Barkskins

63. perfidy

Scrawny Miss Heinrich still sat at the front desk, the office anteroom unchanged since the company’s near collapse decades earlier. She would never forget how everything had fallen wrong — the depression, when construction fell off and lumber prices dropped. Then, just as the timber business was recovering Lawyer Flense disappeared with Annag Duncan and the embezzled funds. It was the logging company’s worst time. What an uproar! Miss Lavinia had called in four special accountants, dark-eyed men with black mustaches.

“Miss Heinrich, could we please have the books for ’seventy-three? Could we please have the Board meeting minutes for the last three years?” Mr. Pye, aged and trembly, was called out of retirement to explain certain actions. The accountants spoke among themselves over dinner plates of steak and boiled potatoes — they strongly suspected that old Mr. Pye might have set the whole scheme going decades earlier and made his own nest comfortable.

When the accountants were finished they met with Dieter and Lavinia.

“Mr. Breitsprecher, Mrs. Breitsprecher, from the beginning Flense had extraordinary powers to acquire properties for Duke Logging. And to sell. There was no contract that limited his actions on the company’s behalf to acquisition. Yet he was an employee, not a partner, nor a stockholder. There was nothing that prohibited him from wrongdoing except moral responsibility.”

“I always believed he was loyal to me personally as well as to the company. I never doubted that. I counted him as a friend and I trusted him. We did business as a gentleman’s agreement. My father operated that way and was never defrauded,” said Lavinia stiffly.

“This time you were defrauded. Flense made secret sales of the company’s woodlands, lumber barges, warehouse contents.” The accountants implied that the embezzlement was her own fault, that one’s word counted for nothing.

The chief accountant inclined his head a little and said, “Mrs. Breitsprecher, may I recommend you to read Adam Smith? It is a truism that men do only what they are rewarded for doing. Flense received a rather modest salary for his legal work on behalf of the company. And in future keep in mind when doing business with Chicago lawyers—homo homini lupus est—man is a wolf to man.”

They left Duke & Breitsprecher reduced to a skeleton staff and a lean future.

The company staggered and nearly fell. It was hard times nationally: stocks and land values plunged; industrious brooms of change swept out the markets. Men were no longer grateful for work — labor problems and strikes crippled every business, and the forests of the northwest were flash points for rebellious forest workers who preferred better pay to manly poverty. The entire country was in an irascible, sour mood. Lavinia, wanting to rid herself and the company of anything touching on Flense, voted with the remaining Board members to relinquish the incorporation charter. “When Duke was establishing itself as a major logging company we needed capital to build logging railroads, to purchase lumber barges and steamboats, build roads. But all that has changed. Henceforth we will return, although operating on a shoestring, to a sole proprietorship. Aside from all else, incorporation is better suited to canals and turnpikes, railroads and banks, not the timber industry — at least in the position we now find ourselves.” A sense of being savagely cheated colored the atmosphere in the boardroom.

• • •

“Lavinia,” Dieter said as they went over the details of Duke & Breitsprecher’s teetering position, “we will weather this storm. It is true that the company has lost a great deal of its value, but enough remains that we can start over.”

Lavinia could barely speak for rage: “Dieter, my fortune — my lost fortune — came from the bonanza of Maine and Michigan lumber that we cut over the generations. No such rich woodlands exist these days. Flense took my ancestral heritage.” But she exaggerated. Flense had not touched her personal property, had not sold her Chicago land holdings, now worth millions; it was the company assets he had rifled.

“My dear, please listen. The forests of the northwest are even more prodigious than those of Maine or the Great Lakes country. All will be well in a few years if the company builds up its timber acquisition again. And we are free to focus on our conservation policies as never before. We shall make a new reputation, a new name for Duke and Breitsprecher.”

But Lavinia was not consoled. Especially her heart burned at the thought of Annag Duncan’s perfidy. “I trusted her,” she said. “I gave her a job when she had nothing and this is how she repaid me. I cannot understand how she fell into Flense’s grasp.” She clenched and unclenched her hands.

“Lavinia, did you never notice how attentive the lawyer was to her? He praised her cookies, brought her little bouquets, always had a smile and drove her home after long meetings. I believe she was smitten with his attentions. Neither I nor you praised her — we took her for granted — that was Flense’s opportunity.” He rubbed his chin. “And who can know? Perhaps he had an affection for her. She was a rather handsome woman.” As soon as he spoke he knew he should not have said this.

“Indeed!” cried Lavinia in a passion. “I do not think so myself. But oh how I wish I could relive the years and keep a chain on his neck! And hers. However, I will engage Pinkerton’s to look for the guilty parties. I’ll see them in prison.” She composed herself. There was nothing to do but go on. “And you are right, Dieter, the forests of the northwest are rich — if we can only get at the remoter areas. And we still have that kauri forestland in New Zealand.”

“Do you remember our promise to the Ovals not to clean-cut and run away but remove judiciously and replant? I wish now that my experiments with the kauri seeds had flourished, but the soil conditions were inimical.”

Lavinia could not resist her nature and sent orders to cut all the kauri, sparing none. That cut would begin to rebuild her fortune. And Dieter was right, there was still much that remained. Flense had not touched the plywood mills nor the paper mills, and both were drawing in money like dry sponges. They would take advantage of the new technical advances and milling machinery. Duke & Breitsprecher would survive.

• • •

“Our annual inventor’s exposition must continue,” said Lavinia. But the old Hotel Great Lakes had burned down. Lavinia tried to persuade the Board that an exposition hall on company property would attract inventors. “We made millions with the boxed houses and who knows what might come along these days when every man’s head is whirring with logging machinery improvements? Let us use Mr. Jinks’s old house and grounds as the central node. Participants will take pleasure in strolling through our little forest.”

But fewer inventors applied to the Duke & Breitsprecher Exposition. Its day had passed. Men wanted to patent their ideas in their own names.

Dieter felt, too, that the golden days of logging when the forest was endless were over. Farmers who had cut off, burned down and worn out millions of acres of soil in the east were still rushing into the western timberlands to repeat their work, making huge pyres of prime trees and setting them alight, cursing when the scorched soil showed too rocky and poor for growing anything but weeds.

He suffered through the last quarter of the century as again and again Congress congratulated itself on enacting a series of logging laws — Timber Culture Act, Timber Cutting Act, Timber and Stone Act, all supposedly aimed at conservation but all written with more loopholes than a page of Spenserian calligraphy. “From what eggs do these fools hatch? They cannot see!” cried Dieter. “The greatest ill is waste. Only a minuscule fraction of the standing forest ever becomes lumber — most is burned or abandoned. Mein Gott!

“It is laughable,” said Dieter. “It is criminal. The infamous ‘land-lieu’ clause that allows anyone to ‘donate’ woodland to a protected forest in exchange for an equal amount of land somewhere else. Lumbermen love this ‘clause’ that lets them swap their logged-off woods for acres of untouched timber. It makes me sick to see the way they send carloads of lobbyists to Washington to keep the good paydays coming. This is the real American ‘liberty’!” His solitary breakfast hour was filled with exasperated sighing as he read of successive waves of scandal from real estate men to legislatures. But he said nothing of this to Lavinia. He knew she employed lobbyists. And by association, so did he.

• • •

It seemed the two miscreants had gone in opposite directions. Month after month Pinkerton reported rumors of sightings of Flense in Peru, Athens (Georgia), Glasgow and Buenos Aires, but no actual hard evidence.

“Keep on, keep on,” said Lavinia, paying the steep monthly detective bills. Then came word that Flense had truly been tracked down to an alley behind the Mulo Rojo, a restaurant in Valparaiso, where he lay dead, stabbed and robbed. Of Annag Duncan there was no word. She had truly disappeared into the wilds of Scotland, where no stranger dared go.

• • •

One roaring wet morning the housemaid brought up Lavinia’s pot of hot chocolate and trimmed toast. Lavinia was at the window, tying the belt of her rose silk dressing gown, looking out at the dark wind-streaked lake.

“Good morning, ma’am. Another nasty day. Mr. Dieter complains of a catarrh.”

“He had better stay in then. I will look in on him after I dress.”

The maid put the tray on the little breakfast table, poured the chocolate and left. Lavinia sat down, took up her cup, sipped once, turned to look out at the slanting rain and collapsed, chocolate drenching her thighs. When the doctor came he said heart attack, no one knew why these things happened. Sometimes people just — died. As did Lavinia. Dieter’s catarrh became a lingering pleurisy that immobilized him for six weeks. Yet he managed to rise from his sickbed and meet with the stonemason, for, after a bit of tinkering, there was only one inscription for her stone:

Call for the robin-redbreast

Here lies a friend

She had made no changes in her will since the days before Annag Duncan’s and Flense’s scarper; bequests of properties and wealth no longer in existence made the reading of it painful to those who should have become wealthy but instead found themselves with barely enough to live modestly. She left eleven-year-old Charley the greatest part of her fortune, which he could not touch until he was forty — the age of reason in Lavinia’s opinion. There was an odd addendum — that should a Canadian claimant come forth to seize a share of Duke-Breitsprecher assets that person should be resisted in every legal way. No one knew what this meant but it trailed a black thread through the day.

• • •

Dieter Breitsprecher, who seemed the ideal personality for a widower, surprised everyone by remarrying a year after Lavinia’s death. His bride was the youngest daughter — Rallah Henge — of a preservationist-minded timberman friend. The young woman with long chestnut-colored hair was thirty years younger than Dieter, and he treated her with elaborate courtesy as though she were a crystal goblet. She had a fluttery laugh and none of Lavinia’s robust strengths and mannerisms. The logging business did not interest her; her hopes were all for children and eighteen months after the marriage she bore a son, James Bardawulf Breitsprecher. More than a decade later a daughter, Sophia Hannah, arrived but no more, for Rallah, she who had been so dainty and fragile, went into decline and died of stinking oozing breast cancer before Sophia could walk, before James Bardawulf had reached his teens. As for Charley, he had long before left home.

64. loser

When he remarried, Dieter sold Lavinia’s old place and commissioned Burnham’s to build him a house in the newly annexed town of Edison Park. Classical in appearance, it presented a calm front to the world with its orderly paired windows. Inside it was modern — wired for electric light and with two telephone lines.

Dieter had sent Charley to study forestry at Yale, where he ran up stairs three at a time, contradicted his professors. He was passionate about forests, but disappointed by the school’s lack of similar enthusiasm; it was all about “management.” He went to Germany to see firsthand the results of two hundred years of woodland supervision, but chafed under the lectures and begged Dieter and the Board to let him travel and learn the ways of forests through observation. They agreed on a stipend and he began a wandering journey.

He looked at beech woods and hornbeam, sought out the remnant chestnut groves of France, went to still-extant shreds of boreal forest in Scandinavia, to the scattered pieces of pine and birch woodlands in Scotland, the awkward corners of ash, oak and alder in Ireland and Wales. What preserved each was difficult accessibility. He took passage to Australia to see mutation-crazed eucalypts, to New Zealand, where he was embarrassed by Duke & Breitsprecher’s vandalism of the ancient kauri and used a pseudonym rather than give his name. In a nightmare he had to lift and replace the fallen monsters on their bleeding stumps. But the day came when Dieter and the Board called him back to settle what his future with the company should be.

• • •

Returned to Chicago, he wandered around the city looking at the new skyscrapers, eating scrappy food from street vendors. His thoughts on forests were in shambles. He had seen too much and now believed that a managed forest was a criminal enslavement of nature. His views were unpopular. Nothing he could do but wait until the hourglass turned.

At breakfast one day Dieter said, dithering over his eternal dish of smoked salmon and two poached eggs, “Your sister and brother will visit next week. James Bardawulf has a very handsome wife, Caroline. His law practice is doing well. You have—”

“They are not my sister and brother, Father.”

Dieter ignored the interruption and went on.

“—have not met Caroline. The last time you were here she was abroad with her mother. She and James Bardawulf have twin baby boys — Raphael and Claude. And Sophia married Andrew Harkiss in January. Perhaps I already told you that? She is somewhat young and I feel he will have a steadying effect. Harkiss attended Yale Forestry School, by the way, and started working for us four or five years ago. He revived our cutting operations, got us into Ecuador for the balsa. And after the great fire, into California redwood. He persuaded us to buy up a good deal of prime timber on the Oregon and Washington coasts. It seems the company is regaining its lost wealth.”

“What great fire do you mean?”

“Why the great San Francisco fire after the earthquake — it destroyed every building two and a half miles north from the railroad freight sheds. They say it burned half the city. Surely you saw stories about it in the papers, wherever you were?”

“No. I rarely read the papers.”

“The only buildings that survived were those constructed of redwood. Nothing could have better displayed its flame-resistant qualities. People demanded — still demand — redwood lumber to rebuild. Andrew accepted the challenge. He had men in the woods before the ashes were cold, and they worked every minute there was light to see. The mills ran twenty-four hours a day.”

Charley faintly remembered Harkiss, who had been in the Yale forestry program during his own short time there.

“Andrew is very ambitious about restoring Breitsprecher to its former position. He dedicates himself to its improvement in every way.” With no irony Dieter paraphrased Coué—“Every day, in every way, he strives to become better and better.”

“Father, how do you feel about this logging enterprise? Better and better?”

“I give it my support, as we start replanting a year after they get out the cut. It is a balanced process.”

“I can’t imagine what you think will replace two-thousand-year-old redwoods — Scotch pine seedlings? And what of the diversity of species? What about the soil? Erosion? All those qualities you once cared about? Are you cutting old-growth fir and cedar and planting pine? You mentioned Oregon and Washington.”

“I suppose I have become more practical through years with Lavinia. So, cutting whatever grows along the shoreline. The big timber in rough country remains untouched — we can’t get that out without the great cost of rails and engines.”

“What about the watershed protections? The hydrology will be severely compromised. I have been in that country. It is mountainous with steep slopes. And I know that not only redwoods, but those big cedars, can swell out twenty feet across at the bottom — your choppers likely have to use springboards, get up where the girth is ten foot less. The waste must be prodigious.”

“Well. I suggest you talk to Andrew about that; he’s the man with the ax.” Dieter laughed.

“Oh God,” said Charley at the thought of that dandified homme chic gripping an ax.

