Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“No, no, but I think we might go there. Dieter, will you walk with me in the forest?”

“Certain, Lavinia.”

Dieter exuded a kind of calm surety. In his company she felt protected. The sun was down, the sky still suffused with peach and crushed strawberry light. They walked past the little house from the exhibition and Dieter smiled. Under the trees the air was still and close, tiny black mosquitoes rose languidly from the ground. Under the sultry pines it was nearly dark, a deep oceanic dusky green. There was a distant rumble of thunder. Dieter saw Lavinia in her black dress, the color of her dark hair absorbed by the shadow, everything concentrated in the pale intense face. A fragment of one of Catullus’s poems came to him and he murmured “ ‘ Montium domina, silvarumque virentium… ’ ”

He took her arm and they walked on slowly.

“Lavinia, why have you not married?”

His question startled her by its abrupt directness. She made a feeble sound like a cupboard hinge and said, “Oh, I never met anyone who took my attention in that direction. I am very selective in my friendships, I fear. And you?” A whip of lightning flicked through the sky.

“Much the same,” he said. “I am too picky, too demanding of certain traits which I have never found in a female.”

“And what traits might those be, Mr. Breitsprecher?”

“Why, grace, handsomeness, intelligence, the ability to tell red wine from white, a fondness for robins — and, rarest of all, the ability to scale logs.”

She burst into a fit of laughter and he started as well; they stood whooping in the gloom until a shocked owl swooped soundlessly over their heads.

“Lavinia,” he said when he could speak. “Shall we marry?”

“I think that is a very good question,” she said. “I think we had better see to it.”

Suddenly the thundercloud was upon them, blotting all the light. Veined lightning chased them to the house, the first fat drops rapping down as they came panting through the door. Has ever a woman had such a proposal? thought Lavinia. She was terrified, excited. Now, now would come answers to all her silent questions.

She pitched headlong into the most brutal and fierce love, the kind that could endure anything and that sometimes afflicted solitary women on the threshold of spinsterhood. She poured everything into this feeling. She scorched, she scorched. It was as if she had never been alive until Dieter. Since James’s death she had never been close to another person, but now she was annealed to Dieter Breitsprecher. Of all people!

• • •

They planned to marry within the month but first came abstruse details of obligations and business, of rents and scheduled work. And Dieter had a commitment to go to New England to meet a man he much admired. “This man — George Marsh — is a Vermont farmer who is the first American I have discovered who recognizes the extreme threats hanging over the forests of this country. Second only to our marriage is my desire to converse with this observant and intelligent person. Some time ago we made an arrangement for me to come to him and see the waste laid the land by thoughtless felling of the noble maples and oaks for trivial potash and pearl-ash receipts. We have planned a small tour of the New England forests, where trees have been taken now for a century, to see the results. I must do this, my love.” Lavinia was slightly amused at her betrothed’s interest in denuded forests.

Lawyer Flense and Mr. Pye went to Detroit to meet Dieter’s business manager, Maurice Mossbean, to work out the most sensible way of enfolding the Breitsprecher enterprise into Duke Logging and Lumber. “Indeed,” said Mr. Mossbean, “the company’s name had better change to Duke and Breitsprecher.” The hundred details would be threshed out in Board meetings. Dieter Breitsprecher seemed curiously uninterested in the business end of forestry and relieved to turn all over to Duke Logging. It would give him time to develop his management plans, to expand his pine nursery and look into the hardwoods, which were so abundant and little-known. He thought he might write a paper on the Aceraceae, for maple trees interested him.

• • •

Days later, exhausted and red-eyed, Mr. Pye and Lawyer Flense sat in the rackety coach as the landscape flashed past. They smoked cigars and Mr. Flense had a silver hip flask he shared with Mr. Pye. “Do you not feel a little uncomfortable with this — merging?” he said.

“Very much so,” said Mr. Pye, unscrewing the silver cap and taking a good swig of whiskey. “The possibilities for changes in the direction of our business are there. I applauded the idea of taking on Breitsprecher as a partner, but this marriage could bring deleterious changes to the way we do things. He may well persuade her to take up his conservative ideas of forestry and we shall see income drop even as it dropped for Breitsprechers when the cousin left.”

Lawyer Flense said something so grossly raw that Mr. Pye had to pretend he had not heard it.

• • •

The betrothed agreed that they would live in Lavinia’s house. “But I must have a library for thinking and reading,” said Dieter. “A small greenhouse and laboratory would be a dream fulfilled. A man whose life has been solitary cannot immediately give up all his accustomed ways.”

“I have been thinking,” said Lavinia. “It would be best if we added a wing onto the house. The current arrangement of space is not suitable for a married couple. Goosey can have my old room. But I shall miss the cupola, where I often watched the ships.”

“Let us have a cupola on the new wing — my dear girl must have her view of Lake Michigan shipping vessels.”

“And you shall place your greenhouse wherever you wish. While you are gone to New England the time will pass quickly enough. I can oversee construction of the new wing with our new living quarters. Will we go abroad for a honeymoon? There is such a great deal to do.”

He smiled. “A honeymoon! We shall go wherever you like. I leave it to you. I leave all such decisions to you. But consider if you would not like to see the results of untrammeled forest removal in the lands around the Mediterranean? It is what urged other countries to become mindful of forest care and management.” He picked up her hand and suddenly licked her palm.

“Dieter!” She was startled, pretended offense and pulled her hand away although his hot mouth had given her a strange sensation. But a honeymoon looking at desolate lands was not tempting.

“Lavinia, I shall do my best to make you happy. I see nothing but joy in our future. I will get this visit to New England out of the way quickly. There are train connections much of the way to Albany, the rest by hired coach and whatever local railways exist. Vermont is still very rural. And I will write to you. I will write a long letter on the train, another when I arrive, still another when I go to bed and another when—”

“I think you have a grand sense of silliness.”

• • •

She was in the old cupola looking out at the passing ships when she heard the crunch of wheels on gravel and looking down at the drive saw a carriage draw up at the front of the house. Mr. Pye and a tall thin man unknown to her got out. She heard the door knocker, heard Libby’s voice, yet felt no presentiment until she reached the bottom of the stairs and looked at the unknown man who had taken off his hat, disclosing a dark shaven head, a cannonball skull looking like it had just emerged from the birth canal, the face long and narrow down to the point of jaw. Mr. Pye said, “Lavinia, you must sit down. This is Mr. Averso from the rail office. Lavinia, there has been an accident—” She heard without understanding, heard heard heard. This had happened with James. It could not happen again. She looked at Mr. Averso, that face, that head was imprinted on her memory for the rest of her life. Her heart froze and Averso’s slowly opening mouth was the last thing she saw as she sank to the floor.