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Part 5: WORK SONG
We returned to the bunkhouse, dejected and fearful. I could feel my cheek swelling, and my leg twinged painfully whenever I moved it – I would not be walking right for a few days. But such was the right of the Captain: to break his prisoners, whenever and in what way he pleased. The guards may beat us with rifles, but only their Captain is allowed to kill us. And only through their captain are the guards given assent to fire at us.
Chief took his usual seat, but before he did so he pulled one of the old high-backed chairs from the table and positioned it near his, facing it towards the centre of the room. He gestured to me to sit and I collapsed into it gratefully. Seemingly satisfied, Chief opened his book and began to read silently. Everyone else gathered around the table or sat on beds, all of them facing me. They stared at me expectantly.
All except Vulture. He leaned back on a chair on the other side of the bunkhouse, arm leaning against the cabinet as he flicked the lighter open and closed. He stared at the flame, eyes occasionally flicking to me, when he would meet my gaze with a downturned mouth and steady hatred.
Well so much the better, I supposed. I didn’t have anything to say to Vulture. But I didn’t really have anything to say to anyone else, either.
I looked into the multitude of eyes that returned my gaze expectantly. My mouth had gone dry and I swallowed, gesturing helplessly. My eyes caught the Old Timer; he sat on his bunk and seemed to be the only one whose eyes appraised my injuries, rather than seeking a reason for my outbursts today.
‘What do you want to know?’ he asked eventually. I turned to Chief when he said that, but he gave every impression of being deeply absorbed in his book. I shrugged.
‘What do you know?’ I asked. ‘About the bridge. The song. The river.’ The old man rummaged around under his mattress and pulled out a flat, yellowed scroll of paper.
‘I’ve had this for years,’ he said. ‘When I was younger the song took me too. I spent years listening, recreating the melody as best I could; Chief eventually got through to me, got me to drop it. I was never going to get to the bridge, I would’ve ended up like every other soul who tries.’
He moved to the table, folks shuffling chairs out of the way so he could unroll it and spread it on the tabletop. I craned my neck to get a better view, but it didn’t help much; I stood, limping to the other side of the table, to see what the Old Timer had kept hidden for all these years.
It was a musical score.
Well, something of the sort; In trying to count the lines of the stave, I found it looped around and joined itself in many walls and corners that I could not make sense of. I saw the notation of the music, but where it began and ended was a mystery. There were a few places where the staves did not connect – any of these could be a beginning.
On the yellowed paper it seemed to glow like gold.
‘Why write it out like this?’ I asked. The Old Timer shrugged.
‘I saw it when I slept, sometimes,’ he said. ‘This was after many months of hearing it. In my dreams it always span, so I figured it for a circle.’
‘May I?’ I gestured to the paper, and the Old Timer nodded. I took it and returned to my chair – gratefully, for my leg was beginning to ache something fierce, and I did not want to risk immobilising myself by further breaking my leg. I looked it over by the dim light of the stove.
‘The Old Timer showed me that once,’ Chief said. I turned; he was looking up from his book, at the page I was attempting to decipher.
‘What changed your mind?’ I asked. Chief rolled his eyes at me and scoffed. I shook my head. ‘I mean it – you said you were willing to let me die for this cause. Why are you letting the Old Timer talk to me? What changed?’
‘Nothing changed,’ Chief sniffed. ‘I said it then and I’ll say it again: one reason is as good as any other.’
‘Fine,’ I grumbled. ‘But you know something about this too, don’t you?’
‘Only a little,’ he responded, ‘and nothing to help you cross the bridge.’ I sighed, and peered at the notes, willing them to give up their secret to me.
The sky outside darkened into inky blackness and someone turned on the overhead lights. Everyone was muttering and shuffling, and I felt my stomach begin to growl – we were all going hungry tonight, and it was my fault.
‘I think we’ve earned a reprieve,’ Chief said to the room at large. He closed his book and opened up the cabinet, pulling out the old tin of pemmican and putting a pot on the stove. In minutes the room was warm and lively with the smell, and everyone’s ravenous eyes were on the pot, which was steaming as it bubbled gently. Chief stirred the mixture, apparently heedless of the eyes of every prisoner on him, and on the grumbling and groaning of stomachs. At last, when he judged it good and ready, he produced the big bowl from somewhere and decanted the pot’s contents into it. Before he passed it around, however, he produced a cup and dipped it into the bowl, scooping up a little of the drink and passing it to me.
