Barkskins

60. prodigal sons

The years had been hard on Aaron Sel, Jinot’s only surviving son. When Jinot left for New Zealand with Mr. Bone, Aaron found his way to Mi’kma’ki and the family band of Kuntaw, his father’s grandfather, who had after the death of his wife Beatrix left the Penobscot Bay house and returned to Nova Scotia hoping to live the old Mi’kmaw way. Aaron made an impression on Etienne, Kuntaw’s grown son of twenty-six winters, as a brash youth with nothing of Jinot’s reputation for merriness. Aaron had expected some kind of ceremonial welcome, the warmth of acceptance, had hoped for dissolving mysteries of who he was. He had expected young women. Now that he was here he did not know what he should do. He had no understanding of eel weirs, could not tell a blueberry from an enchantment. He could not hunt caribou or beaver. In any case there were no beaver or caribou.

“I have no friends here — everyone is against me,” he said to Etienne in his most piteous voice.

“You have to learn. Come with me to the river and I show you how we repair the weir.” But Aaron could not fit rocks together, could not hammer stakes in the right position.

“I need a gun,” he said, but there were no guns for anyone without money.

“You want too much,” said old Kuntaw, the Sel clan’s elder and sagmaw. “Here you must learn to give, not take.” But after two restless years in Mi’kma’ki, Aaron went back to Boston, looked for Jinot, who was still in New Zealand, and drifted around the waterfront.

It was on the waterfront that two jovial men got into conversation with him, invited him to the alehouse and bought him drink. Later he had a misted memory of walking between his two new friends toward the docked ships, but no recollection at all of how he came to be aboard the Elsie Jones. He woke the next morning to the painful strike of the bosun’s rope end.

“Git up, you stinkin Indan beggar brat.” He was a green hand on the Elsie Jones bound to London with a cargo of spars and masts.

“You cannot do this! I know my rights. You cannot keep me against my will.”

“What! Are you a sea lawyer? One of them always prating about ‘rights’ and ‘free speech’ and such? I’ll learn you what your ‘rights’ are. You’ll toe the mark and the mark will be high.”

The bosun, James Crumble, instantly took a strong dislike to this young half-breed who spoke of “rights,” put him in the hands of the crew for daily greenhorn instruction in the names and functions of the ropes, the tackle, the watches, the names and functions of the bewildering kinds of sails, the workings of the tackle fall, the daily duties beginning with the swabbing of the deck before the sun was up. They gave him tasks spangled with mortal dangers, sent him clambering up the futtock shrouds in great wind and icy rain, snarled confusing orders salted with vile epithets such as “toad-sucking gib-cat,” and “scabby jackeen,” picked away relentlessly in faulting his lubberly errors. Nor did Crumble spare the rope’s end, cracking it every time Aaron opened his mouth—“Shut yer gob, you hopeless fuckin hen turd of a fool or I’ll spread your guts on the deck.” Crack!

The trip was wretched, storm after storm and in the intervals between, rough seas. A set of monster waves cleaned the deck of the spars stored there and lightning struck their mainmast. Putting up a new mast in the heaving ship cost two men their lives and Aaron expected he would be the dreaded third man. He lay in his hammock trying to think how it would feel when he was pitched into that lurching brine, how long the drowning would take. He asked the old hands, who agreed there was sure to be a third death before they docked, and heard the comforting news that it would be over very quickly, just one or two water-choked gasps from the shock of the cold water, “and then you don’t feel nothin.” During the voyage Aaron grew in strength, knowledge and hatred for Crumble. He swore to himself that if he survived he would kill the man once they were ashore, but the bosun melted away as soon as his boots hit the London docks.

It took weeks, weeks of asking and walking warily along the great wharves in the odorous London fog before he found a ship though he cared not whether bound for Canada or Boston. Day after day the acid fog was so dense that men five feet away were wraiths. In those weeks he began to feel he had somehow changed, and in no minor way. Physically he felt well, strong and alert. He was nineteen, had become watchful, more inclined to read the body movements and faces of people around him. He wanted to go back to Kuntaw’s Mi’kmaw band. “Likely old Kuntaw is dead by now,” he said aloud. Maybe Etienne was in his place, one of the other men. He would try again with a more willing heart. His presumption of himself as the central figure in any scene had been scuttled by the bosun James Crumble.

In a grogshop one afternoon he heard two sailors talking coarsely about what they would do in Halifax. He moved closer, listened, said, “Halifax bound? Ship lookin for crew?”

They gazed at him, at his callused hands, tarry canvas pants. “Excel sails tomorrow mornin. Go talk to the bosun. He keeps aboard all night — Conny Binney.”

Binney was a red-bearded good-natured fellow from Maine, for Maine men were as common as hempen ropes on the wharves of the world. “Wal, yes, sailin for Halifax, carryin China trade goods first for Halifax, a load a China dishes and some porcelain dawgs — at least they call ’em dawgs but look more like pawlywawgs to me. Cobblestone ballast. Ye ain’t green, are ye? Not a landsman? Sailed afore the mast, have ye?” Aaron said he wasn’t so very green as he’d sailed on the Elsie Jones. Binney raised his eyebrows.

“And so you attended Miss Crumble’s Academy for Poor Sailor Lads?”

“I did, sir, and enjoyed a rigorous education. And survived.”

Binney laughed. Aaron was hired as an able seaman. After Crumble, Conny Binney seemed too easy, giving orders in a pleasant voice. It seemed unnatural. The ship traveled against brisk westerlies, beating to windward all the way, and Aaron’s spirits lifted with the exhilaration of sailing home, no matter what waited at the far end.

Going directly to Halifax would save him the torturous overland journey from Boston. He could walk to Pitu’pok, the Mi’kmaw settlement on the shore of the saltwater inland lake, in two or three days. He thought he could find Mi’kmaq there who would take him to K’taqmkuk. And the niggling question he had been pushing down kept kicking its way back into his thought: why was he going back to the Mi’kmaw life? He had a calling now, he could make a sailor’s living. He could go back to the sea if he had to, as long as it wasn’t a-whaling.

• • •

Long before land came in sight they could smell it — a mix of softwood smoke and drying cod blended with the familiar salt of the North Atlantic. A rushing flood of joy made Aaron grin foolishly at nothing. He got his pay, shook hands with Binney, who said, “If ye want a berth on the Excel again, we be back here come April or May. Nother v’yage t’ China.”

Aaron hurried through the knotted streets of Halifax, his mind filling with imagined conversations as he tried to explain why he had returned. Etienne had been angry when he left. Yet in his new sense of self he was glad to be back. He was ready to trap and construct weirs, to fish. He no longer expected his relatives to honor him simply because he had come to them, because he was Jinot’s son. His sea skills might somehow find a use. He’d see what he’d see.

The trail through the forest he remembered was now mostly cleared land with settlements and a few farms, the too-familiar sight of settlers burning swathes of woodland. He met two whitemen children driving cattle along the shore. As they passed they began screaming “dirty Indan bug-eater” and threw clamshells at him. The ragged trail now showed trees again — sprouts growing up from stumps. This was the way he had taken five years earlier, after his father left with Mr. Bone. A Mi’kmaw family had fed him and given him a place to sleep, had told him Sels had all gone to K’taqmkuk, and that if he wanted them he should go to Sydney, the easternmost port, and send word over the water. Someone would come. He remembered the man’s name as Joe Funall. Just another mile he thought and he would see that wikuom near the trail. He walked farther than a mile and knew he had somehow missed it, turned back, looking hard into the scrappy woods. Some distance in he saw a few poles. That was the right place. He went toward them. Yes, it had been a wikuom once but was now weathered poles with rotted skins and bark at the base. They must have moved to the Mi’kmaw village a few miles farther on. He picked up his pace.

