River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  Richmond shook his head, as if that harvest still amazed him, the lavish roil of silver bodies about his shins, hundreds of the capelin shovelled onto a small patch of garden for fertilizer, thousands more simply rotting on the beach after the gulls had their fill.

  The kettle, which was still warm when it was set over the fire, came to a full rolling boil and Richmond got up to see to the tea. He had the permanent hunch of large men used to stooping under doors and low ceilings. It made him seem coiled, Buchan thought, unpredictable. Richmond picked up two cups from a sideboard and stared into them for a moment. He blew into them in turn, held them upside down and shook them and stared into them again. He poured without straining the leaves.

  “How did you come to this part of the country?” Buchan asked.

  Richmond looked across at him with a queer grin that made Buchan’s stomach turn. “The war ended is what happened,” he said cheerfully. He passed the officer his tea.

  Four years after they arrived on the west coast, the Treaty of Versailles returned the entire French Shore to France, extending the territory south of Pointe Riche to Cape Ray. In the months that followed, the French drove English settlers from Sop’s Arm, Holm Point, Noddy Bay, Hawkes Bay, River of Ponds and Port Saunders. News of these expulsions reached all the English on the French Shore as fishermen abandoned their homes further up the coast.

  Richmond’s grandfather had died of pneumonia their second winter in the harbour and they’d wrapped his body in a sheet of canvas and buried him in a tiny clearing among the trees above the cove. It was like planting a flag. The hired men left as soon as they could secure a berth to St. John’s, but Richmond’s father vowed not to surrender his home and Mr. Taylor promised to stand beside him.

  That fall Richmond and his father dragged three cords of spruce logs out of the woods with their dog and had set to splitting and stacking the junks behind their tilt. “I was just a little bedlamer in them days,” Richmond said. The handle of the axe stood as high as his chin and he arced the heavy blade awkwardly overhead, coming off his feet to add his weight to each strike.

  His father wiped the sweat from his face with a ratty handkerchief and looked away across the harbour. He stopped and stared, shading his eyes with his hand.

  The vessel brought in its sails as it floated partway into the bay and anchored offshore. Three boats rowed up to the Richmond fishing room and the entire population of the harbour came down to greet the English marines. They stood at the edge of the wharf and shouted to the men in the boats and applauded. The Royal Navy had come to them. It was as unexpected and miraculous as a visitation of angels.

  On the stagehead, a young officer with a face as sharp as a mole’s and a white powdered wig unscrolled a parchment to read a proclamation from John Campbell, governor of Newfoundland. He quoted King George’s promise to prevent his subjects from interrupting the French fishery by their competition and ended with the governor’s direct order to remove all fixed English settlements on the French Shore.

  Richmond’s mother, pregnant with her eighth child and nearing her time, put a hand to her mouth and began crying silently. The officer escorted the men into the buildings and allowed them to gather any valuables that could be easily transported, then returned with them to the stagehead. He turned to the marines and nodded and they marched up to the shelters where they carried the split firewood inside the largest building and set it alight, then set fire to the tilt beside it and to the few outbuildings nearby. Everything of use was left inside and two armed soldiers prevented the families from attempting any rescue. The marines removed the settlers under guard to the vessel waiting in the harbour and then they burned the stage house and the wharf as well.

  Richmond recounted these events impassively, as if he was reading them from a text, but Buchan could feel the weight behind the words, their intent. The noise of the fire beside them like an echo of that earlier fire passed down through the years. He stared at Richmond with the same counterfeit impassiveness, refusing to give him the satisfaction of any visible response. He set his feet flat on the packed earth floor. He said, “Where is your family now, Mr. Richmond?”

  “My father is dead some years now. My mother, I believe, is in London.”

  “Is that where her people are from?”

  Richmond drank from his cup and winced at the scalding heat. He turned his head to spit fragments of tea leaf from his mouth. “My mother is Welsh.”

  Buchan nodded into his mug. It smelled of salt pork.

