“Stand back! Stand back!” It was the Captain.
Two drovers shouldered up. They stood at the corners of the first tier and swung cant hooks into the cleats, which, incredibly, held back untold tons of logs. Before Henry could see them pull, a standing wave of timber gave way in an awesome, clattering slouch, the ground rumbled with guttural thumps he felt in his stomach and his vision shook and it all was over. Logs churned the river. Such force would leave his body not big enough to fill a hatbox.
Men slithered out into the water and poled errant logs downstream. The second tier was pulled. The seventh. The tenth. Ten thousand logs and the riverbank a chute of muck.
Saw logs were so dense on the river a duck couldn’t light between them. The drovers took up their pikes and tugged on caulked boots that rode up to the calf. Most took penknives and snagged off their trousers at the boot tops, so they wouldn’t get sodden and slap-heavy with water. Henry tucked his own into his boots. They had to last him. Men with new footwear punctured the leather to let the water trickle out.
Sarsen told him that was the right way. “You want it to give water like a sieve. Give like a sieve!”
“Mine’s fixed already.”
“You lied, you said you never run the river! Are you the fugitive living under a name?”
Henry offered up a shy smile at this teasing. His eyes moved subtly, watching Sarsen toss a closed penknife way up into the sun as he spoke. Each time, again, again, Sarsen caught it without looking, effortless calisthenics, like a man with Indian clubs. Always in motion. Never at rest. The knife was so high now, Henry could hardly see.
“These are Ezekiel’s,” Henry said of his boots. “I got to give them back.”
“Oh, I see. Your killer’s secret is safe with me,” Sarsen said with a lazy wink. He caught the knife and put it away. “How’s your pike? You want one so hard and true a cat can’t scratch it.”
The others broke from Sarsen’s path — a sort of deference; they couldn’t approach him directly. Everyone was conscious of him. Everyone moved in his orbit. If Sarsen never quit talking, Henry was the only one answering back.
Drovers lined up at a great bear-shaped rock that leapt out into the Grand. The first man climbed up it, looked left, looked right, and stepped off onto a log naked but for the boxed company brand on either end: GRC. Henry shuddered. He expected the man to spin it like a pinwheel and fall into slushy water, but the boots held fast to the peeled, slippery surface. Beaming in his checked shirt, the man used his pike to balance and push off the rock. The log shot forward in the current. He hollered out. A second man eased himself off. In the prickly wind, under a fickle sun that now shined hard, the pair moved nimbly against the silvery rim of river. Henry couldn’t see their logs; just two men standing on the waters.
It was his turn to climb. Henry’s spiked boots bit the granite with munching sounds. Face hot, legs numb. It didn’t seem real. He stood on the crest. It put him in mind of the first time he went bear hunting on Cabin Creek, hounds surging, the black paws slapping them down and cracking skulls, a sense he was in a place he didn’t belong.
It was Henry’s misfortune to stand out in a crowd, because he wore plain broadcloth, not the fancy shirts of others. “Get up there! Quit acting like cats on a rain barrel! You”—the Captain chopped at Henry—“you was begging me for this job.”
Henry stepped off the rock.
The fall seemed a thousand feet. Like a trick, he did not plunge and stop his heart in icy waters, his spiked boots caught, he balanced, he lived. Under his scanty weight, the log dropped an inch. That was all. He let off a whoop.
“Now that sounds right! You was wrong about the boy, Captain! Look at him crook his knees like a veteran!” It was Sarsen shouting down.
Only Sarsen was loved enough to needle without punishment. He did a backflip off the rock, and the log shuddered beneath. Even the grim Captain cheered.
Their lot: to herd stray logs from backwaters; painfully jackbell logs where they beached ashore; and, most important to GRC, break jams that clotted up in rapids. They teased logs out of bankside tangles and had a rough time of it; the willows were hesitant to let anything go.
But Sarsen was strong. He fished a log from behind a boulder where three men couldn’t have done the same. In the middle of grueling labor that left most breathless, Sarsen offered up his small sermons: “Note how Marcum takes the inside of a bend? You want to ride that seam. Water’s not so fast. Hit that outside bank, you’re in a bleeding world of shit, logs’ll pile up on you, no place to run. Young bull rides the fast water. Old bull takes it light inside. Right on the edge. He gets old for a reason. Remember how the inside’s soft and sweet, like the soft of your trouser pockets.” Sarsen’s pike flashed deftly in the sun. If his father was an evangelist of the Word, he was an evangelist of water. He had the strength to lift your dead body on a pole and shake you.
Seventeen is a hard year, and there was much to learn. True, Henry Gorby couldn’t stretch himself another foot to please a captain, but he could build up muscle and knowledge, he could learn the obscure trade. Sarsen had reached down from the crowd and tapped him for a certain life. Sarsen was the best thing ever to happen to him.
At first the water’s rocking made Henry’s legs shivery, but soon he guided the sixteen-foot oak like a skiff. He learned the undulation underfoot, its intimations, its English. Henry probed the river; the pike jumped in hand as it caught riverbed, about seven feet under. He watched for deadfalls and the white, killing arms of sycamores that reach low over the waters like women sowing seed. In turn, the Grand offered up its visions: otters that slid down banks like runnels of ink; shoals studded with mussel shells; a tanager stitching itself like Rahab’s scarlet thread through crowns of trees; a fox on the bank that seemed to be chuckling. Miles went by. There’s no better way to see the country. A snake rode alongside, using his log for shelter. The river broad and smooth. He and others could admire God’s handiwork, this place where otters are fish and fish are snakes. The going was easy. But as they went on, manipulation became apparent. GRC had dynamited rapids to make the river nothing but a flume. Every rock scarred with dynamite, entire meanders straightened. Some boulders had iron rings sunk in them like jewelry, where you could lever a ratchet bar and pry a jam open, where you could tether a floating ark. On down, the river was slashed with bone-grinding boulders and ruined dams. Word was the first day wouldn’t be too bad a haul of it, until they made Camden-on-Grand, where the river had teeth.
“Tomorrow you’ll sweat,” he was told, but on that first half day, Henry did little but balance, the arks floating in the distance behind.
The light changed. Night would come on. Henry studied the river. He couldn’t tell if it was four foot deep or twenty. The Grand now seemed cruel and lifeless with snowmelt and mud, but he wasn’t afraid.