The Cookcamp

by Gary Paulsen

  “I’ll light a lamp,” his grandmother said. There were some scraping sounds and a splash of yellow light as she struck a match and lit an oil lamp on a table along the wall.

  In the glow, the boy could see they were in a long, narrow room with tables and chairs, and benches down the side. At the end was a wood cooking stove and kitchen where the boy could see bins of flour and potatoes. Next to the stove was a small bed and off to the side was a bunk. Carl put the boy on the bunk.

  “He’s still asleep,” Carl said. “Button cute. Like a puppy.” But the boy wasn’t asleep and heard it.

  Carl turned to leave, and the boy’s grandmother undressed him and tucked him in. The sheets on the small bed smelled of flowers to the boy, flowers and soft summer smells that he remembered without knowing how he remembered them.

  His grandmother went to one of the tables and sat and carefully took the pins out of her hair, which fell in long coils of rich black and gray that hung down her back, and he wanted to see more, wanted to watch her in the yellow light from the lamp but could not.

  He could not. No matter the excitement of the day and train ride — no matter.

  He could not keep his eyes open, and he was once more asleep.

  HE noise startled the boy so badly that he jerked up in the small bed and hit his head against the bottom of a shelf overhead.

  The noise was deafening — a roar he had never heard before — and for a few seconds he did not know where he was and was frightened, and he cried out.

  “What’s wrong, little thimble?” His grandmother suddenly appeared and sat on the edge of the bunk. “I’m right here.”

  “It’s the noise — I didn’t know where I was. It scared me.”

  “I’m here,” she repeated. “I’ll always be here.”

  She rubbed his forehead and cheeks with the back of her hand, a gentle touch, then used her fingers to straighten his mussed hair. She had her hair back in a bun, gray and black mixed in a thick coiled braid. But some hairs had come loose, and he saw that she had flour on her cheeks.

  “What is the noise?” the boy asked, pulling the blanket up around his neck. “It’s so loud.”

  “That’s just the men starting the engines on the trucks and the cats. They always run them in the morning before breakfast to loosen the oil. They’ll be in to eat soon.”

  She moved back to the stove, and the boy could feel the heat from it now that he was awake.

  He decided he didn’t want to be still in bed when the men came in, so he rolled out and put his feet on the floor and stood barefoot in his underwear. He found his pants at the end of the bed and pulled them on and a T-shirt and walked, still barefoot, out around the wood-burning stove.

  His grandmother was making biscuits, and she had just finished pulling a pan of them out of the oven on the stove when she saw him.

  “I thought you might go back to sleep.”

  He shook his head but said nothing. The smell from the biscuits seemed to fill the room, fill the world, and when she wiped them with a small cloth smeared with butter so the hot biscuits shone, the smell grew even more powerful. He swallowed again and again, and she smiled and handed him a biscuit split that she’d filled with honey, so hot he almost couldn’t hold it, but he ate it and could think of nothing else then.

  Just the biscuit and the honey and the butter.

  “You can help me,” she said when he’d finished the biscuit. “The men will come in soon from the bunk trailer and we have to be ready for them.”

  She handed him a pile of plates and he went down the tables putting the plates in a row. When he was done she gave him knives and forks and spoons and he placed one of each by the plates, and then cups.

  “Put the cups upside down,” she said. “The men like to turn them over themselves. That way they know they haven’t been used.”

  “Who would use them?” the boy asked. “Do they think you would use them?”

  She shook her head. “It’s just a way they are, the men. Just a way they are. Put the cups upside down and you’ll see.”

  He did as she said and then put out salt and pepper shakers made of tin with handles on their sides and cans of condensed milk with holes cut in them for cream pitchers and big tin cans shaped like houses full of syrup, and just then, when he finished putting the syrup on the tables, the engines outside stopped and seconds later the door of the cook trailer slammed open and the men came in.

  It was like the outside came in, the boy thought, like the woods came in, like the world came in.

  Nine men came through the door to eat, but they were so big, made such big sounds and had such big smells and big clothes, that it seemed like many more. Carl was in first, the one the boy knew, and he spit his snoose into a can by the door and cleaned out his lip with a finger that he wiped on his pants, as did each man after him. They all took their caps off and jammed them in the pockets of their bib overalls. Their hair was mussed and stood every which way, and there was a tight line across each of their foreheads. Below the line their faces were red, dark red to brown, and burned with oil and smoke and sun. Above the line left by their caps their foreheads were a flat, dead white and it made them look surprised all the time.

  They sat roughly to the tables, all of them big as houses, the boy thought. They sat to the tables and his grandmother brought heaping platters of pancakes and motioned to the boy to bring the big bowls of biscuits, which he did. Then she brought the huge enamel pot of coffee from the stove and sure enough each man turned his cup over — his hands so big the cup looked like a baby cup — and blew in it and held it up for coffee and she looked at the boy and winked and smiled.

  “Yes ma’am,” they said to her, and “No ma’am” and “Thank you ma’am,” and were so polite the boy almost smiled but didn’t. They made him think of big, polite bears.

