Peyton said, “Shut up, Reilly.”
Reilly stepped back from the door to let the younger man in out of the weather, slapping his back to welcome him in.
The two men hadn’t seen one another since the August haying on Charles Brook. For years Peyton and Cassie had travelled to Reilly’s station at the end of the summer to spend several days in the large meadows of wild grass on the hills behind Reilly’s tilt. It was there that Peyton first heard he would be running the trapline alone this season. He and Reilly were sitting on the newly shorn grass, sharing a heel of bread. Reilly pointed at him. There was a confusion of scars like an angry child’s drawing across the back of the hand he pointed with. He said, “John Senior talk to you about running the line this season?”
Peyton looked across at the Irishman. “He haven’t said anything to me different from other years.”
Reilly made a face. “Well I’m not meant to be saying anything about it maybe. But he’s not trapping, he tells me. You’re to have a go at it alone.”
“Since when did he say this?” He tried to keep the smile from his mouth, in case Reilly was simply making a joke.
“When he come over in June, checking the cure. I tried to talk him free of it is the truth. Sure you haven’t been but John Senior’s kedger these years, you’ll be getting yourself lost back there.”
“Shut up Reilly.”
“What are you, twenty-six years old now? And haven’t skinned but a buck-toothed rat without your Da to hold your hand.” He was grinning at Peyton with just the tip of his tongue showing between his lips.
“Shut up,” Peyton said again. But he was too pleased at the thought of running his own line to feel honestly angry. “We’ll see who sets the most hats on the heads in London this winter,” he said.
“The little bedlamer with his own line,” Reilly had said then, shaking his head. “Next thing you’ll want to be getting married.”
Peyton carried a halo of frost into the Irishman’s tilt as he stepped inside, as if his frozen clothes were emanating their own cold light after hours in the outdoors. “Get that coat off you now,” Reilly said. “Close the door behind you.” Peyton was propped near the fire with a glass of rum where he presented his frustrations with the scarce take of beaver and explained his decision to move his line closer to Reilly’s own. Through the conversation the Irishman helped Annie prepare the food, nodding and asking questions and throwing out good-natured insults at every opportunity. Reilly’s constant teasing was a kind of flattery, as ritualized and intimate in its way as dancing. Unlike John Senior’s rough silence, which Peyton couldn’t help thinking of as an implicit condemnation of his abilities, his aptitude, his judgement. He felt vaguely guilty about his affection for Reilly, as if he was being unfaithful to his father somehow.
They sat to a huge meal of salt pork and potatoes and afterwards the two men filled their glasses and their pipes while Annie Boss cleared away the dishes. Annie and Joseph had been married eight years, but she was still known to everyone on the shore as Annie Boss. She spoke over her shoulder with Peyton as she worked and bantered with her husband in a mang of English and Mi’kmaq and Gaelic.
Annie’s belly, which barely showed when Peyton last saw her during the haying, was now quite obviously pregnant. “She’s improving, that one,” he said to Reilly.
Annie turned with both hands on her stomach. She said the child was no time too soon, her mother was starting to have doubts about her choice in a husband.
Reilly smiled at her, his ears rising half an inch on the sides of his head.
Later that evening, after Annie Boss had climbed into a bunk at the back of the tilt and the men had coddled several more glasses of rum, Peyton said, “Can I ask you a question, Joseph.”
“Suit yourself.”
Peyton paused a moment, rolling his glass between the flat of his palms. “What did you,” he said and then stopped. He took a sip of rum. “How did you ask Annie Boss to marry you?”
The Irishman laughed. “Well we’ve all wondered what’s been holding you up, John Peyton. Have your sights set on some lass finally, is it?”
Peyton stared into his glass. “Never mind,” he said.
“There’s not many on the shore to choose from. I bet I could strike the name before the third guess.”
“Never mind,” Peyton said again, angrily this time.
