• • •
Beatrix was buried in the plot that Outger had laid out behind the house. The judge read the will directly after the funeral as the family was at hand. Beatrix had left the house, furniture and property to Elise in gratitude for her care and in atonement for sending her to a miserable marriage when she was a girl. All her books she left to Dr. Mukhtar. The secret pine woodlot she owned in northern Maine, a property of forty thousand acres, went to her sons, Francis-Outger and Josime. To Kuntaw she left two of the five horses they kept, a red English wool blanket he had always liked and a letter. He opened and read the letter of only a few sentences, gave a short laugh and turned silent. Beatrix had made him laugh once again, and once again she had puzzled him. He said he would go back to Canada. Jinot and Amboise each received a small package. Amboise pulled away the paper and found a small watercolor Beatrix had painted depicting Elise, himself and Jinot sitting on a bench under the apple tree. He had a very faint memory that long ago she had sat them in a row and made a drawing in her red sketchbook. He had never seen this painting. There was a small deerskin sock containing five gold pieces. Mopping his eyes and putting his inheritance carefully in his breast pocket he said he would go to New Brunswick for the drive that was barely under way. Jinot opened his own package — it was a familiar stuffed toy horse, four inches tall, that Beatrix had made for him the day after Tonny brought them there. And he, too, had a deerskin pouch of coins. A folded paper written in her unsteady hand said, “Remember me.” How could it be otherwise?
That evening Amboise said to Jinot, “You come my camp end of July and we talk where to go. I got some ideas. But first go find Marchand and git your pay. I can tell you got some trouble, not just Mother’s death — better come work.”
• • •
Marchand said, “I shouldn’t give you nothin. You left me in the lurch, just walk off like that middle of the night.” But he paid him and Jinot found himself with nearly two hundred dollars in his pocket as well as Beatrix’s coins. Yet his heart was sore with the loss of Beatrix. He had loved her since the day she lifted him onto the chair and called him snoezepoes. He had loved the little stuffed horse with its yarn mane and painted eyes; it had been lost, and it seemed he was holding his childhood again. He put it with his other precious memento — Franceway’s tiny songbook, two or three reminder words for many songs. He could feel Beatrix’s warm closeness, could hear Franceway’s beloved voice.
This last day at the Penobscot house he stuffed his pack basket with clothing, a crooked knife, flint, extra moccasins as if he were going on a long journey. He came into the kitchen for the last time. Elise was sitting at the table writing a list of chores. She looked up at him.
“When will you come again?” she said.
“I do not know. I can’t tell. I will work awhile, maybe find Amboise, maybe go back up north. Maybe find Grandfather Kuntaw? I don’t know.”
Taking down the trees was his anodyne. The forests of New England vibrated with chopping. Swarms of men limbed and hauled the windfall to the rivers. Mills sawed day and night and the great glut of lumber brought new settlers and encouraged an unprecedented construction boom.
Another year passed and another and Jinot counted his more than thirty winters. It was time he found Amboise, if he was still in that New Brunswick camp.
41. Gatineau camps
The New Brunswick camp was deserted except for a mournful ex-logger with a bandaged head and scabbed face sitting on the cookhouse steps peeling potatoes. “Wal, they tell me I am lucky. They tell me I am lucky I can peel taters. Lost half my teeth, see?” He exposed empty purple gums. “On the drive, log took half my face, bled like a busted dam. They give me a job of cookee but I spect by fall I’ll be good agin.”
“Looking for my brother, Amboise Sel?”
“Yah, I see it — you got a Indan phiz like Amboise. I seen him come out the bunkhouse with that old Indan pack basket and known he was goin his own way. He talked about makin a shack in the woods, out by our cut. Liked it out there, but I don’t know what there was to like — just swamp. Say, have some tea! I take some this time a day. Name’s Mikla. Joe Mikla.” Like many who spend time alone he could not stop talking. They went into the cookhouse. Jinot noticed shrouded mounds of rising bread, raised his eyebrows at the cookee.
“Yeah, there’s a crew a swampers workin, but no choppers. Here, show you where we was cuttin.” Dipping his finger in his tea he drew a wet map on the table marking the old cut where Amboise might be found. “Can’t miss a cut like that. Guess Amboise’d pick a good spot next to the swamp, get the full benefit a the mosquitoes. I was glad to get out a there.”
• • •
He found Amboise at the end of three days of swamp slash, bent over and whittling on something. To one side Jinot saw a row of dressed tree roots.
“I’m gettin these,” said Amboise, gesturing at the row of roots. “It’s old Perley Palmer’s show. He don’t care if I take the knees — all stumps to him anyways.”
Maybe, thought Jinot, Amboise had lost his mind. He shifted the subject and asked about Kuntaw.
“Grandfather Kuntaw? After her buryin he rolled up and went north. Back to Canada. Back to where he come from. Last I heard. Maybe he writes to Elise?”
“She’s in Boston with that doctor husband, Hallagher.”
“Who is livin in the house?”
“I don’t know. Francis-Outger looks after it now. Maybe Elise sold it? Nobody told me.”
There was silence while they thought about Kuntaw, an old man heading into the north woods. Their thoughts were envious.
“Brother,” said Amboise. “I have work we can do together.”
“What work? Not swampin out roads. Told Marchand I’d be back in November. If I could.”
“Not swampin; I talked with some fellers down in Portsmouth shipyard after — after the drive. I heard they’d pay good for them things.” He waved at his root assembly. “Workin this cut I seen the swamp full a hackmatack. They want ship timber, knees — knees for ships. They say ‘ships get built in the woods.’ ”
Jinot looked at the root knees lined out in a row. Hackmatack, hard as iron, prized for its tough and twisted root fibers.
“We just do it for a while, eh? You go with Marchand when he starts. Winter, I chop again.”
“Guess we can. This a good hackmatack-juniper swamp?”
Amboise said that it was better to get the knees late in the year, when the sap stopped running. In summer it was a sticky business. “But it’s dryin up pretty good now. I figured work on them until frost. And then go back in the camps.”
They dug around the roots of likely hackmatacks. When they found one with a good bend, they cleared away the soil, cut the end two feet out from the tree and went after the taproot. The tree teetered, went down and they bucked off the root stump a good five feet up.
“Now we got a knee,” said Amboise, and he showed Jinot how to measure and mark the line and hew to make a ninety-degree angle at the heel, a smooth throat on the inner curve, the back and bottom smooth and flat.
Jinot didn’t much like grubbing in the swamp for knees and he did not want to go back to Marchand. He felt as Kuntaw, that he had to get away.
“Brother,” he said to Amboise. “Let us go west. I have heard there are great forests west. I do not want to get these hackmatack knees.”
Amboise looked upward at the treetops. “Yes,” he said.
• • •
It was dark when Jinot came awake. There was something — someone — outside the shack. He reached over and touched Amboise and knew by his rigid shoulder that he had heard it and was awake. Slowly, soundlessly, Jinot sat up. His ax was near the door flap. He began to stretch toward it when a voice said, “Long ago in the old days three children were lost in the forest—”