On the last leg of the trip, when they were in sight of Little Peter’s Point and only a few hours’ heavy slogging from the Adonis, a peculiar elation came over the group. The men shouted encouragement back and forth to one another and laughed when they stumbled and spoke incessantly of the food they would eat and the hours they would sleep when they gained the ship, as if all they had been through on the river was a nightmare they’d suddenly woken from together. Even the wrenching guilt of abandoning the marines naked and beheaded on the lake left them briefly.
Already the men had begun remembering the expedition as a series of distinct episodes, the words for the tales they wanted to tell beginning to form in their minds. It was knowing they would live to recount them to others that made them giddy and filled them with a strangely inarticulate hope those last hours on the River Exploits. Like everyone else around him, Peyton felt drained and perfectly clear, bleached of everything but the urge to speak. All the way across the Arm with the Adonis in sight, he thought only of seeing Cassie, of looking her in the face and saying, “Listen to me now. I have a story to tell you.”
SEVEN
The governor leafed through the report as Buchan ate his meal. He had returned from wintering in England only days before and was still trying to digest the news that awaited him. He sipped distractedly at a glass of brandy but hadn’t bothered to order food himself. He had no appetite.
“I blame myself for this,” Duckworth said. He lifted the papers he was reading from and shook them gently.
Buchan set his fork and knife across the plate and placed his forearms on the table. He bowed his head slightly. “It was bad luck,” he said. “Bad luck all around.”
Duckworth nodded at the papers again.
“They were afraid, Your Worship. They acted out of fear.”
The governor said, “I blame myself for this.”
“I will not allow you —”
“Don’t patronize me, Lieutenant.” Duckworth lifted his brandy to his mouth and held the glass under his nose. “David,” he said softly. “Marie is keeping well, I hope.”
“Fine, yes.”
“And the girl?”
“Couldn’t be better, by the last correspondence I received. I hope to have them join me if I’m to be posted here longer than another year.”
Duckworth set his glass back on the table. He drummed his fingers against the wood. He wondered how much longer he was likely to be here himself. “Would you like to stay?”
Buchan was wiping his mouth with a napkin. He looked at the governor. “What I would like,” he said, “is to have the opportunity to return to the Red Indian’s lake.”
“Out of the question.” Duckworth pressed a hand to his stomach as if he’d suffered a sudden stab of pain. “It is plainly too dangerous.”
“Those men died in the course of duty.”
“They died in the course of a reckless expedition undertaken to satisfy my own personal whims.”
Buchan smiled across the table. “You do yourself a disservice, Governor. Which I understand completely, but will not condone.”
“Lieutenant.”
“We have always known that risk accompanies the righteous course.”
“Goddamn it man,” Duckworth shouted and then caught himself. “Goddamn it,” he said again, barely above a whisper. He pointed a finger across the table. “You cannot have stood over those men lying headless on that lake — headless, Lieutenant — you cannot have witnessed that and be so sanguine.”
“The most sensible way I can think to honour the memory of my marines, Governor, is to carry on in this endeavour until we are successful.”
Duckworth shook his head and turned away, as if he was trying to avoid an unwanted kiss. “You are still a young man in these things, I see.”
Buchan picked up his knife and fork. “Now it is you who patronize me.”
“There will not be another expedition to the winter camps. It is too dangerous.” Duckworth sighed. “My constitution will simply not survive it,” he said.
“For now, I will accept that. But I want permission to return this summer, to try again to make contact with the smaller bands on the coast. I think it would be prudent to have a presence among the settlers besides. In case any among them are planning to exact their own measure of revenge.”
The governor helped himself to a huge mouthful of brandy. “This job will be the death of me,” he said.
Buchan nodded. “Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t thank me,” Duckworth said. “Don’t you dare.” He raised his hand in the air. “More brandy,” he shouted angrily.