‘To the hero of the hour!’ he cried, and a great cheer went up, and the bowl was passed around. I looked at him quizzically.
‘To save you getting blood in the bowl,’ he murmured, dropping his lips by my ear. ‘I don’t know how hard a punch you took, but your jacket is stained with blood.’
I looked down at my chest. The grey was stained with flecks of red dried brown, including a long string of dark crusted from my collar to my stomach. I took a sip of the pemmican, feeling a sharp throbbing pain as my teeth moved with the fluid, but it was warm and had some taste and it was filling. I sighed and closed my eyes, and I could hear myself humming the song. I would deal with a stained jacket tomorrow, I resolved, and felt myself drifting towards sleep.
Other voices joined the humming.
I started, opening my eyes to look around. As they passed the bowl around, the prisoners were humming along with me. I stopped, feeling self-conscious, but they continued humming the song, passing the bowl around until it reached Vulture, who was noticeably silent. He lapped the last dregs of pemmican from the bowl and glowered at the floor. As the pemmican was finished, the group launched into one final verse before lapsing into silence.
I stared at them, and glanced at Chief: he seemed to have been wholly engrossed in his book. The other prisoners looked at me, trying not to stare; they coughed, looked around sheepishly, stared at the floor or ceiling. I smiled as inspiration struck me.
‘We need a song,’ I said.
‘I told you that!’ the Old Timer snapped. I shook my head.
‘No, I mean, we need a song for us,’ I explained. ‘We need a song the singer will hear, so they know about us.’
‘We don’t do songs,’ said Vulture.
‘We listen to the song every day,’ I retorted. ‘We hear some mysterious singer telling us she’s trapped and powerless over and over again! Why don’t we use our time to tell her we feel the same?’
‘We’d be better off spending that time working,’ Chief said. His expression was enigmatic – was this a challenge?
‘We can work faster if we have a song,’ I said. He smiled, but remained silent. Everyone else muttered: ‘What?’; ‘How does that work?’; ‘We’d be slower, surely…’
‘A song gives us rhythm,’ I said. ‘We work to the beat, we keep a steady pace and we work faster. A song means shorter days.’
The prisoners discussed it among themselves. There seemed to be a general consensus.
‘I think we can give it a try,’ Chief said.
The next day there was no captain screaming us awake at dawn. We were, mercifully, allowed to sleep in. As the sunlight filtering through the holes in the curtains finally hit my eyes and startled me into slow wakefulness, I wondered at that. If this was punishment, where was the hurt? We got more sleep, though we had less food, but we had no work to do.
Or no work at the bridge, anyway. Thanks to me, there was still work to be done.
We went over the song throughout those quiet days. Outside, the guards formed ranks drilled with weapons, they ripped up straw mattresses and pillows and turned them into practise dummies to fire at and spear with dagger and bayonet. Inside we deconstructed rhythm and meter and pored over the Old Timer’s beautiful manuscript, the bars and staves shifting and singing quietly to themselves. Together with Chief and Ox and the Old Timer, I went through rhymes and songs and tried to fit words to the melody, but the toughest thing was to make it about us. We all were trapped by this song – now the singer would learn who she was trapping.
We ran through practises, Chief thumping his booted foot against the floor to maintain a rhythm – we all began to do it, almost unconsciously. While we starved and thought we thumped and sang, so that after a week had passed with no work we were a little thinner, but the soldiers paused in their formations and looked over to our cabin as they heard the low thuds of twenty-two prisoners stamping in time.
That was the one time the Captain came in. Though Vulture was a misanthrope who did not take part in our lessons, he sat by the window and warned us when the Captain approached. The door slammed open and he found us stood to attention by our bunks, and he grunted and marched down the line.
‘I don’t know what you think you’re up to,’ he warned, ‘but it stops today. Tomorrow you’re up at the crack of dawn and back down to that bridge!’
