River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  Cassie looked towards the one tiny window.

  Annie set her mug down and rubbed her hands back and forth along the length of her thighs.

  Cassie said, “You’re the only person I could ask this of, Annie.”

  Annie would not make eye contact with her. “Whose baby you got there?”

  “Nobody’s,” she said. “It’s not going to be anyone’s baby.”

  Annie nodded. “Make you real sick, Missa Jure, guarantee. Some women up and die with the sick.”

  The white woman folded her arms and tightened them around herself. Her jaw was set awkwardly askew as if she was gnawing on the inside of her mouth.

  “Missa Jure.”

  “I know what I want,” she said.

  “Maybe nothing happen but you get ill,” Annie said. “You sick and still got that problem.”

  “I’ll take that chance.”

  Annie nodded to herself and let out a long breath of air. “God decide, not you, not me. Okay?” She crossed herself and got up to gather maidenhair and bog myrtle and skunk currant from the dried bouquets hung from the rafters above the fireplace, talking aloud all the while in her own language as if to someone else in the room.

  Cassie said, “Thank you, Annie.”

  Annie turned towards her, waving her hands in front of her face. “No,” she said. “Don’t want to hear it.” She pointed a finger. “Whatever happen, I got to live with too.”

  Cassie raised her hand, about to argue, and then thought better of it. She placed her hand back in her lap and simply nodded.

  By early afternoon Cassie had begun vomiting and between spells of throwing up she lay on the single bed in the room and held her stomach and keened. The cramps knifed at her stomach and crawled up her spine to her shoulders. Her head throbbed with fever. The dry heaves she fell into were so violent that a blood vessel in her right eye had burst and the dark look she turned on Annie was so forlorn and foreboding that the Mi’kmaq woman crossed herself repeatedly.

  There were no resident doctors or clergy on the northeast shore of Newfoundland before the turn of the century and Annie’s mother was called to the homes of the French and English settlers as often as those of her own people. At the age of thirteen Annie was sent alone to attend a birth while her mother nursed a boy who had fallen on a fish fork and punctured his abdomen. The pregnant woman’s husband had rowed two hours down White Bay to their tilt and Annie’s brother walked him an hour more through bush in the dark to the home of the injured boy. He was a tall rickety Englishman of no more than twenty-five with a pinched look of worry and he pleaded with Annie’s mother to attend his wife who was in distress when he set out three hours before and might be dead by now for all that he knew. But the boy was bleeding and running a fever so high that Annie’s mother was afraid it would kill him. She conferred with Annie quietly and sent her away with the Englishman and he walked Annie back to his boat in a stunned and furious silence. She sat in the stern facing him as he rowed and he watched her carefully in the sparse moonlight. He asked her age and then pulled at the oars so fiercely Annie could see the veins and muscles in his neck straining like anchor chains in a tide.

  The pregnant woman was lying in a bunk along the back wall when they came into the one-room shack. Annie told the husband to light a fire and boil as much water as the pot would hold and then she knelt beside the woman. “You keep breathing now,” she said, and she used the curt, belligerent tone she’d heard her mother use around whites who were ashamed to be so naked in front of Indian women and to need something from them besides. She put her hand between the woman’s legs and felt for the baby’s head and asked about the pain and how long it lasted. The husband clanked the pot on the crane and hovered nervously and asked Annie and his wife useless questions until Annie told him to wait outside and leave them to their business.

  In an hour the baby was ready and Annie had the woman squat in a corner where the walls gave her some support. She had ripped a bedsheet into towels and boiled them and had a pot of fresh hot water at her side. It was just the end of April but they had struck a solid week of unusually fine weather and the tiny shack was stifling from the heat of the fire. “You got to push when I tell you to push now,” she said and the woman nodded and sucked air through her clenched teeth. “Nothing to be scared of but the hurt,” Annie said, and when the contractions shook the woman’s body again she yelled at her to bear down. The husband shouted through the door as if he thought Annie was doing something to inflict her pain. After the contraction subsided the Englishwoman lifted her chin to take air into her lungs and to tell him things were bad enough without him losing his head and they heard nothing more from him until they were through. Annie wiped the sheen of sweat from her face with a hot cloth and the woman managed a crooked smile until the next contraction ripped through her.

