Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese

tribe and his mother was a skinny, long-haired woman named Spence from a small town in Ontario. Jimmy was their only son. He had four sisters and he was the eldest. The other kids had dolls and toys and carefree hours to spend at play. But Jimmy’s dad had been crippled in a construction accident and there was no one else but him to take up the load. They worked together. The two of them tackled everything they could and if a foreman or a lead hand doubted their abilities in the beginning, they were convinced and sold on their grit, gumption, and utility by the end of the job. They pushed each other. They found the ebb and flow of their energies and their skills and a natural rhythm of work that made them a seamless unit. The pair of them trundled wheelbarrows, staggered under bundles of cedar shakes, dug post holes, mucked stalls, and forked hay. They could outwork grown men and on most jobs were elevated to harder, more challenging work that paid bigger money. That it was sometimes dangerous did not concern them. Or slow them down. Instead, they’d grin and get down to it, each of them driven by the presence of the other. The men around them spoke of the whoops of laughter that came from them even as earth, wood, steel, and rock flew or was crushed or stacked or hauled on shoulders frightening in their strength for two so young. They were working men. It was all they knew.
    “What’s fired together is wired together,” Jimmy would say.
    “Joined by sweat and muscle,” he’d reply.
    “Forged by steel.”
    “Welded by grit.”
    “Screwed by circumstance.”
    It became their running joke.
    Jimmy liked to hear his mother read too. The three of them would sit together and the words would join them. His mother’s voice. His friend: open-mouthed and gazing at her in wonder, agog at the way words filled space. The smell of grease, oil, wood, dirt, and stone that clung to them like a cloud, wafted to the ceiling on candlelight and words. This was the stuff of his childhood. These were the recollections he stored within himself. The toil and the drudge and the relentless job-to-job trek, lost in the magic of that; the spill of words from a page and the feeling of togetherness in whatever meagre shelter they could afford or were provided. His idea of family forever locked in the shared embrace of story.
    “You think when I’m old enough I could marry your mom?” Jimmy asked him one day.
    He laughed. “You crazy? She’d never have a runt like you.”
    “I work bigger.”
    “Takes more’n that.”
    “Oh, yeah. Like what?”
    “I dunno. I guess ya kinda gotta be like them guys in the stories.”
    “White guys?”
    “No. Heroes.”
    “Like your dad?”
    He remembered looking at the sky. It was a hard blue like his mother’s eyes when she looked at him like she was readinga book. He felt the sting of tears, the salt of them, their taste at the back of his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “Like that.”
    Summer. 1948. They wound their way from Alberta to the Yukon and then south, downward into the Nechako Valley. Half the men got hired on with a logging company. While the men felled and bucked, he and Jimmy became boomers, working flotillas of logs and corralling them into booms for the long float downriver to the sawmill at Parson’s Gap. They were nimble and quick and the work became a game. They used the pike poles like cudgels and swung and bashed at each other, fighting for balance on the roll of the logs. They never bought into the danger. Never gave a moment’s thought to the current beneath the logs, the weight of them that could crush a man in a single bob or block his reach for air. They loved the river. The silvered serpentine look of it. The smell. They loved the feel of open space around them, the trees, rocks, and lines of vertiginous cliff and ridge that framed the river valley. The sky hung above it all rich as a promise, and days were spiked with the energy of labour and the thrill of the