Annie Proulx - Barkskins

• • •

For Jinot, cutting his first big kauri was pain. He had to clear away a mountain of debris around the tree with ax and brush hook, with hoe and mattock. Then it had taken three days to chop out a large enough “room” so he could climb up and get inside the tree and, in a twisted half crouch, swing his ax. At last the true assault began. He managed the first hour, but the pain in his leg was bad, very bad. At noon he moved like a crab to the edge of his chopping hole to get down to the ground and some cold tea. He was not hungry. He jumped and felt something give way in his knee. When he tried to stand upright the bad leg folded. He could not straighten it and fell again, the knee hitting the mattock point. Arana saw him down, loped over and looked at blood seeping through Jinot’s pants. “We’ll get it fixed,” he said, “we’ll get you right.” He cut a forked sapling and made a makeshift crutch, helped the injured man up. Jinot, standing because he could not sit, drank a quart of tepid tea, leaned against the maimed kauri and panted. He put his head against the old tree’s grey bark and whispered, “You got me this time.”

“You can’t work,” said Arana and helped him back to the bunkhouse, pulled off his trousers and looked at the knee still oozing blood from the blue and swelling cut. The knee looked strangely flat. He got water from the cook and tore a bit of rag from his extra shirt, mopped the wound and left Jinot to lie there all afternoon trying to find a position that would ease the pain.

There was no doctor. Palmer did any necessary doctoring or burying. Arana brought him in the next day and the trader looked at Jinot’s knee, deformed when the ligament had torn and the patella moved up into the thigh; the mattock wound was red and swollen. “Christ,” he said. “You better lay up. Maine men heals pretty quick so we’ll see.” He noticed Jinot’s graying hair — the man had aged in New Zealand. He went up to the store himself and got two bottles of opium-heavy patent medicines — Sydenham’s laudanum and Dover’s powder. “Course he’s not no chicken now — older feller, you don’t heal so good.” While he was gone Arana put his hand on Jinot’s burning cheek, leaned over and said into his ear, “Rest, rest.”

Jinot slid in and out of narcotic dreams in the bunkhouse for a week while the infected wound broke free from restraint, galloping headlong toward victory. Bright with fever, panting, he did not recognize Arana, called out to Franceway. Arana and Palmer regarded the leg, one vast black blister. Arana sighed.

Arana and Shuttercock buried Jinot near the river at the edge of the hay field where they had cut rickers two years earlier. Before the last shovelful of earth topped the grave it began to rain. They walked back up the steep tree-bare slope sloughing off muddy soil as the rain increased. It was the beginning of a great lopping storm that loosed unreasonable torrents. The mountain streams, joined by other runaway water, raced flashing down the hills carrying rocks, ricker slash, logs, gravel, soil, the old cookhouse, and, disinterring Jinot Sel, swept his carcass out into the Pacific.

• • •

The old year ended trembling in storms of wind after a wild winter, but once again a fresh spring morning, pastel and calm, gave Mr. Rainburrow pleasure as he sucked in the sweet air. He left the door open and hoped for no interruptions. If he finished all his correspondence within the hour he would have the afternoon free to count and arrange the flax bales in his storeroom, but before he had written half a page he heard tramping on the earthen path and a figure loomed, entered his sunny workroom. Another followed. He thought that he had rarely seen uglier customers than the two men who stood with folded arms staring at him. One was hoop-backed and swart, an aging hunchback with obsidian eyes in a flat American Indian face. The other had even more marked Indian features and a wiry body. His inward-drawn mouth showed that he cared for neither Englishmen nor missionaries. To Mr. Rainburrow the pressed-in lips and knotted eyebrows indicated a particularly disagreeable nature.

“Yes?” said the missionary in the brusque voice he used to dust off time wasters.

“Joe Dogg,” said the crooked man, fishing in his pocket, then extending Mr. Rainburrow’s own letter written several years earlier. It was stained and tattered, one corner quite torn away. “I am Mr. Bone’s foreman and acting manager of the ax works. Your letter came to me. Has Mr. Bone now returned? My inquiries have remained unanswered.”

“Oh, he — no, he — he has never returned. We are quite satisfied that he was decoyed and killed by a renegade Maori — it is quite sure that poor Mr. Bone is dead. Quite sure.”

“What basis have you for that surety?”

“Well,” blustered Mr. Rainburrow, “well, because it is known by some — I am not at liberty to say whom — that he was — killed. Killed and likely”—his voice dropped—“in the custom of some of these heathens, eaten.”

Dogg grimaced, shook his head as if driving off an irritating sweat bee. “We will have proof of your assertion, sir. People do not just ‘disappear,’ people are not just ‘eaten.’ ”

“In New Zealand it can happen. Mr. Bone was headstrong and showed no reticence in going into the forest with a native he did not know. Guile is part of the Maori nature.”

“I ask you to produce those people who ‘know,’ ” said Joseph Dogg. “A great deal depends on being sure. And what of his money box, do you have it?”

“I keep it in a safe place, it is in my cupboard in my sleeping room. I will get it directly.” The words tripped over each other like a too-often-repeated prayer.

The hard-faced Indian clenching and unclenching his fists spoke loudly and angrily. “Where is Jinot Sel? I wish to see Jinot.”

Mr. Rainburrow also had a wish — that he might be instantly transported to a desert isle. If he had never written that letter these men would have remained forever in their wretched land of rebels and upstarts.

“He — he, too, is dead.”

Dogg, the hunchback, who had been looking out at the harbor, spun around, spoke in a tigerish voice. “What! Jinot dead? Not possible. Never. How? When?”

“Last year, in, in— I have forgotten the month.”

“He died how? Or did he also ‘disappear’?”

“He died of illness. Of blood poison. He worked as a bushman and hurt his foot. Or leg. His friend, Arana Palmer, was with him and no doubt can tell you all the particulars.”

Joseph Dogg said in a low voice, “Perhaps you do not know that Jinot Sel was not Mr. Bone’s ‘servant’ as you surmise, but was greatly favored by him as a friend and business associate and it is to him that Mr. Bone has willed all his works and possessions, which include the ax factory in Massachusetts. And if truly he is dead, and if Jinot is also dead, then likely Mr. Bone’s holdings will shift into Jinot’s estate and go to his son, Aaron. I have the responsibility to bring all details back to Aaron Sel, who could not make the interminable journey.”

“I am also Sel,” said the dark Indian. “Etienne Sel, an uncle of Jinot Sel although he was older than me by many years. We came to reclaim him and take him back to his home country. If what you say is true we must have his bones that he may be returned to the land where he began. This is important.”

“I cannot speak to the whereabouts of his grave,” said Mr. Rainburrow, seeing an escape route. “I can only advise you to search out Arana Palmer, one of the sons of the trader here, Mr. Orion Palmer. He was a friend of Jinot Sel — and, I think, did bury him — where I do not know. So, I wish you good day, gentlemen, and good fortune with discovering what you wish to know.”