  Three days later the Englishman came down the bay to their tilt with a small cask of pickled herring and a kid on a rope. He stooped under the low ceiling of the front room and hemmed his awkward and formal thanks to Annie, who was too embarrassed to look at him. He proffered the barrel of fish and motioned outside to where the goat was tethered.

  “You leave the barrel,” her mother told him, “but take the animal back home. Annie too young to expect all that, she just a child herself.”

  The boy her mother stayed to care for was dead by the time Annie returned from delivering her first baby. Birth and death. She could never afterwards think of them as separate things. She saw them both now in the woman she was nursing, Cassie moaning helplessly on the bunk, her arms wrapped tight around her womb. Hours ahead of her and worse still to come, Annie knew. She cleaned the slop bucket and wiped Cassie’s forehead and forced her to drink warm water so she would have something in her stomach to throw up.

  When Peyton and Reilly returned at dusk, Cassie was bleeding heavily and Annie refused to let the men enter the tilt. She stepped outside the door and told them they would have to set up a camp for the night and refused to answer any of Peyton’s questions. She spoke a few words in her own tongue to Reilly and the Irishman took Peyton by the arm and they turned away from the tilt. He looked up towards the sky for a moment and said, “Coarse night,” and it was clear to Peyton he wasn’t referring to the weather. They found a freshly killed rabbit in one of Reilly’s slips on their way towards the river. Reilly skinned and cleaned the animal while Peyton laid the fire. They roasted it on a length of alder, the dark flesh turning black in the heat.

  Peyton said, “What’s happening up at the house, Joseph?”

  Reilly pulled the stick free of the carcass and used his thumbs to break the sternum, then tore the torso along the spine with his bare hands. He offered the piece in his scarred hand to the younger man. “You and that lass are close, John Peyton?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Close enough to —”

  “No,” Peyton said flatly.

  Reilly nodded. “Is she close to anyone else you know of?”

  “There’s just myself and father,” Peyton said and he stopped himself before he took the thought any further.

  Reilly leaned away from the fire to rest on an elbow, as if he wanted to step back from the conversation, shift it in some other direction. “I expect the morning will answer what questions you have. No sense making yourself sick with it tonight.”

  They ate in silence a while then and Reilly put a kettle of snow on to boil water for tea. Peyton chewed his food sullenly. The dry flesh tasted like a mouthful of sand.

  After he’d poured them both a mug of tea, Peyton said, “Is it true what I’ve heard about John Senior?”

  Reilly laughed. “I can’t begin to guess what you’ve heard.”

  “Did he beat that old Indian to death with a trap-bed?”

  “I’ll bet you two good oars,” Reilly said, “you heard that from Dick Richmond.”

  “What difference does it make where I heard it?”

  “Sometimes it makes all the difference in the
world.”

  “Did he do it, Joseph?”

  The Irishman gave a long sigh and scratched at the hair over his ear. “That was before my time on the shore,” he said.

  Peyton stared into the fire. He shook his head slowly.

  Reilly said, “John Senior’s never told you how he came to take me on, has he?”

  Before London hangings were moved to Newgate, the official procession to the gallows at Tyburn ran through Smithfield into the heart of Reilly’s neighbourhood, St. Giles, an area of the city densely populated by Irish immigrants. From there it moved through St. Andrews and Holborne and on to the Tyburn road. The City marshall led the parade on horseback. Behind him the undersheriff headed a group of mounted peace officers and constables armed with staves on foot. Behind these came the carts carrying the condemned men, who sat on their own coffins and were accompanied by a prison chaplain. More constables marched on either side of the carts.

