Allegheny Front

THE SLOW LEAN OF TIME

THEY CALLED THE VILLAGE GAULEY BRIDGE after its most discernible feature. In those times, the bridge itself was a swinging affair of rope and boards, enough for one body to cross at a time, and you wouldn’t want to in a rattling wind. The river ran thirty feet below. Once, a grand bridge vaulted the Gauley River, before the war, trig enough for horses, wagon trains, even the army that blew it up upon retreat. It was rebuilt, then blasted again to high heaven, this time by the town fathers. They wanted a river clear for logs. So commerce. So the swinging bridge.

For half a morning, Henry Gorby perched on the bridge like a falcon, and small like a falcon. If anyone noticed him up there, he would’ve been thought eccentric. Most hurried across. The bridge did not inspire confidence. Especially in the men who had roped it. Henry lingered out in the middle in comfort. There was no wind, no one wanting to cross. Despite his slight stature, the rope yawned a bit when he shifted weight. The current bent the weeds below. The Gauley wasn’t wide here, but deep, March-green with snowmelt and swollen. Weathered, quartzite ridges loomed on both sides. Henry couldn’t see the mountains. He was in the mountains.

Any time a bird or a body flashed through the bankside trees, he was certain it was his cousin Ezekiel coming. Despite the years, he reckoned he’d know Ezekiel: someone brisk and swarthy, from playing out in weather, from a gauge of Lebanese blood. From up here, Henry could see the post office, where they were to meet, and the muddy main drag and every direction going there. Gauley Bridge wasn’t much. All paths led to the post office. Ezekiel’s letter said two hundred souls lived here. Henry wondered where they all could fit.

Ezekiel wrote yes, he could find a man work.

Below, a wood duck and her raft of young eddied about in worried spirals. It is a duck that lives in the high hollows of trees — Henry didn’t know that, he only knew the paving stones of Kanawha City — and he would’ve been startled at how the ducklings fling themselves from that great height, trusting their downy bodies to God and the soft bounce of a forest floor. Henry, newly seventeen, could paddle and chug along a bit. The ducklings, swimming with prowess, a couple days old, bested him. He could laugh. He had that virtue.

In the Gauley the green fish rose. Henry thought it a piece of bark until it turned in diagonal sweep and showed the grim, pointed mask of its face. It merely drifted to the surface, the length of a child. Then it sank in grassy nothingness with no more motion than a slight, sinuous curve Henry could have imagined. Or was it a lizard? It left like the demon of dreams.

When it returned, Henry was looking in the wrong direction. An awful, heartbroken cackling from the reeds behind. A vortex formed. A hole in the water. Into this, tufts of feathers disappeared. Turning, Henry saw the fish inhale two ducklings. The others broke into the main river and were swept downstream, their mother with them. The thrashing fish tossed water like a canoe blade. Gills flared as it wolfed them down. Henry looked about, frantic, but no one else was there to see, no one to assure him it was true.

Ezekiel never showed. Two shoppers shifted among the rows — the post office was a corner of a store, elbowed in like an afterthought. Henry stood at the stove, which kicked out the heat of a blast furnace. The weather was mild, the brutal fire kept up out of habit. He mooned about and began to sweat. So it took a moment to hear that other voice.

“You looking for Zeke?”

Henry turned to find a clerk. No one called his cousin Zeke. No one he knew.

“Zeke,” the clerk said again. “Are you looking for him?”

“I am.” Henry moved to the counter.

“Zeke can’t make the run. He says go to the staging grounds, it’s at Mouth-of-Gauley, that’s six mile. Stay on this side of the river and follow the path. Zeke says he’s sorry.” The clerk added, “Zeke says luck to you.”

Henry woke at this jolt. “Wait. What’d you say? He ain’t coming?”

“Six miles downriver. You’ll see a hoving mountain of logs. The path’s muddy but you can make it in three hour. Two if it’s dry. It’s not.” Wearing a clean apron, the clerk stepped out from a half-door and went ferreting in a dark corner. He thunked something heavy on the butcher block. “Zeke says borrow these. He wants them back.”

High-topped boots with spikes that bristled from the soles. The leather was gashed and ugly — it had wet and dried a hundred times over — pinched and rucked like a dead face in the desert. But the fresh caulks shined.

“Go on,” said the clerk, who had work to do. “They go on your feet.”

Henry Gorby lifted a riverman’s boots. Had to weigh ten pounds. He felt his heart murmur. The clerk turned away to deal.

Back outside, Henry chucked his own boots away. This was out of character; the Gorbys never tossed shoes, they let them degrade until they slid off midstride. At run’s end, flush with money, he would purchase new ones, he would buy many things. Compared to Ezekiel’s boots, the scuffed town shoes felt thin as frogskins lashed to your feet. For this sort of life you needed protection.

Mouth-of-Gauley. The Gauley spilled into the Grand River here. Grand? Gauley? South Fork, Back Fork, North Fork of South Branch? A hundred rivers flowed together, joining finally like the veins in an oak leaf, joining in confusion. It took a life to learn them.

Tiered logs, balking above. Tall as hay barns, they humbled the men about them. Henry saw little he recognized. All afternoon that green, awful fish would drift into mind as it had drifted up from the river, as it had killed the ducks.

From the Captain’s approach, the men feinted like alley cats. Henry studied him as he paced a furrow into the bank, yelling shitfire, shitfire, fie. The Captain would show him how to act, perhaps.

A pike was passed into Henry’s hands, and for a moment, he looked maybe as if he knew what he was doing. Henry turned the pike. A fifteen-foot shaft of slender hickory, tipped in an iron barb. Nearby, a smith fashioned more. “Fie! Fie!” The Captain wheeled on the smith, asking why couldn’t them goddamned poles be fixed in the last five sodden goddamned days they sit here instead of the very last goddamned minute?

“Five days!” the Captain cried, “and you sit on your pope’s nose three”—an untrue thing, for the smith had been working twenty hours straight and was too drowsy to take offense. It was also his burden to pitch-brush the floating arks, the ones docked upriver. Henry didn’t know of arks, which that night would haul his sleeping bones.

For a while, Henry hung near the Captain, but not in his line of sight, for the Captain would harry the first thing he saw.

