Wild Life (12 page)

I should have told the fellow truthfully that I was on a terrible errand with bleak prospects, but in recent years have made it my habit, wherever tender or wretched feelings are concerned, to put on a show of coldness and disregard. Naturally I went on in my old jog-trot way, saying to the Swede, “As you see, they are stores for a flight to the moon.”

This facetiousness bewildered him no more than before. He swung his eyes to me with a slight frown and then posed a question and three more in a murmur of Swedish—inquiries evidently directed at his own ears—and upon hearing the answer, brightened considerably. “Sure, sure,” he said, and thumped the list with a blunt, blackened thumbnail. I supposed this to mean all had become clear to him: the ship in question would fly to the moon by helium power, after first being launched from the isle of Majorca by a giant rubber strap.

My small pile of stores appeared slowly on the counter. From the shopkeeper's frowns and gesticulations it became clear that I must settle for a general map covering half the territory of two states, which does not suit my purposes very well but is evidently the only map to be had. And he carried on a sporadic discussion with himself, arguing both sides of the question of chocolate: whether it was to be cake or powder. I know a word of Swedish here or there, but since my Swedish does not include “Majorca,” I kept still and waited for the man's finding; and it fell out correctly that a lunar journey is better served by cake chocolate than by powdered.

I confess without shame, this little shopping expedition uptown was a bright, brief escape from the terrible unhappiness in Florence's house, and when I came out again into the bustling street—men carrying on their affairs in the fine sunlight quite as if nothing were amiss in the world—I found I was short of the necessary courage for going into that cave of despair again. I am a hopeless lilyliver, evidently, and if there had been a hermit sitting on a hill nearby, I suppose I would have set out for the top. In the event, my groceries and I made a vagrant and cowardly return through town, west to the end of the business district and then north among the little houses and chicken yards and stacks of cordwood, until we chanced onto a baseball field where three men were attempting to burn out a yellowjackets' nest in the ground, well out from the first-base line.

A boy with a wooden leg sat on the three-tier bleachers between third base and home plate, watching this activity with interest. He sat on the lowest bench and rested his elbows back on the next high, with his wooden leg and his other one outstretched before him. An east wind had sprung up and cleared out the smoke of burning slab, sawdust, and mill-ends, the great piles that go on burning day and night for years in such towns as these, and the sun shone through for a moment. The bleachers struck me as a fine place to enjoy the improbable spring sunlight and several minutes of free entertainment.

The boy wore a police uniform with brass buttons but no insignia, which is a get-up I know loggers are fond of wearing, seeing as they are inexpensive and warm and known to wear well. He was half a dozen years older than George, I thought, and with George's smart look to his face. His name, he said, was Dick Musch. When we had shared our opinions of the proper way to eliminate a yellowjackets' nest and speculated happily on what might happen in the coming minutes, I leant back and rested my elbows on the bench beside him and commented upon his wooden leg in a mild and roundabout way. “I believe I've seen half a dozen crippled men in coming four blocks through town,” I said, which didn't seem to offend or surprise him.

“Donkey boilers blow up,” he said easily. “people fall from flumes, band saws break, a tree walks, a leg gets caught in the bight of the donkey cable. I guess there is about a hundred ways to get killed or hurt in the woods and the mills.”

While the hornet hunters fumbled to place their firepot in the
hole and cover the hole with a big homemade sheet-metal hood, Dick Musch and I exchanged one-legged-man stories. I told him about the old Russian whose leg was lost in a fishing accident, and when he applied to the Columbia River Fishermen's Protective Union for help, they bought a wooden leg and leased it to the fellow, for fear that an outright donation would set a dangerous precedent.

The boy knew an old man, a chute-flagger, who had ridden a runaway car down the hill into Yacolt. When he was thrown off and his friends came running to ask if he was hurt, he said no, he wasn't, not unless you counted that he had broken his leg; and he brandished the shattered wooden foot.

“Here is what that old man give me,” he said, “when my own leg was cut off.” He pulled from his pocket a limp and dog-eared postcard of a one-legged tramp, hat in hand at the back porch of a fine house.
Kind Lady, I had the misfortin ter loose me leg,
was the tramp's line, and the lady's firm reply,
Well, it's no use lookin for it here, I ain't got it!

