Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

“Gentlemen—this is Outger Duquet, of whom you have heard.” They had also heard Outger’s disclaimer of kinship with Bernard and were rather at a loss how to address him. Outger saw their confusion and said, “You may call me Uncle as long as we all understand it to be an address of respect for an elder rather than a claim to a nonexistent kinship.” He spoke as though he were a prince of the blood.

But Nicolaus, who spent much time with the company’s contract tree cutters, saw Outger had some similarity with the half-unbalanced men who came in from the isolation of the woods. The forest had made them strange—“woods-queer”—as some called it. They leapt with fright at any loud noise, they took their pay and then stormed back into the office an hour later demanding to be compensated—and were flustered when Henk Steen showed them their Xs or signatures on the receipts. But Nicolaus understood. The moment of payment had been too matter-of-fact; there had been no ceremony, no release from the tensions of solitude and dangerous work. He invited the overwrought barkskins to a nearby tavern for a drink. He urged them to tell him of the perils of the recent job—the catface growth that caused a tree to twist and fall badly, illnesses and other afflictions, unseen tree limbs that hurtled down, food shortages, troublesome men. An hour or so of putting the past into the past restored their hearts. It was the same, he thought, with Outger. He would take the man aside and urge him to talk of his invention and the difficulties he had suffered in creating it—whatever it was.

George Pickering and Piet were delighted. If one had to have a mad uncle, Outger was tremendous.

Captain Strik emerged from his cabin with a threaded needle, a pair of scissors and a swab. He snipped away the bloody hair, wiped Wigglesworth’s head, already well rinsed in salt water, and quickly stitched him up. He ordered two sailors to take him to his hammock and keep an eye on him. “He’ll come through. Head hard as a quahog shell. Maybe more confused than usual for a bit. We’ll watch how he goes.”

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.”

“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.”

But he thought squirrels were the worst as there were thousands upon thousands of them, the forest and woodlot alive with the furry devils—red, black, gray squirrels and he knew for a fact that two squirrels could make six, seven, even nine more squirrels every year and each of these was soon mature. He tried to work out how many squirrels one pair created over, say, ten years, but the sums became so large they frightened him. The earth might be carpeted with squirrels in his lifetime.

Although he had been employed as a secretary for only a year he had learned much of Boston life from a dirty manuscript folded in the back of an account book, a furious, rambling critique by a man who signed himself Henk Steen. Steen was aggrieved at the cruelties beyond slavery that he saw in the colonies: husbands who beat their wives with iron pokers until ribs crackled, an overbearing bully who pushed a road through an elderly widow’s property, thieving servants branded with B for burglary, the many who fornicated before marriage, trespassing swine, barrels of rotten fish sold as sound, breaches of peace, drunkenness and swearing—it was a wonderfully wicked place.

This time Duke & Sons had the upper hand, thought Piet. The entrenched political landholders with their great swathes of coastal pine had suffered tremendous losses a year earlier when an epic wildfire strode out of New Hampshire and incinerated fifty miles of seacoast forest, eating deep miles inland until beneficent rain fell. Duke & Sons’ chief holdings were along the interior rivers, a long distance from the fire. Even before the ashes cooled men whose timber had been destroyed looked covetously on the Duke timberlands.

He also thought of a fire several years back after their hasty return from Amsterdam, a different and smaller fire only a dozen miles from Outger’s Penobscot Bay house. He and Nicolaus had used this fire as their excuse to rescue the great pine table—fear of future incineration.

The daughter, Beatrix, was no beauty, but striking. She was young, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, and rather lissome, quiet-spoken. Her black, undressed hair hung loose, and this gave her a wild look that suited her brown Indian skin. But she greeted them in pleasant English and asked them into the house.

“That fire was distant, and the table,” she said smoothly, “is, as you say, too large for any practical use. If you would send me a handsome small table you may have this large one.” She rapped her knuckles on the pine. She said she did not know why Outger was so passionate about it. He asked after it in every letter and would undoubtedly be angry when she told him it was gone. She did not seem troubled by the promise of Outger’s rage. Nor did she seem interested in knowing these stranger “uncles” who came so suddenly, who spoke dismissively of Outger as though he were a castoff from the body of society.

But the matter of the large table was settled. Despite this prize the two aging men were discomfited. They left in an uncomfortable silence. Something was wrong.

“I am your cousin Piet Duke. My uncles Jan and Nicolaus Duke spoke with you in recent weeks past about Duke and Sons’ large business table in this house. I have come for it. And look, I have brought you this smaller mahogany table as you requested.” “I know nothing of this,” she said. “There is no large business table here, and you may take your mahogany object away. Pray do not trouble me again, sir.” She closed the door with a hard swinging crash.

