Washika (13 page)

Two of the students drew water from the stream and helped the old man put out the fire. The wood sizzled and a large cloud of smoke went up from the wet, black wood. As the students poured the last pail, they heard the truck's engine and saw a large section of green forest lit up by the headlights.

“Okay, let's go.” Alphonse said.

The door to the caboose was open and the inside of the caboose was lit by a small dome light on the ceiling. The boys climbed the two steps and went inside. The last to go in was Frederick Garneau. The driver pushed him from behind after Frederick got a foot up on the first step. The old man laughed. But he forgot to duck going inside and he swore as his hard hat crashed against the upper portion of the open doorway.

The boys sat on the benches along the walls of the caboose. As the old man entered, Henri moved down along the bench and motioned to the old man to sit down beside him and next to the rear window opening.

“Sit here,
Monsieur
Garneau,” Henri said. He had heard Alphonse asking the old man what his name was.

“Na, na!” the old man replied. “Fred. My name is Fred, you hear?”

“Yes sir.”

As the truck moved along the gravel road, the students held on to the benches and looked at one another. Hardly anyone spoke. They were quiet going along the new rough road. The only thing attracting their attention was Fred, sitting there in the dim light with his eyes closed trying to sleep. He would grimace with pain when they hit a bad spot on the road, causing the skin, stretched over his skinny limbs, to pinch on the hard wooden bench.

About an hour down the road, Lavigne rapped on the window and signalled to the driver that he had to go outside. When the bar was removed and the door opened, several students went out to relieve themselves. After he had finished, Lavigne had gone to speak to Alphonse and the driver. When he returned to the caboose he was carrying a grey felt cushion. He handed the cushion to the old man and returned to his place along the opposite wall.

Neither Lavigne nor the old man had spoken. Lavigne had handed him the cushion without saying a word. All along the road the rest of the way to Camp 15, the boys sat without speaking and, in the dim light of the caboose, tired old eyes looked at them kindly.

C
amp 15 was very different from Washika. More than three hundred and fifty men lived at the camp and everyone seemed to be in a hurry and going about different tasks. Not everyone ate, or washed, or slept at the same time of day. The sleep camps were two-storey buildings with long wooden stairways on the outside at one end. In the cookhouse there were places for two hundred men at a time and the cook had five cookees helping him. Everyone passing with a tray could see them working the pots and pans in the open kitchen. This was so very different from the cookhouse at Washika where Dumas ruled over all including his small kitchen and one cookee. During the meals Dumas stood at the centre of four long tables surveying all who ate in his cookhouse, making sure that nothing was missing and that the fellows ate without chatting. His food was delicious, his discipline supreme. Here at Camp 15, the cookhouse was much like the cafeteria at the Collège de Ste-Émilie and the food just as mushy and tasteless; the students immediately took a great dislike to the camp and its inhabitants. None of them spoke during the meal and they ate very little and drank tea, and all appeared distraught.

Outside, it was raining. The bus was parked alongside the cookhouse landing with its engine running. As the students came out of the cookhouse they could see Alphonse inside the bus talking to the driver. They were both having a good laugh. The students stepped into the bus and sat down. No one fought for a window seat. It was quiet, and dark, and damp. Before the bus was a mile south of Camp 15 the students were curled up in their seats with arms wrapped around themselves, swaying freely with the bumps in the road and just barely hearing the engine groan and the wipers squeaking across the windshield.

“Work!” a voice called out.

It could not be. Surely it must be a nightmare. The students groaned and squirmed in their seats. They rubbed their eyes and stared at the dim light on the ceiling.

“Come on now, my little ducks,” Alphonse called out in a loud voice. “We're home. Wake up now!”

Alphonse and the driver stood at the front of the bus looking at the students stumbling about and searching for their gloves and lunch pails. They swore and mumbled, and all were in a very bad mood.

“After you've dropped off your things,” Alphonse shouted from the front of the bus, “come over to the kitchen. Dumas will have cakes and tea for you.”