The following summer, Buchan returned to the Bay of Exploits as a surrogate magistrate, and when not holding court or seeing to other duties, he carried out extensive searches of the mainland coast and the islands along the northeast shore. He visited occasionally with the Peytons on Burnt Island and shared a meal while gleaning all he could of their recent sightings of Beothuk. He took notes in his journal, drew free-hand maps to fix locations in his mind. Peyton had seen a recently abandoned camp at the mouth of this or that river. One of the hired men caught sight of a canoe rounding a point of land in one bay or another.
There was a quiet, almost elegiac tone to the discussions, as if they were discussing creatures who had all but disappeared from the earth, ghosts, spirits who drifted occasionally to this side of darkness.
Peyton offered all the information he had on hand and made suggestions for likely areas to search. John Senior sat by quietly, responding to direct questions but mostly keeping to himself. When the officer left he ridiculed the whole undertaking. “How he could leave two men dead on the lake and act like this is beyond me,” he said. He spoke softly, with a note of pained surprise in his voice. “If it had been someone from the shore been killed, there’d be hell to pay and proper goddamn thing.”
“I know what your ideas of the proper thing are,” Peyton said. He found everything the man said these days disagreeable, and he made a point of making sure his father knew it.
John Senior shook his head. “Richmond and Taylor are all for going back down the river come the winter and I can’t say I disagree with the sentiment.” He spat into the idle fireplace. He said, “If it had been you was killed, John Peyton.”
A picture of his father in Cassie’s bed came to Peyton and he got up from his seat and went to the window to drive it out. It was infuriating how they carried on around him as if nothing was happening between them. He said, “Lieutenant Buchan knows well enough what’s right.”
“He’ll wind up with his head ordained for an ornament in some wigwam on the lake. That’s how much he knows of what’s right.”
John Senior’s pessimism only served to goad his son into a state of blind enthusiasm for Buchan’s attempts at reconciliation. He collected stories from other men on the shore to pass on during the officer’s next visit, gathered artifacts from his own travel on the salmon rivers. On several occasions he abandoned his work to hired men in order to accompany Buchan to areas of the coast the officer was unfamiliar with.
“If I didn’t know any better,” John Senior said when he returned from one excursion, “I’d think you was after a Red bride.”
They argued then, standing inches from one another and spraying each other’s faces with spittle. Cassie came out to them, drawn by the shouting, and she put a hand to each of their shoulders. Both men took a step backward, embarrassed to have been seen in such a naked state of fury. Peyton walked off to the house and shut himself up in his room. He found it disturbing, Cassie’s touch obliquely connecting him and his father that way, and he wondered if he was the only one of the three of them to be bothered by it.
In late August, Peyton and Cassie rowed across to the mainland for the haying. Richmond and Taylor had already arrived and were on the beach with Reilly when they rowed up to the salmon weir.
Annie Boss came down the narrow path from their tilt to greet them all, carrying her child. It was the
ir first sight of the baby for all of the visitors but Peyton who had come to Charles Brook twice that summer as he inspected the catch at John Senior’s salmon rivers. There was a round of handshaking and best wishes for the new parents. Richmond pushed Reilly’s shoulder roughly and said, “All this time we thought you was all powder fire and no shot.”
“Don’t pay no mind to the noggyhead,” Tom Taylor said, shaking Reilly’s hand. He and his wife had had their own difficulties and he couldn’t bring himself to ridicule others, even a Paddy and his Indian wife. He said, “The best to you both. And Siobhan would say the same if she was here, I know.”
They spent three solid days in the waist-high meadows. Fragments of the shorn grass worked into their shoes and collars and beneath shirts and the band of the haymakers’ underwear and it stuck there in the sweat on their skin. At the end of the third day, they came down to the river and walked into the water to wash away the dark stain of chlorophyll on their necks and wrists and ankles. They bobbed their heads beneath the surface to wash the sweat from their hair. Back on shore the men removed their shirts to wring them dry. Reilly walked up the bank to lay a fire in the tilt. Cassie paddled out onto the river, turning there to float on her back, the white muslin of her dress moving on the water’s surface like a leaf dropped from an overhanging tree.
