River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  In the last weeks of his life, his father was bedridden, withdrawn and uncommunicative, babbling, incontinent. John Senior sat up with the dying man through the night while his mother and two sisters slept in the adjoining room. Morning and evening he changed the square cloth diapers, scraping the inevitable mess of feces into a chamber pot. It was a kind of penance for knowing, an indignity he was determined to spare his mother. She came into the sickroom early one morning as he squatted over the pot with the diaper. The smell beneath him was putrid, an undeniable proof of rot at the world’s core. His mother said, “A man is all stomach where women are concerned, Johnny.” She shook her head then with a wounded contempt that he had never thought might have included him in its dismissal.

  Miller’s endless racket was making him feel nauseous. He could hear voices from the upstairs rooms, a hushed argument. He stood up from his seat. “Miller,” he said, starting towards him. His stomach roiled and lurched, like a salmon writhing at the end of a spear.

  “Jesus Christ, Peyton!” Miller yelled.

  John Senior had him by the hair, hauling him across the room. Cassie’s father called from the top of the stairs, but they were already going through the door. John Senior pushed and kicked and slapped Miller ahead of him.

  “Are you mad, man?” Miller screamed. “You Christly devil-skin,” he said.

  They continued in this fashion down the tiny dirt alleyway, then along the entire length of Lower Path until they’d reached the public house where they were lodging.

  John Senior went back the next afternoon and waited near the house until he saw Cassie’s father come out the door and nip across to the tavern. He stood before the two women with no notion of what needed to be said or why exactly he had come. He rambled stupidly about the book Cassie held and offered an awkward apology for Miller as if he was a dog who had piddled on a good rug. The women clearly distrusted him and their distrust was heightened by what they could see of his own fear and uncertainty. They looked away and said nothing. And before he could settle on a proper way to take his leave of them Cassie’s father returned.

  John Senior made his hurried excuses then and left, relieved to be released from a duty he didn’t fully comprehend. But before he went out the door, he ’d looked into the man’s eyes a long moment, searching the alcohol-dampened flicker of them, thinking he might be able to tell just from that. Which one had he gone upstairs for, his wife or his daughter?

  John Senior watched the grey water of the cove billow towards the shore, fighting the same surge of nausea he’d felt sitting beside Miller in that room. Feeling the same peculiar heaviness come over him. He’d had no plan to offer Cassie a position in his house and did so on a murky whim, hearing about her mother’s death on his way through St. John’s years later. Soon after Cassie came north, it seemed likely to him that she and John Peyton would make a pair, so he let the question he’d been asking himself lie. It was sometimes better, he had learned, not to know. He left the two of them on their own when he could, sent them across to Reilly’s for the haying alone. Matchmaker is how he saw himself. The good father.

  He shook his head at the thought now. The good father. He’d been on a round of his salmon rivers a summer some years after Cassie’s arrival, inspecting the cure, the state of the weirs. He was meant to stop in at Charles Brook, then go on to Richmond’s river, but had foregone the last leg of the trip for an omen of weather. There was no one on the stagehead when he arrived, John Peyton and the hired men hand-lining for cod in shoal water at the backend of Burnt Island. He went up to the house and walked in on Cassie in the wooden tub in front of the fireplace. She was standing in water to her knees, a cloth in one hand, her hair pinned up at her neck. He stared a moment, stunned, as if someone had clapped the breath from his lungs. Sunlight slanting through the windows, dust motes moving in a slow waltz through the air.

  It had never before that moment occurred to him he might have her himself. That he wanted her. She made no attempt to cover herself, just stared back at him with a fierce, knowing look. Her breath hard through her nostrils, her wet skin glowing like a pane of glass facing a sunset.

  The memory of that look still made John Senior’s chest clutch helplessly about his lungs. He turned away from the steady thrum of the water and walked in off the stage. He felt ashamed of himself and fearful, as if he’d just woken from his nightmare. His wife or his daughter? He set out towards the hills behind the summer house. The ground beneath his feet seemed hardly more solid than the ocean and he could sense the earth’s dark, inevitable undertow. Eventually the earth opened up and swallowed a person, body and soul. Cassie’s father gone now and they were all, every one of them, being pulled along in his wake.

