Barkskins

“When will you go?”

  “Today. I have warm clothes in a hide bag. Shall I take an ax?”

  “Have an ax if you wish, but the lumber camp will give you as many as you need. They provide the tools. This I know, for I, too, worked in those camps chopping trees, even as my father, Achille, did, and his father, the Frenchman René Sel, before him.”

  “I did not know of the Frenchman René. He is our ancestor?”

  “He was my grandfather, murdered, they said, by a girl he adopted. So you see we have French blood in us. But René Sel did not work in lumber camps. He cut trees for himself. Jinot, before you go into the forest I want you to travel with Amboise to Mi’kma’ki and see Elise, see if she is well, if she has children. We have heard nothing. And I want you to inquire if my cousin Auguste, son of my deceased aunt Noë, is still alive. He was a person always in trouble so he may be dead. Though I have noticed that many people who cause trouble live long lives. If he is alive I want him to come here and stay with us. And take care. The woods and rivers are full of English and Americans fighting. Stay distant if you hear firearms.”

  • • •

  Amboise, who was very strong and heavy-shouldered, and Jinot, waving farewell to a bouquet of girls on the wharf who called his name, went by ship up the coast to Halifax, made a foot journey to the post.

  “I do not have a good feeling for Elise,” said Amboise. “I remember Tonny said Mi’kma’ki was a bad place.” In his pocket he had a small wooden turkey he had carved long ago, an object that amused Elise when she was young.

  “If she has children,” he said, “I thought maybe they like to play with this.”

  “Amboise, that is a good idea. I wish I had brought something—even a pinecone.”

  Kuntaw’s sister, Aledonia, thin and with many teeth missing, made much of them, pointed out certain people with the patronym Sel, and told them that yes, Auguste still lived. “That one! He is too bad to die!”

  But Amboise and Jinot saw the Mi’kmaw village was a hungry sad place, a mix of wikuoms and whiteman cabins. The eel weirs were in disrepair and rarely did the men make an effort to put them in order. It was easier to eat bread and pork from the agency than catch eels. Luçon Brassua, Elise’s husband, lay drunk in the mud beside their wikuom, whose torn bark covering needed repairs. They were sorry for Elise, who cried and said she had lost a baby girl whom she had called Bee after Beatrix.

  “I thought married would be like Beatrix and Grandfather Kuntaw, nice, laughing, you know?” She wept women’s tears.

  While they were in the chopped lands of what once had been Mi’kma’ki they heard stories of Kuntaw’s father, Achille the Great Hunter. For some reason these stories made Amboise resentful. “Everything yesterday! Everything good happens long ago! Now—oh now . . .” His eyes narrowed. “Elise, if Brassua is not good to you, you must come with us.” They knew that Brassua was not good to her. Guilty and uneasy, they wanted to get away.

  Old Auguste had succumbed to drink. They found him at the wikuom of one of his granddaughters, bleary and nodding, sitting outside squinting at whatever happened there. When they told him they were Kuntaw’s grandsons he roused a little, huffing out rum breath, gave a bitter smile and said Kuntaw had had a fortunate life, unlike him. He spoke in an old man voice, then clamped his mouth shut. They sat together and watched the dozen idle Mi’kmaw men who hung around the post like flies on meat. Amboise was surprised to see tears running down wicked old Auguste’s face as he watched them.

  “They have nothing to do. When Kuntaw and I were of those years,” he said, “we were always ready for a hunt or go for eels, fish or seals or sturgeon. We made our bows and arrows, we made crooked knives and good canoes, we fashioned the paddles. We had good war games then, not like fighting foreigners with guns. The young men—yes, even I—committed brave deeds and there were feasts and dances such as are no longer performed. But you see what we have become,” he said and he pointed first at the idlers, then at himself. His hand groped beneath his thigh for the flat bottle.

  • • •

  “Elise,” said Amboise. “Come away now.” She threw her few possessions into a turnip sack and outstripped them running for the boat landing. Luçon Brassua was not there to hold her back.

  “He is drunk with his friends,” said Elise. “We go now, now!”

  “Wait. We must get Auguste. Kuntaw wants him to live in the Penobscot house.” The old man got up, trembling when he heard he was to come with them. He looked around. The idlers stood near the post doorway, a dog scratched its fleas. He sat down again, smiling slyly.

