The Lighthouse Road (20 page)

   "So, sure, he's got a lot of pots on the fire. And it's true some of what he cooks up stinks bad as moose shit. But he was true to his word. He never took more than was his, and he got us all ahead of the robber barons. We still own this town. We always will. He had something to do with that. He had a lot to do with that."

   Odd had listened to Curtis with both ears. It was a story he'd never heard before and since it came from Mayfair's mouth, he had no reason to doubt it. But then he thought of Rebekah, of her life in chains, of the things Hosea had made her do. Odd spit. "I appreciate hearing the story. No doubt it's a testament to something. But I have my reasons for feeling suspect."

   "I've never known you as anything but a straight shooter, son. I believe you've your reasons." He turned to face Odd. "Curious as I am, I honestly don't want to know what they are. I'm happier to live in ignorance."

   Odd smiled, though nothing was funny. The blind eye was a bad disease in this town. They shook hands and parted without another word.

E
ven as the hours of daylight lengthened in the first week of February, that winter persisted. Thea fed the dogs those days. Each morning and again each evening, after the jacks took their breakfast and supper, she would haul two wooden pails from the mess. Often as not they were brimming with bread crusts and beans, fatback and milk, but the hounds did not seem to miss their fish. They ate with zeal. By the time she crossed the paddock to drop food for the dog staked under the ridge, the bitch had always finished her slop and would be sitting queenlike in the snow. Thea thought their demeanor was suspect and restful, as though their greater, graver purpose required stores of energy and emotion better not wasted.

   The sled drivers had taken to carrying rifles in the woods, but each night for a week they returned to camp without game. In the early days of winter, it would not have been uncommon for the teamsters to see a hundred caribou during the hauling hours, so their sudden and complete absence was yet another harbinger of doom: That winter had become its own disease, the woodland creatures had vanished in the sickness.

   Even in their mounting despair the jacks still toiled. Each day sled upon sled descended the ice road and pulled into the mill in Gunflint, where the millworkers unloaded the cut. On February twelfth one of the great horses was killed on the ice road, crushed by a careening load of timber. In the same mishap a teamster lost a hand. Soon after one of the crews had a man beheaded on the northern parcel and two days later one of the sawyers passed through camp minus a leg. These were known hazards, though, and the general comportment of the men in the shadows of such calamities was not much changed.

   For her part, Thea steadied during those weeks. She became a dynamo in the kitchen, in charge by then of the suppers as well as the baking. Her favorite job was of course feeding the dogs, those two chances each day to stretch her legs and breathe fresh air. Cold as it was. The dogs greeted her and the pails of food and the three of them formed a sort of congregation of lonesome souls.

   In the two weeks since the Ovcharkas had arrived there had been no wolf song. Groups of men visited the dogs each night after supper, offering busted ax handles in lieu of rawhide, bringing in their pockets crusts of bread and hunks of meat to reward the dogs. The jacks, after paying the dogs, would stand against the paddock fence smoking their pipes or cigars, offering woodsmen's philosophies on the nature of such beasts, on the likeliest source of their lineage. One of the men went so far as to offer the great bears of the Yukon as the most likely origin of the breed. None of the others gathered that evening— though preternaturally inclined to ribbing and chiding— would even dispute the possibility. If that winter would not relent, if the men suffered their frozen flesh and injured limbs, if they were reminded daily of the perils of their labor, they were at least more calm in their few hours of leisure each evening, and certainly more comfortable in their slumber.

   On the first morning of the third week more snow came. After breakfast Thea hauled her buckets to the horse barn. She dropped the first before the bitch, hammered her water free of ice with a hatchet, then followed the fence line around the paddock to the kennel of the dog. She had named the dog Lodden for his long strands of wiry black hair, and each morning now she would call his name as she crossed the paddock. As she approached his kennel, calling him, she saw that a wide swath of snow trailed away from his roost. She saw also the frozen earth cratered around the spot his stake should have been, saw his leather collar and the length of chain tangled atop the packed snow. She hollered his name into the wilderness, dropped the pail at the opening of his kennel, and hurried back toward the mess.

   She was almost jogging as she headed on to the camp office. As she entered, a young man she recognized from the chow line peered over his glasses and onto an open ledger. He looked, no doubt surprised to see her. Before he could greet her she said, "Lodden, Lodden. H
und!
Hund! "
He came from behind the counter and went straight to the door. He opened it, a whirl of snow came in at his boots. "The dog?" he said. "The new dog? What?" He stepped back in, closed the door. While he donned his coat and hat he asked again, "Did something happen to the dogs? Is that what you're saying?"

   He flew out the door and was gone in the snow before he reached the paddock fence.

