Madawaska, Maine

A whistle cut the steam.  The steam came from the paper mill across the river. The steam obscured the view.  The whistle seemed to pull the steam apart—for a moment, workers hastening from their shift were visible.  Then the steam closed back down again, and the men were gone. 

 

            “Like Arnold’s troop,” the lawyer said, referring to the Revolutionary War general and later traitor, “disappearing in the muskeag of Quebec.”  He was sixty-ish, short, burly, gray.  He had not spoken English until he was twelve, and the French-Canadian accent was a thin and a sweet syrup on the other man’s ear. 

 

The lawyer stood beside the salesman at the back window of his law office.  The two men had been acquaintances for a dozen years; they were content with quiet.  The view out the window was down, across a sloping clutter of slap-dash houses to a flat bottom beside the river.  Along that river bottom, on this side of the river, ran the trains. A logging train ran just then, slowly, eastward: car after car with the thick ends of the trees fore and aft, and the thin ends in the middle.  Beyond the tracks flowed the river.  In that late afternoon light, the river was a silver sheen a hundred yards wide, shallow, slow, interrupted now and then by curls of old pilings where once there had been piers.  The river’s flow was to the men’s right, eastward, the same direction as the logs, always eastward, always, that is, since this clench–jaw countryside had been neighbored. 

 

In the view, just to the left, was the bridge across the river, an engineering marvel of the 1930s, across which commerce ran and on the opposite side of which stood the paper mill.  Steam, lit white by the low slant of the sun, continued to obscure the façade of the mill when the wind stayed still for a moment.  But it was cold that autumn day, a harbinger, and the wind was rarely still.  All walkers wore their light-level, winter, outer coats. 

 

The lawyer continued, gesturing at the departing workers, “Used to be they didn’t know if they belonged to the King or to Congress.  Used to be no one quite knew: were we French or English?”

 

The salesman, also sixty-ish, was burly and gray, too.  The two of them had concluded their business—one bought, one sold.  Stacks of imposing law books were on shelves and on the floor.  Most of the books were out-of-date, but their weightiness impressed the lawyer’s clients, and—the salesman surmised—the lawyer himself.  The presence of even their outmoded decisions and methodologies meant that the lawyer was able to fly by the seat of his pants, as he had done successfully through thirty years. 

 

The salesman always tempted the lawyer with up-to-date sets of those books, or even, nowadays, with electronic versions of the same.  But the lawyer always demurred; he liked seat-pant flying.  It’s how he progressed.  He bought off-hand things, a small book here or there, for the purpose—again the salesman surmised—of keeping this salesman stopping in when he was on one of his infrequent trips, seeing lawyers along the river bottom. 

 

Now that the selling was done, the two men were doing what they preferred, really, to do.  They were reflecting slowly about why they were there. 

 

“So the French settlers, the Acadians, they were driven out again from around here and they squatted in the forests over there.”  The lawyer pointed to the soft slopes that reached into the distance, across the river.  “And then after the war, when the loyalists were driven away, they needed to go somewhere, so they came here.  And, since they were loyalists, they appealed to the King, and he granted them legal title, and they drove the Acadians away all over again.” 

 

The salesman was struck by the reference to “the war.”  It was the Revolution, here, in Acadia, which still counted. 

 

“My people were Acadians, mostly closer to Quebec.  We married our women to the English, in the winter.”  He pointed at the river.  “That’s how they communicated then.  The river froze in the winter, and you walked down the river fifty miles and found an Englishman to marry your daughter.  So we became farmers then, up around Saint Agathe.”

 

“So you were with the King.”

 

“No one knew where the border was, both sides of the river.  And there was no way to get south, really south, to America.  The river took you to the sea, but that wasn’t America.  Nothing but forest between here and even Bangor, which didn’t exist then.  Maybe a horse track, or a trapper.  That’s why Arnold had such a bad time.”

 

The men returned from the window to the chairs they had occupied earlier and sat down.  After a moment, the salesman asked, “I’ve always wanted to know: why the law?”

 

The lawyer thought for a minute.  He looked at the sagging shelves of statutes and their endless interpretation by the courts.  “Tales in my family, maybe.  From the early years, maybe the late 1800s, the 1920s.  Men would come up from America, from the government.  We didn’t know, were they here to steal our land?  What did they want?  We’ve always been stand-offish.”  The lawyer paused.  “Maybe it was that.  Help the people to keep their land.” 

 

There was silence in the room.  After a bit, the salesman picked up his bag and placed it on his lap.  “I should go.”

 

The lawyer chuckled quietly.  “I like to think I might retire sometime.  Probably never will.”  He looked at the salesman.  “I’d like to know more about the history, though, that’s what I’d like.  That’s what I do on weekends.  I go around, and I ask about the history.”

 

The salesman stood.  “See you next time.”  Their hands met and shook firmly. 

 

“Stop any time.  That was some journey, that Arnold expedition. We helped his men, you know that?  We Acadians.  We hated the British.  We helped to get Arnold to Quebec, for his attack, after his men—what was left of them—came out of the forest.”

 

“And now they’re Canadians, and we’re Americans.”

 

The lawyer glanced again through the window, across the St. Johns River, at Canada.  “Well, sort of.  Sometimes.”

 

The salesman left the office and walked to where he had parked his car.  He sat down, turned the key, and tuned the radio to find news.  Most of the stations were in French, and when he found English it was Halifax calling: there had been an accident between two ships in the harbor. 

 

The American presidential election was to occur shortly; there was much of great excitement to discuss.  But the salesman took the longer view: he slid in a disc of old spirituals and drove away. 

 

 

*****

Reach me, if you like, at dikkon@dikkoneberhart.com.