  “No. Too late. You go. I stay.”

  No matter what they said he refused. “Someone must stay. I will be the One Who Remains.”

  He was always good at naming.

  • • •

  Amboise used the money Kuntaw had given them to buy passages on a vessel going from Halifax to Boston, then persuaded the owner of a fishing boat bound for Georges Bank to detour and drop them at Penobscot Bay. Elise said very little to them on the return journey, but when the boat sailed into their home port she sucked in a great deep breath and exhaled. Beatrix, who saw them coming up from the wharf, threw the front door open. She looked at Elise, saw the fading bruises and brimming eyes and understood everything. She stretched out her arms.

  “Oh, thank God, my poor Elise, you are with us again. You are safe at home now.”

  “Mother,” Elise cried. Beatrix embraced her and both women began to sob. Amboise and Jinot looked at each other; they had never seen Beatrix cry.

  “This is a woman thing,” muttered Amboise, his eyes stinging. “Let us go out.”

  Though Jinot wanted to be with Elise and Beatrix, he followed Amboise.

  39

  Dr. Mukhtar

  “What is wrong with me?” demanded Beatrix of Elise’s dog, Ami, a wolfish creature who could not ignore porcupines. The dog, flinching from her angry tone, looked at the floor. For months a pain had been twisting in the woman’s belly, came like a crab in the night to pinch at her gut. She had days when she rushed about as usual, teaching a boy from the village to read and write, concocting elaborate meals for Kuntaw, who turned away. He only wanted the spare foods of his childhood.

  A new path had opened to Kuntaw—guiding whitemen to hunt and fish. It started when a Boston man, Mr. Williams, came to him and said he wanted to go in the Maine woods and hunt, and he needed a guide; he would pay. Kuntaw knew the forest, streams and lakes from his years in the logging camps. And they went north together on the train, then by buckboard, then by canoe. Mr. Williams returned to Boston dirty, scratched up, his eyes red from campfire smoke, thinner and more agile; he felt himself a tough woodsman. He had caught more than fifty trout in a single day and described his taciturn Mi’kmaw guide to envious friends. Not only that. The war for independence had linked the idea of freedom to a country of wild forests. Americans saw themselves as homines sylvestris—men of the forest.

  Kuntaw worked tirelessly at this odd business; he carried the packs and canoe, hacked trails through young spruce thickets, and at the campsite he built the lean-to, chopped firewood and got a fire going, cooked samp, trout, wild meat, seasoned only with shreds of wild ginger and garlic. Soon he had regular customers who wanted to hunt moose or caribou, whitemen who wove these trips into tales of manly adventures.

  It seemed to Kuntaw he had blundered into the strangest occupation in the world, helping men have a “holiday,” men ignorant of the tattered forests, ignorant of canoes and paddling, ignorant of weather signs and plants, of fire building. They angered him sometimes. Judge James, whom the others treated with deference, said, “You Indians have a nice life. Just hunt and fish all the time, let the women do the work.” He laughed. Kuntaw said nothing then but later, smoking a pipe with Ti-Sabatis, another guide he saw sometimes at the boat landing, he said, “Whitemen never see it was our work. For them hunt and fish is only to play. They think we lazy because we only ‘play.’ ”

&nb
sp; Ti-Sabatis smiled a little. “These men don’t know nothing about the woods, but they pay good money and I don’t know how they get that money, so they do somethin pretty smart.”

  “It was our life and we lived it, but it was not easy like those whitemen think.” Yet he enjoyed these excursions.

  • • •

  The illness had made Beatrix a different person from the energetic long-haired beauty on a sorrel horse. They had had many happy years, but she was old now, as was he. She was ill and the illness frightened him. Kuntaw wanted to turn it back, to return her to the old Beatrix. He brought her cups of tea. She drank slowly, slowly, smiled at him and then vomited. It was now, when she most needed him, that he veered away from her. He could not help it. His feelings had begun to change years earlier, when Tonny arrived with his three children, bringing the old Mi’kmaw life with him. In his shame at his neglect of Tonny and Malaan, Kuntaw began to regard Beatrix as Other. The feeling was always there, even when they were glad to be together and with their children. Like a faraway drumbeat something inside him said, She is not Mi’kmaq. He had not made her into an Indian. He had betrayed his people by leaving Malaan and Tonny for her. He had betrayed Beatrix by failing to fullfill her wish. Every spring when he readied to take a Boston man on a fishing trip he was a little more pleased to be away from Beatrix’s house, to be back in the forest.

