The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

  The ax was dull. In the time it took René to fell one smallish tree, the master brought down three larger and was at work on a fourth. There must be a way to sharpen an ax with a quarter of the cutting edge gone, he thought. He would refresh its sharpness; with doubts he chose a river cobble and began to grind with circular motions. There was no visible progress and he soon began chopping again. Monsieur Trépagny picked up the useless cobble and threw it into the forest, took the ax from René and flourished it. “To sharpen,” he said, “we use sandstone—grès.” He pantomimed the sharpening. René wanted to ask where Monsieur Trépagny kept his sharpening stones but the man’s glaring expression kept him quiet.

  Monsieur Trépagny twisted his lips at Duquet’s whittle marks. He regarded Duquet’s lopsided face. “Open your mouth,” he said, tapped the rotten tooth with the blade of his knife and muttered that he would pull it at the end of the day. Duquet made a negative sound.

  At the height of the sun the sauvage woman brought a pot of steaming maize. René had rarely eaten food at midday. With a wood chip Monsieur Trépagny scooped out a glob. In the center of the maize melted a creamy substance. René took some on his wood chip, was overcome by the richness. “Ah!” he said and took more. Monsieur Trépagny said tersely that it was cacamos, moose bone marrow. Duquet barely ate even this and leaned against a tree breathing noisily.

  At twilight they left the clearing. Monsieur Trépagny clattered through his smithy tools until he found a pair of ironmonger’s pliers. Duquet sat openmouthed on a stump and Monsieur Trépagny seized the tooth with the tool and wrenched. He dropped the yellow fang on the ground. Duquet spat blood and pus, his lower lip split from the weight of the pliers. “Allons-y,” said Monsieur Trépagny, moving toward his house. René saw him pick up Duquet’s tooth and put it in his pocket.

  The men entered the single room and their masculine stench blended into the human funk of the north woods. The pockmarked Mari noticed René’s nostrils flare at the smell of the house and threw an aromatic juniper branch on the fire. In the hubhub of brats they heard some names—Elphège, Theotiste, Jean-Baptiste, but they all looked the same and so like their Mi’kmaw mother that René forgot them immediately. Mari spoke a patois of mixed Mi’kmaq and terse French with a few Portuguese phrases in a curious rhythm. The children had French names.

  She brought them a pot of unsalted stewed goose cooked with wild onions and herbs. The meat fell off the bone though Duquet could manage only a little of the broth. A small dish of coarse salt stood in front of Trépagny and he pinched it up with thumb and two fingers.

  “Mari does not cook with sel, the Mi’kmaq say it spoils the food. So always carry your own sel, René Sel, unless you can put your thumb in the victuals and season them with your name—ha-ha.” Then came a plate of hot corn cakes. Monsieur Trépagny poured an amber syrup on his cakes and René did the same. The syrup was sweet and smoky, better than honey, and he could not believe it came from a tree, as the master said. Duquet, exhausted by his ordeal, bent his head. Mari went to her cupboard and stirred something. She brought it to Duquet. Monsieur Trépagny said perhaps it was a potion made from green alder catkins, the very alders Duquet had cursed, so then the medicine would not work for him. Mari said, “willow leaf, willow bark good medicine Mali make,” and Duquet swallowed it and slept that night.

  • • •

  Day after day the chopping continued and their hands swelled, blistered, hardened, the rhythm of chopping seized them despite the dull axes. Monsieur Trépagny watched René work.

  “You’ve held an ax before; you have a woodsman’s skill.” René told him about the Morvan forest where he and Achille had cut trees. But already that life was unmoored and slipping sidewise out of memory.

  “Ah,” said Monsieur Trépagny. The next morning he took their wretched axes from them and went off, leaving them alone.

  • • •

  “So,” said René to Duquet, “what is Monsieur Trépagny, is he a rich man? Or not?”

  Duquet produced a hard laugh. “I thought that between you and Monsieur Trépagny all the knowledge of the world was conquered. Do you not know that he is the seigneur and we the censitaires?—what some call habitants. He is a seigneur but he wants to be a nobleman in this new country. He apportions us land and for three years we pay him with our labor and certain products such as radishes or turnips from the land he allows us to use.”

  “What land?”

  “A fine question. Until now we have been working but there has been no mention of land. Monsieur Trépagny is full of malignant cunning. The King could take the seigneurie from him if he knew. Did you really not understand the paper you signed? It was clearly explained in France.”

  “I thought it concerned only a period of servitude. I did not understand about the land. Does that mean we are to be farmers? Landowners?”

  “Ouais, plowmen and settlers, not landowners but land users, opening the forest, growing turnips. If people in France believed they could own land here outright they would rush in by the thousands. I for one do not wish to be a peasant. I don’t know why you came here but I came to do something. The money is in the fur trade.”

  “I’m no farmer. I’m a woodsman. But I would like to have my own land very much.”

  “And I would like to know why he took my tooth. I saw him.”

  “And I, too, saw this.”

