Matthew Null - Allegheny Front

High-topped boots with spikes that bristled from the soles. The leather was gashed and ugly — it had wet and dried a hundred times over — pinched and rucked like a dead face in the desert. But the fresh caulks shined.

“Go on,” said the clerk, who had work to do. “They go on your feet.”

Henry Gorby lifted a riverman’s boots. Had to weigh ten pounds. He felt his heart murmur. The clerk turned away to deal.

Back outside, Henry chucked his own boots away. This was out of character; the Gorbys never tossed shoes, they let them degrade until they slid off midstride. At run’s end, flush with money, he would purchase new ones, he would buy many things. Compared to Ezekiel’s boots, the scuffed town shoes felt thin as frogskins lashed to your feet. For this sort of life you needed protection.

Mouth-of-Gauley. The Gauley spilled into the Grand River here. Grand? Gauley? South Fork, Back Fork, North Fork of South Branch? A hundred rivers flowed together, joining finally like the veins in an oak leaf, joining in confusion. It took a life to learn them.

Tiered logs, balking above. Tall as hay barns, they humbled the men about them. Henry saw little he recognized. All afternoon that green, awful fish would drift into mind as it had drifted up from the river, as it had killed the ducks.

From the Captain’s approach, the men feinted like alley cats. Henry studied him as he paced a furrow into the bank, yelling shitfire, shitfire, fie. The Captain would show him how to act, perhaps.

A pike was passed into Henry’s hands, and for a moment, he looked maybe as if he knew what he was doing. Henry turned the pike. A fifteen-foot shaft of slender hickory, tipped in an iron barb. Nearby, a smith fashioned more. “Fie! Fie!” The Captain wheeled on the smith, asking why couldn’t them goddamned poles be fixed in the last five sodden goddamned days they sit here instead of the very last goddamned minute?

“Five days!” the Captain cried, “and you sit on your pope’s nose three”—an untrue thing, for the smith had been working twenty hours straight and was too drowsy to take offense. It was also his burden to pitch-brush the floating arks, the ones docked upriver. Henry didn’t know of arks, which that night would haul his sleeping bones.

For a while, Henry hung near the Captain, but not in his line of sight, for the Captain would harry the first thing he saw.

In a lull in the scowling, Henry offered up Ezekiel’s letter of recommendation. The Captain took it with a snap. If only Ezekiel were here. Making the long trek from Kanawha City to Gauley Bridge, Henry had been full of hope and vigor in being alone, he didn’t mind sleeping out in odd fields or feeling his food bag slacken, because a blood cousin was at the end of this unspooling road. Eighty-five miles to Mouth-of-Gauley if you put string to map, but crooked rivers and ranges made it time-and-again to walk that. Still, Henry made it there on the appointed day. Didn’t matter — Ezekiel had run off with a local, to make her his wife. Henry was truly alone, remorseful. He could only hope his obscure bosses would have no use for him, absolve him, turn him home. Let the Captain do it. He would! Look at his face.

The Captain let the precious letter fall in the mud. He looked Henry up and down, saying, “I’d rather have a good big man than a good little man.”

Henry didn’t know what to say to that. He nodded, and the Captain moved on. Others covered their mouths so not to laugh. Of course there was work waiting for him at Mouth-of-Gauley. There’s always work, when you don’t want it. Henry could feel the green flimsiness of his bones, their meager reach. He had never stepped upon a stock scale, but if he had, one hundred and five pounds would’ve been a kind measure. He was fifteen hands high. That, anyone has the tools to gauge. He stood to the withers of few horses. In a great metropolis he could’ve been a jockey, but was only let to know Kanawha City’s sulky draft. His mother took in sewing; his limping father disappeared into the valley’s vast salt works daily, except when the war wrecked the works and conscripted their men. Hence the limp and a blue welted hollow in Mr. Gorby’s thigh. Mr. Gorby had expected his son to come along, but Henry wanted to see a little world before settling into that, and recalled an aunt complaining endlessly of Ezekiel, who drove logs on the dangerous Grand, all for love of spending money — at run’s end, you were paid in full — and they fed and housed you along the way. Aunt Cressy would tell these good things through tears. Henry wasn’t allergic to work. He split wood for the Baptist preacher ever since he could lift the maul, and owned hard, small muscles like knots in the cords he split. So Aunt Cressy doomed her sister to share her fate, a wayward Grand River son. Henry wrote Ezekiel care of the Gauley Bridge Post Office. Ezekiel said come on the spring’s first run, when logs are without number and the GRC slobbers for drovers.

“Don’t take it hard.” A fellow stood beside Henry. Awesomely tall, the man wore two pairs of suspenders knotted together. “The Captain’s got to insult you three times for every day’s pay. That’s how he squares outlay to himself. He called me Fatback for years, till I hit him. Tom Sarsen,” the giant said, offering a hand.

Henry told him his name.

“Have you drove logs before?” Sarsen pronounced it druv.

“No. Not at all. My cousin Ezekiel said he’d get me on.”

“Zeke! I know Zeke! Where is he? Where you hiding him? Zeke never run a bank till I showed him how. He didn’t know nothing. He’s the one I expected more than any.”

“I don’t know. Supposed to be right here.”

“Well, that’s a shame. I looked forward to seeing him. Looked forward all winter. I hope he’s not sick. Throw yourself in first thing, I say, get your body used to the wet. You and the muskrat. Trying to keep dry is what makes you sick.”

They watched the Captain watch a hickory limb. It was screwed down in the river mud and notched at a particular point. When water touched notch, it was time. One hundred and six men, all of them the Captain’s, fidgeted on the banks of the Grand. Ten thousand logs, a year’s cutting from the headwaters, were stacked above a sloping bank. Touchy drovers stabbed timber with pikes to test the doused-iron heads. Stray slabs of ice came pinwheeling and grinding downriver, the dregs of winter, though it was halfway through March, and green spikes had begun to poke out of the hard, winter-bitten ground. A week before, the river had been frozen solid, then gave up with a pregnant, heaving groan and splintered in a jigsaw puzzle. Now let it clear! Some tipped hats over their eyes, squatted in cold mud, and tried to doze. Others practiced swinging cant hooks, letting them bite peeled logs — red spruce and hickory, white oak and poplar — but not enough to set them tumbling loose. These men the best culled from the timber crews, not afraid to work, or canny enough to slip the Captain a five-dollar bribe. A riverman’s pay was double a sawyer’s.

Henry didn’t know how lucky he was. The Captain felt magnanimous in giving him a chance.

“You hit him?”

“It was wrong of me,” Sarsen admitted.

Sarsen admired the Captain, so Henry adjusted his own attitude accordingly. Indeed, Sarsen appreciated the Captain’s firm hand. The Captain was like Sarsen’s own father, an evangelist. Last season Cap threw a boy off an ark for stealing a shaving kit — threw him off the deck into black nettling waters — and left him there with nothing but the soggy, homespun clothes on his back, which might double as a shroud, who knows?

Sun poured out of a breach in the clouds. The shadow of tiered logs came knifing over the waters. So much timber.