Measure of Katie Calloway, The: A Novel

by Serena B. Miller

  She dropped a smidgen of doughnut batter into the oil and watched it sizzle to a golden brown. One by one, she slipped raw doughnuts into the hot lard and watched them puff up. The men would enjoy these so much.

  She felt good about today. She was getting the hang of things, learning her way around the supplies and tools of the kitchen. Even though she had gotten up later than she wanted, thanks to her preparations the night before, she wasn’t nearly as frazzled. Jigger was acting decent to her, so she hoped his pique was over. The comfort and warmth of the early morning kitchen washed over her, and she experienced a feeling of deep contentment as she presided over the vat of doughnuts.

  A half hour later, Jigger went to awaken the men. Soon, they came tramping through the door. By that time, she had placed stacks of flapjacks, heaps of bacon, and mounds of doughnuts onto the table. It was a pretty sight, and she knew the dining room was redolent with good smells. She had even heated the sorghum this morning.

  “Looks good,” Robert said as he and the other men took their seats.

  Jigger stood near the head of the table, ready to chastise anyone who spoke while eating. He, too, seemed to be in a good mood. She had even caught him smiling a couple times this morning. Maybe he was beginning to thaw toward her after all.

  The men dug into the food, and she waited, looking forward to seeing the enjoyment on their faces. She was especially proud of how well the doughnuts had turned out.

  Ernie was the first to help himself to the pile in front of him. But instead of groaning with ecstasy, he grimaced at the first bite and swallowed hard. Then he stared at the doughnut as though he couldn’t believe what he had just put in his mouth. To her horror, she saw the same action being repeated up and down the table. Robert was the last to bite into a doughnut, and he couldn’t spit it out fast enough. His eyes sought hers.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  Puzzled, she reached for a doughnut, took a nibble, and understood what had happened. She had put salt in the batter instead of sugar. Four cups of it!

  Jigger didn’t reach for a doughnut. Instead, he stood at the head of the table, grinning from ear to ear—as though he had been expecting this all along.

  The old goat had sabotaged her cooking!

  Without saying a word, she went over to the sack of “sugar” and tasted a few grains. It was salt. She pulled the box of salt off the shelf and tasted. It was filled with sugar.

  “You switched them!” she accused.

  “I don’t know what yer talking about.” Jigger acted as innocent as a newborn babe. “You must’ve gotten things mixed up, getting up so late and all. It’s easy to make a mistake when you’re only half awake.”

  Robert rose, took the tray of doughnuts over to the garbage pail, and dumped them in.

  “Come here.” He motioned Jigger and Katie to follow him to a far corner of the kitchen.

  “She won’t get up in time to do her work properly,” Jigger complained. “Never saw such a lazy woman. Even got the salt and sugar mixed up.”

  Katie opened her mouth to defend herself, but Robert put up a hand to stop her. “I have a lumber camp to run, hungry men to feed, and limited supplies and resources to do it with. If the two of you can’t figure a way to work things out, you’re both fired.”

  He looked back and forth between them. “Do I make myself clear?”

  Katie nodded, her face aflame.

  “Do you understand?” he asked Jigger.

  “Yeah.” Jigger was the picture of penitence as he stared at the ground.

  “Good.”

  Robert went back to his meal. Silence once again descended as the men finished filling their bellies with nothing more than bacon and flapjacks.

  A lump grew in Katie’s throat and tears threatened at the injustice of it all. She had done nothing wrong, and yet Robert had judged her anyway. Determined not to cry in front of the men, she fled out of the back door to her borrowed cabin.

  The moment she entered, she slid the bolt shut on Blackie’s fancy lock so no one could come in. Then she lay facedown on the bed and burst into tears.

  It was a cry that was long, long overdue. She had not cried when Harlan had mistreated her. She had not cried the day Ned and she had made that terrifying flight into the unknown. She had not cried yesterday when her feet and back had ached so bad she could hardly stand up.