“It cheered me up considerable,” Dick said, looking down fondly at the card.

“Are you twenty yet?” I asked him.

“No ma'am, I'm seventeen.”

I had supposed him to be young, but this news—seventeen!—brought on a sudden moment of irrational dread, a vague presentiment of accident or maiming befalling one of my own children while I am off rescuing Harriet—but in the next moment the yellowjackets came out of the ground and the hapless bee killers scattered in a fine panic across the field, arms flailing and hands clawing at shirt collars. The boy fell to laughing in such a sweet way that when he rocked forward to clasp his knees, the one just above the whittled smooth ashwood leg and the neat fold and pin of the trouser leg, I forgot all worry for my sons—forgot Harriet, even, in that bubbling musical sound of pure joy.

I had meant to get from Dick Musch his mother's name and address, having the somewhat maudlin idea that I might write to her about this meeting with her son. But it slipped my mind along with the other things, and I didn't remember it until long after Dick and I had shaken hands and gone our separate ways. I will tell you when I remembered it: it was when I was unfolding my blanket-bed on the floor of Florence's cottage just a while ago and from the small bedroom at the back I heard Florence's voice, a wordless moaning, and then her mother's whisper, her mournful comforting words, “Here, here, come here, lay your head down in your mother's lap.”

 

A woman of my queer and scandalous habits is seldom made to receive visits or to pay them, for which reason the hours between supper and bed can be entirely given over to the small domestic dramas. When we are not playing duplicate Whist, the boys and I often read aloud, going by turns round the room, and I have made condemned books a particular center of interest: Hardy's
Jude the Obscure
(which was dull and which the boys would not put up with), Balzac, Fielding, Zola, and especially Oscar Wilde, whom the world knows I admire highly. We have lately been reading “The Isle of Caninus,” which story we have come through in three days; and though Kingsley's tale is a poor patch on Verne, and his story lifted almost entirely from Welsh tales of the Fortunate Islands, the boys are loyal to any story in which dogs roam in a free state. Even Kingsley's steely-hearted hero, Lord Coquardz, was so struck by the cheerfulness of creatures in their naturally wild condition that—George was reading now—“never afterward would he see fit to confine a dog to leash or crate.”

I've suffered through readings in the drawing rooms of literati, at which it was strictly forbidden to interrupt, but my sons are inclined to break in with shouts or whispers of complaint, corrections, queries, approval, as befits the reader and the story, and I'm inclined to think they're better listeners for it. Now Oscar asked our general assembly, “What's a leash?” Inasmuch as Buster was at that moment lying prostrate and twitching with dream under the dining room table, I intended to make a sour remark, intended to say,
Our house is the very exemplar of the Isle of Caninus, as neither the dog nor the children know the meaning of the word “leash.”
But George, speaking the words with slow gravity and a considered manner, said, “Old Gus Statmuller, how he ties up his dogs.” And the other boys all lifted their eyes to him with an admiring look.

Fatherless, George has made up his own manhood, and his brothers and friends consider him bold and high flying, cunning, deep. He is sensible of this and plays to it, without veering from his natural character, which is solemn and iconoclastic. He has only recently given up a child
hood determination to be a lighthouse keeper and now has in mind a career as a muckraking journalist for
McClure's
magazine. It was George, of course, who authored, printed, and delivered to the neighbors, as well as to every fence post, a vehement and righteous broadside regarding Augustus Statmuller's habit of tying his youngest child in the yard with his dogs, a child of an age with Oscar but feebleminded, damaged at birth by a doctor with clumsy forceps. Several neighborhood women of tender sensibilities thereafter begged Statmuller to take the child inside, which accomplished nothing; but the Wahkiakum County sheriff advised him similarly, and people now say he keeps the child tied to a leg of the kitchen stove.

