River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  “What little girl?” Michael Sharpe asked.

  Richmond said, “Mind your goddamn business, Reilly.”

  The two men began arguing and Peyton yelled at them uselessly, until John Senior sat up in the light of the fire and raised his pistol. He held the gun there until everyone fell silent and then he said, “I will shoot the next man to speak a word before daylight.” He looked around the circle of men watching him. “By Christ, so I will,” he said.

  Everyone settled back onto their beds of spruce. Peyton covered his head with his blanket. Several times through the night he considered getting up to stand in front of his father and say something, any word at all.

  Richmond hadn’t had a thought of the girl since the last time he’d come down the river with Buchan, when Peyton mentioned seeing her in Poole. He lay a while deliberately thinking of other things, but when he fell asleep he began dreaming of the summer morning he’d set out for one of the half-dozen bird islands off the coast. It was a clear day when the sun rose but there was a shroud of mist around the base of the nearest island as he pulled towards it. Thousands of birds circled the sheer cliffs and pitched and took flight again like blackflies tormenting the stoic face of a cow. He rowed into the mist and along the shoreline. The bottle-nosed divers and hagdens and skurwinks and turrs were so thick on the water around his boat it seemed possible to walk ashore on their backs.

  There was one small beach in the face of the island where a boat could be hauled up onto the shore. The Beothuk had arrived ahead of him and were already off along the cliffs to gather eggs, their canoe lying against the grey stone. His first notion was to turn about and pull for the mainland, but he looked down at the twelve-bore long-barrelled duck gun he’d brought for birding and the musket he carried with him at all times. There couldn’t be more than six people in the one canoe, he guessed.

  He muffled his oars as he rowed into the shallows and stepped out into knee-deep water. He grabbed the painter at the bow and sloshed up onto the beach. Above the landwash was the only bit of woods on the island and Richmond flipped the skiff onto an edge and coopied underneath to heft it onto his back. He nestled the boat out of sight and sat as deeply in the droke as he could without losing his view of the canoe. He loaded both guns, humming tunelessly under his breath and stealing glances up towards the beach. He laid the shotgun near his feet and sat with the musket across his lap and waited as the day steadily burned off the mist.

  Taylor startled him awake with the toe of his boot, kicking at his shoulder where he lay asleep. He looked up over the edge of his blanket at the figure standing above him. It took a moment to register where he was, to place himself on the banks of the River Exploits, on the way to the Red Indian’s lake. “Your watch,” Taylor said and then turned to wake John Peyton.

  “Leave him,” Richmond whispered. “Let him sleep.”

  He laid an armful of dry scrag onto the fire for the quick heat and put water on to boil for a mug of tea. He ran his fingers through the length of his beard as if the dream’s greasy residue was tangled there and he was trying to ferret it clear.

  His sister had been hanging out sheets on the line beside her house when he came up from the landwash at Tom Taylor’s river, carrying the girl. There was a sharp, warm breeze of wind and the wet clothing tailed out and snapped behind her. She had clothespins in a pocket of her white apron and held three in her mouth. Her long dark hair was tied back into a ponytail but fine wisps had come free of the ribbon and blew around her head and into her face. She took the clothespins from her mouth and stood to watch him as he came up the low grassy hill. She used both hands to keep her hair clear of her eyes. Richmond carried the girl awkwardly against his shoulder, as if he was shielding her face from the weather. When he reached his sister he held the staring child out in his hands. “Here,” he said.

  She handled the girl but never took her eyes from his face.

  “She haven’t made a sound since I found her,” he said. “Out on the bird islands.” He motioned over his shoulder with his head. “She was left all alone out there.”

  Siobhan looked down at the girl.

  “Where’s Tom?”

  She motioned to the forest behind them. “After a bit of wood.”

  “She’s probably half starved to death,” he said. “Find her something to eat, will you?”

