by Annie Proulx
• • •
Peter Sel, who owned the boat, called to his son, “Alik, take the rudder. I go talk a little to that Aaron Sel who come back.” He came up and stood beside Aaron for a few minutes looking east, said cautiously, “So you are back here. You are older.”
“Yes, I am older. As are you.”
“I heard that sad news about Jinot. Very sad.”
“What sad news?” He looked at Peter.
“Etienne didn’t find you? That Joe Dogg didn’t find you?”
“Nobody found me. I been to sea on the ships. Years. I just come back now. Joe Dogg from the ax factory? What was he doing here?”
“Lookin for you. That Mr. Bone never come back so Joe Dogg wants to go find out what happen. He wants you to go with him, look for you in Boston but never find you. So he come here. Etienne said to him, ‘I will go. I will find Jinot.’ They go to New Zealand, very damn far. When they come back Etienne and Joe Dogg look for you again in Boston. Then Etienne come back here and said maybe Joe Dogg finds you.”
“He did not find me. What happened?” Aaron knew of course with that much searching and travel that Jinot had to be dead.
“I only know Etienne said Jinot died with bad sickness in that sore leg. Mr. Bone dead, too, by a man in grass clothes.”
There was a long silence. Aaron looked at the horizon. He felt an interior ripping as though something was pulling at his lungs. He forced a breath, looked at Peter Sel. He said, “The death of my father does not surprise me. He went away so many years ago. I grieve. I wish I had gone with him. I was a bad and stupid person before, maybe I still am that person but I think I am different.”
“A man can get better,” said Peter Sel. They stood silent while the sails filled and the boat took its course east. “Alik is my son.”
“He is a good sailor,” said Aaron.
“He is. He has eleven winters but he knows the boat. And the water.” There was a long silence, then Peter said, “Sometimes good men start out very bad. I was bad like that. Wait when we dock. We can talk a little.”
• • •
It was dusk when Peter’s boat came alongside the wharf and the basket women raced ashore with their goods and money, and started the long trek home. Aaron did not follow them but waited. After some minutes Peter was there, lit his pipe, leaned on the rail. His son, Alik, coiled a rope a few feet away.
“You say you are changed,” Peter said. “I, too, changed. Used to drink rum and wine, whiskey, all them poison stuff. Drink and fight. Fight ever night, ever day. I didn’t have no boat then. I kill a man. Fight him very hard, drunk, smash his head. I try to break my own head. Just get headache. If I still live I got to change.” Alik came closer, listened, gazing at his father. Aaron wondered if Peter had ever told him this story. It seemed not. After some minutes Aaron said, “Does Kuntaw still live?”
“Yes. He has too many winters now to count. There are not enough numbers for his winters. But he is my father and he is still very wise and leads us. He no longer hunts but tells stories of hunting.”
“Let us go to Kuntaw and Etienne and the others. I want Etienne to tell me everything about the death of my father. And I have much to tell them.”
“You go ahead. We come later,” said Peter. He put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Alik and me got to finish clean the boat. Take care the boat, boat take care of you. Me and Etienne and Alik go out early morning catch fish for our celebrate. You want to come fish?”
“I do. I want this work. I help with the boat, too.”
• • •
Old Kuntaw, half-asleep in the predawn pallid darkness when Aaron came into his wikuom, woke and stared, listened with mouth agape, put his hands up to his face and made a sound like a hurt moose. “Come here,” he said, stretching out his stringy arms, “come and be embraced by one whose blood is running in circles with happiness. Call everyone,” he said to his wife, Maudi, who was fumbling with the hide door. “Call everyone. Here is a Mi’kmaw son come home. Prepare food. Tomorrow we make a celebration. We will be happy!”
The next day Maudi built up her fire on the riverbank and dragged out her big cooking pots. In late morning Alik came carrying three big mackerel, Etienne and Peter following with more of the huge fat fish. Etienne embraced Aaron. The basket-making women Aaron had seen on the dock came from their wikuoms to help make the feast.
Aaron sat next to old Kuntaw and tried to explain that he had changed but the old man waved his hand as if driving off flies.
