by Annie Proulx
“Elise, Amboise, can you read or write?” They bent their faces low.
“Jinot, what do you like best?”
“Get sugar stick at post.”
“Ah, well, I have no sugar sticks, but I think you will like pancakes and some Dutch cocoa.”
“You good,” said Tonny. “I dream it you good.” He and Beatrix exchanged looks, Beatrix’s steady eyes a promise that the children were safe. Tonny’s returned gaze showed a distance that could not be traversed.
They were licking their plates for the last drops of maple syrup when Kuntaw came in with Francis-Outger and Josime. Tonny’s children threw quick shy glances at their uncles, their black eyebrows and hair; their pale eyes. Josime carried a tom turkey by its feet, the bloody beak dragging along the floor.
When Kuntaw grasped who the strangers were his face swelled, his hands trembled. He could barely speak, but croaked, “Stay, stay, we all live here.” He looked at Beatrix, his eyebrows drawn together beseechingly.
So that is how it is, Tonny thought coldly; Kuntaw likely had to plead for favors from this tall woman who looked Indian when she stood in the shadowed corner of the room. He thought she was not one to stand in shadowy corners and in full hard light she showed her whiteman blood in those water-clear eyes. But she spoke the Mi’kmaw language better than Tonny or the children, who got along with a rough scramble of Mi’kmaw, French and English words.
While Kuntaw, Francis-Outger, Josime and Tonny went upstairs, she took the children around the big house, explaining the use of each room to them, especially the room with a vast table. This, she said, was the schoolroom, the schoollokaal, where they would learn to read and write. She would teach them. She sat at the table and took Jinot on her lap, whispered to him that on the morrow she would make him a little toy horse, drew Elise and Amboise close. She spoke to them in a low intimate voice, confiding her reasons. “Our people had special ones among them, those who remembered old stories—old ways. My mother died when I was a baby and she told me nothing. But from my father, even though he was a Dutchman, I learned that Indian people must take whatever is useful from the whitemen. It is just, because they have taken everything from us. Many of our people died with secrets locked in their heads. Now it is good for us to learn how to read and write so we may know how we make useful things, how our grandfathers lived. That is why we learn to read—so we can remember.”
• • •
Jinot was afraid of the tall staircase, for he had never seen more than three steps, and sniveled until Beatrix took his hand and led him up very many, counting “zeven, acht, negen . . . dertien.” Up in the attic they found Kuntaw and big Josime pushing ancient trunks, broken furniture, boxes of books and Kuntaw’s worn-out bows and old quivers against the wall to make room for pallets.
“You will have this for your sleeping place,” Beatrix said. Jinot saw Josime roll his eyes as though she had said she was going to give roast moose to a pack of wolves. He smiled at Josime as only Jinot could smile and Josime twitched his lips in amusement. Jinot wanted to please—this woman; his father, Tonny; his grandfather Kuntaw; even Josime and Francis-Outger, who were ready to dislike their new kinfolk.
Tonny and the children were awkward eating at a table, but Beatrix signed they should not sit on the floor. They were cowed by the many dishes of meat and bread, unknown pottage and something that looked like a fish. Francis-Outger and Josime whispered and laughed together, took up their bowls and headed outside to eat far from the newcomers. Kuntaw called them back.
“In your places.” They ate in silence.
After dinner Beatrix put Tonny’s children to bed. Josime leaned against the doorframe, listening.
“I will tell you two stories,” said Beatrix in a low, slow voice. “Listen. Here is the first one. Long ago in the old days three children were lost in the forest, and in that forest they saw a tree, a very strong big tree so tall its leaves tickled the clouds. The tree was old, old, so old all the other trees called it Old Woman Tree, except the clouds, who said it was Old Foolish Tree. It was big”—she stretched her arms wide apart to show its girth—“and for many years it grew in the forest. It was so big it had a great hollow at the bottom and in there lived two bear-people . . .”
• • •
As they went down the stairs, hearing Beatrix’s murmuring voice above, Kuntaw put his hand on Tonny’s shoulder.
