by Patrick Lane
Bright stars glittered in the heavens. Get in the damned truck, Father said, following behind, and Tom did. He ran to the truck, opened the passenger door, and scrambled in as Father banged the door shut with his knee. Stay to hell in there, he said.
Your father slid past the shed and down the slope to the well, the light-blue towel flapping as he disappeared over the creek. When he was gone into the orchard, Tom slipped out of the truck. The gravel under his bare feet was still warm even though the sun had fallen. He whipped the fly-swatter at the moon as if with a whisk he could put it out.
I watched as he walked slowly on the grass along the shed wall past the root cellar and down to the well. He was so little to be seeing what he did.
The well cap shone, the grey boards silvered by the stars. Tom was huddled down there watching. Father was piling dry branches, wilted grass he tore from the ground, and blackened straw he’d busted out of a discarded bale, loops of binder twine twisted in his blunt hands. When he was done, there was a mound and he placed the small bundle he was carrying on top of the pile, covered it with more straw, and lit it, jumping back when the flames licked their way up the stems.
I don’t remember if I cried, said Starry Night.
Never mind now.
When the fire rose up, Father went for another bale and cut the twine with his knife. He threw mouldy straw on the crinkled flare of blue cotton burning and the flames went dark, smoke billowing out like one of Mother’s dresses on the clothesline caught by wind. The moon was orange. Father circled the fire like some animal both attracted and repelled by its light. He watched it burn. Every few minutes he left to gather sticks and bits of broken flume and fallen fence posts to add to the pyre. When he did, the flames burned cleaner. Father was beyond thought. He was rippled through the flames.
Tom whispered the one word: Fire. He was burrowed into the tall grass by the well, a mouse hiding from the sky.
That’s when Eddy came down from the house. He found Tom and took him by the arm and led him back. Tom said that Father told him he had to stay in the truck, so Eddy put him there. He closed the truck door, went around the house, and was gone toward town. The sound of his bike tires was a dry hiss on the packed clay road.
What about my mother?
After the fire died down, Father stood by the ash and coals until he heard Mother call him from the yard. When he came up from the orchard, she asked him where the baby was. He told her and she struck him with her fists. What have you gone and done? And she said it again: What have you done? He went past her into the house and brought the woman out to the truck, Mother helping her down the back steps. He put her on the seat beside Tom, who was crouching there. The last thing Mother said to the woman was to forget she ever had a child. There was no baby, Mother said.
Where did they go?
Away. Back to the place she came from. Your mother wasn’t a girl, she was a woman alone, a foreigner, living in an old cabin up in the hills under the mountain in the between place where the pines stop and the hemlock starts. It’s all meadows there. She was a stranger, and Father said she went back to a strange place. Tom couldn’t tell because he didn’t know where they went except to say it was north up the Spallumcheen. They were night riding, the truck careening down the back roads and up the valley into the far hills. He sat between the two of them, frightened, tapping the fly-swatter on the dashboard until Father tore it from his hands and threw it out the window. It was night and the woman was there in the truck beside Tom, crying. She didn’t speak, Father cursing as he drove wild into the mountains. And her, your mother? She didn’t know where her baby had gone. She asked only once, but Father wouldn’t tell her. How could he say to her what he had done?