“I know how it is,” he said. “I have felt this. Look you.” He took up an empty wooden bowl, put in a dipper of water, asked Maudi to bring a dipper of mackerel oil from the pot and added it. He stirred the water and oil briskly with a forked twig until it whirled into an amalgam of froth. “Water is whiteman. Oil is Mi’kmaw. In the bowl is mix-up métis,” he said, “whiteman and Mi’kmak. Now watch.” They all stared at the bowl. The glistening mackerel oil rose and floated on top of the water. “That’s how it was with me, long ago. I tried to be whiteman, but Mi’kmaw oil in me come to top. That same oil come up in you. Sometime I hope for this Canada that the Mi’kmaw oil will blend with the water and oil come to the top. We will hold our country again someday,” he said, “but we will be a little bit changed—a little bit watery and the whitemen be a little bit oily.”
• • •
Aaron and Etienne walked away some distance and sat on the ground, drawing strength from contact with the earth. Etienne said, “We look you in Boston. Never find.”
Aaron said, “When I was here before I saw that old Kuntaw and the Sels thought they were making a Mi’kmaw place again, but I did not understand; it felt unsure, as when you take up a cup of tea and put it to your mouth and find that what looked to be tea was only the shadow in the cup.”
“Do you feel this now?” asked Etienne.
“No. I drink the shadow now. I find it good.”
• • •
They passed around the traditional talking stick all day and into the next night before voices slowed and they began to name problems—food, lost territory, the cruelty of whitemen’s laws, the loss of good canoe makers. Suddenly Kuntaw’s young wife, Maudi, very pregnant, who had been listening, said, “You men are foolish. You do not see the greatest problem of all. We need women here.” There was silence for a minute and then Etienne said, “She is right. We need more women. I thought they would come if we made a good place, but they have not come. Why?”
“They have not heard we would welcome them,” said Kuntaw. “In the old days women were important, they were the great deciders. They did everything, some even hunted like men. But over the years Mi’kmaw men begin to act like whitemen, who do not regard women as worthy. It is the old Mi’kmaw way to know women are of equal value as men.”
Then Aaron spoke of the couple in the ruined village wikuom, the starving people, told what he had found in those wikuoms. “Those ones in the only unbroken wikuom are named Louis and Sarah Paul.”
“How old are they?” asked Etienne.
“Old, I think,” said Aaron.
Peter half-stood. “Old! They are not old. Louis is younger than me—a little. I knew that man once. He is a good man for weirs, none so careful as he. We used to call him Eel Man. And a good fisherman. I take him on my boat if he comes here. Very strong, knows the shoals and currents. He cannot be more than thirty winters. We must go there and get them, bring them here. Tomorrow.”
Skerry Hallagher, Elise Sel’s son who had gone to Dartmouth College for half a year, had come to Kuntaw’s band much as Aaron. They were close in age, but where Aaron was muscular and hard-handed, Skerry was thin and intense, rarely said anything as he felt very much the outsider and was afraid of old Kuntaw, who told him he could never be a real Mi’kmaw man until he killed a moose. He did not think there was much mackerel oil in him. Now Skerry held out a dirty, creased envelope. “I did not say this before but my mother, Elise Hallagher, wishes to come in summer for a visit. Since my father died sh
e is alone. She wishes to bring a young woman, Catherine Flute, a full-blood Mi’kmaw girl got brought to Boston by her parents when she was small. The parents are now dead with alcohol sickness and the girl is unhappy. My mother asks if we will take her here. She is fourteen or thereabouts. She says there are other lost Mi’kmaw girls in Boston. We could welcome them here?”
“Yes,” said Etienne in the voice of a hot-blooded moose. “Tell your mother to bring all the girls she can find. I will personally marry them all.”
• • •
Two days later Aaron, Etienne, Peter and Alik went back to the path west of Sydney to find the starving Mi’kmaw couple Aaron had seen and bring them to K’taqmkuk.
“I am sure this is the place where Louis and Sarah Paul had that wikuom,” said Aaron to the others as they stood on the trail staring at five whitemen working with two oxen and a log puller, a dozen more heaping slash into a burning pile. There was no sign of any wikuoms, but at the back of the clearing a tiny wisp of smoke caught Etienne’s eye. “There?” he said, and they walked over to the flat grey circles of ash. The wikuoms had been burned. They saw nothing of Louis and Sarah Paul.
