The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

Rough Deeds by Annie Proulx

FROM The New Yorker

IN NEW FRANCE, which people more and more called Canada, from the old Iroquois word kanata, Duquet was everywhere-examining, prying, measuring, observing, and calculating. Limbs and low-quality hardwood waste became high-quality firewood, and every autumn he packed twenty wagons full for the Kébec market and for Paris, when he could charter available ships with the promise of a good return cargo of tea or coffee or textiles, spices or china. Without the sure promise of a rich return cargo, he thought, let the Parisians freeze, for all he cared.

Leasing a Dutchman’s ships was well enough, but he needed ships of his own. In 1712, a business acquaintance in Boston, an Englishman named Dred-Peacock, connected him to an English shipbuilder and a new but promising yard on the River Clyde, in Scotland, joined to England by the Act of Union, in ’07. Duquet wanted a ship; the yard wanted wood.

“Regard the map, sir,” Dred-Peacock said. “It’s the closest point to the colonies-the briefest sailing time. There are signs of success on the Clyde, but they need good timbers. They will pay for them. It is an opportunity that cannot be neglected.”

There were good precedents in New France for trading with the enemy, but arrangements with the English and the Scots were still secret, complex, expensive, even dangerous. Yet Duquet knew that there was profit in selling to the English, despite their colonial aims. Duquet took the plunge and Dred-Peacock took a goodly share of the profits, which increased year by year. Fifty acres of oak were needed to build one seventy-four-gun warship, and the hardwood stands along the rivers of New France began to fall to Duquet’s ambitions. But he felt hampered by Kébec’s distance from the money pots of the world and by the ice blockage of the Saint-Laurent River in winter.

“Duquet, it is past time for you to consider shifting your business operation to the colonies,” Dred-Peacock told him as they sat over their papers and receipts in the Sign of the Red Bottle, near the wharves, the inn they favored in Boston. Never did Dred-Peacock present his ill-formed face to Duquet in Kébec; always Duquet made the trip south by schooner or by packet.

“Oh, I think on it,” Duquet said, swirling the ale in his tankard until it slopped over the rim, as if that settled the question. “I think of it often. I am of half a mind to do so, sir.”

“Damn, sir! It is quite time you acted. Finish with thinking and act. Every day those poxy whoresons of mill men push into the forests and gain control over the land. In Maine there are countless white-pine mast trees and lesser pines to be used for tar and pitch. You know there is a great market for these if you can get them on a ship bound for Scotland, England, or even Spain or Portugal.”

Duquet nodded, but his face was sour. He knew that Dred-Peacock saw him as an ill-bred boor, a creature from the depths. True enough, he had escaped a cramped childhood spent pulling rabbit fur from half-rotten skins, pinching out guard hairs, plucking the soft fur for quilt stuffing. As a boy he had coughed incessantly, bringing up phlegm clotted with rabbit hair. The fine hairs had settled on every surface, matted on his family’s heads and shoulders. Finally, in this clinging miasma of stinking hair and dust, his mother, choking blood, had lain on the floor as his father’s black legs scissored away into the night, and Duquet began his struggle to get away from France, to become another person.

Dred-Peacock may have sensed Duquet’s squalid beginnings, but his fantastic drive to make money was what interested the Englishman. Dred-Peacock went on, his voice vibrating, “Where there is a market, the businessman must act. And all this would be immeasurably easier if you operated from Boston rather than bloody Kweebeck. And with my help these affairs can be managed.”

It was obvious and timely advice, and yet Duquet hesitated to commit to leaving New France. He had valuable connections there, and a lifetime dislike of the English language, with its vile obscenities, and those who spoke it.

Soon several ships belonging to Duquet but flying British flags ran the seas between Portsmouth and Boston harbors and the ever more numerous Clyde shipyards. It was like walking on a web of tightropes, but the money flew around Duquet like dandelion fluff in the wind. He had only to catch it in his net. And share it with Dred-Peacock.

During the next decade Duquet began to acquire tracts of woodland in Maine. Dred-Peacock’s genius in the legal procedure of acquiring remote “townships” was immeasurable, and an old acquaintance from Duquet’s first years in New France, Jacques Forgeron, scouted out the best timberland. Forgeron, a surveyor when he could get work, a voyageur when he could not, had joined forces with Duquet in his earliest days. Together they had entered the fur trade, had paddled, portaged, walked, and sung the rivers of New France. Forgeron was something of a Jonah, who attracted foul weather, but he had a curious regard for the wild forest and often told Duquet that it could be the source of great wealth. This man cherished his measuring chains and could use one as a weapon, swinging it around and around until it gained velocity and the free end leaped forward to maim. And if he had used it in this way in France, the old days counted for very little. Now he was a partner in Duquet et Fils, perhaps even a friend, if a business tie between two friendless men could be so described.

