• • •
In every life there are events that reshape one’s sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed. For René the great blow had been the loss of Achille, his brother, whom he loved and most dreadfully missed. He came to New France to escape the loss, not realizing he would carry sorrow enclosed within him. The second event was the forced marriage to Mari.
Monsieur Trépagny made a formal assignment of land to René, granting him the old domus and workshop and the gardens but not the cow, as well as the clearing to the west that René coveted and the land with clear water springing from under a yellow birch. René was, in one stroke, a man of property. Père Perreault and Monsieur Bouchard left soon after the brief ceremony with Monsieur Trépagny’s signature on René’s land assignment.
Monsieur Trépagny spoke with casual sarcasm to Mari. “Madame Sel. Cook dinner as you always do and Chama will bring it to my lady wife and myself. After this evening her maid will prepare our food until we find a cook and servant. We will purchase a Pawnee or blackamoor slave or two from Kébec.” He walked westward into the forest.
Six woodcock had been hanging for days and had reached the hallucinogenic point of decay that Monsieur Trépagny savored. Mari roasted the birds, put them in a large basket, added a cold leg of venison, four portions of steamed sturgeon. René thought it was a supper the seigneur hardly deserved. Chama, who had become attentive to the Spanish maid, carried all of this in the oxcart, the cow tied behind. For their own supper Mari thumped on the table a platter of hot eels graced with the sour-grass sauce. She had baked in the morning and served a loaf of bread with the last of the butter—alas for the loss of the cow.
Mari, walking from fire to table in her deerskin tunic, looked as she had always looked, but she gave René the fattest eel and touched his hand lightly. After the boys went out to the wikuom she made up a pallet in front of the fireplace and then pulled off her baggy dress. She stood nude in the firelight—the first naked female he had ever seen—not an old Indian castoff foisted on him, but a strong and well-built woman. She lay on the pallet and waited.
René pulled off his clothes, conscious of his greasy reek. He lay down beside Mari, who rolled toward him. The fabulous shock of warm silky skin against him was powerful in the extreme. Not since he and Achille had intertwined and whispered and tried what they could think to try had he experienced the stunning excitement of another human body naked against his. Mari’s elasticity, her hard muscles, her smell of bread, river eels and bitter plants made him wild. She was not Achille, but he thought of his brother as he proceeded.
In the morning Mari said, “Good you,” got up, pulled on her deerskin dress with its faded designs and made the fire.
With a shock of insight he understood that Mari’s impassive expression was a calm acceptance and knowledge of life’s roils and clawing, an attitude that in a way matched his own belief that he flew in the winds of change like a sere leaf. She had answers to the most untoward questions, for the Mi’kmaq had examined the world with boundless imagination for many generations. Over the months and years he learned from her. His relationship with Mari became a marriage of intelligences as well as bodies.
They stood opposed on the nature of the forest. To Mari it was a living entity, as vital as the waterways, filled with the gifts of medicine, food, shelter, tool material, which everyone discovered and remembered. One lived with it in harmony and gratitude. She believed the interminable chopping of every tree for the foolish purpose of “clearing the land” was bad. But that, thought René, was woman’s talk. The forest was there, enormous and limitless. The task of men was to subdue its exuberance, to tame the land it grew on—useless land until cleared and planted with wheat and potatoes. It seemed both of them were subject to outside forces, powerless to object in matters of marriage or chopping.
Farther west the manor house resounded with discontent. Monsieur Trépagny tired of his commanding wife, who endlessly harped on how much she wanted to return to Paris, and he began to curse the world he had made. His mind shifted from consolidating the domus to vengeance. If only Duquet had been a gentleman he certainly would have tracked him down and challenged him to a duel. Although too much time had passed, he said he would begin his pursuit of Duquet on the next full moon. Elphège, he said, must come with him as his squire. This decision, perhaps, was bolstered by Bouchard’s call for a new road-building corvée at that time, an onerous duty that not even one with a particule could evade.
At night Mari wept. She said it was right that Monsieur Trépagny pursue Duquet if he wished, but Elphège had no reason to do so.
