The Chorus

By Erin Soros
Paintings by Sheri Bakes

Certain readers may be offended by the graphic and violent nature of the contents. The views expressed by the writer do not represent the views of enRoute, Spafax or Air Canada.

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June 28th, 1944. Stillwater, British Columbia.

The sky was bending toward the mountain. June storms steal heat and light and come on fast. A couple of men choked the last logs, and the rest of the hooking crew hurried with the rigging to get out of the clear cut before the thunder. When the rain started, it fell sharp as hail. Small rivers streaked down our faces. Water sucked cotton shirts to skin. Other than a few saplings, the left side of the ridge was plucked bare, and now water was sheeting the dirt. We were done for the day.

What you did, what we’re sure you must have done, was flip the safety rap back too soon. The cable had been pulled taut from the bottom of the mountain to the top, the eye splice wrapped around a stump to keep the cable from snapping loose and pulling back downhill. And suddenly the eye was free. It whipped around in a circle thirty feet wide, a whir of metal, jaggers sticking out of the cable to catch your body in its arc.

Charlie. We heard no scream, just the crack of the line across your chest, then the snap and crash of branches. By the time we turned to look, you were gone.

We dropped our tools. The skyline finally rested. It had dragged you three-hundred feet, we’d heard the roots and stumps tearing through your body. We found your right leg spiked in the dirt as if someone had planted it there, the thigh bone split and sticking through the skin. Rain was already pooling in the gouge. Thorvald pulled the leg out of the dirt. The foot dragged like it was trying to walk.

A hundred feet downhill we found your head still attached to your chest. Your face had been scratched off, the bones smashed into a fine spray so we couldn’t tell the white from the red.

“Wife won’t know him.”

“No.”

* * *

The foreman pulled out his notebook. Tight black letters inside the columns: job, date, location. Then he handed over the pen so we could sign off that we’d identified the body. Charlie was no name for an Eskimo, but we’d never asked about that. You’d been a hook tender twenty years.

June 28th, 1944. We all signed.

* * *

The logging camp was bright, or at least the cookhouse was bright, even at this hour, three a.m. The generator hummed steady against the encroaching evergreens. An oil lamp on the cookhouse porch cast a pale glow. The cook was up, the bullcook was up, slicing, sweeping. Rain spat mud on the stairs faster than the bullcook could sweep it away. Rain on the network of wooden sidewalks that ran through the center of the camp and branched off to link each building to the next. Together the buildings formed a horseshoe: cookhouse at one end, and bunkhouses running down in two long lines. Each building was a cedar rectangle with a low pointed roof—plank walls thrown up in a day—and small windows covered inside by drying shirts.

The commissary was off to the left, behind the cookhouse. It was dark yet, shelves glinting in half-light: toothpaste, shaving cream, tobacco tins. First aid supplies were crammed in the corner, a desk in the back for the timekeeper. He was still asleep, curled in a metal cot beside the foreman’s, dreaming he was anywhere but here. Holding him in bed were the red, yellow and blue stripes of Hudson Bay blankets. He’d bought the white sheets himself. And the throw rug on the floor, a stack of Western novels tidy against the whitewashed walls.

Drops of rain spattered the beer bottles that lined the sidewalk by the cookhouse.

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