The Cookcamp

by Gary Paulsen

  To the memory of MY GRANDMOTHER

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  PORTRAIT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FOR THE BEST IN LITERATURE

  Praise for GARY PAULSEN’S The Cookcamp

  COPYRIGHT

  OR a long time during a war his father was in the army and had to be away to fight, and the boy had to go live with his grandmother.

  Of course, nothing happens that smoothly. Going to live with his grandmother did not come about so easily.

  His mother had taken a job in a factory because she said they needed the money.

  The boy was only five years old, but even then he knew they did not need the money. Checks came each month from the army, and another came from his grandfather — his father’s father — so they did not need the money.

  It was that his mother was bored. She was bored and did not want to spend endless days sitting in the apartment listening to the radio and drinking coffee and waiting.

  The boy knew — sensed — that. He had heard her say it.

  He felt the same.

  He tried to tell her so, his mother, tried to tell her he felt the same, but she didn’t hear it in some way, and she took a job in a factory and he was sent to live with his grandmother.

  Still it did not happen that smoothly.

  At first his mother hired a baby-sitter and kept him in the apartment.

  But the baby-sitter was a crazy woman who sat and drank red wine and listened to and talked to the radio soap operas all day and didn’t bathe and smelled bad, and so he was sent to live with his grandmother in the north.

  But even then what happened was not to be as gentle and smooth as that.

  He learned to be around the baby-sitter and to live with her so his mother did not know how bad it was, and when she asked if he liked the baby-sitter he shrugged and said:

  “Sometimes she makes me hot cereal.” He did not add that the hot cereal was Shredded Wheat with hot water from the faucet poured over it and did not say how he had to drain it himself and find a spoon himself or that the cereal came only in the afternoon when he was hungry and whined.

  So his mother was fooled, and he could have stayed with her and not gone to be with his grandmother in the north woods.

  Except for the man.

  The man was tall and had blond hair like his mother’s only much shorter. He had a thick neck and full shoulders and a wide smile with large white teeth, and his name was Casey.

  Casey came home from the factory with his mother one night.

  “You must say hello to Casey,” his mother said. “He is your uncle and is going to stay with us for a while.”

  But of course he was not an uncle at all, and that first night the boy came out of the bedroom in their small apartment and saw his mother with Casey on the couch making sounds he did not understand but did not like — sounds he did not understand but that made him want to not like Casey forever and ever.

  And his mother saw him staring at them on the couch.

  She pushed Casey away.

  She held the boy and cried.

  And the next day she pinned a note to his jacket and put him on a train, and he rode alone a day and a night sleeping in a Pullman berth and part of another day to get to the small town by the Canadian border where he would meet his grandmother, who was working as a cook for a rough crew of men building a road up into Canada.

  And that was the way it finally happened.

  E HAD never ridden alone on the train before. His mother had been with him the first time, to Chicago, but now the train seemed so different it was like a new world.

  The porter read the note pinned to his jacket and put him in a seat at the front of the car. Twice when he had to go to the bathroom the porter took him by the hand and brought him back to the seat when he was finished.

  Always smiling, the porter made him relax. The porter brought him comic books. The boy could not read, but the pictures held him for a long part of the ride.

  In the middle of the day the porter brought him a lunch in a box and sat with him speaking in low murmurs while the boy ate.

  As it started to get dark the porter lowered the bed for the boy and tucked him in. When he tried to stay awake in the compartment and look at comic books, the porter came back.

  “Boy needs his sleep,” the porter said, and turned the light out. “Boy needs to get his rest….”

  And when the boy still couldn’t sleep the porter came back again and sat on the edge of his bunk and sang him a long song about a woman in New Orleans.

  The song didn’t mean much to the boy. It was all about a beautiful woman and a man who broke her heart.

  But the words didn’t seem to matter. The porter’s voice was low and soothing.

  “Ole Josie,

  laid me low,

  laid me low.

  Ole Josie

  took my money

  and laid me low….”

  The boy lay back in the Pullman bunk and let the porter’s music take him down until his eyes closed and he went to sleep thinking only a little about his mother and Casey.

  * * *

  IN THE NIGHT they went through Minneapolis, where the boy had to change trains. The porter bundled him from one train to the next wrapped in a blanket, and he did not really awaken except to half-hear the hiss of steam and sounds of people running in the depot.

  In the morning he awakened to the rumble of wheels and opened the curtain on the side of his bed to look outside.

  The train was rolling through thick forest — trees that were so richly green and tall and thick it seemed the train was roaring through a green tunnel.

  There was not a dining car on the train. After the new porter raised the bunk and dropped the seats into place, he brought the boy a paper bag. Inside was a small bottle of milk, some grapes, and a biscuit with grape jelly, wrapped in waxed paper.

  The boy sat up in the seat with the note still pinned to his jacket and ate the grapes and biscuit. The biscuit was crumbly but very good, and when he’d finished each and every crumb he drank the small bottle of milk.