Before he left, Monsieur Trépagny buried a small metal box beneath the front doorstep, muttering a curse or two. From the hall window upstairs the Spanish maid watched him. Trépagny and Elphège left under the hard dot of the moon and nothing was heard of them nor Duquet nor the bearded brothers until the next spring.
7
bûcheron
Time passed slowly, a long series of days shaped by work. All the second summer, thought René, Mari had been more silent than usual.
“Speak, Mari. What is wrong? You must tell me. Is it Elphège? Are you thinking about Elphège?” he pressed her one night after baby Achille and the newborn twins, Noë and Zoë, were asleep.
She nodded and then bent her head. There was a deep silence, so deep the tumbling flight of a moth drawn to the fire disturbed the air and they heard the puff of vapor as a flame caught it.
“Woman, tell me.” He grasped both her hands to show his need to understand.
And the long sad story came out. She was terribly frightened of losing Elphège. Again she spoke of the time when she was a child, when, she said, her people lived on the shore far to the east. One day when they were at their ocean camp a ship came with pale men in it. The newcomers said they were les Français. Mari’s people showed the Wenuj how to gather shellfish and berries, shared food with them. One of the French was Père Perreault—Père Pillow, as she called him. All seemed well for some weeks, but one day the strangers abruptly declared they were returning to France and that some of the Mi’kmaq would come with them. No one wished to go, but the Wenuj smiled disarmingly, and then without warning, hairy sailors seized seven of the people, Mari among them, and rushed them to the ship. The anchor was hoisted and the ship away before the people onshore realized. They ran along the coastline gesticulating and shrieking at the ship. The ship sailed on.
“Many days, many days sick us. Then in France come us.”
“France? You went to France?”
“Yes. In Palis, ride in wagon, big noise. Weeping all us. Bad food, in box sleep. Long time. Brother sick. Cough, choke he. Wenuj away him take. Die. Maman die. Sick me. Hot, big sore on me make. All die. Only me, one baby. Ship take us. Père Pillow say home go. Long time. Ocean angry. Bébé die. Then our good land. Mi’kmaw people run. Laugh.”
But the joy at returning didn’t last. Nearly the entire tribe died in the next few months.
“Wenuj sickness. Die Mi’kmaq.
“Sick same bad my face make.” She pointed at the smallpox scars on her cheeks, then continued. Dozens of the tribe were ravaged by the rotting face disease and the tiny village became a sinkhole of suffering.
He understood that she and other Mi’kmaw had been forced onto a French ship and against their will brought to Paris, where most of them died. Mari fell ill with smallpox but survived and endured the long trip back across the ocean to the homeland. But she had brought sickness with her, and most of her people died.
It was then, she said, Père Pillow brought her to Kébec. She married Lolan, a good Mi’kmaw man, at the mission. Elphège and Theotiste were his children. And Jean-Baptiste.
“Big man but die him. One my baby die. But Elphège, Theotiste, Jean-Baptiste then not die they. Me to Wobik with Père Pillow. That mission know you.”
And at the mission Trépagny had found her and hired her as his housekeeper but within days forced
himself on her. It was the way things went in New France.
“No him child. No-bébé medicine know me. Lené, you me good bébés. But now Elphège I say, ‘Back come, Elphège, back come!’ ”
• • •
It was as though he had heard her. The snow was melting away, a hollow circle forming around the base of every tree, a ceaseless piddle of meltwater running over the sopping ground into rills and streams when a man limped into the clearing.
She knew at once. “Elphège!” She ran to him and helped him to the house. The boy was emaciated, covered with the scabs of old cuts and a pattern of bruises. His right ankle was a swollen purple lump. He would not speak. They half-carried him into the house and put him on the pallet. Mari began to stir up the fire and make a sleep potion, to heat a nourishing moose broth. While she took white cedar cones from her storeroom and pounded them to dust, worked them into pounded fern root and leaf for a sprain poultice, René stood gazing at the half-conscious boy.
“Where is the seigneur? Where is Monsieur Trépagny?” he asked gently, but Elphège could not answer, not then.
By asking questions to which Elphège would nod or shake his head, Mari learned that Monsieur Trépagny was dead, but when and in what manner he would not say. He lay quiet and half asleep for nine days, then seemed to recover his strength in a great flush. Within a month he joined René in the woods, chopping. He was silent and rarely smiled, his eyes habitually cast down as though the world was too painful to regard.
