In the Skin of a Lion (3 page)

He is almost asleep. In the darkness another flame ignites then withers into nothing.

In the drive-shed Hazen Lewis outlined the boy’s body onto the plank walls with green chalk. Then he tacked wires back and forth across the outline as if realigning the veins in his son’s
frame. Muscles of cordite and the spine a tributary of the black powder fuse. This is how the boy remembers his father, studying the outline which the boy has just stepped away from as the lit fuse smoulders up and blows out a section of plank where the head had been.

Hazen Lewis was an abashed man, withdrawn from the world around him, uninterested in the habits of civilization outside his own focus. He would step up to his horse and assume it, as if it were a train, as if flesh and blood did not exist.

In winter months Patrick carried meals into the acreage north of the creek where his father, solitary, cut timber all day, minute in those white halls. And then when Patrick was fifteen, his father made the one leap of his life. At some moment, chopping into hemlock, hearing only the axe and its pivoting echo, he must have imagined the trees and permafrost and maple syrup ovens erupting up in one heave, the snow shaken off every branch in the woods around him. He stopped in mid-afternoon, walked home, unlaced his bear paws, and put away the axe forever. He wrote away for books, travelled into Kingston for materials. The explosion he saw in the woods had been an idea as he tugged his axe out of the hemlock. He bought dynamite and blasting caps and fuses, drew diagrams on the walls of the drive-shed, then carried the explosives into the woods. He laid the charges against rock and ice and trees. The detonator cap spat a flame into the cartridge and his eyes watched the snow collapse out of branches from the shudder in the air. Whatever was dislodged became a graph showing him the radius of the tremor.

Before the spring breakup Hazen Lewis rode down to the Rathbun Timber Company headquarters. He demonstrated his talent, moving a log into precisely the location he said it would go, exploding a half-ton of shale, and was hired along with the
river drivers. He had secured a role for himself in the industry that took place along the Depot Lakes and the Napanee River. When the company closed down some years later he moved over and worked as a dynamiter in the feldspar mine excavations around Verona and Godfrey, hired by the Richardson Mines. In all his life the longest speech was the one made to the Rathbun staff when he told them what he could do and that as far as he was concerned there were only two sensible jobs in logging – being a dynamiter and being a cook.

Along the chain of Depot Lakes – from First Depot to Fifth Depot – the loggers arrived in winter and disappeared into shanty camps, walking twenty miles into land they did not know. All February and March at the centre of the lakes the pyramids of logs grew, hauled there by sleds. Before daybreak the men were working – through the worst storms, in weather far below zero – and they finished at six. The double-handed crosscut saw brought down the pines. The pulp cutters, bent double, had to saw the stumps just above the ground. This was the worst job. Some used the swede saw. It cut spruce at twice the speed of the crosscut, and when they moved to the next camp they rolled up the narrow blade, making new handles in whatever forest they arrived at.

In April, with the melting of the lake ice, the river drives began. This was the easiest and most dangerous work. From Bellrock to Napanee men were stationed wherever the river narrowed. Bridges or split rocks had two or three men always there in case of a jam. If a jammed log did not get fished out in time the weight of others would pile up behind it and the whole length of the river would be padlocked. At this point the river
drivers could do nothing and a dispatcher was sent on horseback for the dynamiter. A twenty-foot log suddenly leaping out of the water and side-swiping a man, breaking his chest.

Hazen Lewis and his son rode up to the split rock. The large man walked around the logjam. He drilled in a plug of dynamite and lit the fuse. He got the boy to shout the warning and the logs went up into the air, onto the bank, and the river was free.

In difficult cases Patrick would remove his clothes and grease himself down with oil from the crankcase of the steam donkey. He dove into the ribbed water and swam among the logs. Every half-minute wherever he was he had to raise his hand to assure his father. Eventually the boy located the log his father had pointed to. He caught the charge thrown out to him, crimped the blasting cap onto the fuse with his teeth, and lit the powder.

He re-emerged from the water, walked back to the horses, and dried himself with the towels from the packsack, like his father not even turning around to watch. A river exploded behind him, the crows leafing up.

The drives lasted a month and he watched the men float by, riding the sawlogs with their large poles towards Yarker down to Napanee where the corralled logs were towed to the mills. He was always beside his father. Patrick lazed in a patch of sun by the bridge and they waited.

At noon the cook walked up First Lake Road with two dairy pails. One pail carried tea, the other contained thick pork sandwiches. The sound of the crows above the food was a signal, and men emerged from various bends in the river. When the meal
was over the cook picked up two empty pails and stepped onto a log on the water’s edge and floated back downstream to the camp. He stood up straight in mid-river, travelling at only the speed that the river wished. He would float under the bridge without altering his posture, though there was only an inch to spare, nodding to loggers on the bank, disheartened by the ever-present crows. He would step off at the camp at Goose Island with his shoes perfectly dry.

Hazen read his pamphlets. He dried the powdered cordite on a rock. He was sullen even in the company of his son. All his energy was with the fuse travelling at two minutes to the yard under floorboards, around the trunks of trees, and up into someone’s pocket. He kept receiving that image in his mind. Could he do it? The fuse stitched into the cloth of the trouser leg. The man sleeping perhaps by a campfire, the fuse smouldering horizontal into his shirt pocket, blowing out the heart. In his preoccupations the fuse always zigzagged like a hound’s nose along the ground, setting alight the ground cover till it was red lichen.