• • •

When James Bardawulf and Caroline arrived, that youngest son went straight to the sideboard and made himself a whiskey highball; he did not ask anyone else what they would like. That was for Dieter to do — let him pour sherry, whiskey, more whiskey for Charley. Old familiar tensions seeped into the room.

Sophia and Andrew Harkiss were the family showpieces. Andrew’s even-featured red face and intensely blue eyes, his slender but muscular body gave him an advantage. Yet under the fashionable exterior Dieter saw a hunger that made him think of a dog in the rain watching the master walk to and fro behind lighted windows. And there was James Bardawulf, baring his teeth in a caustic smile. His wife, Caroline, in a modish silk dress, Sophia very pretty. And Charley in his worn tweed lounge suit and unpolished boots. His children, thought Dieter, his dear, terrible children.

“So, Charles, you’re paying us a visit,” said Sophia. She was a certain type of beauty with upright posture and pale hair, her young face ornamented by a beautifully shaped mouth.

“Do you object?” He leaned forward, twiddled his fingers.

“It would hardly matter if I did,” said Sophia. “You do as you please. You always have.” She paused a minute, then delivered her dart. “That is, you have done as you please so far.”

They took their places at the table, handsome with its array of Spode plates and cut-crystal stemware.

Dieter said, “Is your room pleasant, Sophia?”

“It’s very pleasant, Papa, as long as the wind doesn’t come up. How a corner room makes the wind whistle.”

“Well, that’s it. It’s a corner so the wind will catch on it as it changes direction,” said Andrew. “It doesn’t bother me.”

The maid brought in a tureen of carrot soup, hot and spicy.

Conversation lagged, caught for a few minutes on Peary’s claim for the pole, died away, touched on weather, on Andrew’s house, being built by a local man with modernist ideas, on James Bardawulf’s new Model T Ford.

“I don’t know why anyone wants to go one hundred miles an hour,” said Dieter. “It’s folly.”

“Father, if you tried an automobile I think you would see its advantages.”

“What, go rocketing along by pressing one’s foot on a knob? I find the idea effete. A man needs to acquire horsemanship, needs to hold the reins!”

“There is something to be said for the skill of handling and riding horses,” agreed James Bardawulf, who was an indifferent equestrian but an avid collector. “But I am more interested in weapons. I recently acquired two Zulu shields said to be from the Isandlwana battle.”

The conversation stuttered along. James Bardawulf asked Harkiss, “What are the main features of your new house?”

“Automobiles, houses — is not money our subject?” said Sophia in her offensive drawl. “I wonder we have not had a hash-through of the values of stocks and bonds, the excoriation of New York banks.”

“Yes! And as to that,” said Dieter, pleased with the subject, and missing the irony, “I propose a toast to Chicago. I daily rejoice that we settled here, not in New York. Only look at the differences in the last panic. New York was in turmoil, banks and trusts failed — that fellow at Knickerbocker Trust. But in Chicago we had a central clearinghouse and a special bank examiner to keep an eye on liquidity. The New York institutions fell short in these respects as well as on liquidity. That’s when old Morgan had to push his way in and ‘save the day.’ ”

“Some,” said James Bardawulf, “say panics are unavoidable side effects of a free market.”

“And there are those who say such events are the fault, not of the free market, but of unscrupulous individuals and unregulated proceedings, and that the only way to avoid periodic panics and financial failures is to have a government-controlled national bank as most European countries do.”

“I expect there will be a time when that will come to pass, though I doubt I’ll see it,” said Dieter.

• • •

Over the almond pudding Dieter said, “Andrew, Charley was asking me about the West Coast operation — the redwood and cedars. He wonders—”

“I was hoping we could have a family dinner without talk of trees or forest management,” interrupted Sophia, disappointed that the discussion of money had turned into a review of a distant New York panic. She enjoyed hearing about the company’s increasing value, thanks to Andrew. As she had secured Andrew, it followed that she was the source for the company’s improving fortunes.

“But there is no better subject than trees,” put in Harkiss. “For this timber family it is the bread-and-butter subject.”

James Bardawulf reached for the wine decanter, poured and then leaned back in his chair until it creaked ominously. He said, “No. Timberland discussion gets very hot if brother Charley is on hand. He knows everything about logging and forest management but does not condescend to speak until a mistaken apprehension is uttered and then he comes with sword and pistol and lays us all low.”

Harkiss decided to laugh — a staccato bark — and Charley brushed his nose, his feet danced on the floor; he said, “James Bardawulf, I am indebted to you for your deep insights. I quite understand why you are such a success at the bar.”

James Bardawulf, who did, in fact, drink rather much, turned maroon and half-stood, dropping his napkin atop his pudding.

“James Bardawulf,” said Dieter. “You and Charley are not to start wrangling. Caroline, please tell us how the babies are doing.”

She turned, raised her eyebrows as if surprised by the question. “Why, as well as they might do.”

Charley studied Caroline Breitsprecher. She was attractive, even beautiful, a florid brunette, slightly plump, with grey eyes that were shrewd and penetrating. She looked at Charley, half-smiled and tipped him a wink.

He felt an electric current of desire. She had deliberately winked at him. Immediately he decided that she was a flirt and that he’d see how far she would go. His imagination jumped into bed with her. To fuck James Bardawulf’s wife would be a double pleasure. He almost returned the wink.

But he said nothing of forests nor travel, even when questions were put to him. The next day he had that meeting with Dieter to explain how he was supposed to contribute to company capital. He had no doubt that James Bardawulf and Sophia, who both sat on the Board, were the primary sources of Dieter’s summons that he return.

• • •

The spring wind off the lake was unseasonably cold. As Charley hurried along the street with his head down, he put one large Breitsprecher hand over each stinging ear. He lingered in the lower entrance foyer of the Duke Building to get warm, putting off the coming discussion with his father.

He climbed the stairs — so many polished oak stairs. He counted forty. Would they someday put in an elevator? He entered the familiar office, where Miss Heinrich, older than the redwoods, smiled bravely at him. “Go right in, Mr. Charley,” she whispered. “I’ll bring some coffee.”

There sat Dieter at his desk, more of a table than a proper desk. Dieter waved at the chair on the other side of the table. His bald head caught the morning light. Charley wondered what he did to make it shine so. Dieter plunged directly in.

“I’m happy to say that many of my earlier ideas on forest care and management have become today’s practice. I was pleased when Roosevelt created the Bureau of Forestry, after that vicious affair with the western senators who thought they’d scored well by forcing the abolishment of the forest reserves — that just got Roosevelt’s dander up and he sequestered a hell of a lot of forest. The reserve system was always wide open to tinkering — it hardly slowed Weyerhaeuser down. Now he, too, is a colossus like Frick and Morgan. For years I have been saying that if forestlands are to be protected there must be central government control. We are moving in that direction.” He named his new heroes: Bernhard Fernow, who headed up the forestry school at Cornell, and a Maine man, Austin Cary, who struggled to make obstinate lumbermen and landowners grasp some basic forestry principles. And George Perkins Marsh, his old American ideal. Dieter said, “And what did you think of the German forests you saw? Did you look out our family connection to Graf von Rotstein?”

“I did make a search for that relative — no success. I was told the family died out some time ago.”

Dieter snorted. He was proof that at least one distant family member survived, and, of course, the same blood ran in his children’s veins.

“Tell me what you thought of the forests.”

“I saw many, many plantations of pine in orderly rows. But I did not consider them to be forests.”

“Indeed. Then what in your consideration is a forest?”

Charley said slowly, “I am sure that wild natural woodlands are the only true forests. The entire atmosphere — the surrounding air, the intertwined roots, the humble ferns and lichens, insects and diseases, the soil and water, weather. All these parts seem to play together in a kind of grand wild orchestra. A forest living for itself rather than the benefit of humankind.” He stopped.

“I see, ‘living for itself.’ Yes, of course, but that is not managed land, where we plant and watch over trees to provide revenue to the owners, lifetime jobs to workers, shade and pleasure to nature lovers. Wild forests cannot be managed. That is why we cut them and benefit from their wood, then replace them with trees. Trees that can be managed. Your idea of a forest living for itself is not part of modern life. This is what Austin Cary is trying to teach — that timber can be grown as a crop that makes a good profit and can be renewed endlessly. On one side he has to persuade the men who want to cut as they always have and who see his talks as attacks to ruin their business. On the other side are people not unlike you who see the end of the forests, disaster for the rivers. Even changes in the weather. He has to convince them that forest crops are the way to keep a steady supply and control erosion.”

They heard the light ticks of sleet on the window glass. Dieter narrowed his eyes. Chicago had long hard winters, and was it possible this one was persisting so deeply into spring? It was possible. Charley seemed not to notice the sleet but talked on in his low voice.

“I see little merit in rows of pine trees. There is no diversity and the vaunted utility is an illusion. What of the rural people who once went to the wild forest for a hundred reasons? Why do we assume they have no rights to continue their traditional woodland familiarities?” He noticed the fine layer of dust on everything in Dieter’s office — globe, bookshelves, chair rungs, window ledges. There was dust on Dieter’s ideas.

“Charley, you are missing my point. Here in America the cast of mind is fixed on taking all. My plea for replanting is still a peculiar idea to them. You may be right to say the old wild forests are imperiled, but this is, unfortunately, a matter of politics. You are wrong, too, when you say German forests are only managed plantations — there are no people in Europe as passionate for wild forests as the Germans. In you I see that Germanic streak, partly romantic, partly rebellious. And I wish you could understand that there are hidden complexities in the managed forest of which you know nothing.”

“A pity you cannot grow barkless planks. It is no use, Father — I have seen what I have seen and cannot accept tree plantations as a greater good.” He could see Dieter was working himself up; his bald pate shone red and he pinched his lips in and out.

“Then you had better become a botanist”—Dieter spat out the word—“and continue your adventuring.” He got up and left the office.

Charley waited. Dieter’s anger was rare but he was angry now. His temper would not last, never did last. He would come back. And in a while Charley heard the outer door open, heard Dieter say something to Miss Heinrich, heard her answer. He came in, spicules of melting ice on his shoulders. He nodded at Charley, drew out a bottle, went to the cupboard and took out two glasses, poured for himself and Charley.

“Forgive me, Charley.” He swallowed some whiskey. Sighed. “I had ideas and feelings similar to yours when I was young but over the years I learned that the entrepreneurial spirit of this country could not be dampened. We can’t be wild animals. We are humans. We live in a world that is a certain way and forests must adapt to the overwhelming tide of men with axes, not the reverse. I came to believe that planting trees was a kind of forest continuation, not perfect but better than stumpland. We call such plots ‘forest’ and we believe that is what they are. Also, I have never thought that German management could be less than superior.”

“Father, it reeks of the eighteenth century. It no longer fits. It is also true that there is too much cutting. The old forests are going and once they are gone we will have to wait a thousand years or more to see their like. Though nothing will be allowed such a generous measure of time to grow. Most wild American woodlands have already been savaged.”

Dieter inhaled whiskey and erupted in spasmodic coughs. When he recovered, tears streaming, he changed the conversation and said, “Why don’t you tell me what you have seen in your travels?”

• • •

Silence. The hissing lamp. Bursts of sleet on the window. How lined and weary was Charley’s face, Dieter thought; he was old beyond his thirty-five years.

“You ask me about the company’s cut in New Zealand. Where once a grove of the noble kauri grew I came upon acres of devastation. The killing ground could only be differentiated from the gum fields by the fresher stumps.”

Dieter shuddered. The gum fields that he and Lavinia had seen were the most desolate landscapes, churned mud where nothing grew, great holes gouged in the wet earth, swamps without vegetation where moiling creatures clawed for bits of ancient resin to improve paint.

Charley talked, and when he paused Dieter asked, “What of New England, where my cousin Armenius first cruised the woods for James Duke? I have not been there since I visited Mr. Marsh a year or two after you were born.”

“Why, northern New England is a world of denuded mountains scarred by railroad tracks and erosion. Slash, charred logs, millions of stumps and endless miles of washed-out roads. I don’t see how fish can live in New England waters unless they can breathe silt. Large fires every summer, and still the rivers carry log drives — pitifully small sticks for the pulp mills and pressed-wood fabricators.”

Dieter’s voice was low. “Was all destruction? Did you see nothing good and beautiful?”

“Yes. I did. Brazil has the most profoundly diverse forests on earth!” For the first time since his return there was enthusiasm in Charley’s voice. “The striking feature is the mix of species rather than large groves or aggregates of dominant trees. Foreigners are in constant wonderment. When they return to their countries they see how barren and meager are their homelands.”

“I have always championed diversity.”

“It is in the tropics, not only in Brazil but in Colombia, Costa Rica, Venezuela, in India and Malaysia — forests filled with mangoes, guava, passionfruit, starfruit, coconuts, bananas. The tropical forests are the most wondrous forests I ever saw. Spectacular forests, but now attracting men with pencils and measuring sticks, men seeking fruits to export. Cattle ranchers who cut and burn the forest for pasture. They are the places where the punitive aviamento system of the rubber business drives the economy. I take comfort in the thought that none of them can really harm that massive heart of the world. The rain forest is so large and rich it defeats all who try to conquer it.”

Dieter felt he was drawing closer to Charley. “I would very much like to see these forests. But let me say that I heard the same complacent remarks about the Maine and New Hampshire woods, about the Michigan pine forest — too large to be irrecoverably harmed. And I saw them fall. There is no such thing as being too large to fall. They all go down when men come.”

“I hope you are wrong. Dear father, can you understand that I must go back to Brazil? What little I learned of the flowering and fruiting habits of the trees filled me with curiosity. Some seem to follow the rules of invisible seasons, but others flower from the time they sprout until they die. I want to learn why things happen as they do in that place.” He looked at Dieter and said, “Tropical forest soil is rather poor — all the forest’s richness is encased in its living trees. Is that not interesting?”

Dieter shook his head, asked, “Is such a thing possible?”

“It is. And in the level above the soil are shrubs and ferns, young trees, all dependent on shafts of light reaching them. They are not plants in their own right but the slaves of the large trees. Even stranger are the epiphytes, an entire world of parasitic plants that grow on the trees. That forest calls to me.”

Dieter listened with consternation. Charley’s preference for wild forests was disturbing. It was a proof that his older son was a sinking man, fated to be a loser. How to jolt him loose? How to involve him in the company’s work?

