by Paul Boor
The night was dead still. A sugarcoating of new snow lay on the lake. The woods cracked with the cold. The Van Hornes, Adam, and a few of their crew stood at the lakeside, admiring the frozen expanse of white. Night air seeped through mittens and woolens. A sea of stars shone overhead and a curtain of phosphorescent blue-purple rippled over the treetops to the north.
“Excellent,” Nicolas whispered.
Abigail pulled her plaid hunting jacket tighter about her. “See, Father. You got yourself a helluva cold snap.”
“Let’s hope it lasts.”
“I measured fourteen inches before nightfall,” Adam said.
“Still a might thin to work. Shall we chance marking it tonight?”
Adam kicked at the lake’s crusty surface. “It was a good four hours ago I measured, boss, and it’s colder’n a witch’s . . .” He paused and took in a frigid breath. “I say we scrape and mark an ice field tonight.”
“Have ’em do ten acres, then,” Nicolas said, squinting out over the ice. “Take care near the middle. By morning it’ll surely hold all the men, the horses, and the old ice plow, but we’ll cut by hand until you measure over twenty inches. Then”—a gleam came into Nicolas’s eye—“I’ll break out my new plow.”
That evening, after the Van Hornes ate their fill of Cookie’s leftover venison stew, the crew hitched two light teams to the scrapers and hauled their marking tools onto the lake. Jack Casler, the oldest, most experienced member of the crew, put himself in charge of scraping the center of the lake, where the ice would be thinnest. Casler was a tough old bird with a great Santa Claus beard that hung clear to his belt. In his late seventies, father of eleven children and grandfather to many more, Old Jack hadn’t missed a winter cutting ice since he was nine years old.
The youngest of the ice crew were the two hooligans Adam had sent to unload the Van Hornes’ wagon. “Little Jacky” Casler—Old Jack’s grandson—was a village boy, a barrel-chested, sickly child who took to periodic fits of wheezing that laid him up for days on end. Little Jacky’s best friend, Samuel Smith, was his complete opposite—Samuel was a strapping boy who grew up on his father’s hop farm south of Forestport and had the steely biceps and upper torso of a wrestler. This was the two boys’ third winter of skipping school to work the ice. They were seasoned ice workers.
Old Jack led his grey-and-black roan horse, one of the prettiest matched pair in camp, out of the barn and hitched the scraper to it. Jack would scrape the crusty surface smooth. Little Jacky and Samuel’s job was to clean horse droppings off the ice from their “shine sleigh,” a light sleigh drawn by a quick pony, named for the shine left on the ice after its surface had been sanitized with a splash of formaldehyde.
Little Jacky and Samuel readied the shine sleigh and queued up behind Old Jack’s scraper. The new boy scurried over the ice and hopped onto Old Jack’s rig to add ballast to the scraper.
“Who’s the new fella?” Nicolas asked Adam.
“Name’s Knox.”
“Where’d he come from?”
“Outta town somewhere. Abigail hired him, not me, boss. Damned if the boy hasn’t already been a problem, too. Last night we caught him sneaking around the bunkhouse after lights-out, going through the men’s pockets. He had a fistful of silver, and we found more under his mattress.”
“Did you administer some justice?”
“I personally give him a Klock-style walloping. Today, he seems to have attached himself to Old Jack. Follows him everywhere, and I’ll be damned if Old Jack hasn’t taken a liking to the rascal.”
Nicolas searched out Abigail, who was hitching their mule, a small but ornery beast, to the sleigh that would measure and mark the field. “Where’d you find that new boy, Abby?” he asked.
“Knox was volunteered by his uncle, a gent I never saw in the village before. They came all the way from north Franklin County.”
“He’s got family up that way?”
“I guess. His uncle insisted he get half the boy’s pay, in advance. Said he’d be back in three weeks to collect him and the rest of his pay. I wanted him to learn the shine sleigh, but now Old Jack insists the scalawag go with him.”
Old Jack’s scraper sped toward the lake’s center, trailing a cloud of crusty ice, with young Knox hanging on for dear life. Samuel and Little Jacky, their cheeks bright from exertion, their minds keen with dime-store-novel tales of daring, kept the shine sleigh in constant motion ten yards behind. The last harvest of the winter was in full swing.
