Sweet Song (19 page)

Leon told them what they knew. “Creek water froze last night. Along the edges. A deep frost settled in, too.”

“Gettin’ cloudy,” Buck said.

“We’ll get goin’ in a few days when everyone shows up,” Sam said. He cleaned his plate with the last of his bread. “Spring comes faster than you might think out here.”

“Right now I want to be ready for winter,” Leon said. “I need a heavier coat.”

“We can fix you up,” Jeb said. “Morning good?”

“That’s good.” Leon helped to clean up. He listened as the conversation waned and settled.

After a while, one of the men left the group to make the bunkhouse fire. Later, Leon followed as most of the others found their place in the bunkhouse. Leon selected a wooden cot that, in spite of the cold, for the night, seemed to get a lot of the heat from the blaze. He unrolled his bedroll onto the cot, then sat and read by the light of the flames. The men got quiet for a moment when he first pulled the book from his pack. He hesitated, wondering if he should slip it back into his pack, then the men started chatting amongst themselves and Leon relaxed. He read for practice as much as to learn. Reading separated him from others. Not many people he’d met could read as well as he could. He had no idea about this crew, but no one else leaned near the fire with a book in his hands.

Walter walked over to Leon. “Hey?”

Leon put his finger where he had been reading and lifted his face to Walter. The fire made him look even younger than he had originally appeared. It brought out the smooth features in his beardless face. Walter had his arms folded in front of him, holding closed a gray wool coat that Leon admired. Walter’s hands were broad while his fingers were thin and delicate.

“I brought a couple of books if you’d like to borrow one,” Walter said.

Leon closed his book on his finger and stood. “I’d enjoy that.”

“Okay, then,” Walter said.

“Yep.” Leon turned to look into the fire.

“Well, think I’ll go get some shut-eye for now.”

“It’s going to be a cold night,” Leon said. He sat back down. The fire popped and spit steam in a hiss.

“In the morning,” Walter said.

“Good night.” Leon set his book down after bending the corner of the page. He tucked his legs up and held his blanket close. One man snored and others breathed heavily in sleep. Walter rustled around for a minute or two, then fell off to sleep as well. Although Leon lay awake for a longer time than his fatigue might suggest. He felt secure and safe inside the bunkhouse – and warm. A light rain fell outside, the varied sounds of drops hitting leaves; the ground, and the bunkhouse roof added comfort to Leon’s soul. The fire hissed when rain made it through the hole in the bunkhouse roof where the smoke from the fire escaped. Leon thanked the Lord he slept inside tonight. Before slipping all the way into sleep, he heard a rustle of noise and growls stir behind the cabin. The winding down of his mind and the fullness of his stomach teamed together to draw Leon into a deep sleep where he dreamed of his mother touching his face and shoulders. Martha hummed so loudly that he couldn’t hear his father, who watched what Bess was doing to Leon. Big Leon’s eyes showed a terrible anguish, and he yelled undecipherable words toward Leon. Bess’s strong arms pulled Leon from behind into her. Leon couldn’t escape even though he knew he was stronger than she. His strength had somehow been drained. He tried to peel her fingers from his tightened stomach until suddenly there was a shot. A bead of blood appeared on Big Leon’s forehead. Bess squeezed Leon and pulled him even tighter into her so he couldn’t run to his father. Martha stopped humming immediately. The silence hurt Leon’s ears and he screamed out again and again. “Let go! Let go!” He awoke.

The inside of the bunkhouse was black. There was some stirring and a formless, sleepy voice said, “Now, go back to sleep.”

Leon rolled onto his back. He was sweating even though cold air had replaced the warmth of the fire.. The evil of his birth followed
him everywhere. He held his eyes open, yet there was nothing to see. Several hours later, light came.

Leon was the first one outside. A thick fog lay over the area. Although there was no frost, the damp ground and air penetrated his clothes and chilled him to the bone. Work would help to warm his body. He collected wood to build a fire. He lit the first dry wood he found.

