Comes a Time for Burning (3 page)

“This crown’s just got to come off.” The man paused before adding, “There just ain’t no other way around it.” He was ten feet above the trapped logger, and with just a small effort could have drawn himself up to sit on the ragged, blasted pinnacle of the spar. “It’s hung up real good in the neighbor.”

“You’re sure she’s holdin’ hard?”

“Got a couple limbs right through a crotch. It ain’t goin’ nowhere. Hell, I could walk across it.”

“What’s Sonny say?”

It took a while for the logger to ponder that…or perhaps to ask the whimpering Sonny.

“He ain’t sayin’ much, Paul. I guess he’d sure like to get down out of here. He can’t hear shit. That the doc from Port McKinney you got there?”

“Yup.”

“Well, if we got to cut Sonny’s arms away, maybe you could rig the doc up so he can come up and do it.
I
sure ain’t about to.”

Bertram laughed. He stepped back, looking at the ground and shaking his head back and forth to take the kinks out of his neck.

“What will he do?” Thomas asked.

“Oh, Art will figure it out,” Bertram said easily. “Nothin’ we can tell him from down here. If it works, it works. That’s all. If it don’t, then old Sonny hangs there a while longer ‘til we figure out something that does.” He shrugged. “You see where that crown is hangin’ fast? That’s right over Sonny’s head. So that’s a complication. We don’t want that goin’ anywhere when the pressure comes off.”

“And now?”

Bertram looked up as if what was happening far above was of no particular concern. “They think the best thing is to get rid of that crown that’s hangin’ there. That’s puttin’ just hellacious force against the split. Too much to wedge against. But,” and Bertram wiped his face, “If Art cuts the crown too close to the spar, chances are good it could kick down and hit old Sonny, there. See, he’s right under it, damn near. That would put him on the unhappy side.”

“This Art fellow…”

“Art Mabry. He’s the best we got. Been in the timber a long time.”

“Lemme up there, and I’ll get him,” Taylor Simpson said. Thomas glanced over at him, having forgotten the lad who had guided him to this spot. Simpson had moved the two horses to a stump a hundred yards away and then returned, standing now with his hands in his hip pockets, the grin still lighting his features. Now and then he spat a huge, well-directed stream of tobacco juice into the duff and mud at his feet.

Bertram grunted something unintelligible and then ignored the boy.

“We got plenty of wood here holdin’ the crown,” Art called down.

“All right. It’s your call, Art.”

Art worked his way around the trunk until he was directly above the trapped man. He reached out over his head and patted the crown’s trunk, then slapped it hard, as much effect as a slight breeze might have on the bedrock below them. Satisfied, he adjusted his climbing rope and then stamped each boot to reset his climbing spurs. For a moment he just rested there, then leaned back against the safety rope, his body almost horizontal. Sonny said something plaintive, and Art laughed good-naturedly.

“If this don’t work, tell my ma I was a good boy,” Art called down.

“If it don’t work, I’ll tell her that her boy was a clumsy son-of-a-bitch,” Bertram shouted, and more laughter drifted down.

Art pulled up the small crosscut saw and then hung quietly for a moment, his full weight hard against his climbing belt. Thomas realized that, with the safety belt attached at the logger’s waist, the young man was holding himself with belly muscles that must have rivaled the steel core of the safety rope. The logger twisted so that he could look out along the crown’s length to the neighboring spruce tree where the limb wood was tangled. For another minute, he conversed with the third man, who appeared content to watch from the other side of the tree.

With a deft flip of the wrist, he swung the saw up and around, sinking its teeth into the top of the crown’s bole at a spot nearly four feet out from the main spar. Even there, the crown’s trunk was close to two feet thick. No matter how gymnastic he might be, the position was awkward, and he worked quickly. Sawdust drifted out and away on the light breeze, its white mixing with the diamonds of rain to float down to the ground.

Thomas watched through the glass, his breathing loud in his ears. It appeared that, where Art was sawing, the crown’s trunk would sag, hopelessly binding the saw, upper limbs still caught in the neighbor, but still firm on the spar. Of course, Art
didn’t
finish the cut. After cutting into the top of the horizontal crown’s bole for ten inches, he slipped the saw out of the top cut. He hung motionless, feet braced against the spar’s sides and one hand looped affectionately around the log above his head to give his belly and back some relief.