Old Jack hadn’t quite made it to the middle of Upper Spy when his horse suddenly stopped, and disaster struck. There was a low-pitched frump, and the pretty roan horse sank to its withers in the frozen lake.
“Air pocket!” Casler bellowed. “Horse through the ice!” His horse floundered. Knox was thrown against Casler’s back, where he clung, terrified.
“Horse through the ice! Horse through the ice!” rang out across the lake as Casler’s roan struggled in a roiling pool of frigid water and jagged chunks of ice.
Old Jack slipped off the scraper, crouched at the edge of the hole, and pulled with all his strength on the emergency lines, called “choke ropes.” These lines, hung from his horse’s hames, cut off a horse’s air, thus calming the beast.
It seemed to be working until Casler slid toward the hole and went into the slushy mix himself, with Knox still clinging to his back.
“Chrissakes!” Old Jack gasped, before Knox sank the old man and a swallow of icy water shut him up. He let go the choke rope and the horse went wild-eyed. Knox flailed on the water’s surface. Old Jack bobbed up, saw the boy couldn’t swim a stroke, and with one mighty tug, heaved Knox onto solid ice.
Meanwhile, Little Jacky Casler edged the shine sleigh close to the hole. He slipped off the sleigh, scooted on his stomach, and grabbed his grandpa’s coat collar. Little Jacky’s friend Samuel hollered, “Hold on!” and, still on the sleigh, reached for Jacky’s foot to become the last link of the three-man human chain. Moments later, Little Jacky broke through and Samuel, still clutching his pal, slipped off the sleigh and into the mayhem of thrashing bodies and roiling black water. The only one on solid ice was Knox, who lay, frozen with fear, where Old Jack had shoved him.
Abigail was the first close by with the light mule.
Nicolas fought to keep his voice calm. “Lead your mule around the hole, Abby. Rope the roan from that side.”
Nicolas knew all too well that a horse might live for twenty minutes in the icy lake, but a man lasted only minutes, and boys even less. With a glance and a nod, Nicolas conveyed a plan to his best man, Adam Klock, who grabbed the free end of the rope Nicolas extended and trotted toward the hole, tying the rope around his waist as he ran. In one motion Adam slid to his knees, skittered across the ice, splashed into the hole, and latched on to the boys. Nicolas tossed a second rope to Old Jack, who managed to twist it around his arm. Nicolas dug his heels into a crusty spot on the lake and hauled. Two crew members came to help, and the half-frozen victims were on solid ice again. The fine roan, breathing like a racehorse after twenty furlongs, was drawn out from the opposite side by Abigail’s mule.
“Hurrah!” A cheer went up as the crew rushed Old Jack and the three shivering boys, silent and numb, to the warmth of Cookie’s stove.
Every man who worked the ice knew the importance of warming a chilled victim, especially a young one, before a deadly pneumonia set in. Nicolas shouted orders in Cookie’s shanty. Adam handed a good-sized tumbler of whiskey to old man Casler. Abigail—to their chagrin—helped the boys strip so she could wrap their shivering, naked bodies in dry blankets. She made no pretense of hiding her eyes, warmth was so critical.
“Decided to go for a little dip, eh, boys?” Adam laughed. “Take this, now.” He poured Little Jacky and Samuel a drop of the strong stuff and turned serious. “You done good, boys. I mean it. You’re real heroes—better’n old Deadwood Dick in them books of yours.”
“Don’t forget Knox,” Old Jack grumbled. “
The poor devil nearly drowned.”
Adam poured a tad of whiskey for a silent Knox, who huddled near the stove, clutching his blanket around him.
To Nicolas’s eye, Little Jacky looked the worst of the victims. When the boy had been carried off the lake, his lungs gave out a dull whooping sound and his lips were as blue-black as the night sky. Now, in Abigail’s arms, his breathing turned to a high-pitched whistle, like a horse run too hard in subzero weather.
Nicolas set an old Union cot near the stove and fixed a bedroll for Little Jacky. Old Jack pulled up a chair and settled in, trying to calm his grandson’s labored breath. Old Jack looked like he’d aged twenty years. Adam poured another for him, saying, “A bit more whiskey should help.”
“Somebody stoke that stove,” Nicolas said. “I want it hotter’n the damned equator in here tonight.”
