Measure of Katie Calloway, The: A Novel

by Serena B. Miller

  “There’s no more work at Henson’s?” Robert asked.

  “Gettin’ a little crowded. ’Bout five hundred of us there now. ’Sides, I’s figuring on travelin’ south come spring.”

  “I am in need of another teamster,” Robert said. “And I can always use a man who’s good with an axe. Take your horses on over to the barn and give them a good feed.” He paused for a split second. “You can put your bedroll in the bunkhouse.”

  This last statement hung in the air between them. They both knew that there might be men in that bunkhouse who would object to Mose sleeping beneath the same roof.

  If anyone did mind, Robert decided that he would no longer need their services.

  “Thank you kindly,” Mose said, “but I’d rather stay with my horses.”

  Mose wouldn’t be the first teamster to prefer the fresh hay of the barn and the wholesome smell of the animals to the smoky, noxious bunkhouse—but Robert needed to make sure that was what Mose wanted.

  “You’re welcome to bunk with us.”

  “I ’preciate that, but my horses get nervous if I’m not around. They like me being with ’em. Keeps ’em calm.” He gave Robert a shadow of a smile. “Keeps everybody calm.”

  “The pay is a dollar a day and all the food you can eat.”

  “I’m obliged.” Mose gave another low whistle, and the animals responded immediately.

  Mose’s style of driving horses was different than what Robert had ever seen before. He liked it.

  His camp was turning into an interesting place—but then lumber camps always drew a variety of men, all with their own personal reasons for seeking out work in the tall timber.

  A few were hiding from the law. Some might be avoiding a shotgun wedding. Many were war veterans, like him, trying to get back on their feet. Others were farmers trying to piece together a stake to help them make it on the land another year.

  He didn’t know what Mose’s story was, but he probably would before the winter was out. Everyone would know more than they ever wanted to know about one another—after working together for seven long months.

  Every time Katie glanced out of the cook shanty, she saw more men arriving. They were rough-looking men, carrying sacks over their shoulders and axes in their hands. There would be a full table tonight. The work was beginning in earnest now, and it was going to take everything she and Jigger could do to get enough food together. There was no time to quarrel, and they both knew it.

  She absolutely could no longer afford to sleep past two o’clock, and she had a plan she thought might work. When Jigger wasn’t looking, she had taken a washtub and an old teakettle out to her cabin, along with some thick string she had found in a drawer.

  The rich aroma of slow-cooked roasts, carved from a side of beef Sam had hung in the storage shed, drifted from the Dutch ovens she had just pulled from the stove. Three giant wooden bowls piled high with baked potatoes sat steaming nearby. Dried-apple pies cooled on the table where she had placed them at intervals. She had cooked, pared, mixed, and baked all afternoon.

  “We’re ready,” she told Jigger.

  He pulled the Gabriel horn off the wall and headed out the door. A few loud blasts later, and nearly thirty hungry men crowded in. Jigger took over the task of assigning each new man his permanent place at the table.

  She was so busy carrying platters of biscuits to the table that she barely took notice of all the new loggers. The places were filling up fast, and she was preoccupied with wondering whether or not she had prepared enough.

  As she brought the trays of potatoes to the table, she scanned the crowd, seeing many unfamiliar faces. At the end of the table, sitting beside Robert, she was surprised to see a large black man. At that very moment, the man glanced up, their eyes met, and she put out a hand to steady herself.

  She knew him.

  Not only did she know him, she could have recited the exact number of whip marks on his back. There were thirty. Her husband had put them there. She had counted them one dreadful evening, when the sound of each slash echoed against her own soul as her maid, Violet, sobbed in her arms.

  She had listened to those thirty lashes, wincing with each one, wishing she could block out the sound. Her temples pounded with the worst headache of her life, and she had vomited afterward.

  But her husband had been in high good humor when he came to her bedroom that night, and she had hated him for it.

  She and Mose stared at each other, bitter, mind-scorching memories hanging in the air between them.

