The Tinsmith

by Tim Bowling

  At that point, fatigued from his journey and depressed by the atmosphere, Anson had decided that a few hours with Virgil’s Eclogues would be recondite.

  A long shriek pierced the stillness, then faded away in a choked strangle. A wildcat of some kind. Anson recalled the terrifying cries he’d heard in the swamps of the Peninsular Campaign and sat up, aware of his heartbeat; it was stronger than usual. He took his left wrist in the opposite hand. Of course it was natural that he would think of the war while on his way to see Dare for the first time since 1866, when the former slave and soldier had spent a few days at Anson’s home before heading west to make a fresh start for himself. And yet there was something in the heaviness of the air, in the fraternal tension between the Lansdowne brothers, that made him feel he’d crossed some invisible line and re-entered the past. But how could it be? He wasn’t even on American soil.

  Difficulties, the telegram had said. What difficulties, other than the approach of death, could there be after what they’d endured together, after the torn bodies they’d tried to repair? Yes, he had lent Dare money, but that was nothing to the help the man had given him at Antietam. That service had changed Anson Baird’s idea of himself, had brought him face to face with the fundamental questions of honour and justice. Yet as the long shriek rose and fell again, the word “difficulties” reeked of blood and chloroform and deceit. No war ever ends, Anson thought, seeing Odysseus, hooded and plotting, as he returned to his home ten years after the fall of Troy. But Anson was no Odysseus. Dare was not his son, there was no Penelope, no kingdom. The only parallel was the memory of death and the palpable sense of violent change. Cold sweat formed on Anson’s temples. Slowly he brought his feet down to the bare wood floor and stared at the window.

  This darkness had a weight unlike anything he’d experienced, yet it was disturbingly familiar. He didn’t want to know why, but the answer drifted to him through the thin opening between the glass and sill, one word like a light-dazed moth: Dare. Anson rubbed his eyes, could almost feel the blood slosh behind them. He stood and began to pace.

  “O mihi longae maneat pars ultima uitae, spiritus et quantam sat erit tua dicere facta!”

  But recitation was futile. The ancient language wore blood- and pus-stained dressings, and each word dropped on the cold wood like an amputated limb. Anson stopped before the window. As he stared through it, he thought the glass might shatter any moment. Out of old habit, he reached into his pocket for a bottle of opium pills, but he had not taken opium for years. The struggle to stop, for his wife’s sake, had almost killed him, but Anson had not savoured the drug in this way for a long time, not even after Elizabeth’s death, when grief so easily could have weakened his resolve.

  He remained at the window and watched the sky turn pink over a blue-black mountain range to the north. He stood until his feet ached and the cattle of the Lansdowne brothers began to low in the fields. A terrible familiarity had wrapped itself around his heart.

  Dare. It was, after all, a false name, the name of a dead farm boy that Anson had given, out of an impulse he’d never regretted, to a runaway slave fortunate enough to look white. Dare. The name dropped from Anson’s lips just like Latin, a word in a dead tongue. He wondered why the household did not wake at the sound. Anson closed his eyes as light moved swiftly over the river and marshes.

  When the air greyed outside the window and the first pips of bird-sound drifted up from below, Anson could bear it no longer. Moving quietly, he put on his coat and boots, tiptoed down the hall past the Lansdowne’s bedroom, walked softly down the stairs to the front door, and left the house. Outside, the musky smell wrapped him like a buffalo robe. Other than the intermittent lowing of cattle, bird pips, and river trickle, the pre-dawn was silent. Anson negotiated his way through the muddy field to the dew-slick gangway, walked to the edge of the wharf, and looked at the river. It was very broad, several miles across; he could see nothing but water. The agent had explained, in his boosterish manner, that millions of salmon swam right past this very landing on their way inland to spawn—a man could throw a net off the wharf and fill it in minutes during one of the big runs. And this year, he had said, a glint in his eyes, was expected to be very good indeed; there was no telling how many fish might choke the river.

