A Promise to Love (23 page)

If it were God's will, and if she could remain healthy and strong, they would survive the Michigan winter just fine. For the first time, she was grateful that she and Joshua had not truly lived as husband and wife. This particular winter would not be a good time to be with child.

She was just about to call the children to supper when she heard footsteps on the porch. She opened the door, and there stood Richard and Virgie. Richard carried a heavy cast-iron skillet with a lid, and Virgie held a basket covered with a towel. “We heard that Josh went to work at the lumber camps,” Virgie said. “Is that true?”

“Yes,” Ingrid said. “He will not be home until spring.”

Although Josh had allowed Agnes, Trudy, and Ellie to walk the half mile to their grandparents' home several times this summer, Richard and Virgie had not yet taken her up on her invitation to come visit the children. Virgie meant it when she said she would not step foot in Josh's house while he was there.

“You want come in?” Ingrid asked.

Virgie stepped into the cabin, and Richard followed. Both looked around, as though reacquainting themselves with the room with which they had once been familiar. Ingrid knew it must be very hard for them, this first time back inside their daughter's home.

“You stay and eat with us?” she said. “Please?”

“I suppose we could,” Virgie said. “If you really want us.”

“Oh, we want. We have plenty food. Children be so happy to have grandparents here.”

Just at that moment, Ellie looked down the steps and let out a screech. “Grandma Virgie and Grandpa!” Then she came barreling down and hugged both of them around their knees. Trudy and Polly followed right behind her.

“You'd better take this before one of them knocks me down.” Virgie handed Ingrid the basket. Beneath the towel, Ingrid saw biscuits still steaming from the oven.

Richard sat the Dutch oven on the table and lifted the lid, releasing a delicious aroma. “Virgie and me killed a chicken and fried it up.”

“I have cabbage and noodles!” Ingrid said. “We will have feast!”

Agnes came down the stairs, carrying the baby.

“Is that my little Bertie boy?” Virgie held out her arms. “Oh, he has grown!”

Ingrid rushed to set out extra dinner plates and then called everyone to the table. It was gratifying to listen and watch as the conversations swirled around her. She thought about the diary and poisonous pills that she and Joshua had buried beneath the tree at the cemetery. Many men would have rushed to show those items to their in-laws. Instead, Joshua had chosen to absorb their anger—not wanting to add that extra sadness to their lives.

Neither she nor Joshua knew if they had done the best thing, but they had chosen what they thought was the kindest thing. She often prayed for these two broken people, that the Lord would lift at least some of their terrible grief.

Although there was a bittersweetness to the evening for her, Ingrid knew that Joshua would approve. Nothing, in her opinion, could lift grief as quickly as being in a house filled with children. Loving Joshua's family had certainly helped her live with the grief she felt over her brother.

She had asked Joshua to inquire of every lumberman he saw if anyone knew what had happened to a big Swede named Hans Larsen, who had a triangle-shaped scar above his left eye and the sweetest disposition in the world.

It took Joshua three and a half days to get to Saginaw. By the time he arrived, he was convinced that if Michigan did not get rain soon, the whole state would dry up and blow away. It had been hard for him to find enough water to drink on the way here. This did not bode well for the lumber camps that depended on the rivers to move the logs to the lakes each spring.

He found a merchant on the outskirts of Saginaw who was able to give him the location of Foster's camp. It then took him a hard day's walk to get there. It was a new camp and neatly laid out. The cook shanty was well built and had fresh blue-checked curtains in the window. A woman's touch always boded well when it came to food.

He was foot sore, hungry, and weary when he walked into the cook shanty door. His spirits brightened when he smelled the aroma of bread baking.

“Welcome.” A man who had been talking to a pretty red-haired woman enveloped in a cook's apron when he came in walked toward him with his hand extended. “I'm Robert Foster, owner of this camp. Are you looking for work?”

“I was hoping to get here before you filled up,” Joshua said.

“What are you good at doing?”

“I spent one winter as part of a two-man axe team,” Joshua said. “I didn't develop the knack for being a river hog. I can do a fair job on anything else, including carpentry.”

Foster looked him up and down. “You hold yourself like a military man. Where did you serve?”

“I rode with the Michigan First Cavalry.”

“Ah.” Foster nodded. “Custer and his famous Wolverines! I saw him once at Gettysburg. I couldn't believe that young pup was a brigadier general.”

“You were there?”

“I was one of the surgeons trying to patch men back together.”

“I don't envy you having had that job.”

“Nor I yours. How old was Custer back then?” Foster said. “Early twenties?”

“He was twenty-two when he became a general,” Joshua said.

“From what I heard, he was a vain, pompous man who deserted his men to go visit his wife.”

Joshua wondered why Foster was bothering to criticize his general. Was he trying to start a fight? If so, he would look for another camp to work at.

“General Custer had courage,” Joshua said evenly. “He led the attacks instead of staying in the back. He had eleven horses shot out from under him. We overlooked his vanity and his fondness for his wife because we knew we could depend on him in battle. He saved more than one of our lives.”

“You speak like an educated man.” Foster abruptly changed the subject. “Are you?”