Boston’s population swelled to more than 150,000 people. England had seized New France and driven away the Acadians. Yet New France must be a disappointment compared to the extraordinarily rich income, more than four thousand times greater than any timberland investment, from sugar and molasses in the West Indies.

People felt time rushing past ever since England had adopted the Gregorian calendar and forced the colonies to do the same, robbing everyone of eleven days of life.

And who could count the new inventions and occupations? Colleges emerged from raw ideas; daring men invented river flatboats to penetrate the wilderness; shipmasters, not content with trade or passengers, began to pursue whales for the costly and fine oil; teacups suddenly had handles, an effete fad that Nicolaus thought would soon die out. And that fellow Franklin’s inventions: the lightning rods, which had saved hundreds of ...

Wolfgang Breitsprecher, a German forester newly arrived; and a French, Jacques Nadeau, who had worked with old Forgeron for a season in New France. These men were antagonists. There was a new bookkeeper to replace Henk Steen, Thomas Ashbridge, one of the first graduates of the College of New Jersey. With Wedge, Breitsprecher, Nadeau and Ashbridge, Duke & Sons had let in the first outsiders. • • •

If only hams and cakes could fly.

“Nicolaus! Jan! Come into this room.” Nicolaus had never heard his wife speak in that shocked tone. The scarlet-faced women half-ran into the kitchen and let the men go in alone. The thin and wasted body of an elderly man lay on the still sweat-damp sheet. It was Birgit, certainly it was Birgit, but Birgit was a man. Indubitably. The wispy hairs on the narrow chest and the male sexual organs, shrunken and withered but quite real, confounded them. Nicolaus’s mind seethed. He thought not of Birgit but of Bernard. Why? Why? For forty years! And none of them had known.

“Let me alone, Mercy. I must go, I tell you. Help me if you wish me to live. Bar me from this and I’ll die of spite.”

But as the men left they treated the elderly Dukes to looks of pure malevolence. The Dukes would never be invited to even the meanest dogfight after this.

“Perhaps. But I think we will need a place with more vigorous businessmen, with less interference from England. Boston has ever been England’s spaniel.” Nicolaus coughed phlegmily and said, “Even spaniels will bite if provoked.

And something I find extremely trying is the masts on British ships, masts that we cut from our forestlands. The vaunted English navy is constructed from New England timbers. Our pines and oaks come back to us, eh?”

“I will think about it,” Sedley said, but he was already considering that to place James as a Royal Navy midshipman would be a step to the enemy’s side, with the colonial feeling against England stronger every year. He would look into placing the boy on an American privateer.

“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.”

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 ...

“Yes,” Beatrix said. “But it is too much to remember.” “Not to remember like a lesson,” he sa...

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.

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.

“Have an ax if you wish, but the lumber camp will give you as many as you need. They provide the tools. This I know, for I, too, worked in those camps chopping trees, even as my father, Achille, did, and his father, the Frenchman René Sel, before him.”

And take care. The woods and rivers are full of English and Americans fighting. Stay distant if you hear firearms.”

We must get Auguste. Kuntaw wants him to live in the Penobscot house.” The old man got up, trembling when he heard he was to come with them. He looked around. The idlers stood near the post doorway, a dog scratched its fleas. He sat down again, smiling slyly. “No. Too late. You go. I stay.” No matter what they said he refused. “Someone must stay. I will be the One Who Remains.” He was always good at naming.

A new path had opened to Kuntaw—guiding whitemen to hunt and fish. It started when a Boston man, Mr. Williams, came to him and said he wanted to go in the Maine woods and hunt, and he needed a guide; he would pay. Kuntaw knew the forest, streams and lakes from his years in the logging camps. And they went north together on the train, then by buckboard, then by canoe. Mr. Williams returned to Boston dirty, scratched up, his eyes red from campfire smoke, thinner and more agile; he felt himself a tough woodsman. He had caught more than fifty trout in a single day and described his taciturn Mi’kmaw guide to envious friends.

The war for independence had linked the idea of freedom to a country of wild forests. Americans saw themselves as homines sylvestris—men of the forest.

It seemed to Kuntaw he had blundered into the strangest occupation in the world, helping men have a “holiday,” men ignorant of the tattered forests, ignorant of canoes and paddling, ignorant of weather signs and plants, of fire building. They angered him sometimes. Judge James, whom the others treated with deference, said, “You Indians have a nice life. Just hunt and fish all the time, let the women do the work.” He laughed. Kuntaw said nothing then but later, smoking a pipe with Ti-Sabatis, another guide he saw sometimes at the boat landing, he said, “Whitemen never see it was our work. For them hunt and fish is only to play. They think we lazy because we only ‘play.’ ” Ti-Sabatis smiled a little. “These men don’t know nothing about the woods, but they pay good money and I don’t know how they get that money, so they do somethin pretty smart.” “It was our life and we lived it, but it was not easy like those whitemen think.” Yet he enjoyed these excursions.