  He had to go for more biscuits. It seemed that as soon as the food was on the table and he’d turned around, it was gone — shoveled in and down somehow without chewing, coffee on top so hot it steamed into their mouths, and talk, always talking and talking.

  Laughing. They would tell stories, but before the story was out someone else would tell one over the top of it, and before that was half out another would tell one over the top of the first two, until all of them seemed to be speaking at once and the boy could make no sense of it.

  They all ruffled his hair.

  They came in like all the outside and ruffled his hair and laughed and talked and ate until everything, everything was gone — all the biscuits and pancakes and coffee — until each and every can of condensed milk had been poured into each and every cup of coffee and was now empty and each sugar bowl was empty and everything was gone. Gone.

  Then they rose, almost as one man, rose and put their small-looking, greasy caps on their heads and pinched snoose into their lower lips and said “Thank you, thank you” to the boy’s grandmother. “Thank you for the good food.”

  And outside they stomped, and soon the boy could hear the roar of the engines again. But when he rushed to the small window next to the door he could see nothing but thick forest that came in close to the trailers.

  “They’re like animals,” his grandmother said. “They come in and eat like animals.” But he could tell from her voice that she liked them and was proud that her food was eaten by them like animals.

  “They’re so … so big,” the boy said. “They aren’t like other men.” And he was thinking then of Casey who he had thought was big in Chicago but who would have fit under the arms of these men, with room to spare it seemed. He wondered if one of them would beat up on Casey for him if he told them about Casey and his mother and thought maybe Carl would, but he didn’t say anything.

  His grandmother nodded. “Yes, they are like other men. All men are the same. Even you will be like them one day — just the same. You will grow and you will be the same, even if you are now my little thimble.”

  * * *

  AT THE END of the cook trailer th
ere was a tin sink bolted to the wall, and his grandmother took hot water from a bucket on the wood stove and poured it into the sink. Steam came up around her face and made her hair seem to settle at the sides of her head until it lay damp on her temples and cheeks.

  “You bring the dirty dishes to me and we’ll wash and get ready for lunch. It comes soon enough.”

  He went back and forth with plates and cups and silverware, and she washed them about as fast as he brought them, and he only dropped one plate, which didn’t even break.

  When all the dishes were washed she handed him a damp dish towel. “Wipe all the tables. Just wipe the crumbs to the floor and we’ll sweep them out the door.”

  His arms were not long enough to reach across the tables to wipe. He had to wipe down one side of each and then go around and wipe down the other, and he kept going back and forth that way until all the tables were clean and the crumbs were on the floor. Then his grandmother showed him how to use the cedar broom with the straw bristles to sweep the crumbs outside the door and down the steps onto the ground where a chipmunk came from under a log and ate them.

  He had never seen a chipmunk, and he sat on the steps to watch it while his grandmother went back in the trailer to begin cooking lunch.

  The chipmunk ate every crumb that it could find, picking them up and rotating them to smell them on all sides and then nibbling them down with small chewing motions.

  The boy put his hand on the step next to a piece of bread, kept very still, and tried to hold his breath as long as he could. And the chipmunk finally came right next to his finger and took the bread. It moved off four or five inches to eat and he thought he would tell his grandmother, but as soon as he moved the chipmunk disappeared. He did not see it leave, did not see it run; one second it was there and the next instant it was gone.

  He rose and went into the cook trailer. His grandmother had apples on a table, and spices, and a large crockery bowl in which she was mixing pie-crust dough.

  “The chipmunk came right up to my fingers, right next to them, and took a piece of bread.”

  “I’ll bet that if you sat with a bit of dough in your fingers the chipmunk would take it,” she said to him, holding out a small lump of dough. “They like pie dough.”

  “They do?”

  “They like everything you like — don’t you like pie dough?”

  “When it’s baked, I do. Lots.”

  “Then Mr. Chipmunk will, too.”

  “Everything I like?”

  “Everything.”

  “Would they like ice cream?”

  “Of course.”

  “And cake?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And spinach?”

  “If you like it, they like it.”

  “I don’t like spinach.”

  “Well then, Mr. Chipmunk won’t like it either.”

  “I’ll get him to eat out of my hands,” the boy said, and ran for the door. Before he opened it he slowed and peeked through the screen, but the chipmunk was not there, and he turned back to his grandmother. “He’s gone.”

  “He’ll come. You just wait and he’ll come.”

  And so the boy went out quietly and sat on the steps with his hand to the side and the piece of pie-crust dough between his thumb and finger, and for a long time he did not see the chipmunk.

  He heard birds singing and the constant roar of engines as the trucks moved somewhere out of sight and his grandmother singing some Norwegian song he could not understand, but he did not see the chipmunk for what seemed like hours. And then it came. Just as the boy began to give up and was about to go in and tell his grandmother it would not come, the chipmunk came.

  HE little red nose peeked out from beneath a log near the steps up to the cook trailer and when the boy didn’t move the head came, and then the whole body.