From time to time Duquet would join Forgeron in the Maine woods to explore his growing territory. One October afternoon they landed their canoe on a sandy Maine river shore fronting one of their new white-pine properties, twenty thousand acres at a cost of twelve cents an acre. There was a narrow hem of ice along the shaded shoreline.

“Frog ice,” Forgeron said. In the rich autumn light, the deciduous trees stunned with xanthine orange and yellow. The men’s swart shadows fell on the ground like toppled statues. Without speaking, they began to gather firewood. Forgeron held up his hand.

“Listen,” he said quietly. They heard the sounds of chopping not too far off and began to move cautiously toward the source.

With an acid jolt of fury, Duquet saw unknown men in stiff, pitch-blackened trousers cutting his pines, other men limbing the fallen trees, and yet another scoring them. Two men worked with broadaxes to square the logs. Duquet was sure they had a pit sawmill set up nearby. By their bulging pale eyes and doughy faces he knew them to be English colonists. Although Duquet et Fils had no hesitation in cutting big trees where they found them, it was intolerable when they were the victims of this poaching.

“Ho la! Who say you come my land, cut my tree?” Duquet shouted, forgetting his careful English. He was so furious that his voice strangled in his throat. Forgeron advanced beside him, lightly revolving a section of his 33-foot chain.

The startled woodsmen stared and then, still gripping their tools, they ran on an oblique course toward the river, where they likely had boats. But one with a dirty bandage on his right leg lagged behind.

Duquet did not pause. He drew his tomahawk from his belt and hurled it, striking the runner’s left calf. He fell, crying to his comrades for help in a high, childish voice. One of the escaping men turned around and stared at Duquet as he called something to the fallen one. The confrontation lasted only a few seconds but left Duquet with an unfading impression of a man swelling with hatred. Duquet would not forget the man’s mottled slab of a face, encircled by ginger hair and beard, the yellow animal eyes fixed on him, the sudden turning away and violent dash for the river.

“They come from settlements along the coast,” Forgeron said. “All Maine settlers are voracious thieves of fine timber. They are everywhere on the rivers.”

They bound their wounded prisoner, a boy not older than fourteen, and dragged him to a pine, tied him up against it in a hollow between projecting tree roots.

“You, garçon, talk up or I cut first your fingers, then your balls. Who are you? What men you with? How you come here?”

The boy folded his lips in a tight crease, either in pain or in defiance. Duquet wrenched the boy’s arm and spread his left hand against one of the great humped roots. With a quick slash of his ax, he took off a little finger and part of the next.

“Talk or I cut more. You die no head.”

Duquet’s bloody interrogation gave him the information that the thieves were in the employ of a mill owner named McBogle, an agent of the politico Elisha Cooke. He had been hearing of Cooke for years; all described him as a passionate opponent of Crown authority, especially that vested in the English surveyor-general, who struggled to enforce the dictate that all ship-mast pines were the property of the British Admiralty. But McBogle’s name was new. Although Duquet’s heart was pounding with anger, it occurred to him that Elisha Cooke and perhaps even McBogle might be useful men, and he fixed their names in his memory.

“Eh, no trees on Penobscot? Why you come here steal pine?” he said.

“We thought only to cut a few. Away from the surveyor’s men.”

Duquet did not believe this.

“Show your wounds.” When the boy held up his maimed hand, Duquet said angrily, “No, not that. Only scratch. Old wound.” He could smell the stink of infection from a distance. With his good hand the boy unwrapped his right leg and exposed a deep and rotten gash in the thigh. A streak of red inflammation ran up toward the groin.

“How happen this?” Duquet demanded.

“Uncle Robert felled a big pine, and when it smote the ground it broke off a branch that bent double and then sprang to gouge my leg.”

It was an evil mess. In contrast, the cut in the boy’s calf inflicted by Duquet’s ’hawk was clean, though it had nearly severed a tendon, and the chopped finger was a trifle. Nothing to be done.

They carried the youth about half a mile upstream to the interlopers’ camp, which was strewn with abandoned clothing and cook pots, a deer carcass suspended in a tree, and laid him in the lean-to near the still-smoldering fire.

“We will stay here,” Duquet said to Forgeron, “as the thieves have prepared a camp for us.” He tried to speak calmly, but he was filled with a greater anger than he had ever experienced. After all the injustices he had suffered, after all he had done-crossing to the New World, learning the hard voyageur trade and how to read and write and cipher, working out a way to use the forest for his fortune, all the business connections he had made-these Maine vermin had come to steal his timber.

