Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

  “She won’t be left,” said Bren. “I can’t go out of her sight. And she’s the same about you if you don’t get home on time. I don’t know how it will be when she starts school.”

  “You know I can’t always tell when I’ll get back—weather could keep me out—even for days. The fish don’t have clocks. And boats don’t have telephones.”

  “She’d keep watching,” said Bren.

  The incident with a baby chicken rattled both parents. Bren had decided to raise a dozen hens for eggs and meat, save on groceries, make a change from fried cod. She ordered twenty chicks by mail and when they came she put the box behind the stove to keep them warm. She showed the little balls of fluff to Sapatisia, who was enchanted. She let her hold one.

  “Be careful. It’s delicate.”

  But Sapatisia loved the warm little peeping creature and in her immoderate affection squeezed it and squeezed, then shrieked when the dead chick hung limp.

  “For that you must be punished,” said Bren, and Sapatisia roared with the insult of her first spanking.

  “That is how she is,” said Egga. “She can’t help it. God save any man she loves. She’ll eat him alive and throw the bones out the window.”

  Bren’s fear of Sapatisia throwing a fit her first day at school dissolved. It was as if the child had steeled herself for it. She did not cry when Bren left her in the little kindergarten chair, nor would she move to a different chair despite the teacher’s coaxing. Left alone she was tractable; commanded to do something—anything—she was impossible.

  “I don’t know what’s going on in that little head,” said the teacher.

  “Welcome to the knitting circle,” said Bren.

  Still, Sapatisia made it through all the grades, occasionally striking off sparks of brilliance. She seemed happiest, thought Egga, when, on a Sunday, they hiked along the shore. She came home carrying handfuls of wilted grasses, water-smooth rocks with flecks of mica.

  • • •

  In her freshman year at college Sapatisia, given to instant love or hate, fastened her affections first on the subject of plants and then on a married ecology professor. The man was flattered; there was an affair; he tried to disengage and Sapatisia appeared at his door gripping a hunting knife. She lunged at the professor, who twisted adroitly and the knife plunged into the wood doorframe. She was muscular and strong but the professor was stronger and, shouting to his wife to call the police, he held Sapatisia down until they arrived. The next day Egga came to the jail to take her home.

  “You know you are expelled from school,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t ask you why you did this. I know why. You are like I was when I ran away from the resi school.”

  “I am not like you,” she said. “I am different. And my reasons were different.”

  “Oh,” said Egga. “Different from me, different from everybody. But you have to live in this world. Accept some of the rules that keep it in balance. Make an adjustment. Or you will die young.”

  “I want to go to Shubenacadie,” she said. “I want to see those Sel people. I want to know who I am.”

  Egga and Bren had heard nothing about a professor of ecology or botany, only of Sapatisia’s burning interest in the plants and forests of the earth. She seemed to feel personal guilt for eroded slopes and dirty rivers. If she looked up she saw not heaven’s blue but apocalyptic clouds in an aircraft-gouged sky.

  “She has a female urge to repair the damage humans have done to nature,” said Bren that evening after Sapatisia was up in her old room.

  “Yes, and a female urge to destroy men. We are lucky the professor did not press charges.” Silence in the room except for their breathing. Egga sighed and said, “What do you think about letting her go to Nova Scotia?”

  “Oh, Egga, let her go? She will go there no matter what. I’ll talk to her, but brace yourself.”

  • • •

  “You’ll have to find work to live on, a scholarship to finish your studies,” Bren told her in a chill voice. This daughter absorbed too much of her energy. “We have Marie to think about, too, you know.”

  Sapatisia left the next day on a northbound bus.

  • • •

  Egga and Bren heard nothing for months until a rare letter, postmarked Halifax, Nova Scotia, arrived from their firstborn daughter.

  I haven’t met Uncle Paul yet or his daughter Jeanne. Aunt Mary May Mius is shy and seems pretty fussy about her son Felix. Felix is nothing to be fussy about! The best one is Aunt Alice. I liked her. It is a pretty big family. Going to Winnipeg next week to study forestry, doing o.k., love, S

  And only a few days later an ink-blotched letter arrived for Egga from his father, Lobert Sel.

