There were other homeless boys hanging around the docks where the fishing boats came in, running errands for the fishermen and helping unload fish. None of them were Mi’kmaw. Egga got his first real boat job learning to haul trap for weakfish and whiting. Captain Giff Peake, himself half Wampanoag, taught Egga how to read a few words, but watching the boy try to write was, he said, like watching a dog try to play the piano. Still, Egga was an eager worker, cheerful, every morning full of hope for a good day as escaped or released prisoners sometimes are.
• • •
Egga grew to adulthood aboard Captain Peake’s boat, and when the old man retired to sit by his daughter’s fire Egga signed on to bigger boats with men who worked the rich cod waters of Georges Bank. He put away his identification as Mi’kmaq and became a hybrid person. In the sweep of his twenty-first year he volunteered for U.S. military service and was turned down as an alien resident, applied for citizenship, met, courted and married Brenda, a Wampanoag girl.
Years later, reunited with his father, Lobert, he said, “What I loved about Bren right at the start was how fast she could count up — she was quick-minded with numbers and she could read right side up and upside down. She was workin for the fish dealers. But I got her away from them. Yes, I did so, everlasting joy.” But their marriage wasn’t easy; Bren had strong ideas and set them forward fearlessly.
Egga, determined to master reading, set himself the task of making his way through the newspapers every day. He subscribed to several Nova Scotia newspapers, including the Amherst Daily, and the Yarmouth Herald, and so he learned something of what he had left behind and over the years he and Bren talked about it. She had never been to Nova Scotia, but she had seen how it went with the Wampanoag. Sometimes Halifax men came down on fishing boats and Egga invited them to supper and asked for news. In this way they learned that between the wars Mi’kmaw workingmen went to Winnipeg to harvest grain, to Maine to pick apples, did whatever they could find. They worked as stevedores, emptied and dumped stinking ballast from ships. Many of them lived in lumber camps, away from the reservation except for occasional quiet visits to wives and children.
“I know what that does to their traditional ways,” said Bren. “When the men go away to work it puts the responsibility for saving the language on the women.” But it seemed that most of the women signed the papers sending their children to the residential schools, trusting they would be taught what they needed to live in the English culture. Few parents knew of the atrocities practiced on their boys and girls by genocidal nuns and priests. The children were never again wholly Mi’kmaw.
• • •
Molti Sel’s grandsons, Blaise and Louis Sel, were loggers with chain saws and heavy machinery; trees were assembly-line products. Every year there were fewer men on the ground — the place of injuries and death; work was safer in the cab of a machine. They spread out, far distant from the reserve. The Mius and Sel brothers preferred tree-length logging setups and some of them worked in Minnesota and Wisconsin, some in Maine, some in British Columbia or Washington and Oregon states. The old bunkhouse camps were gone. They brought up their families in whiteman houses, listened to the radio, ate at the diner, drove to work and only went back to Nova Scotia for St. Anne’s Day.
They knew how their grandfathers had lived. Blaise Sel, one of Molti’s grandsons, a skilled feller-buncher operator, said, “Them old camps? You couldn’t get me in one of them damn rat hovels for no amount a money, way the hell out in the sticks, nothin to do but work and pick your nose.” His brother, Louis, ran the grapple skidder, hooking on to Blaise’s bundles of trees, dragging them to the landing, where they went through the delimber, which stripped the branches. He didn’t wait to see the logs loaded into the slasher and cut into preset lengths, nor did he care to see them loaded and hauled away to the pulp mill, but hurried back to Blaise for a fresh bouquet of stems. It was a job, it put food on his family’s table, paid for his pickup truck, for his and his wife Astrid’s house. Other Sels found jobs in the pulp and paper mills, in the plywood factories, in the cellulose-acetate plants, moving deeper into the world of plastics.
Noel Mius’s youngest son, Chancey Mius, worked for an in-woods chipping company. But he remarked to his wife, Shelly, that chipping at the landing robbed the woods. “If you don’t put those back, soils start to decline. Should do some nutrient replacement work where we took the trees. Think the company will do that? I don’t.”
“That’s a shame,” said his wife vaguely.
As if to balance this neglect, his brother Jackson in Maine ran an old-style two-man horse-logging outfit, slow, hard work, fresh air and enough danger to go around. Jackson cut the trees and his neighbor-partner, Sonny Hull, dragged them to the landing with his big draft horses. They had steady work from property owners who wanted a quiet operation that didn’t rip up the land. But after a winter of almost no snow when Sonny Hull packed up and moved to Montana and the work was scarce, Jackson went back to school and earned a B.S. in forestry, kept going for a master’s in wood management. He had never set foot on the old Mi’kmaw reservation at Shubenacadie through he knew he had people there. It was something he was going to do someday, some St. Anne’s Day. To the Sel and Mius relatives St. Anne’s Day had a value that outsiders could not understand.
“Worth the three-day drive if that’s what it takes,” said Blaise Sel, sitting relaxed and comfortable with second cousins and old aunties, belonging to the Mi’kmaw people if only for a day or two. His wife, Astrid, the granddaughter of Swedish immigrants, never came with him. “It’s a little bit silly,” she said, “you drivin all that way, sayin those Mi’kmaws are your blood kin. It’s not like you to do that.” But it was.
X. sliding into darkness, 1886–2013
63. perfidy
Scrawny Miss Heinrich still sat at the front desk, the office anteroom unchanged since the company’s near collapse decades earlier. She would never forget how everything had fallen wrong — the depression, when construction fell off and lumber prices dropped. Then, just as the timber business was recovering Lawyer Flense disappeared with Annag Duncan and the embezzled funds. It was the logging company’s worst time. What an uproar! Miss Lavinia had called in four special accountants, dark-eyed men with black mustaches.
“Miss Heinrich, could we please have the books for ’seventy-three? Could we please have the Board meeting minutes for the last three years?” Mr. Pye, aged and trembly, was called out of retirement to explain certain actions. The accountants spoke among themselves over dinner plates of steak and boiled potatoes — they strongly suspected that old Mr. Pye might have set the whole scheme going decades earlier and made his own nest comfortable.
When the accountants were finished they met with Dieter and Lavinia.
“Mr. Breitsprecher, Mrs. Breitsprecher, from the beginning Flense had extraordinary powers to acquire properties for Duke Logging. And to sell. There was no contract that limited his actions on the company’s behalf to acquisition. Yet he was an employee, not a partner, nor a stockholder. There was nothing that prohibited him from wrongdoing except moral responsibility.”
“I always believed he was loyal to me personally as well as to the company. I never doubted that. I counted him as a friend and I trusted him. We did business as a gentleman’s agreement. My father operated that way and was never defrauded,” said Lavinia stiffly.