River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  Cassie lived with her parents in a narrow two-storey house consisting of a single room downstairs and two bedrooms up a steep, unrailed staircase. It was built adjacent to the pub, though she might have grown up in London, for all she knew of the tavern’s interior as a child. Her mother forbade her to step inside the establishment under any circumstances and she orbited the building like a moon all her young life, never coming within a few yards of the door. “My mother was a good woman, God rest her. She was ashamed to be associated with the public house,” Cassie told him. “And with my father too, I suppose. She used to say that love was a fire to warm fools.”

  They fell into a long silence then, as if this idea embarrassed them both. They finished their tea and then set out the food they had brought with them. The day continued clear and mostly warm. Bees hovered over the sealed jar of honey and the crumpled paper stained with molasses, their steady buzzing like the hum of a planet in motion around the sun.

  Peyton lifted his forehead from his fist and looked across at Reilly. He was exhausted with the long days of work and the beer had gone straight to his head. His stomach felt hollow.

  Reilly said, “I thought you were asleep over there, John Peyton.”

  He shook his head. “I was thinking about the first year I came across for the haying with Cassie. The Red Indian,” he said. “Do you remember?”

  Reilly smiled. “Thought you were going to come out of your skin when you laid eyes on him,” he said.

  Peyton and Cassie had come out of the woods several hundred yards above Reilly’s tilt on their way back from the honey meadow that afternoon and followed the shoreline downriver. Reilly was on the beach with his back to the water. Peyton was about to call to him when another voice sounded across the river. On the weir near the opposite shore, a Beothuk man was kneeling and staring into the swirl of water. He had hair down his back as black as peat, his face and neck and his hands were darkened with an ochre stain the colour of blood. He was dressed in caribou leather and hefted a long staff of spruce wood or boxy fir at his shoulder. He drove the spear into the river and lifted it clear, a late-season salmon impaled and writhing at the tip so that the entire length of the staff vibrated. He stood slowly and looked across at the Irishman on the beach with an expression that was somehow proprietary. “Joe Reilly,” he shouted again.

  Peyton ran ahead of Cassie to where Reilly was standing. He kept his eye on the spot where the Indian had disappeared back into the woods and stumbled several times. “What should we do?” he shouted as he ran. “What should we do?” Even standing beside Reilly he stutter-stepped and flailed towards the opposite side of the river with his arm. He stopped suddenly and looked at the Irishman. “He knew your name, Joseph.”

  Reilly turned his face down to stare at his boots. There was an uncharacteristic sheepishness about him. Cassie had come up to them, and Annie Boss was making her way down from the tilt. “This used to be their river,” he said. “They come by once or twice a week and take off a fish. It doesn’t cause any harm.”

  “They murdered Harry Miller.”

  “It’s not my place to speak against the dead,” Reilly said, “but Harry Miller was a hard, hard man.”

  “Red man not bad man,” Annie said.

  Peyton said, “They killed Harry Miller.”

  “Truth be told,” Reilly said, “they could kill any one of us whenever they pleased and we’d never see them.”

  Annie Boss reached a hand to hold his forearm. “John Peyton,” she said. She had never touched him before. He could see how her brown eyes were flecked with gold, like small stones starred with mica. “Red man not bad,” she said again.

  Reilly shook his head. “I don’t suppose your Da will appreciate the fact I let Red Indians walk off with his fish.”

  Peyton looked at Cassie and then back at the hired man.

  Annie Boss picked up the skirt of her apron to wipe her hands. “Bread ready,” she said. “We got bread for John Senior.”

  She knelt on the sand near the spot where Reilly had been feeding the fire that morning and began digging with a trowel. Steam rose from the ground and she reached in with a bare hand to lift out a round loaf. She brushed away loose grains of sand from the snow-white crust before passing it to Cassie.

  The heat scalded her fingers and she had to tip it back and forth from one hand to another. “I’m sure John Senior will appreciate your kindness,” she said and she caught Peyton’s eye and held it for a moment.

