Baloney. Maxime Raymond Bock
food and fuel, tools and clothing. Ayotte, who’d drawn the short straw at the start of the contract, picked up supplies and mail at a cache every two months. A forced complicity arose between Denis and Robert. Neither made friends easily, and neither was a natural cook or housekeeper. They didn’t know how to run a kitchen, had never shovelled manure. But their shared workload and the cold forced them together, and when they finally had some free time between mopping the floors and cooking up huge pots of soup with peameal bacon, they would sit and play some cards or dice, sweating next to the stoves, swearing they had nothing in common with their brothers or fathers or the men they slaved away for in this godforsaken outpost. They were both right, in their way.
Denis, the son of the Saint-Hippolyte notary, showed up to camp in his Sunday best. He may have been only one year older, but his education was beyond anything Robert aspired to. That a mind like his should be sent to wash pots at lumber camp suggested punishment, but Robert couldn’t bring himself to ask Denis what the hell he was doing there. Everyone understood the local politics behind Robert’s presence: part of the camp’s supply order went through the Saint-Donat hardware store. Robert was a favour the Lacertes did the Company, an extra pair of hands paid only in morning porridge, evening soup and plentiful heat. Robert never found out what Denis earned for his work. They figured out a way to work together cheerfully, bemoaning their fate only when the loggers were at work, and even then they always found something to laugh about: the long curly red hairs that worked their way into the building’s every nook and cranny, the dead-rat smell in a bag left under a bunk, the shit-stained long johns frozen stiff behind the backhouse, the socks with holes so big you wouldn’t know which end to put your foot in. They were on their own until evening, except once every two weeks when one of the loggers stayed at camp and split a cord of wood to heat the kitchen. Those days passed in silence. The boys did the dishes and cleaned to the sound of splitting logs. On other days, they chatted about their sisters and mothers, the girls they had seen, impossible things, the cast of the light, the splinters in their fingers, the dishes to be washed, the porridge, the liberal professions, horse piss, village stores. Denis had the mysterious gift of perceiving the hidden faces of objects, people, actions and ideas. He always used words Robert knew, yet it seemed that, by naming the world in this way, Denis conjured up another reality, a field of energy drawn tightly around what each term evoked, and thus the frame surrounding things, creatures and concepts was knit together of some unknown fabric. Through his new friend, Robert had access to an exclusive space whose existence he would never have otherwise suspected, a world that closed up behind Denis’s words like the wake behind a boat.
Times were changing. The company was adopting modern ways and equipment. The lumberjacks talked about a union, but in their hearts still cleaved to the old ways, loved yelling at workhorses harnessed to stumps and the feel of the axe thrumming in their hands. Above all, they had grown used to the rule of the cook who’d been with them eight winters, a heavy-set man with a huge nose bulbous from rosacea whose qualities included never getting hairs in the porridge (he didn’t have any) and putting any man in line with a single look. They said that he’d died over the summer. They said that he’d gone off to cook somewhere else in the Pays d’en Haut, that he’d had enough of the smell of gas oil and pine and given up camp life to be a stevedore, that he’d killed three whores in Mont-Laurier, that he’d been given the boot by the Company and the less they knew about it the better. The two new hands slept one above the other in the bunks closest to the kitchen so they could start the morning porridge without bothering the men and go to sleep as quietly as possible once the dishes were done and everyone was in bed. Most of the time the frozen loggers found the soup too cold. They called the cooks little faggots or skunk-fuckers, and the boys could hear angry shouts from the far end of the bunkhouse ordering them to stop making the mattresses creak and get their hands out of their pants. One night when it seemed the insults might turn to blows, Robert and Denis stacked the sacks of grain along the kitchen wall, protected by a row of mousetraps, hung the sides of salt beef from the rafters, and pushed the bunkbed into the empty pantry. They just barely managed to squeeze it in, and they couldn’t shut the door behind themselves, but at least that way they got some peace and quiet. The lumberjacks could go right on insulting them in the bunkhouse, raise a ruckus, sing all the songs they wanted – the kids felt safe. Robert took the top bunk. There was so little space between the mattress and the ceiling that if he wasn’t careful turning onto his side, he tore holes in the shoulders of his woollens. They froze in their little alcove, but cold was a fundamental element of the camp, like air or water. It didn’t enter anyone’s mind to complain. And they were lucky to be closer to the stovepipes than the other men. Robert often climbed into his cubby when he had an hour of downtime, to finally sleep without the sound of thirty men snoring.
