by Peter Geye
“He’ll be easy enough to manage. You see his shoes? They’re falling apart. He wears the same trousers day after day. He’s got a wife in St. Paul, she’ll grow fond of what those few extra dollars each week will bring. I see new crockery in her kitchen cupboards, new dresses for church on Sunday. Maybe even a beaver-pelt coat.”
“I was you, I’d tell him to keep the hell away from us. Strange things happen to the uninitiated up here at the Timber. There’re lots of places to fall and break a leg, lots of hungry critters in the woods happy to make a snack of boys fallen down.”
Hosea smiled. “So violent, man!”
“I don’t want to see him. That’s all I’m saying. I’ll make things bad for him if I do.”
“Once I’ve pocketed him, I’ll pass your message along.”
Odd liked this talk. He knew that Hosea would indeed pocket the fed and that a summer of running whiskey lay ahead. Enough money to outfit his boat and maybe make a run for it next spring. He and Rebekah gone forever.
“Odd, you want a whiskey? A gal?” Larue asked.
“No, thanks. I’ll be on my way.”
Hosea, speaking to Larue, said, “Don’t worry, he isn’t queer. Just principled.”
“There were more principled men in this world, the Timber would be on the Lighthouse Road, we’d be selling whiskey on the boardwalk,” Larue said.
Odd smiled. “There’d be no fun in that, though,” he said.
Larue patted Odd’s shoulder. “Point well taken, friend.”
Odd took a few minutes to study the lounge, the women in their negligees or cheap dresses, their vacant eyes and slumped shoulders. Odd could not see the pleasure in any of it.
V.
(January 1896)
Thea learned first to tend the scullery fire, to warm water for the dish scrubbing, to make tea for the other cookees. She was up at four every morning, rekindling flames as she mouthed her silent prayers.
Between the stovewood and the kitchen sink carved from white pine, she had splinters enough that her hands looked like porcupines. But she was tireless and dispassionate and worked without complaint. Within two weeks of her arrival at the camp she was paring potatoes and rutabagas and opening tins of milk. Before Thanksgiving she could soak the beans and boil cabbage. Now, in the new year, she was in charge of baking: biscuits and rye bread and larrigan pies. She could slice the loaves and ready the pea soup before the other cookees could set the tables and replenish the woodpile.
Because he could not speak Norwegian the camp cook taught her by demonstrating, speaking only in rudimentary terms fit for a child or simpleton. In this way she came to know the language of the kitchen as a series of words in isolation, nouns and verbs independent of each other. Herring, oleo, roux, apple, mutton, cellar, sowbelly, stove. And clean, stew, stir, cut, serve. Though he was terse and strict, she knew that she pleased him, and not for the reasons she pleased the hundred other men in camp. In the cook’s estimation, her diligence and subordination would have been enough. What came after that was gravy. As for Thea, she understood his authority instinctually, and though she had no great opinion of the man, he was at least not mysterious.
Those others in the kitchen were entirely more beguiling. There was Abigail Sterle, whose croupy hosannas sung into the enormous vats of sowbelly stew were the only evidence of any voice at all. She bunked and worked beside Thea while keeping her stare in a permanent study of the shanty floor. They made the only pair of women in camp. For this reason alone Thea withstood the elder’s coldness, and after washing the morning dishes the two would sit on either side of the cook stove sipping tea sweetened with pilfered sugar.
During these quiet, stolen moments, the brothers Meltmen — the other cookees in camp — would sometimes join the women. They were fine-haired and lean and their skin was so pale as to appear poached. Another shade paler and they might have been albinos. Like Abigail Sterle, they were pious and humorless. But unlike the crone, they were sixteen years old and possessed the vigor of boys their age. It would have been easy for Thea to shrink under their unabashed ogling and sniggering. But she didn’t. Her life was difficult enough without the Meltmen boys’ attention.
