Beneath the Slashings (Divided Decade Collection)

by Michelle Isenhoff

  His eyes begged her to relent, to consider things honestly, but Grace sat tight-lipped, her jaw firm.

  Sam blew out his breath with harsh impatience. “You can be stubborn as an old mule, Grace. As stubborn as Pa. Are you going to stay mad at him forever?”

  “Yes!” she snapped. “Or until I win.”

  He glared at her, his brow furrowed over snapping eyes. “And what if you don’t win? Is it worth being this miserable?”

  She let the silence run on, her expression equally fierce.

  “Have you considered that maybe you’re not mad at Pa nearly as much as you’re mad at yourself for being so darn afraid all the time?”

  Grace’s eyes opened wide. “That’s not fair! I can’t control fear any more than I can control the wind!”

  “Yes, you can!”

  Sam’s voice softened, and his eyes grew more sympathetic. “I lost people in the war too, Grace. Cooper and Thomas were like—” his voice broke “—like big brothers to me. I had nightmares about Pa dying. I was scared of what else might happen. But I finally decided I couldn’t live my life in fear of being hurt all the time.”

  “But—but how did you stop?” Her voice quavered.

  “I chose to live each day like I knew it was going to end well. I dealt with trouble when it showed up, but not a moment before. I stopped looking for it, Grace, and that’s all fear is, really. It’s just anticipating trouble.”

  Grace thought on that a moment. “Why do you care what I do anyway?” she asked.

  “Of course I care,” he burst out. “Grace, you’re making this winter much harder than it needs to be. I know you’re out of your element, but the men won’t hurt you. They’re a little rough around the edges, but they aren’t the monsters you make them out to be. You can be pleasant, smile sometimes. We’re all stuck here together. You could at least be sociable.”

  Grace stood up, bringing the conversation to an end. “I’ll pick my own friends, thank you,” she snapped.

  And they wouldn’t include Gideon Black.

  Chapter 8

  Grace watched until Sam and Gideon left the mess hall. When the way was clear, she grabbed her cloak and slipped outside into the bright, cold clearing. A circle of snow all about the camp had been churned by the feet of men and animals till it looked like a bowl of lumpy oatmeal. The hard-packed tote road cut through it from west to east before branching into icy tracks that wound among the work sites. Grace wrapped her muffler tighter around her neck and followed the road to the rollway.

  Once upon a time, Bear Creek had wound like a tunnel through the forest, but the felling crews had left broken, empty acres at the river’s edge. In place of the standing trees were pyramids of logs, stacked where spring floods would carry them rushing downstream to the saw mills in Manistee. As winter progressed and more and more of the forest succumbed to the lumberjacks’ advance, the yard would fill with raw timber.

  She skirted the piles. Pa had sternly warned her not to go near them. The list of men crushed by heavy, rolling logs was long, and she had no desire to add her name to the bottom of it. So she settled downriver on a mound of brush that held her above the snow. She still had an hour before Ivan expected her to serve supper, and she needed some time to think.

  Was Sam right? Was she giving fear permission to take root? Was she making herself miserable?

  She thought of Aunt Sally and Uncle Peter, so far away, and wondered what they were doing right now. After morning services, Aunt Sally would have prepared a Sunday dinner too large for the two of them. Then Uncle Peter would have overeaten and fallen asleep in his chair by the fireplace. Perhaps Aunt Sally had invited some neighbor ladies over for afternoon tea. Grace could see them in her mind, lined up on the parlor sofa, gossiping about the church service with their knitting needles twittering furiously.

  Grace knew she really should be there, serving the ladies cake on fancy dishes. She ought to be helping Uncle Peter milk the cows when his arthritis acted up. She should be filling up a room in their too-empty house. She should certainly not be sitting beside an icy stream wishing Gideon had asked her to play checkers of his own accord.

  But she wasn’t at home. She was trembling in a lumber camp filled with forty men, and she wasn’t speaking to her father. Was he, she wondered, feeling the rift as much as she?

  A movement caught her eye. Someone was prowling around one of the log piles. She raised herself slightly to see over the brush that blocked her view.

