The Cemetery Man and Other Darkside Tales

McIntosh’s Chute

It was right after supper and we were all settled around the cookfire, smoking, none of us saying much because it was well along in the roundup and we were all dog-tired from the long days of riding and chousing cows out of brush-clogged coulees. I wasn’t doing anything except taking in the night — warm Montana fall night, sky all hazed with stars, no moon to speak of. Then, of a sudden, something come streaking across all that velvet-black and silver from east to west: a ball of smoky red-orange with a long fiery tail. Everybody stirred around and commenced to gawping and pointing. But not for long. Quick as it had come, the thing was gone beyond the broken sawteeth of the Rockies.

There was a hush. Then young Poley said, “What in hell was that?” He was just sixteen and big for his britches in more ways than one. But that heavenly fireball had taken him down to an awed whisper.

“Comet,” Cass Buckram said.

“That fire-tail... whooee!” Poley said. “I never seen nothing like it. Comet, eh? Well, it’s the damnedest sight a man ever set eyes on.”

“Damnedest sight a button ever set eyes on, maybe.”

“I ain’t a button!”

“You are from where I sit,” Cass said. “Big shiny mansized button with your threads still dangling.”

Everybody laughed except Poley. Being as he was the youngest on the roundup crew, he’d taken his share of ragging since we’d left the Box 8 and he was about fed up with it. He said, “Well, what do you know about it, old-timer?”

That didn’t faze Cass. He was close to sixty, though you’d never know it to look at him or watch him when he worked cattle or at anything else, but age didn’t mean much to him. He was of a philosophical turn of mind. You were what you were and no sense in pretending otherwise — that was how he looked at it.

In his younger days he’d been an adventuresome gent. Worked at jobs most of us wouldn’t have tried in places we’d never even hoped to visit. Oil rigger in Texas and Oklahoma, logger in Oregon, fur trapper in the Canadian Barrens, prospector in the Yukon during the ’98 Rush, cowhand in half a dozen states and territories. He’d packed more living into the past forty-odd years than a whole regiment of men, and he didn’t mind talking about his experiences. No, he sure didn’t mind. First time I met him, I’d taken him for a blowhard. Plenty took him that way in the beginning, on account of his windy nature. But the stories he told were true, or at least every one had a core of truth in it. He had too many facts and a whole warbag full of mementoes and photographs and such to back ’em up.

All you had to do was prime him a little — and without knowing it, young Poley had primed him just now. But that was all right with the rest of us. Cass had honed his storytelling skills over the years; one of his yarns was always worthwhile entertainment.

He said to the kid, “I saw more strange things before I was twenty than you’ll ever see.”

“Cowflop.”

“Correct word is ‘bullshit’,” Cass said, solemn, and everybody laughed again. “But neither one is accurate.”

“I suppose you seen something stranger and more spectacular than that there comet.”

“Twice as strange and three times as spectacular.”

“Cowflop.”

“Fact. Ninth wonder of the world, in its way.”

“Well? What was it?”

“McIntosh and his chute.”

“Chute? What chute? Who was McIntosh?”

“Keep your lip buttoned, button, and I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you about the damnedest sight I or any other man ever laid eyes on.”

Happened more than twenty years ago [Cass went on], in southern Oregon in the early nineties. I’d had my fill of fur trapping in the Barrens and developed a hankering to see what timber work was like, so I’d come on down into Oregon and hooked on with a logging outfit near Coos Bay. But for the first six months I was just a bullcook, not a timberjack. Low-down work, bullcooking — cleaning up after the jacks, making up their bunks, cutting firewood, helping out in the kitchen. Without experience, that’s the only kind of job you can get in a decent logging camp. Boss finally put me on one of the yarding crews, but even then there was no thrill in the work and the wages were low. So I was ready for a change of venue when word filtered in that a man named Saginaw Tom McIntosh was hiring for his camp on Black Mountain.

McIntosh was from Michigan and had made a pile logging in the North Woods. What had brought him west to Oregon was the opportunity to buy better than 25,000 acres of virgin timberland on Black Mountain. He’d rebuilt an old dam on the Klamath River nearby that had been washed out by high water, built a sawmill and a millpond below the dam, and then started a settlement there that he named after himself. And once he had a camp operating on the mountain, first thing he did was construct a chute, or skidway, down to the river

Word of McIntosh’s chute spread just as fast and far as word that he was hiring timber beasts at princely wages. It was supposed to be an engineering marvel, unlike any other logging chute ever built. Some scoffed when they were told about it; claimed it was just one of those tall stories that get flung around among Northwest loggers, like the one about Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox. Me, I was willing to give Saginaw Tom McIntosh the benefit of the doubt. I figured that if he was half the man he was talked of being, he could accomplish just about anything he set his mind to.

