to him. He’d do anything to win Hester’s love.
Gerrit blew out a breath, watching it form a white cloud. Despite the great fire in the center of the cabin, his bed at the very end of it already felt cold from the frigid temperatures just beyond the six-inch logs forming the walls.
Would he ever see Hester again? At the rate he was going, he thought it unlikely. The winter days seemed endless. He sat up. He had to have some kind of link with her if he was going to be able to see it through. His gaze fell on his pack. He reached for it, remembering what Crocker had given him. With a thought of dropping his old valet a line, he’d stuffed the writing paper into it at the last moment. A useless thought. There was no mail in and out of the camp until spring. Pierre had brought up the last link to the outside world, and the men had pounced on the letters and newspapers he’d carried with him.
Now Gerrit took out the folded, slightly crumpled sheets of paper. If he couldn’t see her or talk to the woman who had brought him to these shores, at least he could write to her. She might never get his letters, but that didn’t matter. He only needed to feel a connection to Hester to be able to keep going in this inhospitable land he found himself in.
He took out his small bottle of ink and his quill pen. He shook the bottle. Good, it hadn’t frozen. He didn’t relish sitting closer to the fire to warm it. He placed the bottle on the deacon seat.
He needed a hard surface to write upon. His glance fell on the Bible protruding from his pack. A parting gift from Hester’s mother. At least he had an ally in her. He hadn’t even taken it out of his pack since he’d packed it. He took the book out now and placed his hand on the smooth leather cover. He flipped it open and read the flyleaf.
Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. Joshua 1:9
8th December, 1815
The words comforted him. He needed all the strength and courage he possessed right now. He’d needed them, too, when he’d first gone as a young soldier to the Spanish peninsula, but then he’d had the fellowship of other officers, men, like him, of high birth. He’d had, in addition, his ambition—and like young Jamie, that belief in himself and his own prowess.
Now, he had only the knowledge of what a weak and worthless individual he was. He might be able to kill and defend himself, but for what? He had no power to wash away the guilt of having survived when so many had perished. He sighed and closed the book, knowing he must stop the direction of his thoughts. He opened the bottle of ink and dipped in the quill. Placing a sheet of paper on the Bible, he wrote:
My dearest Hester, I wonder what you are doing at this moment. It is only eight o’clock here. You are doubtless sitting with your sisters, making yourselves useful with your sewing or quilting, chatting about the day’s events. You probably spent the day at some worthy endeavor with your mother—visiting the sick or taking food to some widow or to an old sailor living out his last days near the wharf.
How I wish I could be near you right now. I wish I could hold you and tell you what’s in my heart. I have never in my life felt so lonely. Not when I was far from home on the plains of Spain. Not when I stood contemplating a field littered with broken bodies after a battle.
He blotted the last words. He must take another tack. This line of thinking wouldn’t do.
The days have been long and hard. Your brother is acquitting himself tolerably well, I’ve heard. He’s had the distinction of being among the choppers. I know your father would be proud of him….
He continued writing, finding a curious release in being able to pour out his heart, knowing his words would never be read by anyone. When the other men began to stand and stretch and make their way to the bunk, Gerrit quickly blotted the last page and folded the letter. As an afterthought, he placed it inside the Bible and packed it away again.
Jamie crept into the bunk beside him. “What’re you writing?”
“Nothing. Just a letter.”
“You know there’s no mail,” he said in concern.
“I know. It doesn’t matter.” Gerrit stretched back out on the bed, under the blankets this time, his head pillowed by his boots like the other men. Soon the candles were doused and only the fire remained.
“Are you sweet on my sister?” Jamie asked from his side of the bed.
Sweet on? There was an expression. What did the frank question from the naive young man beside him mean? Had Gerrit ever been sweet on a young woman before? It was much too bland an expression to describe the lusty thoughts he usually entertained toward women.
And it certainly came nowhere near to describing the heart-wrenching yearning he felt for Hester. He turned to look at Jamie in the firelight. “Which one?” he asked, cracking a smile.
The boy looked at him in shock for an instant, before he understood Gerrit’s teasing. He punched him in the arm. “You’re bamming me.”
Gerrit reached over and ruffled the boy’s hair. “Get to sleep. You’ve still got a lot of growing to do.”
“All right, if you want me to mind my own business, just say so. Just don’t treat me like a kid.” His voice held no offense.
“Mind your business. Good night.” Gerrit faced back up at the fir roof.
“Good night, Gerrit.” Jamie yawned. “I can’t wait till tomorrow. The head chopper said I could go with him to the new grove of pine. You should have seen him today. He brought down a tree four-feet wide at the base.” His jaw stretched open in another yawn.
“You’d better get some sleep then,” advised Gerrit, glad he couldn’t witness firsthand the risks Jamie was taking.
“Yeah. I want to be alert tomorrow.” With a contented sigh, the boy turned around, resting his head on his elbow. Soon Gerrit heard his even breathing. One by one, the men down the line fell asleep. Deep breathing and snores mingled with the crackling fire.
Oh, to have the peaceful slumber of youth or the deep sleep of hardworking men who had little on their minds but facing hundred foot trees in the forest. Gerrit closed his eyes, picturing Hester’s smile. It was the only thing that kept the other images from surfacing.
Gerrit was working on his fifth tree of the m
orning. The snow around him was littered with gray bark. Suddenly, a man ran out of the forest.
“A man’s been hurt!” he yelled before banging open the door of the cabin. “Cookee, Farraday’s down! Get your kit ready!”
Gerrit threw down his ax, his thoughts immediately on Jamie’s safety, and joined the man when he came out again. “What happened? Where is he?”
“Up in the new grove. Bleeding all over the place. It’s his leg,” he panted.
The cook joined them, his jacket thrown on and a satchel in one hand. “Take me to him.”
The two took off into the woods. Gerrit followed after, along with the other swampers. The pine grove was about a mile away through a forest covered in a foot of snow. A path had been trodden down enough with the dragged logs so that snowshoes weren’t needed.
They were all breathless by the time they reached the area. Gerrit stopped short at the great red blotch on the snow. The pure white snow readily absorbed the blood and spread it out like a scarlet carpet.
The man called Farraday was writhing on the ground holding his knee. A deep gash perforated his foreleg. Gerrit approached slowly. A double-bitted ax lay on the ground beside the man. The wound on his leg went clear to the bone.
Gerrit had seen worse injuries—from heads blown off to holes leaving a man’s insides spilling onto the battlefield. But his reaction now was like a maiden soldier’s. His stomach lurched, wanting to cast up his breakfast.
It was happening all over again. From the trampled grass sticky with blood across the fields of Europe to the wild forests of Maine, it was the same. Suffering and death.
The men were all talking at once and hovering around Farraday. “What happened?” Cookee asked, crouching down and examining the leg.
“Ax flew the wrong way. Landed in his leg.” The foreman frowned. “Think he’ll make it?”
The cook didn’t speak right way, but took his knife and cut away the pant leg. Then he began binding the wound with the roll of bandages from his sack. He glanced at Farraday. “Looks like a clean wound,” he said as he tied the ends together. “You’d be dead by now if your ax had severed anything important.” He turned to the group of men. “All right, let’s get a pallet made to carry him back.”
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