He was frightened by the village. Shabby wikuoms sat on rough ground amid slash and baked patches of bare earth. He saw smoke issuing from only one wikuom. There were no dogs, no people in sight. He walked slowly toward the wikuom making the smoke, but as he passed a derelict jumble of poles with only saplings instead of bark for a covering he heard someone cough, a retching, choking cough that sounded like it was tearing out someone’s lungs. He bent to the opening. “Hello. Anybody there?” Stupid question. Of course there was someone there, someone dying of violent spasms of coughing. He peered into the gloom and saw a bundle of rags jerk forward and cough and cough and cough. The more he looked the more he saw — there were others in there, emaciated skeletal arms rose as if to ward him off, huge feverish eyes fixed him. An infant lay naked and dreadfully still on the ground. He went to the next wikuom, where a comatose man lay on the earth, only the very faint rise and fall of his rib cage showing he lived. He did not speak. Farther along in the sole wikuom issuing smoke sat a man and woman, both very thin, but able to move and talk. The man said their names — Louis and Sarah Paul.

“What has happened?” asked Aaron, wondering what was wrong with himself. He was choking, hardly able to speak. He told them he wanted to find the way to K’taqmkuk, where others of his family lived. But here, in this ruined village, what had happened here, what had overcome these people, where were Joe Funall and his wife, who had been so kind to him years earlier? Whatever had occurred also might have befallen the Sel clan in K’taqmkuk.

“They die. Everybody sick, no food, die, die, die. Children all die. Mi’kmaw people now walk around, look for food, eat dirt, no firewood, whitemen shoot, say it their firewood. We make potato garden but too many rain. Potato all go rot. We come any place, try make wikuom, always whitemen come and set fire, come with clubs and sticks. They drive us on. Nowhere to go. Sometime good whiteman give food, coats. Only look for more good whitemen. Mi’kmaw people walk lookin, keep walkin. Now lie down and die.”

Aaron knew that since the death of Amboise, his childhood brother, he had had a cold heart, but now, appalled, he felt it burning. He had no food but he had his wages. He reached for his money, his impulse was to thrust it into their hands, but he considered. They were too weak, he thought, to go buy food. But where was the nearest place? It would take him two days to go to and return from Halifax. Sydney was closer, and perhaps he would pass a whiteman farmer who would sell him food. “I will come back with food,” he said and rushed forward on the trail.

• • •

Two miles along he saw a settler’s house with a large garden, a cow and chickens. Before he could enter the gate a tall whiteman with glassy eyes and sprays of hair like black grass on the sides of his head came rushing around the corner of the house. “Git off’n my propty!” he shouted. “Git! Damn Indan.”

He walked on toward Sydney, passing settlers’ houses and gardens. He tried once more to buy food and an angry man shot at him. Once more he tried. He walked around the corner of a small church to the pastor’s house and saw the housewife on her knees weeding onions.

Poised to run he said, “Ma’am, I would like to buy some of your vegetables for some poor starving Indans down the trail.”

“Why, them poor things,” she said, “let me ask the pastor.” And she went into the house. When she came out again the pastor was with her, his yellowish old face drawn into a stern expression.

“So, who is starvin? Indans, eh? You do not know how often I hear this complaint, but we do live in a time when the Red Man passes from the scene, replaced by the vigorous European settler. The Indan has to learn to work and earn his livin, grow a garden and put the harvest by against winter. Charity does but delay the inevitable.” Then, taking in Aaron’s posture and face, which suddenly looked less like that of a softhearted white man and more like the visage of a murderous Indian with a barely suppressed intent to kill, he stepped back a little. “Course we do try t’ help, even knowin it — yes, course we sell you some vegetables. What will you, taters? Maggie, pull some taters and carrots for the poor Indans.” Hastily the two pulled at stems, plucked young turnips from the ground, heaped the plunder on the ground for Aaron to pick up as best he could. He stuffed everything inside his shirt, the warm turnips scratching his skin. He stood up with the last potato in his hand and said, “This potato means life to those people.” He held out his money. The pastor snatched it and with the passage of tender recovered from his fright and said, “I would say that the will of God, rather than a potato, decides the matter.”

Aaron did not wait for the end of the sentence but was on his way back to the broken wikuoms. On the trail he saw movement under an elderberry shrub. He picked up a heavy maple stick from the slash pile alongside the trail. He came closer and saw the animal was one of the whiteman’s favored creatures, a house cat. It had something — a bird — and he saw a wing rise and fall as the cat crunched the wing joint. Closer and closer, gripping the maple stick, came Aaron. The cat, intent on savaging the young partridge, which was large enough and still lively enough to escape, did not abandon the prey and Aaron crushed its head with the first blow. He then wrung the still-struggling young partridge’s neck. “This is the will of your whiteman god,” he murmured to the cat, taking it up by the hind legs and, with the limp partridge inside his bulging shirt, walked on toward the wikuom of Louis and Sarah Paul, left Louis making a fire and Sarah skinning the cat.

• • •

The next day in Sydney he saw five Mi’kmaw women sitting together on the dock. They seemed easy and content, joking with one another. They looked healthy. One of the women — he was almost sure it was Losa, the wife of Peter Sel, one of Kuntaw’s sons, the older brother of Etienne. Round-faced with very red lips, Losa carried a single basket and the others, their handiwork sold, were chiding her for making something so clumsy no one wanted to buy it. She said something he could not hear. They laughed and it felt good to him to hear Mi’kmaw women laugh.

And there was Peter Sel’s fishing smack at the far end of the wharf.

The basket makers began to board the vessel, chattering and laughing, still showing each other bits of finery or foods they had bought at the stores. Aaron, heavy in thought, and mentally rehearsing a variety of pleas to Kuntaw and Etienne to come west to the ruined wikuoms and save the starving people and bring them back to K’taqmkuk, followed. As they left Sydney harbor and entered the grey ocean, Aaron went into the bow and faced east, taking bouquets of spray in the face, staring into the haze of distance. Why had he come back? What had changed him, he who cared for nothing but himself, who acted on fleeting impulse?

• • •

Peter Sel, who owned the boat, called to his son, “Alik, take the rudder. I go talk a little to that Aaron Sel who come back.” He came up and stood beside Aaron for a few minutes looking east, said cautiously, “So you are back here. You are older.”

“Yes, I am older. As are you.”

“I heard that sad news about Jinot. Very sad.”

“What sad news?” He looked at Peter.

“Etienne didn’t find you? That Joe Dogg didn’t find you?”

“Nobody found me. I been to sea on the ships. Years. I just come back now. Joe Dogg from the ax factory? What was he doing here?”

“Lookin for you. That Mr. Bone never come back so Joe Dogg wants to go find out what happen. He wants you to go with him, look for you in Boston but never find you. So he come here. Etienne said to him, ‘I will go. I will find Jinot.’ They go to New Zealand, very damn far. When they come back Etienne and Joe Dogg look for you again in Boston. Then Etienne come back here and said maybe Joe Dogg finds you.”

