The Wanigan Read online

  The early-morning light was thin as skim milk. Overhead a V of geese headed north. The geese sounded like Gabriel’s horn, the long tin horn that had called the men to meals back in the lumber camp.

  On one side of the river there was nothing along the shore but empty fields and a crop of tree stumps left behind by the loggers. On our side of the river, where there had been no logging, the pine trees soared more than a hundred feet. Even if I stretched my neck, I could not see to the trees’ tops. Ahead of the wanigan floated thousands of logs, so that the whole river looked like it was made of wood.

  My unhappy thoughts at what lay before me were interrupted by a terrible crashing and banging of pans from inside the wanigan. Jimmy collected wood for the stove and polished the stove with blacking to keep it from rusting. It was also one of his jobs to scrub the pots. It was a job Jimmy detested. I had heard him say to his father, “Why must I stay with the women? I can free up the logs along the shore as well as any man.”

  Teddy McGuire shook his head. “You’re only twelve, son. That’s no job for a boy. One misstep in that raging river and you’re done for. Don’t whine, there’s a good boy. I don’t need to have the likes of you causing me grief. I’ve enough to worry me.”

  Mama went into the kitchen to see to all the commotion. I stayed out on the deck of the wanigan to avoid being in the same room with Jimmy, who was sure to find some way to torment me.

  Just as I feared, I soon found Jimmy beside me. Once the pots were cleaned, Mama was glad to get him out of the kitchen. Jimmy is tall for his age and skinny, with large, clumsy hands and ragged nails because he bites them. His feet are large, too, so that he looks like a puppy with big paws who will grow into a great dog. He has red hair, which his father calls ginger. His father cuts Jimmy’s hair and one side never matches the other. Jimmy has no mother to care for him, so that his shirts were missing many buttons until Mama sewed them on for him.

  Jimmy’s story is a truly tragic one. His mother died a year ago. Papa said it was diphtheria and Jimmy had it as well. After his wife’s death Teddy McGuire was left to care for Jimmy. Since lumberjacking was all Teddy McGuire knew, he took his son along with him. Jimmy became the chore boy in camp. I pity Jimmy having no mother to care for him.

  Once I expressed my deep sorrow at the death of his mother, but Jimmy said it was none of my business and ran away. Mama said it was too hard for him to talk about his mother’s death. Even so, I thought he needn’t have been so churlish.

  That morning I had no wish to speak with Jimmy and pretended to be studying the shore.

  Jimmy stared most impolitely at my feet. “If you had a proper pair of boots,” he said, “instead of those fancy laced kid-leather things that aren’t good for anything, you could go along the bank with me. You could help me pick up firewood for the kitchen stove.”

  It was my dearest wish that Jimmy would just disappear. “I haven’t the least desire to accompany you anywhere.”

  “You’re so stuck-up, Princess Annie, it’s a wonder you can bear to breathe the same air everyone else does.”

  While it’s true I pride myself on my manners and deplore those of the lumberjacks, no one wishes to be called stuck-up, especially when they aren’t at all. I felt my lip trembling and tears start up. I did not see how I could spend weeks and weeks shut into a tiny cabin with no company but a cruel boy.

  I turned my face away but not quickly enough.

  “Hey,” he said, “you don’t have to blubber. If you can’t stand for me to be on the wanigan with you, I’ll get my own barge.”

  Jimmy swung himself from the wanigan onto a huge pine log floating in the river. He stretched out on his back as if the log were a couch and waved to me. The log floated along with hundreds of other logs on the river’s flood. A moment later it bumped into another log, and Jimmy was flailing about in the icy water. He climbed out of the river, leaking water from his cap to his boots. As he jumped onto the bunk shack to change his clothes, he gave me a furious look. I kept my countenance, but it was hard not to smile.

  THIS HAUNTED WOODLAND

  Mama called me inside the wanigan. The whole shack had the sour, yeasty smell of rising bread. Mama was looking tired, as she always does after the hard kneading of a big batch of dough.

  “Annabel, I heard you talking with Jimmy. You are very hard on him. You ought to have a little consideration for the poor boy, motherless as he is.”

  I hated scoldings from Mama. She always looked so sorrowful about my bad behavior, as if it truly hurt her. “But he’s so rude,” I told her.

