The Measure of Katie Calloway,: A Novel (28 page)

25

Our lumber camps are all so nice;

they’re filled, the bunks, with bugs and lice.

You’ll scratch and dig them with your hands,

but you’ll still have them in Michigan.

“Don’t Come to Michigan”
—1800s shanty song

February 10, 1868

Robert watched dark winter days dissolve into dark winter weeks, and yet Harlan did not come back. Logs, wet with snow, multiplied along the riverbank, piled into pyramids as high as a house, readied to be rolled into the water the moment the spring thaw came and the river rose.

Some days the temperatures were so low, the forest snapped and boomed as the sap froze within the huge pines in the savage cold.

Accidents had been held to a minimum. Some cuts and bruises. One case of frostbite in a young shanty boy too green to understand the need to stop often and warm himself at the campfire.

It was necessary to work in even the coldest temperatures. The snow was heavy this year. The men cut trees while wearing snowshoes on top of snow several feet deep. In the spring, the stumps left over would be as high as eight to ten feet tall—wood wasted from the men having to stand on top of deep snow.

There had been one very dangerous, but memorable, moment, when Cletus and Ernie fell through an embankment where the snow was especially high. They had fallen in on a black bear in its den, startling it out of its hibernation and scaring both men and bear out of their wits. He wasn’t sure who had been the most shocked, the men or the bear, but there was a flurry of arms and legs and fur—until the bear and the men got themselves untangled and the bear ran into the woods.

He had no doubt that the bear was still wondering what in blazes had happened. The episode had provided conversation for the men for days. Cletus was now in the process of carving a small bear for his collection. Ernie said it calmed Cletus’s nerves after his narrow escape.

The snow had long ago blocked the door of the children’s hollow tree house. Perhaps, come spring, they could enjoy it for a few days until the entire camp made its way down the river.

As the weeks passed, Robert continued to worry about Harlan. He hoped that getting that money back from Katie would be enough to satisfy the man, but somehow he doubted it. It appeared that Harlan might have actually gone back to Georgia, but nothing about the man’s demeanor had suggested to Robert that he would give up a fight so easily.

Skypilot, still on the mend and having nothing to occupy his time, had offered to teach the children. Skypilot was a gifted teacher, and he often wove in little Bible stories as a sort of treat. The children, with few chores and fewer toys, were entranced by their “school.” During breaks from learning, they made a sport of trying to tame the orange cat. So far, the cat had spurned their advances, but it did take its job of mouse patrol very seriously.

Moon Song, bright as a button, sat in on the lessons, and her English was improving daily.

It was thrilling to Robert that Skypilot was healing with little sign of infection. There was definitely a new day dawning in medicine. He was convinced that this fledgling knowledge of sterilization that was slowly making its way into the medical establishment was going to save thousands of lives.

Yes, there was a new and exciting day dawning in the field of medicine. But he would not be part of it. His ability to operate on Skypilot had been a direct answer to prayer. He doubted that his struggle with his “soldier’s heart” was over quite yet.

26

But when the winter days were past

then came the spring and thaw;

our drive was started for the mills

that lined the Saginaw.

“The Old Cass”
—1800s shanty song

April 2, 1868

It began with a change in the air. An almost imperceptible feeling that something deeply primal had shifted in its sleep and was beginning the slow process of awakening. It showed up on the thermometer attached to the cook shanty as the temperature slowly rose.

One morning, with the sun shining brightly, water began to run down the heavy icicles in rivulets—creating a constant drip, drip, drip—until they froze solid again during the night.

Then the snow turned to slush, and the faintest of green began to appear upon the bushes.

Katie could hear the rush of the river grow each day, as water melted from the thousands of acres of the Saginaw Valley and funneled down through waterways to feed the river.

According to Jigger, the men would spend a few more days getting out the last of this season’s logs, and then each pyramid would have a key log knocked loose, and the logs would tumble into the river to be ridden and herded by river drivers, or “river hogs,” until the bobbing logs flowed into the “booms” of Bay City—where they would be sorted and counted.

It would never have occurred to her to think to brand a log—but that was what she saw Blackie doing one day while she walked with Jigger to take the men their dinner. Blackie swung a heavy hammer into which was carved a sort of branding iron, gouging a design into the butt end of each log. Robert’s brand was simple—RF surrounded by a circle.

This was done, according to Jigger, to keep river pirates from stealing the camp’s logs. This seemed incredible to her that with so many trees still uncut anyone would feel the need to steal someone else’s labor, but Jigger assured her it was true. He said they even went to the lengths of cutting the end of the trees off when they could get by with it, and then rebranding the fresh butt with a brand of their own. Jigger laughed when Katie said she thought that if the river pirates were going to go to all that trouble, they might as well go out and get honest work.

Tinker had been working for weeks on the wannigan, and it was ready. Soon, she would be living in and cooking and serving meals from the rough-looking flatboat.

It would not be an easy task. Jigger had told her that the men would be working so hard and spending so much time in ice-cold water that they would need four to five meals a day, instead of just three. She and Jigger would be cooking in nonstop shifts.

