spruce. North of The Forks, where the Dead River rushes into the Kennebec, we turned onto a rutted logging road and followed the setting sun up into the hill country. Dust, raised by the logging trucks, powdered the trees along the road, and one time a big truck, loaded with trees the length of telephone poles, came barreling out of the woods as if intent on flattening us like an insect against its grill. My father played chicken with it before dodging aside at the absolute last second. The truck rushed by, horn blaring, pulling a hurricane of dust behind it that left me choking, half-blind, and spitting mud.
I was dirt-covered and sunburned when we reached the last forest gate that blocked the road down to Rum Pond. Truman scurried out of the truck and unlocked the chain gate so we could pass. Soon we were burrowing through old-growth pines, taller than any trees I had ever seen. I peered over the top of the cab and saw a flash of blue ahead through the pine needles and then suddenly we were stopped in a compound of buildings made of hemlock logs and pine planks.
My father lay on the horn, and Truman leaned his head out the window and shouted, “This is it!”
A man with a drooping black mustache appeared in the door of one of the log buildings. He had a cigarette clenched between his fingers. “Is this the new serf?” he asked, pointing at me with the lit end of the cigarette.
“Yep,” said my father. “What do you think?”
“Kind of scrawny.”
“But he’s a hard worker-just like his old man.”
“I thought he was
“Fuck you,” said my father. “This is Russ Pelletier. He owns this dump.”
“You want me to give him the ten-cent tour?” Pelletier asked my father.
Truman was unloading the cases of liquor and lugging them into the back of what I assumed was the main lodge.
“Go ahead,” said my father. “Send him over to my camp when you’re done.”
“What about my stuff?” I asked.
“I’ll take care of it. Damn, it’s good to see you, Mike.” He clapped me on the shoulder so hard it hurt, but the gesture made me happier than anything in a long time.
For the next half hour Pelletier showed me around.
The sporting camp consisted of a main lodge, four guest cabins, an open-sided woodshed, toolshed, and boathouse, all built on the shore of a long lake carved between mountains. There didn’t appear to be a single other building on the lake, just miles and miles of spruce and maples sloping down from talus cliffs to the water’s edge.
“This was originally a logging operation,” Pelletier said. “Built back in the eighteen nineties. You see that building over there by the lake? That used to be a post office. It served as the central location for distribution of mail for this whole area-from Flagstaff all the way up to Jackman.”
Black flies had descended in a buzzing cloud around my head as we stood looking at the lake. “Where’s your nearest neighbor?”
“That depends,” said Pelletier, oblivious of the biting insects. “There’s another sporting camp over to Spencer Lake, but you’d have to hike over those mountains there to get to it. We have to drive down to Flagstaff or out to The Forks to get our mail and everything else we need.”
I waved my hand near my face, but the bugs kept biting me.
Pelletier looked at me with a sly smile. “I guess they like your blood,” he said. “Come on, let’s go inside.”
Inside the kitchen of the main lodge, a skinny little girl was chopping onions for a stew pot. Truman was leaning against the sink eating a raw onion as if it were an apple.
“Howdy,” he said.
“This is Truman’s girl, B.J.,” said Pelletier. “She and my wife, Doreen, do all the cooking around here.”
“And I’m the chief bottle washer!” said Truman.
The girl glanced up at me and quickly looked away. She couldn’t have been older than twelve. Except for a single long braid that trailed halfway down her back, I might have mistaken her for a boy. She had a bony face with eyes the same almond shape as Truman’s.
“Hello,” I said.
“Doreen lives up at our house in Flagstaff during the week,” said Pelletier. “That makes B.J. here the only full- time female at Rum Pond. Isn’t that right, B.J.?”
“I guess,” she said without looking up from her cutting board.
“She’s shy,” said Truman.
Pelletier escorted me into the lodge’s great room, where a towering fieldstone fireplace rose up to a smoke- blackened ceiling. A shabby-looking moose head stared down from the mantel, and old upholstered chairs and wicker rockers were arranged around the hearth. In the dining room were two long tables with benches where the “sports”-as Pelletier called his guests-ate their meals family style. A big picture window showed twilight descending on the hills and the first canoe returning across the lake. Pelletier poured himself a mug of coffee without offering me one and lighted a new cigarette and leaned back against the serving counter.
“Your dad says I should put you to work,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know what a serf is?”
“It’s a Russian peasant-sort of an indentured servant.”
“I wasn’t really joking when I called you one before. You’re going to work hard here if you plan on eating my food. And don’t think you’re going to be guiding fly fishermen. You’ll be washing dishes and cleaning cabins.”
“Yes, sir.”
He gestured through the window at a stretch of heavily wooded shoreline a hundred yards or so down the lake. “Your dad’s camp is down in those trees. Go settle in but be ready to wash dishes after supper.”
I was about to leave when he called me back. “One more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Your dad works for me, understand? What that means is that I’m the boss here. Your dad does what I say and that means you do, too.”
“I understand.”
“Just so we’re clear, kid.”
My father’s camp was set back amid the pines on the hillside above the lake. It consisted of three separate log cabins-one for sleeping, another with a fireplace and table for playing cards, and a third with a kitchen-all of which opened onto a plank deck with cedar rails. The whole affair was raised on stilts above the floor of the forest, and a steep set of stairs tumbled down the hill to the gravel beach below. There was no electricity, only propane gas for the lights, stove, and fridge, and no plumbing, just a two-seater outhouse behind the woodpile.
My “room” was the middle cabin. A plastic-coated mattress, taken apparently from a child’s bunk bed, had been laid out in a corner, but aside from that, my father hadn’t made any effort to clean up for me. Empty beer cans lay scattered about the floor, amid water-warped issues of
What Pelletier had told me about my role as camp serf proved to be an understatement. When I wasn’t washing dishes, I was sweeping out cabins or splitting firewood or clearing brush. Enviously I watched the fly fishermen, affluent men and sometimes women from Massachusetts and Manhattan outfitted with the best Sage rods and Simms waders, head out in canoes in the morning. In the evening, I had the privilege of filleting the trout they had caught for lousy dollar tips. Groups of them came and went, but to me they were always the same insufferable rich people.
My father didn’t seem particularly interested in spending time with me, either, as it turned out. In fact, I saw more of Russell Pelletier and even his wife, Doreen-a hard-faced, unhappy woman who was only at the camp on weekends-than I did my dad, who always seemed to be off somewhere in the woods or running errands out to Flagstaff.
The person I spent the most time with was Truman’s daughter, B.J., who worked in the kitchen with me. She was a strange, silent girl. From Pelletier, I learned that her mom had died of alcohol poisoning some years earlier. The two of them-Truman and B.J.-had lived in the same cabin at Rum Pond ever since, spending each winter with relatives on the reservation at Indian Island in Old Town.
The fact that Truman and B.J. were actual Penobscot Indians seemed exotic at first. After a while, though, I
