“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.”
“What makes you think I care?” he said. “Come here and I’ll tell you about lobster pots.”
69. boreal forest
Jeanne Sel and Felix Mius grew up together, knew each other’s childhood thoughts and feelings; as they grew older these diverged as a mountain rill bifurcates in rocky terrain and becomes two streams. Felix had quiet ways that disguised an agile and explorative mind. His complexion was rough and he was inclined to fall in love with unattainable older women who raised their eyebrows at him but never their skirts. Jeanne’s close-set eyes and thin lips convinced her she was above the fray of love entanglements.
Jeanne remembered her mother on a ferry, leaning over the rail waving good-bye, good-bye, until the vessel melted away in heavy fog where a few hours later it collided with a coal barge; both went down in deep water. Her father, Paul Sel, told her that Mama could not come back, but his own weeping indicated something very terrible.
“I don’t know, Mary May,” Paul said to his sister, whose son, Felix, was a year younger than Jeanne. “I don’t know what to do. She won’t talk or play with other kids — except here with Felix.”
“That’s a good sign,” Mary May said. “Let them be together. Little kids sort things out. I think better Jeanne come stay with us. And I think a picnic trip. Help her get over losing Marta. Help you, Paul.”
“Nothing can help me,” said her brother, but he didn’t object when Mary May called, “Felix and Jeanne, come on. We are going on a picnic.”
They headed away from the reservation crowded together like buns in a package in Paul’s decrepit grey truck. The interior smelled of mold and a dog that Paul had once owned.
“Where we goin, where we goin?” Felix asked over and over, excited.
“Where we goin?” said Jeanne.
“You’ll see when we get there.”
“There” was Kejimkujik Provincial Park. Mary May said to them, “Long time ago this was Mi’kmaw place.” Jeanne and Felix, after hours of riding until their legs became paralyzed sticks, jumped and ran under the huge old-growth hemlock. There was a garden of boulders under lustrous blue-green trees.
Felix discovered that the undersides of the branches shone silver, in the deep shade grew maidenhair fern, graceful ebon-black curved branches and tiny mitten-like leaves. The hemlocks sighed very gently. He engaged with Tsuga canadensis.
“I wish Mama could see this,” Jeanne said, admiring the gleaming stems of the fern, smelling the musky odor. At the edge of the water she found a forest of mathematically perfect ebony spleenwort and looking around encountered myriad tones of green: citrine, viridian, emerald. It was a fine and satisfying day that was never forgotten by the children.
• • •
In high school teachers talked of careers. Jeanne learned that botanists lived in a world of stem and leaf. There would not be an oil or gas job with Encana or Mime’j Seafoods for Felix Mius; he intended to get into forestry school — everyone knew about Jackson Mius, who had logged with a horse team in Maine back in the sixties, then went to the University of Maine and got a degree and a job with the state in forest research. He had done it, so would Felix. The cousins set the goal of getting into university. They had to complete two years at the community college before they could apply. The odds were against them.
After high school graduation they moved to Aunt Alice Sel’s house in Dartmouth, her child-care center and home for an occasional young Mi’kmaw trying out urban life. They enrolled at the community college and worked part-time jobs.
The lower level of Alice’s kitchen traffic was always congested with toddlers; the upper level with friends and relatives, chaos exemplified. Jeanne thought it a madhouse until one September Saturday she came downstairs and found the kitchen empty, the house silent. A syrup of honey-colored autumnal sunlight fell on the scrubbed table and old mismatched chairs. Alice’s kitchen was beautiful.
• • •
“Those two, they’re sure tryin hard at their schoolwork. I guess it’s good they got each other. Like brother and sister,” remarked Alice to her sister, Mary May. They sat at the crowded kitchen table with teapot and cups.
“Well, I just hope it don’t get — funny. That kind of worries me, them bein so close. You know, cousins and all. I pray they don’t do nothin wrong.”
Alice gave her sister her dry look. “Quit worryin. He just watches out for her. That Jeanne, I think, she won’t never get romantic about nobody. And Felix takes girls to the movies if he can afford it. But not Jeanne — she wants to see a movie she goes by herself.”
• • •
The cousins struggled with the college course work: they couldn’t get into university without the credits. Neither spoke Mi’kmaw fluently; English had come first, but some early mornings they sat together at the computer to learn Mi’kmaw words, following the Listuguj speakers’ pronunciations. Then Alice would come in and ruin everything by criticizing their efforts.
• • •
On Saturdays, Jeanne hauled laundry to the Bucket O’ Suds. While the clothes churned she flipped through a stack of ragged magazines and old newsletters that featured profiles of people in the province. One interested her; she tore the page out.
That evening, drinking tea after supper to wash down the store-bought cake, she showed it to the others. “It’s an article on this woman, Sapatisia Sel. Suppose she is a relation?”
Felix said, “If every Sel relative gave us a dollar we’d be rich. What about this Sapatisia Sel?”
“It says she collects medicine plants and trees.”
“Another one?” said Felix scornfully. Medicine plants! Over the years a stream of white people had come to “study” Mi’kmaw medicine plants and the older women on the reservation were used to being quizzed about traditional cures.
“I know Sapatisia,” said Alice, reaching for the page. She read a minute, studied the picture. “That’s Egga’s daughter. She’s a relative from the States. She come here once. This says she knows about old-time medicine plants.”
“And she plants trees.”
• • •
Felix hated the required remedial English grammar and composition that seemed unnecessary to a future study of forestry. It was not that he disliked learning — he and Jeanne stuffed their brains. The relentless reading and studying wore them down and they decided to make a rare free evening and hear Dr. Alfred Onehube from Manitoba lecture on the state of the world’s forests.
Onehube disclosed himself as a militant ecoconservationist. Several people connected with forest production and timber sales got up and walked out. But Felix and Jeanne sat on the edges of their seats drinking in the named sins against the forest.
“Budworm, for example,” said Dr. Onehube at AK-47 velocity. “Natural cycles of budworm infestation, roughly every thirty or forty years. When the insects outstripped their food supply they disappeared. Dead trees fell, waited for the fire. Fire came, new trees grew from the ashes. But after the Second World War we wanted all the trees we could get for wood pulp and paper. Everybody had new chemical weapons, and war surplus planes. So when spruce budworm invaded the boreal forests in the 1940s, the Forest Service sprayed DDT. Our Miramichi River, home of the greatest Atlantic salmon run on earth, turned into a death river as the DDT killed all the tiny water animalcules that fed the salmon.”