  Someone was there; someone who looked an awful lot like Mr. Bigg.

  He had a ledger in one hand and what looked like a long ruler in the other. For a moment, he reminded her of Mr. Birchfield, who taught one year in the Saginaw schoolhouse. But it was Mr. Bigg, all right, stomping around the logs as loudly and clumsily as a moose. As she watched, he gave one of the chains holding the pile a sharp jerk. At the same moment, the branch supporting her weight gave way with a loud crack.

  Grace sank into the brush pile with a small squeal, but not before she saw the scaler startle violently. When she dug her way out, Mr. Bigg’s log rule was sticking out of the snow ten feet behind him, and he was angrily snatching at papers scattered around his feet. She snickered softly, but when the man straightened, red-faced, and strode toward her, the laughter strangled in her throat.

  “What is the meaning of spying on me and pulling such a childish prank? Do you think twenty tons of rolling death is funny?” He loomed over her, goatee quivering and eyebrows fused above his nose. She hadn’t noticed before how long his nose was.

  Grace backed into the brush pile she had just climbed out of. “I—I wasn’t—I didn’t—” she quavered, but he snapped off her sentence before it took shape.

  “I’ll be reporting this to your father immediately.” He ratcheted himself to his full height. “One would think even a man foolish enough to bring a girl into a lumber camp might think to exercise some control over her.”

  And with a movement as swift as a mule kick, he cracked the log rule against her backside. It didn’t hurt much. The brush pile took the brunt of it, but she yelped with surprise.

  As she cowered further into the branches, he leaned in, pushing his nose uncomfortably near to her own. “I don’t care for the way your father tolerates your disrespect. A man who cannot control the antics of a spoiled little girl certainly has no business running a lumber camp. And it’s high time something was done about it.”

  With that declaration, he spun on his heel and disappeared up the road, his mutterings growing faint.

  Grace watched him stride away, too stunned to move. Her backside smarted. She rubbed at it with shaking hands, but she didn’t allow herself the luxury of the tears that prickled just behind her eyelids. It was no time to give in to humiliation.

  That last comment, what exactly did it mean? The scaler had made clear his disdain for her. Did he plan to take on the task of rectifying her behavior? That didn’t sound very agreeable, especially if he improved his aim with the log rule. Or did he plan to remove her father from authority?

  Then the truth spilled over her like an egg shell cracking above her head. Fiddlesticks had been right. Mr. Bigg really did want her father’s job! But what, she wondered, could he do to get it? What would he do to get it?

  Grace ground her bottom lip between her teeth. Was it Mr. Bigg’s ambition that had led to Mr. McCready’s death?

  Would he kill again?

  Her father entered the van sometime after supper. Grace could tell it was him by his light, crisp footsteps. Mr. Bigg always shuffled in the close quarters. The knock on her door came as no surprise.

  “Grace? You in there?”

  She rolled over to let the noise be her answer. She never returned to the kitchen that afternoon. Instead, feeling weak and ill, she had tucked herself beneath Grandma Harper’s quilt on her straw tick. Sam might be able to set his emotion aside like a pair of shoes, but she just couldn’t seem to manage it.

  “Grace, one of the boys was swin
ging in from hunting this afternoon and saw what happened at the rollway. He overheard everything.”

  Some of the tension in her body let up. At least she wasn’t going to get lectured for a prank she hadn’t pulled.

  “Grace, I’ve given Jim Bigg stern orders and promised him very serious consequences if he goes near you again. He’s not to bother you at all. If he does, you come tell me immediately, do you hear?”

  Grace’s stomach cramped and she thought she was going to vomit. Pa didn’t seem to understand the situation. She wasn’t the one in danger. He was!

  Her emotions embarked on a game of tug of war. She would never forgive herself if Pa was killed because she didn’t make him aware of the danger. The thought troubled her enough to stand and unlock the door.

  Pa took one look at her pale face and dropped to a knee. “Grace, are you ill? Did he hurt you?” He put a hand to her forehead and swept her body with his eyes.