13
the big saws screamed, steel teeth biting into the log rolled onto the head-rig by two gaunt men with peevees, and the drive belts whined, high and distorted by the heavy grunts of the diesels. Cants slammed into the edger, the bite of the saws eating through wood, the sawdust behind them a fountain spray, and the new log on the head-rig set and jammed into the great saw, the slab carved off, its bark scabbed and shredding. The sawyer pulled the drop lever for the bin and the slab fell onto a bed of raw sawdust in the metal trench below, the chain bearing the refuse to the beehive burner and the flames. The piston dogs flipped the log over and it was pulled back past the saw and thrust forward again, the bite of the saw-teeth a sound beyond sound, and everywhere chains and belts shoving logs and cants and lumber through the mill, the trim saws with their insect whine, men at their machines, the horrible clank clank clank beating steady under the screams and whistles. Raw wood, heavy and green with sap, two-by-fours, sixes, and eights, spaghetti lumber to be sent south into the maw of the States, trundled down through the trim saws and clattered onto the long chains that carried the wood out into the heat of the sun where the men in their draw slots, shirts off, boots braced in dirt and dust, pulled the boards across the chain and into the lumber stacks, rows and piles growing. The forklift thundered as Carl Janek lifted the stacks away, the half-naked men on the line beginning another pile. The lumber poured from the mill, and, hands in gloves or bare and calloused, the men on the chain reached out and pulled the boards off, a continuous, almost desperate task that had no end, the men’s curses unheard amid the moans and misery of the shift, the edger howling and the head saw howling as the blade tore into another log.
Chooksa Three-Horns worked the head of the chain, straightening out awkward pieces of wood when they came down crooked, all of the boards bumping along the creak and crank of hauling metal, the spoked teeth of the iron wheels pulling the lumber down the thirty-foot bed. Tom stood across from the new man, Wlad Kirkowski, at the tail end where the two-by-fours were stacked, the Cruikshank brothers and the other men working the bigger dimension piles ahead of them, Chooksa stepping in here and there when he was needed to sort out a mess when they got behind.
There was no roof over the chain and the morning sun ate its way into the aluminum hard hat on Tom’s head, the heat heavy on his skull. Sweat poured down his face and across his bare shoulders, his chest filmed with ash and dust as he pulled the two-by-fours into their piles. The boards rolled toward Tom in their hundreds and he’d long ago taken off the leather glove on his good hand so he could work faster, his skin sticky with the bleed of sap. His torn hand with its new bandage was sore, but he could still hold a plank, the fingers bent into a curl, his leather thumb pressing down on the wood. His arms dragged boards and shucked them into the piles, four feet wide and four feet tall. When a pile was finished, Carl would come on the forklift and take it away, the machine’s gears grinding. Then another pile and another, Tom never slowing down, and Wlad, who’d been hired out of the bar just before the shutdown, bitching breath after breath, fuck, fucking Jesus, the cries of a new man at his terrible work.
Tom’s head was thick and churning slow. On the chain, his body repeated itself, not as a machine does but as bone and muscle do, each move he made identical and not, each board coming down the chain a variation upon every other board whether cut from the rim or the heart of a tree, his portion the quota set for him, the volume seemingly twice what a man could reasonably manage. At the end of the chain was a metal bumper where the boards he had rejected, split, knotted, warped, and broken, clattered and tumbled against a wall of iron.
The forklift hefted a pile of lumber and backed up, Carl’s shout lost in the cries from the mill, his arm raised and waving as he grinned and rode away. At that moment, Carl looked the same to Tom as the day he had first seen him. Tom had been a kid then, out hunting with Docker. He’d passed by the farm many times before and heard dogs barking. The hayfields behind the barn would have been a good place to find birds, but he’d always gone on by, not wanting to be caught trespassing. Then one Sunday he was on the trail in the trees above the farmyard and heard a noise, metal clanking, then someone cursing, and he’d come out to the field and looked down the hill. A tall man in overalls with brown, funny
-looking hair, kind of long over his ears, was lying on his back under the engine of a red tractor, his tools laid out on a square of canvas, and Tom had crouched behind a bush and watched, his dog beside him. After a while, he went back down to the trail and crossed up to the road and headed home.
A troubled whistle burned the air and the diesels lurched for the briefest moment, an almost silence, and then the chain in front of him, which had barely halted, jerked and began again its grind of metal, the lumber tumbling, and the scream of the saws on the mill floor reiterating their complaint. He rested the end of a new board on his gloved palm and his good hand pulled it in one smooth motion, the blunt wood running across his glove and disappearing behind him as it found its place on the stack. As it rattled into place his injured hand was already cupping the next board and the next, two, sometimes three at a time, all pulled back in a single motion, a perfect dance done only with his hips and upper body, his legs spread slightly. His boots were planted in the grooves he had made in the deck over the four years he’d worked there. The foreman had told him he could get off the chain any time and onto the mill floor, but he’d turned him down so he could stay where he was in a job that was mindless, without thought or feeling.
