by Paul Boor
“This way,” Mike said, pointing between the rock formations. “They’re a little further, against the wall.”
“Damn, it’s colder in here than outside,” Adam said.
“It’s the way this cave sits . . . the draft or something,” Mike said. “It’s froze all summer long.” Mike lifted his lantern. “Here they are.”
Four frozen corpses stood like boards propped against the grey-yellow limestone. Seepage from above had encased the bodies in translucent columns of ice stretching from the cave’s ceiling to its floor. Mike raised the wick on his lantern. The ice columns were shot through with blue, green, and rust-colored streaks from the limestone water dripping from above. The dead men peered through their icy sheath—lumberjacks, still clad in their woodsmen’s woolens and Croghans. The four faces were ghastly death masks contorted by shock and horror.
“Well, sir . . . and madam,” Big Mike said with a nod to Abigail, “we have our work cut out for us.” Mike hefted a pickaxe and took a tentative swing at the pillar of ice encasing the corpses. “Best get a start.”
It took three hours with axes and sledgehammers before the column broke loose, the ice was chipped away, and the dead men were laid out frozen on the cave’s floor. The room was still, the air laden with kerosene fumes from their lanterns.
“Now we . . . have to drag ’em out,” Abigail said, her voice quavering at the thought of that long narrow passage, the only way to daylight.
Gasping for air, drenched from exertion despite the cold, they dragged the bodies to the passageway. Mike pulled the first into the narrow crevice. Adam pushed and prodded from behind. Abigail followed, her eyes wide. When the first body was out, Big Mike waved Abigail over to a rock by the entrance. He took her hand, felt her pulse pounding. “You stay put,” he said kindly. “Me and Adam’ll bring the rest.”
It wasn’t until all four bodies were lying on the ground in the late-morning sun that Adam and Abigail had a good look at them. Two were badly crushed through their middle by their deadly encounter with a sledge loaded with timber. The influenza victim’s mouth hung wide open, as if gasping to fill his battered lungs. The last corpse—the one hit by the falling limb—was the grisliest of the lot. The man’s head was split clean in two, skull and all, from dome to jaw.
“Which one’s this?” Adam asked, pointing. The two halves of the man’s face sagged apart like a gruesome carnival mask.
“That’s the one caught the widow maker,” Mike replied.
Adam crouched down for a closer look. “Don’t look like no widow maker to me.”
“It was a helluva big limb, Adam. Helluva big limb.”
Adam circled and bent over the body to get a look at the top of the man’s skull. It was split like a melon, except Adam was looking into shattered brain. He squinted at Big Mike.
“Yessiree!” Mike waved his hands and pointed high into the forest’s canopy. “Biggest damn limb ya can imagine . . . fell from the tallest white pine I ever saw.”
“No, Mike.”
“You know them widow makers, Adam.”
“No, Mike, this is somethin’ else. A woodsman’s axe done this.”
Adam straightened and fixed his gaze on the camp foreman. Mike turned his back. “Nah,” he said, looking off in the woods. “You got it all wrong.”
“What happened here, Mike?”
“Nothin’.”
“What happened?”
“Nothin’, I said . . . well . . . okay. It was Jimmy Lamphear,” Mike said softly. “He done it.”
“Murdered him?”
“Not hardly, no. See . . . Jimmy’s got a little sister lives over in Old Forge, and she’s a real looker, this one. The boy keeps an Eastman print of her by his bunk. Well, this dumb Canuck persists in asking about her. Keeps at it, ya know? Then he’s heading to Old Forge on Sundays, courtin’ the girl. But he’s crazy, this Canuck. He’s one shoulda been in that asylum up to Lake Placid. See, he done the young girl wrong”—Mike glanced at Abigail—“real wrong. He had his way with her and when he finished, he beat her bad. Broke her arm, her nose, her jaw.”
“So Jimmy gets even,” Adam said.
“This Canuck’s so crazy he comes back to camp jabbering French, picks up his gear, and skedaddles. But word was already back to Jimmy. He follows the Canuck into the woods . . . you can figure the rest. All my men are handy, but Jimmy, he’s up from Paul Smith’s and he’s good as they come with a double-bit felling axe. And we keep ’em sharp in this outfit.”
