by Annie Proulx
• • •
At noon the Hotel Great Lakes served the alfresco picnic lunch of sliced ham, fried chicken, stuffed eggs and pie in the shade of the beech trees. Lavinia took her chicken leg to a bench on the far side of the beech.
“Thank you.” His voice was already familiar to her. She looked up at Dieter Breitsprecher. “I spoke with your lawyer and accountant. I accept your offer provisionally. It will take some time to work out the details of what role I might play in such a partnership, and how best it might be done. I think Breitsprecher should close down its logging operations—perhaps sell them directly to Duke—but our cutover lands which I still own I want to keep so that I may continue my reforestation projects.”
“Oh. Oh, Dieter. I am so glad.” She stood up and grasped his fingers with her chicken-greased hand before snatching it away, blushing, dropping the gnawed drumstick to the ground, where ants rushed upon it. “After dinner tonight,” she said, “we can walk in the park,” for she had seen how much he liked the little woodland.
“Oh yes, wild horses could not stay me.”
• • •
The second evening was easier. They talked as though they had been friends for many years—perhaps they had, thought Lavinia. They reviewed the inventors. Dieter did not like the thought of strychnine in the skid-road grease. “You have your robins,” he said, “I have my bears.” They agreed that the crated houses were smart and a sure success. Lavinia loved the little model house.
“It is our gift to you,” Weed had said, and within an hour of the exhibition’s close Lavinia had it placed under the great silver maple in her park. It stood as though waiting for small visitors, elves perhaps. Or children—she had read Lamb’s “Dream Children” first with an ache, then with revulsion at her reaction. She quashed the silly weak thought.
A few days after the gathering the Duke Logging Corporation, for Lavinia had acted on Mr. Flense’s advice to incorporate, formed a subsidiary they named the Prairie Home Division, which would handle all facets of the business, including transportation to the prairies, as well as supply all seasoned and milled lumber and stair rails, turned spindles, steam-bent balusters and decorative elements for the prebuilt houses. Van Dipp, Brace and Weed would direct the construction and, as employees, would receive salaries from Duke. But a full partnership, which Weed wanted, was not agreeable to the Board.
“We are better able to handle the business end of this venture,” said Flense. “Our offer of a ten-year contract at high salaries and a percentage of the income from the packaged buildings will ensure you stability and wealth. In ten years we can discuss the terms anew.”
• • •
At dinner, Lavinia asked for an account of Armenius Breitsprecher’s misfortune. Dieter sighed.
“If it is too painful, do not tell me,” she said.
“It is painful, but offers many lessons. You know, Armenius was impetuous in nature. He was always interested in getting ahead, in adventurous risks. Our business was nothing compared to his passion when they discovered gold in California. He became a lunatic. Nothing I could say deterred him from packing his valise and wayfaring to California. He was there for a year and a half before I finally had a letter from him. From San Francisco. He said he had collected a fortune in nuggets, waited for a ship to New Orleans. From there he would make his way up the Mississippi to Chicago and so to Detroit. I waited; then, after two months I received an envelope, empty except for a newspaper clipping that read ‘Timber King Fatally Wounded,’ naming Armenius. I had no idea who had sent this lurid account. So I went to San Francisco and after considerable asking discovered the facts and the sad news that Armenius was truly dead. May I trouble you for a little more wine, Lavinia?”
“Of course.” She poured it. “Go on. What had occurred?”
“He had flaunted his precious nuggets, bragging and showing them. Finally, he was accosted by two men in the alley behind a saloon, knocked unconscious, shot, robbed, and left for dead. But he was not dead and some Good Samaritans brought him into the saloon. They laid him on a table in the back room and called for a doctor. I heard that there were hundreds of doctors in San Francisco at that time on the hunt for gold, of course, and the man with whom I spoke, a fellow who knew Armenius from the hotel where they both were staying—it was he who had sent me the clipping—said many doctors crowded around him and fought for the privilege of treating him. I do not know whether they hoped for a fat fee or whether Armenius was considered, as the paper reported, a ‘Timber King’ whose cure would bring a doctor both money and fame. The doctor who seized him first cut open his shirt. The bullet had entered his chest and gone through his left lung. He was bleeding profusely. This doctor probed, then cut the wound further open to see how extensive the damage might be. He put a sponge in the gaping wound to stop the bleeding, then stitched up the incision. Armenius was brought to the hotel where he had been staying and put in his room. There he died four days later of a profound infection caused, I am sure of this, by the resident sponge.”