  She had worked as hard as she knew how, and all she had gotten for it was being chastised by a man she had thought might actually become a friend.

  Years of frustration and anger poured out into the straw-tick mattress. The privations of war. The burning of her home by Northern soldiers. She cried over having to sell the valiant Rebel’s Pride. She even cried over how much she missed her two good cows.

  Never in her life had she cried so much or so hard. Part of it was because of extreme fatigue. She had slept but a handful of hours in the past week. And part of it was because it was overdue. She had had enough. It was hard to cook for all those men, let alone with Jigger sabotaging her efforts and Robert standing ready to scold her just because of Jigger’s meanness.

  It felt as though everything had come crashing down on her at once, and she cried until she was sick.

  Then, as her sobs slowed, she hiccupped a few times, wiped her tears away with the edge of a pillowcase, and forced herself to think about what to do next. One thing she knew—self-pity wasn’t going to fix anything.

  She went over to the basin of water and washed her face again. She lit the kerosene lamp and took a good, hard look in the mirror. What she saw was a woman with a red nose, blotchy face, and swollen eyes. She was a mess, and it was well past time to head back into the kitchen to clean up and prepare for lunch. It felt as though she had already put in a full day’s work and it was only five o’clock in the morning.

  She didn’t relish facing Jigger after his prank, especially with the aftermath of her tears still written all over her face, but she had to do something that would stop this nonsense. If she didn’t get the upper hand, and soon, she would lose her job. Robert hadn’t been joking when he’d threatened to fire both of them. After this morning’s fiasco, she didn’t blame him.

  As she stared at her mottled reflection in the mirror, she decided that she was tired of being the victim. Sick to death of being some man’s punching bag. A raw fury stronger than anything she had ever felt before washed over her. She’d tried being nice. She’d tried being polite. She’d even made excuses to herself for Jigger’s bad behavior. But no more. That old bully wasn’t going to cause her to lose her job without a fight!

  If there was one thing she knew she could do well—it was cook. Jigger wasn’t going to take this well-paying job away from her. If it came down to a contest of wills between her and the old man, he was going to lose.

  Robert saw the look on Katie’s face as he scolded her and Jigger. He saw the tears threatening to spill over from her big blue eyes, and he saw her leave the cook shanty the minute she could escape.

  All of this pain, just because of a stupid prank Jigger had played and his own overreaction to it. He knew she had not made a mistake. Jigger had deliberately engineered it. Practical jokes were common in a lumber camp. Many of them were pretty rough. He had seen half-frozen raccoons put into bedrolls and tins of lice poured down the back of an unsuspecting greenhorn’s shirt. He’d seen grown men, bored with camp, make a game out of whacking a blindfolded logger on the backside with a stick and then challenging him to guess who had hit him. In a lumber camp, exchanging salt for sugar was pretty mild stuff.

  But the tension between his two cooks was getting on his nerves. He had meant what he said. Katie was going to have to find a way to deal with Jigger or both of them were going to be out on their ear. He’d figure out a way to cook himself before he’d put up with any more of this nonsense.

  He really did mean it. At least he had meant it when he said it, with the sting of salty doughnuts still on his tongue. Now, well . . . Katie was crying. />
  From outside her cabin, he could hear her sobs. He was certain she thought everyone was still in the cook shanty, eating her feather-light flapjacks, but he was here, outside her door, and her sobs had taken his appetite away.

  The girl had been so plucky, had tried so hard, had worked nonstop since they had arrived—without one complaint. She had even endured his lecture this morning without a whimper or word of defense. She had stood there, absorbing his words. He wondered now how hard Jigger had made things for the girl when his back was turned.

  He also wondered what she had experienced before coming to the camp to make her so stoic, so accepting of hardship. He knew next to nothing about her except what he had seen with his own eyes—her love for her brother, her skill in the kitchen, that lift of her chin the first time she had told him she was a good cook. Being a good cook was obviously something she was proud of—maybe the only thing—and Jigger had ruined it for her.

