The Land(53)

After that, I took on teaching jobs and carpentry work, and sometimes I trained and raced horses. But mostly, Mitchell and I went lumbering, working long hours in the Louisiana and Mississippi lumber camps. I didn’t have to go to the camps to find work. I went because of Mitchell. He liked the camps, the excitement of them, and the danger. When Mitchell asked me to work in a camp with him, I did so because he asked, and Mitchell was now family to me, the only person near I could count on. I was the only person Mitchell could count on too.

Now, being small built and so white-looking, I always had to prove myself in the camps, and I worked as hard as any man to pull my own load and didn’t let anybody beat me. Mitchell had no problem in pulling his own. He was tall and muscular, a good-looking young man to the womenfolks, and other men respected him on sight. Mitchell was just that kind of person. However, he still had his quick temper and sullen ways, and that meant trouble too many times. Seeing that Mitchell and I always backed each other up, like at Miz Mary’s place, I sometimes found myself in a fight when the matter had nothing at all to do with me and many times made no sense to me either. I didn’t like brawling, and I figured the best way to stay out of needless trouble was to stay out of places like Miz Mary’s. Now I was angry at myself for letting Mitchell talk me into going there in the first place.

The longer I sat on that stump in that night chill, I thought that maybe it was a good thing I had been caught up in another senseless fight. Maybe it was a good thing the boss man Jessup had taken such a strong dislike to me and pushed me into working for him for nothing. Maybe I needed this anger that had built up in me to get me moving in another direction. It was my nature to always look at what seemed a setback as being something from which I was supposed to learn. I figured everything that happened was supposed to be telling me something, and I always figured there was something good that was supposed to come out of the something bad, if I just took the time to study on what it was. Well, I was taking the time now, and I had made up my mind about one thing. This kind of life wasn’t what I wanted, and it was time for me to move on.

I rose from the stump. I’d been sitting there for the better part of the night, but I had things figured now. First thing I did was gather up some firewood, then I headed back with it to the shanty. No one was there. It was dark and cold in the shanty, with not even the fire that dimly lit the room on work nights. There wasn’t even moonlight shining in, for there were no windows. I laid the wood on the floor, then tacked back the tarp over the door to bring the moonlight in. I found my bedroll packed with my gear. I unrolled it and took out one of the blankets. I placed logs in that blanket, rolled it carefully up again, and tied it with rope, so that it looked as if all my gear was still inside. I did the same with Mitchell’s gear, then placed the blanket-wrapped logs where our bedrolls had been. I re-rolled the rest of our gear and took it with me back to the woods, where I hid it in the brush. Then, without a blanket or a fire to warm me, I settled on the damp ground and went to sleep.





That morning I rose with an aching head and a swollen jaw. It was another foggy morning, and though I had on long johns under my pants and wore a coat over the heavier of my two work shirts, I shivered uncontrollably. My body was stiff from sleeping in the damp, but I took up my axe from the tool shed and headed for the slope. It being Sunday, there was no breakfast. The cook had the day off. When I got to the chopping line, I found Mitchell sitting on a stump, waiting for me.

“What you doing here?” I said.

“Waitin’ on you. Time t’ go t’ work.”

“This is my load,” I contended. “It’s not on you.”

“Not on me? You know Jessup just used me bein’ away the other night as an excuse to come down on you. ’Sides, anythin’ on you, it’s on me. You know that.”

I knew that, all right. I had expected Mitchell to come sooner or later, for if the situation were switched, I would have been there for him. I acknowledged his words with a nod, then said, “I decided, Mitchell.”

“What’s that?”

“I can’t stay working here.”

Mitchell jumped up. “Then let’s go! We get our gear and head outa here right now!”

“Can’t do that, not yet. Jessup’ll be watching, and he won’t hesitate to put the sheriff after us.”

“Then what we do? Work here all day for nothin’?”

“That’s right.”

“Ah, naw—”

“We put in this day’s work, Jessup won’t figure us to be going off come nightfall. He would be figuring if I were going to run, I’d’ve done it last night. If we leave at nightfall headed back toward Miz Mary’s, nobody’ll question us. Lot of the men’ll be staying up at Miz Mary’s sleeping the night through, so there’ll be no question either about us not being in camp come nightfall. Now, I figure we can both work this day if it means putting some ten or more hours between us and them.”