  “There is something evil there. This man has a dark vein in his heart.”

  • • •

  Monsieur Trépagny returned a few hours later with iron axes for them, the familiar straight-hafted “La Tène” René had known all his life. They were new and the steel cutting edges were sharp. He had brought good whetstones as well. René felt the power in this ax, its greedy hunger to bite through all that stood in its way, sap spurting, firing out white chips like china shards. With a pointed stone he marked the haft with his initial, R. As he cut, the wildness of the world receded, the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass shivered as each tree fell and one by one the web strands snapped.

  After weeks of chopping, limbing and bark peeling, of dragging logs to Monsieur Trépagny’s clearing with his two oxen, cutting, notching and mortising the logs as the master directed, lifting them into place, chinking the gaps with river mud, the new building was nearly finished.

  “We should be building our own houses on our assigned lands, not constructing a shared lodging next to his ménage,” Duquet said, his inflamed eyes winking.

  Still they cut trees, piling them in heaps to dry and setting older piles alight. The air was in constant smoke, the smell of New France. The stumpy ground was gouged by oxen’s cloven hooves as though a ballroom of devils had clogged in the mud: the trees fell, their shadows replaced by scalding light, the mosses and ferns below them withered.

  “Why,” asked René, “do you not sell these fine trees to France for ship masts?”

  Monsieur Trépagny laughed unpleasantly. He loathed René’s foolish questions. “Because the idiots prefer Baltic timber. They have no idea what is here. They are inflexible. They neglect the riches of New France, except for furs.” He slapped his leg. “Even a hundred years ago de Champlain, who discovered New France, begged them to take advantage of the fine timber, the fish and rich furs, leather and a hundred other valuable things. Did they listen to him? No. Very much no. They let these precious resources waste—except for furs. And there were others with good ideas but the gentlemen in France were not interested. And some of those men with ideas went to the English and the seeds they planted there will bear bloody fruit. The English send thousands to their colonies but France cannot be bothered.”

  As spring advanced, moist and buggy, each tree sending up a fresh fountain of oxygen, Duquet’s face swelled with another abscess. Monsieur Trépagny extracted this new dental offense and said commandingly that now he would pull them all and Duquet would waste no more time with toothaches. He lunged with the
blacksmith’s pliers but Duquet dodged away, shook his head violently, spattering blood, and said something in a low voice. Monsieur Trépagny, putting this second tooth in his pocket, spun around and said in a silky, gentleman’s voice, “I’ll have your skull.” Duquet leaned a little forward but did not speak.

  Some days later Duquet, still carrying his ax, made an excuse to relieve his bowels and walked into the forest. While he was out of earshot René asked Monsieur Trépagny if he was their seigneur.

  “And what if I am?”

  “Then, sir, are we—Duquet and I—to have some land to work? Duquet wishes to know.”

  “In time that will occur, but not until three years have passed, not until the domus is finished, not until my brothers are here, and certainly not until the ground is cleared for a new maize plot. Which is our immediate task, so continue. The land comes at the end of your service.” And he drove his ax into a spruce.

  Duquet was gone for a long time. Hours passed. Monsieur Trépagny laughed. He said Duquet must be looking for his land. With vindictive relish he described the terrors of being lost in the forest, of drowning in the icy river, being pulled down by wolves, trampled by moose, or snapped in half by creatures with steaming teeth. He named the furious Mi’kmaw spirits of the forest—chepichcaam, hairy kookwes, frost giant chenoo and unseen creatures who felled trees with their jaws. René’s hair bristled and he thought Monsieur Trépagny had fallen too deeply into the world of the savages.

  The next day they heard a quavering voice in the distant trees. Monsieur Trépagny, who had been limbing, snapped upright, listened and said it was not one of the Mi’kmaw spirits, but one that had followed the settlers from France, the loup-garou, known to haunt forests. René, who had heard stories of this devil in wolf shape all his life but never had seen one, thought it was Duquet beseeching them. When he made to call back Monsieur Trépagny told him to shut his mouth unless he wanted to bring the loup-garou closer. They heard it wailing and calling something that sounded like “maman.” Monsieur Trépagny said that to call for its mother like a lost child was a well-known trick of the loup-garou and that they would work no more that day lest the sound of chopping lead the beast to them.

  “Vite!” Monsieur Trépagny shouted. They ran back to the house.

  About Annie Proulx

  ANNIE PROULX is the author of ten books. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner Award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award–­winning film. Her most recent novel is Barkskins

  ALSO BY ANNIE PROULX

  Heart Songs and Other Stories

  Postcards

  Accordion Crimes

  Close Range

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1993 by E. Annie Proulx

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Scribner Paperback Fiction edition 1999 SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  Designed by Cora Lee Drew

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Scribner edition as follows:

  Proulx, Annie.

  The shipping news / Annie Proulx.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3566.R697S4 1993

  813’.54—dc20 92-30315

  CIP

  ISBN 0-684-85791-X

  ISBN 13: 978-0-7435-1980-9 (ebook)