Barkskins (29 page)

“Yea,” said Jan. “We must remain cordial with all factions, including the English, and often test the direction of the wind. And stay aware of new Acts. The Crown seems as determined to shackle us as we are to evade the bonds.”

“Hear, hear,” said Pickering. The rum bottle made its rounds.

Bernard came up to them holding his wife's blue woolen cloak. “It is time,” he said gently, and they slid out the door.

Young Piet was wrapping up in his own cloak when his cousin George came over to him. He spoke sotto voce. “Cousin, shall we meet again? I must leave for Carolina in three days' time. I wish us to be friends as one day we will work together for the company. I feel we—and Sedley—represent the young blood of the family. Do you know the Wolf's Den tavern?” George was twenty-six and Piet a year younger.

“Well enough. Do you prefer it to the Bear Tavern or the Turkie Cock?”

“I do—quiet and less chance of a drunken hubbub. Let us meet there tomorrow evening.” They touched hands and young Piet went out into the fresh night with its sweet odor of woodsmoke and the not-distant evergreen forest.

T
he Wolf's Den was a quiet and pleasant tavern with half a dozen small tables, and a commodious fireplace at one end of the room. The place was empty except for the pockmarked innkeeper, busy decanting a keg into bottles. The two cousins went to the smallest table near the fireplace. Both ordered hot peppered rum, for it was a cold and windless night that promised a hard frost. Piet stretched out his hands to the dying fire.

“I relish a good fire. In Europe and England I am always cold with their stingy little twig arrangements in fireplaces the size of soup bowls. Only here do we drive the cold away with a proper blaze. This one needs replenishing.”

The innkeeper, overhearing, said, “We were to lay a new back log this morning, but one of the men was detained. He is here now.” He held up a finger indicating a short wait. Within minutes four men, one of them a colossus crowned with dirty white hair, all redolent of fresh air and tree bark, came into the room. The innkeeper came to their table. “You gentlemen may wish to move to a more distant table to avoid the commotion. Robert Kemball, who is necessary to the task, has only now arrived.” That would be the big man, thought Piet.

The door opened and through it came a bolt of cold air and the men lurching under the weight of a monstrous green beech log eight feet long and two feet in diameter. They got it into the great fireplace with grunts and swaying and shoving, with remarks on its hundredweights. The innkeeper rushed forward with an iron bar to lever the great log to the back. Then came a hemlock forestick of considerable dimension, and the innkeeper heaped ashes onto the fresh wood to slow combustion. A boy brought in a basket of pitch pine splinters and in a minute or two a young blaze filled the room with heat and dancing light. The innkeeper gave each of the men a glass of rum and a coin, slapped Robert Kemball on a shoulder like an ox rump. He looked at Piet and George, asking if they would return to their original table with a questioning gesture of his arm. But now the fire was too hot to sit near and they stayed where they were.

“Ah,” said George Pickering Duke, swigging his toddy and patting his red lips. Piet, as angular as tree branches, nodded and smiled. They were quiet for a long time, enjoying the fire's warmth and the hot spirit.

“I wonder we have not met like this before,” said George, who saw his cousins rarely. “Neither you nor Sedley. But one day, not too distant, you and I will make the decisions for the company of what should be done and what not done.”

“Yes. We should meet more often. Of course, you are sometimes in Carolina.”

“Unfortunately. But I do find reasons to return to Boston.” They sat in comfortable silence. George cleared his throat. “I assume, following last night's discussion, that you would side with the colonists rather than England or France.”

“Yes, I would. And I think Uncle Bernard would support New France rather than France itself. Although he has lived in Boston so long he may be on the side of the colonies.”

“So much of the news we get is conjecture.”

“Indeed. And much is, I suspect, deliberately misleading.”

George stretched out his legs and broke into their meditations. “Dear cousin, I have a somewhat private question for you.”

“Ah?”

“Have you ever clapped eyes on our uncle Outger?”

“Yes. But only once. The same day that you saw him.”

