• • •
The visit to the Hobble Peterson camp did not go as well. Peterson disliked women, whom he considered brainless and backward, refused to talk to her and addressed sarcastic replies to her questions only to Andre Roque. His camp was dirty, the ground littered with wood chips, torn rags, a ragged ox hide, several broken barrels surrounded by circling flies, broken ax handles, rusted wire and worn-out saw blades, discarded boots. The drying lumber stacks looked ragged and the ends sagged. As they rode away from the camp Andre, who had been silent until now, followed her glance and said, “Them boards won’t dry even.” Lavinia noted all of this in her little red book, a book that became infamous in the logging camps, for a bad report from Lavinia meant the jobber would not work for Duke & Sons again, as Peterson discovered when the spring drive ended.
On the return trip there was one night when Andre was thoroughly awake. A storm had been hovering on the horizon all afternoon. They made camp early and dinner was the inadequate New England “nookick,” parched corn ground to a powder and mixed with hot water, filling but tasteless, and as dark fell the storm arrived. Lightning cracked without interval and violent rain doused the fire. While Andre sat near, Lavinia tried to sleep but the mad winds tore their lean-to apart. They could hear trees falling in the forest and even see them in the stuttering blue flashes. With the shelter gone they were soaked through in minutes. When lightning cleaved a great pine a short distance away Andre wrapped his wet arms around Lavinia as if to take the brunt of any falling tree. Two hours passed before the rain slackened and suddenly stopped, pushed southeast by an icy wind. Andre got up, groping in the dark for a log he had set aside earlier and with his ax laid the dry interior open. He spent the next half hour with the tinderbox and char cloth, and when that was not successful put a little gunpowder on the log. The spark ignited, the log surface showed a tiny flame, which he fed with a feather stick and twiglets, then pulled out the dry branches he had cached under their bags. Only then Lavinia remembered the little box of Congreves her father had pressed on her before they left. The next morning she dug out the box, opened it and tried rubbing one of the little strips on a piece of wood and was utterly surprised when it flared up brilliantly. She held the box out to Andre, who examined the matches, frowned and handed them back. He preferred steel and spark. And a week later, back in the Detroit house, she learned that matches were dangerous.
She was copying out her notes from the trip while Ruby unpacked her bags. She heard a slight noise and a smothered word, then a shriek from the unfortunate maid, who had dropped the Congreves box and stepped on one of the spilled strips, which immediately ignited her cotton dress. Lavinia seized the pitcher in the washbasin and sloshed the contents on the fiery dress, shouted for Mrs. Trame to bring a bucketful, pushed the maid to the floor and stamped on the still-burning cloth, singeing her own wool skirt hem.
“Butter,” said Mrs. Trame. “Butter will calm the pain,” and she ran back down to the kitchen. Ruby’s burns on her hands and neck were painful despite the butter. James called in a physician who pooh-poohed the butter and substituted a salve of his own making and prescribed generous doses of opium for the pain. The burns healed but Ruby’s attachment to opium increased and after several months James sent the scarred and addicted maid back to Boston with a generous allowance. Lavinia replaced her with a local girl.
• • •
It was not necessary to go to Ohio to learn scaling. Lavinia swallowed her pride and wrote to Armenius Breitsprecher, explaining what she wanted and asking how to gain the knowledge. Both Breitsprechers were in their Monroe office, just back from surveying heavy river sections. Armenius was amused; laughing, he showed the letter to Dieter.
“Duke and Sons are our chief rival — it seems they may have to change their name to Duke and Daughter, as there are no sons except the young children of Cyrus Hempstead. James is old and it looks rather as though this Lavinia, a chit of a girl, will have a position in the company. I think we may quickly swallow them up.”
But Dieter thought it must have taken courage to write that letter. “She has spirit. Does she have brains? Do you know her?”
“I never met her. I just knew she existed. It’s lächerlich, a woman wanting to learn how to scale logs. A rich girl’s passing fancy, something she heard about but hasn’t any idea of the reasons or procedures.” He crumpled and tossed the letter into the woodbox near the fireplace. It was Dieter who plucked it from the woodbox the next day and answered the letter himself, offering his personal instruction if she could manage to come to Monroe for a week.
“I hope you have some knowledge of mathematics,” he wrote. “Few women do, but familiarity with numbers is quite essential in estimating log volumes. I would be pleased to tutor you in the rudiments of the art and if it is to your liking you may advance to more difficult problems.” He thought she would not reply; he made the work sound disagreeable and difficult. She wrote back with a list of dates she could be in Monroe and assured him she had no fear of arithmetic nor mathematics and particularly enjoyed calculus above all things — not quite the truth.
57. a cure for headache
For James there was one highly annoying disadvantage to living in Detroit — his wine cellar remained in the Boston house and in Detroit there were rivers of whiskey but no wineshop. It had always been his intent to have his cellar shipped, but he shuddered when he thought how many good bottles would suffer from stirred-up sediments and take years to settle down. The longer it took to arrange for the packing and shipping the more he pined for the dark dusty bottles of choice Madeiras and clarets in their silent racks. His mouth watered. Dinner without wine was insipid. There was no pleasanter end to a day than a glass of port and a cigar by the fire.
James and Lavinia made a point of dining together at each other’s table in turn. This night it was James’s house. After dinner — venison roast with baked apples, potato soufflé and small business talk — in the library, each with a glass of whiskey, he said, “Lavinia, I am determined to return to Boston and arrange to have my wine crated and shipped here. While I am gone — I will be about six weeks away — I’m having a carpenter put bottle racks in this cellar. Of course I shall stay at Black Swan, though likely eat out, visit my tailor and bankers. Where did I put my — there they are.” He hung the cord of his pince-nez around his neck. “I’ve spoken to Cyrus and he said that while I am away anything you wish he will help you procure.” Cyrus was becoming hard of hearing and it meant strenuous shouting to explain anything to him.