  Robert had seen her look of pleasure as she had surveyed the table right before the men had dug in. Her eyes had lingered a little longer on the carefully stacked pyramid of perfect, golden doughnuts. She was proud of them. Proud of having made them.

  After getting up in the middle of the night to create a wonderful breakfast for the men, after having done her level best to make a work of art out of nothing more than breakfast in a rough lumber camp—thanks to him and Jigger, she had been humiliated and chastised.

  Her sobs were breaking his heart.

  He raised a fist to knock on the cabin door. Then he pulled his hand away and jammed it into his pocket. If she opened the door, with those big tear-stained blue eyes, he would melt. Pure and simple. In fact, he had already begun to melt. Katie was starting to occupy too many of his thoughts, and he was only two days into logging. In fact, he hadn’t even begun to log yet. His crew wasn’t complete. Not one tree had been felled. And already things felt as though they were spinning out of control.

  The problem was, he couldn’t afford to let Katie’s sobs affect him, or the wall he had erected between himself and the rest of the world would crumble. As it was, it was all he could do just to keep putting one foot in front of the other long enough to support his family. Had he not possessed the ability to harden his heart, he would have already lost his mind.

  The nightmares alone would have driven him mad.

  He had looked into the eyes of men who were dying and whom he had no way on earth of helping. He had seen the pleas in their faces—begging him to save them for their wives, their children, their aged mothers and fathers.

  He had watched good, decent men falling, men whose families were depending on them to return to their small family farms. Needing their strength at home to keep the children fed, the families intact. There were too many men whose wives had ended up like Katie, alone in the world and trying to keep body and soul together by any means possible. He had seen some of those war widows, out of sheer desperation, working in the brothels of Bay City.

  He couldn’t save everyone. He could barely save himself.

  He shoved away the memories of the bloodbaths he had endured. He took a deep breath of the clean air of the pine woods and stared at the treetops in the distance—the giant pines in whose presence he felt cleansed and renewed.

  Cutting logs, ordering supplies, hiring men. Taking his turn with an axe or a crosscut saw or a peavey. This was what he did now. This was who he was. If he were to make a success of this camp, he would have to be tough. Logging companies weren’t built by men who fell apart over the sound of a woman crying.

  Resolutely, he walked back to the cook shanty and took his place at the table. Katie would have to learn how to deal with the realities of life in a lumber camp, or she would have to go. It was that simple. And Jigger would have to straighten up, or he would have to go. Robert couldn’t waste another minute worrying about either of them. He had children depending on him for support, and the only way he knew to do that was to float at least three-hundred-thousand board feet of timber down the Saginaw River come spring.

  Katie swept into the kitchen after she saw the men leave, with her jaw set and her head held high. She was done with tears and finished with cowering and placating. The only person left in the room when she entered was Jigger, who was wiping off the table with a rag and a bucket of water.

  “Where’s Ned?” she asked.

  “The boy’s watching Tinker fixin’ the steps out front.” Jigger rinsed the rag out with one hand.

  “I’m glad he’s not here. I want to talk to you. Alone.” She picked up a butcher knife from the worktable and tested the blade. “That was a good one, Jigger—your practical joke.”

  He grinned, proud of himself.

  “You don’t know me very well.” She picked up the whetting stone and hefted it in her hand. “Do you?”

  “Don’t need to,” Jigger muttered, going back to his work. “Women are all about the same.”

  “Not really.” She began to hone the butcher knife with the stone, taking slow, steady swipes. “Once you get to know them, women are very different, one from another. Take me, for example.” She tested the knife by cutting a small shred off an old newspaper lying nearby. “I used to be an innocent, trusting girl. Very sensitive. I could weep just at the thought of something or someone being in pain.”

  Jigger sniffed, dismissing her statement.