Only when the codger bull cook passed through did Thea feel any sense of curiosity. If that was what she felt. She would never know his name, that old man so timeworn by his life in the wilderness. The whole liquid part of his eye — sclera, iris, pupil — was white as pearl and set deep in his wizened face. He might have been blind but for how he stepped around camp with complete sovereignty, less a cook than a bull. His position among the men puzzled Thea. One moment she’d see him hauling water up from the river, the yoke over his shoulders an ungodly cross for a man his age, and the next he’d be in private consul tation with the camp foreman. He would feed the horses, brand the lumber, tend the wanigan while the clerk took his evening constitutional, even distribute the mail on occasion. But whatever his errand or task, every man in the camp regarded him with the utmost respect.
Her only reprieve from the kitchen crew came from the hundred ravenous jacks. For fifteen minutes three times a day they descended on the mess, arriving in single file and leaving the same way. They all looked the same at a glance, so she learned to identify them by their grotesqueries: the missing fingers or hands, the peg legs, the hunchbacks, the harelips, the sunken chests, the pruritus and scabies. It seemed as if each of the men possessed some defect or wound. They did not speak but greeted her with grunts or pleasant nods, depending on their age or mettle. Some were churls, some gentlemen, but most had about them a halo of resignation so heavy as to mask character of any sort. Their ambivalence followed them into the mess and weighed heavy on the mood. Silence was the rule of the mess hall. So despite the clattering of tinware and shuffling of boots, despite the sighs and audible yawns, their presence at chowtime only made the dumbness of her days more oppressive.
The quiet might have been tolerable were it not for the close quarters. When word had come to the camp foreman that he would have two women in his charge — he’d been alerted only days before the crew of sawyers and teamsters had reported at the end of October — he’d had to fashion their accommodations quickly. Trond Erlandson had worked the northwoods for years and could remember the camboose shanties of the seventies. Therefore, he saw no reason the men should need separate bunkhouses and mess halls. He likewise could not come to peace with the idea of two women toiling under his watch. Unless they were selling hospital tickets or accompanied by their proprietor husbands, women were to be unseen. That was his belief. As such, he put little effort into their billet, ordering the bull cook and two others to extend the root cellar behind the kitchen.
In a single rainy afternoon they dug a den not seven feet deep. They fortified the dirt walls with pine planks and built a roof of the same. They tarred the seams of the roof and hung a curtain between the cellar and their hovel. Against opposite walls they built bunks with no more thought than they gave the woodbox, which they stashed beside the potbelly stove. Above each bunk candle sconces were hung without the least consideration for where the paraffin might drip. A pewter pitcher and basin were set atop the stove, a barrel opposite the woodbox on the floor, and a pail without a handle intended to suffice as chamber pot was tucked behind the curtain. As dusk settled the rain gave way to drizzle and each of the three men carried a bale of hay from the stable to the new burrow. Having spread half of the hay on the floor, they padded the bunks with what remained. Finally, they stood back and considered their work. One of the jacks said, “I’d not unbutton my britches to make water here, but it’ll do.”
The first days in camp the quarters actually appealed to Thea, contrary as they were to the ship’s berths where she’d spent so much of her recent time. At least here the squalor did not pitch and roll, was not rank with the smell of vomit, had not, in those first few days anyway, been infested with rodents and lice. Though it was true she could not stretch her arms fully above her head, though her bunk was b
arely wider than her thin hips, though it was true that when the autumn winds came howling through at night they sawed through her eiderdown as if it were no more than mosquito netting, she still possessed a sense of relief for having found a place to rest.
It was a mere ten sleepy steps from her bunk to the stove in the kitchen. She could retrace half of those steps to fetch stores from the cellar. And unless she was setting tables or making a trip to the privy she did not much move beyond that scant domain. By the time of the first snowfalls, she had begun to feel caged.