  And all this time the train roared through the trees and past lakes and finally, late in the afternoon, it began to slow.

  The boy had become bored by the endless green and had dozed off, his face leaning against the glass. The stopping of the train awakened him, and he sat up just as the porter came to his seat.

  “This is where you get off,” the porter said, smiling. “Your people should be waiting for you in the depot. Make sure you’ve got all your fixings and come on….”

  The boy jumped up and grabbed the sack with his clothes, and the porter took his small suitcase, and he followed the porter out of the car.

  Outside it was hot, and the damp heat hit the boy as he came into the opening between the cars. The conductor was standing below on the wooden platform and helped him down.

  The first thing he saw was the station. There was no town. The trees had been cleared back, and a single yellow building had been put next to the tracks as a depot. On the side of the building was a sign:

  PINE, MINN.

  But there was no town, only the one building. The locomotive made hissing and cracking sounds as if impatient to be going, and the boy moved away from the car, afraid of the loud noise and the big steel driver wheels on the engine.

  He could not see his grandmother. The dep
ot agent came onto the platform with a canvas mailbag and nodded to the boy, who was standing next to the porter.

  “Isn’t the boy’s family here?” the porter asked.

  “Nope.” The agent shook his head. “And no word, either, about a boy….”

  “Well, we can’t take him back on the train.” The porter leaned over the platform and spit tobacco juice neatly down by the train wheels. “We’re going up into Canada, sonny, and won’t be back until day after tomorrow.”

  The depot agent rubbed his neck and shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve just got a cot in the back room — I’m only here two nights.” He looked at the boy. “What’s your family’s name?”

  The boy told him the name of his grandmother.

  “Halverson,” the station agent repeated the name. “Anita Halverson.” He shook his head again. “Nope. I don’t know the name….”

  The whistle on the locomotive gave a sudden blast, and the porter stepped forward. “We’re cutting into our running time. I’ve got an idea. You take him and keep him. If nobody comes for him we’ll pick him up on the way back and I’ll put you in for two days extra pay.”

  “Done.” The agent nodded, but the porter had already mounted the steps and waved to the engineer. The locomotive snorted and jerked and the train was moving. In minutes the caboose had disappeared around a curve.

  In the sudden silence the boy heard a bird singing.

  “What’s your name, boy?” the agent asked.

  The boy told him, but the agent had turned away and didn’t hear the answer. He moved into the depot, and after a minute the boy picked up his sack and suitcase and lugged them after the man, trying not to cry.

  Inside the depot it was dark and cool. The agent moved into a small room at the end of the building. The boy went to a bench along the wall and sat down with his sack and suitcase next to his feet.

  HE boy sat on the bench and saw all the things there were to see in the depot room. There was a monster stove in one corner for heat in the winter, with a wood-box, scarred and beaten, in back of it where the agent kept wood. It was empty now.

  The bench was too high and the boy’s feet did not reach the floor and were uncomfortable, felt pinched. He swung them back and forth to loosen them up and thought of how it would be if his grandmother did not come for him.

  What would they do?

  Send him back to Chicago where his mother worked in the war plant and lived with Uncle Casey and he would have to live with Uncle Casey, probably, though he hated Uncle Casey for the sounds.

  There was a clock on the wall with a brass pendulum that swung back and forth, and he watched it, listened to the loud ticking that seemed to fill the whole room. Now and then the agent would move something in the back room, and the boy would hear a thump or a scrape.

  Probably they would send him back to Chicago to live if his grandmother didn’t come, and when he thought that, he missed his mother and could not keep from crying. He bit his lower lip and kept very quiet, but the tears came just the same and dripped off his cheek down onto his hand while he stared at the clock and thought that it wouldn’t even be bad to live with Uncle Casey if his grandmother didn’t come and he had to go back to Chicago.

  It would be better than sitting on the bench in this old depot where his feet didn’t reach the floor, listening to a dumb old clock tick back and forth.

  “I’m sure they’ll come for you,” the agent said, appearing suddenly from the back room. “Your people, I mean. They’ll come. Don’t worry. Here, take this.”

  In his hand he held a doughnut that had been dipped in sugar. The boy nodded and thanked him and took the doughnut and bit into it. He was not hungry — had just eaten on the train — but the doughnut tasted good anyway and he ate it all.

  “I’d give you something to drink, but I’ve only got coffee in my thermos and you look a bit young for coffee….”

  And he was gone, back into the small room, closing the door behind him and leaving the boy sitting on the bench with the doughnut crumbs on his shirt.

  The day passed. No other trains came by, and after what seemed like years sitting on the bench memorizing everything in the room the boy slid down to his feet and went outside on the platform.

  Once outside he could hear the sounds of the birds again. A large blue one — he did not know the different kinds of birds — landed on a limb not far from him and made an ugly, squawking sound, then flew to a limb farther down the track.

