“He should be brought up by Mi’kmaw people,” said the women.
“And am I not a Mi’kmaw person? I will keep him here at the post. He will learn whiteman ways. Mi’kmaw ways not good now.” Too deep in private despair to bother with the child who did well enough on his own, she existed on a narrow ledge of life that was neither Mi’kmaw nor white, going with whichever man nodded at her or gave her food. She grew fat. She slept prodigiously, night and day, difficult to arouse, as though it was too painful to rise from submergence.
“Ah,” said one of the old women, “I remember when she was a girl, she was clever. She made fine quill embroidery.” No one knew what had changed her into the somnolent, distant woman. Some said she was sick with the whiteman whiskey disease, others said it was for love of Kuntaw and shame at his abandonment. They had all heard that Kuntaw was living with a whiteman woman in Maine. He had not come back and no one had gone to talk him back. Some said Malaan had divorced Kuntaw.
They had married as children, soon after Kuntaw, Auguste and Achille had returned from their moose hunt to find ruin. In sorrow Achille had left his lonely and grieving son, a boy so sore in heart he could not accept that he and Malaan were too young for marriage. Elphège had forbidden it, but Kuntaw argued that he had killed his moose, now he was a man, he would marry! Elphège was not his father and could not deny him. They married and Malaan bore their son, Tonny. She had only thirteen winters and her labor was long and painful. Before the child was three Kuntaw left for the lumber camps and Malaan discovered whiteman’s whiskey. The boy ran with a pack of orphaned and abandoned children.
From the older women who sometimes coaxed Tonny into their wikuoms to feed him good moose meat, to tell him that he could always come to them for food and shelter, he heard stories about his father, Grasshopper Slayer, and his skill with bow and arrow at a time when Mi’kmaw men preferred whiteman guns. It embarrassed him to have a father called Grasshopper Slayer. Now only a few feeble oldsters still kept their unstrung bows and time-warped arrows. Every Mi’kmaw man had a gun and it was possible even for an inept hunter to kill five or six geese from a distance. Food was easier to get and there was little reason to spend long hours tracking and stalking keen-witted prey.
Tonny was a sly thief and beggar; he had neither bow nor gun and depended on his wits for food and shelter. He ran errands for whitemen, slept under an upturned canoe or in a sapling lean-to he had scuffled together in the broken woods. At fourteen he and Hanah, a girl whose mother also hung around the post, began to sleep together under old canoes and while still very young they made three children, Elise, Amboise and Jinot, who all managed to live, scrabbling around the post like young turkeys. Then Hanah, too, who liked rum and the free wild feeling it gave, began to go with whitemen and when she was twenty she was beaten to death by Henry Clefford, a jealous and bellicose trader who kept two other Mi’kmaw women. It was early spring, windy cold days mixed with sleet and intermittent sunlight.
“Here I leave,” said Tonny to his mother, Malaan, smarting with hatred and sorrow. He despised her; why should he tell her anything? “I am grown. I am a father. I go, my children go with me.”
“You leave here,” she said flat-toned. “Always I know this.” She nodded and turned away, yawning one of her deep, deep gaping yawns. He could say nothing else; her wretched life was with the post. He was now grown, strong but without hunting skills or weapons, ignorant of animal behavior, which was men’s correct interest and work. He no longer belonged here, if ever he had. He woke one morning, his eyes fixed on the underside of the broken canoe, the children wedged under his arm, and turned away from this life. He would no longer be part of the tattered Mi’kmaw people, whose customs had fallen off like flakes of dead skin. But he still believed that his children should live with blood kin. He felt a bitter sadness for them, nearly orphans with a dead mother and a worthless father. He could not leave them at the pernicious post. He knew only that his father was in a place called Penobscot Bay. Unannounced, paddling a stolen canoe and walking for weeks in mud and old snow, often carrying Jinot, the youngest, he found the house, the house of Kuntaw and the whiteman woman.
• • •
Year after year the logs of the old house had darkened almost to black. It seemed to be settling into the earth, but new cedar shingles shone like precious metal in the sunrise. The paint on the door and shutters had faded to a moss-grey color, something that made Beatrix think they must be repainted. Kuntaw paid no attention to house chores beyond getting in the winter wood and hunting.
“Enter you,” Beatrix Duquet called when she heard the scratching on the door. Tonny and the children stepped inside, ragged and travel-worn. They stood on the polished boards smelling the strange odors of the household, seeing the slant light dropped through glass windows, reflecting from mirrors.
Beatrix, grey-black hair streaming down her back like water, drew in a quick breath.
“Who are you?” She stared at them. “Who are you?” But Tonny thought she must know.
“I Tonny. Kuntaw Sel my father. These my children, Kuntaw their grandfather. Their mother dead. Names Elise, Amboise, Jinot.” As he turned them toward her he touched each child on the forehead. “No good live Mi’kmaw place now. I grown man but no good. I pretty bad man. I come my father Kuntaw, you. Help them.”
“Ah,” said Beatrix. She looked at the children; Elise at nine the oldest, withdrawn and shy; seven-year-old Amboise, also shy but with a winning smile; and Jinot, almost five, with a plump merry face.
“Sit at the table. I will give you food.” The chairs were strange and high, the table like the goods counter in the post. Jinot struggled to get on a chair until Beatrix lifted him up, found him warm and heavy, gave him a small squeeze.
“There you are, snoezepoes—sweetie pie,” she said, then turned to Tonny. “Oh poor Tonny, you must tell me everything, everything that has happened. Kuntaw is out hunting with our sons, Francis-Outger and Josime. They are close to the ages of your children. I know Kuntaw will weep with happiness to see you. He has spoken to me many times of his son, Tonny, and wondered if he still lived and how things were with him.” She felt a flash of compassion for this young man who resembled the handsome Indian striding into her life years past. “And now you are here. How happy he will be. But you, you are so young to be the father of three such big children.” She looked at them.
“Elise, Amboise, can you read or write?” They bent their faces low.
“Jinot, what do you like best?”
“Get sugar stick at post.”
“Ah, well, I have no sugar sticks, but I think you will like pancakes and some Dutch cocoa.”
“You good,” said Tonny. “I dream it you good.” He and Beatrix exchanged looks, Beatrix’s steady eyes a promise that the children were safe. Tonny’s returned gaze showed a distance that could not be traversed.
They were licking their plates for the last drops of maple syrup when Kuntaw came in with Francis-Outger and Josime. Tonny’s children threw quick shy glances at their uncles, their black eyebrows and hair; their pale eyes. Josime carried a tom turkey by its feet, the bloody beak dragging along the floor.