  “Tell him we were asking,” Reilly said, and there were nods all around.

  The afternoon had turned surprisingly humid and warm. Reilly shaded his eyes and looked off into the points of the compass. “It’s a broad day,” he said. “Could be weather behind that.”

  As they rowed home to Burnt Island, Peyton sat facing Cassie in the stern, the bread resting in a fold of her skirt between her legs. To the south and west a large front of dark cloud had pushed up quickly over the horizon and the sun had passed behind it. They would be lucky to get in off the water before the rain started and there was likely lightning and wind coming as well. Peyton hauled at the oars. His skin felt tight around him, as if it was no longer large enough to accommodate everything that was going on inside it.

  Cassie said, “What are you thinking about, John Peyton?”

  He came back on the oars with everything he had. “Nothing,” he said.

  She smiled at him. “Was that your first sight of a Red Indian?”

  “I saw one in Poole,” Peyton said between strokes. “Before I come over. A little girl. She didn’t look. A thing like that.”

  Cassie nodded but didn’t say anything more. Peyton leaned hard on the oars again. Without discussing it they had agreed not to mention the Indian to John Senior. A shared secret, a space cleared just for them. It made him want to kiss her. He looked overhead at the oncoming weather. Where the black banks of cloud met and overlapped there were brilliant red and gold seams of light burning through, the colours as vivid as molten lava.

  Years after that first trip to Reilly’s for the haying, Peyton still thought of Cassie’s mother making the mistake of her life. He could still smell the fresh baked bread in Cassie’s lap, heat rising from its centre. Peyton took a slow mouthful of his beer which was piss-warm and tasted just as foul.

  Reilly reached into the bucket of river water for another bottle. He said, “You never mentioned that Indian to John Senior, did you?”

  The younger man shook his head. “Not a word,” he said.

  Reilly nodded. “Is your man Buchan still hunting the coastline for them?”

  “He is.” Peyton look up at the Irishman. “What do you give for his chances?”

  Reilly said, “He’ll not but lay eyes on them, is my guess. And after what happened the winter, that’ll as likely as not be a blessing.”

  “Why did they kill those marines, Joseph?” “There’s no odds in guessing at what that crowd were thinking.”

  Peyton pointed with the tip of the bottle he held. “You know, don’t you.”

  A look passed across Reilly’s face, as if he’d stepped wrong on a gimpy ankle. They could hear the argument between Richmond and Taylor still going on near the water.

  Peyton said, “It was them, wasn’t it? Those two on the beach?”

  Reilly sat up straight and put both hands on his thighs.

  “And Cull and Hughster.”

  The Irishman let out a long breath of air. “They might have had suspicions about some of us. If they recognized anyone, I’d be willing to wager it wasn’t from the most pleasant of circumstances.”

  Peyton pointed with the bottle again and was saying, “John Senior —” when Annie Boss came out of the tilt carrying the child and seated herself near the two men. He didn’t finish the thought.

  Annie pushed the dress away from her breast and settled her son at the nipple. When she raised her head from the baby, Peyton could see the gold flecks in each iris sparking in the sunlight. She smiled acros
s at him, a close-lipped smile that seemed to him to be an apology of some kind, as if she was embarrassed to be sitting with him, nursing a child. It was an embarrassment they all felt and had no notion how to overcome.

  Reilly said, “What do you figure to do, John Peyton?”

  “Do with what exactly?”

  He gave an elaborate shrug and then looked directly at the younger man. “It must be hard living in that house,” he said. “With the two of them.”

  Peyton stared down at his feet and scuffed at the ground. “Where have I got to go?” he said.

