Tessier, who was coaching, called up, “Don’t cut your rope.” Men had been known to make a quick misplaced slash and cut their own loop, a one-time-only mistake. Blony kept on, strong quick blows, paying no attention to the feathery scratching branch tips, up again, flip, chop, continue.
“High enough,” yelled Tessier. “Top it.” Blony topped it. The swinging ride as the limber spar swiped back and forth was the reward. He could see the distant ocean, he was above the world.
“Très bien! Done pretty good for a first climb,” said Tessier. “Slow, but you done good.” Blony couldn’t get enough spar-tree climbing, and the more he did the faster he moved, trying to beat Tessier, who lately had struck a pose standing atop the fresh-trimmed spar while it was still quivering. So Blony had a stunt in mind as he climbed his last tree. Up he went, as squirrel-like as Tessier and about to do a trick that would show up the mustachioed Frenchman. He planned to top his tree, lift himself on top, stand on his head and whistle, but as the heavy-branched top he had just cut hinged over, the spar split and caught Blony in the cleft as a clothespin grips a tea towel. His scream was short, the air squeezed out of his collapsed lungs. It was Tessier’s dreadful job to climb up and cut the spar a second time, this time below the dead boy, whose urine-drenched boots dangled in his face. Blony fell, still in the clasp of the Douglas fir, and they buried him that way.
• • •
Etienne’s son Molti Sel, his cousin Alik Sel and the two Mius brothers, Noel and John, worked from Oregon to the Queen Charlotte Islands. Nimble and limber as they were, after Blony’s death no one wanted to climb and rig tall trees. Molti stayed a choker setter for five or six seasons, his hands as hardened as lobster claws from gripping and heaving heavy chains; he was used to chains, didn’t mind the weight. He signed on to work with Flannel Logging, a small gyppo outfit owned by Robbie and Glen Flannel, but only a few miles from a bobtail town offering some of the pleasures of life.
It was a bad crew. In his second week of work the three other choker setters stole the gyppo’s chains and left in the night. Robbie Flannel drove his ailing log truck down the mountain to set the sheriff on the trail and to buy new chains. When he came back he had no chains but cheaper coils of cable and used haywire and two old drunks from the bar, who were the replacement choker setters.
“Cable lighter to use, easier to git it under a log,” said Glen. “Use the haywire to move the cable. Forget about chains. Molti, you show these two stiffs what to do. They ain’t no good but they’re alive and anybody can be a choker setter, right?” Molti knew he should have walked off the job right then, but he didn’t. They attached the haywire to the skyline cable and the donkey pulled it uphill. Someone released the haywire and one of the downslope stiffs fumbled with the excess. Molti fastened the haywire to another cable that had to be moved. He gave the signal to the donkey tender to pull and then saw the stiff was not clear, but standing in the cable’s bight—that had been Pollo’s mistake. He shouted to the drunk, who started a clumsy run, but the tangled haywire was still being drawn and it snarled, kinked, went tight and snapped. It lashed Molti’s midriff with terrible force. The frightened stiffs helped him down to the bunkhouse, and there he lay with blood filling his mouth until ten o’clock that night, when he died. It was only Lobert Sel, Édouard-Outger’s oldest son, trained to be cautious, who returned from the West Coast to his family unscarred, unbroken, happy to be reunited with his brother Jim, happy to find a wife, to take up the business of fatherhood and life.
• • •
Men could die in distant lands, as Aaron’s oldest son, John, died across the ocean in trench mud in 1917 watching the slanting rain become the final mist. Men could die at home, as on the December morning in the same year when two ships, one packed with munitions and explosives for the war in Europe, collided in the Halifax narrows causing the world’s largest explosion and a tsunami that wiped out the Mi’kmaw village in Tufts Cove. Among the mangled and drowned were Lobert’s brother, Jim Sel, and four of his children.
