The Cookcamp

by Gary Paulsen

  There were buckets and tubs and axes and ladders and leather harnesses and bags of feed stacked higher than even Carl could have reached. There were rolls of brightly colored cloth and layers of canvas belting and stacks of cans of food and a huge metal bin with a picture of crackers on the side.

  And a glass counter full of pocket watches and pocketknives.

  “Oh,” the boy said, because on top of the counter was a large glass jar of candy. “Oh,” he said again, and pulled on his grandmother’s dress. “See it?”

  She nodded and put her hand on his head, yet seemed not to hear. But the store owner looked down at him and smiled and handed the jar down.

  The boy looked up at his grandmother and she said:

  “Go ahead.”

  He took a green candy with red stripes and held it up to the light to see the colors before he put it in his mouth.

  It was very sweet with a sharpness in the green part that made his tongue feel cool.

  He sucked on the candy slowly, hanging on to his grandmother’s dress, and she told the store owner all the things she needed:

  “Potatoes, one hundred and fifty pounds, and the same of flour and some yeast and five gallons of syrup and thirty cans of tomatoes …”

  Her voice went on as she read from the list, but the boy didn’t really listen until the very end.

  At the end of the list she said:

  “I want the smallest engineer cap you have and also the smallest set of children’s bib overalls you can find. For the boy.”

  “And that pocketknife in the case,” Carl said. He was leaning over the glass counter. “The one with the black handle and the eagle on it.”

  The storekeeper took the knife out of the case and handed it to Carl.

  Carl turned to the boy. “Here — don’t cut yourself.”

  The boy couldn’t believe that Carl had given him the knife. He held it tightly in his hand and looked at it closely.

  It had two bright silver blades and a shiny black handle. On the handle was a picture of an eagle holding arrows in its talons.

  It was the most beautiful thing the boy had ever seen.

  “Thank you,” he said to Carl. “It’s so pretty.” He turned to his grandmother. “See how the eagle shines?”

  She nodded and smiled and pushed the hair out of his eyes but was still speaking to the store owner again.

  “I need to mail some letters,” she said to him. “Can you do that?”

  The store owner nodded. “They go out every Monday.”

  “She’s down in Chicago,” the boy’s grandmother explained. “Will the letters go that far?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good. Here.” She handed him all the letters she had written through the week sitting at the table each night.

  From her apron pocket she took a coin purse and gave the store owner change for stamps.

  “Mail them,” she said, her voice tight. “Mail them good and hard.”

  “I will,” the store owner said.

  Then the owner and Carl loaded all the groceries in the back of the dump truck by lifting the tailgate.

  Then his grandmother, Carl, and the boy traveled back to camp the same way they had come, but the boy saw none of the country.

  He sat the whole way back holding the knife in his hand, turning it this way and that so the light shone on the eagle.

  It was so beautiful — the most beautiful of all things — and he suddenly wished that he was with his mother so he could show her the knife. He missed her so much it hurt but he said nothing, just sat between Carl and his grandmother looking at the knife.

  HE BOY thought life in the cookcamp could just go on and on except for missing his mother.

  Summer days mixed with summer nights in the cook trailer and it all seemed to be more of a home than even Chicago was a home except for missing his mother.

  In the days he would either ride with the men in the trucks or on the cat or play outside the trailer and use the pocketknife with the eagle on it to make little wooden houses or stick fences and stick animals and he only cut himself two or three times, when he would go crying in to his grandmother to get a bandage, and that was all right except for missing his mother.

  In the evenings he would sit with his grandmother after the men had gone to the sleeping trailer and eat pie and drink warm milk made from the can and swat at the mice that ran around on the floor with a broom and listen to her sing songs about her childhood in Norway, and that was all right except for missing his mother.

  And the days could have gone on and on, the boy thought, except that as the men made it, the road went farther and farther from the camp, and they had to move the cook trailer and sleeping trailer to get closer to the end of the road so they didn’t have to drive so far to sleep or eat.

  Moving day was a time of large excitement. He helped his grandmother pack dish towels around all the dishes in the cupboards and tape all the drawers and doors shut and lift the steps to the cook trailer and put them in on the floor.

  Then the men hooked the trailer to one of the trucks with a steel pin and they drove down the road with the boy and his grandmother sitting in the truck. The boy tried to see the trailer out the back window of the truck to watch it being pulled, but the dump box blocked the way and he couldn’t see it. Carl noticed him and put him in his lap, from which the boy could watch in the outside mirror as the trailer bumped and bounced down the road in back of the truck.

  He thought how strange it was to watch your whole house bouncing down the road, and he thought of the chairs inside and all the wrapped dishes and his bed bouncing and bouncing as they drove down the road.

  “What about the mice?” he asked his grandmother.

  “What?” She had been speaking to Carl and had not heard him.

  “What about all the mice in the cook trailer? When we get to the new place they won’t know how they got there. Their whole house is bouncing away. What about them?”

  Carl laughed and his grandmother smiled.

  “They take their home with them,” she said, “just like us. They have beds and nests in the trailer and it doesn’t matter where they are — that’s their home.”

