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Authors: Victoria McKernan

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BOOK: The Devil's Paintbox
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“You all are required to have three pair of wool socks, two pair of wool long johns,” he said to all the gathered men. “A wool hat, two pair of canvas pants, oiled is best. One sweater, one jacket, horsehide gloves, nailed boots.” Powhee's voice was surprisingly soft, and his accent had a gentle, lilting rhythm.

“Don't complain for the cost,” he went on. “The price here is twice any town price. But as you've seen, we're two days’ walk to any town. And if I find your kit short in the far camp, it will be five times that.”

Aiden watched the pen scratch out numbers on his account page. Each dollar meant days, but for once the debt didn't bother him. Days had no value anymore.

The bunkhouse was packed to overflowing, with at least thirty men in a room built for twenty. They slept all over the floor, some squeezing under the lower bunks to avoid getting stepped on. Some had been there for three days, waiting for the full group to assemble for the trek upstream to the far camps. The only comfortable place was one corner by the stove, where a group of eight men played cards in a haze of pipe smoke and chased away anyone else who dared to come close looking for a scrap of space. They were seasoned loggers, big hard men who had found themselves with big hard gambling debts to pay off and a choice between Napoleon Gilivrey and the sea. Between the gold rush and the building boom in San Francisco, merchant ships were as desperate for men as the logging camps. Gilivrey had covered their debts and now owned them until they earned the money back.

The rest of the group, as far as Aiden could make out, seemed to be a mix of all possible failures in the known world. There were other busted homesteaders, failed gold miners and leftover soldiers, one nearly blind. There were two Negroes, a Mexican and a big gloomy Russian, impoverished and alone since the death of his dancing bear and the loss of his acrobat wife, who had run off with the ringmaster of their little circus, married a shopkeeper in Portland or fallen from a tightrope. He was pretty drunk and the story
kept changing. There were petty criminals directly from the Seattle jails and one man, it was rumored, fresh from the lunatic asylum. There were sailors who had abandoned their ships and men who had abandoned the world. It seemed as if anyone with nowhere else to go and no way to get there wound up here, bound to Napoleon Gilivrey by debt, failure or desperation.

Aiden lay on the floor listening to the grunts and arguments, farts and snores and complaints of all the other men. William Buck, who had bullied his way into an actual bunk, cursed Jackson continually under his breath.

“Damn his eyes. Damn his ass and the horse it sits upon! He tricked us here. Goddamn tricked us!”

Arguments erupted over nothing, and if Mr. Powhee hadn't confiscated all knives and guns, Aiden was sure there would have been blood on the floor by now. As it was, a violent fistfight broke out over floor space and was only contained when the lunatic began flapping his hands and shrieking loud whooping noises that startled everyone into peace.

But in the midst of this chaos Aiden felt a strange sort of calm. It was almost like the feeling he'd had with the Indians that one grand day, when everything was simply out of his hands. Every bit of the world had become so strange, from the intense landscape to this insane room, that he felt any last bits of normal life had been sucked out into space and all feeling swept from his soul. He was disconnected from the world and all things in it. He would live or die and it didn't matter. He would work to dying and it didn't matter. He could be crushed dead by a falling tree and it didn't matter. He had a brief thought of Gilivrey's maimed clerk and felt a
flicker of horror at the possibility of dismemberment, but even that didn't really bother him for long. As long as he had one arm left, he could always kill himself. There was no one else he had to think about anymore.

He woke the next morning to the sound of a gong so loud it made his ribs vibrate. He had slept in all his clothes, so there was no need to dress. The men quickly shuffled into the dining room and dropped onto the long benches around the rough-hewn tables. Mugs of coffee and bowls of oatmeal steamed at every place, with enamel pots and iron kettles sitting in the middle of each table, ready for refills. There were plates of sliced bread and bowls of butter to spread on it. It was so crowded that the men ate with elbows pressed against their sides, but they still managed to devour great piles of food in fifteen minutes.

The gong sounded again and Mr. Powhee stood in the doorway. The cook came through the room with platters of sandwiches for dinner on the trail.

“Take two,” Powhee directed. “Saw men meet me by the toolshed, the rest of you by the stores hut. We leave in five minutes.”

Mules loaded with supplies were already moving up the muddy trail by the time the men joined the march. All the supplies came by river from Seattle to East Royal St. Petersburg but then had to be packed up to the far camps on foot trails. The river was only high enough a few times a year to float anything heavy, and then it was full of logs. No one traveled lightly. Along with their own packs of personal gear, each man carried various awkward items that would not easily be strapped on a mule. Aiden was given a large can of
kerosene. The experienced saw men carried new crosscut saws, nine feet long, thin as paper and shiny as ice. They flexed and vibrated to a dangerous degree as the men walked, despite the men's experience in handling them.

The trail wound along beside the river and made the first of its splits just about a half mile north of East Royal St. Petersburg to follow one of the smaller tributaries. Napoleon Gilivrey had the logging rights to land around all five of the streams in the area. The land was rich in timber, but it was so difficult to get the trees out that no one else had been very interested in it. Gilivrey's system required expert management and exquisite patience, with logs piled on the riverbank for months, waiting for enough water to float down.