  By the time Richmond found Tom Taylor and the two made their way back to the house, the girl was sitting at the table with a fig tit, sucking at the flavour of raisins through a cloth. Her free hand held a wooden figure, a doll of some sort, to her chest.

  “Well Jesus loves me,” Taylor said.

  “We got to get her into St. John’s Tom.”

  Siobhan looked from Richmond to her husband and back several times. “And what do you think you’ll be doing with her there?”

  Richmond said, “She’s worth fifty pounds if we can get her to the governor.”

  Taylor shook his head and looked at his feet, embarrassed to have it stated so plainly. Siobhan’s face was pale as milk despite her years of working outside and her pulse pounded in the blue veins at her temples. “And you think the governor is going to believe you found this child wandering around on her own on the bird islands?”

  Taylor said, “I knew it was a mistake to let her see the girl.”

  “I suppose you’re in for it as much as he is,” she said to her husband. “I never seen the likes of the two of you in all my born days.”

  The girl stared and sucked at the cloth in her hand.

  “Well now, there she is, like it or not,” Taylor said. He took his hat from his head and folded it between his hands. “We can’t go put her back on the island and leave her there, can we?”

  Siobhan had suffered two miscarriages early in her married life and had never managed to become pregnant again. The two men could see all the grief and anger she accumulated through those losses expressing itself now in her protectiveness of the child. Taylor turned to Richmond and said, “We’ll never talk no sense into her.”

  “Well, we’ll see what Master Peyton has to say about it all then,” Richmond said.

  They slept that night at the Taylors’ house. Richmond lay on the daybed in the kitchen and the girl was given a tiny room opposite the one where Tom and Siobhan slept. Taylor tied a string to the doorknob of her room and, once in bed, tied the end of the string about his big toe to guard against her sneaking the door open and wandering off in the night.

  Siobhan shook her head. “She’s not five years old, Tom Taylor.”

  “Those are not normal creatures,” he said. He leaned up on an elbow to blow out the candle.

  The girl woke crying in the middle of the night and Siobhan went to her, nearly dragging her still-sleeping husband from the bed by his foot when she pushed the door open. She spent the early hours of the morning at the child’s side, offering what little comfort she could in the dark.

  By noon the next day the two men were on their way to Peyton’s summer house on Burnt Island with the Beothuk girl in tow. After conferring with John Senior, it was decided she should spend the rest of the season with Siobhan and Tom Taylor. They would carry her into St. John’s when they brought the cured salmon to market and hope to catch the governor before he’d scuttled back to England for the winter.

  They requested a meeting as soon as they made St. John’s harbour, but had to wait three days for an audience. John Senior spent much of that time attending to business, leaving Richmond and Taylor to occupy the girl in some fashion. They carried her around the stores on Upper and Lower Path and shop owners offered her cubes of sugar to suck on or small sour green apples. Respectable women who would have otherwise passed the men by without so much as a nod stopped and spoke in singsong voices to the child and asked her name and age. Richmond tried once or twice to say honestly who the girl was, but the confusion this created led him to fashion a story that would better suit the questioners, telling them the girl was his sister’s child, that she was d
umb and had not spoken a word since she was born. He became increasingly comfortable with the fiction the more he repeated it and he added details as he went, giving the child a name (Rowena, after her grandmother), an elder sister who had been stillborn, a love of old Welsh songs. Tom Taylor watched in disbelief as the tale grew in length and complexity, but never contradicted his friend until Richmond explained to one inquirer that the child was a bit unknown and had an unusual predilection for eating grass as an infant, which some now blamed for her inability to speak.

  “Dick Richmond, that is the biggest load of gurry,” he said.

  Richmond looked hurt. “It’s not my opinion neither,” he said, bristling. “I only said that some thought it so.”

  He began referring to himself in her presence as Uncle Richard and each day bought her a block of hard taffy to occupy her during the evening. The streets near the harbour were ground to mud by carts and animals and the hundreds of people who came to St. John’s from across the island looking for winter passage back to England. Richmond was afraid she would fall or that he might lose sight of her in the crowds and eventually he sat the girl on his shoulders and left her there much of the time.

