Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

  “He’ll come through. Head hard as a quahog shell. Maybe more confused than usual for a bit. We’ll watch how he goes.” He turned to George Pickering, who was watching with great interest.

  “You are not to speak to any member of this ship’s crew for the duration of the voyage. You would do well to keep out of sight or there might be an accident. The crew regards you as a Jonah.”

  “They are just jealous of my friendship with Wigglesworth,” smiled George Pickering.

  “It is Wigglesworth would give you the push, Mr. GEORGE PICKERING Duke.”

  36

  clouds

  Before they left Boston, Bernard had arranged the hire of a private carriage to take them around Amsterdam as he was not sure if Cornelia and Doortje had a stable and conveyances. Outger had made his own arrangements. A wealthy merchant to whom he had sent crates of sassafras over the years had offered him the use of his berlin, horses and coachman.

  It was a bright blue January morning when they came off the Bladwesp. Outger’s borrowed equipage stood at the end of the wharf. The travelers looked it over. The berlin was an exquisite thing, deep marine-blue enamel, glass windows, the merchant’s initials coiling like golden snakes on the doors. The body of the carriage was slung on steel springs, the apex of travel comfort. The coachman’s livery was a strong yellow and from a distance, Bernard said the ensemble resembled a blue teapot with a canary sitting on the spout. Outger ordered the Bladwesp sailors to load his trunks onto a waiting dray and in minutes the merchant’s cream-colored horses bore him away.

  Amsterdam had grown so large it shocked Jan, Bernard and Nicolaus, so bustling, its port jammed with ships of every nation, the streets—the streets of their childhood—thick with people speaking twenty tongues. Jan found he could barely understand the street slang, yet it shot tendrils of painful nostalgia through him. The travelers recovered their legs by walking to their inn, then hired a laundress to wash their linen in fresh water. Jan strolled about the streets; Nicolaus bought an old book, Erasmus’s De civilitate morum puerilium, a book of manners for children, but useful to adults, especially in uncouth New England, where force and boldness defied efforts at politesse. He opened the book and immediately read that wild eyes implied a violent character, and fixed stares were proofs of effrontery. Outger, he reflected, had both wild eyes and a fixed stare, depending on his disposition.

  Back at the inn a messenger presented Bernard with a letter from Doortje telling them that in the morning they should go to Piet Roos’s old house, which was now Cornelia’s home. She, Doortje, was living in their parents’ house attended by her servant, Mieke. She would meet them at Cornelia’s and wished them Godspeed. She added a postscript: “Outger is here already one day.”

  • • •

  Amsterdam had swollen like a cracker in hot milk, but Bernard remembered the stale odor of the canals, the wet cobbled streets and sky milky with overhead cloud. After so many years in the dark forests at the top of the world, where trees rejected the puny efforts of men, he found pollarded willows ridiculous. He and his adopted brothers had changed very much, the world had changed. He felt he belonged neither here nor there. The next day when he entered his assigned room in Cornelia’s house he was pleased to see a half-remembered painting of a hunting scene, a huntsman raising a horn to his lips. This painting stirred some subterranean image of lost familiarity and it was a good omen that it still pleased him.

  As for Jan, the return to his homeland affected him deeply—the light, the long, long horizon and the opalescent subtleties of clouds—the clouds!—made him long to toss away his present life, to remain here in the few short years left him, for he was fifty-four. He did not want to see Cornelia or Doortje; he only wanted to gaze at clouds. In their shifting forms and vaporous mutations they seemed uncanny manifestations of what he felt inside his private self.

  • • •

  The next morning they walked to the old Piet Roos house. Inside the entry hall the first thing Jan saw was a painting of horizon and endless sky filled with clouds of unraveling lace, clouds pulling up the dark of the sea into their nether regions. Why had he never seen this painting when he was young? How different his life might have been. But no, had he not been rescued from the Weeshuis orphanage he would likely have been apprenticed to some farrier or chimney sweep. But perhaps . . .

