Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

  Achille, Noë and Zoë stayed on alone at the house in the ever-larger clearing. Achille trapped fish and hunted, cut firewood as had René, and made hardwood potash. He sold this stuff to the traveling merchant who came with his wagon every month or two in the warm season. Noë and Zoë gathered berries, cowslips, fiddlehead ferns in spring, nuts, calamus root, mayapples, sassafras and many barks for the medicines they had learned from their mother. They made maple syrup. They had a garden but it was small and weed-choked for they had adopted Mari’s distaste for cultivation. A few pumpkins sometimes matured in the fireweed. Noë made rather awkward willow baskets, which Achille sold to the potash man. Zoë milked and tended the cow. There had been two cows but one died the month after René was killed, perhaps, thought Zoë, out of sympathy so that René’s spirit might be comforted by a familiar cow spirit.

  Their lives were marred by unwanted visits from swill-wrecked Renardette and her paramour. It was unclear at first why the couple kept returning to René’s old house, but they came often, lugging demijohns of spirit, which they urged on Achille. Renardette swaggered into the house looking at each spoon, each wooden cup. Often she would examine a pot or a cloth and say, “Well, that’s mine!” Noë would wrest the object from her.

  “Nothing in this house is yours. There is nothing here for you.”

  “This house is mine,” said Renardette. “René gave it to me. He said, ‘When I am gone, Renardette, you have this house.’ ”

  “What lies!” cried Zoë.

  “Go away!” said Noë, swishing the broom.

  Achille began to think the drunkards wanted René’s house and property and would be pleased to murder all of them to get it. He refused drinks from their jug, which he knew would make him insensible and give them the opportunity to butcher him and his sisters and blame the deaths on bounty killers. He slowly came to the belief that they were the ones who had murdered René.

  Tales of the alcoholic couple drifted far east to the ears of Elphège and Theotiste along with the rumors that they planned to kill Achille and the twins and seize the property. They heard of Renardette’s claim that the house belonged to her.

  “They are white people and they think they can seize it,” Elphège said to Theotiste.

  “They will likely get it.”

  Elphège was troubled by the idea of inherited property. Was the house René’s to give? Was it even Trépagny’s? All this was French, French ideas, French ways. English ways, English words, French words. Invaders’ ways.

  • • •

  The older brothers had lived for some years at Odanak, the Indian village of Abenaki, Mi’kmaq and mixed tribes, fighting for the French and raiding New England settlements for bounty captives. Once warring enemies, they banded together, lamenting the submergence of their ancestral lands under a flood of white settlers.

  At Odanak, Theotiste had married and fathered a son, who died of measles in his third year, two days after the mother succumbed to the same burning illness. Elphège was secretive about women and even wary because of his long infatuation with the youngest wife of Sosep, an elderly sagmaw.

  Theotiste came to his brother one day. Elphège was sitting near the river shaping a handle for a crooked knife. “Brother,” he said, “I have thought much of our younger brother and sisters. Achille, Noë and Zoë. I think we should get them.”

  “Ho,” said Elphège. “Get them? Live with them here as kin? In Odanak? Or make a visit to them?”

  “No. I wish for us to be united. I wish them to be with us, wherever we go. They are part of our band. More and more I do not care to stay longer in Odanak.”

  Elphège said nothing and after a long silence Theotiste said, “Perhaps this is not a very good idea.”

  Elphège looked at him. “Brother, you have ever put forward good ideas. I will think about what you say.” After a little while he said, “Maybe it is good if we go to that place of our mother.”

  Theotiste said, “Here we are just some Indians. There we will be Mi’kmaw people.”

  Elphège was silent for a long time. He had no taste for whitemen’s “conversation.”

  “René was a good man,” he said at last.

  “He was. Do you recall that winter when we gave him a snake and showed him how to play snow snakes and he didn’t want to stop at dusk?”

  “Yes. Trépagny threw his snake in the fire.”

  “Small matter, that was only a stick. Maman carved him a better one. It could slide far. I remember that well.” He looked at the river. “The children of one mother should be together. We have the same blood.” Elphège nodded and bent over his work.