“I? I have never seen him. He is a mysterious and unknown figure to me.”

“No, no. You saw him. Surely you remember that day when we gave the birds great happiness? It was springtime and we must have been seven or eight years old. Not older.”

“That occasion of the birds' rejoicing is fixed forever in my memory. But what of Uncle Outger?”

“Do you not remember a thin little man with wild eyes spreading bedsheets over a table and telling us to get away from him?”

“I do. I remember his violent expostulations and the way he swung the sheets around as though he were raising sails. Surely that wasn't—”

“That was Uncle Outger. He is said to have many connections abroad, men of science to whom he writes and sends specimens of plants and weeds.”

“That mad old——? That man is our famous uncle Outger? He sends weeds to men of science?”

“Indeed. To them the weeds of New England are novel.”

“So that was Uncle Outger. I am horrified.” He called for two more hot rum flips. “My truest memory is of the birds and what we found in that old trunk.”

The innkeeper brought the hot drinks, the cousins held up their glasses and remembered.

Their parents had been closeted with the mad uncle in what they called the “old assembly room.” The boys had explored the house, crept up the creaking narrow stairs to an attic. A small and filthy window let in the only light. There was a desiccated owl carcass in one corner, which gave them a pleasant frisson. A leathern trunk stood against a low wall and they were drawn to it, worked at the rusty hasp, trying to guess what might be inside, then leapt back as the lid flew up with a crash and showered them with dust and owl feathers. They waited. George then walked boldly up to the trunk and looked inside. With a scream he bolted for the stairs crying, “It's alive!” Young Piet galloped beside him. “What? What was it? A wolf?”

“Maybe a wolf! Maybe a Indan! It was a horrible hairy thing. It looked at me. It moved!”

It took long minutes for them to creep up the stairs again. All was quiet. The trunk stood open, the owl lay in its corner.

They approached the trunk, looked inside. The thing, all twists and tangles, did not move very much, but it gave off a sense of suppressed liveliness. Piet reached inside very slowly and touched it, then sprang back.

“Very hairy,” he said. “Nasty.”

It was George's turn to touch it. He did so and even, to show his boldness, closed his fingers on the mass for a few seconds before backing away. In truth they both knew what it was but it served their mood to pretend it was an incarnation of evil. Piet wrenched at the begrimed attic window and raised it to admit light.

At last they lifted the mass and for the first time in more than thirty years Duquet's wig resurfaced. They hauled it around the attic, draped it like a shroud over the owl, tried to throw it at each other though it was heavy. At last George dragged it over to the window and stuffed it through the opening. It fell on the ground below with the whoosh of a gassy cow.

“George Pickering! Young Piet!” called Patience from below. “What antic gambols are you practicing up there? You are making more noise than the militia. Go out into the garden at once.”

In the fresh air their prize looked less interesting. Piet got a strip of leather from the stable and tied it onto the wig. They ran with it, the hairy mass bounding and gathering twigs. When Piet's mother Mercy called them to come and have a dish of apple slump, they left it in the brambles. Later the adults returned to the assembly room, ever talking, and the cousins drifted outside once more. A marvelous sight! Birds were wrenching hairs from the wig.

“They're building their nests with it,” said Piet. “They are very well pleased,” said George. They watched for a long time and even as their carriage drove away in late afternoon they saw birds flying in the direction of the garden. In this adventure a childhood friendship formed.

•  •  •

“Yes,” said George, who knew nothing of his grandfather Charles Duquet, “it was the memorable day of mad Uncle Outger's wig. Had he seen us he would have become madder.”

Young Piet got up and unnecessarily prodded the fire, driven by masculine instinct. Fresh sparks roared up the chimney and heat pulsed out.

“That's the way,” said George as the warmth licked his face. “And what of your brother, Sedley? He was not at the funeral or the gathering.”

“No, Eugenia is near her time and Dr. Perry advised complete bedrest. Sedley felt he should stay with her as she is very delicate—and may not survive.”

