Medicine Walk (10 page)

His father became the scratch of a pencil nub on paper in the wavered light of a candle. He became the faraway look in his mother’s eyes as she wrote, staring into the candle flame for minutes at a time. He became the long act of waiting. He became the flash of him, white as a bone and clenched in his mother’s hand. The words she read, moving her lips, her finger tracing them across paper crumpled and creased from being composed against a root or stump or the broad back of a fellow hunched in a foxhole in places with strange names
she couldn’t pronounce. He became the sound of those words read to him in the flickering light. Then he became the taste of beef, the feel of new shirts against his skin, and new stout shoes on his feet. He was in the tiny wads of bills that sometimes arrived with the letters that became a slingshot for him, a pale blue dress with white polka dots and a kerchief to match for his mother.

“For the train,” she said to him. “For when he comes home.”

The war was the knowledge that things could be missed.

His father became weeks of worry. The tiny lines that broke out overnight across his mother’s brow, at the edge of her eyes, the back of her hands, and the steady, downward droop of her mouth. Her back huddled in the doorway looking out across the stretch of land, smoke from a cigarette around her like a rain cloud bearing the tears she would never let him see. He became silence. Nights of it. Mornings stretched to their limit by it. Days chinked with it like mud and straw stuffed into the gaps between boards to keep a chill wind from whistling through. The silence lived in her face, moved in her step and her hands when she touched him. It became the outline he could see walking the fields and meadows in the glimmering light of evening. His father. Grinning. Waving. Free of whatever terrors he lived with. Silence became his lullaby and it served him until one day a man stood in the doorway and his mother collapsed on the floor, sobbing, wailing, punching the rough boards, entrenched in a grief so deep and sudden it scared him and he had to run, chasing the vague outline of his father across the fields and hollering as loud as he could, spitting snot, and blood from where he’d bitten through his lip. The war became the knowledge that life can strip you raw, that some holes are never
filled, some gaps not chinked, some chill winds relentless in their pitch and yowl.

His mother was lessened by the loss of his father. He could see that. He could feel it. She took to dancing in the polka-dot dress. Twirling, sashaying, dipping, and spinning to music he couldn’t hear, her arms clenched about herself. Other times the blank look on her face, one hand reaching out to a space that would never be filled, the fingers curling slowly, the hand drawn back to her face to cup her mouth and chin. The absence like the space between words. “You’re the man now,” she said softly one night. He didn’t even know she knew he was there, half hidden behind the door jamb, watching, remembering. She swept a wisp of hair back from her brow and he liked the smallness of the gesture. It made her girl-like. She was small in the dress. He wanted to protect her.

So work became his war. He turned thirteen and he became serious. Grave. He bent to the work that came to him with an expression that appeared cold, angry perhaps, and he attacked it with what some took as vengeance. But it was just his way. He worked like a grown man, like how his father worked.

They travelled in a battered caravan of rusted trucks and broken cars held together with wire and poor welds, stacked and stuffed with tools and gear, furniture and possessions. They followed rumours of work. They slept by day and drove at night in order to arrive at a place when the light was breaking and put in a full day’s work from the get-go. They were fruit pickers, wood cutters, tree planters, fish gutters, trench diggers, stall muckers, and the lucky few with a skill set were itinerant masons, carpenters, and welders. For the most part
they were lucky to get on anywhere and they took whatever they could get if it meant full bellies.

“There’s those that would try to take advantage of us now,” his mother told him. “We got to pay our own way.”

They wound back and forth across the mountain ranges to the flatlands and back again. They found dams and earthworks and paving crews and one summer the whole lot of them worked a railroad section, levelling track and clearing bush. There were trailers to live in and food was run in regular by train. There was nowhere to spend wages and they came out of it with full pockets and high hopes. He was almost fourteen. His growth had hit, and he gained six inches over the course of the winter. He towered over his mother and the work had made him thicker so that he had the look of a man. He could haul a chainsaw through thick brush to buck deadfall. He could slam a tamping bar under railroad ties for hours to pack the gravel in. He was strong. Purposeful. He earned his keep. Every payday he would hand the full packet to his mother without a word. She’d look at him and nod and he would take that as his measure and be proud.