“He did not find me. What happened?” Aaron knew of course with that much searching and travel that Jinot had to be dead.

“I only know Etienne said Jinot died with bad sickness in that sore leg. Mr. Bone dead, too, by a man in grass clothes.”

There was a long silence. Aaron looked at the horizon. He felt an interior ripping as though something was pulling at his lungs. He forced a breath, looked at Peter Sel. He said, “The death of my father does not surprise me. He went away so many years ago. I grieve. I wish I had gone with him. I was a bad and stupid person before, maybe I still am that person but I think I am different.”

“A man can get better,” said Peter Sel. They stood silent while the sails filled and the boat took its course east. “Alik is my son.”

“He is a good sailor,” said Aaron.

“He is. He has eleven winters but he knows the boat. And the water.” There was a long silence, then Peter said, “Sometimes good men start out very bad. I was bad like that. Wait when we dock. We can talk a little.”

• • •

It was dusk when Peter’s boat came alongside the wharf and the basket women raced ashore with their goods and money, and started the long trek home. Aaron did not follow them but waited. After some minutes Peter was there, lit his pipe, leaned on the rail. His son, Alik, coiled a rope a few feet away.

“You say you are changed,” Peter said. “I, too, changed. Used to drink rum and wine, whiskey, all them poison stuff. Drink and fight. Fight ever night, ever day. I didn’t have no boat then. I kill a man. Fight him very hard, drunk, smash his head. I try to break my own head. Just get headache. If I still live I got to change.” Alik came closer, listened, gazing at his father. Aaron wondered if Peter had ever told him this story. It seemed not. After some minutes Aaron said, “Does Kuntaw still live?”

“Yes. He has too many winters now to count. There are not enough numbers for his winters. But he is my father and he is still very wise and leads us. He no longer hunts but tells stories of hunting.”

“Let us go to Kuntaw and Etienne and the others. I want Etienne to tell me everything about the death of my father. And I have much to tell them.”

“You go ahead. We come later,” said Peter. He put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Alik and me got to finish clean the boat. Take care the boat, boat take care of you. Me and Etienne and Alik go out early morning catch fish for our celebrate. You want to come fish?”

“I do. I want this work. I help with the boat, too.”

• • •

Old Kuntaw, half-asleep in the predawn pallid darkness when Aaron came into his wikuom, woke and stared, listened with mouth agape, put his hands up to his face and made a sound like a hurt moose. “Come here,” he said, stretching out his stringy arms, “come and be embraced by one whose blood is running in circles with happiness. Call everyone,” he said to his wife, Maudi, who was fumbling with the hide door. “Call everyone. Here is a Mi’kmaw son come home. Prepare food. Tomorrow we make a celebration. We will be happy!”

The next day Maudi built up her fire on the riverbank and dragged out her big cooking pots. In late morning Alik came carrying three big mackerel, Etienne and Peter following with more of the huge fat fish. Etienne embraced Aaron. The basket-making women Aaron had seen on the dock came from their wikuoms to help make the feast.

Aaron sat next to old Kuntaw and tried to explain that he had changed but the old man waved his hand as if driving off flies.

“I know how it is,” he said. “I have felt this. Look you.” He took up an empty wooden bowl, put in a dipper of water, asked Maudi to bring a dipper of mackerel oil from the pot and added it. He stirred the water and oil briskly with a forked twig until it whirled into an amalgam of froth. “Water is whiteman. Oil is Mi’kmaw. In the bowl is mix-up métis,” he said, “whiteman and Mi’kmak. Now watch.” They all stared at the bowl. The glistening mackerel oil rose and floated on top of the water. “That’s how it was with me, long ago. I tried to be whiteman, but Mi’kmaw oil in me come to top. That same oil come up in you. Sometime I hope for this Canada that the Mi’kmaw oil will blend with the water and oil come to the top. We will hold our country again someday,” he said, “but we will be a little bit changed — a little bit watery and the whitemen be a little bit oily.”

• • •

Aaron and Etienne walked away some distance and sat on the ground, drawing strength from contact with the earth. Etienne said, “We look you in Boston. Never find.”

Aaron said, “When I was here before I saw that old Kuntaw and the Sels thought they were making a Mi’kmaw place again, but I did not understand; it felt unsure, as when you take up a cup of tea and put it to your mouth and find that what looked to be tea was only the shadow in the cup.”

“Do you feel this now?” asked Etienne.

“No. I drink the shadow now. I find it good.”

• • •

They passed around the traditional talking stick all day and into the next night before voices slowed and they began to name problems — food, lost territory, the cruelty of whitemen’s laws, the loss of good canoe makers. Suddenly Kuntaw’s young wife, Maudi, very pregnant, who had been listening, said, “You men are foolish. You do not see the greatest problem of all. We need women here.” There was silence for a minute and then Etienne said, “She is right. We need more women. I thought they would come if we made a good place, but they have not come. Why?”

“They have not heard we would welcome them,” said Kuntaw. “In the old days women were important, they were the great deciders. They did everything, some even hunted like men. But over the years Mi’kmaw men begin to act like whitemen, who do not regard women as worthy. It is the old Mi’kmaw way to know women are of equal value as men.”

Then Aaron spoke of the couple in the ruined village wikuom, the starving people, told what he had found in those wikuoms. “Those ones in the only unbroken wikuom are named Louis and Sarah Paul.”

“How old are they?” asked Etienne.

“Old, I think,” said Aaron.

Peter half-stood. “Old! They are not old. Louis is younger than me — a little. I knew that man once. He is a good man for weirs, none so careful as he. We used to call him Eel Man. And a good fisherman. I take him on my boat if he comes here. Very strong, knows the shoals and currents. He cannot be more than thirty winters. We must go there and get them, bring them here. Tomorrow.”

Skerry Hallagher, Elise Sel’s son who had gone to Dartmouth College for half a year, had come to Kuntaw’s band much as Aaron. They were close in age, but where Aaron was muscular and hard-handed, Skerry was thin and intense, rarely said anything as he felt very much the outsider and was afraid of old Kuntaw, who told him he could never be a real Mi’kmaw man until he killed a moose. He did not think there was much mackerel oil in him. Now Skerry held out a dirty, creased envelope. “I did not say this before but my mother, Elise Hallagher, wishes to come in summer for a visit. Since my father died she is alone. She wishes to bring a young woman, Catherine Flute, a full-blood Mi’kmaw girl got brought to Boston by her parents when she was small. The parents are now dead with alcohol sickness and the girl is unhappy. My mother asks if we will take her here. She is fourteen or thereabouts. She says there are other lost Mi’kmaw girls in Boston. We could welcome them here?”

“Yes,” said Etienne in the voice of a hot-blooded moose. “Tell your mother to bring all the girls she can find. I will personally marry them all.”

• • •

Two days later Aaron, Etienne, Peter and Alik went back to the path west of Sydney to find the starving Mi’kmaw couple Aaron had seen and bring them to K’taqmkuk.

“I am sure this is the place where Louis and Sarah Paul had that wikuom,” said Aaron to the others as they stood on the trail staring at five whitemen working with two oxen and a log puller, a dozen more heaping slash into a burning pile. There was no sign of any wikuoms, but at the back of the clearing a tiny wisp of smoke caught Etienne’s eye. “There?” he said, and they walked over to the flat grey circles of ash. The wikuoms had been burned. They saw nothing of Louis and Sarah Paul.