In a lull in the scowling, Henry offered up Ezekiel’s letter of recommendation. The Captain took it with a snap. If only Ezekiel were here. Making the long trek from Kanawha City to Gauley Bridge, Henry had been full of hope and vigor in being alone, he didn’t mind sleeping out in odd fields or feeling his food bag slacken, because a blood cousin was at the end of this unspooling road. Eighty-five miles to Mouth-of-Gauley if you put string to map, but crooked rivers and ranges made it time-and-again to walk that. Still, Henry made it there on the appointed day. Didn’t matter — Ezekiel had run off with a local, to make her his wife. Henry was truly alone, remorseful. He could only hope his obscure bosses would have no use for him, absolve him, turn him home. Let the Captain do it. He would! Look at his face.

The Captain let the precious letter fall in the mud. He looked Henry up and down, saying, “I’d rather have a good big man than a good little man.”

Henry didn’t know what to say to that. He nodded, and the Captain moved on. Others covered their mouths so not to laugh. Of course there was work waiting for him at Mouth-of-Gauley. There’s always work, when you don’t want it. Henry could feel the green flimsiness of his bones, their meager reach. He had never stepped upon a stock scale, but if he had, one hundred and five pounds would’ve been a kind measure. He was fifteen hands high. That, anyone has the tools to gauge. He stood to the withers of few horses. In a great metropolis he could’ve been a jockey, but was only let to know Kanawha City’s sulky draft. His mother took in sewing; his limping father disappeared into the valley’s vast salt works daily, except when the war wrecked the works and conscripted their men. Hence the limp and a blue welted hollow in Mr. Gorby’s thigh. Mr. Gorby had expected his son to come along, but Henry wanted to see a little world before settling into that, and recalled an aunt complaining endlessly of Ezekiel, who drove logs on the dangerous Grand, all for love of spending money — at run’s end, you were paid in full — and they fed and housed you along the way. Aunt Cressy would tell these good things through tears. Henry wasn’t allergic to work. He split wood for the Baptist preacher ever since he could lift the maul, and owned hard, small muscles like knots in the cords he split. So Aunt Cressy doomed her sister to share her fate, a wayward Grand River son. Henry wrote Ezekiel care of the Gauley Bridge Post Office. Ezekiel said come on the spring’s first run, when logs are without number and the GRC slobbers for drovers.

“Don’t take it hard.” A fellow stood beside Henry. Awesomely tall, the man wore two pairs of suspenders knotted together. “The Captain’s got to insult you three times for every day’s pay. That’s how he squares outlay to himself. He called me Fatback for years, till I hit him. Tom Sarsen,” the giant said, offering a hand.

Henry told him his name.

“Have you drove logs before?” Sarsen pronounced it druv.

“No. Not at all. My cousin Ezekiel said he’d get me on.”

“Zeke! I know Zeke! Where is he? Where you hiding him? Zeke never run a bank till I showed him how. He didn’t know nothing. He’s the one I expected more than any.”

“I don’t know. Supposed to be right here.”

“Well, that’s a shame. I looked forward to seeing him. Looked forward all winter. I hope he’s not sick. Throw yourself in first thing, I say, get your body used to the wet. You and the muskrat. Trying to keep dry is what makes you sick.”

They watched the Captain watch a hickory limb. It was screwed down in the river mud and notched at a particular point. When water touched notch, it was time. One hundred and six men, all of them the Captain’s, fidgeted on the banks of the Grand. Ten thousand logs, a year’s cutting from the headwaters, were stacked above a sloping bank. Touchy drovers stabbed timber with pikes to test the doused-iron heads. Stray slabs of ice came pinwheeling and grinding downriver, the dregs of winter, though it was halfway through March, and green spikes had begun to poke out of the hard, winter-bitten ground. A week before, the river had been frozen solid, then gave up with a pregnant, heaving groan and splintered in a jigsaw puzzle. Now let it clear! Some tipped hats over their eyes, squatted in cold mud, and tried to doze. Others practiced swinging cant hooks, letting them bite peeled logs — red spruce and hickory, white oak and poplar — but not enough to set them tumbling loose. These men the best culled from the timber crews, not afraid to work, or canny enough to slip the Captain a five-dollar bribe. A riverman’s pay was double a sawyer’s.

Henry didn’t know how lucky he was. The Captain felt magnanimous in giving him a chance.

“You hit him?”

“It was wrong of me,” Sarsen admitted.

Sarsen admired the Captain, so Henry adjusted his own attitude accordingly. Indeed, Sarsen appreciated the Captain’s firm hand. The Captain was like Sarsen’s own father, an evangelist. Last season Cap threw a boy off an ark for stealing a shaving kit — threw him off the deck into black nettling waters — and left him there with nothing but the soggy, homespun clothes on his back, which might double as a shroud, who knows?

Sun poured out of a breach in the clouds. The shadow of tiered logs came knifing over the waters. So much timber.

Sarsen whispered, “I’ll be captain someday. I been driving for years. I know every shoal. I give them fellers a run for their money.” He began to explain, as he would in the coming hours, the Grand’s unruly soul, its riprap, its wild currents, its vital mystery. For Sarsen, the world was divided between good, brave drovers and “rat-mouthed fiends.” A man named Blind Blake was held out for particular acrimony, called blind because he overlooked the nastiest jams and left them for others, skating away downriver to safety. But most were good and brave, and a gentle, disinterested hand lorded over them all. “I like the Grand River Company. Always treated me square, not like some.” Sarsen would’ve told more, he would’ve warned Henry against the bad girls of “Rat’s Mouth,” what he called Mouth-of-Gauley, and not to go abroad of a night into straggling shacks, be glad to leave this palace of temptation behind, but a cry went up.

“Stand back! Stand back!” It was the Captain.

Two drovers shouldered up. They stood at the corners of the first tier and swung cant hooks into the cleats, which, incredibly, held back untold tons of logs. Before Henry could see them pull, a standing wave of timber gave way in an awesome, clattering slouch, the ground rumbled with guttural thumps he felt in his stomach and his vision shook and it all was over. Logs churned the river. Such force would leave his body not big enough to fill a hatbox.

Men slithered out into the water and poled errant logs downstream. The second tier was pulled. The seventh. The tenth. Ten thousand logs and the riverbank a chute of muck.

Saw logs were so dense on the river a duck couldn’t light between them. The drovers took up their pikes and tugged on caulked boots that rode up to the calf. Most took penknives and snagged off their trousers at the boot tops, so they wouldn’t get sodden and slap-heavy with water. Henry tucked his own into his boots. They had to last him. Men with new footwear punctured the leather to let the water trickle out.

