The Badger Riot by J.A. Ricketts

never meant for humans to dress like that.
    So he quit school. He and Vern and Tom Hillier just walked away from it halfway through the eleventh grade. Ralph, because he couldn’t stand the nuns, Vern, because he thought he knew enough anyway, and Tom, because, at six foot six, he was too big to fit into the seats.
    The young men wanted jobs in the lumberwoods. Grandfather had once told Ralph that it was called “lumberwoods” because of the lumber mill that was there at the turn of the century. Even though, since 1906, they had been cutting trees not for lumber, butfor pulp and paper. However, the name lumberwoods had stuck. Grandfather had said that all the flat land in Badger, along by the Exploits River, once had big, tall pine trees, hundreds of them, forty, fifty feet tall. A white man and his crew had come, raped the tall pines from the land, sawed them up and shipped the lumber out. Without the trees to strengthen the riverbanks, the waters of the great Exploits overflowed onto a sad and barren land.
    It sickened Ralph to see what the men put up with for a pittance of a wage to help their families survive in poor villages all over Newfoundland. The lumber camps were filthy and damp and in them the men lived like rats. All those bodies packed in a small space was too much for him. Ralph preferred to sleep outdoors. If the weather was bad, he built a bough whiffen and crawled in. But Vern and Tom slept in the crowded bunkhouse and put up with it.
    In the summertime, swarms of flies ate the men. They crawled into their eyes, their ears and their mouths. It drove them crazy. They rubbed all kinds of concoctions on themselves, including bear grease, urine and kerosene oil. The flies never bothered Ralph. He hummed a song of the People that came on the wind that blew over the Great Mound and the flies and swarming mosquitoes stayed away.
    Vern begged Ralph to tell him the secret. “Look, Ralph, a whole pack of baccy for you. All you have to do is tell me what kind of tune you’re humming under your breath there. Sounds like Hank Snow to me.”
    Tom was there too. “Everything sounds like Hank Snow to you, Vern b’y. Don’t pay any attention to him, Ralph. As for me, I likes the sound of it. Sort of calms me.”
    â€œShut the fuck up, Tom.” Vern hated Tom. Ralph knew it was because Jennie was casting him aside for Tom. As well, Ralph felt that Vern was also jealous of Tom’s height while he stayed short.
    Ralph laughed. “Tom, I guess if my humming could calm black-flies, it could calm anything or anyone,” he said. “And Vern, my son, if I told you, it wouldn’t make a peck of difference. You’re not Indian. You wouldn’t get it.” Then, changing the subject: “So, which one of you fellas is taking out Jennie Sullivan these days?”
    Tom turned as red as a beet. Mumbling that he had to file his saw, he shambled away. Vern, on the other hand, was furious. “Goddamn you, Ralph Drum. You fuckin’ bastard, makin’ me feel small in front of that big son of a bitch. Jennie haven’t had nothin’ to do with me in over a year, you knows that. I seen her makin’ eyes at him, I did. I don’t give a fuck, anyway. Lots of women down in Windsor that I could get if I wanted to.”
    Unlike Tom, who was destined to be a super-logger, Ralph produced an average amount, not because he couldn’t do more, but because there was something inside him that hated to see the tall trees, some hundreds of years old, fall to the ground like dead soldiers. He never voiced that thought to the boys. They’d never understand. To them, a tree was a tree, not a soldier.
    Company officials put pressure on the contractors to produce as much pulpwood as they could in a season. In turn, the contractors pressured their foremen, and the foremen pushed the loggers. It seemed to Ralph that there was always a race to see who could cut the most. Tom