As the door slammed in the wake of his retreat I stared at Chief.
‘Are we ready?’ I asked uncertainly. He shrugged.
‘We have the words,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to see what tomorrow brings.’
What a balm it was to be woken in the pre-dawn light the next day! The shout of, ‘Get dressed, Camp F! I want you ready and in your lines in five minutes!’ was like a cold shower to my lethargic mind. In just a week I had grown slow, and the song waned in my heart – I feared for the first time that we may get there and have no song to listen to. But then, would that time have been wasted to bring our own song back into it? If the singer were gone, wasted away, we would at least prove to the world that we had not wasted away ourselves.
Dressed, lined up, a mug of gruel in the truck for breakfast. The rising dread in me did not settle as I looked into Chief’s reassuring eyes; had I set all this up for nothing?
But the mood was different as we stepped out of the trucks and onto the snowy bank. It looked as it always did, but we were seeing it with fresh eyes; as we took our shovels (Vulture shoving the wobbly one into my arms and nabbing mine) there was a steely set to our eyes. The prisoners strode out onto the ice, and even as we marched I could hear the thump of the shovels hitting the ice in time. The soldiers started; I took my place behind the Old Timer and thumped the end of my shovel down in time with the rest, filing out onto the ice. We spread our tarps and made ready.
I began to hum, and everyone followed suit. Slow at first, but getting faster. And when we all were humming half of us broke into a chorus, and we sang:
We wake before dawn
To clear snow from the river of songs.
Our shovels may break
But our punishment rights all our wrongs.
We feel no cold,
We work hard as the day is long;
Our hearts locked in chains,
This is the river snow shovellers’ song.
Though our hands may freeze,
Still we keep to the haul-and-go.
Though our feet go numb,
Our boots hold us fast to the floe.
With each frozen breath,
This is the river snow shovellers’ song.
We worked steadily that day, every round of the song filling up the tarps. As we filled them up the folks still humming would break to sing, and we’d hum as we hauled our bounty of snow to the far bank. When we got back the places would shift, and the cycle continued. We moved faster, dug deeper, and hauled further to match the song.
I glanced at the Captain on my return to the line one trip; he motioned to the soldiers to lower their guns and folded his arms. Not pleased, but not angry. We were doing good work today, but it was also the song that had disrupted the work on that fateful day; I wonder what he thought about that.
Work continued apace, and before I knew it the sun was climbing through the arch of the bridge. It looked so big and so bright today, the light of hope – and I realised then that the song was working. I sang it with my full heart that morning, because the bridge was closer than ever before and we had yet to hear the song.
I turned my eyes back to my work. No sense in making a mistake now.
Two more verses. Three. We went around and around. Humming then singing, another four times before the sun hit the capstone and I heard that verse again:
I am locked in this tower
With only the cell’s rhythms for company.
Let my sight pierce the veil
That I may see who joins me in harmony.
What fear must they face
That bloodies their mouth and breaks their knee?
The world outside turns,
But it turns only the ice on our skin.
Young rebel,
How much do you bleed for me?
Young rebel,
The stakes are so high for you.
Young rebel,
It turns only the ice on our skin.
And I could not sing in answer, because it came through louder and clearer. It pealed like a bell, echoing across the valley, and the soldiers stood stunned. As the song ended I started – was I missing my chance? - but my companions stood to attention, one arm crossed over their heart, and they sang clearly our answer:
We wake before dawn
To clear snow from the river of songs.
Our shovels may break
But our punishment rights all our wrongs.
And as they sang I looked towards the Captain – he stood white-faced, rooted to the spot and open-mouthed in indecision.
We feel no cold,
We work hard as the day is long;
Our hearts locked in chains,
This is the river snow shovellers’ song.
I glanced to Chief; he gave me an incredulous look and nodded his head: yes, go!
Though our hands may freeze,
Still we keep to the haul-and-go.
I was so close.
Though our feet go numb,
Our boots hold us fast to the floe.
I dropped my shovel and took two faltering steps forward.
With each frozen breath,
This is the river snow shovellers’ song.
And then I was running as fast as my broken legs could carry me, until I was no longer running, I was falling, falling through the dark...