I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ScHoolboy Q “Collard Greens” (2013).

NPR opened their summer preview show with two rap songs.  This was the second.  The bass line is very neat—propulsive and continuous and there’s this little keyboard sprinkling across the top.  This is West Coast rap style and I like the music quiet a bit.

The rapping is unusual—some amusing voices and nonsense words, but I admit I didn’t really get into it until about half way through when the rapper (ScHoolboy Q or guest Kendrick Lamar I don’t know) comes in with an unusual-sounding voice—sped up and goofy.  And he does one of my favorite rap things—singing really fast in a high voice then ending with a low word (Gawd).

The song feels atmospheric, although overall, I’m not a fan.  The DJ who introduced the song says that he is part of the “supergroup” Black Hippy, along Ab-Soul, Jay Rock and Kendrick Lamar.  She describes ScHoolboy Q as the darkest of the bunch, which makes me think I should check out the rest to see what other kinds of things they do.  [I did, and I didn’t like them–lyrically they are remedial at best].

[READ: June 18, 2013] “Rough Deeds”

This story is set in New France, (also known as Canada).  Duquet is a timberman, seeking his fortune by amassing the largest area of woods to be exported both to the Americas and back to Europe.   He connected with a man named Dred-Peacock (I included him mostly for his name) who set him up with a connection in Scotland.

Duquet wasn’t exactly sure about trading with the enemy, the English, but money is money and they had lots of it and need for lots of wood.  And soon a fortune was made.

Then Dred-Peacock encouraged him to head to Maine where thousands of acres were there for the asking.  Indeed, Duquet was able to buy twenty thousand acres at 12 cents an acre.  But when he and his man Forgerson went to investigate, they found a crew cutting down trees on his property!  When he accosted them, they fled.  The youngest member of the thieving team had a limp and fell behind–which gave Duquet the opportunity to hurl his tomahawk at him, felling him instantly.

When the boy won’t talk, Duquet cuts off two of his fingers (Duquet does not mess around) and the boy reveals that he works for McBogle.  The boy already had an infected leg and Duquet had no intention of healing him, so he allowed the boy to die, ultimately killing him and burning his body in McBogle’s makeshift mill.

While Duquet was doing this, Forgerson was off scouting a new way to get the timber to the mill and finding people to work with them.  When he returned, he wondered where the boy had gone, but said nothing.

And there were no consequence for Duquet.

Soon Duquet was living in Boston as a different man,  he was one of the largest loggers in the country, perhaps even bigger than McBogle.  Duquet had still never met McBogle but he was ready to go into partnership with the man.  He arranged for himself, Forgerson and Dred-Peacock to track down McBogle (who undoubtedly had a host of men waiting to attack any interlopers) and talk to him.  But then a few things changed and Duquet was forced to track him down by himself.

Which he does–across many many miles of terrain.  He followed tenuous paths until he came across McBogle’s mill.  And indeed it was as guarded as he feared.  But then he sees McBogle himself, and he thinks the man looks familiar.  And McBogle recognizes him immediately.

McBogle is not quite wiling to make the deal that Duquet hoped.  For reasons that become very clear very quickly.  Proulx really made the harsh landscape come to life, and I enjoyed the way she had Duquet try his hand at the hated English language.

  I wouldn’t want to read a whole novel about the man, but this was a good, violent short story.