  “He is a little clumsy in his ways, but I believe he only wants to make friends with you. He doesn’t know how to go about it. You must meet him halfway. Now help me set the loaves.”

  Relieved the scolding was over, I scooped up a handful of the dough, patting and folding it in the way Mama had taught me. The dough felt like the softest down pillow. The fragrant brown loaves that came out of the oven seemed a miracle to me.

  When we finished setting the loaves, I soaked the dried apples for pies, peeled a great pile of potatoes, and shed tears over a peck of onions. All the while I worked, I was engaged in the learning of Mr. Poe’s poetry. This day I had chosen the lines:

  Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,

  This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

  I didn’t understand exactly what the words meant, but the dark woodland on the one side of the wanigan truly appeared mysterious.

  Mama was taking a moment to rest in the wanigan’s single chair. Her face was pale and I saw she had pinned up her long hair any which way. It hurt me to see her so worn out. “Mama,” I asked, “don’t you get awfully tired of all this cooking? Don’t you wish you were in a beautiful garden reading poetry with flowers all around you and servants to bring you a cool drink and little cakes with pink frosting?”

  Mama sighed. “Annabel, what’s the use of wishing for something that will never happen? It just makes you unhappy.”

  I wasn’t so sure. I had lots of daydreams. When I was unhappy with what was around me, I could close my eyes and go where I wanted to be.

  When I looked up, I saw Jimmy all dried off and standing at the doorway with a canvas sack of firewood. I wondered how much he had heard. Some of it, surely, for he said in a low, grudging voice, “If it’s flowers you want, the whole woods is full of them. I could show you, only you got those silly things on.” He pointed to my boots.

  Before I could come up with a response to put Jimmy in his place, Mama said, “Annabel has an old pair of rubber boots she could put on.” She gave me a meaningful look and said, “I’m sure it’s very kind of Jimmy to offer to show you the flowers. Only don’t go too far.”

  I loathed the old rubber boots. They made me feel ugly. Anyhow, the last thing in the world I wanted was to go wandering around in some desolate woods with Jimmy McGuire, but the look from Mama made me remember her scolding. I pulled on the boots while Jimmy stood there grinning. Jimmy has a wide mouth, so there was a lot of grin.

  The wanigan was anchored close to the shore. I held up my skirts and walked carefully through the shallow water so as not to get my hem wet. Jimmy splashed his way to shore, showering me with water. I was sure he did it on purpose and I bit my tongue to keep from saying so.

  Downstream we could see the men wrestling the huge logs that had been caught up on the shore. They would send the logs back into the river. After they had worked their way a few miles downstream, they would hike back to the wanigan. The next day they would move the wanigan and start all over again. I searched among the men, recognizing Papa by the black cap Mama had knitted for him.

  As we clambered over a great pine log that lay along the shore, I asked, “Why didn’t they push this log into the river?”

  Jimmy pointed to one end of the log. Cut into the log were two triangles. “That’s not our mark,” Jimmy said. “Every outfit’s got its own brand. Since that’s not our brand, the men leave it be.”

 
I remembered seeing our lumberjacks using a marking hammer to hammer a star onto the ends of the logs before piling them up on the riverbank.

  “Lots of lumber companies send their logs down the river, so that the logs are all mixed up,” Jimmy said. “When the logs get to the mouth of the river, they’ll be sorted according to their marks.” He was happy to show off knowing more about something than I did.

  Jimmy headed into the dark woods as if he knew exactly where he was going. I followed nervously, worrying about what was behind each tree. At last we escaped the woods and came to an open field. The May sun was as warm as a shawl on my shoulders. We had left the river smell behind, and what I smelled now was grass and earth, something I had not smelled since we had left our poor farm.

  There had been woods all around our farm, but I didn’t often venture into them. Mama had warned me not to go too far, reciting the poem about the babes in the woods who had gotten lost and died and the little birds who came and covered them with leaves. After hearing that poem, I was afraid of all the darkness in the woods and how one path looked like any other. Even now, though Jimmy seemed to know where he was going, I worried that we would end up lost and buried under a pile of leaves.

