Barkskins

23

dogs and villains

He sat for an hour on a knotty and punishing pine bench before the governor’s secretary beckoned him in. As a young missionary Louis-Joseph Crème had first served in New France. Later he had been sent to Port Royal in Acadie, a true wilderness, and among the Mi’kmaq he began to keep a notebook of their rich vocabularies of geological structures, weather and season, plants, animals, mythological creatures, rivers and tides. He saw they were so tightly knitted into the natural world that their language could only reflect the union and that neither could be separated from the other. They seemed to believe they had grown from this place as trees grow from the soil, as new stones emerge aboveground in spring. He thought the central word for this tenet, weji-sqalia’timk, deserved an entire dictionary to itself.

Now, with receding hair and arthritic joints although he was only forty, he stood before the governor, shivering, for he felt a coming illness. Sleeping on the ground did not suit him. He was not of this place, he had not sprouted here and so to him the ground was hard.

The governor was a haughty snob, un bêcheur with a cleft chin and a bulge of throat fat. He gave off an air of having hung in a silk bag in the adjoining room until it was time for him to emerge and perform the duties of his position. His eyes focused on the wall, never meeting those of Père Crème.

“Surely I do not need to tell you that the English in Hudson Bay press down from the north, they press in from the sea, they squeeze Acadie, they press east from the Ohio valley. New France is awash in spies, scouts, Englishmen and rangers from New England. The coast fishery is ravaged by English and Boston vessels.”

The missionary thought that every sentence the man uttered had a subterranean meaning—if only he could grasp what it was. “Your Excellency, the Mi’kmaq are constantly called to fight for France although they have very few fighting men these days. They were once a vigorous tribe, as many as the hairs on ten men’s heads. Today they have but a few hundred warriors. As they die they lose their sensibilities, their knowledge falls away.” He hoped he, too, would not fall away. He felt quite dizzy.

“Their sensibilities! These people are masters of inventive cruelties. I mention to you the example of the young sailor captured from a fishing boat. The women, who are even more inhuman than the men, tortured him by fire and knife. They burned his feet with fiery brands, his legs, his privy parts. They cut him until he was pouring blood like an April freshet, then thrust his charred feet into an iron pot of boiling water. So speak not to me of their ‘sensibilities.’ It is your concern to care only for their souls. And to inculcate in them love and respect for le Roi notre prince—the King, our prince. And urge them to fight the English. That is your duty.” He spoke as one confident in his position of power.

Père Crème knew that temporal power had its limits, some of them very abrupt if one observed recent history. “I humbly try to do so at every chance,” he said, feeling his chills switch suddenly to feverish heat. “And in any case that sailor was an English, a Protestant.”

“That is beside the point. You seem to regard the Indians as special persons. They are no more than men, and not very reliable men at that. We are forced to use them as fighters when our territory, when the great fort we are now building at Louisbourg is menaced by the English. It will be the gateway to our North American possessions. You know how important Acadie is to New France. France must retake it. It is vital sea access.” Now he was locking his fingers together and stretching them out.

Père Crème forbore to mention that the fort could not protect the seaway; that was the responsibility of the French fleet. But he only said, “Your Excellency, the Indians do suffer. They do have feelings. They love their country, which we are taking, they love their children, whom we are corrupting with our goods and forceful ways. They say France regards them as of little value. And this has long been their land, where untold generations have lived undisturbed.”

“Indeed. You know, Père Crème, you seem to me to be lacking in zeal for the cause of France.”

“No, no. I only pity them. They have lost so much, so many.” Why could the man not grasp that the Mi’kmaq wished only to live their lives as they had for many generations, and that as every day passed that was less possible?

“And France has lost so many. You would do better to think of them rather than these libertine heathens who are dogs and villains. They are not Christians as you, a designated man of God, might have noticed.”

Père Crème, dismissed, tacked for the door, his feet at odds with each other and his neck wry. He prayed silently for the governor to become more observant, more kindly. Or better yet, to fall down in a fit and never rise. He immediately withdrew this cruel wish and requested forgiveness.