Forgeron brought their canoe up to the campsite while Duquet searched until he found the trespassers’ pit sawmill. There were no sawed planks beside it, indicating they had been there only a few days, but with the clear intention of stealing his trees. The stack of limbed and squared logs told him that. He wondered if they had planned to build a fort. It was said that the English were plotting to build forts along all the rivers.

“Let us put our mark on them,” Duquet said, and he and Forgeron took possession of the logs with two deep hatchet slashes on the butt ends. They talked of ways to move them. It seemed that a raft floated to the nearest sawmill might be the best way, getting what they could, and while Duquet stayed to guard the timber in case the thieves returned, Forgeron went to Portsmouth to hire raftsmen.

During the early evening the mildness went out of the weather. The sky filled with clouds the color of dark grapes, torn by flailing stems of lightning. An hour of rain moved along, and behind it the temperature dived into winter. Duquet woke at dawn, shivering. There was not a breath of wind, but every twig and branch bristled with spiky hoarfrost. In the distance wolves howled messages to one another, their cries filleting the morning. They had likely scented the boy’s blood and infection and would linger out of sight, waiting for a chance. Duquet got up and piled more wood on the fire. The wounded boy’s eyes were closed, his face feverish and swollen, cheeks wet with melting frost. Duquet thought that he would be dead after one more cold night. Or he might not last until nightfall.

With some urgency, Duquet prodded the boy awake and fired questions at him: his name, his village, his family’s house. But the boy only croaked for water, which Duquet did not give him, and then went silent. He still lived. Duquet spent the short day estimating the boardfeet of the felled pines.

The light faded early as the growing storm invaded the sky, the wind and sleety snow rattling and hissing in the pines. While there was still light enough to see clearly, Duquet walked over to the prisoner. The boy lay on his back, his right leg bursting with infection, a yellow froth of pus oozing out from under the bandage, the leg a little splayed, as though it were detaching itself. Nothing could be done with this burden except wait for him to die-one more cold night. The boy opened his eyes and stared at something across the river. Duquet followed his gaze, expecting to see Indians or perhaps one of the woodcutters returning. He saw only a wall of pines until a blink of yellow showed him where to look. A tall gray owl sat on a branch, seeing them. Its eyes were very small and set close together, like twin gimlets.

The boy spoke. “Help. Me,” he said in English. “Help. Me.”

Inside Duquet, something like a tightly closed pinecone licked by fire opened abruptly, and he exploded with insensate and uncontrollable fury, a lifetime’s pent-up rage. “J’en ai rien à foutre. No one helped me!” he shrieked. “I did everything myself! I endured! I contended with powerful men. I suffered in the wilderness. I accepted the risk that I might die! No one helped me!” The boy’s gaze shifted, the fever-boiled eyes following Duquet’s rising arm, closing only when the tomahawk split his brain. Duquet struck the hatchet into the loam to clean it, and the owl lifted into the air.

In the flying snow, Duquet dismantled the saw-pit scaffolding and threw the boy into the pit hole, piled the scaffolding on top, and set it alight. The gibbous moon rose.

Hours later, when the burning ceased, he went to shovel in the half-frozen excavated soil, but before he hurled the first shovelful he glanced down and saw the black arm bones crooked up, as if reaching for a helping hand.

“Foutu!”

He shoveled.

Forgeron arrived four days later with six men, who began constructing a raft of the cut pines. Not seeing the wounded boy, Forgeron opened his mouth several times, as if to speak, but he did not say anything except that the war was making it very difficult to find able-bodied labor.

“What war is that?” Duquet asked.

“Has not Peter the Great invaded Persia? They spoke of nothing else in Portsmouth. That and the smallpox inoculations inflicted on Bostonians.”

In the next years Duquet changed, reinventing himself. In Boston, Duquet et Fils became Duke and Sons. But although there were endless business opportunities in the English colonies, he kept his enterprise and some holdings in New France. He sat with Dred-Peacock in the taproom of the Pine Dog, a pleasant tavern with a sign showing an eponymous carved mastiff, now their favored meeting place, as the Sign of the Red Bottle had burned in a conflagration that took half the wharves and several ships.

“Do you know aught of that fellow McBogle?” Duquet asked, breaking the crust edge from his meat pasty with heavy fingers.

Dred-Peacock, bewigged and togged out, regarded his steaming coffee. “I have not made his acquaintance, but I’ve heard much deleterious talk concerning his ways. As we both know, Maine is full to the scuppers with woodland entrepreneurs, water-powered sawmills, surveyors, tree choppers, potash makers, turpentine distillers, and settlers, every man assaulting the free-to-all timberlands.”

