by Tim Bowling
“I entrust the patient . . . the patients . . . to your care,” he said over his shoulder as he left the room.
From the wall in Thomas Lansdowne’s den, Anson removed a shotgun and loaded it. Then he hurried to catch up to the Indians.
They had not gone far, but only the dog’s incessant barking and growling indicated their whereabouts. The darkness had closed as though sewn to the earth. To the west along the riverbank, the cannery beat remorselessly on, spewing smoke and yellow shards of light, but even its hissings and clankings seemed smothered by the thick night. A wind had come up from the east, but it wasn’t strong enough to freshen the air of its heavy blood, slime, and low tide taste.
The Indians stopped at Anson’s call. The dog, whimpering, ran to his side, as if seeking permission to return to her master. She moved heavily, her belly swollen.
“It’s all right, girl, go on now, go on back.”
Anson shouldered the gun and spoke plainly to the man.
“I need to get to Crescent Slough right away.”
The Indian’s face was noncommittal in the darkness. He spoke softly to the woman. She nodded.
“I’ll go,” he said. “But not stay.”
Anson understood. He also wasn’t keen to follow any farther in the wake of Henry Lansdowne’s vengeance than was necessary. Unfortunately, the necessity was ultimate, he could not pretend otherwise. The heavy smell of blood wafting over the damp earth was more than sobering fact; it was the unassailable truth that had replaced faith and memory. He could no more turn away from it than Henry Lansdowne could turn away from his vengeance. And it was a truth whose darkness could be penetrated only by a different belief. That Dare stood at the centre of it meant that Anson had no illusions about his journey. More than even the child’s survival, it was, at last, the reason he had come to this place—to prevent a murder. But the knowledge was like a gun at his back.
Past the wharf in the direction of the slough mouth, they neared the Indian settlement, their way dimly lit by burning bulrushes he’d been told were dipped in oolichan grease. A cluster of barking dogs ran out of the shadows but retreated immediately at the male Indian’s command. Though they moved steadily, Anson and the Indian couple’s progress seemed imperceptible. The smell of fish and tide deepened, the river sucked at its banks, the stars brightened but cast no greater light: the distance to Crescent Slough might have been the distance between planets. By the time Anson and the male Indian had veered off to the riverbank, boarded a skiff, and set off into the current, only minutes had passed, but Anson could not stop himself from thinking in years; each pull of the oars was like a tear in the thin fabric between a life’s experiences, between the child’s and the man’s sense of time. From the Indian, Anson learned little, only that Henry Lansdowne had left just before the Indian and his wife had come to the house: if he pulled hard and steadily, the Indian believed he could close the gap. Anson settled into the bow, and his body tensed, set to the trigger of Henry Lansdowne’s anger. The canoe seemed to plunge through panes of glass that broke silently again and again. Other than the almost soundless motion of the oars, only the occasional cry of a hunting owl disturbed the still air.
They entered the mouth of Crescent Slough without seeing or hearing another skiff ahead of them. Yet Anson’s whole body tightened. It was as if they floated on a bloodstream. Earth and sky fell away, the small black wharf loomed ahead like a clot. The tide had fallen and begun its rise again since he had sped downriver with Dare. The going was now smooth, rhythmical. The Indian, however, did not relax until the skiff pulled alongside the wharf, directly behind another already moored there. With haste, Anson scrambled onto the wharf and gazed along the bank.
Dare’s cannery pounded steadily not far away, its noises erupting in sudden spurts, its smoke and lights spewing the same broken energy as the Lansdownes’ cannery. Together, they were like the inflamed lungs of some great beast that had crawled to the river to die. Anson could see dozens of shadows in the faint lamplight; they fell swiftly back and forth, flung like dead salmon. For the air was thick with their creaturely death; like a wind, it touched everything, from the silt of the low tide to the sweat on Anson’s brow. It seemed to him that the fish, in their dying, only continued their ecstatic journey in another form, one invisible to the ordinary senses. But he took no hope from the thought. He ducked his head repeatedly as he ran up the gangway, convinced the air would crack and bleed above him at any second. He had no idea where to go. Should he try to ward off Henry Lansdowne somehow or look for Dare and warn him? The night offered no guidance. For now, it mattered more that he reach the dike.
