Washika (15 page)

“The water, Fred” Lavigne said. “It's ready”

The old man got up from where he was sitting. His face grimaced with the pain. “I'm getting old,” he said.

The boys stood around the fire and watched closely as Fred threw in one handful of leaves, and then another. They saw the water boiling, turning the leaves over and over again, and then changing to a golden brown. The old man took the pail off the branch and set it down near the fire. He dipped his cup into the river and emptied it into the pail of steaming hot tea.

“What's that for?” Gauthier wanted to know. “Eh Fred? Why did you do that?”

“Aha!” the old man smiled, showing his wet, bare gums. “Now that's the secret. That comes from my old grandfather all the way from Charlevoix in Ireland. Yes sir! Passed on to me by the old fart himself. Ha! Ha! Ha!”

T
he breeze had grown into a light wind, twisting the flames away from the fire and rocking the boats tied to shore. Alphonse looked at his watch and walked over to the boats loaded with the shovels and hand pumps. There were eight pumps and more than enough shovels.

“Work!” he yelled out.

The young men looked at him. This was not the
Madeleine
. They sat around the fire and there was a look of emptiness in their eyes when he called them to work. Out on the lake, on the sweep, they would groan at first, that was true, but once they were fully awake and they had begun to work, they were a good happy bunch. Here, it was quiet. Nobody said a word. The only sounds were the fire crackling and the waves slapping the shore and the boats snubbed to driftwood sticking up from the sand.

Fred took a long drag on his pipe. He looked into the bowl and then tapped it lightly on a stone showing itself above the sand.

“
Bon
,” he said. “Time to earn a living again.”

The old man's face twisted in pain as he got up from the log. He had been sitting too long and now he was paying the price. It was always like that. While he and Alphonse were walking around the island he had told him that, “when you're old, all the pleasures are more expensive.”

The students got up slowly and left the fire. They joined Alphonse by the boat with the pumps and shovels. Fred had motioned to François Gauthier to stay behind. As the students gathered around Alphonse they heard a loud hiss coming from the fire and, turning, they saw a cloud of steam rising and Gauthier behind it with his empty pail.

“More!” the old man said. “More water. Don't be shy. It's not expensive here. Come on,
sacrament
! Get a move on it. Hee, hee, hee!”

Gauthier rushed back towards the water. He stepped on the seats of the two boats tied in tandem and loaded down with hoses. As he reached the end of the second boat, a place where he could get to deeper water, he slipped sideways. The students roared and slapped their thighs. Even Alphonse could not keep from laughing. Gauthier had slipped and now was sitting on the bottom of the river with water up to his armpits as he held the empty pail above his head.

“
Et bien calis
!” the old man muttered.

The boys were feeling better now. Even André Guy seemed to be coming back to his normal self. Waking up in his bed in the pouring rain, and the beating he had suffered from St-Jean's solid fists, had quietened him down some.

“Hey Gauthier!” he yelled. “Find a leak in the boat?”

Everybody laughed, and cheered. They were happy now. Even Gauthier, wading out of the river, did not feel badly as he could see that Fred was having a good laugh over the whole affair. On shore, the old man was bent almost in two, laughing and showing his bare gums and slapping his thighs and saying, “
Et bien calis
! Hee, hee, hee!” He even had tears in his eyes. It was difficult not to smile; the smile grew and grew until Gauthier was laughing along with everyone else, no longer feeling a fool seeing the water dripping from the pockets of his mackinaw.

“Fred,” Alphonse said, “make another fire, will you. We'll go ahead now and you can meet us later.”

“Well, well,” the old man looked Gauthier up and down. “Now I'm a nurse for one of Ouimet's little ducks. Come on, then! Let's get a move on. Get me some wood!”