“Come outside with me and walk to the river. The recent rain fattened the river and disturbed the weir. While we mend it I want you to tell me of Malaan and Mi’kma’ki. Do not spare me.”
They waded in, shifted stones. Tonny watched Kuntaw to see how it was done, replacing those the current had dislodged. The sky was overcast, a leaden dreary day of biting damp. The water numbed their feet and legs. Tonny talked haltingly, then furiously, told of Malaan’s lethargy, her withdrawal into a silent world, the whitemen who pulled her about. He told of Hanah and how her wildness with the same whitemen had brought about her death. “Henly Clawfoot. I would kill him if I stayed there. Many times I want kill all.”
“You did well, my son, to bring your children here. I will care for them as I should have cared for you. I will pay for my neglect of Malaan and our people. I know well my earlier life was one of wrong behavior and loss. I did not teach you the things you need to know.” They came out of the water, pulled on their mkisn and began to walk back to the house in silence, Kuntaw opening his mouth several times until at last he began.
“It is not winter, but I will tell you the old stories of our people and the great ones in our lineage.” He did not wait for Tonny’s reply but began to speak of warriors and hunters, of ancestors, but could not tell of the horror of seeing his mother’s severed arm, of Achille’s disappearance, his own years searching for that missing father. All the time he spoke he felt he was talking to the sky. The sky, as unmoved as Tonny, responded with a chill fine mist that thickened into steady rain. Kuntaw said, “I went from one tree to another, unthinking, never reflecting on you, my first son. But now I see I was not a good man. I should not have looked for Achille. I should have stayed with you and Malaan. So I say you should not leave your children.”
Tonny shrugged. The more Kuntaw spoke the colder grew his feeling for this father. He called him by name.
“Kuntaw. I do not belong here. I do not belong in Mi’kma’ki—Nova Scotia, they say it now. I am apart from every person, English, Mi’kmaq, French, American. I have no place. Many Mi’kmaw people in the village pretend all is well, but the animals are scarce and no one knows the correct way to live. White people take the berries, the clams, the fish and sell them. I cannot pretend. I have told you how things are at the English post. You, you have this woman. I have no one. I not belong. No place good for me. I go away. Maybe somebody kill me soon. Then I be done.” So he said, with rain trickling from his hair, soaking his shoulders.
The rain became a deluge. Kuntaw felt needles of fear in his throat when he heard these words. Was this his son or a malignant spirit in his shape? It was true that Tonny appeared different—not as two-spirit people are different, but more . . . white. Bad white. He was nicked everywhere with old scars, his features bunched in a scowl, he spoke in a hoarse voice. He was dirty and ill-clothed. Kuntaw wondered what he truly was, this isolate and unknowable young man. But he smiled numbly and said, “Foolish words. You still young. You have a place here. You did a good thing to bring the children here. Do not inflict the wrong that I did you on them. Stay here with me. Stay.”
He was afraid the whitemen had broken this abandoned son.
It rained all night and a heavy fog made the world impenetrable, yet Tonny said he would go, he would try New Brunswick for work.
“I hope to come back for you,” he mumbled to Elise, Amboise and Jinot. He met Kuntaw’s censorious eyes boldly. Had he not done the same? Yes, Kuntaw wordlessly agreed, he had done the same.
• • •
There was little work. The lumber camps were the only place
s that would hire Indians, considered disposable labor—good enough, as long as they lasted, and for water work the best, while they stayed among the living. From a lumber camp, Tonny thought, he could always move deeper into the forest though he had no gun. He thought about trying to live in the forest without a gun. Without knowing the ways of animals. Would he go to a city? To Boston? Would he find something or someone? He had to find a new way. He would try the lumber camps first. And so he went to a chaotic world of groaning trees that ripped holes in the canopy, felled other trees, snapped off halfway, exploded into splinters. Some trees refused to come down, locking their branches into nearby neighbors, teetering on half-gnawed stumps. A few, on the edge of a new clearing and unprotected by the fallen hundreds, waited for the windstorms that would sweep them flat in great waves, uprooted, clods of dirt dropping with small sounds. He worked through the winter limbing felled pine and in the spring drive the boss ordered him into a bateau: he was an Indian and by birth skilled with the paddle. But Tonny’s knowledge of bateaux was that they were shelters, roofs that had protected him from the rain in his childhood. He was no riverman. Before he could collect his season’s pay, he drowned below Wolf Falls and, like countless other fathers, slipped into the past.