  Anson stared at the water and tried to imagine so much animal energy below the surface. But it was unimaginable. The river was dark, roiling. As the minutes passed, the surface grew lighter, became a rich brown, and moved faster, judging by the branches and what sometimes seemed to be whole trees on its surface. Anson stepped back from the edge. This was no eastern river; its wildness was far beyond the ken of his experience. His resolve to find a boat and row upriver in the direction of Crescent Slough weakened.

  He looked nervously up the bank. Somewhere in that short grey distance, Dare was sleeping. The idea was no more fathomable than the idea of millions of fish pouring themselves against the river’s flow. How rarely Anson had known his friend to sleep! In fact, he couldn’t recall Dare’s face in repose—always he had been awake, taking things in, helping, moving before being asked. It had been the same during those few days after the war, when Dare, at once grateful for Anson’s friendship and restless to be on his way again, seemed never to relax. And to think of how much he had travelled since Anson had first lost news of him—a few months after Antietam, when ill health had forced Anson to resign his commission, though not before Dare was safe, as safe as a man could be while fighting a war. Anson did not even know all the places Dare had gone—south and west with the Army of the Potomac, then afterwards to Kansas, San Francisco, Victoria, and now the mouth of the Fraser River—no doubt there had been other stops along the way. Anson wondered how heavily those years of constant motion would be mapped on his friend’s face. Dare would have aged; he could not have discovered any way to stop the progression of the suns. No, not even Dare could have learned that.

  Faint voices swirled out of the grey. Anson tensed. Rapidly the voices grew louder—a harsh, guttural tongue suddenly exploded in the air. A wide, flat skiff filled with men emerged out of the half-light and drifted rapidly toward him. One man stood, hunched over, in the centre of the dark heads—like a flower with its petals torn off. Anson rallied to the panic in the voices; the shouts had turned to cries as the river hurled the skiff along the bank.

  In a moment the faces took on definition. All were upraised, open-mouthed. They belonged to yellow men, Chinese, judging by the long pigtails dangling from their dark canvas slouch hats. Briefly, and for the first time, Anson had encountered the race and its language in San Francisco, but this shock meeting on the Fraser River transcended race and speech.

  The skiff sped toward him. The faces, young and old, gap-toothed and darkly shadowed, loomed so close that Anson could attach the flung gutturals to individual mouths. The man hunched over in the centre of the skiff held a long pole and swung it toward the wharf. He shouted continuously, his lips peeled back, his hat fallen to the back of his skull and staying there by means of a string around his throat. Each time he swung the pole, the hat jumped up, as if he had a small monkey clutched to his back.

  Anson suddenly understood the reason for the terror. The tide was running so fast, and the skiff was just far enough out in the main current, that the man with the pole could not secure a landing. The end of the pole bounced futilely on the first planks of the wharf, each contact threatening to upset the man’s balance and plunge him into the river. Two of the other men grasped the pole man’s coat tails, flailing instructions with their free hands, shouting words as harsh as retches. Another man had scrambled into the stern, where he held his arms out to the east, as if to embrace the sun he didn’t expect to see again. His movements only increased the terror. Two others leapt to their feet and stepped, bent over, toward the bankside of the skiff.

  Afraid they planned to jump, Anson shouted, “No! Don’t!” and waved his arms frantically, at the same time looking around for a spot where he could plant his fee
t. To grab the pole would not be difficult, but how could he keep himself from being yanked into the river? The pole hit the wharf a few feet above him and he squatted, ready to drop backwards, his boots braced against the slightly raised crossbeam at the wharf’s edge.

  The Chinese had seen him now. A few words of English exploded out of the strange consonants and vowels, the surprising clarity and force of them almost as great as that of the skiff when Anson finally seized the pole.

  “You hold! Swing the bow around!”

  A few seconds of slack followed as the pole swung in front of Anson like a scythe. He drew in a deep breath, tightened the muscles in his thighs. In the skiff, the men who had been holding the coat tails now wrapped their arms around the pole man’s lower body. He, in turn, crouched even lower.