“Ho!” shouted one of the whitemen. “Git out of there. Go on! Git goin!” He took up his shotgun, which had been leaning against a log, half-aimed it and pulled the trigger. A pellet went past Alik’s ear with a sound like a hummingbird.

“We go,” said Etienne. “We go!” This last he shouted angrily and the same whiteman did not like his tone and shot again.

“Eh!” said Etienne, hit in the back by a piece of shot.

“Those men,” said Etienne later as Aaron pried the pellet out of his shoulder, “I seen them afore. They not settlers. They come and take any land they can get, clear it, burn it, however they can rid of trees and sell it. Some settler not want spend his life choppin trees buys it. It’s a way whitemen make money. Take a lot of Kuntaw’s oil to make them change.” They walked on toward Sydney.

“And do Mi’kmaq not need money now?” asked Aaron. “How do you get your money?”

“Cooperin,” said Etienne. “Didn’t have time to show you yet but we make barrels. Whitemen buy from us. We got a workshop, forge, oak planks, steamer, plane, everything to make barrels, big ones, little ones, kegs, casks and tubs. We make the best barrels in Canada. Julian Cooko used to work in a cooper shop in Halifax, showed us how to make barrels, washtubs, all them things. He comes to live with us.”

• • •

Elise Hallagher, widowed and aging, her hair white and stormy, arrived with two girls, Catherine Flute and Marie Antoinette Nevin. Skerry embraced his mother and it seemed to Aaron that his cousin clung to his mother rather childishly. He would never have survived Bosun Crumble. He smiled at Elise and when she smiled back he saw her likeness to Jinot. He looked at the two girls. Marie Antoinette had a cough and was sometimes distant in her manner but more often she laughed. She took refuge in laughter and silliness when Elise scolded her for her lazy ways. Marie Antoinette told Catherine Flute that she wanted to go back to Boston. She did not know any plants, failed to learn how to make baskets or sew, burned anything she tried to cook. She was good company, but that was it. The younger men liked her, and Alik Sel, Peter’s son, spent as much time as he could following her around. Aaron saw his youthful self in her behavior.

At the end of the summer before the autumn storms began, Peter, Alik, Aaron, Etienne and his three boys, Molti, James and Joe-Paul, loaded Peter’s boat with barrels to sell in Boston, where they got better prices. They sailed at dawn. Catherine Flute, who shared a wikuom with Elise and Marie Antoinette, said Marie had got up very early. Elise knew at once that the girl had gone on the boat, back to Boston, where she would surely take to drink and have a bad end.

• • •

The men came up the path loaded with bundles and boxes, all the supplies for winter, sacks of potatoes, candles and matches, coffee beans for Elise and Aaron, great tins of tea for the others, needles and bolts of wool and cotton. And there was Marie Antoinette Nevin, red-cheeked and laughing. And coughing.

She said, “I am here.” She looked at Alik. Catherine Flute, who was shy and plain, a very quiet girl who had been starved and ill-treated by her parents, sat beside Joe-Paul. They married before the first snow. Even Elise found herself courted and she agreed to marry Julian Cooko, the man who had started the men making barrels years earlier, before he had been hurt in a woods accident. Now he had long spells of confusion and was no good for the barrel shop but sat by the fire and made eel traps.

• • •

Kuntaw died on the most beautiful day in a thousand years. The October air was sweet and every faint breath a pleasure. Wind stirred and he said, “Our wind reaching me here.” A small cloud formed in the west. “Our small cloud coming to me.” The hours passed and the small cloud formed a dark wall and approached. A drop fell, another, many, and Kuntaw said, “Our rain wetting my face.” His people came near him, drawing him into their eyes, and he said, “Now… what…” The sun came out, the brilliant world sparkled, susurration, liquid flow, stems of striped grass what was it what was it the limber swish of a released branch. What, now what. Kuntaw opened his mouth, said nothing, and let the sunlight enter him.

61. talking stick

Over the next generation through isolated years of sickness and watchfulness Kuntaw’s people tightened as a clan although they took in six or seven outsiders. Everyone now had English names, for the old Mi’kmaw names were fading out. Aaron married Lisal Jacko, the only young woman among the newcomers. As a group they avoided whitemen, but still fisher-hunter-missionaries found them. Some of these whitemen only pretended to be hunters; they were scouts on the lookout for timber and ores, anything of economic value. They asked casually to be taken where the big trees grew.

“They think we don’t know they want to cut them trees down.”

Their old continuing problem was that Mi’kmaw women rarely came to them. To find wives the Sels had to return to their remnant people at Shubenacadie, thin and listless people who sat staring at the ground.

“You see?” said one white settler to another. “They are lazy. If they starve it is because they refuse to work. Do not waste your pity on them. Do not give them food — it only delays the inevitable.”

When Etienne heard of this he said, “But they are not lazy, only weak with hunger.”

A year came when the Sels stopped making barrels, for whitemen had pushed them away from that trade by making cheaper ones, not as tight and sturdy, but at a lower price and, tellingly, with snowy curling letters stenciled on the side: WHITE RIBBON COOPERAGE. Some who had made barrels began to carve hockey sticks from the dense hardwood of hornbeam trees, whose grooved branches resembled muscular straining arms, but in a few years that enterprise, too, passed out of their hands and to a whiteman manufacturing company.

Another womanless Sel had drifted to them a few months after Kuntaw died—Édouard-Outger Sel, the oldest son of Francis-Outger, who himself was one of the two sons of Beatrix Duquet and Kuntaw, and so a grandson of the ancestor Dutchman Outger Duquet.

Édouard-Outger, who had been subjected to a Duquet education, left Penobscot Bay after his father’s funeral, worked a few years in Boston and then began decades of wandering. By the time he came to his Mi’kmaw relatives he was in early middle age and rather peculiar. He spoke a garbled, halting old-fashioned kind of Mi’kmaw language mixed with unknown jargon and French words. At first no one knew how he had learned his antique version of the language and that information he kept to himself for a long time. Every few months he went away somewhere and came back grey and shaky, sometimes bandaged, but carrying a bag of flour or meal.

Little by little it came out. He said that after his father’s death he had been a scrivener, a document copyist, in a Boston lawyer’s office, hired for his clear legible hand, but then he was dismissed for tardiness and certain reasons he did not name. “I tell you something now,” he said. “The world is very wide. I have traveled much, all the way to the western ocean.” Slowly Édouard-Outger began to talk. He told how skilled horsemen of the Plains tribes were often shot by whitemen travelers for sport from moving trains as they shot running animals — dark waves of bison, huge skies stiff with birds. So rich in game were the vast plains that astonishing caravans of lordly hunting parties from Europe and England came with dogs and guns, cooks and special beds and tents. He did sometimes deviate from these sad tales with descriptions of curious adventures, which the Sels preferred to hear.

He was only a little strange, and that strangeness fell away. Although his skin was light in color, the shape of his features closely resembled Kuntaw’s. He said it was because his mother was the daughter of a man who had married a Mi’kmaw woman. “So I am Mi’kmaw person on two sides,” he said, laughing, “front and back sides,” slapping his crotch and his hindquarters. It was this maternal Mi’kmaw grandmother who had taught him the language which sounded correct from a distance but was usually incomprehensible. Nor did it take long to discover what Édouard-Outger did when he went away every few months: he went on a reeling, mindless drunk and came back very quiet and humble with his penitential bags of flour. His one ability that drew the others to him was storytelling, his tales of what he had seen and done on his travels across the continent to the Pacific. He named some of the west ocean tribes — Nootka, Kwakiutl, Tlingit, Makah.