“Ho!” shouted one of the whitemen. “Git out of there. Go on! Git goin!” He took up his shotgun, which had been leaning against a log, half-aimed it and pulled the trigger. A pellet went past Alik’s ear with a sound like a hummingbird.
“We go,” said Etienne. “We go!” This last he shouted angrily and the same whiteman did not like his tone and shot again.
“Eh!” said Etienne, hit in the back by a piece of shot.
“Those men,” said Etienne later as Aaron pried the pellet out of his shoulder, “I seen them afore. They not settlers. They come and take any land they can get, clear it, burn it, however they can rid of trees and sell it. Some settler not want spend his life choppin trees buys it. It’s a way whitemen make money. Take a lot of Kuntaw’s oil to make them change.” They walked on toward Sydney.
“And do Mi’kmaq not need money now?” asked Aaron. “How do you get your money?”
“Cooperin,” said Etienne. “Didn’t have time to show you yet but we make barrels. Whitemen buy from us. We got a workshop, forge, oak planks, steamer, plane, everything to make barrels, big ones, little ones, kegs, casks and tubs. We make the best barrels in Canada. Julian Cooko used to work in a cooper shop in Halifax, showed us how to make barrels, washtubs, all them things. He comes to live with us.”
• • •
Elise Hallagher, widowed and aging, her hair white and stormy, arrived with two girls, Catherine Flute and Marie Antoinette Nevin. Skerry embraced his mother and it seemed to Aaron that his cousin clung to his mother rather childishly. He would never have survived Bosun Crumble. He smiled at Elise and when she smiled back he saw her likeness to Jinot. He looked at the two girls. Marie Antoinette had a cough and was sometimes distant in her manner but more often she laughed. She took refuge in laughter and silliness when Elise scolded her for her lazy ways. Marie Antoinette told Catherine Flute that she wanted to go back to Boston. She did not know any plants, failed to learn how to make baskets or sew, burned anything she tried to cook. She was good company, but that was it. The younger men liked her, and Alik Sel, Peter’s son, spent as much time as he could following her around. Aaron saw his youthful self in her behavior.
At the end of the summer before the autumn storms began, Peter, Alik, Aaron, Etienne and his three boys, Molti, James and Joe-Paul, loaded Peter’s boat with barrels to sell in Boston, where they got better prices. They sailed at dawn. Catherine Flute, who shared a wikuom with Elise and Marie Antoinette, said Marie had got up very early. Elise knew at once that the girl had gone on the boat, back to Boston, where she would surely take to drink and have a bad end.
• • •
The men came up the path loaded with bundles and boxes, all the supplies for winter, sacks of potatoes, candles and matches, coffee beans for Elise and Aaron, great tins of tea for the others, needles and bolts of wool and cotton. And there was Marie Antoinette Nevin, red-cheeked and laughing. And coughing.
She said, “I am here.” She looked at Alik. Catherine Flute, who was shy and plain, a very quiet girl who had been starved and ill-treated by her parents, sat beside Joe-Paul. They married before the first snow. Even Elise found herself courted and she agreed to marry Julian Cooko, the man who had started the men making barrels years earlier, before he had been hurt in a woods accident. Now he had long spells of confusion and was no good for the barrel shop but sat by the fire and made eel traps.
• • •
Kuntaw died on the most beautiful day in a thousand years. The October air was sweet and every faint breath a pleasure. Wind stirred and he said, “Our wind reaching me here.” A small cloud formed in the west. “Our small cloud coming to me.” The hours passed and the small cloud formed a dark wall and approached. A drop fell, another, many, and Kuntaw said, “Our rain wetting my face.” His people came near him, drawing him into their eyes, and he said, “Now . . . what . . .” The sun came out, the brilliant world sparkled, susurration, liquid flow, stems of striped grass what was it what was it the limber swish of a released branch. What, now what. Kuntaw opened his mouth, said nothing, and let the sunlight enter him.
