Wild Life (20 page)

I lent him my light, and when the batteries gave out, I offered up my little tin match safe. He carried before him into the darkness one flaring match after another, while I waited at the opening and kept an eye out for monsters.

I have said nothing until now about this business of ape-men living in the lava beds, but in fact there's been much agitated muttering among the boys and the sort of nervousness which, in males, presents itself as blustery wrath and fidgety swagger. If Martin Pierce is afraid of crawling unknowingly into a savage den, he never would admit it, but carries a big, solid piece of wood which he pokes in front of him as he advances into each black hole. Poor Almon Pierce, who is a mere boy, younger than his brothers by a margin of twelve or fifteen years, was plainly afraid to be left alone with the horses and begged from his brothers the only weapon the three of them own, a little .22 caliber rifle which I don't suppose could kill a giant ape regardless. In fact, several of the men possess firearms—even the photographist packed in a .32 caliber takedown rifle on his back with the camera case—and now that we're among the lava rocks, they've begun to sport their weapons about, which to my mind is only further proof of fear.

I have an energetic imagination which allows for the existence of wild woods-beasts, and a certain giddiness—perhaps it's my relish for adventure—which may actually be a wish for their discovery. But when I allow my mind to think of Harriet, it goes directly to a handful of clear visions: to a little broken body at the foot of a rocky escarpment; to a barely living child shivering under blankets of leaves and boughs; to that first, unspeakable image of her delicate girl's body brutalized and murdered—by a monster, surely, but in human form—no hairy mountain devil. I have even, at times, entertained the idea that she lies buried in a grave dug by an unnatural father. My imagination deserts me when I try to see Harriet carried off on the shoulders of a giant ape-man. I could as soon imagine her whisked away to the See-Ah-Tiks by the gentle Tatoosh.

Still, without a doubt this is the wildest, most monstrous landscape I've ever known, which may account for my own uneasiness—a sense of being observed. I was throughout the day painfully on the alert, my eyes and ears on a search, my whole body straining and ready for whatever should occur. Some primeval instinct has evidently been startled into activity—an acute wariness that must ordinarily lie asleep in one's civilized life.

When Pierce and I sat to eat our lunch, it was cold and overcast, but no weather had blown over us—my feet were amazingly dry, which is very nearly all I require to be happy. We occupied a small open depression filled with wild currants, mountain box, and elderberry, amid scanty woods of fir and hemlock grown up thinly on the ridge of magma. Standing off to the east some moderate distance it was possible to see the high back of Special Agent Willard's Mexican saddle.

We talked about the weather—
uncommonly cold—wouldn't be surprised to see a dust of snow in the morning
—and I asked after Pierce's mining prospects, which he replied to with vague optimism and more information of cinnabar than I ever yearned to know. Eventually the subject of the explorer's compass was raised, though I don't recall which of us raised it first. I allowed as how a compass is a useful tool in the woods, but perhaps a native sense of direction might be better trusted in these kinds of rocks. Pierce modestly agreed: “Maybe it's the lead ore as takes the compass needle for a spin.” Then he said, in a low tone, “This little girl that's gone lost, she's your niece, is that right?” When I corrected his misapprehension, he said quietly of Melba and Florence, “Well, it may be imagined what anxiety they're suffering,” which took me aback. I have known the roughest men in the West be made soft and womanish by a child, but it's also the usual case for men to be entirely taken up with their own heroic efforts and think little of the women waiting at home. I said—and perhaps my tone was supercilious—“Well, they are praying,” to which he said, “Yes,” his voice sinking lower yet; and nothing further. So that I was forced to turn over the idea that his brain might be more complicated than I had thought.

In the afternoon there was a brief flurry of excitement when someone fired off a rifle shot—impossible to tell from which direction. We were, at that time, in view of Gracie Spear and one of the hand-loggers, acting as her partner, and we all four reared up and
stood looking and waiting—some of us more reared up than others; but we went on with our business when no further shots sounded. (It proved to be the little Finn named Peter Mer, a peeler from Bill Boyce's crew, who had stepped into a sinkhole and, losing his balance, had fired his rifle accidentally. I don't wonder if E. B. Johnson, who was his partner, considers himself fortunate not to be killed.)