Hazen Lewis did not teach his son anything, no legend, no base of theory. The boy watched him prepare charges or pack equipment neatly back into his wooden case. His father wore no metal on him – not a watch or belt buckle. He was a man who with his few props had become self-sufficient, as invisible as possible. The explosions jostled logs out of the water unharmed. He left a track of half-inch holes in the granite all down the Depot Lakes system and along the Moira River system where he sometimes was hired. But these were as modest and minimal as they could be. A woodpecker’s work. He never wore a hat. He was a big man, six-foot-six, a heavy body. He was a bad rider of horses and later on a bad driver of trucks. He could assemble river dynamite with his eyes closed. He was
meticulous in washing his clothes every evening in case there were remnants, little seeds of explosive on his apparel. Patrick scorned this obsession. His father took off his shirt one evening and threw it onto the campfire. The shirt fizzed and sprayed sparks over the knees of the loggers. There were abrupt lessons like this.

It was strange for Patrick to realize later that he had learned important things, the way children learn from watching how adults angle a hat or approach a strange dog. He knew how much a piece of dynamite the size of a bullfrog could destroy. But he absorbed everything from a distance. The only moments his father was verbal was when calling square dances in the Yarker and Tamworth Hotels during the log drives. He was always called on and he walked up to the stage as if it were a duty and broke into verses, swirling around the guitars and fiddles, dropping in a last phrase tight before he hit the wall of the rhyme. Taciturn about everything else, his father was taciturn in his square-dance calling. His words would slide non-commital over the dance floor, the boy watching at the edge and mouthing the phrases to himself. Not a muscle moved in the large body of his father as he stood there calling
“Little red wagon the axle draggin.”

The unemotional tongue. Patrick could see himself on stage striding up and down, his arms bent and cocky.
“Birdie fly out and the crow fly in – crow fly out and give birdie a spin,”
he would mutter to himself, later, in the daylight.

One winter night when he was eleven years old, Patrick walked out from the long kitchen. A blue moth had pulsed on the screen, bathed briefly in light, and then disappeared into darkness. He did not think it would go far. He picked up the kerosene lamp and went out. A rare winter moth. It was scuffing along the snow as if injured and he could follow it easily. In the back garden he lost it, the turquoise moth arcing up into the sky beyond the radius of the kerosene light. What was a moth doing at this time of year? He hadn’t seen any for months. It may have been bred in the chicken coop. He put the hurricane lamp onto a rock and looked over the fields. Among the trees in the distance he saw what looked like more bugs. Lightning bugs within the trees by the river. But this was winter! He moved forward with the lamp.

The distance was further than he thought. Snow above the ankles of his untied boots. One hand in a pocket, the other holding a lamp. And a moon lost in the thickness of clouds so it did not shine a path for him towards the trees. All that gave direction was a blink of amber. Already he knew it could not be lightning bugs. The last of the summer’s fireflies had died somewhere in the folds of one of his handkerchiefs. (Years later, Clara making love to him in a car, catching his semen in a handkerchief and flinging it out onto bushes on the side of the road.
Hey, lightning bug!
he had said, laughing, offering no explanation.)

He waded through the snow, past outcrops of granite, and into the trees where the snow was not as deep. The lights still blinked in front of him. There was laughter. Now he knew what it was. He crept on into the familiar woods as if walking into, testing the rooms of a haunted house. He knew who it was but he did not know what he would see. Then he was at the river. He put the lamp down beside the oak and walked in darkness towards the bank.

The ice shone with light. It seemed for a moment that he had stumbled on a coven, or one of those strange druidic rituals – illustrations of which he had pored over in his favourite history book. But even to the boy of eleven, deep in the woods after midnight, this was obviously benign. Something joyous. A gift. There were about ten men skating, part of a game. One chased the others and as soon as someone was touched he became the chaser. Each man held in one hand a sheaf of cattails and the tops of these were on fire. This is what lit the ice and had blinked through the trees.

They raced, swerved, fell and rolled on the ice to avoid each other but never let go of the rushes. When they collided sparks fell onto the ice and onto their dark clothes. This is what caused the howls of laughter – one of them stationary, struggling to shake off a fragment that had fallen inside his sleeve, yelling out for the others to stop.

Patrick was transfixed. Skating the river at night, each of them moving like a wedge into the blackness magically revealing the grey bushes of the shore,
his
shore,
his
river. A tree branch reached out, its hand frozen in the ice, and one of them skated under it, crouching – cattails held behind him like a flaming rooster tail.

The boy knew they were the loggers from the camp. He longed to hold their hands and skate the length of the creek slowing down through cut rock and under bridges and into
town with these men, knowing they would have to return to those dark cabins by the mill.

It was not just the pleasure of skating. They could have done that during the day. This was against the night. The hard ice was so certain, they could leap into the air and crash down and it would hold them. Their lanterns replaced with new rushes which let them go further past boundaries, speed! romance! one man waltzing with his fire.…

To the boy growing into his twelfth year, having lived all his life on that farm where day was work and night was rest, nothing would be the same. But on this night he did not trust either himself or these strangers of another language enough to be able to step forward and join them. He turned back through the trees and fields carrying his own lamp. Breaking the crust with each step seemed graceless and slow.

So at this stage in his life his mind raced ahead of his body.

THE BRIDGE