The Northwoods Read online

  The Northwoods

  In 1853 Wisconsin, Evelyn Bauer’s husband dies and, to support her children and their farm, she must disguise herself as him and work the logging camp for the winter. Sarah Bell has lost her partner, Abigail, to pneumonia. When she’s offered a job as a cook's helper at the logging camp, she has little choice but to go. The two women secretly forge a friendship as they struggle to survive the harsh environment.

  As Evelyn’s and Sarah’s feelings grow, tension silently builds and their unspoken passion will either force them apart or bind them together forever.

  The Northwoods

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  The Northwoods

  © 2018 By Jane Hoppen. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13:978-1-63555-144-0

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, NY 12185

  First Edition: March 2018

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Cindy Cresap

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design by Tammy Seidick

  By the Author

  In Between

  The Man Who Was Not

  The Northwoods

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my editor, Cindy Cresap.

  To Sharon Morrison

  Chapter One

  Evelyn Bauer was as ready as she ever would be to transform into a man. She laid out the logging clothes that had belonged to her husband, George, on the bed. As the bitter, brutal Wisconsin winter required, the clothes were mainly made of wool. Evelyn fingered a large checkered coarse shirt, brightly colored with rust, pine green, and brown. The woolen pants that she would pack were cut off at the knees for easier movement. She set aside two wool caps, a pair of mittens and gloves, and a deep red mackinaw, and she put a pair of rawhide shoepacks on the floor near the bed. They would serve as her boots and were made large enough so that several pairs of wool socks could be worn. These were the clothes that Evelyn would don for the good of her family.

  Two months earlier, near the end of a very dismal harvest season, Evelyn went to the cornfield on the farm’s northern section to fetch George for dinner. He hadn’t responded to the dinner bell when she rang it, and she didn’t mind the stroll. The evening was just edging into dusk, the sky’s burnt orange melting into a soft violet blue. After calling and calling for George and getting no answer, Evelyn finally found him in the far end of the field. He had collapsed in the dirt, surrounded by leftover stubble—bent stalks and discarded husks. She was unable to revive him, and the doctor had said that the cause of death was a heart attack.

  The burial was a simple affair, attended only by Evelyn; their three children; Evelyn’s sister, Helen; and George’s brother, Will. A minister from the small church down the road spoke a few words, and Will and one of his farmhands buried George beneath a birch tree that stood behind the house. During the days that followed, Evelyn mourned the loss of George, the loss of his kinship. They had grown up on neighboring farms and became fast friends in youth; their families often gathered together for summer picnics and visited during the winter to break up the long, monotonous stretches of icy cold. Their marriage had been a given, a matter of necessity dictated by nature. Evelyn’s father died when she was only seventeen, and her mother had passed away three years earlier. Her sister was already settled in town as a teacher, and with little discussion, Evelyn and George married soon after her father’s death. George joined Evelyn in the running of her parents’ farm, and his brother took over the Bauer family farm.

  Evelyn fingered the mackinaw that George had once worn. A tear slid down her cheek. I never thought I’d be without you this soon, George. He had been such a key in the fabric of their daily living that, even two months later, she would find herself calling out his name. Evelyn had always been grateful for George’s kindness and his companionship, though their relationship had not been one of great passion. Evelyn had little understanding of the concept.

  George had been a good-natured man, though not a man of many words, and when it came to the sensibilities of affection, he had always been at a loss—reserved and awkward. The marriage was a means of survival, a partnership built to withstand the hardships of the land. To Evelyn, George was more like a brother figure, and with the daily work on the farm being so strenuous, their sexual encounters were always fumbling and rushed affairs. By the time the act was over, George quaking into an orgasm, Evelyn was just beginning to feel some stirring. George would pass out beside her, exhausted, and all she would feel was frustration, lying beside him, awake in the night. Some nights after George had fallen into deep sleep, snoring beside her, Evelyn had let her hand slide past her belly, between her legs, where her fingers provided the release she desired. Any sexual pleasure that Evelyn had had in life, she had given to herself. Evelyn and George did have their three children, though—Peter, Karl, and Louise—and together they had maintained a substantial farm, with the usual ups and downs, the precariousness of farming always close at hand.

  That year had been a hard one for the Bauers, and their crops had suffered greatly. Weeks of heavy rain in the spring had caused the Wisconsin River to overflow just after planting, flooding the potato fields on the south end of the farm and rendering the land useless. The income from the few crops that remained, the corn and the wheat, was barely enough to survive on throughout the long winter months. When Evelyn surfaced from the shock of George’s sudden death, she realized that with a farm to manage and three children to feed, she had to do what he had done during the winter months after a bad harvest—head north to work in the logging camp. Evelyn lifted the heavy mackinaw and held it before her. She would take George’s place—as George.