  Whenever I thought of the farm, I thought of Bandit. I hadn’t wanted to give away my feelings, especially to Jimmy, but before I could stop myself I said, “I really miss my dog, Bandit.”

  “Where is he?” Jimmy wanted to know.

  “He got killed by a coyote.”

  “That’s awful sad,” Jimmy said. I could see he meant it.

  I thought of how Jimmy had lost his mother, and I felt bad about complaining about my dog. I wanted to tell Jimmy that, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it without making him run away, like he always did when you said something kind to him. I didn’t want to be left in the woods by myself.

  “Here’s the flowers,” Jimmy said. “Thousands of ’em.” He peered over his shoulder at me as if he dared me to disagree with him.

  I couldn’t. The flowers were everywhere. It looked as if someone had rolled out a pink-and-yellow carpet so thick your feet would sink into it right up to your ankles. There had been no flowers like that on our stony, sandy farm or in the small yards and along the muddy streets of Detroit. I recited Mr. Poe’s

  All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,

  And all the flowers were mine.

  I should have known better. Jimmy looked at me as if I had taken leave of my senses. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “And they’re not all yours.” He pointed to some pink flowers whose tiny throats had delicate red stripes. “Them’s spring beauties,” he said. “And them yellow ones is trout lilies.” The tiny lilies hung like golden bells on their slender green stems. “My ma taught me the names of the flowers,” he said.

  Before I could stop myself, I said, “I’m sorry your mother died, Jimmy.”

  Sure enough, Jimmy began running and I had to hurry to keep him in sight. Over his shoulder he called, “We better get back. I got to straighten up the bunk shack before the men see it.”

  At suppertime that evening, as he climbed from the bunk shack to the wanigan, Mr. McGuire whispered to me, “I’m glad to see you and Jimmy are becoming friends, Annabel. I’d like to see my boy learn ladies’ gentle ways, and he has no ma to teach him.”

  I was pleased that Mr. McGuire should call me a lady, but as to teaching Jimmy gentle ways, I didn’t think that was possible.

  After supper the men lingered in the wanigan. The early-spring evening stayed as light as afternoon. I showed Papa how neatly I had written my lessons, and Papa told me how he had seen a fox and her two cubs in the woods. I wished that Mama and Papa and I could be by ourselves. In the lumber camp I had been able to retire to our little room. Here there was no escaping the noisy lumbermen.

  Teddy McGuire unwrapped his fiddle from the oiled cloth that kept out the river’s dampness. He began to scrape away at a sad tune. Penti Ranta got out his mouth organ and played along. Papa, who is a fine tenor, sang “Home, Sweet Home” in such a melancholy voice Mama wiped away a tear. For once, the rest of the men were quiet.

  Frenchy broke the silence by calling out, “Give us ‘Old Dan Tucker.’” Soon all the men, even Big Tom Johnson, were harmonizing about Old Dan Tucker, who was too late to come to supper, combed his hair with a wagon wheel, and washed his face with a frying pan. Though the songs they sang did not have the elegant words of one of Mr. Poe’s poems, I could not keep from tapping my toe and singing along:

  I danced with a gal

  with a hole in her stockin’,

  And her heel kept a-knockin’

  and her toes kept a-rockin.’

  The men began to dance, swinging one another about. Frenchy bowed to Mama, and Papa took me by the arm. Teddy McGuire sawed away on his violin, and the rest of us swirled about, bumping into one another in the narrow space of the deck.

  While the singing and dancing was going on, Jimmy had been somewhere in the woods. Now he clambered onto the wanigan. He was holding something in his hands. He thrust it at me. It was a small, furry ball with a stubby, striped tail. Its eyes were closed. I was so surprised I nearly dropped it.

  “You can have it,” Jimmy said. “It’s a baby raccoon.”

  “Jimmy,” Teddy McGuire said, “you haven’t been robbing raccoon nests?”

  “Gosh, no, Dad. It must’ve fallen out of a tree or something. There wasn’t any mother raccoon nearby.” He grinned at me. “You can call it Bandit.”

  It had a black mask on its face, just like my dog. I turned eagerly to Papa. “Can I keep it?”

  “He’s quiet enough now, Annabel, but those fellows are plenty mischievous when they get a little bigger. You’ll have to ask your ma.”

