The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (42 page)

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.”