  As Evelyn began to put on the clothes, she wasn’t surprised at how well they fit. She was a big woman, of German stock, and she and George had the same tall, sturdy build, though George had lacked her breasts and full curves. The outfit wasn’t really that foreign to Evelyn. She found dungarees more suitable to her work on the farm and, unlike her sister, Helen, who lived in town and taught in the one-room schoolhouse, she wore a dress only a few times a year, which wasn’t unusual. Many women from her territory were as masculine as the men and were used to toiling as much as any man. Some of the farm wives wore long prairie dresses, but many others, like Evelyn, found them a nuisance. One day, Evelyn had stopped by the mercantile store in town and the owner had shown her a newspaper that touted the latest styles some women on the East Coast were wearing.

  Evelyn had grunted at the picture and said, “They must be ladies of leisure. No work would ever get done in a getup such as that.”

  Evelyn gazed at the clothes she had laid out. Next to them she added a pile of rags and the pocket watch that had belonged to George. She knew she would be the only logger packing those items, but she would also be the only one who was menstruating. She would need the watch so she could be sure to wake before the others when she needed to change and hide the soiled rags that she would pin to her undergarments when necessary. Evelyn pulled on a pair of long johns and the heav
y woolen pants. Before she put on the shirt, she removed her stays and grabbed an old bedsheet from a trunk. She tore off one wide long panel and folded it lengthwise. She would have to bind her breasts if she was going to pass as George. Slowly, she wound the cloth over her chest in smooth layers, not so tight as to restrict movement or breathing, but tight enough to adequately flatten her breasts. She adjusted the bandage, striving for maximum comfort, as she knew that the binding would need to remain in place for the duration of her time at the camp. Because of the frigid conditions and the lack of water, none of the loggers bathed—ever. Evelyn shook her head as she tried to imagine the stench that must accumulate in the bunkhouse as the months passed. She fastened the binding with two large pins and put on the shirt.

  With the stink of the bunkhouse in mind, she went to the dresser that had belonged to George and opened the top drawer. She removed his pipe and a pouch of tobacco. She fingered the pipe. She wasn’t really a smoker, had taken only an occasional puff whenever George had his nighttime smoke, but she thought the pipe might give her an excuse to escape the bunkhouse for a few moments in the evenings. Evelyn put the pipe and tobacco in the canvas pack that would hold all her belongings for the winter months. She also took George’s straightedge razor off his dresser. She would need it so she could at least go through the motions of shaving. Just as she was shoving it into the pack, the door to the bedroom creaked open and her sister stepped in. She had been staying with Evelyn since George’s death, helping to prepare the farm for winter and to care for the children.

  “Are you sure this is necessary?” Helen asked as Evelyn pulled on a pair of thick wool socks.

  Evelyn looked at her sister, three years her senior. She was more petite than Evelyn, with dark brunette hair that fell only to her shoulders. In town, Evelyn had heard folks refer to Helen, thirty years old and unmarried, as a spinster. She knew Helen wouldn’t care what they called her, and in some ways Evelyn envied her status, so untethered. She lived with another woman, Jess Moore, who helped her run the school. Evelyn had always suspected that their relationship was more than a friendship, that perhaps they had a more intimate connection, something she sensed in the way they sometimes gazed at each other, but she never asked. Such matters were not discussed.

  She did walk in on them one day, though. She had traveled to town for supplies and stopped by their home. As was the custom, she had rapped on the front door and entered. She followed the scent of baking bread into the kitchen, and when she stepped into the room, she found Helen and Jess in an embrace that was a bit more than casual. When they realized she was in their presence, they released one another and stood looking at her unabashedly.

  “Bread smells wonderful,” was all Evelyn had said.

  She’d had no idea what else to say. Two women comforting one another, hugging, was not an uncommon scene, but this embrace seemed different. Evelyn hadn’t wanted to cause discomfort by asking questions, nor did she want to seem naive. She didn’t even know what questions she would ask. Helen had moved over to her side nonchalantly and lightly kissed her on the cheek.

  “Hello, sister.”

  Nothing more was said, and they sat down to indulge in warm slices of bread and cups of hot coffee.

  “Don’t see any way around it,” Evelyn said. “If I don’t go, we won’t have any way to get the provisions that we need come springtime. I won’t have the money to buy seed or hire hands. The farm would be a disaster.”

  “I worry about the kids,” Helen said. “George has been in the ground only two months now.”

  Evelyn worried about the children, too. Their father had been a good man, a mild man, and the children were fond of him and loved him dearly. She could sense the ache of their loss, the echo of his absence. Peter, the eldest at age ten, had always tried to emulate George, trudging out to the barn and fields with him before the break of dawn and joining him by the lake in the late summer afternoons to try to snag some trout or walleyes.