  Nicolaus, too, was shuddering with recognition, with awakened recollections as ribboned as the shifting light. The bridges delighted him, bridges of many shapes and lengths, of stone and wood, the latter very likely of timbers from the forest properties of Duke & Sons. Arched bridges shaped the diffuse light so correctly he felt a flare of joy. He remembered cold winter ice and sliding along on his shoes under one of those very bridges. On one of his walks he saw the skinny bridge—Magere Brug—over the Amstel and he grinned like a fool as he crossed it.

  Outger was in residence. He had to be first; he was the real son, and he was gratified when Cornelia said “my own dear boy,” and squeezed his hands in her buttery paws. He sat on the floor with his head leaning against her knee—a pose he had seen in a painting—and poured out his (expurgated) life history in the English colony which he had decided to renounce.

  “I might live with Doortje, if you do not have room for me here, dear Mother. I do need several rooms and a very large table for my Work.”

  Doortje looked at Outger, then at the plaster cherubs on the ceiling, back again at Outger. Cornelia was slightly alarmed. She began to talk of his childhood ways and of the great changes in the world since he had left. She did not mention Charles Duquet. But as soon as the others arrived she shifted Outger to the fringes of her affection, or so he felt. They all came at once, tall strong men filling the room, everyone pressing forward.

  Age and plumpness had ironed out Cornelia. Her quite smooth face and broad nose seemed almost flat and one eye sat noticeably higher than the other. Her brows were invisible and the white-blue eyes seemed they might be sightless. Her thin hair was covered by a finely embroidered linen cap. She wore a grey silk dress and, as the day was chilly, a little cape of marten fur. One by one the sons approached, bent low and kissed her. The grandsons George Pickering Duke and Young Piet came forward in their turn and pecked at her hand. She tried to feel a stir of affection for these young sons of her adopted boys.

  Doortje’s face had the same sharp features as Charles Duquet’s and Outger’s, but her body was obese. She wore a dress of fine blue wool. Her small eyes flashed around, taking in every detail of the colonial company, and she showed a slight, almost pitying smile. Bernard thought she looked intelligent and likely was sharp-tempered.

  • • •

  Cornelia had ordered a welcoming dinner and many relatives poured into the house, laughing and smiling, beseeching information on the New World and its rigors. Before they went to table there were drinks and delicacies. Jan had not tasted North Sea herrings since he was a boy—there was nothing better on earth. Bernard was enjoying good jenever and smoked eel. At dinner the main dish was waterzooi, a rich stew of freshwater fish.

  Bernard was interested in some of the cousins. Jaap Akkerman he remembered as a small, black-haired boy picking fleas off a spotted dog. Now he showed a drooping face topped with heavy eyes, the lids like ivory covers on pillboxes. He was involved in some business with eelgrass, once used to procure salt, but now, said Akkerman, a very good material for packing fragile items.

  “Zeegras—sea grass or eelgrass—has many virtues. You know of course, that in olden times they used it to help bind the dikes together?”

  “I did not know,” said Bernard. He could not imagine how eelgrass could be made to hold back the sea, but by the end of the meal he was stuffed full of waterzooi and eelgrass particulars.

  Bernard tired of the tales Outger told at every meal. Doortje bore it for two nights and then told her mother, “I will take dinner at home. I am needed there.” Some years earlier Doortje had married Roelof Vogel, a learned antiquarian who died be
fore their son, Lennart, was three. Doortje said Lennart was ill at home. As for the idea that Outger might live there with them—impossible.

  After dinner Cornelia announced that as this visit was a rare occasion she wished to have a painting of the family. The portrait of Piet Roos which hung in her bedroom would serve as the necessary paterfamilias. It would take center position and the rest of them would be grouped below. Two serving men took the portrait from its nail and brought it downstairs.

  “There,” said Cornelia. “You see my father. It is true we no longer have the great painters of the last century, but Cornelis Ploos van Amstel is a fine portrait painter. I shall send a message to him at once.”

  The next morning the painter arrived, a long-bodied chap with an arrogant expression on his florid face. He enjoyed coffee and cakes, heard Cornelia’s plan to have the portrait of Piet Roos included in the work. Ploos van Amstel sauntered around the room looking at the chairs, selected the two largest, heavily carved and gilded, ordered the servants to set them side by side in front of a faded tapestry. He put the portrait of Piet Roos in one and Cornelia in the other. Of Charles Duquet there was nothing except Outger and Doortje. His life had come and gone, and even here among the people he had imagined as a family he was forgotten.

