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| ISBN-13: | 9780544483903 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 03/17/2015 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
The River
STILLWATER, MINNESOTAMAY 1863
Thousands of white pine and tamarack logs were hung up, crisscrossed, and tangled to form a dam as tight as a sinner's fingers on the St. Croix River. North of the logjam, the surface of the great river shimmered and reflected the sun, haloing the town of Stillwater so that its citizens shielded their eyes as they watched rivulets creep toward their homes and stores. A dry spring had depleted the water level, and an easterly crook in the riverbed caught the trunks, one after another, until they stretched shore to shore. The usual roar of the St. Croix was eerily quiet, and stagnant pools sat rank among the logs. The backed-up water breached Main Street, flooding the lower roads, the railroad tracks, and the basement of the state prison.
The women of Stillwater walked from one side of town to the other on boards men had thrown over the miry roads. Mud dangled like lace along skirt hems. A young woman, laden with rat-traps, tripped and fell and was nearly hit by the wheels of a passing wagon, but Mr. Barton Hatterby, a local politician, grabbed her wrist and pulled her into his own arms just in time. Her heart beat hard. Mr. Hatterby was handsome and had more than once charmed a young lass out of her knickers. Everyone in Stillwater said his wife, Millicent Hatterby, was "touched" and, worse, had been a poor mother to their daughter, Angel. When Millicent Hatterby heard about her husband's good deed, she flew into another jealous fit and threatened to throw herself down the stairs. Mr. Hatterby tied her to the bedpost and sent for the priest.
Father Paul, from St. Mary's Basilica, who'd been overseeing the building of a clay berm to hold water back from his church, rushed away to pray over the affected woman. While he was gone administering extreme unction, the laborers he'd hired skulked into the warm church and stared up at a ceiling fresco of the Virgin Mary's Immaculate Heart until they fell asleep upon the dry padded pews. While they slept, the river water poured over the berm and rippled down the marble stairs into the church basement, destroying relics such as a wood sliver from Christ's cross, a bone chip from the apostle James, and a thread from Judas's hanging rope.
Stillwater horses found themselves stuck in the sludge up to their bellies. One fought so fiercely against the sticky matter that he worked himself into a heart attack and died where he stood. The rest of the horses looked as though they wore thigh-high stockings of grime. On the outskirts of town, Beaver Jean's hogs, drowned when the waters overcame their pen, floated, their legs up and bellies bloated. Beaver Jean's two wives lassoed the carcasses together, pulled them to dry land, and disemboweled the animals. The women hadn't seen Beaver Jean in days. But they were content in each other's company, with or without him.
On the north end of Stillwater town, the whores of the Red Swan Saloon waved colorful handkerchiefs and whistled to prospective clients from the safety of the dry balcony. They ordered the hot-footed men to leave their dirty boots on the stairs. And rather than visit each woman individually, Father Paul stood on the bottom steps and threw general absolutions up to all the doves at once. He came to hear their confessions weekly, yelling, "For your fornications say a decade of the rosary and sin no more!" The women crossed themselves. They giggled and shouted down, "We won't!"
Mr. Hatterby, who liked to wear his boots in every situation, bought an extra pair, which he kept on the third stair and would exchange for his sodden ones before he ascended to the room of Miss Daisy, the best whore at the Red Swan as far as he was concerned. Mr. Hatterby showed no shame as he passed Father Paul on the stairs. The politician had promised in his will to bequeath a great gift upon St. Mary's Basilica, and so Father Paul prayed forgiveness for the politician's lust and adultery too, even though the man's shadow had never graced a confessional.
Mother St. John, headmistress of Stillwater Home for Orphans and Infirmed, sent her children out with pails. Frogs teemed from every corner of the earth, as if sent forth in a biblical plague. The children captured them, knocked them out against rocks, and brought them to Mother St. John, who butchered them, then floured and fried the legs in hot grease. After the frog-leg feasts, prayers, and bedtime, Mother St. John's helper, Big Waters, lifted her feet for Mother St. John to tend. The withered old things were drenched, wrinkled, pale, bleeding, and dropping skin in leaves. Big Waters was called "The Beggar" in town for her frequent trips to the backdoors of the wealthy, appealing for pennies for the orphans. Big Waters had the tale of the north in her. She knew the story of the place all the way back to creation if anyone cared to ask, which no one ever did.
