Chapter Two
Bud had one more job to scrounge up before I left for the summer to work at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, and though he would never admit it, he needed me. Bud and a few of his cronies had managed to covertly fell several trees following a major storm but were unable to convince the remaining railroad bosses to haul the load to the lumberyard. The river, with its infinite ability to expand and contract due to cloudbursts or man’s manipulation, offered the only solution. They would burden the beasts that had been retired to farming life and drag the load to the Tuckasegee River. They’d dam it, anticipating the expected summer rains, and wait for the push.
The Smokies had long been a logging economy, ending only with the inception of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I had mixed feelings on such and probably harbor more distaste for the industry in my later days; but back then, logging was just another way to survive. Bud made what semblance of a living he could out of those woods.
As the logging companies dried up, he siphoned every last opportunity they leaked on their way out of town, as if it were maple sap. The timber companies used to build great splash dams to push their haul down the rivers into the timber yards. Railroads couldn’t do all the work. The rivers and animals, as they always have, bore the burden of man’s desire to do things faster and cheaper.
I was seated on a stump at the lumberyard removing my shoes at the edge of an ever-rising pool, watching the rounded, slick logs race down the river toward me. Waiting. My job was to be a river hog. “Gas money,” Bud reminded me. “ ’Bout time you can get off the teat.”
“Yeah, just try and relax.” Thomas, a man I barely knew, nudged me. “Ain’t no big deal.”
Little did I know I’d hear those words again in only a matter of weeks. Just try and relax. It took me a while to understand why suspicion would feel so much like drowning. I know now it was those words that connected the sensations for me. It was those words that would outlast the men who spoke them. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The log runners (those skilled, balanced men who spun endlessly on the glassy logs, prodding them into alignment) had left with the last whistle. I knew with my foot useless as it was, and well, to be honest, my body useless as a whole, I could never maneuver the way they had. I could swim, though. I could swim for hours. Surely I could push the few dozen poles into their stalls from the pool’s rim and, if need be, wade among them. I needed the money. Not just to put away, but to make sure I had the necessities when I got to Asheville. Places like that’ll make you pay for your uniform before you even clock in. That’s how you became more of an indentured servant than free-will staff, and I couldn’t let that happen.
Bud gave no direction on how to accomplish the objective. He told me where to wait, where the logs should rest, and to keep my mouth shut about the splash pool to anyone else.
The logs rushed down the river in a collective heap, fast and bulging from the waters like dark storm clouds mounting. I immediately felt my pulse quicken, and I turned, momentarily considering leaving this impending mess to Bud alone. How could I corral such a force of nature? It was obvious I would never be able to swim between the poles as I had imagined. I would need to, at the very least, mount them on all fours to float among them.
I’ve tried many times to recall what happened next, but much of it will forever be blackened from my memory. Here is what I know.
I was wet—head to toe, submerged in the frigid spring waters. I felt slick bark on my fingertips and managed to pull my torso atop one undulating log until I became nauseated from the pressure against my gut. I found some sort of strength, some sort of urgency, that pulled me into a straddle position, and then I made the mistake of trying to stand. This lasted no discernible time because the balance of my memory is veiled by water and darkness and desperation. I’ve had a similar sensation when I drive beneath a bridge in a rainstorm. There is a brief void of silence, and then everything rushes in again. In this case, the void was when my head dipped below the water, suffocating my senses.
Logs were coming faster, and the pool was rimmed three, sometimes five, deep. To reach the bank I would have had to scramble over multiple rows of the hewed trees. I ducked beneath the surface as each new wave came, fearful that the next time I tried to emerge there would be no space for my body or that the space would be swallowed, crushing me. I couldn’t see a thing beneath the surface. The water reddened with clay and frayed bark. I was blind. Calling for help was a waste of time. The skeleton crew of men were stationed elsewhere. My survival was my own.
I forcefully pushed my legs downward, propelling my torso above the surface as far as I could, like a trout gasping in silted waters. I inhaled deep and sank just as quickly as I had risen.
And then I swam.
I swam as hard and as straight forward as I could manage, knowing that coming up for air was no longer an option. Logs loomed overhead, blanketing the surface and blocking the sunlight. I swam until my lungs no longer held and I expelled a burst of bubbles, what I felt was surely my last contribution to this earth. I waited for my body to rise and rest beneath the barrier of wood, having nothing left in me to breach it.
And just as my body began to rise, my fingertips sank into soft mud. I had reached an edge. I could stand.
I clawed my way up the receding bank until my face rested on grass, and air once again filled my lungs. I tried to blink my eyes open, but they were stung by the splinter remnants and fresh light. I am unsure how long I lay there, but it was Bud’s voice I heard first, followed shortly by other men’s. They were laughing; he was not. “Get up!” he roared, rolling me over with his boot and pointing the way to his truck. I never saw a dollar from that day and we didn’t speak again until I returned to his cabin one last time before leaving for Asheville. This was all I needed to assure me that if I stayed, if I became Bud’s dispensable errand boy, I would die young—if not physically, most assuredly spiritually. My father had not died for his country merely to have his son die for someone else’s pocket change.
Chapter Three
“Cowney! Be sure ’n’ kindle the fire ’fore you head out tonight. Blackberry winter’s settin’ in,” Bud rumbled, shaking me from daydream. Blackberry winter was an impossibility that time of the year. Bud loved to refer to the little winters—sarvis, dogwood, blackberry, locust, and so on—as much as possible, I think because he believed it made him sound wise.
Bud stoked a fire every night, seven nights a week, 365 nights a year. It did not matter whether it was blackberry winter or the Fourth of July. Bud was cold-blooded in that regard, probably in a few other regards as well. He’d mumble something about tradition when questioned by his buddies—saying a fire always had to burn in a real man’s home.
I swept the accumulated pile of wood shavings from under Bud’s rocking chair off the far side of the porch, selected a few twigs from the yard that had yet to be scavenged by Bud for his nightly inferno, and took the top three or four additions of old newspapers from the pile just inside the cabin. The twigs fit neatly into the fireplace like vertebrae, and I began to crumple the paper into tight balls of tinder. But something in the second layer gave me pause.
A bold headline warned of rumored brutalities occurring in Poland. I scanned the article enough to imagine a child caught up in the conflict, a child in a cage, or a child watching his parents being hauled away. My imagination folded into the stories I had been told about when my people had been removed from this land. I could see my own ancestors in pens or hiding in caves, while their neighbors and fellow clan members were marched out, prodded along by soldiers’ rifles. I pictured a child alone, scared, and probably no longer alive when the paper was printed. This was war’s game piece—a skeleton covered in the indistinguishable color of newspaper gray as if his skin was made of the broadsheet itself. Even back then, I remember feeling that if I stirred, or turned the page, the image, the picture would come to know the merging of stillness and velocity that I had known standing on the porch looking out into the forest. But this merging was much deadlier. The paper preserved the truth’s existence, and, as I held it in my hands, I believed crumpling the page or tossing it aside would erase it forever.