The Woodsmen - chapter 8 (with images) (Patreon)

The cramping starts on the morning of the seventeenth day, waking me up before the alarm.

A sharp pulling stitch low on the right side, deep behind the point of my hip bone. It comes hard for a few seconds, eases, then comes back. Sitting up on the narrow mattress, the room is freezing. I push the blanket off.

The breasts ache when I move. I hook a thumb in the waistband of the compression shorts and check. The thick clear mucus from yesterday is gone. The slick stretch of it. Now the inner folds are only damp. Sticky almost. The deep heat is still there, but changed. Less restless. Heavier. Like something has already happened and the body is settling around it.

I press my hand against the spot above my right hip. The pain flashes sharp under the pressure, then fades back to a deep soreness.

I pull my clothes on and go to the mess trailer.

Hank is at the stove frying thick slices of Spam, the edges going crisp and brown in the cast iron. Terrence is at the table, rubbing his hands together over his coffee mug. Dana is sitting next to him. Her jacket is unzipped. She's looking at the window.

Terrence takes a sip of his coffee. He burns his tongue and winces. "Water pump on the skidder is whining," he says. "Heard it yesterday afternoon. Sounds like a bearing is about to go."

He looks at Dana. He expects her to joke about his driving or offer to look at it or tell him to shut up and grease the fitting. That's the rhythm they built. That's the performance she has given them for two years.

Dana doesn't look away from the window. "Tell Hank," she says.

Her voice is flat. She doesn't smile. She doesn't soften the vowels.

Terrence stops with his mug halfway to the table. He frowns. He looks at the side of her face. "I'm telling you. You're the one who signs off on the equipment delays if it breaks."

"If it breaks I'll sign the paper," she says. She takes a drink of her instant coffee. She sets the mug down. "Until then run the machine."

Terrence looks at Hank. Hank is turning the Spam with metal tongs. He doesn't say anything.

The space where Dana's laugh usually goes is just empty air. Terrence shifts his weight on the chair, the metal creaking. He goes back to his coffee.

I sit at the end chair by the door and keep my boots flat on the linoleum. Every few minutes the pain catches again, quick and sharp, then leaves behind a dull ache. I eat my meal fast, without looking at Dana. She doesn't look at me.

We hike the spur road at six thirty.

The physical labor is a grinding torture. The ache sits deep on the right side of my pelvis and pulls when I twist or climb. Every hard step jars it. Sometimes a sudden sharp pain cuts through and disappears before I can brace for it. Every time I plant my boots to swing the Husqvarna the muscles in my lower abdomen pull tight. The cramping flares. I lock my jaw and keep cutting.

I fell timber all morning. Drop a massive dead fir, buck it into twenty-foot lengths, drag the heavy tops into slash piles.

By noon the cramping has settled into a constant heavy ache. I lean against a stump for a minute between cuts. My lower back is locked up. My breasts feel swollen tight. Skin stretched too thin over them. Every breath pulls against the bottom curve.

I walk down the incline to the vine maples and unbuckle the pants to check myself. Nothing. No bleeding. The compression shorts are damp from sweat but otherwise clean. The cramping is just the cramping.

I run the saw for four more hours.

The eighteenth day leaves the whole side of my pelvis tender and overaware. The sharp catches are less frequent now, but the deep ache stays behind them. I don't bend over. Back straight, I push the heavy saw through the wood.

Dana walks the line in the afternoon. She checks the stumps and the slash piles. She walks past Terrence.

Terrence cuts the engine on his Stihl. He flips his visor up. He yells over the wind. "Pink ribbon is gone on the north draw again. Fucking elk."

Dana stops walking. She turns around. She looks at him.

"I flagged it twice," she says.

"Well it's gone."

"Then read the topo map," Dana says. Her voice carries sharp in the cold air. "Follow the elevation line. It's a straight draw. You don't need pink ribbon to find a straight line."

She doesn't wait for him to answer. She turns her back and walks away down the hill.

Terrence stands there holding his saw. His face gets red. He stares at her back. He looks like a man who just reached for a handrail in the dark and found empty air. The accommodation is gone. The cushion she put between them and the world is gone.

I watch him start his saw. He pulls the cord too hard. The plastic handle snaps back and hits the housing. He swears loud and pulls it again.

Dinner that night is quiet. Terrence eats fast and leaves. Hank washes the pots. Dana finishes her coffee and goes to her Tacoma to do paperwork.