  Peyton came back from the pantry with glasses. He poured two small shots of rum and added a splash of water to both. He sat back in his seat. “You woke up beside the fireplace,” he said.

  “Two more things,” Cassie said.

  The old woman was already up and about the tilt, a fire burning to boil water. The smoke vented through a wooden barrel fashioned into a kind of chimney. Margaret squinted down at Cassie, at the blur of movement in the place where Cassie had been sleeping. Her eyes were nearly shut with peering. “Child,” she said and she held a hand in Cassie’s direction. Both men were still asleep on opposite sides of the room. Margaret took her hand at the wrist and smiled suddenly, staring off into the air as if there was something clandestine about physical contact between them.

  “Now,” she said. “I wonder would you ever do us a small favour?”

  Cassie shifted where she stood, resisting the urge to pull her hand away. Her feet burned where the skin had been galled from the heels, the toes.

  Margaret said, “Tell me your name for real.”

  “Miss?”

  “You’re no lad, even I can see that.”

  “Are you blind, miss?”

  “Almost and nearly. Tell an old blind woman your name now.”

  She stepped nearer. She was almost the same height as Margaret and lifted herself on her toes to speak directly into her ear. She felt as if she was betraying a confidence, putting herself at risk somehow. “Cassie,” she whispered. “Cassandra.”

  The Irishwoman was still smiling and patted her arm. “I won’t tell a soul,” she promised.

  In the afternoon O’Brien took them out in a small skiff to hook lobsters for their supper. The water was dead calm and they drifted about the shallows near shore. O’Brien had a wooden staff fourteen feet in length that was tipped with a thin metal hook. He knelt in the bow, bracing his knees against the sides of the boat while Cassie lay across the gunnel to watch him at work. The water was so clear she could see the stones and dark fingers of seaweed on the mottled ocean floor. O’Brien held the staff near the bottom as they drifted, the shaft refracting under the water’s skin like a bone broken and bent at an impossible angle. His arms dipped suddenly, gently, and he brought the staff up hand over hand then to lift a lobster from the sea, the prehensile tail curled into a ring to grip the hook. He shook the lobster into a wooden tub half-filled with water.

  Cassie stared at her supper a while, at the eyes so densely black they seemed sightless, the long feelers waving like insect antennae. “Why did she come up like that now,” she said, “with her tail wrapped on the hook?”

  “You just have to slide the tip underneath, Charlie,” O’Brien explained. “A little tickle and they ball up to protect themselves. The poor buggers can’t help it, you see. It’s in their nature.”

  The lobster’s thick half-moon claws opened and closed, opened and closed. What she now remembered, she told Peyton, was the unexpected pinch of sympathy she felt for it. The sudden urge she had to shove a finger into its desperate, blind grasping.

  Peyton thought she had come to the end of the telling there, though he could feel the story pointing towards some unspoken third thing. The heaviness of it weighed on him, like the loneliness he’d always sensed in her that she refused
to surrender to scrutiny. He felt no less lost in her company for knowing so much about her. When she hadn’t spoken for what he thought was a long time, he said, “Is that it, Cassie?”

  She looked up from the letter in her lap. She was crying and there was a sad, serious smile on her face. She said, “That is never it, John Peyton.”

  THREE

  At the end of that summer’s work, John Peyton and his men loaded the Susan with three hundred tierces of dried salted salmon and were waiting for a fair wind to make way for the market in St. John’s. It was colder than normal for the time of year and there was no sign of a favourable change in conditions. Peyton sent Reilly and Taylor up to the hired men’s outbuilding to join Richmond and young Michael Sharpe who’d already gone to get some sleep. John Senior was aboard, dozing under a thin blanket in the weather house. Peyton stood beside him in the dark, trying to guess from his breathing if the old man was awake.

  “Father,” he said in a whisper.

  “I’m all right.”