Peyton waded in the shallows and watched her. Her hair floated loose in the river. Through the wet fabric of her dress he could see the dark aureole of her nipples and he looked down suddenly at his own soaked clothing, afraid the water might have revealed something of himself in the same way.
Richmond laughed on the beach behind him. “No way he ’ll get on the inside of a cold flinter like she,” he said.
Peyton spun in the water to stare up the beach but Tom Taylor had already turned on his friend. “Richmond, you got no more nature than a picket.” He stood with his hands on his hips and shouted, “You haven’t got the shame God gives a louse.”
“The devil haul you, Tom Taylor. I’ll speak my mind when it suits me.” And to prove his point Richmond slapped Taylor’s stomach and said, “You’ve fallen into flesh, you have. All chuffed out like a cock with the mites.”
Peyton climbed from the water and took off his shirt to wring it out, then pushed on his shoes and walked past Richmond and Taylor as their argument escalated into a shouting match. Reilly was sitting outside the tilt on a junk of wood, a pail of river water that served to cool several bottles of spruce beer beside him. He passed one to Peyton with his scarred hand. The beer was sharp and browsy as tree sap. Peyton drank off half the bottle before he pulled on his wet shirt and took a seat on the ground. He kicked at the dirt with the heel of his shoe.
“What are those two into it over now?”
Peyton shrugged, but didn’t look up at the Irishman.
Reilly said, “Your face is dark as the depths of January, John Peyton.”
He nodded, but said nothing and they sat in silence, listening to Richmond and Taylor carrying on down on the beach. Cassie was likely still in the river, drifting slowly downstream. Peyton closed his eyes against the late afternoon sunlight and leaned his forehead against a fist.
Peyton was eighteen the first time he and Cassie came across to Charles Brook for the haying without John Senior. The old man had insisted she go in his stead so she might have the chance of a little “female company.” Cassie was still tutoring Peyton in the late afternoons in those days, though he was allowing work to keep him away more often as he became increasingly dissatisfied with the thought of being her student. In the week before they crossed over to Reilly’s tilt, he sulked through several evenings of Robinson Crusoe, a book Cassie had thought he would find of particular interest, being cast upon the shores of a strange island himself.
“Are you missing England?” she asked him.
“No,” he said curtly. He was taller than she was now, which served to make him more impatient with the notion of being taught by her.
She could see he wasn’t willing to admit the specifics of his irritation and she carried on as if it was a general question she’d been asking, something related to the book. “Is there anything about England that you miss having here?”
He shrugged. “Orange marmalade,” he said. “And I used to have honey in my tea on occasion.”
She nodded slowly. She tapped the pages of the book. “Go on,” she said.
As they were preparing for that first trip together to Charles Brook, she packed an odd assortment of materials into a knapsack — a compass, several sheets of clean paper, heavy leather gloves, a brass container, molasses, an empty glass jar. At the end of the haying, after the hired men took their leave of Reilly’s river, Cassie told Peyton she wanted to spend a few hours more in the freshly mown meadows. They were on the beach with Joseph Reilly. He was adding wood to a well-burning fire. He said, “We’ll have a bit of bread you can carry home to John Senior if you bide a while longer.”
Cassie and Peyton walked half an hour into the meadows, stopping in one of the wide clearings of shorn grass and boulders. The day was warm though the northerly wind carried a nip when it gusted up and they settled in the lee of a large scaly rock that caught the heat of the sun. There were long white threads of cirrus cloud on the horizon. While Peyton gathered dead wood, Cassie laid out the contents of the bag she had packed.
She stood over the new fire with the container of molasses and poured a long string of it onto the flames, then sat back beside Peyton.
“What are you doing?”
“Just wait.”
The smell of the molasses lifted on the heat of the fire into the air around them. She laid the paper flat on the ground and used stones to hold the corners down.