“We go Shubenacadie,” said grieving and frightened Lobert to his pregnant wife, Nanty, and they moved inland, to the reserve, though he never thought of the reserve as a safe haven. There they found a measure of balance although they were poor. Lobert worked for a timber company in exchange for pay in logs and used them to build a three-room house. When his son Edgar-Jim Sel—called Egga—was born he began to worry as his own father, Édouard-Outger, had worried over him. He did not want his sons to work in the forests nor his daughters to clean house for whitemen women. He saw no danger in the residential school, though he did not like the man who came to the house with paper and pen and said if he did not sign the consent forms his children would be taken by the welfare people. He signed. So, when Egga was ten years old he and his best friend, Johnny Stick, entered the residential school where Mi’kmaw children, their culture and language suffered a forty-year implosion as deadly as any munitions ship.
“You will get education, Egga. To read and write is important. You will get better work than cut trees,” his father told him. And Lobert and Nanty visited him at the school every month, lugging a basket of home delicacies—smoked eel, Nanty’s special bread, sardines and yellow cake. The priests and nuns smiled and spoke pleasantly. Lobert and Nanty were proud their son was getting an education and because of that pride and because of the false sweetness of the black-clad religious, Egga could not tell them that he never attended a class because the priests worked him all day long shoveling coal in the school’s furnace room, where he learned to read only pressure gauges; that he was called a “lazy savage,” frequently kicked. After a hard beating by fat Father O’Hoopy that left him deaf in one ear and with a broken arm that healed badly, Egga knew he was a slave, not a student. Johnny Stick worked beside him. Johnny’s people never came to visit as they lived far away and Johnny got rough treatment from the priests. He was often called to Father Blink’s room. Every boy knew what that meant as Father Blink (a hairy ill-smelling man whose black dress captured and held every stink his body produced) had perverse needs and those who did not satisfy them could expect beating, hunger, isolation, insults, hair pulling, doors slammed on fingers, arms twisted until they hung loose and unusable, kicks and public humiliation, being shaken awake in the night, screams directly in the face, being burned with sulfur-head matches—tortures not just for days, not just for weeks or months, but for years. Father Blink prided himself that he never forgot a boy who refused him.
Egga made a plan. He wanted to ask Johnny to come with him but never found the private moment to ask and he slipped away from the school on his own. Lobert and Nanty were awakened by thunderous pounding on their door.
“Where is he? Your stinking bad son ran off. We know he’s here. You are in serious trouble for this!” They turned the log house upside down looking for Egga and came back at odd times for many months before giving up. Lobert and Nanty were miserable, and now began to hear certain stories about the school; they had failed to protect their son from harm. They were not the only bereft parents. Many, when bad news came that their child had died “after a long illness,” accepted the lie. Not knowing what had happened to Egga, Nanty fell into a kind of prolonged sadness that took her to the grave, leaving Lobert with the blackest thoughts. For him the evils of the residential school and lack of government oversight permanently stained any English-Canadian claim to decency. It was all words. Yet some hopeful spark still burned and after the war he married Kate Googoo. No one ever knew what Lobert had done, but when Paul, Alice and Mary May went to the resi school they suffered scorn and name-calling but were never beaten.
• • •
Runaway Egga, the direct descendant of Charles Duquet and René Sel, half-starved and ragged, walked by night and slept by day. The only place he had in mind was south. He did not know where he was going except away from Canada; attracted to watercraft he stowed aboard a fishing boat headed for Rockland, Maine, slipped off the boat in darkness and b
egan to walk again. He followed the shoreline for many weeks, begging food or offering to work at farms he passed, slowly made his way to Barnstable and because he smelled frying fish from the galley begged a ride on a fishing boat headed to Martha’s Vineyard. The fishermen gave him a hot chunk of scrod and he was theirs forever.
There were other homeless boys hanging around the docks where the fishing boats came in, running errands for the fishermen and helping unload fish. None of them were Mi’kmaw. Egga got his first real boat job learning to haul trap for weakfish and whiting. Captain Giff Peake, himself half Wampanoag, taught Egga how to read a few words, but watching the boy try to write was, he said, like watching a dog try to play the piano. Still, Egga was an eager worker, cheerful, every morning full of hope for a good day as escaped or released prisoners sometimes are.
