The Cookcamp

by Gary Paulsen

  “What’s the matter?” Gustaf asked.

  “I miss my mother,” he said. “I miss my mother and I want to go home….” The crying grew worse and he wanted to swear at himself for crying in front of the men because it embarrassed him, but he didn’t yet know how the words worked for swearing.

  “Dirty damn,” he said, but it just made the feeling worse, and he grew sadder and cried harder until he was gulping with it.

  All the men thought they could cheer him up, and they tried making faces and tickling him and laughing and holding him, but it still only seemed to get worse.

  He could not stop crying, and finally he just sat in Gustaf’s lap and cried and cried until the tears wore out.

  Then he sniffled and sipped some warm milk one of the men made for him, warm milk with sugar in it, and it didn’t feel so bad. He still missed his mother and felt sad, but something came from all the men, all the big and dirty and smelly men — something warm and soft — and he finally fell asleep in Gustaf’s arms again.

  USTAF carried him to Harvey’s bed in the men’s sleeping trailer, but the boy was not so sound asleep that he couldn’t hear them talking.

  “Poor little guy,” one of them said.

  “It’s this damn war,” another said. “Women out working in the cities. Who ever heard of such a thing?”

  “He should be with his mother — and never mind this other business.”

  “Poor little guy.”

  The boy wanted to tell them that it was all right, that he didn’t mind the war or living in the city, but they all went to bed without turning on the lights and he fell back to sleep.

  In the morning when he opened his eyes his grandmother was there.

  Like magic. He had been asleep in the men’s trailer and when he awakened the men were gone and his grandmother was sitting on the edge of Harvey’s bunk brushing the hair away from his eyes, smiling down on him.

  “Good morning, little thimble,” she said.

  “Where is Harvey?” he asked.

  “He had to go be in the hospital for a while so they can fix his arm.”

  “I learned all about spitting yesterday.”

  “Oh you did, did you?”

  He nodded. “In the truck. We spit and spit until I couldn’t make any more spit. I drove the truck again and played cards and then I cried.”

  “Why did you cry?”

  “Because I miss Mother. I like to be with you and the men and the trucks, but I really miss Mother.” Here he started to cry again and he bit his lip to make himself stop.

  “Do you want to go home?” his grandmother asked.

  He nodded. “Yes. I want to go home and be with Mother.”

  She smiled. “Well then, I have good news for you. When we took Harvey to the hospital I went to the telegraph office and sent a telegram to your mother.”

  “What’s a telegram?”

  “It’s a way to talk over a wire.”

  “Like a telephone?”

  She nodded. “Something like that except that the message comes in writing. Like a letter over the wire.” She reached into her apron pocket. “And your mother sent a wire for you.”

  She unfolded a yellow piece of paper with wings across the top. “This is for you.”

  He took the paper. There were letters all over it, and words. He knew all the letters by heart but did not yet know how to make them into words.

  “I can’t read what she says. Would you read it to me?”

  She took the paper back and read it to him, moving her finger along with the words as she read:

  “Dear Pumpkin —”

  “She calls me pumpkin,” he said. “Sometimes. Do I look like a pumpkin?”

  “You must stop talking or I can’t read to you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Dear Pumpkin,

  Mama writes that you miss me and want to come home. I miss you too very much and want to see you.

  So I’m sending you some money for a ticket and Mama will put you on the train and you can come back to Chicago.

  I love you.”

  His grandmother put the yellow paper on the table and he looked at it and touched it with wonder.

  So much in just some words on the yellow paper with the wings at the top. All about his mother and her loving him and wanting to see him and be with him and how he would ride on the train two nights again and see her and not miss her anymore — all on the paper. All of his life on the yellow paper there on the table in the cook trailer.

  “I’m going home,” he said to his grandmother.

  She nodded.

  “When?”

  “Not tomorrow but the next day.”

  And he thought of that and found his hand going out to her apron to hold it. “But I will miss you, too.”

  She was crying now, but he smiled. “Why don’t you come with me and we can all live together and I won’t have to miss either one?”

  But she shook her head. “No. There is a time for living apart and your mother has come to that time. She must have her own life.”

  None of this made sense to the boy, but she had such a tightness to her voice that he didn’t say anything.

  And the day passed while he played around the cook trailer and helped his grandmother set the table and feed the men.

  There was nothing different and yet there was — something had changed. He seemed to be waiting and his grandmother seemed to be waiting and even the men seemed to be waiting, but the boy could not understand why except that he was to leave.

  That night he had a piece of apple pie with milk made from the can and mice came out and ran around the floors and the boy and his grandmother chased them with brooms and a flyswatter and they screamed and the boy laughed until he nearly peed in his pants.