“Mike . . . Mike . . . ,” Adam said, real low, wagging his head. “ I don’t think we can do this. We never had one like this before, never run into the situation.”
“Only Jimmy and me know what happened. We decided the Canuck took a widow maker—that was the way it was going to be, no questions asked.”
“I don’t know. What if someone comes looking?”
Mike was quiet for a moment, then he turned to Abigail. “What’s your thought, miss?”
“It was Jimmy’s sister he wronged?”
“His kid sister. Sixteen years old and the prettiest, most pleasing girl, she is . . . or was.”
Abigail, calm and steady, said, “You know what I think, Mike? This man had no respect for women. No respect whatsoever. I figure he deserved to catch a widow maker.”
Big Mike turned to Adam. “Widow maker it is, then, Adam?”
“Biggest limb I ever heard of.”
“I’ll help you load ’em,” Mike said. “You folks gotta get goin’.”
To haul the bodies to their sledge, Adam took a hatchet into the woods and quickly fashioned two travois, cutting ash for the spars and pine boughs for the cross-hatching. He lashed the spars to their ponies’ traces, and they loaded the bodies two to a travois.
“All set,” Big Mike Shaw said as he secured canvas around the last of the corpses. It was nearly noon.
“We appreciate your help, Mike,” Adam said.
Big Mike pulled a pint from his jacket. “Have one ’fore you go,” he said. “We’ll drink to these poor devils.” In turn, the three of them tipped back the bottle, glanced at its label, and scrunched their faces.
With a wave, Adam and Abigail left Big Mike on the mountainside putting fire to his pipe. They led the horses with sagging travois stretched behind them down the skid road to the Black River trail. They pulled their sledge from the brush, loaded the corpses, unhooked the travois, hitched the two dappled ponies to the sledge, and moved out. From the cutoff on the little-traveled Brandywine Lake trail they made their way over a hard spring snowpack south of Saranac, then headed to Upper Spy Lake on a little-used corduroy road through a hushed stand of virgin white pine.
A breeze sighed through the pines; the only other sound was the scratch of the sledge’s runners.
“About that crazy Canuck,” Abigail said, “he can’t be any older than me, you think? Maybe eighteen, nineteen? What makes a man turn so bad?”
“Well, Big Mike had something to say about that when him and me hauled those last bodies out.”
“Yeah?”
“He told me this Canuck was an orphan from up Quebec way. The man never had no family, no home. Crazy Canuck just plain started out bad.”
“I suppose that’s reason enough.”
It took the rest of the day’s light to reach the Upper Spy trail by the route they’d chosen. It was a desolate, quiet walk in, leading their gruesome load down the narrow lake trail, sandwiched between the shoreline and the railroad spur to the icehouse. They reached Upper Spy at midnight, and the Van Hornes’ dwindling ice gained four sad souls who’d met with unexpected ends in the Adirondack woods.
Midnight. That was when a certain young lady, the youngest Van Horne, locked the icehouse door behind her, and made a decision.
39
Cold Snap
It was the fourth time that morning he’d been to the shed to check his instruments, and with good reason. There’d been changes. The dampness and fog were missing. The wind had s
hifted at dawn and came from the Canadian side, its velocity rising. The shark oil hazed over; heavy sediment ran in thin rivulets to the bottom of the glass cylinder. And Nicolas’s right knee ached. The old football injury—the surest sign.
Nicolas tore out of the shed after his fourth visit. The mercury was well below freezing, and dropping. On the stairs to Ruth’s room, his knee throbbed.
“We’ll soon be off to Upper Spy,” he said, breathless. “I’m sure of it.”
Late that evening, Abigail—her eyes bleary from scant hours of sleep—rode to the house on the horse she most favored, a young stallion as black as night and full of spirit. Nicolas called to her from the porch before she’d even dismounted. “Ready the big wagon for tomorrow, Abby. Canadian air is on its way!”
“Adam’s mustering the last of the workers at the inns, Father.”
“And the men you already have?”
“Ten, and they’re eager; their spirits are high.”
“Supplies?”
