Wild Life (13 page)

Soon the little carved-out fields gave way, and on either side of the tracks stood a desolation of burnt and cutover forests, with the occasional forlorn spar left behind due to puniness or rot, and then unburnt jungly stands, all of it the twenty- and thirty-year-old stump growth and weedy alder that has sprung up where the old handloggers cleared out the big trees with ox teams in days long past.

Melba had been fidgeting with her hands and finally she put her head over and confided something to the young girl, after which she lifted her head and declared to the man who had brought her, “You won't let her wander off into the woods,” as if this fell in the middle of an intimate correspondence. He was not very taken aback. “I won't. I sure won't,” he said with a slight smile, and he gently petted the girl's knee.

“They's a girl took by a orangutan up in the mountains this
week,” the conductor called down from on high, which was apparently not news to anyone in the car. A short, interested conversation followed, consisting almost entirely of old rumors and woods-ape stories of years past, and sober speculation among the three men present. I left it to Melba to reveal us or keep still, and she flattened her mouth and kept still, looking straight down to her clasped hands, even while hearing of miners found dead with their heads bitten off. Afterward, when they had gone on to talking of other things, I looked and found her eyes were fixed out the window, her hands loosed from each other, resting separately on her knees.

At Amboy junction the train slacked speed, and the man and his daughter went off there. They walked the ties a short way and then crossed over through the shadow of a small woodlot and took a cross-planked road that pierced the green hills toward the northwest. Once onto the road, the girl began a little skip, and the man swung off his hat and beat it lightly against her stockinged legs; her laugh carried across the air as if it were a bell chiming.

A man I took to be an agent for the Twin Falls Logging Company, or I suppose a little company accountant or surveyor or saw seller, got on board, gripping his bag and carrying in the other hand a yellow novel. He promptly took out the novel and began to read it, and after some minutes of distant and negligent study of the wrapper, I determined that it was not one of mine.

While the caboose sat waiting for the return of the engine, which evidently had gone up the short way to Amboy, a little crowd began to gather. A man carrying homemade prune wine in a pail came out of the nearby pastures, and boys with dogs appeared from somewhere and climbed over the high steps of the caboose, and a shaky old man wandered forth from a building that might have been a brothel, or a saloon, or a café. There was a friendly exchange of information—what price for the wine, what's to be made of this unseasonable sunny weather, and of course some speculation and newsmongering as regards the “orangutan” who had stolen off with a child in the backwoods—and when the train pulled out, the little boys ran alongside and shouted good-byes quite as if we were all old acquaintances, and even the Twin Falls man looked up from his reading to wave a hand to those left behind. His book, I saw, was
The Ghostly Galleon: A Tale of the Steel-Arm Detective.

In certain seasons of the year there are shallow-draft steamboats as can make it up the North Fork of the Lewis River as far as Etna and Speelyei, and therefore Chelatchie Prairie is a town older than Yacolt by some few years, having been settled by Finns and Swedes who put dairy cows on the natural pasture and in years past took their produce the short way north to Speelyei and thence to the Outside. But the logging show has made Yacolt the center of its universe, and Chelatchie Prairie therefore has become a pitiful little town without the look of progress or prosperity about it, the only new buildings being a mill and a railroad station. We loitered on the platform, as pathetic as hobos, before hitching a ride with a little Shay engine going out the short spur line to Camp 6. Spur lines being temporary, they are no more than light rails fastened to flimsy ties on loose and fickle roadbeds, and though a Shay can hunker down and climb a tree if it receives the order, and turn a curve so sharp as to shine the headlight right back over the engineer's shoulder into the log trucks hauling behind, it is not the Union Pacific: we were invited to sit on a flatcar, or cling to the bell rope on the forward part of the Shay. We rode the flat-car past the Chelatchie millpond and around the steep north side of a mountain with the Indian spirit-name Tumtum, and so on through the shattered and cutover woods well up the Canyon Creek.

