The Tinsmith

by Tim Bowling

  For several minutes he stood in the side yard of the Lansdowne house, trying to convince himself to return to bed. But the smoke on the air from an Indian’s fire further whet his old longing for opium and he began to walk downriver toward the China House.

  The sound that stopped him came as less of a surprise than previously. He listened. It was the girl again. She had not taken his advice. When Anson had come upon her in the middle of the day while she was meant to be at her chores, she had been so rapt in her piano playing that interference seemed more than cruel; it was like turning off the sun. But for her sake he had urged her to be patient. If her father or uncle knew of her passion for the piano—he had not used the word to the child, though he had thought it—they might send the instrument back to Victoria. Ah, but the girl could no more resist the lure of the music than Anson could quell the past. Why not let her run the risk? It maddened him that the Lansdowne brothers had managed only to move the piano from the wharf to the nearby barn. He understood, of course, that they were busy men, but they clearly had no idea of how to treat a piano. Either that, or they simply didn’t care. Anson had thought that his heated exchange with Thomas Lansdowne out in the field would have resulted in the piano’s removal to the man’s house, not just to the nearest barn. Yes, it was maddening. But then, what of the Lansdownes did not madden him?

  He walked to the barn and slid in through the thin gap in the doors. Straw chaff and dust on the planks and in the air almost made him cough. For a few seconds, as his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw only some worn tack—harnesses, bridles, saddles—hanging like strips of beef on a wall near the stable. Then he saw the girl. As before, she had not bothered to find a crate or anything else to sit on. In the fractured light falling through the beams, she stood, wreathed in the stench of manure, and played with unsophisticated energy the lovely Chopin music she had no business, but every right, to play.

  Anson swallowed hard. More moving to him than her talent was the purity of her will. She must play. It wasn’t a question of rules and authority. It almost brought him to tears how little she seemed to be aware of her own vulnerability. But when she played, even he could recognize that, in some mysterious way, she was inviolate.

  The wind shifted the thin starlight a little. Anson turned and coughed deep in his chest. Up from the river came the high-pitched cry of the seal pup, followed by another sound, not so high but just as tortured. Anson realized that it must be the pup’s mother swimming along the bank. Sadly, he turned back just in time to see the child collapse, one hand dragging across the keys before her body hit the ground.

  “Louisa!”

  He rushed forward and lifted her in his arms. She was sweating profusely, on fire, trembling. He staggered into the darkness and moved as rapidly as possible over the soft ground, the whole time thinking, What’s wrong with her, how can I stop it, how can I help her?

  He laboured up the half-dozen steps and across the veranda, then banged the front door of the house open with his foot and shouted as he carried the girl into the parlour and laid her on the ottoman. From above him came quick footsteps that pattered along the ceiling and down the staircase.

  “Light a lamp,” Anson ordered without looking up.

  “What is it? What’s happened?” came Mary Lansdowne’s strained voice.

  “It’s Louisa. She’s sick.”

  “Louisa?”

  “I need light,” Anson said, not waiting even to see his concern mirrored in another’s face. “And my case. In my room. On the dresser.”

  The footsteps started again, climbed, and crossed the ceiling. They were like a pulse. The child moaned but did not open her eyes. In the darkness Anson could barely discern her features, but she was like a live coal to his touch.

  There were more footsteps, then Mary’s voice and fluttering descent in the sizzling spread of light.

  “Dear God, dear God, what’s happened to her?” Mary’s hand descended to Louisa’s brow. “Doctor? She’s burning with fever.”

  “Yes.” Anson sent Mary away for a cool cloth. The girl’s pulse in his fingers was quick and slippery as rain.

  Henry Lansdowne appeared. He stood still as a piling.

  “I don’t understand. How is it that the child’s here, doctor?”

  “The piano, of course. You and your brother wouldn’t take it into the house.”

  Angrily, Anson grabbed his case and opened it. The oil light fell and splashed on his instruments.

  “The piano?”

  “She’s been coming out at night to play it. And obviously she hasn’t been looking after herself. Just look at how she’s dressed.”

