by Paul Watkins
This all changed one morning in early June, when Victor Coltrane arrived at the Mackenzie mill, bringing news of a death in the forest. Coltrane was Mackenzie’s company foreman. He had been around since the days of Mackenzie’s father. Mackenzie watched him coming down the corridor. He saw the hard sinews of muscle wrapped around Coltrane’s arms and the way he wore his shoulder blades like medieval armor on his back. His neck and legs seemed built to take the shock of a danger that hadn’t yet arrived.
Mackenzie sensed disaster coming, the way he recognized miniature tornadoes of dust in the millyard as signs of an approaching storm. Coltrane stopped in the doorway to Mackenzie’s office. The knit of Coltrane’s sleeveless sweater expanded and contracted across his chest as he caught his breath. For a moment, the two men just looked at each other, one standing and the other sitting behind his custom-made black-cherry desk, its wood dark amber and glowing.
Then Coltrane spoke. “Get down to the car,” he said. “Something terrible has happened.”
Without a word, Mackenzie stood, picked his black-and-red plaid jacket off a wooden peg and put it on. Then he took up his walking stick, its top a plum-sized ball of walrus ivory, and, stiff-legged, followed Coltrane out of the office. People turned to watch them go, secretaries and mill workers and a man who’d come to restock the Coca-Cola machine. Mackenzie did not return their stares.
On his way to see the accident, Jonah Mackenzie caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the Range Rover’s window. He raised one hand and touched the mirror image of his eye. It bothered him, but he didn’t know why. Then he focused past his face to the ranks of young pine trees that grew beside the road. The pines had been planted in such straight lines that the empty avenues between them seemed to race away like frightened animals. Mackenzie vaguely recalled what this place had looked like before he clear-cut the land, not unlike when the French and English settlers used the gently sloping ground on the banks of Pogansett Lake as a place to trade with the Abenaki Indians. Guns, knives, beads, pots and pans for beaver and muskrat pelts. Mackenzie’s family had been here since 1790, almost as long as the town. His ancestors had helped to drive out the Indians once and for all. Mackenzie used to tell Alicia, who quietly endured his repetition, that if it weren’t for him Abenaki Junction would be swallowed by the forest. The scouting vines and sapling trees would spread their stubborn tangles through abandoned buildings, across the rusty railroad tracks and down the potholed main street until nothing remained of the town.
On any other day, to see the landscape ordered in this way would have filled Mackenzie with a calm that moved like sleep through his nerves. Tabula Rasa, he thought. Clean Slate. Sweep the forest aside and start again with himself as supreme architect. Tabula Rasa. He loved the way those Latin words rolled off his tongue. The finality of it. The absoluteness. Its purity was almost sexual. The trees in their planted rows appeared to rise in obedience to him. He thought how much he had changed since leaving Yale thirty years before and returning to the north Maine woods to work for his father. He had found himself in the middle of a war against the other logging operations—Deschamps, Mottet, Ruger. The Mackenzies had outlasted them all. It was also a war against faulty machinery, against dishonest employees and wasted time. Once a month Mackenzie went through a day with a stopwatch, marking down whatever he did at fifteen-minute intervals, to see if he was working as efficiently as he could. It was also a war against the forest for taking his leg and leaving him to pace through his life with a cripple’s awkward gait. It would not end until each thing that grew in the wilderness and could be useful to man was spread out in vast, worshipful columns around the town of Abenaki Junction.
As Coltrane drove, he told as much as he knew. Some loggers had been cutting into trees just south of the Canadian Atlantic Railroad. The chain saw being used by a young man named James Pfeiffer had snapped its blade, which whipped back in Pfeiffer’s face and killed him outright. Pfeiffer had come to Abenaki Junction a year ago. Before that, he had worked on a fishing boat out of Newport, Rhode Island. As soon as he made enough money, Pfeiffer had planned to go back to the coast and buy a boat of his own. Mackenzie had liked the boy. He spoke softly and straightforwardly. He wished it could have been someone else, if it had to be anyone at all. There had been accidents before at the company, but never an on-the-job death. A placard on the gates of the Mackenzie Company listed the number of days without an accident. Mackenzie went out each morning to slide the black numbers into place. Today it had been 137. As soon as we get to the mill, Mackenzie thought, I’ll take down the placard and wait a while before putting it back up. Of all the bad-publicity ways to go, Mackenzie thought. Killed by a goddamned chain saw.
