Annie Proulx - Barkskins

A crazy taste for invention and improvement blew through the state like a dust storm. Shingle mills used small circular saws and men swore the time was just around the corner when round saws would replace the old up-and-down and even gang saws. Already there was a forty-eight-inch circular saw in a mill on the Kenduskeag, and another in Waterville that was rumored to cut an amazing four thousand board feet an hour. Steam engines were taking over the world. In Boston the new gaslights burned as brightly as high noon. It was too much progress to swallow in a lump. Amboise and Jinot Sel — Josime was still in far Manitoulin — did not like it and after one season on the much-cut Penobscot among crews of griping farmer-loggers they went north to New Brunswick, to the monkish silence of the old-fashioned woods camps where they found other broad-cheeked Mi’kmaq living the hybrid lives of woodsmen. Their people could no longer live without whiteman goods and food; instead of hunting and making the things they needed they worked for pay.

Jinot could fall a little six-inch pine in less than a minute. Down they went, the small pines. The brothers, pressed between the white world and their own half-known and disappearing culture, settled back into the woodsman’s life. Amboise was highly susceptible to rum. In the camp he was sober and thoughtful, but when they went south for a blowout he became a Drunken Indan, lying sodden in the muddy street, where boys thought it funny to thrust burning splinters into the toes of his boots.

• • •

One year Jinot, like a man visiting his old homestead, went back to Penobscot Bay. He walked down to the Duquet house, just to look. He felt nothing. It was run-down and dilapidated, the roofline sagged, two damaged wagons stood in the yard. But someone lived in it — he could see dogs under the porch. There were sheets hanging limp on a line. Was Elise still there? He walked past the house several times, unable to go to the door. But there were two shops now in the settlement and he went into one to buy tobacco.

“Them that live in that old log place down by the water? Doc Hallagher, years ago?”

The old shopkeeper, walnut-stained color, long thin fingers, looked up.

“They did live there. Move to Boston five, six year past. Bay folks too healthy for the doc to make a livin. Kids to feed.”

“Lot a kids?”

“Course she was Indan, so what can—” He broke off, recognizing that the man he was talking with might take offense at what he almost had said. He had some not too distant Indian ancestors himself. He squinted at Jinot. “You related?”

“Yah. She’s my sister. I didn’t see her long time.”

“You go down Boston way you might find her. Don’t know who’s in that house now. I think Elise sold it or give it to Francis Sel, rich stuck-up bastid. Ask him. He owns it, leases it out. He lives in that house next the sawmill. Sawmill owner. If he’s feelin good he might tell you.” He thought a moment, then said, “But if Elise is your sister, then Francis is your brother? You better go ask him yourself.”

• • •

But Jinot did not care to see Francis-Outger. If young Édouard-Outger was at home it might have been a temptation, but the storekeeper said the nephew was working in the camps somewhere. Jinot wasn’t going to Boston. He went back into the Miramichi woods. But not back to Mi’kma’ki. Better to be in the lumber camps.

• • •

It was a dry winter, cold enough, but no amount of snow compared to the old days. It made woods work easier except for getting the logs to the stream. They ran the water wagon at night to make a slick runway. While the choppers ate breakfast the driver ate his dinner, told of seeing lynx and once a black catamount, its eyes catching the yellow moonlight for a moment and then gone like pinched-out candles.

They rolled the logs into the scanty freshet. Logs grounded on gravel bars and it was hot, hard work prying them off. Sun glint off the river made them half blind and when they walked into the woods the shade throbbed with green blaze.

“Crimes, it’s like hayin season. Hot!”

With half the drive stranded along the river until heavy rain or the next spring drive the farmers went back to their homesteads, complaining, “ ’Tis only June, but I never see it so unseasonable hot. And dry.” Few seeds sprouted. Those that managed to send up shoots withered when no rain came. The wells quit. Women scraped water from inch-deep brooks for their gardens but as the long hot August blazed on, the plants remained stunted and starved. By September potato plants prostrate, maize stalks like faded paper foretold a hungry winter. Even impious men prayed, staring up at the monotone sky.

The only farmwork that could be done was more clearing. Work was the cure for every trouble. And it was thirsty work. The tough French and English farmers came from generations who had burned fallow fields and they saw no reason to change. Burning was part of farming — piles of slash from months of clearing, heaps of deadwood and dry rushes from drained swamps. The easiest way to clear woodland was to set it on fire and later grub out the black stumps. In that crackling dry autumn when dead weeds shattered into dust and brittle grasses crunched underfoot hundreds of settlers set their clearance fires as usual.

• • •

In the camps swampers were building roads for the winter cut. Most smoked pipes and now knocking the glowing dottle onto the ground started a swift little fire. The habit was to let fires burn. Fires were inevitable. It cheered settlers to know a little more of the forest was going down.

By early October the air was smoke-hazed violet, thick with heat, so humid that sweat-soaked shirts could not dry. Everyone moved slowly, cranky with rash and sweat sores. The choppers drank gallons of water from the shriveled brooks and their steaming hair hung lank. No evening breezes cooled and people lay in their smelly beds praying for the heat to break.

On the seventh of October the prayer began to be answered. Dry air from the west crossed an invisible frontal boundary, encountering the stagnant wet air. The winds began to mix with ferocious results, blasting oxygen like myriad bellows into the many small fires.

• • •

Amboise and Joe Martel, their old friend from the Penobscot, had hired on with a jobber on the Nepisiguit. Amboise seemed to land in Bartibog jail every time he left the camp. Miles south on the Miramichi, Jinot, another half Mi’kmaw named Joe Wax and Swanee, a bullnecked limber, were cutting for one-armed old Lew Green.

Jinot’s crew was two miles upstream from the shanty, just starting the show on a marked-out plot. The terrain was level enough where they were cutting, but to the west and southwest steep hills and inaccessible ravines were packed with big timber, deadfalls and heavy underbrush. That morning Swanee had laid his pipe down on an old stump and it had smoldered on sullenly after he took his pipe up. There were little smoke spirals in every direction, always fire somewhere. They let the stump burn; whenever they wanted to light a new pipe they could put a dry splinter into the smolder and have an instant light, but a sudden rush of wind out of the southwest set the stump ablaze in seconds and they stood amazed, watching it rise into a towering column of fire. They heard the sound then — faraway thunder, then a roar like the rumble of logs coming off a rollway. It went on and on and grew louder.

“Hell is that?” said Swanee. The wind increased and it bent the stump’s tower of flame to the ground. Immediately fire spread out like spilled water. They could see bulging black smoke to the southwest. Cinders and ash flew overhead. Joe Wax pointed south and Jinot saw a sight he could never forget. Behind the pine ridge billowed a mountain-scape of smoke and a brightness grew behind the ridge, silhouetting the jagged crest of pines. The roaring sound was tremendous, and with fear they now grasped that it was the wind and fire in a concert of combustion. With a harsh snarl like an exhalation from hell, the entire five-mile-long ridge burst into orange streamers that ran up the pines. Great slabs of flame broke free from the main fire and sprang at the sky. A hail of burning twigs and coals came down on the men. Rivulets of fire snaked up trees they had planned to cut. A nearby pine exploded. The noise from the approaching holocaust and the hurricane wind deafened them. Trees burst open. Nothing could exist in that massive furnace.