  For a second the chipmunk sat up on its hind legs, sat looking at him, making “chiccck” sounds in its throat, jerking its head at the boy, and when the boy still didn’t move it came to the steps.

  Up a little and back a little and up a little it would come, back and forth until it was on the same step as the boy, down at the other end.

  It sat there for a full minute.

  “Chicck, chicck.” The chipmunk jerked and studied him, and he sat as still as he could, trying to not even breathe, and at last it was at the pie dough in his fingers.

  There it stopped. Not two whiskers from the boy’s fingers the chipmunk stopped and sat up again, looking directly into the boy’s eyes, watching him, waiting for him to move.

  And when the boy didn’t, when he held as still as a piece of wood, the chipmunk leaned carefully forward, rested on one tiny paw, and used its mouth to pluck the piece of pie-crust dough out of the boy’s fingers.

  Then it ran with the dough, so fast the boy’s eyes could not follow it — ran and disappeared back beneath the log.

  “Phhhuuuuuu!” The boy’s breath whistled out. It had eaten from his hand! He had never even seen one before and now a chipmunk had eaten out of his hand, and he ran in to tell his grandmother, and she laughed.

  “I told you, my little thimble — if you like it, Mr. Chipmunk likes it.”

  He wished he had some spinach to see if Mr. Chipmunk would eat that, but he didn’t say anything about spinach because he didn’t want to know if there was any spinach. Instead he went to where she was rolling out pie crusts, with flour on her cheeks and in her hair, and he said:

  “I do not know what a thimble is.” He sat on the bench at the nearest eating table and looked up at her. “You call me your little thimble, but I don’t know what a thimble is.”

  She looked at him for a moment, then smiled and went to a small wooden cheese box on a shelf above the stove. The corners of the box were fitted together like little fingers, and the name of the cheese was on the side of the box in red letters: VELVEETA.

  She took the box down, and he could see that it was full of needles and spools of thread arranged in neat rows and by colors.

  “See,” she said. “See all of it and then see if you can pick out which one is a thimble.”

  He sat for a long time and picked through the objects in the box while she made pie crust and sang songs in Norwegian that he could not understand, and he finally found the thimble.

  It was not that he knew what the thimble looked like but that it was the only thing left. He knew needles and thread, and he had seen his mother use a wooden embroidery hoop like the one stuck edgewise in the box, and at last there was nothing left in the box but the little silver cup-shaped object in the bottom. He picked it up and saw that the top of it was speckled in little dots, which he thought were supposed to be hair, because on the front of the object was the silver face of a fat little smiling boy. He held it closely so he could see it, and there was such detail that the eyes on the little silver boy had tiny, tiny lashes and there were little ears at the sides with earlobes.

  “Is this the thimble?” he asked, holding it up, and she nodded.

  “It is. And that’s why I call you my little thimble — because you make me think of it.”

  “Do I look like the thimble?”

  “You have the same dimples when you smile,” she said.

  “But not the speckled hair or the little silver ears and eyelashes.”

  “No, not that.”

  “What’s it for?” he asked, and slipped it on the end of his finger when he said it, using it correctly without knowing it.

  “Just that,” she said. “To protect your finger when you sew.” She smiled and folded pie-crust dough over and over into itself. “To keep the needle from sticking you in the finger.”

  “Can I learn to sew?” The boy had seen his mother sew and now his grandmother talked of it, and he did not know what it meant to sew except that his mother pushed the needle back and forth through the cloth. “And wear the thimble?”

  “I will teach you. All men must know how to sew in case they must live alone. I will teach you my
self.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight I will begin to teach you to sew, but now I must cook. You go outside the trailer and play for a time. But do not go in the woods or get near the machinery. I have to get ready for lunch.”

  “Can I take the thimble?”

  “Yes. But don’t lose it. I brought that all the way from the old country. My mother gave it to me and her mother gave it to her. You can play with it, but be careful.”

  He went outside and found a small patch of dirt next to the trailer, and he scooped some up and made a town for the thimble man. He used sticks and made bridges and roads and pretended that he was using the machinery, so he made machinery noises to mimic the sounds of the trucks he heard but did not see, because they were on the other side of some trees.

  When he had roads and bridges he made a tiny house for the thimble man, and then he changed the game and thought of him as the thimble boy, because his grandmother had said he looked like the face on the thimble. He wondered how it would be to live in the small house of sticks and dirt.

  “He has a little dog and a little cat and a little pet chipmunk so small we can’t even see it,” he said to himself. “And a little mother and father, and his father isn’t away fighting in a war, and his mother doesn’t make the sounds with Uncle Casey, and he’s happy. He’s always happy and he doesn’t ride trains forever and ever….”

  The boy was crying and did not know it until some tears dripped on the side of the thimble boy’s house and made the dirt crumble, and then he thought how could that be? How could he be crying when he didn’t feel bad?

  But he was, except that when he saw he was crying the crying stopped and he went back to playing. He found when he lowered his face down to the dirt on its side and looked out of the eye closest to the ground the thimble boy and the thimble house and thimble playground became large, so huge he thought he could go into it and play.