Within a few minutes the first scatter of bees arrived. Cassie said nothing, though she smiled at Peyton as if they had wagered a bet on something and she was certain now of winning. “Take out your watch,” she said. She poured another dollop of molasses onto the paper and then opened the metal container, carefully shaking what looked to Peyton like some sort of red pepper or tiny metal filings onto the paper around the molasses.
Two fat bees landed on the paper and wandered about in skewed circles. When they lifted away, their bellies were red as a sunset. “Check the time,” Cassie said. She stood to watch the bees hover into the woods, using the compass to note their direction. Then she sat back beside him without a word. Within four minutes the first reddened bee returned to the paper. The second was right behind it.
“Now,” she said. She tilted her head and squinted into the sunlight as if making an intricate mathematical calculation. “That would be somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and fifty yards, is my guess.” She stood and took the leather gloves and empty jar. They had carried a pouch of water from Charles Brook and Cassie told Peyton to put it on to boil for tea. “With any luck I’ll be back in twenty minutes or so.”
He was just beginning to realize what she was about. “You’ll never find it in there, Cassie,” he said.
She was sighting with the compass and didn’t look back over her shoulder. She marched off through the field, her habitual limp exaggerated over the rough rolling ground, and she disappeared into the trees without another word. Peyton set the water to boil and stared into it as it began to bubble at the base of the pot. He fished out the bag of tea and as soon as he had a full rolling boil he dropped in a handful of the leaves, then took the pot off the flame and set it beside the fire. He looked off in the direction she had gone.
“That’ll be froze over by the time she gets back,” he said to himself. He checked his watch. Seventeen minutes. Nineteen.
There was a sheen of sweat on Cassie’s face when she got back to the fire. She carried the heavy gloves under her arm and held the jar before her, filled nearly to the brim with honey and wax.
“I had to climb the tree a ways,” she said. There were half a dozen startling bright welts swelling on her neck and face.
“You’ve been stung,
” Peyton said.
“Pour us a mug.”
He strained tea into tin cups and Cassie heaped a spoonful of wild honey into each. She passed Peyton one and lifted the other in toast. They drank together and even through the scalding heat they could taste the clear, rich sweetness.
“Where did you learn to do this?”
“My father took me out when I was a girl,” she said. “We spent Saturday afternoons tramping around the backcountry above St. John’s. He taught me —” She looked shyly across at Peyton. She’d barely spoken of her family since coming north with John Senior and she seemed to regret it coming up. “He taught me to swim, to fire a rifle. He taught me this,” she said, lifting the jar of honey. “It was this made my mother fall in love with him, my father told me. He took her off into the valley when she was not much above a girl and he’d mine honey from the woods this way.” She shook her head. “Mother always said falling in love with my father was the biggest mistake of her life.”
“How old are you, Cassie?” Peyton asked.
She watched him slyly from the corner of her eye, as if she was assessing him anew. “Why that is very forward of you, John Peyton. I am twenty-four years old.”
He turned his face to the sky and squinted against the sun as she had, making several quick calculations in his head.
“Is that older or younger than you expected?”
“Why did your mother say falling in love with your father was a mistake?”
Cassie looked off towards the border of trees. “My father drank a great deal. He squandered money, he refused to set foot in a church.” For the first time since coming to the northeast shore she spoke of the public house her father owned, one of the dozens of grog shops near the harbour where fishermen and sailors drank away their season’s earnings. She told Peyton the tavern’s motto: Drunk for a Penny. Dead drunk for tuppence. Free Straw. The fishermen drank dark Jamaican rum as long as they could afford it, then callibogus or king calli, a concoction of spruce beer mixed with rum or gin or a locally stilled alcohol that was so harsh and potent it could be set alight and burned like a candle. Men slept on the straw against the walls and urinated in their clothes, arguments and fistfights spilled out the door into the streets. Two or three impoverished prostitutes drifted from table to table in the poor light.
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