Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“And do keep receipts for even the smallest purchases,” said Lawyer Flense. “That is the correct way.” And so Bollard, who considered Lavinia a paler, older, homelier and more modern imitation of the learned female characters in Thomas Amory’s The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq., closed his bookshop and sailed for France on the trail of Duquet relatives, his valises packed with scratch paper, grammars and dictionaries; he read French but did not speak it and planned to write out his questions.

Tetrazinni, younger and with a wild red beard and spectacles in pot-metal frames, came a week later. He was more modishly attired than old Bollard — a pleated shirtfront with a turndown collar and a wide silk tie drawn through a heavy signet ring, velvet waistcoat and — were they? — yes, they were, black velvet trousers. The dinner was mutton and boiled potatoes. Tetrazinni stared musingly at his plate and looked several times toward the kitchen door, but no larded capons nor Pacific oysters came. Goosey was ill with a catarrh and sipped a little veal broth in her room. Lawyer Flense sawed at his mutton, listened to Tetrazinni’s verbose and excited account of his journey — by some stroke of coincidence he had been regaled by the same tale of the burning prairie as Bollard. Over the dried peach pie Lawyer Flense caught Lavinia’s eye, nodded and made his excuses.

“I fear I must run. I have a court appearance tomorrow and wish to be fresh for argument. Delighted to meet you, Mr. Tetrazinni, and wish you good fortune in your search,” he said, bowing and backing.

Lavinia and Tetrazinni went to the library for port and she gave him the bulky packet of family papers, most copied out by Annag Duncan and Miss Heinrich. Tetrazinni’s fingers flew through the pages for a few minutes but he did not stop talking. He had too many questions to suit Lavinia. They had hired him, why could he not do his job without harassing her for names? Surely the old family records and letters were enough — if he would shut up and read them instead of gabbling on.

“I cannot tell you,” she said for the fourth time when he asked for a list of Amsterdam relatives and all ancestors, their current addresses and business interests. “I suppose they all may be dead. It is for you to discover.” She was tired of him.

“Yes, but names will lead me to today’s generations. That is how we do it. I must have a place to start,” he said, jutting his chin out. She pointed at the wad of copied family papers in his hands. In the end Tetrazinni read aloud for two hours, culling dozens of names from Vogel’s Dutch correspondence. A month later he sailed with his list and Lavinia’s letter of introduction to whom it might concern for information on any living connection to Charles Duquet and Cornelia Roos.

Tetrazinni made an inner note to particularly examine the history of Charles Duquet’s son Outger, who had been something of a learned authority on American Indians. Scholar or no, he likely had cohabited with someone in Leiden and his other haunts. And had he not lived in America for some years? Where that might have been he had no idea. Although in the papers Lavinia had supplied there was frequent mention of a “large pine table” that Duquet possessed and Duke & Sons claimed, there was no mention of the location of either table or man. Tetrazinni assumed both had once been somewhere in Boston, but the old city directories had no Outger Duquet listed. As he read again through the meager family history on three faded pages held together with a tailor’s pin and signed Bernard Duke, two short sentences on the ancestor’s voyages to China caught Tetrazinni’s attention. “Well, well,” he said to himself, “if no one turns up in Amsterdam there may be Duquets in Peking, though perhaps rather difficult to sort out from Yees and Yongs.” He imagined the risible possibility of telling Miss Duke that her only living relative and heir was a Chinese noodle seller.

• • •

For the Dukes and the Breitsprechers and lesser timbermen business was good. Insatiable markets along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers squalling for lumber unmade Albany and Buffalo. A tide of agricultural-minded immigrants — sinewy men, their swollen wives and bruised children — streamed onto the prairies, all needing houses and barns, silos and stables, needing furniture and shingles, lathes and pickets, rails and posts. New railroads to and from the prairies delivered them lumber and brought beef cattle and hogs back to Chicago, where the war and fulfillment of the Indian treaties guaranteeing annual livestock distributions meant acres of stockyards. There was a fierce need for planks and poles, fencing and pens. And if it all burned down every two or three years, there were more trees in the woods — endless trees.

• • •

During the war with the south the Duke Board of Directors included Lawyer Flense; Accountant Mr. Pye; David Neale, owner of the newspaper Chicago Progress; Annag Duncan, the office manager; Noah Ludlum, who oversaw the logging sites and sawmills; another Maine man, Glafford Jones, responsible for log and lumber transport; two wealthy logging kings, Theodore Jinks and Axel Cowes, both large shareholders in Duke Logging. Jinks and Cowes built mansions on properties adjoining Lavinia’s grounds. The three shared a park — thirty acres of woodland area on the lakeside of their abutting properties. It was Lavinia’s habit to walk on the silent paths in early evening, when she sometimes met Axel Cowes and his spaniels.

“Evening, Lavinia,” Cowes would say, half-bowing. “A fine day.”

“Yes, very fine, Axel.”

Cowes was in his sixties, white-haired and with a soft rosy face. It was he who had suggested the park. He collected paintings and had an artistic bent. He saw beauty in the forest as well as wealth, something Lavinia found as inexplicable as her pleasure walking the shadowed paths. As for art, he liked pictures that showed stags drinking from forest pools, lone Indians paddling canoes across mirrored lakes. Lavinia favored large canvases showing the triumph of the hunt and engravings with panoramic city views and lines of statistics enclosed in ornate scrolls. Cowes, despite his years and differing ways, had suggested marriage to Lavinia as some men did. They wanted her money and holdings, she knew this. Theodore Jinks, who was a rougher type and slightly tainted with gossip of a gambling habit, had done the same. Yet she did not hold the proposals against them. She liked both men, both were dependable Board members with solid knowledge of the logging business. When Cowes suggested the park it was easy to agree, though she noticed Jinks’s expression when Cowes talked of “sequestering” the valuable pines.

“Those pines would bring a good dollar,” Jinks said.

“Oh yes, but it is good to leave a few to remind us of our early days of fortune. No one wishes to live next to a stump field.” Cowes had an elevated way of saying such things that made Jinks shuffle his feet and curse under his breath. “Except agriculturists,” he said lamely. It was no use; Lavinia and Cowes only tolerated him. He found ease in the knowledge that one day those pines would come down as all pines must.

Pye, Flense and Lavinia made up the inner circle of Duke Logging and Lumber. None of them had any small talk; conversation was always business. The arrival of the telegraph some years earlier had been like a kettle of water dashed into a cauldron of boiling oil for the business world and the railroads. Giveaway Congress guaranteed the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads sixteen thousand dollars for every mile of track laid on level ground, and double that through mountainous terrain and included a forty-mile-wide corridor across the entire continent. Now there was real money, great great fortunes of which the Dukes could not even dream. But there were consolations. The center of the country exploded in hysterical expansion. Duke’s lumber shipments quadrupled as the Union Army hammered up forts and prison camps. Chicago businessmen joyously mulcted the government with shoddy war goods from canned beef to forage caps at high prices, and not Lavinia, Cowes nor Jinks scrupled to hold back warped and knotty lumber billed at the price of clear.