Washika (11 page)

They heard the bar being lifted and then the door opened. The air entered the caboose, damp and cold, along with the smell of diesel fuel and smoke from the burning forest.

“Okay you guys!” the driver said. “End of the line.” The driver was a short, stout man. His skin was deeply tanned and his curly brown hair slipped out below the rim of his hard hat. Although they knew little about the man, his accent told them that he was not from anywhere that they knew of. And besides, his clothes were neatly pressed and clean and he wore new steel-toe safety boots.

Alphonse stood by the truck as the students came out. He had his lunch pail and his extra-large thermos.

“We'll eat now,” he said. “There's a good fire over there to warm us while we eat. If you want, you can eat in the caboose.”

Alphonse turned to the driver.

“You are not leaving right away?”

“No. I'll hang around for a while.”

None of the students wanted to eat in the caboose. They stood around the fire, eating their sandwiches and drinking tea. All of the thermos bottles were the same: black with red plastic tops that served as cups. Only Alphonse's thermos was different and that was because he had brought it with him from his home in Ste-Émilie. It was not one of those small black thermos bottles sold at the van. His thermos was brown with a white cup and at least three times larger than those used by the students.

A very thin old man was feeding wood to the fire. The way he placed each chunk of wood just so, walking around the fire with an armful of wood, had attracted the attention of all who stood there. No one knew why but they had the feeling that they were in the presence of a very special event. The man trimmed a spruce sapling with his axe and when he had notched the top end he placed the butt end into the sand. After piling three large chunks of wood together, he leaned the pole on them so that the notched end stuck out over the fire. Then he reached behind him for a blackened pail full of water. The pail had a wire handle. He placed the handle in the notch and lowered the pail over the fire. The flames, one after another, licked the bottom of the pail.

The old man stood leaning on one leg, watching the fire and the steam rising from the pail. He held a paper bag in one hand and at his feet was a cup of cold water that he had taken from the pail before putting it over the fire. His gaze never left the pail or the water inside. At last the water began to bubble. The old man reached into the bag and brought out a handful of black leaves that he immediately tossed into the pail. He stood back from the heat of the flames. The water bubbled and tossed and suddenly took on a golden brown colour. The old man reached down for the cup of water and quickly emptied it into the pail.

Next to the cup the students had noticed a straight branch with a short stub of a side branch at one end. As he set the cup on the ground, the old man picked up the forked branch and, with its stub of a side branch, removed the pail from the end of the sapling and placed it close to the fire. He stood there for a while, staring at the fire as he probably had done hundreds of times before, giving thanks for his life, the fire, the water, and anything else that happened to come his way.

When the students had finished eating their sandwiches and drank the last of the tea in their thermos bottles, they dipped their cups into the pail by the fire and drank the golden brown tea. Along with the tea, they ate doughnuts and biscuits that Dumas had baked that morning. Mostly, it was warm and pleasant by the fire. They felt the heat on their faces and through the denim of their jeans but when the wind shifted the smoke blew into their eyes. The rain came down in a fine spray but it did not touch the fire and only the backs of their mackinaws and their hard hats were wet. Standing by the fire, with its warmth and soft crackling sounds, their thoughts shifted elsewhere, to some other world. Each person's thoughts were within him, safe and warm.

“Work!” Alphonse said. He threw the last bit of his cigarette into the fire. “Leave your lunch pails in the caboose.”

Alphonse picked up his lunch pail and extra-large thermos. He pointed towards the green truck with the tarpaulin-covered rack.

“Over there, you'll find shovels and grub hoes. Come on, now.”

The brown canvas that stretched across the rack had begun to sag with the weight of the rain, but it was dry inside. The students picked out shovels and hoes that had been placed in neat rows between bundles of canvas hose, portable water pumps and canvas water bags with hand pumps.

