Barkskins

  • • •

  Mr. Stick was in his late middle years, his dark jowls clean-shaven. The back of his pickup held an enormous red cooler and under a tarp the handrail sections for the lighthouse. He said, “Nice maple rail. Same finish like one of them no-stick fry pans. So where do y’want to go on the Cape?”

  “We don’t know. I mean, we’re looking for a woman named Sapatisia Sel. But we don’t know exactly where she lives.”

  “Here’s the deal. You help me put that rail in place you’ll get a round trip and a place to sleep. And your dinner.”

  Jeanne nodded. Mr. Stick gazed out at the horizon for a long minute before he snapped to and said gruffly, “Then let’s get goin. Hop in!” He talked as he drove. “I know who you mean. Egga Sel’s daughter. Sapatisia. There’s not too many live out on the Cape except motel and restaurant people in the tourist season. I guess she’s got a place out there. Somewhere.” They all knew everything was for the tourists, the despised tourists who kept Nova Scotia alive.

  “She knows about the old Mi’kmaw medicines. That’s why we want to talk to her,” said Jeanne.

  “Seen a woman go along the cliffs with a basket. I thought she was a berry picker first time I see her, but it wasn’t the season. I never seen her up close to talk to. I knew Egga pretty good. Long ago. At least I think it was her. Not sure. Cliff path below the lighthouse. Seen her when I was measurin for the handrail. Stayed three nights, slept in the truck and I seen this woman couple times. Must be good stuff grows down there.”

  Mr. Stick said, “She’s a Sel. Try and find a Mi’kmaq ain’t related to a Sel! Get up pretty early in the mornin for that. I got some gneg wetagutijig cousin Sels.”

  Driving slowly in the thickening fog, he said that Felix and Jeanne, between times of helping him, could watch for the woman. “Sapatisia, she went to university, travel all over the world. But I don’t know if you’ll see her, way the fog’s workin up. Not much hope for today,” he said as he turned onto the gravel drive to the lighthouse.

  “Look!” said Jeanne, pointing at the storage building. They all saw a fading movement.

  “No, no! I see her yet. Ala’tett. Way over there.” Mr. Stick pointed at a blob that was gone as soon as he spoke. “Wait for mornin. I think she comes back.”

  He made a fire in the parking lot, cooked hot dogs in a dirty cast-iron frying pan. Then, yawning, he said good night and retired to his truck, where they could see the glint of a bottle as he tilted it up. The cousins went into the lighthouse, unrolled their sleeping bags.

  • • •

  All the next day the fog hung heavy and unmoving. Felix and Jeanne held the railing steady while Mr. Stick bolted the sections to the braces. He fussed with joins and angles, took the sections down again and made minute adjustments. He worked without talking. The light was dimming when he was satisfied with the railing.

  • • •

  The next morning sprang open brilliantly clear with a snapping wind shooting up their jacket sleeves. Mr. Stick ate dry bread for breakfast, didn’t offer any to them but drank deeply from his thermos of stone-cold black tea, then smoked his pipe. “Got to clean her up a little,” he said, meaning the railing. Jeanne and Felix climbed to the top of the lighthouse.

  “Some view. I see two tankers. No, one’s the ferry.”

  “I see Sapatisia Sel,” said Felix. “Down there on the rocks.”

  The woman in canvas overalls and jacket was digging with a trowel. A notebook lay open on a boulder and the wind riffled the pages.

  “Hello,” called Jeanne. The woman looked up at them. She was short and sturdy, black long hair in a single braid. Her narrow eyes looked Asian; she said nothing.

  “Are you Sapatisia Sel?”

  The woman picked up the book and set off rapidly down the shore with a plant still in her grasp, fragments of soil falling from the roots.

  “Please wait! We want to talk to you.”

  In a few minutes they heard a distant engine start up. By the time they reached the bottom of the lighthouse the red pickup was roaring along the road. Gone.

  “I’d say she don’t feel like talkin,” said Mr. Stick. “Ten more minutes then I’m headin back to Dartmouth. You want a ride? Or stay?”

