River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  “Cassie,” he said. “Are you listening?”

  She looked up at him and allowed his name to pass her lips for the first and last time. “David,” she said.

  He was about to smile at her, but her expression spoke against it. “What is it?” he asked. “Cassie?”

  She knelt on the cold of the wood floor in front of him. She reached for the waist of his breeches to open the spair and work them down his thighs.

  “You’re in no condition,” Buchan said quietly, taking her arms and trying to lift her to her feet, but she pushed his hands away and set him back on the daybed, his head angled awkwardly against the wall. The legs of his pants turned inside out as she pulled them free of his feet and she leaned her face into him, kissing the bare skin of his thighs. She took the head of his cock into her mouth until it was wet with her saliva and then stroked him slowly, her fingers circled around the corona. She watched his face as she touched him, every movement of her hand causing muscles in his cheeks to twitch slightly, his head jerking from side to side. It looked to her as if she was rhythmically pricking him with a needle. His breath caught and caught again like a piece of cloth pulled through thorns. He was beautiful and ridiculous and watching his face filled her with a sadness that welled like the pleasure she’d discovered with him, and she had to bear down in the same way to hold in the roiling wail of it.

  Buchan brought his hand to her shoulder. She dipped her head to catch the small flail of cum in her mouth and when he lay still she stood up from the floor to pass it into his. She kissed him hard and went on kissing him until there was nothing in their mouths but the sharp, stinging taste of him.

  She held his head in both her hands. “We can never do this again,” she said.

  He looked at her, waiting, as if he expected more than this simple declaration. Finally he said, “I understand.”

  She smiled at him. “No,” Cassie said. “You do not.”

  The taste of his cum was potent, medicinal, it made her tongue tingle like a numb hand coming to life and the sensation didn’t leave her before she fell asleep, alone in her bed, the stars through her window winking sharply in the moonless dark of the sky.

  “How have they treated her?” Buchan asked.

  “Captain?”

  That tiny note of disappointment in her voice. Perhaps she thought it unfair of him to suggest the Peytons might have mistreated Mary. Maybe she was hurt that the first thing he said to her was so distant and impersonal. The light of the candle bowed and righted itself in the breeze through the open windows of the kitchen.

  “Is she a servant here?”

  “Your tone implies you think it demeaning to be a servant in this household.”

  “Not at all,” he said. The flush hadn’t left his face and it deepened now, and he was glad for the near dark. “I am simply curious as to her circumstances —”

  “John Peyton has already given you an account of her circumstances.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I just — I was hoping. I thought I would be able to trust your word over his, if that were necessary.”

  “She has all she needs or wants. She sleeps twelve hours a night if she pleases and she often does. John Peyton dotes on her as he would a child and gives her little gifts of jewellery and whatnot. She is a help when it suits her, and if it suits her to sit and pout all day long, she is welcome to pout. She has visitors from all over the northeast shore, people coming to take a view of her, and I’d say she is partial to the attention.”

  “You make it sound as if she wants to stay here.”

  “You saw what she drew tonight.”

  Buchan said, “I cannot accept that she prefers to forsake her people to remain on Burnt Island.”

  “I doubt it’s as simple as what she would prefer, Captain. It’s rarely that simple for any of us, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “In the main,” he said quietly, “I would agree.”

  “Her only use of the English language at first was to talk of returning. But in the last weeks she seems to have lost her fire for the Indian way of life.” They stared at one another. Cassie said, “She’s afraid of going back there is what it seems to me.”

  “And why do you think that might be the case?”

  “She has been with us a long time now. Maybe she’s afraid they’ll think she left of her own accord.”

  “A man was killed,” Buchan said.

  “Some might think that all the more reason not to have walked out with the killers. And stayed with them this long.”

  Buchan bowed his head to stare at his feet. He had come down without shoes or stockings and it now seemed a ridiculous intimacy, as if he was interrogating a stranger in his small clothes. “What happened out there, Cassie?”

  She smiled at him. “Do you ever think of me?” she asked.

  He looked up, startled. “I beg your pardon?”

  “When you were icebound in the Arctic and you lay alone in your bunk in the dark, did I ever come to your mind?”

  “Cassie,” he said. He felt a swell of panic rising. “It’s been years since we’ve spoken.”

  “Of course.”

  “I think of our time fondly —”

  “No, forgive me. Please don’t,” Cassie said. Her voice had the urgent, soothing inflection of an adult comforting a child afraid of the dark. “It’s just I go months without seeing a soul that doesn’t belong to this household, Captain. Do you see what I mean?”

  He cleared his throat. “If I hadn’t fallen in love with Marie before I met you,” he said.

  “Oh,” Cassie said. She placed her hand over her mouth. “Oh no. No, you misunderstand,” she said. And she started to laugh, using her hand to muffle the sound as best she could.

  “What is it,” Buchan asked, smiling. He was enormously relieved by her laughter and the relief fuelled a peculiar giddiness of his own. She waved her free hand to quiet him but couldn’t manage to quiet herself. Moments later John Peyton appeared in the doorway in his nightshirt.