He had two kinds of reputation. First, as a demon logger — a man who could get timber cut faster and turned into board lumber quicker than any other boss jack. And second, as a ruthless cold-hearted son of a bitch who bullied his men, worked them like animals, and wasn’t above using fists, peaveys, calks, and any other handy weapon if the need arose. Rumor had it that he—

What’s that, boy? No, I ain’t going to say any more about that chute just yet. I’ll get to it in good time. You just keep your pants on and let me tell this my own way.

Well, rumor had it that McIntosh was offering top dollar because it was the only way he could get jacks to work steady for him. That and his reputation didn’t bother me one way or another. I’d dealt with hard cases before, and have since. So I determined to see what Saginaw Tom and his chute and Black Mountain were all about.

I quit the Coos Bay outfit and traveled down to McIntosh’s settlement on the Klamath. Turned out to be bigger than I’d expected. The sawmill was twice the size of the one up at Coos Bay, and there was a blacksmith shop, a box factory, a hotel and half a dozen boardinghouses, two big stores, a school, two churches, and a lodge hall. McIntosh may have been a son of a bitch, but he sure did know how to get maximum production and how to provide for his men and their families.

I hired on at the mill, and the next day a crew chief named Lars Nilson drove me and another new man, a youngster called Johnny Cline, upriver to the Black Mountain camp. Long, hot trip in the back of a buckboard, up steep grades and past gold-mining claims strung along the rough-water river. Nilson told us there was bad blood between McIntosh and those miners. They got gold out of the sand by trapping silt in wing dams, and they didn’t like it when McIntosh’s river drivers built holding cribs along the banks or herded long chains of logs downstream to the cribs and then on to the mill. There hadn’t been any trouble yet, but it could erupt at any time; feelings were running high on both sides.

Heat and flies and hornets deviled us all the way up into scrub timber: lodgepole, jack, and yellow pine. The bigger trees — white sugar pine — grew higher up, and what fine old trees they were. Clean-growing, hardly any underbrush. Huge trunks that rose up straight from brace roots close to four feet broad, and no branches on ’em until thirty to forty feet above the ground. Every lumberman’s dream, the cut-log timber on that mountain.

McIntosh was taking full advantage of it too. His camp was twice the size of most — two enormous bunkhouses, a cookshack, a barn and blacksmith shop, clusters of sheds and shanties and heavy wagons, corrals full of work horses and oxen. Close to a hundred men, altogether. And better than two dozen big wheels, stinger-tongue and slip-tongue both—

What’s a big wheel? Just that, boy — wheels ten and twelve feet high, some made of wood and some of iron, each pair connected by an axle that had a chain and a long tongue poking back from the middle. Four-horse team drew each one. Man on the wheel crew dug a shallow trench under one or two logs, depending on their size; loader pushed the chain through it under the logs and secured it to the axle; driver lunged his team ahead and the tongue slid forward and yanked on the chain to lift the front end of the logs off the ground. Harder the horses pulled, the higher the logs hung. When the team came to a stop, the logs dropped and dragged. Only trouble was, sometimes they didn’t drop and drag just right — didn’t act as a brake like they were supposed to — and the wheel horses got their hind legs smashed. Much safer and faster to use a steam lokey to get cut logs out of the woods, but laying narrow-gauge track takes time and so does ordering a lokey and having it packed in sections up the side of a wilderness mountain. McIntosh figured to have his track laid and a lokey operating by the following spring. Meanwhile, it was the big wheels and the teams of horses and oxen and men that had to do the heavy work.

Now then. The chute — McIntosh’s chute.

First I seen of it was across the breadth of the camp, at the edge of a steep drop-off: the chute head, a big two-level platform built of logs. Cut logs were stacked on the top level as they came off the big wheels, by jacks crowhopping over the deck with cant hooks. On the lower level other jacks looped a cable around the foremost log, and a donkey engine wound up the cable and hauled the log forward into a trough built at the outer edge of the platform. You follow me so far?

Well, that was all I could see until Nilson took Johnny Cline and me over close to the chute head. From the edge of the drop-off you had a miles-wide view — long snaky stretches of the Klamath, timberland all the way south to the California border. But it wasn’t the vista that had my attention; it was the chute itself. An engineering marvel, all right, that near took my breath away.