“They think as I do,” Duquet said, “so I cannot fault them. But dealing with them is always a struggle.”

“The settlers are hard men, right enough, but there are others even harder, mostly in New Hampshire. I mean those men of Scots lineage lately removed from Ulster, in Ireland.”

“Surely they are as other mortal men?”

“No. They are different. They are damned strange cruel men, clannish and proud to a fault, thirsty for vengeance over imagined slights, hard-drinking, and inhumanly tough. The whoresons prefer to sleep outside in storms, rather than in the comfort of a house. They know the country as the poxy Indians know it, and to live free is their banner. They choose to live in the most remote places. And they are key fighters in the escalating antipathy between the French and the English.” He paused and took up his coffee cup, stared into Duquet’s eyes.

“Dud McBogle, his brothers, and his sons are among these men.”

Duquet threw back his head and laughed. “Well, I have heard bugbear stories aplenty and I would class McBogle tales among them. No doubt he eats children as sweetmeats and wears a red fur cloak bespangled with their bones. What do you say when I tell you I consider taking this man on as a partner?”

For once Dred-Peacock had nothing to say.

In Boston one day, Dred-Peacock came to the Duke warehouse, a cavernous building near the docks, redolent of pine, oak, furs, and roots.

“I thought you might wish to know that that man you mentioned some time ago has been asking people about you. How many sawmills you own, how disgustingly large your fortune may be, what ships you have, what tracts of timber and townships you possess. He himself operates five or six more sawmills on the Penobscot and in New Hampshire. He begins to look like a serious rival.”

“Who do you mean? Elisha Cooke?” Duquet said.

“His damned hard man, McBogle.”

“Indeed,” Duquet said. “I hear this sometimes. He asks questions, but we never see him. What is your own perception of this situation?”

“I think that he should be absorbed. I doubt we could buy him out, but a partnership may be attractive. He has friendly relations not only with Elisha Cooke and the Wentworths but with many judges and businessmen here and in New Hampshire. Yet he does not have our contacts across the Atlantic.” It was Dred-Peacock, with his assortment of languages, who knew the invaluable English and European men of business.

“I think we must talk with him and see what might be arranged. Where do we find him?”

“He may be difficult to locate. He has a sawmill on a tributary of the Penobscot and a house nearby. He keeps very much to himself in this remote place. If we go to him, we must bring a few men with us, for I hear he has a band of ruffians at his beck. And of course he has other mills, other houses, other affairs. He could be at any of them. Still, I could accompany you a week from today. But no sooner.”

“Bien,” Duquet said.

Yet within the hour Forgeron, who had led a crew of woodsmen to cut down one of Duquet’s pine-heavy townships, arrived in Boston. His lean face was blotched with a red rash. He hesitated, as though he wished not to speak his news. When he did speak, he threw his words down like playing cards.

“We found the best trees taken. Most of them were mast pines. The stumps still oozed sap.”

“Who?” Duquet said.

“Sais pas. But there is talk that McBogle last week shipped two great loads of masts to Spain. He will have made a fat profit.”

“I plan to find this man in a week’s time and see what can be arranged. I will let him know we suspect him of this theft. It will be our leverage. We will come to an agreement with him.”

“He is not known for compliance.”

“Nor am I. Dred-Peacock will accompany us on the Monday. You must come as well. It is necessary we go in a body, as we do not know the strength of McBogle’s men.”

In the last year Duquet’s eyesight had begun to deteriorate, dimness alternating with flashes of light and tiny particles gliding through his field of vision, like birds in the sky. He said nothing to Forgeron of this, only, “What is wrong with your face that it shows so rough and crimson?” Forgeron shrugged.

The plan was ill-fated. Two days later a packet entered Boston Harbor with great sacks of mail. Among Dred-Peacock’s mountain of letters was one from the family attorney informing him that his older brother and his nephew had both perished on the flanks of an Icelandic volcano and that he, Dred-Peacock, had succeeded to the title and to the family estate in Wiltshire. In seconds Dred-Peacock’s talk of colonial liberty and rights evaporated, his self-definition as a man dedicated to New England self-rule shriveled.

“I must go,” he said to Duquet. “It is my responsibility to my family and to the estate. I cannot evade the title. I leave at once.”

“Yes,” Duquet said. “I quite see.” Scratch a New England colonist, he thought, and you find Old England-the way a tree’s bark may hide the inner rot.

And as if that were not enough, word came that Forgeron was ill with a fiery skin inflammation and the quinsy, a putrid sore throat that forced him into his bed. Duquet decided that he would not delay. He would seek out McBogle alone.