  The boy followed the bird, kept following as it flew slightly farther on until he looked around and was surprised to find that he could not see the depot.

  The woods seemed to swoop in on him from both sides of the tracks. Thick and green and closing on him, frightening, and he turned and ran back down the tracks until he came around the curve and saw the depot.

  He kept trotting until he was at the platform again, where he sat down in the shade of the building. A mosquito landed on his hand and began to drink and he watched it fill, then squashed it.

  “Dumb bug …”

  Just then he heard the sound of a motor coming, and he walked around the side of the depot to the back where it met the woods.

  A narrow road had been cut through the forest, little more than twin ruts, and as he watched the opening of the road the motor sounds grew louder and still louder until it seemed as if a locomotive would somehow appear in the dirt ruts.

  When he thought he’d have to cover his ears, an enormous dump truck suddenly exploded out of the forest on the road and screeched to a halt barely a foot from the wall of the depot in a cloud of dust, scattering gravel.

  For a moment the boy could see nothing but dust, but when it began to settle he saw the door on the passenger side of the truck open and a small figure step down, first to the running board, then, hanging on to the handle, down to the ground.

  It was his grandmother.

  He stood for a second, still in shock from the size and speed of the truck suddenly blasting out of the trees. Then it all caught up with him, the long train ride and Uncle Casey and finding himself alone at the depot, alone in the world with nothing but a sugar doughnut, and he ran to her — ran into her head-on, crying and not caring that he was crying.

  “Oh my,” she said, wrapping her arms around his head and shoulders and hugging him. “Oh my, look what we found at the depot.”

  She held him away and used the edge of her thumb to wipe his eyes. “Did you think we weren’t coming for you?”

  He nodded, still sniffling.

  “Ever and ever not coming for you?”

  Again he nodded, but he could see the smile in her eyes and on her face and he smiled as well.

  “The truck. Something didn’t work right in the truck and we had to stop at many streams and add water to the radiator in the front of it. Many streams.”

  While she was talking, the door on the driver’s side opened and a man seemingly as large as the truck stepped down. He spit off to the side and wiped his chin with his hand — a hand as big as a ham — and snorted: “Fan belt slips. Got to tighten her. She gets hot.”

  The depot door opened and the agent stepped out, drawn by the sound of the truck motor. He nodded to the driver. “You must be the boy’s family.”

  “Not me. I’m Carl.” The big man pointed with his chin. “She’s the boy’s grandma. I brought her.” His words were short, the sentences almost cut off. “We’re late. You got a crescent wrench?”

  They moved inside, and the boy looked up at his grandmother. “I came alone on the train and they gave me a lunch in a sack with some grapes and we saw miles and miles of trees and more trees….”

  She laughed. “And you’re going to see a lot more. We’re eighty miles by dirt road to where we’ll be and it’s all woods. All the way.”

  While she talked her hands moved through his hair, combing it over to the side in gentle strokes. Her hand felt good to him. He leaned against her, smelling the road dust and the exhaust fumes from the truck i
n her dress.

  The agent and the driver came back out and lifted the hood on the truck. They had several wrenches, and after some hammering and swearing they grunted, spit in the dirt, and closed the hood.

  “She’s tight now, by God,” Carl said. Then, when he saw the boy standing close and the look in his grandmother’s eyes, he added, “Sorry.”

  Carl climbed into the truck and waited while the boy and his grandmother went around and climbed up into the seat.

  The boy sat in the middle, and he had to sit with his legs spread apart so Carl could shift the transmission levers on the floor.

  Carl started the truck with great coughing sounds and clouds of smoke and went backwards and forwards until the truck was turned around, then started off down the narrow road through the woods.

  It was so noisy in the cab that the boy could not hear himself think. Yet Carl kept up a stream of short sentences, punctuating them by spitting snoose out the open window at the side.

  “Making a road up into Canada. Something to do with the war. We’re too old to be soldiers, but we can build roads. In case the Germans [he said “Chermans”] come over here. We might have to move north. In a hurry.”

  He yelled so loudly into the boy’s ear, leaning down with each sentence, that the boy kept jumping sideways, half-deafened.

  “Dumb idea. The road. Starts nowhere and ends nowhere. Just moves through the woods.”

  Soon the boy was used to even the loud noises, the smoke and whine of the truck grinding along, and he leaned against his grandmother. He felt her warmth through the sleeve of her dress, and even in the summer heat it made him feel good.

  But then everything rolled over him. The train ride and the waiting and the bouncing and grinding of the truck over the road and the warmth of his grandmother all came down on him and his eyes closed and he slept again, though this time in peace.

  HE silence awakened him.

  Suddenly it was very quiet, and he opened his eyes to find that the truck had stopped. The night was pitch dark and he could see nothing.

  “We’re home,” Carl whispered to him. Large hands wrapped around him under his armpits and lifted him past the steering wheel and down, and Carl carried him through the dark — so black the boy could see nothing — then up some steps and into a small building of some kind.