MB01 - Unending Devotion (7 page)

She couldn’t rid herself of the memory of Jimmy’s body pressed against hers. And the thought of how close she’d come to ending up defiled . . . like Daisy.

Oh, Daisy.
Her heart cried with all the torment of the past months. What had gone wrong? Why had her sister done the unthinkable?

Where was the little girl that had once snuggled against her in the bed they’d shared at the orphanage?

Lily had always been the one to stop Daisy’s trembling—especially in the early days after relatives had given up caring for them and dumped them on the doorstep of the New York Foundling Hospital. She’d kissed away Daisy’s frightened tears. She’d made sure Daisy was safe and fed—even when she’d had to go without. She’d given Daisy as much of her heart as she possibly could.

So why hadn’t Daisy turned to her? Why had she chosen to sell her body and soul instead?

If Lily slept at all, it was fitfully, and when morning arrived, she had a hard time dragging herself out of the saggy bed to participate in a short worship service that Mr. Sturgis, the grocer, conducted in the dining room for a handful of sober and God-fearing townspeople. As in most of the new lumber communities, churches were scarce. Harrison didn’t have a single one or a reverend.

By the time she and Oren arrived at the first lumber camp and set up the photography equipment later that morning, the usual low gray clouds had dissipated and glorious sunshine brightened the sky.

She turned her face to the warm rays and let the light caress her sun-starved skin. “Oh, beautiful sunshine,” she said with a smile.

“Not half as beautiful as you,” said one of the shanty boys standing in line waiting for Oren to take his picture.

She wanted to throw out her hands and twirl in delight at the rare day of delicious sunshine, but she was already the main attraction for the shanty boys, and they didn’t need any more encouragement to stare at her.

Many of the men were still snoring in their bunks—probably sleeping off drunken stupors. But there were plenty who were taking advantage of the break from their regular lumber duties. One woodsman-turned-barber was giving haircuts near the bunkhouse door. Another man was sitting on a stump cutting patches for his pants from a grain sack. Still others were using the free day to launder their clothes.

Some of the camps had the rule that all crew members had to wash their underwear at least once every fortnight. Even in the dead of winter, boil-up day was a regular Sunday occupation—usually inside the cramped bunkhouse.

But today, with the touch of warmth, the men had dragged the scrub boards, wooden tubs, and yellow lye soap out into the trampled yard. Heaps of dirty clothing lay in piles on the slushy ground.

Steam rose from the hot water, which was already gray—almost black—from the flannel and homespun clothes the men were rubbing against the corrugated tin washboards.

Lily knew her clothes were overdue for a good washing. And Oren’s were too. But the hard task was one she’d never relished, especially in the cold of winter, when the clothes took twice as long to dry and ended up stiff and difficult to put back on.

“Stop all your wiggling and foolish grinning,” Oren called to the man who was posing with a cant hook that was nearly as tall as he was, counting the long steel hook at its end. “What do you think this is? A tryout for the circus?”

The man puffed out his chest and attempted to make his expression more serious and manly. Lily couldn’t understand why smiling was discouraged. Sure, it was difficult to hold the smile for the length of time it took the photographer to capture the pose onto the dry plate. But still . . . if she ever had the chance to have her picture taken, she’d smile as big as she could. If she had to leave an imprint of herself for all time, she wanted it to reflect the happiness of her life, not the heartache.

Oren lumbered to the front of his Centennial perched on a tripod mount. The box camera was made of fine mahogany but had all the scratches and gouges that traveling brought. Oren wiped the glass of the brass lens with a soft cloth. Then he adjusted the faded red leather bellows that were creased and cracked with wear.

At a dollar a picture, he wasn’t making a fortune taking pictures of the shanty boys. But it was good steady work all winter and supplemented the earnings from his photography gallery in Bay City, which he’d left in the capable hands of his partner.

“How much for a picture with the girl?” one of the men called, nodding at Lily.

Another man whistled and others chortled.

Oren stiffened. He tipped up his derby, and his eyebrows narrowed into a scowl. “I’ve got two rules here today, boys.”

Lily stifled a smile. She’d heard Oren’s lecture plenty of times. She could only imagine what he’d say if he found out about Jimmy Neil’s attack of the night before. He’d never let her go anywhere by herself again.

Oren pulled his corncob pipe out of his mouth and pointed the stem at the men.

“One—you keep your filthy hands off Lily, and I’ll keep my hands off your puny chicken necks.”

Except for the rhythmic ring of hammer on anvil coming from the crudely built log cabin that served as a shop for the camp blacksmith, silence descended over the clearing.

“Two,” Oren continued, “you keep your shifty eyes off Lily, and I’ll keep from blowing a hole through your pea-brain heads.”

With that, he toed the rifle, which he always laid on the ground in front of the tripod. She saw no need to tell them Oren had never shot anyone, at least not yet.

Even if the men didn’t stop looking at her, at least Oren’s rules kept them from pestering her. In fact, she might even take a chance at going to the cook’s shack to see if he would have a decent cup of coffee that she could have. After surviving on Vera’s bitter brew the past few days, Lily was more than ready for a real cup.

She glanced around the camp at the scattering of log buildings. In addition to the bunkhouse and blacksmith shop, there was a log barn that housed the teams of oxen. The cook’s shack connected to another large log building that was likely the dining hall. A smaller hut sat off to one side, and Lily guessed it was the van, the office and home of the camp foreman and his scaler.

The door of the van swung open, and her heart did a flip of surprise when Connell McCormick stepped out, deep in conversation with an older lumberman whom she guessed to be the foreman.

For a moment she stared at Connell, at the gold strands of his hair that the bright sunshine highlighted, the fresh cleanness of his mackinaw in comparison to the foreman’s, and his purposeful stride.