As the boards slipped through his hands, he found himself again on Carl’s farm, in a clearing back in the trees where there was a graveyard with stones marking small mounds. The stone Tom liked best had a word incised in the stone, DOBRA, with two dates below, 1948–1952. Under the numbers was carved: BRAVER HART NEVER WAS.
All of a sudden Docker barked and Tom heard someone behind him. He turned and saw the man who’d been working on the tractor the week before. He leaned down and took hold of Docker’s collar and the dog quieted. He knew he shouldn’t be there, but the man didn’t yell at him. Instead he began to talk softly to Tom about a dog he’d raised, one who’d died in a fight two years before. It sounded like he was speaking as much to himself as to Tom, pointing at this grave or that, each animal buried there a story that needed telling. Tom had stayed in the shadow of an old cedar and watched as the man paused in front of one of the graves and called Tom over. When Tom sidled up, the man told him the grave was the resting place of Wintered Jim, a dog named, he said, for the saddle of snow-white hair across his shoulders, a brindle pit bull who’d died the year before, fighting up in Kamloops.
He spoke quietly as Tom, unsure, came closer. The man patted the grave with his hand in much the same way as he might have patted the dog when it was alive. Tom thought for a brief second that Wintered Jim might come alive again and rise out of the ground to lick the man’s hand. Beside Tom was Docker, his dog’s small body straining to be let go. And then the man glanced at the four fat Blue grouse hanging from Tom’s shoulder, and said to him how the hunting must have been good, talking to him while Docker circled them barking in play, his dog trusting this man. He told Tom his name and asked Tom what his was. Tom said his name and then he told him what he’d seen that day in the hills and up the mountain: black-bear tracks in the mud above an irrigation ditch, coyote scat on the trail, a goshawk stooping to take a gopher. He told him too of his family and where he lived, but that was later on that fall.
Each Sunday he’d climb the mountain to hunt in the high meadows, returning in the afternoon to sit quietly on the hill, Docker waiting beside him, half-crazed with love for Carl, who always had bits of dried venison he kept to treat his fighting dogs in the kennels behind the barn, a few small strips and chunks secreted away to give to Docker when they came. Sometimes Carl and Tom would talk, but it was mostly about the weather or a crop, a machine broken down or a dog Carl thought would do well in some fight coming up. Carl showed him where coveys of quail took dust baths and pheasants hunted beetles and bugs, a clearing at the mouth of a nearby gully where Spruce grouse fed on fallen seeds and berries. Every time Tom came, Carl asked how he was doing and Tom always told him about something he’d seen or done.
Most Sundays, Carl would be out by the barn working on the tractor or the truck, his wrenches laid out beside his toolbox and in his lap some part he was working on, a generator or starter, some piece of the motor or drive train. Tom would come out from the trees and let Docker go and Carl would stop what he was doing when he saw the dog. He’d give Docker a bit of dried meat and then Tom would walk toward him, over his shoulder the grouse or pheasants he always brought as gifts for Carl and his wife, Irma. Carl would take the offered birds, telling him what a good hunter he was and then they’d walk to the house, Carl carrying the birds, Docker whining at their heels, wanting to go around back to the kennels where the other dogs were barking.
Carl and Irma’s lives were bound by simplicity, their clear belief in things they could touch and smell and taste. They were by themselves on the farm, their children grown up and gone, but they never seemed to be lonely. They became people he learned to almost trust.
Later that first autumn, Tom began to come to the farm at dawn before he started to hunt the mountain. He’d arrive at sunrise, and find Carl in the kitchen putting crumpled paper and kindling into the wood stove and lighting it with a stick match from the red and white tin box on the wall, the one with little painted roses on it Irma had mentioned that she’d bought at Mac & Mac Hardware. She told him she liked it because it was so cheery.