  “Mrs. Smith,” Robert said, bringing her out of her trance. “Could we have some of those biscuits down here, please?”

  Mrs. Smith? Robert seldom called her that. She supposed he did so now because he was trying to establish a line of respect for her with all the new men. She saw a look of puzzlement pass over Mose’s face. No doubt, he was wondering why she was calling herself “Smith.”

  This man knew who she was and where she had come from. He had ample reason to despise her. Would he inform Robert that she had been the mistress of a plantation where he had been brutalized?

  She hurried to the end of the table and set the platter of biscuits down in front of Mose and Robert.

  “We could use some more butter too,” Robert said.

  “I’ll be right back.” She saw Mose reach for a biscuit as she scuttled toward the kitchen. She would butter that biscuit for him herself, if only he wouldn’t tell Robert who she was. She ran back and placed the butter at Robert’s elbow while shaking her head slightly at her former field hand’s silent, questioning gaze.

  The last time she had seen Mose, it had been a summer evening, near twilight. Harlan had forced him to go back into the fields the very next day after the whipping. That evening, her husband had gone into town. Unable to abide sitting alone at their formal dining table, she had taken a container of lemonade and a packet of food down to the river, planning to have a solitary picnic where it was a few degrees cooler.

  It was a lovely spot with willows overhanging the shallow water. The ripples made a sort of music that always calmed her. There was a small bench beside the river, where she sat and prepared to eat her cold supper.

  As she gazed into the brush on the other side of the stream, she realized that a man was crouching very still. He reminded her of a deer, pausing motionless, hoping to be invisible, waiting for a threat to pass.

  The wounded Mose had almost—but not quite—succeeded in blending into the shadows.

  She had known instantly that she had caught him in the act of running away.

  For as long as she lived, she would remember the look in his eyes when he realized that she had spotted him. Those eyes had pled with her to keep silent, to let him go. It was as though he had shouted at her—so strongly did he beg her with his eyes to ignore his presence.

  And she, the young bride of the largest plantation owner in the county, had held the man’s life in the balance. God forgive her, she had actually debated what to do. She had heard all the pro-slavery arguments from Harlan and the other plantation owners while desperately trying to fit into the incomprehensible social circle into which marriage had thrust her. She had tried hard to believe in those arguments.

  But to her credit, she said nothing when she saw Mose frozen on the other side of the creek with terror written on his face. With the sound of the whip still ringing in her ears, she had gotten up from her seat, deliberately leaving her food and drink untouched upon the stone seat.

  She had walked toward the big house without turning around, and as she walked, she had sung a hymn she had learned at her father’s knee, “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us,” until she heard a slight splashing in the river and knew Mose was gone.

  She did not turn around until reaching the big house. Then she allowed herself a glance over her shoulder. Although she was far away by then, she could see that the picnic she had prepared for herself had disappeared, and so—she hoped—had Mose.

  That night, Harlan had retur
ned very late. As she lay beside him, she prayed for Mose’s safe escape and for his deliverance to a kinder place than the plantation in which she lived.

  She never said a word about what had happened. Not to her angry husband the next morning, nor to the house slaves when she heard them chattering amongst themselves about the field hand’s disappearance. Her own maid, Violet, whom she suspected of being in love with Mose, went into a quiet mourning, and Katie could not risk assuaging even her grief.

  Looking back, she believed that the moment when she had left her picnic behind and turned her back so Mose could run was one of the few truly fine things she had ever done in her life. With all her heart, she wished she had been strong and brave and smart enough to have done more.

  Now, it was her eyes that pled for silence. And it was Mose, after his initial surprise, who silently turned away.

  Like most camp owners, Robert had built the bunkhouse without windows. There was no need to go to the expense and bother of transporting and installing panes of glass for the long building. Winter days in Michigan were short. The men living in this shanty would be awake and at work long before daylight. They wouldn’t come back to the bunkhouse until after dark.