The lines of his forehead wrinkled with seriousness as he talked with the foreman. There was a refined, educated look to Connell’s face. And yet the strong lines of his jaw and nose defined him as a man worth reckoning.

Would he be surprised to see her? She swatted at the fresh mud splats on her skirt, hoping they weren’t too noticeable. What would he say to her?

She waited for him to lift his head, for his green eyes to find her as they had in the dining room of the hotel. Her heart pattered faster with the thought of how he’d defended her honor against Jimmy Neil, how he’d watched after her and protected her.

But without casting even the slightest glance in her direction, Connell and the foreman headed toward the narrow-gauge tracks that ran through the middle of the camp. No longer were the lumber camps solely dependent on the snow and ice for transporting logs. The railroads meant they could carry on their lumbering operations year-round.

She could only shake her head at the piles of cut logs lining the track, waiting to be loaded and shipped to the main railway track in Harrison, the Pere Marquette line. She’d learned that from there, they were moved to the river-banking ground in Averill to await the spring thaw. Then the logs would be floated down the rivers until they reached the sawmills of Saginaw and Bay City.

The longer she’d traveled around central Michigan, the more saddened she’d grown to see the widespread destruction of miles and miles of forests and the devastation left in the wake of the lumber companies when they moved on.

Even though God had placed a burden on her heart to rescue lives, she’d begun to think that maybe the land needed some rescuing too.

As she continued her task of writing down names and collecting money from the men awaiting their pictures, she tried to focus on the task of asking about Daisy and whether any of them had seen or heard of her. But she couldn’t keep from peeking at Connell and watching him at work.

The foreman followed Connell around, his hands stuffed into the tight pockets of his trousers, the weathered lines in his face growing more worried.

“Looks like the boss man is figgering out how he can get more work out of us,” one of the shanty boys grumbled under his breath.

Boss man? Lily followed the man’s narrowed eyes back to Connell.

Under the rising temperature of day, Connell had discarded his mackinaw and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing thick arms. With the help of another man, he lifted a log onto the back of a half-filled flat car, and his well-defined biceps bulged under the strain.

Her stomach fluttered with strange warmth. He was obviously a strong man and a hard worker. But was he the boss of the camp?

“I ain’t gonna work on Sunday,” another man muttered. “The boss man can if he wants. But I need my Sundays to catch an extra forty winks.”

Surely Connell wasn’t the one in charge of all the destruction and mayhem at this camp. The ruination of this beautiful forest.

But even as her heart fought to deny the accusation, her head told her it was true. It made perfect sense that he was the boss. He was too educated, too polite, too polished, and entirely too clean to be an ordinary shanty boy.

She didn’t know why she hadn’t realized it sooner.

A lump of disappointment lodged in her chest. She didn’t know why the revelation saddened her, but it did.

At a tiny meow and a bump against her shin, Lily forced her attention away from Connell to a skinny kitten rubbing against her leg.

“Well now. What do we have here?” She bent and scratched the cat’s head between its ears.

A tabby painted with the same streaks as a faint evening sunset peered up at her with hungry eyes.

“Oh, he’s just the camp mouser.” The shanty boy closest to her gave the cat a shove with the spikes of his boot, sending the tiny creature scurrying across the slushy clearing toward the edge of the forest and the fence of tall pines that hadn’t yet suffered the sharp teeth of the crosscut saw.

“That was cruel.” Lily scowled at the man and then started after the kitten. “Come here, kitty.”

She patted her coat pocket and felt the bump from the two molasses cookies Vera had given her the night before. She’d wrapped them in a handkerchief, intending to have them for breakfast. But she wouldn’t mind sharing some with the cat. The scrawny fellow looked like it needed the sustenance more than she did.

Following the cat’s paw prints, she tramped toward the forest edge. Her boots sloshed in the mixture of melting snow and mud. “Here, kitty-kitty,” she called as she ducked past a low pine sapling and over the rotting remains of a windfall.

She caught a glimpse of muted orange in the spiky tamaracks that grew among a confusion of vines and broken tree limbs. She darted after the cat, lifting her skirt to make the chase easier. Following the flashes of color, she headed deeper into the grove until she lost sight of the kitten altogether.

Sucking in a deep breath of the pine-laced air, she stopped. She’d be a fool to keep going and chance getting lost. Besides, even though Oren was used to her escapades—especially when it came to small helpless animals—she’d worry him if she were gone too long. He had always warned her not to stray too far.

Although she wasn’t much of a worrier herself, she couldn’t keep from glancing around with a shiver of fear. Only the wide trunks of the tall pine trees surrounded her.

The shadows swayed, and her body tightened with the thought that Jimmy Neil might spring out from behind one of the enormous trunks and pounce on her.

It was a silly thought, she knew. She hadn’t seen him among the shanty boys back at the camp. He was likely nowhere near. But for a long moment, she stood absolutely still and listened.

The thud of her heart echoed through her head.

Finally, convinced she was alone, she glanced up the trunk of the tree closest to her. The rippled brown trunk towered high into the air. The tree was an endless pole rising into the sky to the top, where a canopy of green boughs formed a roof that blocked out the sunshine, except for shifting flecks that left quick kisses on her flushed face.

Even though she’d been in plenty of Michigan forests over the winter, the magnificence never failed to amaze her. Every time she stood in an undisturbed grove of white pine and gazed at the enormity of their beauty, she imagined she was in a cathedral—a natural God-made cathedral.

A breeze caught the boughs, and they began to awaken and murmur among themselves. In a few seconds they grew louder, humming like a choir beginning their warm-up.