  It means so much to us that our strong young granddaughter Sapatisia visited us. She ask many questions about our people and old Sel stories. Egga it has been many years since you left. Can you or other granddaughter Marie come here one time? I grow old. Wish to see you. That bad school that hurt you is closed and burned up. Come home.

  These letters made Egga tearful and he planned a trip to Shubenacadie. He wrote to Lobert that he would come—yes, he and Bren—the next St. Anne’s Day. But from Sapatisia they heard little more than occasional cards postmarked from different cities.

  • • •

  How different was their younger daughter, Marie.

  “She should have been a boy,” said Egga to Bren, thinking of the time when his greasy little toddler had partially disassembled an electric motor and put it back together enlivened with pink plastic stacking rings from her toy box. Nothing mechanical in the house was safe from Marie’s inquiring fingers and she was the easiest person in the world to please at birthdays and holidays with gifts of ship and plane models. She was outspoken and a little brash, but that was a proof to Egga that his younger daughter would not be trodden down. She spent a college summer running a CTL, the cut-to-length wonder tool that felled and delimbed trees in front of itself so the detritus formed a mat for it to move on; it was her hero-machine.

  She fell hard for Davey Jones, a bowlegged young lobsterman who wrote poetry, danced reels and strathspeys, played poker and had kept a weather notebook since he was nine. In December of 1978 she married him.

  “Yes,” she said, when he proposed, “but I want to keep my job. I like my job.”

  “I like mine, too, so no argument.”

  After the wedding night the first thing she told her new husband was “There is less soil compaction with the CTL than even a horse team.”

  “What makes you think I care?” he said. “Come here and I’ll tell you about lobster pots.”

  69

  boreal forest

  Jeanne Sel and Felix Mius grew up together, knew each other’s childhood thoughts and feelings; as they grew older these diverged as a mountain rill bifurcates in rocky terrain and becomes two streams. Felix had quiet ways that disguised an agile and explorative mind. His complexion was rough and he was inclined to fall in love with unattainable older women who raised their eyebrows at him but never their skirts. Jeanne’s close-set eyes and thin lips convinced her she was above the fray of love entanglements.

  Jeanne remembered her mother on a ferry, leaning over the rail waving good-bye, good-bye, until the vessel melted away in heavy fog where a few hours later it collided with a coal barge; both went down in deep water. Her father, Paul Sel, told her that Mama could not come back, but his own weeping indicated something very terrible.

  “I don’t know, Mary May,” Paul said to his sister, whose son, Felix, was a year younger than Jeanne. “I don’t know what to do. She won’t talk or play with other kids—except here with Felix.”

  “That’s a good sign,” Mary May said. “Let them be together. Little kids sort things out. I think better Jeanne come stay with us. And I think a picnic trip. Help her get over losing Marta. Help you, Paul.”

  “Nothing can help me,” said her brother, but he didn’t object when Mary May
called, “Felix and Jeanne, come on. We are going on a picnic.”

  They headed away from the reservation crowded together like buns in a package in Paul’s decrepit grey truck. The interior smelled of mold and a dog that Paul had once owned.

  “Where we goin, where we goin?” Felix asked over and over, excited.

  “Where we goin?” said Jeanne.

  “You’ll see when we get there.”

  “There” was Kejimkujik Provincial Park. Mary May said to them, “Long time ago this was Mi’kmaw place.” Jeanne and Felix, after hours of riding until their legs became paralyzed sticks, jumped and ran under the huge old-growth hemlock. There was a garden of boulders under lustrous blue-green trees.

  Felix discovered that the undersides of the branches shone silver, in the deep shade grew maidenhair fern, graceful ebon-black curved branches and tiny mitten-like leaves. The hemlocks sighed very gently. He engaged with Tsuga canadensis.

  “I wish Mama could see this,” Jeanne said, admiring the gleaming stems of the fern, smelling the musky odor. At the edge of the water she found a forest of mathematically perfect ebony spleenwort and looking around encountered myriad tones of green: citrine, viridian, emerald. It was a fine and satisfying day that was never forgotten by the children.

