A New Arrival
Cracked
palms. Blueblack fingers. Jean Comeau gripped the axe by its frosty handle and
brought it down against a trunk of perfect granite. The cedar’s sap was still
frozen, but the spring thaw was on its way and it wouldn’t be long before the season’s
first timbers floated millward down the nearby river. Jean’s puffing face and
ursine body might have struck onlookers as clumsy or even dull-witted. But he
was in fact a formidable scholar of Christian scripture and the most skilful hewer
within thirty kilometres of the Albertville timber camp. His task was to mount
the trunks of felled trees and hack them into square timbers, measuring his
cuts with nothing more than his fierce, discriminating eyes. Despite this skill,
though, most men in the timber camp looked on Jean Comeau with a mixture of
resentment and fear. The man took a furious pride in his power to hew away nature’s
mistakes, and it did not matter whether he saw these mistakes in timber or in his
fellow men.
Forty
feet to Comeau’s right stood a young teamster who observed with folded arms as
each of Jean’s strokes split more bark from the frozen tree. The boy tried to
keep his face grim against the sawtoothed cold. It was his first winter working
at the timber camp and he was eager to prove himself to men like Comeau. He’d
spent his childhood in a one-room shack farther south on the river, where a
life of malnourishment had filled him with veneration for the thickbearded
timbermen who laboured near his home. He admired most those nimble river-drivers
who danced across the springtime logs that often buoyed within perfect view of
his home’s only window. Poverty had cursed him with a humiliating lack of equilibrium,
and he had recognized at a young age that he would never acquire the grace needed
to negotiate the boneshattering logjams that still claimed the limbs and lives of
so many better men.
Like
his body, the young man’s mind lacked balance. It stumbled from thought to
thought unable to stand upon any concept for long before the thing would slip out
from underneath him. Ideas pounded through his skull like a swelling river,
jamming one moment and bursting forth the next. On gloomy afternoons like this,
the boy felt spiteful toward men like Monsieur Comeau and found pleasure only
in the fleeting moments when it seemed as though the old man had split his tree
too deeply. But Comeau never took long to wipe away his mistake, along with the
boy’s frostbitten sneer.
A
lone crow landed between Comeau and the young man, gargling its stark caw. Both
men turned toward the bird as it dug a pit in the powder and fluttered its
wings, scattering snow over its head. The young man glanced back up and froze
to find Monsieur Comeau holding him with glittering eyes—
He
bathes himself in the Lord’s melting ice, Comeau said, jabbing his axe toward
the bird. And he yearns like all living creatures to cleanse himself of the
blackness that never washes away. Comeau paused and waited for the young man to
complete his thought, as though the proper reply were evident.
Until
kingdom come, sir.
Comeau
shook his head and sunk his axe again into the felled tree.
The
young man watched and waited until Comeau had finished. When the moment arrived,
the young man stepped forward and presented Monsieur with a wet piece of caribou
meat that he’d fished from one of his coat’s filthy pockets. Comeau took the
purple pulp without a word and began working through its fatty sinews.
You
would like to learn my trade, Comeau said while chewing.
Yes,
sir.
It
is a difficult skill and there are many things to know about these woods. I do
not know everything about this world, son, nor do I hope to. Comeau scanned the
surrounding forest and snapped his eyes back onto the boy. But what you can know with certainty is the word of
God, which contains more knowledge than any schoolhouse ever will.
The
younger man could only nod.
Comeau
snorted a shard of frozen mucus and swallowed. You cannot know everything, he
added. But you can know everything that is important.
The
young man grimaced. In all his years of Sunday church and daily devotion he’d
never heard his parish priest or even his Monseigneur speak with the kind of
stony certainty Comeau did. The young man craved that same kind of assurance
and began to fantasize about reading the Bible, becoming as impenetrable as the
man who stood before him. He glimpsed a horizon within reach, a meeting of
earth and sky that promised to steady his trembling mind and banish uncertainty
and fear from his soul forever. Jean Comeau could all but hear the young man’s
thoughts.
Make
Him your rock, boy, for He is a perfection that no axe will ever split. Once
you know Him, you will know Truth.
The
young man smiled childishly. He met the black, searching pupils of Monsieur
Comeau and felt his hands warm against the cold.
Everything
that happens is supposed to happen, he said.
Why haven’t you been
working this past half-hour?
The
question struck the young man like a blow. The river in his mind thawed and
surged wildly over its banks.
Sir,
I—
Comeau
glared.
I
was part of the team that cut down this tree. The young man pointed to the hewn
log at Comeau’s feet.
Cedar.
Sir?
You did not cut down a tree, boy. You cut down
a cedar. Crude words are for crude minds.
But
sir. You just said that everything I need to know is in the Word of God. Why
scold me for such a small mistake? Where in the Bible does it say the
difference between a tree and a cedar?
Comeau
sprang from the snow and cuffed the boy so hard that his ears rang and his
tongue tasted metal.
You are just standing about and not working,
boy. That is sloth. You have also questioned one of your elders, which is
vanity. What other mortal sins do you plan on committing this afternoon?
The
young man rubbed his ear and turned to slink back to the cabins of his timber
camp, confused tears standing in his eyes. The glowing coals of Comeau’s gaze
burned into his back as he went. The young man knew that some of the burlier
men at his camp would have tried to return the old man’s blow. But he could not
forget the stories he’d heard about Comeau when he first arrived into the
timber camp – stories that told of Comeau beating the fiercest teamsters to the
edge of death. The young man disappeared into the forest like a lost child and
never saw Comeau again.