Chama no longer worked with them. He had gone to Kébec with Madame Trépagny and the Spanish maid, for the bride was again intending France. The Spanish maid was particularly disenchanted with Trépagny’s mansion, for she had pried up the front doorstep stone, taken the metal box hidden there. It opened easily enough, despite creeping patterns of rust on the lid, but in it were nothing but human teeth and locks of hair. Even Chama wished to return to the old country to grow onions in root-free soil. They concluded that Monsieur Trépagny was dead. They left by moonlight, and when Mari heard the distant bellowing of the unmilked cow, she went to the manor house and claimed her.
“House. Door much open,” she said to René. “Soon inside live porc-épic people.” Yes, porcupines moved into abandoned houses very soon.
• • •
The uncle of Mélissande du Mouton-Noir, now Trépagny’s wife, wrote several letters to his niece. Monsieur Bouchard kept them on the corner of his worktable as though the woman would sometime materialize and claim them. But the day came when a peremptory letter addressed directly to Monsieur Bouchard himself demanded information of the lady, who had failed to respond to her uncle’s solicitous epistles. Monsieur Bouchard had the unpleasant duty of writing to Mouton-Noir and the Intendant with the sad news that the ship had struck rocks a few miles downstream from Wobik and all aboard had perished. He pretended amazement that news of the disaster had not reached them in Kébec, for it had happened some time ago.
• • •
Many months after his return, silent Elphège suddenly spoke at the evening meal, his voice croaking with misuse. He said only that someday he would revenge himself on the Iroquois and their masters, the English. Later that winter during a rest from a long morning of girdling trees Elphège told René that Iroquois women had severed Monsieur Trépagny’s leg tendons, then had sewed him up tightly, closed every orifice of his body—ears, eyes, nostrils, mouth, anus and penis—and that after two or three days Monsieur Trépagny had swelled like a thundercloud and burst.
“Don’t tell Maman,” he said. “She would suffer.”
But René thought Mari would not suffer. Still, he could not bring himself to tell her that Trépagny had died so painfully, so distressed in his tender parts.
• • •
René paddled one day down to Wobik with Theotiste, who was already old enough to march in the militia and receive Captain Bouchard’s harangues on slinking, gliding Indian warfare, although he had learned more at Odanak among the fighting men than Captain Bouchard would ever know. Now he wanted to see the sights of Kébec and Trois-Rivières and would take passage on the next downriver ship. After that, he said, he would throw in with the conglomerate Mi’kmaq, Abenaki, Sokoki, Cowasucks, Penobscots, Androscoggins, Missisquois and a dozen other tribal refugees at Odanak, which the French called St. François. René was sorry to see him go as workmen were scarce and expensive. If he could not do the labor himself it would not be done.
After Theotiste’s ship left he went into Captain Bouchard’s familiar office. The aging captain had news for René.
“A very good doctor from France now in Kébec and who is already renowned takes an interest in the plants of our forests. He collects information from the savages on their use. He has sent a letter to me asking if Mari would meet with him. If she would show him the curing plants that grow hereabouts he will gladly pay her. How much, I do not know, but he suggested it.”
“Who is he?” asked Rene. “Will he come to us?”
Captain Bouchard consulted his letters. “Michel Sarrazine. You understand, Mari’s fame in curing the sick and injured has reached as far as Kébec. We are not so pitiful here in Wobik as some think. Although she is only a Micmac Indan.”
• • •
The doctor was a small man with a high forehead. Wigless, his dark hair receded in front but waved down to his shoulders, his full red lips curled in a dimpled smile. Monsieur Bouchard wondered why he did not wear a wig and tried to bring him into a discussion of books and ideas, to take his measure; was he a deep-dyed conservative, or a pioneer freethinker exploring novel cures? But Dr. Sarrazine, though polite, said his time was limited and he wished to see Mari as soon as possible. He carried a linen bag containing a notebook, cardboard stiffeners and a roll of drying papers. He had a packet of French needles for Mari. Monsieur Bouchard loaned him his only horse and, rather sadly, watched him ride west. Dr. Sarrazine returned in ten days, humming and smiling, his linen bag bulging with wild vegetable specimens, some of which he would send to the Jardin des Plantes. Bouchard, still longing for bookish conversation, watched the learned man board the ship to Kébec. The doctor turned, smiled his engaging smile and saluted. Bouchard returned the gesture and went back into his office.