I stay in the mess trailer. I don't want to go back to the freezing bunkhouse. The cramping has dulled to a low persistent pull, but lying still makes it worse.

Walt is sitting at the table, wearing a dark blue wool shirt.

He has a worn deck of Bicycle playing cards. He’s shuffling them. The paper is soft from the damp air. The cards make a dull snapping sound when they bridge.

He deals out two hands. Ten cards each. He doesn't ask if I want to play. He just sets the pile of cards face down in the middle of the plastic table and flips the top card face up. It's the six of spades. Gin Rummy.

I sit in the chair across from him, pick up my ten cards and fan them out.

Walt organizes his hand. His hands are massive. The thick fingers hold the small paper cards with a heavy practiced gentleness. He reaches out and takes the six of spades, then discards a red three.

I draw a card from the deck.

The trailer is quiet. The wind hits the aluminum siding.

Walt sits with his legs spread wide under the table. His left knee is inches away from my right knee. I can feel the heat radiating off his heavy canvas pants.

I look at his hand resting on the table next to the discard pile. The thick wrist. The dark hair on his forearm.

The heat in my pelvis hits me so hard I almost drop the cards. My breath stops in my throat. Everything down there gets hard and tight against my underwear. A pulse of wet heat low between my legs.

My brain doesn't want any part of it. The rest of me does.

I’ve known Walt for years. I have no desire for him. I've never looked at a man.

But the body under the table is female. It feels the heat of the massive male frame sitting two feet away, smells the sweat and the woodsmoke and the damp wool shirt.

My hips shift on the aluminum chair. A fraction of an inch. Entirely involuntary.

I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste copper, force my eyes down to the cards in my hand. Three kings and a run of hearts. I don't see them. The shapes blur.

The heavy ache in my lower stomach. The breasts ache. The nipples contract into hard points against the thermal. With every breath the waffle-knit drags across them and I feel it down my spine and lower.

Walt draws a card. He discards a jack.

He just watches the table. But he feels the shift in the air. He knows I'm sitting rigid. Knows my breathing has changed, shallow and fast.

He shifts his leg under the table. His heavy boot brushes against the toe of my boot.

A ragged involuntary sound escapes my throat. A soft intake of air.

Walt freezes. He holds a card halfway to the discard pile. He stares at the plastic grain of the table. The muscle in his jaw jumps.

He sits there and lets the sound hang in the air. He knows. He knew in the shed when he looked at me and asked.

The silence stretches out. The heater ticks.

I draw a card. My hand is shaking. The paper slips against my thumb. I put it in my hand. I discard a four.

We play for an hour. We play three hands. We don't speak. The wetness between my legs soaks through into the gray cotton of my underwear. I keep my boots flat on the floor and grip the plastic edges of the cards until they bend.

Walt wins the third hand. He lays down his melds. He gathers the cards into a single pile. He squares the deck tapping the edges against the table.

He puts the deck in the middle of the table. He stands up.

He reaches back and grabs his heavy canvas coat off the hook by the door. He puts it on.

"Night," he says. His voice is a low rumble.

"Night," I say. The alto pitch of my voice is steady.

He opens the door, stops at the threshold for half a second, then walks out into the dark. The door clicks shut. 

I sit at the table alone. My chest is heaving. The pulse low in me beats slow and even. The empty chair across from me still holds his heat.

I rest my forearms on the plastic table and put my head down, waiting for the animal panic to recede, for the heat to die. It takes a long time.

The twentieth day. Breakfast.

The French toast is heavy with margarine and warmed Karo syrup, the bread soft from soaking. The coffee is boiled black. The rain stopped during the night but the landing is a lake of frozen mud.

Terrence is sitting at the table. He has barely looked at me for fifteen days. He's spent two weeks staring at the wall, staring at the floor, staring at the windows.

Today he looks at me.

He looks at the heavy gray sweatshirt hanging off my shoulders, the smooth skin of my jaw, the way my neck sits on my collarbones.

He drops his plastic fork.

"I can't do it anymore," he says.

The words are loud. They cut through the hum of the propane heater. Hank stops turning the French toast at the stove. Walt stops chewing.

Terrence stands up. He steps over the aluminum support bracket. He points a thick finger at my face.

"What the fuck are you taking Briggs?" he says. His voice is high and tight. It's pure aggressive confusion. "You think we don't see it? You think we're stupid? You bring some sick twisted freak shit up onto a company block and you just sit there eating breakfast like nothing is happening."

I sit in my chair. Don't stand up. Look at the plastic grain of the table. Eighteen inches to the door latch.