  “Yes to a ride,” said Jeanne, not looking forward to the fumigation, hoping Mr. Stick would stop at a store along the way. But he did not, drove faster and faster through the fog that had erased Sapatisia Sel.

  • • •

  Mr. Stick, feeling obscurely responsible for the cousins’ thwarted search, had gone to Lobert Sel, whose mind was failing, yet he seemed to know where Sapatisia’s little house stood. He put his trembling finger on an inlet he said was Pussle Cove. “Couple kilometers east the lighthouse. No road sign.” Mr. Stick gave the smirched paper to Alice, who put it beside Jeanne’s plate that evening. So she had an address. And to get there she took money from her savings account at the East Coast Credit Union and gave it to Felix, asked him to rent a car. She had no license.

  • • •

  The rain didn’t matter and the cousins had a sense of holiday freedom. The rental car hummed along, the wet roadside unfurled and the windshield wipers beat a slow march. They shared a bag of jelly donuts Felix bought at Tim Hortons. They passed the Wreck Point lighthouse and he slowed.

  • • •

  “That’s it. Has to be.” Jeanne pointed at a faint trackway that sidled shyly off the main road directly into a patch of wind-racked black spruce. “I see car tracks.”

  Felix turned cautiously into the watery ruts dimpled by raindrops and inched slowly between clawing branches. They looked down at a small unpainted house on the edge of the sea, smoke barely clearing the chimney. Nearby a wind-twisted spruce and an outhouse leaned west. A northern harrier huddled in the tree.

  Before they could knock, the door opened and Sapatisia Sel, wearing a heavy grey sweater that looked like it had been knitted from fog and briars, stood staring at them without expression. She was not old but weathered, a plank washed up on shore.

  “All right,” she said in a low voice. “Here you are. Again. Why? Who are you and what do you want? Ever hear of privacy?”

  “We come up from Dartmouth,” said Jeanne and waited as though she had explained everything.

  “I guessed that. Why are you bothering me?”

  “I am Jeanne Sel, and this is my cousin Felix. Also Sel. We are students. I read this article”—she held the limp cutting out—“about you and I have a question.”

  “What question?” She did not take the clip.

  “Well, you say that Mi’kmaw medicine plants from long ago can’t be used now. Why not? I mean, if we know that a certain plant cured aches or itches, why wouldn’t it be good to use it now? Our aunt Alice just had the flu and everybody brought her Mi’kmaw medicine and she got better.”

  Sapatisia Sel made a sound halfway between a moan and a sigh. “Good God, you came all this way to ask that?”

  • • •

  Salt-dimmed windows faced the Atlantic and the ocean itself seemed hung in space. The only table in the room looked like it had been stolen from a provincial park. Near the door stood an immense cupboard, painted red.

  “Used to be a fisherman’s house,” said Sapatisia. “Fixed it up. Suits me the few months I’m here.”

  On the west wall Jeanne saw a bench cluttered with botanical instruments, a large microscope, a battered and age-blackened plant press layered with drying papers, dark stem ends protruding.

  “Sit,” said Sapatisia Sel, jerking her thumb at the table. “So. You want to know so badly why we can’t use the old medicine plants that you drive a hundred kilometers on a stormy day to ask me, who you don’t know? Maybe you think I have an answer. I don’t.”

  Her unbraided hair straggled over her shoulders. “Since the conquest the air has been filled with pesticides and chemical fertilizers, with exhaust particles and smoke. We have acid rain. The deep forests are gone and now the climate shifts. Can
you figure out for yourselves that the old medicine plants grew in a different world?” Felix, who had had many school-yard fights, liked her low voice, but not her combative posture.

  “Those plants were surrounded by strong healthy trees, trees that no longer exist, trees replaced by weak and diseased specimens. We can only guess at the symbiotic relationships between those plants and the trees and shrubs of their time.” She looked out the window, tapped her foot. “And I must say you are unusual young people to come here looking for answers. Are you botany students?”

  They began to explain their lives to her, Alice’s house and how they came to be there.

  “You deluded idiots,” said Sapatisia Sel. “And now you will go back and continue your studies?”

