Barkskins (63 page)

•  •  •

Several weeks after the mass funeral a letter of condolence reached them in Boston from Armenius Breitsprecher with the postscript that if James and Cyrus needed aid he and Dieter would be pleased to help in any way. Lavinia was inclined to think it presumptuous, but James took it in good heart and said Duke & Sons were in no position to offend other timber companies. “We cannot tell what the future will bring. In fact, other timbermen are beginning to buy parcels of Michigan pinelands. Many of them are from Maine. Now, Lavinia, I think it is finally time to shift all our operations west,” he said, dipping a crust in his cocoa.

“Is there any decent society in Detroit? Or is it still a captive of the wilderness?”

“Oh, Detroit is very well, it is not Boston but it has a growing population and is convenient for our current business. We have a good solid establishment there and the lakes provide transport, though they are difficult and dangerous waters, quite as perilous as the oceans, yet not saline—one drowns more quickly they say. But as for society—there is not much of that. It is, as you say, yet a captive of the wilderness.”

“Papa, have we a great deal of money?”

“The truth is that indeed we do have a great deal of money despite the timberland purchases of recent years. Why do you ask? Is there some great expense you contemplate?”

“Yes. I would wish for this house”—she waved her arm over her head in a compassing sweep—“to be replicated in Detroit to the last roof slate. Perhaps it would be the first mansion in Detroit. Would it not be soothingly familiar if we had our old rooms? I can make lists of the linens and Mrs. Trame may enumerate the kitchen goods, the plates and silver. We can order those.”

James felt a frisson of fear—it would take many thousands to replicate Sedley's Boston house. But he could afford the expense, and what better way to use the money now coming in from the Michigan pines? And there were the legacies from Edward and Freegrace, even from Lennart. He did not hesitate. “Yes. We can do this. I will contact an architect. We might even have a few embellishments added, as bathing tubs. Bigger stables and new equipages. A chapel dedicated to your mother. But I put my foot down on one thing—that monstrous mahogany hall stand will not come to Detroit.”

“We must have something where people can hang their hats and put their umbrellas.”

“We will get another, something elegant and simple rather than carved elks and hunting horns.” For a week they talked of this new house. Mrs. Trame entered the sport with an eager list of improvements—a bigger pantry, a butler's room for cleaning silver, a larger staff that included two housemaids, a wine decanting room with a private staircase to the cellar, piped-in water instead of a kitchen cistern.

But old Will Thing would have none of it. “No Detroit for me. I was born in Boston, I will stay in Boston. I worked all my life for your father and you right in this stable and here I will stay.”

“But as soon as may be we intend to sell it all,” said James. “You would have a new family in residence. Suppose you do not like them?”

“It is not my place to like or dislike, I shall get along,” said the old fellow and there the conversation ended. James was disappointed and still hoped to prevail. Perhaps Will did not realize the horses were going to Detroit.

Planning the new house became a postprandial exercise for Lavinia. After dinner a stack of paper, sharp pencils and samples of wallpaper littered the mahogany. James had years before chosen a hilltop site in Detroit with a sweeping view south to Lake Saint Clair, that extra lake too small to be Great. He made a sketch for his daughter, outlining the back and sides of the lot as an encircling arm of forest opened to frame the bluest lake and distant smudgy Ontario.

“This house will eclipse Black Swan,” said Lavinia.

“Oh, we will have no black swans,” said James. “In any case let us leave the water feature to the landscape designer, whom we must still discover. We might send to England, where these fellows abound. This country is too young to have acquired such glossy professions. It will take several years to construct this house as we wish, so we must put up with something simpler now. The company houses I had built two years past will do.” He felt his headache creeping in, a tiny pain in his neck that would, he knew, grow into a throbbing agony. He resolved to find another doctor who might help him.