  Then they sat on the bed and his grandmother held him. She told him stories of what it was like when she was a small girl in the old country and later when she came over on the boat as a half-grown girl.

  And her husband who became his grandfather, a man the boy never knew.

  “Clarence,” she said as she talked of him. “His name was Clarence and he had straight shoulders and could outwork three men.” Her eyes had a light in them when she said his name.

  She told of their small farm in the northern prairie and of animals they owned and how it was when his mother was born.

  She told of all the times of her life, sitting there in the cook trailer, of all the sad times and happy times. Of her wedding and the death of her husband, his grandfather, of the farm when he was gone and how she had to sell it and go to work; told of how Clarence would sit in the evenings and play on a violin he had made himself from planed spruce boards; told of men who came to court her when he died and how she turned them all away; told of summer evenings and winter storms, of hot days and cold nights, of mountains in Norway and trees that were so big five men couldn’t reach around them, and a meal she cooked, a single meal for over fifty men who came to thrash the grain on their farm; told of happiness and sorrow, of two children she had that died before they were three and were buried under wood markers in back of the house; told of nights and making candy in the kitchen on their farm and slaughtering hogs in the fall. Told of a touch, a single touch from her own mother that made her feel good when she had the fever, and a scream, a single scream that almost stopped her heart, from a woman whose baby had been killed by a horse; told of raking hay and smelling silage in the late summer when it was cut and chopped green and packed into the silo for winter; told of the beginning of all the boy would ever know and the end of many things he would never know.

  And the boy listened.

  Through a whole night he sat and listened to each story though he did not understand most of them. He did not sleep but sat in her lap with his head against her arm and listened to each story, each part of her life and did not ask questions or break into her talk.

  He listened and did not know why — listened until it was time to cook for the men and
she put him under the covers and he did not know why he did not sleep, did not quit listening, did not feel tired….

  Did not know then that he would take the train with a new note on his jacket, take it back to Chicago to his mother and that Casey, Uncle Casey, would be gone or that the war would end in another year or that he would see his father who came back from Europe and go to live with his mother and father in many new places; in Texas and Washington and the Philippine Islands and California and New York, in all the places where the army told his father to live …

  In all the places where his grandmother did not live.

  He did not know then that year and year and year would pass and all he would see of his grandmother would be Christmas cards once a year with flowers on them, cards that said she loved them, loved him, missed him.

  But not her.

  He would spend year on year living in all the places where his grandmother did not live and would not see her until he was tall and had a broken voice and could not ever again sit in her lap and lean against her arm and hear her tell of her life. Of all her life.

  But he did not know that then, on that night, did not know that he would never see his grandmother again as a boy, as her little thimble.

  So he listened to her and rode in the truck to the depot again. There he boarded the train where the same conductor sat him in a seat for the trip down to Minneapolis, there to change again and take another train to Chicago where his mother waited on the platform, the steam from the engine rising around her like gentle smoke.

  She was crying and laughing at the same time, kneeling on the platform so he could let go of the conductor’s hand and run into her arms.

  “I drove a truck,” he said when she picked him up and hugged him. She made soft mother sounds in his ear.

  “I drove a truck and a cat and helped to cook and clean the cook trailer and kill mice — and I missed you so much I cried.”

  And here she held him out so she could see him better and said:

  “I missed you, too, Pumpkin. It’s so good to see you.”

  And she started to cry again and the boy thought how much her face looked like his grandmother’s face when she cried at the depot as she put him on the train.

  Same face. The same cheekbones and eyes as she cried.

  “You look just like Grandma when you cry,” he said. “Just like her …”

  And he had a moment of sadness, some cutting thing that went through him that he did not understand then and would not understand until he was much, much older. An intense feeling of missing something and he did not know even what it was….

  Then it was gone, the feeling, gone and gone, and his mother took his hand and he followed her out of the station and into his life.

  HE WAS born in a time and place when not many babies lived. Most of them died of fevers or infections. In back of her childhood house there were several graves surrounded by a low white fence, each grave marked by a wooden placard painted white with flowers in a pretty design around the edges.

  She remembered the graves all her life. Remembered the nearness of death. Each name on each small placard stayed in her memory, and even when she was old they were her brothers and sisters, as much as the ones who lived.

  Eleven children were born in her family. Six boys and five girls; four boys lived and only two girls.

  When she was still barely to her father’s waist the family left Norway and came to America, then traveled by old steam train to Minneapolis and north to the prairie on the edge of the northern woods by wagon and, finally, by walking.

