The Tinsmith

by Tim Bowling

  He bowed stiffly, his arm across his waist.

  “I’ll walk back with you,” Thomas Lansdowne said.

  “And your good lady?”

  Henry Lansdowne explained that he would accompany his sister-in-law home after she’d rested a while. Then his brother and Ambrose Richardson departed. Anson found himself alone with the elder Lansdowne. They stood in uncomfortable silence for a moment until the Englishman finally excused himself. Anson, understanding the man’s embarrassment, waited briefly before walking into the front hall and putting on his coat. Then he stepped outside.

  It was a clear night, the sky star-clustered, a small full moon shedding wan light over the fields and slough. The figures of Thomas Lansdowne and Ambrose Richardson, a dog at their sides, were just visible against the black backdrop of the woodlot. Anson lit a cigar as he watched them diminish, and inhaled gratefully. Though he disliked to admit it, he conceded that the Virginian had a point; it had been improper to confront the Lansdownes about Dare in that company. First, one of the ladies was indisposed. Second, he had only just made Richardson’s acquaintance. Anson accepted that his timing had not been propitious. He blew smoke at the stars and stepped slowly along the veranda. Fifty yards to the west loomed the bulk of a ridge-roofed barn. Just beyond it, along the dike, began the cluster of cannery buildings, and beyond those there was only river and marsh. Much closer, thirty yards to the north of where he stood, the Lansdownes’ gangway and wharf hung, tiny as children’s toys, at the edge of the great muddy river.

  Anson exhaled another plume of smoke and tried to orient himself. Two miles up the river, on the opposite bank, was the city of New Westminster. Dare’s settlement was almost as distant, though on the near bank. It seemed hard to imagine any single human life, not to mention whole communities of them, out there in the thick, brinish dark. Anson gazed at it until the heavy sameness forced him to blink. If nothing else, he thought, a man had plenty of quiet for reflection here. Other than the intermittent hooting of owls and lowing of cattle beneath the wind, the night was still. The Chinese, of course, were by now well ensconced in their melancholic sojourns along the opium trail, and it was all Anson could do to keep his thoughts from becoming regretted actions. Dare had made life unexpectedly difficult for him, but perhaps the trial had a purpose, perhaps he was meant to endure it for a greater good he could not yet foresee. Even so, Anson was not sure that he should wait any longer for a Victoria-bound steamer. It might be a pleasant diversion to visit New Westminster, even if for only a week. Someone there might be able to provide more information about Dare’s conflict with the two Englishmen; it couldn’t be a large city, after all.

  He put his hands on the veranda railing and stared at the red end of the cigar in his fingers. In the surrounding dark, the tiny light was like one of the soldiers’ meek fires in the days after the Battle of Antietam. How fragile they had seemed after all the carnage, and how welcome too—ever since, Anson had never ceased to be attracted to a good fire; it seemed at once a refuge and an escape. In those long nights of misery, his hands and feet aching, his bowels loose and stomach cramped, his lungs filled with the spreading miasma of death, how powerfully the soldiers’ weakest fires had fortified him. Between the comfort and hope inherent in the flames and the equally vital presence of goodness in William Dare’s character, Anson had found his survival. Was he, then, to feel chagrined by his continuing loyalty? No, he would not apologize for that. But a man of his years ought to practise greater diplomacy.

  He lifted the cigar to his lips again and considered the immediate future. Thomas Lansdowne must be warned about the perils of his wife’s condition; she clearly required more than a few hours of rest. And Anson realized it was indeed advisable that he should take the next steamer out of Chilukthan, no matter which direction it was headed. In the meantime, he’d stay discreetly out of Ambrose Richardson’s company and he’d limit his conversations with the Lansdownes, especially on the subject of Dare.