Alphonse turned to the others. He picked up one of the pumps from the boat and held it up by its nylon webbing arm straps. A three-foot long rubber hose was attached to the tank with a straight section of metal pipe and a nozzle at one end. Alphonse lowered the tank into the water, holding it there until it was filled. He placed one arm through the nylon strap and pulled the tank up onto his back. He put his other arm through the second strap and adjusted the weight on his back. Holding the section of straight metal pipe in one hand, he slid a piston back and forth along the straight pipe with the other hand. Water shot out of the nozzle and, when Alphonse aimed it at the shore, the stream of water from the pump cut a small groove in the sand.

“These are the hand pumps,” Alphonse explained as he continued pumping water onto the shore. “The men here call them
crosseuses
.” The students looked at each other and smiled. Just the name, and the sight of Alphonse pumping away and the water squirting out of the nozzle with added strength each time the piston moved…it was all too much.

“Hey Alphonse!” one student yelled. “Give one to André. He's good at that. Every Sunday at Washika he practices in the washroom.”

“Now,” Alphonse continued, “we have only eight pumps. The rest of you can use shovels.”

There was a sudden rush for the boat. It was not long before eight students had the pumps filled and strapped to their backs. Even standing still, the boys with the pumps leaned forward because of the weight.

“We'll start by patrolling the shore,” Alphonse said. “It's not very complicated. If you see smoke you put it out with the pumps, or bury it. Okay now, let's go.”

Alphonse led the group along the shore of the island. Eight students with pumps and eleven others with shovels on their shoulders followed Alphonse as they walked single file, around the black burned-over island.

When the last one had disappeared around the bend, Gauthier took off his trousers and hung them up on a branch along with his mackinaw and shirt and wool socks. The branch bent over low with the weight. He stood with his back to the fire wearing only his wet underwear while the old man added more wood. It was a good fire. Fred hung the tea pail over it and sat on a log again, resting his bones and waiting for Gauthier and his clothes to dry. He would worry about the pain later.

The boys walked on the sand of the shore. Where the island dropped suddenly into the river and there was no beach, they walked on the ashes among the black stumps and fallen trees.

They walked. There was not much else to do. Now and then, smoke could be seen rising lazily from the base of a stump or from the end of a charred branch; immediately eight guys attacked the site with their pumps while the others leaned on their shovels and made jokes about the washroom at Washika on Sundays. But mostly, they were bored, again. They were tired of being there on the fire. The guys operating the hand pumps complained that their shoulders ached from the straps and that their backsides were wet from the tanks leaking. Those further down the line were not so gloomy. They walked along quietly at the end of the line, pumping water and emptying their tanks on cold, black ashes and the flat, brown water of the river.

Henri walked third in line behind Alphonse. He stared at the sand or ashes and brittle, black branches as they walked. His eyes were fixed on either the beach sand or the imaginary trail that consisted of ashes and charred lichen, and only when he raised his head could he see the plaid shirt of the fellow in front of him and the blade of the shovel resting on his shoulder. The straps made Henri's shoulders ache but the tank did not leak. He had that at least. And there was Lise. This fire could not last forever. Things would eventually calm down and they would be at Washika again. The first Sunday he was back, he would go to see her. Walking that way in the black nothingness of the island, he remembered her clearly and nothing interrupted his thoughts of her, those green eyes. How they spoke to him. As he walked along the trail with the others, he recalled how he had stared into her eyes for as long as he could manage it while he caressed her with the flat of his hands. He had tried looking into her eyes as he bent down to kiss her lips, or the high bones of her cheeks, but they were always lost, those searching beautiful eyes were always lost in the blur. Henri saw her back stretch and curve like a cat as he ran the tips of his fingers over her breasts, along the side of her neck to the back curve of her ears. Her breasts were firm and moved with her breathing and they touched his chest when he leaned down to kiss her.

“Break!” Alphonse yelled from the front of the line.

Henri looked up from the ashes. A red, plaid shirt was suddenly in his face and, as suddenly, there was a sharp crack as the fellow's shovel sliced into his forehead.

“
Sacrament
!” the plaid shirt said. “You okay?”