Once there, his breath came raggedly, a cramp pierced his side. He stopped and bent at the waist. The clanks and hisses seemed farther off, as if the cannery was drifting away on the very smell that it was swallowing.
Then he heard it. A single word, shouted. “Dare!” And it was like a cipher into which everything plunged: river, stars, sky, even memory. The darkness began to flow. Anson felt himself moving with it, heavy as a sodden stump, roots torn away from the earth. But when the word came again, it stopped him short. Dare. Now it was quieter. Anson wondered if he’d really heard the name a second time or merely an echo. Then he realized that the voice was not quieter, the word had fallen in unison with a sudden eruption of noise from the cannery, which now opened before him like a side of bleeding flesh. The blue-smocked Chinese, their pigtails cracking, tossed chunks of salmon from them like burning armour. The greased and bloodied conveyor belts whined. Rows of Indian women wielding knives bent so far over that they appeared headless—their elbows sliced the air as sharply as the blades they held. Steam and smoke travelled in great scuds underlit with blood. Everywhere workers trundled wooden barrows heaped with fish, as if delivering souls to the furnaces of hell. Anson stared at one worker and his burden: the living man and the dead salmon shared the same agonized expression of nothing. The planks underfoot ran slick with slime and entrails. Anson slipped as he rounded a large, pulsating boiler into which a bare-chested, wickery Chinese grinned as he tossed in chunks of cedar. The wood, like the fish, seemed recently dead. The absence of screams was as nightmarish as the sudden appearance of two Indian children, a boy and a girl no more than eight years old. Naked except for a cloth at the loins, their skin speckled with blood, they stood laughing and chewing on raw gouts of flesh. The boy had his hand inside a severed fish-head, working the jaw open and closed as if it were a puppet. Then a thick retch of steam hid them from view.
Anson stood in the midst of the chaotic order and looked desperately around. The pounding of the gears, shafts, and pistons reverberated up from the floor straight into his skull. Slowly his stinging eyes came to rest on the open wall of the building fronting the river. A tiny stitching of stars shone just below the roof beams. He started toward the light, vaguely thinking that he could regain his bearings outside and make a rational decision. But before he could escape the damp, blood-soaked interior, Anson glimpsed a dark figure slipping to the right of his vision. This time, however, the word did not come. Perhaps, he thought with horror, there was no longer any need for it. Though he had heard no shot, he knew that Henry Lansdowne was capable of a more intimate revenge. Anson began to move, the blue-smocked Chinese sliding away to either side of him as if they’d been stabbed by the grim labours of the Indian women invisible in the dirty steam. Now the word was on Anson’s lips, but he could not utter it. The letters were weighted down with blood. Anson waded through fathoms of stench with dead fish swimming around his legs, their entrails clutching like seaweed, threatening to pull him under.
The night air helped. Outside again, the name became a whisper he could hear a long way down, where he had helped to join it to flesh in the vague years already spent. He listened to himself as if the past were a compass. Then he knew where Dare would be. The knowledge came to him in a burst of clarity, the whole night’s hood thrown back off the shoulders of an indifferent, because non-existent, god.
Dare would be where he had always been, where he had died even as he started to run, where Anson himself had died, where the salmon wanted to die even beyond the meaningless physical phase of their brief lives.
Anson hoped only that Henry Lansdowne would continue to search in the wrong place. If Dare could be warned, even moments ahead, he could yet prolong his dead run, as the salmon did, out of the inexorable hope of purpose inherent in generation, to pass on, if nothing else, the thrill of surviving until the blank eyes were torn by an equal hunger from the skull.
Away from the cannery, the darkness thickened as the air ran fresher. Time grew young. Despite the unceasing cramp in his side, Anson hurried along the dike and then down toward Dare’s house, which sat on the depressed earth like a doused coal. No one stirred as Anson passed. The night was suddenly fragile. Anson held the shotgun before him, pushing the seconds away like cobwebs.
The shot rang out just as the campfire winked its red at his approach. Anson covered the dark ground as fast as he could, keeping the trickle of white smoke straight before him. The gun seemed to come alive as he ran. He grasped the stock; it was slick as horse flesh.
