The Land God Gave to Cain

by Innes, Hammond;

  It was the first-aid box she’d found, and though all the bandages had gone from it and the morphia had been used, there was still some lint and gauze left and a bottle of antiseptic. With these, and strips torn from a clean vest, she bandaged Laroche’s wounds, whilst Darcy and I brought the radio set up close to the fire. I cranked the handle of the generator, whilst he kept his fingers on the leads, but there was no sign of life. “It’s the damp,” I said.

  “Sure it’s the damp.”

  “It’ll be all right when it’s had time to dry out.”

  “Think so?” He stared at me. “It’ll dry outside. But it’s the inside we got to dry. Shut up in that tin box the works will just steam like they were in the tropics. Course, if you happen to have a screwdriver on you so that we can open it up—?”

  “No, I haven’t got a screwdriver,” I said.

  He laughed. “I didn’t think you had.” He peered morosely at the generator. “Looks to me like it needs a whole work bench full of tools the condition it’s got into; certainly we’d need a spanner for those nuts.”

  “Isn’t that water ready yet?” Paule asked.

  Darcy lifted the lid of the smoke-blackened kettle he’d filled with snow and hung over the fire. “Just coming up,” he said.

  “If we could find an old tin or something—I want to get him warm.” She had got Laroche’s boots off and was pulling her own down sleeping-bag up over his legs.

  Darcy got to his feet. “I’ll see what I can find. There’ll be something around here that we can use.”

  I was on the point of following him, but Paule stopped me. “Help me lift him, please.”

  Between us we got Laroche into the sleeping-bag, and when it was done, she sat back on her haunches and stared at the white, bloodless face. “Ian—what are we to do?” She was suddenly looking at me, her small face set in a tragic mask. “I couldn’t help myself,” she murmured. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  There was nothing I could say that would help her and I turned away and stared into the hot heart of the fire. We had warmth at least—so long as we had the energy to cut wood and keep the fire going. But it wouldn’t last. She knew that. Gradually we’d weaken through lack of food the way her father had and then the end would come in a blizzard of snow or in the cold of the night. I thought of Dumaine then and what he’d gone through. But he’d got out in the end and so had Pierre Laroche. There wasn’t much chance for us. “Maybe we’ll get the radio working,” I said.

  But she didn’t believe that either and she squatted there, quite still, watching Darcy picking over the pitiful remains of her father’s last camp like a tramp going over a refuse heap. “I shall stay here,” she said at last in a small, tight voice. “Whatever happens I shall stay with him.”

  “Even though he left your father to die?” I didn’t look at her as I said that.

  “Yes—even though he killed him,” she breathed. “There is nothing else for me now.” And after a moment she asked, “Do you think you and Ray could get back to the Tote Road—just the two of you?”

  “We could try.” And I knew as I said it that I’d accepted the fact that she wouldn’t be coming with us.

  “If you started at dawn to-morrow … Per’aps, if the weather is good, you will make it in less time.” But she said it without conviction. She was thinking of the muskeg and the weight of the canoe which we should have to carry if we were to cross those open stretches of water. “You must help him as much as you can.” Her hand touched mine. “Ray is very tired, though he tries to hide it. He is not a young man like you, Ian.” And she added,” I am not thinking of myself, or of Albert. For us, this is the end. But I would like to be sure that you two will get out alive. The knowledge that you will both be safe will make it—easier for me.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  She gave my hand a little squeeze. “I wish my father had known you.” She smiled, a barely perceptible movement of the lips that left her eyes still empty. She let go my hand then and went to her pack and took out a small tin of Bovril and a metal flask.

  She was mixing the hot drink in her own tin mug when Darcy returned. “This do you?” he said, and placed a rusted oil can beside her. She nodded and then she was bending over Laroche, lifting his head and trying to force a little of the hot liquid between his teeth.