The students waved good-bye to the old man feeding the fire. Only he and the caboose driver remained behind. Alphonse and the twenty students left the road and entered the trail cut by the bulldozer. They walked along the road in the rain, single file, not speaking. They followed the canvas hose and, like it, they disappeared behind the clumps of charred blueberry bushes and overturned jack pine. The most amazing thing about it all was the mosquitoes. As Alphonse and the students followed the canvas hose through the burned-out section, it seemed impossible to them that anything could still be alive in such a black, devastated mess. They walked in ashes that were still warm and, everywhere they looked, black, dead trees lay in a tangled maze or stood apart without leaves or needles, just black skeletons of what they once were, all very dead. The mosquitoes came in droves and the guys joked about the female attack. After the first wave, they did not joke about them anymore. They put on fly oil and tried keeping their mouths shut just to keep from swallowing them.

As they reached the crest of a hill, they saw the smoke down below and could hear wood cracking and chain saws working. When a breeze came, they could see the flames. There was smoke everywhere and men with chain saws cutting down trees that were burning at the tops. Others worked around smoldering roots and stumps with grub hoes. Several men were walking over the burned-out places with shovels. They dug around smoldering pieces and covered them with earth. Two men at the bottom of the slope held canvas hoses and were watering down trees that were still green. Their faces were dirty and the fronts of their trousers were wet from the leaking hoses.

Alphonse turned to the boys walking behind him.

“All right,” he said. “We can start here. Just do like the others. We can't leave anything smoking. We have to put it all out.”

Alphonse left them then. He walked down the side of the hill to where the portable pump was. A short length of canvas hose attached to the pump disappeared into the water of a small creek nearby. On the opposite side of the pump, the hose fanned out into two sections, each section leading to one of the men hosing down the green jack pine.

The pump operator and a foreman sat together on a log by the pump. As Alphonse approached, he could hear the steady whine of the gasoline engine.

“Yes sir,” the foreman said. He stood up as Alphonse arrived.

“Ouimet, from the drive,” Alphonse introduced himself. “Nice little mess.”

“Could be worse,” the man replied. “That rain yesterday, it helped some.”

“I brought in my gang. All students from Ste-Émilie, but they work well. Anything special you want done?”

“No, no. Just keep them going like that, maybe one or two down here. Those guys would like to eat soon.” The foreman pointed towards the two men working the hoses.

Alphonse looked at the two men. He could see how they shot water up into the thick evergreens and how, when the stream of water hit the trunk of a tree, the bark would fly off from the pressure. Beyond the tall, skinny trunks Alphonse could see clouds of smoke and occasional sheets of flame.

He returned to where the students were scattered around the burned-out section on the side of the hill. They walked slowly, carrying their shovels and grub hoes. The shovels were the long-handled, round kind that were good for digging the soil while the grub hoes had flattened blades that could slice through roots and burned humus. The grub hoes had wooden handles, painted red. The boys dug around stumps and exposed roots and buried them until smoke could no longer be seen. Occasionally, a smoldering trunk would suddenly come to life with flames flickering in the breeze. It was not long-lived as the students rushed it together and beat it with their shovels and their boots. Everyone looked pleased when they had finally put it out.

Alphonse joined some of the students standing around a large stump that had been cut by one of the men with a chain saw. The wood was still white where he had cut it but the rest was black and the branches looked naked without their needles. The boys stood around the stump, leaning on their shovels and looking at the smoke coming out of the ground where the roots entered.

“They need a couple of guys down there,” Alphonse said.

Henri looked around him. There was no way to tell. All the trees were burned. There were no needles or leaves to be seen anywhere.

“Which way is the wind blowing, Alphonse?” he said.

“Hard to tell, there seems to be none right now.”

“There's nothing left to burn here.” Henri had read about forest fires somewhere and how they made firebreaks with the bulldozers and felled all the trees in front of the fire. Then they set fire to them so that, when the fire finally arrived, there was nothing left to fuel it and the fire would simply burn itself out. “What about there, Alphonse?” Henri went on. “Where those men are with hoses?”

“There's a break on the other side. It should burn itself out soon.”

