I’ve got a picture I want to show you.
I want to show it to you this way.
It’s a picture of my grandfather, my father’s father.
A man born in 1898.
My grandfather stands among eighteen other men in the picture and seven horses in the winter in front of a raw, unpainted frame house somewhere in Wisconsin in the snow on a day sometime in the early Twentieth Century. The men have guns, axes, cant hooks and mallets because they are lumberjacks. Some of them smoke pipes and most of them wear plaid shirts and heavy coats tied shut with rope or twine. They wear caps. They wear work gloves, but not all of them wear gloves in spite of the cold and freezing temperatures of the picture which is worn and battered. They are a tough bunch of boys.
That’s my grandfather over on the left, comically enough wearing a pair of boxing gloves and trading imitation punches with a man who strikes a Jack Sullivan pose and smiles at my grandfather as my grandfather smiles at him, both able to kill with a single blow.
Lumberjacks boxed for fun and recreation in the lumber camps with temperatures below zero sometimes minus twenty or thirty degrees and no pay until the end of the month for maybe a dollar a day. My grandfather told me the men kept their boots by the bunks while they slept and put their feet in their boots next morning and waited to lace them up until the warmth of their feet thawed the boots which froze solid during the night and once a man failed to return at dark from the woods. They found him out there next morning dead stone stiff from cold. Squirrels had eaten his ears and nose.
A touch bunch of boys.
The horses in the picture are massive animals, beautiful and broad and well fed, well cared for because they hauled the logs out of the forest on sledges and down to the road or all the way to the saw mill. All the horses look straight at the camera as do the men. There are puffs of steam coming out of the horse’s nostrils or maybe its merely time faded on the photograph, taken by a man with a big box camera on a tripod under the camera there in the snow with a hood thrown over his head and a glass negative plate exposed by taking the brass cap off the lens for however many seconds he counted one thousand one one thousand two viewing the image upside down before he reached forward to replace the cap on the lens and announce, “That’s all, thank you boys” and the living image dissolved into eternity.
Everyone had work to do.
No time to waste on images.
Two men hold lever action rifles. One man holds his rifle butt down in the snow. The other aims off to the right in the photograph from a kneeling position. The rifles appear to be Model 1884 Winchesters with brass receivers, but again its hard to tell in an old black and white photograph. They hunted game for the camp. One man is holding something up on one knee as he crouches in the snow. It looks like a bear paw. It could be a bear paw. In that part of the world at that time it could be a bear paw.
A very big bear.
There are what appear to be slabs of meat hanging from the porch ceiling on the house.
It could be bear meat.
There are no dogs in the picture.
It’s a tough bunch of boys.
There are houses in Milwaukee and Chicago, Sturgeon Bay and Green Bay, Sheboygan, as far away as St. Louis and Detroit, Cleveland and maybe further built from the lumber out of the forests of Wisconsin, out of the blood and grit, the guts and sweat frozen as it fell from these men and men like them in the photograph.
There are barns and stables, docks and warehouses, tool sheds and pig pens, silos and shacks all gone now like the men and horses in the photograph, but if it had not been for them it would not be for any of us. It would not be for me and if I did not tell what I know I would not nor could I claim to be among them and cherish them as I do.
“Gee – up!”
“You girl, Mollie. Get up there! Gee – up!”
“Whoa girl! Steady.”
“Easy now.”
Commands given and obeyed amid the chains and straps the harness and the bits and bridles and the blankets and you slept in your clothes. The joke ran about the Frenchman who felt a louse under his shirt against his skin as he worked and he reached down through his collar and pulled the bug out just before he flicked it away into the frozen hell he said, “Christ Almighty, is too cold for him out here,” and put the vermin back beneath his shirt.
That’s the picture. Do you get it? Can you see it? Do you have one like it of your own flesh and blood?
There’s another about the time my grandfather ordered a man to move a rock off the right of way as they built a road. The man said he couldn’t do it. “It’s too heavy,” the man said to my grandfather. So my grandfather ordered the man to sit on the rock. Then my grandfather picked up the rock with the man sitting on it and moved them to the edge of the right of way and dropped them to the ground.
Can you tell the story about the time two toughs lay in wait to beat up your grandfather on a lonely stretch of gravel road he helped to build and as they approached with murder in their hearts he pulled a gun out of his waistband, fired a shot over their heads, leveled it down at them and led them back to camp?
That’s another picture.
Show me one of yours.
ƒ