Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“Here’s the deal. You help me put that rail in place you’ll get a round trip and a place to sleep. And your dinner.”

Jeanne nodded. Mr. Stick gazed out at the horizon for a long minute before he snapped to and said gruffly, “Then let’s get goin. Hop in!” He talked as he drove. “I know who you mean. Egga Sel’s daughter. Sapatisia. There’s not too many live out on the Cape except motel and restaurant people in the tourist season. I guess she’s got a place out there. Somewhere.” They all knew everything was for the tourists, the despised tourists who kept Nova Scotia alive.

“She knows about the old Mi’kmaw medicines. That’s why we want to talk to her,” said Jeanne.

“Seen a woman go along the cliffs with a basket. I thought she was a berry picker first time I see her, but it wasn’t the season. I never seen her up close to talk to. I knew Egga pretty good. Long ago. At least I think it was her. Not sure. Cliff path below the lighthouse. Seen her when I was measurin for the handrail. Stayed three nights, slept in the truck and I seen this woman couple times. Must be good stuff grows down there.”

Mr. Stick said, “She’s a Sel. Try and find a Mi’kmaq ain’t related to a Sel! Get up pretty early in the mornin for that. I got some gneg wetagutijig cousin Sels.”

Driving slowly in the thickening fog, he said that Felix and Jeanne, between times of helping him, could watch for the woman. “Sapatisia, she went to university, travel all over the world. But I don’t know if you’ll see her, way the fog’s workin up. Not much hope for today,” he said as he turned onto the gravel drive to the lighthouse.

“Look!” said Jeanne, pointing at the storage building. They all saw a fading movement.

“No, no! I see her yet. Ala’tett. Way over there.” Mr. Stick pointed at a blob that was gone as soon as he spoke. “Wait for mornin. I think she comes back.”

He made a fire in the parking lot, cooked hot dogs in a dirty cast-iron frying pan. Then, yawning, he said good night and retired to his truck, where they could see the glint of a bottle as he tilted it up. The cousins went into the lighthouse, unrolled their sleeping bags.

• • •

All the next day the fog hung heavy and unmoving. Felix and Jeanne held the railing steady while Mr. Stick bolted the sections to the braces. He fussed with joins and angles, took the sections down again and made minute adjustments. He worked without talking. The light was dimming when he was satisfied with the railing.

• • •

The next morning sprang open brilliantly clear with a snapping wind shooting up their jacket sleeves. Mr. Stick ate dry bread for breakfast, didn’t offer any to them but drank deeply from his thermos of stone-cold black tea, then smoked his pipe. “Got to clean her up a little,” he said, meaning the railing. Jeanne and Felix climbed to the top of the lighthouse.

“Some view. I see two tankers. No, one’s the ferry.”

“I see Sapatisia Sel,” said Felix. “Down there on the rocks.”

The woman in canvas overalls and jacket was digging with a trowel. A notebook lay open on a boulder and the wind riffled the pages.

“Hello,” called Jeanne. The woman looked up at them. She was short and sturdy, black long hair in a single braid. Her narrow eyes looked Asian; she said nothing.

“Are you Sapatisia Sel?”

The woman picked up the book and set off rapidly down the shore with a plant still in her grasp, fragments of soil falling from the roots.

“Please wait! We want to talk to you.”

In a few minutes they heard a distant engine start up. By the time they reached the bottom of the lighthouse the red pickup was roaring along the road. Gone.

“I’d say she don’t feel like talkin,” said Mr. Stick. “Ten more minutes then I’m headin back to Dartmouth. You want a ride? Or stay?”

“Yes to a ride,” said Jeanne, not looking forward to the fumigation, hoping Mr. Stick would stop at a store along the way. But he did not, drove faster and faster through the fog that had erased Sapatisia Sel.

• • •

Mr. Stick, feeling obscurely responsible for the cousins’ thwarted search, had gone to Lobert Sel, whose mind was failing, yet he seemed to know where Sapatisia’s little house stood. He put his trembling finger on an inlet he said was Pussle Cove. “Couple kilometers east the lighthouse. No road sign.” Mr. Stick gave the smirched paper to Alice, who put it beside Jeanne’s plate that evening. So she had an address. And to get there she took money from her savings account at the East Coast Credit Union and gave it to Felix, asked him to rent a car. She had no license.

• • •

The rain didn’t matter and the cousins had a sense of holiday freedom. The rental car hummed along, the wet roadside unfurled and the windshield wipers beat a slow march. They shared a bag of jelly donuts Felix bought at Tim Hortons. They passed the Wreck Point lighthouse and he slowed.

• • •

“That’s it. Has to be.” Jeanne pointed at a faint trackway that sidled shyly off the main road directly into a patch of wind-racked black spruce. “I see car tracks.”

Felix turned cautiously into the watery ruts dimpled by raindrops and inched slowly between clawing branches. They looked down at a small unpainted house on the edge of the sea, smoke barely clearing the chimney. Nearby a wind-twisted spruce and an outhouse leaned west. A northern harrier huddled in the tree.

Before they could knock, the door opened and Sapatisia Sel, wearing a heavy grey sweater that looked like it had been knitted from fog and briars, stood staring at them without expression. She was not old but weathered, a plank washed up on shore.

“All right,” she said in a low voice. “Here you are. Again. Why? Who are you and what do you want? Ever hear of privacy?”

“We come up from Dartmouth,” said Jeanne and waited as though she had explained everything.

“I guessed that. Why are you bothering me?”

“I am Jeanne Sel, and this is my cousin Felix. Also Sel. We are students. I read this article”—she held the limp cutting out—“about you and I have a question.”

“What question?” She did not take the clip.

“Well, you say that Mi’kmaw medicine plants from long ago can’t be used now. Why not? I mean, if we know that a certain plant cured aches or itches, why wouldn’t it be good to use it now? Our aunt Alice just had the flu and everybody brought her Mi’kmaw medicine and she got better.”

Sapatisia Sel made a sound halfway between a moan and a sigh. “Good God, you came all this way to ask that?”

• • •

Salt-dimmed windows faced the Atlantic and the ocean itself seemed hung in space. The only table in the room looked like it had been stolen from a provincial park. Near the door stood an immense cupboard, painted red.

“Used to be a fisherman’s house,” said Sapatisia. “Fixed it up. Suits me the few months I’m here.”

On the west wall Jeanne saw a bench cluttered with botanical instruments, a large microscope, a battered and age-blackened plant press layered with drying papers, dark stem ends protruding.

“Sit,” said Sapatisia Sel, jerking her thumb at the table. “So. You want to know so badly why we can’t use the old medicine plants that you drive a hundred kilometers on a stormy day to ask me, who you don’t know? Maybe you think I have an answer. I don’t.”

Her unbraided hair straggled over her shoulders. “Since the conquest the air has been filled with pesticides and chemical fertilizers, with exhaust particles and smoke. We have acid rain. The deep forests are gone and now the climate shifts. Can you figure out for yourselves that the old medicine plants grew in a different world?” Felix, who had had many school-yard fights, liked her low voice, but not her combative posture.