  She brushed his hand away and shook her head. “I’m fine, Pa. He doesn’t care about me. Not really. It’s you he wants.”

  Pa’s eyebrows nearly met as he worked to comprehend her meaning.

  “He wants to kill you,” she explained.

  “Who wants to kill me?”

  “Mr. Bigg!”

  “Ah!” he said with sudden understanding. His eyes twinkled. “Now that you mention it, I have heard speculation to that effect.”

  “Then you’ll be careful?”

  “I’m always careful, Sweet Pea.”

  His face turned grave, and he held her shoulders to make her look into his face. “Grace, please don’t fret about this. I don’t believe those stories about Jim for a minute. He may be an arrogant louse, but he’s no killer. He simply loves his own importance.”

  Grace couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “But I heard him,” she protested. “I heard what he said about you.”

  “Please, Sweet Pea, trust me to judge a man’s character. I’ve dealt with many more men than you have.”

  She gaped at him. He was really going to brush aside her concerns as if she were some tattling child.

  “Grace?”

  She removed herself from his grasp and lay in her bed with face turned to the wall.

  “Doggone it, Grace!” Pa slammed his palm against the unmoving wood of the wall. “You’re trying my patience with this silent martyr act. Do you think you’re the only one in the world with troubles?”

  Grace’s breath caught in a sob. Her father had never lost his temper with her, not ever. But just as quickly as it flared, his anger faded. He sighed and rested his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Grace. Thank you for the warning. It must have been difficult for you to tell me.”

  Silence.

  His footsteps retreated but paused at the door. “I hope you realize I love you and Sam more than anything in this entire world.”

  “Morning, Gracie!” Sam called. “I heard Bigg got what was coming to him last night!”

  Grace pulled up short. Word traveled fast in the close quarters of a logging camp. She sneaked a peek at Ivan, half expecting a reprimand for her absence last night, but he didn’t look up from the vat of oil in which he was frying doughnuts, which the men affectionately called sinkers. In fact, she thought she saw a slight uptick to his broom of a mustache.

  “Gideon told me that after supper half a dozen of the fellas snuck out to the thunder shack while Bigg was inside using it. They chained the door shut and left him there with a note nailed to the door. It threatened a lot worse if he ever laid a hand on you again. He was half frozen before Pa found him and ordered Johansen to file through the chain.”

  Grace stared open-mouthed at her smirking brother in the kitchen’s predawn gloom. “Why would they do that?”

  “It seems they’ve taken a liking to you,” he grinned.

  “They don’t even know me!”

  “No, but they see you at mess. Johansen says you remind them of their daughters and their sisters,” Sam shrugged. “You remind them of home.”

  Ivan grunted as he scooped out lumps of fried dough. “A niece I had in Russia with braids like yours.” He handed them each a towering platter.

  Grace followed Sam into the mess hall with the sinkers, still baffled by the turn of events. “But how did the men know what happened? Pa didn’t tell them, did he?”

  “Naw. Squeaky saw the whole thing.”

  “Squeaky?”

  “You know, the bloke who’s always singing in French? His real name is Maurice Duval, but most of the men call him Squeaky on account of his deep voice. Anyway, when you didn’t show up for dinner last evening, Squeaky told them what he saw, and a few of them got angry with Bigg—he hasn’t exactly endeared himself to anyone—and decided they’d make sure it didn’t happen again.”

  “But—but—”

  Sam took the platter from her hands and laid it on the table with a thunk. “Gracie, don’t you get it? I’ve told you most of these are honorable men. When they heard Bigg frightened you, it made them think, what if that was my daughter?”

  Grace followed him back into the kitchen and engaged in the familiar chores, still half-doubting her brother’s story. But when the men began filing into the mess hall after Sam blew the Gabriel, nearly every one of them gave her a grin and a polite nod before falling to their grub. Oddly enough, Mr. Bigg chose to forego breakfast.

  She watched them, wide-eyed, until Ivan thrust a plate of fried ham into her hands. She took the hint and moved back and forth between kitchen and mess hall, replenishing tins of cornbread, slinging piles of flapjacks onto empty plates, and refilling the molasses jug almost without thought. It was astonishing how quickly the food disappeared.