A man stood beside the open tent, his arm lengthened by the weapon he held at his side. Feet away lay a body crumpled at odd angles: it looked like two halves of a body struggling to reconnect itself.
Anson came close, stared into the face of the standing man, who spoke with neither sadness nor disappointment.
“It isn’t him. I thought it was but it isn’t.” Henry Lansdowne was calm as only a man can be who has released his violence at last. “I should have known he’d be gone. But I thought more of him than that. I thought he’d face up to it.”
Anson bent to the now-still body, saw that it was the elderly Chinese, saw the hole in his abdomen and the long knife fallen from his hand onto the grass. And all that Anson could think was: that should have been my price, for my loyalty was older. As the last life of the Chinese drained into the ground, Anson’s scalp prickled. Slowly he looked around.
“John?”
Lansdowne tensed and brought his gun up. The campfire hissed, a fish spine of smoke stood against the dark. A throbbing of flies dripped out of the air and onto the corpse.
There was no answer except an old and ravaged echo of the voice of a trembling, runaway slave: “He did not deserve to live. He was evil.” And inside the echo, “A man can doubt everything. Even a good man.”
Anson peered into the darkness beyond where the flies were feeding. He could see no purpose there, hard as he looked. And the stars themselves were faint, sucked clean of light by the same murmurous flies near the grass.
“If he’s here, I’ll kill him.” Henry Lansdowne’s face shone pale in the starlight.
Suddenly Anson saw a trail, clear and direct and mysterious as the salmon’s trail from sea to river. It was lit with bloodshine and Dare walked it, and would keep walking it until his breath came no more and perhaps beyond that. It didn’t matter how it was walked, in what name—justice, truth, faith—Dare would walk and his feet would be covered in blood, his or others’, and that hardly mattered either.
Anson, however, still had a useful service to perform.
“Your brother’s recovering,” he said and rose. “But I must return to your niece. We’ll have to tend to this later.”
Henry Lansdowne nodded. Together they turned from the corpse of the old Chinese and walked with intent toward the river. They had not gone twenty paces before Lansdowne stopped and whirled around, his gun aimed in the direction of the black woodlot.
“Dare!” he shouted. “Come out and show yourself!”
There was no response.
Anson strained to make out the thousand tense faces between the trees, his body went rigid waiting for the burst of noise and motion.
Lansdowne lowered his gun very slowly. “I do not doubt,” he said in a level voice, “that he would shoot me in the back. Or . . .”
His jaw dropped and his eyes widened. He whirled around to the west and stared downriver.
Anson understood what the “Or” implied, but he could no longer be sure if the implication was unfounded. Henry Lansdowne had killed Dare’s Chinese, a man who’d clearly been in Dare’s employ long enough for a certain loyalty to accrue. And yet, to mete out vengeance on a slave owner who’d destroyed all you’d ever known of family, to so lose yourself in that act of vengeance to be reduced to savagery, was a particular brand of justice. Anson knew that Dare was not that same man—twenty years would cool any blood, white or black, but he couldn’t be sure how Dare would respond to the murder of the Chinese.
Henry Lansdowne obviously had no such doubt. He began to run toward the river.
Anson hesitated.
“John?” he said, facing the woodlot. “Are you there?”
He hoped for a response without really expecting one. The air bristled. Seconds passed. When Anson finally turned away, he saw that the darkness had already swallowed Lansdowne’s figure. There would be no catching him.
The smoke of the campfire had vanished. Near the ashes, a body lay under the faint stars, on the cool grass, with the dead salmon’s open-eyed vision on its face. It was there because of Dare, regardless of right and wrong, good and evil. It had been there since Antietam and it was never going to be buried. All the bones in Anson’s body felt the ache of the knowledge—it was like a dull saw blade scraping the memory off his skeleton.
Clutching his side as he ran, he hoped he could find an Indian to row him downriver again.