“Don’t mind my guff now,” Reilly said. He was surprised by Peyton’s seriousness. He leaned forward on his thighs. “It was Annie’s doing more than mine is the truth of it. If it had been left me, it might never have come to pass. She sent me off to a have a word with her father.”
“I suppose it was different with her.” He glanced across at Reilly, but the look on his face made Peyton drop his eyes quickly back to his lap.
“Her being Micmac, is what you mean?” When the younger man didn’t answer him, Reilly said, “She’s a good Christian woman, John Peyton.”
Peyton nodded. He lifted his glass to his mouth and drained it. He said, “Could I get another drop of rum, do you think?”
Reilly cleared the heat from his voice. “Who is this lass now?” he said.
Peyton got up from his seat to fetch the rum. “Never mind,” he said over his shoulder.
Reilly asked no more questions and did the favour of not even looking much at him, which Peyton was grateful for. They went on drinking a while longer until Reilly excused himself and climbed into bed as well. Peyton sat up in the dark then, nursing a last finger of rum, upset with himself to have been such a stupid twillick. What he’d intended to say about Annie was altogether different than what he garbled out. And he had never discussed marriage with a living soul before. He wished now he’d had the sense to leave it that way.
Peyton was sixteen the first time he laid eyes on Cassie, shortly after sailing through the Narrows of St. John’s harbour, twenty-nine days out from Poole aboard the John & Thomas. A fine cold day after a night of heavy rain and the few ships anchored in the still water had raised their sails to dry. Running inland from the east side of the Narrows was Maggoty Cove, a rocky stretch of shoreline built over with wharves and stages, behind them the wide flakes used for drying cod. Each season wet fish fell through the lungers of the flakes and bred maggots on the ground. The dark, bottomless smell of rot rooting the clear sea air.
Peyton and his father made their way to a two-storey building on the east end of Upper Path, which housed the postmaster and the island’s first newspaper — a single sheeter folded to four pages that carried government proclamations, mercantile ads, parliamentary proceedings, local news, a poet’s corner on the back page. A small harried-looking man with a New England accent came forward from a cluttered desk at the back of the room to greet them. The two men exchanged a few words and John Senior handed across a large leather satchel of mail he’d carried up from the ship, then produced a letter from his own pocket.
The postmaster nodded as he scanned the page. “Got the trunk for you along this way,” he said, jerking his head repeatedly to indicate the direction they should follow.
The trunk was large enough to sleep an adult fairly comfortably. Peyton took one end and his father the other. Even John Senior showed the strain of the weight. They huffed it out the door where a crowd had already gathered for the calling of the mail. At the waterfront the trunk was rowed out to the Jennifer, a coaster scheduled to leave for Fogo Island in two days’ time.
“What’s aboard of her?” Peyton asked, watching it being lifted awkwardly over the ship’s gunnel. He was soaked in sweat from hauling the weight of it. He took his cap from his head and wiped a forearm across his face.
John Senior shrugged. “Mostly books, I expect.”
When they boarded the Jennifer two days later, Peyton spotted the trunk set against the back wall of the fo’c’sle. There was a woman seated on the lid in the light drizzle of rain. She wore a dark hat and a long cloak of Bedford cord that showed only black worsted stockings below the knees
.
She stood when they approached her and she extended her gloved hand to John Senior. “Master Peyton,” she said. Her face was misted with rain, tiny beads clinging to the long lashes of her eyes. Light brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, a small, full mouth. There was a suggestion of misproportion about the features that Peyton couldn’t assign to anything particular. He had no idea who the woman was or why she exhibited such a proprietary attitude towards the trunk they’d sent aboard the ship. She seemed to be dressed in a manner meant to bolster a questionable claim to adulthood.
John Senior said, “This is the young one you’ll be watching out for. John Peyton,” he said. “Miss Cassandra Jure.”
She reached out to shake his hand, bending only slightly, but enough to make him draw up to his full five feet five inches. “Are you a reader, John Peyton?” she asked, still holding his bare hand.