  “I heard voices,” he said. He looked them over as they tried to compose themselves. He felt as if he had caught them kissing. The officer’s feet, he noticed, were bare.

  “My apologies,” Buchan said and he coughed out a last stupid giggle. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. The bristle of hair at the wrist made a brief rasping sound that seemed inappropriate and somehow distasteful and immediately sobered their mood. He said, “I wasn’t able to sleep and came down to sit in the kitchen. I seem to have awoken Miss Jure in my wanderings.”

  “I’ve always been a light sleeper,” she said.

  “Yes, well,” Peyton said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Not at all,” Buchan told him. “It would seem more to the point that we have interrupted you. My apologies, again. However, now that you’re up and about you would be welcome to join us.”

  John Peyton was staring at the back of Cassie’s head. She hadn’t turned to look in his direction since he first appeared in the doorway. “Thank you, Captain, no. I’d be best to go back to bed, I’m sure.”

  “As would we all, no doubt,” Buchan said.

  After he’d gone Cassie said, “I believe I’ll do the same,” and she rose from her chair and placed it at the table. She paused with her hands still on the back of the chair. “I wanted to thank you,” she said. “For the letter.”

  The thought of her father in his coffin wearing his ill-fitting suit surrounded by drunken mourners embarrassed Buchan, on Cassie’s behalf, and he simply nodded.

  As she was on her way to her room he said, “Miss Jure,” and then corrected himself. “Cassie,” he said.

  She turned to look at him over her shoulder.

  “Would you help me speak to her?” he asked. “She seems to trust you. You seem to understand her better than I am able.”

  “If you like,” she said. “I will talk to her.”

  NINE

  The following morning Cassie took Mary down to the brook to fetch
water. They balanced on stones over dark shallow pools and before they dipped the buckets Mary pointed to her likeness on the surface. She smiled across at Cassie. “Mary,” she said, still pointing. Every time they came for water she repeated this ritual of recognition and naming, as if to reassure herself of her identity in the Peyton household. It had been months since it had given Cassie a moment’s pause. She looked at the woman beside her. Mary has a child, she thought.

  They pushed the rim of each bucket into their reflected faces and lifted them clear when they dragged full. They carried two buckets apiece by rough hemp-rope handles and they walked in the centre of chime hoops salvaged from pickling barrels, the buckets resting against the circumference of birch to keep the slop of water clear of their dresses. Mary’s bundle of leather clothing was tied to her back in a sling of linen. The last mosquitoes of the summer swarmed their defenceless heads and the Indian woman chanted a song that seemed to Cassie to be as tuneless as the lilt of the insects. She’d asked once what the song was about and Mary had set the buckets down to mime tipping a glass to her mouth. “Wa-ter,” she said.

  When Mary first arrived at the winter house with the Peytons in March, Cassie looked at her as she might have if John Peyton had carted in a half-wild animal — as something that might be tamed, taught a few manners. She boiled kettles of water on the crane and filled the tiny wooden tub while the two men sat about the kitchen in their winter gear. Mary was sitting on the floor near John Peyton and as John Senior talked she looked surreptitiously about the room. “I don’t suggest you being alone in her company,” John Senior said, but Cassie sent the men outside into the cold to cut and split wood and look to the animals and then she stood Mary up and stripped her naked on the kitchen floor. Mary averted her head as if she was avoiding the sight of an ugly wound.

  There was a stench beneath her clothes, Cassie remembered, something sour. She didn’t know then that Mary had been nursing a child, that her milk would have leaked and stained her cassock and spoiled. She’d assumed it was simply the smell of an Indian and something that might be scalded away in time. The leggings were tied at the waist with a string of leather that Cassie couldn’t unknot and Mary reached to do it for her, her head still turned sharply to the side. Her entire torso was oiled with red ochre and when Cassie sat her in the tub the water curdled the colour of blood. There was a bar of lye soap and a brush used to scrub the wood floors and Cassie scoured with the same resolute thoroughness, paying particular attention to the corners and crevices where the ochre was most resistant — in the hollows above the clavicles, the line beneath the slight sag of her breasts. She worked until the water went cold and Mary began shivering. She poured more hot water into the filthy tub and went back to scrubbing.

  The Indian woman spoke then, a single guttural syllable, and Cassie looked at her, their eyes meeting for the first time. She was kneeling beside the tub, her dress soaked in the water and suds and red oil that had spilled on the floor. Their faces only inches apart. Cassie could smell her breath, surprisingly sweet, untainted, with an undertone of something sharp and clear, like spruce gum.

  “What is it?” she said, speaking softly because their faces were so close together.

  Mary repeated the sound and tipped her cupped hand to her mouth.

  “Water,” Cassie said.

  Mary nodded.

  “Wa-ter,” Cassie said again, in distinct syllables, and Mary repeated them back to her. After she had given her the cup, Cassie considered she should have taught her to say “please,” as well.

