The Wanigan by Gloria Whelan Page A

was too hard to bury Bandit, so Papa made a wooden box. Mama lined it with warm flannel. When spring came and the ground softened, we buried Bandit and I planted daisies on his grave.
    That summer the well where we got our water dried up. Every ear of corn we shucked was ugly and useless with corn borers. At last we gave up. Papa got a poor price for our farm. To put bread in our mouths, he took a job as a lumberjack. Mama, though unused to such hard work, assisted the camp cook.
    It was a sad two days’ journey from the farm to the lumber camp. The camp was very rough. The men were loud and coarse. Papa, Mama, and I had a little room, which Mama made as tidy and comfortable as she could. Papa made a shelf for her books and Mama set out Grandma’s tea set. Unfortunately, our room was next to the kitchen, so some days it smelled like sauerkraut and some days it smelled like dried codfish.
    In the bunk rooms the men slept upon straw, which they called marsh feathers. They chewed tobacco and did not care where they spit. They slept in their clothes with their heads resting on “turkeys,” sackcloth bags that held their extra clothes. Nothing got washed until Sunday, which was called, most inelegantly, boil-up day. The rest of the time their dirty, wet socks were draped over the rafters of the bunk room to dry.
    In spite of their coarseness, Mama was friendly to all the men. If they forgot their manners and spit in her presence, she pulled in her skirts and looked the other way.
    Mama was never too tired to school me. When she was only eighteen, her parents had died of typhoid fever and she had been left to make her own way in the world. She became a teacher. Numbers and spelling were old friends to her. Together we did sums and read from Mama’s books of poems. Though Mama encouraged me to turn to more cheerful poems, I always chose Mr. Poe because his poems were so melancholy. I was sure he could have turned our unhappy experiences into a lovely, sad poem that would bring tears to the eyes of all who read it.
    Each afternoon Mama set the kettle to boil, put a spoonful of tea leaves into Grandma’s teapot, and poured us a cup of tea. While we drank from the dainty cups, Mama told me stories of the house she had lived in as a girl. It had a big front porch with a swing. “And a lawn, Annabel, with beautiful green grass.”
    As she spoke, I looked around the camp. Since there was little there of beauty, Mama’s stories and Mr. Poe’s poems were a great comfort. Still, I was sure I was not meant to waste away in such unrefined company and in so uncivilized a place.
    I did all that I could to raise myself above my sad surroundings. I kept my clothes neat, and I tied up my hair each night in rags so that it curled in a pretty way. I shined my boots, and before I went to bed I rubbed a bit of lard into my hands to keep them soft. Nothing I did could rid my hair or my clothes of the odor of the pine trees. The smell of pine was everywhere. We breathed it and ate it and slept with it.
    I drew up a calendar and counted off the days until the winter would be over. I kept myself apart from the men and had nothing whatsoever to do with the chore boy, Jimmy.
    It appeared to me that the only purpose in life for the men was to see how many trees they could cut down. All day long I heard the cry “Timber” as the giant pine trees fell. The choppers cut nicks in the trees. The sawyers cut the trees down. The swampers lopped off the bgranches. The sprinkling wagons laid down a layer of water, which turned to ice in the freezing Michigan winter. The skidders slid the logs over the ice to the sleighs. The loaders put them on the sleighs, and the teamsters hitched up the ox team and pulled the sleighs over the ice to the river. There along the river bank the logs were stacked into great wooden walls awaiting spring.
    At last the snow melted, the spring rains came, and the river rose. In winter the river