Power in the Blood (25 page)

“I thought he was a good gambler.”

“Alas, no, but he did have other talents he might not have shared with you. It may be that you have the nerve to be what he was after all.”

“What talents?”

Marion de Quille told him.

14

The first odor to greet his nostrils every morning was that of slightly damp socks. Most of the men washed their socks outside the cabin, then brought them in and hung them over the stovepipe that ran below the roof for several yards before angling up through the shingles. There were never less than two dozen pairs of socks draped over the pipe, scenting the cabin’s already foul air, a fetid brew of sweat-soaked clothing that somehow never merited the attention given to socks, of tobacco smoke, seldom-emptied spittoons, kerosene lamps, bad breath lightly disguised by whiskey, and lastly, since no window graced the cabin walls and the door was kept shut all night, the overpowering odor of stale farts. Altogether, it was enough to force a man from his bed even before Bruno the cook began pounding with his iron bar on the wake-up triangle outside.

Slade prided himself on being able to greet Bruno as the cook plodded toward the triangle. He knew it irritated the man that someone should be up before he had the opportunity to beat and bash the metal, jerking the camp into wakefulness. Slade knew he could never have risen before Bruno, since Bruno’s duties obliged him to be up and preparing breakfast for sixty men a full hour before the triangle woke everyone. It was satisfaction enough to be up and mobile before the clanging and banging began. Bruno went to bed early in any case, long before anyone else, so Slade felt his point was made, simply by his standing there with a smile when Bruno came across to the triangle with his iron bar. It was a ritual, and as all rituals are designed to do, it renewed Slade’s faith in himself and what he did.

Slade cut down trees; not ordinary trees—the largest trees in the world. They stood around the camp, dark titans looming in the morning mist, and he never failed to appreciate their size and their implacable stillness. The first branches of the redwoods began well over a hundred feet up the trunk. When the mist was thick, as it usually was, these lower branches were completely hidden till midmorning, so the trees stood like massive pillars in a chilly temple of air. Slade had heard that the largest redwoods were between two and three thousand years old. It was hard to credit such antiquity, but he believed it, and never approached one to bring it down with less than the respect he felt it deserved.

His fist was always the first to smash through a scum of ice that formed in the water barrel. A frigid splashing of the face was enough to bring about instant alertness. Slade was always waiting in the cookhouse when Bruno returned to sling his bar into a corner beside the massive stove.

The Northern California Timber Company was not niggardly with its fare. Every man could eat as much as he pleased at every meal, and loggers were not known for their lack of appetite. Ham, scrambled eggs, bacon, flapjacks: they were waiting by the plateful as the men straggled in, hitching suspenders over their shoulders, some still yawning the sleep from themselves. There was little conversation to mask the clattering of heavy-duty cutlery as they sat on the split-log benches and began serving themselves. Many of the men were foreigners with little English, and even these were disinclined to speak among themselves at so early an hour. The business at hand consisted of fueling the body for a day’s hard labor, not communication; that could wait for the evening, for the pipe smoking and harmonica playing and stilted camaraderie of the logging brethren.

Slade ate and ate. He was approaching middle age, but had never felt so strong, so powerful. This was truly the prime of his life, a time of intense happiness, and it came from the straightforward task of felling gigantic trees. Slade had toppled Douglas fir and Sitka spruce and Ponderosa pine up and down the Pacific coast, but he believed himself fulfilled only as the agent of destruction for the redwood. This was the giant, the tree of trees, and he felt he had earned for himself a place at the bole of the earth’s mightiest living thing, ax in hand.

It was the apex of his work among the limitless forests of the far west, this bringing down by sweat and toil of the high and mighty. Slade was a proud man, smart enough to base his pride on actual accomplishment. He pictured himself among these ancient colossi forever, or until such time as an accident took him. He could not conceive of himself as old, infirm, incapable of performing the work that made him a king within the limited realm of his kind. It would be a mercy, he sometimes thought, for a dislodged bough to come crashing down and crush him instantly, rather than to endure the humiliation of physical weakness, the gradual degeneration of his notion of himself.