  Thousands of people lined the streets and the procession stopped often to allow the condemned men to speak with friends and family, and sometimes to drink mugs of ale and spirits carried out to them from taverns on the route. Women threw flowers and fruit into the carts and ran into the street to touch the hands of the men being conveyed to their deaths. The pace was stately, almost celebratory. It was as if the procession was wending its way to a church for a royal wedding. The condemned men were presented with a pair of spotless white gloves to wear. Some of them spent every shilling they had to their names on their hanging clothes and they were ferried through the streets in linen waistcoats and breeches trimmed with black ferret, in white cloth coats and silver-laced hats, in white stockings, in silk breeches.

  Tens of thousands of spectators made their way to Tyburn, arriving on foot and horseback and in coaches. They thronged the cow pastures around the gallows, climbed ladders, sat on the wall enclosing Hyde Park. People fought for places on a scaffold at the bottom of Tower Hill. Entrepreneurs brought carts and sold vantage points above the heads of the crowd.

  The condemned were escorted onto the gallows where they were given permission to address the crowd. Some spoke directly, others gave a prepared statement to the prison ordinary who accompanied them. They cursed the law and the country that condemned them or expressed remorse and regret for their profligate ways or commended their souls to the care of their Lord Jesus Christ. Reilly said, “There was one in particular, a tall rawney-boned fellow, he’d a dark scar across his throat like he’d already been hung. He said ‘Men, women and children, I come hither to hang like a pendulum to a watch for endeavouring to be rich too soon.’”

  A handkerchief was raised and lowered to signal the opening of the trapdoor for that sudden drop, the wrenching sickening pop of the rope snapping taut. The body turning slowly on its line, the fine clothes visibly soiled with urine and faeces. They were left hanging there half an hour to ensure the completion of the sentence and after the dead men were cut down the sick were escorted up to touch the corpses for luck and health. A withered limb could be made whole by setting it upon the neck of a hanged man. Women unable to conceive a child would stroke the hand of an executed felon against their bellies to make them fruitful.

  Peyton said, “You’ve seen this?”

  “More times than I care to remember.” Reilly fed more green wood to the fire.

  “Why would anyone want to touch a corpse like that?”

  Reilly shrugged. “A dead man is an awful thing to look upon. It’s the relic of a thing gone forever from the world. And that’s as close as most will ever get to touching something holy.”

  “I don’t see how all this relates to your working for my father.”

  Reilly looked up, surprised. “You’re an impatient pup then.” He smiled across at Peyton. “Where are you for now? You’ve got something pressing to get to?”

  Peyton shook his head no.

  “Fair enough,” Reilly said. “I’ll come to your father directly.”

  But he hesitated then and Peyton could see he was weighing things in his head, that there was a risk involved. The fire gave off a steady hiss, like the sound of a downpour of rain on still water.

  He was born in St. Giles, Reilly told him, although his parents were both from Ireland and he was raised Irish, surrounded by Irishmen, and never thought of himself in any other way. Most of the people he knew in the community worked on the waterfront, or in shops along the streets as butchers, apothecaries, wholesalers of cloth, grocers. His father worked as a lumper on the cargo ships on the Thames, but his vocation was stealing from the English. Each night at low tide the river thieves made their way onto the East India ships at anchor. Reilly’s father employed his three sons in bailing provisions into the black strip — bags painted black to make them less visible in the darkness — once the casks were pried open. The bags were handed off then to lightermen in flatboats or to mudlarks who waited in the low-tide silt of the river and carried the booty to fences in Alsatia. They could identify the stolen goods just from the smell of it rising through the cloth bags, sugar or indigo, coffee beans, ginger, tea.

  Reilly and his brothers also received training from their mother who was an accomplished pickpocket. She went to churches in an elaborate outfit with fake arms sewn to a remarkably large pregnant belly that concealed her hands and she lifted jewellery, pocket watches and money from the people sitting on the pew to either side of her. No one suspected the mother-to-be whose hands were in plain view and had not moved from her belly through the entire service.

  She taught her sons to remove rings from a person’s fingers as they shook hands, to lift bills or snuffboxes from the pockets of men standing behind them in a crowd. They all became proficient in these sleights of hand but Reilly himself had a talent for it. His mother expressed her delight in his abilities the way other parents fawned over a child’s predisposition for drawing or mathematics. Like most gifted children, he was embarrassed by his facility and wished at times to be free of it altogether.

