The Wanigan (7 page)

“I'll be right there with you, boys,” Teddy McGuire said. “I'm heading back to the lumber camp as well.” He looked at Jimmy. “My boy here will stay with his aunt in Saginaw. He'll get some education and unlearn his wild ways.”

Jimmy winked at me. “You can take me to Aunt Elsie's,” he told his pa, “but I'll never stay there. No hound dog ever sniffed his way back faster'n I will.”

The river widened and deepened as we neared its mouth. The logs floated easily now. The men had little to do but poke one or another log to keep the wooden river flowing.

Because we were nearing the end of the journey, Mama took special pains with the meals. There were doughnuts for breakfast, and for supper she made baked beans the way the men liked them, with both molasses and maple syrup, and potatoes fried crisp with onions and lots of blackberry pie. Jimmy and I had been picking blackberries every day. There were scratches on our arms and legs and my dress had purple stains. Fast as we picked the berries, Mama turned them into pies.

For all Mama's efforts the men didn't cheer up. Teddy McGuire kept his violin wrapped up in its oilcloth. There was no dancing or songs. There were stories, but they were all about the things that had happened on our drive, the logjam and the timber pirates and the fire. The men weren't letting our trip go.

It was August when I awoke and ran to the window to see Lake Huron. Riding on the lake were schooners and steamships, tugs and paddle wheelers. There were houses and stores and a sea of logs that went on forever.

As we reached the town, Frenchy hopped over the deck and climbed onto a huge log. Balanced on the log, he floated ahead of the drive as if he were its king, his peavey raised as if it were a banner. The townspeople gathered along the shore, waving and cheering. Our journey was over and our work nearly done.

Jimmy and I watched the boom company sort out the logs marked with our star. Papa had shown the company the marking hammer, so we got the logs with a circle and a star as well. A part of our boom would go to the sawmill in Oscoda, and the rest would be loaded onto steamers and sent down Lake Huron to Detroit.

“Next year,” Papa said, “you'll see new houses in Detroit made out of boards from these very logs.”

All leftover supplies from the wanigan were divided up amongst the men or sold off. The time came to pack our things. Saying goodbye was harder than I thought it would be. For the first time I realized I might never again see Penti Ranta, Frenchy, Big Tom, Teddy McGuire, and Jimmy. Ever.

When it came time to say goodbye to Jimmy, he stood first on one leg and then the other, not knowing where to look.

“We could write to one another,” I said.

“Sure,” Jimmy agreed. “By next year I'll probably be a chopper or a skidder like my dad. I'll tell you where we're logging.”

I had put down in my best handwriting two lines of Mr. Poe's poetry to give to Jimmy:

Oh, hasten!
—
oh, let us not linger!

Oh, fly!
—
let us fly!
—
-for we must.

They had a strange effect upon Jimmy, for he slapped his hand over his mouth. I believe he was hiding a smile, though why he should find such sad lines amusing I could not imagine.

After a moment he said, “Here's something for you.” He thrust a piece of paper at me. And after shaking hands with Papa and with a very red face planting a quick kiss upon Mama's cheek, he hurried after his father.

I opened the piece of paper to find Jimmy had made a drawing of the wanigan. On the deck he had drawn the two of us standing side by side, big smiles on our faces.

Mama and Papa and I took a room in a boardinghouse for the night. The next day we would be on a steamboat headed for Detroit. The boardinghouse was neat and tidy. Our dinner table was covered with a starched white cloth, and the food was served not on tin plates but on china plates. But with just the three of us, dinner seemed a quiet and lonely affair.

That night I slept in a real bed with clean white sheets. In the morning the first thing I did was to run to the window to see where we were. What a cruel disappointment to find we were right where we had been the day before!

Later in the day Mama, Papa, and I stood on the shore and watched as the wreckers used crowbars and claw hammers to pull apart the bunk shack and the wanigan. There was nothing left of our three months' journey. I felt as if it were me that was being torn apart.

The streets of Oscoda were sprinkled with sawdust from the lumber mill. Papa, who had once been a wheelwright, pointed to the lumber wagon's wide, flat iron tires. “The sawdust keeps the tires from sinking into the sandy roads,” he explained.

Lumberjacks from all over the northern part of Michigan had taken over Oscoda. They crowded into the stores to buy new clothes and boots. Mama hurried me past the taverns, which took a lot of hurrying, for there were a great many. From a distance I saw Big Tom and Penti Ranta walking along the street. When they saw Mama and me, they waved in a friendly way, but they did not stop to talk with us. I saw that they had another life now and I was no longer a part of it.

The next morning we boarded the steamship that would take us down Lake Huron to the Saint Clair River, Lake Saint Clair, and finally the Detroit River and the city of Detroit. We sailed past cabins and small farms whose fields ended at the lake's edge. I began to imagine what our house would look like. Papa would be working on the river barges. Perhaps we would have a little house on the water. I imagined myself watching the boats. Mama promised me I would not have to sleep amongst salt pork and flour barrels but would have a room of my own. Papa promised I would have a dog.

I thought of Mr. Poe's words:

Like those Nicean barks of yore,

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

To his own native shore.

Of course, the river was not exactly perfumed and the wanigan hadn't been a Nicean bark, whatever that was, but we would live on our native shore. We would have our own house in Detroit. There would be shops to visit and a real school. There would be friends. I would see Papa's barge going up and down the Detroit River.

I believed my new life would be very pleasant, but I knew I would always be watching the river, hoping to see the wanigan floating by.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In the early 1800s, when settlers first came to Michigan, they thought the giant pine trees a nuisance. They wanted cleared fields for their crops. By the 1830s, pine was king in Michigan. Lumber camps were everywhere. In spring, when the ice melted, the logs were sent down Michigan's rivers, down the Tittabawassee, the Pere Marquette, the Au Sable, the Shiawassee, the Saginaw, and the Manistee. In 1850, in Manistee alone, sawmills produced seven million feet of lumber. Michigan pine was shipped all over the country. If your house is old enough, it might be made from Michigan pine. Give it a friendly pat from Annabel.

About the Author

Gloria Whelan is a poet, short story writer, and novelist best known for her children's and young adult fiction. Whelan has been writing since childhood and was the editor of her high school newspaper. Many of her books are set in Michigan, but she also writes about faraway places based on her travels abroad. In 2000 she won the National Book Award for her young adult novel
Homeless Bird
. Her other works have earned places among the American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults, the International Reading Association's Teachers' Choices and Children's Choices, Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People, and Los Angeles' 100 Best Books. Whelan has also received the Mark Twain Award and the O. Henry Award. She lives in Detroit, Michigan.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright© 2002 by Gloria Whelan

Cover design by Mimi Bark

ISBN: 978-1-4976-7386-1

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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EBOOKS BY GLORIA WHELAN

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