Sarsen told him that was the right way. “You want it to give water like a sieve. Give like a sieve!”

“Mine’s fixed already.”

“You lied, you said you never run the river! Are you the fugitive living under a name?”

Henry offered up a shy smile at this teasing. His eyes moved subtly, watching Sarsen toss a closed penknife way up into the sun as he spoke. Each time, again, again, Sarsen caught it without looking, effortless calisthenics, like a man with Indian clubs. Always in motion. Never at rest. The knife was so high now, Henry could hardly see.

“These are Ezekiel’s,” Henry said of his boots. “I got to give them back.”

“Oh, I see. Your killer’s secret is safe with me,” Sarsen said with a lazy wink. He caught the knife and put it away. “How’s your pike? You want one so hard and true a cat can’t scratch it.”

The others broke from Sarsen’s path — a sort of deference; they couldn’t approach him directly. Everyone was conscious of him. Everyone moved in his orbit. If Sarsen never quit talking, Henry was the only one answering back.

Drovers lined up at a great bear-shaped rock that leapt out into the Grand. The first man climbed up it, looked left, looked right, and stepped off onto a log naked but for the boxed company brand on either end: GRC. Henry shuddered. He expected the man to spin it like a pinwheel and fall into slushy water, but the boots held fast to the peeled, slippery surface. Beaming in his checked shirt, the man used his pike to balance and push off the rock. The log shot forward in the current. He hollered out. A second man eased himself off. In the prickly wind, under a fickle sun that now shined hard, the pair moved nimbly against the silvery rim of river. Henry couldn’t see their logs; just two men standing on the waters.

It was his turn to climb. Henry’s spiked boots bit the granite with munching sounds. Face hot, legs numb. It didn’t seem real. He stood on the crest. It put him in mind of the first time he went bear hunting on Cabin Creek, hounds surging, the black paws slapping them down and cracking skulls, a sense he was in a place he didn’t belong.

It was Henry’s misfortune to stand out in a crowd, because he wore plain broadcloth, not the fancy shirts of others. “Get up there! Quit acting like cats on a rain barrel! You”—the Captain chopped at Henry—“you was begging me for this job.”

Henry stepped off the rock.

The fall seemed a thousand feet. Like a trick, he did not plunge and stop his heart in icy waters, his spiked boots caught, he balanced, he lived. Under his scanty weight, the log dropped an inch. That was all. He let off a whoop.

“Now that sounds right! You was wrong about the boy, Captain! Look at him crook his knees like a veteran!” It was Sarsen shouting down.

Only Sarsen was loved enough to needle without punishment. He did a backflip off the rock, and the log shuddered beneath. Even the grim Captain cheered.

Their lot: to herd stray logs from backwaters; painfully jackbell logs where they beached ashore; and, most important to GRC, break jams that clotted up in rapids. They teased logs out of bankside tangles and had a rough time of it; the willows were hesitant to let anything go.

But Sarsen was strong. He fished a log from behind a boulder where three men couldn’t have done the same. In the middle of grueling labor that left most breathless, Sarsen offered up his small sermons: “Note how Marcum takes the inside of a bend? You want to ride that seam. Water’s not so fast. Hit that outside bank, you’re in a bleeding world of shit, logs’ll pile up on you, no place to run. Young bull rides the fast water. Old bull takes it light inside. Right on the edge. He gets old for a reason. Remember how the inside’s soft and sweet, like the soft of your trouser pockets.” Sarsen’s pike flashed deftly in the sun. If his father was an evangelist of the Word, he was an evangelist of water. He had the strength to lift your dead body on a pole and shake you.

Seventeen is a hard year, and there was much to learn. True, Henry Gorby couldn’t stretch himself another foot to please a captain, but he could build up muscle and knowledge, he could learn the obscure trade. Sarsen had reached down from the crowd and tapped him for a certain life. Sarsen was the best thing ever to happen to him.

At first the water’s rocking made Henry’s legs shivery, but soon he guided the sixteen-foot oak like a skiff. He learned the undulation underfoot, its intimations, its English. Henry probed the river; the pike jumped in hand as it caught riverbed, about seven feet under. He watched for deadfalls and the white, killing arms of sycamores that reach low over the waters like women sowing seed. In turn, the Grand offered up its visions: otters that slid down banks like runnels of ink; shoals studded with mussel shells; a tanager stitching itself like Rahab’s scarlet thread through crowns of trees; a fox on the bank that seemed to be chuckling. Miles went by. There’s no better way to see the country. A snake rode alongside, using his log for shelter. The river broad and smooth. He and others could admire God’s handiwork, this place where otters are fish and fish are snakes. The going was easy. But as they went on, manipulation became apparent. GRC had dynamited rapids to make the river nothing but a flume. Every rock scarred with dynamite, entire meanders straightened. Some boulders had iron rings sunk in them like jewelry, where you could lever a ratchet bar and pry a jam open, where you could tether a floating ark. On down, the river was slashed with bone-grinding boulders and ruined dams. Word was the first day wouldn’t be too bad a haul of it, until they made Camden-on-Grand, where the river had teeth.

“Tomorrow you’ll sweat,” he was told, but on that first half day, Henry did little but balance, the arks floating in the distance behind.

The light changed. Night would come on. Henry studied the river. He couldn’t tell if it was four foot deep or twenty. The Grand now seemed cruel and lifeless with snowmelt and mud, but he wasn’t afraid.

“Tomorrow we’ll break a jam,” said Sarsen as he poled along. “Always a jam down there. River pinches in like a girdle. You’ll see work.” Sarsen smiled. He liked helping these new boys. Charley Parsons, Sull Meeks, Lem Teter, Lem Watson, Zeke, and this one, whatever his name. Like no other, Sarsen could teach a fellow to unlock a jam. The Captain never asked him to; some looked askance at it, but this was the role Sarsen took on. You had to look for key logs, the ones rucked down face-first in the riverbed, even if you couldn’t see them, but they were buried there under the mass, it could take all day, it was a matter more for the brain than the eyes. The surface always betrayed you. A hard thing to teach, that. To pick a jam like a lock, to labor in frustration, and then, so startling, it gives way. The crux of the trade. If you could pick, you could always find work. Sarsen had a sense for it. He said key logs held an electric charge and one quivered underwater like a compass needle. Breaking the jam was deadly. The foolish let it bear down in a crush upon them; the wise skated away; and perhaps the wisest never came round at all. Sarsen was wise, he reckoned, and not the wisest. Indeed he thrilled when the jam busted and the jaws began to close — to skate into a side channel at the last second, tasting the electric crackle of death in your mouth — he lived for that moment. In gratitude, Sarsen shared his knowledge freely, learning them the code, but once they learned, the young boys would always forget him, they grew into men, they wouldn’t even nod in passing. He could name a dozen right now, on this very river, at this very second. He quit smiling. All his bitterness grew around this black kernel of pain. They wouldn’t even look at him. Wouldn’t dare shake his hand. They shied like horses.