41
In the Icehouse
At midnight, Nicolas stood at the shore and surveyed the expanse of ice. The crew had measured and marked a ten-acre ice field and scraped its surface to mirrorlike smoothness, ready to harvest. Old Jack’s roan horse, warmed and gently talked to in the horse barn, was bedded and made ready to join its teammate in the morning, none the worse for its chilling experience.
Back in Cookie’s shanty, Nicolas shucked off his mittens and greatcoat. The crew began to retire to the bunkhouse. A big day lay ahead. Nicolas and Abigail talked quietly at the far end of a dining table.
When the last man left for the bunkhouse, Nicolas donned his garb again and walked alone to the equipment shed. He searched for the oil lantern he’d outfitted with the brightest available Argand wick. He didn’t light it. Instead, he carried the lamp unlit to the east door of the icehouse, where Abigail, according to plan, waited in the dark.
Nicolas unlocked the main entrance. He pulled a match from his book of flexible phosphors, struck it, and lit the lamp—but only when he and Abigail were inside and had shut the steel door tight. Without a word, Abigail followed through the empty rooms. The only sound echoing through the icehouse was the creak and bang of doors opening and closing.
They went straight to the central room, the smallest in the icehouse, the special room kept double-padlocked. Nicolas pulled a small ring of two keys from his pocket. Here was the last of their dwindling ice; blocks were stacked no more than shoulder-high. Abigail led now, down the narrow ice alley to the far corner. On either side, corpses wrapped in canvas lay wedged in catacombs of ice. Nicolas held the lantern high.
“Here’s the one, Father.”
Nicolas turned the lamp up full. Abigail pulled the body partially out of the ice and crouched to unfasten the twine stays. She unfurled the canvas until the dead man’s head was exposed.
“See?”
“A woodsman’s axe,” Nicolas said. “Who was he, Abby?”
“A Canadian lumberjack. From what Big Mike told us, the crazy Canuck deserved what he got. What he did to Jimmy Lamphear’s sister was . . . even so, this man was murdered.”
“I’ve seen enough, Abby.”
“Now do you . . . you . . .” Abigail choked on her words. “Do you see what I mean? No matter how bad that man was, we’re hiding it, Father, and that makes us just as bad.”
“You’re right, Abby, but what can we do? Wasn’t there a family? Or relatives to tell?”
“No, he was nothing but a wanderer with a mean streak. Had a hard life, according to Mike. He grew up in some orphanage up Quebec way.”
In the bright light of the lantern, Nicolas’s jaw dropped. “An orphan? Here, hold the lamp for me.”
Nicolas pulled the canvas lower, revealing the dead man’s torso. The corpse was still clothed, except for holes in the arm of his shirt where Thomas Chubb had done his embalming. Nicolas yanked at the blood-soaked, frozen flannel shirt. He pulled a folding knife from his pocket and ripped away until he’d laid bare the skin of both shoulders.
“Closer with the lamp, Abby. Here.” He saw it. The mark. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”
The mark was fainter than those he’d seen, healed over years to a dull, flattened scar but still recognizable as a long-legged spidery thing stretching itself over the dead man’s right shoulder.
“What is it, Father?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Couldn’t be an accident, could it? An old burn, where he touched something hot? Not sure if I’ve seen anything like it before.”
“It was under different circumstances I first saw one. Bad circumstances.” Nicolas rewrapped the body in its canvas and bound it with twine. Standing over the body, he paused in thought. “How old would you say the man was?”
“He’d be about the same as Jimmy Lamphear or me. No more’n twenty.”
“That means they’ve been around for years, the others,” Nicolas said, shaking his head. Years. Those others were mere boys, eleven, maybe twelve.
“What others?” Abby trailed her father back through the ice alleys. “What does that thing mean?”
Nicolas couldn’t answer. He’d seen the mark on a dead boy, a murdered boy, and now on a grown man. Thomas Chubb. It’s the undertaker who knows something, who might illuminate the connection. But Thomas isn’t talking.
What could he tell his daughter? Abigail was right; there was no excuse for taking part in murder. Ignoring evil was evil itself. And no matter how much he reassured her, murdered boys would end up in Van Horne ice again.
At the beginning, things seemed so simple. The bodies came easily, and, once sold, they were gone forever into the vats and the dissecting rooms. Now it was murder he dealt in. There were boys murdered in Buffalo. Bad boys, according to Flynt. And bad boys grew into bad men. Whatever it was, it had been going on for years.