  • • •

  In high school teachers talked of careers. Jeanne learned that botanists lived in a world of stem and leaf. There would not be an oil or gas job with Encana or Mime’j Seafoods for Felix Mius; he intended to get into forestry school—everyone knew about Jackson Mius, who had logged with a horse team in Maine back in the sixties, then went to the University of Maine and got a degree and a job with the state in forest research. He had done it, so would Felix. The cousins set the goal of getting into university. They had to complete two years at the community college before they could apply. The odds were against them.

  After high school graduation they moved to Aunt Alice Sel’s house in Dartmouth, her child-care center and home for an occasional young Mi’kmaw trying out urban life. They enrolled at the community college and worked part-time jobs.

  The lower level of Alice’s kitchen traffic was always congested with toddlers; the upper level with friends and relatives, chaos exemplified. Jeanne thought it a madhouse until one September Saturday she came downstairs and found the kitchen empty, the house silent. A syrup of honey-colored autumnal sunlight fell on the scrubbed table and old mismatched chairs. Alice’s kitchen was beautiful.

  • • •

  “Those two, they’re sure tryin hard at their schoolwork. I guess it’s good they got each other. Like brother and sister,” remarked Alice to her sister, Mary May. They sat at the crowded kitchen table with teapot and cups.

  “Well, I just hope it don’t get—funny. That kind of worries me, them bein so close. You know, cousins and all. I pray they don’t do nothin wrong.”

  Alice gave her sister her dry look. “Quit worryin. He just watches out for her. That Jeanne, I think, she won’t never get romantic about nobody. And Felix takes girls to the movies if he can afford it. But not Jeanne—she wants to see a movie she goes by herself.”

  • • •

  The cousins struggled with the college course work: they couldn’t get into university without the credits. Neither spoke Mi’kmaw fluently; English had come first, but some early mornings they sat together at the computer to learn Mi’kmaw words, following the Listuguj speakers’ pronunciations. Then Alice would come in and ruin everything by criticizing their efforts.

  • • •

  On Saturdays, Jeanne hauled laundry to the Bucket O’ Suds. While the clothes churned she flipped through a stack of ragged magazines and old newsletters that featured profiles of people in the province. One interested her; she tore the page out.

  That evening, drinking tea after supper to wash down the store-bought cake, she showed it to the others. “It’s an article on this woman, Sapatisia Sel. Suppose she is a relation?”

  Felix said, “If every Sel relative gave us a dollar we’d be rich. What about this Sapatisia Sel?”

  “It says she collects medicine plants and trees.”

  “Another one?” said Felix scornfully. Medicine plants! Over the years a stream of white people had come to “study” Mi’kmaw medicine plants and the older women on the reservation were used to being quizzed about traditional cures.

  “I know Sapatisia,” said Alice, reaching for the page. She read a minute, studied the picture. “That’s Egga’s daughter. She’s a relative from the States. She come here once. This says she knows about old-time medicine plants.”

  “And she plants trees.”

  • • •

  Felix hated the required remedial English grammar and composition that seemed unnecessary to a future study of forestry. It was not that he disliked learning—he and Jeanne stuffed their brains. The relentless reading and studying wore them down and they decided to make a rare free evening and hear Dr. Alfred Onehube from Manitoba lecture on the state of the world’s forests.

  Onehube disclosed himself as a militant ecoconservationist. Several people connected with forest production and timber sales got up and walked out. But Felix and Jeanne sat on the edges of their seats drinking in the named sins against the forest.

  “Budworm, for example,” said Dr. Onehube at AK-47 velocity. “Natural cycles of budworm infestation, roughly every thirty or forty years. When the insects outstripped their food supply they disappeared. Dead trees fell, waited for the fire. Fire came, new trees grew from the ashes. But after the Second World War we wanted all the trees we could get for wood pulp and paper. Everybody had new chemical weapons, and war surplus planes. So when spruce budworm invaded the boreal forests in the 1940s, the Forest Service sprayed DDT. Our Miramichi River, home of the greatest Atlantic salmon run on earth, turned into a death river as the DDT killed all the tiny water animalcules that fed the salmon.”