  In the eyes of the British Crown at the time, the island of Newfoundland wasn’t considered a proper colony, but a sort of floating fishing station and training ground for naval recruits, a country that existed only during the summer months. Most of the planters and fishermen returned to England for the winter, as did the governor himself. According to the stories Richmond and Taylor gathered while wandering the settlement, the current representative of the Crown was a minor functionary related distantly to royalty who was offered the position as a kind of punishment for profligate living. In England he had become so fearful of creditors that he awoke before dawn and stayed away from his house until dark. He accepted the governorship of Newfoundland first and foremost as a way to temporarily escape his debts.

  The reward Richmond was seeking had been offered by a previous administration and before the arrival of the men who stood before him the governor had never heard of it. He listened to Richmond’s story of finding the child wandering alone on the bird islands without comment or even much in the way of expression.

  “What does she have in her hand there?” he asked afterwards.

  “A doll, Your Honour,” Richmond said. “It was all she had when I discovered her.”

  “She hardly looks like an Indian to my eye.”

  “We have done our best with the little we have to civilize the child,” John Senior said. “The paint was scrubbed off her face and we cut her hair and provided some sensible clothes.”

  The girl stood between her captors and the sickly looking gentleman in his chair who continually passed a palm across the thinning hair on his head. Mud covered her shoes and her legs to her knees. She placed her chin on the head of the doll and held it there.

  “Have her speak something in her native tongue.”

  John Senior cleared his throat. “She haven’t uttered a word since she’s been with us, sir.”

  The governor gave a long, weary sigh. “Gentlemen,” he said, “however you may have come into possession of this Indian, if indeed an Indian she is” — he looked at the men a moment to communicate his doubts on the matter — “she is of no use to the Crown whatsoever.”

  Richmond said, “We’ve come a long ways with this child here.”

  The governor was already on his feet. “And I wish you a pleasant return trip. Your petition for the Crown’s reward is denied.”

  The three men went straight from their meeting to a public house. They felt foolish and unfairly used and it took them most of the evening to disguise those feelings with drink. The Indian girl stood beside them, her eyes just above the tabletop staring at the candle’s flicker, a block of hard taffy in her hand. Eventually Richmond placed her in the straw along the wall and he took off his coat and tucked it around her where she lay clutching her doll.

  John Senior left for Poole in the morning. Richmond and Taylor took the sloop back to the northeast shore. Without ever discussing the possibility, both men expected that Siobhan would take the girl in and raise her as her own when they returned to the Bay of Exploits. They carried her up there as soon as they shipped in from St. John’s and they sat in the kitchen together, the girl fidgeting quietly with her doll in Siobhan’s lap. A mix of snow and rain whipped around in a contrary wind outside and the gusts roared in the chimney.

  Tom Taylor said, “Perhaps it was God’s way of giving us a bairn, Siobhan.”

  Siobhan lifted the girl from her lap and stood her on the floor. She had cared for the child for months now and in a barely conscious way had come to cherish her. But something fragile in the woman came apart then and she refused what a day earlier she would have admitted to calling love. Her voice shook slightly when she spoke. “God never intended me to raise a dumb savage in place of my own child, Tom Taylor.” She turned to her brother. “You’ll take her with you when you go.” She left the room then, the girl pointing after her as she walked away.

  An elderly couple from Poole who had been on the shore a decade and were about to retire back to England on a late crossing out of St. John’s agreed to take the girl and raise her as a servant. To cover the cost of her passage and board in England, she was exhibited to crowds of curious onlookers in a warehouse on the waterfront in Poole. Admission at the door was two pence.

  Richmond was staring blindly at the fire as these things came back to him, the brittle fingers of scrag flaring and then curling in the heat like creatures helplessly trying to protect themselves from the flame. By the time the kettle boiled he was too unsettled to make himself a mug of tea. He sat wrapped in a blanket while steam rose into the air over the fire. The same scalding commotion working in his belly.

