Barkskins (36 page)

At the house on Penobscot Bay, Kuntaw's failure to make Tonny into an instant Mi'kmaw wrenched his heart; he withdrew a little from Beatrix. He spoke to Amboise, too young to understand. “I am shamed I left Mi'kma'ki, my people and my son.” He saw himself without pity as one who was witlessly destroying the ancient ways. Although he reflected that the larch loses its needles, the maple and beech their leaves, standing bare until gleaming new leaves open again, Mi'kmaw people were putting out very few fresh leaves. And he, none at all.

•  •  •

A thousand times Kuntaw had heard Beatrix say, “I need you, Indian man,” as she had the day she rode up to him on her horse. At first he thought she meant she needed him to split wood for her. As the weeks passed he thought she meant she needed him for sex. But one day he understood. She needed him because she was a half-Indian woman who had been brought up as a whiteman girl. She needed him to make her an Indian. She had been leading him into books. But now that he knew he pushed the books aside.

“Woman,” he said, “now I will teach
you
to read,” and he led her into the forest, patiently explaining, as he should have done with Tonny, how to understand and decipher the tracks of animals, the seasonal signs of plants and trees, the odors of bears and coming rain, of frost-leathered leaves, the changing surface of water, intimating how it all fitted together. “These are things every Mi'kmaw person knows,” he said. “And now do you understand that the forest and the ocean shore are tied together with countless strings as fine as spiderweb silks? Do you begin to glimpse Indian ways and learning? I would not wish an ignorant wife.”

“Yes,” Beatrix said. “But it is too much to remember.”

“Not to remember like a lesson,” he said, “but to know, to feel.” He knew this was hopeless.

She soon begged off these excursions. “I have told you my Passamaquoddy mother died when I was very young, before she could teach me anything. It is a pity. What I know I learned from my father. I had to learn the medicinal plants. He often wrote to me from Leiden and asked to have certain pungent leaves sent to him.” But this father, Outger, who never returned yet bombarded Beatrix with letters and advice, with packets of books and outmoded European garments, died abroad a year before Kuntaw came out of the woods to her. He thought of Beatrix's father, if he thought of him at all, as a whiteman, all fiery will and command but with many affectations. He was glad that an ocean and death lay between them.

Beatrix taught the children their letters and numbers, gave them books to read, and Kuntaw, who had failed to teach Tonny, now showed his grandchildren what Francis-Outger and Josime already knew—how to hunt, to paddle a canoe. The boys stuck to him like burrs, and together they prowled the shrinking woodlands, carved and whittled, mended garments, stewed eels, coaxed fish into their hands. “You must learn these things,” said Kuntaw, “you who are more unconscious of the world than stones. You are Mi'kmaw blood but you know nothing.” He showed them animals, plants and yes, grasshoppers as prey. He fashioned child-size bows for Amboise and Jinot. Let them hunt grasshoppers, even as he had! Let them not be ignorant of Mi'kmaw ways. Yet he found it impossible to teach them everything he knew unless all could live inside the Mi'kmaw life; it was more than knowing how to use certain tools or recognize plants. What he taught was not a real life; it was only a kind of play, he thought gloomily. That world he wanted them to know had vanished as smoke deserts the dying embers that made it.

•  •  •

All around the Penobscot settlement the trees fell, tracks inched through the forests, only one or two, then seven, then webs of trails that over the decades widened into roads. The roads were muddy, sometimes like batter, sometimes thick and clutching until late summer, when they metamorphosed into choking dust so fine it hung in the air long after a horse and carriage passed, settling on the grass as the English people settled on the land.

The years passed and logging companies and settlers stripped the banks of the bay and moved up the Penobscot. Fields of wheat and hay took the land, these fields enclosed by linked stumps, the root wads of the forest that had once stood there turned on their edges to bar the whiteman's cows and sheep. Along the shore settlers' houses were stitched into tight rows by paling fences. The old Charles Duquet house sat alone in its acreage, surrounded by forest that had never been cut, a relic of the wooden world.