Into George's mind leapt a cruel sentence he had read somewhere in his London days, the comment about colonial American women by a Mr. Ward: “the Women, like Early Fruit, are soon ripe and soon Rotten.”

Piet talked on. “Moreover, Sedley always disliked old Forgeron so Father excused him.” He sat down again and looked into his toddy mug; still plenty in it. “Do you ever return to London since your studies?”

“No. Though I very much like voyages. You know, I wanted to follow the sea but Father insisted I read law. Our fathers seem to think only on business. Business and business again.” Everyone in the family knew of George's fondness for sea adventure tales, stories of shipwreck and castaways, ships that disintegrated in violent storms, wild men with spears on remote islands who captured sailors and ate them raw, rogue waves that swallowed entire fleets. When the London bookseller sent a copy of Defoe's
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,
George was enamored for weeks and read the book over and over.

“I am glad to hear you like voyages, as we may be making one. Father recently had a letter from Uncle Outger, that uncle you have utterly forgotten. He plans a trip to Amsterdam next year to see his aged mother and sister, Doortje. Father says we must all go as Grandmother Cornelia is very old and infirm. And we cousins have never seen Auntie Doortje.”

They talked for a while about the ongoing wars, Major Rogers and his bands of ruffians, putting off the moment of going out into the night. But it was late. Piet looked at the handsome watch pinned to his waistcoat. “I dream that the colonies will unite. At the moment there is jealousy and business competition among them. For Duke and Sons there is much that should be changed, beginning with certain difficulties in North Carolina. I hope we may meet and work out ways to improve the company's income when you and I and Sedley are in a position to do so.”

“And improve the Duke social standing. At present, ignored as we are, it is damned difficult to meet girls of interest and with good connections.” Piet got up, paid the innkeeper, put on his heavy cloak and moved toward the door. “Are you coming?” he said to George.

“Yes, as far as the church. The fresh air will do us good and dissipate the fumes of rum.”

They stepped out of the Wolf's Den into a blaze of stars so flagrant and shuddering the sky seemed to emit sounds like plucked wires.

“Cold!” said Piet.

“Very cold,” said George. “Very, very cold.” They breathed the tingling piney air. Yet there was the sense of an implacable, even malevolent, force bending the meteorite-streaked night.

B
ernard Duke, fifty-five, had two great problems. His mind gnawed at them constantly. The first worry was his successor. There was no one in the family who could take on the crucial landlooker's job of assessing the valuable timber on Duke & Sons' vast acreages after he was gone. He himself had learned from Charles Duquet before the man's unexplained disappearance, then from old Forgeron, but among the nephews he had found no one remotely interested in judging trees, estimating cubic volumes and board feet.

Nicolaus's son Sedley had come out with him several times. But even explaining the difference between linear and piece measurements made Sedley's eyes glaze, and working out the cubic volume of a tapering eighty-foot log was beyond him. When they were moving through an area of standing timber, Bernard making notes and calculations and then, moving to another plot, Sedley stumbled behind.

“Uncle, is it not possible just to hire a surveyor who can say whether or nay there are big trees worth cutting?”

“It's a business,” said Bernard one noon after a repast of scorched stale bread and hot tea, sitting on a stump and lighting his pipe. “We need to know what timber we've got and what board feet it will make. Finding a good surveyor is difficult. It is arduous work, and inaccurate estimates and outright lies abound. Surveyors we have tried have sometimes submitted false maps and false reports to save themselves trouble. They have sworn that trees were sound, trees that proved rotten or with hollow centers.”

He sucked on the pipe, knocked out the dottle and refilled it. “It smokes hot,” he said. “I must get a new one.” He took a burning stick from their noon fire and lit the tobacco.

“Those surveyors accepted bribes from the Wentworths and others to wrongly value a stand of timber as sound. One time our cutters arrived with their axes and found a thousand stumps left by timber thieves. The stumps were grey with age;
id est,
the surveyor had never been there. Another sent a report of a thick-forested township—we were confronted with ashes.” He made a face, emptied his half-smoked pipe again and put it in his pocket.