  Cassie set the empty cup aside and pointed to herself with a wet index finger. “Cassandra,” she said. A tiny circular stain of water marking her dress at the breastbone. “Cassie,” she said. “Ca-ssie.” After they had worked on the pronunciation a moment, she pointed to the woman in the tub. “What is your name?” she asked. “Your. Name.”

  Without hesitation the Indian woman said, “Mary.”

  “We had to call her something,” John Peyton explained later. “We couldn’t make head nor tail of whatever she called herself.” In all her time in the Peyton household, she would never refer to herself as anything but Mary, the English name like a protective talisman she carried close to her skin.

  Cassie had Mary kneel up so she could scrub at her back and buttocks and thighs. She soaped a cloth and reached to wash between her legs but Mary grabbed her wrist and sat quickly back into the water. “All right Mary,” Cassie said, “all right.” She could feel the blood pulsing in her hand from the force of Mary’s grip. She took the cloth in her free hand and held it in front of the Indian woman, offering it with tiny motions, as if it were a morsel of food. When Mary took the cloth Cassie stood and went into her room off the kitchen. She collected a white dress from the back of her door and dug stockings from her trunk and after she felt she’d allowed Mary enough privacy, carried them into the kitchen. She laid the clothes on the daybed and knelt at the tub. She reached into the cloudy water and extracted one tiny foot after the other, scouring the thickly callused soles, the heels and ankles. Her knees were still bruised where she had fallen to the ice nearly a week beforehand.

  After she was towelled dry and dressed, Cassie went back into her room and brought out a small hand mirror. At the sight of herself Mary screamed and turned away. She grabbed the glass from Cassie’s hands and held it at arm’s length in front of herself and screamed a second time, then fell into ringing peals of laughter that brought the men running in from outside.

  “Everything all right?” John Senior said.

  Cassie sat in a chair at the table, surprised to find herself tired. The skirt of her dress was sopping wet and cold against her skin.

  “She looks like a proper lady in that getup,” Peyton said, and he nodded and smiled at Mary in a tired way, as if she needed to be encouraged, appeased.

  Cassie looked at her then as if that was actually possible, in fact, just a matter of time. She had no idea if Mary was intended to stay with them or be sent to St. John’s or if she would live at the parson’s house in Twillingate, but she already had vague plans for teaching her to cook and sew, to speak English, perhaps even to read.

  John Senior had said, “You can’t dress that kind up on the inside.”

  Cassie saw that as the truth now, though not in the way the old man had intended. She watched Mary’s bare feet on the dirt path in front of her as they hauled the water up to the house, their steps in time to the sound of Mary’s singing. For the first time since she’d bathed her in front of the stove, Cassie wondered what her name might be.

  Peyton and John Senior had risen early to hand-line for late-season cod and by early afternoon had pitched a decent day of fish up on the stagehead. They had a quick lunch and then went back down to the cutting room.

  Shortly after they left, the two women sat together in the parlour with Buchan. Corporal Rowsell had been posted at the front door with instructions that they not be disturbed. There was an oval hook rug on the bare wood floor of the parlour and doilies on the polished side tables. Mary reached a hand to finger the intricate design of the one nearest her as Cassie fixed tea for herself and the officer. He was dressed in his red uniform coat.

  “Now Mary,” he said.

  Cassie watched her face, the customary expression of eager uncertainty. It was her first line of defence, this willingness to please, this fretting after some notion of what was wanted. Every day Mary retreated further and further behind their expectations of her to the point that it was impossible any more to know who she might have been before the Peytons carried her down the river.

  Buchan sat in a rigid posture in his high-backed chair and his voice took on the tone of someone presiding at a trial. “We wish to speak to you about the incident at the lake of this past March.”

  She looked quickly from Buchan to Cassie seated directly to her left. “John Peyton?”

  “The Misters Peyton,” Buchan said, “are nowhere nearby. You have nothing to fear from them, I assu
re you.”

  Mary regarded him with a mix of confusion and coolness, what Cassie thought might almost be contempt. “I don’t believe,” she said to Buchan, “that Mary is expressing fear.”

  “John Peyton,” Mary said again.

  “It’s all right,” Cassie said to her. “If there are things you have forgotten or are unsure of, we will ask John Peyton when he returns. Just tell us what you remember. All right?”

  She nodded.

  Cassie smiled across at the officer. “I think you may proceed.”

  Buchan cleared his throat and flipped through the notebook on his thigh. “Yes,” he said, “very well then. Mary, according to John Peyton, you were taken by a party of Englishmen on March 6 of this year.”

  She looked to Cassie and then stared blankly at the officer.

  “Were you forced to come away with them?”

  She still didn’t respond.

  Cassie held her wrists together in front of herself. “Did they tie your hands, Mary?” she said. “Like this?”

  She shook her head no. After a moment she sat forward in her chair and moved her hands behind her. She twisted so they could see the hands clasped at the small of her back.

  “I see,” Buchan said. He scribbled notes in his book. “Behind the back,” he murmured and then raised his voice. “Did they strike you?”

  She sat back in her chair, startled.

  He raised his palms in apology and spoke more softly. “Did any of the Englishmen hit you?” He showed her his fist and brandished it over his head.