Alphonse put out his cigarette on the stump. He looked at his watch, wound the spring and put the watch back into the slit pocket of his trousers.

“Henri, would you go down there on the hose. They'll show you what to do.”

Alphonse looked behind him. The boys were scattered over the hillside. He turned to Henri and the boy he had been speaking to.

“You, St-Jean,” he said. “What's your first name?'

“Maurice,” St-Jean replied.

“Ah yes. Maurice, would you go with Henri? I'll be down there in a little while.”

Henri and Maurice left then, going down the side of the hill, using their shovels to keep from sliding in the steep parts and to keep from falling when they had to climb over felled tree trunks. They went straight to where the pump, the pump operator and the foreman were.

“We've come down to help out on the hoses,” Henri said to the foreman. It was always easy to tell who was a foreman by the colour of his hard hat.

“Good! Good!” the man said. He turned to the pump operator and made a sign to shut down the engine. As the engine sputtered to a stop, Henri and St-Jean watched the men with the hoses and the look on their faces as the stream of water curved towards the ground.

“Fresh meat!” the foreman yelled to the two men.

The two men dropped the canvas hoses and returned to where the pump operator and the foreman were speaking to Henri and St-Jean. It was quiet then except for the spitting and crackling sounds that a forest makes when it's burning.

After instructing Henri and St-Jean on the use of the canvas hoses, the foreman and the two men who had been working the hoses left, working their way slowly across the hill. Henri reached the end of the hose before the operator had started up the engine. The operator's name was Jean-Louis Venet and he lived in Ste-Émilie like Henri and the rest of the students. Although he did not look old enough, he had a daughter, Marie-Josée Venet. All of the students at the Collège de Ste-Émilie knew about Marie-Josée. Some knew her better than others and some even claimed to have relieved her of her virginity. Henri was not sure about all of this. Of one thing he was sure, however: he would never speak about Marie-Josée in that way. Was it because he was now working with her father? Did it have anything to do with his time spent with Lise Archambault in the back room of the infirmary? He wasn't sure. At that moment, standing in burned jack pine branches waiting for the pump engine to start, there were beginning to be many things that he was not sure of.

Henri held the cold, metal nozzle and with one hand, the wet canvas hose, now limp and empty with the other. He heard Jean-Louis pulling the starter rope, then the sputtering and, finally, the engine whining at full throttle. Henri braced himself and waited for the pressure to build up inside the hose. It seemed a long time coming. At last the hose stiffened and jerked him sideways and the water came, suddenly, in powerful spurts at first and then in one long, steady stream. Henri glanced over at St-Jean. He had straddled the hose and was aiming high, towards the tree tops and then down along the trunks. It was easy after they learned to balance the hose and its nozzle. They could almost handle it with one hand. He and St-Jean amused themselves, cross-firing, or both attacking the same tree and watching its bark and needles fly.

St-Jean stood to the left, towards the slope of the hill. On occasion he tested the strength of his hose by aiming high and up towards the side of the hill where the students were working. With more pressure he could really send them running for cover. He thought of asking Jean-Louis if he could open the engine up a little more. But St-Jean was one of the students who claimed to have slept with Marie-Josée in the back of his father's station wagon after a Saturday night dance at the high school. He thought perhaps that Jean-Louis might have heard mention of it and, besides, the guys on the hillside were yelling and waving their fists at him so the pressure was probably good enough as it was.

Gradually the students moved across the hillside, digging at roots and shovelling fresh, brown earth on the smoldering, charred wood. They moved across the slope like grazing cattle until around mid-afternoon, and then, they were gone. They had reached the easterly crest and, just as slowly, disappeared below it.

Henri and St-Jean poured water onto the thick wall of jack pine but they saw fewer and fewer flames and the clouds of smoke rising from behind the evergreens seemed smaller than before. Henri heard the engine sputter and finally come to a stop. Almost immediately he saw the stream of water drop from where he was aiming to the ashes on the ground before him.