the kitchen. She stoked the scullery fire. Before commencing her morning chores she poked her head out the mess-hall door. For the first time since the ides of January she could smell the horseshit under the snow. During the night a fog had risen, fey and reeking.
In the root cellar Thea collected the morning’s fare: the oats, the buttermilk, the bacon. There were bushels of sprouted potatoes and overripe onions and twenty pumpkins ready to be made into pie. She gathered fifty pounds of potatoes and five pounds of oleo. She had baked the bread the night before, and she removed twenty loaves from the wooden breadbox. She thought if the men were anything like herself, the warm weather on the heels of such cold would induce their greatest appetites.
Indeed, when the men arrived after reveille, they found their seats quickly and ate with gusto. Each was served a rasher of bacon, four slices of bread and oleo, boiled and salted potatoes, a heap of steaming oats, and coffee to wash it down. Fifteen minutes after taking their places at the tables they rose and marched out of the mess hall, their mittens and hats in their hands, their coats and shirt collars unbuttoned. Under a dull sun they climbed aboard the empty hauling sleds and lit their pipes or cigars. Thea went to the door and watched as the horses pulled onto the ice road. She could see the runners plowing through the soft snow. Lodden followed the sleigh to the first bend before reversing his enormous stride and backing toward camp.
She had only finished her tea when the supply sleigh arrived, hauled by two horses worse for the season. The same company that owned the mill owned the timber and two camps — the Burnt Wood River Camp and another in the Cloquet Valley — and the sleigh ran a regular loop between the two, stopping at the commissary in Duluth to reload with each pass. Twice each week the same drivers dropped the stores, both the usual fare and, on Fridays, what passed for Sunday dinner. Oftenest this was herring but on that day it was one hundred pounds of pork chops, a cask of fresh apples, and three gunnysacks of butter nut squash. Thea pinched two of the apples while the brothers Meltmen unloaded the sleigh.
While they worked, Thea took the apples from her apron pocket and fed one to each of the horses.
She was paring the squash on a bench outside the mess hall, the warm sun still hazy above the clouds, when she saw Joshua Smith steer his fine hickory sleigh around the last bend on the ice road. He sat on a seat of crushed purple velvet and wore a mink coat and beaver skin hat. His boots were Anishinabe-style moccasins, covered in beadwork and quills and lined with sheep’s wool. His mittens hung from the cuffs of his sleeves.
“Good afternoon,” he said, then pulled his watch from its pocket and corrected himself. “I should say good morning. Is Trond about?”
Thea understood he was asking for the foreman and shrugged to suggest she did not know.
“Have you got coffee in there?” He pointed at the mess-hall door.
She understood this query, too, and nodded and hurried in. At the stove Thea poured coffee and offered him a cup.
“I thank you,” he said and took a long drink.
She noticed that one of his front teeth was dead.
“I’ve heard rumors of women working the Burnt Wood Camp.” He took another drink. “But I didn’t believe it.” He looked at her directly, his dead tooth dividing an impish smile. “A man could sure use a bowl of that stew boiling up yonder.”
Thea looked down.
He smiled his dead-tooth smile. He said, “You’ve got a thing for quiet, eh? Where are you from, darling?” He cocked his head as if to take stock. “Those cheeks and blond locks, I suppose you ain’t from Africa.” He laughed at his joke. “Norway,” he ventured, “Norge?”
Her eyes widened and she replied in Norwegian, “I am from Norway.” And then, recalling her English lesson upon leaving Hammerfest, she continued in English, “I am new in America.”
To her surprise and relief he responded in Norwegian, introducing himself as the watch salesman Joshua Smith, down from Duluth. He informed her that Trond expected him and repeated his request for a bowl of stew. She moved slowly to the pot on the stove and fetched the stew, deciding as she crossed the hall that despite his dead tooth, Smith was handsome in a way none of the jacks was. His handlebar mustache exaggerated a rakish smile and those eyes of his were wide and devilish enough to cast spells.
He ate standing, loosening the buttons on his shirt. She was used to the jacks and their absence of manners and Smith cut a marked contrast. He dabbed the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief after each bite, there was no slurping, no licking the bowl once the meat and vegetables were eaten. He did not belch when he set the bowl on the tabletop. Without asking, he took a tin cup and went to the cistern and dipped a cup of water. When he finished drinking he used the ladle hanging from the lip and dipped himself another. With every movement he became more at ease in the room.
When he said, “The cold will be coming right back,” again in Norwegian, Thea could not help herself and asked, “How do you know?”
Smith replied, “The winds are already bringing it.”
After dinner he set out his wares: watches and knives and small canisters of curatives and powders. He offered cigars, advertised as finer than the rolled-up dogshit they were peddling in the wanigan, and pipe tobacco imported from Zanzibar. He laid out boxes of chocolates and horehounds. When the jacks leaned in and whispered about hooch, he pulled his coat aside to show pockets with hidden half pints. He passed the bottles with a magician’s sleight of hand, recouping quarters and dollars with equal cleverness. Standing behind a table in the mess hall, a green felt cloth covering the pine boards, sporting a suit of worsted wool and having traded his beaver-skin hat for a black stovepipe, his mustache styled with bear-fat pomade, his pince-nez magnifying his huge brown eyes, he looked like he could have sold a whip to an ox.
Clearly the jacks were in a buying mood, and Smith did a steady business. Even as he haggled in four different languages, even as he extolled the virtues of his fine Spanish blades and Swiss timepieces and pocketed the loggers’ earnings, Smith managed to keep an eye on Thea. In her own way Thea made a sly study of Smith, too.
After Trond bought the last pocket watch, after Smith loaded his unsold goods back into his haversacks, after the jacks adjourned to the bunkhouse, Smith and the foreman and the bull cook and a pair of company men up for the weekend dealt their first game of seven-card stud. They uncorked a bottle of Canadian rye and passed it around the table
Abigail Sterle’s croup had worsened, so after supper the Meltmen brothers brought her to Hosea Grimm’s for care. Thea worked all through the evening hours, doing the job of four herself.
Thea’s hands were wet to the wrist in beaten eggs when she drenched the last of a hundred pork chops in the wash and rolled them in cornmeal. She could hear the Saturday-night accordion and merrymaking from the bunkhouse. The poker game was winding down. Smith’s back was to her, but every other hand he’d turn and leer. A second bottle was being passed around, and a cloud of cigar smoke hung over the table.
Thea wedged the last pair of pork chops onto the baking sheet — the sixth sheet, each of them loaded — and wiped her hands on her apron. As she did, the card game concluded and the players donned their coats and hats. Smith, his mustache losing its shape, gave her a last drunken grin as the men filed out. She stored the pork chops and stood alone in the mess hall. Exhausted, she thought about retiring for the night but then thought better of it and decided to make the next day’s pies. So she boiled water for tea and kept working.
She had already spread the dough and lined the pie tins and mixed the apples and brown sugar and cinnamon when she stepped outside for a breath of fresh air an hour later. The snow had stopped and a full, bright moon hung on the edge of the sky. The bunkhouse had grown quiet but for a few last revelers skylarking outside the door. Smith was right, that hell of cold had blown back in. She hugged herself and turned to go in for the night when she saw a strange sight.
One of the draft horses was being led into the middle of the paddock, snorting plumes of cloudy breath into the night. The handler was nearly invisible in the shadow of the horse, but it was not the barn boss, she knew, for the man pulling the bridle stood at the horse’s shoulder and the barn boss was no more than five and a half feet tall. When the man and horse reached the trough, the handler turned to leave, but only after hobbling the horse. Satisfied, the man loped back to the barn.
