Sweet Song (15 page)

“Damn,” the man next to him said.

“Gonna be a hot one,” another man said.

Leon didn’t care about the heat. He felt stronger than he had when he arrived. He had food in his stomach, his fever had broken, and his muscles didn’t ache.

Several men around him soon rushed through the final morsels of their plates, signaling work was about to begin. It was officially sunup.

He wiped his plate clean and walked back to put it into a drum filled with suds.

Jack and Harry were off under a lean-to talking. They were the bosses, sure and straight, Leon thought.

Harry walked down to Leon while the other men dispersed. “We’ll be helping to drive timber downstream. Timber that’s been left over after the flood run. We take a percentage for ourselves to build a town here. You might of seen places going up as you come into town.”

Harry’s eyes were watery and intense. Leon glanced at them from time to time, but couldn’t maintain contact for long. Eventually, he stared at Harry’s mouth. The man’s teeth were yellow and his lips were split in two places like he’d been hit in the mouth by a log.

Harry cocked his head. “You listenin’,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you can strip the bark what’s left from the logs. Help Jake Butler down there. Just ask for Jake, he’ll speak up.”

Leon nodded and turned to go. He heard Harry shuffling back toward Jack under the lean-to.

Leon felt conspicuous walking among all the whites. Even after he became concerned about the roamers being criminals, he felt comfortable around their mannerisms. These people acted differently somehow, but Leon couldn’t put his finger on exactly what that difference was in particular. As he approached the area where Harry had pointed, a thin young man with tight stringy muscles handed Leon a tool having two handles at the opposite ends of a sharp drawknife.

“Ever use one?” Jake asked.

Before Leon could answer, Jake held the blade up by one handle. “Blade’s toward you.” He grabbed the other handle with his other hand. “You break all the rules. They tell you don’t run the blade toward you? Well, not here. Here you pull right toward your own gut.”

Jake straddled a log, planted his feet firmly and lowered the blade, then yanked in short bursts. “Don’t try to slide the bark off in one long walk backwards. You’ll cut your own legs off. Yank the blade through in controlled distances. You want to know where the blade’s stoppin’.”

Leon listened closely and straddled the log when Jake stepped from it. Leon pulled toward his body in short bursts as he was told. Jake stood beside him watching, then went off to debark his own log.

Leon’s log stretched on for miles behind him. He kept looking around to see how close to the end he was. When he looked up, Jake’s log had been turned and the man was a quarter length down a second side.

Jake glanced over and laughed at Leon. “You’ll get it.”

Leon went back to work. He got it, but his arms were already burning. He tried to pull more evenly so the pulsing wouldn’t make his muscles ache, but he couldn’t even pull through the bark. Then he tried stepping back while his pulsed movement appeared to be separating the bark from the tree, but the blade twisted up, pulled through the bark and freed Leon to fall backward. As he fell, he let go of one handle and the blade came at him. He could see its sheen. The free handle whacked into Leon’s chest, then twisted by his shoulder.

“You’re lucky, even if you’re stupid,” Jake said. He came over to help Leon. “Usually men cut their thighs first. Not you, you go for your own throat.” He stepped over the log, grabbed the debarking tool and handed it back to Leon. Jake had a big grin on his face.

“It’s funny that I almost got killed?”

“It’s not funny if you get killed. It’s funny if you don’t.” Jake stepped back over the log and went to his own work station. “Pulses,” he said.

Leon worked through the morning and through his muscle pain. He paid such close attention to the work at hand that the sound of the river evaporated, the sound of the other workers faded, only his own breath was heard. Pulse-pulse-wait, pulse-wait, pulse-pulse-wait, pulse-wait. He imagined his breath as the base line of a song, and as long as he kept the base line steady, the work got done. Sweat soaked his shirt and trousers and ran into his eyes. His hands got slippery and slid from the handles of the tool. He eventually couldn’t wipe his hands dry on his shirt or trouser legs, so he wiped them in the dirt.

When noon came, there was a silent halt to all work. Like an unspoken yell, the sound of work-stoppage was as loud as the river noise.

Leon let his tool dangle across the log he was stripping. He looked over and Jake had done the same.

The young man headed toward Leon. “You catch on quick,” Jake said.

“Thank you.”

“Bet you’re arms are hurtin’ though.”

“They are.” Leon rubbed one arm with the other, then reversed the action.

“You’ll be achin’ tonight, but in two days you won’t notice. Tomorrow will be your worst day.” He patted Leon on the shoulder. They walked together toward the long table next to the bunkhouse.

Once again, the men filled their plates and found their own stumps, logs, and rocks. Then there was the knoll where Leon sat for the second time that day.

Jake plopped down next to him. Using his spoon as a finger, Jake pointed one by one at the other men sitting around, naming them for Leon. “That’s Chuck, he’s James, then John, and Billy.” The men nodded, said howdy, or looked up, mouths full, eyes weary. Billy, though, stared at Leon.

“Billy observes,” Jake said.

“Observes what?” Leon said.

Billy answered, “Everythin’.” He pointed at Leon. “Like you. I’d say you the quiet sort by lookin’ at you. But that not the truth. I seed you walkin’ and you ain’t a shy walker.”

“What in the hell does that mean?” Chuck said.

“Don’t know,” Billy said.

Chuck laughed and stuffed a piece of bread into his mouth.

“I want to know somethin’,” Billy said.

Leon expected Billy to ask about his nationality since he noticed his walk. He imagined they all wondered the same thing, so he answered even before Billy got the question out. “White.”

“White?” Billy said. “That don’t help.”

Leon cocked his head. Did Billy think he was a liar?

“The last name of White don’t tell me nothing’ about you,” Billy said.