“I’ll do what I personally can to help you,” said Dieter, “but you seem destined to observe, perhaps write a book — I do not see you holding a regular job or making a business success.”

“There is no job that I have ever heard of that would be as honorable and interesting as going about and observing the lives of the trees and noting their peculiarities.”

“Still, men must work — even you.” The words came out so mournfully they both laughed.

“I need a real cause, Father, if I am to work at anything. I am no businessman. And I may indeed write a book. Although I know pitifully little and one lifetime is not enough to study even a single tropical forest tree. I want — how can I describe it? I want to discover the dynamo, the central force of the wild forest — all my interest lies in searching out that vital force.”

But Dieter thought dynamo and force sounded too much like a romantic “meaning of life” quest. He had a painful thought — did he not scent the bitter fragrance of madness in Charley? “Why not think about all this over the winter? Stay here to get your bearings, do some reading and meet others interested in trees. We can talk again in a few months. And of course we want you here for the holidays.” He was determined to understand and help this first son, but it seemed a heavy task; Dieter felt himself too old, lost in the forest of his own experience.

So Charley stayed the winter and spring to play a game of seduction with Mrs. James Bardawulf — Caroline — alternately beckoning and evasive; he was determined to get her, to spite his half brother, whom his father favored.

• • •

He was still trying in August, when the great 1910 fires in Montana, Idaho and eastern Washington burned more than three million acres of prime timber and settlements in two days, a raging blowup crown fire jumping and leapfrogging over hundreds of miles, a fire such as no human had ever seen. The country was shocked by headlines describing how the remote heart of America had been destroyed in forty-eight hours, for people believed that the wild essence of the country existed in its great forests somewhere out west. And now they had burned.

Dieter pled with pea-brained politicians and barely literate congressmen for more money and authority for the Forest Service. He spoke out against that governor who said forest fires were a good thing because they opened new country for settlers, and he cursed the congressman from a fire-plagued state who bellowed, “Not one cent for scenery!” He began a regimen of letter writing, wire sending and telephone calls; he volunteered to start new pine and fir seedling nurseries to replant the hideous blackened mountains and stem the landslides of burned soils. He tried to interest his older son.

“Charley, here’s a cause for you — help rejuvenate the spoiled lands. I am meeting this evening at the house with James Bardawulf and Andrew to discuss possible salvage of some of the burned timber. I hope you will join us.” He did not think Charley could resist the battle to heal the wrecked forest.

“It will just happen again,” said Charley in a dismissive tone, “until the yahoos have burned the country clear. You are pleading with men who just don’t care. As for salvage, it seems a bit like rifling the pockets of a corpse.” He left the door ajar as he went out.

• • •

Charley had had enough of Dieter’s hopeless American forest projects and almost enough of the slippery Caroline. She enjoyed teasing him and that, he promised himself, would be the key to getting her. He would make one more effort and then leave. He telephoned.

“I’m leaving tomorrow morning,” he said.

“Oh, Charley, where are you going? To the terrible fires in Idaho and Montana?”

“No. The fires are ended. My interests pull me to the tropics. Let me see you one last time. Will you not walk in the garden with me for half an hour this evening?”

“I might if you are very, very good. None of your naughty ways.” She laughed, an often-rehearsed laugh that an earlier swain had told her was like the music of a babbling brook.

“But you are so beautiful that I cannot make a promise. You have a powerful effect on me. As a last favor please wear your exquisite green dress.”

“Oh, my Poiret. You have an eye for fashion. That is the most expensive dress I own.”

“The most beautiful,” he murmured gallantly. He knew well that it was a dress famously designed to be worn without a corset.

• • •

He came to the dark garden deliberately a little late, just as the moon was rising, and saw her standing beside the redbud tree, the faded heart-shaped leaves catching the lunar glow as did her pale dress. She resembled the chrysalis of a luna moth. The watery moonlight seemed to solidify their bodies, to render shadows corporeal, as intense as stones.

“Here you are,” she said and produced her rippling laugh. He seized her at once and lightly bit her neck.

“Oh don’t! It will show!”

He bit again, harder.

“Stop, Charley. What has got into you?” She tried to push him away, but he was not having it and he was not playing her flirting game tonight. He pulled her to the garden bench. It took a few moments of sweet flattery and blandishment to ease her into position and gradually ruck high the green dress. He did this almost stealthily, not roughly, eased into her hot and responsive flesh and at the moment of discharge heard James Bardawulf’s voice say, “Why, Charley, how thoughtful of you to drop in,” and there was a tremendous concussive sound that his damaged brain told him was a moon bolt, very like being struck full force with a Zulu knobkerrie.

Caroline’s shrieks brought servants from the house who pulled the club away from James Bardawulf, who then tore a rosebush out of the ground and began flailing the insensible form on the ground. Young Raphael, in his pajamas, ran for Dieter, who arrived still clutching his meeting notes.

“James Bardawulf, anhalten, anhalten sofort! Stop halt this stupidity! Was ist los? Anhalten! You will kill him!”

“I want to kill him! Let me go!”

• • •

The servants carried Charley to his room and two doctors came within the hour. Dr. Plate examined the unconscious Charley and said it was a grave injury. He might remain unconscious for some time — forever, even — might die without waking up. But he cleaned the wound, bandaged it and left the first of three nurses to watch over the wounded man. Dr. Scotbull examined the sobbing Caroline, who had been roughly used and violated but was otherwise unhurt. The moon-green dress was torn and dirty. “A few days in bed to rest and become calm. You must put the experience out of your mind and divert yourself with books or needlework,” said the doctor, shooting sidelong glances at James Bardawulf, whose red eyes glared. The doctor steered him downstairs and poured him a glass of whiskey — watched him swallow it in a single glugging bolt. Within the half hour James Bardawulf went up to Caroline, hissing that if she liked rape so much that is what she would get, slapped her hard and mounted her.

The next day James Bardawulf was discovered in Dieter’s house going up the stairs with the retrieved knobkerrie, and once again the servants disarmed him. Dieter had Charley moved to the hospital with a guard at the door. One son had tried to kill the other and it was clear he was going to keep trying until he was successful. James Bardawulf, now sexually excited, kept Caroline in bed for a week.

• • •

Dieter went to his younger son. “James Bardawulf, I know he wronged your wife, insulted your honor. If he recovers he will leave the family and live abroad. But I beg you to swallow your rage. You are young, and anger and desire to kill can sour you from the heart outward all the days of your life. I have lost one son — I cannot bear to lose you as well. I care for you deeply, James Bardawulf. And you must not blame Caroline. You must forgive.” He embraced the rigid man, tears splashing on the younger son’s shoulder. But James Bardawulf was anxious to get back to Caroline and go where his older half brother had been, and he pulled away from his father.

• • •

Remembrance began to seep in, fleet distorted images of falling, the smell of earth. Moonlight. The day came when Charley could get up and walk to the window. In early dusk he looked out. Soon, he thought, soon rather than late. The nights were chill, leafless trees disclosed their angular frames. When the bandage came off, by manipulating two mirrors he could see thick bristles of hair growing on each side of a furious dark scar.

“Father,” he said to Dieter, whom he knew again, “what happened to me?”

“Something heavy fell on you in James Bardawulf’s garden.” A glass with a residue of sleeping powder stood on the night table.

“In James Bardawulf’s garden? Why!” He turned the glass in his fingers.

“I see no point in keeping the information from you. You did something schlecht. You tried to — you ravished Caroline in the garden and James Bardawulf discovered you in the act. Your own brother’s wife! He struck you.”

“This is extremely painful to hear. I do not remember this. I think you must be mistaken.”

Dieter looked at him. Was he willfully lying or did he truly not remember? He was lying. Worse, Dieter believed Charley’s mind was unsound. And he must go.

Through intermediaries Dieter arranged the purchase of a small house for him in Lugar da Barra do Rio Negro, or Manaós, the city of the forest, where the wild tropical trees would be waiting for him. The house and a modest monthly sum of money were all he could do for this child he had long ago foretold, under the silver maple in Lavinia’s park, would be a man of the trees.

• • •

In Amazonia, Charley discovered himself as nothing. What he did was nothing. He saw the rampant growth of vine, shoot, sprout, seedling, moist and dripping, swollen and bursting with vigor. He vividly, and without regret, remembered raping Caroline. The forest sounded with the constant patter and thump as leaves, twigs, petals and fruits, branches and weak old trees succumbed to gravity. When the storm wind called friagem generated by the Antarctic came, the noise increased, a bombardment of tree parts and fruits mixed with the hissing of the wind in the canopy.

Decomposition seemed as violent — the collapse of leaf structures, cells breaking down, liquefaction of solid wood into a mold squirming with lively bacteria and animalcula seething and transforming into energy. Yes, and insects and larvae, worms and rodents and everywhere the famous ants who ruled the tropics. He almost understood how the incomprehensible richness of Amazonia made humans clutch and rend in maenadic frenzies of destruction. Such a forest was an affront, standing there smirking, aloof from its destiny of improving men’s lives.

Charley was slow in learning Portuguese. His first sentence was “Você fala inglês? — do you speak English?” But the answer was so often “I don’t understand—não compreendo” that he struggled to master some useful words. In his first week in Manaós, making long walks around and through the town, he discovered a Portuguese paper goods shop, a livraria, that sold imported notebooks with fine French paper. He bought several.

Where to begin? Perhaps it was best to make a catalog of tree species. Two weeks of this and he realized it was beyond him. There were simply too many kinds of trees. He did not know them, could only observe their habits. He followed rubber tappers’ paths, poor men in lifelong debt servitude, no better than slaves. He pitied them but it was not until he followed a smell into a small clearing and found a charred corpse that he could believe the ghastly rumor of punishment of those who tried to break free from the system; they were caught, wrapped around with ropes of flammable latex and set on fire. The forest encouraged cruelties and subjugation.

The furniture maker Senhor Davi Fagundes was the only person he knew who could identify the bark, flowers and branches he gathered. This hollow-eyed man when Charley had asked his usual “Do you speak English?” question had replied, “Yes, a little.”

Charley wrote everything down in his notebooks. There were many species of mahogany, Brazilian rosewood, teak, bloodwood, exotic zebrawood, ipe and cambara woods, anigre and bubinga, cumaru and jatoba, lacewood and makore. And hundreds more without names. He felt fortunate if he could attach a name to one tree each week, draw its general shape, list some of its epiphytes and strangler vines.

“Why you want knowing this?” Fagundes asked.

“To learn the trees that grow in this kind of forest. Where I come from there are no such forests.”

But more and more the cabinetmaker held up his hands and said “Eu não sei!” I don’t know.

At the end of his first year Charley had sent the notebook to Dieter as he would every year until he learned of Conrad. He heard nothing back and wondered if Dieter had abandoned him. In fact, Dieter had abandoned everyone.

65. legacies

Not long after Charley’s departure from Chicago, Dieter, the old pine, had gone down. “Mrs. Garfield,” he said wearily on a Monday noon, “I’m going home early. I have a headache and think I need a night’s sleep.” Mrs. Garfield, who had replaced Miss Heinrich when she retired, clucked and said, “I hope you feel better tomorrow.” But the next morning the headache was bad and he had a stiff neck. By the end of the week he was half-paralyzed, and the doctor diagnosed polio.

“I thought only children got polio,” said Sophia.

“No, no, it can attack at any age. But keep children away from the house. It’s contagious.”

“Hard to breathe,” Dieter whispered. It got harder. By Saturday pneumonia finished him.

• • •

“I don’t care what it takes, we’ve got to find him,” said James Bardawulf, striding to the grimy window and back. “He’s a major heir in the will. The situation is crazy enough. That we don’t know where the hell he is makes it worse. I’m going to get a private detective on it.”

Andrew Harkiss made a sound that was almost a laugh. “You’ve been reading too many books, James Bardawulf. I’m sure Dieter had his address. Have you asked Mrs. Garfield? And isn’t it likely that he gave the address to Mr. Grey when he made his will?” He picked up the telephone and dialed. “Mrs. Garfield, do we have Charley Breitsprecher’s address?”

“Yes sir. It’s in the correspondence file. I’ll get it.”

“Well, good,” said James Bardawulf. “We’ll ask Mr. Grey to send someone from his office with the necessary papers. And I will enclose my personal letter.” He had been composing the letter in his mind for several years and now he would write it.

• • •

The young lawyer, excited by the journey to the tropics (though after seeing dead monkeys in the market he wanted to be back in Chicago), had no trouble finding Charley Breitsprecher, disheveled and rather yellow, in the muddy river town. He told him Dieter had “passed” and handed him the envelope of documents. Charley sent the young man back to his hotel and arranged to meet him for dinner. When he was alone he read the lawyer’s letter, read James Bardawulf’s handwritten page, shook his head, wept and read it again.

James Bardawulf had written:

Dear Charley.

We both have very much to regret and resolve. I am deeply, deeply sorry for attacking you. I have suffered pangs of conscience ever since that night. And Caroline who blames herself for all. But as they say, there is no wind so ill that it does not bring some good. The good is our son Conrad. We love him. Our father, Dieter, taught me that holding on to anger is a great evil. If you return someday to your family in Chicago you will be received with affection.

Your brother, James Bardawulf Breitsprecher

“None more sorry than I am, James Bardawulf,” said Charley to the letter.

Hours later he read the details of the will and after half a quart of brandy tore a page from his notebook and took up his pen.

“Dear Sir,” he wrote to Mr. Grey. He disclaimed most of his portion of Dieter’s estate, saying, “I would like it to go to my brother, James Bardawulf Breitsprecher, and his wife, Caroline Breitsprecher, for reasons they know.”

A month later, when Dieter’s will and Charley’s letter were read, James Bardawulf caught his breath. How Charley had changed, down there in the jungle. But then, he, too, had altered.

• • •

In Brazil for the next seven or eight years Charley sent his notebooks not to Dieter but to the boy, Conrad Breitsprecher, often with a letter and a sketch of some comic tropical insect. His malaria attacks increased in ferocity. His fortieth birthday had brought him his mother’s legacy, but he chose to stay in his little house. The work — which he would not leave even for an hour — was everything. Tenacity was in his bone marrow. Yet he dared make only short forays into the forest, for if he went deeper and the malaria laid him low he might be unable to struggle back to his house. Twice the attacks had led to seizures that left him half-dead on the floor.

