Barkskins (87 page)

Hazelton's advice was simple: “Stay away from Tetrazinni. Don't go looking for trouble.”

•  •  •

Almost two weeks later Sophia found a memo from James Bardawulf on her desk. “Call me.” It was still ungodly hot. She worried about sweat stains on her silk blouse. The air conditioner sent out a tepid waft of mold-scented air. She dialed her brother's number, got his snotty new secretary with her English-accented “May I say who is calling please?”

“Tell him it's his old mistress.”

There was an intake of breath, a lengthy silence, then James Bardawulf's cautious little “Hello?”

“I got your memo,” she said. “What's going on?”

“Sophia! Don't ever say that kind of thing to Miss Greenberry. She believed you!”

“Englishwomen have no sense of humor.” She cut off James Bardawulf's roars and huffs. “Calm down. Why did you want me to call you?”

“To give you some very interesting news. For us, anyway. Hazelton Culross, who takes
The Philadelphia Inquirer,
called me this morning. He said there's a back-page story in today's paper saying that a lawyer named Tetrazinni died in a fight with a burglar over the weekend. The office was wrecked, file cabinets overturned, desk drawers pulled out and the safe wide open. Tetrazinni shot. I don't know yet if there is anything in the Chicago papers. I've sent out for a
Trib.
”

“My God. That's extraordinary. You might even think—” A deep breath. “Have you let the others know?”

“Just you so far. I was going to call them after I talked with you. After all, you are the one who opened the whole can of worms. The primary instigator.”

Sophia let that pass. It was James Bardawulf who had started the wheels turning. “Let poor Conrad know. He was so upset that day.”

Another of James Bardawulf's long silences. Then the little voice again. “Maybe he already knows.”

“James, what do you mean? James Bardawulf!”

“I only mean he might have seen the papers already. What did you think I meant?”

“Not important,” she said. “Talk to you later.”

His last remark floated out of the receiver: “We can proceed with the sale.”

•  •  •

And so, over the centuries Breitsprecher-Duke had risen and fallen like a boat on the tides. Now the tide was out. And International Paper was in. Only boxes of papers and several portraits remained of the old company. And a separate entity called Breitsprecher Seedlings.

T
here was no going back after World War II: women were edging into jobs men had always done. Feminist rhetoric floated in the air. Bren Sel thought it should be this way, and shot a combative look at her husband, Edgar-Jim Sel, called Egga, an unaware man. She believed the new ideas were a release from the bondage of history and tried to explain this to him, but Egga did not see a parallel between feminist emergence from an oppressive past and his own life and renunciation of Mi'kmaw particularity. He had come down to Martha's Vineyard as a runaway boy escaping the residential Indian school at Shubenacadie in Nova Scotia, found work as a fisherman and later found Brenda Hingham.

When he proposed she said yes, and then, “I am marrying an enemy.”

“Enemy? How am I your enemy?”

“Do you not know that the Mi'kmaq came here and fought my people? Before the whitemen?”

“I did not know this. Was it a battle?”

“A battle? It was a war. Mi'kmaw warriors took the whole New England coast. For a little time.”

“And now this Mi'kmaw wins again.” He flashed a guess that likely there had been a little infusion of Mi'kmaw into the Wôpanâak in that long-ago time.

•  •  •

They were an awkward match. “You don't understand,” she said to him often.

“What don't I understand?” he asked.

“If you don't know I can't tell you.”

The central problem, she believed, was Egga's refusal to be Mi'kmaq.

He said, “It made my life very bad, being a Mi'kmaw person. I have put it away.”

“You can't put away what you are. Your parents, your brothers and sisters. And all the generations behind them, your people. You cannot rinse out your blood like a dirty shirt and say it is a—a pineapple! It is you, your heritage, what you came from, it
cannot
be something else. And now it is part of our children and they must know it.” Egga rolled his eyes—this was what came from marrying into the matrilineal Wôpanâak.