• • •
At first the red glow in the distance looked like nothing more than a soldier’s campfire on a hillside, a flicker of light in the surrounding dark. But as the skiff drifted in to the Chilukthan wharf, the glow became a fierce ball of crackling flame. Then Anson heard the frantic shouts of men. But it wasn’t until the skiff had landed and he was rushing along the dike that he connected Henry Lansdowne’s open-jawed panic with the fire. To connect the two, however, was not the same as accepting the cause and effect. Anson had seen the cannery in full operation, had seen the careless work in the boiler room where the hot ashes were not hosed down as regularly as they should have been. Even so, he was not a fool, not quite; he recognized that the timing was a damnation not even a friend of Dare could dismiss lightly.
When Anson reached the cannery, the heat was intense even though the fire had been contained to one corner of the building. Madly, the processing continued inside. Anson watched in disbelief as the dark, hunched figures of the Indian women continued to slice away at the silver fish even as the smoke and flames crept closer. Outside, a long line of men and women—Chinese and Indian mostly, but also some whites who oversaw the cannery operations—had formed a bucket brigade down to the river. Each person stood about twenty feet from his neighbour and raced two buckets of sloshing water up the line where they were thrown on the flames by Henry Lansdowne himself. The Englishman hurled each bucketful with such ferocity that he might have been a devil driving a pitchfork into sinning flesh.
With his arm over his face, Anson ran forward.
Lansdowne did not pause. The fire glow in his beard made him look as if he’d been feeding on a piece of bloody meat. He shouted, “Get a bucket, man! Hurry!”
Anson staggered away from the heat. He found a place in the line and reached for the handles of the buckets. The Indian who handed them to him seemed to find nothing unusual in the emergency, but the man who burst out of the darkness below, his face greasy and red, was shouting as if on fire.
“Move it! Move it, there! For God’s sakes, hurry!”
It was Thomas Lansdowne. His blackened sling hung loosely from him as he ran. Anson opened his mouth to protest, but the next buckets were in his hands and the person above him was urging him on. With a heave of his sore shoulders, he set to the task.
To Anson’s amazed relief, the bucket brigade proved effective. After what seemed like hours, the fire was out, but not before the cannery crew had been
forced to flee. Only the use of the steam pumps, in fact, had saved the building.
The riverbank hushed. Anson stood beside a barrow of salmon, the top layer of which was charred. Little flecks of red ash floated past him. He watched one rise until it disappeared against the stars. The night quickly recovered its rhythm. The river chewed almost docilely against the bank, an owl hooted somewhere beyond the smoking cedar of the ruined section of the cannery. Men and women trod heavily through the restored rhythm, their heads down. A few pairs of gumboots sloshed through the inches of water on the cannery floor. Buckets were strewn about like severed fish heads. A man kicked savagely at one. It was Thomas Lansdowne. His brother stood at his side, sniffing disgustedly at the smoking char. Anson did not have to approach them. In unison, they turned to him, and Henry Lansdowne said, “Now he’ll be running. At least he’d better be. And if he’s intelligent at all, he won’t stop.”
He never has stopped, Anson reflected, not since Antietam. Now Dare was gone, plunged somewhere into that darkness of the earth from which he had emerged, and would emerge again, with or without the imprimatur of goodness bestowed upon him by the diminishing belief of one for whom almost twenty years was enough of a church. But if the bricks had collapsed, the beams might yet remain; if it could be done, Anson vowed to transfer what belief he still possessed to where it might prove of greater benefit. There was no point in talking to Thomas Lansdowne about his arm; the man would not listen to him now. Without a word, Anson turned his back on the cannery and set out to resume his vigil at the child’s bedside.
As he neared the house, however, the sudden snorted breath of a horse startled him. But Anson did not see the animal; its hoof beats struck the ground almost immediately and died away in the opposite direction, to the south. When Anson reached the veranda stairs, a strange whimpering sound stopped him before he could fully absorb the idea of connecting Dare with the horse. He knelt and peered into the close, warm darkness beneath the stairs. The smell of blood and wet fur flowed up. It was the Lansdownes’ dog. She’d given birth to at least six puppies; he could hear them suckling, hear the mother licking and breathing. One of the pups was curious, already pushing its nose into the greater world. Anson reached out his hand and collected the soft creature. Then he stood and gazed in the direction the horse had gone.