“We need to get some sleep,” Nicolas said. He clicked the second padlock shut on the room of the dead. “In the morning, we harvest ice.”
For their rest, Nicolas and Abigail trudged down the shoreline path to their lake house. When Nicolas converted the old potato farm into his ice operation, he had renovated the abandoned farmhouse into an Adirondack summer home, or lake house. Perched at the water’s edge on a low stone bluff overlooking Upper Spy, the lake house afforded the Van Hornes the pleasures of clear, cool water and a piney breeze off the surrounding drumlins. The upstairs became sleeping quarters and Nicolas fashioned the first floor into an Adirondack great room fitted with comfortable sofas and adorned with trophy mounts, North Country paintings, and bearskin rugs. He constructed a spacious boathouse over the water, and enclosed and screened its upper deck against the voracious blackflies.
Now, in the grip of winter’s last cold snap, the Van Horne lake house was as frigid and still as a mausoleum. Abigail built a fire in the kitchen stove to cut the chill. They gathered wool blankets and feather beds, and threw together two bedrolls on the kitchen floor. Once Abigail was wrapped in her bedroll, Nicolas reassured her with a soothing, fatherly tone. It would all work out. Ice had a future. He’d solve these problems. And no matter what, she was his daughter and he’d always love his little girl.
Abigail became still, her breathing steady and slow. Nicolas tossed for hours, his eyes open, mulling over the day. The evening’s near-disaster on the lake. The riddle of the dead lumberjack.
In the years he’d worked the ice, Nicolas had never lost a worker to Upper Spy. Tonight, two fine Adirondack boys, the new boy Knox and an old, experienced ice cutter, had nearly died for the Van Horne ice business. Everyone on the ice had done right, and with lightning speed. The old coot Casler seemed none the worse for his dunking. But things might’ve ended differently. Things might’ve ended with corpses.
The thought made him shiver in his bedroll.
42
Season's Last Harvest
The lake came alive with ominous booming sounds, like a bass drum beaten in the distance. Nicolas knew the sound; he often woke to this boom . . . boom . . .on a clear, subzero night. It was the sound of the frozen lake’s plates of ice shifting and buckling. Nicolas and Abigail sc
rambled from their beds well before dawn. Their hearts thrilled at the sound of the ice tightening its grip on Upper Spy.
Father and daughter dressed hurriedly and stepped outdoors. The cold penetrated their woolens. A freshening breeze shook shards of ice from the pines. The ice field shone like milk glass in the lingering moonlight. The hole near the center of the lake, the site of last night’s mishap, had frozen into a roughened, bluish scar.
In Cookie’s shanty the dining tables groaned under great piles of flapjacks, jugs of maple syrup, and bowls of mashed potatoes. Nicolas checked on Little Jacky, who lay listless on the cot. The boy wouldn’t speak. His breathing was hard, and his color was off. Nicolas sent a man to fetch the town doctor in Old Forge, the closest village. He instructed Cookie to keep the fire stoked, report any changes in the boy’s breathing, and pray with all her might that a fever didn’t set in. It was all they could do.
The crew grew boisterous and cracked wise as they dragged their augers and breaker bars onto the ice. Nicolas had the men hitch Old Jack Casler’s roan horses, freshly combed, their smooth haunches twitching with anticipation, to the old ice plow. But the team had no driver.
“Old Jack refused to get out of bed,” Nicolas was told. “He never came to breakfast.”
Adam ran to the bunkhouse to check on Jack. “It’s not the whiskey,” Adam reported back. “Hell, it’s the man’s first day off in fifty years, and he’s drunk plenty of whiskey. No, it’s something else. He ain’t right.”
Abigail took over for Old Jack on the ice plow. Nicolas assigned the new boy Knox to ride the plow’s main beam for ballast, since Abigail was half the weight of Old Jack. Shivering with fear, Knox gritted his teeth and climbed up. Abby stepped onto the plow and sighted along its gauging planks. With a gentle “Gidyap,” the plow shot like an arrow onto the ice field. Abby skillfully cut a grid of six-inch-deep grooves near shore, so the crew could start cracking out ice cakes. While they waited, the men stamped their feet, clapped their mittens, and puffed on their pipes. “Get a move on there, missy!” they yelled, chiding Abigail whenever the plow swung by.