• • •
The smoke-thickened years passed, and Crown corvée work gangs widened the west trail to a road. More settlers came into the forest. Every morning the sound of distant and near chopping annoyed woodpeckers who imagined rivals, then, feeling outnumbered, fled to wilder parts. The trees groaned and fell, men planted maize between the stumps. The deer and moose retreated, the wolves followed them north. In its own way the forest was swallowing René Sel, its destroyer. The forest was always in front of him. He was powerless to stop chipping at it, but the vigor of multiple sprouts from stumps and still-living roots grew in his face, the rise and fall of his ax almost a continuous circular motion. There seemed always more and more trees on the horizon. He suffered the knowledge that his countless ax blows were nothing against the endless extent of the earth’s spiky forest crown.
• • •
One spring Mari fell ill, complaining little but too confused to manage the household. She became thin, the round kind face giving way to the shape of the skull beneath; she saw visions and forgot everything said to her, forgot her children, forgot René, had to be tied in a chair to keep her from the river. For a year Renardette cared for her, but one bright May morning Mari answered her long-dead sisters, who called her as owls call.
“Those sister say ‘come.’ ” In two hours she had joined them.
René could not understand it. It was well known that Mi’kmaq lived long, long lives and remained strong until the last, and Mari was not old. It was the bitterest loss.
• • •
“It is only fitting,” said Renardette to René when a week had passed, “that we should marry.” René shook his head, picked up the ax and walked out to the woodlot. Renardette, barely an adult, had become be
er-swollen, imperious and hot-tempered, always smarting from imagined insults. She would not forget this one.
• • •
Ends come to everyone, even woodcutters. All his life René was a défricheur, un bûcheron or, as the ancient book put it, “a woodsman, a forester, a forest owner; an ax owner, a feller of trees, a woodcutter, a user of the ax. He cuts with an ax; he fells trees—cuts them, tops them, strips them, splits them, stacks them.” His life was spent in severe toil, stinging sweat running in his eyes, bitten by insects of the hot woods, the callused hands shaping into a permanent curl to fit ax handles, the bruises and blood, the constant smoke of burning trees, the pain of unremitting labor, the awkward saw, treacherous saplings used as pry bars, fitting new handles on broken spades and the everlasting lifting of great vicious tree trunks.
But Achille, his eleven-year-old son, found him dead on his knees in the forest, his knotted hands clenched on the ax handle, the bit sunk into a cedar, René dead at forty from a chop to his neck. A sharp scalping knife had been set above and parallel with his eyebrows and drawn around the circumference of his head, the scalp peeled off and carried away to be redeemed for the bounty. He was, until the end, a skillful woodsman, his life and body shaped to the pleasure of the ax. And so his sons and grandsons after him.
II
“. . . helplessly they stare at his tracks”
Zhang Ji (768–830)
1693–1727
8
Forgeron
Duquet had escaped Trépagny, but what next? Gripping the sapling he had cut for a stick, his remaining teeth burning in his mouth, coughing and with a stitch in his side, he followed the river west until dark. Before full light he was on his way again, swallowing whole the chunks of fish pudding he had hidden in his jacket the night before. He drank river water and plunged on. He followed the river from the ridge above in case Trépagny and that fool Sel came nosing after him. The higher ground was rough and gullied. He could see crashing water below, trees half in the water, sodden heads thrashing in the current. Hunger drove him back to the bank, where he knotted the neck and sleeves of his shirt and held it sidewise underwater, the open end inviting fish in. He had enough success to get nourishment, sucking the juice from the raw flesh as a spider with an insect. After eight days, scratched and filthy, lost in the wild, but driven by an inchoate need, he reached another river flowing down from the north. To the northwest were rich beaver grounds, the Indians who trapped the beaver and the traders who transported the pelts down the river. He began his long walk.