Then, shifting his position around the spar, slightly away from the crown, he hefted the double-bit axe and with his torso contorted so he could hit the target, made short work of the V-groove, relieving the notch as much as he could.

“WHOOOHOOOO!” he whooped, letting the axe’s keeper slide through his hands until it hung free. “That’ll work,” he said, obviously more to himself than anyone else. Working his way back until he was beside the horizontal crown, he positioned the saw on the bottom of the trunk, sawing rhythmically for a full minute before stopping. He left the saw in the cut and drew himself back to the spar.

“That’s a tussle,” he said, his words again meant for no one in particular. He said something to the other logger, who immediately started down the spar. After another moment’s rest, Art repositioned himself, the saw’s soft voice resuming. Start, stop, start, stop. Progress was painfully slow, the awkward, twisted, laid-out position against the safety rope impossible to hold for long. Thomas recalled sawing firewood with his father in Connecticut, and he could imagine that this western spruce, fresh, knotty, and gummy, was actually far more difficult than cutting eastern hardwood.

The other logger reached the ground and unclipped his belt. “Need wedges,” he said, and in a moment, he secured four heavy iron wedges to a draw line. He stood at the base of the spar, gazing up, then shook his head and walked toward Bertram.

“He wants me off it until the crown goes,” he explained. “I told him that I needed to hang on to old Sonny, but he said he weren’t goin’ nowheres. He’s got him belted and spurred in pretty good.”

“How much wood do you got on either side of the split?”

The logger held his hands at least a foot apart. “Somethin’ like that. Damn thing runs right down the center of the bole. It’s got ’em good.”

A shrill whistle jerked up a score of heads.

“You all stand there,” Art shouted down, “and you’re gonna be wearin’ this thing.”

“About where your horses are hitched,” Bertram instructed Thomas. Then Art set to work, the sawdust clouding below his furious sawing. Thomas watched through the lens, and could actually see the saw cut, just a faint line against the bark at that distance, begin to gape. The top cut closed, and Thomas saw Art reach up with his left hand, hugging the crown on the stump side of the cut. Twisting like a contortionist, he drove the big saw hard, and then down below the spectators heard a single sharp crack. For an instant nothing happened, and then the saw dropped out of Art’s hands as he hugged the stump with both arms. The crown popped and snapped and broke free, a giant, lazy candle of limb wood.

Because the logger had cut it off four feet out from the spar, and because its top was so securely snagged, it swung straight down to crash into its neighbor, a giant pendulum swinging away from the spar. Its top splintered and let go with a string of reports that sounded like rifle shots. Broken loose and falling, the crown’s uppermost limbwood kicked back toward the spar, sweeping it like a giant broom half way down the stump. With an explosive crash, the crown settled in a storm of limbs, bark, and needles.

Art’s cry of triumph rang across the bluff. The spar’s arc of release snapped him and the trapped Sonny Malone through forty feet of open air. With the weight of the crown removed, the remaining stump stub above the dynamite line gradually eased upward to a forty-five degree angle. And as it did so, Thomas imagined, the split closed some more. Art released his hug around the bole and swung up, his axe and saw dangling. In a moment he was sitting on the sheered top of the spar, leaning an elbow against the stub of crown as if it were the back of an easy chair. He spread out both arms in victory. Sonny Malone let out a moan loud enough to be heard down below. He didn’t sound victorious.

Chapter Four

“Need those wedges now,” Art Mabry said, making no effort to raise his voice. “And a number two.” Fetching things was apparently Taylor Simpson’s forte, and he reappeared in five minutes with coils of rope and lightweight block and tackle.

For a moment he and the climber argued, the climber winning by snatching the rig out of Simpson’s hands, and chiding him with a string of profanity. “God damn ignorant…” he finished off, and deftly adjusted his load on the end of the draw line—the block and tackle, a bundle of wedges, and a heavy-handled single bit axe considerably more massive than Thomas had ever used around the family woodpile in Leister, Connecticut.

The rigger headed heavenward again, trailing the slender draw line while Taylor Simpson, under continual but good-natured threats of creative deaths, minded that the draw line didn’t tangle.

