Chapter 27
The students never returned to the island. On Sunday, their fourth day on the fire, they were sent further north on the Ottawa to a place the men called Sugar Loaf. They were there for thirteen days and worked very hard. On the last day it had rained all morning and the boys hid under the largest spruce trees they could find, rolled cigarettes and waited for the rain to stop.
Henri Morin was alone under his tree. It took him a long time to try to roll a cigarette without the paper getting wet from the water dripping down from the branches. Later that morning, he leaned against the trunk of a large spruce with its branches almost sixteen feet long at the bottom, and fell sound asleep, half listening to the rain.
When Henri awoke, it was still raining. He was damp and hungry. He walked out along the firebreak to the road. The caboose was gone. There was not a truck to be seen. No trucks, no people, nothing but the rain and the sand and the quiet. Henri climbed into the yellow tractor that had been left by the side of the road. He tried to understand why he could not hear the whine of the pump motors or the chainsaws working the trees. The only sound disturbing the quiet was the rain tapping on the roof of the tractor. At that very moment, some thirty miles south, the rest of the guys were finishing up their lemon meringue pie and sipping hot tea in the cookhouse at Camp 15.
After lunch Alphonse was in a hurry to settle up with the camp foreman. They would be going back to Washika. They were finished with the fire and he wanted to make sure that his and the students’ time was properly recorded and that it was clear that the cheques should be sent to Washika. He did not like Camp 15 and he hoped that he would never see it again. All he needed now was the little black notebook with the hours. For the past week or so Henri had been in the habit of keeping the little notebook with him. Once he had the book in hand, Alphonse could report the students’ and his own hours to the clerk and say good-bye to Georges and never have to look at the place again.
“Gaston,” he said. “Have you seen Henri?”
“No,” Lavigne answered. “I haven’t seen him all morning.”
“He wasn’t in the caboose when we came in,” François added.
“But there was a second,” Alphonse said. “He must have come back in that one.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Lavigne said. “I was in the second. I didn’t see him.”
Alphonse looked around the camp yard. Nothing had changed since the morning: trucks arriving, some leaving and men rushing everywhere. He returned to the cookhouse and scanned the rows of tables. Finally he went to the camp office and reported that Henri Morin was missing.
“Can’t be,” Georges said. “We always take a count of the fellows for the hours. You know that, Alphonse.”
“Yes, I know that. I also know that in our gang, it’s Henri Morin who takes the count.”
“Christ! That’s all we needed. I can just hear them at the head office.”
“There’ll be a bigger fuss if we don’t find him.” Alphonse was suddenly angry. Before, he had been worried. Now, he was worried, and angry with this man with the clean clothes and grey curls and everything so neat in his office and everything arranged just so. “Never mind about the people in town, the head office and all that gang. Get a truck out there right away.”
“Yes, yes. You’re right. I’ll send someone right away. Where was he anyway?”
“On a pump. The first one on the creek that crosses the break.”
“That was on number nineteen?”
“Yes.”
The man snatched his immaculate white hard hat from the rack and rushed out of the office. Alphonse stood in front of the large oak desk. He stared at the map covering one wall, at the red, and blue, and yellow pins sticking out of the contours. He tried to imagine which pin showed where Henri might be. He walked around the glass-topped desk and sat down in the chair. He heard the spring stretching as he leaned back and placed his feet up on the desk.
Out at number nineteen, it was still raining. Henri sat high up on the seat of the tractor with his mackinaw buttoned up to his neck, his collar up and his arms folded, trying to keep warm. He was cold and hungry and there was a strong, stale taste of tobacco in his mouth. He was tired and could easily have fallen asleep again but the shivering kept him awake. He was not worried. Eventually someone would notice that he was not there. They would send someone. It was just that it had to happen to him. And on the last day! Finally, he got bored thinking about it and fell asleep.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon when Jacques, the caboose driver, pulled up beside the tractor. He got out of the truck but did not close the door. He took soft, careful steps going towards the tractor. Once close enough, he grabbed Henri’s foot and shook it violently.
“Hey, hey!” he screamed.
Henri opened his eyes. He turned his head slowly to glance down at the man. He felt good seeing that the driver looked disappointed.
“What time is it?” he said.
“After two.”
“Well, it sure took them long enough.”
“Shouldn’t have been hiding in the first place.”
“Hiding? Who was hiding? If they had honked the horn when it was time, I wouldn’t be here now.”
“We did,” the driver smiled. “Three sets of short ones. I know. It was me on the last run.”
“Anyway, I wasn’t hiding.”
“Well, let’s go,” the driver said. He looked around him. To Henri, he seemed to be checking for any other stragglers. “Everybody’s waiting for you.”
Henri had only been cold and damp and hungry before. Now, the driver was making him think that all this was his fault, and that he should feel guilty. He knew that he was being stupid but he was beginning to feel guilty anyway. He looked across at the driver with his brown curly hair and clean boots and gold-capped teeth and, slowly, he began to hate the man and the smug look on his clean, shaven face.