  Just like me, the boy thought but didn’t say it and missed his mother.

  “I miss Mother,” he said, but the words were lost in the grind and whine of the truck motor, and his grandmother didn’t hear them.

  It took almost an hour to get to the new place for the trailer and then another half hour to back it into position and get it level. All the men helped by grabbing the hitch and the corners and rocking it around until it was straight and they could set up the steps.

  As soon as the trailer was in place the boy ran inside to see what had changed, but nothing had fallen or broken. Everything looked as they had left it before they started to move.

  “We have to pull all the tape from the drawers and doors,” his grandmother said, “and get food ready for supper.”

  He helped pull the tape and wad it into a sticky ball and set all the salt shakers out on the tables and get the chairs straight and was just starting with the pepper shakers when there was a loud yell from outside and two men came in the door carrying a third man between them.

  “Clear a table!” one of the men yelled to the boy. “A tree fell on Harvey and crushed his arm. He’s out cold.”

  The boy stood frozen, looking at the man hanging between the other two, and he wondered if the man was dead. He looked white, as white as the milk from the cans, and his eyes were open and showed white as well. His grandmother stepped around the boy, moving very fast, pushed the salt shaker to the end of the table, and helped them put Harvey on his back along the tabletop.

  “Get his legs up,” his grandmother said. “Hold them up.”

  One of the men took Harvey’s legs and held them with Harvey’s ankles on his shoulders.

  “A tree backed,” the other man said, “came back down across the cat and through the cage. It caught his arm o
n the side rest.”

  And the boy saw that his arm was mangled and crushed and bleeding. His grandmother worked so fast that her hands were almost a blur. She found scissors and cut the sleeve away from his shirt and cut it away from the wound and brought some water in a pan with a dish towel and washed it as best she could. Then she found some tape in a drawer and her breadboard that she used for kneading dough to make the bread.

  “Raise him,” she said to the men and they lifted Harvey up enough so she could slide the board under his elbow and she taped the arm to the board and then the board to his body, taped and taped, and all of it the boy watched.

  Then, because his legs were raised, Harvey came to and his eyes focused, but he couldn’t say anything. He grunted with it and swore and did not see even that there were other people in the room but just kept grunting with the pain and swearing in a low voice.

  “We have to get him back to the depot,” the boy’s grandmother said, “and down by train to Pinewood to the doctor.”

  “I’ll take him,” Carl said. He had come in.

  The boy’s grandmother nodded. “I’ll have to go as well, in case he goes back into shock from the movement.”

  “What about the boy?” Carl said. “We could be gone two days, waiting for a train.”

  “He’ll stay with the men,” she said, and looked at the boy. “You’ll be all right, won’t you?”

  And he nodded without thinking what he was doing, still watching the man on the table, seeing his eyes dull with pain and the blood on his arm and the table, and wondering how it could be that anything could hurt that much and the man not cry and ask for his mother.

  “You’ll be all right,” his grandmother repeated. “You can sleep tonight and tomorrow night in the sleeping trailer with the men.”

  Harvey grunted again, this time ending with a small whine, and she motioned to the door. “Take him out now. I’ll follow.”

  They carried him out, three men this time, one to hold the crushed arm, and the boy followed them, trying to see all the things there were to see, trying to see Harvey’s face again because it looked so strange, but they were gone too fast.

  They loaded him in the front of Carl’s truck, and Carl and the boy’s grandmother got in, one on each side to hold Harvey up between them, and they started the long drive to the depot, and the boy watched them leave, watched them drive away until the truck was nothing but a small dot between the rows of trees on the new gravel road.

  Then he turned to the cook trailer. All the other men had gone to their trucks and back to work and he went into the cook trailer and sat alone at the table for a time and missed his mother.

  But she was not there, and after a little more time had passed he took out his pocketknife and looked at the eagle and went outside to find a stick to carve smooth as he’d seen some of the men do, and in this way he kept busy all afternoon until the men finished working and came to eat supper. Gustaf came first.

  “Is the food ready?” Gustaf asked him when he came up to the cook trailer and found the boy sitting outside.

  “No. I don’t know how to do it.”

  “Well, come and help me and learn then, boy,” Gustaf said, and smiled. “Then you can make slum stew for us tomorrow.”

  Of course the boy knew Gustaf was just joking, that he wouldn’t really have to cook, but he followed Gustaf in and set the tables while Gustaf fired up the stove.

  He put a huge pot on the stove and peeled potatoes, and the boy helped him peel, watching his pocketknife take the gray skin off in short, thick pieces while Gustaf’s peelings came off long and thin.

  When the pot was nearly full of potatoes Gustaf added a can of some kind of meat and cans of carrots and put the lid on and made a large pot of coffee while they waited.

  “Ever have coffee, boy?” Gustaf asked, and when the boy shook his head he poured coffee into a thick cup with two spoonfuls of sugar and canned milk and stirred it and handed it to the boy.

  The boy sipped it, expecting to burn his tongue, but the milk had cooled the coffee and it tasted like thick, sweet almost-chocolate.