  Several days later Theotiste said more. “First it would be good to bring them here to Odanak. And then go with them to our mother’s country and make a home there. There are Mi’kmaw here at Odanak who would come with us. Sosep wishes to return. We could find wives. I was happy when my wife was with me.”

  “Yes, a Mi’kmaw woman. But if our sisters and brother come with us, will they abandon René’s house?”

  “It is only a white man’s house.”

  “Our mother’s thoughts were always in her childhood country. She called it ‘the happy land.’ It is our place more than Odanak. Even though Sosep says it has changed greatly and there are many troubles.”

  “It will be good. I dreamed it will be good.”

  Elphège shifted to his brother’s view and said, “Let us go then, first to René’s house, then to Mi’kma’ki.”

  • • •

  They reached Wobik, much grown, with many paths twisting this way and that. The woodland, which had once wrapped around the village, now began nearly a mile from the most distant house.

  They slept in the woods. Elphège woke, staring up at the birds-of-fire stars already folding their wings. It was the time—wopk—when dark became grey, quivering night shapes slowly solidifying and returning to their daytime forms. Theotiste rose and stretched his long arms above his head.

  “It will be a good day,” said Theotiste, ever hopeful.

  • • •

  Smoke coiled from René’s roof hole as always. Theotiste pushed in. Noë was making cornmeal porridge and dropped the spoon when he came through the door. “Brother! You terrified me. You know how our father died—I thought . . .”

  Zoë came in from the cow carrying a bucket of milk. She shrieked with joy and embraced first Theotiste, then Elphège. Her cry brought Achille up from the river, where he had been mending eel traps.

  Achille was almost too handsome a young man to look upon. He was tall but sinewy and as flexible as water, of perfect form. His glossy hair fanned out in the wind, his dark eyes were warm and amused. His mouth, like Mari’s, curled at the corners, and all who noticed this curving smile thought of her.

  The twins, still children, were more like René with stiff black hair and slanted eyes. They were active as all women were, bending, folding, picking up and reaching, handing out and taking, caressing, scooping good things into bowls, offering their brothers delicacies.

  The older brothers looked around, seeing the objects of their childhood—the old table marked with knife cuts. Theotiste remembered Mari wiping it with a piece of damp leather. Those wooden household plates—René had shaped them, Theotiste had smoothed them with a fine-grained stone. Mari’s old wikuom had sunk back into the earth but they remembered sleeping in it as children, remembered reeds of moonlight shooting through the tiniest holes.

  “Brothers,” said Achille, “I must tend my potash kettle. Come outside and talk with me.” They walked some distance to his potash works. He stirred the kettle’s contents with a stick.

  “It is our source of cash money—and the firewood I cut.”

  Money! thought Theotiste with scorn but he said nothing. They talked all day and far into the night. Achille said, “After Renardette left we burned her evil brew house. But men still came out of the woods looking for beer—and her.” Theotiste’s glance caught something shining on the hi
gh shelf against the entry wall. Something like a small snakish eye, he thought.

  “None here have married,” said Elphège.

  “Ah,” said Achille, “the Wobik girls are not Mi’kmaw girls. Should I not find a Mi’kmaw woman?”

  Theotiste nodded. “We all should do so. Even Elphège.”

  “Ho,” said Elphège.

  “Zoë and I never see a good man to marry,” said Noë. “We are out here in the woods and the only ones who come by are bad ones.”

  “So perhaps this place is not so good for you?” asked Theotiste.

  “No, no. It is not, even though in childhood it was pleasant, but what else can we do?”

  “We want you to come with us,” said Elphège, as though it had been his idea. “Theotiste and I are the oldest, but we are of the same blood and we will care for you always.” For Elphège this was long oratory.

  Theotiste spoke with the assurance of one who knows. “We intend to seek out the land of our mother. Even if it be greatly changed, there must still be a place for us among our people. Mi’kmaq still live there, perhaps even kin. I spoke many times with Mi’kmaq at Odanak. Some of them will come.”