“I took Mr. Finnegan away from his supper and made him open up the store. I’ve filled the cook’s list.”
“Bless you, dear. Come for me at dawn.”
Abigail rode off without ever dismounting the rambunctious stallion. Nicolas climbed to Ruth’s room. She had drawn the drapes against the bright moonlight and was already in bed.
“Ruth . . . Ruth.” Nicolas shook her in the darkness. “Come now, please wake.”
He lit the lamp by the bedside. Ruth stirred, fought her way out of a numbing sleep. A moment’s blank stare, then she turned her face to the pillow. “I cannot,” she said.
“Abigail and I are off to the lake in the morning. We must settle on your regimen.”
All was readied—the laudanum, the pills, the compresses. Nicolas left Ruth and stepped outside the kitchen door. He didn’t bother with a coat. The arctic night bit at his nose and cheeks. The black velvet of the sky filled with broad swaths of stars. Northern lights, the first he’d seen in weeks, danced on the horizon.
When Nicolas awoke the next morning, a blaze of first sunlight was at the frosted dormer window. The house creaked with the cold. Nicolas dressed and bounded down the stairs to warm himself by the kitchen stove, where Abigail was frying strips of venison in butter. She reached into a bag on the kitchen table and extracted three eggs with bits of straw stuck to them.
“From Hilda’s goose,” she said proudly.
Nicolas unwrapped a warm bundle on the table. “Biscuits, too?” he said, beaming. “Why are these Germans such fine bakers?”
Abigail spooned the venison onto a plate and set it on the table in front of her father, then tended the eggs that sizzled in bacon fat on the stove.
“Supplies loaded, Abby?”
Abigail nodded. She plated the eggs, then sat at the table and watched Nicolas down his breakfast. “So you see, Father, the wire from Albany was right.”
“Bah!” He chortled. “Their instruments are no better than mine, girl.” He dabbed at a bright orange yolk. “I only hope the cold snap lasts.”
“We’ll fill the icehouse, Father. I feel it in my bones.”
Nicolas finished his breakfast, leaned back, and grinned. “Let’s get going,” he said, reaching for the satchel he’d prepared for the trip to Upper Spy.
40
Preparing to Harvest
A dusting of new snow covered the frozen mud and made the coach road to Old Forge treacherous. Abigail loosened the reins to allow the team to pick its way over hardened ruts as deep as a man’s boot.
“Atta girl, Abby,” Nicolas said with pride, his breath coming in clouds. “Let ’em set their own pace.”
Steam rose from the glossy backs of the two steeds as they strained against the wagon’s load. In the bed of the largest wagon that Mr. Parsons had built at his carriage shop, surrounded by potatoes, bacon, lamp oil, canned beans, and dry goods, lay Nicolas’s new German engine, the power source for his most recent invention—a new ice plow.
By the time Abigail turned the team onto the Upper Spy Road, the late afternoon sun had tucked itself behind a mountain and the tops of the pines were ragged silhouettes against the steel-blue, darkening sky. She chose this time to say her mind.
“You were right, Father. I know now you were right.”
“I’ve always said my instruments were as good as Albany’s. When it comes to the weather—”
“I meant about this business. You said it wasn’t for me, and you were right.”
“The ice trade’s hard, Abby, sure, but if you were to—”
“I’m not talking about the ice trade, Father. It’s the bodies. I understand about the doctors and their studies, but too much can go wrong for us. Ice is fine, but I won’t trade in the dead.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. You’ll see what’s in the icehouse, then you’ll understand.”
The going was even rougher on the lake road. Jouncing along with pine boughs brushing by on both sides, Nicolas tried to wrap his mind around what Abigail had said about the body business. He knew better than anyone how things might go awry. Galveston taught him that. But Abigail couldn’t possibly know about the murdered boys, could she? If only she’d stick to the ice business. Ice was all around them, every puddle, pond, and stream, solid with it. Ice.
Nicolas often pondered the scientific theories about ice and what it had once done to these Adirondacks. He was an avid reader of mail-order tracts on the subject from the university in Albany. According to the scientists, during the great Ice Age these mountains lay under glaciers—ice that was miles in thickness. The thousands of Adirondack lakes had been carved when the glaciers receded, gouging narrow, V-shaped grooves into solid bedrock, or so the theory went.