The forest they were walking through had already been logged, so only the most enormous trees were left, those with trunks twelve feet or more across—simply too big to cut and too heavy to haul. Gilivrey's camps moved farther and farther upstream each year to cut the smaller, more manageable trees. This land was different from anything Aiden had ever seen or imagined. Over every surface, on every rock and limb and fallen tree, grew a hundred shades of moss. The ground beneath the trees was not the tangle of brush and shrub as in the East, but a bare, flat land covered in brown pine needles and punctuated with stumps. Everything was green and damp and soft, carpeted and quiet. There were old fallen trees so rotted you could see through them like lace, yet still so huge they blocked out the sun. They could be a thousand years old, Aiden thought, or older. They could be from the time of Rome.

The mule handler was a rough and impatient man, and Aiden found himself wishing for Joby, who could coax the
most stubborn animal along with little more than a click of his tongue and a gentle switch. At each split of the river, Mr. Powhee read out a list of names and directed men and mules to continue on a new path to the various camps upstream. The Kansas boys broke off first, the widower in the third group. Aiden and William Buck walked on with the last group. It was late afternoon by the time they came to their camp, which Aiden guessed was about five miles from East Royal St. Petersburg. He was well used to walking by now, but his arms ached from carrying the kerosene and his legs were bruised from the knocking of the can. The camp was nothing but a few forlorn wooden buildings. There were two small bunkhouses with a third building between that served as cookhouse, dining hall and the only other place to be if you didn't want to be in your bunk. Mr. Powhee had his own lodging, a pole-and-canvas tent-house with its own little stove. A row of outhouses was set back in the trees. There was a stable for the oxen and mules, and a small toolshed with a blacksmith's forge and grinding wheels. Everything was roughly built, for it would only be used for a year or so, then knocked down and moved upriver after all the suitable trees nearby had been cut.

Each of the two bunkhouses held twelve men, in bunks stacked three high against each wall. There were ten men already in the camp, and they had taken the top bunks, which were most desired for the winter, as the rising heat kept them warmer. Aiden hung back, waiting to see which house William Buck chose, then took the other for himself. The bunk frames were strung with rope and covered with thin mattresses stuffed with pine needles. There were hooks on the wall for coats and on the bedposts for each man's kit bag.
The walls were chinked with moss and lined in places with salvaged canvas or sailcloth. There was a small iron stove in the middle of the room with a few rough-hewn chairs around it. Clotheslines hung above, crisscrossing the room like a giant spiderweb. Aiden chose a bottom bunk, uninterested in fighting for a better space. The other three bottom bunks were already taken by the two Negroes and the Mexican. Ranks were clear in a place like this, Aiden knew. He wondered where the lunatic fit in.

Supper was a dismal mush of boiled corned beef, onions and rice. Some of the new arrivals grumbled. Food was generally very good in the big camps, and the experienced men knew it.

“No talking at the table!” the cook snarled at the newcomers. He was bald as a stone, and his arms were massive from lifting heavy pots.

“Cook don't bear complaints well,” one of the men whispered to Aiden. “But don't worry, it's usually better. This is the last of the stores, you see.” He nodded at the unpleasant stew. “Food came up with you today, and the mules generally come each week, and sometimes we get fresh fish or game from the Indians,” he added.

Aiden didn't care. Everything tasted the same to him. After supper Mr. Powhee distributed fresh apples and rations of whiskey, the usual treat when a pack train arrived. There was some vigorous trading, with the few nondrinkers walking off with six or eight apples, and a couple of men dead drunk by nightfall.

ou!” Powhee glared at Aiden and held up an axe. “You know which end to hold?” The other new men laughed, though none too boldly. They knew they were just as likely to be picked on. “Your job is to clear a path, build the skid road, same as there.” Powhee pointed at the ground nearby, where smaller trees, a foot or less in diameter, had been cut so they fell like railroad ties over the soft ground. The oxen teams could then drag the heavy logs along this skid road to the river.

“The way is already marked.” He tapped his huge palm on a tree that was painted with a red
X.
“Cut the ones with an
X
so they fall that way.” He pointed toward the east. “The trees with an
O
fall the other way. Here—chop.”

Aiden had never chopped down a tree in his life. He hadn't even cut firewood since he was a boy in Virginia. There was nothing to cut in Kansas. He swung the axe into the tree trunk as hard as he could. A steely jolt shot up his arms and a tiny chip of wood peeled off the tree. Powhee said nothing as Aiden went on with awkward strokes. Sometimes the blade would get stuck, or he would hit at the wrong angle and it would bounce back.

“See there,” Powhee announced after Aiden's first dozen strokes. “Everything wrong you can do!” He took the axe back.

“So watch!” He swung with an easy motion that used his
whole body and snapped the blade into the trunk as if it were a loaf of bread. He showed the men how to angle the cuts and when to start the back-cut. A spiral tattoo on his forearm pulsated over the bulging muscle. In his skillful hands, the little tree fell in a couple of minutes.

“That's all there is to it!” He handed the axe back to Aiden. His dazzling grin took the sting out of the criticism. “Once it's down, you cut off all the branches. Try not to cut your foot off as you do!” He pointed the other four men toward the waiting trees. “Ten a day will make you full wage.”

Ten a day; it seemed impossible. Even with the horsehide gloves, Aiden's palms were bleeding by noon. A constant river of sweat trickled down his back and his muscles began to ache, but still he kept on. Trimming the branches off was even harder. The green wood refused to be cut clean through, and sometimes there was a tough knot where a branch joined the trunk.

BOOK: The Devil's Paintbox
2.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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