River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  “Commuted to branding and deportation to the colonies out of consideration for my age and my obvious display of contrition,” Reilly said.

  “Branding?”

  Reilly held his scarred hand up in the light of the fire. “Now we’re getting to John Senior,” he said. “Patience rewarded.”

  He was brought to a public square where criminals were punished in the stocks. He was placed face down and constables tied his hands firmly to a wooden post. A small crowd gathered around him in an almost prayerful silence, as if he was about to be baptized. After the charge against him and the sentence were read aloud, the letter T was burned into the flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand with a red-hot iron. At first there was a nearly painless shock, like jumping into icy water. Then the ache crawled into the bones of his hand, then his arm, then his entire right side. He felt as if one half of his body was radiating light. Glowing.

  He was held in a prison ship on the Thames for seven months. Transportation to the American colonies was suspended after the revolution and a suitable replacement was still being settled on. Some of the men on Reilly’s vessel had been aboard four years and more. The ship was filthy with vermin and rats and so overcrowded that prisoners were regularly freed on the condition they would go voluntarily into exile.

  Within six weeks of accepting this plea bargain Reilly was in St. John’s, penniless, walking from stagehead to warehouse to stagehead, looking for work. He was turned away each time and sometimes chased off by men wielding staves or fish forks if the brand on his hand was noted. Finally he was forced to go from table to table in the grog shops above the waterfront, begging for food, his hand wrapped in a dirty square of cloth to hide his mark. So many men intoxicated to the point of senselessness, he could have robbed them blind. He was tempted over and over and more strongly with each turned head, with each sloppy imprecation to bugger off, with the occasional whispered proposition to suck someone’s cock for a shilling.

  And that’s where he found John Senior sitting alone with a bottle of rum, just in from Poole and waiting for a berth to the northeast shore. He nodded casually as Reilly approached him, almost as if he’d been expecting someone of his description. He didn’t say a word when the boy began to tell him how he arrived in St. John’s three days past and had eaten only scraps he’d managed to steal from dogs in the street in that time. Reilly took his silence as an invitation to carry on and he did so, impulsively unwrapping his hand to show the stranger his brand. He talked about his life in England until he ran out of things he could think of to say, while John Senior sat listening impassively, as if he’d paid good money for this story and was determined to take in every word. His peculiar stillness Reilly chose to interpret as a show of sympathy and instead of asking for food or spare change he asked for work, cleaning fish or cutting wood or shovelling cow shit from a byre, he didn’t care what it was or where. He stood there then while John Senior considered him.

  “How old are you, Joseph Reilly?” he asked finally.

  “Fourteen, sir.”

  “You’ve done some honest work in your time.”

  “Smithfield’s butchers, like I told you, sir. Four years up to this.”

  John Senior said, “Go on up and get yourself a glass.”

  They sat drinking a while, without John Senior saying anything to indicate what he intended and Reilly was superstitiously afraid to ask, as if he had now to wait until fate or the saints pointed them left or right.

  John Senior reached out then and took Reilly’s hand in his own. Two of John Senior’s fingers had no nails, only a hard scrabble of callus and scar tissue from some ancient accident. He passed a thumb gently over the raised welt of the brand. He said, “There’s no one going to let you live an honest life as long as there’s a story that says otherwise.”

  Reilly nodded. He didn’t want this man to let go of his hand.

  “Are you willing to do something about that, Joseph Reilly?”

  He nodded again, stupidly. He had no idea what was being suggested, what he would endure before the night was out. When John Senior let go of him Reilly turned his hand in the air with a little flourish and held up the man’s wedding ring. To show what he was ready to leave behind.

  Peyton reached out then and took Reilly’s hand, much as his father had done in the grog shop above St. John’s harbour. He traced his fingers across the wild copse of scars there. He had never looked at them as anything but a blind injury, an accidental wound of some sort. “Why are you telling me all this, Joseph?”

  He let out a long breath of air. “It’s just a story is all, John Peyton.” After a moment he said, “God bless the mark, but it’s a cold night.” He refilled their mugs and they sat in silence a long time then. There was a thick cloud cover and no moon or stars showed through.

  Reilly said, “If it won’t offend you, I’ll be saying the rosary a little while.”

  Peyton lifted his mug in acquiescence and then threw the cold remains of his tea into the snow. His companion took out his black prayer beads and rolled them through his fingers as he muttered those ancient prayers to himself. The dog got up from its place beside the fire, walked a little ways outside the circle of light and began barking wildly into the woods. Reilly interrupted his rosary to quiet the dog but it would not come back to the fire. The hair was ridged along its spine and it stood there growling at the dark. Peyton felt like crawling out beside the animal and joining in himself.

  FOUR

  Cassie was sitting at the table when Peyton and Reilly came into the tilt the next morning. The skin of her face was pale and translucent and showed the blue of veins beneath it. The bloodshot rim of her damaged eye was as bright as a partridgeberry.

  Peyton sat across from her and watched as she fiddled with her fingers, worrying at them with an intensity that suggested she might fall from her chair if she looked away from her hands. There was a thin acrid smell of vomit beneath the aroma of spruce bark that Annie had put on to boil during the night. Reilly stepped across the room to where his wife stood near the fire and they talked quietly together, partly in Gaelic, partly in Mi’kmaq, like parents spelling words to keep them from the ears of children.

