water shot straight out through the gaps in the timber and onto the rocks below. There, at the bottom of the creek bed, the powder man waded in, his woolen pants turning dark to the knees, a solitary figure in the shrouded air. The powder man did everything slow: attach the rust colored bundle to the crossbar with a piece of wire; then pack something—later Brodis knew it to be fabric and cardboard and waterproofing sulfur—around it. Then the powder man stopped and dragged a match across a rock. He lit the fuse.
The spark mesmerized you whenever you saw it up close, a spitting, fittified flame that wasn’t a flame at all but a live energy that danced and popped up the string. The powder man had already begun his climb out of the gorge by then, and you were torn, wanting to watch the dam for the moment of explosion, but unable to keep your eyes off the fellow hand-over-handing on the rocks below. Whenever he gained the bank, he put his fingers in his ears, and you did too.
The explosion slammed straight up the gorge and into your spine. The gate’s crossbar buckled inward, and then the whole dam flung itself out and out and up and up in a torrent of splinters and water that leapt and crashed straight into the air before it stopped and hung, suspended, and then slowly, as if against its will, spumed toward the creek below. Logs rammed and bellowed their way through the sluice and then kept coming, thousands of them, some of them snapping like twigs whenever they hit the creek bed and some of them disappearing like pine needles in the great white foam. The torrent bucked and writhed with the force of a raging animal escaped from its captors so that you had to remind yourself you were standing far above it. After several seconds you realized you were covered in a thin mist, but by then you didn’t care. By then you were overtaken by the sheer audacity of men moving massive objects from one location to another without the aid of train nor skidder nor mule. You got it. Allen’s Creek had gathered itself from the ridgelines and the springs which in turn became rivulets cutting their way through gullies, one parallel to the next. It was a built-in transport system that Quinlan-Monroe was only improving. Nature was the one had invented it. She used gravity.
And at some point in there you realized you were grinning like a fool.
The water didn’t slow until it reached the bottom of the watershed. The drivers on Brodis’s team kept the timber moving. The pick pole was for balance first, for moving timber second. You didn’t plant, or you’d push yourself right off. Instead you used it like a finger to touch on a piece of wood or a rock. The banks and the bottom rushed past, and you couldn’t hear a thing but the sound of the river. Below, the water shifted and eased, flexed and thinned, contracted itself into a knot or disappeared into spray, moving like the muscled back of some giant serpentine beast. Brodis got to the place where he could separate himself into two parts, the lower half that attended to the contractions and flexions of the water below him, that steered and moved the vehicle he stood upon, and the upper half that stayed loose, controlled his weight, centered always over the place he wanted to be.
But it was the not-talking he liked most, same as it would one day be for his own son. You looked up the steep bank where a creek-branch tumbled from a mountain crevice, the water sheeting and leaping from the rock above, and the cascade so white and alive that you wanted to lay claim upon it, on this place and this moment, whenever this certain kind of freedom poured from the rocks above. Each day more wood floated into the river, bee tree and poplar and cucumber magnolia that the loggers called wahoo, from streams worked by other companies in other watersheds. They passed roads and houses, and the people waved or touched their hats or shouted hello. And then Quinlantown floated into view, the wooden structures yellow with newness, the mud streets crowded with young men. A giant flume dumped wood into a manmade pond at the side of the river. Beyond that was a steam-powered loader lifting still more timber from rail cars.
“They don’t use the river?” Brodis was dismayed that he’d asked the question before trying to sort it out for himself.
For once Dewey didn’t seem to notice. “It don’t work for every kind of tree. Some kinds waterlog. Your oak, for a sample, it likes to sink after a few days.”
“Same with your hickory?”
“Ash. Cherry. And anyway, it’s all about the trains. Everybody loves them some trains.” He sounded bitter. “In five minutes they’ll be using Shay engines to pull up their pants in the morning.” It was years before Brodis would understand that kind of unhappiness.
The mill paid the crew in cash. There were forty-seven dollar bills for thirty-two days’ work. For years after, Brodis had as much money as he wanted, and he lived in the camps where his needs were few. It was the kind of work that brought you to the top of your senses and then beyond, to a place that soaked you up into a bigger sort of grandeur. And a curious thing happened when the timber dropped over the edge of a pitch. If a fellow did nothing, the front end of the log dove straight down into the pile of foam, then straight out from under him, launching his body forward into the water like a slingshot. But if you shimmied straight back to the upstream end of the log fast enough that the front of the stick still looked over the ledge, then for a moment the back-weighted log sailed in the air, and you had to step back to center right quick to level the log as it hit the water flat and gentle with a pillowed boof. If you did it right, you had the timber and the air and the river by the balls. And, for a second, you flew.
But the industry had changed. Now they used the trains for everything, floaters and nonfloaters the same. Besides, a man couldn’t crouch without bending at the ankle. He couldn’t nimble from one stick of timber to the next, nor flex his feet against the plated bark, nor feel the live roll of water beneath him and pit his wit and his timing against the heave and boil of it. A man with a lame foot needed staying on land.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BRODIS WOKE TO FIND THAT HIS WIFE WASN’T IN the bed beside him. His body felt her absence before his hand touched the empty mattress.
It was dead night. The fire in the stove had died down but not out. He listened for her step in the next room, but the silence there felt permanent. A minute passed, then two. Nothing. He threw back the covers. His feet hit the floorboards, and the cold grabbed him. Below the window, a square of light stretched across the floor, and that was where his legs took him. On the other side of the glass, the moon set down atop the privy. The building leaned over the creek branch. The door didn’t open.
Sear.
In the kitchen, familiar objects surfaced up from the shadows: pickling barrel, strings of hanging vegetables. The door of Matthew’s room had gapped, and Brodis treaded past, on habit lifting his lame foot against the possibility of splinters.
The lantern still hung by the door, but her brogans and coat were gone. The fingernail moon offered little light. He opened a lamp and struck a sulfur match. When the wick had finished guttering and flaring, he turned it down until it wasn’t but a yellow wing. Then he set to dressing.
Up the hill, the new-plowed field was barren, the furrows shadowed like the surface of some false and stagnant river. The barn was quiet but live, in the shifting breathing manner of creatures in repose. He slid open the stock door: manger and barley box, barrels of meal and sweetfeed, the bin of corn tops. He held the lantern aloft and peered into the mule box. Still there. Next door, the saddle horse whickered too. Wherever she was, she’d gone on foot.
Sear.
He peered up the stairs to the loft. “Irenie?” Nothing but the shadows of harness and plow lines, hames and singletrees, coils of rope.
Below the barn crouched the house, the mountains vague and hulking on three sides. He listened without knowing what for. It was as quiet as the first day of the world. She was out there somewhere, her slight form wrapped in the too-large coat, maybe nothing but a nightdress underneath. It was a good coat, an Army coat hand-me-downed from her brother. It came fair to her knees, but its blackness wouldn’t show against the night, wherever she was.
Or she wasn’t alone. Maybe there was somebody to walk beside her, someone lowhatted and slouch-shouldered, one hand buried deep