  Ploos van Amstel placed them around Cornelia and asked them to do something with their hands. Doortje folded hers primly. Bernard took out a little pocketknife and began to pare his nails. George Pickering Duke had spent the morning trolling the book stalls and had come back with a prize, an old quarto edition of Willem Bontekoe’s Gedenkwaardige Beschrijving Van de Achtjarige en zeer Avontuurlyke Rise Niewe Hoorne, and he held it in his hands opened to a woodcut of an exploding ship, pieces of human anatomy flung into the sky. Jan and Nicolaus folded their arms across their chests. Outger threw himself at Cornelia’s feet as though beseeching her for something. Two mornings dragged by. Then Ploos van Amstel took himself, his canvas, charcoal pencils and easel away to begin the painting, for, he said, the sketches were done.

  • • •

  It was happy news for everyone except Cornelia when, after a week, Outger left for Leiden with a trunk of papers. Nicolaus had many meetings with businessmen, even the eelgrass cousin. One morning he told Bernard that there were splendid opportunities just waiting to be picked up. They were sitting in a little smoking room. Nicolaus had sheets of paper under his hand, papers that described business ventures he found tempting. One by one Bernard dismissed them. He told Nicolaus it was better exercise to worry about their own market. For two decades Duke & Sons had supplied heavy timbers for the dikes, but in recent years the destructive Teredo navalis had come to Holland in bottom-gnawed cargo ships and attacked the dikes. The dike builders were now importing stone. Duke & Sons had lost several municipal contracts. And unless shipbuilding picked up in Boston they would suffer more losses. Nicolaus continued to describe bargain investments. It was good, thought Bernard, that they would soon leave.

  At the end of a month Bernard was ready to go. He was concerned about Jan, who spent too much time wandering around in polders and along dikes staring at the sky. He had looked at small houses in the company of purchase agents. And Bernard saw him go into a shop specializing in pigments and canvas. What was the fellow thinking? He followed Jan on one of his daily rambles.

  “Jan,” he called. “Have a cup of warmth with me.” He guided him to a coffee shop. They sat near a window.

  He spoke kindly; he understood how affected Jan had been by their return, but what else drew him? They had to think of going home. Soon.

  “Brother,” said Jan. “This may sound strange to you but I have always longed to be a painter. And here is the place I wish to paint.” He pointed upward. “The clouds.”

  “Clouds? Jan, you are a mature man, you are—you are old! You cannot abandon the company and take up painting. Duke and Sons needs your services.”

  “Bernard, I must try. Let me stay on for another six months to see if I can paint. I have so many pictures in my head. Brother, have you not ever wanted to do something that was—how can I say it—out of the ordinary?”

  Bernard laughed bitterly. “Oh God, I have. I entirely understand the feeling.” He went quiet while Jan drank his mixture of hot sweetened chocolate and coffee. When his cup was empty Bernard sighed.

  “So do that, stay here and paint clouds for six months. But give me your word that you will return at the end of that time.”

  “I will,” said Jan. “I’ll bring you my best painting.”

  “That is what I need, Jan, more than anything—a painting of Dutch clouds. But take care not to get windmills in your mind.”

  “I will leave that to Outger,” said Jan.

  They both smiled tightly. Bernard was ready to embark, his passage already arranged. He had only one or two last things to do; he had ordered a pair of bucket-top boots from a boot maker reputed to be an artist with leather and they must be ready. They would look well with his wraprascal coachman’s cloak. He stopped first at a lace maker’s shop and selected a present for Birgit, a needlepoint flounce, point de France, in something the shopkeeper called the candélabre pattern. His boots were not quite ready and the leather artist asked him to come back in two hours; only a few nails had yet to go into the soles. He waited.