When they arrived at Camp 15, Henri could see Alphonse and the driver standing by the open door of the bus. The caboose pulled up alongside the bus. Henri opened the door and stepped out of the truck. He did not speak to the driver.
“You okay?” Alphonse said.
“Yes.”
“Go on in to the cookhouse, Henri. Maybe there’s something left.”
“No, that’s okay. I’ll eat at Washika.”
“You have the book, Henri?”
Henri handed over the notebook and pencil. He had filled in the entry for the last day on his way in to Camp 15. The driver had made a joke about it, about not forgetting to put in two extra hours alongside his own name. Henri had not even looked up from the notebook and the driver did not speak to him after that.
Finally, Henri decided to see what he might find to eat at the cookhouse. He returned shortly afterwards with a paper sack and a jam jar full of tea. He sat up front, to the right of the driver, ate the sandwiches and biscuits and drank tea from the jar with his glove on. He had missed the old man. He was sorry about that. After their last day on the island, Fred Garneau had been assigned tasks at the camp. He must not have liked that. That afternoon, while Henri sat in the tractor waiting for a ride back to Camp 15, the old man had taken the Company bus back to Ste-Émilie. The fellows had lined up single file to say good-bye and to shake his firm brown hand. As he boarded the bus, Fred waved to them with his pipe and smiled his famous toothless smile.
Henri had just finished eating when he saw Alphonse and Georges coming across the yard from the camp office. The two men stood a short while in the rain alongside the bus. The zipper on Georges’ jacket was done up tight to his neck and he kept his hands in his trouser pockets. Finally he jerked one hand out of his pocket, shook hands with Alphonse and turned to leave. As he did so, he looked back towards the windows of the bus and gave a short wave. He waved a second time and smiled up at the raindrop-covered windows. The man turned then and walked back to the camp office. He did not look back again.
As the bus turned in the yard, Alpho
nse was feeling sorry about Georges. It must not be easy to do his job well and not be hated by some of the men. It must not be easy being hated. He must not forget to tell Georges that the next time they met in Ste-Émilie, which was not very likely. But anyway, if ever they should meet, he would invite him to join him at the tavern for a beer. No man that Alphonse was aware of, regardless of his position, could let a short stay over a tavern table with a tall cold beer pass him by. While they shared this neutral territory, Alphonse would tell him how all of the students had waved back to him that last day, and how they had said very nice things about him. The last part was not true of course but Alphonse believed that the man would feel good about that. A man like Georges must not feel good often. And anyway, it was not a very big lie.
PART III
Chapter 28
As the bus came to a stop between the main sleep camp and the bunkhouse-and-office, the students could hear the clangity, clang of the supper bell. The older men had already gathered around the cookhouse landing. They were waiting for Dumas to finish beating the triangle, calling all to the evening meal.
“Hurry and wash up,” Alphonse called from the front of the bus. “We don’t want to keep Dumas waiting, eh?”
They were happy to be back. They pushed and shoved each other stepping out of the bus and, standing at the basin later, there were elbows swung back at ribs and short shoulder jabs and the best name calling they had heard in over two weeks.
The students were late arriving at the cookhouse, not very late, but still late by Dumas’ standards. They came in together, single file, with their hands well scrubbed and their hair wetted down, each holding out a ticket. Dumas stood between the four tables with his arms locked across his chest. He smiled at the boys.
“Glad to be back, I’ll bet,” he said, loudly. “Well, sit down. There’s plenty to eat.”
The older men looked up from their plates. They looked over their shoulders at the cook and they looked at each other across the table.
“He’s started drinking,” Percy Dumont whispered to the man beside him.
“You think so?” the man replied.
“For me, yes. You’ve been here as long as me. Ever see him like that?”
“No. Still, I don’t know. A person can change.”
“Dumas Hébert change? Ha! Listen to me. I saw him in the hotel in Ste-Émilie once. He was laughing and talking with everybody. Liquor. That’s what did it. For me, he’s started again.”
“I don’t know,” the man argued. “I saw him go to the infirmary twice this week. Maybe he’s very sick. The pills, you know. Sometimes they make you act a little crazy.”
“That could be. Still, he looks drunk to me.”
The students sat down at their usual places at the table and Dumas went back to the kitchen. They could hear him yelling something to the cookee and then both of them laughing loudly. They had never heard Dumas laugh before. No one in the cookhouse except Percy Dumont had ever heard him laugh. The effect was immediate. Within seconds of hearing him, everyone in the cookhouse was smiling and waiting for Dumas to come out of the kitchen. They were curious to see if his face looked the same. Still, a few of the older men were convinced that the cook was drunk and they waited anxiously to see him drop a plate or trip and fall flat on his face.
After supper the students showered and those who had begun to grow hair beneath their noses or on the points of their chins, shaved. They dropped their blackened clothes into plastic garbage bags to be washed in Ste-Émilie but, most probably, never to be worn again. Clean and fresh in white T-shirts and jeans, they played cards in the common room or lay on their bunks, talking and smoking cigarettes. In the bunkhouse-and-office, it was the same except that, there, the guys were worried.
“And today’s only Friday,” Lavigne argued. “You know what that means.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” Morrow volunteered.
