Washika

by Robert A. Poirier

  Chapter 19

  Henri could not remember having fallen asleep. Now, he listened in the dark and wondered who was walking around outside. A beam of light came through the door screen and into the bunkhouse. The door opened and P’tit-Gus stepped inside. He walked quietly over to the table by the old space heater.

  “What time is it?” Henri whispered.

  “Time to get up,” P’tit-Gus replied. He had placed his hunting lamp on the table. Henri could see his arm moving and hear the wheezing as he pumped air into the naphtha lamp. P’tit-Gus lit a match and stuck it through the hole to the inside of the lamp. The gas hissed as it entered the mantle and ignited, filling the room with a soft yellow glow.

  “Up!” P’tit-Gus said loudly. “Time to work. Let’s go now. Up!”

  P’tit-Gus chuckled behind the glow of the naphtha lamp. This was almost as good as a storm. He watched the roundness of the blankets begin to move. Suddenly a head popped out from beneath them. The student closest to the table squinted as he stared at the lamp. He turned his head slowly to look at the darkness through the windows and back to the lamp in disbelief. The young man groaned as the truth of the matter filtered through.

  “Are you crazy, calis?” Lavigne yelled at P’tit-Gus. “It’s four o’clock in the morning!”

  “He’s just trying to get even,” someone said.

  “Yeah, he’s still pissed about the other day,” another voice commented.

  “Hey P’tit-Gus!” Lavigne said. “Do you know what time we got to bed last night? Eleven o’clock, sacrament! And you wake us up at four o’clock in the morning!”

  P’tit-Gus said nothing. He was enjoying the whole thing immensely. He would have to wake the boys in the other bunkhouse individually so as not to disturb the older men. But here, he was able to stand back and see the whole effect of his efforts at one moment in time. A strange feeling of joy seemed to rush through his spine. On those rare occasions when he experienced a sudden moment of joy, like when he witnessed an electrical storm, his whole body would shudder and then, it was just a memory, a very pleasant memory. Now, the pleasure of it was past and P’tit-Gus picked up his hunting lamp and walked towards the door.

  “Breakfast in fifteen minutes,” he said, and went out of the bunkhouse.

  It was difficult to believe. Henri dressed slowly. Could it be that P’tit-Gus would do such a thing? After all, it was the bunkhouse-and-office and its occupants that caused him the most trouble. Henri sat on the edge of the bunk rubbing his face, his bare feet resting on the cold floor. He put on his socks and boots. He went to the north window and looked out at the darkness.

  “Oh no!” he swore softly. “Dear God, no! It can’t be.” But as he looked again, he saw Dumas rush past a window in the kitchen. There was a dim light in both the kitchen and the dining area where they took their meals. It was a dim light but it was still a light. The kitchen being lit was normal, as Dumas always began his day around four in the morning but he did not light up the dining area until much later, when the generator was running. Henri was not sure just what time Dumas turned on the lights but he was convinced that it was not at four in the morning. P’tit-Gus had awakened the students in the bunkhouse-and-office. That was one thing. Possibly revenge on his part. But P’tit-Gus would never dream of tricking Dumas into preparing an early breakfast, as a joke on the students. So it was true. They were, in fact, being awakened at four o’clock in the morning to go out to work on the fire.

  The door opened and Alphonse stood in the doorway. “Breakfast in ten minutes,” he said. “We’ll leave right after breakfast. Leave your lunch pails behind. They’ll be sending us out some. Come on now, you guys. Get a move on!”

  “How come we have to leave so early, Alphonse?” Lavigne wanted to know. “We’ve only had five hours sleep and it’s even dark out.”

  “That’s the way,” Alphonse replied. “That’s the way it works on the fire.”

  “It’s not right. I don’t care what they say. It’s not right,” Lavigne mumbled to himself as he put on his boots.

  Alphonse took a last look around the room. Most of the boys were dressed. Some already had towels on their shoulders and were preparing to leave for the washroom. On the bed nearest to the old space heater, André Guy sat wearing only his underwear. He sat facing the wall with his mouth open and staring at the grey plywood floor.

