Cadillac Cathedral Read Online Free

children’s toys and chipped crockery that people had considered not worth the effort of packing up for the move. History had been important to him, especially local history, the story of the people he’d tried to represent in Ottawa. The folks who lived in this Company-owned cluster of buildings might have moved out to the highway or in to town but hefound some sort of importance in the fact that this was where they had raised their children.
    Alder had sprung up amongst the debris, but willows had grown along the river bank, as though to form a dense screen between this sad abandoned place and the logging-scarred blue mountains that reared up from beyond the river to their snowy peaks.
    The pot-holed dusty road that for years had taken the loggers up into the hills now tunnelled beneath the new four-lane freeway and came out into a logged-off area blooming with tall pink foxgloves. They passed by an abandoned farm and a long stretch of second-growth Douglas fir, all precisely the same shape, the same eight-feet-tall, planted a few years ago as seedlings by a crew of university students.
    The road that Peterson eventually turned onto was one that Arvo had not yet explored on his rescue missions. After no more than a few minutes of scanning the woods on either side, his practised eye had no difficulty spotting a red Toyota pickup parked beneath the giant cedars fewer than a hundred metres from the road. Someone hadn’t cared enough to make sure the truck was abandoned where undergrowth would hide it from view. The lazy bugger had done Arvo a favour, however, since even if the Toyota was beyond repair it was bound to have any number of parts worth a return visit as soon as he’d got Martin’s funeral out of the way.
    They climbed a steep hill on a series of long rough switch-backs and eventually reached a plateau to level out through a shuddering stretch of washboard. From here he could look down upon a small gleaming lake like a woman’s sapphire brooch dropped into a stand of spiky hemlock. The patchwork of small farms in Portuguese Creek spread out to the edge of the long blue stretch of the Strait with its scattered islands.
    He hardly dared to hope that the hearse, once they’d found it, would be the one he remembered Old Man Birdsong driving at the head of a funeral parade — his pretty yellow-haired daughter beside him, sometimes even steering, though with her father’s hand never far from the wheel. She had been in Arvo’s class at school, had needed his help cleaning up her failed science experiments, and his advice for getting them right the next time she tried. She had been the school’s prettiest girl — in his eyes at least — and of course she had known this about herself. She had probably known the effect she’d had on him even at that early age.
    They travelled upwards along a side-hill where young firs were growing amongst the gigantic stumps left by the logged-off giants. When he’d first applied for a job in the woods, it was taken for granted by the bosses that he’d be a faller like most of the other Finns in the district, though he’d wanted only to be a mechanic. He’d had to set chokers for four or five years before they’d finally transferred him to the machine shop as Sparky Desmond’s helper, keeping the steam locomotive in good repair, and then, once the loci and Sparky had both passed into history, servicing the large White and Kenworth trucks.
    At the top of a long rough slope, they found themselves in a cleared space of raw stirred-up dirt, with a small unpainted plywood house at the far end. Peterson pulled over to one side and stopped, then oared his arm outside his window to encourage Arvo on past. It seemed they had arrived.
    Arvo pulled up behind the Henry J and stopped, letting the Fargo motor tick over while he had a good look at what appeared to be someone’s home. The house was roughly nailed with mismatched boards of various widths and thickness — some fir, some