Annie Proulx - Barkskins

They turned to each other and spoke as one: “the butler!” And James was impressed to see tears in Prentiss’s little eyes. The Adam’s apple bobbed in his turkey neck.

James drove Prentiss back, then went to the new-formed police office, and told of Freegrace’s missing wine. Two men James thought rather thick-minded came with him and looked at the shambles in the cellar. They pointed out circles in the dust on the sideboards where silver chafing dishes and other ornaments had once stood. In five minutes they concluded that a criminal gang of immigrants must have done the deed. “Comin in Boston by the t’ousand,” said one, likely an immigrant himself, thought James.

“But the butler—” he said to no response. They went out. He went into the library, for what he did not know, picked up the several old copies of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine on the table — something to read at least.

He returned to Mr. Prentiss and made the arrangements to exchange most of his bottles for casks of Madeira to travel by cart to Albany, then by canal and lake steamer to Detroit.

“At least we can do that much.” But he saw the wine merchant was still grieving the loss of Freegrace’s cellar and shifting James’s wines would be little consolation.

“The terrible sin of that theft. I’ll warrant the swine did not know what they had. I have heard for years that Mr. Freegrace possessed Château d’Yquem sauternes from Thomas Jefferson’s private cellar — the 1784 vintage. And I heard of a 1792 vintage Madeira. Madeira is truly the prince of old wines, at its best after half a century. The 1792 would just now be coming into maturity. Open a fine old bottle and it fills the room with such rich deep aromatics—” He broke off and turned away from the light.

• • •

The actual taking up of the Black Swan bottles, and Mr. Prentiss’s excruciatingly slow methods of packing and transferring the bottles to his shop delayed James’s return by nearly ten days. The blazing autumn faded and November rain began the morning after Guy Fawkes Day, which Bostonians still called Pope Day, drowning the last smoldering bonfires. A day or two later the first line storm to screech off the Atlantic shook the oak outside his old bedroom window and brought down the dead leaves.

The house agent called. He had sent a letter saying that he represented a leading Bostonian and wished to discuss a real estate purchase with Mr. Duke. James knew the man was the son of one of the shareholders in the New England Mississippi Land Company, which a few decades earlier had enjoyed a controversial congressional appropriation of more than a million dollars. Now the son, who had inherited the windfall, offered $90,000 for Black Swan and its grounds. James pretended reluctance and was finally persuaded to part with the property, house and all its contents (save his small inlaid table, which would travel with him to Detroit) for a rather larger sum. The next day he put Edward’s place, Freegrace’s rifled mansion and even Lennart Vogel’s handsome brick Federal-style house in the agent’s hands. A week before Thanksgiving he began his own return passage. The wine would follow.

• • •

In his stateroom on the steamer Liberty Tree he read the last Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and was disturbed by a story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the opening paragraphs unpleasantly reminiscent of his cousin’s ravaged house. He had a sore throat. He was coming down with a cold. The worst place to have a cold was on a steamer on Lake Erie in winter. In his valise he had a copy of Nicholas Nickleby for Lavinia. He would read this. So the last leg of the tedious and cold journey began with James wincing at the antics of Mr. Squeers, who certainly would not have balked at stealing a cellarful of wine.

He felt it before he knew what he felt. His own marine experience lay in the days of sail on the Atlantic but he sensed the change in the beat of the inland sea, the increasingly labored response of the steamer. He knew that the Great Lakes and especially Erie were among the most treacherous waters of the earth and that the winter storms wrecked ships as men trod wildflowers. Duke & Sons had lost two lumber boats the last winter, delighting settlers along the shore with planks that floated to them with no labor but to bend over and pick them up. He read on but felt the cold. When he got up to search for his heavy coat he nearly fell with the ship’s violent pitch. He could hear it groaning now, every timber twisting as the vessel gyred through mountainous waves. He put on his coat, a hat, heavy gloves and went out on deck.

A savage wind blew spume off the tops of the waves. It was a fresh gale and God, God it was cold! His first breath of the sharp air wakened his old headache, which struck like a hurled rock. Ice formed as he watched — along the rail, on the deck, on every rope, the hatch covers, heavy deep blue ice, tons of it. With fascination he watched it glaze the front of his coat. He felt his eyebrows weighted. The footing was treacherous. Passengers coming out of their cabins to see how the ship did gasped in the searing cold and one heavy man immediately fell and slid across the deck, but was able to cling to the bottom rail. He could not get up again and at each lurch of the ship his feet swung outward over the abyss. James saw ice forming on the man’s legs. Could James reach him? He could not. He looked for rope, saw a coil, but it was frozen in a great lump of ice. Passengers were clinging to anything they could reach. James wondered if he could get back to his cabin and tried a step without relinquishing his hold on the rail. His foot skidded and he gave it up. People were shrieking now, calling, “Help, help.” Never in his life had he felt such cold. Two icicles hung from his snotty nostrils. The fallen man suddenly shot away under the rail and into Erie. The entire ship was sealed in a casket of ice a foot thick, and it labored and wallowed in the troughs of the waves — slower, lower. Why had no crewmen chipped ice as soon as it started to form, James wanted to ask, but his mouth could not shape the words. Through the sheeting spray he thought he saw land nearby, less than a mile distant. They were making for a local harbor or at least the lee of an island, and he felt cheered. He would last — he’d been through worse. The wind pushed the helpless Liberty Tree on and a quarter mile from a desolate stump-choked shore she smashed onto the foaming rocks; he knew he would never drink that damn Madeira, but with a bizarre sense of victory he felt his headache become a dwindling spicule.

• • •

Cyrus had the news first from the steamship owner and came for Lavinia.

“We must go there,” she said. “We cannot wait. It is my father. We must go to him.” It took them two days to reach the shore near the wreck through some of the coldest weather of the century. Cyrus was exhausted by Lavinia’s agitation, her restless head-tossing and weeping. The bitter temperatures persisted until the entire Erie shore humped up in crystalline domes of ice. Among the stumps, converted to glittering ice cylinders, they found thirty-odd frozen bodies where loggers, summoned from their chopping work a mile distant, had laid them. The passengers were frozen in angular postures just as they had been when the blood solidified in their veins. Many had hands crooked in their last grasp of rope or rail, and the faces fixed in final expressions of struggle or resignation. The captain in his ice uniform held an ice watch in his solid hand. They found James, congealed eyes glaring up at the sky, his tight lips narrow as a crack. Lavinia touched his marble cheek. She looked at Cyrus. He made a hopeless gesture and said, “We shall meet him in heaven.” Some of the shanty men were trying to salvage the last bits of rigging and spars still tumbling in the heavy surf. Lavinia called to a man whose rounded back and sloping shoulders she somehow knew.