Annie Proulx - Barkskins

Noel Mius’s youngest son, Chancey Mius, worked for an in-woods chipping company. But he remarked to his wife, Shelly, that chipping at the landing robbed the woods. “If you don’t put those back, soils start to decline. Should do some nutrient replacement work where we took the trees. Think the company will do that? I don’t.”

“That’s a shame,” said his wife vaguely.

As if to balance this neglect, his brother Jackson in Maine ran an old-style two-man horse-logging outfit, slow, hard work, fresh air and enough danger to go around. Jackson cut the trees and his neighbor-partner, Sonny Hull, dragged them to the landing with his big draft horses. They had steady work from property owners who wanted a quiet operation that didn’t rip up the land. But after a winter of almost no snow when Sonny Hull packed up and moved to Montana and the work was scarce, Jackson went back to school and earned a B.S. in forestry, kept going for a master’s in wood management. He had never set foot on the old Mi’kmaw reservation at Shubenacadie through he knew he had people there. It was something he was going to do someday, some St. Anne’s Day. To the Sel and Mius relatives St. Anne’s Day had a value that outsiders could not understand.

“Worth the three-day drive if that’s what it takes,” said Blaise Sel, sitting relaxed and comfortable with second cousins and old aunties, belonging to the Mi’kmaw people if only for a day or two. His wife, Astrid, the granddaughter of Swedish immigrants, never came with him. “It’s a little bit silly,” she said, “you drivin all that way, sayin those Mi’kmaws are your blood kin. It’s not like you to do that.” But it was.

Scrawny Miss Heinrich still sat at the front desk, the office anteroom unchanged since the company’s near collapse decades earlier. She would never forget how everything had fallen wrong — the depression, when construction fell off and lumber prices dropped. Then, just as the timber business was recovering Lawyer Flense disappeared with Annag Duncan and the embezzled funds. It was the logging company’s worst time. What an uproar! Miss Lavinia had called in four special accountants, dark-eyed men with black mustaches.

“Miss Heinrich, could we please have the books for ’seventy-three? Could we please have the Board meeting minutes for the last three years?” Mr. Pye, aged and trembly, was called out of retirement to explain certain actions. The accountants spoke among themselves over dinner plates of steak and boiled potatoes — they strongly suspected that old Mr. Pye might have set the whole scheme going decades earlier and made his own nest comfortable.

When the accountants were finished they met with Dieter and Lavinia.

“Mr. Breitsprecher, Mrs. Breitsprecher, from the beginning Flense had extraordinary powers to acquire properties for Duke Logging. And to sell. There was no contract that limited his actions on the company’s behalf to acquisition. Yet he was an employee, not a partner, nor a stockholder. There was nothing that prohibited him from wrongdoing except moral responsibility.”

“I always believed he was loyal to me personally as well as to the company. I never doubted that. I counted him as a friend and I trusted him. We did business as a gentleman’s agreement. My father operated that way and was never defrauded,” said Lavinia stiffly.

“This time you were defrauded. Flense made secret sales of the company’s woodlands, lumber barges, warehouse contents.” The accountants implied that the embezzlement was her own fault, that one’s word counted for nothing.

The chief accountant inclined his head a little and said, “Mrs. Breitsprecher, may I recommend you to read Adam Smith? It is a truism that men do only what they are rewarded for doing. Flense received a rather modest salary for his legal work on behalf of the company. And in future keep in mind when doing business with Chicago lawyers— homo homini lupus est —man is a wolf to man.”

They left Duke & Breitsprecher reduced to a skeleton staff and a lean future.

The company staggered and nearly fell. It was hard times nationally: stocks and land values plunged; industrious brooms of change swept out the markets. Men were no longer grateful for work — labor problems and strikes crippled every business, and the forests of the northwest were flash points for rebellious forest workers who preferred better pay to manly poverty. The entire country was in an irascible, sour mood. Lavinia, wanting to rid herself and the company of anything touching on Flense, voted with the remaining Board members to relinquish the incorporation charter. “When Duke was establishing itself as a major logging company we needed capital to build logging railroads, to purchase lumber barges and steamboats, build roads. But all that has changed. Henceforth we will return, although operating on a shoestring, to a sole proprietorship. Aside from all else, incorporation is better suited to canals and turnpikes, railroads and banks, not the timber industry — at least in the position we now find ourselves.” A sense of being savagely cheated colored the atmosphere in the boardroom.

• • •

“Lavinia,” Dieter said as they went over the details of Duke & Breitsprecher’s teetering position, “we will weather this storm. It is true that the company has lost a great deal of its value, but enough remains that we can start over.”

Lavinia could barely speak for rage: “Dieter, my fortune — my lost fortune — came from the bonanza of Maine and Michigan lumber that we cut over the generations. No such rich woodlands exist these days. Flense took my ancestral heritage.” But she exaggerated. Flense had not touched her personal property, had not sold her Chicago land holdings, now worth millions; it was the company assets he had rifled.

“My dear, please listen. The forests of the northwest are even more prodigious than those of Maine or the Great Lakes country. All will be well in a few years if the company builds up its timber acquisition again. And we are free to focus on our conservation policies as never before. We shall make a new reputation, a new name for Duke and Breitsprecher.”

But Lavinia was not consoled. Especially her heart burned at the thought of Annag Duncan’s perfidy. “I trusted her,” she said. “I gave her a job when she had nothing and this is how she repaid me. I cannot understand how she fell into Flense’s grasp.” She clenched and unclenched her hands.

“Lavinia, did you never notice how attentive the lawyer was to her? He praised her cookies, brought her little bouquets, always had a smile and drove her home after long meetings. I believe she was smitten with his attentions. Neither I nor you praised her — we took her for granted — that was Flense’s opportunity.” He rubbed his chin. “And who can know? Perhaps he had an affection for her. She was a rather handsome woman.” As soon as he spoke he knew he should not have said this.

“Indeed!” cried Lavinia in a passion. “I do not think so myself. But oh how I wish I could relive the years and keep a chain on his neck! And hers. However, I will engage Pinkerton’s to look for the guilty parties. I’ll see them in prison.” She composed herself. There was nothing to do but go on. “And you are right, Dieter, the forests of the northwest are rich — if we can only get at the remoter areas. And we still have that kauri forestland in New Zealand.”

“Do you remember our promise to the Ovals not to clean-cut and run away but remove judiciously and replant? I wish now that my experiments with the kauri seeds had flourished, but the soil conditions were inimical.”