  “We have to pass the exams. So we can get into university.”

  “Why do you want that?”

  “To have careers. To be somebody.”

  “You are already somebody. Do you mean somebody more important than poor Mi’kmaw students?”

  “Yes. I guess so,” said Jeanne, and Felix, who did not want to nod, nodded.

  “It’s not just ourselves,” said Jeanne. “Felix cares about the forests,” she said. “And I care. We want to do something.”

  Felix saw the woman’s rigid shoulders drop a little. He told her about hearing Dr. Onehube’s lecture on the boreal forest.

  “Well, Alfred does get people going.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “We’ve worked together on projects.” She got up and walked around, went to the door, opened and closed it. “You two are beginning to interest me now that we’re past the medicine plants. You are young and green, you do not know how the world works or that you will be punished for your temerity in wanting careers.” Outside the window in the gathering twilight Felix saw the northern harrier fly to its tree, something limp in its talons.

  Felix thought of the long drive back. “You sound like a teacher. Are you a teacher?”

  “I’ve done the university things, teaching and lecturing. I, too, wanted a career, I had a career, I left the career. I’ve learned enough to know that today the world we have made is desperate for help. Help that isn’t coming. I don’t teach now. I have a project and I work at it. With others. My interests are overlapping ecosystems, the difficulties in understanding the fabric of the natural world. So if you came here looking for a discussion of research on medicinal plant genomes you’re in the wrong place.”

  Felix did not like her, but there was something—and Jeanne sat with her mouth open, staring hungrily at Sapatisia Sel, waiting for the next sentence.

  “We look at models, examine causation and apparent effect, we struggle with the wild cards, worry about population growth. Humans now outnumber every mammalian form of life that has ever existed. Maybe unstoppable. We have nightmares about oceanic currents and sea star die-off, melting ice, more violent winter storms. And we think about forest degradation. Forest, the beginning and likely end. As Onehube says.” And then in that low voice that sounded as though she were talking to herself she said, “But others now suggest more frightening problems and ends than Alfred Onehube ever dreamed.”

  She seemed done with talking, thrust a notebook at them and said, “Write down your address. I’ll be in touch.” Then she sent them on their way.

  70

  moonlight

  Autumn lurched clumsily out of the equinox, black ice one day, sunlight polishing tree branches the next. A few straggler tourists were still underfoot, as irritating as gravel. Jeanne, who worked weekends at an information kiosk, collected (as everyone did) their idiotic questions, especially those from the Americans who thought it might be shorter to drive from Halifax to Antigonish counting miles rather than kilometers.

  “I’m late, I’m late,” muttered Felix, a white rabbit running through the kitchen, snatching a half-cooked pork chop from the pan and dashing up the stairs.

  “Don’t eat that pork—it’s still raw,” shouted Alice. “Use some sense. And you got some mail.” Felix, simultaneously changing clothes and chewing on the red pork, looked at the clock. On his way to the back door through the kitchen he dropped the pork chop back in the pan and picked up the buff envelope, saw “Breitsprecher Tree Project” and a Chicago address in the upper left corner. He stopped, turned the envelope over.

  “Jeanne get one, too, just like that,” said Alice, nodding at Jeanne’s plate, the envelope standing against it. “Late again—something she has to do at the school.”

  Felix tore the end off the envelope and pulled out a letter. Something fell out as he unfolded it and fluttered under the table. He read the letter and read it again, not understanding. It informed him that he was the recipient of a five-thousand-dollar fellowship from the Breitsprecher Tree Project and was signed by someone named Jason Bloodroot. What did it mean? Once more he read the letter, retrieved the check from the floor. It was made out to Felix Sel, it looked real. The letter said he was to contact Dr. Sapatisia Sel within ten days for further information about the project.

  “I’ll be double damn,” he said. “Doctor Sapatisia Sel.” There was her address and her cell phone number. He whooped so loudly that Jeanne, outside in the street, heard. She came in to find them dancing around the table, tore open her identical letter.

  “You call her,” said Felix. “It’s you who connected us with her. So you phone.”