  The following year Buchan returned to the northeast shore, although he sensed the governor’s will to continue the search fading as the summer progressed. He responded with an intense, desperate hope like a man attempting to save a failing marriage. He sent detailed reports to St. John’s each month, including a list of all camps, trails and artifacts he’d come across and recounting the sightings reported to him by others. Each letter included assurances that the hoped for encounter was not only likely, but inevitable. There is the greatest probability of attaining our goal if we follow up the operation without intermission until the end of August, he wrote. Our continued efforts to bring the natives into civil society, he insisted later in the season, should be considered a national object and our ultimate success will wipe away a certain degree of stigma brought on us by the former barbarity of our countrymen. He wrote, My dear Duckworth.

  John Thomas Duckworth’s service as governor of Newfoundland ended in the fall of 1812. The discreet expeditions he had permitted to be undertaken in Red Indian country he considered to be abject failures and he returned to England complaining of headaches so severe he lost peripheral vision in his right eye for hours at a time.

  Lieutenant Buchan’s petition to the governor’s successor to continue the work Duckworth initiated on the northeast shore was denied. It would be seven years before he returned to the Bay of Exploits.

  Part 2

  dwall n also drool, dwoll MED dwale n ‘dazed or unconscious condition’ (c1400-1450); EDD dwal(l) sb 1 ‘light slumber’[…]

  28 Dwoll: a state between sleeping and waking….

  — Dictionary of Newfoundland English

  Other Losses

  1817–1818

  ONE

  In the early evening of November 7, 1817, a fire broke out in a small house adjoining the shops and warehouses of Lower Path, known by this time as Water Street, in St. John’s.

  Almost the entire path had once been covered by high fish flakes, rough trellises of spruce logs where salted cod was spread to dry. Most of these were gone now, some victim of a Water Street fire the previous winter, others torn down to make way for buildings as St. John’s became less a fishing village and more a centre of commerce and trade for the colony. But several stretches of the street still ran under the rows of loosely fitted lungers, which were themselves covered with a layer of tinder-dry spruce boughs.

  On the harbour side of Water Street a row of large wooden stores warehoused dried cod for export in the late summer and, by early fall, much of the imported food and supplies that saw the inhabitants through the winter months. The north side was a mile-long strip of houses interspersed with retail shops selling food, hardware and clothing, patent cures such as Extract of Mustard, sarsaparilla, Balsam of Life, antibilious pills. There was a shoe repair shop, a millinery, a bakery, a blacksmith’s, there were taverns such as the Royal Oak, Shoulder of Mutton, the Globe, the Jolly Fisherman.

  The street itself was still unpaved, uneven and rocky at the best of times, in inclement weather a relentlessly muddy quagmire. Up to fifteen feet in width at its most generous, there were points where little more than six feet separated the shops on either side. The prevailing wind funnelled through this long, narrow tunnel of two-storey buildings, ripping hats from the heads of pedestrians, inverting the ribs of parasols, restlessly swinging the painted wooden signs of dogs, goats and fish that hung over merchants’ stores.

  On the night of the seventh, a steady wind lifted large flankers from the single burning building and showered them along the darkened street like sparks flailing off a pinwheel of fireworks. Within minutes the neighbouring houses and fish flakes were alight and the flames had jumped to the south side of the path. The fire bell was sounded and parties of marines and soldiers and volunteers from the town itself were dispatched with buckets, hatchets and hawsers to try to contain the blaze. Every establishment between King’s Beach and the Governor’s Wharf was raging by the time the firefighters assembled on the street, the fierce glow of the flames under a low cloud of smoke lighting the harbour’s ring of hills like torches set around a stage. Ships docked at the wharves slipped their moorings to drift free of the fire’s reach, the calm surface of the water roiling with reflected light beneath them. Wind carried flankers onto their decks and several caught fire, the vessels burning down to the waterline. Crowds of people from the shanties and tilts built higher above the harbour came down to Water Street and began looting from the buildings in the path of the flames. Some merchants guarded their wares with rifles until the fire forced them to abandon their posts, others threw open their doors to allow the looters to make off with whatever they could carry before the conflagration overtook their stores. There was an intermittent roar of roof timbers collapsing two storeys into the buildings they once covered. Burning walls foundered and fell into the street.