He doubted that his fellow workers brooded on such topics. Slade knew his thoughts were of a far more complex nature than those of his fellows. He had never fit in, wherever he worked, and this fostered in him a sense of his own uniqueness. He ate his ham, wolfed down his bacon, drained cup after cup of gritty coffee like a god quaffing ambrosia.

Slade always walked ahead of the rest. The current felling area lay almost a mile from the camp, more than three from the mill. Morning was the best time, with mist still thick around him, and sometimes the faint salt smell of the ocean at Mendocino. If he got far enough ahead of the rest, he could barely hear their few words of talk.

The forest was capable of swallowing just about any sound man could make. Even the biggest sound, when a tree came crashing down, would reverberate for only a short time, then be gone. The sound of axes was puny, the bellowings of the oxen that hauled log sections down the skid road to the mill were as nothing. Slade’s voice was considered the loudest of any tree faller, but as it warned of another giant’s imminent collapse, it was only a squirrel squeak in the deep woods.

Every tree required two fallers working as a team to bring it down; every tree except the one Slade chose to work on. He worked alone, the only man in the company allowed to do so. He could not topple a redwood in the same time it took two men to do so, but he was never more than a day or so behind any regular team, and this in a field of work that often required a week’s solid work per tree. One man, performing the work of one and three-quarters men, but paid only one wage; it was an arrangement that made fiscal sense to Slade’s employers. He was too arrogant to be made a bull of the woods, or logging boss; Slade neither gave nor accepted orders. He would work in the same general area as lesser men, but never consent to be one of them. It was not company policy to allow exceptions to their rules, but in Slade’s case they relented; he was, after all, a legendary figure in the industry, therefore something of a bristling feather in their cap.

Slade’s tree of the moment was a monster of around two hundred feet, not the biggest he’d ever felled, nor the smallest. He had worked four days already on the undercut, the huge wedge-shaped bite taken from the bole near the redwood’s base. An ordinary team would deepen its axed-out undercuts with double-length crosscut saws and wedges before tackling the backcut, the smaller chunk, taken from the opposite side, that would cause the tree to topple. Not Slade; he required nothing but his double-bladed ax for both cuts.

Today he would begin the backcut. He had already directed the layout crew to prepare a long bed of boughs leading away from the trunk, in the direction Slade intended it should fall. He had placed a stake in the ground for them to work toward, and if his calculation and skill were of the usual order, this stake would be driven into the ground by the upper reaches of the descending redwood. The crew had done a good job, he saw, arranging the lopped boughs and covering them with great swaths of bark peeled from previously felled trees, to make a soft landing bed for Slade’s latest conquest. With a little luck and several buckets of sweat, it would hit the earth before daylight was done.

The work was performed as art, as self-expression. Slade poured himself into every swing of the ax, working with rhythm, no movement wasted, taking each bite from the precise spot he aimed for. He was aware at every moment of what he was about, allowed no thought to distract him, not even the simplest. He knew this ability to empty his mind completely was as important to his skill as the superior strength in his arms and back. He knew of men who had died horribly because of wavering concentration. To Slade’s way of thinking, those men had betrayed themselves, revealed their inferiority, and paid the price. He had no sympathy for them, nor would he have sympathy for himself if he should ever let his attention wander. That was a fate for others. If he should die in the woods, it would not be any fault of his own; the tree that killed him would be brought down by almighty God, no less.

He drank often from the two-gallon jug that accompanied him each day, felt the water flood through him and out his pores minutes later, a constant irrigation or oiling of the engine within. When the sound of other axes was stilled around noon, Slade drove his blade lightly into the trunk below the narrow springboard he stood upon to work, jumped to the board below that, and from there to the ground, where his lunch pail stood beside the jug. Inside were the usual two-inch-thick beef sandwich and the heavy oatcake or sweet bread Bruno and his assistant prepared for the pails that every faller collected on his way out of the cookhouse. It never varied beyond the oatcake/sweet bread alternate, but Bruno received no complaints.

