River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  Buchan nodded distractedly and pushed his notebook into a tunic pocket. Reilly leaned down to offer a hand and helped him to his feet.

  Peyton and Mary had already boarded the cutter and Buchan climbed in to join them. Annie Boss and several of the children were on the beach to wave the party off and they stood there until both boats had disappeared around the first bend in the river.

  “Up there a long time,” Annie Boss said, still looking out across the water. “What you tell that man?”

  “Except for one small detail,” Reilly said, “I told him the truth.”

  Annie turned to look at her husband. From the band of his trousers beneath his shirt he removed a small calfskin-bound journal. He looked drained, despondent.

  “I told him I was a poor pickpocket,” he said.

  The journal was perfect-bound, the signatures sewn firmly into the spine. Six inches by four or so, Peyton guessed, about 150 pages. The pale calfskin cover was smooth and cool to the touch.

  Buchan had gotten himself into a small frenzy searching for it the night they’d put into Boyd’s Cove. He patted the pockets of his coat, rooted through a leather satchel. He spoke in a fierce whisper to several of his marines who went off to search the boats. When they came back empty-handed he sent them off to look a second time. He stood before the fire, face blank with attention as he walked back through the events of the day, trying to locate it in his mind. There was his interview with Reilly on the weir that morning when he had it in his hands. After that he could not place it.

  Peyton said, “Is there anything I can help you with, Captain?”

  Buchan turned to him suddenly. He looked like a sleepwalker startled awake on a street outside his house. “No. No,” he said slowly, as if he was just beginning to recognize his surroundings, to place himself. “I don’t believe you can.” He said this as if it was an accusation. He gave up the search then and took a seat beside Peyton in front of the fire. They both smoked their pipes slowly, tamping the bowls with their thumbs.

  Buchan said, “I admire your father, Mr. Peyton. I admire the loyalty he inspires.”

  “He is what he is, sir. There’s no puzzle to what John Senior thinks of this or that. Every man on the shore knows where he stands in my father’s eyes.”

  “He’d have made a fine officer.”

  “He wouldn’t have been much for taking orders from superiors.”

  Buchan made a noise to say he could see his point.

  Peyton said, “You have a boy of your own now, Captain, have I heard right?”

  “You have. Born in St. John’s two winters past.”

  There was a rush of laughter from a group of Blue Jackets huddled on the other side of the fire. Mary lay asleep under a blanket beside Peyton and he looked down to see if the noise had disturbed her, but she didn’t stir.

  “And you, Mr. Peyton,” Buchan said. “It’s about time for a wife and family?”

  Peyton relit his pipe. “It was something I once considered. I seem to have lost the fire for it. John Senior was my age and then some when he married. Perhaps I’ll bide my time the same.”

  “Turning after a father in all things,” Buchan said. His voice had a sad, mildly scolding tone.

  Peyton looked down at the sleeping woman again. “She’s sound to the world,” he said.

  Three days later the party returned to the house on Burnt Island. They’d had no luck sighting any recent campsites near Boyd’s Cove and abandoned any hope of contacting the Beothuk on the coast. They settled on a winter expedition to the lake as soon as the weather allowed it. The following morning Buchan and the marines left for Ship Cove. He’d made no further mention of his missing journal and seemed to have given it up for lost.

  John Senior passed it to Peyton that afternoon, when they were down in the cutting room away from the women. “Joseph Reilly brought that across Wednesday past. Said you had asked for it.”

  Peyton took the small book and turned it over in his hands. Then he said, “Buchan was across and spoke to Richmond and Michael Sharpe.”

  “Reilly told me as much.” He shook his head. “Richmond isn’t feared of the man. And young Michael will tell the clock to whatever hour you gave him.” John Senior paused for so long then that Peyton asked what the matter was. “Buchan knows about the other one was killed,” he said. “That one up to the house give it away to him.”

  Peyton forced out a breath of air. “Well,” he said, “she never saw nothing more that could hurt anyone. As long as we all keep our mouths shut.” He looked down at the journal, then held it up for the old man to see. “Not a word to Cassie. No sense dragging anyone else into all this.”

  John Senior looked away from his son. “She was there.”

  “Where?”

  “With Buchan and that one, when she went on about it all.”

