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Authors: Sarah Leipciger

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BOOK: The Mountain Can Wait
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First morning
of the plant, Tom woke early and sat on the steps of his trailer, flicking off the small round slugs that had clung to his bootlaces in the night. The blue air cold enough for him to see his breath. He wore his heavy woolen sweater and wool-lined coat and a black toque. Wind gusted off the lake, buffeting and sucking the few tents that had been set up right on the beach. At the other end of the camp, Roland loaded tarps into the back of his crew van. Tom laced his boots and walked across the clearing to the serving window at the cook van and leaned on the frame. Nix's back was to him as she worked with strong arms to stir a large pot with a long wooden spoon. Steam and spitting oil and the smell of fried biscuits and cinnamon.

“Smells good,” said Tom.

Her shoulders tensed and she turned around, her hand at her throat. “You scared the crap out of me.” Her dark hair was plastered to her forehead.

He put his palms up.

“Help me get this stuff out,” she said. She passed him a tray loaded with three jugs of milk, a bowl of butter, and a plastic container of sugar. He ferried more food out to the mess tent, breakfast and fixings for lunch: loaves of bread, plates of ham and salami and cheese, fruit, boxes of cereal. A jar of instant coffee and a hot-water urn.

He went back to the van. “Can I steal a bowl?”

With her back to him: “No.”

“You going to make me go back to my trailer for it?”

“I give you a bowl, chief, I have to give everyone a bowl.”

“Come on.”

She shook her head and shuffled around some boxes and passed him a small stainless steel bowl.

“Spoon and a cup too,” he said.

“Bring it all back clean,” she said. She dropped a spoon into a chipped enamel cup and gave it to him.

He chose a box of cereal and made himself a cup of strong coffee. He sat at the end of one of the long, wooden tables and watched his planters drift into the mess tent, wrapped warmly against the cold. Some faces he recognized, some not. They filled their mugs with coffee and prepared stacks of sandwiches for the day, squares of cake wrapped in paper towel. The tent slowly filled with the din of morning voices, and then Roland and Matt sat on either side of him.

“Hey, I just heard about Rocky,” said Roland.

Tom nodded, drank his coffee.

“You think you'll get another dog? You'll need one if you end up moving out to that shack.”

Tom looked out the door of the tent. “True enough.” He stood up and collected his dirty dishes and took them outside to the wash table. He rinsed them in a tub of hot water and left them on the table to dry.

The day had turned gray and fog skirted the mountains across the black chop of the lake. Sweet stood at the pump filling a large plastic barrel, and when he saw Tom he stopped and loped over to him, the color in his cheeks blooming as if he'd been slapped.

“I did a run out to my block last night, boss. Set my cache up.”

“Okay.”

Sweet waited.

“What?”

“Lots of draws. Slash everywhere. What are you trying to do to me?” He fingered a few fat curls behind his ears.

“You've got the most experienced crew.”

“They'll quit when they see this. It's bullshit. What kind of land did Matt and Roland get?”

“Everybody gets their share,” said Tom, making his way over to his truck.

Sweet followed him. “Have you even seen it?”

“Wouldn't've made a difference if I had.” Tom opened his door and got in. “I know how bad it can get. So do you.”

“You owe me. Another one.”

“Only asking you to do your job.”

  

Two hours later, Tom pulled into the landing where Sweet had left his crew van parked next to a white Nielson Logging truck, which meant that the company checker was already on the block somewhere. It was an aggressive move, for the checker to arrive on the first day. Other outfits had been sniffing around this contract, and Tom felt a little like he was in the scope. There could be no fuckups this year. He pulled his old vinyl bags, soft and worn, out of the back of the truck. This was the third or fourth set he'd had over the past fifteen years, and he thought he'd burn them at the end of the season, his last. He laced his arms through the shoulder straps of the harness, then tightened and clasped the belt. The three bags, dirty and scuffed at the seams, hung empty around his hips.

