Power in the Blood (26 page)

Slade knew little and cared less about this end result of his handiwork; the sawing and dicing of timber was a task for little men. Once the living tree was down, Slade’s part in its termination became an event from yesterday, a thing to be proud of, surely, but not to be contemplated overlong. Slade knew the men who owned the mill, and others like it from San Francisco to the Canadian line, were millionaires, but he could never bring himself to consider them more important than himself. They were puny fellows, he supposed, with whitened skin and dry coughs; one strong breath from Slade’s lungs would have knocked the lot of them off their pins. Slade had no wish to earn vast sums of cash; no amount of wealth could have brought him the one thing he already had, a reputation as the best faller in the western woods. He had earned it. It was his, and he wore it like a crown.

Hartley and Hubert Louther owned the Northern California Timber Company. Hartley was the older brother by six years, and made a habit of reminding Hubert of his inferior status. Hartley tended to make the larger business decisions on behalf of them both, but was prepared to leave the bookkeeping and accounts entirely in Hubert’s hands. Hartley was content with the arrangement; Hubert was not. Transplanted New Englanders, they ran the tightest and most profitable logging operation in Mendocino County.

Neither their admirers nor their detractors were fully aware of the bad feeling that existed between the Louther brothers. Their mill and lumber shipping concerns had been developed by their father, Hartley Senior, and his firstborn had always known himself to be the true heir. Hubert might disagree, and often did, but was silenced each time by an offer to buy him out. Hubert didn’t want to leave the company or the Louther mansion outside Ukiah; he wanted to own it all and throw his bullying older brother out on his pompous ear.

The rift between them widened when Hartley married a young lady who happened to conform almost exactly with Hubert’s notion of the ideal woman. Susan was not perfect, of course, since she had accepted a boor like Hartley for her spouse, when she could just as well have chosen Hubert instead, but Hubert forgave her; Susan was very young, hardly responsible for the magnitude of her error.

Hubert made love to his sister-in-law with his eyes for months before confessing his feelings toward her. Susan stared at him, then laughed at the expression of anguish on his pudgy face and said, “Oh, Hubert, you are such a silly boy. Now I won’t say a thing to Hartley, because he may not understand you were only making a joke, but just you keep your silly jokes to yourself in future, or I might change my mind, and then where would you be?” She capped this with a lighthearted laugh.

Crushed, Hubert slunk into Ukiah to find solace at his favorite den of low vice, an unpretentious brothel run by a Mrs. Clancy. After sobbing onto the breast of Mrs. Clancy’s newest girl, Hubert went downstairs to get very drunk.

Toward evening, he looked up from his mug to see before him the largest man God was capable of assembling without recourse to the term “giant.” He was alarmingly, stunningly, unavoidably large, and Hubert could not help but stare at the fellow’s sheer massiveness. He watched as this Goliath began climbing the stairs behind a girl who appeared quite inadequate for the work in store, and heard the woodwork groan beneath his Brobdingnagian boots. What a creature! It could only be a logger.

Hubert fell to musing, suddenly uninterested in his beer. Several years earlier, brother Hartley had hired a man with the reputation of being able to perform the work of two ordinary fallers, a muscular but otherwise unremarkable-looking axman by the name of Slade. Hartley had done it because he wanted the Northern California Timber Company to have on its payroll the acknowledged best in the business. Slade hired on, and had stayed in the logging camp all this time, never coming down from the mountains with the rest of the men to blow off steam in establishments such as Mrs. Clancy’s.

He was considered something of a mystery man, this Slade, one whom no amount of questioning could tempt to answer the simplest question. It had been a sharp move on Hartley’s part to bring Slade into the fold, even Hubert agreed, since Slade’s mere presence granted the falling team a glamour it might otherwise not have had. Contenders for the woodsy laurels Slade wore had come forward from time to time, and what Hubert referred to as “hacking contests” were held to determine which was the better man. Slade had won all of these without real effort.

Hubert knew, as if the fact had been whispered in his ear by angels, that the hulking creature whose footsteps could at that moment be heard above was a foe worthy of Slade, just as Hubert was himself a worthy successor to Hartley at the company helm. The unrelated nature of these clashes was already blurring in Hubert’s imagination, becoming as one.