  A long seat called a “deacon’s bench” made of split logs ran around the inside of the room, flush against the bunks. In the middle, a barrel stove squatted in a box of sand with its stovepipe shooting straight up through an open hole in the roof. The stovepipe funneled some of the smoke out, and the hole let fresh air in. After men’s intestines had absorbed the full effect of eating meals consisting of beans and bacon, the bunkhouse was always in need of a little fresh air.

  There were twenty double bunks made of rough-sawn pine lining the walls. Each was built to hold two men. It was common for strangers who might not even speak the same language to sleep two to a bunk. They slept fully clothed, cushioned by sawdust or straw, doubling up their blankets, and kept from freezing by sharing body warmth. He would have a crew of thirty, so he had room to keep a bunk to himself. His personal supply of wool blankets was thick enough that he thought he could survive the winter without a bunk partner.

  Several of the men lined the deacon’s bench. Some lay in bunks. The logger from Maine was sharpening his axe on the grindstone that sat in the middle of the floor. Ernie, one of the few men who favored a mustache instead of a beard, scraped at his jaw with his own newly sharpened axe blade. Cletus was carving something that looked like a miniature horse. A Dutchman named Klaas was hanging his wet socks with all the others over the stove on a wire that stretched the length of the bunkhouse. Soon, the socks would begin to steam and add their own ripe aroma to the smoke and sweat.

  Henri, one of the new men, was sitting cross-legged on a top bunk, his back against the wall, his eyes closed, playing a soft tune on his fiddle. Come Saturday night, the tune would become more raucous, but this was a work night and there would be no dancing and singing.

  Skypilot was lying in his top bunk, reading a ragged Bible by the light of a kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling. This behavior was out of the norm. Few shanty boys owned a Bible, let alone read one.

  “So—you think you’re a preacher.” Sam sat on the deacon’s bench, picking his teeth and watching Skypilot with mild curiosity.

  Skypilot licked his finger and turned a page. “Nope.”

  “That’s what Ernie and Cletus said.”

  “Ernie and Cletus were wrong.”

  “If you ain’t a preacher,” Sam said suspiciously, “then how come they call you Skypilot?”

  Skypilot kept his eyes on the page. “Because I used to be a preacher.”

  “How can anyone used to be a preacher?” Sam probed. “Either you are or you ain’t.”

  “Not if you get fired, you’re not.”

  “You got fired? From a church?”

  Skypilot sighed and put his finger in the Bible to mark his place. “Yes.”

  “What in thunder did you do, man?”

  “I was not happy about the institution of slavery.”

  “A lot of us up here in the North weren’t,” Sam scoffed.

  “I wasn’t in the North.” Skypilot laid his Bible on his chest, folded his arms behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. “I was living in Richmond.”

  “Wait a minute. You mean you were trying to be an abolitionist right smack dab in the capital of the Confederacy?” Sam’s jaw hung open. Henri’s fiddle playing stopped. All paused to stare at Skypilot.

  “I preached some sermons against it, yes. I thought there were things that reasonable Christian people ought to think about before they started shooting at each other. But according to my father-in-law-to-be, I was a ‘fire-breathing, dyed-in-the-wool, wild-eyed, raving lunatic’ who was trying to destroy him and everything he held dear.”

  “Then what happened?” Sam asked.

  “It got my dander up. Within twenty-four hours of a sermon in which I compared my father-in-law and others like him to the Pharaoh who tried to keep Moses and the Hebrew children in slavery, my engagement to his daughter was cut off and the leaders of the church gave me the boot.”

  “What did you do then?” Cletus’s eyes were huge.

  “I lived up to my former fiancée’s father’s low opinion of me by escorting over fifty slaves across the Ohio River and I made certain that several were his.”

  “How come you’re an axe man now?”

  “I put myself through Bible college on one season of timber-cutting at a time. I’d work a year and go to school a year. Took me a while.”

  “We ran two preachers out of my camp last year.” Sam spat a stream of tobacco juice into the sand beneath the stove. “You planning on tryin’ any of that convertin’ stuff on us?”

