Annie Proulx - Barkskins

When he proposed she said yes, and then, “I am marrying an enemy.”

“Enemy? How am I your enemy?”

“Do you not know that the Mi’kmaq came here and fought my people? Before the whitemen?”

“I did not know this. Was it a battle?”

“A battle? It was a war. Mi’kmaw warriors took the whole New England coast. For a little time.”

“And now this Mi’kmaw wins again.” He flashed a guess that likely there had been a little infusion of Mi’kmaw into the Wôpanâak in that long-ago time.

• • •

They were an awkward match. “You don’t understand,” she said to him often.

“What don’t I understand?” he asked.

“If you don’t know I can’t tell you.”

The central problem, she believed, was Egga’s refusal to be Mi’kmaq.

He said, “It made my life very bad, being a Mi’kmaw person. I have put it away.”

“You can’t put away what you are. Your parents, your brothers and sisters. And all the generations behind them, your people. You cannot rinse out your blood like a dirty shirt and say it is a — a pineapple! It is you, your heritage, what you came from, it cannot be something else. And now it is part of our children and they must know it.” Egga rolled his eyes — this was what came from marrying into the matrilineal Wôpanâak.

Bren wanted to guide their two daughters toward being a new kind of woman — whiteman, Wôpanâak and Mi’kmaw mix of genes, ideas, careers, perceptions of the world. Both girls were strong-minded and smart, both sassy children who gave Egga bizarre thoughts of the residential school with its punishing nuns and priests. If his womenfolk were dropped into such a school the place would be in riot within a day, Bren, Marie and Sapatisia leading the charge, nuns and priests begging mercy. He enjoyed this vision and when one of his rambunctious girls was particularly audacious he was pleased, comparing them to the pitifully fearful Mi’kmaw children at the resi school. He wanted bold children. Very gradually, very slowly he began to talk about his old life, surprised at the sharp interest his children and wife took in his stories. When he told his parents’ names — Lobert and Nanty Sel — they wanted to write letters, go to Shubenacadie, to Lobert’s log house. They wanted to love these unknown relatives. And perhaps, thought Egga, so did he. Bren’s nagging made him wonder what being Mi’kmaq could mean beyond pain and humiliation. Bren herself was enthusiastically Wôpanâak, and again he imagined lustful and ancient Mi’kmaw warriors surging into Wôpanâak villages and women. He laughed.

“What is so funny?” asked Bren.

“If you don’t know I can’t tell you,” he said.

• • •

In Shubenacadie a few years after his wife Nanty died, Egga’s father, Lobert Sel, remarried a young widow, Kate Googoo, already pregnant with their first child. The year after Paul was born, Alice Sel arrived, and the last baby, Mary May. Egga, down in Martha’s Vineyard, knew nothing about these younger siblings.

• • •

Bren insisted on a serious commitment to homework. “I want you girls to go to university. I will make the money to send you.” Although from childhood she had wanted to study linguistics with the vague hope of resurrecting the old native Wôpanâak language (which she did not speak), there had been no money in her family for such schooling. When Sapatisia, her older child, started school Bren got the only job available — night shift at the fish plant, socking almost all of her paycheck into their education account. Her girls would have lives of value.

“They’ll never have to work at a fish plant,” she said to Egga. “Or a tourist motel.”

• • •

Nothing had prepared either Egga or Bren for the intensity of their first child, Sapatisia, named for Egga’s mother’s mother. The child fixed obsessively on subjects and people; did everything with intensity — there seemed no middle way for her. If Egga was late coming in from the water she stood at the window watching until she saw him climbing up the gravel path. He came through the door and she clung to his leg like a barnacle.

“She won’t be left,” said Bren. “I can’t go out of her sight. And she’s the same about you if you don’t get home on time. I don’t know how it will be when she starts school.”

“You know I can’t always tell when I’ll get back — weather could keep me out — even for days. The fish don’t have clocks. And boats don’t have telephones.”

“She’d keep watching,” said Bren.

The incident with a baby chicken rattled both parents. Bren had decided to raise a dozen hens for eggs and meat, save on groceries, make a change from fried cod. She ordered twenty chicks by mail and when they came she put the box behind the stove to keep them warm. She showed the little balls of fluff to Sapatisia, who was enchanted. She let her hold one.

“Be careful. It’s delicate.”

But Sapatisia loved the warm little peeping creature and in her immoderate affection squeezed it and squeezed, then shrieked when the dead chick hung limp.

“For that you must be punished,” said Bren, and Sapatisia roared with the insult of her first spanking.

“That is how she is,” said Egga. “She can’t help it. God save any man she loves. She’ll eat him alive and throw the bones out the window.”

Bren’s fear of Sapatisia throwing a fit her first day at school dissolved. It was as if the child had steeled herself for it. She did not cry when Bren left her in the little kindergarten chair, nor would she move to a different chair despite the teacher’s coaxing. Left alone she was tractable; commanded to do something — anything — she was impossible.

“I don’t know what’s going on in that little head,” said the teacher.

“Welcome to the knitting circle,” said Bren.

Still, Sapatisia made it through all the grades, occasionally striking off sparks of brilliance. She seemed happiest, thought Egga, when, on a Sunday, they hiked along the shore. She came home carrying handfuls of wilted grasses, water-smooth rocks with flecks of mica.

• • •

In her freshman year at college Sapatisia, given to instant love or hate, fastened her affections first on the subject of plants and then on a married ecology professor. The man was flattered; there was an affair; he tried to disengage and Sapatisia appeared at his door gripping a hunting knife. She lunged at the professor, who twisted adroitly and the knife plunged into the wood doorframe. She was muscular and strong but the professor was stronger and, shouting to his wife to call the police, he held Sapatisia down until they arrived. The next day Egga came to the jail to take her home.

“You know you are expelled from school,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I won’t ask you why you did this. I know why. You are like I was when I ran away from the resi school.”

“I am not like you,” she said. “I am different. And my reasons were different.”

“Oh,” said Egga. “Different from me, different from everybody. But you have to live in this world. Accept some of the rules that keep it in balance. Make an adjustment. Or you will die young.”

“I want to go to Shubenacadie,” she said. “I want to see those Sel people. I want to know who I am.”

Egga and Bren had heard nothing about a professor of ecology or botany, only of Sapatisia’s burning interest in the plants and forests of the earth. She seemed to feel personal guilt for eroded slopes and dirty rivers. If she looked up she saw not heaven’s blue but apocalyptic clouds in an aircraft-gouged sky.

“She has a female urge to repair the damage humans have done to nature,” said Bren that evening after Sapatisia was up in her old room.