  Cassie said, “You’ll not say a word of this to your father.”

  Peyton stared at her. The liquid burn of fear that he’d carried all night congealed to something heavier then, something with the heft and solidity of stone.

  She looked up to him with her wounded stare. “Promise me,” she said.

  Annie refused to let Cassie leave for home until the following day and only then when Cassie agreed to allow Peyton to accompany her. Reilly promised to keep an eye on as much of Peyton’s lines as he could manage and they set out down the river about mid-morning. Cassie was so weak that they were forced to stop every half-hour or so and when they turned into the bush above Ship Cove the heavy snow sapped the last of her strength. She leaned on the trunk of every third or fourth tree and bowed her head while she sucked at the air. Finally she fell backwards in the snow and could not get herself to her feet again. Peyton cut two thin spruce trees and limbed them out, then lashed the thickest branches between the poles with leather thongs. He harnessed the head of the stretcher to his shoulders and dragged Cassie through the bush. She slept for most of the afternoon and woke only to tell him she felt well enough to walk on her own for a while, then dropped quickly back to sleep.

  Near dark he lifted her down into a narrow gully and fashioned a lean-to. He set a pot of snow to boil to make a thin broth for Cassie’s supper. She managed to sit up and eat the soup herself, but could only stomach half a bowl before she handed it back to him, then stretched out beneath her blanket and fell immediately asleep.

  Peyton laid junks of green wood on the fire and the sap snapped and hissed as the flame took hold. The smoke blew lazily in one direction and then another, and the smell of it in the cold air was clean as laundered clothes just brought in off the line. He looked up to the night sk
y and even without the vertigo of alcohol he could feel the constellations turning on the axis of the North Star. He filled his pipe and tamped it with his thumb and then lit it with the end of a stick set alight in the coals.

  He was twenty-six years old and had never touched a woman or been kissed in any but the most innocent of ways. It seemed a personal failure to him somehow. He looked at the sleeping figure on the opposite side of the fire. His father was still married in the eyes of the Church even if he had not seen his wife in seven years. And Cassie was young enough to be the old man’s daughter. But for all the things that said it was impossible, Peyton could not make himself feel surprised and he had to admit now that part of him suspected this for years.

  He tried to locate the seed of those suspicions, walking backward through his years on the coast until he came to his first spring in Newfoundland. They’d begun preparing for the return to the summer house on Burnt Island, setting the sloop into the water from her winter dry dock, loading the hold with nets, cordage, sheets, clothing and tools. At that time of year icebergs meandered aimlessly through the maze of tickles, bights and runs among the islands like dazed farmers set adrift in the honeycomb streets of London. But the massive fields of Gulf ice that could cap harbours closed for days or weeks at a time had largely come and gone by then.

  John Senior had sent two hired men off to the summer house four days before to prepare for their arrival while he and Peyton and Cassie closed up the winter house. Shortly after the men left a late field of pack ice muscled in, a solid sheet of pans chafing island granite, the white glim of it stretching to the horizon. It was moving steadily on the Labrador current but was so featureless that it seemed completely still.

  John Senior sat with his pipe and knitted twine to mend the salmon nets or whittled blindly at sticks of wood, hardly speaking to his son or to Cassie. Seeing that the only option was to wait, a surprising patience and calm came over him. Peyton couldn’t believe a man of such grimly relentless energy could give himself over so easily to dawdling. It was more than he could manage himself and he constantly went out the front door to look in on the animals, to see if there was any change in ice conditions. It was on one of these aimless reconnaissance missions that he spotted them, their dark bodies dotting the distant surface of the ice. He burst into the kitchen and grabbed his father by the arm. “Seals,” he shouted. “Hundreds of them.”

  “Seals don’t come this far into the bay,” John Senior said, but he allowed Peyton to lead him out of the house nonetheless. The barking of the herd carried across the ice to the cape where they stood. Back in the kitchen John Senior turned around several times, like a dog about to lie down, as if the physical motion was a way of settling his mind. He said, “What a time to have those two men stuck on Burnt Island.”

  Peyton looked at Cassie a moment and then at his father. “Cassie could come out with us.”

  The older man glanced at Cassie and gave a short heavy sigh. “How do you find your leg, now?” he asked her.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “She’s a fierce business on the ice. You won’t like it, first along, I can guarantee you that.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said again.

  They started out across solid ice near the shore and quickly came into looser floating pans that they copied across in long loping strides, each carrying rope looped across their chests, a short wooden gaff and a sculping knife. Cassie held her long skirt in one hand to keep it clear of her legs. The animals were nearly a mile out on the water. There weren’t hundreds, as Peyton first reported, but more than enough to make work for the three of them. The seals stared as they approached, their dark delicate nostrils testing the air.