  “Then my husband went to war, and I had to fend for myself. I nearly starved until I learned how to trap rabbits and gut them. I learned how to fish and how to clean those too.” She held the newspaper in front of her face and slowly sliced off another sliver with the razor-sharp knife. “In order to survive, I had to become so hard-hearted that I could chop off a chicken’s head and watch it bleed out without so much as blinking—already planning the dumplings I would stew in its broth.”

  Jigger’s hand that had been wiping off the table stilled—and she saw that she had his complete attention.

  “What’re you saying?” he said.

  “What I’m saying is—and you need to listen carefully here—that sweet little boy out there is the only close relative I have left on this earth. If anyone is foolish enough to force me into a corner, I’ll do whatever I have to do to take care of him.” She brought her hand down suddenly, plunging the butcher knife into the work counter with so much force that it quivered. “If you ever try to sabotage my cooking again, by even so much as one teaspoonful of baking soda, you will regret it.”

  He tilted his head back, his eyes squinted. “What do you think yer gonna do?”

  She stared him down while enunciating very slowly. “You don’t want to find out, old man.”

  He turned away and continued to wipe the table.

  And then she saw Robert standing stock still at the back of the room. Had he heard her threats? Did he believe them? Did it matter?

  She straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin, and looked him square in the eye. It might do him some good to be a little wary of her too.

  Robert was wearing an old slouch hat. Without taking his eyes off of her, he lifted a hand and tipped his hat in a sign of deference and respect. Then he left, quietly closing the door behind him.

  10

  With patched-up clothes and rubber boots

  and mud up to the knees

  with lice as big as chili beans

  fighting with the fleas.

  “The Jolly Shanty Boy Song”

  —1800s shanty song

  Robert couldn’t help but smile over the look of alarm he had seen on Jigger’s face as Katie had subtly threatened him with a butcher knife. Anyone who had heard her sobbing in her bunk an hour ago wouldn’t be worried. That sweet girl wasn’t capable of hurting a fly. But if her threats kept Jigger in line, Robert would never tell.

  He had gone to the cook shanty intending to let Katie and Jigger know that two teams of axe men, four men total, had arrived and would be needing dinner. But Katie seemed to have things well under control. His guess was that after this mor
ning’s disaster, she would outdo herself for dinner and supper. If Jigger’s expression was any indication, he would be quite the helper too.

  Hopefully, the tempest that had been brewing in the cook shanty was at an end and he could attend to more important things—like scrounging up a second teamster and praying that more good men, some who had already promised to come, would materialize.

  As he made his way through the camp, the sun broke out over the distant trees. In front of the sunrise, coming from the east, rode a man driving a team of horses. The sun blinded Robert, and he shaded his eyes to see who it was.

  He was a little surprised when the man drew closer and he saw that he was black—not one of the various shades of brown worn by many freed men Robert had known but the inky blackness born of Africa. He was well-muscled and his team of horses shone with health. It was not unheard of for black men to work in the lumber camps, but it wasn’t common.

  “Nice-looking team you’ve got there,” Robert called as the wagon drew near.

  The man gave a low whistle, and the horses came to a complete stop. Robert was impressed. No harsh tugging on the reins, no customary string of curse words.

  “I hear you’s hiring.”

  “I am.” Robert checked out the wagon, which was in excellent repair. “What’s your name?”

  “Mose.” The teamster’s face was expressionless, but his muscles were taut as though steeled for rejection.

  “Where are you from, Mose?”

  “Josiah Henson’s.” He jerked his head toward the north. “Up in Canada. We lumbered a deal of black walnut ’round his place. I’m a right good hand with an axe, as well as a team.”

  Robert had heard of Josiah Henson, who had escaped North before the war. Henson had managed to buy land upon which he had founded a cooperative colony of former slaves. The quality of work done there was legendary. From what Robert had heard, if Mose had been trained by Josiah Henson, he would be worth hiring indeed.