Mist settled into his hair and his wool collar as he stood at the edge of the road and took in the land. A small dirt track sloped down into a steep-banked draw, which was crisscrossed with fallen logs. Slash piles of sticks and branches, left behind after the trees had been felled, delimbed and bucked, and taken away by skidder, marked the land like pencil scribbles breaking through paper. It was slow-going land, frustrating as hell to work. He pulled his collar up around his neck and headed down into the draw, following the muddy chunks of track left by Sweet's quad bike. He balanced his shovel across his shoulders with both arms slung over it and hopped the puddles, frozen at their edges. Soon he came to the first planter's cache, a white and silver tarp fastened with rope to a stump and to sticks jammed in the dirt. He checked under the tarp: two boxes of seedlings and a jug of water, a muddy backpack. From here he left the track and headed straight up the slope of the draw, climbing over logs and dead branches, thistles hooking his pants and bootlaces. He slipped in the mud and ground the heel of his hand into a jagged stump. When he reached the ridge at the top of the draw, he could see the planter, Amy, moving fluidly toward the tree line, bending every few steps to put another seedling in the ground. She looked up and saw Tom but continued to plant, stopping only when he reached her. She put one foot up on a stump, balanced her shovel across her knee, and hung her arms over it.

“You welcomed us back with some beautiful land here.” She smiled, her eyes narrow.

Tom rubbed the back of his neck and nodded. “Sorry about that. It's only because you guys are so good.” He winked and reached into Amy's side bag, grabbed three bundles of seedlings, and unwrapped the cellophane that bound the root plugs together. He put them in his own bags and began to plant a meter off the line of seedlings that Amy had already put in the ground. Amy, short and muscled, was fast. She went ahead and Tom had to hustle to keep up. She planted her trees in good sites, in the crooks of stumps that would help keep the seedlings warm through the winter, or in the mulchy red crumbs of rotting wood. She hopped back and forth planting two lines of trees to Tom's one, and when Tom ran out of seedlings he reached into Amy's bag for more, and in this way they worked together in silence.

“This land is angry,” Amy eventually said. She stopped and leaned against a waist-high log. She dug an orange from a deep pocket at her thigh and peeled it with dirty fingers wrapped in silver duct tape. “It wants to eat me.”

Tom wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and smiled. How many times had he listened to his planters theorize about clear-cut land, about the spirit of the land? All the cutting and dragging, they said, and all that loud, heavy machinery had to leave something vengeful behind. They'd all felt it, in the slaps from sticks unsprung, the snare of the thistle, the suck of their boots in the mud and the mosquitoes and blackflies that rose from stagnant water (like the living dead, they said, because no matter how many you killed, they mindlessly kept coming back). They'd all felt the downward pull, the earth angry with each one of them for studding across her great big wounds with their cork boots. Even though their job was to replace what had been so brutally taken, they said, she was pissed off at them, too.

Tom agreed that the land had spirit. But what got him was the injury they felt, the incredulity. Sure, the spirit was there where rock met sky, or in the fall of a needle to the ground, or the smell of sap on your knuckles. And it was there in a dried-up creek bed, a mudslide, a rotting carcass. But it was indifferent. It was indiscriminate.

“Sweet's already pissed off and it's only week one,” Amy said, peeling the pith off a wedge of orange and flicking it to the ground. “I love the guy, but you know. He's a piece of work. You mind if I ask why you bring him back every year?”

“You guys are a great crew. He's your crew boss.”

“You're afraid if he went somewhere else we'd go with him.”

A few hundred meters away, the tree line was hazy with mist and drizzle. He looked at Amy. “He's never liked being told what to do. You learn to put up with these things.”

“But if you don't like it, dump it.”

Tom put out his hand for a wedge of orange. Amy passed him one, grazed with dirt, and he popped it in his mouth, sweet juice and grit. “Have you seen the checker?” he asked. “Her truck's on the landing. She'll be prowling around here somewhere.”

“On day one?”

“She's new.”

Amy wiped her fingers on the front of her shirt and stood up. “If you find her, tell her fifteen cents is a shit price for this shit land.” She ducked under the log and started planting again on the other side.