Several days later he addressed a letter to his sister Marguerite, one of hundreds of letters never sent, for he had no sister. It eased his mind to have an imaginary confidante, and he was able to work out his sometimes chaotic thoughts this way.

Dear Sister Marguerite.

For a minute he imagined her, slender and pale, sitting in a green chair and opening his letter with a silver knife. She might wear a gold locket with a wisp of her brother’s hair in it—or a miniature of their mother, whom Père Crème could scarcely conjure from his faded memories.

They do not have orderly Lives as we do. Their time is fitted to the abundance crests of Animals, Fruits and Fish—that is to say, to the Seasons of the Hunt and ripening Berries. One of the most curious of their attributes is their manner of regarding Trees, Plants, all manner of Fish, the Moose and the Bear and others as their Equals. Many of their tales tell of Women who marry Otters or Birds, or Men who change into Bears until it pleases them to become Men again. In the forest they speak to Toads and Beetles as acquaintances. Sometimes I feel it is they who are teaching me.

He stopped for a long time before continuing with the feeling that he was getting it wrong.

To them Trees are Persons. In vain I tell them that Trees are for the uses of Men to build Houses and Ships. In vain I tell them to give over so much hunting and make Gardens, grow Grains and Food Stuffs, to put order in their Days. They will none of it. Therefore many French people call them lazy because they do not till the Earth.

I have heard a Story that in some earlier time …

24

Auguste

The children of Mari—Elphège, Theotiste, Achille, Noë and Zoë—were trying to find their place in a world so different from Mari’s stories of the rich Mi’kmaw past. The realities were difficult.

“Dîner!” called Noë without bothering to step outside, slapping down the worn wooden bowls, the old spoons. There was no response, not even from Zoë, who always had a remark. Noë stood in the doorway, listening. The offshore wind had shifted slightly but carried the fading clatter of boots on rock. They were wearing boots instead of moccasins. Noë knew what that meant but denied it. She stepped out onto the path. Auguste clutched her skirt. She saw them far down the shore crossing naked rock. If it were just Elphège and Theotiste—but no, it was all of them. Achille, Theotiste, Elphège and Rouge Emil, all three of her brothers and the cousin, and at the end, half-running to keep up with the striding men, the slight figure of Zoë. Anguish and rage mingled in her like a kind of soup made from nettles and grit. She shouted, “Go on, then!” and pulled Auguste up in front of her so he could see and mark this event.

“That’s them,” she said through clenched teeth. She picked up a small stone and pressed it into Auguste’s hand. “Throw it,” she said. “Throw it at the no-goods that has run off.” Her voice rose again. “Go on then, you hell brothers and damnation sister,” and to the boy, “Throw it, throw your stone at them we’ll likely never see again.” But even as she said it she knew it was untrue, that she was acting out an imitation of drunken Renardette’s angry fits. She did not know why she sounded like someone she detested, nor why she spoke this way once again. She was not behaving as a Mi’kmaw. Why did she even think of Renardette, who was now deep in the past?

The child cast the stone; it fell on the path. As it rolled, the boy saw Zoë, the smallest figure, turn and look back, Zoë who responded to his outstretched arm and waved. The lead figure turned as well and his arm cut an arc in the air, a kind of salute from Achille that made Noë groan. The men should be setting out to hunt moose, but because of the boots she knew they were going to work for the French logger.

“Come, dear Auguste. We’ll eat all the dinner, just you and me.” Their house was a wikuom and although Mi’kmaq sat on the ground to be in contact with the replenishing earth, there was a low single-board table, the nails hammered into the legs from above. Before the stew redolent of duck meat, meadow garlic, wild rice and greens had cooled in the kettle the door flap was pushed aside and Zoë slid in.

“Not what you think,” she said before Noë could start in. “They will cut trees on the St. John again. Rouge Emil heard from Eyepatch they should come. Just this winter. Elphège said tell you money is in his good moccasin. You use it for what we need, says he. They come back spring, those cut logs go in the river. Come back a little bit rich, maybe. But not Achille. He goes moose hunting.”

