The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye

cut , serve. Though he was terse and strict, she knew that she pleased him, and not for the reasons she pleased the hundred other men in camp. In the cook's estimation, her diligence and subordination would have been enough. What came after that was gravy. As for Thea, she understood his authority instinctually, and though she had no great opinion of the man, he was at least not mysterious.
       Those others in the kitchen were entirely more beguiling. There was Abigail Sterle, whose croupy hosannas sung into the enormous vats of sowbelly stew were the only evidence of any voice at all. She bunked and worked beside Thea while keeping her stare in a permanent study of the shanty floor. They made the only pair of women in camp. For this reason alone Thea withstood the elder's coldness, and after washing the morning dishes the two would sit on either side of the cook stove sipping tea sweetened with pilfered sugar.
       During these quiet, stolen moments, the brothers Meltmen— the other cookees in camp — would sometimes join the women. They were fine-haired and lean and their skin was so pale as to appear poached. Another shade paler and they might have been albinos. Like Abigail Sterle, they were pious and humorless. But unlike the crone, they were sixteen years old and possessed the vigor of boys their age. It would have been easy for Thea to shrink under their unabashed ogling and sniggering. But she didn't. Her life was difficult enough without the Meltmen boys' attention.
       Only when the codger bull cook passed through did Thea feel any sense of curiosity. If that was what she felt. She would never know his name, that old man so timeworn by his life in the wilderness. The whole liquid part of his eye — sclera, iris, pupil— was white as pearl and set deep in his wizened face. He might have been blind but for how he stepped around camp with complete sovereignty, less a cook than a bull. His position among the men puzzled Thea. One moment she'd see him hauling water up from the river, the yoke over his shoulders an ungodly cross for a man his age, and the next he'd be in private consul tation with the camp foreman. He would feed the horses, brand the lumber, tend the wanigan while the clerk took his evening constitutional, even distribute the mail on occasion. But whatever his errand or task, every man in the camp regarded him with the utmost respect.
       Her only reprieve from the kitchen crew came from the hundred ravenous jacks. For fifteen minutes three times a day they descended on the mess, arriving in single file and leaving the same way. They all looked the same at a glance, so she learned to identify them by their grotesqueries: the missing fingers or hands, the peg legs, the hunchbacks, the harelips, the sunken chests, the pruritus and scabies. It seemed as if each of the men possessed some defect or wound. They did not speak but greeted her with grunts or pleasant nods, depending on their age or mettle. Some were churls, some gentlemen, but most had about them a halo of resignation so heavy as to mask character of any sort. Their ambivalence followed them into the mess and weighed heavy on the mood. Silence was the rule of the mess hall. So despite the clattering of tinware and shuffling of boots, despite the sighs and audible yawns, their presence at chowtime only made the dumbness of her days more oppressive.
       The quiet might have been tolerable were it not for the close quarters. When word had come to the camp foreman that he would have two women in his charge — he'd been alerted only days before the crew of sawyers and teamsters had reported at the end of October— he'd had to fashion their accommodations quickly. Trond Erlandson had worked the northwoods for years and could remember the camboose shanties of the seventies. Therefore, he saw no reason the men should need separate bunkhouses and mess halls. He likewise could not come to peace with the idea of two women toiling under his