The Lighthouse Road(17)

It was a mere ten sleepy steps from her bunk to the stove in the kitchen. She could retrace half of those steps to fetch stores from the cellar. And unless she was setting tables or making a trip to the privy she did not much move beyond that scant domain. By the time of the first snowfalls, she had begun to feel caged.



Each day after Thanksgiving the hours of daylight shriveled until it seemed there was hardly any purpose to the sun rising at all. And with each short day a definite restlessness settled into her. The jacks returned for lunch and for dinner with frosted coats, their faces hoary as ash, wraithlike. As their coats melted in the mess hall's heat, they appeared to be vaporizing. Where once she had needed all her powers of concentration to perform her tasks, she now found herself with time to daydream. While plating their slices of pie she would puzzle over their evanescence as though it were a religious rite. Day after day they entered and took their seats and began their disappearance. It saddened her and scared her some, but mostly it simply mystified her.



She spent all her spare thoughts on the men, and what she discovered— for the first time in her life — was simple desire, as if their warming, their steaming, their appetite, the way they smelled, all of it fed this new thing in her. Each night, after the camp had settled, after she had finished her own duties and lay in bed exhausted, she would recall the subtlest moments: the way a man would rub the cold out of his hands, for example, or the way he would blow on his stew, any of a hundred such mundane habits. In her revisiting them, the moments became profound, delicious, and she would often find herself caressing the bottom of her belly or tracing her fingers up and down her neck, feeling for her quickening pulse.





With the New Year came the cold. Colder even than the bitterest days in Hammerfest. The first week of January Thea hardly slept for the whining from the horse barn. The accordion music from the bunk house that had been a Saturday night staple since her arrival ceased. And if such a thing were possible, the men found new measures of silence as they filed into the mess for their meals. In a vacant gesture the foreman began making rounds during breakfast, glad-handing the men as they sulked over their porridge and coffee, reminding them of their fortitude and stoutheartedness. Of course they left each morning into the frigid darkness, but the purpose in their step was visibly reduced.

The second week of January was colder still. Twice the temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero overnight, and on those mornings following, the murmurs in the mess hall began. Any speech at all was rebellion, but even the hardened bull cook seemed reluctant to enforce the rule of silence. From his stool at the head of the table, he looked thoughtful, judicial, even, as he contemplated the new boundaries of his order. The taciturn resignation in the men had given way to anger. They griped about the cold, about frostbite, about the snapped saw blades and shattering ax handles. The teamsters lamented the horses' agony and their own. In all of this the bull cook and foreman indulged the men.



Thea was not so alarmed by the cold, partly because most of her day was spent near the comfort of the ovens and stoves and scullery fires but also because of her arctic childhood. So despite the turn to peevishness in the jacks, and despite the fact that she understood almost none of what they said, she actually welcomed the sound of their voices.



It was during the third week of January that something completely unexpected happened to Thea. After supper on Sunday, after most of the men had filed out of the mess and trudged back to their bunkhouse, one of the jacks stopped by the kitchen to address Thea. He was an old man, his lips cracked to the point of bleeding. He said his name was Rolf and that he had been asked by the bull cook to speak with her. He spoke in Norwegian, and the sound of her mother tongue after months of its absence almost made her cry. The old man must have sensed as much because he paused and smiled and patted the back of her hand. He then told her what he had to say was important. He reiterated that he was speaking on behalf of the bull cook, who was speaking on behalf of the foreman. Thea composed herself and sat down.



Rolf said that there had been reports from the jacks and teamsters of wolf sign. He said there were many wolves in the woods, and that in all his years of working in the forests, he'd never seen one himself. Given the horrendous cold, the wolves were perhaps getting desperate, and that was why they were encroaching on the camp. Were, in any case, coming nearer and nearer. He told her about the tracks on the river, about the scant moose and caribou, and that she was not to use the latrine without being accompanied by the old lady. The bull cook thought it best for the women to move as a pair until further notice. And then the old man nodded and left.