  “It’s good,” he said to Gustaf. “Sweet …”

  “Just one cup. It will stunt your growth and you’ll never get big enough to drive the trucks yourself.”

  Of course the boy did not believe Gustaf because all the men drank coffee and none of them had stunted their growth or they wouldn’t have seemed large as houses when they came in the trailer, but they did not talk more and sat drinking the coffee, the boy feeling the edges of being a man, until the other men came in to eat the stew Gustaf and the boy had made.

  E TRIED to eat with the men again, eat as much as they ate because he had to be with them alone, but he could not.

  They ate stew with salt and pepper thick on it, ate it with spoons and joked about how bad Gustaf and the boy were as cooks, which was only partly true.

  When they were done eating and the men had used their fingers to wipe out the pot, licking them clean, they all leaned back and put snoose in their lower lips and sat to talk for a little time.

  The boy tried to listen, but it was all talk older than he could understand.

  “She’s using oil now worse than ever — I think her rings are gone.”

  “My dump is taking so long I could take a nap while she gets rid of her load.”

  It all swam in his head. Talk of valves and fluids and yards of gravel and Harvey’s arm went into his ears, but the room was warm and his stomach was full and nothing made sense to him.

  His eyes closed and he would have slept, leaning against Gustaf, except that Gustaf picked him up and carried him to the sleeping trailer.

  “Big day for little ones,” Gustaf said, and though it wasn’t dark yet he tucked the boy into Harvey’s bunk.

  The bunk smelled of man sweat — almost a stink but still nice in the boy’s nose — and he fell asleep wondering about Harvey’s arm and missing his mother.

  Always that — missing his mother. Even in sleep.

  He did not sleep well. Gustaf put him to bed so early it was just barely dark. For a time he seemed to sleep hard, but in the darkness his eyes snapped open and he lay for a moment trying to remember where he was.

  Around him there were all the sounds of the men breathing and snoring and rasping, and he was frightened because it sounded like monsters and he could see monsters in all the shadows in the trailer. Moving with the moonlight that came through the windows in slanted gray bars, they seemed to dance around the room on the walls; the monsters, not the men, seemed to be making the sounds and he sat up and closed his eyes.

  When he opened them he could see the other bunks with the men sleeping and smell the men sleeping and hear that it was the men making sounds and the monsters were gone.

  The trailer was so strange.

  There was nothing soft in the men’s sleeping trailer. In the cook trailer with his grandmother there were curtains on the windows and a fresh smell of lavender water and bread cooking and brown sugar and here it was all hard. The windows had no covers, no curtains, no soft edges, and the sounds and smells were thick somehow.

  But it did not frighten him any longer, and he went back to sleep with the blanket wrapped around him.

  In the morning he was awakened by coughing and spitting. It seemed that every man woke up and coughed and sat in his underwear hacking and scratching before he would get up and go to the door and open it to spit outside.

  It was still dark.

  “Wake up, boy,” Gustaf said. “We have to go make coffee and get to work.”

  The boy rolled out of bed and slipped his shoes on and followed Gustaf outside where he tried to cough and scratch and act like the men though it didn’t seem to work very well.

  They went to the cook trailer to make coffee and when it was boiled in the big pot on the stove Gustaf made some biscuits that everybody complained about even though they ate them all; the boy saw one man cleaning up the crumbs with the edge of his hand and ea
ting from his cupped palm.

  Then they went to work. All that morning the boy rode in a truck with the man named Pete. He had hands as big as one of the burners on the wood stove in the cook trailer and chewed snoose that he spit all the time.

  Sometimes he would spit out the window and sometimes he would spit on the floor of the truck and sometimes he would spit on the dashboard of the truck. It looked to the boy as if he had been spitting on the dashboard for a long time because the buildup of dried and sticky tobacco juice was over an inch thick.

  Pete’s continuous spitting looked like fun and so the boy tried it, spitting first out the window, then on the floor and the dashboard, and he would have spent the whole day spitting and spitting, but soon he ran out of it because he did not have snoose to make more.

  And still there was the whole day left. The boy became bored, finally, and the day seemed to drag until he thought he’d never been anywhere but in the truck — was born in the truck and lived in the truck. He made a whole game of being in the truck and because he missed his mother he thought of how it would be to live in a truck with his mother so that it would be a home.

  There could be curtains over the windows and a small table with small chairs and a small radio where he and a small Clara could listen to the radio but they wouldn’t allow a small Casey….

  He missed his mother.

  And in the end, sitting that long day in the truck when all his spit was gone, in the end he missed his mother so that he could hardly stand it.

  At last the day was done and all the men came back to the cook trailer. The boy helped Gustaf to make another pot of stew, and it only bothered him a little that they didn’t clean the pot from the night before.

  He ate with them and helped to clear the tables and sat in Gustaf’s lap while the men played cards and slapped the cards down and laughed and swore.

  But he had seen the cards before and watched them play before and seen the inside of the cook trailer before and he couldn’t be excited by it anymore.

  And he missed his mother.

  Sitting there in Gustaf’s lap he wanted to cry, and before he could stop it he was crying, which embarrassed him because the men could see him cry.