Barkskins (27 page)

He shrugged. “What do?”

“Split wood, of course.” She enunciated very carefully. “You carry an ax. Do you not know how to split firewood?”

He nodded. “I know.”

“I need you, Indian man. Follow.” Beatrix Duquet turned her horse and trotted gracefully toward the big house; he had to run to keep up with her. Watching her long crinkled hair sway, the bright heels of her boots, he felt a wave of enchantment strike him like warm rain. So, in his thirtieth spring, began the strangest part of his life as he seemed to stumble out of the knotted forest and onto a shining path.

Were not René Sel's children and grandchildren as he had been, like leaves that fall on moving water, to be carried where the stream takes them?

O
n the day of old Forgeron's funeral, unusually warm for mid-November Boston, the sky was covered with mild cloud. A dozen elderly men sat in the front pews to remember the surveyor who had made them fortunes with timberland. At last the three Duke brothers, Jan, Nicolaus and Bernard, aided by the company bookkeeper, Henk Steen, carried the clear-pine casket, lacquered and rubbed to a glass-like glare, an elegant burial case for a man who had spent almost forty years taking the measure of
Pinus strobus.
Jan silently willed Bernard not to stumble, not to fall. Outger, the youngest brother, should have been there but he refused to leave the house on Penobscot Bay, refused to give up the great table, a single board from the largest pine Duquet had ever cut. This icon belonged in the company's Boston council room.

“I need it for my work,” Outger had said with passion.

“What sort of work would that be?” Bernard had asked of the ceiling; he thought Outger an imbecile. It was said that Indians visited him often. He could not be depended on for anything except to receive his annual stipend. Still, he should have been there.

The sermon had gone on for two hours, but at the graveside things began to move briskly. A rising wind wrinkled the milky sky. Nicolaus shifted from foot to foot, his boots gleaming like oiled hooves. All warmth leaked from the day as the wind hauled to the north. The brothers looked knowingly at each other. It was the Forgeron weather curse. The sudden chill urged the minister on. They lowered the coffin into the dark hole, and at last came the words “rest in peace.”

The brothers and the skeleton-thin Henk Steen, one of the many Dutch orphan protégés who came to Duke & Sons as apprentices over the years, walked away from the graveside. In a body the fittest mourners walked to Nicolaus Duke's house, treading in the center of the street, where it was smoothest.

“Do come along, Henk,” Nicolaus said to the bookkeeper, who hovered at the edge of the crowd. “Join us in farewell to the old fellow.” Nicolaus was the best diplomat among the brothers and had learned the art of persuasion from his grandfather Piet Roos, with whom he had made voyages to China and Japan. Now his dark hair, when not covered with a wig, was ragged grey. His face and neck had swollen with fat though he still moved easily, unlike Jan and Bernard.

Deceived by the mild forenoon, none of them was warmly dressed. They hurried on past a wooded lot, a large garden stiffened by the last week's frosts, until they saw the candlelight glowing enticingly in Nicolaus's front windows. Through the wavery glass they could see his wife, Mercy; Bernard's wife, Birgit; and the Panis slave girls passing to and fro with tureens and pitchers, for Bernard had brought Panis—Pawnee—Indian slaves down from Ville-Marie.

The door to the best parlor stood invitingly open with Mercy welcoming them. In the center of the room a long table covered with a fine turkey carpet presented the collation of covered dishes, an array of silver and twist-stem glasses. Some fragrant wood burned in the fireplace; Steen thought it might be a few pieces of sandalwood to perfume the room, a scrap of Charles Duquet's oriental plunder. Beeswax candles in brass sconces lit the room, their trembling light reflected in a large pier-glass mirror. Henk Steen gaped at the dozen black walnut chairs with cushions—so many, so rich.

“Please enter, dear guests, come in,” said Mercy, guiding them into the warmth. She wore a loose grey silk
saque
pleated at the shoulders over a scarlet bodice and underskirt, her wig low and neat. She often suffered from crushing headaches that sent her to a quiet room and she now silently prayed to get through the evening without an attack. Their children, Patience, Piet and Sedley, lived nearby, the two sons well settled into the family lumber business. Patience had married a boatbuilder, Jeremiah Deckbolt.