He ordered a fresh beer, in a celebratory mood, but ignored it when it arrived; he must keep his head clear for the bargaining and cajolery that undoubtedly would be required to convince even so large a man as the one directly above him (Hubert could hear the bedsprings now, and changed tables) that he could beat the company’s reigning champion.

A whisper traveled up-country to the mill, and from there to the camp: a new man was coming, a big man, a veritable giant, and a mean master of the double-bladed ax. When every ear had received the rumor, and every mind digested it, every eye turned to Slade for his reaction.

True to form, he said nothing, although it was clear he had heard the whisper around him, and was mulling it over in his own imperturbable fashion. The team would have been disappointed had he spoken of this topic that seemed to fill the cabin. Slade’s response was the appropriate one: say nothing, wait and see. It could well be that the whisper had exaggerated the new man’s size and prowess, as whispers often did.

Bruno noticed, next morning, the increased appetite of nearly everyone. The logging team scoffed their food and looked at each other often, as if sharing some obscure joke among themselves. He knew it was the whisper that had done this, stimulated them to eat more than their usual heaped portions. For the first time since he could remember, he was obliged to make second helpings of almost everything, and that did not sit well with Bruno, for whom the art of estimating in advance the needs of the communal belly was a source of professional pride.

There had been other whispers, other new men who came with the specific intent of besting Slade. Bets were placed, axes sharpened; wood chips flew like angry bees, and closely tallied scores were kept, sometimes for days on end, as the contender kept pace with Slade. But in the end these aspirants faded, their strength gone, seemingly sucked from them by Slade, who never once appeared to tire. There had been a close-run thing some years ago, when a big Swede came closer than any man before him to breaking the magical hold Slade had on winning, but even that one had given out in the end, in a most spectacular manner; gouts of blood had suddenly spewed from his mouth, and he fell from his springboard to the forest floor, stone dead before the nearest man could even reach him. Slade had continued hacking until his tree came down, then wandered over to witness the sorry fate of the Swede. Naturally, he said nothing.

It would have been gratifying, Bruno thought, if Slade could be brought to his knees just once, to teach him a lesson in humility. Bruno had experienced a great many of these lessons in his life, and resented Slade’s apparent ability to escape the vicissitudes, great and small, that bedevil the affairs of ordinary men. Slade’s reputation appeared bulletproof, a permanent fixture around the man, like the unearthly glow Bruno had seen around holy personages in illustrated Bibles.

Slade was unworthy of being singled out thus by fortune, in Bruno’s opinion, but there was nothing he could do to upset the divine balance Slade seemed to enjoy. It irked Bruno that Slade somehow knew of the animosity directed at him by the cook. What else could have explained the morning ritual of finding the big man waiting by the triangle every time Bruno went out with his iron bar to bash and jangle the camp to wakefulness. It was a stupid act, without meaning, and the faint smirk that accompanied it occupied much of Bruno’s thoughts for the rest of the day, every day.

There had been a time when he considered murdering Slade. When everyone else went down to the town to get drunk and fight and fornicate with whores, Slade always remained behind, as did Bruno. For the cook, Ukiah represented Sodom and Gomorrah, and probably a few other cities of iniquity besides; his mother had warned him of the dangers, moral, spiritual and physical, attendant upon consorting with loose women. She had given him many pamphlets, with such titles as “Carnality’s Poisonous Secret” and “A Rake’s Descent” and “A Doctor’s Earnest Advice to Christian Men.” Bruno understood from an early age that the body is the temple of the soul, sacrosanct in the eyes of the Lord. He couldn’t abide to see so many temples sullied by unworthy tenants who insisted on visiting the pustulant harlots of the lower valley. Bruno intended to remain pure all his days, despite the ribbing this earned him from the fallers whose food he served.

