“You’re right.” The black-haired man found his toolbox, took out a hatchet, and struck. A crescent of wood flew off. The only thing left was a savaged section of the G. One more blow took care of that. Sarsen did nothing to stop him.
“Now that’s river trash for you,” Sarsen said. “Henry, that is pure-D river trash.”
The black-haired man lifted the hatchet in a half-threatening way. He smiled like one among friends. He had a moustache. “You come take it. You put down that pole and come on over.” His voice was stern as a knife, with an edge to it, because he’d shouted himself out on the mules. The family watched this scene with sullen eyes; they had clearly seen others like it. They stood behind in washed-out clothes, the wan color of butternut dye.
Sarsen asked, “What’s your name?”
“We seen a hundred thousand trees go this way,” said the black-haired man. “I take a couple for my little place up here, won’t nobody notice.”
“Martin!” his wife hissed.
“Damn it, Mary, let me talk.” His voice, once so harsh, grew expansive. “Let me take this, boys. Look around you. All the good chestnut been cut. I can’t be going twenty miles up the headwaters to get it, can I? Will it pinch your pocket? No. Let me take this one,” he said, on the gentle edge of hysteria. “I’m just splitting fence rails of it.”
Sarsen said mildly, “You’re going to sell it. You can say if you are.”
“No, I’m not. You need good chestnut for good rails.”
In the same friendly voice, Sarsen said, “You’re going to sell it. Fence rails? Shit. You’re too trashy to pen your animals. I can tell by your clothes.”
In a dumb, monotonous rhythm, the black-haired man pounded the dull side of the hatchet against his palm. You could see him reckoning what to do. He seemed to appreciate the chance to take a breather. The mules, for their part, couldn’t decide whether to sit or stand.
Henry whispered to Sarsen, “This ain’t worth fighting over. Really.”
“Don’t backbite me, son.” Sarsen wasn’t about to whisper. “Don’t get in the road.”
“I’m not backbiting. Just, listen. Listen, let’s just give it to him. He got a point.”
“What? What?”
“It’s just one.”
The black-haired man cried, “See there? That bonny boy says I got a point.”
Sarsen took off his wet hat and put it back on. He faced enemies on both sides. He turned to Henry, saying, “Your cousin wouldn’t do this way!”
Henry said, “It’s one of ten thousand.”
Sarsen was aghast at this little child. “If every piece of river trash took one or two, me and you’s out of work. All us. This river driving didn’t spring up yesterday. This is a damned system!”
“Well, that’s true,” Henry said. “That’s true, too.”
“My God, you’re overstepping. My God, you was never here till yesterday.”
The black-haired man slapped the closest mule with the side of his hatchet. “Get on!” he cried, his voice breaking on a high, merry note. The mule tried to sit. He prodded it again. “Get on!” Then he buried the hatchet in its shoulder. Blood flew to Sarsen’s feet.
“Now damn it,” Sarsen shouted, “there’s no call for that!”
The man’s wife wept in wretched jabs. Sarsen couldn’t take it. Swinging his pike, he whacked the cruel fellow across the head. The black-haired man fell, unconscious but not dead. Henry and the eldest girl pulled him from the shallows, so he wouldn’t drown in a foot of water. Sarsen began unfastening the chains. Henry tried to help. Sarsen shrugged him off.
Henry asked the woman, “What you want me to do? That animal’s in bad shape.”
The mule bled in silence, its head lolling about. Somehow it would’ve been easier to take in if it were howling. The hatchet fell out of its own accord. Yellow adipose tissue shined through, then reddened. The black-haired man kept a neat edge. The blood poured in a curtain with each heart beat. The wound was a rugged flap that peeled from the bone.
“Do you want me to cut its throat?” Henry asked her.
No answer. Henry pulled out his sheath knife — besides Ezekiel’s boots, the one thing of value he carried — and killed the animal. It was an act of mercy, but when he finally poled himself away from shore, he would wonder if it would’ve been more merciful to cut the black-haired man’s throat, or the wife’s throat, the children’s, or his own. When he skated away, he would see the teenage girl watching him. She had violet depths around her eyes. Though he had barely noticed her during the disturbance, Henry fell in love with her. And he would haunt her thoughts. They knew they wouldn’t see one another again and were meant to live on in perfect, sentimental balance.
But that was for leaving time. First, he had work to do. Sarsen demanded it. They jammed pikes under the log, levering it out of the mud. It was like tipping a train car onto its side, or trying to. Sarsen could lift his end, but Henry was sweating, moaning, he could feel fiber giving in the pike, he flinched in case it would snap and throw splinters at his eyes. This was the punch of the Captain’s possible joke. They needed one more man. Henry added nothing.
Sarsen shouted, “Put your ass into it! Get down low!”
Henry groaned.
All this happening while the woman pitifully made a bandage for her husband’s head, gashed between eyebrow and eye.
Sarsen said, “Let it down.”
“What?”
“Just leave it go to hell.” A dismissive wave of the hand. “You can’t do it.”
When they poled away from the mud beach, Henry exchanged glances with the girl. His wrists ached, and he tried rolling his shoulders to work out the kink, to show her himself, despite all his failings, all his softheartedness. His sleeve was clammy with the spew of blood.
“I never left a log behind before,” said Sarsen.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. Captain won’t even care — I bet.”
“Don’t tell him! Don’t tell nobody.”
Henry said cheerfully, thinking of the girl, “It’s funny we never seen that dog again.”
Sarsen would not answer.
In silence, they steered around the teardrop island, rejoining the river in its main course. Would the Captain notice they rescued none? No, thank God. In the rally of bodies, the confusion of work, he didn’t say a thing. Sarsen exhaled. They rode on, they made the miles. Sarsen left a good space between Henry and himself. As if sweeping aside a curtain, they saw the cutover lands, black acres where the slashings had been burned. There would be a strip of forest again, then cutover, then forest, a brindled senselessness of healthy lands and disaster. At the mouths of feeder streams, silt plumed in the water.
Sarsen finally spoke, but it was to himself. “We got this last year. Look at them big damned stumps.”
All had changed. Sarsen had wasted his time on Henry. Henry felt it coming off the man in waves, and he could die of shame. Thoughts of that girl were no comfort.
Here the ruins of a burned gristmill and the new one rising just on down, its great wheel grinding evermore. Here the country baptizing in a chilly, slack hole, the people wading out. Henry thought it a choir singing through open windows until he saw robes billowing in the current. To the staring congregants, he gave a wide berth.
“Them are foot-washers,” Sarsen muttered.
Around the bend, drovers shouted. You couldn’t make out what they were saying, and then you could.
Jam ahead, they cried. Jam ahead.
This brown, shapeless mass and then, as a tintype picture rises from its cold bath of chemicals, the pieces became distinct, a hillock of buckled logs, some on their sides, some driven in the riverbed, some jutting straight in the air, some planing mysteriously in the current though nothing seemed to hold them back. Henry had dreamed a mountain; this was a sodden carpet. It went on for a hundred yards, and every minute more logs pinned against the mass, increasing its weight, wedging the river shut ever more tightly. Henry’s own would soon become part, a thousand held by a single key. Men climbed upon the logs, testing with kicks for loose pieces. A boy with a peavey wrenched at one, shaking his head in disgust.