Touch (2 page)

EVEN THOUGH WE
wanted to be with my father in the cuts during the summers, the winters were better, because at least then we had him to ourselves. School days, he took to the mill, filing blades, checking the books, helping the assistant foreman, Pearl, tend to the horses, but he was home when we were, sitting at the stove at night, listening with us as my mother, a former schoolteacher at the Sawgamet schoolhouse, read from her books. He carved small wooden toys for Marie—a rough horse, a whistle—using his destroyed hand to pin the block of wood to the table. Mostly, though, he told us stories.

I know that out in the cuts he was a different man. He had to be. He kept the men’s respect and, in turn, they kept the saw blades humming through green wood. While their axes cut smiles into pines and stripped branches from fallen trees, while they wrapped chains around the logs, my father moved through the woods, yelling, talking, making them laugh, taking the end of a saw when it was needed. He pushed them hard, and when they pushed back, he came home with bruises, an eye swollen shut, scabs on his knuckles. He made them listen.

At home, he was gentle. At night, he told us stories about his father, how Jeannot found gold and settled Sawgamet, and then the long winter that followed the bust. He told us about the qallupilluit and Amaguq, the trickster wolf god, about the loup-garou and the blood-drinking adlet, about all of the monsters
and witches of the woods. He told us about the other kinds of magic that he stumbled across in the cuts, how the sawdust grew wings and flew down men’s shirts like mosquitoes, how one tree picked itself up and walked away from the sharp teeth of the saw. He told us about splitting open a log to find a fairy kingdom, about clearing an entire forest with one swing of his ax, about the family of trees he had found twisted together, pushing toward the sky, braided in love.

Our favorite story, however, the story that we always asked him to retell, was about the year he finally convinced our mother to marry him. The last time I remember him telling the story was the spring before I turned ten.

“Every man had been thrown but me and Pearl Gasseur,” he said.

“Old Pearl?” Marie giggled, thinking of Pearl as I thought of him, riding the middle of the float with his close gray hair bristling crazily from his scalp, yellowed long underwear peeking from the cuffs of his shirt.

My father had told the story so many times that Marie probably could have recounted it word for word by then, but like me, like our mother, she still laughed and clapped.

“Old Pearl? Old Pearl?” my father roared, his teeth flashing. “Old Pearl wasn’t always old,” he yelled happily. “Old Pearl could sink any man and would laugh at you while he spun the log out from under your feet.”

“And Mrs. Gasseur was happy to tell you about it,” my mother said. “She was happy as winter berries watching him dunk the boys.” My mother smiled at this. She always smiled.

Logrolling in Sawgamet was a tradition. Every year the entire town came down to the river the day before the float.
They carried blankets and baskets full with chicken, roasted onions and potatoes, bread, blueberry pies, strawberry wine. My father—and before him Foreman Martin—would roll out a few barrels of beer, and the men took to the water. They spun logs, a man on either end, turning the wood with their feet, faster and faster, stopping and spinning the other way, until one, or sometimes both, pitched into the cold water to raucous cheers from the banks.

“Pearl won ever since I could remember,” my father said. “He’d never been unseated, but I had to win.” He slapped the worn pine table with his mangled hand and winked at my mother. “Oh, your mother was a clever one.” He stood up from the table and hooked his arm around her waist, pulling her close to him and looking over her shoulder at Marie and me. “She still is.”

He kissed her then, and it surprised me to see my mother’s cheeks redden. Before she pushed him away, she whispered something into his ear and he reddened as well, pausing a moment to watch her take the plates from the table.

“Papa,” Marie said, demanding more.

“Oh, but you know all this already. She married me,” he said, turning back to us and waving his hand, “and here you are.”

“Papa,” Marie said again, shaking her finger at him like our schoolmarm.

“Tell it right,” I said.

He smiled and leaned over the top of his chair. “She wouldn’t marry me.”

“But Mama,” Marie asked, “why didn’t you love Papa?”

My father stopped and looked at my mother. This was not part of the story. “Why didn’t you love me?” he said.

“You asked every girl in Sawgamet to marry you,” my mother answered.

“But I only asked them once,” he said, turning back to Marie. “Your mother I asked every day. All of the men had asked her to marry them, even some of the ones who were already married, but I kept asking. Every day for three years I called on her at the boardinghouse, and every day I asked her to marry me.”

“And she always said no.” Marie reached out and cupped the withered fingers of my father’s bad hand in her two hands. He sat down next to her. “Mama,” she asked again, “why didn’t you love Papa?”

“I always loved him, sweetheart,” she said, pouring hot water from the stove into the dish tub. She leaned in toward the steam, letting it wash across her face. “I just didn’t know it yet.”

“So I kept asking her to marry me, until one day she didn’t say no.”

“What did she say?” Marie could not stop herself.

“She said the day she’d marry me was the day I got Pearl into the water.”

“I thought it was a safe bet,” my mother said. “Your father never could seem to stay dry.”

My father was leaning back in his chair now, staring at the moon through the window. He had taken his hand back from Marie, and he rubbed the fingers of his good hand across the back of the bad, as if it ached.

