The Tinsmith

by Tim Bowling

  “A lovely child,” Miss d’Espereaux murmured. “Worthy of heaven, but she will remain in the material sphere a full life’s course, I sense it. Please, everyone, be very still.” She slowly circled the room, gazing around her, her body moving like a dowser’s branch. At different points, she paused before a tall mahogany wardrobe, then before a plain deal dresser, her gaze fixed on the unblinking eyes of a small boy china doll seated on its surface. At last, she lingered before a small oval mirror on the wall, into which she stared as if seeking those same changeless eyes in the glass. Then she began to move again, almost gliding, past the wooden doll house with its eerily darkened little rooms, past the shut closet containing the child’s dresses and shoes, past a table with a cracked porcelain basin on it, and finally past the simple needlework on the wall opposite the child’s bed that announced in red stitches the biblical phrase, “He shall gather the lambs with his arms.”

  Edney’s pulse quickened. She yearned to see with the younger woman’s eyes, she held her breath and put a hand to the child inside, asking without words for it to be calm.

  Suddenly Miss d’Espereaux froze, her body rigid, her chin raised so that the white of her throat appeared to spread. In the middle of the room, with her eyes fixed on the open window in which the curtains billowed gently, she waited. Minutes passed.

  Finally, she turned slowly, as if following the flight of a bird. Now she looked at a portion of wall just beyond Edney’s shoulder. Louisa moaned and twisted her head on the pillow, then fell silent. Several more minutes passed. Miss d’Espereaux did not even blink. Her lips were slightly parted. At last she spoke, but only to the air. “Yes, I understand,” she said, and her voice was different, more of a monotone than the usual trill. She approached the bed. For a painfully long period, she stood there, her spine seeming to tighten as if with screws. Then she began to breathe out slowly and evenly, through pursed lips.

  “It’s all right, ma’am,” Edney heard from behind her. “It’s only the start of the insufflations. Lizzie always uses them on the sick cases.”

  “Sir, you must be silent,” Ambrose Richardson said in a low voice.

  The other man bristled. “You’d think I’d never been to a healing before. I know I need to be quiet. But the lady here was getting kind of upset.”

  He meant Mary. Edney glanced at her, saw that she was trembling, her eyes widening like a frightened horse’s. But Edney felt no such terror, only an ever-increasing wonder. Even as Miss d’Espereaux bent to Louisa and began to breathe on her bare arms, a cloth placed between the young woman’s lips and the child’s skin, Edney remained calm. But Mary did not.

  “Oh, what is she doing? Mr. Richardson, can this be proper?”

  Francis Collins spoke up forcefully. “Oh, it’s as proper as the Sabbath, ma’am. The insufflations always come before the curing passes. It’s all very proper procedure. There’s no harm in it. Why, I’d almost welcome the fever just to have it done to myself and that’s the honest truth.”

  “Will you or will you not hold your tongue?”

  But Edney did not look away to witness Ambrose Richardson’s temper. She was, instead, entirely absorbed by Miss d’Espereaux’s powers of concentration. The young woman had breathed her way up Louisa’s arm to her shoulder, and now drew back. She folded the cloth and placed it to one side on the bedsheet. Her face was rapt, slightly dewed with effort: the light in her eyes had a candle-flickering quickness. Amazed, Edney stared as the young woman slowly drew the palms of her hands over Louisa’s face, just above the skin. Then, suddenly, she put her hands together and shook them, a look of distaste on her features.

  In a voice barely hushed, Collins said, “That’s the bad magnetics she’s shaking out. See. It’s like washing the dirt off your hands, that’s all.”

  Miss d’Espereaux’s touch again hovered an inch from Louisa’s brow, then passed all the way down her body to her feet. Again, the young woman clasped her hands and shook them. Then she picked up the cloth once more. This time, she very discreetly spat onto the cloth and placed it over one of the crimson spots at Louisa’s throat.

  Mary gasped. Edney noticed out of the corner of her eye that Ambrose Richardson had stepped to the side of her sister-in-law. He bent his white head to hers.