“One year at Michigan State Normal School is all, but my mother was a schoolteacher. Why do you ask?”

“I won't have any trouble getting together an axe crew,” Foster said. “But I'm missing an ink slinger for the office. The man who worked for me in the past decided to stay home this winter and help his daughters build a beef cattle business.”

“His daughters?”

“Seven of them. The oldest has turned into quite the manager. We used to rib him about how someday he would end up working for her, and that's what's happened. Are you good with figures?”

“I am.”

“How would you feel about being ink slinger and storekeeper for the camp?”

“I'll work any job you want me to.”

“Oh, and by the way,” Foster said. “I have nothing at all against George Custer. I never met the man. I need someone I can trust to keep my books and run the store. I liked the way you defended your general against me when I criticized him. I'm impressed with your loyalty. It shows integrity. Ink slinger is your job if you want it.”

“Thank you, sir,” Joshua said. “I'm grateful for the work.”

His gamble in walking across the thumb of Michigan had just paid off.

Foster called out, “Katie, does this man have time to go drop his things off in the bunkhouse before you set out supper?”

“If he hurries.” Katie sat a huge pone of corn bread on the table.

“When Katie says you'd better hurry,” Foster said, “you had better hurry.”

As Joshua was leaving the cookhouse, he heard a great clatter of tin dishes and an old man's voice cursing a blue streak.

“Jigger,” he heard Katie say patiently, “I don't care if you did just drop a load of dishes. There's no call to use the Lord's name in vain. We have been through this before.”

“Well, if I didn't have a dang woman in my way all the time, I wouldn't drop so many dishes.”

It would be a long winter, Joshua thought, but an interesting one.

 22 

Keeping the books and running the little store made a nice change. Joshua discovered that he greatly enjoyed visiting with the men as they came in for a new nose warmer—the small stubby pipe that the lumbermen preferred—or a new pocketknife, or perhaps a bar of laundry soap for clothes-washing Sundays, or maybe even a small sack of candy. The shanty boys, as the loggers called themselves, loved their hard candy.

Foster kept more stock on the shelves of his store than the owner Joshua had worked for in the past. He didn't know if that was in order to make more money or if it was simply Foster's way of making camp life a little less hard on the men. He'd even supplied a large pile of dime paperbacks and police gazettes—the kind of reading material the men adored.

The only hard thing about his job was trying to sleep. The noise didn't bother him so bad, but the smell was awful. There were wet wool socks and sweaty boots perpetually drying out before the stove. Most of the men chewed tobacco, and many kept a tin can beside their bunks, which was not something a man wanted to stub his toe against. Some didn't bother with a can and simply aimed their streams of tobacco juice directly at the woodstove sitting in the middle on a thick layer of sand.

Most of them believed that tobacco juice sizzling on the stove would clear the air of any disease that might be floating around. Tobacco juice was believed to have other medicinal uses. Some used it as a dressing for small wounds.

The bunk beds, filled with sawdust, were only slightly more comfortable than sleeping on bare wood, and it was a challenge for him to sleep each night beneath the bunk of a French Canadian who snored like a steam engine, smelled like a wet dog, and occasionally cursed in two languages while asleep.

The camp filled up quickly with axe men, swampers, road monkeys, a blacksmith, a carpenter, and teamsters. The men had come from all over, and shanty boys were some of the biggest gossips in the world. Crammed together in a bunkhouse, not seeing outside civilization for eight months at a time, and with little to occupy their time in the evenings, they had little with which to amuse themselves except the sharing of stories and the telling of tall tales.

He questioned each man who joined the camp, but none had run across a man matching Ingrid's description of her brother. He was beginning to doubt that Hans Larsen had ever stepped foot into the Saginaw Valley until a timber-looker—the loneliest profession in lumbering—came in after weeks of scouting for new stands of timber.

The man was unshaven and lean to the point of emaciation. He wore stained leather pants, which offered some protection against rattlesnakes and thorny brush, high-topped boots, a battered hat, and a wary expression.

“See anything interesting out there?” Joshua didn't expect the man to answer truthfully. Timber-lookers, if they were worth their salt, didn't reveal where they had been. Finding an undiscovered stand of white pine in the middle of millions of acres of almost shore-to-shore forest was akin to finding a gold mine, especially if it was anywhere near a river.

“Nothing to speak of.”

In other words, he had no intention of talking about it.

“Looking to buy anything in particular in here?”

“I need a new knife. I broke the blade on mine.”

Joshua brought out a selection of knives. The timber-looker tested a few blades on his thumb and then made his purchase.

He was almost out the door before Joshua thought to ask him if he had happened to run across a Swede matching Ingrid's brother's description.

The timber-looker stopped and slowly turned around to face him. “Why are you asking?”

Joshua closed the case of knives and put them away. “He's my wife's twin brother. She came all the way across the ocean to meet him, but he never showed up. No one seems to have seen or heard of him. She insists that he was working in a Saginaw Valley camp and was not the kind of man who would abandon her.”

The timber-looker closed the door, and Joshua's pulse quickened. Did the man know something?

“How long have you been working in lumber camps, mister?”