He called out softly to Henry, who did not answer. This time Sarsen cried with vigor. The boy was looking about, to the reeds, to the shoals, like an idiot.

Henry felt something watching him, some small sort of god.

The fish surfaced in the deep, viridian green. Near five feet long and it sharked beside him with sullen violence. He nearly tumbled. Had it followed him down?

It sank and Sarsen saw it go. He split water, he aimed for a swirl of absence.

“What was it?” Sarsen made a listless figure eight with his pike in the water.

“A big fish. A big long fish.” Henry spread his arms to show.

“Musky. They’re usual not up this high.”

Sarsen was about to say he knew a man who caught one on a yellow plug — but he drove the pike like a piston with both hands.

He lifted the thrashing muskellunge, held it up for the world to see, and let the thrash go out of its body in a final, lurking shudder. He had pierced it through, a third of the way behind its head. Pale out of the water, all dull greenish-bronze and insipid vermiculations, except for reddish fins that reminded Henry of his mother’s hard tack candy. It had the teeth of a nasty little dog. Sarsen slid its body down off the shaft, leaving a watery braid of blood. Off the pike, its wound seemed to close. He lifted it by the tail and hollered.

Sarsen could do anything.

The two of them found bunks in a far corner, hunching so not to strike heads on the low ceiling. Others, moving subtle as shadows, gave them a wide berth. The ark smelled of unwashed hair, shaving lotion, moldering clothes. A jungle of socks hung by the stove, from every corner and nail. The river knocked below, snags bumping the hull, scratching, softly thunking. Sarsen’s yellow feet dangled over the bunk’s edge above.

Henry never had a better night’s sleep, and felt fresh when the Captain sent him and Sarsen to a hidden beach that liked to capture logs. There was a bent channel, almost an oxbow, around Smith’s Musselshell Island. Usually four or five men were needed. Maybe the Captain sent the pair alone as a joke, because you had to dig pikes under the beached logs and lever them out, straining your shoulders to the ripping point; perhaps he wanted to set Sarsen down a peg or give little Henry a fright. His aims were mysterious. He dressed no different than any drover, no insignia, not even a watch and chain, but you knew at first glance he was captain.

Sarsen didn’t care, he was so primed to break a jam. It had been a long, listless winter. He could jackbell the earth if there was call to. He told Henry, “You got to fetch them out or locals’ll steal them. A fellow can get good money on that. Blind Blake hides logs back of there and gets them later. J-grabs, too. He’d steal the eyeballs off your head.”

It was good to be alone together. With long, dragging pulls they poled into the still channel, where no current helped them along. A lush place of black cherry and bloomless rhododendron. A thatch of grapevines strained light like a colander.

“What the hell is that?” Something was swimming out to meet them.

“Just mother beaver,” Sarsen said.

“No, it ain’t.”

Then a silver V cutting the current, now the black knot of a dog’s head rising. Mystified, Sarsen knelt down on his knees to stroke its floating head. “Hello, little fox!” When the dog tried to put its paws on the log and drag itself up, Sarsen lost balance and slid off in the stinging water. Henry couldn’t help himself, letting out a great laugh. Sarsen came up sputtering. After several tries, he crabbed back on the log and shouted the dog off him. It angled away for shore.

Sarsen beat water out of his hat. “Oh shit,” he said.

In the shallows, a thin woman pulled up double-fisted piles of duck potatoes. She might as well feed her children air and water. The woman lifted her head to them, then looked back to the slough. She let out a cry. Sarsen poled on in silence, and Henry followed.

They saw a massive chestnut log, almost four feet across, and two straggling mules hitched to it with a singletree. The log was half ashore, half in water. A black-haired man — a big fellow, who once had meat on his bones but had it no more — was cussing softly but sharply, begging the mules to drag it on. He tugged at their bits, the worst thing he could do. From the slithery drag marks on the ground, it was clear other logs, small ones mules could handle, had been dragged off into the woods.

Henry couldn’t help himself. He called out, “What are you doing?”

“We’re having a prayer circle,” answered the black-haired man.

“Oh shit,” Sarsen said again. He cupped his hands and shouted, “Hello! Did you cut them logs?”

Henry shook his head at this piece of nonsense. Even from here he could read GRC stamped on the butt end. A girl, teenage, thin as a mantis, helped the black-haired man with his mules, if you could call holding a tether helping. Three others appeared: two young girls and the woman pulling duck potatoes. She carried them in a wicker trout creel on her hip.

“There’s too many people,” Sarsen whispered.

The two of them poled closer. Sarsen tapped the chestnut log with his pike. “If this is your property,” he said, “then I’m Tom Walker and the devil, too.”

“You’re no sheriff,” said the black-haired man.

“I hope that’s true.” Sarsen crooned as you would to a touchy horse. “Look here. That belongs to us. Give it here. Look at that mark.”

The black-haired man swatted at the nearest mule. His animals couldn’t haul it alone. He glanced at his wife and daughters, one of them slack-mouthed and clearly not sound of mind. He seemed to be considering whether to hitch them to the log, too.

“Too much for them,” said Sarsen. “You got greedy.”

When Henry and Sarsen hopped off onto the shore, the man spoke freely. “This is a deadhead and by rights I can take it.”

“It ain’t no deadhead. Brand’s right there.”

The black-haired man bent down to study it.

Sarsen smiled. “See there? Grand River Company.”

“You’re right.” The black-haired man found his toolbox, took out a hatchet, and struck. A crescent of wood flew off. The only thing left was a savaged section of the G. One more blow took care of that. Sarsen did nothing to stop him.

“Now that’s river trash for you,” Sarsen said. “Henry, that is pure-D river trash.”

