"The same for me," Roy added. "The buttermilk's extra."
"We'll have it anyway," Macurdy answered. "We only ate twice in two days, and then not much." The man's aura still reflected distrust, so Macurdy handed him the dollar bill. "Take it out of this. Maybe we'll have something else when we're done."
The meal came with bread, butter, and rice pudding with canned milk, but before they were done, they'd each had another serving of potatoes. It used up the whole dollar. In Sig's eyes they were customers now, not bums, and pulling another chair over, he talked with them briefly. There was no work to be found in Missoula. The sawmills that were running at all were down to one shift a day, running on inventory; almost no logging camps were manned. "I heard it ain't no better in Spokane," Sig added. "Maybe on the coast."
Macurdy and Roy went back to the railyard with stomachs and canteens filled. They were not heartened by what they'd heard. Roy said if they needed to, they could stay with his family till something broke for them. But he didn't sound terribly confident; his family would be hard up at best, trawling salmon for a cannery that probably wasn't paying much at all.
Macurdy slept his way across the Idaho panhandle, waking when the train stopped at Spokane, Washington, and again to the clash and jerk of couplings as it started to leave. The next time he awoke, they were rolling across grassy hills and bare rock washes. After they left Pasco, they never stopped at all, rolling down the Columbia River Gorge through scenery that to Macurdy was beautiful almost beyond comprehension.
So this is Oregon, he thought. God, Varia, if you could only see it! As newlyweds, moving to Oregon had been a dream, nothing urgent, but something they'd do someday. Now she was in another world with another man, and he was here alone. That should, he thought, have spoiled it for him, but somehow the beauty overrode such considerations.
They spent a day at Portland, swimming in the river with their clothes on to get out most of the soot, then wearing them dry in the sunshine, eating on Macurdy's money, and walking around. They took the elevator to an upper floor of a bank building, where Macurdy stared in awe at distant snow peaks. The nearer, to the east, was Mount Hood, Roy told him, and the one off north, Mount Saint Helens. They spent that night with one of Roy's aunts, who treated Macurdy as a welcome guest. The next day they hiked to the railyard and caught another freight, this one on a branch line, headed for the sawmill town of Nehtaka, where Roy, not so confident as he'd been fifteen hundred miles east, hoped they'd find work.
4
Severtson's Camp
They didn't go to the hiring hall. Instead they hiked a dusty road out of town, past yards of great dark logs, and acres of fragrant lumber stacked in the sun to dry. Past a sawmill, whose shrieking headrig and growling planers they could hear from the road four hundred yards away. Above the mill, a tall stack trailed a pennant of woodsmoke. A slab burner, like a fifty foot sheet-iron teepee, leaked more of it, from the top and every seam. Like the visual scene, the resinous pungencies charmed Macurdy. Oregon!
Roy led him to a large, shed-like building covered with asphalt siding. At one end was an office, and it was there they entered. A tall, rawboned blond woman sat at a desk, with a typewriter, a phone, and a pint-sized mug of coffee. On a nearby table sat an electric burner- something Macurdy had never seen before- topped with a large enameled coffee pot, robin's egg blue with black chips. Within the woman's reach was a battered file cabinet, another novelty; Macurdy didn't even know what it was.
"We come to see Axel," Roy told her. "We're looking for work."
This was a self-deprecatory Roy Klaplanahoo, figuratively with hat in hand. White men had left Europe to avoid such servility for themselves. She looked them over, then turned toward an open door. "Axel!" she called, "there's a couple of jacks out here looking for work. One's a Klaplanahoo."
A moment later a tall, big-shouldered, middle-aged man came through the door. He was bald as an egg, but a thatch of flaxen chest hair bushed from his open collar. "Vhere you been?" he said to Roy. "I ain't seen you for a year or more."
"I been to Oklahoma. I'd heard it was real Indian country, and I wanted to see it."
"Vas it? Indian country?"
"Outside the cities it was. The cities were like Portland, only hotter in summer and colder in winter. I didn't like it very much." Axel Severtson, turned to Macurdy. "Vhere you from?"
"Indiana."
"Indiana." Severtson frowned. "You know anything about the voods?"
"Yeah. I've cut timber off and on all my life."
The Swede appraised him, checking the heavy shoulders, the large beefy hands. "Come vit' me," he said, and beckoning, led the two of them through another door into the shed end of the building. Mostly it was storage. Tools hung on the walls; large, well-greased spools of cable lay on skids; and there were chests presumably holding other equipment. "You a faller?" Axel asked Macurdy.
"When we cut, my uncle and me, we did everything: felled, bucked, and skidded."
"Vhat did you cut?"
"White oak, more than anything else. Barrel stock."
The Swede grunted, as if oaks were beneath the attention of real loggers, then took down an axe and tested the blade with a thumb. "C'mon," he said, and led them out the back of the building. A log perhaps three feet in diameter lay there on skids. Someone had already cut into it with an axe; there was a pair of cuts a few feet apart, one of them ragged and rough. Severtson handed Macurdy the axe.
"Let's see vhat you can do vit' it."
Macurdy hefted it-the handle was longer than he was used to-checked an edge for himself, then stepped onto the log, planted his feet and began, his strokes measured and powerful, precise. Chips as big as books began to fly. Halfway through, the Swede called a halt. "Okay," he said, "you'll do. I got some guys didn't come back from the Memorial Day veekend, and I ain't vun of those that goes to Portland to bail them out of yail."
Q Q
Axel sent him back into town to get boots and caulks-said it wasn't safe working without them-and tin pants and whatever else he needed. After giving him a note saying he was hired, in case he needed credit in the stores. Macurdy invested in a toothbrush, too, but not a razor. Like most Macurdy men, he grew little hair except on his skull-because of his ylvin genes, Varia had told him. He'd never grown more than a faint down on cheeks and jaw.
By noon they were on their way to camp, in a truck hauling rigging gear. They ate a late lunch of sandwiches in the messhall-the crew carried their lunches-then were taken into the woods. Macurdy wondered how it was possible to cut timber on such steep slopes. And the stumps! Most were between fifty and ninety inches across, maybe twenty inches high on the uphill and five feet on the downhill side. On this job, he would learn, most of the trees stood between two hundred and two hundred eighty feet tall. He'd never imagined such forest.
They had to wait a few minutes while the foreman-the youngest Severtson brother, Lars-finished marking out a new cutting strip for a pair of fallers. Then Lars assigned a bucker to fell trees with Roy. Finally Macurdy was given the ex-buckers long one-man saw and steel tape measure, and told what to do. He realized now why buckers worked alone: Most of the prostrate trunks were too large for men to work together on opposite sides.
"You ever do this before?" Lars asked. His accent was slight; he'd come over as a child, and gone to school in Nehtaka.
"Not in trees like these," Macurdy answered.
"Let's see how you do."
The cut had been started, and the saw left in the kerf. Macurdy took hold of the handle, and after a few strokes got the feel of it. "Okay," Lars said. "Remember, I don't stand for nobody loafing, even if this is piece work. If you don't get the wood out, you go down the road."