Buck rested a pot of beans over the fire. He stirred the bubbling mass with a wooden spoon that looked hand -carved. His hair stuck out in several directions. A three- or four-day beard scarred his chin and neck. “Another fire wouldn’t hurt.” Buck pointed to a second pit five feet or so from the one he leaned near.

Leon foraged for more wood. He sang an old Civil War song he had heard, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”, until he forgot the words. Then he sang, “Amazing Grace”, which Martha used to sing to him on occasion. Dropping wood onto a pile and going back for more, Leon cycled through a number of familiar and unfamiliar tunes, then made up his own: “Run from my pappy/ run from my ma/ find myself in a wooden hall./ Axing the timber/ stacking it tall/ don’t think I’ll be home till fall.”

The other men paraded from the bunkhouse one or two at a time until all eight were milling around. Walter and a third younger man, Horace, collected firewood from inside the forest, bringing it in armfuls to the clearing, and letting it drop onto piles near the fires.

Horace came from behind as Leon looped around camp. Horace stood like a rock, short and thick and grizzly. His arms were stumps. His teeth showed pits of black, like stars in a pale white sky. “When the cuttin’ starts, we’ll put up wood for the winter. That bunkhouse could use some all-night fires.”

“I noticed the racks along the cabins,” Leon said.

“We’ll fill ‘em to the brim soon.”

“You work here before?”

“This my third year.” Horace said while the two walked. “Come from Ohio, clear across the Western half of Pennsylvania to get here,”

“Why?”

“My daddy and two brothers dead in the war. I’s runnin’ from that memory, plain and simple. Found myself here. Jeb and Red took care a me, let me work.”

“What do you do the rest of the year?”

“Odd jobs. Sometimes mill work, sometimes farm work. I like that nobody owns me.

They dropped their loads and Buck told them to stay. “Beans is ready.”

Leon sat next to Horace. Buck filled a plate and handed it to Leon.

“So, Leon,” Jeb said, “you a singin’ man?”

“Suppose I am.”

“You learn those songs from home or from war?” Jeb had some gray in his short beard and his eyes were big, wide slashes across his face.

“All over,” Leon said. “I have a memory for sounds. Hear a tune once and I own it. Not always so lucky with words though.” He met Jeb’s eyes. Leon let a calm step into him.

“Wondered,” Jeb said.

Leon knew Jeb wasn’t finished. He didn’t know what it was Jeb was getting at but waited for the next comment.

Red spoke up, though, blocking what appeared to Leon to be a purposeful pause on Jeb’s part. “It’s good singin’,” Red said. “I, myself, could never carry a tune in a bucket, but I can hear a good one. My ears is smarter ‘an my voice.”

Jeb said to Leon, “Some of those songs from Negro workers, you know?”

Leon wiped the last of the bean sauce from his plate with a piece of bread. He stuffed the whole sauce soaked lump into his mouth. When he saw that Jeb was about to speak again, Leon held up his hand as though he would answer once he swallowed. It stopped Jeb long enough for Leon to think.

Leon gulped. “A lot of the songs I learned from Negro workers.” He swallowed a second time. “Then there’s the war songs I heard, even though I didn’t go to war, and love songs. I don’t like them much.”

“He got the singer’s memory,” Red said.

Jeb sat back. “Well, you sure got a pretty voice. And I don’t mean pretty like a woman, but pretty like a man.”

“Thank you,” Leon said.

During the long work-day, Leon kept discussion to a minimum by singing. Once in a while, when a tune was learned, Walter would sing along. Sam too would sing from time to time. They even learned Leon’s made-up songs like they were real ones. It wasn’t until several days later, when the camp filled up that one of the men, Bradley, produced a harmonica and let it cry out a tune at night, usually as everyone settled down to sleep.

In no time, winter dropped by for an extended visit. The routine of hard work brushed the days away two at a time. Wages accumulated but the men had nowhere to spend it but in the camp’s supply store. And there wasn’t much there. Leon bought a wool coat and a second blanket, an Indian blanket that a trader had brought through.