At the ground, the spruce was nearly seven feet in diameter, its trunk flaring out to enormous roots that Thomas imagined must surely sink to the center of the Olympic peninsula. The climber reached Art Mabry and the two of them conversed. Sonny remained quiet. Through the glass, Thomas could see that the injured man’s head was slumped against the bark, jaw slack, a strand of drool hanging from the corner of his mouth. The physician moved to the nearest sapling, a runty big-leaf maple that had been struggling to find its way to the sun. He braced the glass against the inch-diameter trunk and found the image.

Sonny Malone was not just resting. His head hung against the trunk of the tree, the spruce bark pushing his eyebrow up into his forehead. It might have been a shadow from his cap, or the vagaries of the distance and light, but the rivulet of darkness below his ear looked to be hemorrhage. Thomas could not see the man’s right hand, but his left was basically engulfed in spruce, as if the tree were trying to swallow him. Thomas walked a circle around the spar, finding another vantage point on the far side. Sure enough, Malone’s right hand was also caught, this time just above the wrist bones. His right leg and boot hung straight down beside the tree, the climbing spur gleaming and free of the wood, while the Malone’s left boot looked as if its spur was caught in the bark.

The draw line snapped taught, and the shipment of block and tackle, wedges, rope and axe jerked aloft. Feeling a presence standing beside him, Thomas lowered the scope.

“What do you think?” Paul Bertram asked. “Not gettin’ much work done, are we.” The crowd of onlookers remained, and Thomas supposed that the wagering was thick and heavy.

“There appears to be some discharge from his left ear. And he’s clearly unconscious. So close to the blast…”

The logger thoughtfully dug the toe of his boot into the duff. “Don’t know as a man can stand ten feet away from fifty sticks of dynamite goin’ off and not end up with somethin’ to show for it.”

“It’s incredible.”

“What is?”

“I can’t imagine how he could withstand the concussion and
still
have the presence of mind to cut his safety rope?”

“Cut it or get wrecked,” Bertram said philosophically. “Sonny’s been in the timber since he was sixteen.”

“And how old a man is he now?”

“I think he’s goin’ on twenty-six, if I remember correct.”

“You’ve had this happen before?”

“Nope. Well, let me see now. We’ve had a man or two killed by the dynamite, all right. And high riggin’ in general has laid waste to a couple more. Never the two together.” He looked almost proud of the accomplishment. “This is a first. Had crowns give a topper a good kick sometimes when they’re not payin’ attention. That’s the most common thing.”

Off to the left, Thomas’ gelding uttered a long, heart-felt nicker, and the physician turned to see the ambulance threading its way toward them, sticking to the narrow trail through the stumps.

“Sure hate to see this. We’re short handed as it is.”

Thomas laughed. “And you’ll be more so, Mr. Bertram. Does a young fellow named Huckla work for you? Buddy Huckla?”

“He’s over on the flume gang. They’re puttin’ the last of the chute together, down to the bay.” He turned and pointed off toward the north as if those directions were accurate enough. “Why?”

“He managed to ruin his right hand last night. Thumb wrestling, he says. You know how that’s done, I suppose. One of his comrades fetched him in to the clinic this morning.”

“A few wrenched fingers aren’t going to slow
that
kid down none,” Bertram scoffed.

“More than wrenched. I operated this morning. If he’s very lucky, he may regain some partial use of his right index finger.” He touched his own finger to his thumb. “I worked to give him some pinch. I won’t know how successful we were for some time.”

“Well, damn, then,” the foreman muttered. “Can’t work for a while?”

“Plan on six weeks. Maybe eight.”

“Well, Christ. Who brung him into town?”

“A young chap named…it escapes me, but something German, I think.”

“Sitzy,” Taylor Simpson offered. He had once again drifted toward where Thomas and the foreman stood.

“Sitzberger. Yes. He’s not feeling his best, either.” He smiled at Bertram’s puzzled expression. “Too much indulgence last night with rich food.”

“Too much woman-friend, more likely. Huckla can use his left hand all right?”

“It’s fine.”

“Then he can tend one of the flume gates.” Bertram turned and nodded at Taylor. “Does Huckla know his numbers and such?”

“Guess he does,” Simpson replied. “He don’t write as good as Sitzy does, but some, I guess.”