"You look like a goddamn sideshow," Terrence says. He takes a half step forward. His hands are curled into fists at his sides. "You're taking pills. You're doing this on purpose. You're trying to turn yourself into a woman while you run a saw next to me. It's disgusting."

I swallow hard. The muscles in my throat pull. I don't say anything. There’s nothing to say. There’s no explanation he’ll believe.

Dana walks in. Cold pours in behind her.

She stops just inside the doorway. She looks at Terrence standing over the table, at his pointed finger. She looks at me sitting still in the gray sweatshirt.

She shuts the door and walks straight to the coffee pot.

"Sit down Terry," she says.

She doesn't raise her voice. She doesn't yell. The words are flat and hard.

Terrence turns his head. He glares at her. "Stay out of this Dana. This isn't your business. Look at him. Look at what he's doing."

Dana pours the black coffee into her ceramic mug. She sets the glass pot back on the burner. She turns around and leans against the counter. She crosses her arms over her chest.

She looks Terrence up and down.

"I don't care what he's doing," Dana says. "I care about the tally sheet. And right now his tally is double yours."

Terrence blinks. The lateral attack catches him off guard. He opens his mouth but she doesn't let him speak.

"You've been bitching since day two," Dana says. Her voice is a relentless march. "You complain about the rain. You complain about the mud. You complain about the spark plugs. You blew an hour the other day whining about pink ribbon on a draw a blind man could follow. You are thirty trees behind schedule."

"That's not the point," Terrence says his voice rising.

"It's the only point," Dana says. She pushes off the counter. She takes a step toward him. "This is a state contract. We're here to cut wood. Briggs is dropping sixty a day. You’re dropping forty and crying about the cold. I don't care what he's doing as long as the timber falls."

She stops two feet away from him.

"Sit down and finish your breakfast. Or pack your gear and walk down the spur road right now. I'll sign the release form."

Nobody says anything. The propane heater clicks once, twice.

Terrence stares at her. The anger in his face slowly drains out leaving a hollow stunned embarrassment. He looks at Hank. Hank is looking at the floor. He looks at Walt. Walt is looking out the window.

Terrence's jaw works. He swallows and looks at his boots.

Dana takes a sip of her coffee. She walks over to the table and sits. She pulls her clipboard out of her jacket pocket and starts reviewing the daily logs. I eat my French toast.

Terrence sits back down. He doesn't look at me. He picks up his fork and works through the rest of the plate in silence. Hank pours another coffee. Walt goes back to looking at his hands.

Late that night I'm in the equipment shed pulling a fresh chain out of the supply rack for tomorrow. Terrence is at the workbench with the bar from his saw clamped in the vise. He’s filing the rakers. The scrape of the file is the only sound.

I get my chain and turn to leave. I’m almost at the shed door.

"Briggs."

I stop, but don't turn around.

"My wife had a thing," Terrence says. The file gives a hard, forward bite against the metal, then lifts. "Where her insides grew on the outside of themselves. They took it all out two years ago."

Metal bites into the next raker. I hear him lift the file, reset, and push it forward again.

"I'm still going to call you Briggs."

"Okay."

I stand at the door with the chain in my hands. I don't turn around. He doesn't say anything else. The file goes back to work.

The twenty-first day. The last full day of cutting.

The sky is a pale hard blue. The air is freezing. The mud is solid.

My body feels different today. The cramping has eased. The heavy ache in my pelvis has faded to something I barely feel.

The hips feel settled now. The center of gravity is known. My stride rolls now. The bones don't fight the climb. I walk up the mountain with a seventy-cc chainsaw on my shoulder.

The gray sweatshirt hides the shape of the breasts but not the mass. I've stopped trying to hide it. No more hunching. I stand straight.

I reach my unit and set my gear down, checking the bar oil and the gas mix. The smell of the raw fuel is sharp and clean in the cold air.

I pull the starter cord and the engine catches clean.

Stepping up to a marked fir, I read the lean and check the canopy for widowmakers.

I bring the saw up. The vibration buzzes through the plastic handles into my thick forearms. The hands holding the saw are different. The thick ropey veins are gone. A layer of fat has smoothed the skin over the knuckles. The calluses are still there, hard and yellow, but the shape of the hand is softer.

The saw is the same. The wood is the same.

I sink the bar into the trunk. The sawdust flies back against my chaps.

I work the line all day. It’s pure mechanical violence. I drop twenty trees, buck the logs and drag the heavy brush.

