by Annie Proulx
There were three groups: Maine men, French-Canadas and Indians. The Maine men, crouched around their indoor fire pit, put their various fixings in one gigantic frying pan and, cursing and blowing on their burned fingers, ate directly out of the hot utensil. The French buried a cast-iron Dutch oven filled with beans in the hot ashes of the central fire pit to cook overnight. When they had pork they added it to the beans. These beans smelled very delicious and when the Maine men could stand it no longer they stole the cast-iron pot, carried it into the woods and ate the contents. The empty Dutch oven was found a mile from the camp, near where they were cutting, and there was a tremendous fight with ax handles, rocks, knives, one man dead and the iron pot recovered by the supperless French. Most of the Maine men left the camp the next day. When a new crew came in from Bangor, they brought a Dutch oven and a bushel of dried beans.
The Indians cooked meat outdoors on the coals on the lee side of their wikuom, protected from the wind. They had no iron kettle, but the Passamaquoddy shared two good bark baskets so they could heat water for spruce tea. The Passamaquoddy had a little bag of China tea but the Mi’kmaq preferred spruce tips and black birch bark. During the daylight hours while chopping Achille kept an eye open for game, or even put down his ax for an hour or two and hunted the ridges. When at last he found a bear’s den under the snow they spent their free Sunday killing it. The frozen meat lasted a month, and the pelt went on the wikuom floor, the best place to sit. None of them had more than a few words of English, but Achille began to learn the tongue-twisting talk.
He had several axes, including an old one that had belonged to René. Hard use had worn away much of the cutting-edge metal and the thick remnant dulled quickly. He wanted an American falling ax with a heavy poll and, if he had enough money, a good goose-wing hewing ax. He planned to buy these when Fraude paid him for the winter’s work. He thought of René and his inimitable chopping style. At this moment in among the big pines he missed him and wished they were cutting together again. Every chopper had his own way of doing the work, but René had been notable for quick light strokes with his very sharp ax; he could go on chopping for hours without tiring. As a boy Achille had found it difficult to chop in rhythm with him.
• • •
As spring began its slow crawl up from the south, Georges Fraude arrived on a heavily breathing horse one morning and said they had to get the logs into the river immediately. The ice was going, and with one more warm day the snowmelt freshets would pour into the heavier water. But they still had hundreds of logs to drag out of the woods.
“Forget them! Roll what we got in the water.” The man’s haste seemed desperate and Achille remarked on it to the swamper.
Leon LaFlèche, one of the French choppers, said, “Did you not know that we are in the New England colonies and that we have cut their forbidden mast pines all the winter long?”
“Know nothing that. Thought we was in—what they call it?—Brunsick.”
Leon laughed. “That is why Fraude is in a hurry. The owner of this forest tract must be sendin his men to seize the logs and Fraude heard of it. The owners always know where we cuttin and let us do the work. Then they take the logs the last minute before we get them into the river.”
Getting the logs in the water was the trick. The river flowed north into New Brunswick, where they would be pulled out by Georges Fraude’s sawmill men and metamorphosed from the English king’s mast pines into New Brunswick planks. Fraude shouted and ran back and forth, urging the men to roll the logs faster. But before thirty timbers were in the drink a gang of woodsmen and Bangor toughs armed with ax handles and chains burst out of the forest and the fight was on. The militant ox teamster led Fraude’s troops in joyous resistance; the Maine men enjoyed fights above all else. They were grossly outnumbered, for the landowner had rounded up scores of men from the saloons with the promise of pay and an exciting fight. Those of Fraude’s men who could swim plunged in and made for the far shore.
The logs were captured by the landowner. Fraude paid no one. Most of the Mi’kmaq headed north, but Achille, who had meant to go back to Elphège and fetch Kuntaw and Auguste, could not return empty-handed. He drifted south looking for work.
31
follow me
Elphège, now sixty-six winters, was half-blind but sat outside in fair weather. The smell of autumn, the tick of waxy leaves hitting one another on their descent to earth let him remember the fierce colors. The leaves fell, the first winter winds swept them into hollows, rain and new snow pressed them flat. Then the woods went silent.