Each day after Thanksgiving the hours of daylight shriveled until it seemed there was hardly any purpose to the sun rising at all. And with each short day a definite restlessness settled into her. The jacks returned for lunch and for dinner with frosted coats, their faces hoary as ash, wraithlike. As their coats melted in the mess hall’s heat, they appeared to be vaporizing. Where once she had needed all her powers of concentration to perform her tasks, she now found herself with time to daydream. While plating their slices of pie she would puzzle over their evanescence as though it were a religious rite. Day after day they entered and took their seats and began their disappearance. It saddened her and scared her some, but mostly it simply mystified her.
She spent all her spare thoughts on the men, and what she discovered — for the first time in her life — was simple desire, as if their warming, their steaming, their appetite, the way they smelled, all of it fed this new thing in her. Each night, after the camp had settled, after she had finished her own duties and lay in bed exhausted, she would recall the subtlest moments: the way a man would rub the cold out of his hands, for example, or the way he would blow on his stew, any of a hundred such mundane habits. In her revisiting them, the moments became profound, delicious, and she would often find herself caressing the bottom of her belly or tracing her fingers up and down her neck, feeling for her quickening pulse.
With the New Year came the cold. Colder even than the bitterest days in Hammerfest. The first week of January Thea hardly slept for the whining from the horse barn. The accordion music from the bunk house that had been a Saturday night staple since her arrival ceased. And if such a thing were possible, the men found new measures of silence as they filed into the mess for their meals. In a vacant gesture the foreman began making rounds during breakfast, glad-handing the men as they sulked over their porridge and coffee, reminding them of their fortitude and stoutheartedness. Of course they left each morning into the frigid darkness, but the purpose in their step was visibly reduced.
The second week of January was colder still. Twice the temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero overnight, and on those mornings following, the murmurs in the mess hall began. Any speech at all was rebellion, but even the hardened bull cook seemed reluctant to enforce the rule of silence. From his stool at the head of the table, he looked thoughtful, judicial, even, as he contemplated the new boundaries of his order. The taciturn resignation in the men had given way to anger. They griped about the cold, about frostbite, about the snapped saw blades and shattering ax handles. The teamsters lamented the horses’ agony and their own. In all of this the bull cook and foreman indulged the men.
Thea was not so alarmed by the cold, partly because most of her day was spent near the comfort of the ovens and stoves and scullery fires but also because of her arctic childhood. So despite the turn to peevishness in the jacks, and despite the fact that she understood almost none of what they said, she actually welcomed the sound of their voices.
It was during the third week of January that something completely unexpected happened to Thea. After supper on Sunday, after most of the men had filed out of the mess and trudged back to their bunkhouse, one of the jacks stopped by the kitchen to address Thea. He was an old man, his lips cracked to the point of bleeding. He said his name was Rolf and that he had been asked by the bull cook to speak with her. He spoke in Norwegian, and the sound of her mother tongue after months of its absence almost made her cry. The old man must have sensed as much because he paused and smiled and patted the back of her hand. He then told her what he had to say was important. He reiterated that he was speaking on behalf of the bull cook, who was speaking on behalf of the foreman. Thea composed herself and sat down.
Rolf said that there had been reports from the jacks and teamsters of wolf sign. He said there were many wolves in the woods, and that in all his years of working in the forests, he’d never seen one himself. Given the horrendous cold, the wolves were perhaps getting desperate, and that was why they were encroaching on the camp. Were, in any case, coming nearer and nearer. He told her about the tracks on the river, about the scant moose and caribou, and that she was not to use the latrine without being accompanied by the old lady. The bull cook thought it best for the women to move as a pair until further notice. And then the old man nodded and left.
VI.
(March 1910)
In mid-March, along the river’s frozen waters, two thirteen-year-old boys shattered the glaze on a knee-deep and moon-shaped snow. They wore snowshoes they’d made of bent ash and moose gut. Their hats were beaver fur, trapped and skinned and finally sewn while they sat around the fire in the wigwam.
