“The same for me,” Roy added. “The buttermilk’s extra.”
“We’ll have it anyway,” Macurdy answered. “We only ate twice in two days, and then not much.” The man’s aura still reflected distrust, so Macurdy handed him the dollar bill. “Take it out of this. Maybe we’ll have something else when we’re done.”
The meal came with bread, butter, and rice pudding with canned milk, but before they were done, they’d each had another serving of potatoes. It used up the whole dollar. In Sig’s eyes they were customers now, not bums, and pulling another chair over, he talked with them briefly. There was no work to be found in Missoula. The sawmills that were running at all were down to one shift a day, running on inventory; almost no logging camps were manned. “I heard it ain’t no better in Spokane,” Sig added. “Maybe on the coast.”
Macurdy and Roy went back to the railyard with stomachs and canteens filled. They were not heartened by what they’d heard. Roy said if they needed to, they could stay with his family till something broke for them. But he didn’t sound terribly confident; his family would be hard up at best, trawling salmon for a cannery that probably wasn’t paying much at all.
Macurdy slept his way across the Idaho panhandle, waking when the train stopped at Spokane, Washington, and again to the clash and jerk of couplings as it started to leave. The next time he awoke, they were rolling across grassy hills and bare rock washes. After they left Pasco, they never stopped at all, rolling down the Columbia River Gorge through scenery that to Macurdy was beautiful almost beyond comprehension.
So this is Oregon, he thought. God, Varia, if you could only see it! As newlyweds, moving to Oregon had been a dream, nothing urgent, but something they’d do someday. Now she was in another world with another man, and he was here alone. That should, he thought, have spoiled it for him, but somehow the beauty overrode such considerations.
They spent a day at Portland, swimming in the river with their clothes on to get out most of the soot, then wearing them dry in the sunshine, eating on Macurdy’s money, and walking around. They took the elevator to an upper floor of a bank building, where Macurdy stared in awe at distant snow peaks. The nearer, to the east, was Mount Hood, Roy told him, and the one off north, Mount Saint Helens. They spent that night with one of Roy’s aunts, who treated Macurdy as a welcome guest. The next day they hiked to the railyard and caught another freight, this one on a branch line, headed for the sawmill town of Nehtaka, where Roy, not so confident as he’d been fifteen hundred miles east, hoped they’d find work.
4
Severtson’s Camp
They didn’t go to the hiring hall. Instead they hiked a dusty road out of town, past yards of great dark logs, and acres of fragrant lumber stacked in the sun to dry. Past a sawmill, whose shrieking headrig and growling planers they could hear from the road four hundred yards away. Above the mill, a tall stack trailed a pennant of woodsmoke. A slab burner, like a fiftyfoot sheet-iron teepee, leaked more of it, from the top and every seam. Like the visual scene, the resinous pungencies charmed Macurdy. Oregon!
Roy led him to a large, shed-like building covered with asphalt siding. At one end was an office, and it was there they entered. A tall, rawboned blond woman sat at a desk, with a typewriter, a phone, and a pint-sized mug of coffee. On a nearby table sat an electric burner-something Macurdy had never seen beforetopped with a large enameled coffee pot, robin’s egg blue with black chips. Within the woman’s reach was a battered file cabinet, another novelty; Macurdy didn’t even know what it was.
“We come to see Axel,” Roy told her. “We’re looking for work.”
This was a self-deprecatory Roy Klaplanahoo, figuratively with hat in hand. White men had left Europe to avoid such servility for themselves. She looked them over, then turned toward an open door. “Axel!” she called, “there’s a couple of jacks out here looking for work. One’s a Klaplanahoo.”