The Sels liked to hear stories of their West Coast counterparts. As Mi’kmaq had lived on the edge of the Atlantic for thousands of years without intrusive whitemen, those faraway people had lived on the Pacific; they felt a sense of counterbalance. They listened to Édouard-Outger’s accounts of lives linked to huge cedar trees and the black canoes the western people made from them, of how they hunted giant whales in those canoes. He told of their communal houses as great buildings with lofty beams, decorated with carved animals and painted visages, and in front of the houses stood immense and gaudily colored poles with the heads of ravens and bears serving as memorials.

The men could scarcely believe his stories of how those people split great planks from living trees, how they fashioned boxes by steaming and bending flat boards, never cutting the wood. Édouard-Outger had one such small bentwood box with him to hold his tobacco and they passed it from hand to hand, examining it closely. It had a fearsome red face painted on one side that Édouard-Outger said was an eagle. Once they recognized the eagle it gave them the feeling of looking into a strange mind. Etienne wanted to know more about how they built the huge houses.

“I wish,” said Etienne’s wife, Alli, “that we could build such a great house, where we could all live safely and in harmony.”

Peter spoke. “And those people on the western coast, do they live free from the incursions of whitemen?”

Édouard-Outger hesitated. He understood how badly his relatives wanted to hear of one place in the world where tribal lives continued unspoiled.

He sighed. “Those coast people have known whitemen for a long time just as we Mi’kmaw. They traded otter furs to whitemen for metal to make tools. Then the whitemen began to catch the otters themselves, and as they always take everything until it is gone they made the otter very scarce. The people’s lives changed. And now the whitemen diseases are burning them up even as we suffered. Sickness comes in their own beautiful canoes on trading trips, for they are great visitors and traders, traveling up and down the coast with goods and to see their friends. The most skillful canoe makers have already died, and many carvers and artists, too. In only a few years they have lost too many of their people to count. They say their world has ceased to exist in a single generation.” His listeners knew too well how this was. He changed the subject and for some time told how these people on the opposite ocean brought down huge trees without axes.

• • •

Kuntaw’s people, most of them Sels, drifted back to Sipekne’katik, now called Shubenacadie, an old Mi’kmaw village location named a reserve in 1820, not because it was better; they went despite the worthless land the whitemen allowed them, despite the crowding and racist jeering, despite the massacres of the past, the onerous government rules. As Kuntaw had said they must live in two worlds, they went because inside they carried their old places hidden under the centuries, hidden as beetles under fallen leaves, as pebbles in a closed hand, hidden as memories. They were lonely for their own kind — and for women. There were women there. Beneath the reality of roads and square houses they saw their old sloping ground, saw their canoes drawn up onshore, pale smoke drifting from wikuoms decorated with double curves and pteridoid fronds, chevrons, arched frames and high color. Yet they could not ignore the reality that wikuoms could no longer be made and that whitemen settlers had built countless sawmills on the rivers, ruining the best places for eels. Everywhere, to feed the thousand sawmills countless trees went down.

After one St. Anne’s Day celebration some tried to paddle back across the water to Kuntaw’s old place, but their canoes were caught in a storm and they perished. There were fewer Mi’kmaq every year and whitemen laughed and said with satisfaction that in forty more years they would be gone, gone like the Beothuk, vanished from the earth. It seemed true. There had never been so few Mi’kmaq since the beginning of time, less than fifteen hundred, the remains of a people who had numbered more than one hundred thousand in the time before the whitemen came. Still the people clung to their home ground though they wandered often, looking for food, for a haven, for a cleft in the rock that would open into that world that had been torn from them.

Etienne spoke seriously and long.

“We got to do something. Our women can make their baskets but us men got to find wage work for money to buy food. Everybody says, ‘Be that whiteman guide for fishing.’ But that’s not enough.”

“I rather do guide for fish than hunt,” said Peter. “They can’t hurt you with that fish rod.”

“Only other work for us Mi’kmaw is woods work. Plenty work there.”

The whiteman timber kings were taking down the forests of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick. Hundreds of sawmills stood on every river and stream that could be dammed. Once again Sels took up axes, and although everything was difficult they continued to talk together, to look for ways out of their troubles. Etienne built a whiteman log house and named his newest son Joseph Howe Sel to honor the fair-minded Commissioner for Indian Affairs. This took some explaining and in the evenings the remaining Sels gathered in the warmer log house to talk, each bringing a few sticks for the fire. It was a confining, immovable box, but it held the heat better than ragged wikuoms made without good bark, tanned skins or correct poles.

“Joseph Howe is one of them good whitemen. He looked and he saw our troubles,” said Alli, who had shyly suggested the baby’s name. “He tried help us. He saw us danger, all us land taken, us push away from river. Can’t make eel weirs no more.”

“Yes,” said Etienne with something like a rare smile. “He saw we was cold, hungry, give us coats, blankets. He said these days we have to give up our wikuom as the bark gone with the big trees. No skin covers, them caribou and moose gone.”

“Plenty logs and planks for a whiteman house but we got to buy them. With whiteman money,” said Peter. He drew his face into a cruel mask. “Howe is a whiteman. If he is good to us it is to get something — more land — something. That is all I got to say bout that.”

Alli asked a question. “Édouard-Outger, is it better in that Penobscot place where you come from? You got people there? Mi’kmaq already there?”

“Not anymore. No, Maine people don’t like Mi’kmaw people. There are some Mi’kmaw people live there in Aroostook County. Good basket makers, not just women, men make those big baskets, too. But Penobscot? Same like here, woods all gone, whitemen got the land. My father, Francis-Outger Sel, had a sawmill”—he paused for a murmur of admiration—“but after he die in that sawmill somebody set it afire and it burned all down and the house. I was alone, family dead, went away out in the west. When I was gone the town took the property for taxes. My father he never pay taxes. He thought if you own property you own it. But you don’t own it. You have to pay money every year to that town or they can take the land.”

There was a hum of disbelief. “They took his land. Well, it was my land then but I didn’t know about the tax. I wasn’t there. When I come back it was all gone, you see. All gone. They laughed at me, said, ‘Indian, you don’t own no land here.’ ”

“Do whitemen here pay those tax?”

“I think so. Not know for sure. It is the way of whitemen that they must pay for everything, not one time but many many many times.”

“We never did this thing with land — own it, buy it and pay and pay more tax.”

“Yes, and that is why the Mi’kmaw people now have very little land. The whitemen get land with papers that secure it. You can see for yourself that now there are a hundred times more whitemen than Mi’kmaw people. If we want to secure any of our old land we have to do it the whiteman way with papers. And money. To learn those English laws we have to know how to read. Write. In English. The children must learn these ways if they live here. Or be wiped out.”

“No. If we had a canoeful of money they would not let us own our own land. That is why there is the reserve.”

There was muttering and a father in the back said, “It is true. We are so few in number that they can crush us with ease. One day of shooting and we would all lie dead. It is only a dream that they will someday go back to their old countries. They will never leave our country. They are with us for all time. And if we want to live we must be like them.”