  “You’ll be wanting to talk about what happened at the lake, I s’pose,” Richmond said then, to indicate he was through gaming about.

  “I have a few questions, yes.” Buchan pulled out his notebook and rummaged in a pocket until he located a lead. He said, “You were one of the shooters, Mr. Richmond?”

  Richmond raised his eyes above the rim of his mug.

  “You were one of the men who shot the Red Indian,” Buchan repeated.

  “He had Master Peyton on the ice by the throat.”

  “John Senior.”

  Richmond nodded angrily. “Yes, John Senior. By the throat, as I said. And he would’ve strangled him unless some action got taken.”

  “An unarmed Indian man approached a party of eight settlers brandishing rifles and, unprovoked, he accosted one of the party. Is that correct?”

  “That is how I feature it, as far as I can remember. He come down off the shore carrying a sprig of white spruce. He walked straight up to the lot of us and started in to talking. He went on with his arms flicing about and no sense to be made of a single word. We just looked at one another. He kept pointing to the woman and striking his chest” — Richmond used his own fist to demonstrate — “and waving at the wigwams on the shore. Then he stepped in and shook John Peyton’s hand and the hands of several others. It seemed we might come out of it without bloodshed at that point.”

  “But you did not.”

  “He took the woman by the arm then as if to walk off with her, you see. And John Senior made it clear he would do no such thing.”

  “Even though he was simply attempting to protect his wife.”

  Richmond gave a little laugh. “Whether she was wife or no, as I said, we couldn’t understand a sound the savage made. And our party was attempting to bring out a Red Indian with the blessing of Your Lordship, the governor.” Buchan suppressed a grunt of dissatisfaction and Richmond said, “They got all in a roke then, both of them shouting, John Senior rhyming off the oaths. And the Indian grabbed him by the throat and commenced to choking him.”

  “That’s when you and Mr. Taylor stepped in?”

  Richmond nodded his head.

  “Was there no other course of action open to you? There were eight of you to face a single Indian.”

  Richmond said, “The facts are the facts and I regret your disliking them, sir. But dislike is not enough to alter the past. He was nearly as large as myself, an awful length of a brute. He had hold of a seventy-year-old man and was not about to give him up. Tom Taylor and I laid onto him with the butts of our rifles and we battered him about the head, but he would not relent.” He paused and considered the officer observing him. “A curious thing it is to me, sir, that you are more concerned with the death of this Indian than the murder of your own men on that selfsame lake.”

  “Your curiosity,” Buchan said slowly, “is irrelevant.”

  “And is the curiosity of those men you’ve got standing outside the door irrelevant?”

  More than likely then, Buchan guessed, he had not been sleeping when they arrived.

  Richmond said, “Odds of fifty years now, John Senior and his like have been fighting for this shore. You know yourself there’s been deaths on both sides. And you thought going up the river to hand out a few blankets would take the savage out of that lot.”

  “I had hopes we might change their view of us.”

  “You hoped to have the governor kiss your heroic little arse.”

  “Mr. Richmond
—”

  “I know your kind.”

  “Mr. Richmond —”

  “You’d fuck your own mother if the King gave the order.”

  “Mr. Richmond!”

  He sat up at mock attention. “Sir,” he shouted.

  Buchan gripped his tunic at the waist and pulled it straight. He wanted to take the pistol from his belt and shoot from inches away, to blow the man’s nose through the back of his head.

  Corporal Rowsell stuck his head in the doorway. “Captain, sir,” he said.

  Buchan raised his hand without turning his head. He waved the corporal back outside. He said, “You shot the Indian, Mr. Richmond, is that correct?”

  “John Peyton ordered us to get the Indian off his father, yes. I stepped away and used my rifle. I shot him once in the back at close range and even then we had to pry his hands free of John Senior’s neck.”

  “After the Indian had been shot, what did you do?”

  “Sir, we collected spruce branches and covered the corpse on the ice, sir.”