McIntosh and his crew had cut a channel in the rocky hillside straight on down to the riverbank, and lined the sides and bottom with flat-hewn logs — big ones at the sides and smaller ones on the bottom, all worn glass-smooth. Midway along was a short trestle that spanned an outcrop and acted as a kind of speed-brake. Nothing legendary about that chute: it was the longest built up to that time, maybe the longest ever. More than twenty-six hundred feet of timber had gone into the construction, top to bottom.

While I was gawking down at it, somebody shouted, “Clear back!” and right away Nilson herded Johnny Cline and me onto a hummock to one side. At the chute head a chain of logs was lined and ready, held back by an iron bar wedged into the rock. Far down below one of the river crew showed a white flag, and as soon as he did the chute tender yanked the iron bar aside and the first log shuddered through and down.

After a hundred feet or so, it began to pick up speed. You could hear it squealing against the sides and bottom of the trough. By the time it went over the trestle and into the lower part of the chute, it was a blur. Took just eighteen seconds for it to drop more than eight hundred feet to the river, and when it hit the splash was bigger than a barn and the fan of water drenched trees on both banks —

“Hell!” young Poley interrupted. “I don’t believe none of that. You’re funning us, Cass.”

“Be damned if I am. What don’t you believe?”

“None of it. Chute made of twenty-six hundred feet of timber, logs shooting down over eight hundred feet in less than twenty seconds, splashes bigger than a barn...”

“Well, it’s the gospel truth. So’s the rest of it. Sides and bottom a third of the way down were burned black from the friction — black as coal. On cold mornings you could see smoke from the logs going down: that’s how fast they traveled. Went even faster when there was frost, so the river crew had to drive spikes in the chute’s bottom end to slow ’em up. Even so, sometimes a log would hit the river with enough force to split it in half, clean, like it’d gone through a buzz saw. But I expect you don’t believe none of that, either.”

Poley grunted. “Not hardly.”

I said, “Well, I believe it, Cass. Man can do just about anything he sets his mind to, like you said, if he wants it bad enough. That chute must of been something. I can sure see why it was the damnedest thing you ever saw.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Cass said.

“What? But you said—”

“No, I didn’t. McIntosh’s chute was a wonder but not the damnedest thing I ever saw.”

“Then what is?” Poley demanded.

“If I wasn’t interrupted every few minutes, you’d of found out by now.” Cass glared at him. “You going to be quiet and let me get to it or you intend to keep flapping your gums so this here story takes all night?”

Poley wasn’t cowed, but he did button his lip. And surprised us all — maybe even himself — by keeping it buttoned for the time being.

I thought I might get put on one of the wheel crews [Cass resumed], but I’d made the mistake of telling Nilson I’d worked a yarding crew up at Coos Bay, so a yarding crew was where I got put on Black Mountain. Working as a choke-setter in the slash out back of the camp — man that sets heavy cable chokers around the end of a log that’s fallen down a hillside or into a ravine so the log can be hauled out by means of a donkey engine. Hard, sweaty, dangerous work in the best of camps, and McIntosh’s was anything but the best. The rumors had been right about that too. We worked long hours for our pay, seven days a week. And if a man dropped from sheer exhaustion, he was expected to get up under his own power — and docked for the time he spent lying down.

Johnny Cline got put on the same crew, as a whistle-punk on the donkey, and him and me took up friendly. He was a Californian, from down near San Francisco; young and feisty and too smart-ass for his own good... some like you, Poley. But decent enough, underneath. His brother was a logger somewhere in Canada, and he’d determined to try his hand too. He was about as green as me, but you could see that logging was in his blood in a way that it wasn’t in mine. I knew I’d be moving on to other things one day; he knew he’d be a logger till the day he died.

I got along with Nilson and most of the other timber beasts, but Saginaw Tom McIntosh was another matter. If anything, he was worse than his reputation — mean clear through, with about as much decency as a vulture on a fence post waiting for something to die. Giant of a man, face weathered the color of heartwood, droopy yellow mustache stained with juice from the quids of Spearhead tobacco he always kept stowed in one cheek, eyes like pale fire that gave you the feeling you’d been burned whenever they touched you. Stalked around camp in worn cruisers, stagged corduroy pants, and steel-calked boots, yelling out orders, knocking men down with his fists if they didn’t ask how high when he hollered jump. Ran that camp the way a hardass warden runs a prison. Everybody hated him, including me and Johnny Cline before long. But most of the jacks feared him, too, which was how he kept them in line.