  Achille nodded.

  “I had a vision some time ago that we must do this,” said Theotiste very softly. “First we come for you, then all go to Mi’kma’ki. I saw it fair and beautiful as our mother told us.”

  “But what will we do about Papa’s place?” asked Achille, waving his hand, encompassing the house, the river, the weeds, the potash kettle filled with the results of his labor.

  With some sadness Elphège thought that Achille might be more French than Mi’kmaw. “If you follow the white man’s ways of property you could sell it,” said Elphège. “Or, if you are not that way, just leave it and come with us. What are your thoughts?”

  It was clear what Achille’s thoughts were. He could not just walk away after so much chopping and burning. He was wedded to the idea of ashes as something of value. He had a sense of property. Elphège wondered if all Mi’kmaq were not changing into Frenchmen, wanting money and goods. Few could resist the luxuries, and Achille, Zoë and Noë were métis, half French, half Mi’kmaq.

  Theotiste nodded. “You maybe sell it. Is that old captain still alive? Bouchard?”

  “He was alive last week,” said Achille. “He is very old but strong. Yes, he would have ideas.”

  “Shall you go see him and ask what disposition might be made of this property, all this sad ravaged land? He may be helpful to us.”

  • • •

  The next morning Achille and Theotiste set out to paddle to Wobik in René’s canoe, but less than three miles from the house something whistled overhead.

  “Vite! To the shore!” said Achille through clenched teeth, swerving them under hanging willows. The canoe scraped through tearing branches. Before the willows played out they crept up onto the bank and dragged the canoe behind them.

  “The forest is alive with bounty hunters. Let us leave the canoe here and go by foot. But warily.”

  Theotiste touched Achille’s shoulder in assent and they began to weave through the trees.

  • • •

  “What, sell René’s house?” said Captain Bouchard. “Yes, such a thing can happen. There is a man, Jean Mague, a farmer from France looking for a property with cleared land and a house. He does not intend to waste the good years of his life chopping trees. I think he would pay a fair price. He will soon be here.” Jean Mague, he remarked, had two brothers, three grown sons, their wives, two nephews and their wives to farm with him. They were a strong group and handy with firearms. As the old man spoke, Jean Mague himself came through the door, a lipless face, legs and arms as long as wikuom poles.

  Mague was interested to hear about René Sel’s place and wondered how it had come in the possession of these Indians. He liked the sound of a sturdy French house, a potash kettle, cleared land. He looked Achille and Theotiste up and down rather insolently but agreed to walk back with them to see René’s property.

  “I’ll tell you something,” he said when they mentioned René’s death. “Bounty hunters will never molest my family.” And because he was who he was he wished he had brought some beads and cheap whiskey to trade. He carried his gun and followed.

  Before the house came in sight Theotiste ran ahead. He dug quickly in a certain place and put what he found in his pack basket, then rushed to the house to tell Elphège and his sisters that Jean Mague was coming. Noë ran into the back room and rummaged for the small birch-bark box decorated with colorful quillwork, a box from Mari’s childhood and precious to Noë. Inside the door Theotiste reached up to the high shelf. His hand grasped René’s old snow snake. They went out where Achille was already talking with Jean Mague, the newcomer looking around the property with narrowed eyes to show no one could put anything over on him. His squared shoulders and long heavy steps showed he already felt himself the possessor.

  “Will we give him the potash I made?” Achille asked Elphège in a low voice.

  “Yes.”

  • • •

  Before the talk of price even began, they were interrupted by Renardette and Démon Meillard, who came out of the trees riding tandem on a black horse. They were sober and grim. Démon, his rum-red face shaped like a hazelnut, the modest chin augmented by a pointed black beard, spoke only to Jean Mague and said that the previous owner, René Sel, who had held the notarized title to the property, had bequeathed it to Renardette, his adopted daughter. René and Renardette, he said knowingly, were both pure French. Renardette owned it, not the half-breed Indian squatters who claimed it, who said they were René’s children. Demonstrably a falsehood. What Indian knew his true parentage? None!