  Miss d’Espereaux’s hand passes resumed; it was as if she were covering the child in fine silk. Long moments passed. The room filled with dusk. From outside came the crying of gulls and the lowing of cattle, the life of the ordinary day nearing its end. The creamy colour of Miss d’Espereaux’s throat darkened. Her eyes lost their quickness. When she spat on the cloth again and prepared to lower it, the sound assailed Edney’s ears as if a drunkard had hawked in a gutter. Edney couldn’t move. Something had changed, but she did not possess the strength to stop the young woman’s ministrations. All at once, the room was dark. Mary made soft protesting sounds, almost like whimpers. When Francis Collins began to reassure her, Ambrose Richardson hissed, “Enough!”

  Suddenly Miss d’Espereaux stiffened.

  “No, no, no!” she cried and put her hands over her face.

  In the darkness Edney thought the young woman was striking herself.

  “It was well, but there is evil here, a terrible evil.”

  “What?” Francis Collins exclaimed. “Liz, what are you saying? That’s not the usual . . .”

  “Damn it, man!” snapped Ambrose Richardson. “Have you no sense?”

  “Look here, colonel, I’ve had about all I’m going to take from you. Can’t you tell you’re only wasting your time? Liz, I’m done putting up with this one. Do you hear? I wouldn’t care if he was missing both his arms.”

  But Miss d’Espereaux had risen from the bed. Her voice was strange, shrill, her eyes glassy. “Mother! Mother!”

  Edney clutched at her stomach. The cry seemed to come from inside her. The dark swirled and then rushed into her eyes. Alone at the foot of her daughter’s bed, she fell.

  “Watch it!” a man yelled.

  Edney heard herself hit the floor. On her knees, she listened to her heartbeat running fast over the bare planks, louder and louder.

  “Mother, oh, Mother,” Miss d’Espereaux whimpered and slumped almost without sound or contact to the floor a few feet away from Edney.

  “Lizzie! What is it? For the love of God, girl!”

  Edney sensed bodies rushing toward her. A lamp sizzled on, the light burned across the floor and ceiling. Miss d’Espereaux’s horror-stricken face, the beauty shocked out of it, roiled below, as if risen from a current. Then the faces of the men plunged down from above. The footsteps came closer until they reached Edney’s heart. Just as the door burst open, she closed her eyes and let Mary support her weight.

  IV

  July 1881, Crescent Slough, British Columbia

  Anson paid the Indian for his rowing services, then climbed out of the skiff onto the small wharf and looked toward Dare’s operations. His cannery was oddly quiet in the mellow mid-morning sunlight. Only the constant keening of gulls—a sound that at Chilukthan seemed as continuous as the noise of the cannery workings—reminded Anson of the particular slaughter occurring along the river. But there were visual triggers too: a few square-bottomed skiffs pulled up on the dike, some Indian children running silently in the distance, a listing scow on the near bank. Yet, compared with Chilukthan, Crescent Slough seemed almost abandoned. Of course, the fishing hadn’t ended; doubtless many of the skiffs Anson had seen on the river, their occupants hunched over in the sterns, picking fish out of the nets, worked for Dare. His cannery would likely explode into life as the fresh catch came in.

  Anson proceeded slowly up the gangway, his eyes trained on Dare’s plain house. There was no sign of life anywhere near it. But then, Dare himself would be either at the cannery or on the river. Anson knew his old comrade-in-arms was every bit as industrious as the Englishman, and Thomas Lansdowne certainly would not have stepped foot inside any house during the past week had his daughter not lain deliriou
s and fevered in her sickbed.

  The smoke, therefore, brought Anson up short. It trickled thinly up from behind the house, its white almost transparent against the pale blue of the sky. Anson felt tethered by it, but he resisted the pull. Suddenly he realized that his eagerness to see Dare had been replaced over the past few days with dread. They had not met since shortly after the war, and there was no guarantee there’d be any ease between them. But much more disquieting than that was the old spectre of deceit that always seemed to accompany their relationship. Anson had lied to Thomas Lansdowne about Dare’s blood, he had shaken hands to “prove” that his old friend was white, just as he had once forged papers to prove that a runaway slave named John was a dead and forgotten farm boy and soldier in the Union Army. That had been a simple enough deception: the dead farm boy remained dead to everyone who’d ever known him, and Anson had made certain, initially, that Dare remained out of sight in a tent with some rebel wounded. Later, as it turned out, the deception proved even simpler: the dead soldier had been a recent arrival and had kept to himself. No one seemed to notice his resurrection in the form of a tall white soldier who was, in fact, the mulatto killer of his master.