  “Nope.”

  Sam leaned back against the deacon’s bench. “How come?”

  “Here.” Skypilot tossed his Bible at Sam. “Read it for yourself. Make your own decision. I’m done with preaching.” Skypilot turned his back on Sam and faced the wall.

  Sam gingerly laid the Bible on the deacon’s bench as though it might bite. “Think I’ll get some shut-eye.” He pulled off his shoes and crawled into his bunk.

  “That woman cook.” The big logger from Maine spread his blanket on the bunk he had chosen. “She’s a widow?”

  “Yes,” Robert answered.

  “Pretty little thing.”

  Sounds of affirmation came from around the bunkhouse. Robert kept quiet. So far, no one had said anything out of place. Katie was a pretty little thing, and she was a cook.

  “A man could get used to having a woman like that around,” Mainer said.

  More sounds of affirmation. Robert was glad now that he was sharing the bunkhouse with his men. He could keep the talk about Katie from spiraling downward.

  Henri hung his fiddle on a peg on the wall. “Where is the girl from?”

  “Ohio,” Robert said.

  “That’s odd,” Tinker said. “There seems to be some Southern in her talk.”

  “Ohio’s south of us.”

  “Not that far south.”

  “Do you think she’ll make flapjacks again for breakfast tomorrow?” Ernie asked.

  “Or more of ’em fried potatoes,” Cletus said. “I love ’em fried potatoes.”

  Robert relaxed. Their questions and comments were normal for a group of men whose interests lay, to a large extent, in what they put into their stomachs. He allowed himself to settle down in his bunk. Tomorrow morning would come soon enough. He hoped to start felling trees tomorrow.

  As the men settled down for the night, Skypilot quietly climbed down out of his bunk, knelt beside the deacon’s bench, bowed his head, and began to pray. It wasn’t loud, and Robert couldn’t make out the words, but he could hear Skypilot’s voice softly conversing with God.

  Out of the darkness, someone threw a shoe at the kneeling logger. It hit him square in the back. Skypilot stopped praying, picked up the shoe, looked at it, set it down, and resumed his prayer. A few mome
nts later, another shoe came sailing out of the same bunk. Robert knew it was Sam doing it. This time, the shoe hit Skypilot in the back of the head. Again Skypilot picked up the shoe, looked at it, rubbed the back of his head, and slowly got to his feet.

  “Now, Sam, why’d you have to go and do that for?” Skypilot said.

  This time it was Sam’s wet, dirty sock that was flung, hitting Skypilot square in the face.

  There was an intake of breath all around the bunkhouse as they waited to see what Skypilot would do. Almost reluctantly, Skypilot walked over, grabbed a fistful of Sam’s shirt, punched him twice in the face, then calmly went back to the deacon’s bench and resumed his prayer. This time, the bunkhouse remained silent. Nothing else was thrown, and Skypilot was allowed to finish in peace.

  Robert went to sleep with a smile on his face. This camp was going to be a very interesting place this winter.

  11

  About four o’clock our noisy little cook

  cries, “Boys, it is the break of day.”

  With heavy sighs from slumber we rise

  to go with the bright morning star.

  “A Shantyman’s Life”

  —1800s shanty song

  October 10, 1867

  A loud clatter awoke Katie from a sound sleep. It sounded as though the roof had fallen in. She lit the lamp beside her bed and checked her watch. It was a few minutes past two o’clock in the morning.

  Finally! After several experiments, her makeshift alarm had worked. Never again would she be late for preparing breakfast. Never again would she have to rely on Jigger to awaken her.

  She was smiling as she went to investigate the contraption she had rigged. The candle had burned to within an inch of the base, to where she had imbedded the string in the candle wax. The string, which had been tied to her bedpost and strung up over the rafter, had caught fire when the candle had burned down to the point she had marked after letting a similar candle burn through the previous night. This had released the old teakettle to plunge against the washtub she had turned upside down beneath it.