The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  George would not have minded the light. He liked looking at her. She had symmetrical features, long limbs, auburn hair. In better clothes, in a better place, she might have looked regal.

  He pushed back his chair and stood. Her scent was woman-sweet and hard-work sour at the same time. It filled the little space and intoxicated his brain.

  She stuffed the dollar into the apron pocket with her tools. Her scissors jangled. Then she turned her eyes away from him, slipped her hands under her dress, pulled down her bloomers, bunched them up and put them into another pocket. Then she hiked her dress to her thighs and sat on the desk.

  “Thank you for coming,” he whispered.

  “We’d best be quick,” she said. “I seen Mr. William down in the mill yard.”

  George listened a moment, heard nothing, then ran his hands under her dress. She was not wearing stockings. Her thighs felt cool and smooth until he reached the tangle of hair where they met.

  She made a sound and twitched herself—toward him? Away? He could not tell.

  Then she unsnapped the top button of his trousers. The rest of the buttons popped under growing pressure.

  He leaned forward to kiss her but before he could, she brought her hand to her lips and wet her fingers. “Like I say, we’d best be quick. But that ain’t any problem for you, now, is it?” She reached down and moistened him with her fingertips.

  The feeling of her touch and the promise of what was about to happen were almost too much. He controlled himself with this thought: She had grown practiced and impersonal at this. Perhaps she was selling her wares on a wider basis.

  Still he let her draw him toward her and guide him into her. He thrust once, twice, then stopped, simply to enjoy the exquisite sensations that flowed from her loins into his, up his spine, into his brain.

  And she chose that moment to whisper into his ear, “Tell me one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Have you any feelin’s for me, George Amory?”

  “Feelings? Of course.” He tried to pull back and thrust again.

  But she held him, digging her nails into his back. “Real feelin’s. More than just the feelin’s of a man with a hoor, which is what you’ve made of me.”

  A man who had no feelings would simply have told her that she had made a hoor of herself. But George was still a minister’s son, and though he had fallen into the thrall of fucking, as his cousin so bluntly put it, he tried to think of something gentle to say.

  Instead, he heard the key in the door.

  Uncle William appeared, shoulders hunched, head down, eyes pointing like knives over his spectacles. “George! What … what would your father say?”

  The girl jumped up.

  George pulled back, turned away, grabbed his trousers.

  Uncle William glared at the girl. “And what would your sister say?”

  Sheila brought her hand to her mouth, covering a chin that began to quiver.

  “Never mind that,” said Uncle William. “I want you both gone by tomorrow. I’ll not have one of my company officers soiling the morals of the girls we claim to protect. And I won’t have one immoral girl soiling the reputation of the rest.”

  Sheila tried to speak, “But—”

  “Get out, girl. Be on the train tomorrow.”

  Without bothering to put her bloomers back on, she left.

  Then Uncle William turned to George. “As for you—”

  George said, “Uncle, I can explain.”

  “You can’t explain this any more than you can explain how you shot yourself in the foot on the battlefield.”

  “Goddamn you, sir.”

  “Goddamn you! Your grandfather trusted you, but I don’t. I favor Bartlett. I always have.” He turned and started across the mill floor. “Bartlett gets my interest in the mill when the time comes. Not you. You’re a coward with a wandering mind, and a sneak. We give you a chance to redeem yourself, and this is how you repay us.”

  “YOU LED HIM right to us,” George told Bartlett the next morning in the cupola. “You’ve planned it for months, from that first morning you pointed out Sheila, right here.”

  “Nothing personal, George,” said Bartlett. “It’s business. And business is business. I was born for business, and you weren’t. You said it yourself.”

  “I said it a long time ago. I’m going to tell Uncle William it was you who put me onto that girl, you who led me to start fucking her.”

  Bartlett laughed in George’s face. “I work at his side in the office house. You work in the mill. Tell him what you want. I’ll tell him you’re lying.”

  George said, “You betrayed me. I want the letters back.”