The forest makes new sounds in winter, not merely muffled, but new. As the trees were cut down, “… in their sleep,” as Jeb said once, the clearing made a different sound altogether.

Leon had saddened at Jeb’s words, almost to tears. His repeated dream with Bess and Martha and Big Leon made him want to die in his sleep, but he always woke. Did the trees have nightmares and never wake from them?

To Leon, the sound of a tree falling stretched through the forest like a scream. Every time he heard that scream, he saw his father’s face lying in the grass and mud. Like a sledge hitting a fence post, that image pounded into Leon’s head a hundred times a day. Big Leon’s face reminded Leon of his heritage. Half black, half white, all the rest a lie.

The loud screech and scream of the trees, the crack, crack, crack – like shots from a musket – breaking limbs as it falls and hits the frozen ground. Snow, leaves, and dust burst into the air, and a great pain backed by muscle hammered into Leon’s memory.

Every day Leon dreamed of getting finished with this segment of his life. Every night he dreamed of his mother’s attack from behind, taking her guilt out on Leon, taking her hatred of Big Leon out on his son, who wasn’t really his son at all. Everything a lie. The
world built from lies and cheating, from revenge and hatred. From evil. And Leon was that evil, and he couldn’t run from his dreams.

Some days he sang all day making up words to fill all the space inside his head for memory and to burst the song loudly enough to cut short the screaming of the trees. Leon lived a dead life by day and at night dreamed a living death.

The work in a lumber camp could be varied daily. It took eight to ten men to stack tie, buckle, and mule-haul logs down the hill. Another half-dozen stacked the timber ready for the spring floods. Cutting trees were done in stages, trimming them, hauling brush, debarking. The camp maintenance for all those men was organized by a rotation of four. Fires, meals, medical care. The camp was a city of muscle and sound, a metropolis of activity geared toward death. And for Leon, it was a fearful and dangerous world where the work at hand was destruction. Every man’s death or slash indicated how the forest fought back. Leon sang to the forest. He apologized to the logs as he obediently stripped the bark from the smooth wood.

Leon did a thousand jobs in one season. He didn’t know whether Jeb moved him from job to job because he lacked the skill for any or because he could learn each easily. Or did Jeb move him from duty to duty because the man recognized Leon’s difference, his separation, and the job-switching made it easy on Leon?

Sucking in the frozen air as he worked kept his lungs clear, dry and in pain. Debarking became more threatening because the cold numbed every inch of his body. Leon witnessed a man slice his own leg and not notice. Fingers were cut completely off, arms gouged. The kickback from a tree knocked one man back twenty feet and into another tree, killing him. Every day that Leon worked reminded him that he had made it through the previous day. Some of the men claimed to be ‘too mean to die’ and that led Leon to thinking that he was too evil to die.

He couldn’t explain the evil any more than the others could explain their meanness. None of the men appeared to be overly mean, especially those who claimed it.

Leon decided that it was a personal meanness, like his evil was a personal evil. Only the person himself could know the truth. Leon had enough evil happen in his life that he often felt he fit easily into
its palm. He vowed never to do this work again. He didn’t know what he would do, but he knew what he’d refuse to do. Song was the only thing that helped to reduce the emotional or physical pain.

Horace and Walter sidled up to Leon on many occasions.

“I love this work,” Horace once said.

“I love the pay,” Walter countered.

Looking at Leon, they waited for what he loved about the camp, the work. “I’ll love it when it’s over,” Leon said.

They all laughed, including Leon.

“I believe you,” Walter said. “It don’t feel like you belong here even as I watch you do the work. I don’t really belong either,” Walter said. “I do it because it’s good payin’ work.”

“Do you like farming?” Leon asked.

“I do. I like growing things better than cutting things down.”

Horace slapped his knee. “You wouldn’t be groin’ nothin’ unless we cut the trees first.”

“That’s not true,” Leon said, surprising himself.

Horace didn’t like the comment and Leon could see it in the man’s face. “What land is there?”

“Maybe you’re right,” Leon backed down.