He came into Senhor Fagundes’s shop clutching a black twig with seven leaves. He was shaking and too ill to speak. He held out the branch to the man who had become something like a friend. The cabinetmaker took the shaking branch, twisted a leaf, looked in his dictionary.

“Leopardwood. Not same like lacewood but look almost — a little.”

Charley swayed, put his hand out to take his twig and dropped to the floor, convulsed. Senhor Fagundes, shocked and afraid, hoping the man did not have a pestilent disease, called the hospital for an ambulance. Charley Duke Breitsprecher, ever a man of contradictions, died a week later of Plasmodium falciparum in Manaós, after writing in his last notebook:

Nothing in the natural world, no forest, no river, no insect nor leaf has any intrinsic value to men. All is worthless, utterly dispensable unless we discover some benefit to ourselves in it — even the most ardent forest lover thinks this way. Men behave as overlords. They decide what will flourish and what will die. I believe that humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I am sorry that I am one of them.

The final sentence was his will — a scrawled request that this last notebook be sent to Conrad and all that he possessed, his fortune inherited from Lavinia, and Dieter’s seedling nursery, be held in trust for the boy until he turned twenty-one.

• • •

The early months of the war in Europe did not much affect remote Chicago. As conflict sucked in country after country Americans went about their lives and voted to stay neutral. James Bardawulf and Caroline thought not of war, but of the future, and considered schools for Raphael, Claude and Conrad, handsome boys marked for success.

“This military academy in Indiana,” said James Bardawulf, holding up a paper, “has a high reputation for educating young men of good character. Closer than eastern schools. I say we take a trip to Indiana to look it over.”

James enrolled Raphael and Claude in the school and put down young Conrad’s name — he was barely nine — to hold a place for him. And, as the yellow mists of chlorine gas spread over Ypres, James Bardawulf and Caroline returned to Chicago with their brochures and impressions.

• • •

“We got them where we want them,” said Andrew Harkiss, recovered from the Spanish flu that had killed Chicagoans like chickens. Great rollers of change beat on national shores: newly independent but poor countries, once the colonial holdings of the great European powers, struggled to join the global scuffle. “What these countries have is the raw materials — forests and minerals and oil. We’d be fools not to get in on this, South America, Asia — all kinds of hardwood. It’s our chance.”

James Bardawulf, curious one day about the notebooks Charley had sent to Conrad, looked into them and found them filled with useful information on the qualities of tropical trees. He showed them to Andrew.

“Papa, I want my notebooks back,” said young Conrad, who instead of reading Tom Swift stories found the grimy pages, punctuated with squashed gnat and mosquito corpses, interesting for their opaque originality and because this uncle he had never met had bequeathed him the notebooks and the seedling nursery business.

The company, now Breitsprecher-Duke, in league with banks, other timber outfits, the mining industry, coffee, cocoa, banana and mango importers, became part of the new colonialism. When the great onslaught on tropical forests began, they were in the van, taking all they could. Charley Breitsprecher’s notebooks were used to plunder his forest.

• • •

At sixteen, after a summer on a cattle ranch where the work was considered character-building and healthful, Conrad fell ill with headaches and chills, painful joints and a deep weariness. He was diagnosed with undulant fever and kept in bed most of the fall and winter. He began to recover and in spring the doctor recommended three months rest at a hotel-sanatorium in the mountains of New Hampshire. There he experienced a day, never forgotten, that bound him forever to forests.

He fell in love with a local girl, Sally Shaw, a waitress in the dining room. Most of the visitors took breakfast in their rooms, but every morning he sat near his favorite east window and she brought him tea and the institution’s famous popovers. She spoke to him in a teasing voice about the weather, or the breakfast offerings, but he felt strangely happy when she came to his table with the teapot. Her hands were small but deft, her nails lacquered, her black straight hair cut fashionably short. Very red lipstick outlined the rosebud shape of her mouth. She flirted. The room was quiet except for the swish of the door to the kitchen and the soft chink of silverware. The grey mountain slopes showed a frost of pale green, the buds of emerging leaves. When the sun struck they glowed a luminous gold-green. Conrad blurted out his wish that she would go walking with him on the mountain.

“I think you must know the best place to walk,” he said.

“Say, do I ever! Tomorrow? I got the afternoon off.” She had heard he was a rich man’s son.

• • •

It was not a fair day. Heavy mist hung over the mountains. Yet the afternoon went in a direction he had not dared hope for. They walked up a steep trail, there was a clumsy kiss as they veered into sweet fern, her shrill laugh, then grappling and rolling on the ground. The perfume of crushed sweet fern fixed the experience. A light rain began. When he looked beyond her, he saw an army of perfect young white pine trees glistening in the wet mist, bursting with the urgency of growth. The rain, falling slant and silver, amplified their resinous fragrance. It was raining, the girl, her hair in ratty wet tails, was pulling at him to go back to the hotel, but he was happy. And somehow he was caught, not by the girl, but by the little pines.

• • •

After the crash of ’29 the country staggered under the weight of economic depression and the rage of striking workers. Breitsprecher-Duke began to lose its footing. James Bardawulf told Conrad, now finished with school and with a degree that fitted him for nothing, that the family company would employ him if he wished, but without salary; after all he had money he could live on and Breitsprecher-Duke was enduring hard times. Raphael was counting on his smooth good looks for a job in films, and Claude worked for a real estate company specializing in western ranch properties. Since Roosevelt, cattle ranching had been popular with those who still had wealth.

“Let me think about it, Father,” Conrad said. He thought instead of Dieter’s old seedling nursery business. Could anything be done with it? It had been more of a hobby for Dieter with very few clients, but over the years he had kept on a single employee, Alfred McErlane, who managed the greenhouses. Perhaps it was time to evaluate the nursery, to talk with Mr. McErlane.

• • •

Conrad had been very young the first time he was in one of the greenhouses, a visit with his parents and brothers. He remembered a long, long wet concrete floor with hoses and watering cans in the aisle. There was a man in a yellow raincoat. Raphael and Claude had run down the aisle and were leaning over a tank at the end. Conrad followed them. When he looked into the dark water he saw huge slow-moving creatures, orange, spotted black and white like cows. James Bardawulf said they were koi, a kind of fish.

“Why are they so slow?” asked Raphael.

“Because they have seen everything in the tank, nothing new,” James Bardawulf answered, and he laughed. But Caroline was upset and demanded that the koi be caught and brought to the pond in the garden.

“At least they will have a better life,” she said. Two days later, though, Conrad saw a pair of great blue herons at the edge of the pond, and when he went closer to see if the fish were visibly enjoying their new freedom, the birds flew up, leaving behind the bones of the orange koi.

• • •

Very little had changed in the greenhouse. Al McErlane was not wearing a yellow raincoat, but hoses still stretched and coiled on the wet floor. As a child Conrad had not noticed the seedlings, but now he saw them: spruce and pine.

He looked first at the account books and client lists, for the nursery did a small but steady business.

“Al, it looks like our customers are mostly local parks and private landscape concerns. And just spruce and pine seedlings? I see very few lumber company clients. Tell me how you think our position stands and if you think it might be improved.”

McErlane was surprised at Conrad’s serious interest. He had expected Conrad to say the business would be sold or closed down.

“Well, you know, we go along. Timbermen that want to replant just leave a few seed trees and let the trees do the job. Nobody’s got any money these hard times even if they believed in planting seedlings. Which they don’t. But a guy from Weyerhaeuser come around a month or two ago asking questions about how we set up, where we get the seeds and all. I think they might be planning to get their own nursery going. They have the money to do it — they are the only timber people making a profit.”

“And my grandfather Dieter was doing this fifty years ago. I wonder if there is not a real future for our seedling nursery.”

“That would be my thought,” said McErlane.

They talked and walked through the other glasshouses — there were five, all old and in poor shape. It didn’t take Conrad long to discover that McErlane was as ignorant of new research and knowledge on seedling propagation, cloning, forest genetics and site preparation as Conrad himself. He was putting his hands on a finicky complicated business that called for extensive knowledge on the part of both the seedling grower and the planter.

“I have to back up,” he said to McErlane. “I don’t know what I need to know. I have to go to forestry school. I think we can keep the greenhouses running as they are for the clients that still depend on us until I learn enough to map out a new plan. One thing is sure. Seedlings are the best way to keep forests alive.”

That night he made a list of questions. What would be the needs of future seedling buyers? McErlane had been raising and selling “will grow anywhere” pine and spruce bare-root seedlings, but there was evidence that most of these died when planted on rough logged-over sites. Site preparation would help, but what companies could afford the labor and machinery in these times? He strained to put his mind into the future, when the need for timber would press harder. Which species would timbermen demand, what were the diseases, what were the best planting sites and how should the sites be prepared? Nature’s most dramatic way of replenishing the forest was fire. Loggers could duplicate such sites by clear-cutting and burning the slash. But which species did well in burned-over land? Which would suffer from possible invasion by wild grasses and plants?

He enrolled in forestry school, and as he studied he saw more and more difficulties. The real knot was the timber industry. He would have to persuade logging companies and lumbermen that their future was linked to his; if they wanted trees to cut in the future, they would have to plant new seedlings among the stumps. They would have to learn to think in decades and hundreds of years. They could not depend on leaving a few wild trees to seed the barren cuts — experience showed there was poor regeneration. Again and again, as he asked questions of college experiment stations and men who had tried reseeding, he came back to the same difficulty — site preparation was vital; timbermen had to see that doing the work and paying the costs was to their benefit. Conrad made a decision. Breitsprecher would offer site preparation as a service.

In the forestry school he heard of someone who had made kraft paper cylinders, filled them with soil and planted a seed in each. These seedlings did better than those with bare roots when set out on the same site. But was it practical to grow seedlings this way? Practical matters demanded experimentation. He had to include research in his plans. And there were costs. A square foot of nursery space could produce how many seedlings of what species with what labor and time and maintenance? Were there optimum or minimum sizes for seedlings? Were there limits? Yes, there were always limits — he had to find them. Finally, could the seedlings be priced to allow some profit or should he just hope to break even? For already he was inclining toward philanthropy, using his uncle Charley’s legacy.

• • •

By 1939 he knew enough to work out a long-range plan. He built new greenhouses and set up a seedling experiment with eleven tree species. Al McErlane was busy with two new workers, Pedro Vaca, a young Mexican who told fanciful but amusing tales, and Hank Stone, the son of German immigrant grandparents who had changed their name from Stein during the Great War. A separate building was a small laboratory-office though he had not yet found the research horticulturist or plant breeder that he wanted. He had liked Elsie Guderian, one of the few women enrolled in the forestry school and interested in plant heredities, but she had another year before graduation. “Once I’ve got that degree…” she said, indicating she wanted the job. She was stocky, with hard red cheeks and horse legs, but a true researcher. What he wanted.

War was in the pure air once again, in the inky newspapers. It seemed to older people a continuation of the war they had grown up with, coming to a boil after just enough time to raise a new crop of sacrificial young men. A pattern was emerging — every twenty-five years or so another war would keep the human world stumbling along, a human boom and bust carried to deadly extremes. The Breitsprechers and Dukes had escaped military service for generations, but Conrad was called up. Both Raphael and Claude knew the right people. Conrad knew only Al McErlane and some forestry professors. Growing nursery seedlings was not a vital agricultural occupation.

• • •

He came back from the South Pacific in 1945, face and body damaged and changed, thoughts changed, ideas and beliefs changed. And when once more he shook Al McErlane’s hand and walked through the seedling greenhouses, he thought that the rows of spiky, fresh green sturdy little pines were the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

66. her place in the sun

Plywood and fiberboard kept Breitsprecher-Duke alive. During the Second World War they experimented with interior and exterior hardboard siding, but after two years of moisture problems with different recipes — one unhappy trial involved seaweed and corn husk pulp — they dropped the product and concentrated on their plywood — Brite-Ply, made of culls and forest fire salvage. In the years after the war they caught the tail end of the building boom, but bigger companies supplied by cheaper Canadian wood sent them into decline, although the illusion of a productive, busy wood products company headed by two dynamic men — James Bardawulf Breitsprecher and Andrew Harkiss — persisted. Both men photographed well standing in front of a mountain of logs or the glittering rotary peeler, but like plywood these images were only a surface layer covering inferior material.

The younger generation of Breitsprechers wanted nothing to do with the plywood company. But Sophia Hannah Breitsprecher Harkiss, the youngest of Dieter’s children, had her own idea of a place in the works. She found her brother and her husband annoyingly obtuse.

“Andrew! I do not understand why you and James Bardawulf don’t let me into the company. For God’s sake, it’s the sixties, not the Dark Ages. I have no position.” She had grown up listening to Dieter’s stories of how Lavinia Duke, his first wife, apparently a reincarnation of Elizabeth I, had controlled the lumber business since her youth, and it seemed to Sophia, only vaguely aware of the company’s decline, that she, too, should have a title. Her children were grown, why should she not have a career?

“You are a company director, you sit on the Board,” said Andrew. “Very few companies have women on their boards. You have influence in that way and your comments are taken into consideration. What more do you want?”

“I want a position. I want an office and the responsibility of that office.” She kept banging out this tune for more than a year until Harkiss said he would discuss it with James Bardawulf, who, as president of the company and paterfamilias, had the say. But she could not come up with a specific description of what her position might be.

• • •

“She wants to make a career move,” Harkiss said gloomily to his brother-in-law. “You’d think she’d calm down, now that she’s a grandmother. Instead she is like a rolling cannonball on the deck of a ship. She wants an office and her name on the door, a telephone and probably an expense account. Which she’ll spend on clothes.” He and James Bardawulf were having dinner at the Wild Goose in Sherman Oaks, James Bardawulf slashing at his veal cutlet Oskar, Andrew Harkiss picking gingerly at boned pheasant with a Kahlúa sauce.

“How’s the pheasant?” asked James Bardawulf.

Harkiss made a face. “Unusual. I think I prefer gravy to Kahlúa.” They were silent for a few minutes while the waiter hovered, filled their glasses with a sharp white wine. Harkiss drank greedily to rid his mouth of the Kahlúa.

“But what would Sophia do?” James Bardawulf wanted to resolve the issue.

