Annie Proulx - Barkskins

With the trees gone Beatrix saw the decaying house. The roof and sills could not wait and just as she fell ill Beatrix sold the last big pines in her woodlot to pay for the repairs. Kuntaw simply did not notice such defects; it was a house, a big immovable house.

• • •

Elise showed Dr. Mukhtar to the sick woman’s room. Under the single window was a table piled with books Beatrix had been reading before they became too heavy for her to hold. He looked at the titles, then sat beside the bed in a rosewood chair with a cracked leg. The woman lay in an uneasy sleep of shallow rapid breaths, febrile and wasted. He looked at her steadily. Suddenly she moaned and her eyes flew open.

“Am I in hell now?” she whispered as her eyes took his measure.

Dr. Mukhtar, who quite understood that the pain had awakened her and that she thought he was the devil, said, “No, madam, you are not, although it may seem that way. Allow me to introduce myself and let us work together to see how I may help you. But at the moment I believe you are in too much pain to carry on a rational conversation, so I will just fetch a sedative that will allow you some ease for a while.”

He went to his saddlebags and came back with a black vial and a teaspoon.

“Please open and swallow.”

“I will vomit,” she said.

“No, you will not. You will be calmed and the pain will back away. For a while. Open.” He watched her swallow painfully, half-retching. He held her up until the easing began.

In a few minutes Beatrix, panting with relief, looked at Dr. Mukhtar. “Oh,” she said, “oh, oh. Oh how good. Thank you.”

“The pain will return but we shall fight it in every way we can.”

He examined her legs, palpated the great lump of stomach, asked her if she was able to eat anything, how long it had been difficult to swallow, did she vomit blood, was there blood in her stool, black and grainy, was she often breathless? In the midst of a reply she fell asleep again, but breathed deeply.

The next time she woke the light in the room was dim. Dr. Mukhtar still sat in the chair, his dark face hidden in shadow, his black clothing blending in to the chair’s indigo shadow. Beatrix’s pain was still at bay and this pleased him.

“I know my death is approaching,” said Beatrix. “What is wrong with me, is the pain returning soon, how long…” Her voice fell away.

“You have a stomach cancer but also much fluid in your stomach, which I can relieve, though it, like the pain, will return. It is a battle, Mistress Beatrix, a battle that at this stage you cannot win. Perhaps another month, perhaps two. I will do all I can to smother the pain. Will you allow me to stay here? Your daughter, Elise, needs rest and I must be on hand to attend you. Do not worry, I have brought enough elixir to soothe elephants for a decade.”

“I want to die,” she said. “I want to be done with the pain, done with this life.” But this was not entirely true. Over the next six weeks Beatrix developed deep feelings for Dr. Mukhtar as they spoke of books and ideas, of places imagined but never seen, of peace and quiet, of horses, for Mukhtar knew much about these animals. It pleased Beatrix to think of galloping horses, fluttering silky manes. At first it was the doctor who spoke while she listened, half asleep, half dead. The pain elixir became less effective and he tried another. Kuntaw came in now and then, but Beatrix could not look lovingly at him nor he at her.

• • •

To Dr. Mukhtar she said, “My father told me once that swallowing Guatemalan lizards was a cure for this illness.”

“Never can this be. It is the rarity of Guatemalan lizards in Boston and its environs that earns them the reputation of a great cure. One might also name unicorn milk as a cure. There is no cure. When it becomes resistant to all I have, I will give you a sleeping draft that never fails to bring the final relief.”

He came in every morning, opened the window, which shrieked in its warped frame, and gave her the blesséd elixir. From the bed Beatrix looked at the sky and saw a thin cloud like a ribbon of spilled cream on blue satin. In the hours of respite from pain she began to talk to him in her hoarse voice, sometimes whispering when her throat was too painful for speaking.

She told of her lonely childhood, Outger’s obsessive teaching, books and books, his declaration that when she was sixteen he would send her to Europe for “finishing,” likely to Switzerland, which was fashionable, something that never happened, the usual way of Outger’s promises. She spoke of the enmity of the Dukes, who did not acknowledge her existence after their failed efforts to wrest Outger’s big pine table from her. She told him of Kuntaw and their happy years, her children, Francis-Outger and Josime, spoke of Tonny and the grandchildren, now grown, but always she circled back to Outger and his hours drilling her in Latin and Greek, assigning books for her to read, his discussions of theories and inventions.

“I can see now,” she said, “that all his pedagogy was an experiment.” The books and instruction had been his attempt to make her into something like a learned whiteman, like himself. After he left for Leiden the instruction continued in the form of boxes of books, papers, long letters of advice and orders, but she gradually understood that she herself was not wanted — she was nothing to Outger but a subject on which to practice his ideas of intellectual development. She had failed in some way to become an Enlightened Savage, and so remained alone in the house on Penobscot Bay. When the solitude became a monstrous frustration she began to look for one who could help her become an Indian. Kuntaw had come with her to split wood and had stayed for many years. They had made children together.

“But,” she said sadly, “I could not become an Indian.”

“Of course not,” said Dr. Mukhtar. “There is a whole world of signs, symbols and spirits which all must be absorbed from birth. You could not hope to grasp the meanings except by living the entire life.”

She could not, she explained to Dr. Mukhtar, express affection except by teaching, holding out books as tokens of love. When at last light the doctor, exhausted from listening, stood to go to his room above for the night and pinched out the candle, she begged him to leave the curtains and the window open. The door closed gently and she could look at the moon, a blood-streaked egg yolk rolling in the shell of sky.

• • •

In the last week of her life Beatrix had the illusion she was suspended in an immense bowl of water. At first the water was as easy to breathe as air, but gradually as the mass in her stomach pressed on her lungs it became viscous as old honey. The bowl was similar to the yellow crockery bowl in which she had mixed bread dough. Occasionally she surfaced and in the distance could see its pale rim. Some days the water was limpid and yielding, others, shot through with strong orange currents of pain. Underwater storms raged, and then she had tried to draw up her legs to protect her throbbing gut from the lightning strikes.

Dr. Mukhtar tried many ways to make Beatrix’s fading existence more bearable. Francis-Outger, whose house was only a mile distant, came every day with balsam boughs for the sickroom so the spicy scent of the forest could cleanse the air. He brought juniper berries and Dr. Mukhtar crushed these and their dry bitter perfume made Beatrix smile, a smile more like a grimace, but all she could manage. She died in this cordial of fragrance. Fifty-two strange years and then to fall in love on her deathbed.

Elise stood weeping at the window. Francis-Outger said to her, “I will go to Josime’s camp and tell him. Maybe he knows where Amboise works now, maybe he knows where Jinot is. Did they not tell you their camps?”