  Anson drew a deep breath of the mud-heavy air. Could it be that, at the bottom of that white finger of smoke, or even nearby in the cannery or on the river, breathed another man for whom the past was such a potent mixture of pride and horror? Somehow it was easier to believe that Dare was dead, that he’d gone into the grave at Antietam with the poor white farm boy at last. Of course, Anson knew he hadn’t, knew he had continued to reinvent himself, always keeping ahead of the deception until the deception itself inevitably increased the pace and caught him from behind, caught them both from behind.

  But even as he walked across the yard toward the smoke, Anson knew he was lying to himself, something he had resisted doing for almost all his adult life. It wasn’t punishment or capture that worried him now: what could the world do to him that would change what he’d done in another life and been proud of doing? It was a nagging sense that perhaps, just perhaps, he’d been wrong in his pride. He had sheltered a slave, turned a black man into a white man as if he’d possessed a god’s power. But the Lansdownes’ hatred of Dare had eaten away at Anson’s confidence to the point where he had to concede that his friend, white or black, might have changed for the worse. It was at least possible. And Anson had just lied for him again on no greater basis than an old system of belief.

  He stepped around the corner of the house and approached the canvas tent. It was even more familiar than before, its sag like an admission of the weight of the years. Anson walked to the fire. The coals were still red, still giving off heat. He looked around and let his eyes rest on the stand of cottonwoods just beyond the tent. The trees stood dark in the clear light. They seemed to breathe, to form something animal. Anson watched them and did not realize with how much anticipation until he heard his own short breaths.

  “Hello? Is anyone here?”

  Only silence returned his call. He fought off the feeling that the woods, the tent, and the absent man were part of the same unease. But the longer he stood by the fire, breathing the wood smoke, the more the feeling came back to him, intensified. So he walked to the house and knocked loudly on the front door. It opened on contact. Anson called out a greeting, then stepped in.

  The air reeked of fish and sweat. He opened a door off the entrance and looked in on emptiness: no furnishings at all, just bare planks. Puzzled, he moved along the hall and tried another door. This time, he came upon a large room that looked like an Indian village of the sort he’d observed at spots along the Washington coast—clothes, hides, furs, cooking utensils, and a powerful odour, that curious mix of the human and wild that defined the riverbanks at Chilukthan and was captured here in an enclosed space. Some pieces of fishnet were stretched across the floor, no doubt for the purposes of mending. So Dare had given his house up to the workers for the duration of the season. That did not seem out of character for the man Anson remembered. Besides, Dare had never seemed like a man who’d prefer a parlour to an open field.

  Outside again, Anson drew the obvious conclusion: if Dare had just left the fire, then he’d be at the cannery. He hurried toward the dike.

  Now even the Indian children had vanished. He wondered if they’d really been there at all. Crescent Slough was disturbingly still. Where were the Indians? Surely not all of them went out on the boats? And the Chinese? If Dare had managed to replace his crew, they’d likely be somewhere nearby. At the very least, there should be some activity once he reached the cannery buildings.

  But, at the campfire, evidence of recent activity was everywhere, from the smell of grease and oil and smoke to the slop of fish heads and guts over which buzzed clusters of flies. When Anson peered through the gaps in the wharf planks at his feet and saw a fleet figure rummaging in the muck of the low tide, he breathed a sigh of relief. It was just what the Indian children did at the Lansdownes’ cannery; they scavenged for the knives that had slipped out of the workers’ hands during the frenzy of making the pack.

  He walked into the darkness of the main building. The sudden stifling of the gull cry was like the slamming of a door. The machines were silent, greasy with death.

  “William! Are you here?”

  He cried out in the same way that he’d throw a rope to a drowning man, only Anson could not shake off the feeling that he was the one struggling in the water.

  But a living man did emerge from the bloodied shadows. It was the elderly Chinese with the smoky eye.

  “Where is everyone?” Anson said.

  “They sleep. Others fish. Much, much work to do.”

  “Your boss? Is he sleeping too?”