Tom hiked back along the ridge until he found other planters from Sweet's crew, LJ and Beautiful T, who told him that their fingers were frozen and they were considering slicing each other's tits off for agreeing to come back to the bush this year. He planted with them for a while, following their slow, steady pace. They sang Patsy Cline songs, to keep from going crazy, they said. As Tom was leaving, they told him to tell Sweet that if it didn't stop raining, they were going to spend the afternoon in the crew van smoking his cigarettes.

He worked alongside other planters, lightening their bags, helping them put their seedlings into the harsh ground. Being paid by the tree, they were grateful. Tom walked the length of the block, piece by piece, and returned to the landing nearly four hours after he'd left it, dirty and wet to the bone. The checker was sitting in the front of her truck. Tom approached the window and she rolled it down and he felt dry heat on his face, took in the smell of cigarettes and coffee. He leaned in and rested his forearms on the window frame.

“You want to hop in?” she asked. “It's warm.” She wore a plain white baseball cap that looked too clean for the bush, and too big for her face. In the hollows of her cheeks, the pebbled shadows of old acne scars.

“Don't want to get too comfortable.”

“Your foreman, Daryl, tells me this is the most experienced crew in the outfit.”

Tom nodded.

“Because I found two planters without damp sponges in their bags. None of them were carrying plot cords, so I don't know how they expect to get their density right. I dug up about fifty seedlings and found three J roots.” She sipped coffee from a small thermos cup and caught a drip on her bottom lip with her teeth. “I don't know what your standards are, but I'd call that pretty sloppy. Blueberries aren't even out yet and they're fucking the dog already.”

The buzz of a quad bike sounded in the distance.

“Maybe you should have a meeting with your foremen. Make sure everybody is clear on the quality we're expecting,” she said, watching the rearview mirror.

Tom nodded and looked down at his boots, then looked up at her. “First day today. They need a little time to settle.”

She put her thermos in the cup holder and rubbed her hands together, started the ignition.

Sweet pulled into the landing on his quad bike and sat idle, the engine sputtering.

“I'll follow you to the next block,” she said. “I'd like to see all three of them today.”

“We'll make Matt's, but Roland's is a good hour and a half drive out. It'll be getting dark.”

“We'll fit it in.”

Tom drummed his hands against the window frame and stood back and watched her pull the truck around. He walked to the edge of the landing where Sweet sat on his bike, his arms hung loosely over the handlebars.

“That one's going to be trouble,” Tom said.

“Who, Camel Toes?”

“What?”

“Have you seen her camel toes?” Sweet smiled, rolling his tongue against his cheek.

“Don't let your guys get lazy.”

  

The planters had all left the block and were back in camp while Tom followed a few meters behind the checker, watching her dig up seedlings, testing to see whether the root plugs had been bent into J shapes when they were planted. She was tall and had legs like a newborn calf but somehow moved with efficiency over the terrain, as if she'd already studied the placement of every log and rock.

They were on high ground and the land dropped away to the northeast, where the clear-cut ended in swamp. Beyond that, mountains. The sky was clearing up now and the clouds that remained were low, ragged swipes of pink across the white. It was cold and he was chilled, and hoped this would be over soon. She had already told him that she would be coming every week, which in his experience was a lot. Her shovel was very clean.

“You the sole owner of this company?” she asked him, batting at the pall of dusk mosquitoes that hovered around her head.

“I've got a shareholder.”

“Who's that, then?”

“My mother.”

“You from Prince George?”

“Yup.”

“You ever do any logging?” She stopped and leaned against a tall stump. Every second it grew darker.

“I did one season.”

“Good. Loggers are pigs.”

“I don't know about that.”

“Well, then why only one season?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her coat pocket and lit one, and jiggled the pack in front of his face. “I'm from a small town,” she said.

“Well.”

She held up the pack a moment longer and then put it back in her pocket. She blew smoke out the side of her mouth.

BOOK: The Mountain Can Wait
12.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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