Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“I am going to have a child. This nausea will pass. I will be in health again. But I will be a mother and you a father.”

Dieter laid down his fork and looked at her. He nodded but said nothing. After a long silence he looked at her, smiled and said “hurra!” loudly. The maid rushed in from the kitchen, saw them smiling at each other. Back in the kitchen she said to the cook, “Mr. Dieter is glad to be home again.”

“I shall have to discover a first-rate nursemaid,” said Lavinia.

• • •

Lavinia went to the office the next day feeling quite well and even pleased. She would know the mystery of motherhood. They would be parents. She felt she was, at last, a complete adult.

“Good morning, Annag,” she said. “I’ll look through the post for an hour. Come in at nine to take letters.” The letters took all morning. One was rather annoying: a subcontractor logger wrote a rude note demanding the survey map of the Sticker River camps.

“This fellow sets out his demand as though he owns the property,” said Lavinia.

“Oh, I’ll deal with that, Miss Lavinia,” said Annag. “It never should have been put in with your post. Mr. Flense knows all about it.”

• • •

Lavinia expected the birth would be a frightful ordeal as she was not young and it was her first child, but she might have already produced half a dozen for all the difficulty. It was a quick and easy labor. The boy was healthy and perfect in form. Lavinia and Dieter had talked endlessly about names. Lavinia first suggested James Duke Breitsprecher, but Dieter made a face; next she suggested Charles Duke Breitsprecher, incorporating the name of the ancestor; Dieter asked why not use his father’s name, Bardawulf, but Lavinia repeated, “Bardawulf Duke Breitsprecher? What a mouthful for the poor mite,” and in the end Charles Duke prevailed. Dieter asked himself why humans reached into the ancestral pot for infant names, but found no answer.

She quickly regained her full health and went back to the office when Charles was ten days old, but not before she met with the elderly lawyer she and Dieter used for personal legal affairs and named Charles Duke Breitsprecher heir of her estate and business holdings. Now all was well; the future of the baby and the company was secure.

Her greater interest was not in the infant but in rotary lathes. Duke & Breitsprecher was entering the plywood market. Here was a use for birch, long despised as a weed tree. Her engineers were experimenting with various glued-up wood layers from different species. And they were discussing an interesting new wood, balsa wood from Ecuador, very light and very strong. She listened to their reports of its remarkable weight-strength ratio. The problem was that balsa trees did not constitute whole forests, but grew in scattered places throughout the dripping tropical forests. Finding the trees and getting the logs out was the difficulty. She thought it was not worth the effort, and balsa logging went on the shelf.

The day Lavinia went back to the office Dieter took the baby from his nurse and carried him into the park, laid him down under the newly leafed silver maple, propped himself on his elbow beside the child. Charles stared up into the quivering green, where dots of sunlight winked. But, wondered Dieter, how much could he see? Were the shapes of leaves sharp or was all a green massed blur? He picked the baby up and looked into his small pointed face seeing his expression change to one of interest as his eyes focused on Dieter’s mustache. The baby’s arms flew up in a nervous start.

“You see, Charles, it is a tree. Your life and fate are bound to trees. You will become the man of the forests who will stand by my side.”

• • •

One morning Axel Cowes walked through the forest to the Breitsprecher kitchen door at six in the morning. “Good morning, Mrs. Balclop. Is Lavinia up?”

“Awake, I am sure, but likely not up and dressed. I have orders to send her coffeepot up at six thirty sharp.” Lavinia had abandoned tea for cups of strong black coffee sweetened with honey.

“If you can add another cup I will take it up to her myself. There is most urgent business — a crisis I must discuss with her immediately.”

At that moment Dieter came into the kitchen for his coffee mug. He would take it out to the potting shed and begin the morning’s work.

“Axel! What brings you here at this early hour? A tree down in the forest?”

“In a manner of speaking. I came to break the news to Lavinia and to you that Mr. Flense has done a bunk.” Mrs. Balclop tipped her head to hear everything.

“What does that mean, ‘done a bunk’?”

“It means that he has left the city and the country for parts unknown — perhaps Texas, as they say of all absconders — with a great chunk of Duke and Breitsprecher funds in his pockets.” There was a ringing silence. Cowes drew in his breath, said, “And Annag Duncan, too. She went with him.”

“Oh oh oh,” said Dieter. “Let us go up to Lavinia. She will take this hard.”

The years had been hard on Aaron Sel, Jinot’s only surviving son. When Jinot left for New Zealand with Mr. Bone, Aaron found his way to Mi’kma’ki and the family band of Kuntaw, his father’s grandfather, who had after the death of his wife Beatrix left the Penobscot Bay house and returned to Nova Scotia hoping to live the old Mi’kmaw way. Aaron made an impression on Etienne, Kuntaw’s grown son of twenty-six winters, as a brash youth with nothing of Jinot’s reputation for merriness. Aaron had expected some kind of ceremonial welcome, the warmth of acceptance, had hoped for dissolving mysteries of who he was. He had expected young women. Now that he was here he did not know what he should do. He had no understanding of eel weirs, could not tell a blueberry from an enchantment. He could not hunt caribou or beaver. In any case there were no beaver or caribou.

“I have no friends here — everyone is against me,” he said to Etienne in his most piteous voice.

“You have to learn. Come with me to the river and I show you how we repair the weir.” But Aaron could not fit rocks together, could not hammer stakes in the right position.

“I need a gun,” he said, but there were no guns for anyone without money.

“You want too much,” said old Kuntaw, the Sel clan’s elder and sagmaw. “Here you must learn to give, not take.” But after two restless years in Mi’kma’ki, Aaron went back to Boston, looked for Jinot, who was still in New Zealand, and drifted around the waterfront.

It was on the waterfront that two jovial men got into conversation with him, invited him to the alehouse and bought him drink. Later he had a misted memory of walking between his two new friends toward the docked ships, but no recollection at all of how he came to be aboard the Elsie Jones. He woke the next morning to the painful strike of the bosun’s rope end.

“Git up, you stinkin Indan beggar brat.” He was a green hand on the Elsie Jones bound to London with a cargo of spars and masts.

“You cannot do this! I know my rights. You cannot keep me against my will.”

“What! Are you a sea lawyer? One of them always prating about ‘rights’ and ‘free speech’ and such? I’ll learn you what your ‘rights’ are. You’ll toe the mark and the mark will be high.”

The bosun, James Crumble, instantly took a strong dislike to this young half-breed who spoke of “rights,” put him in the hands of the crew for daily greenhorn instruction in the names and functions of the ropes, the tackle, the watches, the names and functions of the bewildering kinds of sails, the workings of the tackle fall, the daily duties beginning with the swabbing of the deck before the sun was up. They gave him tasks spangled with mortal dangers, sent him clambering up the futtock shrouds in great wind and icy rain, snarled confusing orders salted with vile epithets such as “toad-sucking gib-cat,” and “scabby jackeen,” picked away relentlessly in faulting his lubberly errors. Nor did Crumble spare the rope’s end, cracking it every time Aaron opened his mouth—“Shut yer gob, you hopeless fuckin hen turd of a fool or I’ll spread your guts on the deck.” Crack!