Annie Proulx - Barkskins

Lavinia could not resist her nature and sent orders to cut all the kauri, sparing none. That cut would begin to rebuild her fortune. And Dieter was right, there was still much that remained. Flense had not touched the plywood mills nor the paper mills, and both were drawing in money like dry sponges. They would take advantage of the new technical advances and milling machinery. Duke & Breitsprecher would survive.

• • •

“Our annual inventor’s exposition must continue,” said Lavinia. But the old Hotel Great Lakes had burned down. Lavinia tried to persuade the Board that an exposition hall on company property would attract inventors. “We made millions with the boxed houses and who knows what might come along these days when every man’s head is whirring with logging machinery improvements? Let us use Mr. Jinks’s old house and grounds as the central node. Participants will take pleasure in strolling through our little forest.”

But fewer inventors applied to the Duke & Breitsprecher Exposition. Its day had passed. Men wanted to patent their ideas in their own names.

Dieter felt, too, that the golden days of logging when the forest was endless were over. Farmers who had cut off, burned down and worn out millions of acres of soil in the east were still rushing into the western timberlands to repeat their work, making huge pyres of prime trees and setting them alight, cursing when the scorched soil showed too rocky and poor for growing anything but weeds.

He suffered through the last quarter of the century as again and again Congress congratulated itself on enacting a series of logging laws — Timber Culture Act, Timber Cutting Act, Timber and Stone Act, all supposedly aimed at conservation but all written with more loopholes than a page of Spenserian calligraphy. “From what eggs do these fools hatch? They cannot see!” cried Dieter. “The greatest ill is waste. Only a minuscule fraction of the standing forest ever becomes lumber — most is burned or abandoned. Mein Gott!

“It is laughable,” said Dieter. “It is criminal. The infamous ‘land-lieu’ clause that allows anyone to ‘donate’ woodland to a protected forest in exchange for an equal amount of land somewhere else. Lumbermen love this ‘clause’ that lets them swap their logged-off woods for acres of untouched timber. It makes me sick to see the way they send carloads of lobbyists to Washington to keep the good paydays coming. This is the real American ‘liberty’!” His solitary breakfast hour was filled with exasperated sighing as he read of successive waves of scandal from real estate men to legislatures. But he said nothing of this to Lavinia. He knew she employed lobbyists. And by association, so did he.

• • •

It seemed the two miscreants had gone in opposite directions. Month after month Pinkerton reported rumors of sightings of Flense in Peru, Athens (Georgia), Glasgow and Buenos Aires, but no actual hard evidence.

“Keep on, keep on,” said Lavinia, paying the steep monthly detective bills. Then came word that Flense had truly been tracked down to an alley behind the Mulo Rojo, a restaurant in Valparaiso, where he lay dead, stabbed and robbed. Of Annag Duncan there was no word. She had truly disappeared into the wilds of Scotland, where no stranger dared go.

• • •

One roaring wet morning the housemaid brought up Lavinia’s pot of hot chocolate and trimmed toast. Lavinia was at the window, tying the belt of her rose silk dressing gown, looking out at the dark wind-streaked lake.

“Good morning, ma’am. Another nasty day. Mr. Dieter complains of a catarrh.”

“He had better stay in then. I will look in on him after I dress.”

The maid put the tray on the little breakfast table, poured the chocolate and left. Lavinia sat down, took up her cup, sipped once, turned to look out at the slanting rain and collapsed, chocolate drenching her thighs. When the doctor came he said heart attack, no one knew why these things happened. Sometimes people just — died. As did Lavinia. Dieter’s catarrh became a lingering pleurisy that immobilized him for six weeks. Yet he managed to rise from his sickbed and meet with the stonemason, for, after a bit of tinkering, there was only one inscription for her stone:

Call for the robin-redbreast

Here lies a friend

She had made no changes in her will since the days before Annag Duncan’s and Flense’s scarper; bequests of properties and wealth no longer in existence made the reading of it painful to those who should have become wealthy but instead found themselves with barely enough to live modestly. She left eleven-year-old Charley the greatest part of her fortune, which he could not touch until he was forty — the age of reason in Lavinia’s opinion. There was an odd addendum — that should a Canadian claimant come forth to seize a share of Duke-Breitsprecher assets that person should be resisted in every legal way. No one knew what this meant but it trailed a black thread through the day.

• • •

Dieter Breitsprecher, who seemed the ideal personality for a widower, surprised everyone by remarrying a year after Lavinia’s death. His bride was the youngest daughter — Rallah Henge — of a preservationist-minded timberman friend. The young woman with long chestnut-colored hair was thirty years younger than Dieter, and he treated her with elaborate courtesy as though she were a crystal goblet. She had a fluttery laugh and none of Lavinia’s robust strengths and mannerisms. The logging business did not interest her; her hopes were all for children and eighteen months after the marriage she bore a son, James Bardawulf Breitsprecher. More than a decade later a daughter, Sophia Hannah, arrived but no more, for Rallah, she who had been so dainty and fragile, went into decline and died of stinking oozing breast cancer before Sophia could walk, before James Bardawulf had reached his teens. As for Charley, he had long before left home.

When he remarried, Dieter sold Lavinia’s old place and commissioned Burnham’s to build him a house in the newly annexed town of Edison Park. Classical in appearance, it presented a calm front to the world with its orderly paired windows. Inside it was modern — wired for electric light and with two telephone lines.

Dieter had sent Charley to study forestry at Yale, where he ran up stairs three at a time, contradicted his professors. He was passionate about forests, but disappointed by the school’s lack of similar enthusiasm; it was all about “management.” He went to Germany to see firsthand the results of two hundred years of woodland supervision, but chafed under the lectures and begged Dieter and the Board to let him travel and learn the ways of forests through observation. They agreed on a stipend and he began a wandering journey.

He looked at beech woods and hornbeam, sought out the remnant chestnut groves of France, went to still-extant shreds of boreal forest in Scandinavia, to the scattered pieces of pine and birch woodlands in Scotland, the awkward corners of ash, oak and alder in Ireland and Wales. What preserved each was difficult accessibility. He took passage to Australia to see mutation-crazed eucalypts, to New Zealand, where he was embarrassed by Duke & Breitsprecher’s vandalism of the ancient kauri and used a pseudonym rather than give his name. In a nightmare he had to lift and replace the fallen monsters on their bleeding stumps. But the day came when Dieter and the Board called him back to settle what his future with the company should be.

• • •

Returned to Chicago, he wandered around the city looking at the new skyscrapers, eating scrappy food from street vendors. His thoughts on forests were in shambles. He had seen too much and now believed that a managed forest was a criminal enslavement of nature. His views were unpopular. Nothing he could do but wait until the hourglass turned.