Abbeville (5 page)

“What will happen?”

“The forest will regenerate,” said his uncle. He pointed to a chipmunk rooting around in a pile of brush. “In the meantime, if there is food for him here, he will stay and prosper. If not, he will either move on or die. It is the same for us.”

As they approached the water, the noise increased. Men barked orders. Chains clanked. Wood rasped against wood. Out of the reeds stepped a dark figure soaked to the skin. In the still air his clothing actually steamed.

“Goddamn greenhorn!” he said. “Ran a goddamn log right over mine.”

The river was engorged with melted snow. Two lumberjacks knocked away the stays at a rollway, and the logs thundered down the bank and hit the water like an explosion. The men stood and watched silently, as if it were a natural disaster.

When the logs in the river stopped moving forward, the lumber-jacks stripped down to their undershirts and walked out onto the treacherous jams, their only protection an uncanny sense of balance and a safety rope, which seemed just as likely to get snagged and pull them under as to provide for their rescue. Armed with long, pike-like peavies, they attempted by applying leverage to unlock the front logs and set them parallel with the current, which rushed under them in a torrent.

Hoekstra picked his way surely from log to angled log. He was an enormous man, and his very bulk caused movement in the jam. Fortunately for the Dutchman, it was not enough to break the mess apart because if that happened without his being ready, he would be crushed to death.

He moved quickly toward the center until he found the keystone logs. They were fast against a half-sunken stump that backed up against a boulder that held it firm. After surveying the situation, he slipped back to the rear end of one of the leading logs and jumped. The height of his leap took Karl's breath. The Dutchman landed on both feet, his outstretched arms angling to hold his balance. The shuddering log bucked but did not break free.

Dozens of other lumberjacks watched from the banks. Hoekstra walked forward again and surveyed the geometry. Then suddenly he undid the safety rope from his waist and plunged into the icy water. In unison the crowd drew a breath. For a moment Karl could see his head just above the water. Then it disappeared. Seconds passed. A minute. Two lumberjacks took a step out onto the jam, then backed off. Something was happening. At first it was just a nervousness among the logs. Then came an awful groan that could have been a man's death agony amplified a thousand times. Hoekstra's head popped out the water. Foam flew from his hair, and with both arms he hugged the lead log as it slowly gave way.

The safety rope lay useless across the top of the jam, which was all in motion now. Someone retrieved the rope and tried to throw a loop to him. But it was too late. The log he was holding careered downstream a few feet ahead of the others. He struggled with it like a man wrestling a beast.

At the next bend the river narrowed, deepened, and went flat. Karl knew the spot well because several times while fishing he had been sucked down into the cavernous hole. It was a place a man could die.
But the deeper, slacker water was just what the Dutchman wanted because in it the log slowed down enough that he was able to guide it shoreward. Then in one terrible moment he made a leap to a spot just behind a fallen tree, which held off the tumbling logs for a couple of seconds before snapping like a twig. By then Hoekstra had clambered up the bank and was looking back at the crushing weight of the harvest as it swept past him.

That night Karl and his uncle sat across from one another eating dinner.

“Dangerous business out there today,” said Karl.

“Without risk, there is no business,” said Uncle John, wiping his lips on a handkerchief. “You borrow money to buy rights to a territory, hire a skeleton crew in the summer to scout it. Then you wait for the freeze. If it comes late, you lose precious days. If the snow doesn't fall, the rivers don't rise in the spring to float the logs. These things are variable, but the interest on that borrowed money is as relentless as the current. Many have drowned.”

“It seems a shame to have to borrow,” said Karl, his father's son.

“The need for capital is what has kept every lumberjack out here from going into business against me,” said Uncle John. “That and the memory of 1857 and 1873, when everything collapsed and the less you had the less you lost.”

“On the farm it's different,” said Karl. “We have the land.”

Uncle John looked at him.