  • • •

  The boots were ready, black and gleaming, lacking only a pair of silver spurs. Impatient to wear them Bernard put them on in the shop and walked back to old Piet Roos’s house. After some minutes he felt a painful sharp object digging into his left foot. As he could hardly take the boot off in the street, he went back to the boot maker’s shop, favoring his foot to avoid driving the sharp object further into his flesh.

  The boot maker was surprised. “What, sir, back so soon? Not to your liking?”

  “There is something sharp in this one,” said Bernard, sitting in the customer’s chair and tugging at the boot. There was blood on his stocking. He didn’t bother to look inside, but tossed the thing at the boot maker, who caught it deftly and plunged his hand into it.

  “Ah,” he said. “A nail went awry. Haste made waste, ha-ha. I’ll have it right in a moment.” With pincers he drew the nail, threw it into a bin and set another with a few sharp taps of his hammer, plunged his hand in again and felt around vigorously. “There you are, quite sound. I am sorry for the nail.” He gave Bernard an oiled chamois cloth as a make-peace gift. Bernard pulled the boot back on and tested it. He left, heels ringing on the floor.

  As he came through the door of the old Piet Roos house the servant girl was there. She curtsied and said, “Mevrouw wishes you to join her and the others in the library.” He expected Cornelia had arranged some sort of farewell party and was not surprised to see Doortje, Nicolaus, Jan, Piet and George Pickering Duke when he came into the library. On a side table there was a steaming coffeepot and cups.

  “I have asked you all to be here,” said Cornelia, “because I have had a letter from Outger this past hour. He encloses a private envelope for Bernard. In the letter to me he says that he has been invited to join the Leiden faculty. He will send for his possessions once he has found a furnished and well-staffed house.” She passed the other envelope to Bernard, who opened it and drew out a single sheet.

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh God damn his eyes—forgive my language, Mother. I must read this aloud since it is of importance to all of us.

  Dear Almost-Brothers. This is to notify you that I will not be returning to the Colonies nor the House on Penobscot Bay. But do not think you can have the Large Table. It, and all the other Contents of the House, are now the Property of my Daughter, Beatrix Duquet. Her Mother was a Passamaquoddy Indian, a kind and gentle Woman who helped Me with My studies of Indian ways and beliefs. She died and I had the charge of my Daughter who has benefited from a Good Education. From Me. She is in Residence at My House on Penobscot Bay as I write this. I have told her all that I am telling you. Perhaps she will eventually join me in Leiden. I will endeavo
r to return occasionally in order to pay Her a visit. On such Trips I will not stop in Boston. Yours, quite sincerely, Outger Duquet.”

  Cornelia put her hand over her heart and leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed. The servant ran for smelling salts.

  “Daughter?” shouted Nicolaus. “That fool has a daughter? Who else but an Indian would take up with Outger? We must go back and get her out of our house. It was never Outger’s to own, it was always the property of the company. We only let him remain in it to keep him from troubling the business. How soon can you be ready to leave, Bernard? We must see to this immediately.”

  Doortje helped Cornelia up to bed, then rejoined the men. The talk went on for hours with a hundred bold and impractical plans to oust the “daughter,” to punish Outger, to cut off his company stipend, to get the large table, to claim the house. In the end they decided that Nicolaus and Bernard would go up to Penobscot Bay as soon as they were back in the colonies and see the situation for themselves.

  The first available ship sailing for Boston was a tired old East Indiaman—De bloem. The captain’s small pointed face, a narrow pointed nose that led to a pointed chin embellished with a pointed wisp of beard, did little to inspire confidence. His cheeks were red, whether from drink or eczema Bernard did not know, but the man promised all speed.

  “She looks tired but she moves smart over the waves,” he said. The ship was, in fact, going to be broken up in Boston.

  • • •

  The ship bucked and sidled in the North Sea. Nicolaus and Bernard put their shared stateroom in order. Bernard’s bucket-top boots took up a surprising amount of space and he finally folded them over and stowed them in his trunk. He would wear them when he was back in Boston.

  Nicolaus noticed that Bernard was limping. He had limped for years with his old injury but now he also seemed unwarrantedly slow, as though dazed. Perhaps the news of Outger’s daughter had affected him.