Stillwater children squealed with delight and were head-to-toe wet from frolicking in the water during the day. But many of them took sick with fever and chills at night. Thomas and Angel Lawrence's youngest daughter, Goldenrod, caught a chill and would suffer a cough for the rest of her short life. Thomas Lawrence was heir to and operator of the largest timber outfit in the entire north. He spent little time at home, though his wife, Angel, was considered by many to be the most beautiful woman in Stillwater. Some said, though, that if you looked near enough, you could see that her eyes were too close together and pitch-black and that her nose and chin were too pinched to be considered beautiful. Everyone agreed that she had strange ways, like her mother, Millicent Hatterby, and kept suspect company. There was something about a hidden affair with an army deserter, some gossip about a Negro lover, and more speculation about an illegitimate child kept hidden in the basement of the Lawrences' mansion. And some said she wasn't even a natural child, that she'd been abandoned by one of those prairie mothers who every year popped out a baby she couldn't feed and was then adopted by the Hatterbys when she was but a few days old. Some said her rich husband, whose Lawrence lineage went all the way back to French aristocrats, would never have married Angel Hatterby if he'd known the truth. Some said that if he found out now, he'd divorce her and disown the children and marry someone more suitable, and there were plenty of willing prospects in Stillwater. Some of the women from other prominent families of Stillwater had a good mind to send Thomas Lawrence an anonymous note. Angel Hatterby Lawrence never saw a friendly female face in Stillwater.
After three weeks of the logjam, the whole town stunk of wet wood, rotting foliage, overflowing outhouses, drowned animals, and moldy potatoes and onions. Insects of every miserable biting and stinging kind proliferated by the millions and hung over the town in a buzzing fog. Workers from Lawrence's company and all available men from the woods, the riverboats, the farmlands, the businesses, and the mills ran to the river with picks and shovels. They jabbed at logs. Everyone had a stake in it. The freedom of the river affected the livelihood of all. The mayor demanded that the logjam be freed. "Blow it up," he said. "Get that river going again." He picked at his ear, where a malarial mosquito had bitten, as he watched a thin man hack at a log near the front of the jam.
CHAPTER 2The Key Log
A trumpeter swan, A large white fowl with black eye-bands, had taken advantage of the quiet waters dammed between the logs to build its nest and lay two eggs. For days, the mother nudged her beak against the shells now and again to encourage the babies out. She cruised the waters, ignoring the chaos around her. Only when a logger came too near did she flap her long wings and jerk her neck and honk warning.
Loggers chipped with axes at logs here and there. But the hodgepodge was enormous and dense. The odds of freeing the jam by finding the key log and chopping it were slim. Sawmill foremen, whose empty warehouses and idle employees made them frantic, raced up and down the jam. They swore at one another and at the loggers, whose pace ebbed and flowed with the approach and departure of the foremen.
The foremen kept a close eye on the logging barons, the men dressed in suits and top hats who stood on the shores and stared up and down the long knot. The barons smoked pipes and cigars, which might have suggested calm, but the foremen knew that their smoking nonchalance masked an icy fear and anger. The barons worried their logs might be lost, their profits gone. They were concerned that the logging companies of Michigan and Wisconsin would jump on the contracts for the railroad ties, the fences, the wagons, the sidewalks, the barns, and the houses of the growing country. American people of every breed and station seemed to be headed west, building cities on lakes, rivers, and railroad outposts. They put barns on the prairies, general stores in the river valleys, and depots in the crags. Those brave adventurers and entrepreneurs needed lumber. Wood was king in 1863. The barons worried they'd be left behind if they couldn't deliver it. The reputation of their infant industry would be ruined. They smoothed their mustaches and watched the water level and eyed rogue gullies streaming toward Stillwater, toward their own mansions. They'd all seen logjams before, a common enough phenomenon. But the depth and scope and compression of this one were unparalleled in anyone's memory.
