Chapter 7
Danny would tell Jed later he'd never felt as sorry for anyone. There she stood in her father's slicker and tin hat, telegram in one hand, letter in the other, looking both angry and stricken.
"Ask when the next north-bound mail is due, will you, Danny?"
It came at two o'clock and would be distributed soon afterward. Danny promised they'd wait. Meanwhile he took the jeep to a lumber yard, and Sheila hovered at the secondhand store and the market.
Hiding behind an ancient dresser with a mirror half as big as her shack's end wall, she reread the letter.
"Darling, I'm making a quick trip up to marry you. I'll feel better about everything if you are Mrs. Carter. Don't bother about making it a festive affair; just Justice of the Peace or whatever they use there. We'll have a formal celebration when I get my vacation.
"Don't file on the claim until after the ceremony. I'll wire date and approximate time of arrival.
All my affection, Andy."
Danny was the perfect companion. He asked no questions but implied perfect belief in her. She needed it. He didn't insist she eat, so she ate. She even had apple pie a la mode, because heaven knew when she'd see ice cream again.
Well, she'd send Andy his money air-hopping right back to him.
She did, by certified check.
Danny told Jed Sheila had acted funny all through lunch. "Sort of like a balloon, so full of something her skin looked thin. I was scared of pricking it. Then that letter came in on the two o'clock bus. She read it and went all soft again."
And wished she could get that certified check out of the bank postal box.
Poor Andy, she thought all the way home as lumber slapped and metal jangled. Wouldn't his mother turn to him instead of to his father? And Mr. Carter-how must he feel?
She thought that until they were near the cabin that would shelter her parents and she saw her father come striding toward them, alive, happy, undefeated.
So Mr. Carter had been laid off, had he? Well, the senior Carters had a home and a deep freeze full of food and bulging canning closets. Why were they tearing their hair? The lay-off was temporary, the plant closed down for a slump season. It would open up again; it wasn't like a logging camp.
"What's eating you?" Nate demanded when they were alone.
When she told him, he said, "Tough on a fellow like him. The old girl will blame him. Wouldn't be surprised if he moved his bed out to that cabin of his."
Sheila looked ahead to where her mother was happily setting up a wash bench under a shelter the men had run out from one end of the cabin. Nearby, a pipe brought up from the derelict mill was running off its rust, the water being brought down from a spring. It would be clear in time.
"Look, Sheila, running water and no water bill."
"Dad," she whispered, "aren't we lucky having her!"
"And who was smart enough to pick her?"
"My, do you ever hate yourself!" she chided. Except for the white wings in her black hair, wings which had appeared when her son's plane was reported missing, she looked like a girl, slim, active, color in her cheeks and sparkle in her black eyes.
"Remind me to remind you, you're my best girl friend," Sheila said, giving her a hug.
"Now what brought that on? What did you get in meat?"
"Sale on mutton shanks; day's best buy, so I picked up two fat garlic bulbs to take off the curse."
"Good. Come on; I'll give you a hot dish to take up to your shack. Better start now; it will be dark early tonight."
They went into the twenty by twenty cabin, already taking on the look of home. The walls had yet to be insulated with the patterned building paper Sheila had bought that day, but familiar drapes hung over the celloglass windows (for additional warmth); slip covers were on the divan and big chairs. The dining table was neatly set; the bed corner screened off by plaid drapes hooked to wires.
"You'll have to rustle your own wood after today," her mother warned. "Nate left you a good axe. He'll be helping the boys for a few days. If you want to sleep down here-"
"If you want me-"
"Frankly, I don't, Sheila. If there's no one around to watch, I can be lazy."
Sheila nodded. She'd felt that way when Welma went off for weekends.
"I can use a little of that myself," she confessed.
"Except that you can't afford it. You're working your claim alone. Now skat before it's too dark to climb the cliff."
It was Jed who helped carry her supplies to the shack. "We'll be out of your way tomorrow," he remarked.
