Barkskins. Annie Proulx

as Dieudonné, a fisherman’s son who returned again and again for his pleasure. She could not evade him. He seemed to live in the underbrush near their wikuom. He was only a boy, a fisherman boy, with a red chapped face and eyes flicking as though he feared the priest was near. He was strong from hauling nets and pulling oars. At first she loathed him, but after some weeks he became affectionate and, although he was two years younger, she began to return the sentiment. He said he wished they could marry and would press the matter on his parents when he was older.

      When the brothers came back from the St. John her condition was obvious. No one mentioned it. But the next day Elphège looked at her in silence for a long time. He waited. And she told him how it was. By then Dieudonné was weeks dead along with his father and uncle and several other Acadians, for their fishing boats all had been caught in a concentrated snarl of storm that strewed the shore with broken boats. She thought of Dieudonné in the grip of the relentless sea as she had been in his grip. The result of the dead boy’s life had been Auguste.

      In their childhood days in the forest, Noë thought, none of them had imagined they would come here to the ocean’s edge, far from René and Mari’s house. But they were here. She had not thought to have a child, but now there was Auguste. All this had happened because Theotiste and Elphège had brought them to Mi’kma’ki, the land of memory.

       25

       sense of property

      Their great change had come about because of Renardette, who caused their lives to become as different as those of strange people. For years at René’s old place, heavy drinkers from Wobik lurched out of the trees calling for Renardette. One, “Démon” Meillard, appeared often and Renardette went into the woods with him. The day after René died, Renardette rushed to Wobik, to Meillard, a widower whose taste for spirits matched hers.

      Achille, Noë and Zoë stayed on alone at the house in the ever-larger clearing. Achille trapped fish and hunted, cut firewood as had René, and made hardwood potash. He sold this stuff to the traveling merchant who came with his wagon every month or two in the warm season. Noë and Zoë gathered berries, cowslips, fiddlehead ferns in spring, nuts, calamus root, mayapples, sassafras and many barks for the medicines they had learned from their mother. They made maple syrup. They had a garden but it was small and weed-choked for they had adopted Mari’s distaste for cultivation. A few pumpkins sometimes matured in the fireweed. Noë made rather awkward willow baskets, which Achille sold to the potash man. Zoë milked and tended the cow. There had been two cows but one died the month after René was killed, perhaps, thought Zoë, out of sympathy so that René’s spirit might be comforted by a familiar cow spirit.

      Their lives were marred by unwanted visits from swill-wrecked Renardette and her paramour. It was unclear at first why the couple kept returning to René’s old house, but they came often, lugging demijohns of spirit, which they urged on Achille. Renardette swaggered into the house looking at each spoon, each wooden cup. Often she would examine a pot or a cloth and say, “Well, that’s mine!” Noë would wrest the object from her.

      “Nothing in this house is yours. There is nothing here for you.”

      “This house is mine,” said Renardette. “René gave it to me. He said, ‘When I am gone, Renardette, you have this house.’”

      “What lies!” cried Zoë.

      “Go away!” said Noë, swishing the broom.

      Achille began to think the drunkards wanted René’s house and property and would be pleased to murder all of them to get it. He refused drinks from their jug, which he knew would make him insensible and give them the opportunity to butcher him and his sisters and blame the deaths on bounty killers. He slowly came to the belief that they were the ones who had murdered René.

      Tales of the alcoholic couple drifted far east to the ears of Elphège and Theotiste along with the rumors that they planned to kill Achille and the twins and seize the property. They heard of Renardette’s claim that the house belonged to her.

      “They are white people and they think they can seize it,” Elphège said to Theotiste.

      “They will likely get it.”

      Elphège was troubled by the idea of inherited property. Was the house René’s to give? Was it even Trépagny’s? All this was French, French ideas, French ways. English ways, English words, French words. Invaders’ ways.

      The older brothers had lived for some years at Odanak, the Indian village of Abenaki, Mi’kmaq and mixed tribes, fighting for the French and raiding New England settlements for bounty captives. Once warring enemies, they banded together, lamenting the submergence of their ancestral lands under a flood of white settlers.

      At Odanak, Theotiste had married and fathered a son, who died of measles in his third year, two days after the mother succumbed to the same burning illness. Elphège was secretive about women and even wary because of his long infatuation with the youngest wife of Sosep, an elderly sagmaw.

      Theotiste came to his brother one day. Elphège was sitting near the river shaping a handle for a crooked knife. “Brother,” he said, “I have thought much of our younger brother and sisters. Achille, Noë and Zoë. I think we should get them.”

      “Ho,” said Elphège. “Get them? Live with them here as kin? In Odanak? Or make a visit to them?”

      “No. I wish for us to be united. I wish them to be with us, wherever we go. They are part of our band. More and more I do not care to stay longer in Odanak.”

      Elphège said nothing and after a long silence Theotiste said, “Perhaps this is not a very good idea.”

      Elphège looked at him. “Brother, you have ever put forward good ideas. I will think about what you say.” After a little while he said, “Maybe it is good if we go to that place of our mother.”

      Theotiste said, “Here we are just some Indians. There we will be Mi’kmaw people.”

      Elphège was silent for a long time. He had no taste for whitemen’s “conversation.”

      “René was a good man,” he said at last.

      “He was. Do you recall that winter when we gave him a snake and showed him how to play snow snakes and he didn’t want to stop at dusk?”

      “Yes. Trépagny threw his snake in the fire.”

      “Small matter, that was only a stick. Maman carved him a better one. It could slide far. I remember that well.” He looked at the river. “The children of one mother should be together. We have the same blood.” Elphège nodded and bent over his work.

      Several days later Theotiste said more. “First it would be good to bring them here to Odanak. And then go with them to our mother’s country and make a home there. There are Mi’kmaw here at Odanak who would come with us. Sosep wishes to return. We could find wives. I was happy when my wife was with me.”

      “Yes, a Mi’kmaw woman. But if our sisters and brother come with us, will they abandon René’s house?”

      “It is only a white man’s house.”

      “Our mother’s thoughts were always in her childhood country. She called it ‘the happy land.’ It is our place more than Odanak. Even though Sosep says it has changed greatly and there are many troubles.”

      “It will be good. I dreamed it will be good.”

      Elphège shifted to his brother’s view and said, “Let us go then, first to René’s house, then to Mi’kma’ki.”

      They reached Wobik, much grown, with many paths twisting this way and that. The woodland, which had once wrapped around the village, now began nearly a mile from the most distant house.

      They