At the house on Penobscot Bay, Kuntaw’s failure to make Tonny into an instant Mi’kmaw wrenched his heart; he withdrew a little from Beatrix. He spoke to Amboise, too young to understand. “I am shamed I left Mi’kma’ki, my people and my son.” He saw himself without pity as one who was witlessly destroying the ancient ways. Although he reflected that the larch loses its needles, the maple and beech their leaves, standing bare until gleaming new leaves open again, Mi’kmaw people were putting out very few fresh leaves. And he, none at all.
• • •
A thousand times Kuntaw had heard Beatrix say, “I need you, Indian man,” as she had the day she rode up to him on her horse. At first he thought she meant she needed him to split wood for her. As the weeks passed he thought she meant she needed him for sex. But one day he understood. She needed him because she was a half-Indian woman who had been brought up as a whiteman girl. She needed him to make her an Indian. She had been leading him into books. But now that he knew he pushed the books aside.
“Woman,” he said, “now I will teach you to read,” and he led her into the forest, patiently explaining, as he should have done with Tonny, how to understand and decipher the tracks of animals, the seasonal signs of plants and trees, the odors of bears and coming rain, of frost-leathered leaves, the changing surface of water, intimating how it all fitted together. “These are things every Mi’kmaw person knows,” he said. “And now do you understand that the forest and the ocean shore are tied together with countless strings as fine as spiderweb silks? Do you begin to glimpse Indian ways and learning? I would not wish an ignorant wife.”
“Yes,” Beatrix said. “But it is too much to remember.”
“Not to remember like a lesson,” he said, “but to know, to feel.” He knew this was hopeless.
She soon begged off these excursions. “I have told you my Passamaquoddy mother died when I was very young, before she could teach me anything. It is a pity. What I know I learned from my father. I had to learn the medicinal plants. He often wrote to me from Leiden and asked to have certain pungent leaves sent to him.” But this father, Outger, who never returned yet bombarded Beatrix with letters and advice, with packets of books and outmoded European garments, died abroad a year before Kuntaw came out of the woods to her. He thought of Beatrix’s father, if he thought of him at all, as a whiteman, all fiery will and command but with many affectations. He was glad that an ocean and death lay between them.
Beatrix taught the children their letters and numbers, gave them books to read, and Kuntaw, who had failed to teach Tonny, now showed his grandchildren what Francis-Outger and Josime already knew—how to hunt, to paddle a canoe. The boys stuck to him like burrs, and together they prowled the shrinking woodlands, carved and whittled, mended garments, stewed eels, coaxed fish into their hands. “You must learn these things,” said Kuntaw, “you who are more unconscious of the world than stones. You are Mi’kmaw blood but you know nothing.” He showed them animals, plants and yes, grasshoppers as prey. He fashioned child-size bows for Amboise and Jinot. Let them hunt grasshoppers, even as he had! Let them not be ignorant of Mi’kmaw ways. Yet he found it impossible to teach them everything he knew unless all could live inside the Mi’kmaw life; it was more than knowing how to use certain tools or recognize plants. What he taught was not a real life; it was only a kind of play, he thought gloomily. That world he wanted them to know had vanished as smoke deserts the dying embers that made it.
• • •
All around the Penobscot settlement the trees fell, tracks inched through the forests, only one or two, then seven, then webs of trails that over the decades widened into roads. The roads were muddy, sometimes like batter, sometimes thick and clutching until late summer, when they metamorphosed into choking dust so fine it hung in the air long after a horse and carriage passed, settling on the grass as the English people settled on the land.