•  •  •

But if this was the amusement of evenings, for Lavinia the daytimes were packed with study and reading of newspapers and government bulletins that came in the mail coach, writing letters and quizzing visitors for news of new inventions and technical advances. Most of the news concerned the exploratory claims of various would-be railroad promoters; short local lines were springing up all over the eastern cities like weeds after rain and there was no doubt that a transcontinental railroad would be built sooner or later but the fights over the central-northern route or the southern route were ferocious. Both James and Lavinia were in favor of a northern route. “It will be another twenty years before they lay the first rail,” said James. His thoughts were on another invention. “Have you read anything of the telegraph experiments? No? They say the electric telegraph will allow people to send messages over great distances as long as there is a copper wire to carry the impulses. Imagine. If the process comes to pass and if the wire comes to Detroit I can send an immediate message to someone in Boston, a message that can be read within minutes. But so far it is only on trial in England.”

Lavinia was charmed by the idea of words traveling along coppery wires like ducks swimming across a river inlet. It seemed close to a fictional tale. James lit his cigar and puffed, immediately put it out as it urged the headache to reappear, then said, “What do you think of a rotunda with a stained-glass ceiling for the entrance?” But his heart wasn't in rotunda discussions. A new doctor, a neurologist, was coming at eight with a curative contraption.

•  •  •

James, wearing Putnam's Head Electrode on his cranium and hoping static electricity would finally overcome his headaches, was overwhelmed with work; the design of the new house caught only fitfully at his imagination. With the loss of Lennart the work of handling jobbers, the new-hired landlookers and scalers, their lumber volume reports, the lumber camps and their expected yield, the actual yield, their sawmills and the requests for new equipment as well as technological developments in milling, commissioning shipyards to build lumber barges to deliver the milled lumber to brokers in Albany all fell on him. Nor could Cyrus do Lennart's work as he was busy with the complex order department. He personally knew every naval buyer, every lumber dealer. No, Cyrus could not take on Lennart's work and no one could replace that head full of company history and lumber knowledge. But someone could try.

“Lavinia,” he called, “will you come here a moment?” He explained that someone had to handle the details of the current production work. They could hire an outsider, and likely would in time, but immediate attention was vital. If she could temporarily take on some of Lennart's work—well, not the exploration, but the day-to-day affairs. He knew it would be very difficult for her—she was only a woman and there would be resistance to her from every logging contractor. Duke & Sons had two jobbers at work in Michigan now, both more than a day's ride from Detroit. Five more applying for winter work had to be interviewed. Lennart had been able to saunter into a camp, eat pork and beans, josh with the men, discover how the cut was going. But James would not ask Lavinia to go to the individual camps. Instead he would request the jobbers to come to Detroit and make a report to her.

“Why should I not go?” she said.

“Because you are a girl—a woman. It isn't done. It is impossible.”

“Papa, it is not impossible. It is not customary, perhaps, but I will make it so. I insist. If I do not know the jobbers and see how the camps operate there is no way I can judge their worth—or the cut. You and Lennart told me I am doing well learning the business. This is a necessary step. If I could I would hire on to cut trees, the better to know the work. I will visit the camps starting as soon as we can get ourselves removed to Detroit.”

“Lavinia, this is only temporary. I am searching for a permanent replacement for Lennart.”

It was time to go. Sixteen wagons of household goods and linens had been crated and shipped. Lavinia leaned far out of the coach looking at her childhood home. I go into a new life, she thought. I will succeed.

•  •  •

In Detroit, Cyrus and his wife, Clara, welcomed them with a heavy pork and potatoes family dinner. Clara's pride was the elaborate dining room chandelier with a thousand crystal prisms. James ate little. He had come down with intermittent fever on the journey and after the roast pork dinner took to his bed for five days. Clara and Lavinia instinctively disliked each other. Clara, from an important Boston family—Judge Spottiswood was her father—was the Ideal Woman with a simpering way, averted gaze and subservient fealty to Cyrus, who sprawled about in a lordly manner. She was known for her collection of silk scarves and shawls. The children were automatons, chirping “yes, Mama,” “yes, Papa,” curtsying and very quiet. After dinner the company had to go to the music room and endure an hour on narrow chairs while Clara played the parlor organ and entertained them with mournful songs of lost dear ones.