Without a pause, George went on reading down toward the end of Lord Coquardz's adventures on Caninus, but while still pages from the end he closed the book in midsentence and said matter-of-factly, “Anybody would know what happens next,” which wasn't true—Kingsley is nothing if not inventive. But Lewis and Frank together trumpeted, “Sure! Anybody!” which forced Oscar to say he knew the end too, and then it was only poor Jules, with a wail of dismay, who begged to be told. There was a brief flurry of cruel lying in which the twins and Oscar advanced an assortment of horrific endings: “His throat is cut by the queen of the Fortunate Islands!” “He buries the treasure in a sack soaked with poison, and the dogs dig it up and they all die!” Jules wailed the louder, and George, who had been looking off with a fine theatrical disinterest, allowed himself to be drawn slowly into the argument. He began to tell an elaborate plot of his own, involving the intrepid Lord Coquardz with, first, Hermaphrodite, then Xerxes, on an archipelago inhabited by dwarfs. It was a meandering invention, intricate and unsolvable, but the other boys followed it with shouts of devotion; and when the end was reached and the loose ends snipped off wholesale, they were satisfied.

Editors, I shall hope—every one of them.

C. B. D.

December 1902

 

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

O
SCAR
W
ILDE

I told Melba and Florence to expect me gone by the first light, as I planned to rise early and catch the 5:30 train to Chelatchie Prairie. In the cold half-darkness, as I was putting on my traveling pants and buttoning a wool shirt and jacket and lacing my boots, I heard someone stirring in the little back room, and shortly here came Melba, dressed and clutching both her duffel and a stubborn look. Of course, she is too decrepit to make the trip up the flume and the trail to Camp 8, and we had thoroughly agreed upon her waiting in Yacolt with her daughter while I went up into the woods alone. But since I have long known Melba to be willful and bullheaded, I don't know why I should ever be surprised when she changes her mind.

She followed after me onto the sidewalk and shut the door quietly on Florence. We went without words through the smoke-gray streets to an open café on Railroad Avenue across from the station landing and drank our coffee in silence and ate our mush in silence while the day paled, and finally I said, “What in the world was the point of my coming up here, then, if you insist upon going into the woods yourself?” and she put her chin out and said, “What is the point of my staying behind?” Florence, being with child, is absolutely prevented from the trip, but Melba is convinced the duty should fall to some one of the family, which must be her. I let this foolish argument stand out from the shore, and after suffering the silence, she said, “Well, I won't hold you up, if it comes to that. You can put me beside the tracks.” Which I coldly agreed to do.

The caboose of the Chelatchie Prairie train, attached to a long line of trucks and flatcars, has doubtless done duty as coach for traveling loggers in various stages of illness or intoxication, as well as all manner of agents and cruisers, wives and
filies de joie,
which must account for the sanguine way the conductor and the brakeman took four of us aboard. His passengers comprised a man with a handlebars mustache and a mild
manner, bound for Amboy, bearing with him a little girl in a blue crepe jumper; and us two women, going all the way up the line, one of us well upholstered and getting along in years, and the other a model of immodesty, decked out in trousers which were rucked up into high boots. The brakeman, imperturbable, laying eyes on me without much of a blink, ushered us into the forward compartment as if it were his front parlor. “Ye'll be cold standing out there. Come in to the stove.”

The car was stuffy, with a prevailing odor of smoke and leather cushions and grease. The coal bin was built up from the floor of the caboose close beside the long-necked, clubfooted stove. A shovel stood in the coal, and an iron washstand in the corner amidst a litter of soap and soiled towels. Boots with thick worn soles dangled from a hook on one short wall, and a yellow oilskin coat on the opposite wall. We sat on the benches and put our bags behind our shoes.

There was a great deal of shunting from the mills to the station before the conductor and brakeman finally climbed to their high chairs, opposite to each other in the turret of the coach; and at last the engine made up a little steam and bore away from Yacolt. For the first short while, the rails ran past little farms whose few acres have been hewn from the forest. These tracts were once thickly set with trees that rose three hundred feet to the sky and shut out the sun like a lid; now the pale sunrise fell glittery and tender through the haze of mill smoke, and between the stumps in the hop fields, bare winter poles stood as much as twelve feet, and thin as the bones of Longshanks.