He was about to say he was and stopped himself. It occurred to him she was asking something other than whether he knew how to read. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Well,” she said. She seemed to wink at him then, giving her words a conspiratorial air. “We’ll soon find out.”
Through that first summer Peyton worked with his father hand-lining for cod morning and afternoon, and in the early evenings while John Senior cleaned and salted the fish with two hired hands in the cutting room, he did sums at the kitchen table or read to Cassie from The Canterbury Tales or Pope’s translation of the Odyssey. He decided early on that he was not, in fact, a reader. It was something he could easily have given up if he didn’t think it would upset Cassie, to whom it seemed to mean so much that he become one. They struggled through Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady. They read Paradise Lost.
She saw much in the poems and stories that he did not. She was sometimes cryptic and high-minded in a way he found off-putting. She could wander into flights of speculation beyond his interest or understanding, and this was usually the case when he was too tired to know what he was reading, the words on the page like beads on a string that he shifted from one side to another.
“What does that mean?” Cassie would ask then. “To justify the ways of God to man. What is Milton saying?”
Peyton’s eyes were bleary with exhaustion. He had been on the water since five that morning. He did not know what it meant. He stared at her in the hope she would pity him enough to explain it.
“A story is never told for its own sake,” she said. “True or false?”
“True,” he said. “False,” he added quickly.
Cassie sighed and worked her fingers in her lap.
He stared at her. He was the only person in the world she had to talk to about poems, to discuss her peculiar notions about stories. It was a disappointment to them both that he thought of her books as a discomfort, like being forced to walk in shoes full of gravel. She seemed so peculiarly out of place in their house, so lost. Almost as long as he’d known her, Peyton wanted to make that otherwise.
He’d kept his marital aspirations close for years, telling himself he had little to offer yet as a husband. Running his own trapline was a first step towards a station from which he felt he might legitimately declare his intentions, and the thought of this, along with the alcohol, had made him reckless in Reilly’s company.
He stepped outside to relieve himself a final time before he went to his own bunk, pissing into a snowbank at the edge of the trees. He said, “ Take note, take note, O world, To be direct and honest is not safe.” Where was that from again? He lifted his head to stare up at the sky as he shook himself. Stars winking through the moving branches of trees like flankers rising from a distant fire. He was drunker than he realized. He raised his head a notch higher and fell over backwards into the snow, his cock still in his hand.
The morning John Senior and the officer left for White Bay, Cassie pulled a pair of John Senior’s leather trousers on beneath her skirt, turning the cuffs up at the bottom for length, and buttoned a sheepskin waistcoat over her bodice. She closed the animals up in their shed with a week’s supply of hay and packed herself a bag with provision enough for two days’ travel. It was late November and there had been a steady week of snow. She followed the shoreline towards the headwaters of the river until she was in sight of Peter’s Arm. Joseph Reilly’s trapping tilt was at least five miles more up the Exploits from what she had gathered listening to the men talk among themselves. She decided to make her way to the river through the woods so as not to pass through Ship Cove.
Cassie started into the forest bearing southeast and the large Indian rackets she wore sank a foot into the loose powder with every step forward, coming away with a weight of snow like a shovel. It was heavy work and out of the wind the day was surprisingly warm. She removed her gloves and opened the heavy overcoat to the air and then unbuttoned the waistcoat as well.
Before dark she tramped a piece of ground firm and took off the rackets and sat on her overcoat against a tree. She had no clear notion of how much further a walk was ahead of her. Her right leg ached. She ate a cold meal of blood sausage and bread and closed her eyes long enough to feel the weather begin to steal into her body.
When she pushed herself up to start moving again the pain in her leg throbbed in time to her pulse. It seemed strangely appropriate to feel her heart swelling the hurt that way.