Chain saw. The words interrupted his thoughts. Chain saw. Chain saw. They repeated in his head as if he had never heard them before. Once more he felt the buzz of the blade through his leg. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth.
Coltrane turned off the road and the Range Rover began moving along a gravel track that led up to the Algonquin Wilderness. Mackenzie had just purchased logging rights for 50,000 acres from the government. By the time the news was made public, the clear-cutting had already begun. He had nine months to finish the job, after which the area would be declared a permanent wilderness preserve. Mackenzie thought the idea was ludicrous. By the time I’ve finished with the Algonquin, he told himself, there won’t be any wilderness left to preserve. But the price is good. Timber’s good. I’d be a fool to turn down the offer. Someone else would take it instead. Some of the forest had never been cut. It had that rare name “old growth” attached to it, which struck Mackenzie as a challenge he could not turn down. He thought the idea of old growth was stupid. The Forestry Service would replant the area and in twenty years the land would be ready for cutting again. “If anybody needs a better reason than that,” Mackenzie had told his wife, “they can go to hell and I’ll join them there at my convenience.”
Mackenzie set his hand on Coltrane’s shoulder. “Why are we going so slow?”
“Man’s already dead.” The car bounced over potholes filled with the cream-colored water of dissolved clay. The puddles exploded across the Range Rover’s hunter-green cowlings. Coltrane kept his eyes on the road, but the muscles stayed tensed along his shoulders, where Mackenzie’s hand had settled like a crow.
In the distance, almost lost among the pines, Mackenzie could see a dozen of his loggers in their yellow hard hats and blaze-orange of vests, a letter M stamped in red on the backs. They clustered around a clearing, where sawdust powdered the ground. Parked on a dirt road across from the accident was a paramedic truck. Its flashing lights were off, the cargo doors shut. The driver, a man named Twitch Duvall, stood beside the body. He was called Twitch because he never sat still. He wore the blue-and-white jacket of the paramedic unit, and under it the white apron of his other job as manager of the Fresh Time Supermarket. Duvall was wringing his hands, as if squeezing water from a sponge.
Seeing this useless gesture gave Mackenzie his first clear message of the death. Before that, he had refused to believe it completely. To watch Twitch just standing there made Mackenzie furious. The Range Rover had barely come to a stop when Mackenzie swung open the door and climbed down, tottering on his good leg until he’d regained his balance. He felt the urgency of standing in front of someone badly hurt. He wanted to rush in, stop the pain and yell at his loggers to do something. But before he could speak, Mackenzie had a sudden and horrible vision—that it was not himself coming to see the dead man but the dead man rushing down to meet him, cackling and bloody through the trees. He reached out to take hold of Coltrane’s arm for support, but the vision went away and Mackenzie’s arm slipped back to his side.
As Coltrane began to wade through the crowd, the loggers stepped away from him as if in a well-orchestrated dance. No one had ever thought Coltrane would become a foreman. He had never been one to give orders. But this was precisely why Mackenzie had hired him: so he could give all the orde
rs himself. Coltrane’s rank had set him apart from the people who were once his closest friends.
As soon as Mackenzie saw Pfeiffer’s body, his anger at Twitch Duvall disappeared. At least, the excuse for it did. The anger itself left a residue, which would oblige Mackenzie to become enraged at something else in order for him to leave it behind. There was nothing to be done for James Pfeiffer, no thread of life remaining by which to pull the young man back from death. Death had arrived completely and taken everything. The yellow-painted, black-oil-smudged chain saw lay almost on top of the corpse. The broken chain-link blade was lodged in Pfeiffer’s face under a ragged flap of skin, and tangled in the flaked bone of his burst skull. The blade had woven like an iron snake through his hair and across the ground. One of his eyes remained open, peering suspiciously, as if Pfeiffer still needed some visible sign before his soul could abandon his body.