I wanted to hear about his triumph, how that was the year the log had spun so fast he could not see his feet, and how it was not until he heard a splash, and a roar from the banks of
the river, that he knew he had finally dunked Pearl Gasseur. I wanted to hear him describe the feel of the cold water when he dove from the log and swam to the bank, the river dripping from his clothes as he walked to my mother. I wanted to see the wink he gave us when he said that our priest, Father Hugo, was asleep with drink at the barrels of beer. I wanted to hear how Father Earl, who had arrived from Ottawa only the day before and who was Anglican and younger than my father, performed the wedding right then and there on the bank of the Sawgamet. But before he could tell us that, before he could tell us how he had to leave the next morning for the float, and how he ran home all the way from Havershand, running to his wife, I asked him, “Do you miss it? Do you miss the float?”

He looked at me for a moment, as if he had not heard my question, and then my mother spoke. “You and Marie wash up now, get ready for bed.”

As I rose from the table, he stopped me. He raised his ruined hand, the fingers curled like a claw. “I miss it,” he said.

He did not tell many stories for the next few weeks, and then when the snow finally melted enough for the men to take out their saws and axes and get into the woods, my father pushed them terribly, as if he knew how bad the coming winter would be. He kept them working from dawn to dusk with not a day’s break until the first of September, when the trees were stacked and lined beside the mill.

THE LOGS HAD TO RUN
the river, of course, for the money to come in, and the winter that Foreman Martin had misjudged
the weather and waited too long, the river froze with the logs still in it. That had been a hard winter, with money tight and credit long. When cutting started again in the spring, snow still on the ground, my father crushed his hand the first week, and then later that month Foreman Martin died when the errant swing of an ax caught him across the back of the head. The company gave my father the foreman’s job.

The year that I was ten, ice clung to the banks of the river on the morning of the float, and the men glanced appreciatively at my father, knowing that the freeze-up would not be far behind. The winter was coming early and fierce, troubling even for the few men who remembered the original rush and the year that Sawgamet had turned hard and lean; the boomtown had gone bust and rumors of desperate men eating their mules to stay alive through the snowed-in winter had been overshadowed by whispers of their eating more pernicious meat than what came from mules.

My father pushed the men to send the logs down the chute, screaming at them, adding his weight to the poles when needed, and by supper, Father Hugo and Father Earl had both blessed the float; the men were gone, the logs gone with them.

The men came back from Havershand in the snow, cold but laughing, flush and ready for a winter of trapping and hunting, a chance to file saw blades and sell a few furs. But by the end of October the cold ate at us, wind pulling tears from our eyes, solid on our cheeks in moments. Men stacked firewood three rows deep outside their houses, the thump of axes a constant sound. Mothers kept their stoves burning all day, the dishwater they threw out the door freezing as it hit the ground.

The river froze inward, flat and even near the banks at first, but by November even the fast-moving water at the center of the river, the dangerous meeting of the Sawgamet and the Bear Rivers, had iced over. Daylight fading, we skated on the river after school while shoreline bonfires raged, giving us a place to warm our hands. Girls played crack the whip while the men and boys played hockey on the broad run of ice swept clear of snow.

Sundays, before dinner, we usually went down to the river. That Sunday, however, my mother stayed in the house to finish her baking, so only my father came down with us, carrying his and Marie’s skates slung over the hockey stick he rested on his shoulder. With the cold, which had shattered the schoolhouse’s glass thermometer the week before, even my father wore a scarf over his face to protect him. My mother had swaddled Marie and me with so many layers of clothing that we had trouble with the steps. Still, the cold seeped through the layers like water, and we were eager to skate and warm ourselves a little.

Down at the river, we sat on the packed snow at the banks, and my father helped Marie with her skates. He tied her laces and sent her off on the river. As he tied his own laces, she skated slowly toward the tip of the channel, pushing away from us with timid steps, like a newborn moose with shivering legs. The sun was already setting, and I could feel the temperature falling away and getting colder, if such a thing was even possible.

I had my head bent down over my skates and was pulling the laces tight, eager to take my stick and join the other boys playing shinny, when my father suddenly jumped from
the snow along the bank, one skate still unlaced. He screamed Marie’s name, skates chewing the frozen water, flying toward the thin ice at the confluence of the two rivers. There was just a dark hole where Marie had broken through the ice and disappeared.

Other men raced behind my father, but he was the first to the open water, screaming her name. For a moment he stopped at the edge of the fissure. Suddenly we saw her—we all saw her—gasping, bobbing, taking a last breath at the surface of the water, too cold or too scared to even scream, and as I reached the water, I saw my sister’s eyes lock on to my father.

He dove into the water.

And then they were gone.

I hesitated at the edge, staring at the water, surprised at how smooth it was. Pearl grabbed my shoulder roughly. “No,” he said, as if he were holding me back, and I realized that I had not even thought of following my father in.

The black water in the hole that Marie’s fall had opened up started icing even as Pearl held my arm. The men yelled for rope, but then, not willing to wait, they linked arms, Pearl the first one into the breach. I could see the shock on his face at the first touch of the water. It was a minute at most before the men hauled him back from the water, the skin on his hands gone white from the cold. He could not stand when they took him out, his legs shaking uselessly beneath him.