  “I’d appreciate a few more cackleberries, Miss Grace.”

  She dished out more eggs, surprised to hear her name spoken. As a rule, the only talking in the mess hall was limited to an occasional “Send round the pig, Red” or “Salt, Shorty.” No one had ever addressed her beyond raising an empty cup or platter in the air. But today, her name floated about the room.

  “The mud’s just right, Miss Grace. Strong enough to tan bootleather. Could you splash a little more in my cup?”

  “Grace, these are right fine dunkers.”

  “Do you think, Miss Grace, you could rustle up another slab of pie?”

  Grace never had a busier morning. As she set down the last kettle of tea, one of the men, Squeaky Duval, shoved back his plate and grinned, “Eet is good to see you in health zees morning, ma chérie.”

  And Pa, who sat through the whole meal with the men, didn’t make any effort whatsoever to curb the chatter.

  Grace gave Squeaky the barest hint of a smile and whisked away his empty plate.

  That noon, while Sam carted lunch to the forest and Ivan paused for a puff on a battered stone pipe, Grace slipped out to the barn. The interior was dark and warm, smelling strongly of hay and horses. The animals were stabled on the opposite end from the forge, the hay far from any stray sparks. Separate doors serviced each side.

  Johansen was bent over a table, his powerful figure illuminated by the orange glow of the furnace. Most of the animals were away working, but a gray mare with a strained ligament was enjoying a few days of rest in the company of the camp’s single saddle mount. Grace hoped she might slip in and pay the horse a short visit without Fiddlesticks’ company, but the barn boss was busy applying a sharp-smelling ointment to the mare’s leg.

  “Well, hello there, Miss Grace. Ivan send you out here for a little cooking advice?” Fiddlesticks looked up from his crouched position.

  She smiled shyly and edged backward toward the door. “No, sir.”

  The man’s thin laughter seemed to come from all sides in the echoing barn. “Ivan’s a right tolerable dough roller, I’ll be bound. His slop ain’t killed us yet, that so, Johansen?”

  The blacksmith grunted but didn’t look up from his work.

  “Hand me that rag, darlin’.” The barn boss gestured toward a somewhat
clean length of material looped over a peg on the wall. Grace carried it to him tentatively and watched his fingers wind the cloth snugly up to the horse’s hock.

  “There you be, Annabelle.” He stood with a crackle of joints and slapped the animal on the haunch. “Another day or two and you’ll be ready for the dance.

  “So,” Fiddlesticks grinned as he reached for a flat shovel, “if it’s not cooking, perhaps it’s relational advice you’ve come for. Word is, you and young Gid been sparkin’ over a checkers game yesterday afternoon.”

  Grace stiffened and her cheeks burned enough to light the dim room. She regretted her missed opportunity to escape the barn unnoticed.

  Laughter bounced around the room again as Fiddlesticks set to mucking out the stalls. “An old bachelor like me wouldn’t be the one to ask. But Johansen, there, is a regular romantic. Got a wife and six kids at home, ain’t it so, Johansen?”

  The blacksmith leveled his cool blue eyes at the pair of them and gave a singular nod before returning to his work.

  “’Course, I was married once. To a right large woman. Downright useful, she were. Cast a broad shadow. I always had shade at the Fourth of July picnic.” He cackled again.

  Grace glanced at Johansen, who was shaking his head silently over his work.

  “And I always say, the larger the woman, the better she cooks. My Maude could have taught ol’ Ivan a thing or two about slingin’ hash. Why she—”

  But a pounding at the door interrupted the man’s recital. “Fiddlesticks!” Sam panted, “Pa says he needs a new harness for Jip and Jess pronto. Jess’s breeching is sliced through. Everything’s at a standstill till you bring the replacement.”

  The barn boss snapped into action. He yanked a leather harness off the wall and, after a brief examination, saddled the smaller horse and rode off.

  Sam took a moment to catch his breath. “I have to go back for the cart. Want to walk with me?”

  Grace hesitated, but for the first time, the suggestion sparked a tiny interest. “All right.”