“How dreadful,” said Lavinia. “How very, very dreadful. Poor Armenius. Oh how sorry I am.”
“Yes, it was one of the darkest hours of my own existence. In my opinion Armenius was murdered by the doctor. We were doing well in the timber business and my poor cousin left all that was good to run after minute particles of gold in a distant mountain stream and paid for it with his life.”
They sat silent until Libby came in to clear the table and gasped when she saw them sitting in the dusk. “Sorry, miss, I thought you was outside.”
“No, no, but I think we might go there. Dieter, will you walk with me in the forest?”
“Certain, Lavinia.”
Dieter exuded a kind of calm surety. In his company she felt protected. The sun was down, the sky still suffused with peach and crushed strawberry light. They walked past the little house from the exhibition and Dieter smiled. Under the trees the air was still and close, tiny black mosquitoes rose languidly from the ground. Under the sultry pines it was nearly dark, a deep oceanic dusky green. There was a distant rumble of thunder. Dieter saw Lavinia in her black dress, the color of her dark hair absorbed by the shadow, everything concentrated in the pale intense face. A fragment of one of Catullus’s poems came to him and he murmured “ ‘Montium domina, silvarumque virentium . . .’ ”
He took her arm and they walked on slowly.
“Lavinia, why have you not married?”
His question startled her by its abrupt directness. She made a feeble sound like a cupboard hinge and said, “Oh, I never met anyone who took my attention in that direction. I am very selective in my friendships, I fear. And you?” A whip of lightning flicked through the sky.
“Much the same,” he said. “I am too picky, too demanding of certain traits which I have never found in a female.”
“And what traits might those be, Mr. Breitsprecher?”
“Why, grace, handsomeness, intelligence, the ability to tell red wine from white, a fondness for robins—and, rarest of all, the ability to scale logs.”
She burst into a fit of laughter and he started as well; they stood whooping in the gloom until a shocked owl swooped soundlessly over their heads.
“Lavinia,” he said when he could speak. “Shall we marry?”
“I think that is a very good question,” she said. “I think we had better see to it.”
Suddenly the thundercloud was upon them, blotting all the light. Veined lightning chased them to the house, the first fat drops rapping down as they came panting through the door. Has ever a woman had such a proposal? thought Lavinia. She was terrified, excited. Now, now would come answers to all her silent questions.
She pitched headlong into the most brutal and fierce love, the kind that could endure anything and that sometimes afflicted solitary women on the threshold of spinsterhood. She poured everything into this feeling. She scorched, she scorched. It was as if she had never been alive until Dieter. Since James’s death she had n
ever been close to another person, but now she was annealed to Dieter Breitsprecher. Of all people!
• • •
They planned to marry within the month but first came abstruse details of obligations and business, of rents and scheduled work. And Dieter had a commitment to go to New England to meet a man he much admired. “This man—George Marsh—is a Vermont farmer who is the first American I have discovered who recognizes the extreme threats hanging over the forests of this country. Second only to our marriage is my desire to converse with this observant and intelligent person. Some time ago we made an arrangement for me to come to him and see the waste laid the land by thoughtless felling of the noble maples and oaks for trivial potash and pearl-ash receipts. We have planned a small tour of the New England forests, where trees have been taken now for a century, to see the results. I must do this, my love.” Lavinia was slightly amused at her betrothed’s interest in denuded forests.