Winters he huddled next to the fire, buried in thoughts of colors and fog, of hunts and journeys, of the terrible day six years earlier when scorching tears burned his cheeks as he knelt beside Theotiste’s headless corpse. Despite his fifty-nine years Theotiste had become a warrior. In August 1749, when Cornwallis, ignoring Mi’kmaq territorial rights, declared Halifax an English settlement, Theotiste’s band attacked some English tree-choppers. He escaped the avenging rangers, but fell the next week to an unknown assassin, his head a prize to a bounty hunter.
Elphège was now composing his death song. Noë’s daughter Febe, after the death of her mother, had moved in to care for him. Sometimes they guessed at what might have befallen Achille, the youngest brother, who went to Maine to chop trees years before.
“Kuntaw,” said Febe. “Kuntaw will find him,” for Kuntaw, after much trouble with his wife, Malaan, left her and their boy, Tonny, and went south to search.
“If he lives,” said Elphège. “If he lives. Many evils could befall Kuntaw as he is headstrong.”
“Not so headstrong as Auguste.” Auguste spent much time with the English; he broke many English laws, drank whiskey, stole, he was imprisoned and beaten but remained defiant. The English called him a bad Indian and he took pleasure in the epithet.
“One day they will kill you,” warned Elphège.
“No. I kill them,” said Auguste. It was true that occasionally some villager was found drowned in the lake behind the town, or washed up on the shore, the white puckered body lacerated with knife wounds. Children had wandered into the forest and never emerged, their bones found years later with great crunched holes in the skulls. No one knew how these things had happened but Elphège had thoughts he did not wish to explore.
It was amusing to Elphège that with age he was presumed to be a wise man, even a sagmaw. Many people came to him to ask what they should do when an English housewife threw scalding water on a Mi’kmaw child begging food, or when another asked for magic help. It was a punishment to see his people half starved, skulking around the English and asking for employment or food. There were not many Mi’kmaw people left in the world, and each of them seemed plagued by sickness, hunger and sadness. They died easily, for they wished to die.
• • •
Years went by and Achille did not go north to his people. He kept to himself. He had the reputation of a skilled axman. The camp toughs stayed away from him. He fought with intensity and cold malice, and a man who had come up behind him in the woods and tried to club him at the base of the neck was spouting blood from the stump of his forearm—his severed hand hit the ground before he could strike. Another who crept up in the night with a firebrand to burn Achille’s wikuom was himself roasted though no one knew quite how it had happened. The man’s charred body was dumped in front of the shanty. Newcomers to the logging camp were warned to stay shy of the killer Indian, the reincarnation of the bloodthirsty savages who had massacred settlers in earlier times.
Kuntaw heard some of these stories as he made his way from camp to camp after leaving Malaan and Tonny in Mi’kma’ki. He hired on as a swamper for Duquet et Fils. It was becoming difficult to find good chances of pine on fair-size streams, so the swampers worked summers, constructing dams on the smallest rills. And the forest was dangerous; the fighting, ambushes and skirmishes continued. Men were in a killing mood.
There were more Indians in the Maine camps, and occasiona
lly he heard some news of one named Sheely. He thought it might be Achille. This Sheely was a very good hunter, a good axman. All Kuntaw could find out was that Sheely was working in York state, cutting pine on the Raquette River. He made up his mind to go there in spring. It would take two weeks of walking, he thought. Maybe he would join Achille’s crew. How surprised his father would be. Maybe they would go to Mi’kma’ki together after they drove the logs down to Montreal. He would have his wages and they could arrange passage in a trade canoe until the river forced them to walk.
The spring of 1758 came on uncommonly fast; one day the shrinking snow was frozen and he could make good time, the next it was mush and mud. The forest gurgled and slopped. It was slow going and when he reached the river Frenchmen rolling logs into the black water said Sheely had gone with the first logs.
“Hey, Indan, you look him Montreal,” they said. “Maybe Nouveau Brunswick. Maybe Terre-Neuve. Maybe l’enfer.” Suddenly the long chase seemed foolish. He turned back and headed for Maine. There was still time to hire on a spring drive. It wasn’t meant for him to find Achille.