Mackenzie knew at once that even though jokes had been made about what happened to him, the peg-leg gibes that he allowed because he had invented them, there would never be jokes about this. The spilled-blood curiosity left him so quickly that he suddenly forgot what this curiosity felt like, even though he had been filled with it only a few seconds before. Instead, he felt suddenly cold, as if his flesh were no more than cheesecloth and the wind was blowing clean through him. It was a chill so deep that for a moment Mackenzie felt the terror of his own life slipping through the soft gauze of his flesh. He could not bring himself to believe that only a shell remained of James Pfeiffer, something to be hustled underground and remembered from now on in fading photographs.
The stares of the loggers had turned toward Mackenzie. They waited for some words to release them from their spell, for his voice to rise above the muttering.
Mackenzie breathed in deeply, summoning courage, not daring to show fear. “Twitch!” he shouted.
Twitch Duvall stepped forward. “Yes, Mr. Mackenzie?”
“Bring this poor man down the hill,” was all Mackenzie said. He did not know where the body should be taken after that, but it did not matter. All he had to do was give the one command and everyone was suddenly in motion, the body in its stillness strangely distant from them now. Twitch carefully removed the saw blade from Pfeiffer’s face. Then the men took off their belts and slid them gently under the corpse. They all lifted at once and carried Pfeiffer to a flatbed truck on which there was a crane for raising logs.
It was evening now. The air had filled with the tiny silver parachutes of dandelion seeds, blown in from the valley beyond. From a nearby tree, a bald eagle beat its massive wings and soared up toward the granite skull of Seneca Mountain.
The distant but fast-approaching sound of a police siren came from the main road. A minute later, the police car arrived, bouncing and sliding up the hill, its red and blue lights flashing. The car skidded to a stop in the chalky mud and Marcus Dodge climbed out. Dodge stood six feet three inches tall. He had short blond hair, a straight nose and eyes the brown-green color of old bronze. He was the only policeman in Abenaki Junction, and driving the only police car. They had never needed more than Marcus Dodge to keep the peace. His family had been in these woods even longer than Mackenzie’s, and the way Dodge moved and spoke and thought were so much a part of the town that he never had to raise his voice to anyone, or ask twice for a thing to be done. He turned off the siren, but left the red lights flashing. They made a quiet, whirring noise.
The loggers stopped their talking. They waited to see what Dodge would do. Before he could speak, another car appeared at the end of the dirt road. It was a red Volkswagen Bug, chrome fender pimpled with rust. Mackenzie felt his heart clench like a fist. The outlet for his anger had arrived. It was Madeleine Cody in that car. Editor of the Forest Sentinel. Environmental activist, she called herself. Mackenzie considered Madeleine and her watchdog newspaper his own personal plague of locusts. He could not deny that she was very intelligent and pretty and full of potential. But Madeleine was the kind of person who needed to be told these things, and by someone she trusted to know. And the only person in this town who could say them to her and be believed, thought Mackenzie, is me. This was one of his greatest weapons in their private battle. Another was that she reminded him of his wife. Both Madeleine and Alicia had a sense of fair play that made them helpless against anything that was not fair. Mackenzie had been biding his time with Madeleine. He waited for her to tire out and move on. But his patience was wearing thin. If she didn’t pack up soon, he would make her go, the same way he had finished the owners of those other logging companies.
For a while after Forest Sentinel started up, Mackenzie had thought the paper would fold by itself. Nobody seemed to be reading it. Then he realized that people were reading Forest Sentinel, they just never read it around him. He marveled at the way Madeleine wrote the paper and distributed it and solicited advertising all by herself. Although he would never have said it to her face, Mackenzie thought she was the hardest-working woman he had ever met. He had watched her grow up in Abenaki Junction, and the day she left for the University of Maine at Orono on a full scholarship to study journalism, Mackenzie doubted he would ever see her again. He was surprised when she returned four years later, having given up offers from newspapers all over the country. Madeleine had chosen to start her own paper. When Mackenzie found out what kind of paper it was to be, he felt an irritation that had never quite left him alone since.
