Annie Proulx - Barkskins

He walked along the plank sidewalks. He thought of Josime, he thought of the girl. He still did not recollect her. What he remembered about the time in the canoe was Josime’s hard bright stare, he had assumed it was aimed at all of the girls, a fixed gaze that went on and on. But it must have been for only that one. He felt a little sorry for Josime.

• • •

In the morning Amboise and Martel were waiting for him outside the Wing King.

“Where’s Josime?” He had a headache and saw they, too, were suffering.

Amboise shook his head. There was a long silence. “Got to make tea,” he said at last.

“Where’s Josime?”

“He took that girl off. Old Madam screamed like wild cat she can’t go, he’s got to pay her money, so he didn’t have any money but he give her somethin, maybe he found some money he forgot in his pocket, and she shut up. Josime said tell you he’s gone Manitoulin with that girl, says we better wait — he comes back.”

“Wait where? No place here we can wait. We got no money.”

“Get work — plenty sawmills here. You know, move the logs up into the mill. Sort logs in the millpond. Other jobs. Plenty work, if you know logs and water, hey?”

He was right. They all found jobs at sawmills and the cross-eyed toothless owner of the Wing King, once a logger and riverman, said they could stay on as long as they could pay. They could, but Amboise and Martel began to drink their money up. Amboise said he didn’t care, he liked to drink whiskey. Jinot, who also liked to drink whiskey and who didn’t know how far it was to Manitoulin, hoped Josime would come back soon so they could get away from the city, back to the sober life of the camps.

• • •

More than two months later Jinot came into the Wing King storeroom and Josime was there, lying on his bed, his eyes closed. He sat up.

“What took you so long time come back?” said Jinot.

“Brother, my life has changed greatly. I chop trees no more. I stay always with that girl on Manitoulin Island and give up whiteman ways, whiteman work. That girl my wife. I come tell you I go back to her now.”

“You are like Kuntaw,” said Jinot, “slaved to a woman. And you talk different. Much time with that Manitoulin girl.”

“It is right for me to be with her in the forest, away from stinking men and the wounding of the land. It is — what I want.”

Jinot thought he looked very much like Beatrix, especially his pale eyes. “I know,” he said.

“It is a joy that you do not know,” said Josime stiffly. They sat silent for a long time, then Josime spoke again.

“I wish you come with me. I know you will not but I wish it. We are not so young now. You would feel a happiness to eat whitefish, see those people living good lives, not false whiteman lives like we do in lumber camp. One day you come to Manitoulin and learn what I say is true.”

“I sure to come, Josime, come visit, see you, your children. But you doin this makes me afraid. Maybe I wish I was the one do it.”

Josime laughed. “You! You leave the ax? No, I do not think so. But I want to tell you something I have seen a day’s paddle south from that country. Brother, I have seen with my own eyes the largest white pines that ever grew in the world. The Manitoulin people told me that pine tree forest is very big, maybe a thousand English people’s miles. It is their forest and they move through it, their rivers and they travel on them for they are traders and have been traders for many generations. They are good people who have not forgotten the old ways. You must never tell any white man about this pine forest for they will come in numbers like ples —passenger pigeons — and cut it down. Never speak of it to anyone. Never.”

He would not speak of it but they would come anyway.

• • •

A few weeks later Jinot, Amboise and Martel drifted back to Maine. Before they went to Bangor to look for work they returned to Penobscot Bay. Josime had a too-small shirt that he wanted to give to his nephew, Francis-Outger’s son, Édouard-Outger. He must be near-grown by now.

Captain James Duke, in his early fifties, was complicated, dark-haired, and somewhat handsome. He took a hard-headed and hard-handed stance to disguise an inner recognition of worthlessness. Quixotic, he swung from morbid self-pity to rigid authority over his crews and himself. The future flickered before him as a likely series of disappointments.

On the annual occasion of an all-day drunk (his ill-starred birthday) he dragged out the piteous litany that he had been pitched onto a British ship as a midshipman in his tenth year “as an unwanted pup-dog is tied to a sapling in the woods and left to be torn apart by wild beasts.” Even his appointment had come about only because his grandfather, old Nicolaus Duke, wrote to the more ancient Dred-Peacock and begged the favor of a recommendation. The favor granted, Nicolaus Duke and the antique peer died within weeks of each other and could be depended on no more. But James Duke lasted; repeatedly passed over for promotion in favor of candidates from influential landed families or members of the peerage, he lasted.

He had done moderately well on the examination, then stalled for years as a “passed midshipman.” But the Napoleonic Wars had lofted him swiftly over a lieutenancy to post captain. And there he stayed until, in his fifty-first year, a letter arrived from his Boston cousin Freegrace Duke, asking if he would consider a director’s seat on the Board of Duke & Sons to fill the vacancy left by the death of his father, Sedley.

That his father had died was a shock to James. He had heard no news from him nor of him for many years. He had never had a letter, nor a remembrance, never a visit. He thought that if Sedley had left him anything in his will it would be an insultingly paltry sum, as a single shilling, or a savage castigation for causing the death of his first wife, James’s mother; he had always known why his father hated him.

As the days passed he considered the idea of sitting on the Board of the family timber company. Little had ever come to James from the Dukes beyond a yearly allowance of fifty pounds. If he accepted, he would have to make concessions, would have to revert to being an American. He would bring a touch of English distinction to the no doubt squalid Board meetings of Duke & Sons — likely the reason they invited him to join them. He could imagine those meetings, a scarred oaken table with half a dozen backwoodsmen slouched around it on pine benches, tankards of rum-laced home-brewed beer, tipsy ribaldries, for he had no illusions that the Dukes were models of moral behavior.

Before he could draft his cool note of refusal, a letter arrived from a Boston law office signed by the attorney Hugh Trumbull. It was late December, the days short and dark, the worst of the English year. Advocate Trumbull begged James’s attendance at Trumbull & Tendrill as soon as he might manage the journey in order to hear something to his advantage; enclosed was a draft for one hundred pounds (drawn on Duke & Sons) for his passage to Boston. So rarely had the words “something to your advantage” come to him that he decided on the minute to accept Freegrace’s offer and remove permanently to Boston. “Advantage” meant more than a single shilling! He made his arrangements and booked passage for Boston.

• • •

The Western Blessing was crowded with German immigrants journeying to Pennsylvania to found a utopia and these people quarreled incessantly with each other about the details of the earthly paradise to come. To keep free of them James Duke stayed in his cabin during the day, coming out only to take the wintery air or to dine and drink with Captain Euclid Gunn, who was even older than himself but of an equal rank. Over a roast chicken they raked through sea acquaintances held in common. They spoke of retired and disabled friends as the level sank in the decanter. “Captain Richard Moore, one of the most ablest seamen I ever knew, is forced to open a herring stall in Bristol. You are a fortunate man, Captain Duke, to be connected to a wealthy family. Some of us depart from the sea to live out sad lives ashore selling fish or driving a goods cart. I myself have no expectations of a rich sinecure but hope I will go to Davy Jones afore I wheel a barrow of mussels.”