“Look around you. Land is everywhere,” he said. “No, I'm afraid that to make money, you have to play with fire. And the closer you get to it, the bigger the payoff.”

“The Dutchman didn't seem to be looking for a payoff,” said Karl.

“Thank goodness for such men,” said Uncle John.

The next day his uncle left for the city. Karl was in charge of seeing
the harvest downstream to the sawmill, then making proper financial settlement with the tribe.

But first came a task he dreaded. After all the work was done he gathered everyone together and told the men that this was to be his uncle's logging company's last harvest. There would be no more work. The men murmured, then drifted away. Only the Dutchman stayed, leaning against the side of one of the cabins, puffing his pipe.

“Where are you going to go?” Karl asked.

“Another river,” he said.

“You could do anything,” Karl said, “a man like you.”

“A man like me,” Hoekstra said. “A man like me does what a man like you tells him to do.”

“I'm no different than you,” said Karl.

“I hope for your sake you are wrong about that.”

After finishing with the last payroll and reconciling balances, Karl set off to give the tribe its royalty payment, which he had meticulously documented with copies of the mill receipts. The trip to where the chief lived was a simple matter of mounting a naked ridgeline and following it. Long before the snows the chief's family would settle into the cabin where Karl and his uncle had worked and slept, the chief at Uncle John's desk doing whatever chiefs did.

Karl's breath came heavily in the thick air as he mounted a hill and got the village in sight. He was carrying a lot of money and wearing no sidearm, but he was not concerned. Nobody would come to this barren place to look for something worth stealing.

The village stood on the other side of the river. Karl descended and picked his way around the marshes until he reached the bank. He felt no urgency. He had nothing left to do in camp but pack up his things. The men had reveled late into the night and would be doing little today but paying for it.

He stepped into the water and pulled from his rucksack a light rod
he had bought from the Dutchman. It came in two pieces, ingeniously held together with a ferrule of tooled tin, which had been joined to the shank with a varnished winding of thread. Karl withdrew from his pocket a reel of nickel steel his uncle had sent him from Chicago. He cinched it to the handle of the rod, then threaded the braided horse-hair line through the guides, doubled so that if his fingers slipped, it would not drop all the way back through. He had greased the line carefully the night before. To the end of it he had tied a length of gut and then another of silk so fine that he had to use a special knot Hoekstra had shown him.

Karl took out a small tin from his breast pocket and greased the gut and silk so they would float. Then he withdrew a wooden box. Into its lid he had carved his initials in the fanciest German script he could manage. He gently opened the box and took out a tiny tan fly that he had made of rabbit fur, feathers, and thread. His fingers, which had seemed so thick and unwieldy when he was learning the knots, now deftly whipped the filament around itself five times, then threaded the tip back through the loop until he had a connection he was confident could hold the wildest fish in the river. He pulled it tight, the hook biting into the edge of his thumb. Then he put a bit of grease on the fly itself, grooming it as carefully as he might ready himself for church.

When he was satisfied, he stripped out some line and waited, watching the water. There were tiny midges in the air, but nothing to interest a trout of any size. Karl saw no rings on the surface of the water that would have marked feeding fish like a bull's eyes. He gazed up and down along the far bank until he spotted some fallen timber lying just inside the line of bubbles in the current and parallel to it. A few days ago he would have thought to free it up and send it downriver, but now it suggested to him another purpose.

Sliding his feet along the river bottom, feeling for obstacles, he carefully pushed upstream. With folding money in his pocket he could not afford to take an accidental swim. When he stopped and looked up, he met another pair of eyes.

An Indian brave about his age stood ten yards off the bank in a thicket of reeds. Karl nodded to him. Nothing passed the young man's face.