  He had grown sullen since George’s passing. The younger boy, Karl, was seven. He had also insisted on being in close proximity to George whenever possible, angling for a place on his lap when they sat outside on the porch in the summer, or inside near the woodstove on dark winter nights. Every morning since George’s death, when Karl came down to find his father absent from the breakfast table, he burst into tears. Even little Louise, who was four, had always vied for a place near her father’s side. She didn’t understand that her father’s absence would be permanent and often asked, “Papa? Where’s Papa?” The void of George’s presence would not be easy to fill.

  “I’m doing this because of the children,” Evelyn told Helen. “If we’d had a better harvest, I wouldn’t even think about it. But all the rain early in the season took its toll. Most of the fields were waterlogged, and the root cellar’s only three-quarters full. I can’t take a chance.”

  “I worry about your safety,” Helen said. “The work at those camps can be deadly, and what do you think will happen if the other loggers figure out that you’re not George?”

  Evelyn shrugged.

  “Guess they’ll send me home. Guess it’s up to me to make sure that doesn’t happen. Let me finish dressing and you can tell me what you think.”

  “All right,” Helen said. “I’ll go down and tend to the stew.”

  Evelyn glanced out the window.

  “If you don’t see the children heading back from the barn yet, ring the dinner bell,” she said. “It’ll be getting dark soon.”

  “Will do,” Helen said as she left the room.

  As Evelyn finished dressing, she wondered how George had fared at the logging camp. He wasn’t much of a complainer, and when he returned home in the spring, the logs having been delivered downriver, he wanted to hear more about her winter with the children, the happenings on the farm and about town, than he wanted to recount the long, laborious days and nights at the camp. Whenever Evelyn had asked George about the camp, his reply was always simple.

  “There’s not much to tell,” he’d say. “Every day was the same day, and every day was a long one.”

  She knew he had disliked going to the camp, but he took it all in stride, just as she would. She, however, would have the constant worry of being discovered. George did mention to Evelyn once that some of the men called him Quiet George because he never participated in the nightly singing and storytelling. George stayed mostly to himself when at the logging camp, and for that Evelyn was grateful. That would make her taking his place that much easier. George wasn’t a regular at the camp either, like many of the other men. He’d gone to work there only twice since Peter was born. No one would be able to remember George Bauer well enough to call her into question.

  Just as Evelyn finished putting on the clothes, she heard the children entering the house, and the scent of the stew she had prepared earlier in the day wafted up through the wooden rafters. She stood before the dusty, dim mirror in her new clothes. They were bulky, awkward. She put on a cap; wrapped a sheath of her long, wavy hair around one hand; and tucked it under the cap. She would ask Helen to cut her hair for her that night after dinner. She stepped away from the mirror and spoke, pushing her voice down as low as possible.

  “George Bauer,” she said. “I’m George Bauer from Maple Grove.”

  Her voice cracked, and she cleared her throat and tried again.

  “Well, this winter I will be a woman of few words,” she finally said after a few attempts, displeased with her performance. “Quiet George it is.”

  The chattering of the children below rose to the bedroom, and Evelyn took one last glimpse of herself and went downstairs to join them. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, the children turned their attention to her. Evelyn settled her eyes on them. Peter was tall and lanky, growing into himself, with a mop of reddish-brown hair and a band of freckles across his nose. Being the eldest, he took things seriously and had a somewhat stern personality. Karl was about a foot shorter, with a stocky build, blond hair,
and light blue eyes. He was more easygoing and lighthearted than his brother. Louise was a pudgy little girl, with wavy brown hair and hazel eyes, and she was generally joyous. Peter was the first to stammer any words.

  “Ma, why are you wearing Pa’s clothes?”

  “I’ve got to go north for the winter,” Evelyn told the children. “I’m taking your father’s place at the logging camp. Aunt Helen is going to stay here with you, and I’ll be back as soon as I make enough money to keep the farm going and food in our bellies.”

  Karl ran over to her from the other side of the room and clung to one of her legs as she ran a hand through his hair. Little Louise turned her face into the folds of Helen’s dress. Peter’s eyes filled with tears.

  “I want to go with you,” he said, his voice pleading.

  “The camp’s no place for a child,” Evelyn said. “And I need you here, to help your aunt with your brother and sister, and the farm. You know how this farm runs better than anyone. You know how to tend to the animals, keep the barn clean. Your father taught you well.”

  “But, Ma…”

  “This is how it has to be, Peter,” Evelyn said. “We need to make your father proud. Now, get out the bowls and spoons while I bring the food to the table.”

  “All right,” Peter mumbled, as tears began to stream down his cheeks.

  Evelyn went to his side and wrapped her arms around him.

  “It’ll be okay,” she assured him. “It’s only for the winter, this one winter. You know I wouldn’t go if I didn’t need to. Your uncle will help you with the farm. Just listen to him and your aunt and you’ll be fine.”