  “A deal’s a deal.” Bartlett shook his head. “I gave you the girls, you gave me the letters. The Henry Knox letter is the gem of my collection. It’s right in my scrapbook.”

  Just then, they heard a distant whistle. Off to the north, the smoke of an engine was cutting across the landscape.

  “The train for Providence,” said Bartlett. “Worcester Express will be here soon. You should go.”

  “I have business to clear up before I leave.”

  “Uncle William said that if you’re here after second bell, I should summon the Micks from security.” Bartlett shrugged, as if he were only the messenger.

  “Are you lying about that, too?”

  Bartlett shook his head. “I have it all sewn up, George. The family shares in the mill, the Irish muscle. And I have you right where I want you.” Bartlett made the mistake of sliding a hand lightly under George’s lapel.

  The condescension of the gesture infuriated George Amory. He drove his hands into Bartlett’s soft belly and slammed him against the railing, which cracked and began to let go. Bartlett cried out, eyes widening, and he grabbed one of the pillars that supported the roof of the cupola.

  George grabbed Bartlett’s belt, but he did not pull Bartlett to safety. Instead, he undid the belt and snapped it open.

  “Wha … what are you doing?” said Bartlett.

  There was just enough leather for George to wrap the belt around the pillar and notch it.

  “Some day, I’ll ask you if you’re sorry you betrayed me. You’ll say yes, if you can hear the question.”

  By the time George reached the first floor, the bell was clanging and a man, somewhere above, was crying in pain with every strike of the clapper.

  The workers in the yard were all looking up toward the noise. George went past them, neither looking at their faces nor looking back. He hurried out of the yard, crossed the stone bridge, and reached the depot as the last passengers were boarding for Providence.

  At the conductor’s call, the train began to roll.

  George looked up at a window, and there was the face of Sheila Murphy—sad, angry, fearful, brave. Her eyes met his. He wanted to say something, but no word came. Her lips moved, but with the engine noise and the closed window, he could not tell what she said. I’m pretty? I’m promised?

  Limping along beside the train, he thought to give her some money and fumbled in his pocket.

  But the train was moving faster, puffing steam against the wall of the depot.

  He cried. “Open the window!”

  She did and leaned out and shouted something, but the roar of the engine drowned out her words.

  DROPPED FROM HIS regiment because of a wound that damaged his foot and besmirched his reputation. Driven from his community by gossip and angry glares. Cast from the family business by an uncle who forgave no indiscretion except, perhaps, his own intolerance. Betrayed by a cousin far less trustworthy than he seemed.

  It had been a bad year.

  Would George become a wanderer? Would he go to Europe and live as an expatriate, reading war dispatches from a distance? Would he study philosophy at Heidelburg? Have a romance with a beautiful French girl? Sit for a week in the Sistine Chapel? And do it all with … what?

  His mother promised to pay his passage to Europe by digging into her savings. But h
ow would he live after that?

  The only asset he had, other than his mother’s interest in the mill, was a tract of land at the base of Crawford Notch, where his Amory grandfather had obtained a grant on a thousand acres of prime timber in 1800.

  Grandpa Amory had planned to cut trees and run them down the Saco. But in its upper reaches, the Saco was a typical White Mountain river, nothing but a boulder-studded slope where big logs hung up every fifty feet. An impossible sluiceway. So the Amory tract had been left standing, growing taller and more valuable by the year.

  Now there was talk of running railroads into the White Mountains. And while George still dreamed of wandering the Tuileries Gardens or the Roman Forum, war had made him practical. It might be time to learn how to exploit his New Hampshire tract. What better way would there be than to learn the timber business from the ground up?

  And he had another reason for heading to Turlock’s camp in the Penobscot wilderness: its name. John C. Caldwell Camp # 6.

  AT THE END of September, George hitched a ride on an ox-drawn tote-wagon that was part of a supply train heading out of Bangor.

  They followed roads north across marshes where the swamp maple flared red and went bare all in a day. They climbed hills still covered in color and evergreen. They crossed logged-out expanses where the stumps stretched to the horizon and not a weed grew tall enough to wave in the breeze.