“It seems life is better for Indians in the States country?”

“No, it is not better for us anywhere. But here near Shubenacadie I think it is worse. Here the whitemen hate us very much.”

Skerry Hallagher took the talking stick. “I know how to read and write. I know a little bit about the laws. If I can get books and paper I can teach the children and anyone who wants to learn this reading and writing. But it takes a long time. It is like learning to hunt.”

“I, too, can help,” said Elise.

Édouard-Outger cleared his throat and said softly, “And I. But where are all our children? I count only five.” And he decided that he, too, would marry. It was one thing to talk, quite another to act.

Skerry Hallagher stood up. His eyes were weary and red. “Also. It is not only that the children must learn reading. Mi’kmaw men must take jobs and be paid.”

“Jobs! What jobs?”

“The jobs whitemen don’t want, the hardest jobs. Work in forest to cut trees. Cut firewood for settlers. Carry things for surveyors who mark out ways to take more of our land. Make our hunting paths into roads for whitemen wagons. Dig potato in Maine. More woods cutting there. We can do this. We can do these things. They will not crush us.”

The young men agreed. They would go to the lumber camps and ask for work.

“At least in the lumber camps we will eat,” said Alik, Peter’s son.

“You are not going,” said Peter. “I need you on the boat. Passengers. Fishing.”

Etienne’s oldest son, Molti, took the stick and said, “We can bring money to everyone.”

At the end of the evening someone tossed the stick into the fire — it was only a stick. It was the last talking stick any Sel ever held. Talking sticks were the old way.

• • •

Alik said nothing to Peter, but slipped away in the night. In the end nine of the younger men went to lumber camps scattered across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Maine. It was easier for them in the woods camps. Men were valued and measured by what work they could do. And for Édouard-Outger that meant increasing Mi’kmaw numbers. He took a young wife, Maddil, and did what had to be done. Born in 1877, Lobert Sel was the oldest of Édouard-Outger’s six children.

62. barkskins

For three generations the Sels worked in the woods of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, down into Maine, falling and spudding trees, making booms, cranking booms from headworks, river driving, working the sawmills, building corduroy log roads, cutting cordwood, cutting pulp, cutting pit props. As Europe disgorged its people the logging camps, especially after the Great War, became polyglot assemblies of men — English, French, Americans, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, a few men from Greenland, First Nation natives, even one or two Inuit. Injury and death were common enough in the northeast woods, but since the first logging days the most dangerous work was river driving, and until it ended it was work apportioned to Indians, those considered born to violent water.

“I’ll tell you somethin, mister,” a camp boss said to a company bookkeeper who had questioned his bateau and grub expenses. “Company wants its logs? Wants to git them to the sawmill? Water is everthing. Water moves the logs, powers the mills. They want their logs in the saw house they better swallow the drive expense cause ain’t no other way to git ’em there.” He jerked his thumb at the river where two Mi’kmaq and a Montagnais were dancing over the sticks, jabbing them along like sullen sheep.

The Sel barkskins saw the poll ax give way to the double-bitted ax, the double-bitted ax give way to the crosscut saw, the old up-and-down gang saws give way to circular saws and double circulars, to immensely long steel band saws that could cut the moon in half if they loaded it on a conveyor, saw the steady oxen give way to smart horses, horses replaced by stinking donkey engines and Shay-geared locomotives. As roads punched into forest distant from water, the tumultuous river drives ended in favor of trucks and roads. Loggers began to tend whirling, thumping, boiling, crashing machinery. The Sels suffered accidents and deaths in a profession where a man had to be watchful and lucky to live more than seven years.

The huge trees of the west were hard for puny axmen. It took years to learn how to handle the big stuff and slow learners did not have time to stay alive. But technology shaped crazy daydreams into real hissing screaming machines that leveled the last of the ancient forests on the continent.

After the talking stick had been thrown into the fire the young men left to take up woods work. Etienne Sel and Mike Jacko tried to watch out for their sons, but the boys resented a parental eye and escaped to more distant camps. Mike Jacko’s son Blony, fifteen winters, and his younger brother, Pollo, started on a cutting crew for an outfit in Queens County. Blony had an inborn knack for the ax. When he wasn’t chopping, Blony and a young Swede named Erto peeled bark with spudding irons made of old carriage springs, handled and honed. On his first drive Blony discovered he liked the dodging, leaping river work. He quickly understood the geometries of jams and relished picking them apart. Twice he fell in among the churning logs but knew better than to fight toward the shore — better to travel downstream with the sticks.

But still the hateful, cramping reservation was too close and Blony and Pollo moved west, worked for a winter in Idaho, where driving on cranky, twisted rivers was still the way to get logs to a sawmill. In the spring some men in the camp kept going to California, Oregon, Washington, where they said the trees were three hundred feet high.

A man he only knew as Shirt said to Blony, “Sonny, I’ll learn you about them trees. The first Maine logger sailed up the coast and come near the shore seen a solid wooden wall a hunderd mile long with green stuff up around the clouds. Couldn’t believe what he seen, fell down in a fit. He couldn’t believe it. Nobody could believe it. But it was true. And that’s where I’m goin.”

• • •

Blony and Pollo were frightened the first time they saw the donkey engine at work. The engine was lashed to several stout trees and its steel haul cable lying loose and quiet on the ground. Five men stood casually around the engine. A signal came from somewhere distant and the puncher threw his lever; the donkey engine came to life. They watched the cable drum turn and the cable itself begin to wind on, tightening and tightening. The engine roared louder and there was a distant snapping of branches, a few faraway shouts, and in minutes the crackling and ground-shaking thumps grew louder and then out of the slash came a monstrous thirty-foot log springing into the air like a decapitated chicken in its final manic leaps, smashing down on stumps so hard they splintered, rebounding and coming straight for the donkey engine. “Holy Jesus!” yelled Blony to the delight of the puncher — the two greenhorns ran for their lives, followed by the haw-haws of the donkey crew. They looked back. The terrible log rested quietly a few feet short of the donkey engine. Pollo never imagined that a few months later he would be assigned as one of the steam kettle’s crew and that an hour after he began work, ignorantly standing near a lazy curve in the cable already fastened to a faraway log, his left foot would be amputated by the tautened wire minutes after the engineer hit the lever with the heel of his callused hand.

His brother, Blony, and the engineer carried him spouting blood down to the bunkhouse. The second cook, Andre Mallet, served the camp as medic. He rested Pollo’s leg on a junk of wood to elevate it, bound the bleeding stump above the ankle with a clean dishtowel soaked in melted lard, gave Pollo copious amounts of his medicinal whiskey for the pain and said he’d look in after the dinner hour. He sent Blony back with a cup of hot partridge broth and half a whiskey-soaked cake. This, in addition to certain Mi’kmaw sedatives — crinkleroot and lady’s slipper root — that their mother had given Blony “just in case,” and the shock, shut Pollo down like a dry oil lamp. He slept. There followed weeks of pain and whiskey but slowly he began to heal.

“You stay here until you get around, but then I need your bunk for a workingman,” the boss said. One of the choppers whittled out a pair of crutches. He was moving around the bunkhouse when Andre Mallet came in. “Hey, kid, boss cook cleared it so’s you can help in the kitchen.” What could he do but say yes? After a year he could scuttle around wearing a logger-whittled prosthesis. He was becoming a cook and some kind of permanent job might be there. But then Blony’s death hit hard and he was the one who had to write the letter home.