  Darcy dropped wearily on to the ground beside me. “He buried Baird a little way back amongst the rocks,” he said quietly, leaning his head close to mine. “I just seen the grave.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Over there.” He nodded towards the edge of the beach where boulders were piled against the rock of the shore. “I guess he was too weak to dig a hole, or else the ground was frozen. He just heaped some rocks over the body and tied two sticks together to form a cross.” He hesitated, and then he opened his hand to show a piece of stone the size of a pigeon’s egg lying in the palm. It was grey with grit, but where he’d rubbed it clean there was a dull gold gleam to it. “Know what that is?”

  I opened my mouth to answer him, but the word seemed to stick in my throat, for this surely was evidence of the cause of that old tragedy. And then I was suddenly remembering that first meeting with Laroche, when McGovern had been so taken aback by my certainty that the plane had crashed at Lake of the Lion. “I found that oil can on top of the grave. It had been filled with these—like some pagan offering to the dead.” Darcy’s voice trembled slightly, but whether it was anger or fear I wasn’t certain. “Feel the weight of it,” he said, and dropped it into my hand.

  The cold touch of that fragment made me shiver, and I turned without thinking to stare out across the dark surface of the lake to the towering mass of the Lion Rock. In my mind I saw the rusted can on the grave more vividly than if I had discovered it there for myself, and I knew then that the Indian had been right. I hated this place and should always hate it.

  “I can’t get him to swallow any of it,” Paule said. She had laid Laroche’s head back on the pillow of her sweater and was squatting there, disconsolate, with the steaming mug in her hand.

  “Then drink it yourself,” Darcy said harshly. And he added under his breath: “The bastard deserves to die anyway.”

  She heard him and the shock of his words seemed to stun her.

  He took the fragment from my hand and passed it to her. “After all the years you’ve spent prospecting, I guess you know more about minerals than I do,” he said. “Tell me what that is.”

  She stared at the fragment as it lay in her hand, and then a look came into her eyes that I knew was fear. She was reacting to it the way I had. “It’s gold,” she said in a small, tight voice.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought it was.” And he told her how he had found it.

  She turned her head slowly and stared towards the boulder-strewn edge of the lake. “Oh, no,” she whispered. And then she was staring at us, and the fear that had suddenly taken hold of her was there in her eyes and in the trembling of the hand that held the nugget. “Oh, no,” she said again, and she got slowly to her feet and went down to the water’s edge, her body stooped as she searched along the frozen margin.

  In a few moments she came back with four small nuggets, which she dropped into my lap. “It’s true then,” she whispered. “This place is a …” Her voice died away and she suddenly burst into tears.

  “What’s true?” Darcy scrambled to his feet. “What’s the matter, Paule? What’s got into you?” He had his arm round her shoulders, trying to comfort her. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” she sobbed. “I’m frightened.”

  “We’re all frightened,” he said soothingly. And because she was sobbing uncontrollably, he shook her quite roughly. “Pull yourself together, girl,” he said gruffly. “We’re in enough trouble as it is without you going crazy just because we’ve discovered gold.” He pulled her hands away from her eyes. “Is that what’s upset you—that your father found what he’d been looking for all his life, and
when he’d found it, it wasn’t any good to him?”

  “It’s not the gold,” she cried desperately.

  “Then what is it?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.” Her voice was quite wild, and she broke away from him suddenly and went stumbling blindly down towards her father’s body.

  “What the devil’s got into her?” Darcy was staring after her.

  I shook my head, for a sudden, terrible thought had crossed my mind, and I didn’t dare put it into words. “I don’t know,” I muttered, and I watched her as she stood staring down at her father. She was there a long time, and then she came slowly back and sat down beside Laroche, gazing down at his ashen face, and though she didn’t say a word, I could feel the turmoil of doubt in her mind.

  “You all right, Paule?” Darcy was watching her anxiously.

  She nodded dumbly, her face wet with tears. “If only he were conscious,” she murmured at length, and her hand went up to Laroche’s head, touching the place where the hair was growing up over the wound. “If he could just speak.”