The moment she stepped foot on the wannigan would be the beginning of the end of her sojourn as Robert’s cook. She and all the rest of his employees would be paid at the end with deductions for whatever they had purchased from the camp store. She had purchased nothing but a few bars of laundry soap, so her pay would be large. Three hundred and eighty dollars! Enough to keep her and Ned for quite a while.

She had hopes of cooking for another lumber camp in the fall—although not Robert’s. It was too hard to be around someone you loved but could never have. She had heard that there were camps opening up in Wisconsin. Perhaps, if she went there, it would be too far away even for Harlan.

“Timberrrr!”

Robert watched the giant pine crash to the ground. The crew swarmed over it, denuding it of its branches while the crosscut saw teams began their work of turning it into logs. Night was closing in. This would be the last tree his crew would cut this season. The extra river hogs had begun to arrive, men who were expert in the dangerous skill of herding the logs down the river. Some of his crew would stay on and ride the river as well; others, not comfortable with the job, would head to Bay City and await the river drivers’ arrival, collecting their wages once he and Inkslinger had settled up with the milling company.

His men would then either turn the wages of the past winter into one glorious drunk lasting at most a couple of weeks, or they would tuck their pay away into their turkeys and strike out for the various small farms struggling to gain a foothold in the Michigan wilderness. He knew that there were families waiting, praying that Father would come home with his wages intact.

What the men did, or didn’t do, with their wages was not something he could control. His biggest worry right now was getting the logs down the river without anyone drowning. Strangely enough, some of the best river drivers couldn’t swim. They felt it was an unnecessary skill, since usually, when a river hog fell into the water, the crush of logs above their heads would make it impossible to surface.

He prayed his most fervent prayers at this time. He prayed that there would be no logjams—a lumberman’s nightmare. If even one log got hung up, the ones behind it could pile up for miles behind—the weight of them crushing the front logs into pulp, creating a nightmarish dam out of the splintered timbers, through which the river hogs would have to pick their way carefully, hunting for the key log holding the others back.

Unraveling a logjam was the most dangerous work of all. If the men were lucky or skilled enough to pry the key log out, they still had to have the reflexes of a cat to jump out of the way before the mountain of logs in the accidental dam poured down over them.

Few river drives took place without some deaths. He couldn’t do anything about it except be as responsible as he knew how, keeping his men as well fed and cared for as possible. The drivers made three times the salaries of common shanty boys—and they earned every penny.

Tinker had made a good, solid wannigan. It would accommodate a kitchen large enough for Katie and Jigger to work. It had a deck big enough for Katie or Jigger to nap during their short breaks and to store supplies. The men would eat on shore and sleep in hastily erected tents.

The river hogs lived those few weeks in the spring constantly wet and chilled from the icy spray of the river. They never changed into dry clothes, believing that to do so would give them pneumonia. Instead, they chose to fall asleep sopping wet, awakening as miserable as when they had lain down. Rarely had he seen a river hog working past the age of forty.

He had already sent Skypilot and Moon Song ahead with Sam, along with the children. All would be cared for the next few days by his sister. She would not be pleased, but she would do her duty for a short time. She was, after all, living with her new husband in a house that Robert owned.

Most of Bay City and Saginaw would turn out to watch the river drive. Buggies and horses would line the rivers and creeks waiting for the logs to roar down. Many of the townspeople would pack picnics. Sometimes they cheered a river hog from the banks for some especially heroic feat.

Yes, tomorrow would be a big day. They would break the logs loose from their frozen piles and watch their winter’s harvest tumble into the water. He would set the wannigan and its occupants floating far behind the mass of logs, and he would ride his horse beside the riverbank, keeping an eye out for river pirates, helping shove logs away from getting hung up on the river’s edge, and encouraging the men the best he could. Although he could hold his own with an axe or a saw, he had never mastered the art of balancing on the logs well enough to ride the rough waters of the river drive. He admired the brave men who did.

Soon, if everything went well, the season would be over. The logs would be delivered, and everyone would leave. It was a strange sort of life. Men lived and worked together, shared their stories and the details of their lives, learned the cadence of each other’s snores, fought one another over the most trivial of things out of sheer boredom, and protected one another with their lives. They became a sort of supportive, brawling family—and then at winter’s end, they parted ways, often never to see one another again.

He was used to it, but saying good-bye to Katie was another thing altogether. How could he leave her to just fend for herself? And yet he had no right to look out for her once they reached Bay City. She wasn’t his sister, and she wasn’t his wife. He didn’t think she could initiate a divorce from Michigan since she didn’t even have a permanent address in the state. And there was always the chance that doing such a thing might draw Harlan back—which could be dangerous. But it was her choice—not his. She had no ties to him at all. She had the right to disappear from his life completely. He had overheard her talking to Jigger about the new camps springing up in Wisconsin.

He couldn’t ask any more of her. She had fulfilled her responsibility to him and the men. She was free to go where she wished.

And it would break his heart.

The thought of the vacuum her absence in his life would cause was overwhelming. Not only for himself but for his children. They, too, had grown to love her. How would they feel when she walked away? And how would they get over the loss of Ned, who had become as close as a brother?

He was good at solving problems. He could cipher out numbers better than most, and he had once been able to make split-second life-or-death decisions during surgery. But this was one problem for which he had no answer.