  Anson noted the man’s incomprehension: it was like a block of lead dropped on the floor. To keep himself from losing his temper completely, he said, “You’d better notify the child’s parents. The danger’s not immediate, but it is grave.”

  “Oh, poor Edney,” said Mary Lansdowne and placed the cloth in Anson’s hand. “Hurry, Father. You must hurry.”

  Once Henry Lansdowne had gone, his wife knelt beside Anson. Her voice was hushed, her white face framed by grey braids.

  “Is it the scarlet fever, doctor?”

  “I don’t believe so. But I can’t say with certainty.” He placed the cloth gently on the child’s brow and turned to the window at the sound of hooves striking the ground. At least the man appreciates the gravity, he thought.

  Mary Lansdowne, however, took Anson’s turning for something more ominous.

  “What do you suspect? Not . . .”

  The child moaned, her eyes opened wide, with that seeing that sees more than the surroundings. Then the eyes flickered and shut again.

  “It could be any number of illnesses.” Anson read the pale face for answers he suspected that time alone would provide. And yet, he had a suspicion. The high fever, the periodic moans, the look of delirium: these symptoms pointed to typhoid fever. If the girl, on waking, complained of headaches or stomach pain . . . yet she had been strong enough to come across the fields and slough to play the piano. The mother, no doubt, could provide some useful information.

  Anson cursed beneath his breath. For now, there was little he could do. Treating disease, even during the war, had the effect of reminding him of how little his skill and knowledge mattered. At least a shotgun wound, for instance, required immediate action of a most absorbing kind. For the sake of his sanity, a man could not feel hopeless or powerless as he sawed through flesh into a bone.

  Mary Lansdowne, who had slipped quietly away, returned with a blanket. But as she laid it over the still form on the ottoman, the girl suddenly rose up, her eyes wild, and the blanket slid off.

  “Louisa, dear, it’s Aunt Mary. Your mother’s on her way. Oh, child.”

  The girl’s dark eyes flared, then rolled back. She opened her mouth, but no sound came.

  Anson sent Mary away with the cloth, which was already warm and damp. Lightly he touched the girl’s brow. The fever was very high. The blanket on the floor might have been a skin shed by fire. Seconds accumulated very slowly, heavily. Mary returned. Anson placed the cloth on Louisa’s burning brow. Then he listened to the pulse again until the rapid hoof beats struck the ground outside and the child’s mother rushed into the parlour, a whirling descent of black in the yellow light, her long hair loose, her eyes almost as wild as her daughter’s. She smelled thickly of rain and mud. Her skirt bottom was drenched and splattered from the half-mile ride along the slough bank. Anson rose and withdrew a few steps to give Edney a clear path to her child’s side. In a silence much more disturbing than cries would have been, she threw herself on the girl’s breast. Anson watched Edney’s shoulders shake violently and a sense of horror rose in him. Why didn’t she cry out? Why didn’t she speak the child’s name? She looked like some animal feeding off its kill. Anson fought to quell the gruesome image.

  “Edney. Oh, Edney, please,” Mary Lansdowne moaned.

  Anson turned and saw that Mary’s hands were at her mouth. Whe
re was the girl’s father? It would be his duty to lift the mother from the girl. Anson could hardly bring himself to consider doing so, but if the woman didn’t raise herself soon . . .

  Henry Lansdowne entered the room and spoke softly in his wife’s ear.

  “Not back?” Mary said, then lowered her head at her husband’s stern look.

  The two returned quietly into the shadows.

  Anson could no longer abide the mother’s terrible, almost silent grief.

  “Madam, compose yourself.”

  But even as he spoke, he felt foolish and very far removed. It was as if he stood above a woman slowly transforming into an open grave. He almost expected the floor to give way and all of them to be swallowed by the earth. Some terrible moment was at hand, more than illness, more than a human death. Now Anson did not want the woman to rise. Any change would trigger the greater death he could not even imagine.