  Satisfied, Anson flicked the cigar into the muddy yard and was about to return inside the house when he heard a faint, curious tinkling sound coming from the direction of the river. It was an eerily familiar sound, and at first he doubted that he’d really heard it. He strained to shut out the wind. Yes, there it came again, a glassy shivering. Anson closed his hands to keep them from shaking. All the calm he’d gathered from the cigar was evaporating with each repetition of the sound. He looked dully into the moonlit dark, expecting . . . what? He knew that glassy shivering, but it took him a moment to see the wagon in his mind’s eye and the burly photographer with the heavy brogue and pointed questions. It had been some time since Anson had recollected that image. Ah, but it was too much, fanciful—the product, he knew, of futile brooding. A man could find the past everywhere if he wasn’t vigilant against it.

  Self-knowledge. Anson had never considered himself a fool, and he wasn’t about to change. And yet, there was a reason for the patterns the mind assumed, just as there were reasons for the rhythms in nature. If he’d come to the delta of the Fraser River to find again the battlefield of Antietam, so be it. And why should that even be a surprise? In twenty years Dare had never asked for him to come anywhere, had only sent telegrams and brief letters regarding business matters after their last meeting, when Dare had stayed at Anson’s home. So, out of loyalty and genuine faith in the man, Anson had come to this Canadian river. There was misery and tension all around him, his old longing for opium had returned, and a former enemy bearing the physical evidence of defeat had opened the painful wounds of his country’s severance. Why should all this not be photographed like a battlefield? It would make a fine study of the dissolution of the years. Anson could see the grinning Scotsman making a square of his fingers before his eyes.

  But the image faded. Anson knew he was not prone to fancies. So he left the veranda and walked around the house. The glassy sound increased as he crossed the field toward the wharf, and, walking up the gangway, he recognized the sound as piano music. He could not have been more amazed if there had been a tripod set up on the planks with a grinning figure poised to vanish under a black cloth. In different circumstances, Anson would have clapped his hands with joy at the unexpectedness of life, he would have gladly succumbed to humility before the mysterious workings of a greater power. As it was, the sight he came upon only deepened his dread, for it struck him as grotesquely out of place, like seeing children emerge from a woodlot at Antietam. His mouth filled with the smoke of long-dead ashes, Anson approached the unlikely congruence in the moonlight. But with each step, one amazement gave way to another. For as he reached the source of the sound, he felt easier in his spirit, liberated from the poisonous miasma of his own musings.

  The girl stood in the middle of the wharf, her thin figure in the moonlight slightly hunched, her elbows extended to either side. Bareheaded, her long, black hair gleaming, she faced the river. But he knew she could not see it, for her view was blocked by the large wooden crate that had been unloaded from the paddlewheeler some days before and that Anson had assumed contained cannery equipment. Off to her right, stepping rapidly forward and back, poised as if to run, stood the girl’s older brother, Edward, a reserved, handsome boy of twelve years. Near his feet lay the front side of the crate. Only when Anson had reached the end of the gangway and stepped onto the wharf did he notice that the boy held a hammer in one hand and a crowbar in the other. Even in the bright moonlight, his face looked ashen.

  But Louisa did not lift her hands from the piano, which, as far as Anson could see, was a handsome instrument, the front of its high back ornately carved and almost gleaming, as if made of rosewood or some other special variety. The high notes swirled into the damp air, notes as delicate and pretty as the child who gave them life. Anson felt the tears come to his eyes. In such a remote and forlorn place, where beauty seemed mostly to exist in the surroundings, such music was a rare beneficence. Even the sucking of the tide at the pilings and the drone of the mosquitoes seemed quieted
by Louisa’s playing.

  The boy, only a few feet away, suddenly dropped the hammer and crowbar and hurried to his sister. He grabbed both her elbows from behind. She gasped and the music stopped.

  “That’s enough, Lou,” he said and then added in a whisper, “You’re upsetting the doctor.”

  Anson, however, was smiling broadly and letting the tears press against his lenses until he finally had to remove his glasses.

  The brother and sister, blurred now, waited. The lost music had drifted away with the current, which gurgled and sucked at the pilings. Anson tried to hold on to the notes. In a quavering voice, he said, “That’s very pretty. Chopin, I believe?”

  “I . . . I don’t know,” the girl said. She hardly even seemed a part of her surroundings, her face shone so vividly. Anson noticed that her fingers still played the air at her sides.