• • •
Egga grew to adulthood aboard Captain Peake’s boat, and when the old man retired to sit by his daughter’s fire Egga signed on to bigger boats with men who worked the rich cod waters of Georges Bank. He put away his identification as Mi’kmaq and became a hybrid person. In the sweep of his twenty-first year he volunteered for U.S. military service and was turned down as an alien resident, applied for citizenship, met, courted and married Brenda, a Wampanoag girl.
Years later, reunited with his father, Lobert, he said, “What I loved about Bren right at the start was how fast she could count up—she was quick-minded with numbers and she could read right side up and upside down. She was workin for the fish dealers. But I got her away from them. Yes, I did so, everlasting joy.” But their marriage wasn’t easy; Bren had strong ideas and set them forward fearlessly.
Egga, determined to master reading, set himself the task of making his way through the newspapers every day. He subscribed to several Nova Scotia newspapers, including the Amherst Daily, and the Yarmouth Herald, and so he learned something of what he had left behind and over the years he and Bren talked about it. She had never been to Nova Scotia, but she had seen how it went with the Wampanoag. Sometimes Halifax men came down on fishing boats and Egga invited them to supper and asked for news. In this way they learned that between the wars Mi’kmaw workingmen went to Winnipeg to harvest grain, to Maine to pick apples, did whatever they could find. They worked as stevedores, emptied and dumped stinking ballast from ships. Many of them lived in lumber camps, away from the reservation except for occasional quiet visits to wives and children.
“I know what that does to their traditional ways,” said Bren. “When the men go away to work it puts the responsibility for saving the language on the women.” But it seemed that most of the women signed the papers sending their children to the residential schools, trusting they would be taught what they needed to live in the English culture. Few parents knew of the atrocities practiced on their boys and girls by genocidal nuns and priests. The children were never again wholly Mi’kmaw.
• • •
Molti Sel’s grandsons, Blaise and Louis Sel, were loggers with chain saws and heavy machinery; trees were assembly-line products. Every year there were fewer men on the ground—the place of injuries and death; work was safer in the cab of a machine. They spread out, far distant from the reserve. The Mius and Sel brothers preferred tree-length logging setups and some of them worked in Minnesota and Wisconsin, some in Maine, some in British Columbia or Washington and Oregon states. The old bunkhouse camps were gone. They brought up their families in whiteman houses, listened to the radio, ate at the diner, drove to work and only went back to Nova Scotia for St. Anne’s Day.
They knew how their grandfathers had lived. Blaise Sel, one of Molti’s grandsons, a skilled feller-buncher operator, said, “Them old camps? You couldn’t get me in one of them damn rat hovels for no amount a money, way the hell out in the sticks, nothin to do but work and pick your nose.” His brother, Louis, ran the grapple skidder, hooking on to Blaise’s bundles of trees, dragging them to the landing, where they went through the delimber, which stripped the branches. He didn’t wait to see the logs loaded into the slasher and cut into preset lengths, nor did he care to see them loaded and hauled away to the pulp mill, but hurried back to Blaise for a fresh bouquet of stems. It was a job, it put food on his family’s table, paid for his pickup truck, for his and his wife Astrid’s house. Other Sels found jobs in the pulp and paper mills, in the plywood factories, in the cellulose-acetate plants, moving deeper into the world of plastics.
Noel Mius’s youngest son, Chancey Mius, worked for an in-woods chipping company. But he remarked to his wife, Shelly, that chipping at the landing robbed the woods. “If you don’t put those back, soils start to decline. Should do some nutrient replacement work where we took the trees. Think the company will do that? I don’t.”
“That’s a shame,” said his wife vaguely.
As if to balance this neglect, his brother Jackson in Maine ran an old-style two-man horse-logging outfit, slow, hard work, fresh air and enough danger to go around. Jackson cut the trees and his neighbor-partner, Sonny Hull, dragged them to the landing with his big draft horses. They had steady work from property owners who wanted a quiet operation that didn’t rip up the land. But after a winter of almost no snow when Sonny Hull packed up and moved to Montana and the work was scarce, Jackson went back to school and earned a B.S. in forestry, kept going for a master’s in wood management. He had never set foot on the old Mi’kmaw reservation at Shubenacadie through he knew he had people there. It was something he was going to do someday, some St. Anne’s Day. To the Sel and Mius relatives St. Anne’s Day had a value that outsiders could not understand.