Walt is working the adjacent section. We run our lines parallel moving up the hill. I can hear the idle of his Stihl when I cut my engine, can smell his two-stroke exhaust mixing with mine.

At four thirty Hank blows the air horn from the landing. The sound echoes off the ridge.

I hit the kill switch. The silence rushes in filling the space the engine just left. My ears ring.

I wipe the sweat from my forehead and pick up my saw.

Walt meets me where our two paths cross. We walk down the spur road together.

We don't talk. We just walk. The gravel crunches under our boots.

We reach the landing. The sun is gone behind the mountains. The metal roofs of the trailers are cold and dark.

I walk to the back of Hank's Ford F-250 and drop my saw in the bed, unbuckle my heavy leather tool belt and let it hit the metal.

Walt sets his gear next to mine.

He stands by the tailgate and pushes his hard hat back on his head. He looks at the timber we just cleared, the vast empty space in the canopy.

He looks at me.

He sees the bulky gray hoodie, the smooth jaw. He turns around and walks toward the bunkhouse.

I lean against the cold metal of the truck.

Hank walks up. He has his metal clipboard, tracking the final numbers.

He stops at the tailgate and looks at the daily log sheet, then makes a checkmark with a blue ballpoint pen.

He reaches into the large pocket of his heavy canvas coat and pulls out a pair of yellow cowhide work gloves.

They’re broken in but barely worn. Size medium.

He sets them on the tailgate next to my tool belt.

My old gloves were size large. They’ve been loose for a week, the thick fingers slipping on the saw handles.

Hank doesn't say a word. He doesn't make eye contact. He just turns around and walks away toward the mess trailer, his boots crunching in the frozen mud.

I stand by the truck and look at the yellow leather gloves sitting on the metal.

Picking them up, I slide my right hand inside. The fit is exact. The stiff leather wraps the new shape of my hand, and I put the left glove on, flexing my fingers. The leather squeaks slightly.

I leave them on and walk to the bunkhouse.

That night I finish the caribou. Vine maple, four inches at the shoulder. Head turned slightly to the right, ears back, one side of the antlers shorter than the others. I hadn't planned the turn. The wood was harder along the grain on one side. I let the figure come out of where it wanted to.

The last day. Out.

We break camp in the freezing dawn. The process is fast. The crew is an efficient machine tearing itself down.

We load the generators and secure the heavy machinery. The state inspector arrives in a green SUV. He walks the block with Hank, checking the slash piles and the stump heights.

He signs the clipboard.

Hank walks back to the trucks. Shakes Terrence's hand. Shakes Walt's hand. He walks over to me. I'm standing by the white Tacoma.

He holds his hand out.

I take it. My yellow glove fits his bare scarred hand. He pumps it once and lets go.

"Good work, Briggs."

"Thanks Hank."

He walks to his F-250. Walt gets in the driver's seat. Terrence gets in the back. Hank climbs in the passenger side.

The big diesel engine fires up. A cloud of black smoke hits the cold air. The truck pulls away and disappears down the logging road.

I stand on the empty gravel landing.

Dana walks around the front of her Tacoma. She opens the driver's door.

I walk over to the Tacoma. The driver's door is still closed. I drop my duffel in the bed and reach into my coat pocket and pull the caribou out. I set it in the side pocket of the door panel through the open passenger window. It slides down behind the maps and the rolled topo sheets. I don't tell her. She'll find it next month when she cleans the truck out.

I have a new piece of alder in my coat pocket that I haven’t started cutting yet.

"You ready?" she asks.

"Yeah."

I climb into the passenger side.

The cab smells like old coffee and dust. The heater is running on high, blowing dry hot air against my shins.

Dana puts the truck in gear. We roll forward.

The drive down the mountain is four hours. The suspension of the Tacoma bounces over the deep washboard ruts. The heater fan squeals softly.

Dana keeps both hands on the wheel. She watches the dirt road.

I lean my head against the cold glass of the passenger window and watch the Douglas firs blur past. The heavy gray sweatshirt sits loose over my chest. The breasts rest soft and heavy against my ribs.

We drop below the snow line. The dirt turns to wet packed clay. The trees thin out.

The truck hits a pothole. The suspension bottoms out. The heavy mass of my breasts bounces sharply against my stomach. I don't cross my arms, don't try to hold them still, just let the weight settle back down.

The road curves hard to the left following the river canyon.

The gravel gives way to wet packed clay, then to smooth black asphalt under the tires, and the vibration stops.