by Annie Proulx
• • •
One day, sitting outside the healing wikuom in a special chair, he had a visitor. A lanky whiteman came striding down the path. Jinot didn’t know who he was but hated him for his good legs. The man stopped in front of him.
“Member me? Vic Goochey? Borned Gautier but they all call me Goochey. We was in the fire and the river? Brung ya here with Lew Green? Dragged a damn wagon with a old black horse. He got burned up, y’know. Most a the crew got it. But Lew heered about this Indan, Jim Sillybub, he’s a burn healer. I had to get away from New Brunswick anyhow, place is all black and stinkin, so we brung you here. Lew Green had his right ear burned off and Sillybub fixed him up good. Course his ear is gone, just a little bit a skin left, but he’s up and around. Figured he might do the same for you. Seein you got me to run down to the river. I was goin a stay in the shanty, figured the fire would never take it, but when you come runnin and half on fire yellin ‘run! run!’ I change my mind. So I’m alive and hardly got scorched. Remember that sow bear on fire? She died right there and the cub just kept on tryin to suck. It was a bad fire.”
“God save me,” said Jinot. “I want to know about that fire. How big, what they say. I got a brother, Amboise, workin up on the Big Bartibogue.”
“Ver bad, that place. Fire come in, burned her up. They say three million acres a good timber burned. Towns, houses, jails, lumber camps, sawmills. Half a Fredericton got it.”
“Amboise and Joe Martel,” said Jinot. “Oh my brother, my friend. It can’t be the fire killed them.”
“Must of. More’n a hundred people got it.”
Jinot could not speak for choking. Goochey waited. He sighed to express sorrow for Jinot’s people, then he spoke softly. “We was lucky we made it, specially me. How your legs comin along?”
Jinot snuffled a little, then spoke in the hard and angry voice of someone who puts bad news behind him and gets on. “Slow. Sillyboy says it takes a long time. The scar draws up my leg, so I can’t walk good. Can’t do much.” He slapped the side of his right leg to indicate that it was the most damaged limb.
“Well, I come to ask if you want to go back out west, work the Gatineau?”
Jinot, unable to stop thinking about Amboise, shook his head. “I just told you I can’t do nothin now. And I got no clothes cept what Sillyboy got from the priest, can’t do no work. Not a chance I can do woods work now.”
“Hell, y’can cook, can’t ya? That’s the law, people get hurt in the woods, they cook.”
“I can’t cook nothin but fish. Can’t stand up for long, just two, three minutes. I tell ya, the burn pulls my leg up hard. I don’t know how I’ll get along. I want to get away from here. Sillyboys, all of ’em, been good but this is a hard place, hungry, poor, no money, no job, no huntin, nothin. I don’t belong here no more. If I ever did. If I could maybe get to my other brother on Manitoulin, let him know what happened, I might work out some things.”
“Hell, Jinot, I’ll take you out a here, Manitoulin if that’s where you want a go. You save my life. I ain’t forgettin that.”
“I got to get healed up, first. Sillyboy says couple more months, this fall, maybe, I might be walkin. Some. I got to get so I can move around better. I’m just cripple this way.”
“Say what, you get Sillabub fix you up some more and I’ll come git you. Lessee, it is now just about June, drives are on, what say I come back October, see how ya go? Maybe you be better and we’ll see what.”
He left, and Jinot thought Goochey was a good man, though he’d never paid him any attention before the fire. He cried again for Amboise, his older brother, a drinker, a dreamer of past days he never knew, now lost to him forever. Amboise, who hated cutting the forest but did it because when they went into new woods he felt he was entering a past world. Amboise, who drank whiskey to get away from the present.
• • •
The son, Beeto Sillyboy, showed him there was something more that could be done besides the gentle massage and softening salves. He coaxed the stiff, scar-bound leg into positions that hurt, very gradually stretching the clenching scar, moving the leg carefully, carefully, not to tear the stiff tissue. So by September, almost a year after the fire, Jinot could limp slowly. The leg was dreadfully painful, a kind of pain like no other, tedious and biting, angry and gripping, and he could see how the scar held his leg under tension. He said one day to Jim Sillyboy, “If you was to cut right here—seems to me it would let the leg stretch more. That scar is like a rope tyin me up. Just a little cut where that thick place binds, eh?” But Jim Sillyboy did not want to make such a cut. So Jinot was no good for the woods, or other heavy work. He had no money, everything lost in the fire, and when Goochey came back he would have to say he could not go with him. He would have to stay in Indiantown until he died, poor, hungry and crippled. He saw that life in front of him. But he tried once more with Beeto Sillyboy, saying that one little cut might make the scar easier. Beeto thought he was right.
