Then Aaron spoke of the couple in the ruined village wikuom, the starving people, told what he had found in those wikuoms. “Those ones in the only unbroken wikuom are named Louis and Sarah Paul.”
“How old are they?” asked Etienne.
“Old, I think,” said Aaron.
Peter half-stood. “Old! They are not old. Louis is younger than me — a little. I knew that man once. He is a good man for weirs, none so careful as he. We used to call him Eel Man. And a good fisherman. I take him on my boat if he comes here. Very strong, knows the shoals and currents. He cannot be more than thirty winters. We must go there and get them, bring them here. Tomorrow.”
Skerry Hallagher, Elise Sel’s son who had gone to Dartmouth College for half a year, had come to Kuntaw’s band much as Aaron. They were close in age, but where Aaron was muscular and hard-handed, Skerry was thin and intense, rarely said anything as he felt very much the outsider and was afraid of old Kuntaw, who told him he could never be a real Mi’kmaw man until he killed a moose. He did not think there was much mackerel oil in him. Now Skerry held out a dirty, creased envelope. “I did not say this before but my mother, Elise Hallagher, wishes to come in summer for a visit. Since my father died she is alone. She wishes to bring a young woman, Catherine Flute, a full-blood Mi’kmaw girl got brought to Boston by her parents when she was small. The parents are now dead with alcohol sickness and the girl is unhappy. My mother asks if we will take her here. She is fourteen or thereabouts. She says there are other lost Mi’kmaw girls in Boston. We could welcome them here?”
“Yes,” said Etienne in the voice of a hot-blooded moose. “Tell your mother to bring all the girls she can find. I will personally marry them all.”
• • •
Two days later Aaron, Etienne, Peter and Alik went back to the path west of Sydney to find the starving Mi’kmaw couple Aaron had seen and bring them to K’taqmkuk.
“I am sure this is the place where Louis and Sarah Paul had that wikuom,” said Aaron to the others as they stood on the trail staring at five whitemen working with two oxen and a log puller, a dozen more heaping slash into a burning pile. There was no sign of any wikuoms, but at the back of the clearing a tiny wisp of smoke caught Etienne’s eye. “There?” he said, and they walked over to the flat grey circles of ash. The wikuoms had been burned. They saw nothing of Louis and Sarah Paul.
“Ho!” shouted one of the whitemen. “Git out of there. Go on! Git goin!” He took up his shotgun, which had been leaning against a log, half-aimed it and pulled the trigger. A pellet went past Alik’s ear with a sound like a hummingbird.
“We go,” said Etienne. “We go!” This last he shouted angrily and the same whiteman did not like his tone and shot again.
“Eh!” said Etienne, hit in the back by a piece of shot.
“Those men,” said Etienne later as Aaron pried the pellet out of his shoulder, “I seen them afore. They not settlers. They come and take any land they can get, clear it, burn it, however they can rid of trees and sell it. Some settler not want spend his life choppin trees buys it. It’s a way whitemen make money. Take a lot of Kuntaw’s oil to make them change.” They walked on toward Sydney.
“And do Mi’kmaq not need money now?” asked Aaron. “How do you get your money?”
“Cooperin,” said Etienne. “Didn’t have time to show you yet but we make barrels. Whitemen buy from us. We got a workshop, forge, oak planks, steamer, plane, everything to make barrels, big ones, little ones, kegs, casks and tubs. We make the best barrels in Canada. Julian Cooko used to work in a cooper shop in Halifax, showed us how to make barrels, washtubs, all them things. He comes to live with us.”
• • •
Elise Hallagher, widowed and aging, her hair white and stormy, arrived with two girls, Catherine Flute and Marie Antoinette Nevin. Skerry embraced his mother and it seemed to Aaron that his cousin clung to his mother rather childishly. He would never have survived Bosun Crumble. He smiled at Elise and when she smiled back he saw her likeness to Jinot. He looked at the two girls. Marie Antoinette had a cough and was sometimes distant in her manner but more often she laughed. She took refuge in laughter and silliness when Elise scolded her for her lazy ways. Marie Antoinette told Catherine Flute that she wanted to go back to Boston. She did not know any plants, failed to learn how to make baskets or sew, burned anything she tried to cook. She was good company, but that was it. The younger men liked her, and Alik Sel, Peter’s son, spent as much time as he could following her around. Aaron saw his youthful self in her behavior.
At the end of the summer before the autumn storms began, Peter, Alik, Aaron, Etienne and his three boys, Molti, James and Joe-Paul, loaded Peter’s boat with barrels to sell in Boston, where they got better prices. They sailed at dawn. Catherine Flute, who shared a wikuom with Elise and Marie Antoinette, said Marie had got up very early. Elise knew at once that the girl had gone on the boat, back to Boston, where she would surely take to drink and have a bad end.
• • •
The men came up the path loaded with bundles and boxes, all the supplies for winter, sacks of potatoes, candles and matches, coffee beans for Elise and Aaron, great tins of tea for the others, needles and bolts of wool and cotton. And there was Marie Antoinette Nevin, red-cheeked and laughing. And coughing.
She said, “I am here.” She looked at Alik. Catherine Flute, who was shy and plain, a very quiet girl who had been starved and ill-treated by her parents, sat beside Joe-Paul. They married before the first snow. Even Elise found herself courted and she agreed to marry Julian Cooko, the man who had started the men making barrels years earlier, before he had been hurt in a woods accident. Now he had long spells of confusion and was no good for the barrel shop but sat by the fire and made eel traps.
• • •
Kuntaw died on the most beautiful day in a thousand years. The October air was sweet and every faint breath a pleasure. Wind stirred and he said, “Our wind reaching me here.” A small cloud formed in the west. “Our small cloud coming to me.” The hours passed and the small cloud formed a dark wall and approached. A drop fell, another, many, and Kuntaw said, “Our rain wetting my face.” His people came near him, drawing him into their eyes, and he said, “Now… what…” The sun came out, the brilliant world sparkled, susurration, liquid flow, stems of striped grass what was it what was it the limber swish of a released branch. What, now what. Kuntaw opened his mouth, said nothing, and let the sunlight enter him.
61. talking stick
Over the next generation through isolated years of sickness and watchfulness Kuntaw’s people tightened as a clan although they took in six or seven outsiders. Everyone now had English names, for the old Mi’kmaw names were fading out. Aaron married Lisal Jacko, the only young woman among the newcomers. As a group they avoided whitemen, but still fisher-hunter-missionaries found them. Some of these whitemen only pretended to be hunters; they were scouts on the lookout for timber and ores, anything of economic value. They asked casually to be taken where the big trees grew.
“They think we don’t know they want to cut them trees down.”
Their old continuing problem was that Mi’kmaw women rarely came to them. To find wives the Sels had to return to their remnant people at Shubenacadie, thin and listless people who sat staring at the ground.