•  •  •

Henk Steen hung back in the entryway staring at the luxuries and rich clothing of the guests. He felt out of place, and longed for his cold little room, but Nicolaus urged him to take a tankard of steaming cider laced with rum. Mercy led him to the cold sliced meats and Birgit's famous horseradish sauce, so stinging, she said, it would make the devil gasp. “Hardly an inducement to try it,” Steen muttered to himself and his hand veered away. He took a small marzipan cake. The fireplace crackled and spoke to itself. Yes, thought Steen, Nicolaus Duke lived very well. And why not, with Duke & Sons' swelling sales to the timber traders whose millmen converted logs into planks, barrel staves and clapboards, hogshead staves, shingles, masts, spars and bowsprits, dike timbers. All the Duke brothers lived gallant lives, except perhaps the strange one, Outger, who kept to the disappeared father's house in Penobscot Bay and whom Steen had never seen and imagined as a crabbed hermit clutching a blackthorn stick. The marzipan cake surged in his gut and he thought he might have to rush outside.

Mercy glanced over the room to see if everyone had a cup of comfort, a chair, someone with whom to converse. In truth she wished the company were different. These old men with their timber holdings! She wished very much to entertain (and be entertained by) the wealthy Boston families connected with commercial shipping, quite different from the fishing boat owners who had thought themselves the crème de la crème in her parents' day. The merchant shipping families had replaced them and built magnificent houses. She and Jan's wife, Sarah, gossiped enviously of their social doings. But never had any member of the Duke families been invited to their collations or soirees. Mercy told Nicolaus that she longed to give a grand party and invite these worthies, but Nicolaus said, “My dear, better not. You do not wish us to be regarded as jump-ups”—that most odious word.

Bernard and his lanky Danish or Norwegian wife, Birgit, stood in a corner talking with Joab Hitchbone, who was even older than old Forgeron. Birgit spoke in her odd accent, smiling and nodding.

What a jolt they all had felt when Bernard returned with Birgit from one of the Baltic or Scandinavian countries, precisely which one was never clear. She once told Mercy she had been born near the great
Kongeegen
tree in Denmark. It was a shock, for Bernard had been a remarkably attractive youth with wavy hair and cobalt-blue eyes. His habitual expression indicated he was about to smile and a mole on his left cheek encouraged that impression. Cornelia, his adoptive mother, had imagined that he was the by-blow of some French aristocrat and a pretty seamstress. He was still handsome though the dark hair had disappeared and the fine jawline had been replaced with a jowl; he limped. No one understood what had drawn him to Birgit. But their marriage, though childless, had lasted nearly thirty years. Birgit kept an orderly house and a rich table. She spent much time in the kitchen, not content to leave cookery to the slaves. Despite hoopskirts she preferred to mix and singe and roast herself. Her flummeries were renowned.

Sarah, the only daughter of the wealthy molasses and sugar importer James Pickering, had been a beauty with dark oiled hair and melting hazel eyes. She rejected hoops in favor of stiff petticoats that swelled out her skirts at the ankle, showing pink silk stockings, an unseemly mode for a woman in her fifties. Their oldest son, George Pickering Duke, had recently returned from reading law at the Inns of Court in London. For years he had struggled against being pushed into this profession, saying he wished to go to sea, not as an officer but as a common sailor, to visit other lands.

“George,” said Jan, “it is necessary to the business to have a trained legal mind among us. You will have a good income and in later years you can see the world in a more comfortable manner than you would before the mast. Only ask Bernard what that life is like.”

He had, in fact, talked with Uncle Bernard, who froze his bone marrow with stories of typhoons, men overboard, the paralyzing Doldrums, the boredom, the eternal work, the noisome ports, the capricious cruelty of captains. George Pickering Duke was dissuaded and took his adventure in books.

Bernard spoke to Joab Hitchbone, young Piet standing with them. “Old Forgeron would have taken joy in knowing the day started with good weather.” Hitchbone sucked at his cup of syllabub. “And how goes your pitch production? Do you still travel down to the pinewoods in the Carolinas?”