“We do it. I get good knife, old kind, black stone she ver sharp.” And he came the next day with a wicked little slant of fresh-flaked obsidian and made the cut, put on healing salve and an eel skin binding to hold the leg in a more open position. In a week Jinot was hobbling around and Jim Sillyboy admitted the cut had been useful. “But some it don’t work. You lucky.”
“Oh, yes, I am lucky,” said Jinot.
• • •
When Vic Goochey came in October, Jinot told him he wanted to go to Boston and find Elise, to see his nieces and nephews. He wanted next to find Josime on Manitoulin Island and count up more nieces and nephews. He had come out of the year of trial by fire wanting children.
Goochey looked at him and drew down his lips. “You want kids? Way most folks git ’em is git married and do that thing. Find you a woman-girl and git married. Hell, I been married twice and got some kids in Bangor, two more in Waterville. Why I keep workin—send them all the money I make. You know plenty women—I seen you jabberin with ’em four at a whack. Snatch one out.”
Jinot knew a trip to Boston was stupid. He had no money, he would not know where to begin the search for Elise in a city squirming with people. And Goochey said he had maybe promised too much when he said he could get Jinot to Manitoulin. He was grateful for having his life saved, but he wanted some time to live it.
“Your talk about kiddos made me itch to see the ones I got, turn over a new leaf. But I’ll keep my eyes open, see if I find any work you kin do. I know you kin learn cookin and git took on with a lumber camp. It’s all beans and pork, anyway. Easy. Hell, I done it for years. Nobody never died from beans and pork.”
Jinot did not want to cook. To hobble around the shanty cook stove while strong men cut and limbed in the fragrant forest—no. He borrowed a dollar from Vic Goochey, shook his hand and thanked him for his trouble, said he would send him back the dollar when he found work.
He went with the dollar to the first saloon he could find.
“Whiskey.” Though he preferred rum, whiskey was the cheapest drink. For twenty cents he bought a bottle of the cheapest. This was his first binge since the fire. The pain faded and faded as he drank and he suddenly felt very well, even happy. He smiled to himself and poured more in his glass.
“Spare some a that?” said the man next to him, a heavyset fellow in wool pants with callused hands and a long grey face. He was a lumberman from his looks.
“Hold on,” said Jinot. “Here she comes,” and he poured liberally. He discovered the man was Resolve Smith, part Passamaquoddy, and had worked the Penobscot as a master driver, knew the river country well. He, too, had crippled legs, both broken in a rollway accident. “Whole damn pile knocked me flat, come down on my legs and I could see ever one a them logs comin before it hit me. Broke my legs into pieces like a stick and they set crooked. Awful when it rains.”
Jinot told him about the fire on the Miramichi that swept New Brunswick and how Amboise and Martel had perished in the fire, and he himself had been crippled. The
next hour was devoted to stories of woods fires, Amboise, Martel, injuries. They finished the bottle together and Jinot bought another. After a long time they fell silent, then Smith said, “You lookin for work?”
“Lookin for work but I can’t do woods work no more.”
“Me neither, but there’s something I heerd. These fellers in Massachusetts or somewhere are startin up a ax factory, make the heads in numerous numbers. They lookin for men know axes. So I heerd. You been a axman a long time, you know axes.”
“Like I know a tree,” Jinot said. “All kind of ax. All my life since I was a kid I live with a ax in my hand.”
“Let’s go up there, see can we get us a job. Hell, we’ll have good drinkin and good times.” They agreed to meet the next noon in front of the saloon.
50
a twisted life
Mr. Albert Bone pushed his baby face forward, the whitest face Jinot had ever seen, ice-blue eyes set deep and mouth fixed in a knot. He resembled a wizened child but spoke in a voice that was asymmetrically large. He fitted two fingers of his right hand into his watch pocket, gazed at Jinot, who shifted his weight, uncomfortable in the confines of the office.