  “It’s better perhaps that he can’t.”

  She turned and looked at him then. “You don’t understand,” she whispered.

  “Don’t I?” Darcy’s voice was thick with the anger he was trying to hide. “This place is a gold mine, and that’s explanation enough for me. Ian was right.”

  “Ian?”

  “Yeah. He said all along Bert had gone crazy.”

  Her gaze went back to Laroche, and then she said to me in a voice so quiet that I barely heard her, “Do you still believe that?” And I knew she was remembering what she had said to me that night beside the camp fire when it had been so still.

  “Just try to forget about it,” Darcy told her gently. “He did what his grandfather did—and for the same reason. You’ve just got to accept it, that’s all there is to it.”

  But she shook her head. “You don’t understand,” she said again. And then she turned her stricken gaze on me. “Tell me the truth, Ian,” she pleaded. “Tell me what happened.” And when I didn’t say anything, couldn’t even meet the desperate pleading of her eyes, she cried, “For God’s sake, I must know the truth.” Her voice had risen to a note of hysteria and Darcy gripped hold of my arm. “Better leave her alone for a while,” he whispered in my ear. “She’s tired and she’s overwrought.”

  I wasn’t certain whether to leave her alone or not, but she was staring down at Laroche again and in the end I went with Darcy, for I knew there was nothing I could do to help her. “Where did he bury Baird?” I asked him.

  “Over there.” He nodded to a group of rocks half-way between the camp site and the sunken aircraft. And when I started towards it, he called to me to wait. “Give me a hand and we’ll take Briffe’s body up there and bury it beside him.”

  But I was already moving down along the lake shore. “Later,” I said. I had to see that grave. I had to be certain what had happened now. But when I reached the place it told me nothing. The grave was just a mound of rocks the length of a man, covered over with grey silt. Two jackpine branches tied with wire served as a cross. “I wonder when he died,” I said as Darcy joined me.

  “Does it matter?”

  “I don’t know,” I murmured. “But Laroche was convinced he was dead when he left him. I’m quite certain of that.”

  “Well, he was probably killed in the crash.”

  But I shook my head. ‘No. Nobody was even injured when the plane crashed. Laroche admitted that to me.” I was thinking of that oil can full of nuggets. It was Briffe who had placed that there. “I—I think we ought to have a look at the body,” I said.

  “Good God! Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I murmured uncertainly. “It might tell us something.” I didn’t dare tell him what I expected to find, but much as I disliked the thought of disturbing the grave I knew suddenly that I had to see for myself how Baird had died, and I went down on my knees and began pulling the silt and boulders away with my hands.

  “Goddammit!” Darcy’s hand seized hold of my shoulder. “What’s got into you? Can’t you let the man rest in peace?”

  “Uncovering him won’t do him any harm now,” I said, tearing myself free of his hand. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” I added almost savagely to cover my own nervousness, for I didn’t like it any more than he did. But there was no other way I could discover what had happened, and for Paule’s sake I had to discover that.

  My urgency must have communicated itself to Darcy, for he didn’t try to stop me after that, and in the end he got down beside me and helped to shift the pile of stones. And when we had finally uncovered the upper part of the body, we stayed for a long time on our knees without moving or saying anything, for the whole side of the man’s face had been laid bare.

  “An axe did that,” Darcy said at length, and I nodded. But though it was what I’d feared, I hadn’t been prepared for such a ghastly wound. The right ear was gone completely and the cheek had been laid open to the bone, so that the teeth showed white through the curled and vitiated flesh. And yet it hadn’t killed him outright, for pieces of gauze still adhered to the wound, where it had been bandaged, and the face, like Briffe’s, was hollowed out by privation and suffering. The beard was still black, almost luxuriant in growth, so that he looked like the wax image of some crucified apostle.

  “That settles it,” Darcy said thickly. “I’ve made up my mind. We start back to-morrow, and we leave him here.” He meant Laroche, of course, but he couldn’t bring himself to mention his name, and I wondered whether to tell him what was in my mind. “Well, say something, can’t you?” he cried angrily. “Do you think I’m wrong to leave a man to die—a man who could do a thing like this?”