No one bothered them about school. They were transient and never in one place long enough to garner attention or else tucked away in a work camp far from truant officers or social workers. He got educated in the ins and outs of machinery and tools. He learned to read moving parts and the sound of engines so he could fix things before they broke. He learned the geometry of framing and the science of planting and harvest and by the time he was full-on fourteen he understood the mathematics of earned money. There were books too. His mother read to him every night and he came to love the sound of her voice in the flicker of firelight
or candle and the worlds spun into being by Dickens, Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson. He never found a facility with words himself. It didn’t matter. He was a worker. The more they travelled the more he absorbed and he became a jack of all trades, fluent in the language of workers and the unspoken dialect of sweat and strain.

Jimmy Weaseltail became his best friend. His only friend. Jimmy’s father’s roots were Blood tribe and his mother was a skinny, long-haired woman named Spence from a small town in Ontario. Jimmy was their only son. He had four sisters and he was the eldest. The other kids had dolls and toys and carefree hours to spend at play. But Jimmy’s dad had been crippled in a construction accident and there was no one else but him to take up the load. They worked together. The two of them tackled everything they could and if a foreman or a lead hand doubted their abilities in the beginning, they were convinced and sold on their grit, gumption, and utility by the end of the job. They pushed each other. They found the ebb and flow of their energies and their skills and a natural rhythm of work that made them a seamless unit. The pair of them trundled wheelbarrows, staggered under bundles of cedar shakes, dug post holes, mucked stalls, and forked hay. They could outwork grown men and on most jobs were elevated to harder, more challenging work that paid bigger money. That it was sometimes dangerous did not concern them. Or slow them down. Instead, they’d grin and get down to it, each of them driven by the presence of the other. The men around them spoke of the whoops of laughter that came from them even as earth, wood, steel, and rock flew or was crushed or stacked or hauled on shoulders frightening in their strength for two so young. They were working men. It was all they knew.

“What’s fired together is wired together,” Jimmy would say.

“Joined by sweat and muscle,” he’d reply.

“Forged by steel.”

“Welded by grit.”

“Screwed by circumstance.”

It became their running joke.

Jimmy liked to hear his mother read too. The three of them would sit together and the words would join them. His mother’s voice. His friend: open-mouthed and gazing at her in wonder, agog at the way words filled space. The smell of grease, oil, wood, dirt, and stone that clung to them like a cloud, wafted to the ceiling on candlelight and words. This was the stuff of his childhood. These were the recollections he stored within himself. The toil and the drudge and the relentless job-to-job trek, lost in the magic of that; the spill of words from a page and the feeling of togetherness in whatever meagre shelter they could afford or were provided. His idea of family forever locked in the shared embrace of story.

“You think when I’m old enough I could marry your mom?” Jimmy asked him one day.

He laughed. “You crazy? She’d never have a runt like you.”

“I work bigger.”

“Takes more’n that.”

“Oh, yeah. Like what?”

“I dunno. I guess ya kinda gotta be like them guys in the stories.”

“White guys?”

“No. Heroes.”

“Like your dad?”

He remembered looking at the sky. It was a hard blue like his mother’s eyes when she looked at him like she was reading
a book. He felt the sting of tears, the salt of them, their taste at the back of his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “Like that.”

Summer. 1948. They wound their way from Alberta to the Yukon and then south, downward into the Nechako Valley. Half the men got hired on with a logging company. While the men felled and bucked, he and Jimmy became boomers, working flotillas of logs and corralling them into booms for the long float downriver to the sawmill at Parson’s Gap. They were nimble and quick and the work became a game. They used the pike poles like cudgels and swung and bashed at each other, fighting for balance on the roll of the logs. They never bought into the danger. Never gave a moment’s thought to the current beneath the logs, the weight of them that could crush a man in a single bob or block his reach for air. They loved the river. The silvered serpentine look of it. The smell. They loved the feel of open space around them, the trees, rocks, and lines of vertiginous cliff and ridge that framed the river valley. The sky hung above it all rich as a promise, and days were spiked with the energy of labour and the thrill of the boom.

Lester Jenks. He was the boom foreman. He was a New Brunswicker, raised in logging camps and lumberjacking full-time by the time he was their age. He liked their bravado, the aplomb they brought to the art of the boom, and he encouraged their play and rambunctiousness.

“A cautious man’ll die out here,” he told them. “You need to be playful as an otter and sturdy as a bear. That’s what’ll save your skin in this job.”

