Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

  She came on a folder that Debra Strong had labeled “Genealogy?” containing some torn and yellowed pages. This, she thought, might be useful. She matched the torn pieces together. A letter from R. R. Tetrazinni in Philadelphia said only that the investigation was complete to the point set out in his report and that if Lavinia Duke Breitsprecher wished to follow up with further investigation of the names and addresses of the heirs she should contact him as soon as practicable as he had other work to hand. The report puzzled Sophia. What heirs?

  She telephoned James Bardawulf. “I’ve come on something that I don’t quite understand. It’s a report from a private investigator to Dieter’s first wife, Lavinia Duke. I wish you would take a look at it. I think it says there are some unknown heirs. But I don’t know who they are or what they have inherited.”

  “It’s probably a fraud letter. People claiming to be heirs to fortunes and long-lost cousins are not uncommon. Can you send it over to me?”

  “I’d rather show it to you here. Why don’t you come over this afternoon and look at it? And we can go have a drink and talk. Some outdoor place on the lake—it’s so hot this summer. I haven’t seen you for months.”

  67

  a little problem

  It was Breitsprecher-Duke’s most peculiar meeting, so divided in content it was as though strangers had been swept up from the hot streets and ordered to conduct business. They sat around the mahogany table in Breitsprecher-Duke’s meeting room with a portrait of Lavinia Duke on the south wall and one of Dieter on the north. The old air conditioner was gasping as though fighting off its own heatstroke. On the table was a tray of cream cheese sandwiches with the bread curling up, paper napkins from the old days stamped with the letters DUKE LOGGING and the image of an ax. Although the room was swollen with August heat, a coffee urn hissed on the side table.

  Sophia, in the grey wool Chanel despite the heat, made a rambling speech about the company history and passed out copies of the fruits of her labors—sixteen pages of company fantasy bound in leather and stamped Breitsprecher-Duke, the Story of a Forest Giant. She waited for congratulations, but James Bardawulf had already told the others of the old Tetrazinni report and his own weeks of dead-end work to prove it a hoax. The company’s legal adviser, Hazelton Culross, was present. James Bardawulf, in an acid-tinged voice, went straight to the problem.

  “Mr. Tetrazinni is long gone. His son, Chandler Tetrazinni, with whom I spoke at length, inherited the business. He is a lawyer.”

  Raphael, who knew his father well, recognized the danger signal. If James had respected Tetrazinni he would have said “attorney.” “Lawyer” meant something with greater elements of python. The room was hot and the August sun eating at the begrimed window glass seemed to have found a way through it.

  James Bardawulf’s harsh voice continued. “Frankly, I wish I hadn’t contacted him. He heads up Tetrazinni Search Services, which specializes in tracing missing and unknown heirs. He was surprised to hear from me and said he would look in the files. Two days later he called and said he had found the relevant papers and that the case was far from dead. I’m afraid my questions led him to this almost forgotten affair and he smelled the possibility of money. I regret to say that I think that if I had not called him he would never have heard of Breitsprecher. But we can’t undo the situation. I learned from Hazelton that Tetrazinni’s outfit works for a percentage of the inheritance, and to me that means that he now intends to go to the heirs and offer them a contract. A champertous contract, which is, unfortunately, quite legal these days. Lavinia Duke initiated this search decades ago”—he glanced up at her portrait—“just why she did this is far from clear as she should have been advised to ignore sleeping dogs. Tetrazinni, the man she hired, claimed to have found legitimate heirs to the Duke fortune, heirs who actually had a more valid claim than Lavinia herself—that is if blood relationship is the criterion.”

  “How can that be?” said Sophia, pushing the extra copies of The Story of a Forest Giant away. “Surely it can’t mean anything. Breitsprecher and Duke have owned the business for generations! It’s accepted, it’s known.” She patted her forehead with one of the napkins. “This air conditioner is useless.”

  “A suit may be forthcoming if those heirs proceed,” said James Bardawulf morosely.

  “Proceed! Have they begun an action?” Andrew Harkiss got up and poured his sixth cup of coffee since breakfast. Coffee gave him jitters and palpitations, forcing him to drink gin at night to calm down. “And are you going to tell us who these ‘putative heirs’ might be?”

  “Believe it or not, they are some Indians up in Canada.”

  “Oh no, oh no,” said Conrad Breitsprecher suddenly, his face so drained of color that his black eyebrows seemed drawn on his forehead with charcoal. “That could break up the company.” James Bardawulf was surprised at his agitation. What did he have to worry about? The seedling nurseries were making money as though they had a printing press in the cellar. No red ink there, no covetous Indians with their hands held out. And Conrad took no profits, but poured every penny back into his damn seedlings. His obsession.

  Claude Breitsprecher also noticed Conrad’s anxiety. Pure ego, he thought. Conrad believed the reputation of Breitsprecher-Duke rested entirely on the seedling nursery division, which wasn’t even part of the company. As a young man Dieter had set it up with his cousin Armenius Breitsprecher and made it into a hobby that he fondly believed was an innovative business. But Conrad had, for all his eccentricities and peculiar ways, turned it into a success. How did that happen?