Sheila looked up, surprised. "I'm sorry if I've made you feel that way. Do you think I have no gratitude at all?"
"Gratitude!" He spun and went down for another load.
When he returned he had the little transistor at its loudest pitch, sending out a rollicking tune and effectively drowning out any chance conversation.
"Well," he turned it down a little, "be seeing you. Don't let your growing pains get you down."
She would learn not to slam doors. It took her ten minutes to pick up cans and kettles.
So now she was alone. Carefully she opened the door and peered out. The world was a bowl of dark grey. Swiftly she closed the door, comforting herself with the thought she could see the light in the cabin if they ever got the glass for the big window.
She brought out Andy's letter and studied it, trying to read behind the hastily scribbled lines.
"Dad acts knocked out," he'd written. Of course, he'd have a really tough time finding another job like the one he had. "He's been with this same firm twenty-five years. You'd think the U.S. government had closed down for a slump season. Accountants stay put, once they're entrenched."
Hmm, mused Sheila, so do mill mechanics, as long as they can. But when a place is timbered off She read on. "This proves what I've always told the folks. A man should have more than a paid-for home; he should have a paying hobby, something to fall back upon. All Dad's ever done is collect adventure books. Well, he'll have time to reread the lot of them in the next three months."
Sheila reread one paragraph several times. Andy had written he felt he shouldn't take on the responsibility of a wife at such a time. At the moment his folks were comfortably fixed financially, but should his father not be recalled, he would have to see them through until his dad could find a job.
"You above all can understand this," he wrote.
As she looked out the next morning, a watery-eyed sun peered over the eastern range, then drew down an eyelid of cloud, and the skies wept.
"So I make drapes," she tossed out to the grey and shadow-blue world.
But by the time she'd made coffee and toast and the fire was sizzling with wet wood, she'd changed her mind. Heavy rains would come. She didn't want to sit shivering. The only way to offset that was to do what her her mother had said, "rustle wood."
She'd bought waders for the day she would start panning for gold at the mouth of North Creek. Now she added these to jeans, sweat shirt and parka and started out.
After she'd stumbled over low growing salal bushes a few times, she learned to lift the waders in a goosestep. She learned, too, why woodsmen carried their axes over their shoulders.
By evening she was too tired to prepare food and sacrificed a can of chow mein she'd brought from the apartment. She ate hungrily, breaking off many times to shift kindling drying in the oven.
As she fell into bed, three men sitting around a fire on a ridge a mile away spoke of the day.
"I still think we ought to give her a hand," said one.
"I've got me more than one reason not to," returned another. "Come to think of it if you'd spend less time with those field glasses and more time at your work, you'd get a shanty up faster."
By the second evening, Sheila had quite a sizable stack of wood behind the shack. She also had a black eye, a bruised lip and three broken fingernails.
Nate, coming up just before dusk, took a look at his daughter and bit his lips. "To think a daughter of mine would try to chop a limb like that. Leave it be; I'll bring my chain saw up for those."
"You bring the saw up," Sheila informed him gratingly, "and I'll cut it up. Any time I let any little old alder knock me out-"
"Now, Sheila, you know how I feel about my tools. You're not taking your temper out on anything I cherish. Came up to tell you Danny's going in tomorrow, in case you want to go or send mail."
"Costs me money to go near stores," she stated, "but I will send in some mail. When do we get our box up?"
"When we have time to cut some posts. But it will be a two-mile hike to the county road, crosswise over that hill."
When he found she'd sacrificed the tarp she'd used for the floor to cover her wood, he said he'd take time next morning to throw up a shed roof for shelter. She'd have the wood sweating, tucked in like that. Wet as it was, it needed air blowing through.
Her letter to Andy wasn't the warmly sympathetic one she had planned. Her hands ached. Her head ached. Her eyes burned from the smoke and steam of wood drying both in the oven and on the grill she'd mounted on stones on top.
All she wanted to write was, "So you think the Carters are having a tough time. You should see me."