The camp was asleep. The generator had been shut down but there were dim lights coming from the main sleep camp and the bunkhouse-and-office as well as from the cookhouse kitchen. As the students stepped down from the bus they saw P'tit-Gus walking across the yard with his hunting lamp. It was still raining softly. In the bunkhouse-and-office, a naphtha lamp hissed loudly on the table. The guys dropped their gloves and lunch pails on the beds and left for the cookhouse. André Guy undressed quickly and before the last guy had left the bunkhouse he was in his bed with the blankets covering his head.

Dumas smiled at the students as they entered the rear door of his kitchen. He did not even seem to mind that they had not removed their hard hats. He stood in a corner of the kitchen talking to Alphonse, stopping only to smile at the arrival of yet another student. The students did not know what to make of this sudden change; they were never permitted to enter the cookhouse wearing their hard hats or without washing their hands thoroughly and combing their hair. They stood on both sides of the long wooden table and ate cookies and doughnuts and drank several cups of hot tea. They were happy to be home. Eating slowly, they looked at the array of pots and pans hanging from hooks on the walls, felt the heat of the large wood stove and smelled the fresh bread stacked in racks near the windows. They were happy and tired and each of them was feeling very special for the way Dumas was treating them.

H
enri could not remember having fallen asleep. Now, he listened in the dark and wondered who was walking around outside. A beam of light came through the door screen and into the bunkhouse. The door opened and P'tit-Gus stepped inside. He walked quietly over to the table by the old space heater.

“What time is it?” Henri whispered.

“Time to get up,” P'tit-Gus replied. He had placed his hunting lamp on the table. Henri could see his arm moving and hear the wheezing as he pumped air into the naphtha lamp. P'tit-Gus lit a match and stuck it through the hole to the inside of the lamp. The gas hissed as it entered the mantle and ignited, filling the room with a soft yellow glow.

“Up!” P'tit-Gus said loudly. “Time to work. Let's go now. Up!”

P'tit-Gus chuckled behind the glow of the naphtha lamp. This was almost as good as a storm. He watched the roundness of the blankets begin to move. Suddenly a head popped out from beneath them. The student closest to the table squinted as he stared at the lamp. He turned his head slowly to look at the darkness through the windows and back to the lamp in disbelief. The young man groaned as the truth of the matter filtered through.

“Are you crazy,
calis
?” Lavigne yelled at P'tit-Gus. “It's four o'clock in the morning!”

“He's just trying to get even,” someone said.

“Yeah, he's still pissed about the other day,” another voice commented.

“Hey P'tit-Gus!” Lavigne said. “Do you know what time we got to bed last night? Eleven o'clock,
sacrament
! And you wake us up at four o'clock in the morning!”

P'tit-Gus said nothing. He was enjoying the whole thing immensely. He would have to wake the boys in the other bunkhouse individually so as not to disturb the older men. But here, he was able to stand back and see the whole effect of his efforts at one moment in time. A strange feeling of joy seemed to rush through his spine. On those rare occasions when he experienced a sudden moment of joy, like when he witnessed an electrical storm, his whole body would shudder and then, it was just a memory, a very pleasant memory. Now, the pleasure of it was past and P'tit-Gus picked up his hunting lamp and walked towards the door.

“Breakfast in fifteen minutes,” he said, and went out of the bunkhouse.

It was difficult to believe. Henri dressed slowly. Could it be that P'tit-Gus would do such a thing? After all, it was the bunkhouse-and-office and its occupants that caused him the most trouble. Henri sat on the edge of the bunk rubbing his face, his bare feet resting on the cold floor. He put on his socks and boots. He went to the north window and looked out at the darkness.

“Oh no!” he swore softly. “Dear God, no! It can't be.” But as he looked again, he saw Dumas rush past a window in the kitchen. There was a dim light in both the kitchen and the dining area where they took their meals. It was a dim light but it was still a light. The kitchen being lit was normal, as Dumas always began his day around four in the morning but he did not light up the dining area until much later, when the generator was running. Henri was not sure just what time Dumas turned on the lights but he was convinced that it was not at four in the morning. P'tit-Gus had awakened the students in the bunkhouse-and-office. That was one thing. Possibly revenge on his part. But P'tit-Gus would never dream of tricking Dumas into preparing an early breakfast, as a joke on the students. So it was true. They were, in fact, being awakened at four o'clock in the morning to go out to work on the fire.