When the key log was found and freed, the mess would unravel and all the logs would float on down the St. Croix toward the boomsite, where they'd be sorted by catchmarkers according to each baron's mark, where they'd be loaded and shipped and cut and sold and fashioned into barns and houses, schools and courthouses, beds and rocking chairs, pitchforks and hammers, kitchen tables and fireplace mantels, armoires and desks, floorboards and shingles, picture frames and window frames, ox yokes and fence posts, shoe soles and shirt buttons, serving bowls and knife handles, traveler trunks and train cars, smoking pipes and field plows, apple barrels and flour boxes, and sturdy baby cradles and strong unyielding coffins for the living, moving, settling, and dying pioneers of expanding America.
Someone would have to soon find the key log, bust it up, and unlock the jam. Either that, or the mayor would bring in the dynamite, devastating the inventory.
Clement Piety was one of the men searching for that particular log. Many of the other loggers weren't convinced of the key log's existence. But as he climbed and crawled over the logjam, Clement Piety remembered that even as a single stray thread could unravel a cloth, so too could a single log untangle a logjam.
Clement had been born in this river valley, which once had been surrounded by the trees now felled and knotted together in this river. Sometimes while he was working, he swore he could identify a single log, recognize a knot or a gnarl in it, and remember the place where it once stood as a tree. He swore he could recall the animals that had made a home in it and the shape of its green foliage against the blue sky. Water from this very river, when it had been cold, clean, and free, had quenched his thirst and washed his face since the day he was born in the tiny orphanage, a building that was then hidden and protected by dense wood cover. Though those canopies were now nearly gone, victim to this ruthless industry and Lawrence's greed, Clement still knew the ways and whims of the rivers, lakes, animals, plants, and weather. Clement Piety was a man of the trees. They grew together, thrived together, suffered together. These other men were from countries and lives far away. They complained of the branch-cracking cold in winter, the tongue-thickening heat in summer, and the bloodthirsty mosquitoes in between. They didn't understand this place. Clement Piety didn't like them. And they didn't like him.
At twenty-three, he was still slight among his peers. Thin and short. Gaunt and jumpy. His long sideburns aged him somewhat, as did the two furrows in his forehead, one for each year he'd spent at war. In May of 1863, Clement Piety had been a half-year home, a veteran of Bull Run and Edward's Ferry, where he watched his best friend die. He was a deserter of the Union army, a fact he didn't advertise, though neither did he hide it. Deserters were everywhere. No one took their capture terribly seriously this far north. Though he'd been gone only two years, he hardly recognized Stillwater when he returned.
Lately, he'd had the feeling that someone was watching him, following him. At first he had convinced himself that the strange feeling came from the fallen trees. He supposed that he felt exposed and vulnerable, now that the long branches, solid trunks, and hovering leaves were gone. But then, at the Red Swan Saloon, where he now rented a room, he'd heard footsteps in the hall outside his door late at night. He'd awakened to a floor creak. His heart beat so loudly that he had to wait for it to calm before he could listen for any other noise. Just as he was about to nod off again, secure that no one had been at his door, another floorboard groaned. Clement sat up, put his feet on the floor, and waited. He wondered if it was a customer of one of the ladies of the house, lost in the hallway on his way out, but somehow knew it was not. The slight scent of fur and leather and drying meat made his nose bristle. And he could sense the weight and shape of a body on the other side of the door. Clement stared at the crack between the door and the floorboards. Though it was dark, he could clearly see the silhouette of two boots. He wondered if it was a bounty hunter looking for deserters. He put his hands up in the dark as if to ward off whatever might come through the door. He was about to call out when the phantom boots twisted on the floorboards, heavily and firmly in the way of a man, and then walked away. Clement threw himself back onto his bed and stared up at the ceiling until morning. He turned his mind toward the logjam. In the dark, he found great satisfaction in visualizing it and dissecting the problem.
