Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“Yes, and a female urge to destroy men. We are lucky the professor did not press charges.” Silence in the room except for their breathing. Egga sighed and said, “What do you think about letting her go to Nova Scotia?”

“Oh, Egga, let her go? She will go there no matter what. I’ll talk to her, but brace yourself.”

• • •

“You’ll have to find work to live on, a scholarship to finish your studies,” Bren told her in a chill voice. This daughter absorbed too much of her energy. “We have Marie to think about, too, you know.”

Sapatisia left the next day on a northbound bus.

• • •

Egga and Bren heard nothing for months until a rare letter, postmarked Halifax, Nova Scotia, arrived from their firstborn daughter.

I haven’t met Uncle Paul yet or his daughter Jeanne. Aunt Mary May Mius is shy and seems pretty fussy about her son Felix. Felix is nothing to be fussy about! The best one is Aunt Alice. I liked her. It is a pretty big family. Going to Winnipeg next week to study forestry, doing o.k., love, S

And only a few days later an ink-blotched letter arrived for Egga from his father, Lobert Sel.

It means so much to us that our strong young granddaughter Sapatisia visited us. She ask many questions about our people and old Sel stories. Egga it has been many years since you left. Can you or other granddaughter Marie come here one time? I grow old. Wish to see you. That bad school that hurt you is closed and burned up. Come home.

These letters made Egga tearful and he planned a trip to Shubenacadie. He wrote to Lobert that he would come — yes, he and Bren — the next St. Anne’s Day. But from Sapatisia they heard little more than occasional cards postmarked from different cities.

• • •

How different was their younger daughter, Marie.

“She should have been a boy,” said Egga to Bren, thinking of the time when his greasy little toddler had partially disassembled an electric motor and put it back together enlivened with pink plastic stacking rings from her toy box. Nothing mechanical in the house was safe from Marie’s inquiring fingers and she was the easiest person in the world to please at birthdays and holidays with gifts of ship and plane models. She was outspoken and a little brash, but that was a proof to Egga that his younger daughter would not be trodden down. She spent a college summer running a CTL, the cut-to-length wonder tool that felled and delimbed trees in front of itself so the detritus formed a mat for it to move on; it was her hero-machine.

She fell hard for Davey Jones, a bowlegged young lobsterman who wrote poetry, danced reels and strathspeys, played poker and had kept a weather notebook since he was nine. In December of 1978 she married him.

“Yes,” she said, when he proposed, “but I want to keep my job. I like my job.”

“I like mine, too, so no argument.”

After the wedding night the first thing she told her new husband was “There is less soil compaction with the CTL than even a horse team.”

“What makes you think I care?” he said. “Come here and I’ll tell you about lobster pots.”

Jeanne Sel and Felix Mius grew up together, knew each other’s childhood thoughts and feelings; as they grew older these diverged as a mountain rill bifurcates in rocky terrain and becomes two streams. Felix had quiet ways that disguised an agile and explorative mind. His complexion was rough and he was inclined to fall in love with unattainable older women who raised their eyebrows at him but never their skirts. Jeanne’s close-set eyes and thin lips convinced her she was above the fray of love entanglements.

Jeanne remembered her mother on a ferry, leaning over the rail waving good-bye, good-bye, until the vessel melted away in heavy fog where a few hours later it collided with a coal barge; both went down in deep water. Her father, Paul Sel, told her that Mama could not come back, but his own weeping indicated something very terrible.

“I don’t know, Mary May,” Paul said to his sister, whose son, Felix, was a year younger than Jeanne. “I don’t know what to do. She won’t talk or play with other kids — except here with Felix.”

“That’s a good sign,” Mary May said. “Let them be together. Little kids sort things out. I think better Jeanne come stay with us. And I think a picnic trip. Help her get over losing Marta. Help you, Paul.”

“Nothing can help me,” said her brother, but he didn’t object when Mary May called, “Felix and Jeanne, come on. We are going on a picnic.”

They headed away from the reservation crowded together like buns in a package in Paul’s decrepit grey truck. The interior smelled of mold and a dog that Paul had once owned.

“Where we goin, where we goin?” Felix asked over and over, excited.

“Where we goin?” said Jeanne.

“You’ll see when we get there.”

“There” was Kejimkujik Provincial Park. Mary May said to them, “Long time ago this was Mi’kmaw place.” Jeanne and Felix, after hours of riding until their legs became paralyzed sticks, jumped and ran under the huge old-growth hemlock. There was a garden of boulders under lustrous blue-green trees.

Felix discovered that the undersides of the branches shone silver, in the deep shade grew maidenhair fern, graceful ebon-black curved branches and tiny mitten-like leaves. The hemlocks sighed very gently. He engaged with Tsuga canadensis.

“I wish Mama could see this,” Jeanne said, admiring the gleaming stems of the fern, smelling the musky odor. At the edge of the water she found a forest of mathematically perfect ebony spleenwort and looking around encountered myriad tones of green: citrine, viridian, emerald. It was a fine and satisfying day that was never forgotten by the children.

• • •

In high school teachers talked of careers. Jeanne learned that botanists lived in a world of stem and leaf. There would not be an oil or gas job with Encana or Mime’j Seafoods for Felix Mius; he intended to get into forestry school — everyone knew about Jackson Mius, who had logged with a horse team in Maine back in the sixties, then went to the University of Maine and got a degree and a job with the state in forest research. He had done it, so would Felix. The cousins set the goal of getting into university. They had to complete two years at the community college before they could apply. The odds were against them.

After high school graduation they moved to Aunt Alice Sel’s house in Dartmouth, her child-care center and home for an occasional young Mi’kmaw trying out urban life. They enrolled at the community college and worked part-time jobs.

The lower level of Alice’s kitchen traffic was always congested with toddlers; the upper level with friends and relatives, chaos exemplified. Jeanne thought it a madhouse until one September Saturday she came downstairs and found the kitchen empty, the house silent. A syrup of honey-colored autumnal sunlight fell on the scrubbed table and old mismatched chairs. Alice’s kitchen was beautiful.

• • •

“Those two, they’re sure tryin hard at their schoolwork. I guess it’s good they got each other. Like brother and sister,” remarked Alice to her sister, Mary May. They sat at the crowded kitchen table with teapot and cups.

“Well, I just hope it don’t get — funny. That kind of worries me, them bein so close. You know, cousins and all. I pray they don’t do nothin wrong.”

Alice gave her sister her dry look. “Quit worryin. He just watches out for her. That Jeanne, I think, she won’t never get romantic about nobody. And Felix takes girls to the movies if he can afford it. But not Jeanne — she wants to see a movie she goes by herself.”