Lawyer Flense and Mr. Pye went to Detroit to meet Dieter’s business manager, Maurice Mossbean, to work out the most sensible way of enfolding the Breitsprecher enterprise into Duke Logging and Lumber. “Indeed,” said Mr. Mossbean, “the company’s name had better change to Duke and Breitsprecher.” The hundred details would be threshed out in Board meetings. Dieter Breitsprecher seemed curiously uninterested in the business end of forestry and relieved to turn all over to Duke Logging. It would give him time to develop his management plans, to expand his pine nursery and look into the hardwoods, which were so abundant and little-known. He thought he might write a paper on the Aceraceae, for maple trees interested him.
• • •
Days later, exhausted and red-eyed, Mr. Pye and Lawyer Flense sat in the rackety coach as the landscape flashed past. They smoked cigars and Mr. Flense had a silver hip flask he shared with Mr. Pye. “Do you not feel a little uncomfortable with this—merging?” he said.
“Very much so,” said Mr. Pye, unscrewing the silver cap and taking a good swig of whiskey. “The possibilities for changes in the direction of our business are there. I applauded the idea of taking on Breitsprecher as a partner, but this marriage could bring deleterious changes to the way we do things. He may well persuade her to take up his conservative ideas of forestry and we shall see income drop even as it dropped for Breitsprechers when the cousin left.”
Lawyer Flense said something so grossly raw that Mr. Pye had to pretend he had not heard it.
• • •
The betrothed agreed that they would live in Lavinia’s house. “But I must have a library for thinking and reading,” said Dieter. “A small greenhouse and laboratory would be a dream fulfilled. A man whose life has been solitary cannot immediately give up all his accustomed ways.”
“I have been thinking,” said Lavinia. “It would be best if we added a wing onto the house. The current arrangement of space is not suitable for a married couple. Goosey can have my old room. But I shall miss the cupola, where I often watched the ships.”
“Let us have a cupola on the new wing—my dear girl must have her view of Lake Michigan shipping vessels.”
“And you shall place your greenhouse wherever you wish. While you are gone to New England the time will pass quickly enough. I can oversee construction of the new wing with our new living quarters. Will we go abroad for a honeymoon? There is such a great deal to do.”
He smiled. “A honeymoon! We shall go wherever you like. I leave it to you. I leave all such decisions to you. But consider if you would not like to see the results of untrammeled forest removal in the lands around the Mediterranean? It is what urged other countries to become mindful of forest care and management.” He picked up her hand and suddenly licked her palm.
“Dieter!” She was startled, pretended offense and pulled her hand away although his hot mouth had given her a strange sensation. But a honeymoon looking at desolate lands was not tempting.
“Lavinia, I shall do my best to make you happy. I see nothing but joy in our future. I will get this visit to New England out of the way quickly. There are train connections much of the way to Albany, the rest by hired coach and whatever local railways exist. Vermont is still very rural. And I will write to you. I will write a long letter on the train, another when I arrive, still another when I go to bed and another when—”
“I think you have a grand sense of silliness.”
• • •
She was in the old cupola looking out at the passing ships when she heard the crunch of wheels on gravel and looking down at the drive saw a carriage draw up at the front of the house. Mr. Pye and a tall thin man unknown to her got out. She heard the door knocker, heard Libby’s voice, yet felt no presentiment until she reached the bottom of the stairs and looked at the unknown man who had taken off his hat, disclosing a dark shaven head, a cannonball skull looking like it had just emerged from the birth canal, the face long and narrow down to the point of jaw. Mr. Pye said, “Lavinia, you must sit down. This is Mr. Averso from the rail office. Lavinia, there has been an accident—” She heard without understanding, heard heard heard. This had happened with James. It could not happen again. She looked at Mr. Averso, that face, that head was imprinted on her memory for the rest of her life. Her heart froze and Averso’s slowly opening mouth was the last thing she saw as she sank to the floor.
“Lavinia, we do not yet know!” shouted Mr. Pye. “Libby, fetch water!” He dashed the water into Lavinia’s face, shook her, slapped her cheek. “We do not know! He was on the train, but we do not know if he was in the car that—the car that fell.” What she did know was that Dieter had reserved a seat on an Albany-bound train. She heard Mr. Averso say that east of Cleveland the locomotive had steamed onto a high trestle bridge, the last car had somehow derailed, uncoupled, crashed into the chasm below.