The black-haired man lifted the hatchet in a half-threatening way. He smiled like one among friends. He had a moustache. “You come take it. You put down that pole and come on over.” His voice was stern as a knife, with an edge to it, because he’d shouted himself out on the mules. The family watched this scene with sullen eyes; they had clearly seen others like it. They stood behind in washed-out clothes, the wan color of butternut dye.

Sarsen asked, “What’s your name?”

“We seen a hundred thousand trees go this way,” said the black-haired man. “I take a couple for my little place up here, won’t nobody notice.”

“Martin!” his wife hissed.

“Damn it, Mary, let me talk.” His voice, once so harsh, grew expansive. “Let me take this, boys. Look around you. All the good chestnut been cut. I can’t be going twenty miles up the headwaters to get it, can I? Will it pinch your pocket? No. Let me take this one,” he said, on the gentle edge of hysteria. “I’m just splitting fence rails of it.”

Sarsen said mildly, “You’re going to sell it. You can say if you are.”

“No, I’m not. You need good chestnut for good rails.”

In the same friendly voice, Sarsen said, “You’re going to sell it. Fence rails? Shit. You’re too trashy to pen your animals. I can tell by your clothes.”

In a dumb, monotonous rhythm, the black-haired man pounded the dull side of the hatchet against his palm. You could see him reckoning what to do. He seemed to appreciate the chance to take a breather. The mules, for their part, couldn’t decide whether to sit or stand.

Henry whispered to Sarsen, “This ain’t worth fighting over. Really.”

“Don’t backbite me, son.” Sarsen wasn’t about to whisper. “Don’t get in the road.”

“I’m not backbiting. Just, listen. Listen, let’s just give it to him. He got a point.”

“What? What?”

“It’s just one.”

The black-haired man cried, “See there? That bonny boy says I got a point.”

Sarsen took off his wet hat and put it back on. He faced enemies on both sides. He turned to Henry, saying, “Your cousin wouldn’t do this way!”

Henry said, “It’s one of ten thousand.”

Sarsen was aghast at this little child. “If every piece of river trash took one or two, me and you’s out of work. All us. This river driving didn’t spring up yesterday. This is a damned system!”

“Well, that’s true,” Henry said. “That’s true, too.”

“My God, you’re overstepping. My God, you was never here till yesterday.”

The black-haired man slapped the closest mule with the side of his hatchet. “Get on!” he cried, his voice breaking on a high, merry note. The mule tried to sit. He prodded it again. “Get on!” Then he buried the hatchet in its shoulder. Blood flew to Sarsen’s feet.

“Now damn it,” Sarsen shouted, “there’s no call for that!”

The man’s wife wept in wretched jabs. Sarsen couldn’t take it. Swinging his pike, he whacked the cruel fellow across the head. The black-haired man fell, unconscious but not dead. Henry and the eldest girl pulled him from the shallows, so he wouldn’t drown in a foot of water. Sarsen began unfastening the chains. Henry tried to help. Sarsen shrugged him off.

Henry asked the woman, “What you want me to do? That animal’s in bad shape.”

The mule bled in silence, its head lolling about. Somehow it would’ve been easier to take in if it were howling. The hatchet fell out of its own accord. Yellow adipose tissue shined through, then reddened. The black-haired man kept a neat edge. The blood poured in a curtain with each heart beat. The wound was a rugged flap that peeled from the bone.

“Do you want me to cut its throat?” Henry asked her.

No answer. Henry pulled out his sheath knife — besides Ezekiel’s boots, the one thing of value he carried — and killed the animal. It was an act of mercy, but when he finally poled himself away from shore, he would wonder if it would’ve been more merciful to cut the black-haired man’s throat, or the wife’s throat, the children’s, or his own. When he skated away, he would see the teenage girl watching him. She had violet depths around her eyes. Though he had barely noticed her during the disturbance, Henry fell in love with her. And he would haunt her thoughts. They knew they wouldn’t see one another again and were meant to live on in perfect, sentimental balance.

But that was for leaving time. First, he had work to do. Sarsen demanded it. They jammed pikes under the log, levering it out of the mud. It was like tipping a train car onto its side, or trying to. Sarsen could lift his end, but Henry was sweating, moaning, he could feel fiber giving in the pike, he flinched in case it would snap and throw splinters at his eyes. This was the punch of the Captain’s possible joke. They needed one more man. Henry added nothing.

Sarsen shouted, “Put your ass into it! Get down low!”

Henry groaned.

All this happening while the woman pitifully made a bandage for her husband’s head, gashed between eyebrow and eye.

Sarsen said, “Let it down.”

“What?”

“Just leave it go to hell.” A dismissive wave of the hand. “You can’t do it.”

When they poled away from the mud beach, Henry exchanged glances with the girl. His wrists ached, and he tried rolling his shoulders to work out the kink, to show her himself, despite all his failings, all his softheartedness. His sleeve was clammy with the spew of blood.

“I never left a log behind before,” said Sarsen.

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Captain won’t even care — I bet.”

“Don’t tell him! Don’t tell nobody.”

Henry said cheerfully, thinking of the girl, “It’s funny we never seen that dog again.”

Sarsen would not answer.

In silence, they steered around the teardrop island, rejoining the river in its main course. Would the Captain notice they rescued none? No, thank God. In the rally of bodies, the confusion of work, he didn’t say a thing. Sarsen exhaled. They rode on, they made the miles. Sarsen left a good space between Henry and himself. As if sweeping aside a curtain, they saw the cutover lands, black acres where the slashings had been burned. There would be a strip of forest again, then cutover, then forest, a brindled senselessness of healthy lands and disaster. At the mouths of feeder streams, silt plumed in the water.

Sarsen finally spoke, but it was to himself. “We got this last year. Look at them big damned stumps.”

All had changed. Sarsen had wasted his time on Henry. Henry felt it coming off the man in waves, and he could die of shame. Thoughts of that girl were no comfort.

Here the ruins of a burned gristmill and the new one rising just on down, its great wheel grinding evermore. Here the country baptizing in a chilly, slack hole, the people wading out. Henry thought it a choir singing through open windows until he saw robes billowing in the current. To the staring congregants, he gave a wide berth.

“Them are foot-washers,” Sarsen muttered.

Around the bend, drovers shouted. You couldn’t make out what they were saying, and then you could.

Jam ahead, they cried. Jam ahead.

