Annie Proulx - Barkskins

James enrolled Raphael and Claude in the school and put down young Conrad’s name — he was barely nine — to hold a place for him. And, as the yellow mists of chlorine gas spread over Ypres, James Bardawulf and Caroline returned to Chicago with their brochures and impressions.

• • •

“We got them where we want them,” said Andrew Harkiss, recovered from the Spanish flu that had killed Chicagoans like chickens. Great rollers of change beat on national shores: newly independent but poor countries, once the colonial holdings of the great European powers, struggled to join the global scuffle. “What these countries have is the raw materials — forests and minerals and oil. We’d be fools not to get in on this, South America, Asia — all kinds of hardwood. It’s our chance.”

James Bardawulf, curious one day about the notebooks Charley had sent to Conrad, looked into them and found them filled with useful information on the qualities of tropical trees. He showed them to Andrew.

“Papa, I want my notebooks back,” said young Conrad, who instead of reading Tom Swift stories found the grimy pages, punctuated with squashed gnat and mosquito corpses, interesting for their opaque originality and because this uncle he had never met had bequeathed him the notebooks and the seedling nursery business.

The company, now Breitsprecher-Duke, in league with banks, other timber outfits, the mining industry, coffee, cocoa, banana and mango importers, became part of the new colonialism. When the great onslaught on tropical forests began, they were in the van, taking all they could. Charley Breitsprecher’s notebooks were used to plunder his forest.

• • •

At sixteen, after a summer on a cattle ranch where the work was considered character-building and healthful, Conrad fell ill with headaches and chills, painful joints and a deep weariness. He was diagnosed with undulant fever and kept in bed most of the fall and winter. He began to recover and in spring the doctor recommended three months rest at a hotel-sanatorium in the mountains of New Hampshire. There he experienced a day, never forgotten, that bound him forever to forests.

He fell in love with a local girl, Sally Shaw, a waitress in the dining room. Most of the visitors took breakfast in their rooms, but every morning he sat near his favorite east window and she brought him tea and the institution’s famous popovers. She spoke to him in a teasing voice about the weather, or the breakfast offerings, but he felt strangely happy when she came to his table with the teapot. Her hands were small but deft, her nails lacquered, her black straight hair cut fashionably short. Very red lipstick outlined the rosebud shape of her mouth. She flirted. The room was quiet except for the swish of the door to the kitchen and the soft chink of silverware. The grey mountain slopes showed a frost of pale green, the buds of emerging leaves. When the sun struck they glowed a luminous gold-green. Conrad blurted out his wish that she would go walking with him on the mountain.

“I think you must know the best place to walk,” he said.

“Say, do I ever! Tomorrow? I got the afternoon off.” She had heard he was a rich man’s son.

• • •

It was not a fair day. Heavy mist hung over the mountains. Yet the afternoon went in a direction he had not dared hope for. They walked up a steep trail, there was a clumsy kiss as they veered into sweet fern, her shrill laugh, then grappling and rolling on the ground. The perfume of crushed sweet fern fixed the experience. A light rain began. When he looked beyond her, he saw an army of perfect young white pine trees glistening in the wet mist, bursting with the urgency of growth. The rain, falling slant and silver, amplified their resinous fragrance. It was raining, the girl, her hair in ratty wet tails, was pulling at him to go back to the hotel, but he was happy. And somehow he was caught, not by the girl, but by the little pines.

• • •

After the crash of ’29 the country staggered under the weight of economic depression and the rage of striking workers. Breitsprecher-Duke began to lose its footing. James Bardawulf told Conrad, now finished with school and with a degree that fitted him for nothing, that the family company would employ him if he wished, but without salary; after all he had money he could live on and Breitsprecher-Duke was enduring hard times. Raphael was counting on his smooth good looks for a job in films, and Claude worked for a real estate company specializing in western ranch properties. Since Roosevelt, cattle ranching had been popular with those who still had wealth.

“Let me think about it, Father,” Conrad said. He thought instead of Dieter’s old seedling nursery business. Could anything be done with it? It had been more of a hobby for Dieter with very few clients, but over the years he had kept on a single employee, Alfred McErlane, who managed the greenhouses. Perhaps it was time to evaluate the nursery, to talk with Mr. McErlane.

• • •

Conrad had been very young the first time he was in one of the greenhouses, a visit with his parents and brothers. He remembered a long, long wet concrete floor with hoses and watering cans in the aisle. There was a man in a yellow raincoat. Raphael and Claude had run down the aisle and were leaning over a tank at the end. Conrad followed them. When he looked into the dark water he saw huge slow-moving creatures, orange, spotted black and white like cows. James Bardawulf said they were koi, a kind of fish.

“Why are they so slow?” asked Raphael.

“Because they have seen everything in the tank, nothing new,” James Bardawulf answered, and he laughed. But Caroline was upset and demanded that the koi be caught and brought to the pond in the garden.

“At least they will have a better life,” she said. Two days later, though, Conrad saw a pair of great blue herons at the edge of the pond, and when he went closer to see if the fish were visibly enjoying their new freedom, the birds flew up, leaving behind the bones of the orange koi.

• • •

Very little had changed in the greenhouse. Al McErlane was not wearing a yellow raincoat, but hoses still stretched and coiled on the wet floor. As a child Conrad had not noticed the seedlings, but now he saw them: spruce and pine.

He looked first at the account books and client lists, for the nursery did a small but steady business.

“Al, it looks like our customers are mostly local parks and private landscape concerns. And just spruce and pine seedlings? I see very few lumber company clients. Tell me how you think our position stands and if you think it might be improved.”

McErlane was surprised at Conrad’s serious interest. He had expected Conrad to say the business would be sold or closed down.

“Well, you know, we go along. Timbermen that want to replant just leave a few seed trees and let the trees do the job. Nobody’s got any money these hard times even if they believed in planting seedlings. Which they don’t. But a guy from Weyerhaeuser come around a month or two ago asking questions about how we set up, where we get the seeds and all. I think they might be planning to get their own nursery going. They have the money to do it — they are the only timber people making a profit.”

“And my grandfather Dieter was doing this fifty years ago. I wonder if there is not a real future for our seedling nursery.”

“That would be my thought,” said McErlane.

They talked and walked through the other glasshouses — there were five, all old and in poor shape. It didn’t take Conrad long to discover that McErlane was as ignorant of new research and knowledge on seedling propagation, cloning, forest genetics and site preparation as Conrad himself. He was putting his hands on a finicky complicated business that called for extensive knowledge on the part of both the seedling grower and the planter.