I suppose there are some camps where the little Shay would go puffing in with great drama, rolling straight up to the landing with the sound of axes ringing on every side and the thunderclap of falling trees and the thudding donkey engines rocking the sky, but it is more often the case to find the train has stopped on a level stretch of track where a branch road joins and a few houses show in the distance; and if you're not to waste hours going up the spur to load wood before coming down to the landing, you're advised to jump off into the mud at the side of the track and walk a mile over ties to the camp buildings, where your arrival goes unnoticed and you find all the great woods activity is a distant mutter of sound and fury, off behind a ridge littered with the wreckage of last summer's logging.

Melba wouldn't complain but huffed and wheezed alarmingly as she went up the ties toward Camp 6, and her usual short-legged rocking stride quickly became a sailor's roll. She shifted her duffel from the left hand to the right and back to the left and cast a glance without quite lifting her head from its low-set bulldog stance. “What are those
houses there? Have we got to it? I should have thought there'd be more buildings.” There were a few houses upon a slight rise standing well apart from the other collected buildings of the camp, which I took for the private houses of the manager and his fellows.

“The camp is up the way yet, Melba. Here, sit down, find a stump. Put down your bag and sit.” She was eventually persuaded, and we leant against high old stumps until she had caught her breath enough to peer down the rails and find the buildings that comprised Camp 6.

“Well, there it is,” she said with a little cluck of satisfaction.

It was a highballing twentieth-century camp: not an ox to be found, but a shed for storing piles of heavy chains and coils of wire cable under cover, and a great long machine shop where men were mightily engaged keeping the mechanical devices and enginery in working order. In other respects a camp entirely ordinary for its size: the commissariat fifty feet in length; the cookhouse and dining room perhaps ten feet longer than the store, and wide in proportion; five bunkhouses with accommodations each for twenty-five or thirty; to say nothing of meat house, oil house, smithy, stables, filing house, and a tent church of the Northwest Lumbermen's Evangelical Society. Dozens of tents and shacks stood at the perimeter, homes of men who valued solitude or men whose families were with them in camp. I had known of a camp on the lower Columbia boasting rose hedges and walnut trees, as well as a Swiss gardener, but admit to its rarity. Round the buildings of Camp 6, in the more usual way, were desolate stumps of trees and the great litter and disorder of splintered tree limbs and tops, empty casks and tin cans, soiled straw, broken tools, abandoned railroad grades.

A woman stood out from one of the houses in that separate little community of boss places and called to us in a shrill voice, “My dears, are you lost, or looking for work?” which struck me wrong, and I called back, “My dear, we are looking for the rose garden.” She stood a moment in silence and then retreated.

“You have a wicked, rude mouth,” Melba said, which was delivered as a kind of shocked announcement, and which I did not deny.

We went on leaning upon stumps until Melba had sufficiently recovered her breath, and then minutes more while she fidgeted and pursed her mouth, which is a habit of hers, and a warning and portent
of coming commotion. In my experience she is at such moments often preparing herself to make some troublesome petition, or to lodge some vicious complaint against me or my children or the arduous conditions under which she is made to labor in our home.

“He can be dirty mean, you know,” was what she finally brought out, and her slight look, as it passed over me, seemed composed equally of embarrassment and insinuation. Since I didn't know what to make of this, I should have made the safest answer, which is silence, but my own habit is always to toss something out. I believe I said, “Then he's only true to the form,” without knowing in the slightest which man we were condemning. Melba knows my radical opinions and the general disrespect with which I like to speak of the male sex, but her round face colored to a fine pink. She said, “Well, most men as I've known were decent to their wives and their children. And I know you don't like to speak of it, but Wesley Drummond was a good husband who never laid a hand on you nor none of the boys, that I ever seen.” She nodded tightly as if to draw a line beneath these words, and then said, “Which is more than I can say for Homer, and that's all I wanted to say.”