This brown, shapeless mass and then, as a tintype picture rises from its cold bath of chemicals, the pieces became distinct, a hillock of buckled logs, some on their sides, some driven in the riverbed, some jutting straight in the air, some planing mysteriously in the current though nothing seemed to hold them back. Henry had dreamed a mountain; this was a sodden carpet. It went on for a hundred yards, and every minute more logs pinned against the mass, increasing its weight, wedging the river shut ever more tightly. Henry’s own would soon become part, a thousand held by a single key. Men climbed upon the logs, testing with kicks for loose pieces. A boy with a peavey wrenched at one, shaking his head in disgust.

“This is where you earn your keep! Climb on!” Sarsen was vigorous again, but that was all he said. When Henry most needed counsel, Sarsen would not give.

Like crows on a corpse, men picked at the edges. The Captain shouted, “That’s not how you do! You know better than that!” He directed them to the lip of it, the dangerous place. They crawled there out of shame, tried prying a blue channel from the middle. Henry called for random advice. Pull enough mess, it was averred, and the river will do your labor for you.

Grinding wet work. About one of fifty logs Henry prodded at would give way, a little. He teetered on top with water hissing under the logs, though he couldn’t see it but for a few black triangles of river. You slipped and scurried, you could fall right through. He looked up at the sound of a dry branch cracking. One fellow had snapped his leg clean. Getting him out of there was a puzzle. Thankfully he fainted away, so they could pass him off like a sack of groceries, that broken leg whanging about. Nauseated, Henry lifted him by the belt. It broke. The boy fell, whacked his leg, cried, and passed out again. The others jeered. Humiliated, Henry lifted the poor boy up in a hug, the broken belt dangling.

Ashore, the Captain fed the boy whiskey and made him a splint and poultice.

While Henry watched this grim medicine, realizing that with a slight injury he could go on home and leave this wet hell forever behind, the logs began to vibrate beneath him. Henry bent down to touch; a vibration ran the maze of his bones. Drovers had picked for hours, opening the slightest channel. Before anyone could shout, the jam gave with a cringe and slung him forward.

Blue and white tumble, a roar of water in his ears. Henry was in the Grand. A boulder loomed, then sucked him under and spat him out the other side. Where was the pike? Foot caught gravel, ankle wrenched. Sarsen ran along the bank. They locked eyes. Sarsen would pluck him out, Sarsen only had to reach down his pike.

All around logs went barreling, any one could crack your skull.

Henry lifted an arm, he waved a hand. Sarsen seemed to hesitate. Henry went under. Sarsen let him go.

They buried him in a talus slide. They had no shovels and were lucky to find him such a place. In this humid country, there are few — bare spots where the mountain shrugs its loose, weathered rock; home to rare, straggling plants; blue rubble; minute, dry prairies. The drovers made a hole in the talus by picking out chunks and scooping up scree with bare hands. Henry didn’t look poor in death, only sodden and dusty now, like a confection, with a red smudge on the cord of his neck. They rolled three good boulders on top so animals couldn’t dig him up. This was near a place called Gumtree, where locals came with smokers and veils to rob wild hives. In the lore of the river, Henry Gorby is the one who died at Gumtree. He would live on on their tongues, not forever, but a while, the nearest thing to forever.

The Captain asked Sarsen, the evangelist’s son, to say a prayer. Sarsen demurred, worn out from lifting boulders, so the Captain said it himself, a mangled psalm.

After, Sarsen slapped a pair of mosquitoes on his rock-dusty hand.

“They’ll carry you away drop by drop,” the Captain told him.

“Sure enough.”

Amazing not more were killed in that tricky spot; more amazing they found Henry’s body. Many a Grand River virgin you never saw again. Before lowering Henry in, Sarsen removed his nice boots. No one questioned it, but Sarsen felt the need to explain: he must return them to Zeke, a cousin. Sarsen wasn’t specific enough — they wondered if tall Sarsen and scrawny, dark Zeke, always together back then, really were blood? — but they were too exhausted to parse it out. Sarsen was forever wasting his time on one boy or another.

Sarsen finished the run with the heavy pair about his neck, tied at the laces and clanging against him like the strangest jewelry. On landing at Hinton, where the GRC mill stood, a clerk asked Sarsen with misplaced cheer if the giant worked so hard he needed two pairs to last him through. Sarsen replied only with a glum look. He took his task seriously. Ezekiel would have his boots.

Sarsen later heard there was confusion because someone tried to claim Henry’s money at the counter and the rumor was he’d lived, another drowned, with coward Henry sneaking there to draw pay anyhow, perhaps he’d be lost in the crowd. Many believed it.

Sarsen could tell you it wasn’t true. He stood in line half-asleep, listening to the bandsaw squeal — it made an awful yowl hitting a knot, you’d think they were sawing up live wildcats in there — and inhaling the vile, gut-shot fumes of the tannery. Branded logs bobbed and thunked in catchment ponds. The gaslights of Hinton pushed against the night. Sarsen was a hundred miles from Gumtree and had labored hard in the weeks since then. The run sped by this year for his liking. He wasn’t sure what to do. Go the Elk River run? Little Kanawha? Maybe he could make it in time. He should ask the Captain. Sometimes the Captain went to Greenville, Maine, and perhaps he could use a merry traveling partner. A teetotaler, Sarsen left the others as they went to taverns, brothels, or the infirmary. He had no ear for their biting cant. With pay in hand, he walked to the place where the Grand debauched into the flatness of the Ohio River, a warmish flow where prehistoric fish glided sightlessly in turbid sediments, their open mouths straining unseen sustenance and vile trash — it made no difference to them: the sturgeon with rubbery tails and fecund rituals; gar breaching to fill their grapelike sacs with air; rolling, barrel-chested cats; and monstrous paddlefish with gaping eyes and notochords and boneless drift. The paddlefish wouldn’t eat a bait. You could snag them only with treble hooks and lead, or string gill nets bank to bank, which the legislature wanted to outlaw for it fouled up boaters in the night, a harrowing experience. Sarsen had seen the paddlefish, big as rams and just as wild as they thrashed, twisting gill nets, magnificently dying. He once made the mistake of watching what happened next. Some river trash chopped the paddlefish clean in half with a broadax and scooped out bucketfuls of eggs — it made him vomit and the river trash laugh. With glee, they had mended nets. Tonight, the Ohio was one shit-brown swirl. No one fished. He hated ending his run in such a place and was all out of sorts. Hated how the Grand degraded itself by coupling with such an ugly watercourse. Hated how, despite all best efforts, the world will sully you.