  • • •

  Beatrix’s good days became fewer; the pain always returned as though refreshed by its holiday and bit into its victim with greater force. If Elise brought cod broth to her she would sip a few drops from the spoon and then vomit. Her bowels became untrustworthy, her face gaunt and drawn, arms and legs like reeds, but the treacherous stomach swelled and grew enormous. The pain was the size of a beaver and gnawing with a beaver’s yellow chisel teeth.

  Elise washed Beatrix’s soiled linens and hung them out to be sweetened by the chill wind off the bay. She cooked for herself and Kuntaw, kept broth simmering for Beatrix, who often could not swallow it. Elise knew little of herbal medicines and came to Kuntaw.

  “Grandfather Kuntaw. Beatrix has been ill for six moons and I do not know how to ease the pain. It grows. She won’t eat nothin. Do you not know a healer who understands this sickness?”

  But Kuntaw shook his head. “Maybe still in Mi’kma’ki, but here, no. She will want a whiteman doctor.”

  “If he will come,” said Elise. “I have heard that he is haughty and says he will only treat white people.”

  “Well,” said Kuntaw. “Beatrix’s father was whiteman. He had doctor friends. Maybe all dead now.”

  He spent an uncomfortable quarter hour with the sick woman and prized the names of two medical men from her. The first, elderly Dr. Woodrit, sent a message that he had a full list of patients and could not come. The second, Dr. Hallagher, an Irish fellow new to Penobscot Bay, visited Beatrix, examined and talked with her for some time. When he came out of the sickroom he sat beside Elise and shook his head.

  “She knows many big words, this Ind—this lady. I think she has a bad sickness, and I advise to call in a certain learned doctor from Boston—Dr. Mukhtar—if he will come. He has much experience with—with stomach ailments. Of this kind.”

  Elise wanted to ask what “this kind” was, but only stared at him with pleading dark eyes.

  Hallagher continued, studying the tense woman. “He is a foreigner, and his ways are not our—your—usual ways, but he is very learned in medicine. If anyone can do anything . . .” He promised he would write to Dr. Mukhtar himself and see if he could be persuaded to make the trip to the Penobscot Bay house. Elise’s face changed for a moment and she smiled at him, the roguish Sel smile.

  • • •

  When Kuntaw heard all this he exhaled between his teeth, a hissing sound like that of an angry animal, furious to feel so helpless, and went outside. He could not bear to see her suffering.

  • • •

  Dr. Hallagher returned on a weekday afternoon ten days later, shining with cleanliness and fresh linen, hoping to find Elise alone. But Kuntaw was also there, repairing his guide equipment for another Maine trip.

  Kuntaw nodded and nodded when Dr. Hallagher said that the Boston doctor—Mukhtar—would arrive any day and examine Beatrix. He was making the arduous trip. But, said the Irishman, Kuntaw should not get his hopes up expecting a cure. Beatrix’s illness was profound. Kuntaw nodded, then asked a brutal question.

  “How long she live?”

  Hallagher stuttered out that he did not know, that God would decide, that Dr. Mukhtar could perhaps say, but he—no, he could not say. He left without a chance for a few private minutes with Elise.

  • • •

  It was a cool autumn afternoon when Dr. Mukhtar arrived on a black Arabian mare that had turned heads all the way from Boston. As he was removing his saddlebags, Elise came out and said that if he liked he could turn the mare in to the horse pasture or put her in the stable, as he preferred. He chose the pasture with its shady maples and rattling brook. He was a small, wiry man with a foreign face, wet black eyes and a nose like a falcon’s beak. Elise thought his dark face was frightening, even devilish, his voice somewhat rough but kind. A little reluctantly she led him into the house.

  As soon as he stepped into the hall he sniffed the fetid air and knew what he would find. Elise took him first into the schoolroom, where Beatrix always served visitors and brought him a cup of tea. He put his saddlebags on the great pine table. He asked Elise many questions, demanded she show him Beatrix’s soiled sheets, examined them closely. He looked at Elise with his glittering foreign eyes.