Duquet had the kitchen woman make him a canteen of strong black coffee. He would ration it out, drink it cold, eschewing fires, as the forest was sown with skulking Indians and Frenchmen looking for scalp money or payments for captives. He hired a schooner to take him to the mouth of the Penobscot, and there on the riverbank began his solitary journey.

It was early spring, rafts of rotten ice riding the current in company with the first of thousands of logs. Where there were mills, crowds of woodsmen stood on the banks, snagging the logs with their outfit’s mark of ownership. The work continued all night by the light of enormous bonfires, cat-footed men running out onto the heaving carpet of logs to hook and prod their property to shore. Impossible to put a canoe into that maelstrom. Duquet had ordered his timber crews to hold back his logs until the river cleared of the floating forest. Now he set out on foot. And noticed two riverbank men turn away from the heaving river and cut obliquely into the forest. He smiled. Did they imagine they were not noticed?

Sometimes he was on dim Indian trails, following landmarks almost always obscured by the jagged skylines of conifers, but more often he made his way through logging slash and blow-downs. Although timber cutters had worked the area along the river, a mile or so inland was still terre sauvage, and like the ocean it breathed wild grandeur; from it emanated a sense of great depth. The tree limbs arched over the silent earth like the dark roof of a vaulted tomb. Once from a distance he saw two men working a pit sawmill, the top man bending and rising like an automaton, the man below in a smother of woolly sawdust. Intent on their labor, they did not see him. If they were industrious, he thought, they could cut a thousand boardfeet in a day, but it was more likely that their work would be interrupted by a scouting party out for captives or blood. Or the two riverbank louts.

He skirted innumerable ponds, sinking to his knees in soggy moss, and took an entire day to cross an autumn burn, the charred trunks of the smaller trees with their own black limbs tangled around their roots like dropped drawers, still-smoldering logs that could not be quenched. The biggest trees stood lightly scorched but unharmed. Winter snow had converted the ash to black muck. On steep slopes it was the ancient wind-felled monsters that caused the greatest hindrance; the branches on the lower side plunged into the earth and supported the main trunk, which resembled a multilegged monster, the remaining branches clawing out like arms with a hundred crooked spears thrusting upward. There must have been a strong windstorm to put down so many large trees. Some had pulled their neighbors to the ground too. Often Duquet had to crawl beneath these barriers, through leaf mold, fern, toadshade, and viburnum, through slimed fungi, only to encounter another half-decayed giant within a few paces. He could not count all the streams and bogs, the hellish thickets of close-packed larch, the whipping red stems of osier willow. The treetops dazzled. The flashing wings of hundreds of thousands of northward-migrating birds beat above him. He saw snowy owls drifting silently through the trees, for they had come into the Maine woods by the thousand that winter, and with the turn of the season were retreating to the cold lands. His eyes wearied of broken, wind-bent cedar fringing glinted swamp water. All one afternoon he had the feeling he was being watched, and as twilight thickened he saw a gray owl flutter to a branch stub and grip him with its gimlet eyes. Of all birds, it was this wretch he hated most.

After six days he cut back toward the Penobscot, following Moosegut Brook; McBogle’s sawmill, sited on this tributary stream, could not be far distant. He listened for the sound of falls. He felt the mill through his feet before he saw it, the metal clank and rasp of the drive-shift gears and the pitman arm sending a mindless thumping rhythm into the ground. His eyes troubled him, the flashes growing more frequent, tree branches and needles sparking. He walked along the stream and, abruptly, there was the millpond and the mill, a heavy log structure built to take the weight of the saw machinery. He walked around to the side of the mill. And there was Dud McBogle standing above him in a razzle of flinching lights.

Recognition was instant. Dud McBogle was the ginger-whiskered timber thief who long ago had turned back and called something to the wounded boy. Duquet felt a red cloud of anger envelop him, a certainty that this man knew all that had happened those years ago on the riverbank. His blood instantly flowed back on itself. The teeth of the moving saw gnawed through a 20-foot-long squared log, sent up a spray of sawdust.

“I have been waiting for you these some years,” McBogle said in an easy tone. “I went back, you see. I went back and dug up the pit where you burned my boy.” Four men, two of them the riverbank men, stepped out of the mill gloom and stood beside him.

Duquet could smell the hot sawdust as the blade began a new cut, chewing through the log. He bucked and twisted as he was seized by McBogle’s men and carried into the mill. Narrow rods of light pierced the interstices of the shingled roof. He could hear the relentless up-and-down grind of the saw, could see McBogle’s hand near the lever that stopped the saw, could see the hand move away. What could not happen began to happen.