Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“Mr. Roby? Oh, oh it really is you, Mr. Roby. You can do me a very great favor and I will pay you for it. My father, James Duke, lies among those bodies. I must have him brought to Detroit so we may bury him. Will you help me?” The man looked in her face white as dirty old snow, tracked with frozen tears.

“What! Mr. James Duke? Your father? Oh Jesus and Mary, Miss Duke, I will. We’ll take him out soon as we may. And I’ll take no pay for it.”

“I’ll never forget this kindness,” she said.

• • •

Now she was alone, except for Cyrus and Clara, who did not count. She had encountered aloneness in the hated English school. And now with James buried in the Mount Elliot Cemetery and Posey buried in Boston, the uncles all dead, it was the same. She lay on her bed and tried to breathe slowly. She breathed, breathed and then almost heard the saddest sound in the world, the far notes of a piano played in an empty room… re mi fa sol… “Mama. Mama! ”

Hours later in the dark she woke, her heart galloping, her salty face stuck to the silk pillow slip. Why had she not thought of this before? She was not alone. There was someone who would protect her, care for her. Although he was a common man she sensed he had a noble character no matter what they said. She got out of bed, lit the oil lamp and began to write. Her pen gouged into the paper page after page, ink sputtering, and when she stopped it was milky dawn. She folded the pages, wrapped, sealed and addressed the packet. She felt a sense of completion, knew she had saved herself. Very tired she crept back into the chilled bed and slept.

She rose at noon, dined on a poached chicken breast. She carried her letter to the post office and saw it on its way. Now she could only wait. She was not anxious. He would not fail her.

The days passed and Lavinia began to fret. After ten days there was still no response. She threw herself at the office work but it was hourly apparent that she could not run Duke & Sons by herself.

• • •

She arranged a meeting with Mr. Edward Pye. James had brought Pye, the company’s accountant, treasurer and paymaster, to Detroit and settled him in a house near the Duke offices. Mr. Pye, pale-faced with dark curling hair and beard, was reticent and responsible, the ideal employee. But he had a way of pointing out Duke & Sons’ deficiencies that Lavinia could not quite like. He introduced her to a Chicago lawyer visiting Detroit on business, Clayton Jasper Flense. Within two weeks Flense had become indispensable. He advised her to shift the company to Chicago — Chicago had a far better geographical location than Detroit, it was central to the entire country, it was becoming an important city. He advised her to incorporate and name a board of directors.

“Very many businesses do incorporate. For then, anything the company may choose to do, if some action excites litigation, why, such an attack does not fall on you nor on any individual director, but on the corporation, which is a thing, and not a person. It is a legal protection, you see. And this is a way you can raise capital to purchase extensive woodlands. Your investors enjoy limited liability, that is, they face no losses greater than their invested moneys. Incorporation is one of the great benefits to business in this country — incorporation lies with the states not the central government — and if you are not content in one state and the opportunities look better in another, why you may go there. It is the lifeblood of our American spirit of enterprise. We do not have tyrannical kings and despots squeezing us into poverty. We can invent and make and work and do and keep the fruits of our labor.”

“But my father said that corporations were often monopolies, and that they would prove fatal to partnerships and sole proprietor situations. He cited the East India Company as an example.”

“That was hardly an American institution. Remember, too, that it was a royal charter, under the ‘protection’ of the British government — and under its thumb. The thing American people fear about corporations is that they might achieve too much power. We have an antipathy to power even as we admire it. And I believe competition among corporations will make that concern null and void.”

She did see, she thought she understood the situation. It was time to reshape Duke & Sons. And every day she waited for the answer to that painful letter written in the night.

• • •

Flense and Pye were valuable but she needed an assistant, someone who could act as secretary, handle the paperwork and office supplies, oversee other employees, manage visitors and business callers. She put a small advertisement in The Democratic Free Press and Michigan Intelligencer for a responsible woman with a sense of order.

The advertisement brought only two responses. The first was a bony eighteen-year-old girl wild to get away from her father’s stump farm. She was alternatively doubled over with shyness and forthright. She picked nervously at bleeding cuticles and seemed to have only a few qualifications beyond her desire to escape farm life. “I can read. I can write. I can learn!” she said when Lavinia asked what skills she had.

“I admire your spirit, but that may not be enough, Miss Heinrich. I will keep your name in my book and let you know if we have a suitable opening in future.”

The second applicant was a middle-aged rusty-haired widow, Annag Duncan, thin, with long spider-leg fingers. She had a low easy voice.

“I worked in the office of a hat manufacturer in Glasgow before I met my husband, Alasdair Duncan. Then I stayed to home. We married and he wanted to come to the New World and make a living as a purveyor of fine woods. He knew what was desirable. We went to New York. But his cough — he had a little cough for years, nothing much — this cough became very constant and brought blood. A doctor said he had consumption and should go to a dry mountain climate. But before the mountains, said the man he worked for, he must go to Detroit and examine some beautiful clear pinewood, so we came and he died two weeks after we come ashore. He never got to the mountains.”

She was homely, had no money, indeed she wore threadbare garments. But her office experience with the hat manufacturer gave her value and Lavinia hired her. She sent again for the stump farmer’s daughter to help Annag. “I will put your avowal of wanting to learn to the test. You are hired. You will be paid five dollars a month with a chance of more if you do well. We will be shifting to Chicago in coming months. Report to Mrs. Duncan at seven tomorrow morning — she will assign your tasks. I expect hard and accurate work from you.”

Now, she thought, I must deal with Cyrus, for she longed to get him out of the company. His fussy, overbearing ways, his dulled hearing, were unwanted. She had every confidence in her own abilities aided and abetted by Flense and Pye. And still there was no reply to that letter.

The answer when it came was so contrary to her expectations she could hardly grasp what she was reading. She plowed through it again and again, sure she had made a mistake. But right enough, it was a refusal: “… your generous but unusual offer… prefer to keep my own name… choose my own helpmeet… earn my own way in the world.” Mr. Andre Roque had the effrontery to wish her good fortune.

She fell apart, she raved and shrieked, hurled clothes, furniture, smashed books through the window, screamed obscene words she didn’t know she knew and finally crashed sobbing onto the torn-apart bed.

Downstairs Mrs. Trame and the new maid, Alberta Snow, heard the uproar.

“Whatever ails her!” said Alberta.

“I expect she is grieving for her father,” said Mrs. Trame.