  He stopped and drank half the glass of water on the podium, spilling some down his jacket, where the drops sparkled in the light until they were absorbed by the cloth. He looked up into the lights, seemed to draw breath, then continued in his earnest rapid-fire baritone.

  “We know better about DDT now. But what makes us think we are any smarter about the effects of vast clear-cutting of a very fragile ecosystem? Hah? There are countless unknowns here. And we don’t even know how much we don’t know.”

  Finally, when listeners began looking at their watches and some in the rear sidled guiltily out of the hall, he came to an end: “Incompetent forest . . . ignorance . . . wood fiber, battles . . . disturbances . . . chemical destruction . . . slow-growing . . . unstoppable.” He lowered his voice dramatically, paused and then whispered into the microphone, “Now we are finishing off the cold land of little sticks, the great breeding grounds for millions of birds, the cleansing breath of the earth, the spring nutrient runoff to the ocean that revitalizes everything—the beginning of the great food chain. You people,” he said, looking at the audience. “We are killing . . . the . . . great . . . boreal . . . forest.” There was a frictional hissing sound as people moved in their seats, then small applause and the noise of seats folding back into place as everyone rose. A college official came out and announced that Dr. Onehube would speak at noon the next day on overpopulation—a lecture titled “SRO—Standing Room Only.”

  As they left the auditorium Felix heard a man behind him say, “Another tree-hugging eco-nut.” Jeanne’s face was stiff. Without looking at Felix she said, “I feel completely stupid, helpless. What are we doing but cramming our heads with words? Felix, what can we do?”

  “I don’t know.” They walked in silence. The rain was finished, pushed along by the rising wind, its raw edge slicing off the water.

  • • •

  Impossible to go back to the study schedule after the call to activism, but where to begin? Jeanne reorganized the stacks of paper and books on her study table. She came on the profile of Sapatisia Sel torn from the power company’s newsle
tter and read it with fresh interest.

  “Felix, I want to know why she said that the old Mi’kmaw medicine plants can’t be used anymore. I bet she knows how to help the forest. The article says she lives on Cape George. Let’s go find her.”

  “How can we get there? No car.”

  They left it there for several days. Alice came down with the flu and Jeanne stayed home from classes to run the child care and cook. Alice’s reservation friends brought Mi’kmaw medicines for the sick woman. Jeanne was delighted to see the medicines in use and to hear their clicking names even if she didn’t know what they meant: wijok’jemusi, wisowtakjijkl, pako’si-jipisk, pko’kmin, miti, pakosi, tupsi, l’mu’ji’jmanaqsi, kjimuatkw, stoqon. Morning, noon and night Alice was inundated with washes, gargles, tisanes, decoctions, brews, teas and infusions.

  “You see,” said Jeanne to Felix. “The medicines are still used! That Sapatisia has some explaining to do.”

  Another week and Alice was on her feet again, cured. “Layin there in bed I decided to give up meetins of the Child Help Program. Just too tired at the end of the day,” she said, and looked it, her round face mottled and puffy as a cheese soufflé.

  “Hitchhike,” whispered Jeanne to Felix, who was struggling into his old torn jacket.

  “You just won’t give up, will you?” And he was out into the early darkness.

  • • •

  Alice found the way. “You can get a ride. It seems like,” she said, “Johnny Stick is goin that way. He’s pretty good company now. He started goin to those ‘truth and reconciliation’ meetings a few years ago. Helps to know you are not alone in the boat.”

  “What was the matter with him?” asked Felix, who picked up a tone in her voice.

  “Oh, that bad stuff from years ago when he was a kid. The resi school.”

  “Mr. Stick is all right to take a ride with?”

  “Yes. He’s fine. He’s got a carpenter job up there fixin the handrail in the old lighthouse. It hasn’t blinked a blink for sailors for eighty years but the tourists like it. In the summer there’s a chips truck in the parking lot, does good business, so that shaky old handrail, got chip grease and salt all over it. He said be ready tomorrow mornin. Early. Bring your blankets. You can rough it a few nights.”