  “The second Indian. What became of him?”

  “He run off, to the best of my knowledge.”

  “No additional shots were fired?”

  Richmond turned his head to look at the officer. “Not that I recall, sir, no.”

  “And then what?”

  “We spent the night in one of the Indian wigwams, sir. We collected our belongings what had been stole from John Peyton’s boat. We carried the Indian woman down the river to the Peyton house along with a quantity of furs we felt we had some claim to by way of compensation for losses.”

  “Was there any contact with other Indians on the way down the river?”

  “Not of the Red persuasion, no.”

  “Of which persuasion then?”

  Richmond rapped the knuckles of one hand against the tabletop. “A Micmac trapper is all.”

  “Does this trapper have a name?”

  “Noel Young.”

  “You knew this man?”

  “Everyone on the shore knows Noel Young. He kipped down with us for the night and we went our separate ways in the morning.”

  Buchan nodded and made a note in the journal. “Did the woman come down the river willingly?”

  “She did not say, that I recall, one way or the other.”

  “In your opinion,” Buchan said. “Based on your observations.”

  Richmond settled back into his habitual slump. “She had little choice in the matter, now, did she?”

  “She tried twice to escape, is that right?”

  “Twice she took a stroll into the woods at an hour that might lead one to see it as an attempt to run off. Perhaps she meant to take care of some delicate business and lost her way.”

  Buchan tapped his pencil against the page.

  “We had the governor’s blessing to take a Red Indian back from the lake,” Richmond said again.

  “But not, I believe, to murder two men in the process.”

  Richmond leaned back from the table as far as his chair allowed.

  “The second Indian on the ice. I don’t believe you were the shooter, Mr. Richmond, there would hardly have been time to reload.”

  “He run off,” Richmond said.

  “He may have run, yes. But he was shot and killed as he did so. Without provocation. In cold blood. And I promise you, Mr. Richmond, someone will pay for that.”

  Richmond stood from his seat.

  “You have an opportunity now to save yourself from the gallows.”

  “I have a fair bit of work to do before dark,” Richmond said. “I trust you enjoyed your tea.” He took the still half-full mug from where it sat in front of the officer and emptied the contents onto the floor, then made his way out the door into the piercing afternoon light.

  Richmond strode past the marines outside the tilt and made his way to the shoreline where Michael Sharpe was lifting traps from the cauldron with a metal hook. He was in a fury and cursed at his green man and pulled the hook from his hands. “You’ll only make a shag of this,” he muttered. “Watch out now.” There was a large wooden bucket of water with a layer of beeswax floating on the surface beside the kettle. Richmond plunged the steaming trap into the bucket and waited a moment for it to cool, then lifted it slowly through the wax so it would take on an even coat.

  Buchan and the marines came down to the cutter and pushed off into the water and they left without a word to the men on the beach. Michael Sharpe looked across at Richmond for some sign of what had gone on behind the tilt’s closed door, but the older man refused to catch his eye as he went about his work. Richmond hung the freshly coated trap from a nail in the seine-gallows and went to the kettle for another.

  He had never talked much of his time on the French Shore, of being burnt out by the navy, not even to Tom Taylor. He’d told the story to Buchan intending to get under the officer’s skin, and was surprised to find how savagely it burred at him as well. When they were released from the navy vessel in St. John’s, the two families booked passage on a ship bound for London. Mrs. Taylor attended Richmond’s mother when she delivered a stillborn child halfway across the Atlantic. Richmond hadn’t seen England in years and the filth and the noise he had taken no notice of at the time were terrifying. The families shared two small rooms near the Thames. All night an unruly tide of traffic and shouting roared in the streets below their windows. The crowds of people and animals roaming free and the slop in the street made his skin crawl. Even the Thames was slubby and clouded and stank like a bog pond.