One mid-January afternoon, a jingling bell and a Whoa! from the driver turned the boys from their cleaning. Denis cried out, unusually happy to see the winter’s second delivery. The first, in November, had arrived in the middle of the night and a week late. It wasn’t a fond memory. Ayotte, covered with half an inch of frost and in the throes of vertigo, had jumped at the boys, seeing two evil spirits with putrefying faces. The lumberjacks had to step in and knock him out. This time the horses had made a good trip of it, the day was cold and clear, and Ayotte was cracking jokes about the previous delivery. While he warmed up at the stove, Robert and Denis unloaded the bundle of mail, last month’s newspapers, two jerry cans of fuel, a side of beef, a new oven element, two metal files, six axe heads, hundred-pound sacks of oats and buckwheat and big bags of laundry. Though the sled appeared empty, Denis went out one final time and came back holding a packet the size of a music box, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string, which he immediately slid under his bed. When the lumberjacks went back out to swing their axes, Denis pulled out the package and called Robert over. He severed the string with his teeth and tore off the brown paper. Fifteen books, a hundred-odd sheets of paper and a few pencils spilled out onto the floor and mattress.
That was the end of their afternoon naps. Denis became distracted and less thorough with his work. He read a quick line every time he passed by the bed, took more frequent trips to the outhouse and burned an oil lamp in the alcove to read by once the dishes were done. It fell on Robert to make up the work that Denis left unfinished. With no partner for cards or dice in a camp that felt suddenly empty, Robert couldn’t help taking an interest in the written word. Fifteen books and nothing but French-Canadian verse. Robert was wholly ignorant of poetry, though he’d managed to sound out the opening of Routhier’s ‘Ô Canada.’ The first lines of the first volume he opened, by Alain Grandbois, seemed at once obvious and empty, a series of words dumped out one after another. There was nothing to understand. Perfect: he hadn’t understood a thing. The next day he tried again with Gilles Hénault. Even worse. He went back to the kitchen. A few days later Denis started writing little chunks of text, leaving large white spaces on the paper – not frugal practice in such an isolated camp, Robert couldn’t help pointing out. By way of answer, Denis opened Anne Hébert’s Les songes en équilibre on his bed and invited Robert to take in and compare the positive and negative capability of the black and the white spaces. The pile of blank sheets began to dwindle and Robert wondered whether he shouldn’t take a few before they were gone. Denis gave him four. Robert slid them under his mattress.
A new rhythm began to take hold, a break from the routine. The days grew longer but the cold dug in its heels. Robert cultivated an interest in Crémazie, Fréchette and Gill, who were much richer in evocative power, to his mind, due to the smaller spaces they left on the page. Denis recited verse while scrubbing pots and deboning hunks of meat. The lumberjacks went about their business. In the evenings they would emerge from the bush in clouds of steam to slurp down their soup and stink up the bunkhouse with their pipes and roll-your-owns. They were getting rougher with the boys. The stables weren’t clean enough: luckily, the shit froze the second it hit the ground, but sometimes the loggers had to shovel it themselves. The soup was disgusting, the porridge too sticky, the beans too mushy. Robert and Denis counted the days till spring.
Big Lambert came in from the bush at noon one day in March, treading silently over a foot of powder so fluffy that, once disturbed by his feet, it took flight again. As he approached the pile of logs to split behind the kitchen, he peered through the window and saw the two boys bent over books in front of the furnace, a plaid blanket spread over their laps. That night, standing on an overturned washbasin