He drove all his crews hard, demanding that a dozen turns of logs go down his chute every day to feed the saws working twenty-four hours at the mill. Cut lumber was fetching more than a hundred dollars per thousand feet at the time and he wanted to keep production at a fever pitch before the heavy winter rains set in. There was plenty of grumbling among the men, and tempers were short, but nobody quit the camp. Pay was too good, even with all the abuse that went along with it.

I’d been at the Black Mountain camp three weeks when the real trouble started. One of the gold miners down on the Klamath, man named Coogan, got drunk and decided to tear up a holding crib because he blamed McIntosh for ruining his claim. McIntosh flew into a rage when he heard about it. He ranted and raved for half a day about how he’d had enough of those goddamn miners. Then, when he’d worked himself up enough, he ordered a dozen jacks down on a night raid to bust up Coogan’s wing dam and raise some hell with the other miners’ claims. The jacks didn’t want to do it but he bullied them into it with threats and promises of bonus money.

But the miners were expecting retaliation; had joined forces and were waiting when the jacks showed up. There was a riverbank brawl, mostly with fists and ax handles, but with a few shots fired too. Three timber stiffs were hurt bad enough so that they had to be carried back to camp and would be laid up for a while.

The county law came next day and threatened to close McIntosh down if there was any more trouble. That threw him into another fit. Kind of man he was, he took it out on the men in the raiding party.

“What kind of jack lets a gold-grubber beat him down?” he yelled at them. “You buggers ain’t worth the name timberjack. If I didn’t need your hands and backs, I’d send the lot of you packing. As is, I’m cutting your pay. And you three that can’t work — you get no pay at all until you can hoist your peaveys and swing your axes.”

One of the jacks challenged him. McIntosh kicked the man in the crotch, knocked him down, and then gave him a case of logger’s smallpox: pinned his right arm to the ground with those steel calks of his. There were no other challenges. But in all those bearded faces you could see the hate that was building for McIntosh. You could feel it too; it was in the air, crackles of it like electricity in a storm.

Another week went by. There was no more trouble with the miners, but McIntosh drove his crews with a vengeance. Up to fifteen turns of logs down the chute each day. The big-wheel crews hauling until their horses were ready to drop; and two did drop dead in harness, while another two had to be destroyed when logs crushed their hind legs on the drag. Buckers and fallers working the slash from dawn to dark, so that the skirl of crosscuts and bucksaws and the thud of axes rolled like constant thunder across the face of Black Mountain.

Some men can stand that kind of killing pace without busting down one way or another, and some men can’t. Johnny Cline was one of those who couldn’t. He was hotheaded, like I said before, and ten times every day and twenty times every night he cursed McIntosh and damned his black soul. Then, one day when he’d had all he could swallow, he made the mistake of cursing and damning McIntosh to the boss logger’s face.

The yarding crew we were on was deep in the slash, struggling to get logs out of a small valley. It was coming on dusk and we’d been at it for hours; we were all bone-tired. I set the choker around the end of yet another log, and the hook-tender signaled Johnny Cline, who stood behind him with one hand on the wire running to the whistle on the donkey engine. When Johnny pulled the wire and the short blast sounded, the cable snapped tight and the big log started to move, its nose plowing up dirt and crushing saplings in its path. But as it came up the slope it struck a sunken log, as sometimes happens, and shied off. The hook-tender signaled for slack, but Johnny didn’t give it fast enough to keep the log from burying its nose in the roots of a fir stump.

McIntosh saw it. He’d come catfooting up and was ten feet from the donkey engine. He ran up to Johnny yelling, “You stupid goddamn greenhorn!” and gave him a shove that knocked the kid halfway down to where the log was stumped.

Johnny caught himself and scrambled back up the incline. I could see the hate afire in his eyes and I tried to get between him and McIntosh, but he brushed me aside. He put his face up close to the boss logger’s, spat out a string of cuss words, and finished up with, “I’ve had all I’m gonna take from you, you son of a bitch.” And then he swung with his right hand.

But all he hit was air. McIntosh had seen it coming; he stepped inside the punch and spat tobacco juice into Johnny’s face. The squirt and spatter threw the kid off balance and blinded him at the same time — left him wide open for McIntosh to wade in with fists and knees.

