As soon as Hec and Frenchy were swinging in the peculiar rhythm that was so familiar now to George, he began to clear some of the understory. He had worked with these two long enough to know that the first tree dropped would mark the sled path. So he began to envision a route down the hillside to the dragging road.
He turned to say something and a curse caught in his throat.
They called them widow-makers, those limbs that dropped silently from somewhere in the canopy. This one was covered in green needles but as rotten as a mummy inside. With a whoosh that none of them heard above the ringing of the axes, it plummeted through the branches, struck Hec Burns, and killed him where he stood.
THAT NIGHT, THEY passed the hat and told stories of old Hec, while he froze solid beneath a canvas out by the cook shed.
The contents of the hat would go to Hec’s widow, a stern-faced woman who peered out from a carte de visite tacked to a log beside Hec’s bunk. The crew would go back to work the next day with a new first chopper.
“Bad luck, eh?” said Pierre LeBrun, dropping money into the hat.
“Mal chance, oui.” Frenchy sniffled and drew a sleeve across his face.
“Bad luck? Mal chance?” growled a big teamster named Beale. “Ain’t no such thing. I say there’s a Jonah in this here camp.”
“A Jonah?” said Enos. “In a loggin’ camp? Jonah’s are on boats.”
“I been on boats,” said the teamster. “I fished the Grand Banks out of Portland. I know fellers who used to fish, who stump ’round now on one leg they got at Fredericksburg, fellers who tell stories about a officer who shot himself in his own foot. And I say—”
Enos got to his feet, “Listen, you big son of a bitch—”
“Stand down, Sergeant,” said George in a low voice, and Enos fell silent.
George fixed his eyes on the teamster, put his foot on the bench between them, and pulled off his boot, then his outer sock—heavy gray wool with a red stripe around the top. Beneath was another wool sock, gray, and finally a white cotton sock that he had changed two weeks before, which made it one of the cleanest socks in the camp.
As he drew it down, the men drew closer, like doctors in an operating theater, fascinated to see how a gunshot foot might heal. They were hard men, those loggers. They stitched their own chilblains together with needles and thread. They dosed themselves with swallows of kerosene to keep away the grippe. None of them would flinch if an ax glanced off a frozen log and cut clean through a boot and into a leg. No surprise that the most any of them said about the mangled foot was that he’d seen worse.
But a deeper sound ran through them, almost as if they could not control it, a murmur … of something? Awe? Contempt for a coward? George could not tell.
He wiggled the big toe and the little one. Everything in between was gone, and the flesh where the toes had once connected was scar-tissue white.
George stood—one shoe on, one shoe off—and fixed his gaze on that big teamster. “I slipped in a puddle of blood. My gun went off in my hand. That’s the truth. So … if you want to call me a coward, go ahead, but it means you’re callin’ me a liar, too. I might stand for one or the other, but not both.”
The teamster started to say something but he stopped because—
George pulled two new-hewn ax handles from a box in the corner and held them out. “We can fight with these, in here or out in the snow.”
The teamster looked at the handles, but he did not move to take one.
George said, “You’re big enough to pound me to pieces, but I’ll make sure I break your hands, so you can’t grip the reins. You want that?”
And a voice growled, “There’ll be no heft-fightin’ in any camp of mine.”
Heads turned toward the dingle, the little door to the cookhouse.
And there stood Big Jack Caldwell. He could be no one else, since “big” was the only adjective that applied. Big frame, big belly, big head, and big bearskin hat. His weight made the boards creak as he came across the floor.
The icicles dripped from his mustache. His eyes traveled from George’s knit cap to his mangled foot. He said, “I heard about you.”
George lowered the ax handles. “I heard about you, too.”
“Well if you heard that I’m the best man in these woods with ax or peavey, you heard right.” Big Jack stepped closer to George. “I ain’t heard so good about you.”