  “Break up the company? I doubt that. In any case your nursery business is and always has been quite separate.”

  “Of course. But—it’s the thought that someone you don’t know can come in and take all you’ve built up. Once they get their hooks into you they’ll keep on until they’ve got everything. They’ll come after my nurseries! They carry the name Breitsprecher!” Conrad was clenching his fists.

  Conrad is really upset, thought Sophia. She made a suggestion. “Can’t we just rip up the report and forget we ever saw it? Actually part of it was ripped when I found it.”

  Hazelton Culross laughed. “Not now. James Bardawulf contacted Mr. Tetrazinni and they discussed the report, so Mr. Tetrazinni knows and he knows James Bardawulf and all of you also know. You are no longer ignorant of the report’s existence.”

  James Bardawulf gave his copy of The Story of a Forest Giant a little dismissive flick with his finger. Sophia clenched her fists.

  “We can sell, can’t we?” asked Harkiss. “International Paper has been after us for a year. Shouldn’t we accept their offer, divide the money and reorganize our lives? Most of us active in the company are near retirement age in any case. To me it seems a good time to sell.”

  James Bardawulf stuck out his lower lip. “Doing so will not stop Tetrazinni and the so-called heirs. Even if we sold, those heirs could still come after each of us.”

  Sophia began to snivel.

  But Hazelton Culross asked the big question. “How much do you know about the assumed heirs?”

  “According to Tetrazinni’s report to Lavinia Duke the heirs would be Mi’kmaq Indians. Canadian Indian. We do not have the names of the present-day descendants.”

  “Well, none of those people were in the company papers,” said Sophia. “How was I expected to know? I only saw something about a large table in the Penobscot Bay house. No idea what that referred to.”

  “In fact,” said Andrew Harkiss, ignoring her, “the line may have died out? The problem may have solved itself? That report is old.”

  “Perhaps. We just don’t know. And the original report found that the Duke descendants as we know them”—he touched his copy of The Story of a Forest Giant—“were only through Charles Duquet’s adopted sons. His only legitimate son was Outger Duquet, Beatrix’s father. That’s where the trouble comes. So Lavinia herself had no direct claim to Duquet ancestry.” There was a touch of triumph in James Bard
awulf’s voice.

  “Before you start to worry,” said Hazelton Culross, sensing the waves of anxiety crashing around him, “consider that Tetrazinni himself may not know if there are any current presumed heirs. He would have to do the legwork to establish names and whereabouts. And if and when he finds them he would have to persuade them that they have a claim worth pursuing. He would likely get them to sign a contract with him and only then would things go forward. If these heirs are Canadian it is another layer of difficulty for Tetrazinni to work through. All those things take time and money and the lawyer would have to bear the cost. And then he would come up against a company that for centuries has been directed and led first by the Dukes, then by the Breitsprechers, accepted as the legitimate owners of the properties and the operators of a legitimate business for almost three hundred years. Even if he put the effort and money into finding any living heirs, Tetrazinni would have the slimmest chance of getting anywhere with this. I would put it out of my mind and continue as you always have.”

  There was a silence, a grateful silence. Andrew took a deep breath and said, “But we have discussed selling the company. International Paper is interested. Except for the seedling division,” he added hastily as Conrad half-stood.

  “But there’s still a chance the heirs could sue us, right?” he asked, fixed and tense.

  “Well, yes. Anything is possible. But I don’t think any court would give them the time of day.”

  “Well, I give them the time of day,” said Conrad. “I find all this very disturbing.” And he rushed from the room.

  Hazelton Culross looked at James Bardawulf, at Sophia and Andrew. “He really seems to see this as a threat. He is overreacting.”

  Claude said, “He has never been right since his war experience. It may sound far-fetched but I have heard of delayed reactions to war experiences.”

  Hazelton’s advice was simple: “Stay away from Tetrazinni. Don’t go looking for trouble.”

  • • •

  Almost two weeks later Sophia found a memo from James Bardawulf on her desk. “Call me.” It was still ungodly hot. She worried about sweat stains on her silk blouse. The air conditioner sent out a tepid waft of mold-scented air. She dialed her brother’s number, got his snotty new secretary with her English-accented “May I say who is calling please?”

  “Tell him it’s his old mistress.”

  There was an intake of breath, a lengthy silence, then James Bardawulf’s cautious little “Hello?”

  “I got your memo,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “Sophia! Don’t ever say that kind of thing to Miss Greenberry. She believed you!”

  “Englishwomen have no sense of humor.” She cut off James Bardawulf’s roars and huffs. “Calm down. Why did you want me to call you?”

  “To give you some very interesting news. For us, anyway. Hazelton Culross, who takes The Philadelphia Inquirer, called me this morning. He said there’s a back-page story in today’s paper saying that a lawyer named Tetrazinni died in a fight with a burglar over the weekend. The office was wrecked, file cabinets overturned, desk drawers pulled out and the safe wide open. Tetrazinni shot. I don’t know yet if there is anything in the Chicago papers. I’ve sent out for a Trib.”

  “My God. That’s extraordinary. You might even think—” A deep breath. “Have you let the others know?”

