Noë nodded. If Zoë stayed it was all right, and if Achille came back from his hunt in ten days or so, they could manage for a winter. It was the idea of abandonment she dreaded. All her life she had been afraid of being left alone while everyone around her vanished. She filled a bowl with stew for Zoë and set it before her. When the bowl was empty Noë filled it again.
“They didn’t want to go, thinking what happened before. Rouge Emil’s father comes to stay with us so that don’t happen another time. He comes soon, I think. Other people see those brothers leave, think just you and me here.”
“They think just me — they see you go with them.”
Zoë shrugged and made a face. “Maybe. Maybe they see me come back, too.”
A little later Rouge Emil’s father — Cache Emil — appeared in the doorway. He threw something large and heavy wrapped in bloodstained canvas on the floor.
“Moinawa,” he said. “Bear meat.” He looked at the stew pot. Noë filled a bowl for him.
“Good.” He told them he had shot the bear hunting with Achille a few weeks earlier. Not only bear meat, but he had brought his blankets and his flintlock. He would sleep outside in the small wikuom that Theotiste and Elphège shared.
“I am here. No male persons will bother you.”
• • •
Three years before the brothers had made a trip to La Hève to the lumber mill to ask if there was any work for them, but a man with a patch over one eye said the local Indians were sufficient, go away. The cousin, Rouge Emil, was persistent. He stood beside a stack of cut planks.
“You got work for good axmen cut pine?” Everyone knew that the mast pines of Mi’kmaw lands were superior to the trees that grew along the St. Laurent, which were coarse in grain and more liable to snap. Eyepatch nodded. “It’s summer, but there’s always work for good choppers. Let’s see what you can do.” He fetched four axes from the mill, then filled his pipe. “See two spruce in front of the rocks? Take them down.” His tone was contemptuous, for he knew Indians were lazy and stupid. Eyepatch’s pipe was not finished before the spruce lay side by side on the ground, topped and limbed. He reversed his opinion of Indians.
He nodded and they cut mast pines on the St. John River despite the summer heat and biting insects. In a few days they were crusted with black pitch, a kind of woodcutters’ armor. When they first had arrived the pine candles had been in bloom, each great tree pulsing out tremendous volumes of pollen until the sky was overcast and the choppers and even ships at sea wondered at the brilliant yellow showering down.
• • •
That summer while they were swinging distant axes, Noë, barely fourteen winters old, gathering wild onions, was raped by two boys from the French settlement, one of whom she recognized as Dieudonné, a fisherman’s son who returned again and again for his pleasure. She could not evade him. He seemed to live in the underbrush near their wikuom. He was only a boy, a fisherman boy, with a red chapped face and eyes flicking as though he feared the priest was near. He was strong from hauling nets and pulling oars. At first she loathed him, but after some weeks he became affectionate and, although he was two years younger, she began to return the sentiment. He said he wished they could marry and would press the matter on his parents when he was older.
When the brothers came back from the St. John her condition was obvious. No one mentioned it. But the next day Elphège looked at her in silence for a long time. He waited. And she told him how it was. By then Dieudonné was weeks dead along with his father and uncle and several other Acadians, for their fishing boats all had been caught in a concentrated snarl of storm that strewed the shore with broken boats. She thought of Dieudonné in the grip of the relentless sea as she had been in his grip. The result of the dead boy’s life had been Auguste.
In their childhood days in the forest, Noë thought, none of them had imagined they would come here to the ocean’s edge, far from René and Mari’s house. But they were here. She had not thought to have a child, but now there was Auguste. All this had happened because Theotiste and Elphège had brought them to Mi’kma’ki, the land of memory.
25. sense of property
Their great change had come about because of Renardette, who caused their lives to become as different as those of strange people. For years at René’s old place, heavy drinkers from Wobik lurched out of the trees calling for Renardette. One, “Démon” Meillard, appeared often and Renardette went into the woods with him. The day after René died, Renardette rushed to Wobik, to Meillard, a widower whose taste for spirits matched hers.
Achille, Noë and Zoë stayed on alone at the house in the ever-larger clearing. Achille trapped fish and hunted, cut firewood as had René, and made hardwood potash. He sold this stuff to the traveling merchant who came with his wagon every month or two in the warm season. Noë and Zoë gathered berries, cowslips, fiddlehead ferns in spring, nuts, calamus root, mayapples, sassafras and many barks for the medicines they had learned from their mother. They made maple syrup. They had a garden but it was small and weed-choked for they had adopted Mari’s distaste for cultivation. A few pumpkins sometimes matured in the fireweed. Noë made rather awkward willow baskets, which Achille sold to the potash man. Zoë milked and tended the cow. There had been two cows but one died the month after René was killed, perhaps, thought Zoë, out of sympathy so that René’s spirit might be comforted by a familiar cow spirit.
Their lives were marred by unwanted visits from swill-wrecked Renardette and her paramour. It was unclear at first why the couple kept returning to René’s old house, but they came often, lugging demijohns of spirit, which they urged on Achille. Renardette swaggered into the house looking at each spoon, each wooden cup. Often she would examine a pot or a cloth and say, “Well, that’s mine!” Noë would wrest the object from her.
“Nothing in this house is yours. There is nothing here for you.”
“This house is mine,” said Renardette. “René gave it to me. He said, ‘When I am gone, Renardette, you have this house.’ ”
“What lies!” cried Zoë.
“Go away!” said Noë, swishing the broom.
Achille began to think the drunkards wanted René’s house and property and would be pleased to murder all of them to get it. He refused drinks from their jug, which he knew would make him insensible and give them the opportunity to butcher him and his sisters and blame the deaths on bounty killers. He slowly came to the belief that they were the ones who had murdered René.
Tales of the alcoholic couple drifted far east to the ears of Elphège and Theotiste along with the rumors that they planned to kill Achille and the twins and seize the property. They heard of Renardette’s claim that the house belonged to her.
“They are white people and they think they can seize it,” Elphège said to Theotiste.
“They will likely get it.”
Elphège was troubled by the idea of inherited property. Was the house René’s to give? Was it even Trépagny’s? All this was French, French ideas, French ways. English ways, English words, French words. Invaders’ ways.
• • •
The older brothers had lived for some years at Odanak, the Indian village of Abenaki, Mi’kmaq and mixed tribes, fighting for the French and raiding New England settlements for bounty captives. Once warring enemies, they banded together, lamenting the submergence of their ancestral lands under a flood of white settlers.