River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  “I was a navy man meself,” he said. “Years ago this was. Till I lost the eye.” He gestured at his head.

  Buchan nodded.

  The coffin was set up on the bar and there was a row of drunken fishermen standing beside it. It was built of plain board and the dead man inside it was dressed in a black suit several sizes too large for him and thirty years out of fashion.

  “The suit was my own,” Harrow told the officer. He wore a slop smock tied at his waist that draped almost to the floor. “Haven’t put it on my back since my first year out of the navy. And he didn’t have a proper fit-out for burying, poor bugger.”

  “Was he a relation of yours?”

  “No sir, a business partner at one time. Before his wife died. He sold his share in the establishment afterwards and then drank away the works.”

  Several men near them at the bar toasted the corpse’s legendary exploits as a drinker.

  “When is the funeral?”

  “Tomorrow noon.” Harrow shook his head. “I’m surprised the Church would have him. He never set foot inside one in all the years I knew him.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “And so it is. He was a queer stick, I’ll grant you. Had a daughter, a clever girl. He dressed her up in men’s clothes one August and they traipsed off to Portugal Cove before there was a road. And I’ve heard stranger things that the presence of his remains prevent me from speaking of.”

  Another round of salutes from the mourners.

  Buchan looked around the dimly lit room. “Where is his daughter now?”

  “She left twenty-odd year ago. She was in the employ of a northern man, one Peyton, owns half the country up there. No saying where she is these days. Would you take a complimentary beverage, Lieutenant?” Harrow had gone around the bar and was out of sight behind the coffin.

  “No,” Buchan said. “Thank you. I just wanted to offer my condolences.”

  Harrow reappeared at the side of the bar and leaned a shoulder against the head of the coffin. “We thank you,” he said. “On his behalf. Come back on a happier occasion, the complimentary will still be here.”

  It was weeks afterwards before Buchan could bring himself to take pen and paper to write a letter that would be sent on the first packet boat out of Portugal Cove after the spring breakup. He began, Dear Ms. Cassandra Jure. It is with regret and the most heartfelt sympathy I write with news of your father’s passing from this world in the early morning of November 21, 1817.

  TWO

  Cassie was telling John Peyton about the first walking trip she took with her father as a girl, between St. John’s harbour and Portugal Cove. She was sitting next to the fire at the summer house, wearing a thick wool sweater and flannels beneath the pale linen of her skirt against the chill of early May. The letter carrying news of her father’s death was in her lap and she worried at the paper absently as she spoke.

  “I was only twelve at the time,” she said. She and her father were travelling an Indian path, an overland route through miles of what the books she read would have called impenetrable forest, impassable bog-land. It had been decades since the Beothuk Indians occupied this part of the island and the trail seemed to be little more than a rumour of their passing, barely marked, sometimes petering out halfway across a marsh, sometimes disappearing in a copse of spruce. They would spend half an hour or more then, zigzagging aimlessly to pick up some hint of the direction it continued in, her father walking bent at the waist as if he might be able to sniff out the path like a hound. He had thickly curled sideburns, a head of thinning hair showing pale scalp. He carried a nunny-bag packed with food and clean stockings, a costril of spruce beer tied at his waist. He squatted where depressions in the moss indicated the path might turn northward and pulled at the sideburns with both hands, considering.

  He caught Cassie watching him and smiled across at her. “Yes,” he said, as if her watching was the deciding factor. “This way then.” He straightened and started off, and Cassie settled in behind him, her eyes at his feet, trotting every few steps to keep up. She was exhausted and near tears by this point, but refused to give in by naming it, by asking for relief. Her father was moving at the same pace he’d set when they began walking out of St. John’s in the dark that morning and she was determined not to alter it, not to slow him down. At the time she aspired to his indiscriminate appetite for the world. Just as her mother once had.

  Her mother was a girl of barely seventeen years when she met the man who would become her husband, moving away with him to Newfoundland to protect her parents from unacceptable public embarrassment.

  Cassie looked at Peyton, to see if he understood what she was saying. He nodded for her to go on.

  Her mother wanted to live a respectable life, and before the years and her father’s increasingly dissolute behaviour exhausted her, she struggled to maintain some semblance of dignity. In her eyes, the pub operated by her husband was another humiliation she had to endure and she couldn’t speak of the place without a tremor of distaste in her voice.

  Peyton said, “You’ve told me how she felt.”

  Cassie nodded. Her father complained his wife had airs about her, but thought she had suffered enough at his hands to have a legitimate claim to some disappointment. He let her censure of the tavern stand without serious rebuttal. But the unresolved disagreement between the two spilled over into other areas of the family’s life, particularly when it came to their daughter. Her mother was fastidious and demanding, attentive, solicitous, firm. Her father was reckless, delinquent, uninhibited by notions of what was proper for a girl her age, particularly if he was under the influence of drink. He allowed her to read the early poems of John Donne, took her lining for conners off the wharves in the harbour, taught her to swim at Quidi Vidi Lake. He taught her to load and shoot a rifle in the hills above St. John’s.

  “You’re going to ruin that girl,” her mother warned him.