  “Just you so far. I was going to call them after I talked with you. After all, you are the one who opened the whole can of worms. The primary instigator.”

  Sophia let that pass. It was James Bardawulf who had started the wheels turning. “Let poor Conrad know. He was so upset that day.”

  Another of James Bardawulf’s long silences. Then the little voice again. “Maybe he already knows.”

  “James, what do you mean? James Bardawulf!”

  “I only mean he might have seen the papers already. What did you think I meant?”

  “Not important,” she said. “Talk to you later.”

  His last remark floated out of the receiver: “We can proceed with the sale.”

  • • •

  And so, over the centuries Breitsprecher-Duke had risen and fallen like a boat on the tides. Now the tide was out. And International Paper was in. Only boxes of papers and several portraits remained of the old company. And a separate entity called Breitsprecher Seedlings.

  68

  Egga’s daughters

  There was no going back after World War II: women were edging into jobs men had always done. Feminist rhetoric floated in the air. Bren Sel thought it should be this way, and shot a combative look at her husband, Edgar-Jim Sel, called Egga, an unaware man. She believed the new ideas were a release from the bondage of history and tried to explain this to him, but Egga did not see a parallel between feminist emergence from an oppressive past and his own life and renunciation of Mi’kmaw particularity. He had come down to Martha’s Vineyard as a runaway boy escaping the residential Indian school at Shubenacadie in Nova Scotia, found work as a fisherman and later found Brenda Hingham.

  When he proposed she said yes, and then, “I am marrying an enemy.”

  “Enemy? How am I your enemy?”

  “Do you not know that the Mi’kmaq came here and fought my people? Before the whitemen?”

  “I did not know this. Was it a battle?”

  “A battle? It was a war. Mi’kmaw warriors took the whole New England coast. For a little time.”

  “And now this Mi’kmaw wins again.” He flashed a guess that likely there had been a little infusion of Mi’kmaw into the Wôpanâak in that long-ago time.

  • • •

  They were an awkward match. “You don’t understand,” she said to him often.

  “What don’t I understand?” he asked.

  “If you don’t know I can’t tell you.”

  The central problem, she believed, was Egga’s refusal to be Mi’kmaq.

  He said, “It made my life very bad, being a Mi’kmaw person. I have put it away.”

  “You can’t put away what you are. Your parents, your brothers and sisters. And all the generations behind them, your people. You cannot rinse out your blood like a dirty shirt and say it is a—a pineapple! It is you, your heritage, what you came from, it cannot be something else. And now it is part of our children and they must know it.” Egga rolled his eyes—this was what came from marrying into the matrilineal Wôpanâak.

  Bren wanted to guide their two daughters toward being a new kind of woman—whiteman, Wôpanâak and Mi’kmaw mix of genes, ideas, careers, perceptions of the world. Both girls were strong-minded and smart, both sassy children who gave Egga bizarre thoughts of the residential school with its punishing nuns and priests. If his womenfolk were dropped into such a school the place would be in riot within a day, Bren, Marie and Sapatisia leading the charge, nuns and priests begging mercy. He enjoyed this vision and when one of his rambunctious girls was particularly audacious he was pleased, comparing them to the pitifully fearful Mi’kmaw children at the resi school. He wanted bold children. Very gradually, very slowly he began to talk about his old life, surprised at the sharp interest his children and wife took in his stories. When he told his parents’ names—Lobert and Nanty Sel—they wanted to write letters, go to Shubenacadie, to Lobert’s log house. They wanted to love these unknown relatives. And perhaps, thought Egga, so did he. Bren’s nagging made him wonder what being Mi’kmaq could mean beyond pain and humiliation. Bren herself was enthusiastically Wôpanâak, and again he imagined lustful and ancient Mi’kmaw warriors surging into Wôpanâak villages and women. He laughed.

  “What is so funny?” asked Bren.

  “If you don’t know I can’t tell you,” he said.

  • • •

  In Shubenacadie a few years after his wife Nanty died, Egga’s father, Lobert Sel, remarried a young widow, Kate Googoo, already pregnant with their first child. The year after Paul was born, Alice Sel arrived, and the last baby, Mary May. Egga, down in Martha’s Vineyard, knew
nothing about these younger siblings.

  • • •

  Bren insisted on a serious commitment to homework. “I want you girls to go to university. I will make the money to send you.” Although from childhood she had wanted to study linguistics with the vague hope of resurrecting the old native Wôpanâak language (which she did not speak), there had been no money in her family for such schooling. When Sapatisia, her older child, started school Bren got the only job available—night shift at the fish plant, socking almost all of her paycheck into their education account. Her girls would have lives of value.

  “They’ll never have to work at a fish plant,” she said to Egga. “Or a tourist motel.”

  • • •

  Nothing had prepared either Egga or Bren for the intensity of their first child, Sapatisia, named for Egga’s mother’s mother. The child fixed obsessively on subjects and people; did everything with intensity—there seemed no middle way for her. If Egga was late coming in from the water she stood at the window watching until she saw him climbing up the gravel path. He came through the door and she clung to his leg like a barnacle.