  “Come on, André,” Alphonse encouraged him. “Hurry now.”

  André nodded his head. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I’m coming.” And then his eyes closed and his head drooped, causing strands of hair to stand straight up on top of his head.

  Chapter 20

  It was quiet in the cookhouse. Dumas did not ring the bell. He collected the tickets inside as they went to their places at the table. It was strange not seeing Dumas beating the inside of the triangle with the bar. There was no bell, no Dumas on the little porch landing and not even a light above the door. There was of course no generator, only the hissing of the naphtha lamps and the darkness outside.

  The students sat at the long wooden table and ate more from habit than any desire for food. No one spoke or coughed or even looked at each other. The twenty young students sat at the table with their hair still wet, forcing in bacon and eggs and potatoes and pancakes and sipping at cups of steaming hot tea.

  Alphonse sat alone at the older men’s table. Halfway through breakfast Dumas came out from the kitchen with a cup of coffee and joined Alphonse, sitting down just in front of him.

  “Looks like more rain again today,” Dumas began.

  Alphonse washed down the toast with some tea. He poured more tea from the pot and sucked at his teeth with his tongue. Back home in Ste-Émilie, his wife would not hear of it. It was strictly forbidden to do that at the table. But, at this table at Washika, it was accepted behaviour, even in the presence of Dumas.

  “It rained pretty well all night,” Alphonse replied. “It wasn’t raining when I came in just now. But you could feel it in the air. What do they say on the radio?”

  “Sun and cloudy periods. But that is in Ste-Émilie. And who can believe them anyway? Probably it will rain all day. That should keep your gang happy, eh?”

  Alphonse glanced around the room. They were not sad or angry. They sat there, silently putting food into their mouths looking very dejected. Some were eating with their eyes closed.

  “They’re not too happy now,” Alphonse said, finally. He picked up his plate and cup along with knife and fork, took them over to the opposite table and dropped them into the wash pans. These would be picked up later by Richard Gagnier, the cookee. That was one his jobs, that and washing all of the soiled dishes and cutlery left in the pans. There was only one cookee at Washika and Dumas made sure that his life was a busy one.

  The students left the cookhouse and walked across the yard towards the sleep camps. It started to rain. They heard it, first, on the tarpapered roofs, and then on the bus parked in the yard between the main sleep camp and the bunkhouse-and-office. The driver and Alphonse were talking by the door of the bus as they walked by.

  “Get your stuff,” Alphonse said to them. “And get on right away. You can have your smoke as we go.”

  No one said anything. The students went on to the main sleep camp and to the bunkhouse-and-office without saying a word. They returned shortly afterwards wearing their wool mackinaws and hard hats with their gloves sticking out of their back pockets. They boarded the bus and sat at the first empty seats that they came to. No one fought for a window seat and no one opened a window. The bus quickly filled with smoke.

  The driver switched on the headlights, closed the door and shifted into gear. The wiper blades squeaked and the rain pattered on the thin metal roof. The springs of the bus stretched and groaned as they went around the bunkhouse-and-office and crossed the truck scales. From there they drove down the gravel road, past the infirmary, and north to the Ottawa River.

  Henri did not look up from his place as they went by the infirm
ary. He did not think about Lise Archambault and he did not worry about the fire and not going to Ste-Émilie for the weekend. He was tired. He dragged on his cigarette and felt sick to his stomach. He tried not to think about that. He tried not to think about anything at all.

  They were only five miles out of Washika when it happened. As they reached the crest of a very steep hill, the darkness suddenly changed to the semi-darkness of dawn. They could make out the shores of the lakes and swamps and see clearly the jack pine silhouetted along the roadside and the shores of the lakes.