  With a jolt, Anson jerked forward, his arms tearing at their sockets. But his boots held firm to the raised beam. Second by second, the pole slid through his hands. He felt a stab of pain in his wrists, felt the skin of his palms tear. He lowered his head and hoped his muscles would not snap like weak rope.

  The bow turned. A thump sounded on the wharf. Anson looked up to see one of the Chinese scrambling onto the dock and reaching out his hands to the others to pull the skiff safely in. The tension in the pole decreased. Another pair of boots struck the planks. The strange words were still loud but no longer panicked. The tension decreased again. Anson’s shoulders and chest straightened. He drew several deep breaths. The familiar, enticing smell of opium engulfed him. He stared into his hands. Splinters were driven into the bloodied palms.

  English again reached his ears. The Chinese surrounded him and grinned so widely that their faces threatened to crack like vases. One man said, “Thank you. You saved us. Thank you, sir.” Another man bowed, then reached out and shook Anson’s hand in both of his. He did not appear troubled by the blood, but Anson grimaced at the contact.

  Heavy boot steps pounded across the wharf. Anson looked behind him to see Henry Lansdowne approaching, his face as sad as it had been the night before.

  To Anson’s amazement, the thin Englishman barked out a few words in Chinese. All of the men but one cringed at the sound and turned away, busying themselves with the moored skiff. The remaining man’s grin quickly vanished. He was about to speak when Henry Lansdowne held up a hand and silenced him.

  “Are you all right, doctor?” he said with genuine concern.

  Anson nodded and wiped his bloody palms on his trousers.

  “I saw what happened from the window. You’re stronger than you seem. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get here in time to help.”

  “I’m only glad that I was here myself.”

  “These damned Orientals. I don’t know why they choose to work near water when they’re so afraid of it. Not one of them knows how to swim.”

  Henry Lansdowne scowled at the remaining Chinese—Anson recognized him as the one who’d held the pole. Alone of the group, this man did not wear a pigtail, and his face was fuller, healthier; the others had the emaciated, bone-showing, and skin-slack faces of nutritional deficiency so familiar to Anson from his war years.

  “Why would you get it into your heads to travel on such a tide? You should have all been drowned or washed out to sea. Were you trying to get home to China? That’s no way to do it.”

  The lone Chinese almost jumped in his eagerness to explain. “Not our fault. He’s crazy. He’s gone crazy. Not like other white men. He used a gun!”

  Lansdowne narrowed his eyes. Briefly, he looked beyond Anson, upriver. It was an almost imperceptible glance, but the silence that followed it could not be mistaken.

  “He called us spies!” the Chinese continued. “He says we work for Owen. He’s crazy! He says he will make more cans himself!”

  Lansdowne said coldly, “He isn’t crazy. Not about that. He can make the cans, right enough. And better than you can make them too.”

  He turned to Anson. “I’m sorry, doctor. You’ll want to return to the house. This is more of my brother’s salmon business. These men make the cans for packing the fish.”

  Anson clenched his hands, felt the blood stick.

  “Spies?” he said to the remaining Chinese man. “Why would he call you that?” He knew from Henry Lansdowne’s tight-lipped expression, if nothing else, that they were talking about Dare.

  The Chinese shrugged. “He’s crazy, that’s all. He thinks everyone out to get him.”

  Vivid light flooded over the mountain range. Some sort of marsh bird whistled by. Its flight turned Anson’s gaze upriver.

  “Maybe someone is,” he said, watching the Englishman.

  But Henry Lansdowne did not take the bait.

  “If you please, doctor. My wife will see to your wounds.”

  Anson looked at his torn palms. “Thank you. But I wish to go to Crescent Slough this morning. As soon as possible. If it’s a matter of payment . . .”

  The Englishman frowned. “Once my wife has looked after you, and the tide is slack, I’ll take you. We don’t charge guests for our hospitality, doctor.”

