Annie Proulx - Barkskins

After six days he cut back toward the Penobscot following Moosegut brook; McBogle’s sawmill could not be very far distant. He listened for the sound of falls. He felt the mill through his feet before he saw it, the metal clank and rasp of the driveshaft gears and pitman arm sending a thumping rhythm into the ground. It was spring, he thought, and the entire forest would soon reverberate with the noise of multiple mills as water ran freely again. His eyes troubled him, tree branches and needles sparked. Abruptly there was the mill, a heavy log structure to take the weight of gang-saw machinery. And there was Dud McBogle standing above him in a razzle of flinching lights.

Recognition was instant. Dud McBogle was the ginger-whiskered timber thief who had long ago turned back and called something to the wounded boy. Duke felt a red cloud of danger envelop him. His blood instantly flowed back on itself. The teeth of the moving saws gnawed and glinted. He saw that he was fatally imperiled. Exitus in dubio est.

“Been expecting you,” said Dud McBogle in an easy tone. “I went back, you see. I went back and dug up the pit where you burned my boy.” The two riverbank men stepped out of the corner and stood beside him. What could not happen began to happen.

“Not yet!” blurted Duke. “I’m not done—”

But at the age of fifty-three with his fortune only half-secured he was done.

He sat for an hour on a knotty and punishing pine bench before the governor’s secretary beckoned him in. As a young missionary Louis-Joseph Crème had first served in New France. Later he had been sent to Port Royal in Acadie, a true wilderness, and among the Mi’kmaq he began to keep a notebook of their rich vocabularies of geological structures, weather and season, plants, animals, mythological creatures, rivers and tides. He saw they were so tightly knitted into the natural world that their language could only reflect the union and that neither could be separated from the other. They seemed to believe they had grown from this place as trees grow from the soil, as new stones emerge aboveground in spring. He thought the central word for this tenet, weji-sqalia’timk, deserved an entire dictionary to itself.

Now, with receding hair and arthritic joints although he was only forty, he stood before the governor, shivering, for he felt a coming illness. Sleeping on the ground did not suit him. He was not of this place, he had not sprouted here and so to him the ground was hard.

The governor was a haughty snob, un bêcheur with a cleft chin and a bulge of throat fat. He gave off an air of having hung in a silk bag in the adjoining room until it was time for him to emerge and perform the duties of his position. His eyes focused on the wall, never meeting those of Père Crème.

“Surely I do not need to tell you that the English in Hudson Bay press down from the north, they press in from the sea, they squeeze Acadie, they press east from the Ohio valley. New France is awash in spies, scouts, Englishmen and rangers from New England. The coast fishery is ravaged by English and Boston vessels.”

The missionary thought that every sentence the man uttered had a subterranean meaning — if only he could grasp what it was. “Your Excellency, the Mi’kmaq are constantly called to fight for France although they have very few fighting men these days. They were once a vigorous tribe, as many as the hairs on ten men’s heads. Today they have but a few hundred warriors. As they die they lose their sensibilities, their knowledge falls away.” He hoped he, too, would not fall away. He felt quite dizzy.

“Their sensibilities! These people are masters of inventive cruelties. I mention to you the example of the young sailor captured from a fishing boat. The women, who are even more inhuman than the men, tortured him by fire and knife. They burned his feet with fiery brands, his legs, his privy parts. They cut him until he was pouring blood like an April freshet, then thrust his charred feet into an iron pot of boiling water. So speak not to me of their ‘sensibilities.’ It is your concern to care only for their souls. And to inculcate in them love and respect for le Roi notre prince —the King, our prince. And urge them to fight the English. That is your duty.” He spoke as one confident in his position of power.

Père Crème knew that temporal power had its limits, some of them very abrupt if one observed recent history. “I humbly try to do so at every chance,” he said, feeling his chills switch suddenly to feverish heat. “And in any case that sailor was an English, a Protestant.”

“That is beside the point. You seem to regard the Indians as special persons. They are no more than men, and not very reliable men at that. We are forced to use them as fighters when our territory, when the great fort we are now building at Louisbourg is menaced by the English. It will be the gateway to our North American possessions. You know how important Acadie is to New France. France must retake it. It is vital sea access.” Now he was locking his fingers together and stretching them out.

Père Crème forbore to mention that the fort could not protect the seaway; that was the responsibility of the French fleet. But he only said, “Your Excellency, the Indians do suffer. They do have feelings. They love their country, which we are taking, they love their children, whom we are corrupting with our goods and forceful ways. They say France regards them as of little value. And this has long been their land, where untold generations have lived undisturbed.”

“Indeed. You know, Père Crème, you seem to me to be lacking in zeal for the cause of France.”

“No, no. I only pity them. They have lost so much, so many.” Why could the man not grasp that the Mi’kmaq wished only to live their lives as they had for many generations, and that as every day passed that was less possible?

“And France has lost so many. You would do better to think of them rather than these libertine heathens who are dogs and villains. They are not Christians as you, a designated man of God, might have noticed.”

Père Crème, dismissed, tacked for the door, his feet at odds with each other and his neck wry. He prayed silently for the governor to become more observant, more kindly. Or better yet, to fall down in a fit and never rise. He immediately withdrew this cruel wish and requested forgiveness.

Several days later he addressed a letter to his sister Marguerite, one of hundreds of letters never sent, for he had no sister. It eased his mind to have an imaginary confidante, and he was able to work out his sometimes chaotic thoughts this way.

Dear Sister Marguerite.

For a minute he imagined her, slender and pale, sitting in a green chair and opening his letter with a silver knife. She might wear a gold locket with a wisp of her brother’s hair in it — or a miniature of their mother, whom Père Crème could scarcely conjure from his faded memories.

They do not have orderly Lives as we do. Their time is fitted to the abundance crests of Animals, Fruits and Fish — that is to say, to the Seasons of the Hunt and ripening Berries. One of the most curious of their attributes is their manner of regarding Trees, Plants, all manner of Fish, the Moose and the Bear and others as their Equals. Many of their tales tell of Women who marry Otters or Birds, or Men who change into Bears until it pleases them to become Men again. In the forest they speak to Toads and Beetles as acquaintances. Sometimes I feel it is they who are teaching me.

He stopped for a long time before continuing with the feeling that he was getting it wrong.