“Of course, it’s Saturday. We know that. But it’s also a workday around here. We work six days a week here. Remember?”
“You think they’ll send us out tomorrow?” Henri said.
“Could be. Why wouldn’t they?” Lavigne replied.
“Well, I don’t know.” Henri tried to reason the thing out. “I mean, we’ve worked sixteen days straight and two Sundays on top of that. Seems to me they owe us a couple of days.”
“Yeah,” Morrow interrupted. “And besides, we missed our weekend because of the fire.”
“You don’t understand,” Lavigne began. “The fire’s the fire and the sweep’s the sweep. The way I see it, we’ll have to work two more days before we can get two days off. Look, it’s simple. We finished on the sweep on a Wednesday of the week we were supposed to go down. There were still two days left to work. So, if we work two days, we can go.”
“You’d like your time off on a Monday and Tuesday?” Maurice St-Jean joined the conversation.
“Sacrament! I forgot about that,” Lavigne said.
“You’re all wasting your time,” St-Jean continued. “We’ll get a weekend off when they decide and not before.”
“He’s right, I think,” Henri said.
“Maybe we should speak to Alphonse,” Lavigne tried again.
“No, I don’t think so,” Henri said.
“We can make them an offer,” André spoke up suddenly. He had been shuffling cards at the table where he sat alone. He tossed the cards onto the table and joined the others by Henri’s bunk.
“What do you mean, a bargain?” Lavigne inquired.
“Sure,” André answered. “It’s too late tonight but, tomorrow, when were ready to go out, we can talk about it with Alphonse and Simard-Comtois. We can say to them that if they let us go down this weekend we’ll make up the time by working a couple of extra hours a day next week, or maybe go out next Sunday.”
“Whoa!” Lavigne stood up. “Not Sundays. We’re not going to start that. Still, I think you have a good idea there.”
“Sure,” Morrow added. “And what’s a couple of hours more a day anyway.”
“What do you think, Maurice?” Lavigne said.
“It sounds pretty good to me. But we’ll have to speak to the others.”
“Hey, I can’t think of anyone who would be against it,” Lavigne said, looking across the room. “You Gaston, you’re with us on this?”
Gaston Cyr was sitting reading a picture magazine with the back of his chair leaning against the wall.
“What’s that?” he said.
“You’d like to go down this weekend?”
“Don’t ask?”
“Be willing to work extra hours next week?”
“No problem.”
“There, you see,” Lavigne turned to the others. “Everybody will be like that.”
That night, lying in his bed, Henri was both happy and unhappy, so much so that he was unable to sleep. He was very happy to be finished with the fire and to be back at Washika. Maybe tomorrow they would be sent down to Ste-Émilie for the weekend. He could hardly wait. There were his parents, and all of his friends, and the stories he had to tell them about his experiences on the fire. With his best friend, David Greer, he would share his experience with Lise Archambault. Lise, that was the sad part. He had not seen her for a very long time it seemed. With the crazy hours they worked on the fire, even dreaming of her did not come easy. Once, hiding beneath a spruce tree out of the rain, he had thought about her and he remembered being aroused instantly. Sitting there under the wet, dripping branches, he had never felt lonelier in his life. And now, if they were to go down to Ste-Émilie for the weekend, he would not see her on Sunday. He would have to wait until the next Sunday before seeing her again, and then, it could rain.
Henri tossed around under his blankets. He lifted himself up on his elbows and tried to look outside. It was dark everywhere. He could not even make out where the windows were. He would think about something else. He was warm and dry in his bed, he was back at Washika, finished with the fire, and maybe in t
he morning he would be on the bus, going home. He tightened the blankets around him and closed his eyes. He thought about Alphonse and Simard-Comtois and what he would say to them after breakfast. It had been decided by the others that he should be the one to speak to Alphonse and the superintendent. It would be simple enough. They would like to have their weekend off, he would tell them, but since they owed the Company two days before being entitled to a weekend off they would work two extra hours each day the following week to make up the time. And…Henri lifted his head off the pillow. Then, he sat straight up in his bed. It could not be! How could they have been so stupid? And yet, it was simple. They owed two days. That made eighteen hours. At two extra hours per day, they would have to work nine days, almost two weeks putting in extra hours each day.
Henri drew back the blankets and slid his feet across and onto the floor. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked into the darkness. Perhaps Maurice would be angry. Henri felt the need to talk this over with someone but Maurice did not like being awakened before the bell, whatever the reason. What could they do? Two weeks working extra hours and coming home late for supper every night. Dumas would be furious. Dumas! They had not thought of Dumas. That was it then, the end of their plan. Dumas would certainly not change the hours of his cookhouse just for them and, of course, he would not serve them two hours late for supper either.
Henri laid his head on the pillow, still happy and unhappy. He was disappointed now that they would not be going down to Ste-Émilie for the weekend. He wrapped the blankets around himself. He closed his eyes and was warm and happy again, lying on the hot sand, looking up into her green eyes and feeling the roundness of her breasts against his chest. Later, they would do a little fishing or, maybe, just lie there in the sun and wait for the day to pass.
Washika Page 13