  “I’m through ruining girls, m’love,” he told her.

  She gave him a dark, disparaging look. “I wish I’d never clapped eyes on you.”

  Cassie sometimes worked the tension between her parents to angle for concessions from her mother that would otherwise have been out of the question. John Donne was a little beyond her comprehension, lining for tomcod was more or less a bore. But learning to swim, firing a rifle, these things were exhilarating and worth fighting for. When her father announced his plans for the walking tour to Portugal Cove, she began lobbying to accompany him.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” her mother told her.

  “Leave the child be,” her father said. But his tone suggested it would take some convincing to bring him around.

  “What kind of a creature are you raising?” her mother wanted to know. “Dragging her down to the wharf. Stripping her half naked at the lake. What are people to think if they see you stealing her off through the country in her petticoat?”

  “People? What people are you concerned with?”

  “By all that is sacred, Garfield Izakiah Jure, I will not allow you to carry Cassandra off into the woods.”

  “You won’t allow it?”

  “No,” she said. “I will not. That’s no place for a girl.”

  Her father nodded thoughtfully. “Indeed,” he said. He looked at his daughter who was sitting quietly while events took their course and then he looked back at his wife. “I quite agree,” he said. And he left the house without a word.

  Cassie stared down at her shoes, studying the polished buckles. Her mother paced the floor. It was as if they had come to an impasse in an argument they’d been carrying on with each other. It was clear there was more to come. They were both expectant, apprehensive.

  Half an hour later Cassie’s father came through the door carrying a pair of men’s trousers, stockings, a hat and a short Spencer coat. “We shall need a name for you,” he said to his daughter.

  “Now, Izakiah,” her mother said.

  “Try these on,” he said. “We’ll
have to make some adjustments.”

  “Where on earth did you get these clothes?”

  “From the smallest gentleman I could find next door. Cost me a bottle and a half of Jamaican rum. Something regal would be in order, something with the ring of royalty about it. What do you think of Henry as a name, Cassie? Or Charles, I’ve always fancied Charles. That’s what we’d have called you if you were a lad.”

  The stockings were full of holes and filthy and the rank smell of them filled the room. Her mother stood helplessly in the centre of the floor. There was so much wrong with what was happening that she couldn’t focus on the order in which she should be objecting to things. Finally she said, “She will not wear an item of those clothes until they have been washed.”

  It was a small concession to make and conceded so much to them in its turn that Cassie and her father immediately agreed to it.

  They set out an hour before light, a week later. Her mother watching from the open doorway, her silhouette in the dim light of a candle behind her, her shadow cast on the dirt path. “You bring her home in one piece,” she shouted to her husband when they were almost out of earshot. Cassie turned and looked back down the hill as the door closed, cancelling out the square of light.

  The first three miles beyond the town they walked a wide, well-travelled road to a place called Tilt House, making good time. The sun was well up by then. Cassie could feel the itch of new blisters already forming on the heels of her feet.

  “It gets much worse from here, young Charles,” her father said. He tipped the costril of spruce beer to his lips and then replaced the cork. He took out a small jar of pork fat. He used two fingers to scoop a dollop from the jar and offered it to Cassie as he began liberally applying the white grease to his forehead, face and neck. He nodded ahead to the broken path of tree stumps and shallow bog. “Nippers,” he said.

  Cassie nodded and began applying the grease in the same manner her father had.

  They travelled another three miles to Twenty Mile Pond, following a trail used mostly in winter to reach the lake. It was rutted and studded with tree stumps and stones and crossed by running streams of water. The mosquitoes hung about their heads in shaggy halos so thick and active they had to cover their mouths with their hands when they spoke. There were stretches of marsh spotted with deep, black-water flashes. Where the trail was most sodden, rocks or logs were lain at intervals for travellers but even these had begun to disappear into the muck. Cassie ’s shoes were slightly too big for her feet and she lost them both on separate occasions, rescuing them from the dark sucking mud with her hands.

  At Twenty Mile Pond they stopped to rinse their shoes and stockings in the water and to eat a meal of cheese and bread. There was a strong breeze in the clearing that kept the insects down and dried their clothes as they sat at the water’s edge. She lay back on the stones with bread still in her hand and fell asleep.

  Cassie paused there, as if telling the story was exhausting her as much as the actual trip had, years before. Peyton watched her stare into the fire.

  Beyond the lake the Indian path knifed into the trees, becoming so narrow that they couldn’t walk abreast of one another. Stones pushed up to block the trail, some as high as the axle tree of a wagon. Her father waded waist-deep rivers with Cassie on his back, both of them staring into the current, his foot shifting carefully ahead to feel out each step. They lost the path and found it and lost it again. They clung to tree branches, stepping across exposed roots to cross patches of thigh-deep mud. Their hands were cut and scraped and coated in spruce gum. Cassie’s legs were numb with walking, the soles of her shoes caked with blood. It was nothing like she expected and everything she wanted it to be all the same. “Do you see what I mean?” she asked.

  Peyton raised his shoulders. “I guess so,” he said.

  She said, “I wanted whatever he wanted is the thing.”

  Peyton only nodded.