Enos said, “Now, boss—”
“Quiet.” Big Jack swung his head around at the circle of men. “You all know me. You know I don’t believe anything ‘bout a man till he give me reason. If there’s any here who say this young feller shirked his work or done bad to ’em, speak up. I’ll take him with me in the mornin’. He can ride the tote wagon out with Hec’s body.”
Big Jack allowed his challenge to sit in the air for a moment. Then he looked at George. “Put your boot on, son.” Then he turned to Enos. “I didn’t come all the goddamn way up here to haul beans and break up fights. Show me your books.”
Enos, who had acted with generals as if he were their equal in all but shoulder bars, hopped to like a greenhorn. He led Big Jack to the end of the bunkhouse, where a curtain separated his space from the rest of the crew, and they disappeared.
After a moment, the big teamster pulled a pint from his pocket and offered it to George. “I was wrong, I reckon. Like Enos says, can’t be no Jonahs in a loggin’ camp. Jonahs ride in boats and get swallowed by whales.”
THE NEXT MORNING, as a light snow fell, they put Hec’s body onto the tote wagon, and Big Jack ordered them all to take off their hats and bow their heads. Then he led them in the Lord’s Prayer.
“All right,” he said after the amens. “There’s trees to cut. Get to work.”
But George stayed at the side of the wagon. “Mr. Caldwell.”
Big Jack looked down, long jets of steam shooting from his nostrils. “You try me, son. And I’m in a hurry. Got another camp to inspect.”
“Could I talk with you?”
“About what?”
“Well … a story from your family’s past.”
“My family? I don’t talk about my family with goddamn choppers nor sled tenders, neither. And I don’t talk about nothin’ when there’s snow comin’ down.”
“But—”
Big Jack gave a nod to his teamster, who snapped the reins and the horses kicked forward. Then he said over his shoulder. “Be here come spring. Prove yourself. Then ask your questions.”
SO GEORGE AMORY stayed, and he became second chopper to Frenchy.
And they cut trees. They cut through March, after the calendar and the angle of the sun pronounced it spring but the snow lay deep and the nights stayed old. They cut into April, until just before Easter, when there came an afternoon that not only looked warm but felt warm, too. And the snow began to melt, and the streams began to rise, and the ringing of the axes was replaced by thunder, the sound of log pyramids collapsing when the ice beneath them melted into the rivers.
The cutting was done. Time for the drive to begin.
Soon enough, the Bangor Tigers strode into camp in their red shirts and sashes and studded boots. There were other log-driving gangs, but none so famous, and if you asked one of them, they would tell you that there were none so good.
The loggers were paid off, but Big Jack Caldwell kept a small crew—the cook and cookie and a few choppers who would clear space for the wangan, the camp that would now move downstream with the drive. Since Turlock chose the choppers, George and Frenchy stayed on.
For days, the logs came tumbling and rumbling and thundering down the little streams. At some places, they were held back by rough sluice dams and delivered one by one into the bigger waterways. At other places they were let loose all at once and left to speed their way in an unstoppable wave to the next tributary. The rivers up here were narrow and twisting, but by May, they were all covered with floating logs, moving as fast as the current would carry them. And because the rivers did not stop w
hen night fell, there were drivers who stayed with them, riding them by cold starlight, keeping them headed for the hungry sawmills of Bangor.
George did as he was told and waited for the moment that he could catch Big Jack at the wangan, drinking coffee or taking a bowl of beans.
But Big Jack seemed to be everywhere on the drive except at his ease. He could be heard bellowing his goddamns above the roar of the river. He could be seen leaping across the water with a peavey in his hands, moving as nimbly as a man half his age when the logs began to hang up on some underwater junk or a bend in the river.
“You see a jam,” said Frenchy as they rode ahead on a warm morning, “don’t do nothin’. Just watch Big Jack and them Tigers. Cause that river, it kill you fast.”
So George watched. Sometimes, the Tigers balanced themselves on the spinning logs to do their work. Sometimes they rowed their lightweight bateaux into the middle of the churning, log-choked current to break up the jams. Sometimes, they just got themselves to the front, stood on one of the boom logs, and rode the river the way an engineer rode the rails.