No log drives on the Ohio. Long since settled with locks and dams, a storied artery of trade that once split the wilderness in two halves, with its hidebound tales of Blennerhassett and Audubon.

He had Ezekiel’s boots in hand. And would return them. But Ezekiel was nowhere to be found.

How could he let Henry drown?

Sarsen was capable, as few are, of great physical courage. He had saved strangers from jams, from rapids, even from a burning ark that sank and snuffed itself hissing in the water. But not for the fool, not for one like fractious little Henry. Sentimental people are the most deadly; Sarsen was one of them. So many of his past charges avoided him; so hard to measure up, so hard not to wither in that annihilating presence.

He wouldn’t let himself get sewn up with these children again. He would make the perfect captain.

But there was the matter of Ezekiel, which kept it all in mind. The boots belonged to a man Sarsen admired. A good, brave drover. Ezekiel could work the pike like a lancet; for a while Sarsen called him “The Doctor,” but the name never caught.

In the spring of 1876, Sarsen carried them to the staging ground at “Rat’s Mouth,” but Ezekiel didn’t show. Jokes were cracked. Besides that, it was a good run.

1877 the same, boots clopping about Sarsen’s bull neck. The year of wicked heat. The boots annoyed the hell out of him. He quenched his own heels in water. From time to time, smiling fire newts drifted to the surface, sipped a bubble of air, and wriggled back down. Like them, he disappeared when winter came, then returned to the river of a spring, back from nowhere, back from nothing. From what he recalled, Ezekiel was like that, too. He lived for the river. Was a mystery.

In 1877, that wicked year, he saw workers grading hills with Fresno plows, and sulky Irish blew a hole in the mountain.

He carried the boots for years, even after the end of the river runs. Despite his knowledge, his candor, his vicious sense of right and wrong, Sarsen would never make captain. The cream, he realized, would not rise. Life awards the middling. The railroads came.

There was no poetry in it. You dragged trees to the grade with horses and, later, steam donkeys and cranes, cradling logs in Alpine cars. Shay engines hauled them away. Workers built corduroy roads and fashioned iron alphabets of grab hooks, each with its own narrow discipline. No need for rivermen, and just a low, gut craving for the river’s water, to slake a steam boiler from time to time. You could haul overland, right over the mountain. Now, timbering began in earnest. You could cut away from big rivers, and big rivers were few in the grand scheme of things. In the same grand scheme, Sarsen’s river life is a thin, early chapter, more than a footnote, but not the true story. Railroads leveled the forest, fed commerce, changed the place forever. The rivermen had only scratched at it as you would an itch.

All the blasted rivers, all for nothing. On the Grand, the bright scars of dynamite faded. For years, you could buy cheap blasting caps if you knew the place. A sackful made good fishing. Children were shown drill holes in bankside rocks to prove what had happened, and, later, poor sepia pictures of rafts that turned out, on closer inspection, to resemble logs. That and a single iron ring rusting in a midstream boulder. Later still, canoeists would see this oddity and wonder.

Sarsen absorbed all this with wounded grace. He married, and married again. This balm did not soothe. Sarsen’s last wife was pretty but almost blind. Her glasses were thick as a turtle’s shell and did about as much good. She squinted at him fiercely, no matter how close he stood. They had one child, a boy not bright, but that was fine. He was sweet-tempered, and Sarsen gave him jobs he could undertake with success, let the children all do what they’re able to do. It might’ve softened the father. It did not.

And this business of making a living. Strange. He scrounged. When he had worked the river and didn’t give it a passing care, paper bills always found their way into his pocket. Now there was none to be had. He used to say he’d rather be town ratcatcher than a dirty railroad man. When he entered the railroad office, the last to give in, no one could believe it. No one hated the rails more than he.

He’d waited too long. The only work available was building tunnels among Irish. Hot, dusty labor, planting the hard seed of silicosis in your lungs. At a certain hour, lunch was served. Sarsen would lift his plate and walk out to eat alone, so as not to be a railroad man.

All to suture the country with dead rails, which he walked home to Hinton. Sarsen found them hard and punishing to travel upon, by plush car or by your own foot, the steel jolting your joints, “heel-splitters,” he called them: you arrived beaten and demoralized at your destination. But water — well, water was pure glide underfoot. Any man could walk on it like Jesus if he had a mind to. Sarsen walked water seven years, then lived twenty-odd of aftermath. When the railroads neared the end of expansion, with a short-line gauge pushed up every hollow, he finished his days pouring shots in a barroom and cleaning glasses with a rag that was eternally damp. He redistributed germs with a democratic flourish. He thought he was doing right — this was the age of miasma theory — and would hate the notion of inflicting sickness. He liked his patrons. He told stories of Grand River days, was thought a raconteur, a living museum.

Sarsen kept the boots behind the bar, to wave about and punctuate a story, but the yeasty room did something to them. When the leather began to green and be unsightly, the owner made him take them home for good.

Sarsen was putting up glasses when Ezekiel walked in.

Walked in, that is, on the arm of his wife.

Sarsen cried, “Zeke! Zeke!”

No answer.

“Do you remember me? Now don’t deny me!” Sarsen held a nervous grin. “We fought the river together.”

Now, finally, Ezekiel cocked his head, studied the giant in front of him, and offered his tough, little hand. That was all.

It fell to Ezekiel’s wife to explain the luckless thing.

Shortly after they had married, Ezekiel took fever, edged up to death with a searing brow, lived, but the fever deafened him. Gradually he lost the power of speech. A passel of faith healers and doctors couldn’t slow its decline, no matter the rank, expensive poisons they poured down his throat. He could understand you, but struggled to make his desires known. Or was too proud to. His pride, his wife suspected, was what deadened his tongue.

“He ain’t dumb,” she said. “People thinks he’s dumb. Burns me up. He ain’t. He can read your mouth good if you talk at him. He’s the best leatherworker in Kanawha City. I does the ordering and he works his magic. My book’s filled up a year and a half, even if you want a belt. He makes shoes for Senator Gassaway Davis and his pages, too.”

Sarsen was slowly realizing this was one of the women of “Rat’s Mouth,” of the straggling shacks where pay was spent. His charge had not listened.