Odd and Danny Riverfish. They wore bowie knives on their belts and carried shotguns over their shoulders and they dragged a toboggan behind them. They were on their way to Danny’s traplines on Thistle Creek and in the beaver ponds above. Their play at being men was grave and full of purpose and hardly premature anymore.
“Maybe there’ll be some otter or marten, too,” Danny said.
“Otter’s good to eat. Pelts will fetch a fair price at the trading post. Maybe at Hosea’s,” Odd said, trying the woodsman’s banter he was just learning that winter.
“Loony Hosea.”
Odd smiled. “Yeah.”
Danny smiled back.
“How’s marten roasted up?” Odd said.
“We don’t eat marten.”
Odd nodded, committing to memory this new knowledge.
They went into the woods east of the lower falls. The water had cut through the snowpack and fell thunderously, icy mist rising into the clear, hard morning.
“You think Miss Huff will miss us today?” Odd asked.
“Miss Huff could make a forest fire boring. Besides, I don’t plan on ever going to that schoolhouse again. I’ve had enough of her goddamn Bible. Goddamn arithmetic. Arithmetic never got a beaver tail to fry up, did it?”
“Or a pelt to sell,” Odd said, then fell silent for a moment before he added, “She tells Hosea I’m truant and I’ll get the belt.”
“Someday you’ll be doing the belting.”
“I’ll never be able to whomp Hosea.”
“Sure, you will. Someday we’ll whomp him up together, steal his money.”
The mere thought of this made Odd despair. His feelings about Hosea were as complicated as his own true history. The only thing in his life that held any semblance of order was his friendship with Danny. They’d been fast friends since they could crawl. Miss Huff had been their teacher since kindergarten.
“I don’t mind her lessons,” Odd said. “Those Old Testament stories are about as scary as hell.”
“None of it makes the least damn sense. Fire and brimstone and a bunch of things to be scared of. Bunch of impossible rules. And she’s ugly as a pile of bear shit.”
“That’s plain meanness. She can’t help how she looks. And her Bible stories ain’t that different than those stories your grandpap tells around the fire.”
Daniel looked over his shoulder and smiled at his friend. It was his best feature, that smile. It conveyed a minute’s speech in a second’s time. “Grandpappy never whipped you if you doubted him, though, now, did he?”
Odd tried his turn at a smile.
“Did he?” Daniel persisted.
“No, he did not.”
“And besides, you think Miss Huff could tell you a damn thing about these woods? You think there’s secret directions in that black b
ook of hers on where to set your traps? Where to tap the maple trees come spring? Where to go ricing?”
“The woods ain’t everything, Danny.”
Daniel stopped, held his hands palms up. “What else do you see?”
It was true: The wilderness was ubiquitous, in all its guises. From where they stood he could see the cedar swamp east of the lower falls, knew it went from bog to basalt in a few mere steps, the rock rising sharply into bald outcroppings too steep to climb. This late in winter the lichen would have been eaten away by the surefooted caribou, their tracks were all over the place.
The outcropping went on for a mile, and they walked its base in silence until they heard the river falling at the Devil’s Maw.
“We’ll take a break at the river, eat those biscuits and bacon,” Danny said. They each had a pair of sandwiches in the pockets of their wool coats.
“I’m about hungry enough. That gruel Bekah cooks up in the morning is the worst.”
“You know, you can come live with us anytime you want.”
“I don’t think Hosea would like that very much.”
“Hosea. Pap says he’s two men at once.”
“I believe he might be.”
They walked through the edge of the woods to the river’s shore. Odd said, “It ain’t that I wouldn’t want to.”
“Want to what?”
“Live in the wigwam village.”
“It’s better than town,” Danny said.
“Sure is.”
They stood on the shore and unwrapped their sandwiches and drank cold coffee Odd had carried in the deer-hide wineskin.
“You got the land and farm now,” Danny said.
“It ain’t so bad at Hosea’s. Except he makes me go to school.”
“Plus you got Bekah.”
“Yep.”
“Well.”
They finished the coffee.