Jake said, “Billy has observed that names tell what people should do, or what they come from, like Carpenter, and Butler, and Carrier, and Butcher. White don’t fit into his theory.”

Leon giggled out of nervousness. “Whites don’t do anything,” he said. The rest of the men laughed over that one.

After lunch, the silent order went out again, and the men stood and shuffled back to their work.

Leon’s legs hurt as much as his arms, but he hadn’t noticed until then. His thighs and shins strained to move along. And his back, bent half the day, fought his attempt to straighten up at first. Getting back to work, Leon noticed how he enjoyed being around people even though he felt out of place. While he was growing up, he felt the opposite. People were cruel and standoffish. They were mean even though Leon had done nothing but be born with a different look about him. Even Hillary had used him as if she hated him. It was difficult to understand her motivations. It was difficult to understand any of their motivations.

Leon’s pace slowed as he thought, and as his body rejected the shock it had to bare.

Jake whistled at him. When Leon looked over, Jake motioned for Leon to get back to work.

Leon spit and wiped sweat from his face, then went back to the job at hand. He focused on the base rhythm and the labor progressed more smoothly. He hummed to the beat, but it sounded more like grunting when backed by the pain in his body.

He focused hard on his work and on the beating of his throat. From time to time he’d look to his side to see how far behind he had fallen. After a while, he noticed that Jake wasn’t gaining on him any longer. In fact, Jake was pacing Leon, apparently hammering away at the pace of Leon’s grunting. He had created a machine of two men.

Leon felt proud of his secret accomplishment and began to test it. He speeded up the rhythm and noticed that Jake did the same. Then after a log or two, he slowed his rhythm and Jake kept pace. Leon giggled at the thought that he could control the work with his song.

The idea expanded inside his mind. He recalled how Bob, Jesse, and the others asked him to sing, and how their mood changed when he did. He remembered Martha humming to the attitude in the shack. Or was she creating the attitude with her song?

The debarking tool jerked loose from the log and Leon was able to stop it short of his thighs. He controlled where the blade would stop. Leon glanced over and once again Jake had pulled ahead of Leon, who apparently couldn’t think without slowing down.
Wherever he focused his attention that’s what got done. Leon placed the tool back onto the log. Jake lifted his head and stared at Leon, or past him. What was so arresting as to get Jake’s full attention? Leon turned to follow Jake’s gaze.

T
he river wore a black stripe of timber about a mile long. A raft stationed mid-river floated in position to turn the logs toward shore. Another raft floated three quarters across to the other side of the river, and upriver several hundred yards, ready to accept the logs as well.

Jake appeared to be mesmerized by the log slick.

“Won’t that timber bust through those rafts?” Leon asked, struck by the timber’s obvious power.

“Nope.”

“That river’s flowin’ pretty fast.”

“Look close, Leon. The river runs faster than the logs. The raft men divert some to shore and the rest go downstream to the next town. There are three mills before those logs hit Northumberland. We all do plankin’. Keep some. Sell some.”

“Who builds?” Leon asked.

“We all do. Timber don’t come down every day.” Jake stopped talking and went back to work.

As the first raft got in the way of floating timber, the men scurried to their posts and shoved logs around the raft. It appeared to Leon that the men selected as well as diverted the logs. The agility of the men and their quick accounting of each log fascinated him.

Jake whistled and Leon, without looking over, got back to work. As he worked through several more logs, he listened to the calls of the men. The orders and excitement exhilarated Leon. The sounds of his new companions gave him the sense that there existed an even greater machine for him to be part of. He and Jake were only an axle
bearing in the wheel, and the rest of the men, with all their individual duties represented an entire wagon train.

Before the day ended, Jake stopped and waited for Leon to finish the log he worked on. They had worked from two stacks and Leon was proud of Jake having only stripped a few logs more than he had.

“What are you waiting for?”

“When you be finished there, we got to drag these up to the mill,” Jake said.

“Why’s the mill so far up there?”

“Flood line. In spring we’ll be stackin’ right next to the building.”

Leon, following Jake’s lead, grabbed a timber hook. Each of them swung the hook into the first log and dragged it up the hill.

“So, what you gonna do with your wages?” Jake asked.

“Never thought about it.”

“I’m gonna go to college,” Jake said. “My brother went off to college, then the war take him and me, both, only he never come back. I gonna go to college and help out my mama and sisters. I can read good, and cipher some.”

“You’re not building a home here like some of the others?”

“Naw. I wouldn’t live here. You want to strip logs for the rest of your life?”

“No.” Leon was certain of that, even after one day.

“You got a family?”

“No.”

“None?” Jake stood straight. “None at all?”

At this point, Leon wished for the questions to stop. After a moment of hesitation, he said, “All dead and that’s it.” Leon had eliminated his family and his past. Killed everyone off with one shot like the one that entered Big Leon’s head. With that memory, Leon erased many others, at least when it came to explaining his past.

“Didn’t mean nothing,” Jake said.

“Apology accepted,” Leon said.

They released the log and went back for another.

Jake stayed quiet for several log-drags, then said what he must have been thinking. “You should meet my sister, Ellen. She gonna need a husband.”

Leon laughed. He could feel his cheeks tighten. Sweat trickled into the corners of his eyes. He wiped his face. “Why is she going to need a husband? She ugly?”

“No,” Jake said, leaning back as if hurt by Leon’s accusation. “I’d never try to pass off no ugly sister. It’s just that she’s been helpin’ my mama for years. She’s a hard worker and does a lot of sewin’ and cookin’ for others is all. She ain’t had time for no husband.”

“I didn’t mean anything.”

“She has a pretty face,” Jake said.