• • •
In the last week of her life Beatrix had the illusion she was suspended in an immense bowl of water. At first the water was as easy to breathe as air, but gradually as the mass in her stomach pressed on her lungs it became viscous as old honey. The bowl was similar to the yellow crockery bowl in which she had mixed bread dough. Occasionally she surfaced and in the distance could see its pale rim. Some days the water was limpid and yielding, others, shot through with strong orange currents of pain. Underwater storms raged, and then she had tried to draw up her legs to protect her throbbing gut from the lightning strikes.
Dr. Mukhtar tried many ways to make Beatrix’s fading existence more bearable. Francis-Outger, whose house was only a mile distant, came every day with balsam boughs for the sickroom so the spicy scent of the forest could cleanse the air. He brought juniper berries and Dr. Mukhtar crushed these and their dry bitter perfume made Beatrix smile, a smile more like a grimace, but all she could manage. She died in this cordial of fragrance. Fifty-two strange years and then to fall in love on her deathbed.
Elise stood weeping at the window. Francis-Outger said to her, “I will go to Josime’s camp and tell him. Maybe he knows where Amboise works now, maybe he knows where Jinot is. Did they not tell you their camps?”
“Jinot sent a letter asking if we all were well, but I have not found a moment to answer. He said he was working for a Canada man — Marchand. Up north. Amboise I don’t know.”
• • •
Kuntaw had hardened himself to resist the pain of losing Beatrix. He had lost Tonny, he had lost Malaan. He had lost Beatrix. He had lost himself. He turned his painful feelings into rejection, told himself his years with Beatrix had been wasted. She was not an Indian but an overeducated white woman in an Indian body. In those years with her he had become weak and powerless. Yet he knew he could regain his lost strength, for he felt young, though perhaps not young enough to dance and drive his feet deep into the earth up to the knee with each crashing step.
He would go to the north, where there was still half-wild forest. He thought of the way his people had lived in it when they were not on the coast, thought of Achille, his father, standing up with the great dead bear on his back; it must have weighed four hundred pounds. He, Kuntaw, could not carry full-grown bears, but he could live in the old way, even though the trees of the forest were now mere stuff, whiteman stuff. Whitemen looked at trees and saw they were good only to build flat-sided cage-houses or ships. Kuntaw wanted to know trees again as the old people knew them.
The year before Beatrix was ill he had killed a moose — for there were still a few moose for men who knew how to find them — and made himself a proper Mi’kmaw jacket. He had never given up greased mkisn for whiteman shoes. He had his beaver cloak and deer-hide leggings, pliable and silent when he moved through brush. And now, with Beatrix dead, he would go to the northern forest and he would build a camp as if for two, just as he did for his clients, but there would be no client. He would have everything for two — clothing, bed robes; he would have no whiteman’s metal pots for they would spoil the magic of his camp. He would cook for two people, setting out the dish for the One Who Would Come. He had once believed Beatrix was that One, and surely she herself had believed it of him.
He mended his bows and made new arrows. He would live among trees until the One Who Would Come appeared, and he knew it would be like the shadows of moving leaves at first, gradually becoming more solid until the day the One accepted the extra set of clothes and appeared before him as firm and real as a tree. They would hunt together, deep companions, and he, Kuntaw, would share his new friend’s magic power. He would be strong again. He would be a Mi’kmaw man again.
40. choppers and rivermen
At seventeen Jinot Sel’s smiling face had been at once amusing and dissolute with full cheeks, heavy-lidded eyes. His hair was thick and springy as a bear’s pelt, his mouth thin and curled, a face with something of a mink’s eager expression. He was quick of movement like Grandfather Kuntaw. Not only girls and women wanted to sit with him, mature men also looked at him, and in a certain way.
After a year as a swamper-limber in a decrepit Penobscot camp, he hired on as a chopper and riverman with Simon Marchand. The camp lay on a feeder branch of the big Penobscot. Marchand, a subcontractor, had taken on a tract of aged monster trees judged by most lumbermen as too big, too awkwardly placed on a gullied ridge to be worth getting.
“Nah,” said Marchand, “what I say is this is a long route — take two seasons cut up to them old trees. Then we might get them big boys, if we cut good track for a ice road. Biggest log in the world comes along sweet on a ice road. It’s a pretty good show.”
Marchand seemed to have started life as an ash tree, barked, scraped and whittled down to sinewy fiber. His hooded eyes glinted. His neck was encircled by coarse hair foaming up from his chest. He was a hard-nosed Maine man who had kicked his way up and was still kicking.
God-fearing Marchand did not allow holy names to be used as curses in the camp. “You know the man that oaths like that, will be a judgment on him.” He cited scores of examples of men who had cursed and without fail they had been mashed, drowned, frozen, quartered, speared and fried. Every logger knew of such things. And so Marchand’s camps were fueled by imprecations of “all-fired tarnal dickie bird,” “by dang,” “dern,” “by gar!” Jinot kept a holy silence.
Like most camps Marchand’s looked impermanent; the cookhouse was crowded into the north end of the shanty. Downslope stood a slipshod ox hovel. A constant stream of red-shirted choppers came and went, men from the north and coastal fishermen — Irish, Bluenoses, Province men, a few French Canadians, St. Francis Indians, Passamaquoddy and Mi’kmaq, and P. I.s — men from Prince Edward Island — and sometimes a man from foreign shores. There were always two or three Québécois running from the impoverished habitant life. The border between Maine and Québec was so twisted by the waterways that men passed freely over the unknown line — a place that could be what you wanted it to be.
In the lumber camp they were a brotherhood of the ax. A kind of pride in excess and risky work knitted them. Up before daylight to gnaw on cold salt pork and gulp boiled tea, they walked to the cut carrying their sharpened axes and private thoughts. They walked back to the shanty in near dark to more pork and watery bean porridge, then fell into stunned sleep until the bull cook’s wordless catamount shrieks woke them — too dark to see, too dark to cut until the faintest light arrived. They stood in the still and merciless cold, ax heads beneath their jackets thrust up into their armpits to keep the steel from freezing, waiting for the light, so cold they could feel the arcs of their eyebrows, ice-stiffened nostril hairs.
There were no bunks, only the dirt floor, moist with tobacco juice and tramped-in food scraps; along one wall lay a greasy blanket to cover a row of louse-infested men. At night they heard wood borers rasping through the logs. If rain slanted in and soaked the blanket it took a week of multiple body heat to dry it out again.
After the spring drive most blew their wages in the log-shanty bars and whorehouses of the nearest town, bummed around until some contract logger came looking for raw labor. This calling of destruction was suited to them: no chance for other work, nothing to lose but their lives — but they were young and immortal, and you were safe if you were fast. A few worked for Marchand all year, chopping in the winter, driving in the spring, sawing in his mills through the summer. Jinot chopped and worked the drive that first year, tried the sawmill but after a few days of wood dust and noise he went home to the big house to gorge on eel and fresh garden truck, luxuriate in the attention of Beatrix and Kuntaw, then back to the camp with the autumn frosts.