  “You’ll catch your death of cold down here.” He leaned down and pulled the blanket away from the bunk.

  “Jesus, John Peyton.”

  “Go on up to the house.”

  The old man muttered as he sat up and began pawing in the dark for his hat, his gloves. “Where is that now?” he said to himself.

  “What is it?”

  “My watch is here somewhere.”

  “Leave it now, we’ll be back down in a few hours’ time and on our way. Go get some sleep.”

  All evening it had been pitch dark under cloud but a nearly full moon was beginning to come clear as the cover dispersed. The light was pale, phosphorescent, it seemed to emanate from the ground itself, from the walls of the summer house. Peyton watched John Senior make his way up from the dock. He was seventy years old and Peyton could see the discomfort of that age in his walk though he still handled the work of men half his age, hauling nets or cleaning fish or cutting a cord of birch billets. There was something almost unnatural about the man’s capacities and it invested him with a peculiar authority that Peyton resented.

  “Keep an eye,” John Senior said over his shoulder.

  “Don’t mind me.”

  Peyton spent the next hour wandering the stretch of ground above the beach, walking out the dock and back, the clump of his boots on the dry lengths of spruce like waves flobbing the hull of a boat. A thin line of moonlight laddered across the harbour towards open sea. The horseshoe of forested hills behind the house and outbuildings was a black wedge shimmed into the speckled dark of the night sky. On the summit of the highest ridge there was a single tree that stood head and shoulders above those around it, as if it had been ordained to afford an unobstructed view into the cove. Peyton shivered as he looked up at it. There were still moments when something in the country moved through him this way, a wind in the woods approximating the sound of footfall behind him, a cold current of watchfulness on the shoreline when he sculled by to check the family’s weirs. He promised himself he would climb up there this fall and cut the bastard tree down. He checked his pocket watch. It was nearing one in the morning and he took a final look around. The Susan nodded lazily at her moorings. There was no sound but the contrary wind and the motion of the sea, inhale, exhale, against the beach.

  He made his way up the path to the house, turned at the door to overlook the dock and the boat again, and went inside to the warmth of the kitchen. John Senior was on the daybed with his face to the wall. Cassie was asleep in a chair beside him, her head slumped forward so that her chin rested on her shoulder. They looked like an old married couple.

  He moved the kettle as quietly as possible to the full heat of the fire and slipped into the parlour. He lay in the cool air on the high-backed settle and closed his eyes a moment while he waited for the water to boil.

  The Beothuk had watched the white men loading their boat for two days from a sentinel tree on a hill overlooking the cove on Burnt Island. On the second night of their vigil, when the ship was packed to the gunnels and ready for departure, seven men and a woman in two canoes paddled under the cover of darkness into the sheltered water of the cove. The voices of the fishermen on watch carried across to them as they mirrored the uneven curve of the shoreline, moving slowly towards the dock. Their paddles worked soundlessly through the lap of salt water, each stroke perfectly synchronized, perfectly silent. They slipped beneath the spruce timbers of the wharf and sat there while the sporadic talk and farting and laughter of the white men went on into the late hours of the evening. Each breath they took was as measured and subtle as the paddle strokes that had carried them into the harbour and they waited until only the footsteps of a single white man echoed on the wharf lungers overhead. And some time later they heard the sound of the door to the house opening and closing up the hill.

  They hacked the vessel free of its moorings and then leaned into their paddles, the boat sheering around with the silent grace of the moon travelling through cloud overhead. A fever of euphoria crept through them as they made for open water but no word was spoken, all their energies poured into hauling the weight of the ship that followed behind them like a well-trained dog.

  Peyton came to himself on the settle when he heard the eruption of garbled shouting in the kitchen. And Cassie’s voice then trying to wake his father from his nightmare. He jumped to his feet and ran past them through the front door. He pulled out his watch and tried to read the time by the moonlight as he ran down the path towards the dock. He was halfway along the hill before he looked ahead to the water and stopped where he was. His breath came in shallow gasps and steamed in the night air. He looked around wildly, as if he expected to see the boat being carried up the hill on the backs of Indians. His father shouted after him from the door of the house. He looked down at his watch. It was one-thirty in the morning.

