Annie Proulx - Barkskins

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The day came when Sophia, installed in her new office, began reading through pages and pages of crabbed handwriting and atrocious spelling, trying to sort out mysterious characters whose connections to the family were unclear. She hired a secretary, a potato-faced blonde named Debra Strong (niece of Mrs. Garfield, the company secretary), who said her last job had been at a women’s magazine. Debra sorted the papers into rough time periods, put them into neatly labeled folders. Sophia’s plan was to tell of the early travails of a pioneer enterprise that became successful through hard work, and went on to enjoy the fame and fortune of being one of the oldest and most successful logging companies in the nation.

Obscurity, and French, like thick blankets, befogged the papers. Was Charles Duke the same person as Charles Duquet, whose name appeared on what might be a promissory note signed by someone named Dred-Peacock; it was signed with an X indicating Charles Duquet was illiterate — or was it Dred-Peacock? Later correspondence was clearly signed by Charles Duke. So she was sure Dred-Peacock, whoever he was, was the illiterate. There was too much French for her. She hired a student to translate the difficult pages but found the lists of old deals and accounts tedious and put them aside as immaterial.

After a year of scratching through the papers a story began to take shape. Charles Duke, a poor French boy, set out for the New World to escape a harsh life on a French farm. Once in North America he began to make his way by hard work and eventually, with the money he earned, bought timberland and opened a sawmill. The correspondence with Dred-Peacock ended abruptly, though in the next batch of material there were nearly forty letters to his sons. These made tiresome reading as they were loaded with advice and maxims and shed no light on Charles Duke’s character beyond commanding his sons to do what he told them to do. He seemed a serious fellow, but one who doted on his children. She skipped over James Duke, a dull stick. Lavinia, alas, had left behind hundreds of boxes of business correspondence and notes on the lumber industry. Sophia did not understand most of Dieter’s first wife’s descriptions of inventions, meetings, numbers of board feet taken from various forests and shipped to distant destinations. It was enough to say she was a highly respected businesswoman. And, thought Sophia, an insanely busy scribbler.

She came on a folder that Debra Strong had labeled “Genealogy?” containing some torn and yellowed pages. This, she thought, might be useful. She matched the torn pieces together. A letter from R. R. Tetrazinni in Philadelphia said only that the investigation was complete to the point set out in his report and that if Lavinia Duke Breitsprecher wished to follow up with further investigation of the names and addresses of the heirs she should contact him as soon as practicable as he had other work to hand. The report puzzled Sophia. What heirs?

She telephoned James Bardawulf. “I’ve come on something that I don’t quite understand. It’s a report from a private investigator to Dieter’s first wife, Lavinia Duke. I wish you would take a look at it. I think it says there are some unknown heirs. But I don’t know who they are or what they have inherited.”

“It’s probably a fraud letter. People claiming to be heirs to fortunes and long-lost cousins are not uncommon. Can you send it over to me?”

“I’d rather show it to you here. Why don’t you come over this afternoon and look at it? And we can go have a drink and talk. Some outdoor place on the lake — it’s so hot this summer. I haven’t seen you for months.”

It was Breitsprecher-Duke’s most peculiar meeting, so divided in content it was as though strangers had been swept up from the hot streets and ordered to conduct business. They sat around the mahogany table in Breitsprecher-Duke’s meeting room with a portrait of Lavinia Duke on the south wall and one of Dieter on the north. The old air conditioner was gasping as though fighting off its own heatstroke. On the table was a tray of cream cheese sandwiches with the bread curling up, paper napkins from the old days stamped with the letters DUKE LOGGING and the image of an ax. Although the room was swollen with August heat, a coffee urn hissed on the side table.

Sophia, in the grey wool Chanel despite the heat, made a rambling speech about the company history and passed out copies of the fruits of her labors — sixteen pages of company fantasy bound in leather and stamped Breitsprecher-Duke, the Story of a Forest Giant. She waited for congratulations, but James Bardawulf had already told the others of the old Tetrazinni report and his own weeks of dead-end work to prove it a hoax. The company’s legal adviser, Hazelton Culross, was present. James Bardawulf, in an acid-tinged voice, went straight to the problem.

“Mr. Tetrazinni is long gone. His son, Chandler Tetrazinni, with whom I spoke at length, inherited the business. He is a lawyer.”

Raphael, who knew his father well, recognized the danger signal. If James had respected Tetrazinni he would have said “attorney.” “Lawyer” meant something with greater elements of python. The room was hot and the August sun eating at the begrimed window glass seemed to have found a way through it.

James Bardawulf’s harsh voice continued. “Frankly, I wish I hadn’t contacted him. He heads up Tetrazinni Search Services, which specializes in tracing missing and unknown heirs. He was surprised to hear from me and said he would look in the files. Two days later he called and said he had found the relevant papers and that the case was far from dead. I’m afraid my questions led him to this almost forgotten affair and he smelled the possibility of money. I regret to say that I think that if I had not called him he would never have heard of Breitsprecher. But we can’t undo the situation. I learned from Hazelton that Tetrazinni’s outfit works for a percentage of the inheritance, and to me that means that he now intends to go to the heirs and offer them a contract. A champertous contract, which is, unfortunately, quite legal these days. Lavinia Duke initiated this search decades ago”—he glanced up at her portrait—“just why she did this is far from clear as she should have been advised to ignore sleeping dogs. Tetrazinni, the man she hired, claimed to have found legitimate heirs to the Duke fortune, heirs who actually had a more valid claim than Lavinia herself — that is if blood relationship is the criterion.”

“How can that be?” said Sophia, pushing the extra copies of The Story of a Forest Giant away. “Surely it can’t mean anything. Breitsprecher and Duke have owned the business for generations! It’s accepted, it’s known.” She patted her forehead with one of the napkins. “This air conditioner is useless.”

“A suit may be forthcoming if those heirs proceed,” said James Bardawulf morosely.

“Proceed! Have they begun an action?” Andrew Harkiss got up and poured his sixth cup of coffee since breakfast. Coffee gave him jitters and palpitations, forcing him to drink gin at night to calm down. “And are you going to tell us who these ‘putative heirs’ might be?”

“Believe it or not, they are some Indians up in Canada.”

“Oh no, oh no,” said Conrad Breitsprecher suddenly, his face so drained of color that his black eyebrows seemed drawn on his forehead with charcoal. “That could break up the company.” James Bardawulf was surprised at his agitation. What did he have to worry about? The seedling nurseries were making money as though they had a printing press in the cellar. No red ink there, no covetous Indians with their hands held out. And Conrad took no profits, but poured every penny back into his damn seedlings. His obsession.