Annie Proulx - Barkskins

On the day of old Forgeron’s funeral, unusually warm for mid-November Boston, the sky was covered with mild cloud. A dozen elderly men sat in the front pews to remember the surveyor who had made them fortunes with timberland. At last the three Duke brothers, Jan, Nicolaus and Bernard, aided by the company bookkeeper, Henk Steen, carried the clear-pine casket, lacquered and rubbed to a glass-like glare, an elegant burial case for a man who had spent almost forty years taking the measure of Pinus strobus. Jan silently willed Bernard not to stumble, not to fall. Outger, the youngest brother, should have been there but he refused to leave the house on Penobscot Bay, refused to give up the great table, a single board from the largest pine Duquet had ever cut. This icon belonged in the company’s Boston council room.

“I need it for my work,” Outger had said with passion.

“What sort of work would that be?” Bernard had asked of the ceiling; he thought Outger an imbecile. It was said that Indians visited him often. He could not be depended on for anything except to receive his annual stipend. Still, he should have been there.

The sermon had gone on for two hours, but at the graveside things began to move briskly. A rising wind wrinkled the milky sky. Nicolaus shifted from foot to foot, his boots gleaming like oiled hooves. All warmth leaked from the day as the wind hauled to the north. The brothers looked knowingly at each other. It was the Forgeron weather curse. The sudden chill urged the minister on. They lowered the coffin into the dark hole, and at last came the words “rest in peace.”

The brothers and the skeleton-thin Henk Steen, one of the many Dutch orphan protégés who came to Duke & Sons as apprentices over the years, walked away from the graveside. In a body the fittest mourners walked to Nicolaus Duke’s house, treading in the center of the street, where it was smoothest.

“Do come along, Henk,” Nicolaus said to the bookkeeper, who hovered at the edge of the crowd. “Join us in farewell to the old fellow.” Nicolaus was the best diplomat among the brothers and had learned the art of persuasion from his grandfather Piet Roos, with whom he had made voyages to China and Japan. Now his dark hair, when not covered with a wig, was ragged grey. His face and neck had swollen with fat though he still moved easily, unlike Jan and Bernard.

Deceived by the mild forenoon, none of them was warmly dressed. They hurried on past a wooded lot, a large garden stiffened by the last week’s frosts, until they saw the candlelight glowing enticingly in Nicolaus’s front windows. Through the wavery glass they could see his wife, Mercy; Bernard’s wife, Birgit; and the Panis slave girls passing to and fro with tureens and pitchers, for Bernard had brought Panis — Pawnee — Indian slaves down from Ville-Marie.

The door to the best parlor stood invitingly open with Mercy welcoming them. In the center of the room a long table covered with a fine turkey carpet presented the collation of covered dishes, an array of silver and twist-stem glasses. Some fragrant wood burned in the fireplace; Steen thought it might be a few pieces of sandalwood to perfume the room, a scrap of Charles Duquet’s oriental plunder. Beeswax candles in brass sconces lit the room, their trembling light reflected in a large pier-glass mirror. Henk Steen gaped at the dozen black walnut chairs with cushions — so many, so rich.

“Please enter, dear guests, come in,” said Mercy, guiding them into the warmth. She wore a loose grey silk saque pleated at the shoulders over a scarlet bodice and underskirt, her wig low and neat. She often suffered from crushing headaches that sent her to a quiet room and she now silently prayed to get through the evening without an attack. Their children, Patience, Piet and Sedley, lived nearby, the two sons well settled into the family lumber business. Patience had married a boatbuilder, Jeremiah Deckbolt.

• • •

Henk Steen hung back in the entryway staring at the luxuries and rich clothing of the guests. He felt out of place, and longed for his cold little room, but Nicolaus urged him to take a tankard of steaming cider laced with rum. Mercy led him to the cold sliced meats and Birgit’s famous horseradish sauce, so stinging, she said, it would make the devil gasp. “Hardly an inducement to try it,” Steen muttered to himself and his hand veered away. He took a small marzipan cake. The fireplace crackled and spoke to itself. Yes, thought Steen, Nicolaus Duke lived very well. And why not, with Duke & Sons’ swelling sales to the timber traders whose millmen converted logs into planks, barrel staves and clapboards, hogshead staves, shingles, masts, spars and bowsprits, dike timbers. All the Duke brothers lived gallant lives, except perhaps the strange one, Outger, who kept to the disappeared father’s house in Penobscot Bay and whom Steen had never seen and imagined as a crabbed hermit clutching a blackthorn stick. The marzipan cake surged in his gut and he thought he might have to rush outside.

Mercy glanced over the room to see if everyone had a cup of comfort, a chair, someone with whom to converse. In truth she wished the company were different. These old men with their timber holdings! She wished very much to entertain (and be entertained by) the wealthy Boston families connected with commercial shipping, quite different from the fishing boat owners who had thought themselves the crème de la crème in her parents’ day. The merchant shipping families had replaced them and built magnificent houses. She and Jan’s wife, Sarah, gossiped enviously of their social doings. But never had any member of the Duke families been invited to their collations or soirees. Mercy told Nicolaus that she longed to give a grand party and invite these worthies, but Nicolaus said, “My dear, better not. You do not wish us to be regarded as jump-ups”—that most odious word.

Bernard and his lanky Danish or Norwegian wife, Birgit, stood in a corner talking with Joab Hitchbone, who was even older than old Forgeron. Birgit spoke in her odd accent, smiling and nodding.

What a jolt they all had felt when Bernard returned with Birgit from one of the Baltic or Scandinavian countries, precisely which one was never clear. She once told Mercy she had been born near the great Kongeegen tree in Denmark. It was a shock, for Bernard had been a remarkably attractive youth with wavy hair and cobalt-blue eyes. His habitual expression indicated he was about to smile and a mole on his left cheek encouraged that impression. Cornelia, his adoptive mother, had imagined that he was the by-blow of some French aristocrat and a pretty seamstress. He was still handsome though the dark hair had disappeared and the fine jawline had been replaced with a jowl; he limped. No one understood what had drawn him to Birgit. But their marriage, though childless, had lasted nearly thirty years. Birgit kept an orderly house and a rich table. She spent much time in the kitchen, not content to leave cookery to the slaves. Despite hoopskirts she preferred to mix and singe and roast herself. Her flummeries were renowned.

Sarah, the only daughter of the wealthy molasses and sugar importer James Pickering, had been a beauty with dark oiled hair and melting hazel eyes. She rejected hoops in favor of stiff petticoats that swelled out her skirts at the ankle, showing pink silk stockings, an unseemly mode for a woman in her fifties. Their oldest son, George Pickering Duke, had recently returned from reading law at the Inns of Court in London. For years he had struggled against being pushed into this profession, saying he wished to go to sea, not as an officer but as a common sailor, to visit other lands.