“I don’t know. For God’s sake she doesn’t know. It’s the change of life — or something — and you know how they get.” “They” made up the vaporish, flighty, talkative, scrambling world of women. Yet her husband understood that she had been biding her time for years, and that she would not let this drop. “I told her the company isn’t the monolith she seems to think it is. I told her we had discussed selling out. She blew her top — how could we think of such a thing, ineffective management, lax ways, blah blah. I suppose I can put it to her that she has to draw up a formal request outlining the duties she would assume — tell her that vague wishes bear no fruit. I hope we can find something to quiet her down.”

James Bardawulf glanced at the dessert wagon against the wall. The waiter saw the glance and hurried to snatch up two dessert menus. “How about something to do with the arts? She’s always been interested in museums and concerts — she can do something cultural. Or civic. Community relations?”

“Sophia feels entitled to a place in the company.”

“She’s smart — I admit that. Too smart, maybe.” Andrew Harkiss thought of his wife’s years of correction of his appearance, how she sniped at his way of speaking, realigned the way he marshaled his facts. He sometimes felt he was married not to Sophia but to James Bardawulf; they spoke the same language. “She’s not young but I can tell you that pointing that fact out to her will produce Vesuvius in action. Let’s wait and see if she can come up with an idea on her own.” Harkiss saw that Kahlúa sauce figured in two of the sweets on the dessert menu. He asked for butterscotch pie but even that came with an arabesque of the moody liqueur drizzled down the triangle. He sent it back, saying, “The chef must have stock in the company.”

• • •

Andrew Harkiss told Sophia that James Bardawulf had asked that she write out a description of the job she wanted.

“Yes, yes,” she said and went upstairs to her closet to sort out old, boring clothes that she would replace on a shopping trip to New York, for Chicago did not have really good garment shops. The specific position she wanted, whatever it was, would come to her.

• • •

The flight to New York bumped over a cloudscape that looked like trays packed with cauliflower heads. The air evened out later in the afternoon. As they flew toward darkness, approaching the cities of the east, the slender tangles of light below became great webs, the radiant country glittering in the night.

Sophia stayed at the Waldorf, as the Breitsprechers always did. From her room she telephoned her cousin Althea Evans, who had married a Wall Street stockbroker. She and Althea could shop together and have an elegant lunch. A maid answered the phone.

“Mrs. Evans is away. They are in Boca.”

“Where?”

“Boca. Boca Raton. In Florida.”

“Oh. Well, tell her her cousin Sophia called. Sophia Breitsprecher. From Chicago.”

• • •

After a late New York breakfast of coffee and toast she went to Bonwit Teller, to Saks and Bergdorf’s. She bought two Norell silk shirtwaist dresses. She tried on suits, even a pants suit, not liking the effect. On her last day she thought again about the position she had conjured up on the plane, rushed out to Henri Bendel and daringly tried on two Coco Chanel suits. Both horribly expensive, they were right for her, and damning the cost she bought them. They were what she imagined an ultrafashionable businesswoman would wear. And the position she was shaping in her mind meant stylized business rituals and the right costumes; Chanel suits were correct.

• • •

It amazed her how much alike were her husband and brother. They were almost interchangeable. She saw herself as the family intellectual; she took Book-of-the-Month Club selections and often read at least the first chapters of the books that arrived. She liked history and habitually skimmed the newspaper columns by “Old Timer” or “Pioneer Jack.” Dieter had been on the Board of the Chicago Public Library from the time after the Great Fire when Chicagoans were emotionally moved by the stooping gesture of the English intelligentsia who donated boxes of books for a new library. Dieter had continued to donate money to the library, first to get it out of that water tower, and then as a Good Work. This memory gave her the idea. If Dieter were still alive he certainly would give her the position and office she wanted.

It took her the entire return flight to write out the job description. The woman in the adjacent seat noticed her writing and said admiringly, “You must be a busy career woman!”

Sophia said, “Yes. Just returning from a business trip to Boca. Boca Raton. In Florida.”

She sent the page to her brother, James Bardawulf Breitsprecher, President of Breitsprecher-Duke, rather than give it to Andrew, who might conveniently lose it. Or laugh meanly. Her brother would see the value. Then she waited.

• • •

Andrew met James Bardawulf for lunch at the members’ club they both frequented. James smiled broadly and said, “That was easy enough. We can give her the job.”

“What job?”

“Sophia. The position she wanted. I got her letter this morning. It will suit her and keep her out of business deals.”

“What the hell? She didn’t send me any letter.”

“Maybe she wanted it to be a surprise. Don’t worry, she only wants to be the company historian. She wants to write a history of Breitsprecher-Duke. She wants all the old journals and letters, copies of wires and telegraphs, whatever papers didn’t get burned or thrown out. There are boxes of that stuff in one of the storage rooms. She calls all that junk ‘the Breitsprecher-Duke archives.’ I’m happy to have a door painted with her name and ‘Archival Research’—which is what she wants.”

“Knock me over. She said nothing to me. Is there anything to write about?”

“Oh yes. Dieter, of course, and Lavinia — working back to old Charles Duke, who started the company — Charles Duke — Canada, Holland. All over. Yes, there’s a lot back there we don’t know. Have to say I’m interested myself to see if she turns up anything useful. There could be some nice publicity that we could work into ads — you know, ‘Venerable Old Company. Leader in wood products for over two centuries.’ ”

“Oh boy,” said Andrew.

• • •

There were several unused rooms in the building, any one of which could be cleared out to become Sophia’s office. She looked them over. Four dusty conjoined rooms, once the kingdom of Lawyer Flense, with a view of the lake would do very well — an anteroom for her secretary, her inner sanctum, two meeting rooms. They would have to be cleared, cleaned, repainted. She telephoned her son, Robert, who had recently opened his office, Harkiss Interiors.

“Robert, I need your help. Are you very busy?” Robert, who had had only a single commission — the guest room in the apartment of Mrs. Grainley Wiley, with whom he was having an affair — was sick with worry over his upcoming office rent. He needed another commission. He made the usual noises of “let me see” and “I think I can squeeze you in” before he agreed.

“This is rather good, Mother, a very workable space. Your renovation ideas are not bad but I would suggest opening out this wall”—he pointed at the separation between the two meeting rooms—“and giving yourself a really large office. Make that room you had picked for your office a meeting room. And we can put in carpet. You’ll be amazed how much carpet softens the atmosphere.”

“I haven’t been living under a stone for the past fifty years, Robert. I have actually heard about carpet.” But she liked the idea of a larger office. Together they shopped for Danish modern office furniture in oil-rubbed teak, beige wool carpet, a big leather Eames chair.

• • •

The day came when Sophia, installed in her new office, began reading through pages and pages of crabbed handwriting and atrocious spelling, trying to sort out mysterious characters whose connections to the family were unclear. She hired a secretary, a potato-faced blonde named Debra Strong (niece of Mrs. Garfield, the company secretary), who said her last job had been at a women’s magazine. Debra sorted the papers into rough time periods, put them into neatly labeled folders. Sophia’s plan was to tell of the early travails of a pioneer enterprise that became successful through hard work, and went on to enjoy the fame and fortune of being one of the oldest and most successful logging companies in the nation.

Obscurity, and French, like thick blankets, befogged the papers. Was Charles Duke the same person as Charles Duquet, whose name appeared on what might be a promissory note signed by someone named Dred-Peacock; it was signed with an X indicating Charles Duquet was illiterate — or was it Dred-Peacock? Later correspondence was clearly signed by Charles Duke. So she was sure Dred-Peacock, whoever he was, was the illiterate. There was too much French for her. She hired a student to translate the difficult pages but found the lists of old deals and accounts tedious and put them aside as immaterial.

After a year of scratching through the papers a story began to take shape. Charles Duke, a poor French boy, set out for the New World to escape a harsh life on a French farm. Once in North America he began to make his way by hard work and eventually, with the money he earned, bought timberland and opened a sawmill. The correspondence with Dred-Peacock ended abruptly, though in the next batch of material there were nearly forty letters to his sons. These made tiresome reading as they were loaded with advice and maxims and shed no light on Charles Duke’s character beyond commanding his sons to do what he told them to do. He seemed a serious fellow, but one who doted on his children. She skipped over James Duke, a dull stick. Lavinia, alas, had left behind hundreds of boxes of business correspondence and notes on the lumber industry. Sophia did not understand most of Dieter’s first wife’s descriptions of inventions, meetings, numbers of board feet taken from various forests and shipped to distant destinations. It was enough to say she was a highly respected businesswoman. And, thought Sophia, an insanely busy scribbler.

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 Bardawulf’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.

“She won’t be left,” said Bren. “I can’t go out of her sight. And she’s the same about you if you don’t get home on time. I don’t know how it will be when she starts school.”

“You know I can’t always tell when I’ll get back — weather could keep me out — even for days. The fish don’t have clocks. And boats don’t have telephones.”

“She’d keep watching,” said Bren.

The incident with a baby chicken rattled both parents. Bren had decided to raise a dozen hens for eggs and meat, save on groceries, make a change from fried cod. She ordered twenty chicks by mail and when they came she put the box behind the stove to keep them warm. She showed the little balls of fluff to Sapatisia, who was enchanted. She let her hold one.

“Be careful. It’s delicate.”

But Sapatisia loved the warm little peeping creature and in her immoderate affection squeezed it and squeezed, then shrieked when the dead chick hung limp.

“For that you must be punished,” said Bren, and Sapatisia roared with the insult of her first spanking.

“That is how she is,” said Egga. “She can’t help it. God save any man she loves. She’ll eat him alive and throw the bones out the window.”

Bren’s fear of Sapatisia throwing a fit her first day at school dissolved. It was as if the child had steeled herself for it. She did not cry when Bren left her in the little kindergarten chair, nor would she move to a different chair despite the teacher’s coaxing. Left alone she was tractable; commanded to do something — anything — she was impossible.

“I don’t know what’s going on in that little head,” said the teacher.

“Welcome to the knitting circle,” said Bren.

Still, Sapatisia made it through all the grades, occasionally striking off sparks of brilliance. She seemed happiest, thought Egga, when, on a Sunday, they hiked along the shore. She came home carrying handfuls of wilted grasses, water-smooth rocks with flecks of mica.

• • •

In her freshman year at college Sapatisia, given to instant love or hate, fastened her affections first on the subject of plants and then on a married ecology professor. The man was flattered; there was an affair; he tried to disengage and Sapatisia appeared at his door gripping a hunting knife. She lunged at the professor, who twisted adroitly and the knife plunged into the wood doorframe. She was muscular and strong but the professor was stronger and, shouting to his wife to call the police, he held Sapatisia down until they arrived. The next day Egga came to the jail to take her home.

“You know you are expelled from school,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I won’t ask you why you did this. I know why. You are like I was when I ran away from the resi school.”

“I am not like you,” she said. “I am different. And my reasons were different.”

“Oh,” said Egga. “Different from me, different from everybody. But you have to live in this world. Accept some of the rules that keep it in balance. Make an adjustment. Or you will die young.”

“I want to go to Shubenacadie,” she said. “I want to see those Sel people. I want to know who I am.”

Egga and Bren had heard nothing about a professor of ecology or botany, only of Sapatisia’s burning interest in the plants and forests of the earth. She seemed to feel personal guilt for eroded slopes and dirty rivers. If she looked up she saw not heaven’s blue but apocalyptic clouds in an aircraft-gouged sky.

“She has a female urge to repair the damage humans have done to nature,” said Bren that evening after Sapatisia was up in her old room.

“Yes, and a female urge to destroy men. We are lucky the professor did not press charges.” Silence in the room except for their breathing. Egga sighed and said, “What do you think about letting her go to Nova Scotia?”

“Oh, Egga, let her go? She will go there no matter what. I’ll talk to her, but brace yourself.”

• • •

“You’ll have to find work to live on, a scholarship to finish your studies,” Bren told her in a chill voice. This daughter absorbed too much of her energy. “We have Marie to think about, too, you know.”

Sapatisia left the next day on a northbound bus.

• • •

Egga and Bren heard nothing for months until a rare letter, postmarked Halifax, Nova Scotia, arrived from their firstborn daughter.

I haven’t met Uncle Paul yet or his daughter Jeanne. Aunt Mary May Mius is shy and seems pretty fussy about her son Felix. Felix is nothing to be fussy about! The best one is Aunt Alice. I liked her. It is a pretty big family. Going to Winnipeg next week to study forestry, doing o.k., love, S

And only a few days later an ink-blotched letter arrived for Egga from his father, Lobert Sel.

It means so much to us that our strong young granddaughter Sapatisia visited us. She ask many questions about our people and old Sel stories. Egga it has been many years since you left. Can you or other granddaughter Marie come here one time? I grow old. Wish to see you. That bad school that hurt you is closed and burned up. Come home.

These letters made Egga tearful and he planned a trip to Shubenacadie. He wrote to Lobert that he would come — yes, he and Bren — the next St. Anne’s Day. But from Sapatisia they heard little more than occasional cards postmarked from different cities.

• • •

How different was their younger daughter, Marie.

“She should have been a boy,” said Egga to Bren, thinking of the time when his greasy little toddler had partially disassembled an electric motor and put it back together enlivened with pink plastic stacking rings from her toy box. Nothing mechanical in the house was safe from Marie’s inquiring fingers and she was the easiest person in the world to please at birthdays and holidays with gifts of ship and plane models. She was outspoken and a little brash, but that was a proof to Egga that his younger daughter would not be trodden down. She spent a college summer running a CTL, the cut-to-length wonder tool that felled and delimbed trees in front of itself so the detritus formed a mat for it to move on; it was her hero-machine.

She fell hard for Davey Jones, a bowlegged young lobsterman who wrote poetry, danced reels and strathspeys, played poker and had kept a weather notebook since he was nine. In December of 1978 she married him.

“Yes,” she said, when he proposed, “but I want to keep my job. I like my job.”

“I like mine, too, so no argument.”

After the wedding night the first thing she told her new husband was “There is less soil compaction with the CTL than even a horse team.”

“What makes you think I care?” he said. “Come here and I’ll tell you about lobster pots.”

69. boreal forest

Jeanne Sel and Felix Mius grew up together, knew each other’s childhood thoughts and feelings; as they grew older these diverged as a mountain rill bifurcates in rocky terrain and becomes two streams. Felix had quiet ways that disguised an agile and explorative mind. His complexion was rough and he was inclined to fall in love with unattainable older women who raised their eyebrows at him but never their skirts. Jeanne’s close-set eyes and thin lips convinced her she was above the fray of love entanglements.