Jenks taught them to log roll. He showed them the footwork that would keep a log spinning in the froth and yet
allow them to work it, manoeuvre it, herd it into the boom, and rest it lightly against the outside logs. When they fell he laughed. When they cussed and clambered out, water peeling off them like sheets of light, he slapped them hard on the back and showed them one more time. Jenks was fast. He was a tall, athletic, heavy man but light on his feet, agile, and completely fearless. The look on his face when he worked the log was one-half childish delight and one-half jubilation like a demon cajoling souls, and the faster he spun a log beneath his feet the more crazed and flushed his face became. They learned to mimic him.

Together he and Jimmy would spin a timber in the flow. They’d stand a few yards from each end and run. The log would slip in the water and twirl slowly at first until they picked up speed and then it would spew froth out behind it as they ran. Then they’d exchange a look and reverse it. They’d catch the log lightly with the hobs of their boots, slow it, coax it to a roll, and then run again and spin it the other way while Jenks watched and applauded their skill. It became a dance they did, another entrance into manhood burgeoning at the edges of the boom. The two of them set out against the river. The logs at their feet. The bob of them. The airy feel of suspension. Weightless. Then the impossible release of gravity as they ran and spun the log, churning the water and moving it forward and backward, locked in rhythm, eyeing each other, daring each other, the current, the flow, the muscle of the river forgotten until all that existed was the speed and the pitch and bob of logs in the water and the feel of them free, unencumbered and uncontained.

“Where’d you get the moxie?” Jenks asked one day over lunch.

“My dad rodeo-ed,” Jimmy said. “Bulls. Didn’t pay none so he quit.”

“You?” Jenks asked him.

“Don’t know,” he said. “It’s the action. The thrill to it.”

“Like the feel of danger, do ya?”

“Don’t feel dangerous.”

“What’s it feel then?”

He thought for a moment. “Free, I guess. Like I’m doin’ what I gotta do and there ain’t nothin’ much to stop me.”

“Said like a true daredevil. I can trust a man like that,” Jenks said.

They spent a long time talking. Jenks knew the ins and outs of logging and he shared adventures from camps from Nova Scotia to northern Quebec. He’d wandered west on a whim one year and came to love the rugged interior mountains. There was work from Vancouver Island to the northern border to Alaska but he favoured the Nechako. He’d never been much to settle but found a cabin to his liking and a truck he’d come to love.

“And a passable dog,” he said with a laugh. “Fellas been known to make a home with less, I figure.”

So he told Jenks about the caravan, about the winding road that led to jobs, the things he’d done for money, and then he told him about his father, the war, and about his mother.

“She’s where I got so strong,” he said. “When my dad died she just got even more gumption. I use that. The sight of her. It keeps me going.”

He told him about the feeling of words spun out of the darkness and how the sound of her voice reading to them became someone painting images in the light of candles on
the walls or firelight on the branches of trees. He told him how her voice held his world together.

“I could use me some of that,” Jenks said.

At first it was shared meals in the cookhouse where his mother worked. Jenks listened to their talk and marvelled at how easy it came out of them. Then stews and soups and plates carried over to the shack they called home. The candles, the talk eased and made merrier by the flow of wine and beer that Jenks seemed never in shortage of. He watched his mother’s face change in the light of the man’s attention. She became girlish; shy, then bursting out into soft blooms of laughter, one hand covering her mouth. Jenks himself grew more animated, sparkling in her company, the rough and manly jokes making Jimmy and him gape at the daring it took to say them in front of a woman. She never complained. Instead, she came to share his boisterous energy and they rollicked in the wash of the tales she spun of camps and fields and tough men and tougher women. Later, when the words from the books quieted them down, her face composed itself into lines and edges gilded by the soft yellow candlelight, framed in the rapture of magic spells cast by faceless men in a long ago time, and they were hushed and dazzled, made into children again, and each of the three of them loved her for her acts of conjuring, shifting nights into days of adventure, daring, and mystery. The words compelling in the textures she wove them in. The dreams made real by the shifts of tone, emphasis, and the long, almost painful pauses she held them with, restrained and breathless, until released into the flow of the tale again. He watched Jenks reach one callused finger out to touch the back of her hand one night and the edges of her lips curled into a small smile while she read.