  The driver shifted gears and began a long descent towards a bridge at the bottom, with swamp on both sides. Floating shrubs like tiny islands lined the shore between the water and the trees. As the bus headed down, Henri could feel the heaviness of his stomach rising up to his throat. It was difficult to swallow. He heard the snap of the window fasteners at the front of the bus and felt the cool air on his face as it rushed towards the back of the bus. Suddenly, someone yelled, “Ah no, sacrament!”

  Henri looked from his seat to the front of the bus. François Gauthier was kneeling on the seat with his head sticking out of the open window. All of the windows from François down were splashed with a pink, creamy substance. Looking out through the window beside him, he could see the vomit sliding down on the glass.

  CC Coulomb sat next to Henri and beside the window. He sat with his eyes closed and his mouth shut very tight and Henri could hear noises coming from his throat. The bus had just crossed the bridge when CC quickly snapped his hard hat off his head and held it in front of him like a soup bowl. Without retching more than once, the hat was filled almost to the brim.

  Chapter 21

  It was after six when they arrived at Camp 15. There were men rushing down the long stairways of the sleep camps and heading towards the cookhouse. There were trucks arriving with men who had worked all night and other men on the verandahs of the sleep camps waiting to take their places. The bus stopped outside the camp office and the camp foreman they had seen the day before, with his grey curls and neatly pressed trousers and clean shirt, waved to them from the office verandah. They could not see his clean shirt and trousers under the black rubber raincoat but they knew they were there and they hated the man again.

  Henri looked at the man and guessed that perhaps he had a son about their age and he wondered if his son hated him too.

  “Yes sir!” Alphonse greeted the man as he stepped down from the bus. The foreman stayed on the verandah, out of the rain.

  “Nice weather for ducks, eh,” the man replied. “Your boys in good shape today? Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  The boys stared at the foreman from the windows of the bus and they hated him and they hated his white hard hat and his grey curls and his black rubber raincoat.

  “Where to this morning, Georges?” Alphonse inquired.

  So, that was his name. Georges. Now they had a name. That goddamn Georges! That goddamn Georges and his lousy goddamn curls and his goddamn clean clothes and his lousy son-of-a-bitch of a forest fire. There, they felt better now. It was like a cyst they had been pressing from all sides and now, finally, it had burst and the creamy, yellow pus had come shooting out. Afterwards, the red scar would heal over and the skin would be as if the cyst had never been there at all.

  “Well, you see,” Georges said. There’s been a little change in plans. The men finished up on one of the islands just this morning. There’ll be some cleaning up to do in there. And patrolling, after. Maybe five, six days.”

  “Oh, at the very least!” twenty voices called out from inside the bus.

  The man looked up at the windows of the bus. “Well,” he said. “They’re in good shape this morning, aren’t they?”

  “They’ll be all right,” Alphonse said.

  “It’s the hours. It’s not the work so much. It’s the hours that get you.”

  “They’re a good bunch. Give them a few days.”

  As the two men stood talking, the caboose arrived alongside the bus. The old man, Fred Garneau, was sitting up front with the driver. The fellows waved to the old man and he smiled back at them, showing his bare gums. The driver got out and went to join Alphonse and the camp foreman.

  “You know Jacques here,” the foreman said.

  “Yes, we met yesterday,” Alphonse nodded to the man.

  “Jacques will take you out to the island. There’ll be boats there so you can get across, and spare ones for loading the equipment. You can start patrolling as soon as that’s done.”

  “What about the old man?” Alphonse inquired. “Does he stay with us?”

  “Do you mind?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “He can make tea and take care of the lunches and everything.”

  “No, we don’t mind,” Alphonse repeated. “In fact, the boys seem to like him. It might cheer them up.”

  “He’s a funny one,” the driver said. “And sacrament, you should hear him swear.”