  Mama sighed. “We’ll try it, but one day it’s going to have to go back to the wild.” I think she would have said no but for Jimmy bringing up the Bandit part. She knew how much I missed my dog.

  At last the men quieted and one by one climbed from the wanigan to the bunk shack. Papa went last. I kissed him good night. Mama was asleep in a minute, but I lay awake listening to the river and the forest sounds. An owl hooted and somewhere farther away, coyotes howled. I was glad the raccoon was safe with me. We were in the middle of nowhere, and not even yesterday’s nowhere or tomorrow’s. Though the Bible said envy was the rottenness of bones, still I envied children who lived in a real house that stayed where it was supposed to. I envied children who went to school in the morning and when they got home in the afternoon, there was their house, just where they left it.

  I missed our city life in Detroit. I missed the dry-goods store, where Mama and I would admire the bolts of cloth. I missed the wide Detroit river, where Papa would point out the ships, telling me where they came from and what their names were.

  To cheer me, I thought of how Jimmy had brought me the baby raccoon. I tiptoed to the box where Bandit was curled up on an old towel. Poor homeless critter, I thought, just like me. Then I remembered I had a mama and papa.

  That day Mama and I had read from The Tales of King Arthur and His Court. I closed my eyes and imagined I was sitting by the side of Queen Guinevere in King Arthur’s castle awaiting fair Sir Lancelot, to whom she had given her heart. In no time I was asleep.

  IN THE MONTH OF JUNE

  Though our surroundings changed each day, our rough life remained the same. The men searched out the logs that were hung up along the shore, Mama cooked, I helped, and in the evenings there were card games, rowdy songs, and often stories about the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan.

  Frenchy said, “Dat Paul Bunyan, he used de pine tree for de toothpick.”

  “When he got up in the morning,” Big Tom said, “Paul reached for a lake to use for his washbowl.”

  “And you know how he speeded up the logs?” Papa asked. “Paul Bunyan just straightened out the curves in the river.”

  “Why,” said Penti Ranta, “that big man could clear a whole forest with one single swi
ng of his ax.”

  Mama joined in. “It took hundreds of pigs to furnish his bacon and half a day to walk around one of his pancakes.”

  It was a rule that you could never repeat the Paul Bunyan story told by someone else but must make up your own. When it was my turn, I said, “Paul Bunyan kept a grizzly bear to scratch his back when it itched and to lie on his bed to keep his toes warm.”

  Jimmy said, “When Paul Bunyan wanted to pay for something in a store, he just plunked a whole mountain right down on the counter and said to the storekeeper, ‘There’s gold in that mountain, but you got to get it out yourself.’”

  I thought that was pretty good even if it was Jimmy who made it up.

  Sundays were the men’s only day of rest. One Sunday afternoon there was a birling contest. Penti Ranta and Big Tom climbed onto a floating log. Standing upright, the two men began rolling the log with their spiked boots. Faster and faster the log rolled while the men balanced themselves like tightrope walkers.

  We all watched from the wanigan’s deck. Papa bet Penti Ranta would be toppled first. Teddy McGuire and Frenchy bet it would be Big Tom. Penti Ranta was the first to splash into the river, leaving Big Tom standing. Papa won two nickels and gave me one of them and Jimmy the other one.

  Penti Ranta climbed on board soaking wet. It was nothing to him that the water was cold. Most mornings I had to stay in the wanigan and not look while Penti Ranta, naked as a jay, jumped into the river for his morning bath. He said everyone in Finland did that. When they came out of the cold water, they ran into a steam bath and got all sweaty again. He said every house had a steam bath called a sauna. Penti Ranta said we ought to make a sauna with the kitchen’s woodstove. Mama said he’d have to put his clothes on before he came into her kitchen.

  Most days when I was finished with my tasks and Jimmy had done his chores, we would explore the woods. While I still thought Jimmy unrefined, he was the only friend I had. I even gave him my book of Mr. Poe’s poetry to read, but the only poem he liked was “The Conqueror Worm,” which was a horrible poem about dead people. “‘It writhes! It writhes!’” Jimmy read in a voice so scary it made my blood creep. “‘A crawling shape,”’ he whispered in my ear.