  Peyton and his men breached the head of the lake in the late afternoon of the following day, March 6, after walking without rest since dawn and they crouched out of sight among a thick blind of spruce trees on the shoreline. Several miles across the ice a cluster of winter shelters stood in a clearing, loose braids of smoke rising into the glare of the day’s end. They backtracked along the River Exploits as the sun fell behind a dark blind of trees at the crest of the valley, and circled into a gully where a small rattling brook met the river. They tramped a piece of ground firm before unlacing the Indian rackets from their boots and standing them up in the thigh-deep snow. They cut spruce limbs from the near trees and set the largest against cross-logs for a windbreak and settled the rest over the places where they intended to sleep. By then it was night with a fair breeze of wind brought up but Peyton refused to allow a fire to be kindled for fear it might give them away. He set three watches and the group settled to wait out the stars. No one managed to so much as doze off in the bitter cold, but the night was edgeless and surreal as a dream and each of the men felt lost in it.

  Before first light they roused themselves and packed up the camp. They gnawed on cakes of hard tack to quiet their bellies and then shook out the old priming of their muskets, pricked the touch holes and fresh primed. Most of the party’s ammunition consisted of slugs or quarter shot or drop shot, but Tom Taylor and Richmond and John Senior loaded their pieces with balls. After they’d laced on their rackets Peyton reminded them that no one was to fire on any account without his permission. Richmond allowed he was just a hired man, but thought it an awful thing to be ordering your father about in such a fashion. John Senior said, “He knows my mind well enough,” and Peyton repeated his order to wait on his word. They tramped single file out of the gully, turning south on the bank of the river towards the point of land that intersected the lake.

  The forest along the shoreline was dense with underbrush and they were forced to skirt the edge, but stayed as close to the trees as they could. Loose snow had drifted heavy against the shore and they struggled forward two and a half hours before stopping a hundred yards shy of the clearing where the shelters stood. They hunkered among a sta
nd of trees on a small finger of land pushed out into the lake. John Senior was breathing in short laboured whiffs beside Peyton. He shook his head. “Panking like the devil,” he said. “Haven’t got neither bit of wind like I used to.”

  Peyton glanced across at his father. His own feet were galled, his knees and ankles were swollen and stiff with the cold and exertion, and it was painful just to crouch there. He’d been worried about his father’s stamina before they set out, but John Senior had been the first from his blankets each morning and urged the men on past dark. Peyton shook his head and turned back to the clearing.

  Two of the mamateeks were shingled with sheaves of birch-bark stitched together with spruce root or sinews. The third was wrapped with a canvas sail that had been stained with a mixture of red ochre and grease. Richmond lifted his bearded chin towards it and said, “She’d be ours, I imagine.”

  John Senior nodded. “Won’t be more than fifteen or so to a wigwam,” he said, “so fifty at the outside.” He looked across at Peyton who had pulled out his pocket Dollard and was squinting through it to study the clearing. “Well?” he said.

  He closed the glass and shook his head. “Nothing doing.” He could feel the intensity of anticipation around him, the hum of it in the air like the noisy heat of green wood laid on a fire. Joseph Reilly touched his shoulder then and pointed where a figure had just stood clear of one of the shelters. He lifted the glass back to his eye.

  Richmond offered they should get a move on before any more of the Indians started the day and there was a general mutter of agreement that Peyton ignored. He stood up and walked out of the trees towards the clearing. Several of the party followed up behind him and he waved them back into the woods. There was still only the one figure moving outside the mamateeks, and there was such an immense quiet in the valley and across the frozen surface of the lake that Peyton imagined for a moment the woman was alone in this place but for him. Through the telescope he had seen the well-kept sheen of her black hair, her face darkened with the same red stain they had used to mark the stolen sail.