  Satisfied, though a mite embarrassed by his unintended insult, Anson began to walk away. But a strange impulse, a prickling on his nape, made him stop and turn back. Lansdowne and the lone Chinese stood very close together. The Englishman’s lips were moving. Against the pale sky the two heads were silhouetted as clear as cut glass. Anson began to shake. He wished it was only because his old weakness had returned, borne to him on the sweating terror of the men he’d pulled to safety. Because that weakness was something he knew, and knew he could overcome if he wanted to summon the strength. But there existed a curious kinship between this conversation whose words he couldn’t hear and the Latin he could no longer recite with equanimity. The sensation was curious, more so than if he had heard Virgil’s poetry in the mouth of a Chinese.

  Anson noticed the empty skiff. If a soldier in a torn uniform had leapt from it, a dead man on his back, he would not even ask him about his purpose. The purpose didn’t matter, not as much as the consequence. And maybe that didn’t matter either.

  The thought of life’s futility—not entirely new to him, but never before draped in such black colours in such a lonely place—put the river beneath his feet, the salt of some great untraversable distance on his mouth. With a sigh, Anson continued his slow walk back toward the house.

  • • •

  Three hours later, as Henry Lansdowne steered the skiff into the wharf at Crescent Slough, Anson shivered at the eerie silence hovering over Dare’s settlement. By the time he stepped out of the skiff onto a small, black wharf, even the almost-ceaseless gull cry above the river had stopped, leaving only the sighings and gurglings of the slight current, the drone of mosquitoes, and, every few minutes, the incongruously cheerful trill of a blackbird or robin. Anson looked up at the earthen dike, twenty feet above the wharf and stretching southward along the riverbank toward a cluster of buildings similar to those that constituted the Lansdownes’ cannery. Similar but with some clear differences.

  Dare’s main building was several hundred feet long, low—perhaps a dozen feet high—open-ended at the riverside and without windows. And its lumber was almost blond compared with the dark planks of the Lansdownes’ cannery, perhaps, Anson thought, because it had been more recently built. But there was something disturbing about this white building. It did not look new so much as scoured, like a beached whale that had been gnawed down to its skeleton by the elements. And it stood out dramatically, because all the smaller buildings—A-framed and also windowless, likely used, as at Chilukthan, for net storage—were darker and touched in places with a dark green slime.

  “I’ll wait here,” Henry Lansdowne said and lowered his head toward the gnarled fold of hands in his lap. “Just in case. Fifteen minutes, mind. No more than that.”

  Anson shook off the foreboding caused by his first sight of the white cannery building and almost smiled. Just in case of what? That Dare might chase him off with a gun as well?

>   “Thank you. I’ll come back as soon as I can to let you know if I’m staying.”

  His calf and thigh muscles still aching from his rescue of the Chinese, Anson climbed the gangway and, upon reaching the dike, surveyed the immediate vista.

  In a hollow about fifty yards away, a plain-planked, two-storey house sat in a foot of muddy water surrounded by huge weeping willows, their yellow fronds motionless. Another fifty yards off to one side of the building, near a cluster of cottonwoods, a canvas tent had been constructed. No one moved near the house or the tent, and no smoke rose against the blue sky. Anson approached the house. A single window, facing riverward, was boarded up, with perhaps an inch showing between boards. Anson peered in, conscious of not wanting to make Henry Lansdowne wait the full fifteen minutes. As he did so, a dog began to bark fiercely inside, its dark shape sliding across the broken sunlight falling into a large room filled with junk. Anson stepped back, then braved the dog’s noise by staring through the gap again until his eyes adjusted to the gloom. Now he could see clothing scattered everywhere, cooking utensils, what looked like animal hides and pieces of fishnet. The barking increased, more shapes slid toward the window. Then Anson noticed the figures seated on the floor; they appeared to be weaving something. A body unfolded itself from the shadows and called to the dogs in a strange tongue. The dogs quieted and the body vanished. Anson stepped back again in confusion. Why should Dare have allowed his house to become an Indian village? At Chilukthan, the Indians camped on the riverbank, on the opposite side of the slough mouth.