Bren wanted to guide their two daughters toward being a new kind of woman—whiteman, Wôpanâak and Mi'kmaw mix of genes, ideas, careers, perceptions of the world. Both girls were strong-minded and smart, both sassy children who gave Egga bizarre thoughts of the residential school with its punishing nuns and priests. If his womenfolk were dropped into such a school the place would be in riot within a day, Bren, Marie and Sapatisia leading the charge, nuns and priests begging mercy. He enjoyed this vision and when one of his rambunctious girls was particularly audacious he was pleased, comparing them to the pitifully fearful Mi'kmaw children at the resi school. He wanted bold children. Very gradually, very slowly he began to talk about his old life, surprised at the sharp interest his children and wife took in his stories. When he told his parents' names—Lobert and Nanty Sel—they wanted to write letters, go to Shubenacadie, to Lobert's log house. They wanted to love these unknown relatives. And perhaps, thought Egga, so did he. Bren's nagging made him wonder what being Mi'kmaq could mean beyond pain and humiliation. Bren herself was enthusiastically Wôpanâak, and again he imagined lustful and ancient Mi'kmaw warriors surging into Wôpanâak villages and women. He laughed.

“What is so funny?” asked Bren.

“If you don't know I can't tell you,” he said.

•  •  •

In Shubenacadie a few years after his wife Nanty died, Egga's father, Lobert Sel, remarried a young widow, Kate Googoo, already pregnant with their first child. The year after Paul was born, Alice Sel arrived, and the last baby, Mary May. Egga, down in Martha's Vineyard, knew nothing about these younger siblings.

•  •  •

Bren insisted on a serious commitment to homework. “I want you girls to go to university. I will make the money to send you.” Although from childhood she had wanted to study linguistics with the vague hope of resurrecting the old native Wôpanâak language (which she did not speak), there had been no money in her family for such schooling. When Sapatisia, her older child, started school Bren got the only job available—night shift at the fish plant, socking almost all of her paycheck into their education account. Her girls would have lives of value.

“They'll never have to work at a fish plant,” she said to Egga. “Or a tourist motel.”

•  •  •

Nothing had prepared either Egga or Bren for the intensity of their first child, Sapatisia, named for Egga's mother's mother. The child fixed obsessively on subjects and people; did everything with intensity—there seemed no middle way for her. If Egga was late coming in from the water she stood at the window watching until she saw him climbing up the gravel path. He came through the door and she clung to his leg like a barnacle.

“She won't be left,” said Bren. “I can't go out of her sight. And she's the same about you if you don't get home on time. I don't know how it will be when she starts school.”

“You know I can't always tell when I'll get back—weather could keep me out—even for days. The fish don't have clocks. And boats don't have telephones.”

“She'd keep watching,” said Bren.

The incident with a baby chicken rattled both parents. Bren had decided to raise a dozen hens for eggs and meat, save on groceries, make a change from fried cod. She ordered twenty chicks by mail and when they came she put the box behind the stove to keep them warm. She showed the little balls of fluff to Sapatisia, who was enchanted. She let her hold one.

“Be careful. It's delicate.”

But Sapatisia loved the warm little peeping creature and in her immoderate affection squeezed it and squeezed, then shrieked when the dead chick hung limp.

“For that you must be punished,” said Bren, and Sapatisia roared with the insult of her first spanking.

“That is how she is,” said Egga. “She can't help it. God save any man she loves. She'll eat him alive and throw the bones out the window.”

Bren's fear of Sapatisia throwing a fit her first day at school dissolved. It was as if the child had steeled herself for it. She did not cry when Bren left her in the little kindergarten chair, nor would she move to a different chair despite the teacher's coaxing. Left alone she was tractable; commanded to do something—anything—she was impossible.

“I don't know what's going on in that little head,” said the teacher.

“Welcome to the knitting circle,” said Bren.

Still, Sapatisia made it through all the grades, occasionally striking off sparks of brilliance. She seemed happiest, thought Egga, when, on a Sunday, they hiked along the shore. She came home carrying handfuls of wilted grasses, water-smooth rocks with flecks of mica.