She didn’t want to talk about the river. Sarsen couldn’t make up his mind whether to ask Ezekiel or the wife his questions, he kept goggling back and forth. Yes, this was Ezekiel, wizened and gray, but still swarthy, still smiling, his bald pate like a hickory nut. One of the new boys Sarsen taught the trade. Zeke, not twenty years old, “The Doctor,” busting jams like human dynamite. He was one you barely had to teach. Just offer encouragement. Sarsen vaguely remembered a night of camaraderie, a stumbling walk back to the arks, arms around shoulders, helping one another onto that bobbing platform that rose and fell, rose and fell, like a carnival game. He had been talked into drinking alcohol. Never again. Or had that happened? Sarsen could not be sure.

Other patrons were getting surly. Sarsen was ignoring them.

“I got something to give you,” he told her. “Give him.”

Could they meet at their hotel for dinner tomorrow?

They were, she said, on a well-deserved rest. At the New Northern, the finest hotel Sarsen ever set foot in, they were served tiny sandwiches that wouldn’t fill you. Sarsen wore his black necktie from work — that much he knew. He was made to check Ezekiel’s boots at the cloakroom. That made him nervous, but the attendant looked trustworthy.

To be safe, Sarsen slipped him a coin.

After being poured a coffee in bone-thin china, Sarsen asked about Henry Gorby. Ezekiel didn’t even blink, but his wife nodded. “Oh yes. We live next to his people, we thought it best to live near family. They never forgive that boy for running off. They said a Mass for years, there at Our Lady of Lebanon. I’m a convert,” she smiled challengingly.

Did they have any idea what happened? No. Sarsen was startled.

Though still teetotal, he told the story with such spirit they thought him a little drunk. Indeed Sarsen was giddy. He explained Henry’s goodness, his beatific smile, his feats of strength, how he impressed every drover he met, how he died in the crush. “There at awful Gumtree.” By people like Sarsen, the dead are praised all out of sorts at a funeral, and he surely made up for that meager talus prayer.

He ran to the cloakroom, wrenched the boots from the bewildered attendant, and presented them.

“Henry pulled me out the river! He got me out of a spot, he did! When he drowned, I took your boots off him. Here,” he said, “by rights they belong to you. He charged me with it. Was the last thing Henry asked me to do.”

Henry Gorby had done right: die on the river’s crest, at the height of your powers, and the drovers would sing songs about you. Not this long, malingering after. Sarsen would have given his all to trade places. Without shame, he told this to Ezekiel and Ezekiel’s wife. He had few memories of a black-haired man and his weeping family; none of Henry’s suggestion they betray GRC and give the river trash free rein; none of dead mules and muskellunge thrash; none of letting Henry drown, except the small, niggling realization of something not quite right in the telling. Sarsen’s present and his past collided like continental plates, buckling the layers of the old life, making something alarming and new, driving up mountains, faults, declivities. He was a poor geologist. He couldn’t map the past. He only wanted to be the Captain.

Ezekiel’s wife may have been bothered at being handed moldy leather across white linen, but Ezekiel took the boots with solemnity.

Sarsen feared the wife would ruin the moment, say something chirpy, like, “Them things should be in a museum!” or, “Our leather, sir, is much finer than that!” She did not, only murmuring of Henry Gorby, “What a good boy. I’ll tell his mother.” Sarsen loved her for it. The whole thing was like a book.

Ezekiel beckoned. He picked up the boots, and Sarsen followed. The wife stayed behind with a coffee and brandy. She warned Ezekiel not to catch cold, as you would a child.

A landing out back of the hotel overlooked the Ohio River in all its cloacal glory. A few tables, scattered chairs, too chilly out for anyone to dine there. Dead leaves pooled in the corners. Ezekiel pulled a small pistol from his jacket. He dropped the boots on a table.

Sarsen flinched. Oh God, he’s going to kill me.

“It weren’t my fault,” Sarsen said, raising his hands like a preacher.

Ezekiel swept his arm past him and aimed at the river. He took a potshot at a bobbing bottle in the current. It exploded. Then another. There was a tavern upriver, and drinkers flung their empties over the rail. So this was to be entertainment. Bottles kept coming. Ezekiel liked shooting because he could, ever so slightly, hear the reports, or at least feel them vibrate through his skull, or imagine he could. Since he’d gone deaf, people ascribed to him a vast inner depth and wisdom he did not have. Still flighty old Zeke, not a care in the world. He fished in his pocket for rounds.

Sarsen was rattled on being handed the pistol. He was never much for shooting. His long arm kept the gun sight too far from his eye, just a bitty thing out there you could hardly see, like a comma. He kept apologizing for waste. Ezekiel waved it off, reloading the cylinder for him with petite bullets. After a dozen tries, Sarsen chipped a bottle. It bubbled meekly under. Ezekiel smiled and took back the gun.

Sarsen said, “Your cousin was a good boy. Real good. He was the picture of a good, brave drover. Had a future ahead. He died in them things.”

If Ezekiel had any feelings about the long lost cousin, he didn’t share. Instead, he squeezed the muscle in Sarsen’s arm. It jolted Sarsen. Zeke was forever one of his boys. Ezekiel seemed to be saying, I had some good times in these boots. I earned me some money. I seen some world. I learnt it from you.

In truth, he hardly recalled Sarsen and that life so long ago. Hell, even a cousin met ten times.

“I know,” said Sarsen, “exactly how you feel.”

So it shook him when Ezekiel tossed the boots over the rail. They bobbed in the current. Ezekiel shot one, then the other. It made Sarsen shiver. The boots would rest among prehistoric fish, fill with mud and tannery sludge, be probed by the mute schools of gar with their speculum bills. Nothing left to touch and consider. Yet they weren’t his to keep. He took a bitter pleasure in having done right. He told Ezekiel — looking him full in the face in the nickel wash of moonlight, so his words could be understood — that he should have thrown the boots over himself, years ago. They stood for a heartbeat or two in companionable silence. The boots would drift on. There they were, filling with water.

So the deaf man was startled when Sarsen leapt over the rail after them.

In the darkening night, Ezekiel watched the faint splashing out there in the great wide river. The murky Ohio might take this fool. Then again, he thought, God seems to save those who least merit rescue. He wondered if Sarsen and this blurry cousin had one of those particular friendships you sometimes hear of. What else could explain it? He decided probably not, and reminded himself to buy more shells tomorrow, and laughed at his own lurid, postcard dream.