I took this to mean there was a good deal more she wished to say, but though I pressed her, could get nothing further. What was I supposed to make of such dark hinting as this? The worst of several possibilities occurred to me: that Homer had killed his own daughter through beating her too hard, and had buried her in the woods. I don't put this past a man of a certain temperament, and therefore cannot entirely rule it out, but I have got hold of my imagination by now and believe I know what Melba was getting at, which is only that she blames Homer's harsh ways for causing Harriet to run off and get lost.

We trudged on to the office, where we were received with surprise and courtesy—
the orangutan—horrible business—hope yet—innocent child
—and made to understand the way up to Camp 8 was “a turrible slog fur a lady”—with a pitying look at poor Melba. Would we like to pack a lunch from the dining room? We would. Have a lie-down until the cook's flunky brought it round? Most obliged. We were then let into quarters at the rear of the store where there were three beds, evidently used by traveling timber cruisers and Twin Falls Company men. One of the beds was in disarray, and upon another lay a man's open shaving kit, as well as soiled socks and underdrawers. This
seemed to give our host a moment of fluster, though he recovered in good order and swept the offending articles under his arm as he backed out and left us to our privacy.

Melba sank to the one neat bed as if we'd finished up a trek over the mountains of Tibet. Her face was scarlet, the sleeves and collar of her shirtwaist wilted and wrinkled from damp sweating, her breath a dangerous rale. She lies there now, snoring, while I sit upon the other bed and write these words. I said to her bluntly, “The way from here will be all mud and hills and entirely afoot, seven miles or more, which ought to be all the argument necessary why you're not fit to go on.” Her idea of physical conditioning lies in a weekly scrubbing of the kitchen floors and a quarterly beating of the parlor rugs. In recent years I believe she's seldom been called on to walk farther than from one Astoria shop to the next, and the boat that ferries her around Skamokawa is often as not rowed by Stuband or one of my sons, all of which has left her legs sinewless and her lungs enfeebled. She is a stubborn hen, though, and had to be worn down and led by the wattles before finally granting my point. She then argued for waiting on at Camp 6, until made to see that it wouldn't help the cause. We agreed, finally, that I would go on alone, and after lunch and a rest she would take the Shay back to Yacolt and keep a vigil with Florence, which of course had been my original idea; and though I had a keen wish to remind her of this, the set of her face warned me from it. Melba, as I have come to know, can be steered but never driven.

 

“Why are inferior novels sometimes very widely read?” P. G. B.

 

Because a good many readers of novels do not know the difference between good and bad work; as a good many people do not know the difference between good and bad architecture, and build ugly houses when they might build beautiful ones. Because crudely written novels often deal with subjects in which people are deeply interested at the moment. Because novels of inferior quality sometimes have considerable narrative interest; there appear from time to time men
and women who have the gift of telling a story but no feeling for the art of writing. Because tales of inferior quality are occasionally illuminated by knowledge of character and by humor. Not all inferior novels are hopelessly bad. It must be added that there are some popular novels the success of which is inexplicable; they are cheap in style, clumsily constructed and untrue to life. In the reading public, as in every other public, there appears to be a residuum of natural depravity in matters of taste and intelligence.

H
AMILTON
W. M
ABIE, “MR. MABIE ANSWERS SOME QUESTIONS,”
Ladies Home Journal,
November 1905

 

Melba

 

The woman clapped the sleeve iron to the shirt front and ran the heavy narrow nose along the gathered pleat that overlapped the buttonholes, and then the next pleat and the next, polishing the tucks to the seams, and she then snatched a hot sadiron from the stove and smoothed the shirt across the back in broad strokes, and turned the shirt and pressed the yoke, and turning again ran across the seams at the caps of the sleeves and pressed the narrow selvage of the collar band and flattened the lower sleeves and the buttonhole band, then placed the seven-pound iron on the stove again and took the little sleeve iron and pushed into the gathers of the sleeve caps and smoothed the cuffs flat, turning the tip of the iron delicately into the small pleats at the wrist.