  It was dark by the time they reached Portugal Cove and her father approached the first tilt they came across to inquire after lodgings and food. The building consisted of a single room only and through the door they could see the light of a small fire laid against the evening chill. They were ushered in and introduced — Cassie as Charles. “A pretty young lad,” the man who had come to the door said. His name was O’Brien, an old Irishman whose high forehead and remarkable jowls seemed too large for the rest of his face, for his body. His wife, Margaret, was the only other occupant of the hovel, a small spry woman who they would learn later was nearly blind. She walked about the room with the confidence of a cat.

  Margaret warmed a pot of seal meat in a stew of potatoes and turnip for their supper while they went outside to wash their feet in a brook running a few yards from the tilt. Her father lifted Cassie’s feet into his lap and dried them with his shirt-tail, then applied a little of the pork fat to the bald patches of blister.

  Cassie had never tasted seal meat — her mother refused to buy or eat it where salt pork was available — and she was of two minds about the dark, oily flavour. But she was so hungry from the travel that she ate her bowlful and accepted an offer of seconds, using her index finger to clean every bit of gravy from the earthenware. Her father was telling their hosts a fictional story about his son’s appetite, how insatiable it was, when she fell asleep against his arm. She woke up the next morning on a layer of spruce branches spread over the dirt floor near the fireplace. Her father’s coat laid over her as a blanket.

  Cassie turned her head towards Peyton. Her face was sickly pale, which made her eyes seem black and spent, like bits of char left behind by a fire. Peyton said, “Perhaps you would like a drop of rum.”

  She looked around the room suddenly and he realized she was thinking of John Senior. She ’d never touched a drop in his father’s presence that he could recall. The old man had gone down to the stage house to work on the nets or simply whittle wood as soon as she opened the letter and the news came out. He placed a rough hand to Cassie’s shoulder for a moment — his only comment on the matter — then stepped out the door without a word. Peyton tried to imagine Cassie telling this story to his father and couldn’t. The talking, at least, had always been left to them.

  Down on the stagehead John Senior was staring out over the sea. No wind to speak of, but there was a heavy send in the water of the cove. The smooth slate-grey surface looked like a stone courtyard riding a swell of tectonic motion.

  He had come down to meet the sloop when John Peyton hauled in from Fogo with a load of spring supplies. “There’s a letter,” Peyton said to him, jumping from the gunnel after they had collared the Susan to the stage. “From St. John’s.”

  They’d walked up to the house then, the bearers of bad news, neither of them doubted that. After she opened the letter John Senior put his hand to Cassie ’s shoulder and thought he might say something, a word for comfort. But nothing he could think of seemed the leastways appropriate, given the circumstances under which he first encountered Cassie and her father.

  During their visits to St. John’s to market the catch of salmon in the old days, he and Harry Miller stayed in rooms let by public houses for as long as a week. They drank hard after the day’s business was complete and each night Miller availed himself of the services that were at a man’s disposal in the island’s capital. At first John Senior had resisted the undertow of his own loneliness and lust, holding himself apart from the women who circled the tavern tables like gulls over a cutting room. “I was beginning to wonder,” Harry Miller said, after finally goading his younger partner into bringing a woman back to his room, “what sort of oil you required to set a flame to your wick, if you follow my meaning.”

  John Senior never shared the obvious relish with which Miller engaged in his annual ritual of debauchery. Miller’s drunken propositioning of every female he encountered, his howling orgasms that could be heard on all three floors of the public house, embarrassed him, pricked at his sense of propriety in the sober light of day. But for a t
ime they became partners in this, as in all other things.

  The two men had once spent part of an evening in St. John’s at the tavern owned by Cassie’s father and after joining their table for several rounds he’d brought them next door to his house. Miller shouted propositions to the two women who’d taken refuge upstairs and Cassie’s father, far from being insulted, laughed and urged him on. He got up from his seat then and leaned low over Miller, as if he was crying on the man’s shoulder. They nodded together and Cassie’s father slapped Miller’s shoulder several times and then went drunkenly up the stairs. Miller sat on the edge of his chair, paddling at his thighs with the palms of his hands. He was singing tunelessly, wordlessly, de dee dee dee, de dee. He fingered at his crotch, leaning back in the chair as he made adjustments.

  John Senior stared across at his partner. He experienced a peculiar moment of heaviness, as if the strangeness and uncertainty of the world suddenly weighed in on him. If things had gone differently, he knew, his father would be sitting beside Miller now with the same look of drunken, predatory expectancy.

  John Senior’s mother had accused her husband of sleeping with prostitutes all their married life. When he was thirteen she moved into the room his sisters shared, in protest. It was a change that was never spoken of, the necessary accommodations and compromises within the family made silently, like sleepers shifting to make room for another body. But he felt the humiliation it was for both of them. It was like a sickness they passed back and forth, a virus surviving first in one host, then the other, and kept alive for years in this fashion.

  Without setting out to, he had satisfied himself as to the truth of his father’s habits through remarks from neighbours and friends, through a more explicit awareness of the man’s routines and whereabouts. He said nothing to either of his parents but felt as if the knowledge made him complicit in the whole affair.