Free The Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard Page B

twelve miles up the river, and Powell said Yes sir, he knew that, knowing there were only two counties, Doodlum County and Carter County. Bill said before he and Louise were married her father started the sawmill at the river headwaters, floating logs on barges up and lumber back, back down to Norfolk and up around to Baltimore. Powell said yes, he knew where the pulp mill was, and Bill said, Yes, but this was way before that. This was when not even all the logs came up the river but that Kirby Carter was still cutting out the virgin woods, trees four and five men thick around the trunk. Trees so big Kirby Carter had brought down from Canada by barge a five-and-a-half-foot buzz-saw blade with a stripped-down steam locomotive to drive it. It took two weeks working around the clock to set it up getting running right, and ever it started spinning it only stopped for two things, one for filing the six-inch teeth with hand rasps and oil. Bill opened the side garage door to wet down the azaleas.
    Kirby Carter, Bill began again, brought in Pamunkey Indians to run the saw at night for half wages. And on nights was when Kirby Carter had Louise there, mostlyalone, to go in and refigure the books in Kirby Carter’s favor. Oh yes, said Bill, our Louise fixed the books for her daddy, never looking back for it that I know. But what else of it all was that, though don’t look at her now, Louise was all we had for the best-looking girl around, and with her dark-complected, she stirred the Indians, like every net dragger, lumberhand, and boat builder alike, crazy with her looks, but only them around with her alone, working at night for half wages.
    Bill lit another cigarette and side-smoked it one-lunged.
    So, Bill said, I would court her Friday and Saturday nights over in Carter and she’d ride over with her sister Sundays for church over here. It would be the weekdays in between, Bill said, that no matter how blessed tired I was from pulling net or lifting tongs on my father’s boat, I’d lay upstairs in this very house all frisky-feelinged and blue over Louise. You see, we didn’t have all the liberties you take today, he said to Powell, and Powell took his point.
    Bill sipped his beer, looking, leaning out the window a little south and then a little north.
    You see, Bill said, I also knew the Indians drank on the all-night shift, not a lot to be fired over on half wages, but enough so’d one or two a year would lose a hand or at least a set of fingers. So you see, I’d lay sweat-bothered and blue twelve miles downriver from Louise every night no matter how tired, getting nosleep, I’m telling you, listening to the gottdamn tide come in and go gottdamn out, worrying about those gottdamn Indians around my Louise, you know, like you’re on the edge of a bad sleep, until it was time to go out again with my father in his boat. I tell you that was backbreaking work to get tired over too, work like no one really has to do any more, I’m telling you, and Powell said, Yes, sir.
    So you see at night, with the Indians a little wet and, to give them their due, working under strings of bare bulbs lit dim from a generator, hardly enough light to see by but drawing every itch and biting bug around, maybe one of the Indians would chain-lever a log on the belt set for the big buzz-saw, and maybe in the bad light he wouldn’t see where somebody’d left a comealong spike in, or maybe he’d be too busy slapping bugs to see where the tree had grown so big it had grown all around a rock the size of a loaf of bread like a tree will do, and maybe the saw would plane off a plank or two before the steam-drive six-inch teeth would try to bite into solid steel or native stone, but then the sound would be out, out from under the open-sided shed where the buzz-saw bit. And let me tell you, they couldn’t shut that saw down fast enough to stop that sound from rousing six miles overland Kirby Carter pajama-ed on horseback, or to stop that reaching screech