Over the Plain Houses. Julia Franks

was like none he’d seen. What you marked most was the litter: the broken wood and twisted deadfall. Draped in the crooks and branches were clumps of wet-looking leaves, as if the stream had flashed high and then receded quick. The foliage on both sides had been swept clear and the laurel and rhododendron cut back twenty feet. The naked earth baked in the sun, and sumac and weeds and poison vine had already set root. A few young hemlock and walnut still stood, but most had been toppled in the mud. When they came across a beech tree fallen into the channel, Dewey and the other regulars took their packs off, and Brodis did too. Then Fletcher. Brodis couldn’t see what had caused the tree to fall, only that it seemed to have tired of holding onto the loosened earth. Now the roots tipped upward all naked and spindly against the sky, like a girl who’d tumbled from a porch and flipped her skirt to expose everything. It was exciting and disturbing at the same time. Dewey laid a band saw across the trunk of the tree and motioned for Brodis to take a position on the other side. “Here.” Brodis scrambled across the log. Then Dewey handed Fletcher the ax. “Get as many of them top branches as you can.” For a half an hour they chopped and sawed at the beech, the smell of winter-green whanging the air.

      In the afternoon the creek rounded a sharp bend. A manmade wall of cedar and chestnut planking stood just inside the curve, upright in the dry bed as if by some accident of planning. Brodis couldn’t feature its purpose, even as the crew set to replacing one of its planks. His eye searched upstream and tried to imagine the creek with rushing water. Without the wall, the current would be forced to the outside of the bend, wouldn’t it? After a while that water would make an eddy, a dead place where you could wade or fish. So the wall—the boom—was supposed to get rid of the eddy and move the sticks along. Because. . . Brodis saw it then: dozens of logs piled up in the bend that in turn would trap more logs. A jam.

      Fletcher was running his hand along the side of the boom. It was two board-widths taller at the deepest part of the curve than it was at either end. “What’s the wall for?”

      Jackass. “Boom,” Brodis corrected. “A boom is something that makes the timber to go where you want.”

      Fletcher ignored him and directed his question toward Dewey Lister, who was driving a nail into one of the bottom planks. “Sure, but what’s it for?”

      Dewey Lister never looked up. He seemed not to hear.

      Brodis answered louder than he needed. “Keeps the logs from piling up.”

      And that was the difference right there. Matthew wouldn’t have done that way. Matthew would have figured it out just as quick if not quicker, but he would have covered for Fletcher. He would have made sure the other boy understood everything he did without rubbing his nose in it. He would have brought the other boy with him.

      “Watch,” Dewey told the two boys one afternoon after they’d worked their way up Allen’s Creek to the splash dam. The new-formed lake was a depthless gray, the statues of broken stumps protruding through its mist, a field of timber floating motionless on its surface. Bracket booms like stationary rafts channeled floating sticks toward the sluiceway. “Don’t do nothing else either.” Dewey commenced unbuttoning his woolen shirt, and for a moment Brodis thought he was going to take a swim. Then he stepped onto a slanted rock and, without checking his pace, onto a peel-slick log. The wood dipped with his weight, but then he was in the middle, and then he’d already stepped onto a she-balsam. Now he footed from timber to timber, as nimble as strolling through a meadow in the morning gloom.

      Fletcher shouted, “Hoo boy!”

      Brodis said nothing. It couldn’t be as easy as it looked. Dewey’s feet never slipped, and his arms never waved at his sides for balance. Brodis tried to unriddle the secret. Both of Dewey’s knees were bent, always bent, that was one thing. Nor did he seem to reach out with the top of his body, not once, not ever. His chest was perched right there, just atop his hips. Dewey made a little leap from the log to the shore. It was the first time he’d extended any effort. The log bobbed once in the water and was still. “Who’s first?”

      But Fletcher was already unbuttoning his jacket. He started from the same granite outcropping Dewey had, took a confident step onto a cucumber tree, and as he transferred his weight, the wood moved away, leaving him to straddle the open air between the moving timber and the rock. Then his rear foot crashed into the water and he fell.

      Brodis laughed. But not too hard.

      “Hold on,” said Fletcher. “Let me try again.”

      But Brodis had already planted his hindquarters on the get-in rock, both feet firm on wood. He drew the log as close as possible and eased his body over it. The timber didn’t give much when he transferred his weight. And then he was standing, edgy and parlous, yes, but standing. He took a step, and the wood spun under his feet. He looked to correct with the other foot, but it was too late. He leapt free of the log, and found himself standing in three feet of water. He chanced a glance at Dewey, but the man was already buttoning his shirt and didn’t look up. “Don’t drown yourselves.”

      Brodis and Fletcher looked at each other. How?

      Dewey picked up his rucksack. “And don’t get anywhere near the blessed dam.” He turned away and began walking up the bank, throwing out one more tidbit as he went. “Suck you under so fast you’ll be dead before you know what happened.”

      When the rains began, the camp by the railroad tracks came to a halt, and the crews came to restless rest, gathering in the steel cars that served as camboose and bunkhouse, playing cards and rosining string-fiddles and arm-wrestling and rumpusing. But Brodis left his dry clothes under his cot and hiked back up to the headwaters in his woolen underwear. Wet was wet, and the air was cold enough that when he waded into the lake, the water felt warm. He pulled a hemlock trunk to him, still barked, and it was the surest purchase yet, scratchy under his palms. He hoisted himself to a sitting straddle, then to a shaky stance, feet wide, knees bent, not too stiff, and not too still.

      All day the rain drubbed the surface of the lake, and all day he practiced. The idea wasn’t to stay put. It was to ready yourself to move. Now, whenever there was no one to show off for, he learned the textures of the trees, the wide easy plates of pine bark, the stringy slip of cedar skin, the striped grip of poplar and hemlock, and the sure fissured purchase of the bee tree. And yes, he’d done it because it was a job, but that wasn’t all. There was something in him did it for the same reason Matthew kept a notebook for pencilling the names of the plants and the salamanders. Just that Brodis didn’t believe in list-making. His notebook was in his head.

      At night he listened to the patter of water on steel. On the fourth day, Dewey Lister appeared in the door flap with a fourteen-foot spruce pole. Attached to the end was a pipe like a large screw, at one side a hook.

      Something in Brodis’s chest leapt up.

      Dewey also brought a bundle wrapped in a rubber blanket, which he set upon the cot. “You’re gonna need these.”

      Brodis unwrapped the rubber blanket. Inside was a pair of woolen pants, the same kind Dewey had worn to clear the creek bed. Everything except the pick pole was brand new. “Hot dang!” was all he could manage.

      “Don’t get lumpy on me. They’ve took it out of your account already.”

      “I’m gonna drive on the creek?”

      “Hell, no. You’re gonna walk the creek, same as everybody else. This watershed don’t open till we get down to the Pigeon.”

      “I’m gonna drive there?”

      ‘‘Hell, no. But as soon as you got the money you get yourself some Chippewa boots from supply, and tell Callahan you want the ones with the caulks. And get you some Neatsfoot oil too. Case you want them waterproof.”

      They always did the splash dams in the mornings, whenever a ghosty mist hung above the water and the thousands of sticks of timber clogged the surface of the lake and stretched way to hell and gone into the steaming gorge. For some reason you always positioned yourself next to a group of other men, either standing at the edge of the lake or hunkering on an outcrop high above the splash dam. Two