•  •  •

A day came when Beatrix noticed her son Josime giving Elise glances that were not brotherly and said to Kuntaw that perhaps it was time she was married. Elise was fifteen, rather old to be single. Kuntaw's advice was to send her to Nova Scotia to stay with his sister, Aledonia; there she might find a Mi'kmaw husband. There she might live a Mi'kmaw life. He had forgotten what Tonny had said of the place, remembered only the good days before the moose hunt of his childhood.

•  •  •

Everyone noticed how the little girls of the settlement, whether Indian, French,
métis
or English, wanted to be with Jinot. They ran to meet him, told him their small secrets and swore him not to tell—he never did—brought him pieces of ginger cake stolen from the home pantries. Beatrix, who watched them whispering, asked, “What do they tell you, Jinot?”

“Tell me worms, funny frogs. Just nothing.” The conversations were loaded with giggles. Few girls, or later, women, could resist Jinot's impish, smiling ways.

“Stay that way, dear child,” murmured Beatrix, who was not immune to his charm.

Kuntaw also watched Jinot and noticed he was different as some Mi'kmaw of the old days were different. The name for the difference escaped him.

•  •  •

The wooden world extended out into the bay in the shape of watercraft. Amboise and Jinot Sel played with the village boys on the wharves, ran, balanced and jumped on the floating logs in the sawmill ponds, pretending they were on a log drive. The heroes of all were the rivermen riding the logs down the surly Penobscot. The boys around the bay paddled canoes and rowed skiffs; as they grew, they worked with fishermen, learned to mend and cast nets and haul lines, and the sons of the fishermen pulled for deeper water when they, too, joined the maritime trade. Day after day the children watched men loading mast ships with the great pine spars, stacking plank lumber on decks. The Sel children went with Kuntaw to mend the weirs, to help drive and catch eels—their dependable and favored food. For the town boys the ideal future was to chop great pines and ride the boiling waters of the spring freshets. For Jinot and Amboise Sel it was an irresistible pull.

•  •  •

The children grew up too rapidly, Beatrix thought. One day they were children, still full of questions and innocent enthusiasms, and the next day they were grown men with tempers and ideas who preferred Kuntaw's company to hers. When Francis-Outger turned twenty-one and married a half-French, half-Mi'kmaw girl, he and the girl's father built a small cabin for the young couple. Then Josime left home, going to the New Brunswick lumber camps. A month later it was Amboise's turn to go to the woods. For Jinot Sel, the only one left, time passed very slowly. For him the year dragged on, spring arrived and he watched the acres of logs that escaped the mills float down the river and into the bay, envied the jaunty rivermen who prodded and corraled the dumb timber. After the drive Amboise, broader and stronger, came home with tremendous stories. And money, too. Summer came and faded. Amboise left again to work as a swamper for a New Brunswick outfit. For weeks the cries of geese rang like blacksmiths hammering lofty anvils. The moon waxed full, lunatic clouds racing across its face. Jinot suffered from a restless urge to go somewhere. One morning, his decision made, he went to Kuntaw.

“Grandfather, I am old enough and I want to go to the forest camps to cut trees,” he said. Kuntaw nodded. “I know you think of starting a man's life,” he said, “although there are many girls who maybe think you better stay. You have been warm with these girls. Is it not possible many children here will call you father?”

Jinot, shocked, said no, no. “Grandfather, the girls only talk to me. Girls like to talk to somebody. We are friends.” Kuntaw looked at his grandson with an assessing, weighing eye, putting wispy thoughts together.

“Yes, I see. I see you. I am old, Jinot, but do not take me for a fool. If you were among Mi'kmaw people they would see no wrong in a man who has a double spirit. But whitemen call it bad. And those church men.”

There was nothing to say to this. In a moment Kuntaw continued.

“When will you go?”

“Today. I have warm clothes in a hide bag. Shall I take an ax?”

“Have an ax if you wish, but the lumber camp will give you as many as you need. They provide the tools. This I know, for I, too, worked in those camps chopping trees, even as my father, Achille, did, and his father, the Frenchman René Sel, before him.”

“I did not know of the Frenchman René. He is our ancestor?”