McIntosh seemed to go berserk, as if all the rage and meanness had built to an explosion point inside him and Johnny’s words had triggered it. Johnny Cline never had a chance. McIntosh beat him to the ground, kept on beating him even though me and some of the others fought to pull him off. And when he saw his chance he raised up one leg and he stomped the kid’s face with his calks — drove those sharp steel spikes down into Johnny’s face as if he was grinding a bug under his heel.

Johnny screamed once, went stiff, then lay still. Nilson and some others had come running up by then and it took six of us to drag McIntosh away before he could stomp Johnny Cline a second time. He battled us for a few seconds, like a crazy man; then, all at once, the wildness went out of him. But he was no more human when it did. He tore himself loose, and without a word, without any concern for the boy he’d stomped, he stalked off through the slash.

Johnny Cline’s face was a red ruin, pitted and torn by half a hundred steel points. I thought he was dead at first, but when I got down beside him I found a weak pulse. Four of us picked him up and carried him to our bunkhouse.

The bullcook and me cleaned the blood off him and doctored his wounds as best we could. But he was in a bad way. His right eye was gone, pierced by one of McIntosh’s calks, and he was hurt inside, too, for he kept coughing up red foam. There just wasn’t much we could do for him. The nearest doctor was thirty miles away; by the time somebody went and fetched him back, it would be too late. I reckon we all knew from the first that Johnny Cline would be dead by morning.

There was no more work for any of us that day. None of the jacks in our bunkhouse took any grub, either, nor slept much as the night wore on. We all just sat around in little groups with our lamps lit, talking low, smoking and drinking cof fee or tea. Checking on Johnny now and then. Waiting.

He never regained consciousness. An hour before dawn the bullcook went to look at him and announced, “He’s gone.” The waiting was done. Yes, and so were Saginaw Tom McIntosh and the Black Mountain camp.

Nilson and the other crew chiefs had a meeting outside, between the two bunkhouses. The rest of us kept our places. When Nilson and the two others who bunked in our building came back in, it was plain enough from their expressions what had been decided. And plainer still when the three of them shouldered their peaveys. Loggers will take so much from a boss like Saginaw Tom McIntosh — only so much and no more. What he’d done to Johnny Cline was the next to last straw; Johnny dying was the final one.

At the door Nilson said, “We’re on our way to cut down a rotted tree. Rest of you can stay or join us, as you see fit. But you’ll all keep your mouths shut either way. Clear?”

Nobody had any objections. Nilson turned and went out with the other two chiefs.

Well, none of the men in our bunkhouse stayed, nor did anybody in the other one. We were all of the same mind. I thought I knew what would happen to McIntosh, but I was wrong. The crew heads weren’t fixing to give him the same as he gave Johnny Cline. No, they had other plans. When a logging crew turns, it turns hard — and it gives no quarter.

The near-dawn dark was chill and damp, and I don’t mind saying it put a shiver on my back. We all walked quiet through it to McIntosh’s shanty — close to a hundred of us, so he heard us coming anyway. But not in time to get up a weapon. He fought with the same wildness he had earlier but he didn’t have any more chance than he gave Johnny Cline. Nilson stunned him with his peavey. Then half a dozen men stuffed him into his clothes and his blood-stained boots and took him out.

Straight across the camp we went, with four of the crew heads carrying McIntosh by the arms and legs. He came around just before they got him to the edge of the drop-off. Realized what was going to happen to him, looked like, at about the same time I did.

He was struggling fierce, bellowing curses, when Nilson and the others pitched him into the chute.

He went down slow at first, the way one of the big logs always did. Clawing at the flat-hewn sides, trying to dig his calks into the glass-smooth bottom logs. Then he commenced to pick up speed, and his yells turned to banshee screams. Two hundred feet down the screaming stopped; he was just a blur by then. His clothes started to smoke from the friction, then burst into flame. When he went sailing over the trestle he was a lump of fire that lit up the dark... then a streak of fire as he shot down into the lower section... then a fireball with a tail longer and brighter than the one on that comet a while ago, so bright the river and the woods on both banks showed plain as day for two or three seconds before he smacked the river — smacked it and went out in a splash and steamy sizzle you could see and hear all the way up at the chute head.

“And that,” Cass Buckram finished, “that, by God, was the damnedest sight I or any other man ever set eyes on — McIntosh going down McIntosh’s chute, eight hundred feet straight into hell.”

None of us argued with him. Not even Poley the button.