Blony had wanted to be a river driver, but water work in Washington was salty, herding and corralling logs in tidewater. Because he was young he was a choker setter, the lowest job in the camp. After a few weeks in the high-lead logging camp he discovered a job even more daring than river work. He watched Napoleon Tessier, a skinny little Frenchman wearing climbing spurs and laden with saw, ax and rope, rush ten or twelve feet up the trunk of a big Douglas fir, dig in and casually flip his climbing loop to a higher position, scamper on again toward the top of a two-hundred-foot-tall tree. As he climbed he cut the limbs as flush as possible with his long-handled double-bitted ax, finally stopped thirty feet below the leader. His rope secure around the naked trunk and himself, his spurs jammed deep, he axed off the top (as large as a second-growth Maine pine); it tipped down with a crack and hiss, the wind rushing through the needles of the falling section. The bare spar, with Tessier hanging on, whipped back and forth. Tessier let out a screech and waved one arm, like a wild horse rider. Then he slid and kicked down so swiftly he blurred. On the ground he took a swig of cold tea, ate a handful of sugar and went back up to rig the pulley block, for Tessier was a rigger as well as a climber. When the job was done and the pulley block and guy lines in place they were ready to move giants.

Blony wanted to do this, to become a climber. He begged the boss to let him try. This man, a big perfect Swede with a mouth full of tobacco, did not like Blony or Pollo because they were East Coasters as well as half-breeds. But Blony kept asking, and finally Tessier said aloud that he ought to let the kid try, climbers were not plentiful, and finally the boss said, “Go ahead, Pocahontas.”

Blony put on Tessier’s spurs, buckled on the belt, tied his ax to it, got the climbing rope around the tree and himself, stuck his spurs into wood and tried to move up as Tessier had, to flip the loop up as Tessier had. Higher and higher, jamming in, flipping the rope and he reached the first branches.

Tessier, who was coaching, called up, “Don’t cut your rope.” Men had been known to make a quick misplaced slash and cut their own loop, a one-time-only mistake. Blony kept on, strong quick blows, paying no attention to the feathery scratching branch tips, up again, flip, chop, continue.

“High enough,” yelled Tessier. “Top it.” Blony topped it. The swinging ride as the limber spar swiped back and forth was the reward. He could see the distant ocean, he was above the world.

“Très bien! Done pretty good for a first climb,” said Tessier. “Slow, but you done good.” Blony couldn’t get enough spar-tree climbing, and the more he did the faster he moved, trying to beat Tessier, who lately had struck a pose standing atop the fresh-trimmed spar while it was still quivering. So Blony had a stunt in mind as he climbed his last tree. Up he went, as squirrel-like as Tessier and about to do a trick that would show up the mustachioed Frenchman. He planned to top his tree, lift himself on top, stand on his head and whistle, but as the heavy-branched top he had just cut hinged over, the spar split and caught Blony in the cleft as a clothespin grips a tea towel. His scream was short, the air squeezed out of his collapsed lungs. It was Tessier’s dreadful job to climb up and cut the spar a second time, this time below the dead boy, whose urine-drenched boots dangled in his face. Blony fell, still in the clasp of the Douglas fir, and they buried him that way.

• • •

Etienne’s son Molti Sel, his cousin Alik Sel and the two Mius brothers, Noel and John, worked from Oregon to the Queen Charlotte Islands. Nimble and limber as they were, after Blony’s death no one wanted to climb and rig tall trees. Molti stayed a choker setter for five or six seasons, his hands as hardened as lobster claws from gripping and heaving heavy chains; he was used to chains, didn’t mind the weight. He signed on to work with Flannel Logging, a small gyppo outfit owned by Robbie and Glen Flannel, but only a few miles from a bobtail town offering some of the pleasures of life.

It was a bad crew. In his second week of work the three other choker setters stole the gyppo’s chains and left in the night. Robbie Flannel drove his ailing log truck down the mountain to set the sheriff on the trail and to buy new chains. When he came back he had no chains but cheaper coils of cable and used haywire and two old drunks from the bar, who were the replacement choker setters.

“Cable lighter to use, easier to git it under a log,” said Glen. “Use the haywire to move the cable. Forget about chains. Molti, you show these two stiffs what to do. They ain’t no good but they’re alive and anybody can be a choker setter, right?” Molti knew he should have walked off the job right then, but he didn’t. They attached the haywire to the skyline cable and the donkey pulled it uphill. Someone released the haywire and one of the downslope stiffs fumbled with the excess. Molti fastened the haywire to another cable that had to be moved. He gave the signal to the donkey tender to pull and then saw the stiff was not clear, but standing in the cable’s bight — that had been Pollo’s mistake. He shouted to the drunk, who started a clumsy run, but the tangled haywire was still being drawn and it snarled, kinked, went tight and snapped. It lashed Molti’s midriff with terrible force. The frightened stiffs helped him down to the bunkhouse, and there he lay with blood filling his mouth until ten o’clock that night, when he died. It was only Lobert Sel, Édouard-Outger’s oldest son, trained to be cautious, who returned from the West Coast to his family unscarred, unbroken, happy to be reunited with his brother Jim, happy to find a wife, to take up the business of fatherhood and life.

• • •

Men could die in distant lands, as Aaron’s oldest son, John, died across the ocean in trench mud in 1917 watching the slanting rain become the final mist. Men could die at home, as on the December morning in the same year when two ships, one packed with munitions and explosives for the war in Europe, collided in the Halifax narrows causing the world’s largest explosion and a tsunami that wiped out the Mi’kmaw village in Tufts Cove. Among the mangled and drowned were Lobert’s brother, Jim Sel, and four of his children.

“We go Shubenacadie,” said grieving and frightened Lobert to his pregnant wife, Nanty, and they moved inland, to the reserve, though he never thought of the reserve as a safe haven. There they found a measure of balance although they were poor. Lobert worked for a timber company in exchange for pay in logs and used them to build a three-room house. When his son Edgar-Jim Sel — called Egga — was born he began to worry as his own father, Édouard-Outger, had worried over him. He did not want his sons to work in the forests nor his daughters to clean house for whitemen women. He saw no danger in the residential school, though he did not like the man who came to the house with paper and pen and said if he did not sign the consent forms his children would be taken by the welfare people. He signed. So, when Egga was ten years old he and his best friend, Johnny Stick, entered the residential school where Mi’kmaw children, their culture and language suffered a forty-year implosion as deadly as any munitions ship.

“You will get education, Egga. To read and write is important. You will get better work than cut trees,” his father told him. And Lobert and Nanty visited him at the school every month, lugging a basket of home delicacies — smoked eel, Nanty’s special bread, sardines and yellow cake. The priests and nuns smiled and spoke pleasantly. Lobert and Nanty were proud their son was getting an education and because of that pride and because of the false sweetness of the black-clad religious, Egga could not tell them that he never attended a class because the priests worked him all day long shoveling coal in the school’s furnace room, where he learned to read only pressure gauges; that he was called a “lazy savage,” frequently kicked. After a hard beating by fat Father O’Hoopy that left him deaf in one ear and with a broken arm that healed badly, Egga knew he was a slave, not a student. Johnny Stick worked beside him. Johnny’s people never came to visit as they lived far away and Johnny got rough treatment from the priests. He was often called to Father Blink’s room. Every boy knew what that meant as Father Blink (a hairy ill-smelling man whose black dress captured and held every stink his body produced) had perverse needs and those who did not satisfy them could expect beating, hunger, isolation, insults, hair pulling, doors slammed on fingers, arms twisted until they hung loose and unusable, kicks and public humiliation, being shaken awake in the night, screams directly in the face, being burned with sulfur-head matches — tortures not just for days, not just for weeks or months, but for years. Father Blink prided himself that he never forgot a boy who refused him.

