• • •
Etienne’s son Molti Sel, his cousin Alik Sel and the two Mius brothers, Noel and John, worked from Oregon to the Queen Charlotte Islands. Nimble and limber as they were, after Blony’s death no one wanted to climb and rig tall trees. Molti stayed a choker setter for five or six seasons, his hands as hardened as lobster claws from gripping and heaving heavy chains; he was used to chains, didn’t mind the weight. He signed on to work with Flannel Logging, a small gyppo outfit owned by Robbie and Glen Flannel, but only a few miles from a bobtail town offering some of the pleasures of life.
It was a bad crew. In his second week of work the three other choker setters stole the gyppo’s chains and left in the night. Robbie Flannel drove his ailing log truck down the mountain to set the sheriff on the trail and to buy new chains. When he came back he had no chains but cheaper coils of cable and used haywire and two old drunks from the bar, who were the replacement choker setters.
“Cable lighter to use, easier to git it under a log,” said Glen. “Use the haywire to move the cable. Forget about chains. Molti, you show these two stiffs what to do. They ain’t no good but they’re alive and anybody can be a choker setter, right?” Molti knew he should have walked off the job right then, but he didn’t. They attached the haywire to the skyline cable and the donkey pulled it uphill. Someone released the haywire and one of the downslope stiffs fumbled with the excess. Molti fastened the haywire to another cable that had to be moved. He gave the signal to the donkey tender to pull and then saw the stiff was not clear, but standing in the cable’s bight — that had been Pollo’s mistake. He shouted to the drunk, who started a clumsy run, but the tangled haywire was still being drawn and it snarled, kinked, went tight and snapped. It lashed Molti’s midriff with terrible force. The frightened stiffs helped him down to the bunkhouse, and there he lay with blood filling his mouth until ten o’clock that night, when he died. It was only Lobert Sel, Édouard-Outger’s oldest son, trained to be cautious, who returned from the West Coast to his family unscarred, unbroken, happy to be reunited with his brother Jim, happy to find a wife, to take up the business of fatherhood and life.
• • •
Men could die in distant lands, as Aaron’s oldest son, John, died across the ocean in trench mud in 1917 watching the slanting rain become the final mist. Men could die at home, as on the December morning in the same year when two ships, one packed with munitions and explosives for the war in Europe, collided in the Halifax narrows causing the world’s largest explosion and a tsunami that wiped out the Mi’kmaw village in Tufts Cove. Among the mangled and drowned were Lobert’s brother, Jim Sel, and four of his children.
“We go Shubenacadie,” said grieving and frightened Lobert to his pregnant wife, Nanty, and they moved inland, to the reserve, though he never thought of the reserve as a safe haven. There they found a measure of balance although they were poor. Lobert worked for a timber company in exchange for pay in logs and used them to build a three-room house. When his son Edgar-Jim Sel — called Egga — was born he began to worry as his own father, Édouard-Outger, had worried over him. He did not want his sons to work in the forests nor his daughters to clean house for whitemen women. He saw no danger in the residential school, though he did not like the man who came to the house with paper and pen and said if he did not sign the consent forms his children would be taken by the welfare people. He signed. So, when Egga was ten years old he and his best friend, Johnny Stick, entered the residential school where Mi’kmaw children, their culture and language suffered a forty-year implosion as deadly as any munitions ship.
“You will get education, Egga. To read and write is important. You will get better work than cut trees,” his father told him. And Lobert and Nanty visited him at the school every month, lugging a basket of home delicacies — smoked eel, Nanty’s special bread, sardines and yellow cake. The priests and nuns smiled and spoke pleasantly. Lobert and Nanty were proud their son was getting an education and because of that pride and because of the false sweetness of the black-clad religious, Egga could not tell them that he never attended a class because the priests worked him all day long shoveling coal in the school’s furnace room, where he learned to read only pressure gauges; that he was called a “lazy savage,” frequently kicked. After a hard beating by fat Father O’Hoopy that left him deaf in one ear and with a broken arm that healed badly, Egga knew he was a slave, not a student. Johnny Stick worked beside him. Johnny’s people never came to visit as they lived far away and Johnny got rough treatment from the priests. He was often called to Father Blink’s room. Every boy knew what that meant as Father Blink (a hairy ill-smelling man whose black dress captured and held every stink his body produced) had perverse needs and those who did not satisfy them could expect beating, hunger, isolation, insults, hair pulling, doors slammed on fingers, arms twisted until they hung loose and unusable, kicks and public humiliation, being shaken awake in the night, screams directly in the face, being burned with sulfur-head matches — tortures not just for days, not just for weeks or months, but for years. Father Blink prided himself that he never forgot a boy who refused him.
Egga made a plan. He wanted to ask Johnny to come with him but never found the private moment to ask and he slipped away from the school on his own. Lobert and Nanty were awakened by thunderous pounding on their door.
“Where is he? Your stinking bad son ran off. We know he’s here. You are in serious trouble for this!” They turned the log house upside down looking for Egga and came back at odd times for many months before giving up. Lobert and Nanty were miserable, and now began to hear certain stories about the school; they had failed to protect their son from harm. They were not the only bereft parents. Many, when bad news came that their child had died “after a long illness,” accepted the lie. Not knowing what had happened to Egga, Nanty fell into a kind of prolonged sadness that took her to the grave, leaving Lobert with the blackest thoughts. For him the evils of the residential school and lack of government oversight permanently stained any English-Canadian claim to decency. It was all words. Yet some hopeful spark still burned and after the war he married Kate Googoo. No one ever knew what Lobert had done, but when Paul, Alice and Mary May went to the resi school they suffered scorn and name-calling but were never beaten.
• • •
Runaway Egga, the direct descendant of Charles Duquet and René Sel, half-starved and ragged, walked by night and slept by day. The only place he had in mind was south. He did not know where he was going except away from Canada; attracted to watercraft he stowed aboard a fishing boat headed for Rockland, Maine, slipped off the boat in darkness and began to walk again. He followed the shoreline for many weeks, begging food or offering to work at farms he passed, slowly made his way to Barnstable and because he smelled frying fish from the galley begged a ride on a fishing boat headed to Martha’s Vineyard. The fishermen gave him a hot chunk of scrod and he was theirs forever.