  The occupants of the house straggled down to the dock behind him in unfastened boots and holding their trousers up with their hands. They stood together at the edge of the wharf and stared into the blackness of the water and off across the harbour where the vastness of the sea was just beginning to run away from them on the new tide. The Susan’s mooring ropes still noosed the stage timbers.

  “Red Indians,” Tom Taylor said.

  “They can’t have got far,” Peyton offered.

  “No bloody sense going after them in the dark,” Richmond said. “We couldn’t tell an Indian from our own arses in this.”

  John Senior said, “Father’s watch was on that boat.”

  “As soon as there’s a hint of light we’ll get after them,” Richmond promised.

  The group turned and made their way back up to the house. Cassie set out tea and raisin cake for them all and they sat around the table to eat in silence.

  John Senior emptied his cup and stood to go upstairs to his room. “They could have dragged her anywhere between Leading Tickles and Gander Bay. Let’s try not to sleep through the morning.” He looked across at his son, but said nothing more.

  The next day was fair with a brisk wind. A perfect day to sail. Peyton shook his head. He and Taylor were sculling among dozens of islands that crowded the mainland like a flock of ducklings trying to keep close to their mother. The coastline offered enough coves, bays and tickles to hide a stolen sloop somewhere different every day of the year. “Needle in a haystack, Tom Taylor,” Peyton said every thirty minutes or so, like a clock striking the half-hour.

  Taylor said, “For all we know, the buggers might have dragged her out somewhere and scuttled her.”

  By early afternoon they had reached Chapel Island and stopped in at Boyd’s Cove for a boil-up on the beach.

  “Not much sense to go beyond here, I don’t expect,” Peyton said. “It would have taken the British navy to haul it much further than this.”

  Taylor nodded. “If we turn back now, we might get in before its too far gone to dark.”

  “All right,” Peyton said. He tossed the dregs of his tea into the sand and
looked slowly around himself. Grey ocean, grey sand beach. Low cliffs up the shore behind them.

  Taylor stood beside him and kicked sand over the embers of the fire they’d made. He said, “Maybe the others have had more luck than we.”

  Late in the afternoon Richmond and the green man, Michael Sharpe, came upon the Susan abandoned on shoals near Charles Brook and in trouble on the rising tide. The sails and some of the rigging had been cut away and there was damage to the hull from the beating that was underway. They could see there was a chance she might be taken into the rocks and lost altogether, but there was no way to get safely aboard of her in the meantime.

  Richmond managed to throw ropes with grapples across the gunnels while Michael Sharpe handled the oars, slewing around in the ocean roil, coming as handy to the sloop as he dared. They fastened one of the ropes to a killick to anchor the boat oceanward and secured the other line ashore in hopes of keeping the boat from slamming helplessly against the cliffs or the low-lying skerries. By this time it was near six o’clock in the evening. Richmond left Michael Sharpe with a rifle to keep watch over the sloop and then headed back to Burnt Island in the falling darkness.

  When Taylor and Peyton arrived, Richmond came down to the water to meet them.

  “Found her out at Charles Brook,” he said. “No surprise there, hey, Tom Taylor,” he said as the two men clambered up onto the wharf. “On the doorstep of our very own half-breed and his brood of Jackietars.” He laughed then, although there was no humour in his voice. The little civility that Richmond once showed the Irishman was long gone. Reilly had been Peyton’s choice for head man when his father gave up the day-to-day concerns of the family enterprise. It was a decision John Senior hadn’t disagreed with although the set of his head when Peyton told him, the slow thoughtful way he tamped his pipe full of tobacco, suggested there might be some trouble to accompany it. Taylor felt slighted, clear enough. But Richmond felt betrayed, as if his own flesh and blood had turned on him, and he seemed determined to wage a petty war of revenge. If Peyton could think of a way to sack him without John Senior taking his part, he would have done so long ago.