“Yes. It's nothing,” Henri said.

“Lucky for you, you had your hat.”

“Yes, I guess.”

There was a mark on the front of the hat. That was all. He had not been hurt and it had really been his fault after all. Worse still was the moment with LIse that he had suddenly lost. Just the remembering had made him feel empty and alone. The shovel hit to the head was nothing at all.

The group stood around Alphonse, rolling cigarettes and watching the slow current of the river. The boys with the pumps had removed the straps from their shoulders and let the tanks drop to the ground.

“Henri,” Alphonse said. “Your head? It's all right?”

“Yes. I'm okay.”

“We should be meeting up with Fred and François soon.”

“You think they can catch up?”

“They'll come the other way around.”

“But, they have no pumps.”

“Yes, I know.” Alphonse replied. “Anyway, there's not much to be done here.”

Henri looked at him, at his thick, sad eyebrows and the heavy moustache of the same dark brown drooping over the grinning lips. But it was the eyes that said it, those hazel eyes that smiled out of the leathery tanned face.

“Then why, Alphonse? Why are we here?”

Alphonse gave a short laugh and pulled deeply on his cigarette. He leaned back with one eye shut to keep out the smoke.

“We're here,” he said, “because they want us to be here. Today, perhaps, and maybe even for a couple of days, we might not find any smoke. But they'll want us here longer, and we'll be here longer even if we know that there is not a single spark left anywhere on this island.”

Henri looked at the man. There was neither weakness nor bitterness in his eyes. He was a man like any other man standing by a river with a black, burned-over forest behind him.

“But why,” Henri seemed almost to be whining. “If you know that it's useless us being here like this. How can you accept that? You're not bitter. You're not even angry. I don't understand.”

“You're young, Henri, you and all the guys here.”

“I know. So?”

“You see, Henri, it's your time, yours and the others here. It's time to ask why, and to question everything. It's your time, just like it's Fred's time to swear and tell lies and poke fun at the bosses. When you're older, you'll learn not to take things so seriously, only the important ones.”

“You think so?”

“Sure. And besides, Henri, I can tell right now that you'll be all right. Or maybe you'll grow up and wear fancy clothes and give orders and have people like Fred making fun of you.”

“Never!” Henri replied.

Alphonse took out his watch. He looked at it, turned it over in his hand and then put it back into the slit pocket of his trousers.

“Courage, my little ducks,” he said. “The way I see it, we'll patrol this island for another four or five days and then they'll be sending us back to Washika. We'll be finished with the fire then and back on the lake. About another five days.”

“Oh yes,” the boys yelled out together. “At the very least!”

Alphonse smiled. At least the group had not been split up. Soon, they would be together on the lake. But, for now, they were content and happy standing on the shore of that burnt, black island on the Ottawa.

T
here was a thick fog in the morning. The students could barely see each other in the boats. As they moved forward, the fog seemed to split open and expose another stretch of river.

It was their third day patrolling the island. They had not seen any smoke on the second day and, with the storm the night before, they did not expect to see smoke on this or any other day. They pulled the boats up onto shore when they reached the island. After tying the boats, they sat on the gunwales waiting for orders from Alphonse.

Alphonse turned to the old man.

“Fred,” he said. “You know how to run the boat, eh?”

“Yes, sure.” the old man replied.

“All right then,” He looked at the boys sitting in the boats and the others standing around him. “Henri,” he continued. “You go with Fred, here. Take the boat and patrol around the island.”

“Should we take a pump, you think?”

“Be better, yes. You never know with these things. And bring a couple of shovels.”

The boys were slow getting started. They stood on shore, smoking and talking quietly. They were cold and wet from the fog and not one of them had removed his life jacket.

“All right, you guys,” Alphonse shouted. “Get your stuff now.”

The students groaned, some swore softly. They removed their life jackets and tossed them into the boats. From one boat they hauled out the shovels and pumps.