  But always they moved along rivers that led deeper into the wilderness. Some said that the story of New England was the story of the sea. But rivers told the tale, too, in the south, where New Englanders made things, and in the north, where they cut things.

  George got to Camp #6 on a day so warm and bright that only the gloomiest of men would think about winter. Boss Enos Turlock was not among that species, but he stood in the middle of a clearing carved from those endless woods and shouted at everyone about everything. He kept a dozen men working their axes, notching logs, stacking them, and building shelters, because they all knew that winter would come, no matter the kindness of September, and it would come first to the north country.

  “So,” said Enos, when he spied George, “decided to do man’s work, eh?”

  If George had been a braggart, he might have said that he had come to see what there was that could toughen him more than war. Instead, he climbed down, shook his old sergeant’s hand, and looked around. “I thought you cut trees.”

  “Put roofs over our heads first. Then we cut trees.” Enos swung a hand toward the hills. “Come spring, all this timber’ll be stacked by the streams, stacked on the rivers, stacked every damn place we can get it to water. Then we’ll sluice it all down to Bangor, make lumber for houses, paper for books, staves for beer barrels, too. How’s the foot?”

  “Hurts like hell. How’s the hip.”

  Enos lowered his voice. “If it hurts, I ain’t sayin’.”

  So began George Amory’s education in the great north woods: Don’t complain. Don’t explain. Just do.

  “Once the cuttin’ starts, you’ll be sled-tender to them fellers”—Enos gestured to two men notching logs—”Hec Burns and Frenchy LaPointe.”

  Hec and Frenchy, first chopper and second: wiry, leathered, close-eyed little men who swung their axes with a rhythm that seemed almost musical.

  “They’ve worked together so long, they look alike. Only way to tell ’em apart, Hec wears a red flannel shirt. Frenchy wears whatever his Frenchy wife packed.”

  “Oui,” said Frenchy. “You will see many colors on me, so you know I change my shirt, eh? Hec, he don’t change nothin’ all winter long.”

  Hec spat tobacco juice and kept swinging his ax.

  Enos said, “Frenchy’s from Quebec. Talks a lot.”

  “I talk a lot,” said Frenchy. “Hec, he don’t talk at all.”

  As if to give Frenchy the lie, Hec grunted. “Feller’s got city hands. Can he swing an ax?”

  “He swung a sword at Fredericksburg,” said Enos.

  “Swingin’ a sword don’t mean he can swing anything else.” Hec glanced at George from under his hat brim. “You know the first rule of loggin’?”

  “Never touch another man’s ax,” said George.

  Hec nodded and kept chopping. “You got an ax?”

  George shook his head.

  “Give him a hammer,” Hec told Frenchy. “Put him to work on the plank floor.”

  Dear Cordelia:

  I am in receipt of your letter of 17th last. I envy your stay in France, a nation that, as you wrote, “has a democracy born after our own, and yet has had several constitutions to our one.” I can agree, for I know more about the genesis of our Constitution than most men.

  Your letters may reach me here, at Caldwell Camp #6, until spring. Bad foot and all, I am now a logger. By day, I work in the big woods, rain or snow, unseasonably warm or cold enough to freeze your breath. By night, I sleep on a board-bunk with forty other men in a log bunkhouse called, for reasons that escape me, a ram pasture. I arrived earlier than most so my bunk is closer to the stove, and it is on the bottom. That is good because our diet consists mainly of pork and beans. My friend Frenchy warned me to seek a lower bunk “because the air is better there.”

  How I got here from the Pike Mill need not trouble you. However, were this not Caldwell Camp #6, I would have found something less strenuous to do. Caldwell is a common enough name, but the people of northern New England are a close-bred lot, so these Caldwells might be related to the land grabber of my grandfather’s tall tales.

  I have come to agree with you that finding a certain document, with the thoughts of certain New Englanders set down upon it, might be a boon to the country in our present Constitutional crisis, a boon to my reputation as well. More important, if finding it is a way to earn back your love …

  He scratched out that last sentence, found another piece of paper, and rewrote the letter, ending with no more than best wishes.