This made sense to Nicolas. The Spy Lakes—Upper, Middle, and Lower—ran parallel in straight north-south lines; all were four or five miles long, but none was more than a quarter mile across. It was as if they’d been scratched out by the sharpened talons of a gigantic claw, and scratched deep—so deep that folks in the North Country called them “bottomless,” as if their dark waters penetrated to the center of earth.
Nicolas imagined, too, how the glaciers had molded the land alongside Upper Spy into these long, steep-sided mountains, like overturned canoes lying along the lake’s length. At the northern end of Upper Spy, the mountains flattened into rounded hills called “drumlins.” It was there—at Upper Spy’s gentler north shore—that underground springs fed the lake its clear, iron-rich water, making Upper Spy a superb place to harvest ice.
When he started his ice trade, Nicolas had acquired a large, failed potato farm that once thrived on the drumlins at the north end of Upper Spy Lake. He purchased three hundred acres of land, and with the lakefront land came the rights to harvest ice. Nicolas shored up the potato farm’s dilapidated barns and outbuildings to serve as stables, cook’s shanty, and bunkhouse for an ice camp of thirty men. He dedicated one large shed to his ice-cutting equipment and—as in Forestport—his weather instruments and tinkering. To complete the ice operation he constructed an imposing, three-story icehouse, the largest in the Northeast. It was a unique design, with a capacity of over fifty thousand tons, natural ventilation, and double-walled construction to maximally preserve ice. Soon after its completion, Nicolas persuaded the Adirondack Railroad to run a spur to the icehouse, guaranteeing his commercial success at rapid delivery of large quantities of ice to the Mohawk Valley and points south.
Now, at the approach to the Van Horne ice camp, their wagon rolled along the length of the icehouse, and Nicolas’s throat tightened. Only one of the icehouse’s internal rooms held any ice at all; with an average harvest it might take three weeks to fill the massive structure. And there was no way to know if the cold snap would hold.
Night had fallen, the woods were still, the mercury was dropping fast. The only signs of life were the twin plumes of smoke rising from the chimneys of the cook’s shanty and the bunkhouse. Despite their heavy wool caps, coats, and
mittens, Nicolas and Abigail were chilled to the core. They stepped down at the cook’s shanty, which also served as the men’s dining and recreation hall. Nicolas threw open the shanty door and stood in the doorway, a cloud of ice crystals billowing around him. Adam, as the crew’s foreman, was the first to jump up from his card game at the nearer of the two long dining tables. He grinned and reached a hand to each.
“A pleasant evening to the Van Hornes.”
“A perfect evening,” Nicolas agreed as he and Abby shucked off their caps and mittens. “Must be ten below zero.”
The camp’s cook, a white-haired woman in her eighties lovingly known as “Cookie,” stooped by her stove, feeding oak to the fire. Fifteen hardy men sat around the rough pine tables, playing pitch. One by one, the men laid down their cards to greet the boss and the boss’s daughter. At the far end of the table, two young boys were reading dime-store novels by lamplight; a third boy sat alone in the shadows.
“Little Jacky! Samuel!” Adam snapped at the two young readers. “You fellas get your faces outta them books for a minute and get that wagon unloaded.” The youths marked their places in the stirring adventures of Deadwood Dick and Nick Carter; grabbed their coats, caps, and mittens; and tumbled out the door. “And you—Knox—go tend to Mr. Van Horne’s horses like I showed ya. And I mean now. Lickety-switch!”
Cookie reached into a cabinet and pulled out a brown bottle.
“Here’s a little warmer for you, Mr. Van Horne,” she said, pouring for the Van Hornes and their foreman. “I sure hope you didn’t freeze them potatoes on the way up.”
“Nope,” Van Horne replied, smiling. “Before we left I ran that German engine hot as she’d go, then packed your spuds and perishables near its crankcase.”
After warming by the stove a minute or two, Nicolas thumped down his empty glass, reached for his coat, and declared, “I need to see the ice.”