  “You don’t know? Well, I suppose the composer doesn’t matter as much as the composition. But you play beautifully, Louisa. And at such a young age. How long have you been taking lessons?”

  “She’s never even had one,” her brother said, and it was as if he’d turned all the moonlight onto the girl.

  She lowered her eyes and said quietly, “Ed, you’re forgetting Mrs. Parmiter. She gave me a lesson.”

  “That hardly counts. Two or three minutes was all it lasted before Mother came in and made you . . .”

  The boy stopped and glanced over Anson’s shoulder in the direction of the house. He frowned and all the sudden enthusiasm over his sister’s talent drained out of his body as if he’d been punctured. Anson, still amazed by what he’d come upon, hurried to address the girl.

  “Do you mean that you’ve never been taught to play? How is it that you can play Chopin?”

  Her brother’s enthusiasm flooded back. His broad, handsome face beamed.

  “She has a gift. Mrs. Parmiter said so. She said Lou was a . . . a . . . what was that word, Lou?”

  The girl did not look up. Her fingers twitched a little, as if the last of the music was dying out in sparks.

  “Prodigy, I suspect,” Anson said.

  The boy nodded excitedly.

  “And I suppose this is why there’s a piano on the wharf?”

  Neither child responded. Very gently, the boy had taken hold of one of his sister’s hands. The tenderness of the gesture moved Anson deeply. These children had lost an older sister the summer before, their mother, still grieving, was clearly not well. Edward and Louisa, he saw at once, were close in a way that Anson, without siblings, had never known.

  He smiled. “Your parents have recognized your talent and are encouraging it?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” Edward said. “I don’t believe so. Mother doesn’t like her to play and Father thinks it will be good for her to play hymns in the house. Mrs. Parmiter wants to give her lessons, but I don’t think Lou will be allowed.”

  Anson nodded slowly. He could almost feel the sadness seep back into his face. To combat it, he put as much cheer as possible into his voice.

  “Well, now, something will have to be done about that. Louisa, surely you wish to take lessons?”

  “Oh, yes! More than anything!” The girl pulled her hand free, then clapped both hands together. The sound sent all the notes she’d played whirling starward again.

  Anson, who had almost forgotten the infectious sensation of joy, suddenly recognized the oddity of the situation. “Why on earth is this piano on the wharf? Why hasn’t it been taken indoors?”

  The children blinked, as if they found the questions silly.

  “But, doctor,” Edward said, looking toward the cannery buildings, “it’s the salmon season.”

  Anson frowned. “Yes, I know, but why does that . . .”

  Louisa, in a peevish voice, explained, “Father and Uncle have no time for anything except work when the salmon come.”

  Feeling sorry for the children, and the girl in particular, Anson sought to recapture the joy of the moment before. With careful diplomacy, he thought he might be able to arrange piano lessons for the child.

  “Perhaps I can help,” he said. “I will see what I can do. No promises, but a talent such as yours, Louisa, is a very rare and special gift. You understand that?”

  The girl pushed her long hair back and revealed a hopeful smile. Anson could not see the tears in her eyes, but he knew they were present.

  “But the Chopin?” he said, suddenly curious. “Where have you heard Chopin before? Does your family have a gramophone?”

  The girl shook her head and replied in a trembling voice. “At the Parmiters. Mrs. Parmiter was playing it. From a book.”

  From a book! Anson cupped his chin with his hands and murmured a brief paean in Latin. Finally, noticing the children’s confusion, he laughed and pointed at the piano.

  “Well, Louisa, I cannot be satisfied with such a brief concert. Will you do me the pleasure of playing that piece again? I don’t know when I’ll have another chance to hear something so lovely.”

  God truly works in mysterious ways, Anson thought, and as the music rose again, like a spring rain reversed and returned to the heavens, he could almost forget the murderous ways and the bloodied path he’d been forced to walk, away from the softly tolling certainties of his own childhood and youth.