The door opened and Alphonse stood in the doorway. “Breakfast in ten minutes,” he said. “We'll leave right after breakfast. Leave your lunch pails behind. They'll be sending us out some. Come on now, you guys. Get a move on!”

“How come we have to leave so early, Alphonse?” Lavigne wanted to know. “We've only had five hours sleep and it's even dark out.”

“That's the way,” Alphonse replied. “That's the way it works on the fire.”

“It's not right. I don't care what they say. It's not right,” Lavigne mumbled to himself as he put on his boots.

Alphonse took a last look around the room. Most of the boys were dressed. Some already had towels on their shoulders and were preparing to leave for the washroom. On the bed nearest to the old space heater, André Guy sat wearing only his underwear. He sat facing the wall with his mouth open and staring at the grey plywood floor.

“Come on, André,” Alphonse encouraged him. “Hurry now.”

André nodded his head. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I'm coming.” And then his eyes closed and his head drooped, causing strands of hair to stand straight up on top of his head.

I
t was quiet in the cookhouse. Dumas did not ring the bell. He collected the tickets inside as they went to their places at the table. It was strange not seeing Dumas beating the inside of the triangle with the bar. There was no bell, no Dumas on the little porch landing and not even a light above the door. There was of course no generator, only the hissing of the naphtha lamps and the darkness outside.

The students sat at the long wooden table and ate more from habit than any desire for food. No one spoke or coughed or even looked at each other. The twenty young students sat at the table with their hair still wet, forcing in bacon and eggs and potatoes and pancakes and sipping at cups of steaming hot tea.

Alphonse sat alone at the older men's table. Halfway through breakfast Dumas came out from the kitchen with a cup of coffee and joined Alphonse, sitting down just in front of him.

“Looks like more rain again today,” Dumas began.

Alphonse washed down the toast with some tea. He poured more tea from the pot and sucked at his teeth with his tongue. Back home in Ste-Émilie, his wife would not hear of it. It was strictly forbidden to do that at the table. But, at this table at Washika, it was accepted behaviour, even in the presence of Dumas.

“It rained pretty well all night,” Alphonse replied. “It wasn't raining when I came in just now. But you could feel it in the air. What do they say on the radio?”

“Sun and cloudy periods. But that is in Ste-Émilie. And who can believe them anyway? Probably it will rain all day. That should keep your gang happy, eh?”

Alphonse glanced around the room. They were not sad or angry. They sat there, silently putting food into their mouths looking very dejected. Some were eating with their eyes closed.

“They're not too happy now,” Alphonse said, finally. He picked up his plate and cup along with knife and fork, took them over to the opposite table and dropped them into the wash pans. These would be picked up later by Richard Gagnier, the cookee. That was one his jobs, that and washing all of the soiled dishes and cutlery left in the pans. There was only one cookee at Washika and Dumas made sure that his life was a busy one.

The students left the cookhouse and walked across the yard towards the sleep camps. It started to rain. They heard it, first, on the tarpapered roofs, and then on the bus parked in the yard between the main sleep camp and the bunkhouse-and-office. The driver and Alphonse were talking by the door of the bus as they walked by.

“Get your stuff,” Alphonse said to them. “And get on right away. You can have your smoke as we go.”

No one said anything. The students went on to the main sleep camp and to the bunkhouse-and-office without saying a word. They returned shortly afterwards wearing their wool mackinaws and hard hats with their gloves sticking out of their back pockets. They boarded the bus and sat at the first empty seats that they came to. No one fought for a window seat and no one opened a window. The bus quickly filled with smoke.

The driver switched on the headlights, closed the door and shifted into gear. The wiper blades squeaked and the rain pattered on the thin metal roof. The springs of the bus stretched and groaned as they went around the bunkhouse-and-office and crossed the truck scales. From there they drove down the gravel road, past the infirmary, and north to the Ottawa River.