“Lavinia!” shouted Mr. Pye. “Mr. Averso is telling us most of the people in the other cars survived, though some were injured. We must wait for news, Lavinia, we must wait! Hope is not lost. It is not sure who—who died or lived.”
She stared at him. Stared at Averso. “It is not sure?” she asked.
“It is not sure,” said Mr. Averso. “I have come to offer you transport to the scene so we may determine if Mr. Breitsprecher was among the—the saved.”
“It is not sure! I will come with you. I must know. Libby, Libby, my shawl. I am going to Dieter!”
So Lavinia learned that love came with a very high price and she sat clenched and bent in the seat as the special train rushed toward the accident. It was the familiar journey with Cyrus to find James frozen among the stumps. Once again she was rushing toward proof of the perils of modern life. Fate could not be so singularly cruel as to take Dieter from her.
Before dawn the next morning they reached a scene of horror lit by flickering bonfires and dim lanterns, the fallen car still smoldering in the rocks below the trestle. Blackened bodies lay in the stream below, the injured along the tracks moaning and calling. Where was help? All was the feeble chaos of the inept. Lavinia, Mr. Pye and Averso walked among the survivors looking for Dieter. She thought a huddled form had the wide shoulders of Dieter but the man turned his raw and bleeding face away. She could see one ear was torn so that it hung down below his jaw. His nose was a pulp and the swollen blackened features resembled a boiled hog face. She stumbled to the next one.
“Lavinia!” came a choking hoarse roar behind her. She turned. The hog-faced man, mouth agape, dribbling bloody froth croaked again, very low: “. . . viniaaaaa.” She stared, trembling. Mr. Pye ran up, looked in the creature’s face. “It’s Dieter! Lavinia, it is Dieter Breitsprecher.”
• • •
Goosey Breeley came into her element. She took on Dieter Breitsprecher’s injuries as a mission. The guest suite in Lavinia’s house became his recovery room and Goosey his private Clara Barton. She was indefatigable, dressing his wounds, changing bandages, airing the room, reading to the patient for hours, concocting tasty dishes famed as recuperative: oat porridge, beef broth, shredded chicken breas
t, poached eggs and the like. “Sleep,” she would say, “I am keeping watch, so sleep,” and he slept.
He asked her one day if she would go to the little forest park and bring him a sprig of pine; he thought the scent would refresh him.
Goosey asked Lavinia’s permission first, for there was an unspoken sense that the park was only for the use of Lavinia, Mr. Jinks and Mr. Cowes.
“Of course, Goosey, you are quite free to ramble in those woods all you like. Do bring him an armful of pine boughs.”
Goosey was gone for more than an hour, but she went back every day, occasionally bringing a fresh branch to the sickroom.
• • •
For Lavinia something important had changed. The foaming cataract of love that had coursed through her seemed to have shifted into a subterranean channel. Dieter stitched and bandaged and lying on pillows was not the Dieter against whose shirtfront she had wept. This vulnerable man could not protect her. Their positions had been reversed. Her desire for money and success swelled back into the space vacated by Dieter—that at least was permanent.
The doctors said Dieter Breitsprecher would likely make a complete recovery but when she entered the sickroom and looked at the swollen discolored face she could not quite believe it. When she sat at his bedside she turned slightly away and spoke to the wall or window. She could not quell the atavistic feelings of being alone and surrounded by wolves that had plagued her since James’s frozen death.
She plunged into work, leaving Dieter’s care to Goosey except for the hour in the evening when she came and sat beside him and, looking at the wall, held his hand and told him sketchily of the day’s business—too much detail might tire him. Although her feelings had changed she intended to go through with the marriage as soon as he was well. She liked him very much, she wanted a husband. But never had business been more absorbing: for the first time Duke was opening foreign markets.