It was a clear night and the constellations watched her through the branches of the trees as she travelled and where she came upon a clearing she stopped to take her bearings by the stars. When she came out of the woods it was near dawn. The River Exploits still ran open but there were runners of ice along the banks. Cassie took off the Indian rackets and strapped them to her pack and headed south, keeping as close to the shoreline as she could, watching all the while for signs of Reilly’s traplines or his shelter or rising smoke.
His tilt was built in the bush on the north side of a narrow stretch of river. His dog caught sight or sound of her as she approached and Reilly and his wife came out of the tiny shack to see what had raised the barking. Reilly carried a rifle, thinking it might be a wolf or a bear. Annie Boss was wiping her dark hands in the skirt of her rough calico dress. She whistled for the dog and kicked awkwardly at his shoulders when he refused to quiet down.
Reilly walked down to meet her and shook her hand. Cassie had not until that moment considered what she would say to these people and stood with her mouth open while Reilly smiled at her. He was sure she came with news but was in no rush to hear it.
“Come up,” he said, “the kettle is on. We haven’t had this much company in all my days on the river.”
“Company?” she said.
“Sure the Thames doesn’t see as much traffic in a week,” he said and motioned up the clearing towards the tilt.
Cassie looked up to where he pointed. John Peyton stood in the tiny doorway in his shirtsleeves, watching her come up the bank.
Annie Boss was born and baptized on Cape Breton Island but she’d moved with her parents to Newfoundland at such a young age that she thought of no other place as home. When she was a child, her family spent winters in the country near White Bay where her father and brother trapped marten, beaver and fox, and each spring they migrated down to St. George’s Bay on the west coast for the summer. Her mother was born the seventh of seven daughters, a puowin, with a rare gift for healing. Annie accompanied her when she was called to deliver a child or nurse an injury or comfort the dying. She inherited her mother’s knowledge of roots and herbs and the position of a child’s head in the womb that distinguished a boy from a girl in the same unconscious and predictable way she had taken on her gestures, her habit of hiding her eyes with her hand when she laughed, the way she rubbed the length of her thighs while considering a thorny medical problem.
By the time she married Reilly, Annie had seen all manner of births and their complications and most every form of human injury imaginable. She knew something of how pe
ople carried themselves when they had a wound to nurse or hide. And watching Cassie Jure walk up the bank to their tilt, she’d seen something in the woman’s gait beyond her customary limp that made her watchful and wary. She stood at the fireplace tending a pan of capelin and leftover brewis but she was eyeing Cassie where she sat with the men. Only something calamitous could have occasioned her visit up the river, but she drank her tea calmly while they discussed the number of animals on the trapline this year and how much snow was down compared to last winter.
Peyton inquired after his father’s health, as casually as he could manage. Cassie spoke briefly of Lieutenant Buchan’s visit and John Senior’s agreeing to assist in the expedition he had planned. She said he had taken the officer across to White Bay to meet with William Cull.
“That’s a queer turn of events,” Reilly said quietly.
Peyton hid his relief that Cassie hadn’t come with bad news of his father by nodding into his mug and wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
Reilly turned to his wife and asked after the food and she waved her hand to shush him up. “Fire don’t work no faster ’cause you hungry, Joe Jep,” she told him. “Missa Jure not going to starve this minute now, are you, Missa Jure?”
Cassie looked across at her and shook her head no.
When they’d eaten their breakfast and dawdled over more tea and gossip, Annie shooed the men outside and they dressed themselves and packed food for the day. Peyton looked to Cassie while Reilly checked the works of a trap-bed on his lap but she refused to acknowledge him. The men left the shack after guessing they’d be by again around dark and Cassie started in to clear away the dishes. “You walking all night,” Annie said, “you got to rest now.” But Cassie refused to sit and they worked in silence until they were done. Afterwards Annie boiled the kettle to make more tea and then sat across from Cassie with her legs spread to accommodate the size of her belly. “Must be more than one in there,” she said and she laughed and wiped her eyes with the palm of her hand. She said, “Annie Boss not so good at reading your mind, Missa Jure.”
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