After ten hours of hard tramping up and down a countryside of rough rocks and dense groves of small trees, we are camped once again, with a great crackling fire to hold back the cold and the phantoms; and the older Pierce brothers have demonstrated the wide scope of their talents by cooking up a decent potato soup, macaroni, and
galletta,
which is a hard Italian bread one moistens and heats in a fry pan. Earl Norris has set up his camera and taken several pictures of us plying our forks and chewing. Now the boys are lying about, talking and intermittently spitting tobacco juice while stitching up their torn garments, as well as waterproofing the seams of their shoes. I listen while I write, write, write, catching up these events.

Politeness and propriety are the order of the day in the presence of two women—or really only one, as Gracie Spear behaves entirely as if a man. Though her natural behavior with her fellow loggers is quite cheerful—much whistling and laughing and humming of gay tunes—she seems to regard me with suspicion, and I am put off by her myself, which I suppose springs from a morbid misgiving. This has put me in a strange way, behaving more nearly ladylike than if I had been alone with the boys. I have abstained from bringing out my tobacco; and earlier, when the youngest Pierce brother pushed a needle through his thumb, I cooed and clucked over him like a mother, and finished sewing up his ragged pants myself. (He has a burn-scarred hand which does not allow of full movement.) Though I suppose this will distance me, in the boys' eyes, from such as Gracie, I have had a low thrill of worry: that my womanly demeanor might make me attractive to her. How appallingly shallow is one's broadmindedness and progressivism!

 

Gracie

 

The woman, who wore denim overalls, sat on the veranda steps of the hotel with her forearms across her knees and her booted feet planted exactly as men plant them, immodestly apart. Her hair was cut short and her face, beneath a wool cap, was broad and mannish. She had no work and little money, and had come out here with scant idea of the arrangements usual in such places—a loggers' hotel. She did not wish to announce her ignorance by asking the bartender or the cook, so her plan was simply to wait here on the hotel veranda until work should fall into her lap. In any case, the weather was uncommonly clear, with a slight breeze to carry the smoke away, which she considered the best sort of weather for waiting.

About halfway through the long morning a redheaded man in a logger's get-up came out onto the veranda and stood near her, gazing uninterestedly at the new buildings along the muddy street, the cleared fields, the smoky hills beyond. One of his eyes was swollen and discolored; there was a deep gash which had filled with old, dark blood. He had been hit by the flying end of a broken wire rope.

“You been hurt?” she asked, with the intent of being friendly and in case it might lead to something. She believed he had been fighting, which was the usual course for loggers “blowin' it in” on the weekend.

Now that she had brought his attention to it, he took an interest in his injury. “Well, I s'pose I was,” he said, giving an impression of mild surprise. The forefinger of his left hand gently explored the wound, which immediately opened and ran with fresh blood.

The woman brought a clean handkerchief from her vest pocket and offered it up. It was a large and plain-hemmed square, unembroidered, a man's handkerchief. He considered and then accepted it, and pressed it to his eye.

“I just come down from Vancouver,” she said, which was a lie. “Have you heard of work for a peeler?” She had last worked as a prostitute in a coastal mill town and so had a general notion of the jobs to be had in the woods. She believed peeling was something she was strong enough to handle, and was determined to bluff her way onto a crew and then, in the Western way, learn the work by watching other fellows out of the corner of her eye, thus not ever having to admit to ignorance.

The man stood with the woman's folded handkerchief pressed to his eye as he went on looking out at the shattered and cutover field in front of the hotel. He was well traveled, well educated; he had made and lost and remade a moderate fortune and had come West to oversee his investment in the logging business. There was still wildness to be found in this part of the country if you were willing to leave the cities and venture into the backwoods, and he had found himself charmed by the loggers' rough and dangerous life. “I could use another peeler,” he said generously. He believed the woman sitting on the hotel steps to be a young man. Other men would eventually point out his mistake, and after his first flush of anger and embarrassment, he would flaunt this bull dyke, this gal-boy he had hired, as proof of the liberalism and unruliness of the West—proof of his own Western nature.

He gave vague and imprecise directions to his camp—she understood that it could be reached from the East Fork of the Lewis River, and that she would come upon the river if she struck out roughly north on a particular trail—and he gave her his name, which he said would be sufficient to get her hired. “Tell Mike yur the new peeler, which I said so,” he told her, having deliberately adopted the intonation and cadence and phrasing of uneducated Western men.