  Démon spoke directly to Jean Mague. “Renardette will sell this good property to you. We will record the sale in Captain Bouchard’s great ledger and all will be legal and binding. This is white man’s business. These Indians have no claims, they are nothing at all. Nothing.”

  Achille whispered to Theotiste. “But is it not recorded in the ledger that the house belonged to René? And that René married Mari, our mother, following the whiteman law?”

  Theotiste whispered back: “Perhaps it was, but when I asked Captain Bouchard he went in the back room with the ledger, came out a moment later and showed me there was nothing. But I could see rough bits of torn paper in the cleft of that book.”

  In the end Jean Mague, Démon and Renardette Meillard stood apart under the trees and made their arrangement. They shook hands, turned and faced Elphège, Theotiste, Achille, Zoë and Noë. Jean Mague said, “I have agreed to buy the property from the owners. You must now leave.” He raised his gun, ready primed and loaded, to his shoulder.

  Achille stood stiff with rage but Elphège touched his arm and said in a low voice, “Brother, it is only a whiteman house. You do not wish to be tied down to a potash kettle like such a one. Let us go. We will hunt and fight. We will not burn trees into dirty ashes.”

  Achille’s voice was tight. He felt his blood curdling with poison. “It is clear that Captain Bouchard informed them, that he removed René’s claim from the ledger. He was friendly to our father—for our father was a white Wenuj. But to our mother and to us his friendship was false.”

  “What does it matter? Before you there lie many good years of hunting. That is a better life for you.”

  Achille stood silent for many heartbeats, then said, “We will come with you to our mother’s country.”

  “Good. First we go to Odanak.”

  26

  Mi’kma’ki

  At Odanak, Zoë, Noë and Achille turned shy, unused to such a moil. The village, with its wikuoms, and even some log cabins, frothed with people working, cooking, softening hides, splitting canoe ribs, lifting a tangle of gaudy roots from a dye kettle. Two men played waltes, the bone dice leaping up when they slapped down the wooden bowl. Jen, a round-faced Mi’kmaw woman with three children, looked at Zoë and Noë, at their soiled whiteman dre
sses.

  “Sit down. Eat,” she said. “You are good strong girls who will make a journey to Mi’kma’ki.” Zoë and Noë, starved of female company for years, began to thaw. Noë had brought three of her baskets, which she presented to them, but these were not admired. In Odanak there were basket makers of great skill and the women brought out several to show her: an oval birch-bark container sewn with spruce root and worked with such intricate designs the eye could not hold them. Noë touched a basket with a decorative rim of artfully twisted black root. Some baskets were tiny, woven of sweet-grass, some were splendid with red- and green-dyed root strips.

  “I wish to learn how to make such beautiful baskets,” said Noë, kicking at her own poor efforts.

  “We will show you,” said a young and heavy woman with callused hands who told the story of Ai’ip, the lazy woman who split and twisted roots around her fingers and somehow made the first basket. “No person could name this object. And they had to call it ‘that root thing.’ ”

  “I am choking with new thoughts,” said Zoë. “We know nothing,” for they had only ten winters.

  Theotiste, Elphège and Achille wanted to start at once for Mi’kma’ki, but Sosep, an old trapper sagmaw, took them aside and spoke at length.

  “I am going with you. But it is not good to go now when winter is advancing. There is nothing to eat at that place in the winter. People go up the river. We better wait until spring.”

  Achille itched to go.

  “What does he mean, there is no food at Mi’kma’ki? Mari our mother told us it was a place of great richness, fish, lobsters, clams and oysters, birds by the thousand, succulent plants.” Sosep overheard this and laughed. “Mi’kma’ki is a summer place. Winter very hard there unless you cached ten moose and sixteen bears.”

  For more than four cycles of the moon the Sels waited at Odanak. Theotiste, Elphège and Achille hunted and fished, talked with the men about the best route to Mi’kma’ki. The women helped Noë and Zoë dry and smoke venison and eel for their journey. Noë, determined to become a maker of fine baskets, worked at it until her fingers blistered.