When he was done with eating, Slade contemplated his place in the universe, and found it satisfactory. His primitive state of bliss renewed, as it was over every lunch, Slade allowed himself a brief nap, into which no dream intruded. He awoke at the first thud of a distant ax, raised himself up and stretched like an animal well content, without enemies, a creature belonging body and soul to its time and place in the natural order of things. He leapt to the first springboard, and to the next, yanked his ax from the tree and drew it slowly back for the first of the final series of blows that would bring it down.

He worked without pause until the backcut had been deepened to a dangerous extent, then cupped both hands around his mouth and bellowed at his loudest, “She faaaaaalls …!” This was a phrase of Slade’s own invention; let the rest of them holler “Timmmm-berrrrr …” like so many echoes of each other; Slade had his own holler, because he had his own way of making a redwood fall. The cry he gave was a summons to anyone in the vicinity to come see an event such as they would see nowhere else in the tall woods, the thing that had made the name of Slade synonymous with daring and bravado and—the ingredient guaranteeing legendary status—a touch of magic.

They were already running through the trees to be nearby when the tree came down. It gave Slade pleasure to see them flocking toward him this way, like so many ardent followers answering his call from the tower, adherents to the creed of Slade. Soon there were three dozen or more, standing at a respectable distance from Slade’s tree.

He jumped down from the backcut boards, marched around to the undercut and launched himself up the boards remaining below it until he could stand in the cut itself, the sloping roof of the missing wedge several feet above his bushy head. He stood with hands on hips, his back to the narrowed waistline of wood still supporting the two hundred feet of tonnage above. The redwood could begin to fall at any moment, depending on the winds, and the recess in which Slade chose to stand was the most dangerous, since a toppling tree could shatter at its narrowest place and drive splinters ten feet long into the region cleared by the faller’s ax, or if it did not, the ragged end of the separated trunk could spring back into that same space when its upper branches hit the ground so far away and sent a reciprocal, gargantuan twanging back along its own length to the point of injury and despoilment.

Nonetheless, Slade chose to stand there, smiling at his audience, and when he judged the moment was right, he looked up at the partial vault of wood above, its sap bleeding in droplets onto his beard. This was the time of Slade’s magic, the conjuring of the right wind from just the quarter he required, a gentle stirring among the high treetops that soon was causing his redwood to groan and squeal like a mast bent on unstepping itself before the elements. The wood behind Slade began to splinter. Another faller would have jumped for safety then, but he remained as before, beaming his rigid smile, and moved his boots not an inch. If the wind shifted, if it happened to reverse itself then, he stood a fair chance of being caught in the undercut’s closing maw: but the breeze favored Slade as always, and pushed his ailing giant in precisely the direction he wished.

The massive trunk began its protracted fall, the fulcrum of its descent mere yards behind Slade’s heedless back. Now the length of it was quivering as if in pain, as the crown arced downward past the tree’s own offspring, gathering speed at the forty-five-degree mark, accelerating from there to the forest floor, where it smashed itself down along the prepared alignment of boughs and bark, its arrival tossing earth and matter into the air, the ground itself buckling and recovering itself in a series of shudderings that were felt through the boots of every onlooker. Their eyes were on the jagged splayings of wood at the trunk’s end, horizontal splinters liable at a second’s notice to spring backward, impaling him. But they did not, and while the dust of impact hung in the air still, and the earth seemed to vibrate inside their legs, Slade’s admirers watched as he executed a stiffly mocking bow to their faces.

Tomorrow the peelers would strip the giant’s foot-thick bark: then the buckers would attack it with their crosscut saws, dividing the trunk into manageable lengths; the choker setters would follow in turn, to lash the truncated sections with cable so the bullwhackers could harness each section to their teams of oxen and haul it down greased skid roads to the millyard.

There the redwood would be further reduced by an assortment of screaming metal blades, its bulk halved and quartered by endless bandsaws; then would come the series of belittlings that rendered a colossus into squared railroad ties, or so many board feet of planking; at its most humbling, the tree’s great bulk became roofing shingles a mere twelve inches long. All of this, tie or board or shingle, would be dumped into the stream-fed flume that would carry it to the coast along forty-three miles of man-made water road, a narrow rushing rivulet contained within banks planed from the most serviceable lumber around—redwood.