His celibacy was his pride, the thing that had granted him uniqueness in the camp, until Slade came. It quickly became apparent Slade also shunned the fleshpots, but Bruno saw no evidence of piety influencing Slade’s choice. It was irritating to have to share the camp on Sundays with this silent unbeliever. His presence was an intrusion, a distraction; Bruno couldn’t concentrate on his Bible studies with the dedication that had come easily from being surrounded by nothing but the greatest of God’s trees. Slade tended to prowl restlessly, like a caged brute suddenly freed, but directionless in his freedom. They saw each other often each Sunday, always at a distance, and never spoke, didn’t so much as nod. The morning ritual by the triangle had been their most intimate contact for several years, and seemed likely to continue.

Three days after the whisper arrived, its subject came to the camp after quitting time, brought up from Ukiah in the fancy surrey of Mr. Hubert Louther himself. Such a thing had never happened before. Even Slade had been hauled from Ukiah on an oxcart filled with supplies. From a distance it was obvious who was who, the new man having caused the near collapse of the vehicle’s springs on the right-hand side. Mr. Louther went straight inside the cabin of the camp boss, leaving his passenger to disengage himself from the tiny seat that had withstood his bulk up the narrow pathway from the mill.

As he stood clear, it was with a practiced slowness calculated to draw attention. The giant stretched his arms as if to embrace the world, then placed both ham-sized fists on his corduroyed hips and smiled at the gathering he faced.

“Been expecting me, boys?” he asked. “Or maybe you was expecting the circus, huh?”

He laughed when no one responded. His audience felt Slade should have been there with them to witness the new man’s arrival. The two could have strutted around each other like prize roosters, each sizing up his opponent, but Slade was nowhere around.

“Name’s Chason, but mostly they call me Chase. You men here, you do that, call me Chase. That’s the way I prefer it, friendly like.”

His smile was made ugly by tobacco stains. Chason was taunting them with a false display of openness, every man could see it. Chason knew very well why he was there, and felt he had already scored against his opponent through the latter’s nonappearance.

“This all of you, right here?” he said.

“Except for Slade,” someone offered.

“Slade? I heard of someone called that. Little man, plays with his pud, that the one?”

“I don’t reckon.”

“Sure, that’ll be him. You see him hiding out, you tell him there’s a new man here to work alongside of him.”

“Slade, he don’t work with no one.”

“Well, he does now, orders of the big man in there.”

Chason jerked his thumb at the door Hubert Louther had disappeared behind. Raised voices could be heard from within the camp boss’s cabin. Looks were exchanged among the men. Hubert must be sick and tired of his big brother’s man ruling the roost, and had brought the new contender up from town himself, so everyone understood exactly how matters stood. It was an unthinkable violation of the camp boss’s authority to instruct him, as Hubert clearly was doing, that Slade and Chason were to work together. Nothing could better have been calculated to antagonize the champion than this invasion of his professional domain. Slade’s work practices had until that day been of his own devising. The men were anxious to see if he would submit to working with a partner.

Hubert Louther came outside, climbed into his surrey and departed without even a glance at the man he had brought. The camp boss came out a moment later, and indicated that Chason should accompany him. The entire team fell in behind as Chason was led to a cabin and told to find a vacant bunk. It was not the cabin Slade used, Bruno was disappointed to note. The boss obviously wasn’t wanting to cooperate in Hubert’s plan to thrust Slade and Chason up against each other as soon as could be arranged. Bruno happened to know there was a vacant bunk in Slade’s cabin the new man could have used, but it didn’t really matter; Slade and Chason would confront each other soon enough, over Bruno’s cookhouse tables.

The evening meal of mutton was served in an air of muted apprehension. Neither of the two men had arrived to eat, and heads that usually were lowered to their plates were constantly twisting toward the door in expectation. When Chason entered, a hush fell. What happened next was foreseen by a prescient few; Chason went directly to the one available space left at the table—Slade’s. As he lowered himself to the split-log bench, a collective sigh could be heard. Now there would be hell to pay when Slade came in. No one ever sat where Slade wanted to; one man had tried it a year or two back, and been thrown across the room.

“How’s the grub in this hole?” Chason asked. “You men all look healthy enough.” He examined the heaped plate awaiting Slade. “Sheep,” he said. “I like sheep.” His first mouthful provoked another sigh. The confrontation to come as a result of this would be savage. Chason was bigger than Slade, much bigger, and seemed already in the mood for confrontation.