• • •
A month later he was on the west shore of Penobscot Bay in Catawamkeag, where crews were loading timber onto ships for export. There were several shipyards and a straggle of whiteman houses, one great log house and a tiny settlement of the few surviving Penobscots. He walked along the street fronting the bay following five or six other lumberjacks headed for the loggers’ bar where most of the rivermen would drink, wake up the next day penniless and amnesiac.
Kuntaw felt very well. He was strong, his muscular body hard. He was relieved to have given up the search for Achille. Maybe someday they would find each other, but now he would enjoy being alive and vigorous. He strode along, his eyes flashing left and right as he took in the sights. After six months in the woods even the poor settlement of Catawamkeag looked like a city.
“You!” called a strident voice in English. “You there, you Indian!”
He turned and looked behind him. There was a young woman on a brown horse and she was pointing at him. He guessed correctly that she had only eighteen winters, a double-handful less than he.
“Come here.” Her voice was firm.
He hesitated, then shrugged and walked toward the horse. It was a valuable horse, nothing like the big scarred beasts that drew logs to the landings. He stood a few yards back from the horse and looked at the girl. She was elegant, wearing a black cloak edged in red. Something about her dark-ivory face said she was part Indian.
“You like to make some money?” she asked, moving close. She lifted her head and inhaled his odor of smoke, meat and pine pitch.
He shrugged. “What do?”
“Split wood, of course.” She enunciated very carefully. “You carry an ax. Do you not know how to split firewood?”
He nodded. “I know.”
“I need you, Indian man. Follow.” Beatrix Duquet turned her horse and trotted gracefully toward the big house; he had to run to keep up with her. Watching her long crinkled hair sway, the bright heels of her boots, he felt a wave of enchantment strike him like warm rain. So, in his thirtieth spring, began the strangest part of his life as he seemed to stumble out of the knotted forest and onto a shining path.
Were not René Sel’s children and grandchildren as he had been, like leaves that fall on moving water, to be carried where the stream takes them?
IV
the severed snake
1756–1766
32
a funeral
On the day of old Forgeron’s funeral, unusually warm for mid-November Boston, the sky was covered with mild cloud. A dozen elderly men sat in the front pews to remember the surveyor who had made them fortunes with timberland. At last the three Duke brothers, Jan, Nicolaus and Bernard, aided by the company bookkeeper, Henk Steen, carried the clear-pine casket, lacquered and rubbed to a glass-like glare, an elegant burial case for a man who had spent almost forty years taking the measure of Pinus strobus. Jan silently willed Bernard not to stumble, not to fall. Outger, the youngest brother, should have been there but he refused to leave the house on Penobscot Bay, refused to give up the great table, a single board from the largest pine Duquet had ever cut. This icon belonged in the company’s Boston council room.
“I need it for my work,” Outger had said with passion.
“What sort of work would that be?” Bernard had asked of the ceiling; he thought Outger an imbecile. It was said that Indians visited him often. He could not be depended on for anything except to receive his annual stipend. Still, he should have been there.
The sermon had gone on for two hours, but at the graveside things began to move briskly. A rising wind wrinkled the milky sky. Nicolaus shifted from foot to foot, his boots gleaming like oiled hooves. All warmth leaked from the day as the wind hauled to the north. The brothers looked knowingly at each other. It was the Forgeron weather curse. The sudden chill urged the minister on. They lowered the coffin into the dark hole, and at last came the words “rest in peace.”
The brothers and the skeleton-thin Henk Steen, one of the many Dutch orphan protégés who came to Duke & Sons as apprentices over the years, walked away from the graveside. In a body the fittest mourners walked to Nicolaus Duke’s house, treading in the center of the street, where it was smoothest.
“Do come along, Henk,” Nicolaus said to the bookkeeper, who hovered at the edge of the crowd. “Join us in farewell to the old fellow.” Nicolaus was the best diplomat among the brothers and had learned the art of persuasion from his grandfather Piet Roos, with whom he had made voyages to China and Japan. Now his dark hair, when not covered with a wig, was ragged grey. His face and neck had swollen with fat though he still moved easily, unlike Jan and Bernard.