  Then Henry Lansdowne emerged from the shadows and brusquely took Edney by the shoulders and lifted her. “Mary,” he said to his wife, who then supported Edney on the other side. Together, they sought to remove her from the parlour, turned her slumped figure doorward.

  Anson tried not to see, but it was as if his eyelids were pinned up. The mother’s face floated into the dim light like something dead that had been trapped a long time on the bottom of the sea, yet as it rose it seemed, inch by inch, to be shocked back into sentience by a grinning blackness whose silent mirth trembled all around them. But the thought and feeling that flooded into the eyes were blank in their fathomless searchings. Anson, though he had witnessed similar suffering before, had never become immured to it. The sense of an intense misery just withheld was almost too much to bear, especially here, when he had already imagined himself on the way back to Antietam. The room was like a surface of water out of which, at any instant, a powerful force must explode. If there was skin on the mother’s face, Anson couldn’t see it. If there was a woman in the features, it was a woman Anson had never encountered, not even in a nightmare. Yet the grief was human. That was the most awful part of it. Fifty thousand dying men, fifty thousand grieving mothers, were screaming without sound in the brief bone frame that hung before his eyes, eyes that he could not close.

  Then she was gone and Anson stood alone above the child’s fitful fire, wondering if even the music of Chopin could ever wash that screaming from his sight.

  They moved the child to an upstairs room, the uncle cradling her and walking slowly, as if leading a procession. But Anson alone attended the move, for the mother remained bone-white and trembling in a chair, with her sister-in-law dutifully at her side. Alone with Henry Lansdowne, Anson waited for the man’s questions: What illness? How serious? What about quarantine? But even now the Englishman remained mostly mute. He did thank Anson for his help, but implied in his manner and tone was a criticism—no doubt he suspected Anson of knowing more about his niece’s piano playing than he was admitting to.

  For his part, Anson cared only about the girl’s condition. Though almost in shock himself at the terrifying image of the mother’s grief, he settled into a bedside chair and prepared for a night-long vigil. Even if he could do nothing to prevent a sudden death, or even if the crisis was yet weeks away, he realized that a doctor’s presence, at least, might comfort the patient’s family. And then, oddly, he felt that the mother’s grief was itself a threat, as if her initial black descent upon the child would, if given another opportunity, usher in the permanent darkness.

  The night passed slowly. At times, Anson thought he heard a weeping in the air but suspected his imagination had been stirred by the proximity of death. Toward daybreak, with the girl’s fever unchanged, he stood and went to the open window. The sky was a blood-tinged gauze to the north, but the river and near distance were still a rich, impenetrable black. As far as he was concerned, it couldn’t lift fast enough. Night seemed a smothering contagion, a poxed blanket, not a sanctuary of calm. It was always so when a child lay sick. Somehow daylight was the earth’s equivalent of bracing health, perhaps because the sun draws children out as a field of flowers draws honeybees. For the old, of course, the night becomes almost a welcoming portal to whatever lies beyond the grave.

  Shortly after the tin press began its usual thunking of the silence several rods downriver at the cannery, the girl’s mother and aunt appeared. They came in as softly as gusts of black snow and settled on each side of the girl, their drawn, chalk-white faces like twin moons. Anson knew his presence was superfluous. But before he retired to his own room for perhaps a few hours of broken sleep, he studied the mother’s manner.

  Standing at her daughter’s bedside, bent over at the waist, she was certainly changed from the terrible, almost inhuman creature of earlier: her dark eyes had resumed their focus on the surroundings, her hair, in two tight braids, reflected the general control that had come into her body, and she looked, more or less, like any woman in the throes of concern for a child. Even the way she rubbed her hands together in her lap, one palm circling the knuckles of the other hand, was familiar to Anson, almost like an action taken from a primer on maternal behaviour.

  And yet he could not forget the face as it had been revealed in the parlour. A slight trace, evident in the quivering of the nostrils, which looked unusually pallid in the dimness, suggested an almost failing balance on the side of sanity. And so, before retiring, Anson took Mary Lansdowne aside and pressed on her the importance of not leaving the mother alone with the patient.