“What can you tell me of the ax? Have you made axes?” The questions rumbled.
“Never made one. Wore out a good many fallin pine on Penobscot and Gatineau. Twenty years a-choppin. Know a bad ax, used quite a few.” He was exhausted by all this talk.
“So, Mr. Jinot Sel, would you say this was a good ax or a bad ax?” and Baby Face turned and grasped a fresh-faced ax that lay on his desk, gave it helve first to Jinot, who, after the shock of being addressed as Mister, hefted it, turned it every which way, sighted down the handle, peered closely, looking for the weld (which he did not see), ran his thumb carefully along the bit edge. He took an attenuated swing. “You got a tree or a log?” he said. “Better try it before I say nothin,” for he knew this was a test.
They went out into the fresh morning, mist lifting from the river. Two crows cawed amiably from the invisible far side. Mr. Bone pointed at a chestnut tree, perhaps ten inches through, on the bank. Jinot limped over to it, took his stance, swung the ax; it bit and the chips flew. It was a young tree and did not deserve to be cut. It was not as yielding as soft pine but he had it on the ground in minutes and thought that if he had had any half-submerged thought of chopping for a living again he could drown it; he was slow now and each stroke shot a pang through his scarred leg.
“Good ax,” he said. “Quality.”
“Yes. I and the men I have trained are dedicated to making the best axes. Quality is everything, and a man who works for me must swear to uphold the growing reputation of these axes. This is the Penobscot model. Let me ask you a question. You are an Indian, I suppose?” A tiny ding came from his vest pocket.
Ah, thought Jinot, he only hires whitemen. “I am Mi’kmaw. From Nova Scotia. They say there’s a Frenchman way back there. Great-great-grand-père Sel.” He half-turned to go. There was still time to find Resolve Smith in one of the saloons and tie one on. But he added, “I lived in Maine most a my life.”
Bone talked, his words flowing into the mist. “I have a particular regard for Indians. I know English newcomers practiced great injustices on them and in my life I have tried to make up for those malfeasances. I have ever believed that if your people had resisted the first explorers you would still be living in the forest gathering nuts. I have, in my own way, sought to repair injustices when I can.” As he talked he strolled back to his office, limiting his stride to accommodate Jinot’s limp. “To that end I hire some Indians. I find Indians have an instinctive ability for mechanical improvements and invention. My foreman, Mr. Joseph Dogg, for example.” The little mouth twitched.
Jinot stood speechless. He had never heard a whiteman make such talk. He didn’t like it.
When they reached the door Mr. Bone drew a gold watch from his pocket and pressed a button; it sang sweetly, telling the nearest hour. The sun found a hole in the thinning mist and the watch glittered. “Mr. Jinot Sel, you will learn the processes of forging and tempering. I need good men in those skills. And grinding and filing—we will try you there. It would be to our mutual advantage if you learned every facet of ax manufacture. What do you say? Yes? All right. I will take you on and may you do good work, for I know I will lose money until you grasp the essentials. Go with that man there, my foreman, Mr. Dogg. He’ll show you the ropes, as mariners say.” He nodded at a hunchbacked métis who stood inside the hallway, grinning, not more than thirty years old.
Jinot nodded, but trembled inside. He was hired. It had been so easy.
• • •
“Iroquois-Seneca,” said Joe Dogg to his unasked question. “Come on.” And they rushed back out the door and through the yard, Dogg pointing out Mr. Bone’s array of buildings. “He’s a fair man,” said Dogg, “no matter what you hear.” They walked into the forge shop, a room of fire and hammering where men cut hot iron stock. “You think I’d ever git hired by somebody else? Nossir. Ha-ha, Mr. Bone says I am his Hephaestus, though I have not yet forged any thunderbolts.”