As the Volkswagen approached, Dodge sensed the tension in the air. Some of it came from himself. He was in love with Madeleine and had been for years, as much as anyone could be from a distance and with no way to tell her how he felt. He knew what she thought of him and what he stood for. To Madeleine, he was the two-dimensional image of everything she fought against. The law that protected Mackenzie. Dodge wished he could tell her how much he despised the old man. He saw Jonah Mackenzie as a ravenous, grabbing giant, whose sense of law and fairness was loud and blustering until things went against him. Then he would turn around and cheat until he won. Getting what he wanted had become like a drug for Mackenzie, and he couldn’t do without it. Dodge never said any of this. He kept his opinions to himself. His job demanded it. The way he felt about Madeleine had gotten in the way of every relationship he’d tried to have, and sometimes he resented her for it, out of frustration more than logic.
The Volkswagen skidded on the gravel. Then came the bone-crack sound of the emergency brake being applied. The puttering engine coughed and quit. Madeleine jumped out. She carried a camera slung around her neck, and an old leather mailbag, in which, he knew, she kept a tape recorder and notebook. Madeleine was thirty-two years old. She wore her cedar-colored hair pulled back with a rubber band. Not even one of those glittery bands made for the purpose, Mackenzie noted. An actual rubber band. Each detail of her existence seemed designed to piss him off. Her beauty taunted him, especially her eyes, which were a shiny mahogany brown. He knew that she had been an athlete in college, and even though it had been several years since then, her body still carried the same compact muscularity. Her skin stayed pale, even in the summer, but her cheeks were brushed rosy in the cool air. “How is he?” she shouted, and ran toward the flatbed where Pfeiffer lay, his head covered by an orange vest. She had not taken the time to put on her boots, and her feet, in sandals, looked naked next to the heavy, boot-clad feet of the loggers.
“James Pfeiffer is dead, Madeleine.” It was Mackenzie who spoke. He sounded paternal and impatient.
Madeleine stopped in front of the body. Pfeiffer’s blood-spattered hands hung down off the flatbed, the cuffs of his work jacket dark with old sweat. For a moment, it looked as if she might raise the orange vest to see the corpse’s face, as if she didn’t trust Mackenzie’s word. The chill wind raised goose bumps on her naked forearms and batted at the baggy sleeves of her T-shirt. She hesitated in front of the body.
In that moment of hesitation, Mackenzie felt sure she would not look, and in not looking would show herself to be weak in front of the loggers.
Madeleine raised the cloth and stared stone-faced at the wreckage of Pfeiffer’s head. Then she set it down, the bloody fabric molding against the wounds like a cast. She turned to face the crowd, but her eyes were aimed at Mackenzie. “Mr. Mackenzie.” They had always been cordial to each other, but it was a brittle, flinty politeness that held more hostility than any insults that could pass between them. “You’ve got your men working double shifts, haven’t you?”
“They get paid double. I don’t hear any complaints. It’s not against the law to be in a rush. Most people spend their lives rushing around. You, for example.”
“The reason you’re in such a hurry is because you’re afraid someone will come along and find a way to stop what you’re doing here.”
“Not legally, dear. And not at all if I can help it.”
Madeleine unshouldered the bag and the camera. She let them dangle on their straps until they touched the ground and then she let them go. “Why can’t you admit the importance of this being the last area …”
“Area of old growth in the northeast.” Mackenzie droned out the words. “Yes, I’ve heard all that. I’ve read it in your paper and seen it on your posters. I bought the right to cut here from the government. If you don’t agree with it, take the matter up with Uncle Sam.” Mackenzie began walking toward her, his cane digging deep into the pine-needled ground.
“Are you trying to make some connection between this accident and my purchasing the land? Because if you are, well, say it right here in front of all these people. I’m interested to hear it. Is there some cosmic force at work here that I’m not aware of?”
“I’m suggesting that you are cutting this timber so quickly to get as much as you can in the nine-month time limit, that you might be overworking your crews.”
