Vaara in the woods

It’s night. Liz and I are in the bedroom, putting the new bed together. She’s wearing a white T-shirt that makes the pregnant curve of her belly obvious. 

“It seems substantial,” she says.

“We’ll be supported,” I say.

I can think of the monster while lying in the dark, as both of us are drifting off, and I can dream it, too, and see the white pines and the groups of men huddled around a fire. How many years can such things last? That’s an important question.

My family tells me this happened in Forest County, Wisconsin, far from Chicago, and I would like to say that it isn’t or wasn’t true, because I am a modern person who uses computers, not a lumberjack. This was 18-something or 19-something, somewhere close to there, and the most important thing to know is that people who spent time in lumber camps suffered tremendously. The lumberjacks and the bosses lived in their killing zones for months at a time, used oxen to drag logs through the woods after they’d been felled, and often these oxen died of exhaustion, just crumpled first to their knees and onto their sides with a wail or a moan, and to hear that dying moan was like you had died as well. Sometimes they were just beaten to death by whips or shot for being not strong enough. When the jacks burned the dead oxen at night, it was said among the camps that the smoke collected up in the trees and came together, and later, not far away, it coalesced and drifted down to the earth, and it became the monster.

The pain. That’s what drove the magic. It came alive again in the shape of something that looked like an ox but an ox made in a cave of hell, standing low to the ground with razor teeth, the horns on its head twisted around one another, its eyes burning red, a fire-liquid dripping from its rotten lips. The night after it was created, the monster would return and pull men from the camps.

My grandfather’s grandfather, a man named James Somerville, worked those camps, and he worked them so long and so hard, so mercilessly, that he became a boss as a young man. He drove the jacks in the camps harder than anyone, and they hated him even more because he wouldn’t eat with them at night; instead he ate in his shanty with his pregnant wife and his baby boy. It was uncommon for there to be any women in a camp, but James had demanded she come along through the summer. There had been what he once called “indiscretions” having to do with the pregnancy, and he wanted her by his side where he could watch her. She came. Her name was Martha. And when the story plays in my mind, for some reason I am one of the young loggers in that camp, I am 17 and outside of it and I see her through the open doorway some evenings as we come back to the camp, sitting in a chair with that baby in her lap, rocking it, her black hair loose around her shoulders, and I sometimes hear her singing to the child, and I realize why other men would be so quick to love her: She doesn’t fit here.