Jinot Sel—Minnie Boss

Jinot Sel and Minnie Boss’s relationship begins in the Boss household, where friendship and practical tenderness develop into marriage and family life. Their shared years bring love and children, but also the death of their son Amboise, a widening separation between husband and wife, and a cholera outbreak that kills Minnie and their younger twins. The relationship’s course is marked by care that can briefly bridge suffering, and grief that ultimately leaves Jinot and Aaron alone.

Friendship and Courtship

Jinot becomes a friend of Hugh Boss, the hammerman, and spends Saturday evenings at the Boss family’s large cabin, a mile from the factory, playing checkers. He grows fond of the children, among them Minnie, the eldest, and her many younger siblings. Minnie lives with scoliosis and undergoes monthly stretching treatments that leave her exhausted. Jinot understands the pain of such treatment and sometimes reads aloud to her as she rests on the kitchen daybed. His sympathy becomes a source of closeness: Minnie’s affection for him grows, and Hugh notices it, though for a time the family says nothing.

When Minnie’s doctor says her condition has improved enough to lengthen the interval between treatments, the family celebrates. Hugh gives her money for a dress, and she appears in blue silk. Soon afterward, Hugh speaks privately with Jinot, telling him that Minnie likes him. Jinot answers that he likes her too. Hugh accepts the match, and a month later Jinot and Minnie marry in the front room of the Boss house. During the brief ceremony, they can hear men struggling to raise logs for the cabin being built for them in a corner of Hugh’s pasture. Minnie wears the blue silk dress; the new home and the sounds of its construction make their union part of the household’s ordinary, practical life.

Marriage and Family

The birth of twin boys, Amboise and Aaron, gives Jinot a sense that he has become like other men and is beginning to understand truths that once seemed mysterious. The children resemble Kuntaw more than Hugh Boss. Their arrival makes family life feel newly settled, although the narrative signals that this security will not last.

Minnie remains anxious about the boys’ health because of her own scoliosis. She takes them to the doctor when they begin walking, but he finds no sign of the condition and advises continued observation. Minnie’s own posture, however, continues to worsen: childbearing does not cure her, and she bends further to the left. Her physical suffering is part of the marriage’s background well before its later losses, and her experience of illness shapes her vigilance as a mother.

Amboise’s Death and Their Separation

When the twins are six, an icy slope becomes the site of a fatal accident. A neighbor boy has made the slide more slippery; on a later ride, Amboise, Aaron, and the boy are carried into a stand of spruce. Minnie runs out after hearing them. She finds Aaron hurt but moving toward her, while Amboise is unresponsive. A dry stick left among the trees during the children’s summer games has caused the fatal wound. The play landscape of the spruce passages and winter slide, previously a shared neighborhood refuge, becomes inseparable from the loss.

Jinot is away with Mr. Bone and does not learn of Amboise’s death until late that evening, after the coach returns. Minnie and Aaron have already settled into a stunned calm. Jinot walks through the night, overcome at intervals by grief, and returns shortly before dawn. He and Minnie sit together at the blue-painted kitchen table with their hands locked; neither needs to explain what cannot be said. For a time, their physical closeness gives grief a shared form, even as the household remains somber.

The loss also changes the way each parent relates to the surviving children. Minnie vows that there will be no more children, whom she regards as too fragile and precious to risk further heartbreak. Amboise had been especially beloved by Jinot because he seemed to him a resurrection of his burned brother, and Jinot recognizes with guilt that he had given Aaron less affection. He resolves to make up for it, and he and Minnie thereafter favor Aaron with love and gifts.

But the marriage does not recover its earlier intimacy. Minnie tells Jinot that she will never sleep with him again; he feels, without confronting her, that she blames him for Amboise’s death. He withdraws to the back porch and sleeps on a worn bison robe he had used on the Gatineau, in summer and winter. The children can visit him, but he is no longer the affectionate, playful father he had been. His remoteness, except toward Aaron, leaves him slow to notice Minnie’s worsening condition.

Illness, Cholera, and Aftermath

Over the two years after Amboise’s death, Minnie becomes gaunt as her spine twists further, and she suffers from a persistent cough. Domestic life deteriorates alongside her health. Jinot makes a large kettle of pease porridge once a week for the children, then hires Mrs. Joyful Woodlawn, a neighboring widow, to help feed the boys and care for Minnie. A doctor other than the one who treated Minnie’s scoliosis diagnoses advanced consumption and offers little hope of recovery. Jinot refuses the proposed bleeding treatment and wishes he could find a Mi’kmaw healer of the kind he has heard his great-great-grandmother was.

The next catastrophe arrives through the water Mrs. Woodlawn brings to the Sel household. She becomes violently ill after drinking it, and Jinot recognizes cholera, which has been spreading from New York into smaller towns. He runs to Minnie, but she is already gravely sick. Lewie and Lancey, the younger twins, die as Jinot watches. Aaron survives: he has been in the woodshed reading a book of tales, has eaten leftover ham fat, and has not drunk Mrs. Woodlawn’s water.

Jinot takes Aaron to Hugh Boss and tells him that cholera has taken the others, leaving only himself and Aaron. Hugh breaks down. His own household has also been exposed to the water: Mrs. Boss and the three youngest children die that same day, while Hugh survives. The deaths thus strike both the family into which Jinot married and the family he formed with Minnie, collapsing their shared domestic world in a single outbreak.

In the weeks after the funerals, Jinot and Hugh hate each other for months. They meet again in the cemetery to erect seven freshly cut stones, and grief finally reconciles them. The stones bear only names, dates, and the word cholera. Minnie’s death ends Jinot’s marriage not through a return to closeness but after years in which bereavement and illness have already separated them. Jinot is left with Aaron, the child he had resolved to love more fully, while the cemetery memorials preserve the scale of the loss in stark, minimal form.