  It was 1904 and she was twelve years old. She was a slight girl, thin but strong, with large brown eyes and rich brown hair that hung down her back to her knees.

  Her father’s brother had a farm that he had carved from the woods, and her father hand cleared forty acres nearby. This work took two years and he cleared another forty, which took another two, and during the clearing of the land, during those four years, she grew into womanhood and became so beautiful her father joked about having to carry a club to beat suitors away.

  It perhaps was not quite that bad. But the young men did come in droves — some on foot from as far as fifty miles away — just to sit in front of the clapboard house her father made and tell her of their hopes, dreams. Or just to sit shyly and stare at the ground and be seen by her.

  Clarence was such a young man. Painfully, almost hopelessly shy, he had walked thirty miles to introduce himself to her father and had then been unable to say anything to her but to stammer out his name and say:

  “I am of the land….”

  And then sit in blank silence with his hands clasped in front of him staring at the ground.

  And she loved him.

  It came to her that way. Of all the suitors she did not just love him the best, think more of him — she did not compare him to others.

  She loved him only, starting at once and for all the time they knew each other she loved him and only him and he loved her the same hard, intense, full way.

  They were married by a Lutheran circuit minister, and Clarence wore a stiff black suit with a celluloid collar that made him look like he had a rail up his backside, and they posed for a man who had a wooden box camera nearly as large as a wagon: she in her beauty and youth and he looking somehow boiled and scrubbed. They paid a small amount extra to have the picture tinted so there is light skin tone and a blush to their cheeks, and for their life together and for hers later after he died — for all of that they kept the picture on the wall.

  They built a farm where a river flowed into a small lake. First a small house, then the barn and granary and smokehouse for smoking meat, and she set about the business of having a family.

  She bore nine children — one every other year for eighteen years — and remained beautiful in spite of it. Or perhaps because of it.

  Seven of the children lived to maturity whereupon one son was taken into the army, trained briefly, and then blown to pieces on an island in the Pacific by a defective artillery round he was trying to load. A daughter was killed in a car accident while driving drunk and the rest of the children including the boy’s mother married, had children, some remarried and had more children, then died, all of them of heart trouble or cancer or living, and she outlived them all. She outlived all her children, but somehow was not destroyed by it, accepted their ends as she finally did her own.

  Through it all, through ninety-two years, she never lost her joy or her beauty or her gladness at living, at seeing each new day; never lost the feeling of celebration at seeing her grandchildren, and when the one who had been the little thimble, who hid from the men in back of her apron, when he came to visit as a grown man and had children to show her, she took his small son into the kitchen and sat him down and stole him completely and utterly with one piece of apple pie and a glass of milk.

  “See,” the new boy said to his father. “There is sugar and simmanon on top….”

  And she looked up and smiled at him, a smile that cut across all the years and made him wish he could sit in her lap — an intense, cutting longing.

  “Would you like some pie?” she asked.

  And of course he did and he sat and ate the pie and drank the milk and wished to God that all good things could go on forever and ever.

  GARY PAULSEN is one of the most distinguished and best-loved writers of young adult literature today. Three of his novels — Hatchet, Dogsong, and The Winter Room — were Newbery Honor Books. His books frequently appear on the best books lists of the American Library Association.

  Born May 17, 1939, he developed a passion for reading and a love of adventure at an early age. He has worked on a farm and as an engineer, construction worker, ranch hand, truck driver, and sailor, as well as competing twice in the 1,180-mile Alaskan dogsled race, the Iditarod. Many of these experiences have found their way into his books.

  Paulsen and his wife, Ruth Wright Paulsen, an artist who has illustrated several of his books, divide their ti
me between a home in New Mexico and a boat in the Pacific.

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  “A beautifully written book of a boy’s healing trust in people.”

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  “This is vintage Paulsen — the harsh, northern, isolated setting, the survival theme, universal truths simply stated, and powerful description.”

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  “In its simplicity of story line but depth of imagery and emotion, Paulsen’s latest work is very much like MacLachlan’s Sarah, Plain and Tall…. While the boy is very young, his experiences are universal, making this a superb book for readers just old enough to look back and remember their childhoods and grandparents with a feeling of nostalgia.”

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  “This short, lyrical novel … strikes extraordinary emotional chords … Paulsen expertly balances sensitive probing of the boy’s mental and emotional life with superb descriptions of the boy helping the men build the road, making Paulsen’s unnamed hero one of the most fully realized characters in recent memory. Those hungry for adventure stories, as well as more introspective readers, will be spellbound by this stirring novel, which is every bit the equal of The Winter Room and Paulsen’s other works.”

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  Copyright © 1991 by Gary Paulsen

  All rights reserved.

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