61
talking stick
Over the next generation through isolated years of sickness and watchfulness Kuntaw’s people tightened as a clan although they took in six or seven outsiders. Everyone now had English names, for the old Mi’kmaw names were fading out. Aaron married Lisal Jacko, the only young woman among the newcomers. As a group they avoided whitemen, but still fisher-hunter-missionaries found them. Some of these whitemen only pretended to be hunters; they were scouts on the lookout for timber and ores, anything of economic value. They asked casually to be taken where the big trees grew.
“They think we don’t know they want to cut them trees down.”
Their old continuing problem was that Mi’kmaw women rarely came to them. To find wives the Sels had to return to their remnant people at Shubenacadie, thin and listless people who sat staring at the ground.
“You see?” said one white settler to another. “They are lazy. If they starve it is because they refuse to work. Do not waste your pity on them. Do not give them food—it only delays the inevitable.”
When Etienne heard of this he said, “But they are not lazy, only weak with hunger.”
A year came when the Sels stopped making barrels, for whitemen had pushed them away from that trade by making cheaper ones, not as tight and sturdy, but at a lower price and, tellingly, with snowy curling letters stenciled on the side: WHITE RIBBON COOPERAGE. Some who had made barrels began to carve hockey sticks from the dense hardwood of hornbeam trees, whose grooved branches resembled muscular straining arms, but in a few years that enterprise, too, passed out of their hands and to a whiteman manufacturing company.
Another womanless Sel had drifted to them a few months after Kuntaw died—Édouard-Outger Sel, the oldest son of Francis-Outger, who himself was one of the two sons of Beatrix Duquet and Kuntaw, and so a grandson of the ancestor Dutchman Outger Duquet.
Édouard-Outger, who had been subjected to a Duquet education, left Penobscot Bay after his father’s funeral, worked a few years in Boston and then began decades of wandering. By the time he came to his Mi’kmaw relatives he was in early middle age and rather peculiar. He spoke a garbled, halting old-fashioned kind of Mi’kmaw language mixed with unknown jargon and French words. At first no one knew how he had learned his antique version of the language and that information he kept to himself for a long time. Every few months he went away somewhere and came back grey and shaky, sometimes bandaged, but carrying a bag of flour or meal.
Little by little it came out. He said that after his father’s death he had been a scrivener, a document copyist, in a Boston lawyer’s office, hired for his clear legible hand, but then he was dismissed for tardiness and certain reasons he did not name. “I tell you something now,” he sa
id. “The world is very wide. I have traveled much, all the way to the western ocean.” Slowly Édouard-Outger began to talk. He told how skilled horsemen of the Plains tribes were often shot by whitemen travelers for sport from moving trains as they shot running animals—dark waves of bison, huge skies stiff with birds. So rich in game were the vast plains that astonishing caravans of lordly hunting parties from Europe and England came with dogs and guns, cooks and special beds and tents. He did sometimes deviate from these sad tales with descriptions of curious adventures, which the Sels preferred to hear.
He was only a little strange, and that strangeness fell away. Although his skin was light in color, the shape of his features closely resembled Kuntaw’s. He said it was because his mother was the daughter of a man who had married a Mi’kmaw woman. “So I am Mi’kmaw person on two sides,” he said, laughing, “front and back sides,” slapping his crotch and his hindquarters. It was this maternal Mi’kmaw grandmother who had taught him the language which sounded correct from a distance but was usually incomprehensible. Nor did it take long to discover what Édouard-Outger did when he went away every few months: he went on a reeling, mindless drunk and came back very quiet and humble with his penitential bags of flour. His one ability that drew the others to him was storytelling, his tales of what he had seen and done on his travels across the continent to the Pacific. He named some of the west ocean tribes—Nootka, Kwakiutl, Tlingit, Makah.
The Sels liked to hear stories of their West Coast counterparts. As Mi’kmaq had lived on the edge of the Atlantic for thousands of years without intrusive whitemen, those faraway people had lived on the Pacific; they felt a sense of counterbalance. They listened to Édouard-Outger’s accounts of lives linked to huge cedar trees and the black canoes the western people made from them, of how they hunted giant whales in those canoes. He told of their communal houses as great buildings with lofty beams, decorated with carved animals and painted visages, and in front of the houses stood immense and gaudily colored poles with the heads of ravens and bears serving as memorials.