  I had uncovered Baird’s right hand then, the wrist all shattered and a gritty bandage covering the wound where some fingers were missing. And below the hand was the top of a canvas bag. “Paule won’t go,” I said, and I wrenched the bag out from under the stones that covered it. It was an ordinary canvas tool bag and it was full of those dull-grey pebbles that were so heavy and metallic to the touch. The body itself was less terrible to me then than the sight of that canvas bag, and as I stared at it, appalled, I heard Darcy, behind me, say, “How do you know she won’t go?” And I knew he hadn’t understood its significance.

  “She told me—just now. She’s staying with Laroche.” I said it impatiently, for my mind was on that bag full of nuggets so carefully buried with the body—like a sacrificial offering. And there was that tin can full of them that Darcy had found on the grave. The man who had buried Baird had given to the dead all the wealth he’d picked up; a gesture of abnegation, a madman’s attempt to purchase absolution? “My God!” I thought to myself. The irony of it, to want it all for himself and then to die alone in the midst of it!

  Darcy plucked at my arm. “I’ll go and talk to her,” he said.

  “It won’t do any good.”

  “No? Then I’ll bring her here. You think she’ll want to stay with the man when she’s seen what he’s done.” He had got to his feet.

  “Wait,” I said. “You can’t show her this.” I glanced down at the dead man’s face and then at the bloodied hand, remembering suddenly that Briffe’s hand had been injured, too. “And if you did,” I said, “she still wouldn’t change her mind.” I looked up at him then. “Laroche didn’t do this,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was Briffe who went berserk.”

  “Briffe?” He stared at me as though I’d gone crazy.

  I nodded, for now that I’d said it, I knew it was true; I could see how it all fitted in—the wound on Laroche’s head, his decision to trek out on his own. And no wonder he’d been convinced that Baird was dead. How could he have expected any man to live with his head cut open like that? And then his determination that nobody should find the place, that the search should be abandoned and Briffe given up for dead. He’d been prepared to go to almost any lengths to save Paule from the truth.
>
  But even when I’d explained all this to Darcy, he didn’t seem to grasp it. “I just can’t believe it,” he muttered.

  “Then what about this?” I said and thrust the canvas bag at him. “And the can full of them you found on the grave. It was Briffe who buried Baird, not Laroche.” And I added, “You know the sort of man he was—you said it to Paule just now. He’d spent all his life prospecting, and this was one of the places he’d always wanted to find. She told me so herself the other night. Well,” I said, “he found it.” And in my mind I could picture the scene as it must have been when the three of them stood on the lake shore here and Briffe held that first nugget of gold in his hand.

  “I still can’t believe it—her own father.”

  “If we ever get out alive,” I said, remembering now that first day in Labrador, “you go and talk to McGovern. I think he knows what really happened. I think Laroche told him.”

  He was silent a long time then. Finally, he said, “Well, see you don’t let Paule have any idea what’s in your mind. It’d just about kill her.” And when I didn’t answer, he seized my elbow in an urgent grip. “Do you hear me, Ian? You may be right. You may not. But Laroche is going to die here anyway. She mustn’t know.”

  “She knows already,” I told him. “She knew the instant you handed her the nugget.”

  He looked at me a moment, and then he nodded. “Yeah, I guess so,” he murmured unhappily, and he crossed himself. “It’s a terrible thing,” he breathed. And as I started to cover Baird’s body again, he said, “We’ll have to bury him—up here beside Baird.” And then he added, with sudden decision,” But we leave in the morning. You understand? Whatever Paule decides, we leave in the morning. We got to.”

  III

  That Paule now knew the truth was obvious as soon as Darcy told her we would be leaving in the morning. “We’ll make him as comfortable as possible,” he said, nodding to Laroche, “and then the three of us, travelling light—”