Deceived by the mild forenoon, none of them was warmly dressed. They hurried on past a wooded lot, a large garden stiffened by the last week’s frosts, until they saw the candlelight glowing enticingly in Nicolaus’s front windows. Through the wavery glass they could see his wife, Mercy; Bernard’s wife, Birgit; and the Panis slave girls passing to and fro with tureens and pitchers, for Bernard had brought Panis—Pawnee—Indian slaves down from Ville-Marie.
The door to the best parlor stood invitingly open with Mercy welcoming them. In the center of the room a long table covered with a fine turkey carpet presented the collation of covered dishes, an array of silver and twist-stem glasses. Some fragrant wood burned in the fireplace; Steen thought it might be a few pieces of sandalwood to perfume the room, a scrap of Charles Duquet’s oriental plunder. Beeswax candles in brass sconces lit the room, their trembling light reflected in a large pier-glass mirror. Henk Steen gaped at the dozen black walnut chairs with cushions—so many, so rich.
“Please enter, dear guests, come in,” said Mercy, guiding them into the warmth. She wore a loose grey silk saque pleated at the shoulders over a scarlet bodice and underskirt, her wig low and neat. She often suffered from crushing headaches that sent her to a quiet room and she now silently prayed to get through the evening without an attack. Their children, Patience, Piet and Sedley, lived nearby, the two sons well settled into the family lumber business. Patience had married a boatbuilder, Jeremiah Deckbolt.
• • •
Henk Steen hung back in the entryway staring at the luxuries and rich clothing of the guests. He felt out of place, and longed for his cold little room, but Nicolaus urged him to take a tankard of steaming cider laced with rum. Mercy led him to the cold sliced meats and Birgit’s famous horseradish sauce, so stinging, she said, it would make the devil gasp. “Hardly an inducement to try it,” Steen muttered to himself and his hand veered away. He took a small marzipan cake. The fireplace crackled and spoke to itself. Yes, thought Steen, Nicolaus Duke lived very well. And why not, with Duke & Sons’ swelling sales to the timber traders whose millmen converted logs into planks, barrel staves and clapboards, hogshead staves, shingles, masts, spars and bowsprits, dike timbers. All the Duke brothers lived gallant live
s, except perhaps the strange one, Outger, who kept to the disappeared father’s house in Penobscot Bay and whom Steen had never seen and imagined as a crabbed hermit clutching a blackthorn stick. The marzipan cake surged in his gut and he thought he might have to rush outside.
Mercy glanced over the room to see if everyone had a cup of comfort, a chair, someone with whom to converse. In truth she wished the company were different. These old men with their timber holdings! She wished very much to entertain (and be entertained by) the wealthy Boston families connected with commercial shipping, quite different from the fishing boat owners who had thought themselves the crème de la crème in her parents’ day. The merchant shipping families had replaced them and built magnificent houses. She and Jan’s wife, Sarah, gossiped enviously of their social doings. But never had any member of the Duke families been invited to their collations or soirees. Mercy told Nicolaus that she longed to give a grand party and invite these worthies, but Nicolaus said, “My dear, better not. You do not wish us to be regarded as jump-ups”—that most odious word.
Bernard and his lanky Danish or Norwegian wife, Birgit, stood in a corner talking with Joab Hitchbone, who was even older than old Forgeron. Birgit spoke in her odd accent, smiling and nodding.
What a jolt they all had felt when Bernard returned with Birgit from one of the Baltic or Scandinavian countries, precisely which one was never clear. She once told Mercy she had been born near the great Kongeegen tree in Denmark. It was a shock, for Bernard had been a remarkably attractive youth with wavy hair and cobalt-blue eyes. His habitual expression indicated he was about to smile and a mole on his left cheek encouraged that impression. Cornelia, his adoptive mother, had imagined that he was the by-blow of some French aristocrat and a pretty seamstress. He was still handsome though the dark hair had disappeared and the fine jawline had been replaced with a jowl; he limped. No one understood what had drawn him to Birgit. But their marriage, though childless, had lasted nearly thirty years. Birgit kept an orderly house and a rich table. She spent much time in the kitchen, not content to leave cookery to the slaves. Despite hoopskirts she preferred to mix and singe and roast herself. Her flummeries were renowned.