Jeanne remembered her mother on a ferry, leaning over the rail waving good-bye, good-bye, until the vessel melted away in heavy fog where a few hours later it collided with a coal barge; both went down in deep water. Her father, Paul Sel, told her that Mama could not come back, but his own weeping indicated something very terrible.

“I don’t know, Mary May,” Paul said to his sister, whose son, Felix, was a year younger than Jeanne. “I don’t know what to do. She won’t talk or play with other kids — except here with Felix.”

“That’s a good sign,” Mary May said. “Let them be together. Little kids sort things out. I think better Jeanne come stay with us. And I think a picnic trip. Help her get over losing Marta. Help you, Paul.”

“Nothing can help me,” said her brother, but he didn’t object when Mary May called, “Felix and Jeanne, come on. We are going on a picnic.”

They headed away from the reservation crowded together like buns in a package in Paul’s decrepit grey truck. The interior smelled of mold and a dog that Paul had once owned.

“Where we goin, where we goin?” Felix asked over and over, excited.

“Where we goin?” said Jeanne.

“You’ll see when we get there.”

“There” was Kejimkujik Provincial Park. Mary May said to them, “Long time ago this was Mi’kmaw place.” Jeanne and Felix, after hours of riding until their legs became paralyzed sticks, jumped and ran under the huge old-growth hemlock. There was a garden of boulders under lustrous blue-green trees.

Felix discovered that the undersides of the branches shone silver, in the deep shade grew maidenhair fern, graceful ebon-black curved branches and tiny mitten-like leaves. The hemlocks sighed very gently. He engaged with Tsuga canadensis.

“I wish Mama could see this,” Jeanne said, admiring the gleaming stems of the fern, smelling the musky odor. At the edge of the water she found a forest of mathematically perfect ebony spleenwort and looking around encountered myriad tones of green: citrine, viridian, emerald. It was a fine and satisfying day that was never forgotten by the children.

• • •

In high school teachers talked of careers. Jeanne learned that botanists lived in a world of stem and leaf. There would not be an oil or gas job with Encana or Mime’j Seafoods for Felix Mius; he intended to get into forestry school — everyone knew about Jackson Mius, who had logged with a horse team in Maine back in the sixties, then went to the University of Maine and got a degree and a job with the state in forest research. He had done it, so would Felix. The cousins set the goal of getting into university. They had to complete two years at the community college before they could apply. The odds were against them.

After high school graduation they moved to Aunt Alice Sel’s house in Dartmouth, her child-care center and home for an occasional young Mi’kmaw trying out urban life. They enrolled at the community college and worked part-time jobs.

The lower level of Alice’s kitchen traffic was always congested with toddlers; the upper level with friends and relatives, chaos exemplified. Jeanne thought it a madhouse until one September Saturday she came downstairs and found the kitchen empty, the house silent. A syrup of honey-colored autumnal sunlight fell on the scrubbed table and old mismatched chairs. Alice’s kitchen was beautiful.

• • •

“Those two, they’re sure tryin hard at their schoolwork. I guess it’s good they got each other. Like brother and sister,” remarked Alice to her sister, Mary May. They sat at the crowded kitchen table with teapot and cups.

“Well, I just hope it don’t get — funny. That kind of worries me, them bein so close. You know, cousins and all. I pray they don’t do nothin wrong.”

Alice gave her sister her dry look. “Quit worryin. He just watches out for her. That Jeanne, I think, she won’t never get romantic about nobody. And Felix takes girls to the movies if he can afford it. But not Jeanne — she wants to see a movie she goes by herself.”

• • •

The cousins struggled with the college course work: they couldn’t get into university without the credits. Neither spoke Mi’kmaw fluently; English had come first, but some early mornings they sat together at the computer to learn Mi’kmaw words, following the Listuguj speakers’ pronunciations. Then Alice would come in and ruin everything by criticizing their efforts.

• • •

On Saturdays, Jeanne hauled laundry to the Bucket O’ Suds. While the clothes churned she flipped through a stack of ragged magazines and old newsletters that featured profiles of people in the province. One interested her; she tore the page out.

That evening, drinking tea after supper to wash down the store-bought cake, she showed it to the others. “It’s an article on this woman, Sapatisia Sel. Suppose she is a relation?”

Felix said, “If every Sel relative gave us a dollar we’d be rich. What about this Sapatisia Sel?”

“It says she collects medicine plants and trees.”

“Another one?” said Felix scornfully. Medicine plants! Over the years a stream of white people had come to “study” Mi’kmaw medicine plants and the older women on the reservation were used to being quizzed about traditional cures.

“I know Sapatisia,” said Alice, reaching for the page. She read a minute, studied the picture. “That’s Egga’s daughter. She’s a relative from the States. She come here once. This says she knows about old-time medicine plants.”

“And she plants trees.”

• • •

Felix hated the required remedial English grammar and composition that seemed unnecessary to a future study of forestry. It was not that he disliked learning — he and Jeanne stuffed their brains. The relentless reading and studying wore them down and they decided to make a rare free evening and hear Dr. Alfred Onehube from Manitoba lecture on the state of the world’s forests.

Onehube disclosed himself as a militant ecoconservationist. Several people connected with forest production and timber sales got up and walked out. But Felix and Jeanne sat on the edges of their seats drinking in the named sins against the forest.

“Budworm, for example,” said Dr. Onehube at AK-47 velocity. “Natural cycles of budworm infestation, roughly every thirty or forty years. When the insects outstripped their food supply they disappeared. Dead trees fell, waited for the fire. Fire came, new trees grew from the ashes. But after the Second World War we wanted all the trees we could get for wood pulp and paper. Everybody had new chemical weapons, and war surplus planes. So when spruce budworm invaded the boreal forests in the 1940s, the Forest Service sprayed DDT. Our Miramichi River, home of the greatest Atlantic salmon run on earth, turned into a death river as the DDT killed all the tiny water animalcules that fed the salmon.”

He stopped and drank half the glass of water on the podium, spilling some down his jacket, where the drops sparkled in the light until they were absorbed by the cloth. He looked up into the lights, seemed to draw breath, then continued in his earnest rapid-fire baritone.

“We know better about DDT now. But what makes us think we are any smarter about the effects of vast clear-cutting of a very fragile ecosystem? Hah? There are countless unknowns here. And we don’t even know how much we don’t know.”

Finally, when listeners began looking at their watches and some in the rear sidled guiltily out of the hall, he came to an end: “Incompetent forest… ignorance… wood fiber, battles… disturbances… chemical destruction… slow-growing… unstoppable.” He lowered his voice dramatically, paused and then whispered into the microphone, “Now we are finishing off the cold land of little sticks, the great breeding grounds for millions of birds, the cleansing breath of the earth, the spring nutrient runoff to the ocean that revitalizes everything — the beginning of the great food chain. You people,” he said, looking at the audience. “We are killing… the… great… boreal… forest.” There was a frictional hissing sound as people moved in their seats, then small applause and the noise of seats folding back into place as everyone rose. A college official came out and announced that Dr. Onehube would speak at noon the next day on overpopulation — a lecture titled “SRO — Standing Room Only.”

As they left the auditorium Felix heard a man behind him say, “Another tree-hugging eco-nut.” Jeanne’s face was stiff. Without looking at Felix she said, “I feel completely stupid, helpless. What are we doing but cramming our heads with words? Felix, what can we do?”

“I don’t know.” They walked in silence. The rain was finished, pushed along by the rising wind, its raw edge slicing off the water.

• • •

Impossible to go back to the study schedule after the call to activism, but where to begin? Jeanne reorganized the stacks of paper and books on her study table. She came on the profile of Sapatisia Sel torn from the power company’s newsletter and read it with fresh interest.

“Felix, I want to know why she said that the old Mi’kmaw medicine plants can’t be used anymore. I bet she knows how to help the forest. The article says she lives on Cape George. Let’s go find her.”

“How can we get there? No car.”

They left it there for several days. Alice came down with the flu and Jeanne stayed home from classes to run the child care and cook. Alice’s reservation friends brought Mi’kmaw medicines for the sick woman. Jeanne was delighted to see the medicines in use and to hear their clicking names even if she didn’t know what they meant: wijok’jemusi, wisowtakjijkl, pako’si-jipisk, pko’kmin, miti, pakosi, tupsi, l’mu’ji’jmanaqsi, kjimuatkw, stoqon. Morning, noon and night Alice was inundated with washes, gargles, tisanes, decoctions, brews, teas and infusions.

“You see,” said Jeanne to Felix. “The medicines are still used! That Sapatisia has some explaining to do.”

Another week and Alice was on her feet again, cured. “Layin there in bed I decided to give up meetins of the Child Help Program. Just too tired at the end of the day,” she said, and looked it, her round face mottled and puffy as a cheese soufflé.

“Hitchhike,” whispered Jeanne to Felix, who was struggling into his old torn jacket.

“You just won’t give up, will you?” And he was out into the early darkness.

• • •

Alice found the way. “You can get a ride. It seems like,” she said, “Johnny Stick is goin that way. He’s pretty good company now. He started goin to those ‘truth and reconciliation’ meetings a few years ago. Helps to know you are not alone in the boat.”

“What was the matter with him?” asked Felix, who picked up a tone in her voice.

“Oh, that bad stuff from years ago when he was a kid. The resi school.”

“Mr. Stick is all right to take a ride with?”

“Yes. He’s fine. He’s got a carpenter job up there fixin the handrail in the old lighthouse. It hasn’t blinked a blink for sailors for eighty years but the tourists like it. In the summer there’s a chips truck in the parking lot, does good business, so that shaky old handrail, got chip grease and salt all over it. He said be ready tomorrow mornin. Early. Bring your blankets. You can rough it a few nights.”

• • •

Mr. Stick was in his late middle years, his dark jowls clean-shaven. The back of his pickup held an enormous red cooler and under a tarp the handrail sections for the lighthouse. He said, “Nice maple rail. Same finish like one of them no-stick fry pans. So where do y’want to go on the Cape?”

“We don’t know. I mean, we’re looking for a woman named Sapatisia Sel. But we don’t know exactly where she lives.”

“Here’s the deal. You help me put that rail in place you’ll get a round trip and a place to sleep. And your dinner.”

Jeanne nodded. Mr. Stick gazed out at the horizon for a long minute before he snapped to and said gruffly, “Then let’s get goin. Hop in!” He talked as he drove. “I know who you mean. Egga Sel’s daughter. Sapatisia. There’s not too many live out on the Cape except motel and restaurant people in the tourist season. I guess she’s got a place out there. Somewhere.” They all knew everything was for the tourists, the despised tourists who kept Nova Scotia alive.

“She knows about the old Mi’kmaw medicines. That’s why we want to talk to her,” said Jeanne.

“Seen a woman go along the cliffs with a basket. I thought she was a berry picker first time I see her, but it wasn’t the season. I never seen her up close to talk to. I knew Egga pretty good. Long ago. At least I think it was her. Not sure. Cliff path below the lighthouse. Seen her when I was measurin for the handrail. Stayed three nights, slept in the truck and I seen this woman couple times. Must be good stuff grows down there.”

Mr. Stick said, “She’s a Sel. Try and find a Mi’kmaq ain’t related to a Sel! Get up pretty early in the mornin for that. I got some gneg wetagutijig cousin Sels.”

Driving slowly in the thickening fog, he said that Felix and Jeanne, between times of helping him, could watch for the woman. “Sapatisia, she went to university, travel all over the world. But I don’t know if you’ll see her, way the fog’s workin up. Not much hope for today,” he said as he turned onto the gravel drive to the lighthouse.

“Look!” said Jeanne, pointing at the storage building. They all saw a fading movement.

“No, no! I see her yet. Ala’tett. Way over there.” Mr. Stick pointed at a blob that was gone as soon as he spoke. “Wait for mornin. I think she comes back.”

He made a fire in the parking lot, cooked hot dogs in a dirty cast-iron frying pan. Then, yawning, he said good night and retired to his truck, where they could see the glint of a bottle as he tilted it up. The cousins went into the lighthouse, unrolled their sleeping bags.

• • •

All the next day the fog hung heavy and unmoving. Felix and Jeanne held the railing steady while Mr. Stick bolted the sections to the braces. He fussed with joins and angles, took the sections down again and made minute adjustments. He worked without talking. The light was dimming when he was satisfied with the railing.

• • •

The next morning sprang open brilliantly clear with a snapping wind shooting up their jacket sleeves. Mr. Stick ate dry bread for breakfast, didn’t offer any to them but drank deeply from his thermos of stone-cold black tea, then smoked his pipe. “Got to clean her up a little,” he said, meaning the railing. Jeanne and Felix climbed to the top of the lighthouse.

“Some view. I see two tankers. No, one’s the ferry.”

“I see Sapatisia Sel,” said Felix. “Down there on the rocks.”

The woman in canvas overalls and jacket was digging with a trowel. A notebook lay open on a boulder and the wind riffled the pages.

“Hello,” called Jeanne. The woman looked up at them. She was short and sturdy, black long hair in a single braid. Her narrow eyes looked Asian; she said nothing.

“Are you Sapatisia Sel?”

The woman picked up the book and set off rapidly down the shore with a plant still in her grasp, fragments of soil falling from the roots.

“Please wait! We want to talk to you.”

In a few minutes they heard a distant engine start up. By the time they reached the bottom of the lighthouse the red pickup was roaring along the road. Gone.

“I’d say she don’t feel like talkin,” said Mr. Stick. “Ten more minutes then I’m headin back to Dartmouth. You want a ride? Or stay?”

“Yes to a ride,” said Jeanne, not looking forward to the fumigation, hoping Mr. Stick would stop at a store along the way. But he did not, drove faster and faster through the fog that had erased Sapatisia Sel.

• • •

Mr. Stick, feeling obscurely responsible for the cousins’ thwarted search, had gone to Lobert Sel, whose mind was failing, yet he seemed to know where Sapatisia’s little house stood. He put his trembling finger on an inlet he said was Pussle Cove. “Couple kilometers east the lighthouse. No road sign.” Mr. Stick gave the smirched paper to Alice, who put it beside Jeanne’s plate that evening. So she had an address. And to get there she took money from her savings account at the East Coast Credit Union and gave it to Felix, asked him to rent a car. She had no license.