A week into the drive, they approached a place called Dead Man’s Bank.
Every river had a Dead Man’s Bank, what the rivermen called a dirty spot, where the logs always hung up and often enough killed the man trying to unhang them.
Frenchy stopped the tote wagon beside a pair of studded boots nailed to a tree. Then he took off his hat and blessed himself.
“What’s that?” asked George.
“Riverman drowns, they nail his boots to the nearest tree where he went under. Sometime, if you no find the body, them boots his only grave marker, eh.”
The river here ran wide, straight, and fast, so logs were thundering mightily along, but as they hit the bend about a hundred yards downstream, they were slowing, groaning, piling up on themselves.
“This gonna be a bad one.” Frenchy snapped the reins and drove his team ahead to the place where the road curved and dropped down to the riverbank. And there was Big Jack, with two of the other Tigers, fighting to find the single log that had twisted itself out of alignment and caused this giant mess.
“You watch,” said Frenchy. “A thousand logs, they know just which one to grab.”
George jumped down and went to the edge of the water.
Big Jack was booming out his “goddamns” and “son-of-a-bitches” while he and the others dug their peaveys into the logs. Meanwhile a mountain of upstream wood was growing, like a volcano rising from some ancient landscape, driven by forces just as relentless.
“See that,” said Frenchy, coming up beside him. “They found the key log, what I call the fucker log.”
George watched them work like surgeons in the rising jumble. Big Jack was screaming, “You two pull the top! I’ll pull the bottom.”
They moved, they pushed, they pulled and tugged, until a single, log twisted up and out of the pile.
There then came a deep, resonating groan that seemed to catch the men by surprise, as if they had expected it, but not so soon. The groan rose into a thunderous roar and one of the Tigers screamed, “Look out!”
Another log broke loose and rocketed down at them, like a falling ice shelf that precedes an avalanche.
An instant later, that mountain of wood collapsed.
Big Jack Caldwell fell backward. One of the Tigers disappeared while the other was knocked over and sent rolling with a log under him and another on top of him.
Big Jack boomed out another “goddamn!”—his word for curses and prayers and praise, too—because the logs were moving underneath him, and he was rolling and floundering, unable to get back to his feet.
And that was the moment when George Amory became a riverman. He did not think. He did not study. He simply acted, leaping, then jumping, then running, then stumbling, then leaping again, log to log across thirty feet in a few seconds that unfolded as slowly as the four-hour wait at Fredericksburg.
He grabbed Big Jack’s collar. And by some miracle of balance, ax-built strength, and luck, he pulled Big Jack from between two logs that were about to crush him. Then the log beneath George rolled and he fell back.
He smashed down on his side but held tight to Big Jack’s collar.
The log was turning both of them, pulling them under, and another was rising up over the top of them. But he could hear someone shouting “Take it! Grab it!”
Frenchy was holding out a peavey to him, while Enos Turlock was snatching his collar on the hookend of another. They both roared up all their strength, and the river suddenly heaved a great sigh of wood toward the bank, and George and Big Jack were saved.
“Goddamn!” Big Jack got to his feet with barely a flinch, though his left leg was bent above the boot. “My Tigers!”
“One got saved to the other bank,” said Frenchy. “The other, he gone under.”
“Goddamn!” Big Jack brought his hands to his hair. Then he turned to George. “Son, you done a goddamn fool thing. Could’ve been killed.”
“You, too,” said George.
“I’m alive. But I broke my goddamn ankle.”
BIG JACK SAID that if he couldn’t ride the river, he’d go home and do a harder job: comforting a widow. And he’d see to his sawmills, too. So George was delegated to bring him back to Bangor, the “city that lumber built.”
What a sight those Bangor sawmills were, scores of them cutting millions of board feet, sending clouds of sawdust swirling into the air above the river, which itself seemed to be made of wood for miles, all the way back to the falls of the Penobscot.
