Barkskins (88 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where we goin?” said Jeanne.

“You'll see when we get there.”

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

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

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

•  •  •

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

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

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

•  •  •

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

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

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

•  •  •

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

•  •  •

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

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

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

“It says she collects medicine plants and trees.”

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

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

“And she plants trees.”

•  •  •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•  •  •

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

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

“How can we get there? No car.”

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

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

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

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

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

•  •  •

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

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

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

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

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

•  •  •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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