  THE MONTHS WENT by, the snow fell as fast as the temperature, and the trees fell, too. Camp #6 ran so well under Enos Turlock that Big Jack Caldwell never came near. But whenever George and Enos talked about Big Jack, Enos always said—or threatened—that Big Jack would come round eventually.

  “When?” asked George one bitter night, after the pork and beans had settled and the loggers had clustered near the stove to play cards and fart and dry their damp socks. “When do you think we’ll see him?”

  “If he don’t come ridin’ in someday on a tote-sled, he’ll be here for certain when we run the logs come spring.”

  “Is he a logger or a riverman?” asked George.

  Frenchy looked up from the sock he was darning. “Some men is loggers and some is river rats. But that Big Jack, he been both since his Gran’père buy these woods. He drop a tree faster than Hec, and he break up logjams with his bare hands.”

  “He uses a peavey.” Hec was sitting on the other side of the stove, spitting tobacco against the hot iron, making it sizzle. “Like any man.”

  “Bare hands or peavey,” said Enos, “there’s none better in the woods or on the river.”

  “What was his Gran’père’s name?” asked George.

  “Same name, front and back,” said Enos. “Caldwell.”

  “Big Jack’s a man I’d like to talk to,” said George.

  Enos chuckled. “Big Jack ain’t much for talkin’ to the men, ‘less he’s goddamnin’ ’em.”

  “Oui,” said Frenchy. “He shout so loud, he give out so many goddamns, he make Boss Turlock here sound like an ol’ woman.”

  “Eh-yeh,” said Turlock. “Need to do somethin’ stand-out for him to talk to you.”

  EVERY DAY, EIGHT cutting crews left Caldwell Camp #6 and went to work.

  Under their axes, anything with a trunk and a ten-inch diameter came down, spruce mostly, white pine too, more valuable but growing scarce, and white birch that was taken for those two marvels of modern invention, the clothespin and the match. They did not cut other hardwood, because it did not float. So mapl
e and beech were safe, yellow birch too, unless they got in the way.

  In woods where no man-made sound had ever been heard, the axes bit bark and rang and echoed like churchbells through the shocked silence.

  By the middle of winter, the landscape in that small fiefdom in the realm of the Caldwell Grant had become a patchwork of cut over acres and untouched remnants, overlain by a filigree of ice-covered tote roads that followed the contours of the land like lines on a topographical map, winding their way downhill—always downhill—to the places where water waited, water in the form of ice, water sleeping in the streams that would soon begin to run toward the rivers that always ran to the sea.

  Every crew had two choppers, a sled-tender, and a set of teamsters. The choppers cut the trees. The tenders cleared the brush and snubbed the logs down to the two-sleds. The teamsters loaded the sleds and hauled the logs down the drag roads.

  It was hard work, and it was dangerous. Just how dangerous came clear to George Amory on an afternoon in early February.

  The snow was deep, the air so cold that the snot would freeze on the tip of a man’s nose if he didn’t wipe it off with his sleeve.

  Still, the choppers wore no more than their woolen shirts and gloves. Too much clothing just slowed them down. And what the choppers did, George did. He also did whatever he was told and didn’t say more than he had to. He knew the men talked about him some, but he gave none of them reason to say a bad word about his work.

  The crew had moved down from a stripped-off height of land, down into a grove of white pine on the south side of a granite outcropping. Here the trees had been so well protected from the wind that they had grown to two hundred feet.

  “Good lumber here,” said Hec.

  “Seems a shame.” George looked up into the high canopy.

  “It’s what we do,” said Hec.

  “But these are the biggest trees yet,” said George. “Like a roof of pines.”

  “A cathedral of pines, eh?” said Frenchy. “Like Sainte-Anne de Beaupré, maybe.”

  “It’s what we do,” said Hec again. Then he walked over to the biggest tree, inspected the trunk, the trees around it, the lay of the land, and said, “We’ll start here.”