The Last of the Lumbermen Read Online Free

greenhouses, of course. Shortly after he turned down the Rangers he decided that if the seedlings used for local reforestation were grown locally they’d be better acclimatized, and the survival rates would be higher than the current lousy rates. Along with that — and this part I agree with — it would create employment locally. Sound like a pipe dream to you?
    It wasn’t. Easier than most people could borr ow fifty bucks from their best friend, Wendel finagled three hundred grand from the government so he could mess around with his theory, along with a permit from the public utilities commission that for ces one of the pulp mills — at their expense — to pump excess steam from their power plant to heat the greenhouses.
    The greenhouses are going up just fine. In fact, they’d be ahead of schedule except that the unemployed roofers he hi red as builders suffer from perpetual hangovers, and keep dropping the glass they’re supposed to be installing.
    Wendel, here as with everything else, isn’t letting up. “Christ, Mom,” he whines, “Let the old fart take a cab or something. There’s probably nothing w rong with his back anyway.”
    Esther glances in my direction, her hand on her hip. I shrug, and turn back to the photographs. “Rent a truck,” she says, after a moment’s consideration. “I need the pickup for later .”
    â€œCan’t you go get his car?”
    â€œIt doesn’t have four wheel drive.” That’s another of Esther’s quirks. She doesn’t like driving anything that doesn’t have four wheel drive.
    â€œWell, he can drive it, can’t he?”
    I see Esther’s resolve start to waver, so I toss my keys to him. “If you bring my car over here you can take the pickup.”
    He catches them easily, grimaces while I tell him where it is — a few blocks away — then yanks the pickup keys from Esther’s outst retched hand.
    â€œPark it in the usual spot and stick the keys on the hook under the bumper, will you?” I say. “And see if you can manage not to put any dents in it on the way over here.”
    He waves the handful of keys at me as he kicks open the Coliseum doors. “I’ll try real hard,” he answers, without looking back. “But there’s a lot of fire hydrants around here.”
    JUST LIKE ESTHER DOESN’T know I saw her freckles all those years ago, no one in Mantua knows I’m in those team photographs in the lobby. It isn’t that they’ve forgotten. They never knew. And no, it isn’t because the photos ar e so distorted that I’m unrecognizable. If all that was hiding me was a green face, they have been able to read my name in the list of players beneath the photos, right? But that’s the thing, see. I went by a different name then.
    Let’s start with Chilliwack and its Christian Lions.
    Chilliwack is a town in southern B.C., in those days about the same size as Mantua. But where Mantua has always been loaded to the rafters with logging equipment, sawdust burners, and dr unk loggers, Chilliwack was heavy on car dealerships, skating rinks with sturdy rooves, dairy farmers, and evangelical churches. While I lived there, there were so many Bibles being thumped on Sunday morning that it sounded like jungle drums. But since this is Canada, they also play hockey in Chilliwack, and one year someone got the idea that Chilliwack should send a team of nice Christian boys like me to win the Mantua Cup.
    While we were winning our first Cup for Jesus a few of us slipped seriously south of the path of righteousness, doing our share of drinking, bar-fighting, and carrying on. When we returned home to Chilliwack, several ministers — friends of the Car Dealers Association that sponsored us — decided that too many native sons had come back with beer stains on their Bibles, and the next year they tried to stop us from going