“Now, then,” said Big Jack once he had ensconced himself in his mill office a few days later. “You asked me about my family. I told you to ask me again in the spring.” The floor vibrated from the rolling of the millwheel, and they talked with raised voices to be heard over the screaming of the saw blades in the room below.
“I don’t mean your wife or children,” said George. “Your grandfather.”
“Why would you want to know about Caldwell P. Caldwell?”
George pulled up a chair next to the stool where Big Jack had his foot propped. And he told the story as his grandfather had told it to him, finishing with this: “I’d like to find that Constitution, and I think you might know about it, considering your ancestry.”
Big Jack Caldwell gave out with a laugh that made his belly and beard shake and his bad leg, too. “You put yourself through a winter in my camp, just to ask me that?”
“I went to your camp to learn a lot of things and prove a few, too.”
“Well, I learned that you might be a goddamn fool, but you’re a bearcat for courage. No man who run out on that river would shoot himself in the foot. And no man who went up that Fredericksburg hill can be anything but a good goddamn Union man”—Big Jack gestured to a photo of Lincoln on the wall—”like me.”
“So … do you have the Constitution?”
“ ‘Fraid not. If any Caldwell does, it’s my cousin Dawson.” Big Jack almost spat the word. “One of the Vermont Caldwells.”
“Vermont?”
“Eh-yeh. Plenty of good Union men in Vermont. But not my Caldwell cousins. Goddamn Copperheads. You know Copperheads?”
“A few.” George thought of Professor Edwards, and of the Blackstone investors, worrying about their cotton supply. Copperheads would make peace with the South and get back to business rather than continue the war and pay its costs.
“A first draft of the Constitution, you say?” Big Jack stroked his beard. “With writin’ on it about the birth of the government, you say?”
“That’s what I’ve been told.”
“Be a damn shame if it said things that put the lie to what we’re fightin’ for, to what Lincoln says about the Union bein’ … what’s the word?”
“Indissoluble,” said George.
“Right,” said Big Jack. “And what if it said that slavery was just fine?”
“A damn shame,” said George.
“Goddamn Copperhead bastard
s might use that against Lincoln in the election.”
“Where does your cousin live?” asked George.
“A town called St. Albans, last town in Vermont before you get to Canada. They say it’s grown into a big railhead since the war started. Never liked the Vermont Caldwells. Not good dairy-farmin’ Vermonters, nor quarrymen, nor men who actually do anything. Just money men. Speculators. Like Grandpa Caldwell.”
“Would you write me a letter of introduction?”
Big Jack gave another laugh. “Wouldn’t do no good. Just go, tell him you’re lookin’ to buy land in Vermont. Tell him you want to harvest timber and run it south on the railroad. He’ll smell money. He’ll talk.”
BUT BEFORE ST. Albans …
George stayed another month to finish the drive, because he kept his promises.
Had Reverend Amory lived long enough to know of his son’s dalliances in the mill, he might have found a lesson in George’s brutal days at Camp #6: His time in the woods had been his atonement for sin, cleansing him and preparing him for whatever was coming next. His father had found many lessons in human suffering, but few to explain human joy. Perhaps because suffering was always waiting at the end.
In the last week of the log run, George received a letter from his mother. It mentioned that she had not been feeling well of late and had had a “bit of surgical work.” He returned to Portland to find her propped in a chair, her head down, her graying hair askew, her whole attitude one of deflation, as if her essence were emptying out and her corporeal being were collapsing in on itself.
But when she looked at him, her eyes brightened. “Georgie! I thought you were going to Vermont.”
“I got your letter. I decided to come home.” George knelt and took her hand.
She said, “How’s that nice girl? That Ophelia, from Brunswick?”
“Cordelia. She’s in Europe. But, what’s—”
“A cancer. In the breast. Doc Withers says he got all the lumps.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not more than I can bear.” She reached out to touch his hair, but the pain on that side seemed too much for her. She lowered her hand and said, “It’s grand to see you.”
The Lost Constitution Page 28