  Within six hours of the first alarm the merchant houses along Water, Duckworth and Holloway streets had burnt to the ground, along with the courthouse, dozens of storehouses, sheds and wharves and 130 homes. On the eastern side of the town as far as Hill o’Chips nothing but a few scattered outbuildings remained standing.

  The first official residence of Newfoundland governors was established in 1781, inside the walls of Fort Townshend on the hills above the town of St. John’s. It was intended to act only as a summer residence during the fishing season, but even in this limited role it was regarded by its inhabitants as less than adequate. It was built of fir with heavy slate roofs that damaged the structure to the extent that rain dripped steadily into offices and bedrooms. Drifts of snow driven by winter gales filtered through the same nooks and crannies to pool beside beds and desks as early as September and as late as May each year. Successive governors ordered additional rooms and offices attached to the core of the building for their servants, for secretaries and clerks, the residence spiralling outward from its dysfunctional core like a malignant tumour. There were complicated labyrinths of long windowless corridors and passageways illuminated with borrowed light that trapped dampness and cold inside. Each room was equipped with a fireplace but the constant draughts made it impossible to maintain a comfortable temperature anywhere in the building.

  The first governor to be saddled with the responsibility of year-round habitation, Vice Admiral Francis Pickmore, had spent a long miserable November in the governor’s house at the heel of the previous season. He wrote to His Majesty’s government, begging for money to construct a home that would better suit someone of his station and the extreme conditions a winter-long stay was likely to bring. The earl of Bathurst in his response cited economic circumstances in England as a deterrent to such extravagance.

  Two weeks after the fire and not yet a full month into his first St. John’s winter, Pickmore sat in one of the relentlessly chilly offices trying to comprehend the enormity of the loss, the myriad implications. A second consecutive year of depressed markets for cod in Europe had left many of the island’s residents in a condition of severe impoverishment and much of the store of food stockpiled for the winter was consumed in the fire. Temperatures in November were already dipping twenty degrees below zero. At night, gangs of rowdies roamed the village, made reckless by hunger and the cold, beating and stealing from anyone they encountered on the streets.

  Pickmore brought his handkerchief to his mouth. He said, “We’re in for one hellish winter, I expect.”

  Buchan was standing acr
oss from the governor’s desk, his hat beneath his arm. “Likely so, sir.”

  Pickmore looked up. His face was pale and bloated and somehow lifeless. Dank brown hair, large watery eyes. A drowned man, Buchan thought, a man too listless to be overwhelmed. “What are the estimates on the losses, Lieutenant?” the governor asked.

  “A million pounds, at the least. A portion of that amount, perhaps a hundred thousand pounds, will be written off by insurance. Most of the fishermen have lost everything.”

  “How many homeless?”

  “Perhaps a thousand or more.”

  Pickmore nodded. “How does that compare with those burned out in last year’s fire?”

  “About on a par, I would say.”

  “And these rals roaming the streets at night?” He waved his handkerchief.

  “They seem as bold this winter as last. Public floggings tended to temper their mood somewhat. I’ve taken the liberty of setting up a small force of marines to patrol the town after dark.”

  “Most commendable,” Pickmore said. There was a distracted quality to his voice that made his compliments sound like censure. “We are fortunate to have a man of your experience in these situations. I confess I would be at a loss where to begin with it all.”

  Buchan inclined his head slightly. The previous winter’s fire, and the hardship and unrest among the inhabitants of St. John’s that resulted from it, had been the sole reason for installing a governor year-round in the colony. But Pickmore, he could see, and by the man’s own admission, was going to be of little help. “They are already starting to build shanties, Your Worship, along the same miserable paths. I think it might be best to discourage this until the spring when construction can be undertaken in a manner more carefully reasoned or we will find ourselves living in the same fire trap as always.”