Carl would set a kettle on the stove plate to heat up for coffee, busying about, putting out cups along with a small jar of fresh cream from the new refrigerator he’d bought when the money came in from the last hay crop. Turning to the cupboard, he’d take down the silver sugar bowl that used to belong to Irma’s mother, then open the wooden chest that held the set of South Seas silverware he said he’d won at the regional curling bonspiel in 1949. He told Tom they liked to start each Sunday with their best spoons.
Then Tom would head up the mountain, only to return in the late afternoon with his gift of birds. He’d see the smoke coming from the chimney of the house from far off, and know that Irma was there in the kitchen, a batch of fresh bread cooling on the windowsill. He’d sit on the porch and she’d feed him slices of warm bread and strawberry jam.
The break whistle cut off the saws abruptly, and the green-chain shuddered to a stop, the mill floor silent, the thin keening left in the air a diminution of sound that dwindled to nothing, the sudden whine of a black hornet cutting through the air by Tom’s ear. He straightened his back, trying to find the original curve of his bones. He pressed his fists against his hips, and then reached for the canvas water sack hanging from the nail on the shadow side of a post. He took a long drink, dropped his hard hat on a pile of lumber, and held the bag over his head, the cool water pouring onto his skull, cascading down across his shoulders and torso. The water scored the ash and dust on his skin in dirty rivulets to his belt where it soaked into his pants, a dark stain spreading down his groin.
Tom wiped his face on the sleeve of the shirt he’d left hanging from a nail on the post. A fifteen-minute break. His hand was throbbing now, the bandage wet inside his glove. He looked up as Chooksa waved his thermos at him, pointing into the shade behind a lumber pile, but Tom ignored the offer. He walked instead across the mill yard toward the lake, charred sawdust and ash sifting out of the air and settling on his skin. He could hear a last slab fall into the burner, a heavy thud as the long chunk of wood and bark hit the fire. The flames in the beehive never stopped, the mill refuse running up the bunker chain to the square cut in the sheet metal high in the iron sheathing. What wasn’t consumed rode the plume of heat and smoke out through the cracked and broken shelter screen. Charred motes of wood rode the wind and settled upon the fields that surrounded the mill. The end of the lake was adrift with it. It floated there, a mottled sludge of partly burned wood until, finally water-logged, it sank to the bottom. Across the lake was the outfall from Carson’s Creek.
He’d fished there with Eddy when they were kids. They’d head up the creek into the piney hills. Royal Coachmen were hooked to the collars of their shirts, their leader wrap
ped around pine sticks. He remembered how Eddy would cast into the pools under the dead-falls. Tom would sometimes hang his arm into the current by the bank and wait for the trout to lie up in the shadows against his wrist. He’d stroke their bellies with his fingers, rainbows and cutthroats in his hands. Tom stared down into the murky water, thoughts of his brother muddled in his head.
He remembered the night Eddy came home from the coast, how the year before, Father and Mother and he had come back from the train station in silence, Mother going into the kitchen and standing there at the sink as if cast in stone, and Father staying outside and lifting the hood of the truck, a case of beer cooling in the shade of the fender, greasy wrenches and screwdrivers strewn across the gravel. It was as if his brother had become a ghost, someone made up, a lost brother Tom had dreamt. He remembered the tense quiet of month following month, no word said, the silence so thick it buried them all. And then, the next summer, he had woken in the late hours of a warm night and knew Eddy was coming home. It was a feeling so deep in his blood that Tom felt if he reached out into the darkness of his room he could touch his brother’s skin.
He remembered crawling naked from his bed and creeping downstairs, his feet finding their way on the edges by the wall where there were no creaks to warn his father that he was awake. Once out the screen door, he ran up the driveway and climbed the old fir tree, his hands and bare feet moving limb to limb, pulling his body higher and higher until he reached the last huge unbroken branch and laid himself down on it.