She shook his hand as a man would and went up into the hotel for her ditty bag. She considered that the redheaded man might be a bull artist and that she might have a six-mile walk for nothing; but she didn't mind the walk, and if this job didn't break well, she would walk back and wait again for what might come along. She was determined not to fall into a woman's usual occupation as housekeeper, cook, maid, laundress; and equally determined not to be a mother or a wife. Her work as a prostitute had been undertaken primarily for the lively income, and as a radical corrective for what her mother had termed an unnaturally masculine nature. The particulars of sexual congress with men had struck her as disgusting, stinking, and dreary; but loggers and millmen were surprisingly simple in their needs, and she had learned from the other women certain useful proficiencies of touch and tongue which made the work less objectionable, and less likely to result in a pregnancy.

Recently she had given up her attempt to effeminize. She had met a woman, a logging camp cook, who had shown her a couple of
things about touch and tongue and had encouraged her to follow her own natural inclination. Now her hair was cropped short as a man's, and her dress was manly as well, and though she made no particular effort to masquerade as a male, she was often mistaken for a beardless boy, which had many advantages in terms of freedom and protection. She wasn't afraid of hard work and believed that she would find, in a logger's outdoor life, the liberty and adventure that were denied to the female sex.

As she went up the muddy street in search of the East Fork trail, the redheaded man came out of the hotel outhouse. She lifted her cap to him, and though he was bareheaded, he lifted and gestured to her cheerfully with the bloody handkerchief as if it were a cap. His business affairs were in a hopeless mess and his men had learned to keep their wages drawn up to date, but he was earnest and always set himself to work as hard as his men, which put him in a good way with them. He was pleased with himself for offering work to a boy down on his luck, a boy who nevertheless kept a clean handkerchief in his pocket. She was pleased with herself for snagging work so easily; and generally high in spirits due to the beaut of a day.

She began to whistle “Oh, That Will Be Glory!” which was heard by people in the nearby buildings and understood correctly to be a youthful expression of simple joy.

I tried to think, last night and this morning, what to say, what steps to take, and it's come to nothing, nothing, only vain circling around. I keep my head up and look each man in the face, an absolutely cold look. The innocents, I'm sure, must now believe I have overnight transformed into another woman—a Fury without a shred of civility—and the guilty party, what does he think? That he has had a nasty, smutty little victory? I am half crazy to know which man it was and half crazy with dread to see in someone's face the filthy smugness that must give him away to me, and what will I do then? I imagine mayhem—a knife cutting through his smirk—a fire poker swung square up between his legs—but go on sitting here writing as if all is not utterly changed and I am not rocked by humiliation and rage and—
impotence.

A
hard rain fell in the night, the noise deafening inside the crowded tent, and I woke enough to realize the change in the weather—too tired or hopeless to grieve for Harriet, a shameful worry whether we were to suffer flooding, wet blankets—and then slept deeper and woke again—how much later?—pitch black, the rain still loud—to feel something warm and damp was on me, in me, and groggily thought it must be my monthly flow—an inward groan,
oh dear—
and then my brain fluttering to life, something flashing through my lower limbs, an awakening, a realization, and I scrambled in the blankets, trying to get up, to get away, but the blankets tangling, and the man's hand still between my legs—
his fingers inside me
—and I made a desperate sound, I know I did, but not a word, it was a guttural animal noise such as a cow must make when her belly is torn away by wolves, and
he
made a sound, an obscene whispery breath which he may have meant as hushing—he was surprised, afraid to be found out? His fingers turned in me, his arm caught in my twisted drawers as I reared and lurched—I was absolutely desperate—before he slipped from me, or I escaped, and I flung myself wildly from the tent—the blankets pulled to my breast in a bundle—out into the great noise and cold and utter blackness of the rain. Took no more than a few steps before falling—rocks everywhere—broke open the skin of my knee—and so had to creep back into the tent, soaking, terrified, bleeding, pathetically afraid of tumbling to my death out in the weather, the black night. The stupid men went on sleeping, as poleaxed as steers, and the one, the rat, lying awake though quite still among them, while I scuttled around feeling out my clothes—mad with fear of touching, being touched by
him,
by any of them, the men—putting on the tin pants and every other thing, layer after layer, and then sitting shaking in the darkness in a kind of shock, my heels to my hips and the wet blankets drawn around my coat like a squaw, sitting trembling and listening to every small stirring noise, to the wind thumping the tent ropes, and the scratching of tree branches, and the toenails of animals scratching across rocks, and the turning and sighing of bodies in the night. Long, long hours sitting thus.