The years passed and logging companies and settlers stripped the banks of the bay and moved up the Penobscot. Fields of wheat and hay took the land, these fields enclosed by linked stumps, the root wads of the forest that had once stood there turned on their edges to bar the whiteman’s cows and sheep. Along the shore settlers’ houses were stitched into tight rows by paling fences. The old Charles Duquet house sat alone in its acreage, surrounded by forest that had never been cut, a relic of the wooden world.
• • •
A day came when Beatrix noticed her son Josime giving Elise glances that were not brotherly and said to Kuntaw that perhaps it was time she was married. Elise was fifteen, rather old to be single. Kuntaw’s advice was to send her to Nova Scotia to stay with his sister, Aledonia; there she might find a Mi’kmaw husband. There she might live a Mi’kmaw life. He had forgotten what Tonny had said of the place, remembered only the good days before the moose hunt of his childhood.
• • •
Everyone noticed how the little girls of the settlement, whether Indian, French, métis or English, wanted to be with Jinot. They ran to meet him, told him their small secrets and swore him not to tell—he never did—brought him pieces of ginger cake stolen from the home pantries. Beatrix, who watched them whispering, asked, “What do they tell you, Jinot?”
“Tell me worms, funny frogs. Just nothing.” The conversations were loaded with giggles. Few girls, or later, women, could resist Jinot’s impish, smiling ways.
“Stay that way, dear child,” murmured Beatrix, who was not immune to his charm.
Kuntaw also watched Jinot and noticed he was different as some Mi’kmaw of the old days were different. The name for the difference escaped him.
• • •
The wooden world extended out into the bay in the shape of watercraft. Amboise and Jinot Sel played with the village boys on the wharves, ran, balanced and jumped on the floating logs in the sawmill ponds, pretending they were on a log drive. The heroes of all were the rivermen riding the logs down the surly Penobscot. The boys around the bay paddled canoes and rowed skiffs; as they grew, they worked with fishermen, learned to mend and cast nets and haul lines, and the sons of the fishermen pulled for deeper water when they, too, joined the maritime trade. Day after day the children watched men loading mast ships with the great pine spars, stacking plank lumber on decks. The Sel children went with Kuntaw to mend the weirs, to help drive and catch eels—their dependable and favored food. For the town boys the ideal future was to chop great pines and ride the boiling waters of the spring freshets. For Jinot and Amboise Sel it was an irresistible pull.
• • •
The children grew up too rapidly, Beatrix thought. One day they were children, still full of questions and innocent enthusiasms, and the next day they were grown men with tempers and ideas who preferred Kuntaw’s company to hers.
When Francis-Outger turned twenty-one and married a half-French, half-Mi’kmaw girl, he and the girl’s father built a small cabin for the young couple. Then Josime left home, going to the New Brunswick lumber camps. A month later it was Amboise’s turn to go to the woods. For Jinot Sel, the only one left, time passed very slowly. For him the year dragged on, spring arrived and he watched the acres of logs that escaped the mills float down the river and into the bay, envied the jaunty rivermen who prodded and corraled the dumb timber. After the drive Amboise, broader and stronger, came home with tremendous stories. And money, too. Summer came and faded. Amboise left again to work as a swamper for a New Brunswick outfit. For weeks the cries of geese rang like blacksmiths hammering lofty anvils. The moon waxed full, lunatic clouds racing across its face. Jinot suffered from a restless urge to go somewhere. One morning, his decision made, he went to Kuntaw.
“Grandfather, I am old enough and I want to go to the forest camps to cut trees,” he said. Kuntaw nodded. “I know you think of starting a man’s life,” he said, “although there are many girls who maybe think you better stay. You have been warm with these girls. Is it not possible many children here will call you father?”
Jinot, shocked, said no, no. “Grandfather, the girls only talk to me. Girls like to talk to somebody. We are friends.” Kuntaw looked at his grandson with an assessing, weighing eye, putting wispy thoughts together.
“Yes, I see. I see you. I am old, Jinot, but do not take me for a fool. If you were among Mi’kmaw people they would see no wrong in a man who has a double spirit. But whitemen call it bad. And those church men.”
There was nothing to say to this. In a moment Kuntaw continued.