  The foreman stretched his arm forward and looked at his watch. Alphonse stared at the gold watch with its flexible metal wristband and, for a brief moment, he compared it to his own ordinary Westclox ticking loudly at the end of a leather thong in the slit pocket of his trousers. He felt a cut below Georges and his gold watch and his neatly groomed hair and expensive clothes, but only for a passing moment. He thought of that night, after midnight mass, how Francine and the children had sat around the tree. Not one of them would open their gifts until he, Alphonse Ouimet, father of the family, had opened the little square box wrapped in fine, soft paper with a red silk bow and held up the Westclox pocket watch for everyone to see. The look of pride in the eyes of his seven children was worth more than all the gold watches in the world. But there was another gift as well. Alphonse looked at his wife Francine. The children were far too busy tearing open their presents to have noticed. The look they shared that Christmas Eve, brief as it was, would remain with them for the rest of their lives.

  “Good,” the foreman said. “That’s settled then. I’ll let you go now. If you need anything. Any problem. Don’t hesitate. You can always get in touch with me through Jacques here.”

  “Sure thing! No problem,” the driver snapped.

  “Well, we’d better get going,” Alphonse said.

  “Yes sir!” the driver snapped again. “No problem.”

  Alphonse turned to say good-bye to the foreman but the man had left and Alphonse could hear him laughing loudly as he stepped into the dry, warm office.

  Chapter 22

  The island was completely burned. All along the shore the charred stems of the bushes stuck out over the sand. Inland, there were black, standing tree trunks and the tangled remains of the ones that had fallen or had been cut down by the men with saws. Grey canvas hoses sat in the ashes on the forest floor and were spread out all over the island.

  As the students stepped out of the boats they could hear the mosquitoes. It had stopped raining but it was hot and humid. There was no breeze and the only moving thing was the flat brown water of the river beside them.

  “All right,” Alphonse said. “Now here’s what we do.”

  Alphonse picked up one end of a canvas hose from the ashes. He bent two feet of the hose along itself, turned it edgewise, and rolled it two more feet, on the ground this time.

  “Now, you have to get the water out,” he said. “Squeeze it out as you go. It’s not hard. Just roll one way and then the other. Keep it up until you reach the end. You disconnect the brass connector and then you make a little knot with what’s left. That’s the handle. Here, I’ll show you.”

  Alphonse followed the canvas hose through the ashes, over stumps, around trees and through charred bushes, rolling two feet at a time until he reached the place where the hose was joined to another by a brass connector. Alphonse disconnected the two hoses. He passed the loose end through the bundle he had formed. He gave the remaining piece of hose a sharp tug and swung the bundle over his shoulder.

  “You see?” he said.
“That’s all. It’s called a banane and you carry it like this. Okay? Here, Henri, you try one.”

  Henri picked up the hose end that Alphonse had disconnected. The hose was stiff in his hands and left them covered in soot. It was flat in places, but where water remained inside it was round and difficult to bend.

  “Go on, Henri,” Alphonse encouraged him. “Press hard. You have to get all the water out. That’s the way. Press hard and get it out as you go. That makes nice tight bananes, and not so heavy to carry.”

  The students stood in the burned-out section fighting off the mosquitoes and watching Henri roll his way along the length of hose in the ashes.

  “All right,” Alphonse called to them. “You see how it works now. I want you to make bananes with all the hoses you can find. Bring them back here and put them in the boats.”

  The group spread out across the island. They searched out the grey hoses and held the ends up to force the water down. Then they rolled them into bananes and carried them off to the boats as Alphonse had told them.

  Alphonse and Fred Garneau had gone for a walk. As soon as Alphonse had finished telling the crew about rolling the canvas hoses into bananes, he and Fred each took a shovel from one of the boats and left, following the shoreline and examining the damage that had been done by the fire.

  “A real goddamn shame,” Fred said.

  “What’s that?” Alphonse said. His eyes followed the slow current the Ottawa made around the island.

  “All this mess, what good does it do, eh?”

  “Good? I don’t know. They say it grows blueberries. And jack pine.”

  “Calis!”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” Alphonse laughed. “I don’t know Fred. They say that God has put everything on this earth for a reason. But, the fires? I don’t know. Makes jobs for fellows like us, I guess.”