  The clandestine nature of his family’s enterprises troubled him. He could see that even the Irish in St. Giles harboured ambivalent feelings about them. He wanted to live differently, though he never expressed that wish in words. When he wasn’t picking pockets at Bartholomew Fair or public hangings, he worked at the Smithfield butcher shop, a job he’d found without consulting his parents. They seemed deeply disappointed in him, as if he had betrayed his country.

  Peyton heard an odd note creeping into Reilly’s voice, a dimness, a filtered quality. He seemed to have lost the thread of the story and was simply reminiscing.

  Hanging days, he said, were the best of times for pickpockets — a large unruly crowd accustomed to jostling and shoving for position, a distant spectacle that held the audience’s rapt attention. They talked of it among themselves with careless anticipation: a hanging was to morris, to go west, to be jammed, frumagemmed, collared, noozed, scragged, to be invited to the sheriff’s ball, to dance the Paddington frisk, to be nubbed, stretched, trined, crapped, tucked up, turned off. A hanged man, his father used to say, will piss when he cannot whistle.

  Reilly shook his head. He could see now there was an odd symmetry to the event, men about to be twisted at the end of a rope for thieving and dozens of others like them moving surreptitiously among the crowd, relieving the spectators of their valuables. A tax on their entertainment. A down payment on future attractions.

  “You understand I’m not proud of it now,” Reilly said. “I was just a lad.”

  “My father knew this when he hired you?”

  “Same as I’m telling you now.”

  “What happened, Joseph?”

  “Bad luck, I guess,” Reilly said. “Bad luck all around.”

  It was the first hanging of the new year, two men convicted of stealing money and alcohol from a tavern, a young Irish servant who had killed his master in retaliation for a beating. The weather appropriately sombre, a morning of fog and freezing drizzle. No real fall of rain but the threat of
it in the air all day. That cold winter smell of wet iron. It was the worst sort of weather for a thief, people bundled under layers, their coats buttoned tight and held at the collar. Reilly managed to lift a silver snuffbox, a handful of shillings, a gold repeater watch.

  He found his brothers once the hanging was concluded and people slowly came back to themselves in the fields, setting their hats tight to their heads, pushing their hands into pockets. As they were leaving the grounds, Reilly was taken by the shirt collar and the hair from behind. A large well-dressed man with a round face and surprisingly tiny mouth began bellowing he had caught the thief that had stolen his pocketbook, dragging Reilly towards the gallows where the constables stood. His younger brothers hung off the man’s arms and coat, Reilly yelling at them to get away.

  “You hadn’t stolen a pocketbook,” Peyton said.

  “No odds in the end. He’d heard me speaking Gaelic, I expect, which is evidence enough in the eyes of some. I managed to sneak the snuffbox and shillings to my brothers before the constables took note of us and they ran off. But I had the watch on my person, which he claimed as his own once it was turned out. There were holes in the lining of my coat that left my hands free when it looked like they were tucked away in my pockets. They’d found a thief, no question. There hardly seemed a point to whether it was him I’d robbed or not.”

  Peyton listened to Reilly with a growing sense of unease. He could feel the story’s dive into calamity, its tragic narrative careening towards his father where John Senior would set it aright as easily as he’d piss out the fire in a tobacco pipe. The thought was profoundly disagreeable to Peyton. He had heard Cassie moaning through the door of Reilly’s tilt when Annie Boss came outside to send them away and the memory of that sound came to him again in the darkness.

  There were eight men in the docket for sentencing and the sentence was repeated eight times. The law is that you shalt return from hence, to the place whence thou camest, and from thence to the place of execution, where thou shalt hang by the neck till the body be dead! Dead! Dead! When his turn was called, Reilly held the wooden rail of the docket to stay on his feet. He broke into tears and wept uncontrollably as the sentence was pronounced and the weeping most likely saved his life.