Annie Proulx - Barkskins

“Can no one tell me about the fire? You say it burned up New Brunswick? Could not burn up all New Brunswick. Très big place, many rivières, ” he said, hauling out a few French words.

“I hear all burn. I look somebody. For tell you. Maybe find that man you bring.”

The next day Sillyboy gently cleaned the honey from his legs. He rolled Jinot on his side, said the back of the right leg was the worst.

“Big scar come you, I think.”

This meant nothing to Jinot. Scars were common, scars didn’t kill you. Scars were the proofs of survival. But as the weeks and months went on he discovered their cruelty. The cicatrices made him a walking dead man, for the scarred back of his right leg contracted painfully and made it almost impossible for him to walk. When he tried, it was to hobble with tremendous pain and he could manage only a few steps. The scar froze his leg in an unnatural position.

All through the winter he lay in the wikuom. Early in his recovery, when Jim Sillyboy examined the itchy healing wounds, he explained in words and gestures that the scar was “too enfant ” for his special massage that would make it a little softer and more flexible. Beeto would do this — it was his skill. He would use a special salve Jim Sillyboy compounded of the mila-l’uiknek, the seven kinds of healing herbs, roots, bark and needles. He made another good salve of beaver fat and the gum of kjimuatkw, the white spruce. And there were useful decoctions and teas which he would teach Jinot to make himself from the good ingredients. For the scar was now his master and it would demand a lifetime of care. The fire had been the salient point of his life. He had an absolute knowledge that nothing — nothing — would ever be as it had been.

• • •

One day, sitting outside the healing wikuom in a special chair, he had a visitor. A lanky whiteman came striding down the path. Jinot didn’t know who he was but hated him for his good legs. The man stopped in front of him.

“Member me? Vic Goochey? Borned Gautier but they all call me Goochey. We was in the fire and the river? Brung ya here with Lew Green? Dragged a damn wagon with a old black horse. He got burned up, y’know. Most a the crew got it. But Lew heered about this Indan, Jim Sillybub, he’s a burn healer. I had to get away from New Brunswick anyhow, place is all black and stinkin, so we brung you here. Lew Green had his right ear burned off and Sillybub fixed him up good. Course his ear is gone, just a little bit a skin left, but he’s up and around. Figured he might do the same for you. Seein you got me to run down to the river. I was goin a stay in the shanty, figured the fire would never take it, but when you come runnin and half on fire yellin ‘run! run!’ I change my mind. So I’m alive and hardly got scorched. Remember that sow bear on fire? She died right there and the cub just kept on tryin to suck. It was a bad fire.”

“God save me,” said Jinot. “I want to know about that fire. How big, what they say. I got a brother, Amboise, workin up on the Big Bartibogue.”

“Ver bad, that place. Fire come in, burned her up. They say three million acres a good timber burned. Towns, houses, jails, lumber camps, sawmills. Half a Fredericton got it.”

“Amboise and Joe Martel,” said Jinot. “Oh my brother, my friend. It can’t be the fire killed them.”

“Must of. More’n a hundred people got it.”

Jinot could not speak for choking. Goochey waited. He sighed to express sorrow for Jinot’s people, then he spoke softly. “We was lucky we made it, specially me. How your legs comin along?”

Jinot snuffled a little, then spoke in the hard and angry voice of someone who puts bad news behind him and gets on. “Slow. Sillyboy says it takes a long time. The scar draws up my leg, so I can’t walk good. Can’t do much.” He slapped the side of his right leg to indicate that it was the most damaged limb.

“Well, I come to ask if you want to go back out west, work the Gatineau?”

Jinot, unable to stop thinking about Amboise, shook his head. “I just told you I can’t do nothin now. And I got no clothes cept what Sillyboy got from the priest, can’t do no work. Not a chance I can do woods work now.”

“Hell, y’can cook, can’t ya? That’s the law, people get hurt in the woods, they cook.”

“I can’t cook nothin but fish. Can’t stand up for long, just two, three minutes. I tell ya, the burn pulls my leg up hard. I don’t know how I’ll get along. I want to get away from here. Sillyboys, all of ’em, been good but this is a hard place, hungry, poor, no money, no job, no huntin, nothin. I don’t belong here no more. If I ever did. If I could maybe get to my other brother on Manitoulin, let him know what happened, I might work out some things.”

“Hell, Jinot, I’ll take you out a here, Manitoulin if that’s where you want a go. You save my life. I ain’t forgettin that.”

“I got to get healed up, first. Sillyboy says couple more months, this fall, maybe, I might be walkin. Some. I got to get so I can move around better. I’m just cripple this way.”

“Say what, you get Sillabub fix you up some more and I’ll come git you. Lessee, it is now just about June, drives are on, what say I come back October, see how ya go? Maybe you be better and we’ll see what.”

He left, and Jinot thought Goochey was a good man, though he’d never paid him any attention before the fire. He cried again for Amboise, his older brother, a drinker, a dreamer of past days he never knew, now lost to him forever. Amboise, who hated cutting the forest but did it because when they went into new woods he felt he was entering a past world. Amboise, who drank whiskey to get away from the present.

• • •

The son, Beeto Sillyboy, showed him there was something more that could be done besides the gentle massage and softening salves. He coaxed the stiff, scar-bound leg into positions that hurt, very gradually stretching the clenching scar, moving the leg carefully, carefully, not to tear the stiff tissue. So by September, almost a year after the fire, Jinot could limp slowly. The leg was dreadfully painful, a kind of pain like no other, tedious and biting, angry and gripping, and he could see how the scar held his leg under tension. He said one day to Jim Sillyboy, “If you was to cut right here — seems to me it would let the leg stretch more. That scar is like a rope tyin me up. Just a little cut where that thick place binds, eh?” But Jim Sillyboy did not want to make such a cut. So Jinot was no good for the woods, or other heavy work. He had no money, everything lost in the fire, and when Goochey came back he would have to say he could not go with him. He would have to stay in Indiantown until he died, poor, hungry and crippled. He saw that life in front of him. But he tried once more with Beeto Sillyboy, saying that one little cut might make the scar easier. Beeto thought he was right.

“We do it. I get good knife, old kind, black stone she ver sharp.” And he came the next day with a wicked little slant of fresh-flaked obsidian and made the cut, put on healing salve and an eel skin binding to hold the leg in a more open position. In a week Jinot was hobbling around and Jim Sillyboy admitted the cut had been useful. “But some it don’t work. You lucky.”

“Oh, yes, I am lucky,” said Jinot.

• • •

When Vic Goochey came in October, Jinot told him he wanted to go to Boston and find Elise, to see his nieces and nephews. He wanted next to find Josime on Manitoulin Island and count up more nieces and nephews. He had come out of the year of trial by fire wanting children.

Goochey looked at him and drew down his lips. “You want kids? Way most folks git ’em is git married and do that thing. Find you a woman-girl and git married. Hell, I been married twice and got some kids in Bangor, two more in Waterville. Why I keep workin — send them all the money I make. You know plenty women — I seen you jabberin with ’em four at a whack. Snatch one out.”