• • •

The rain didn’t matter and the cousins had a sense of holiday freedom. The rental car hummed along, the wet roadside unfurled and the windshield wipers beat a slow march. They shared a bag of jelly donuts Felix bought at Tim Hortons. They passed the Wreck Point lighthouse and he slowed.

• • •

“That’s it. Has to be.” Jeanne pointed at a faint trackway that sidled shyly off the main road directly into a patch of wind-racked black spruce. “I see car tracks.”

Felix turned cautiously into the watery ruts dimpled by raindrops and inched slowly between clawing branches. They looked down at a small unpainted house on the edge of the sea, smoke barely clearing the chimney. Nearby a wind-twisted spruce and an outhouse leaned west. A northern harrier huddled in the tree.

Before they could knock, the door opened and Sapatisia Sel, wearing a heavy grey sweater that looked like it had been knitted from fog and briars, stood staring at them without expression. She was not old but weathered, a plank washed up on shore.

“All right,” she said in a low voice. “Here you are. Again. Why? Who are you and what do you want? Ever hear of privacy?”

“We come up from Dartmouth,” said Jeanne and waited as though she had explained everything.

“I guessed that. Why are you bothering me?”

“I am Jeanne Sel, and this is my cousin Felix. Also Sel. We are students. I read this article”—she held the limp cutting out—“about you and I have a question.”

“What question?” She did not take the clip.

“Well, you say that Mi’kmaw medicine plants from long ago can’t be used now. Why not? I mean, if we know that a certain plant cured aches or itches, why wouldn’t it be good to use it now? Our aunt Alice just had the flu and everybody brought her Mi’kmaw medicine and she got better.”

Sapatisia Sel made a sound halfway between a moan and a sigh. “Good God, you came all this way to ask that?”

• • •

Salt-dimmed windows faced the Atlantic and the ocean itself seemed hung in space. The only table in the room looked like it had been stolen from a provincial park. Near the door stood an immense cupboard, painted red.

“Used to be a fisherman’s house,” said Sapatisia. “Fixed it up. Suits me the few months I’m here.”

On the west wall Jeanne saw a bench cluttered with botanical instruments, a large microscope, a battered and age-blackened plant press layered with drying papers, dark stem ends protruding.

“Sit,” said Sapatisia Sel, jerking her thumb at the table. “So. You want to know so badly why we can’t use the old medicine plants that you drive a hundred kilometers on a stormy day to ask me, who you don’t know? Maybe you think I have an answer. I don’t.”

Her unbraided hair straggled over her shoulders. “Since the conquest the air has been filled with pesticides and chemical fertilizers, with exhaust particles and smoke. We have acid rain. The deep forests are gone and now the climate shifts. Can you figure out for yourselves that the old medicine plants grew in a different world?” Felix, who had had many school-yard fights, liked her low voice, but not her combative posture.

“Those plants were surrounded by strong healthy trees, trees that no longer exist, trees replaced by weak and diseased specimens. We can only guess at the symbiotic relationships between those plants and the trees and shrubs of their time.” She looked out the window, tapped her foot. “And I must say you are unusual young people to come here looking for answers. Are you botany students?”

They began to explain their lives to her, Alice’s house and how they came to be there.

“You deluded idiots,” said Sapatisia Sel. “And now you will go back and continue your studies?”

“We have to pass the exams. So we can get into university.”

“Why do you want that?”

“To have careers. To be somebody.”

“You are already somebody. Do you mean somebody more important than poor Mi’kmaw students?”

“Yes. I guess so,” said Jeanne, and Felix, who did not want to nod, nodded.

“It’s not just ourselves,” said Jeanne. “Felix cares about the forests,” she said. “And I care. We want to do something.”

Felix saw the woman’s rigid shoulders drop a little. He told her about hearing Dr. Onehube’s lecture on the boreal forest.

“Well, Alfred does get people going.”

“Do you know him?”

“We’ve worked together on projects.” She got up and walked around, went to the door, opened and closed it. “You two are beginning to interest me now that we’re past the medicine plants. You are young and green, you do not know how the world works or that you will be punished for your temerity in wanting careers.” Outside the window in the gathering twilight Felix saw the northern harrier fly to its tree, something limp in its talons.

Felix thought of the long drive back. “You sound like a teacher. Are you a teacher?”

“I’ve done the university things, teaching and lecturing. I, too, wanted a career, I had a career, I left the career. I’ve learned enough to know that today the world we have made is desperate for help. Help that isn’t coming. I don’t teach now. I have a project and I work at it. With others. My interests are overlapping ecosystems, the difficulties in understanding the fabric of the natural world. So if you came here looking for a discussion of research on medicinal plant genomes you’re in the wrong place.”

Felix did not like her, but there was something — and Jeanne sat with her mouth open, staring hungrily at Sapatisia Sel, waiting for the next sentence.

“We look at models, examine causation and apparent effect, we struggle with the wild cards, worry about population growth. Humans now outnumber every mammalian form of life that has ever existed. Maybe unstoppable. We have nightmares about oceanic currents and sea star die-off, melting ice, more violent winter storms. And we think about forest degradation. Forest, the beginning and likely end. As Onehube says.” And then in that low voice that sounded as though she were talking to herself she said, “But others now suggest more frightening problems and ends than Alfred Onehube ever dreamed.”

She seemed done with talking, thrust a notebook at them and said, “Write down your address. I’ll be in touch.” Then she sent them on their way.

70. moonlight

Autumn lurched clumsily out of the equinox, black ice one day, sunlight polishing tree branches the next. A few straggler tourists were still underfoot, as irritating as gravel. Jeanne, who worked weekends at an information kiosk, collected (as everyone did) their idiotic questions, especially those from the Americans who thought it might be shorter to drive from Halifax to Antigonish counting miles rather than kilometers.

“I’m late, I’m late,” muttered Felix, a white rabbit running through the kitchen, snatching a half-cooked pork chop from the pan and dashing up the stairs.

“Don’t eat that pork — it’s still raw,” shouted Alice. “Use some sense. And you got some mail.” Felix, simultaneously changing clothes and chewing on the red pork, looked at the clock. On his way to the back door through the kitchen he dropped the pork chop back in the pan and picked up the buff envelope, saw “Breitsprecher Tree Project” and a Chicago address in the upper left corner. He stopped, turned the envelope over.

“Jeanne get one, too, just like that,” said Alice, nodding at Jeanne’s plate, the envelope standing against it. “Late again — something she has to do at the school.”

Felix tore the end off the envelope and pulled out a letter. Something fell out as he unfolded it and fluttered under the table. He read the letter and read it again, not understanding. It informed him that he was the recipient of a five-thousand-dollar fellowship from the Breitsprecher Tree Project and was signed by someone named Jason Bloodroot. What did it mean? Once more he read the letter, retrieved the check from the floor. It was made out to Felix Sel, it looked real. The letter said he was to contact Dr. Sapatisia Sel within ten days for further information about the project.

“I’ll be double damn,” he said. “Doctor Sapatisia Sel.” There was her address and her cell phone number. He whooped so loudly that Jeanne, outside in the street, heard. She came in to find them dancing around the table, tore open her identical letter.

“You call her,” said Felix. “It’s you who connected us with her. So you phone.”

• • •

The next day over the supper plates Felix studied the provincial highway map looking for an alternate route. “The trip was too long last time. But how about this”—he jabbed his pencil into the map—“a shortcut.” Jeanne was old enough to know that no man on earth could be deterred from taking an unknown shortcut.

And now the lime-green rental car thumped into the darkening morning. The coast road would have been better. The shortcut was like driving up a dry river bed. Despite the rental car’s chopped-off look (as though a log slasher had got it), Jeanne thought it a technological marvel. She began poking at the GPS touch screen.

The back road was a roller coaster of broken asphalt. The car could not catch the rhythm of the frost heaves. There were no towns, no houses, only third-growth spruce and brush representing the great forest of an earlier century. At the height of land they could see the dulled ocean and its grey line of rain. Tiny drops speckled the windshield.

“I don’t think this is the tourist route,” said Felix, steering around a dead branch. “Not sure where we are. And this city car doesn’t like it.”

“But we can see the water, so the highway has to be between us and the shore. When you see a right turn, take it.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost eleven. We’ll be late.”

The car scraped through a series of potholes. Something dark and thin ran across the road.

“What was that?”

“Mink, one of those big escaped ones from the mink farms.”

“You remember what Dr. Onehube said about those farms — pollute the rivers and the minks get out and breed with wild minks and make bad genetic changes?” The road degenerated into a stew of stones and mud. Felix clenched the wheel, drove very slowly, and the car struggled forward.

“You know,” Felix said, “I found out something interesting about Dr. Sapatisia Sel. Guess.”

“What, she was elected prom queen back in the day?”

“Not likely. She was married. Married to somebody we know.”

“Who!” Jeanne did not believe it. How could her hero have married anyone?

“Well, not somebody we actually know — someone we heard talk.”

“No, you don’t mean that Onehube?”

“Yes. She was his student. And they got married.”

Jeanne shuddered. She preferred to think of Sapatisia as a Lone Heroine.

“Anyway, what difference does it make? They were divorced.”

Jeanne said nothing.

“Onehube’s okay. He got us going.”

“Wonder why they split up.”

• • •

They descended the hill, passed assemblages of motley boards and corrugated roofing, one with a hopeless FOR SALE sign. Abruptly the clouds began to rip open like rotten cloth, showing bright blue underskirts. As a slice of sunlight painted the drenched countryside, touched the sea, a flight of migrating birds cut the sky like crazy little scissors.

“We’ll get there pretty soon,” said Felix. “But I don’t know where we are.”

Jeanne began tracing her finger over the GPS touch screen. A tiny red dot on a crumpled string of a road appeared. “Look, Felix! It shows us on this road!”

“All right!” said Felix. Jeanne promised herself she would buy this model of car if she ever had the money. Suddenly a loud female voice said, “In a half kilometer turn right.” Jeanne shrieked.

“You don’t get out into the world enough,” said Felix, swinging onto the wet highway. The sun changed the macadam surface to black lacquer and in a few kilometers they passed the lighthouse.

• • •

There was Sapatisia Sel’s red pickup, beside it a rust-blotched sedan and a jeep so muddy it had no other color. Felix parked next to the jeep. At the lee side of the house they saw two large tents. A sign on one read MEN.

“The other one must be for women,” said Jeanne. “Are they toilets?”

“Now you sound like a tourist. The outhouse is over there,” he told her and jerked his thumb toward the unmistakable small building on the cliff. The northern harrier sat on its branch, eyeing them. “I say the tents are for sleeping.”

“Let’s go in.” The harrier rattled a loud tektektektek.

• • •

The room looked different, richer in a homely way. The stolen picnic table was cluttered with papers, two laptops, a carton of almond milk and some plastic plates. Sapatisia, two young women — one with elaborately coiffed black hair, the other white-blond — and a sun-darkened man in a checked lumberjack shirt sat at the table drinking tea — wintergreen, thought Jeanne, catching the sprightly aroma — and eating take-out fried chicken legs.

“You made it,” said Sapatisia. She was still in dirty jeans and the heavy grey sweater. “Sit down and have something. The coleslaw — where is it—” She half-rose.

“I’ve got it,” said the man. His eyes looked bruised. He was older than the others, tall and thin, with a scar that torqued his mouth into a crooked slant. He stretched out a long arm and pushed the coleslaw bowl down the table. He looked at Jeanne and Felix.

“That’s Tom Paulin,” said Sapatisia, and she made sketchy introductions: “Jeanne Sel, Felix Sel, Tom Paulin, Hugdis Sigurdsson and Charlene Lopez. Let’s eat now and then talk about the project.” Her knotty dark hair was held back in a ponytail that resembled a Percheron’s fly whisk; her eyes reflected the window light with a pale flash. Felix repeated “Tom Paulin” to himself, Tom Paulin the coleslaw passer. There was something about the man’s straight back and the way he moved that indicated tension.

• • •

They tossed the gnawed chicken bones into the stove; Jeanne smelled them scorching.

Sapatisia said, “So then. Briefly, the Breitsprecher Tree Project does forest replanting. We have ties with as many as thirty conservation groups and we often work within their programs. The six of us make a work group. We like to have ten, but this time we have six. A few more might come later. We will be the only team working in Nova Scotia this season and there is a lot to do. We’ll plant trees and monitor several test plots outplanted three years ago. We keep detailed notes on how well they are doing for up to ten years. One particular plot was showing a lot of chlorosis last year. Dozens of variables. I have a pet site where we’re looking for the effects of mycorrhizal fungi on seedling growth. Burned soil is deficient in mycorrhizae and seedlings do not do well without them — their presence increases nutrient and mineral intake.”

Sapatisia looked down the table at Jeanne and Felix scribbling notes, Charlene staring back at her, Tom Paulin in his private distance. She said, “Come back to us, Tom.” She spoke softly. She knew a little about him: that he had been through deadly experiences in Afghanistan years earlier, and that after he came home, somehow trees had saved him. He looked at her, cracked out a blink of a smile like someone working a mirror against the sun. She went on.

“Whenever we can we’ll visit the province’s ecoregions, starting tomorrow with the highland plateau. It’s useful to have a grasp of small areas, to know what is special about each. Once you understand how to assess different geographies, soils and hydrologies, sizing up new places will become second nature.”

Felix said, “You mentioned different countries — will we go to other places or just stay here?” Tom Paulin nodded, poured more tea into his personal cup marked with mù, the Chinese ideogram for tree.

“For this three-month session you stay here. Next year you may work in a tropical rain forest.” Jeanne noticed that Sapatisia’s hands were dark, the nails broken. She looked at her own white, useless hands. The room was quiet and they could faintly hear the relentless cry of the harrier.

“If you like a particular kind of work you might specialize — Tom knows about wildfires and deforestation. Charlene is our expert on planting techniques.” She nodded at the handsome hawk-nosed woman whose hair was twisted into an intricate knot at the back of her head. Jeanne wondered how she managed it in a tent.