Grimly she set herself to her task. She wrote, "Fortunately I received your wire before I read the letter saying you'd be up to marry me. I might have wasted money on a wedding dress.
"I returned the hundred dollars because it didn't seem fair to use it. This claim," the assessor told me, hasn't much gold but a lot of living. He can say that again, but I'd change his tone of voice.
"You'd better come up and file on one of your own, one that has better prospects. There are men here you can hire to prove it for you. You only have to put in a hundred dollars per year for three years to get your patent."
She finished with "Love, Sheila," and let it go.
The letter finished, she wrote more freely to Welma. "You and your attitudes! I had the wrong attitude today. I was fighting, and I got the worst of it. Things, not people, fought back. You should see me."
She wrote about Danny, the blond giant now growing a beard. "He looks more like Santa Claus every day. You'd love him; he's big and gentle and thoughtful."
Rising to get more paper, she groaned and thought of Jed's remark about "growing pains." She added a final note to her letter.
"Jed, the bear, likes music. Sounds queer here in the wilds to hear something I danced to in the city. Funny thing: the other evening when he was being superior, I looked out, and I'd have sworn the clouds were rolling to the beat."
Knowing she should check groceries as snow might fall at any time, Sheila went into a huddle with her billfold.
She had given her mother twenty-five of the hundred and sixty-one. She herself now had sixty left and no means of earning anything more.
Whereas she had been tired, she was not tired and worried.
She didn't sleep well, and when her father came cheerily to the door in the morning, chain saw and other gear in hand, she looked anything but happy.
"Been thinking," he confided, coming in to settle for a cup of coffee, "about this wood cutting. We'll really get on it this summer, be well stocked before the next cold season sets in. Chain saw's fine for felling your timber, but when it comes to whacking it into small pieces-"
"You saw a dilly of a saw down at the second-hand store," offered Sheila darkly.
"You mean you saw it?"
"In your eyes. Dad, listen. Between us we haven't enough money for food for any length of time. Let's let next winter's wood go until next winter." Her voice faltered a little. "Let's not live in tomorrow."
The light died in his eyes. "Soon as you and your mother are settled, I'll go fern whacking. The way you women spend a man's money!"
He took his temper out by throwing up her wood shelter, and Sheila heard him talking earnestly to someone unseen as hammer connected with thumb. When she thought he'd cooled a little, she took her black eye out to help him.
Danny, coming up for mail and a list, looked once and looked away. Nate said nothing, happily. Naturally Danny could only surmise, and Jed laughed.
"You don't think Nate would-" Danny ventured.
"Might want to, but she wouldn't let him. No, Danny, that's one of the penalties of living alone. There's nobody to blame it on."
"Some day maybe I'll find out why you don't like that swell little kid."
"When you do, let me in on it, will you?"
Days passed; a soft snow fell and melted. This was to be a green year, a strange year in many places. Danny brought up his battery radio for Sheila. No need of it, with Jed's going all day and half the night, and she took surprising comfort from it.
She had thought she'd be bored, but thus far hadn't found time.
Gradually she worked the blue denim into curtains. Occasionally her mother came up to help, but more often she went down there to lend an extra hand.
"Mother," she confessed one day, "I've never wanted anything as much as I want glass in that window."
Mrs. Norris could sympathize; she could also remind her how much food the money for a window would buy.
She asked Sheila to go into town with her father the next day. "It shames him to buy bargains, and he doesn't get our money's worth."
Sheila agreed. She'd see how far she could stretch the ten dollars she would take with her.
Nate had a passenger when Sheila came down to join him. Jed, a pad under him, sat with his back to the jeep seat and clung to the sides as they rattled down to the first road.
With the Norris duo, he went to the post office and naturally had to be right at Sheila's elbow when she cried, "No, oh, no!"
"Now what?" demanded her father.
"This is from Andy. He wants to know when we can meet the bus. He's sending his father up to stake a claim."