No other place. No other place! Just a good scare? We’ll have a party with just a good scare. Women aren’t invited, women can’t watch? Women can’t watch? We’ll watch our fill, the good Lord will watch with us.”
The angrier she grew the faster the words came out, to the point I could no longer understand. After a few minutes a horn sounded out on the road. She grabbed my wrist, not bothering to be gentle and pulled me after her outside. A black truck was waiting, shabbier than Alan’s, driven by a man I recognized as one of the roughest of Mr. Steen’s loggers, feared for the way he used his belly as a weapon during brawls. Mrs. Steen hurried over and issued her instructions, jabbing his stomach in emphasis. He nodded, got behind the wheel, and then Mrs. Steen grabbed me by the hair and forced me onto the back seat next to her.
Mr. Steen’s man drove east toward the village, which puzzled me, and I only became frightened when we reached the main road and swerved south. Mrs. Steen kept urging him to go faster. The road was clear but then we came to where the snow had fallen and he had to stop and put on chains. Mrs. Steen, if she noticed the snow, said nothing. While she waited for the man to finish she drummed her knuckles on the back of the seat and stared toward the steering wheel as if debating whether to take over. She cuffed him on the back of his neck because he drove too slow and cursed him when he skidded. For an hour we drove that way. We passed the high school. We came to the railroad tracks and the river and then suddenly I knew where we were heading.
Trucks had trampled down the snow and parked atop their own dirty tracks. A child’s shredded kite, forgotten in the summer, stuck out of the drifts like a yellow marker showing which way to walk. Mrs. Steen walked on one side of me and the driver on the other so there was no chance of my bolting. There was a band of birch trees, then an abrupt ridge, and it was not until we crested this that we could see the river. It was the color the deepest cold can take on without actually freezing—gray beyond gray, so it was impossible to look at without shuddering. There were icebergs, too, long swelling humps, and they bobbed up and down in the current like racing ponies.
Twenty yards back from the bank, in the flat spot where the three of us had our picnic in October, stood a group of ten or eleven men. My first reaction was laughable. I thought it was a ball game—that these men had decided on the coldest day of winter to play baseball. Then, when they dragged me closer, I saw they all wore parkas and gumboots, so I knew they were loggers, Mr. Steen’s men. They are driving something downriver I decided, logs or pulp, but the cold slowed my understanding and it was another few seconds before I saw things clear.
In the center of their ring, prone but with his arm up as if fending off blows, lay a naked man. Lawrence! He was wet and it made his whiteness even more startling, though the veins in his arm were as red as licorice. I could not understand why he should be wet and naked and cringing in the snow, my eyes could not accept what they were seeing. One of the men kicked his ribs and laughed and then another man took off his parka and threw it at him, not in charity but disdain. Lawrence fumbled desperately to pull it on—already the wetness was turning to ice.
I tried running to him, but Mrs. Steen grabbed my arm and yanked me back. Lawrence’s humiliation was not what I had been dragged there to witness. On the edge of the river stood another group of men, the roughest of Mr. Steen’s loggers plus Mr. Steen himself. There was someone in the middle of their ring and like Lawrence he was naked, though he was not lying down but standing tall and proud like he was at attention.
“Peter!” I yelled.
The driver shoved me sideways and Mrs. Steen clamped her hand over my mouth. Off to the left under a big pine, well apart from the two mobs, Alan stood by himself watching. I know he