But in the past three years, it had been all about tobacco. And Irenie had learned to focus on the moments she already owned—the choices preserved in glass or stowed in the recesses of a mountain. Now she stretched the cotton sacking taut across the tobacco frames and secured it with paper-string, imagining the green shoots unfurling, the roots stretching timid and dark into the black compost. In two weeks or more, the seedlings might show themselves as clusters of green dots against the soil, and she might have to thin them with a pair of tweezers. Might. Or a hard frost would fur up the sacking and she would open the boxes one morning to find the shoots exhausted and limp.
Pretty bird, pretty bird.
Then a sound like a dead pop, metallic and flat, and she couldn’t lay her mind on the meaning of it. Until she did. After a long second, the hawk’s scream split the air, followed by a spastic beating of wind that flapped and flapped and stretched time out of its track until it flagged and halted as if to take a long breath and gather up the will to move forward. Irenie ran toward the scream, but the bird was a blur of wings and white air, and then all at once somehow in flight, a miracle, pounding her great way into the sky, trailing drops of blood across the dust of the yard all the way to the white oak, her outrage careening up the valley in a high wail. Then she did a queer thing. She bumped into the mid branches of the tree, pitched forward and toppled into the new leaves, took flight again and was gone.
Leaves trembled. Chickens shrieked.
The trap was still balanced on the fence post, the metal jaws clenching two yellow and brown twigs—except they weren’t twigs. They were jointed and hinged and precise. The long toes reached out across the metal plate like fingers grasping for a purchase. For some reason they didn’t bleed.
She scanned the sky but didn’t see the hawk. Somewhere up there she was beating and beating the skinny air, through the updrafts or down the valley. Or maybe towards another tree, one with a nest lodged high in its crown where new hatchlings flopped and squealed. Maybe she watched their open mouths, circling.
Without stopping to study on it, Irenie found the second trap and pressed the point of the spade into the center plate and knew in that instant that that was how you found your earlier self, without planning whatever steps you’d thought needed planning. In the same instant the steel jaws leapt together and grabbed the blade with a violence that jolted straight up her arm and into her spine. When she pulled the shovel away, the steel teeth rasped down the blade and etched four jagged parallel lines into the metal.
And Brodis safe in his place in the world, certain-sure that he could teach the birds a thing or two if given half the chance. He’d leave for the river soon, a week, maybe two. The creeks were rising. Even with his limp, they’d hire him to work the stationary flumes and the sorting booms whenever the waters peaked. And when he returned, his spirit would be as ragged as his feet.
CHAPTER SIX
A BOY GOT THE SAME KIND OF EDUCATION NO MATTER how it fit him. That’s the way the county did it anymore. But it had been different once. When he was Matthew’s age, there’d been a war on in Europe, and boys coming up a few years before him were boarding trains, and all the young men he’d ever looked to had disappeared in one season. All of a sudden Brodis was one of the oldest children in school, and the teacher set him to tutoring younger pupils, never mind the fact that his father was paying two dollars a month to send him there. But there were trains leaving town three times a day, and after they’d hauled out all the young men of the county, they went to hauling out the minerals and timber. And on the way back, they brought flossy fabrics and refrigerators and cast iron sinks. The world busted in, and the general stores filled with flower-painted china and factory dungarees and orange-colored crackers wrapped in cellophane. And Brodis, at the age of fourteen, went to logging.
He’d stepped off the company train into the Quinlan-Monroe camp with a letter in his pocket and a bedroll slung over his shoulder. Straight off, he’d stopped and stared. In front of him opened acres and acres. The only thing between him and the ridgeline were stumps, slash, deadfall, broken limbs, and treetop lops. Above his head, a machine with an enormous arm swung an oak trunk like a toothpick while a fellow in a wide-brimmed hat shouted curses and instructions, a gaggle of others craning their necks to follow the timber’s progress. It was a masterstroke of human industry.
But he’d been skinny then, and the foreman told him he was too green to work with the skidders or the road crew. Same as he would have told Matthew. Both father and son skinny and smart. The difference was that Brodis didn’t have what it took to conjure up a new straw man or train a pack of hound dogs to do half his chores for him.
The foreman had just grunted, assessing him with his eyes the way a fellow did a horse or a woman. “Dewey’s the only one wants youngsters. It don’t work out with him, then you come back next year and we’ll find you a place with the teamsters. Right now you’re too small.” Brodis stood as tall as he was able. “Can you swim?”
Swim? Brodis nodded on habit, though he wasn’t sure it was the right answer.
The next morning Dewey Lister searched him out as he was sitting down to table in the camboose. “You. New boy.”
Brodis turned.
The man was no bigger than him, spare and tight as a knuckle-joint, the growth on his cheeks flecked with gray. His shiny pate overcame the features of his knobby face. “Are you Brodis or are you Fletcher?”
“Brodis, sir.”
Dewey stepped back and gave him the same look the foreman had. “Can you swim?”
“Yessir.”
Dewey Lister made a dismissive sound in his throat. He was missing one of his front teeth. “Where’s Fletcher?” He reached into the front pocket of his shirt and withdrew a piece of oilcloth, unfolding it to reveal skinny papers and a tiny canvas pouch.
“I don’t know him, sir.”
“Well, find him. Then both of y’all meet me here in twenty minutes.” He tapped a pile of tobacco onto a paper and glanced quick at Brodis’s feet. “And get you some wool socks.”
Brodis watched him roll his cigarette. “Yes sir.” He wondered if he’d been dismissed.
Then Dewey Lister plugged the cigarette between his lips and jogged away in a queer forward-pitched gait, and Brodis saw that the man’s boots were thick-heeled and raised from the floor with something that looked like barbed wire. Gouges in the pine planking marked his leaving.
Fletcher turned out to be a diluted-looking boy with red-rimmed eyes and a light brown fur growing on his chin. Brodis never did ask how old he was. He didn’t want to give him the pleasure of saying, “I’m sixteen, how old are you?”
Dewey Lister was the walking boss, and he didn’t talk to either of them.
They started with two other crewmen at the bottom of Allen’s Creek. The bed was wide but the water a trickle. In place of picking their way up the bank, Dewey and the other crewmen clomped right up the middle, their cutter boots making spiked prints in the sand that caved in upon themselves the moment they lifted their feet. Brodis wondered how come they chose to be wet, but he didn’t ask. Instead he followed in the pooling impressions, and the cold of the water