Egga made a plan. He wanted to ask Johnny to come with him but never found the private moment to ask and he slipped away from the school on his own. Lobert and Nanty were awakened by thunderous pounding on their door.

“Where is he? Your stinking bad son ran off. We know he’s here. You are in serious trouble for this!” They turned the log house upside down looking for Egga and came back at odd times for many months before giving up. Lobert and Nanty were miserable, and now began to hear certain stories about the school; they had failed to protect their son from harm. They were not the only bereft parents. Many, when bad news came that their child had died “after a long illness,” accepted the lie. Not knowing what had happened to Egga, Nanty fell into a kind of prolonged sadness that took her to the grave, leaving Lobert with the blackest thoughts. For him the evils of the residential school and lack of government oversight permanently stained any English-Canadian claim to decency. It was all words. Yet some hopeful spark still burned and after the war he married Kate Googoo. No one ever knew what Lobert had done, but when Paul, Alice and Mary May went to the resi school they suffered scorn and name-calling but were never beaten.

• • •

Runaway Egga, the direct descendant of Charles Duquet and René Sel, half-starved and ragged, walked by night and slept by day. The only place he had in mind was south. He did not know where he was going except away from Canada; attracted to watercraft he stowed aboard a fishing boat headed for Rockland, Maine, slipped off the boat in darkness and began to walk again. He followed the shoreline for many weeks, begging food or offering to work at farms he passed, slowly made his way to Barnstable and because he smelled frying fish from the galley begged a ride on a fishing boat headed to Martha’s Vineyard. The fishermen gave him a hot chunk of scrod and he was theirs forever.

There were other homeless boys hanging around the docks where the fishing boats came in, running errands for the fishermen and helping unload fish. None of them were Mi’kmaw. Egga got his first real boat job learning to haul trap for weakfish and whiting. Captain Giff Peake, himself half Wampanoag, taught Egga how to read a few words, but watching the boy try to write was, he said, like watching a dog try to play the piano. Still, Egga was an eager worker, cheerful, every morning full of hope for a good day as escaped or released prisoners sometimes are.

• • •

Egga grew to adulthood aboard Captain Peake’s boat, and when the old man retired to sit by his daughter’s fire Egga signed on to bigger boats with men who worked the rich cod waters of Georges Bank. He put away his identification as Mi’kmaq and became a hybrid person. In the sweep of his twenty-first year he volunteered for U.S. military service and was turned down as an alien resident, applied for citizenship, met, courted and married Brenda, a Wampanoag girl.

Years later, reunited with his father, Lobert, he said, “What I loved about Bren right at the start was how fast she could count up — she was quick-minded with numbers and she could read right side up and upside down. She was workin for the fish dealers. But I got her away from them. Yes, I did so, everlasting joy.” But their marriage wasn’t easy; Bren had strong ideas and set them forward fearlessly.

Egga, determined to master reading, set himself the task of making his way through the newspapers every day. He subscribed to several Nova Scotia newspapers, including the Amherst Daily, and the Yarmouth Herald, and so he learned something of what he had left behind and over the years he and Bren talked about it. She had never been to Nova Scotia, but she had seen how it went with the Wampanoag. Sometimes Halifax men came down on fishing boats and Egga invited them to supper and asked for news. In this way they learned that between the wars Mi’kmaw workingmen went to Winnipeg to harvest grain, to Maine to pick apples, did whatever they could find. They worked as stevedores, emptied and dumped stinking ballast from ships. Many of them lived in lumber camps, away from the reservation except for occasional quiet visits to wives and children.

“I know what that does to their traditional ways,” said Bren. “When the men go away to work it puts the responsibility for saving the language on the women.” But it seemed that most of the women signed the papers sending their children to the residential schools, trusting they would be taught what they needed to live in the English culture. Few parents knew of the atrocities practiced on their boys and girls by genocidal nuns and priests. The children were never again wholly Mi’kmaw.

• • •

Molti Sel’s grandsons, Blaise and Louis Sel, were loggers with chain saws and heavy machinery; trees were assembly-line products. Every year there were fewer men on the ground — the place of injuries and death; work was safer in the cab of a machine. They spread out, far distant from the reserve. The Mius and Sel brothers preferred tree-length logging setups and some of them worked in Minnesota and Wisconsin, some in Maine, some in British Columbia or Washington and Oregon states. The old bunkhouse camps were gone. They brought up their families in whiteman houses, listened to the radio, ate at the diner, drove to work and only went back to Nova Scotia for St. Anne’s Day.

They knew how their grandfathers had lived. Blaise Sel, one of Molti’s grandsons, a skilled feller-buncher operator, said, “Them old camps? You couldn’t get me in one of them damn rat hovels for no amount a money, way the hell out in the sticks, nothin to do but work and pick your nose.” His brother, Louis, ran the grapple skidder, hooking on to Blaise’s bundles of trees, dragging them to the landing, where they went through the delimber, which stripped the branches. He didn’t wait to see the logs loaded into the slasher and cut into preset lengths, nor did he care to see them loaded and hauled away to the pulp mill, but hurried back to Blaise for a fresh bouquet of stems. It was a job, it put food on his family’s table, paid for his pickup truck, for his and his wife Astrid’s house. Other Sels found jobs in the pulp and paper mills, in the plywood factories, in the cellulose-acetate plants, moving deeper into the world of plastics.

Noel Mius’s youngest son, Chancey Mius, worked for an in-woods chipping company. But he remarked to his wife, Shelly, that chipping at the landing robbed the woods. “If you don’t put those back, soils start to decline. Should do some nutrient replacement work where we took the trees. Think the company will do that? I don’t.”

“That’s a shame,” said his wife vaguely.

As if to balance this neglect, his brother Jackson in Maine ran an old-style two-man horse-logging outfit, slow, hard work, fresh air and enough danger to go around. Jackson cut the trees and his neighbor-partner, Sonny Hull, dragged them to the landing with his big draft horses. They had steady work from property owners who wanted a quiet operation that didn’t rip up the land. But after a winter of almost no snow when Sonny Hull packed up and moved to Montana and the work was scarce, Jackson went back to school and earned a B.S. in forestry, kept going for a master’s in wood management. He had never set foot on the old Mi’kmaw reservation at Shubenacadie through he knew he had people there. It was something he was going to do someday, some St. Anne’s Day. To the Sel and Mius relatives St. Anne’s Day had a value that outsiders could not understand.

“Worth the three-day drive if that’s what it takes,” said Blaise Sel, sitting relaxed and comfortable with second cousins and old aunties, belonging to the Mi’kmaw people if only for a day or two. His wife, Astrid, the granddaughter of Swedish immigrants, never came with him. “It’s a little bit silly,” she said, “you drivin all that way, sayin those Mi’kmaws are your blood kin. It’s not like you to do that.” But it was.