Matthew Null: Allegheny Front

Jam ahead, they cried. Jam ahead.

This brown, shapeless mass and then, as a tintype picture rises from its cold bath of chemicals, the pieces became distinct, a hillock of buckled logs, some on their sides, some driven in the riverbed, some jutting straight in the air, some planing mysteriously in the current though nothing seemed to hold them back. Henry had dreamed a mountain; this was a sodden carpet. It went on for a hundred yards, and every minute more logs pinned against the mass, increasing its weight, wedging the river shut ever more tightly. Henry’s own would soon become part, a thousand held by a single key. Men climbed upon the logs, testing with kicks for loose pieces. A boy with a peavey wrenched at one, shaking his head in disgust.

“This is where you earn your keep! Climb on!” Sarsen was vigorous again, but that was all he said. When Henry most needed counsel, Sarsen would not give.

Like crows on a corpse, men picked at the edges. The Captain shouted, “That’s not how you do! You know better than that!” He directed them to the lip of it, the dangerous place. They crawled there out of shame, tried prying a blue channel from the middle. Henry called for random advice. Pull enough mess, it was averred, and the river will do your labor for you.

Grinding wet work. About one of fifty logs Henry prodded at would give way, a little. He teetered on top with water hissing under the logs, though he couldn’t see it but for a few black triangles of river. You slipped and scurried, you could fall right through. He looked up at the sound of a dry branch cracking. One fellow had snapped his leg clean. Getting him out of there was a puzzle. Thankfully he fainted away, so they could pass him off like a sack of groceries, that broken leg whanging about. Nauseated, Henry lifted him by the belt. It broke. The boy fell, whacked his leg, cried, and passed out again. The others jeered. Humiliated, Henry lifted the poor boy up in a hug, the broken belt dangling.

Ashore, the Captain fed the boy whiskey and made him a splint and poultice.

While Henry watched this grim medicine, realizing that with a slight injury he could go on home and leave this wet hell forever behind, the logs began to vibrate beneath him. Henry bent down to touch; a vibration ran the maze of his bones. Drovers had picked for hours, opening the slightest channel. Before anyone could shout, the jam gave with a cringe and slung him forward.

Blue and white tumble, a roar of water in his ears. Henry was in the Grand. A boulder loomed, then sucked him under and spat him out the other side. Where was the pike? Foot caught gravel, ankle wrenched. Sarsen ran along the bank. They locked eyes. Sarsen would pluck him out, Sarsen only had to reach down his pike.

All around logs went barreling, any one could crack your skull.

Henry lifted an arm, he waved a hand. Sarsen seemed to hesitate. Henry went under. Sarsen let him go.

They buried him in a talus slide. They had no shovels and were lucky to find him such a place. In this humid country, there are few — bare spots where the mountain shrugs its loose, weathered rock; home to rare, straggling plants; blue rubble; minute, dry prairies. The drovers made a hole in the talus by picking out chunks and scooping up scree with bare hands. Henry didn’t look poor in death, only sodden and dusty now, like a confection, with a red smudge on the cord of his neck. They rolled three good boulders on top so animals couldn’t dig him up. This was near a place called Gumtree, where locals came with smokers and veils to rob wild hives. In the lore of the river, Henry Gorby is the one who died at Gumtree. He would live on on their tongues, not forever, but a while, the nearest thing to forever.

The Captain asked Sarsen, the evangelist’s son, to say a prayer. Sarsen demurred, worn out from lifting boulders, so the Captain said it himself, a mangled psalm.

After, Sarsen slapped a pair of mosquitoes on his rock-dusty hand.

“They’ll carry you away drop by drop,” the Captain told him.

“Sure enough.”

Amazing not more were killed in that tricky spot; more amazing they found Henry’s body. Many a Grand River virgin you never saw again. Before lowering Henry in, Sarsen removed his nice boots. No one questioned it, but Sarsen felt the need to explain: he must return them to Zeke, a cousin. Sarsen wasn’t specific enough — they wondered if tall Sarsen and scrawny, dark Zeke, always together back then, really were blood? — but they were too exhausted to parse it out. Sarsen was forever wasting his time on one boy or another.

Sarsen finished the run with the heavy pair about his neck, tied at the laces and clanging against him like the strangest jewelry. On landing at Hinton, where the GRC mill stood, a clerk asked Sarsen with misplaced cheer if the giant worked so hard he needed two pairs to last him through. Sarsen replied only with a glum look. He took his task seriously. Ezekiel would have his boots.

Sarsen later heard there was confusion because someone tried to claim Henry’s money at the counter and the rumor was he’d lived, another drowned, with coward Henry sneaking there to draw pay anyhow, perhaps he’d be lost in the crowd. Many believed it.

Sarsen could tell you it wasn’t true. He stood in line half-asleep, listening to the bandsaw squeal — it made an awful yowl hitting a knot, you’d think they were sawing up live wildcats in there — and inhaling the vile, gut-shot fumes of the tannery. Branded logs bobbed and thunked in catchment ponds. The gaslights of Hinton pushed against the night. Sarsen was a hundred miles from Gumtree and had labored hard in the weeks since then. The run sped by this year for his liking. He wasn’t sure what to do. Go the Elk River run? Little Kanawha? Maybe he could make it in time. He should ask the Captain. Sometimes the Captain went to Greenville, Maine, and perhaps he could use a merry traveling partner. A teetotaler, Sarsen left the others as they went to taverns, brothels, or the infirmary. He had no ear for their biting cant. With pay in hand, he walked to the place where the Grand debauched into the flatness of the Ohio River, a warmish flow where prehistoric fish glided sightlessly in turbid sediments, their open mouths straining unseen sustenance and vile trash — it made no difference to them: the sturgeon with rubbery tails and fecund rituals; gar breaching to fill their grapelike sacs with air; rolling, barrel-chested cats; and monstrous paddlefish with gaping eyes and notochords and boneless drift. The paddlefish wouldn’t eat a bait. You could snag them only with treble hooks and lead, or string gill nets bank to bank, which the legislature wanted to outlaw for it fouled up boaters in the night, a harrowing experience. Sarsen had seen the paddlefish, big as rams and just as wild as they thrashed, twisting gill nets, magnificently dying. He once made the mistake of watching what happened next. Some river trash chopped the paddlefish clean in half with a broadax and scooped out bucketfuls of eggs — it made him vomit and the river trash laugh. With glee, they had mended nets. Tonight, the Ohio was one shit-brown swirl. No one fished. He hated ending his run in such a place and was all out of sorts. Hated how the Grand degraded itself by coupling with such an ugly watercourse. Hated how, despite all best efforts, the world will sully you.

No log drives on the Ohio. Long since settled with locks and dams, a storied artery of trade that once split the wilderness in two halves, with its hidebound tales of Blennerhassett and Audubon.

He had Ezekiel’s boots in hand. And would return them. But Ezekiel was nowhere to be found.

How could he let Henry drown?

Sarsen was capable, as few are, of great physical courage. He had saved strangers from jams, from rapids, even from a burning ark that sank and snuffed itself hissing in the water. But not for the fool, not for one like fractious little Henry. Sentimental people are the most deadly; Sarsen was one of them. So many of his past charges avoided him; so hard to measure up, so hard not to wither in that annihilating presence.