Noë nodded. If Zoë stayed it was all right, and if Achille came back from his hunt in ten days or so, they could manage for a winter. It was the idea of abandonment she dreaded. All her life she had been afraid of being left alone while everyone around her vanished. She filled a bowl with stew for Zoë and set it before her. When the bowl was empty Noë filled it again.

“They didn’t want to go, thinking what happened before. Rouge Emil’s father comes to stay with us so that don’t happen another time. He comes soon, I think. Other people see those brothers leave, think just you and me here.”

“They think just me—they see you go with them.”

Zoë shrugged and made a face. “Maybe. Maybe they see me come back, too.”

A little later Rouge Emil’s father—Cache Emil—appeared in the doorway. He threw something large and heavy wrapped in bloodstained canvas on the floor.

“Moinawa,” he said. “Bear meat.” He looked at the stew pot. Noë filled a bowl for him.

“Good.” He told them he had shot the bear hunting with Achille a few weeks earlier. Not only bear meat, but he had brought his blankets and his flintlock. He would sleep outside in the small wikuom that Theotiste and Elphège shared.

“I am here. No male persons will bother you.”

Three years before the brothers had made a trip to La Hève to the lumber mill to ask if there was any work for them, but a man with a patch over one eye said the local Indians were sufficient, go away. The cousin, Rouge Emil, was persistent. He stood beside a stack of cut planks.

“You got work for good axmen cut pine?” Everyone knew that the mast pines of Mi’kmaw lands were superior to the trees that grew along the St. Laurent, which were coarse in grain and more liable to snap. Eyepatch nodded. “It’s summer, but there’s always work for good choppers. Let’s see what you can do.” He fetched four axes from the mill, then filled his pipe. “See two spruce in front of the rocks? Take them down.” His tone was contemptuous, for he knew Indians were lazy and stupid. Eyepatch’s pipe was not finished before the spruce lay side by side on the ground, topped and limbed. He reversed his opinion of Indians.

He nodded and they cut mast pines on the St. John River despite the summer heat and biting insects. In a few days they were crusted with black pitch, a kind of woodcutters’ armor. When they first had arrived the pine candles had been in bloom, each great tree pulsing out tremendous volumes of pollen until the sky was overcast and the choppers and even ships at sea wondered at the brilliant yellow showering down.

That summer while they were swinging distant axes, Noë, barely fourteen winters old, gathering wild onions, was raped by two boys from the French settlement, one of whom she recognized as Dieudonné, a fisherman’s son who returned again and again for his pleasure. She could not evade him. He seemed to live in the underbrush near their wikuom. He was only a boy, a fisherman boy, with a red chapped face and eyes flicking as though he feared the priest was near. He was strong from hauling nets and pulling oars. At first she loathed him, but after some weeks he became affectionate and, although he was two years younger, she began to return the sentiment. He said he wished they could marry and would press the matter on his parents when he was older.

When the brothers came back from the St. John her condition was obvious. No one mentioned it. But the next day Elphège looked at her in silence for a long time. He waited. And she told him how it was. By then Dieudonné was weeks dead along with his father and uncle and several other Acadians, for their fishing boats all had been caught in a concentrated snarl of storm that strewed the shore with broken boats. She thought of Dieudonné in the grip of the relentless sea as she had been in his grip. The result of the dead boy’s life had been Auguste.

In their childhood days in the forest, Noë thought, none of them had imagined they would come here to the ocean’s edge, far from René and Mari’s house. But they were here. She had not thought to have a child, but now there was Auguste. All this had happened because Theotiste and Elphège had brought them to Mi’kma’ki, the land of memory.

25

sense of property

Their great change had come about because of Renardette, who caused their lives to become as different as those of strange people. For years at René’s old place, heavy drinkers from Wobik lurched out of the trees calling for Renardette. One, “Démon” Meillard, appeared often and Renardette went into the woods with him. The day after René died, Renardette rushed to Wobik, to Meillard, a widower whose taste for spirits matched hers.

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 high 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.