   Within an hour what few men remained in camp were scattering into the passel of white pine. The bull cook, the brothers Meltmen, the clerk, they all set out into the wilderness, calling for the dog. By the time the jacks returned from their parcels, word of the missing dog had already spread. Whispers above the evening's stew ranged over the possibilities.

   One of the men said, "That weren't a godly beast. Likely he's in the Devil's Maw, making fast with Beelzebub."

   When the searchers returned with lanterns aglow and no word on the hound, the rest of the camp retired with a new set of misgivings.

   But sunup found the dog back in camp, blood staining his muzzle and the snow outside his kennel. Only the hide and bones of a caribou fawn remained. The same scene played at the bitch's stake, for the dog must have rent the fawn and left the hindquarters for his sister. The Ovcharkas found a new and holier place in the minds of the men. Lodden was left to his duties without the hindrance of stake or chain. For the rest of the cold spell he roamed the camp's perimeter with a beautiful arrogance.

F
or three weeks during February the temperature still had not climbed above zero, two feet of snow had fallen, the horses had grown coats like bears, but still the camp trundled on. Hosea visited camp often. His leather satchel over his shoulder. He set up a makeshift examining room in the wanigan. Several men had frostbitten fingers or toes or both amputated. Others had black scabs of dead flesh removed from their upper cheeks. Two men had even died by way of the cold; the first of hypothermia, the other of a heart failure way up the northern parcel. Their deaths inspired more dread than sadness, as most of the men knew the calendar well enough to note how much more winter was in the offing.

   There were nights during that interminable stretch when the woods above Gunflint on up to Canada were the coldest place on earth. One such dawn broke minus fifty-two degrees. So it was properly strange when Thea woke on the last morning of February to the sound of dripping water. She kicked her eiderdown away and lit a candle in the kitchen. She stoked the scullery fire. Before commencing her morning chores she poked her head out the mess-hall door. For the first time since the ides of January she could smell the horseshit under the snow. During the night a fog had risen, fey and reeking.

   In the root cellar Thea collected the morning's fare: the oats, the buttermilk, the bacon. There were bushels of sprouted potatoes and overripe onions and twenty pumpkins ready to be made into pie. She gathered fifty pounds of potatoes and five pounds of oleo. She had baked the bread the night before, and she removed twenty loaves from the wooden breadbox. She thought if the men were anything like herself, the warm weather on the heels of such cold would induce their greatest appetites.

   Indeed, when the men arrived after reveille, they found their seats quickly and ate with gusto. Each was served a rasher of bacon, four slices of bread and oleo, boiled and salted potatoes, a heap of steaming oats, and coffee to wash it down. Fifteen minutes after taking their places at the tables they rose and marched out of the mess hall, their mittens and hats in their hands, their coats and shirt collars unbuttoned. Under a dull sun they climbed aboard the empty hauling sleds and lit their pipes or cigars. Thea went to the door and watched as the horses pulled onto the ice road. She could see the runners plowing through the soft snow. Lodden followed the sleigh to the first bend before reversing his enormous stride and backing toward camp.

   She had only finished her tea when the supply sleigh arrived, hauled by two horses worse for the season. The same company that owned the mill owned the timber and two camps— the Burnt Wood River Camp and another in the Cloquet Valley— and the sleigh ran a regular loop between the two, stopping at the commissary in Duluth to reload with each pass. Twice each week the same drivers dropped the stores, both the usual fare and, on Fridays, what passed for Sunday dinner. Oftenest this was herring but on that day it was one hundred pounds of pork chops, a cask of fresh apples, and three gunnysacks of butter nut squash. Thea pinched two of the apples while the brothers Meltmen unloaded the sleigh.

   While they worked, Thea took the apples from her apron pocket and fed one to each of the horses.

S
he was paring the squash on a bench outside the mess hall, the warm sun still hazy above the clouds, when she saw Joshua Smith steer his fine hickory sleigh around the last bend on the ice road. He sat on a seat of crushed purple velvet and wore a mink coat and beaver skin hat. His boots were Anishinabe-style moccasins, covered in beadwork and quills and lined with sheep's wool. His mittens hung from the cuffs of his sleeves.

   "Good afternoon," he said, then pulled his watch from its pocket and corrected himself. "I should say good morning. Is Trond about?"

   Thea understood he was asking for the foreman and shrugged to suggest she did not know.

   "Have you got coffee in there?" He pointed at the mess-hall door.

   She understood this query, too, and nodded and hurried in. At the stove Thea poured coffee and offered him a cup.

   "I thank you," he said and took a long drink.

   She noticed that one of his front teeth was dead.

   "I've heard rumors of women working the Burnt Wood Camp." He took another drink. "But I didn't believe it." He looked at her directly, his dead tooth dividing an impish smile. "A man could sure use a bowl of that stew boiling up yonder."