“The name's Hunter,” Joshua said. “I worked in the camps one winter a couple of years before the war.”

“You were Union?”

“Michigan First Cavalry.”

The man nodded. “You were one of the lucky ones who made it through Gettysburg.”

“I was,” Joshua said. “And you are?”

“Dyer Wright.” A muscle in his jaw twitched. “I scouted for Sherman. Lost my taste for war and for people after serving with him through Georgia. Being a timber cruiser suits me fine. I leave everyone alone, they leave me alone.”

Joshua wondered what this had to do with his wife's brother—if anything.

“There's a camp about ten miles north of here. Nice timber. Hard to get to. The owner of it lives in Detroit. He's a cripple, but he owns the right to more timber than he can keep track of. The foreman, Bart Mabry, is a hard man, and he runs the worst haywire camp I've ever seen. Drinks heavy. Feeds the men slop. Pockets the difference. Hungry men make mistakes. Dangerous ones. It didn't take long for the word to get out, and loggers stayed away. The foreman got desperate to keep his job. Desperate men do desperate things.”

“What are you saying?”

“I leave people alone. I stop at a camp for a few hours to resupply, and then I head back into the timber. I do this job for a living—because frankly, I can't stand being around people for too long at a stretch, and I figure it's none of my business what happens in the camps.”

Joshua gripped the edge of the counter, tense. This man knew something about his brother-in-law, and it wasn't good.

“A couple days ago, I saw where the foreman had set up camp and had been cutting into a stand of timber I own partial holdings to. I started to go have a little man-to-man chat with Mabry, but then I saw something that made me stay away—at least for now.”

“What was that?”

“He's got some men working for him at gunpoint. I saw a big Swede like you described out working in the timber, with a guard over him and some other men. The guard was armed. I made my way over to the camp, and when I saw a padlock on the bunkhouse door, I figured I needed to get out of there. Been wondering what to do about it ever since.”

Joshua was appalled. “They lock the men in at night?”

“Can't think of any other reason for that padlock to be there. Never saw a lumber camp bunkhouse with a padlock before.”

“If the place caught fire, they couldn't get out.”

“I doubt Mabry would care. Except for having to go to the trouble of kidnapping more timber cutters.”

“Can you describe the Swede to me?”

“I was there long enough to see that he wasn't happy and was deliberately working as slow as he could get by with. The guard yelled at him several times. Called him Larsen. The man had a big scar over his left eye.”

“That's him,” Joshua said.

“What are you thinking of doing about it?”

“Go get him, of course,” Joshua said. “I surely don't intend to let him stay there. Do you have any fight left in you?”

“No,” Dyer Wright said, “but I'll lead you to them.”

“Let me go talk to my boss and see if we can get some men together. Are you staying the night?”

“Katie Foster is the best cook in the Saginaw Valley. I walked five miles out of my way just to have supper at her table.” For the first time since Wright had walked in, he grinned. “Of course I'm staying the night.”

Joshua found Robert Foster in the cookhouse and told him what he had learned.

“I've heard of men being kidnapped to work in haywire camps before,” Foster said. “It's a bad business. Ten miles, did you say?”

“Yes.” Joshua waited. He would go by himself if he had to, but it would be better if Foster would lend him a couple of men to go with him.

“We'll need to leave just after midnight, then,” Foster said. “I'm assuming it would be best to surprise them at dawn?”

“We?”

“You might need a good surgeon along, and we'll see which of my men are willing to go. One thing for sure, we aren't going to leave those men there.”

Foster had not hesitated about freeing the men, and Joshua was impressed.

“Wright said he would lead us to them.”

“Good. About half of the men in camp are veterans. I'm thinking we could muster at least a dozen ex-soldiers willing to go. I'll find out how many weapons we have. Many of the men carry a gun to camp with them in case they get a chance to put some fresh game on the table. I'll talk to everyone after supper.”

Ten miles was no challenge for loggers. Most of them, like Joshua, had walked much longer distances to get to Foster's camp. They were all able-bodied and bent on their mission as they strode, single file, through a woods illuminated by a full moon.

“What's your plan?” Foster asked.

Although many of the men were veterans, Joshua was the only one who had strategic experience and who had led men into battle. He was the obvious choice to take charge of the rescue.

“I don't have a plan yet. I want to see the lay of the land first. I'm hoping the two sharpshooters will be good enough that the rest of the men won't have to fight.”

It was no small thing to close down the work of the camp for an entire day to rescue the kidnapped loggers. Foster would lose money because of this. All of them would, but there wasn't one man who didn't want to go.

Even those who had not fought in the war had equipped themselves with axes and their long, spiked peaveys. There was nothing a shanty boy liked better than a good fight—it was almost a form of recreation for them—but tonight there was nothing but grim determination on their faces. Haywire camps—so named because they were reportedly held together by the wire left behind after the hay had been shaken out—were the scourge of lumbering.

The thought of fellow woodsmen being forced at gunpoint to do this dangerous job made their blood boil. Joshua wondered if the angry men would allow the kidnappers to live once the imprisoned men were rescued. It wouldn't be the first time a group of shanty boys dealt out their own form of shanty justice.