  “Is there another person who can help you? You are thin and very tired. Nursing someone with an advanced stomach cancer is exhausting. We must get you some help.” Elise was shocked to hear Beatrix’s sickness named and knew at once there must be a fatal conclusion. Then came his questions; never had she been asked so many. He wanted to know everything about Beatrix, about Elise, Kuntaw and the family, their circumstances, how they came to be in this house; he even asked about the foods they ate and nodded as if he already knew when Elise told him Beatrix was uncommonly fond of meats smoked in the chimney. It was unnerving how many questions the man could ask. She saw how he looked around the schoolroom. Their two porcelain cups looked small and frail on the table’s wood expanse.

  The house on Penobscot Bay had always been the great possession of Outger and Beatrix. But Outger had left and she had stayed. New people were building bigger houses with clapboarded painted sides all around the bay now. Charles Duquet’s great log house had become a decaying eyesore derided by the white settlers as “the wood wigwam.” When at last she sold the woodlot stumpage, the house, black with age, stood naked and decrepit.

  With the trees gone Beatrix saw the decaying house. The roof and sills could not wait and just as she fell ill Beatrix sold the last big pines in her woodlot to pay for the repairs. Kuntaw simply did not notice such defects; it was a house, a big immovable house.

  • • •

  Elise showed Dr. Mukhtar to the sick woman’s room. Under the single window was a table piled with books Beatrix had been reading before they became too heavy for her to hold. He looked at the titles, then sat beside the bed in a rosewood chair with a cracked leg. The woman lay in an uneasy sleep of shallow rapid breaths, febrile and wasted. He looked at her steadily. Suddenly she moaned and her eyes flew open.

  “Am I in hell now?” she whispered as her eyes took his measure.

  Dr. Mukhtar, who quite understood that the pain had awakened her and that she thought he was the devil, said, “No, madam, you are not, although it may seem that way. Allow me to introduce myself and let us work together to see how I may help you. But at the moment I believe you are in too much pain to carry on a rational conversation, so I will just fetch a sedative that will allow you some ease for a while.”

  He went to his saddlebags and came back with a black vial and a teaspoon.

  “Please open and swallow.”


  “I will vomit,” she said.

  “No, you will not. You will be calmed and the pain will back away. For a while. Open.” He watched her swallow painfully, half-retching. He held her up until the easing began.

  In a few minutes Beatrix, panting with relief, looked at Dr. Mukhtar. “Oh,” she said, “oh, oh. Oh how good. Thank you.”

  “The pain will return but we shall fight it in every way we can.”

  He examined her legs, palpated the great lump of stomach, asked her if she was able to eat anything, how long it had been difficult to swallow, did she vomit blood, was there blood in her stool, black and grainy, was she often breathless? In the midst of a reply she fell asleep again, but breathed deeply.

  The next time she woke the light in the room was dim. Dr. Mukhtar still sat in the chair, his dark face hidden in shadow, his black clothing blending in to the chair’s indigo shadow. Beatrix’s pain was still at bay and this pleased him.

  “I know my death is approaching,” said Beatrix. “What is wrong with me, is the pain returning soon, how long . . .” Her voice fell away.

  “You have a stomach cancer but also much fluid in your stomach, which I can relieve, though it, like the pain, will return. It is a battle, Mistress Beatrix, a battle that at this stage you cannot win. Perhaps another month, perhaps two. I will do all I can to smother the pain. Will you allow me to stay here? Your daughter, Elise, needs rest and I must be on hand to attend you. Do not worry, I have brought enough elixir to soothe elephants for a decade.”

  “I want to die,” she said. “I want to be done with the pain, done with this life.” But this was not entirely true. Over the next six weeks Beatrix developed deep feelings for Dr. Mukhtar as they spoke of books and ideas, of places imagined but never seen, of peace and quiet, of horses, for Mukhtar knew much about these animals. It pleased Beatrix to think of galloping horses, fluttering silky manes. At first it was the doctor who spoke while she listened, half asleep, half dead. The pain elixir became less effective and he tried another. Kuntaw came in now and then, but Beatrix could not look lovingly at him nor he at her.