•  •  •

In her freshman year at college Sapatisia, given to instant love or hate, fastened her affections first on the subject of plants and then on a married ecology professor. The man was flattered; there was an affair; he tried to disengage and Sapatisia appeared at his door gripping a hunting knife. She lunged at the professor, who twisted adroitly and the knife plunged into the wood doorframe. She was muscular and strong but the professor was stronger and, shouting to his wife to call the police, he held Sapatisia down until they arrived. The next day Egga came to the jail to take her home.

“You know you are expelled from school,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I won't ask you why you did this. I know why. You are like I was when I ran away from the resi school.”

“I am
not
like you,” she said. “I am different. And my reasons were different.”

“Oh,” said Egga. “Different from me, different from everybody. But you have to live in this world. Accept some of the rules that keep it in balance. Make an adjustment. Or you will die young.”

“I want to go to Shubenacadie,” she said. “I want to see those Sel people. I want to know who I am.”

Egga and Bren had heard nothing about a professor of ecology or botany, only of Sapatisia's burning interest in the plants and forests of the earth. She seemed to feel personal guilt for eroded slopes and dirty rivers. If she looked up she saw not heaven's blue but apocalyptic clouds in an aircraft-gouged sky.

“She has a female urge to repair the damage humans have done to nature,” said Bren that evening after Sapatisia was up in her old room.

“Yes, and a female urge to destroy men. We are lucky the professor did not press charges.” Silence in the room except for their breathing. Egga sighed and said, “What do you think about letting her go to Nova Scotia?”

“Oh, Egga,
let
her go? She will go there no matter what. I'll talk to her, but brace yourself.”

•  •  •

“You'll have to find work to live on, a scholarship to finish your studies,” Bren told her in a chill voice. This daughter absorbed too much of her energy. “We have Marie to think about, too, you know.”

Sapatisia left the next day on a northbound bus.

•  •  •

Egga and Bren heard nothing for months until a rare letter, postmarked Halifax, Nova Scotia, arrived from their firstborn daughter.

I haven't met Uncle Paul yet or his daughter Jeanne. Aunt Mary May Mius is shy and seems pretty fussy about her son Felix. Felix is nothing to be fussy about! The best one is Aunt Alice. I liked her. It is a pretty big family. Going to Winnipeg next week to study forestry, doing o.k., love, S

And only a few days later an ink-blotched letter arrived for Egga from his father, Lobert Sel.

It means so much to us that our strong young granddaughter Sapatisia visited us. She ask many questions about our people and old Sel stories. Egga it has been many years since you left. Can you or other granddaughter Marie come here one time? I grow old. Wish to see you. That bad school that hurt you is closed and burned up. Come home.

These letters made Egga tearful and he planned a trip to Shubenacadie. He wrote to Lobert that he would come—yes, he and Bren—the next St. Anne's Day. But from Sapatisia they heard little more than occasional cards postmarked from different cities.

•  •  •

How different was their younger daughter, Marie.

“She should have been a boy,” said Egga to Bren, thinking of the time when his greasy little toddler had partially disassembled an electric motor and put it back together enlivened with pink plastic stacking rings from her toy box. Nothing mechanical in the house was safe from Marie's inquiring fingers and she was the easiest person in the world to please at birthdays and holidays with gifts of ship and plane models. She was outspoken and a little brash, but that was a proof to Egga that his younger daughter would not be trodden down. She spent a college summer running a CTL, the cut-to-length wonder tool that felled and delimbed trees in front of itself so the detritus formed a mat for it to move on; it was her hero-machine.

She fell hard for Davey Jones, a bowlegged young lobsterman who wrote poetry, danced reels and strathspeys, played poker and had kept a weather notebook since he was nine. In December of 1978 she married him.

“Yes,” she said, when he proposed, “but I want to keep my job. I like my job.”

“I like mine, too, so no argument.”

After the wedding night the first thing she told her new husband was “There is less soil compaction with the CTL than even a horse team.”