  V

  The only thing interesting about a sunset, J.H. Craig mused as he stood on the wharf outside his New Westminster cannery, watching the agent’s dainty approach up the gangway, is that it tells fools to stop working. A seagull flapped out of the red sky and unfolded like a dirty newspaper on the planks a few feet away. It screeched and started to peck at something. Briefly admiring of the bird’s industry, Craig caught himself. He snarled at the bird and stomped toward it, waving his arms in small circles. Screeching louder, the gull flapped away. Craig bent to the red pulp of salmon flesh, disgust turning his lips thinner. Goddamned waste. Such a firm piece of fish belonged in a tin. He stood, gingerly brushing dirt off the piece, and watched the agent almost tiptoeing toward him. Belvedere Smith. A ridiculous name, but it suited an English gadfly more interested in fancy clothes than in the workings of a cannery. Still, he could be useful.

  The agent’s orange suit in the red sunlight made Craig wince. He did not wait for any pleasantries. “Well? Who is he? What’s he here for?”

  The agent wheezed a laugh out of his pasty, sparsely whiskered face. He looked like an underfed fox that the hounds had cornered, except that he was too stupid to even realize it. “Having your supper, Craig? I trust I’ll merit something better.”

  Craig whistled sharply at a Chinaman lazing against a piling fifty feet away, and the toothless old man, wearing the usual blue smock, shuffled over.

  “Get this into a tin,” Craig said and handed the piece of flesh to the coolie. “And tell Kwan I don’t want to see waste like this again. Or I’ll deduct it from the contract.”

  A sharp pain flared along Craig’s gumline. He glared at the agent, but the man was too stupid and too English, which amounted to the same thing, to take the hint.

  “A week from now,” Smith said and nodded southwest in the direction of the rivermouth, where the dingy sails of the returning skiffs could just be seen, “and you’ll be up to your knees in fish that you won’t be able to tin. That’s what the Indians are saying.”

  “Whose Indians? Did you talk to Dare’s? Goddammit, man, I’m not paying you for your predictions on the next run.”

  “All right, all right, just let me have a smoke.”

  The agent delicately bit the end off a cigar, lit a match and held the flame to the tobacco, and was about to fling the match away when Craig grabbed his arm.

  “Not on the wharf. Can’t you tell it’s like tinder in this heat?”

  The agent shrugged, inhaled deeply, and blew out a puff of smoke.

  “Well?” Craig said. “Did you learn anything or not?” He sucked at his molar and tried to shut out the shuntings of the cannery and the gurglings of the tide so he could better f
ocus on the agent’s answer.

  “He’s American, a doctor from the east. Doesn’t talk much, but he’s definitely come to meet with Dare. And I don’t think it’s to discuss whether he should set up practice at Crescent Slough either.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Henry Lansdowne asked straight out. They wouldn’t mind having a doctor at Chilukthan, you know. The Landing’s large enough to support one.” Belvedere Smith shook his head. “But not this doctor. He’s not thinking of his prospects. At least that’s what he told me, and I believed him. Worn-out chap, really.”

  Craig closed his eyes against the pain in his mouth. A doctor? Perhaps he was the source of Dare’s financing? Somehow or other, the damned nigger had the means to hire a new crew of coolies in Victoria. Now it looked as if he’d be ready for the big run after all. Owen, for all his shrewdness, hadn’t been able to stop him. Then again, Dare hadn’t been seen for days. Craig cursed under his breath. Not knowing what a rival was doing pained him more than any tooth could. He pushed his tongue hard against it and thought, Maybe this doctor doesn’t even know Dare is a nigger. Inspired, he phrased the thought into a question and asked it aloud.

  The agent smiled through the grey rings of smoke. “I never brought it up. I could tell it wouldn’t have mattered. The doctor’s one of these noble chaps, you can tell just by looking at him. A good American. Apparently he saved a bunch of Dare’s coolies from drowning the first night he arrived.”

  “Yes, I know about that,” Craig said. “So the Lansdownes didn’t mention that Dare was a nigger either?”

  The agent guffawed. “Henry Lansdowne? He takes the Lord’s view of such things. And his brother, whether he likes it or not, follows suit. Anyway, I’m not so convinced that Dare is—”