“Well, then he can be a tallyman at the flume for a few weeks. That’ll bore him silly, and maybe he’ll heal faster.”

Thomas turned to watch Howard Deaton take his time tying off the reins, then carefully lower himself from the rig. The fine white paint, touched here and there with elegant gold trim, was now showing a hundred pounds of the countryside, the rich muck welded throughout the undercarriage and splattered down each side. The driver moved two steps away from the ambulance and settled himself on a broad stump, the charging of his pipe requiring his full attention.

Up above, considerable discussion carried in only fits and snatches to those below.

Thomas handed the glass back to the foreman and then walked over to Deaton.

“What you got here?” the driver asked, calm as if asking the time of day.

“We have a man with both hands caught in the split trunk. And he was too close when a charge of dynamite went off. The crown got hung up in a neighbor.”

“Well, hell.” Deaton sucked on his pipe, the big match drawing and flaring, the cloud of smoke enveloping his head. “I tell you what, these boys think of more ways to ruin a day.” He scanned the timber. “Whyn’t they clear the close timber away from the spar first?”

Thomas shrugged. “Someone was in a hurry. The foreman said they weren’t supposed to use dynamite anyway.”

“Well, there you go.”

One of the men topside shouted something, and Art let the single-bit axe hang loose. A moment of discussion followed, and they saw the block and tackle rigged, one end of the rope secured to Sonny’s safety belt at the back of his waist. In a moment, a long coil dropped earthward.

“Couple of you get on that,” Art called down, and Simpson jumped as if kicked. He and another logger secured the rope, tying the loose end to yet another coil with a deft series of hitches.

Up above, Art dropped down and drove a wedge into the split a foot or so above the trapped man’s hand, then repeated the process on the other side. Still, the stubborn spruce refused to release its hold. More sawing ensued, this time three feet above the stricken man, and in twenty minutes—it seemed to Thomas to take hours—Art Mabry shouted again, and an off-side six-foot section of split trunk pirouetted away from the spar. It hit the duff below with a loud
whump
, driving a foot-deep wedge into the wet ground.

Now the rescuers had a flat seat half the width of the trunk, just above the man’s trapped hands.

“Take the weight now,” Art instructed the men below. Again the wedges were driven in. An excited shout greeted success. First the injured man’s left and then his right arm flopped down, away from the tree. He made no move to lift them, his face still leaning against the bark. With his safety belt unclipped, Sonny hung like a large bean bag from the rope tied around his belt at the small of his back.

The two men on the ground fed rope upward to the block and tackle’s rigging one hundred and sixty feet above their heads. Sonny Malone never moved a muscle as he was lowered. By the time his spurred boots touched the ground and half a dozen hands gently stretched Sonny out on his back, Howard Deaton had brought a canvas stretcher from the ambulance.

The group of loggers fell silent as they watched Thomas Parks adjust his stethoscope. Out of habit, he shut his eyes as he listened to the thin, thready pulse, then opened them to watch Sonny Malone’s face as he counted again. The man had bled from both ears, and one eye was only partially closed while the right was squeezed shut.

“Gently now,” Thomas ordered. Stripped of his safety belt, boot spurs, and an eight inch knife, the stricken logger was positioned on the stretcher and carried the few yards to the ambulance. “I’ll ride with him.” Thomas turned to see Taylor Simpson leading the physician’s gelding across the clearing. “He’ll trail the ambulance.” Simpson nodded, tethering the gelding’s reins to the ambulance’s rear grab bar.

“You want me to come into town this evening to check on him?” Bertram asked.

“Someone needs to,” Thomas said, situating himself on the side bench in the ambulance near Sonny Malone’s head. The polished handles of the stretcher fit neatly into yokes, turning it into a secure cot for the trip to the clinic. “He has family somewhere?”

“Well, I suppose he does,” Bertram mused. “Don’t know for sure. Maybe one of the boys can tell us.”

“That would be good. Someone needs to inform his mother and father. You could stop by and have a talk with Buddy Huckla at the same time. He’s at the clinic, and I’m sure he’s feeling sorry for himself right about now.” Howard Deaton had already coaxed Sallie and Ebbie into a walk, and Sonny Malone made not a sound as the ambulance jerked forward.