“And do you have two comely maidens to help you?” asked Jinot, dredging up Beatrix’s accounts of the Greek gods. Joe Dogg laughed with delight. “Hah, y’are an educated Injun, ain’t you? And it don’t do you no good at all, hey? Tell you, there’s more than Jinot Sel can read books,” he declared, indicating himself. Jinot watched a mope-faced man take up a metal bar and lay it on an anvil. While he held it in place another man scored it with hammer and cold chisel, and broke the bar. “Them patterns is the start, they make up into axes,” said Dogg. “A man—if he’s any good—makes eight axes a day. If he’s no good he can make ten or twelve.”
They walked on into the din. Jinot had never seen a trip-hammer before and here were six of the pounding things, tireless in their idiot strength. The stone floor trembled.
“Ever one a them bastids got its own waterwheel for power,” bellowed Dogg.
At the grinding shop they stepped into an oppressive roar punctuated by the soft coughing of men who inhaled steel dust all day long. A row of stone wheels six to eight feet in diameter stood along one wall, their rotation making a hoarse wet whisper; men grasping the new axes bent over the speeding stones.
“Now,” said Dogg in a normal voice when they stepped outside, “over there is workers’ lodgin. Y’go there and they’ll give y’own room. Anything y’want to know, y’ask me.”
• • •
Jinot began to learn the skills and subtle judgments of ax makers. In the forge house his old river-drive reactions to the quixotries of moving water and rolling logs translated into recognition of gradations of the shapes and colors of hot metals, quickly, delicately turning the ax under the descending hammer blows, all motion in the deafening heat like running dream-like through a chamber of the inferno; it was the Miramichi fire compressed into a bed of coals, the hurricane wind blowing only at the command of the bellows. Those dark wraiths in the room were not men of nerve and skill but demons, beckoning him to their damned society.
Dogg, his tutor, talked about himself. “How I come to leave that Iroquois country in upstate York, why, smart whitemen they get our property. Iroquois don’t think that way. Sell it but we so foolish think it still ours. Whiteman give whiskey, give little presents—and get our huntin land. That land be theirs. They say, ‘Indan, give up them ways you people, Indan, get civilize.’ So I come here to get civilize, get job. That blacksmith, Mr. Bone, pretty nice to me—he see me down by river, I try catch frog—hungry—he fix me up, learn me to be smith. You maybe never think Mr. Bone can find end of his thing but he make a good ax. Good smith. He make a good ax.”
This was difficult to believe, Mr. Bone looked so small and childlike. Later, covertly, Jinot began to study the small frame beneath the black suit, the small hands. He had been deceived by the baby face. The body was small but steely, the little hands callused and hard.
• • •
; He was drawn to the trip-hammers. The hammerman had to be something of an artist, shifting the position of the glowing ax clamped in his tongs for the perfect shape, and he had to be fast. Most wracking was the tempering process, which demanded experience and a good eye. Hugh Boss, in his fifties, tall and lopsided from spine-twisting scoliosis, heated a new-shaped ax, then dropped it into a vat of water.
“Makes it so damn brittle the bit will break first time you use it,” said Boss. “So—you got to draw the temper, eh?” He winked at Jinot and again the ax went to the forge, where it was reheated; he worked a file over it. “Watch the colors edge down to the bit.” Jinot saw the color parade from pale yellow to orange, to dark orange to brown. It went again into the water.
“It’ll go all the way to blue, but brown is where we want a ax. There. She’s fixed, now.”
The months slid into years before Mr. Bone was satisfied that the tools Jinot made could withstand thousands of heavy strikes.
• • •
It was the richest and strangest part of his life, for he felt he was no longer Jinot Sel, but someone else, a hybrid creature in a contrived space. Mr. Bone took an interest in him. There were many good Indian men in the factory but he had fastened on Jinot, who, with his fresh, smiling face, looked younger than he was.
• • •
One day, when Mr. Bone had to make a trip to Boston, he told Jinot to come with him.
Alone in the coach neither spoke for an hour until Mr. Bone said earnestly, “I want you to understand all the intricacies of the ax business. I have undertaken to educate Indans such as yourself in the mechanic and manufacturing arts. But there is more to a business than that. The sooner your people leave the forests and adopt useful trades, the sooner the woodlands will become civilized and productive. That is not to say that it will be goose pie all the way—no. I wish you to know the business end of ax making. You must learn how to consort with men of quality.” He took out his repeater and pressed the knob; the watch chimed.