Now, as he climbed over two slippery logs near the nest of the swan, he thought about his sister, Angel. He wondered if she thought of him as often as he thought of her. Unlike the logjam, his problems with Angel were not easy to dissect with his imagination. There seemed to be no key log. He recalled how, as children, he and Angel would stand along the shores to watch the swans fly in and land. They'd laughed at the doddering birds arriving on the waters, lilting to one side and then the other before crashing with a splash. He remembered how he used to count the swans with Angel, hundreds of them, so prolific that every other pond and lake around here had once been named Swan Pond or Swan Lake by the Indians. But where were the flocks now? Why didn't they swarm to Stillwater any longer? Clement looked around. He wondered if perhaps they no longer recognized the place from above, now that the trees were gone and smoke from the sawmills filled the air and only stumps and brown earth and wood shavings and pine needles remained.
Clement pulled a tin of sardines from his pocket and dangled a small fish toward the swan. The bird considered him. Clement knelt slowly until they were eye to eye.
"Here," he said. "Here you go. Come and get the fish."
The swan turned and swam away from him, toward its nest, but in a sideways, coy way. Clement Piety lowered his arm. He tossed the sardine into the water, watched that silver, flickering fish float toward the swan. The bird dipped its black beak into the water and snapped up the sardine.
"Pretty good, yes?" said Clement. The swan paddled in circles. He dumped out the rest of the tin before he stood and returned to the search for the key log.
Clement Piety had been working for St. Croix Valley Lumbering for five months. He was employed as a river pig. After the winter cuttings when most loggers headed home to farms or to the towns to spend their money, Clement and the rest of the river pigs herded the logs on the river, guiding them with pike pole and peavey to the boomsites. He spent all the working day soaked to his skeleton.
Angel's husband had given him this job, and Angel had warned him not to make a mess of it. Clement despised Angel's husband, Thomas Lawrence, for his warlike assault on the trees Clement loved so much. The man didn't deserve the money he made or the wife he had. He didn't appreciate the beauty he destroyed in the landscape or in her.
But for now, Clement kept his mouth shut and did his work. If he ever found himself in the position to care for Angel, he'd need money. He was a good worker, better than most, with his wiry build and quick thinking and knowledge of the river currents. These qualities, thought Clement, should have earned him a foreman's position, whereby he could exert some control over the sweeping clearings and lead the men toward saving a stand here and there to grow and seed. But no promotion came, nor would come. So the forests came down wherever Thomas Lawrence turned his eye.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Stillwater"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Nicole Helget.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Table of Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
SINNERS,
The River,
The Key Log,
The Death Blow,
Clement's Fall,
Angel and Big Waters,
MOTHERS,
The Reluctant Mother,
Beaver Jean the Trapper,
Mother St. John the Sister and Nurse,
Stillwater Home for Orphans and Infirmed,
Eliza and Child,
Beaver Jean's Troublesome Wives and Toes,
Albertina,
The Arrival of a Blizzard,
In the Barn,
The Amputation,
The Priest,
Eliza's Hurt,
The Red Swan,
The Schmidt Brothers,
The Disquieting Mother,
The Unwanted Ones,
Beaver Jean Ponders Changes,
ORPHANS,
Angel's Doll,
The Story of the Swan,
The Beloved Child and His Whore-Mother,
Nanny and Angel,
Angel and Clement,
The Hatterbys,
Beaver Jean's Bad Luck Along the Bad River,
Angel Learns to Negotiate,
Weather in Heaven,
A School Visit,
Nanny's Fate,
Davis Learns His Place,
Big Responsibility,
Davis the Piano Player,
Angel the Coy Mistress,
Big Waters Begs,
Fantasies and Realities,
The Voyeurs,
Angel's Wedding,
Beaver Jean Returns,
Clement and Davis Enlist,
Gut-Shot,
Letters from Home,
MYTHS,
The Escapee,
Clement Goes Underwater,
The Good Sister,
The Virgin and the Convict,
Big Waters Cleaves Clement to Her,
Lydian,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,
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