“He was my grandfather, murdered, they said, by a girl he adopted. So you see we have French blood in us. But René Sel did not work in lumber camps. He cut trees for himself. Jinot, before you go into the forest I want you to travel with Amboise to Mi'kma'ki and see Elise, see if she is well, if she has children. We have heard nothing. And I want you to inquire if my cousin Auguste, son of my deceased aunt Noë, is still alive. He was a person always in trouble so he may be dead. Though I have noticed that many people who cause trouble live long lives. If he is alive I want him to come here and stay with us. And take care. The woods and rivers are full of English and Americans fighting. Stay distant if you hear firearms.”

•  •  •

Amboise, who was very strong and heavy-shouldered, and Jinot, waving farewell to a bouquet of girls on the wharf who called his name, went by ship up the coast to Halifax, made a foot journey to the post.

“I do not have a good feeling for Elise,” said Amboise. “I remember Tonny said Mi'kma'ki was a bad place.” In his pocket he had a small wooden turkey he had carved long ago, an object that amused Elise when she was young.

“If she has children,” he said, “I thought maybe they like to play with this.”

“Amboise, that is a good idea. I wish I had brought something—even a pinecone.”

Kuntaw's sister, Aledonia, thin and with many teeth missing, made much of them, pointed out certain people with the patronym Sel, and told them that yes, Auguste still lived. “That one! He is too bad to die!”

But Amboise and Jinot saw the Mi'kmaw village was a hungry sad place, a mix of
wikuoms
and whiteman cabins. The eel weirs were in disrepair and rarely did the men make an effort to put them in order. It was easier to eat bread and pork from the agency than catch eels. Luçon Brassua, Elise's husband, lay drunk in the mud beside their
wikuom,
whose torn bark covering needed repairs. They were sorry for Elise, who cried and said she had lost a baby girl whom she had called Bee after Beatrix.

“I thought married would be like Beatrix and Grandfather Kuntaw, nice, laughing, you know?” She wept women's tears.

While they were in the chopped lands of what once had been Mi'kma'ki they heard stories of Kuntaw's father, Achille the Great Hunter. For some reason these stories made Amboise resentful. “Everything yesterday! Everything good happens long ago! Now—oh now . . .” His eyes narrowed. “Elise, if Brassua is not good to you, you must come with us.” They knew that Brassua was not good to her. Guilty and uneasy, they wanted to get away.

Old Auguste had succumbed to drink. They found him at the
wikuom
of one of his granddaughters, bleary and nodding, sitting outside squinting at whatever happened there. When they told him they were Kuntaw's grandsons he roused a little, huffing out rum breath, gave a bitter smile and said Kuntaw had had a fortunate life, unlike him. He spoke in an old man voice, then clamped his mouth shut. They sat together and watched the dozen idle Mi'kmaw men who hung around the post like flies on meat. Amboise was surprised to see tears running down wicked old Auguste's face as he watched them.

“They have nothing to do. When Kuntaw and I were of those years,” he said, “we were always ready for a hunt or go for eels, fish or seals or sturgeon. We made our bows and arrows, we made crooked knives and good canoes, we fashioned the paddles. We had good war games then, not like fighting foreigners with guns. The young men—yes, even I—committed brave deeds and there were feasts and dances such as are no longer performed. But you see what we have become,” he said and he pointed first at the idlers, then at himself. His hand groped beneath his thigh for the flat bottle.

•  •  •

“Elise,” said Amboise. “Come away now.” She threw her few possessions into a turnip sack and outstripped them running for the boat landing. Luçon Brassua was not there to hold her back.

“He is drunk with his friends,” said Elise. “We go now, now!”

“Wait. We must get Auguste. Kuntaw wants him to live in the Penobscot house.” The old man got up, trembling when he heard he was to come with them. He looked around. The idlers stood near the post doorway, a dog scratched its fleas. He sat down again, smiling slyly.

“No. Too late. You go. I stay.”

No matter what they said he refused. “Someone must stay. I will be the One Who Remains.”

He was always good at naming.

•  •  •

Amboise used the money Kuntaw had given them to buy passages on a vessel going from Halifax to Boston, then persuaded the owner of a fishing boat bound for Georges Bank to detour and drop them at Penobscot Bay. Elise said very little to them on the return journey, but when the boat sailed into their home port she sucked in a great deep breath and exhaled. Beatrix, who saw them coming up from the wharf, threw the front door open. She looked at Elise, saw the fading bruises and brimming eyes and understood everything. She stretched out her arms.