  The Chinese grinned so broadly that Anson could count his three gold-capped teeth.

  “He never sleep. He not need it. Maybe he get all his sleep in winter.”

  “Well, where is he then?”

  “On the river. He just left. More trouble maybe.”

  “Trouble? What sort of trouble?”

  The grin disappeared. The Chinese scratched his chin with a long fingernail. “Very bad this year. Others try to fish our drifts. He take his gun.”

  Instinctively, Anson turned toward the river. But all he could see through the open side of the cannery was a rectangle of blue sky.

  “Which others?”

  The Chinese shrugged. His good eye flickered. “All of them maybe.”

  All of them? Anson struggled to shut out the image of dozens of armed white men surrounding Dare.

  “When do you expect him back?”

  The Chinese turned his palms up. They were like old parchment.

  “I’ll wait,” Anson said.

  As if the words were a spell, the Chinese slipped away at the utterance of them.

  But wait where? Anson decided that a shady spot under a tree would suffice. Perhaps he might even manage a few hours of sleep. Outside again under the gull cry, he passed a towering stack of wooden crates stamped with the label “Fraser River Salmon Dare Cannery.” An arched silver salmon circled by bold red appeared above the words. It was a comfort to Anson to see that the season was proving productive for his old friend. Surely when the fish ran in such abundance, there’d be profits enough for all the canners. So why the trouble? Anson smiled at the question, pleased that it would even occur to him after all he’d lived through. The hope in it calmed his nerves, made death retreat. Soon, he’d ask Dare the question directly, perhaps over a campfire at the edge of a brooding wood.

  He walked along the top of the long, earthen dike that, unlike the one at Chilukthan, fronted the entire settlement, until he saw a large cottonwood casting a broad net of shade over a field of knee-high grass. At the sight of the tree, a sudden weariness came over him. He descended the dike and crossed the field, grasshoppers whirring and leaping at his every step. The murmurous late morning opened so gently that all thoughts of conflict washed away as he took up a position near the
thick trunk and shut his eyes. Through all the horrible suffering and deaths, through the severing and rejoining of his country, through his own losses and failures, Anson had not lost the capacity to recognize and revel in the earth’s own offerings of grace. They did not occur regularly, but he knew the fault was his—the toil of work and society, the mind’s relentless worrying of the past, kept the spirit closed from most opportunities for a natural, human rest. Yet they still occurred: he could still feel himself embraced by something outside of all conscious planning, even if he no longer cared to use the name of God to describe that presence, the God that both sides in the war had used as justification for killing.

  The moment did not cease, nor did Anson open his eyes. Gradually his breathing and pulse slowed, and the world—Antietam, Chilukthan, the eyes of the dying and the healing—joined him in the balm of darkness.

  He woke to voices and frenzied gull cries. At first, he thought they were rapidly approaching him and he raised an arm as if to fend off a blow. But then he realized that they came from the dike and that they rose and fell in varying levels of excitement. Anson stood quickly, for the voices meant one thing: the boats had returned.

  When he reached the cannery, he saw that the harvest had not abated. Two large scows—each twenty feet long and a dozen wide—squirmed with salmon. Six Indian men stood waist-deep in the fish, flinging them as if they were silver blossoms onto the main wharf, where two Chinese, their pigtails swinging in almost perfect unison, transferred them to wheeled wooden carts. These were then shoved hurriedly by other Chinese into the cannery, which had begun to hiss and grind and clatter as if on the verge of explosion.

  The gulls whirled over the wharf, beating their wings as they dropped as close as possible to the fish before some human motion dampened their appetites and blew them back skyward. The din was fierce. The closer Anson came to the wharf, the harder it was to hear the voices. As he stepped out of the buildings’ shadows and approached the river, he felt the equal ferocity of the heat and squinted up. The sun, just past its apex, burned small and white. Anson calculated he had slept at least two hours, but the contrast with his moment of spiritual reflection made it seem more like two years. Already he smelled that curious mixture of smoke, blood, and river that at once alerted and confused his senses. It was a potent, almost overpowering smell that quickened the pulse even as it held out the promise of nothing but carnage. No wonder the gulls had gone mad. They kept breaking like a whitecapped surf against the brown bodies sweating in the scows.