When Kuntaw heard all this he exhaled between his teeth, a hissing sound like that of an angry animal, furious to feel so helpless, and went outside. He could not bear to see her suffering.

With the trees gone Beatrix saw the decaying house. The roof and sills could not wait and just as she fell ill Beatrix sold the last big pines in her woodlot to pay for the repairs. Kuntaw simply did not notice such defects; it was a house, a big immovable house.

“Am I in hell now?” she whispered as her eyes took his measure. Dr. Mukhtar, who quite understood that the pain had awakened her and that she thought he was the devil, said, “No, madam, you are not, although it may seem that way. Allow me to introduce myself and let us work together to see how I may help you.

To Dr. Mukhtar she said, “My father told me once that swallowing Guatemalan lizards was a cure for this illness.” “Never can this be. It is the rarity of Guatemalan lizards in Boston and its environs that earns them the reputation of a great cure. One might also name unicorn milk as a cure. There is no cure. When it becomes resistant to all I have, I will give you a sleeping draft that never fails to bring the final relief.”

“I can see now,” she said, “that all his pedagogy was an experiment.” The books and instruction had been his attempt to make her into something like a learned whiteman, like himself. After he left for Leiden the instruction continued in the form of boxes of books, papers, long letters of advice and orders, but she gradually understood that she herself was not wanted—she was nothing to Outger but a subject on which to practice his ideas of intellectual development. She had failed in some way to become an Enlightened Savage, and so remained alone in the house on Penobscot Bay. When the solitude became a monstrous frustration she began to look for one who could help her become an Indian. Kuntaw had come with her to split wood and had stayed for many years. They had made children together. “But,” she said sadly, “I could not become an Indian.” “Of course not,” said Dr. Mukhtar. “There is a whole world of signs, symbols and spirits which all must be absorbed from birth. You could not hope to grasp the meanings except by living the entire life.”

It was in these encounters with whitemen they learned that they were not Indians but métis or, as one Anglo entrepreneur pejoratively called them, “half-breeds.” In Maine their white-settler neighbors knew confidently that they were fading from the earth; yes, said Josime to his brothers, they were disappearing, not by disease and wasting away in sorrow as the whites supposed, but through absorption into the white population—only

Dukes beyond a yearly allowance of fifty pounds. If he accepted, he would have to make concessions, would have to revert to being an American. He would bring a touch of English distinction to the no doubt squalid Board meetings of Duke & Sons—likely the reason they invited him to join them. He could imagine those meetings, a scarred oaken table with half a dozen backwoodsmen slouched around it on pine benches, tankards of rum-laced home-brewed beer, tipsy ribaldries, for he had no illusions that the Dukes were models of moral behavior.

Over a roast chicken they raked through sea acquaintances held in common. They spoke of retired and disabled friends as the level sank in the decanter. “Captain Richard Moore, one of the most ablest seamen I ever knew, is forced to open a herring stall in Bristol. You are a fortunate man, Captain Duke, to be connected to a wealthy family. Some of us depart from the sea to live out sad lives ashore selling fish or driving a goods cart. I myself have no expectations of a rich sinecure but hope I will go to Davy Jones afore I wheel a barrow of mussels.”

When Mrs. Brandon said she had visited Madame Tussaud’s exhibition, at the Lyceum Theatre, of wax curiosities of crime Gort begged for repulsive details. The lady demurred, saying she had averted her eyes before many of the exhibits. “I do not see how a member of the gentler sex, even a German or French lady, could have fastened on such an unpleasant mode of expression,” she said and cut at her meat. “I understand she first gained her skill in making wax flowers for family funeral wreaths.” After that she said nothing more.

The days of tilting horizon passed slowly. As they neared the continent they saw increasing dozens of ships, wooden leviathans rope-strung like musical instruments, shimmering with raw salt. Boston harbor was so jammed they anchored a twenty-minute row from the docks.

“Ha! You, Woodrow!” He bellowed at a sailor. “Fetch the small table in my cabin to the deck for this gentleman.” There was undoubtedly a sneer embedded in the word gentleman. James Duke guessed that Captain Gunn was in his true self a parsimonious man made momentarily generous by Madeira.

It was exceedingly cold in Boston; snow fell an inch or two every day for a week until all was muffled and silent, roofs, carriages, and still the snow came. Two days after his arrival, and with a drumbeat headache, James Duke walked to the offices of Trumbull & Tendrill slipping on icy cobblestones.