The Scugogs had enough squared timber for two rafts at the end of the winter. The bigger raft, made up of fifty cribs, belonged to old William, and the smaller raft to son Cato. The rafts traveled well enough on smooth water but broke apart at the falls. There was nothing for it but to disassemble them and send the cribs through, one by one, then put all together again. Jinot often thought of free logs surging through the boisterous spring freshet of the Penobscot. But of course rafts did not get into killing jams.
When the rafts arrived in Montréal they could not find a place to moor. Scugog had made no arrangements for the unwieldy mass of timbers. And it seemed to the choppers and rivermen that they were paid off grudgingly, that Scugog’s fingers lingered over the money. The tavern word was that he was having difficulty selling his timber.
• • •
A second son, Blade Scugog, was running a shanty farther up the Gatineau. The Sels shifted to this son’s shanty, glad to work with round logs. It was too bad to leave Diamond Bob’s grub, but the regret faded when they heard the famous cook had abandoned Scugog père in midseason in favor of Montréal, where he opened an oyster house. This younger Scugog, whose deep scratched-up voice was familiar to the river’s lumbermen, despised not only the uncertain rafting enterprise but his father’s stupidity in cutting without permits and permissions. He quickly got a cutting permit for himself after declaring he intended to make lumber for domestic enterprises, not for export.
“What do you imagine you are doing?” shouted the older man at his contrary offspring.
“After the war ends there will be thousands of settlers coming into this country. They will need boards and shingles to build houses.” To himself he added, “Not bloody squared warship timbers that the Crown can seize without remuneration.”
“You are, sir, a reckless fool. There will always be wars, always a need for squared timbers. You will fail with your trust in chimerical men who will never come to settle such rude lands. Do not ask me for aid when poverty brings you down.”
“And do you not come to me with your square timbers hoping for an introduction to purchasers,” said the son in his rough voice.
• • •
Blade Scugog’s sawmill ran through the summer, but at the end of dry September it was caught in a fast-moving wildfire and burned to the ground. The ambitious son refused to see he was ruined, rushed to Québec and leveraged money to rebuild. “I may not know much about square timbers,” he said, “but I know how to make money.”
• • •
The settlers did come and with them came bridges, lightning-fast clearing, plans for crib-size timber slides around the worst falls, canals to bypass rough water, large new settlements, cemeteries, flour mills and postal service. They pushed back the wildwood. Civilization rushed into the trees.
The Sels moved on to other camps after Scugog’s fire. Pine choppers from Maine arrived every season, now and then someone they knew. On Jinot’s first day on the Fischer-Helden cut, walking to the marked trees behind a knot of choppers he recognized the familiar jaunty stride of Joe Martel from Marchand’s long-ago Penobscot camp at the time of Franceway.
“Joe!” he called. “Joe Martel, what you do here?”
Martel turned around, his black beard ruffed out like a grouse’s breast, a gleam of teeth, a happy exclamation.
“Jinot Sel, Jinot. You are here?” He waited until Jinot came up to him and they walked together.
“I seen four, five Penobscots up here in the Canada trees. It’s bad in Maine now, you know. The white pine give out. Cuttin spruce and hardwood now. But this here”—he waved his arm at the riches of the Gatineau—“looks like a pretty good chance, eh?” He said Marchand had gone broke and was swinging an ax like the rest of them somewhere on the Gatineau. Tom Keyo was dead, decapitated by a flying log. That night after supper they talked on about the old days when they were Penobscot rivermen running on bubbles, the best in the world. “We made our mark, by gaw.”
• • •
The next winter was windy and bad for accidents. One man’s ax head flew off its handle, sailed twenty feet and sheared a young chopper’s face away; widow-makers caught three, killing two outright and breaking the third so badly he never worked again. Two buckers cut their feet to the bone and night after night the men talked about the need for stouter boots. Most of them still wore heavy elk-hide midcalf moccasins. An ax cut through one as if it were a syrup-soaked pancake.
The Sel brothers and Martel made the Saturday night trek to the near settlement “to drink and watch the fools” as Amboise put it, “to talk with the girls” as Jinot said. He only came for drink and company. So he said. In the settlement’s two whorehouses the girls made much of Jinot, and if Amboise or Josime came in alone always asked, “Where is Jinot?”
“What is it they see in him?” Martel said. Jinot was only Jinot — a good riverman, easygoing in character, but off a log nothing special. He couldn’t sing, did not play the fiddle, wasn’t much of a step dancer. It had to be his smile and chaffing banter, for Jinot was always good-natured when others were gloomy and he listened to the girls’ complaints with real interest.
“By now he knows more bout women than anybody in the world,” Josime told Martel. “He been listenin to them jabber long, long years now. I guess half the brats in Maine come from Jinot.” Martel, thinking of Franceway, raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
• • •
A few winters later in the Ottawa drainage they were again squaring timbers, this time at Harold Honey’s camp. The shanty was crowded with dirty, lousy men who were strong beyond modern comprehension. The interior was always drafty and smoky. At night, exhausted by the constant swing of the ax against the living tree, they thought the rough accommodations of bare ground luxurious.
The days were longer and the taste of spring was in their mouths. The drive was only a few weeks away. At the end of one day Honey came to them in the shanty.
“Well, boys, I guess I got some bad news. The log market’s fell out the bottom. Scugog’s got all the Canada business. I can’t sell them logs we got on the rollway. I am broke and will have to go back to Maine and hire out again. I can’t pay nobody, but you are welcome to the logs if you can move ’em.” His smile was painful. There was nothing to do but pack up and head downriver with the rest of the crew.
• • •
Jinot was the only one with any money. The Sels agreed to spend it on a blowout in Montréal and then decide whether to go back to Maine or stay in the Ottawa valley.
“They still cut trees in Maine — water pine is gone but there’s red pine and spruce and hardwood. There’s work. Plenty work on the booms. There’s still some long log drives.”
“Let’s go west,” mumbled Amboise. “Not go back to the Penobscot and that — all that.” They knew what he meant: Beatrix’s grave, the old house, the choppers they knew, scabby woods and stump forests, the ghosts of dead men. Martel said that if they went west he would go with them.
In Montréal they hit the Golden Pine, the dingiest whorehouse, but good enough for woodsmen and fur traders — even métis and “savages.” They agreed to meet up afterward at the Wing King saloon, where the proprietor not only sold liquor but rented beds for the night in the big storeroom.
The focal point of the Golden Pine was an upright log carved like a membrum virile and painted “golden” yellow supporting the ceiling. No food was served, but a fierce kind of fermented apple cider Madam Georgine called “calvados” or “Napoleon brandy” or just “spirits” depending on the customer. The room was crowded when they went in. A long row of chairs ranged against one wall and on the chairs sat the merchandise. There were stout Irish girls with flaming cheeks, some blue-eyed milk-skinned English blondes, one sultry Jewess, a smattering of French-speaking farm girls and, in the bargain corner, a few native women. Martel made his little joke, asking Jinot if he would like a chair with the girls, then began talking with one from Kébec, asking her foolish questions about her family. Madam Georgine, who knew Jinot, tugged at his jacket sleeve.