Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“I almost understand why God laid this affliction on him,” said the judge to Dr. Hudson, whom he had discovered after a short search. “The city has become a stinking mire of corruption and evildoing. I see this as a sign of God’s punishing vengeance. And yet I cannot feel my nephew was guilty of strangling this farmer over disagreeable suppers. He was ever a gentle man.”

“There may be a way for him to avoid that — that end,” said the doctor. “I think we must appeal to the Williamsburg authorities at the Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds. There was some indication earlier that he might be harbored there.” The weight of the judge’s name, the pleas of Mr. Brandon’s flock and Dr. Hudson’s carefully composed essay on the felon’s gentleness secured him a room at the Virginia retreat. In the company of others with disordered minds Mr. Brandon shone out as a model inmate.

• • •

Freegrace called the October business meeting of Duke & Sons. As always James felt the significance of being a voting Board member. He dressed carefully: tan wool pantaloons with a narrow fall and instep straps, tan vest piped in black, single-breasted cutaway coat. He carried Sedley’s gold watch, and to its chain he had attached Posey Breeley Brandon’s gift, a gold-wreathed fob that enclosed a miniature painting of her beautiful left eye, for intimate eye paintings were all the rage. Beautiful the subject was, but it had a certain fixing quality not altogether pleasant. Beside him Freegrace and Edward seemed drab in their old-fashioned knee breeches and pale silk stockings, the backs spotted with mud.

Freegrace introduced a cadaverous man with eyes like candles in a cave as Lennart Vogel, who had missed the last two meetings as he was traveling. He was Doortje Duquet’s only child, and so a cousin of Sedley Duke, James Duke’s hard-hearted father. After a cosseted and overeducated life, Lennart eventually came to Boston and made the acquaintance of his Duke relatives. No one was more fastidious in his dress and on this day he wore pearl-grey pantaloons buttoned four inches above the ankle over white silk stockings, his shoes the merest slippers, replaced every fortnight. He had made himself into an indispensable walking encyclopedia of figures, trends and innovations affecting the timber trade. His greatest value, Edward whispered to James, lay in his fluent command of seven languages. Lennart had another side. For two months every year he put away his town clothes, donned heavy bush pants and logging boots and went into the woods, sometimes with an Indian guide. He said he was fishing and visiting subcontractors’ logging camps. He seemed unusually cheerful when he returned to Boston.

• • •

The meeting room was warm with a fire to spite the autumn chill. Freegrace said, “Let us begin.” There was a great scraping of chair legs and a rustle of paper.

“This year the Maine drives got under way late, all was delayed, with the contractors hoping for rain to raise the rivers,” said Freegrace. “We hear from those jobbers that it was only a fair winter, not at all like the snows we had here. Meager snow forced the men to resort to dams to get the sticks down feeder streams and into the river — much labor and time. The jobber is demanding recompense. He won’t get it. I do have some figures for the previous year, which should cheer.”

James interrupted in a low voice. “Excuse my ignorance — how many men do we employ in the woods?”

Lennart Vogel answered, the figures ready in his mouth. “Better than one thousand this year for six to eight months. At ten dollars a month and their bed, board and tools. Ridiculous as it may seem, we’ve increasingly had to hire well-known cooks as other camps will get the better men by dishing up fancy vittles. Vittles!” He clearly relished the slangy American word and thought of himself as an adept slang slinger. “We figure twenty cents a day to board each man, which is a great deal of provision. We are forced to hire cooks who might command the kitchens of elegant restaurants save for personality blemishes.”

Edward spoke up. “But victualing is not the greatest expense. Corn and hay for the oxen. Hay is almost twenty dollars a ton and we last year used more than five thousand tons. Corn is a dollar a bushel and the oxen will gorge on four thousand bushels the season. The oxen are dear and so are the drivers — twenty thousand dollars in costs. Then there are timberland purchases and palms to be greased, especially in procuring the so-called Indian lands that the idiot Congress strives to keep from us with its ‘Nonintercourse Act.’ ”

Freegrace muttered, “In what other country must businessmen trouble with murderous barbarians coddled by the government?”

Edward continued on his set path. “We have high survey expenses, and though we have been cutting most on our own lands and have our own mills and so have few stumpage or mill rent costs, there are a hundred other expenses — axes and tools, grindstones, oil, iron, blacksmiths and their forges, log boomage and lockage.” The clerk’s pen scratched violently as he tried to keep up with Edward’s rapid speaking.

Cyrus thought James looked puzzled and said, “Sir, boomage is the cost for making booms to hold the logs in a body and lockage—” But Edward disliked being interrupted and said curtly, “Cyrus, you may please save your explanations for later. I am sure James understands the terms. What we need to discuss today is first, the precipitous decline in large, first-rate white pine, and second, the persistent problem of timber thieves plundering our holdings and other cheatings and malfeasances. And among the thieves those who manufacture shingles and clapboards are the most terrible dishonest. The thieves are worse on the public lands, but they show no hesitation in cutting Duke trees. New Brunswick loggers are the bane of the forest. Wherever they see it they cut it and then run with it. New Brunswick has no thriving farms nor vigorous towns. Its residents are the locusts of the forest. We regard New Brunswickers as our enemies.” He stopped to draw breath, reviewed what he had said and allowed that “the problem might be somewhat ameliorated if ever the boundary lines with Canada were clearly drawn.” He was stuttering a bit, uneasy with James Duke’s presence — the man too closely resembled his dictatorial father, Sedley, who had made Edward’s life miserable with harping and picking. And James’s awful watch fob flashing its censorious stare rattled him.

James leaned back. He had planned to tell his cousins over the evening dinner that the widow Posey Brandon had accepted his proposal of marriage and that they had set the wedding date for May. After news of Mr. Brandon’s death from pneumonia in Virginia he had waited a decent interval — twenty-four hours — before proposing to her. She had accepted on the spot and he had embraced her and tried to seal the betrothal with a tender kiss. How surprised he had been by the fierce and spitty ardor with which she returned his dry kiss. Later, much later, he was to think back on it and interpret it as a warning, a warning he did not — could not — heed. But now his brain whirred with alarming scenarios of how his cousins would take the news that he was marrying the daughter of David Breeley, a New Brunswick logging contractor. He had not yet met his future father-in-law, but from what Posey told him he had no doubt that Mr. Breeley flourished a free hand with the ax, damnation to any damned border.

James, gazing out the window, saw a distant smudge in the sky that he had learned to recognize as a body of passenger pigeons.

Cyrus spoke up. “I thought we were to hear today of new markets — was I mistaken in this apprehension?”