Sapatisia said, “So. Essential information for our newcomers. The Tree Project will supply you with room and board and pay for your travel and all equipment and tools. Sometimes you will be living in tents, sometimes in hotels or with a host family. This month it’s tents. The team will work together on the same plot. The work is hard and dirty. Next week Charlene will show Jeanne, Felix and Hugdis how we plant trees — we’ll be doing spruce, birch, fir, maples, hemlock on several cutover degraded plots — and the burned plots — all near enough so we can use this place for our camp. We’ll share the cooking, kitchen and cleanup chores.”

“Then this project is not about medicinal plants?” asked Felix. He had noticed that Sapatisia often glanced at Charlene. What was that about?

“It can be medicinal plants where they are natural constituents of an area. Don’t jump to the conclusion that medicinal plants only benefit humans — animals and other plants also use natural medicines. We often have to guess what understory plants belong in the mix because on badly degraded land we are not entirely sure what was there before the cut. You’ll see as we go along.” The male harrier flew from the tree and his shadow crossed the window.

Sapatisia said, “Tomorrow we will be on the plateau to examine the mixed-wood forests.” From the red cupboard she took a stack of notebooks stamped BREITSPRECHER TREE PROJECT. “For field notes. Don’t forget to consult the project’s online library. A huge amount of information is available.” She took up a sheaf of papers.

“Here are thumbnail descriptions of the geology and soils we’ll see tomorrow. Add your personal observations to these notes. And remember that where there are highlands, there must be lowlands with bogs and marshes — they are not discrete.”

“And moose,” murmured Felix. He was here. He’d welcome anything he could learn.

“Yes, and otters and beaver, muskrats and dragonflies, mosquitoes, beetles and worms, and how do they all fit into the forest’s life? Try to approach questions from the viewpoint of the forest.” She looked at Tom Paulin as she said this. Then, more briskly, “If you have questions about fires and soils, ask Tom. Always share your knowledge.”

On the pages she passed out Felix saw a jumble of new words — glacial till, ferro-humic podzols, Proterozoic intrusives, gleysols, fibrisols. He was excited by the names of the soils. This was real knowledge.

Jeanne had a question that had plagued her since she opened the envelope and saw the check fall out. “Why us?” she asked. “Why do you think Mi’kmaw people should do this?” Tom Paulin looked at Jeanne as if he were on a voyage of discovery and seeing a new land for the first time.

“It is not just Mi’kmaw people working on the project. Some are Mi’kmaw, we are even related as I’m sure you know, but Hugdis comes from Iceland and Charlene from Mexico. Tom is from the American south. In Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Cambodia, Sumatra, Vietnam, United States West Coast, many of the people working to replant forests and resurrect damaged rivers are the children of indigenous forest residents. Dispossessed people who lived in forests for millennia until recently are the ones who step forward to do the repair work. They are the ones who best understand how to heal the forest.

“It will take thousands of years for great ancient forests to return. None of us here will see the mature results of our work, but we must try, even if it is only one or two people with buckets of seedlings working to put forest pieces back together. It is terribly important to all of us humans — I can’t find the words to say how important — to help the earth regain its vital diversity of tree cover. And the forests will help us. They are old hands at restoring themselves.

“Now I’m going out to Sobeys market. Let’s try for supper at five thirty?” She left and they heard the red pickup charge up the hill.

• • •

“When she mentioned forest people,” said Jeanne to Hugdis, “I was going to ask if that idea of idyllic tribes living in wild forestland isn’t a myth, like the myth of pristine primeval forest before the whitemen came. And actually isn’t it a favor to bring those people into modern life now?”

“Jeanne!” cried Felix. “You don’t think it was a favor for the French and English to ‘bring’ the Mi’kmaq into their idea of modern life. I know you don’t.”

Jeanne blushed and tensed in embarrassment. “That was different.”

Hugdis changed the subject by telling the bizarre story of how the crazy Nazis tried to make the Bialowieza forest in Poland into the great primeval wilderness, about their efforts in back-breeding cattle to something they imagined was the extinct aurochs. And that started Tom on the sadness of Afghan people chopping down their last pitiful trees to sell for firewood; they talked until they heard the red truck come down the hill. One thing about this group, thought Felix, they really like talking about trees.

• • •

“Spaghetti tonight,” said Sapatisia, coming in with bags of food and bottles of wine. “If you don’t like the food you get to be the next cook.”

Tom Paulin refilled the woodbox, stoked the stove, Charlene put a great pot of water on to boil, Jeanne and Hugdis chopped onions and green peppers, Felix sliced a large wrinkled pepperoni sausage into near-translucent disks and found bowls and forks. When Sapatisia mixed the sauce into the pasta she set the pot directly on the table.

As they ate they talked of their lives and families, but everyone kept looking at Sapatisia. To Jeanne, who had become an instant disciple, she seemed to stand for all that was good.

It was almost dark when they finished. Tom Paulin went outside while the rest of them cleared the table and Sapatisia rinsed out the teapot. Jeanne began to wash the dishes. Tom came back in and said, “The moon is coming up.” In the window they all saw the red moon, made ragged by sea fog, rising swiftly out of the ocean, paling as it climbed. It looked close enough to hit with a harpoon and seemed to draw farther away as it rose. Jeanne knew the moon’s apparent recession was only its rise above the distorting atmosphere, but suppose, she thought, that this time it kept going, becoming smaller and more distant like the waving hand of someone on a ferry.

• • •

The old stove radiated heat as they sat with their cups of tea and talked on, picking up on their earlier conversation about the tropics.

“It seems,” said Sapatisia, “you are all more interested in tropical than boreal woodlands?”

“They are more endangered, aren’t they? I keep reading that the forests of Sumatra will be gone in twenty years,” said Jeanne. “There is a sense of urgency.”

“And you think boreal forests are less threatened? A misapprehension. You are attracted to the romance of the tropics. There has been a lot of media attention lately — Disney Company roasted for using wood pulp from poached tropical trees to make children’s books. Hardwood floor companies suddenly swearing that they only use ecologically sound plantation-grown trees.”

She went on. “Charlene, you’ve spent time in Brazil and Colombia. How many trees and how many tree species would you say grow in Amazonia?”

“My God, who knows! The diversity is so great and the different species so scattered—”

Tom interrupted. “I read the Field Museum’s report last year that said sixteen thousand species and I don’t remember how many million trees.”

Sapatisia nodded. “And they estimate around three hundred and ninety billion individual trees in the Amazon basin.”

Tom looked at her. “How the hell can we understand those numbers? North America only has one thousand species. Sixteen thousand!”

Sapatisia crooked her mouth in a wry smile. “Yes, how do we grasp these enormous diverse numbers? But the report also said that half the trees actually belong to a much smaller count of two hundred twenty-seven species — the predominants, including cacao, rubber, açai berries, Brazil nuts.”

Charlene poured more tea. “Those are the trees humans have been growing for centuries. Aren’t there more of those species because human have nurtured them?”

Sapatisia shrugged. “Possibly. We just don’t know. Some people are sure those hyperdominants were in the catbird seat because preconquest indigenous people grew them. On the other hand, some think they were always dominant and are in a naturally stable state. Quite a nice little puzzle.

“And that’s the allure,” she went on. “The slippery composition of ecosystems in general. It is uncomfortable to live in a spinning world of hallucinatory change. But how interesting it is.”

Tom Paulin leaned forward. Felix thought he had loosened up since dinner — maybe it was the wine. “I’m thinking about the other end of the Amazonian stick — not the hyperdominant species but the rarities. The extinct species. I’m thinking about ‘dark diversity.’ Like dark matter.”

“Dark diversity?” Felix liked the sound of this.

“A little like absent presence — when you pry a sunken stone from the ground the shape of the stone is still there in the hollow — absent presence. Say there is a particular rare plant that influences the trees and plants near it. Say conditions change and our rare plant goes extinct and its absence affects the remaining plants — dark diversity.”

“But if conditions change again will the absent plant return?” asked Jeanne. “Are you saying extinction is not forever?”

“Sit next to me in the van tomorrow and we’ll figure out dark diversity and dark matter. Right now I need sleep.” He thought that she was not pretty but she had that soft beautiful skin color. And feelings. And a mind.

• • •

No one could sleep under such a moon. Its bitter white light destroyed repose. It was like acid poured over the landscape, seeping into every crevice.

• • •

Felix thought first of soil types, then of the unborn millions of tree cutters to come. And Sapatisia’s emphasis on how enormously important the work was, not just a job but a cause, a lifework. He had listened to Onehube — was this the big thing he, Felix, could do? A drowsy thought swam to the surface — he might now actually be doing it — forest work. Had he gotten around the barrier of college and even the university? Yes, he was at the edge of the forest. This was his start. They could not pull him back.

• • •

And Jeanne felt a stream of joy like a narrow sun ray breaking through heavy overcast, a sense that in this one day her life had become filled with leafy meaning. Because of Sapatisia Sel.

• • •

Tom Paulin in his travel-worn sleeping bag was remembering Afghanistan and lost comrades, men welded tightly by searing experiences that outsiders could never understand. There was dark diversity for you. He found civilian life unbearably lonely; he tasted the sour flavor of belonging nowhere but with the old broken group, forever stitched to each other like parts of a coat — the loneliness of a ripped-out sleeve, he thought. And then at Seeley Lake he had found the larches. Running from suicidal despair he had joined a work crew in an old-growth larch forest where lightning storms fried the summer skies. The Indians had burned underbrush to encourage grassy meadows for deer, but in the last century thickets of Doug fir crowded out larch sprouts. He touched one tree’s soft needles. A thought, unbidden, came — that one of his lost friends was inside that young tree. The burn of anxious grief for that fallen friend began to soften. The work crew had fired the built-up fuel load around the old larches, and the next year seedlings surged up in their thousands. He went on to different forests and in each of the young trees he saw the brothers he had lost. The more seedlings he planted, the more of them he resurrected.

• • •

Sapatisia tossed on her bed in the sleeping loft where once fishermen had stored their gear. It emitted a faint odor of stale bedding and old wool, of ancient seaboots and the wood handles of scaling knives. Every place in the world, she thought, had its own distinctive smell. The smell of old Mi’kma’ki must have been wet stones, sea wrack, pine and spruce, mellowing needle duff under the trees, a smell of salted wind and sassafras, of river fish and the people who lived in it, hair and limbs cleansed in the ever-flowing aromatic air. She rolled onto her side and looked down through a gap in the floorboards and saw moonlight shining on the teacups. She turned again and looked at the glowing sea.

Her thoughts surged like the bubbles rising up the sides of a boiling pot. Nothing done. Everything still unsaid, nothing ready. She had not yet told them of the dangers, that forest restoration workers were attacked and killed, that any kind of interruption to the profitable destruction of forests invited reprisal. She had not mentioned the floods of propaganda and lies that would drown them. She had not told them about the devouring fires, the rich peat-bog carbon mass of the boreal Canadian forests that burned hotter than those of Eurasia, the uncontrollable crown fires were changing the earth’s albedo. In the morning she had to tell them.

New thoughts rushed in. Would they work as a group? Not everyone was suited to the life. She thought Felix would be good — he was hungry for the work. Tom Paulin was her rock, he would carry this group — if he stayed alive. Jeanne might be the finest kind once she found her way. Wait and see. Hugdis would leave in November. And there was Charlene, Charlene sulking again over some imagined wrong. And Mayara — no, she did not want to remember, she would not! But there was Mayara, rising in her memory, dark mestizo activist Mayara, sister, daughter, lover. Yes, and beautiful, too. And the treacherous memory would not stop there but leapt to Mayara on the day she had taken the foreign journalist to see a savagely destructive cut in a protected sanctuary, red mahogany logs lying on the ground, the butts still wet, when the cutters returned carrying guns instead of chain saws. As if they had known. Of course they had known. It was over in seconds, short bursts of gunfire. The photographs had shown Mayara cut in half, folded as though she were trying to kiss her own knees. Her knees! Her beautiful brown, rounded knees.

There followed ten terrible days as Sapatisia and Alfred Onehube staggered through a minefield of pain, confessions of betrayal, grief like a heated knife, until their throats were raw, until they were both exhausted by the enormity of what they had lost. And crushing this was the knowledge of another loss so great it obliterated personal dissolution. For after the divorce she had gone to the ice.

• • •

On the Greenland glaciers with ice scientists she suffered a full-force shock of recognition — the coming disappearance of a world believed immutable. She had heard for years that the earth and its life-forms were sensitive to slight temperature changes, that species prospered and disappeared as weather and climate varied, but dismissed these alarms as environmental determinism. On the ice her thinking shifted as the moon shifts its position in the sky. Historical evidence and the intense scrutiny of contemporary changes sent signals like fiery arrows; the earth was exquisitely sensitive to solar flares, the shadow of volcanic ash, electromagnetic space storms, subterranean magma movement. All her life she had assumed polar ice was a permanent feature of earth. She had not understood. “My God, how violently it is melting,” she had whispered to herself. Great fissures thousands of feet deep opened by meltwater that eroded the hard blue ice, fissures that gaped open to receive the cataract’s plunge, down to the rock beneath the great frozen bed, forcing its under-ice way to the sea, lubricating the huge cap from below. Standing near the brink of one ghastly thundering abyss someone said, “We are looking at something never before seen.” That night, back at the camp, everyone admitted being shaken by the living evidence.

“A great crisis is just ahead,” said one scientist. “What we saw this last week—” he muttered. Sapatisia Sel thought he meant that they had been looking at human extinction. She wanted to cry out, “The forests, the trees, they can change everything!” but her voice froze in her throat.

• • •

The ice had frightened her badly and the next day she called him from the airport: “Can’t we try again? Can’t we fix what we broke? I need to be with you. Our lives and our work. I understand now that the work is the most important thing.” Onehube had said—“Some broken things can’t be fixed.”

• • •

She, Sapatisia Sel, was here now and she hadn’t given up, but she had to sleep, had to, had to sleep. “What can I do but keep on trying? But what if it was all for nothing? What if it was already too late when the first hominid rose up and stared at the world? No!” What she and so many others were doing was working, it had to work. So many people trying to repair the damage, so selfless many of them caring and trying. And the forests themselves trying to grow back. “Oh God,” she groaned, “oh God! Put out the moon!”

In the eastern quadrant of the sky the moon was small and very white and its impersonal brilliance showed the rocky coast, ravaged forests, silent feller bunchers, a black glowering mass of peat bog and spiky forest like old negatives. It showed Onehube’s white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. The sea lifted itself toward the light. And kept on lifting.