Bernard made a wry face. “Oh no. I have ever preferred the Québec end of the business. We still operate logging enterprises in the north. As for Carolina, young Piet here”—Bernard touched his nephew's shoulder—“took on that responsibility. He works two hundred black slaves and our pitch and tar are best quality. We've done well despite England's punitive laws.”

“I return to the plantation in several days' time,” said young Piet. The older men ignored him.

“Forgeron,” said old Hitchbone, “a good man, but you know—he had some strange ideas. His outlook remained both French and English, surely an uncomfortable mixture.”

Bernard's eyebrows rose. “Perhaps you do not know that Forgeron was born in Ostende, not France. He encouraged our father to deal with the Low Countries. Father always said that Hollanders had an innate sense of landforms. That was a talent, he said, that made good timberland lookers such as Forgeron.”

But old Hitchbone went on. “He deplored wholesale cutting, those who felled trees but took only the trunks and burned the rest. He had a frugal mind.”

“Oh, he was ever a leading spirit in controversies,” Bernard said. “I well remember his sentiments. He believed that men, when confronted with a vast plenitude of anything, feel an irresistible urge to take it all, then to smash and destroy what they cannot use.”

Old Hitchbone peered at him. “Hah! As we might descend on our host's table, gobble the dainties, then shiver the cups and plates on the hearth?”

“Few of us feel that urge, I trust,” said Bernard.

“I meant it as an example of Forgeron's thinking. Better you remember your Bible: ‘And God said replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and every living thing that moveth, and every green tree and herb.' Of course, here in New England there is such bounty of every wild resource that there is no limit to the assets, whether fish or furs or land or forests.”

Bernard did not correct Hitchbone's misquotes; the old man was known for twisting scripture to suit his intent.

“Then perhaps, with all this bounty, you will explain the shortage of firewood in Boston and its ever-rising price? A good thing for Duke and Sons, but driving some inhabitants away from the city.”

Old Hitchbone refused to be drawn; he examined the low level of syllabub in his cup. “The Indans. That is our problem. The Indans do not use land correctly because of their raw roaming and hunting. As the Bible tells us, it is a duty to
use
land. And there is so much here that one can do what one wishes and then move on. You cannot make the Indans understand that the correct use is to clear, till, plant and harvest, to raise domestic stock, to mine or make timber. In a nutshell, they are uncivilized. And un-Christian.”

Bernard dipped his head, not wishing a quarrel, but thought to himself that King Philip's War had not come about through some vague whim of the Indians. They had fought like rabid dogs to keep their lands and they had lost. Why was hunting and plucking berries not considered as use of the land? But he kept this question to himself. “Well, sir, although Forgeron scalped Indians for the bounty, he also had Indian friends. And he once or twice remarked that the reason New France did not prosper was because of the fur trade, which pulled all the able men away from the settlements and thereby cost a great deal in enterprise and development.”

“There may be something in that,” said old Hitchbone. “But I might advance popishness being their great pitfall. And their low population for all that they breed like mice.”

Bernard ignored this and went on. “He was ever a man of contradictions. He urged Duquet et Fils to keep a hand in the fur trade—which we have done in a small way. He thought that if a certain military triumph occurred, trade could revive.”

“They say the Ohio valley is stuffed with beavers. If the English are successful in seizing New France—the inevitable triumph you avoid naming—that trade might become lucrative once more.”

“Yes, Forgeron said much on various points which did not always make him agreeable company. One felt extremely nervous near him, not only because he attracted lightning and high winds. And yet he himself did more to drive down the forest and the Indans than anyone else.”

“And so in him we see the double nature of man quite revealed.”

“He profited in many ways,” said Hitchbone, who had himself profited in those ways.

“I only saw our father angry with him one time. They were speaking of the Wentworths and Forgeron had the temerity to tell Father that he—Father—could never hope to become one of the merchant aristocracy. That the Wentworths had connections with the English peerage and knew well how to move in those exalted circles. By my God, Father flew into a fury.”