  • • •

  The next day over the supper plates Felix studied the provincial highway map looking for an alternate route. “The trip was too long last time. But how about this”—he jabbed his pencil into the map—“a shortcut.” Jeanne was old enough to know that no man on earth could be deterred from taking an unknown shortcut.

  And now the lime-green rental car thumped into the darkening morning. The coast road would have been better. The shortcut was like driving up a dry river bed. Despite the rental car’s chopped-off look (as though a log slasher had got it), Jeanne thought it a technological marvel. She began poking at the GPS touch screen.

  The back road was a roller coaster of broken asphalt. The car could not catch the rhythm of the frost heaves. There were no towns, no houses, only third-growth spruce and brush representing the great forest of an earlier century. At the height of land they could see the dulled ocean and its grey line of rain. Tiny drops speckled the windshield.

  “I don’t think this is the tourist route,” said Felix, steering around a dead branch. “Not sure where we are. And this city car doesn’t like it.”

  “But we can see the water, so the highway has to be between us and the shore. When you see a right turn, take it.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost eleven. We’ll be late.”

  The car scraped through a series of potholes. Something dark and thin ran across the road.

  “What was that?”

  “Mink, one of those big escaped ones from the mink farms.”

  “You remember what Dr. Onehube said about those farms—pollute the rivers and the minks get out and breed with wild minks and make bad genetic changes?” The road degenerated into a stew of stones and mud. Felix clenched the wheel, drove very slowly, and the car struggled forward.

  “You know,” Felix said, “I found out something interesting about Dr. Sapatisia Sel. Guess.”

  “What, she was elected prom queen back in the day?”

  “Not likely. She was married. Married to somebody we know.”

  “Who!” Jeanne did not believe it. How could her hero have married anyone?

  “Well, not somebody we actually know—someone we heard talk.”

  “No, you don’t mean that Onehube?”

  “Yes. She was his student. And they got married.”

  Jeanne shuddered. She preferred to think of Sapatisia as a Lone Heroine.

  “Anyway, what difference does it make? They were divorced.”

  Jeanne said nothing.

  “Onehube’s okay. He got us going.”

  “Wonder wh
y they split up.”

  • • •

  They descended the hill, passed assemblages of motley boards and corrugated roofing, one with a hopeless FOR SALE sign. Abruptly the clouds began to rip open like rotten cloth, showing bright blue underskirts. As a slice of sunlight painted the drenched countryside, touched the sea, a flight of migrating birds cut the sky like crazy little scissors.

  “We’ll get there pretty soon,” said Felix. “But I don’t know where we are.”

  Jeanne began tracing her finger over the GPS touch screen. A tiny red dot on a crumpled string of a road appeared. “Look, Felix! It shows us on this road!”

  “All right!” said Felix. Jeanne promised herself she would buy this model of car if she ever had the money. Suddenly a loud female voice said, “In a half kilometer turn right.” Jeanne shrieked.

  “You don’t get out into the world enough,” said Felix, swinging onto the wet highway. The sun changed the macadam surface to black lacquer and in a few kilometers they passed the lighthouse.

  • • •

  There was Sapatisia Sel’s red pickup, beside it a rust-blotched sedan and a jeep so muddy it had no other color. Felix parked next to the jeep. At the lee side of the house they saw two large tents. A sign on one read MEN.

  “The other one must be for women,” said Jeanne. “Are they toilets?”

  “Now you sound like a tourist. The outhouse is over there,” he told her and jerked his thumb toward the unmistakable small building on the cliff. The northern harrier sat on its branch, eyeing them. “I say the tents are for sleeping.”

  “Let’s go in.” The harrier rattled a loud tektektektek.

  • • •

  The room looked different, richer in a homely way. The stolen picnic table was cluttered with papers, two laptops, a carton of almond milk and some plastic plates. Sapatisia, two young women—one with elaborately coiffed black hair, the other white-blond—and a sun-darkened man in a checked lumberjack shirt sat at the table drinking tea—wintergreen, thought Jeanne, catching the sprightly aroma—and eating take-out fried chicken legs.