Karl's line trailed downstream until he lifted it from the water in one smooth pull and set it down straight, cutting an angle to the current. His first cast landed well short of the submerged timber, but he was pleased with the soft presentation of the fly and the even float of leader and line. He looked up at his observer to see if he, too, appreciated the technique but received no satisfaction. Then, checking behind him to see how much leeway he had for the backcast, he slipped two more pulls from the reel, lifted the whole length of line, sending it backward, then stopped the rod abruptly. He waited a count and sent it forward again. The fly uncoiled in front of him and landed a little upstream of where he wanted it, but a quick flip mended the line and gave him the drift he needed. Sure enough, from beneath the fallen log flashed an apparition. Karl lifted the rod to set the hook and felt the desperate tug of life.

It took a few minutes to bring the wildly darting, running beast under control. Then he patiently reeled it in until, holding his rod high over his head, he could reach down and seize it by the tail.

The fish was no more than sixteen inches, but, as the Dutchman used to say, it had shoulders. A fine offering it would make when he reached the village. Perhaps, he thought, the chief would ask him to share a meal.

When he looked up, the young Indian was gone. The fish arched its back. Then came a sickening splash as it broke free of his hold.

Shortly he heard movement upstream. The young Indian stood on a raised bank above a deep, murky pool. He glanced at Karl, then set eyes on the impossibly dark waters for a long moment before lifting his arm and hurling a spear. It pierced the river with hardly a splash. The butt end rose, splashing madly this way and that. The young man took several quick, sure steps downriver, pulling in the cord attached to the spear, then plunged his arm in up to the shoulder. When he raised it again, he had a fish twice as large as the one Karl had lost. The Indian flung it unceremoniously to the bank. The brutal efficacy was like an arrow striking Karl's breast.

“Good fish,” he shouted.

But by then the Indian had vanished into the reeds. Karl reeled in his line, broke down the rod, and pulled himself from the river.

When he reached the village, the chief was waiting for him. His skin had the weathered color of deadfall stripped of bark. Alongside him was the brave.

Karl showed the chief his meticulous documentation, but the chief showed no interest.

“You have the money?” he said.

“Here,” Karl said, handing it to him. “Don't you even want to count it?”

“Your people are like fire,” said the chief. “You cannot number the flames.”

“What will you do with the money?” Karl asked.

“We will not buy sticks like yours for fishing,” said the chief. The brave laughed. “My son said you lost your grayling.”

“And your son caught his,” Karl said.

“When we want a thing, we want it only for itself, and we get it,” said the chief. “Your people always are thinking about something more.”

“Like beauty and grace, you mean,” said Karl.

“It is a strange time and place for you to be speaking of such things,” said the chief.

More than a decade passed before Karl worked these currents again with greased line and fur and feather. By then his soul had come dangerously close, through brutal experience, to losing the very thought of grace.

A
FTER KARL ALIGHTED FROM THE TRAIN
in Chicago, he wandered the streets, duffel bag in hand, taking it all in. People wore every manner of costume, from top hats and bowlers to what Karl's father, leafing through the Sears, Roebuck catalog, called “immigrant caps.”

The women all seemed larger than life, with their bustles and high, corseted busts. Karl had never seen such an acreage of exposed female skin, an effect multiplied by the number of months in which the only women he had seen were in the Indian village, as wrapped-up as their papooses. At some point in his wide-eyed meander he came upon the bright blue waters of the lake. Many women were out sunning themselves: shameless, smooth, wonderful legs below their bloomers. What a grand thing a city was!

It did not take long before Karl's own appearance began to make him self-conscious. No matter how diverse the fashion he saw on the streets, he did not run into anyone else looking like a lumberjack. His untrimmed beard itched with each young woman he caught noticing it. His utility shirt felt crude, his boots cumbersome. Suddenly he
wanted refuge, so he asked directions to the address Uncle John had given him.

As he passed the Board of Trade, about which he had heard so much complaining in Abbeville, he could not help thinking of it as an enormous grain elevator, with all the green growth of the plains pouring through it. He pushed open the heavy door of the building where his uncle had his office and stepped into a limestone cave lit by hundreds of lamps. It was not in any ordinary sense a place of worship, but it had a church's solemn hush.