“Worth the three-day drive if that’s what it takes,” said Blaise Sel, sitting relaxed and comfortable with second cousins and old aunties, belonging to the Mi’kmaw people if only for a day or two. His wife, Astrid, the granddaughter of Swedish immigrants, never came with him. “It’s a little bit silly,” she said, “you drivin all that way, sayin those Mi’kmaws are your blood kin. It’s not like you to do that.” But it was.
X
sliding into darkness
1886–2013
63
perfidy
Scrawny Miss Heinrich still sat at the front desk, the office anteroom unchanged since the company’s near collapse decades earlier. She would never forget how everything had fallen wrong—the depression, when construction fell off and lumber prices dropped. Then, just as the timber business was recovering Lawyer Flense disappeared with Annag Duncan and the embezzled funds. It was the logging company’s worst time. What an uproar! Miss Lavinia had called in four special accountants, dark-eyed men with black mustaches.
“Miss Heinrich, could we please have the books for ’seventy-three? Could we please have the Board meeting minutes for the last three years?” Mr. Pye, aged and trembly, was called out of retirement to explain certain actions. The accountants spoke among themselves over dinner plates of steak and boiled potatoes—they strongly suspected that old Mr. Pye might have set the whole scheme going decades earlier and made his own nest comfortable.
When the accountants were finished they met with Dieter and Lavinia.
“Mr. Breitsprecher, Mrs. Breitsprecher, from the beginning Flense had extraordinary powers to acquire properties for Duke Logging. And to sell. There was no contract that limited his actions on the company’s behalf to acquisition. Yet he was an employee, not a partner, nor a stockholder. There was nothing that prohibited him from wrongdoing except moral responsibility.”
“I always believed he was loyal to me personally as well as to the company. I never doubted that. I counted him as a friend and I trusted him. We did business as a gentleman’s agreement. My father operated that way and was never defrauded,” said Lavinia stiffly.
“This time you were defrauded. Flense made secret sales of the company’s woodlands, lumber barges, warehouse contents.” The accountants implied that the embezzlement was her own fault, that one’s word counted for nothing.
The chief accountant inclined his head a little a
nd said, “Mrs. Breitsprecher, may I recommend you to read Adam Smith? It is a truism that men do only what they are rewarded for doing. Flense received a rather modest salary for his legal work on behalf of the company. And in future keep in mind when doing business with Chicago lawyers—homo homini lupus est—man is a wolf to man.”
They left Duke & Breitsprecher reduced to a skeleton staff and a lean future.
The company staggered and nearly fell. It was hard times nationally: stocks and land values plunged; industrious brooms of change swept out the markets. Men were no longer grateful for work—labor problems and strikes crippled every business, and the forests of the northwest were flash points for rebellious forest workers who preferred better pay to manly poverty. The entire country was in an irascible, sour mood. Lavinia, wanting to rid herself and the company of anything touching on Flense, voted with the remaining Board members to relinquish the incorporation charter. “When Duke was establishing itself as a major logging company we needed capital to build logging railroads, to purchase lumber barges and steamboats, build roads. But all that has changed. Henceforth we will return, although operating on a shoestring, to a sole proprietorship. Aside from all else, incorporation is better suited to canals and turnpikes, railroads and banks, not the timber industry—at least in the position we now find ourselves.” A sense of being savagely cheated colored the atmosphere in the boardroom.
• • •
“Lavinia,” Dieter said as they went over the details of Duke & Breitsprecher’s teetering position, “we will weather this storm. It is true that the company has lost a great deal of its value, but enough remains that we can start over.”
Lavinia could barely speak for rage: “Dieter, my fortune—my lost fortune—came from the bonanza of Maine and Michigan lumber that we cut over the generations. No such rich woodlands exist these days. Flense took my ancestral heritage.” But she exaggerated. Flense had not touched her personal property, had not sold her Chicago land holdings, now worth millions; it was the company assets he had rifled.