  John Senior said, “The young ones is saucy as the black, they’ll come for you if you aren’t watchful.” He turned to gaffing the seals nearest him, striking down sharply and repeatedly until the animals lay still. “Take them across the bridge of the nose,” he instructed as he worked. Many of the older harps were already in motion, undulating towards the open circles of sea water that allowed them access to the ocean. Cassie limped after those closest to escape as she slipped the rope over her head and took off her heavy overcoat. She had surprisingly broad shoulders, Peyton thought, watching her swing the gaff.

  “John Peyton,” his father shouted between strikes. “Get to work, for the love of man.”

  The killing went on for more than half an hour. When they knelt exhausted and bent their heads to catch their breath, almost fifty seals lay dead across half a mile of ice. John Senior slowly got to his feet. “We got to get them bled now,” he said. “The pelts are worthless if they gets burnt.” He smiled across at Cassie and nodded his head, like someone not entirely unhappy to have been proved wrong. Peyton watched her too with the same surprised, conflicted pride.

  He and Cassie spent a few minutes observing John Senior as he made a circular cut about the neck of a seal and a second longitudinal cut down the belly to the tail. He gripped the thick layer of fat and fur and sculped it free of the flesh with quick passes of the blade, turning the bloody carcass out of the hide like a sleeper being tipped out of bedsheets. Then they made their own halting, awkward attempts to imitate him. The sleeves of their shirts were soaked in blood and the blood froze solid in the cold air. Blood seeped into the inviolate white of the ice pans. The stripped carcasses were the same dark red as the granite headlands of the coastline, a tightly clustered constellation of ruined stars. The pelts weighed up to fifty pounds apiece and they bulked them in piles of three or four, as many as could be dragged back to shore in one trip. It would take them the rest of that afternoon and all the light of the following day to haul them off the ice.

  They hadn’t eaten since dawn and had brought only cakes of hard tack with them out onto the ice field. They were all exhausted and freezing and ravenously hungry by the time John Senior worked his knife up the belly of the last seal. He used the heel of his boot to crack the exposed breastbone and then opened the chest cavity to cut the large fist of its heart free. He held it in his hand, the organ still hot to the touch, and he brought it to his mouth, biting into it as he would an apple. He offered it to Cassie and then to Peyton, and they ate the raw flesh together, licking the blood from their lips and wiping their chins with the bloodied sleeves of their shirts. He watched his father and Cassie watching each other. They both seemed immensely pleased with themselves, with the day, with the heat of the dead seal’s heart moving in them.

  Peyton stared across the fire at Cassie where she now lay sleeping. The shape of her body under the blankets reminded him of those stripped carcasses on the ice, inert, emptied of the energy of the animate. He sat smoking and tending the fire as the stars wheeled overhead. A she-moon rose and set behind them, a shallow crescent on its back. Cassie woke and asked for water and the two of them stared into the dark without speaking until she said, “Tell me a story, John Peyton.”

  “There’s no fun to be found in any of this, Cassie.”

  “I’m just feeling lonely,” she said and lifted herself on her elbows to watch the fire waver and shift in its place. “I can tell you about fire,” she said. “I can tell you how we learned the use of fire.”

  He nodded and stretched a leg and then folded it back underneath himself. “All right,” he said.

  It was a Greek story, she said, one told to her by her father when she was a girl and too young to understand certain aspects. She said it was an old, old tale about times before our times and the times of the Greeks besides, when fire belonged to the gods alone. Prometheus, she said, and she paused and said the name again. Prometheus was a Titan, and the Titans were a race of giants. He and his brother were entrusted with the creation of the earth’s creatures by Zeus, father of the gods. Feathers and claws and talons and shells and fangs were passed out to the animals as they were formed from the clay and when it came time to create people nothing remained to give them. They were left naked, defenceless, scavenging around without a way to c
ook food or keep warm, it was a sad time to be alive, she said. Prometheus took pity on humanity, and he conspired to steal the secret of fire from Mount Olympus and passed it down to the miserable creatures we were. Cassie stopped for a moment and lay back on the ground. “Are you listening?” she asked.

  She said the sad part of the story was this. It was something she couldn’t conceive of when she was a youngster. Zeus was a jealous, wretched god, as all the gods of those times were. When he discovered the theft, he punished Prometheus by having him chained to a rock and carrion birds came to him where he lay stretched out and helpless and they pecked his liver from his side and ate it. And every day his liver grew back and the carrion returned and pecked it out and ate it.

  Cassie’s voice was so slight that Peyton could barely hear her speaking. The fire popped and a large flanker landed on his sleeve. He shook it off into the snow where the cinder winked to ash.

  “Terrible,” Cassie said.

  Peyton didn’t know whether she saw herself stretched out in chains and helpless on that rock, or if she intended he should see himself there, or whether it was just a story the fire brought to her mind and nothing more. He swallowed against the ache in his throat and looked up at the blur of stars that were being slowly extinguished by the first light of the morning. “Cassie,” he said.

  But she had already drifted back to sleep.

  He decided to let her rest as long as she needed and even managed to doze off himself as the sun rose. A chill woke him where he sat and he stood to stretch the cold from his legs and then stirred the coals and blew on them while he held a dry branch of pine needles to their billowing heat. He had tea ready for her when she woke and more of the broth she could hardly stomach the night before.