•  •  •

Duke & Sons' three company houses in Detroit were a great step down from the Black Swan estate. Cyrus and his family had the center house with two wind-whipped rosebushes in the front yard: they called it Rose Cottage. James, with a manservant and cook, settled in the one to the east. Lavinia had the west house, which she thought extremely rustic, but the rooms on the second floor had a view of the lake and its marine traffic. “I shall learn every ship,” she said. “I shall get a spyglass and study them.”

On the ground floor there were servants' rooms, kitchen, dining room and parlor. The Boston house maid, Ruby Smythe, rather sniffy about the situation, had one room and Mrs. Trame settled into the other and her new kitchen with a bare minimum of cookery equipment. She had no complaints with the great cast-iron stove, its hot water reservoir and the brimming woodbox filled every morning by Robert Kneebone, an all-purpose Duke employee. The plan was to live very simply for several years until the new mansion was ready. It was only the promise of the great new house that kept the snobbish maid in service. James had found a New York architect, Lyford L. Lundy, who studied Black Swan until he knew every feature to be replicated in the Detroit house. He had ideas for improvements and set them out in letters that arrived daily and irked James.

“We must get the business established here,” said James, “and let Mr. Lundy and his assistants deal with the new house. I have given him all the suggestions we discussed, which he is to work into the design. Let him do it. He has carte blanche with the money and as much fine Michigan pine from our Arrow Mill as he can use.” As soon as he thought of the mill James decided a tour would instruct Lavinia.

“Tomorrow I'll take you to our sawmills. You must understand every part of the business, and the mills are at the heart of it. Arrow Mill, the closest, is not as I would wish—we have ordered new saws and equipment.”

•  •  •

To Lavinia the mill seemed a wandering, ramshackle affair spread over acres of yard with narrow passages between stacks of drying lumber. The mill was on a good stream and the dammed pond produced enough power to run an overshot wheel and two heavy up-and-down saws in the same frame. But the place was silent when they arrived, and a boy came out and said his father was picking up a replacement saw from a shipper near the wharf. “The old one bust out most the teeth.”

“Then let us go on and look at the other mill,” said James. The Push Mill, called after its foreman, Joe Bouchard, sawyer and millwright, better known as Joe Push, lay a mile upstream. When Lavinia stepped through the doorway into the roar Push shut off the saws—a single muley saw and a two-blade gang. He came bustling up to James, looking at Lavinia from the corner of his eye. “Mr. Duke, I never know you was comin.”

“That's how it is, Joe—surprises now and then. I'm taking my daughter around to see the parts of our operation. Go ahead, turn 'em back on—she wants to become acquainted with milling. She has a position in the company.”

The millman threw the lever and with a wet clatter water dumped onto the wheel outside and the muley saw began to gnaw slowly through the log with a steely nasal sound. A rain of sawdust fell below, the air thickened with the smell of pine, earth and hot metal. Lavinia saw how the log carriage was pulled forward by a cable and at the end of the log another small wheel gigged the carriage back. Two edger men put the fresh-cut boards on top of the log, Joe Push reset for the next cut and the saws began to bite again, removing the bark edges from the passenger planks. Men carried them outside to a stack. The pondman sent another log up the ramp.

“Slow, but she gets it done,” Joe Push said, pointing to the great ziggurats of boards outside, temples of wood boards. They walked about in the noise and dust, watching the men in the millpond harry the logs to the bottom of the ramp. In the yard a dozen men were buck-sawing small and crooked logs into firewood chunks, stacking them in drying sheds.

“A nice bit of extra income from waste wood,” said James. He pointed at a mountainous stack, said, “Lavinia, note the bottom front crosspiece. It ensures the pile slopes and allows rain and snow to run off. There's an art to building a proper pile.”

“How long does it dry?”

The stacker spoke up. “For this here pine? Say a year for your one-inch boards, better two-three years or more for thick stuff.”