Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“Shocked to hear that Dick Moore has come to such a pass. But, Captain Gunn, I am sure that a happier future awaits you than clam mongering. Do you not have a reputation for fashioning small attractive tables?”

“It is only my amusement, you know, never to make a living from it.”

“You might try — everyone admires small tables — as that one,” he said and he pointed to an example of the captain’s handiwork, an ebon side table inlaid with a ship in full sail cut from walrus-tusk ivory. “Any mariner’s family would be happy to possess such a handsome article of furnishing.”

“You must have it when you disembark! I will make another, but you shall take this one as a memento of your years at sea and this voyage. I insist. Look, it has a secret drawer where you may keep your love letters, heh. ”

• • •

Once a week other choice guests joined the captain’s table, and once a female, Mistress Posey Brandon, a dark-haired lady of considerable stature, quite overtopping the gentlemen at the table, but sitting silent for the most part unless pressed to speak. She was traveling home after a long visit with a relative, to rejoin her husband, Winthrop Brandon, a Presbyterian preacher who had made his name with a book of virtuous precepts. Another passenger, Thomas Gort, showed her excessive attention. James understood why Gort fawned; she had great onyx-dark eyes fringed by thick lashes. But Gort made too much of her. When Mrs. Brandon said she had visited Madame Tussaud’s exhibition, at the Lyceum Theatre, of wax curiosities of crime Gort begged for repulsive details. The lady demurred, saying she had averted her eyes before many of the exhibits.

“I do not see how a member of the gentler sex, even a German or French lady, could have fastened on such an unpleasant mode of expression,” she said and cut at her meat. “I understand she first gained her skill in making wax flowers for family funeral wreaths.” After that she said nothing more.

• • •

The days of tilting horizon passed slowly. As they neared the continent they saw increasing dozens of ships, wooden leviathans rope-strung like musical instruments, shimmering with raw salt. Boston harbor was so jammed they anchored a twenty-minute row from the docks.

James located his trunk, a scuffed brown affair, on the deck. He did not see the promised inlaid table with the boxes and bundles to go ashore and found Captain Gunn on the bridge.

“I thought I would thank you again for the table,” he said.

It seemed to him Captain Gunn showed a coolness. “Ah,” he remarked.

“Sir, I look forward to enjoying it in my new quarters.”

“Ah.”

“Shall I fetch it on deck myself?”

“Ha! You, Woodrow!” He bellowed at a sailor. “Fetch the small table in my cabin to the deck for this gentleman.” There was undoubtedly a sneer embedded in the word gentleman. James Duke guessed that Captain Gunn was in his true self a parsimonious man made momentarily generous by Madeira.

• • •

He was crowded into the tender with two dozen passengers, Bostonians from their accents. In their anxiety to get on shore they were very restive, passing bundles back and forth. A portly matron stood up to receive a small trunk. The weight surprised her and she swayed, tried to hold it, then fell with a shriek into the wintery harbor. Gasping, she clutched at the gunwale, and her weight dislodged two more passengers. Captain Duke stretched out his hand to a terrified man and in slow but inexorable motion the tender rose on its side and sent ten or twelve more people bellowing and clawing over the side. Gasping (for he could not swim), James Duke thrashed his arms, trying for the gunwale. His hand touched it, though he could barely feel it, then he went under again as the heavy woman wrapped one arm around him. He escaped his captor and with an atavistic swimming motion burst upward into the sweet air. Something clenched his hair and dragged him to the side of the tender, something got hold of the back of his coat collar and hauled relentlessly. He came up over the gunwale, crashed into the bottom of the boat and looked up at his savior — a woman wearing a black bonnet and staring at him with lustrous, intensely black eyes — Mistress Brandon, who had exhibited the strength of two men.

Chattering thanks and promises to call on his rescuer in a few days, James Duke returned to his homeland on this first day of February. In a sopping freeze he managed a cab to take him to the Pine Tree Inn. Waiting for his trunk to arrive he stood as close as he could to the fire drinking boiling tea. At last the trunk was hauled up to his room and trembling, he pulled on his warmest clothes — wool, wool, good English wool.

• • •

It was exceedingly cold in Boston; snow fell an inch or two every day for a week until all was muffled and silent, roofs, carriages, and still the snow came. Two days after his arrival, and with a drumbeat headache, James Duke walked to the offices of Trumbull & Tendrill slipping on icy cobblestones.

The clerk who let him in and took his hat gave him two swift startled looks before his habitual air of indifference returned, an empty expression that classified the people he met as side chairs or pen wipers. It was the same with the advocate Hugh Trumbull, whose mouth fell open and then closed. His wrinkled face suddenly creaked into a smile. He might have been English, thought James, taking in the fashionable double-breasted coat with notable lapels. Half-laughing in welcome, Trumbull made James comfortable in a chair near the snapping fire. The clerk brought in tumblers of hot rum toddy.

“You quite shook me! It’s uncanny how you resemble your late father.” Trumbull drank off half his glass of rum and waved his hand at the window, where the flying snow half-obliterated the street and the buildings across the way. “Would you believe that I have killed deer from this window?” he asked. “Of course it was many years ago and deer are now scarce. Now, sir,” he said, “to business,” and over the next hour laid out the details of Sedley Duke’s will.

• • •

Elated and confused James Duke returned to the Pine Tree with a weight of keys in his pocket. In essence, Sedley Duke had regretted his long hatred and left half of his rich estate to James, including his dwelling house north of Tremont Street complete with six acres of garden land, a fruit orchard, twenty acres of fresh meadow, a twelve-stall stable, two carriages and six matched pair of horses, nearly two million acres of forest in Maine (passed to Sedley from Charles Duke’s old partner, Forgeron), a collection of Indian relics, a stuffed crocodile, eight silver platters, four and twenty pewter plates, a turtle-shell hafted knife, a library of eighty-four books, two hogsheads of Portuguese vinho, eight barrels of rum, two waistcoats embroidered with bucolic scenes, five turkey carpets, six warehouses of lumber, twenty-seven acres of salt marsh, part interests in several ships, potash manufactories, a shingle factory, Ohio timberlands, bank accounts and stocks. And more that he could not remember.

Trumbull had enjoyed detailing the provisions of the will. “The servants are staying on at the house and hope that you will retain them. You may remember that your father called the property Black Swan and populated his pond with those birds. Sixty-odd years ago it was all rough, gloomy forest, and now we see handsome estates. I would advise you to keep the servants as they understand the peculiarities and virtues of the place and will make the transition to Boston pleasanter for you.”

James sat with his mouth open, hardly believing what he was hearing.

“Mrs. Trumbull and I hope you will do us the favor of dinner with us a week hence? Some of your cousins will be in attendance and we thought you might wish to meet them away from the offices.”