  “In my experience,” he said, “shock combined with solitude is a highly dangerous mixture.”

  The woman nodded dumbly, but Anson felt he could depend on her.

  Moments later, he lay on his bed and tried to find the memory of sleep among all the other memories that flitted through his consciousness, memories of dying men far from their mothers’ or wives’ attendance or even the comfort of familiar smells and sounds, memories of his own frail mother on her deathbed thirty years before, followed by the more painful memories of his beloved Elizabeth on hers.

  What woke him, he did not know. But something drew him to the window and made him witness to a strange scene. On the wharf, in full morning light, the Lansdowne brothers stood profiled, face to face. Henry Lansdowne suddenly waved one arm dismissively, in a pushing away gesture that caused Thomas to lift his arm as if to fend off a blow. The older man, with surprising speed, turned and pointed at the house. Anson flinched. It seemed he was seeing something that should not have been conducted anywhere but behind closed doors. The fire of Henry Lansdowne’s distorted visage, however, might have burned away all privacy. Thomas Lansdowne appeared to step back from it, scorched.

  Then he shook his head roughly and, at last, sagged in all his joints. With desperation he reached out and grabbed his brother on both shoulders. But Henry swept his arms away. He seemed to loom even larger above Thomas before finally striding off in the direction of the cannery.

  For a few seconds, Thomas did not move. Anson realized what news the man had just received, and he pitied him. If he had been away from home for some inessential reason, he was still not to blame: illness can come on very suddenly, and he was obviously the sort of father who would rather die than be absent when his child was in danger. But the tension had been building around the Lansdownes ever since Anson’s arrival. Perhaps the child’s condition had brought matters to a climax. Something final certainly seemed to attend the motionless figure on the wharf.

  Then, as if shot, Thomas Lansdowne dropped to his knees. He flung his head back, his posture like that of a wolf about to howl.

  Anson couldn’t stop himself. He opened the window, as though to admit the man’s pain, but only the dull, relentless pulse of the tin press disturbed the silence.

  At last, Thomas Lansdowne got to his feet and, like a blinded bull, lumbered down the gangway and into the yard. In a moment, Anson knew, he’d be wild at the girl’s bedside, feverish with questions.

  Turning exhausted from the window, Anson brac
ed himself for the charge.

  PART THREE

  I

  July 1881, the mouth of the Fraser River

  All day he had felt the salmon coming, sure as nightfall. He stood, his long legs braced, in a flat-bottomed skiff in the middle of the broad, silty river and gazed toward the ocean. Out there, by the millions, the salmon waited, hanging like ripe fruit in the salt depths, ready to make their last fierce rush to the spawning grounds far inland. The brinish air trembled with the weight of the fish’s will, the sun burned yellow-white as it crept between the horizons, and Dare often had to raise one of his muscle-knotted forearms to his eyes to wipe away the sweat. All around him the delta of sloughs, sandbars, and marshes held its breath; the tall reeds and grasses close to where the river met the ocean shivered slightly, like the fine filaments beneath the gills of the salmon, and, behind him, along both banks, the serried rows of great firs and cedars silently pulled in their shadows as if they did not want to contribute their black nets to the harvest that would soon follow.

  Dare knew he had done all he could. He had gone to Victoria and secured another crew of Chinese. He had readied the cannery for the great run of salmon that would soon begin. But the forces against him were strong, and he knew that his time in this place was ending. Even knowing that the doctor had come was just a beginning in the next part of his own journey, just as Orlett’s death had been an ending and a beginning as well. As everything was an ending and a beginning.

  Dare looked at his forearms, already browned from the sun, and wondered at the blood flowing in the veins. That wonder had mostly gone, driven under by labour, by the ceaseless chase for fortune. But it could still surface, like whaleback on a calm sea, to shatter whatever peace his mind and spirit had found. Orlett’s desperate lie—“You’re white, boy, you’re not a nigger”—and the relentless pounding of the hooves of the mulatto’s horse mostly resided under his blood, but the world would not be still, it would not let the lie and the hoof beats fall completely silent. Dare had to take care of that himself.