  In the mornings, Richmond and Taylor accompanied their fathers to the dockyards where the men sometimes took a day’s wages unloading a vessel arriving from Africa or the Caribbean. When there was no work the men took their sons to the skittles grounds where they gambled away bits of the precious little money they had, or sat with them in alehouses and drank it away instead.

  In late November, Richmond’s mother secured a position as a wet nurse and housekeeper for a well-to-do family and he rarely saw her in the months that followed. Her youngest was still breast-feeding and the infant was nursed by Mrs. Taylor. Even if Richmond was awake when she arrived home, she barely acknowledged him or her husband, stripping down to her small clothes in the dark and falling immediately to sleep. In the morning she was gone before he woke.

  She used to sing her children to sleep at night — old Welsh songs of a beauty that made his toes curl — but that winter the songs he’d grown up with disappeared for good, though the change went practically unnoticed in the flood of changes that overcame them in England. Once it was decided they would head back to Newfoundland in the spring, Richmond expected things to return to normal and much about their lives did. But the Welsh songs that his mother had carried from her own childhood seemed to have died inside her like the daughter delivered on the Atlantic and buried now at sea. Richmond had never learned to speak but a few words of her native tongue and could bring to mind only the thinnest scraps of the melody or lyrics, though the sensation of hearing them never left him. And like the dead child, those songs came to occupy a hollow place in Richmond’s life, faceless and nameless and lost as they were.

  TEN

  John Senior came to himself in the dark, shaken awake by his own shouting, by the stifled thrashing of his arms. He stared into the blackness, his body roked in sweat, breath ragging in his throat like a branch of thorns. He could hear his heart’s panic, like the manic barking of a dog behind a closed door. The rasp of the ocean’s surf through the open window. It always surprised him how dry a sound it was, like someone kicking through dead leaves in the fall. He turned to the window, hoping for the barest glim of light that might justify his getting out of bed.

  He heard footsteps underneath his bedroom, muffled activity in the kitchen. Cassie up and starting the fire. He dressed in the dark, then felt his way downstairs to the kitchen where Cassie was kneeling at the hearth, nursing the new fire.

  “I woke you,” he said.

  She turn
ed from the frail light to look up at him in the doorway. “I was already up,” she told him. It was an old lie between them, one he never questioned. She poured the kettle full with water and set it on the crane. “Tea now the once,” she said.

  He nodded at her and took the bucket she had just emptied and a second wooden container to go down to the brook for water. The stars were still bright. There was silver thaw on the ground from a spell of freezing rain some time through the night. The chill in the air made his skin feel tight across the shoulders. The freshwater brook ran fifty yards off the side of the house and rattled into the ocean at the foot of the cove. He walked towards the steady murmur of it, the dirt path under his feet trodden hard as rock. At the riverbank he balanced over stones as the buckets dipped and dragged full with darkness. Before he turned to start up the path he looked out across the water to the crooked arm of land that sheltered the cove.

  He was a boy of seventeen the first time he arrived on the northeast shore, coming across from Poole with Harry Miller in April of 1766. They disembarked on Fogo Island and took Miller’s sloop into the Bay of Exploits, a spill of rough country almost uninhabited by Europeans at the time, the coastline shadowed by a ragtag fleet of smaller islands. Humpbacked granite, dark pelts of spruce. Barely submerged skerries breaking white water. Most of the winter’s snow was still on the ground, which suggested there was no colour to the land but white and the wet black of the forest and grey shades of ocean and fog and stone. Just sailing through the raw country set John Senior’s heart on edge. It made him feel he was capable of anything.

  Among the islands there wasn’t enough drift to allow the sloop to travel any direction in a straight line. Miller cut and tucked through the tangle of ragged rocks and sunkers as if he was making up the route as he went. They came to anchor in the same small cove where John Senior now stood, below what was nothing more than a single-storey spruce tilt with boarded windows at the time. Two boats were hauled high up on the beach and overturned, covered by canvas and a layer of spruce branches. An uneven ring of hills rose into a thickening shawl of fog behind the shelter.