  Peyton picked up a thin knife from the cutting table and stabbed lethargically at the wood. “Well Christ,” he said.

  He sat alone in the kitchen now, the rest of the house asleep, the journal sitting on the table in front of him. He turned the book sideways and lifted the front cover slowly, then set it down again. The motion like a mouth talking, the jaws of a skull working open and closed. Something close to a deathwish weighted his shoulders, a desire to be free of all that surrounded him regardless of the cost. It was an urge that was no less appealing to him for being obviously irrational and illusory.

  The afternoon he and John Senior had uncovered the skeleton of the dead Indian together on the beach on Swan Island, his father opened the tiny medicine bag and laid its contents on the ground, then handed his sixteen-year-old son one of the bird skulls to hold. The bone was dry and as light as the air and it seemed to Peyton to belong to a world beyond the one he knew. His father collected the materials together and retied the bag, then offered it to Peyton. A keepsake, he’d called it. Peyton looked at the stained pouch and then at his father. He refused to take it.

  John Senior set the bag on the ground between his feet. There was an amused look of surprise on his face. He reached a huge gnarled hand and closed it around the skull of the Indian man. He lifted it clear of the frame and then gathered up the jawbone as well, holding the two together at the joint. All the teeth but one were still in place. He flapped them back and forth and spoke under this mime in a low-pitched voice. “Just a dead Indian,” the skull said. “Nothing to bother your head about.”

  Peyton stared. He could feel the violation in that act, putting words so carelessly and callously in the mouth of the dead.

  “Harry Miller used to play around with them like that,” John Senior said. He seemed embarrassed, apologetic. He flapped the jaws several times more and then turned the skull to stare into the empty eye sockets, the full, baleful grin of those teeth. “Poor bugger,” he said then and Peyton couldn’t tell if he was talking of Miller or the Indian whose remains he held in his hand as he spoke. He replaced the skull and offered his son the leather pouch again.

  Peyton turned the journal in circles on the table. He’d told Reilly he wanted some notion of how much Buchan knew, to be able to anticipate, to plot a defence. But he was afraid to open it now, after asking the Irishman to risk his life stealing it away from the officer. He would find himself in there, and his father and Mary, and all the men who made up the party to the lake, but not, he was sure, in the fashion they had conspired to present themselves. The start of their undoing, that little book, now or some time beyond their time. There were things he’d seen and heard in his days he vowed to take to his grave, as if that was a safe place for the truth. But two hundred years from now, he knew, some stranger could raise his bones from the earth and put whatever words they liked in his mouth. It was a broken, helpless feeling.

  There was also the fugitive scrawl Cassie made somewhere in these pages, his real reason for wanting to get his hands on the journal. When he saw Buchan storm by towards the beach he’d gone up to the house to see what had happened and he caught sight of Cassie at the t
able then, the pen in her hand. The expression on her face when she looked up to see him there had sparked a long slow fuse of dread that was still burning in him, settling towards the charge. He moved the candle closer and opened the pages to the last entry and began reading his way backward through the journal.

  A mile beyond Burnt Island, Buchan sent the gig on to Ship Cove and turned the cutter about. He had his marines row north past Fortune Harbour and then on to Seal Bay where they put up for the night. The next morning they continued on through Sop’s Arm to Tommy’s Arm River where they turned inland. The river narrowed as they travelled and at points was barely deep enough to admit the cutter’s passage. A Blue Jacket lay across the bow to watch for sandbars and sunkers and deadheads, and Buchan kept an eye to the shoreline for some sign of habitation. It was late afternoon and coming on to dark when he spotted the smoke of a fire, and then a birch-bark tilt hidden back among trees and tuckamore. There was no beach to speak of, only a narrow trail cut into the bush blocked by a canoe, and the cutter was hauled up into a tangle of alder. Buchan shouted up towards the shelter as he started along the path and Noel Young was in the doorway when he reached the clearing.

  The Mi’kmaq looked down on the officer and the small entourage of Blue Jackets behind him. “Got some rabbit inside,” he said.

  The smell of stewing meat carried out to the white men. Buchan said, “Nous avons de peu de pain et de rhum.”

  Noel Young stared at the officer a moment.

  “Ma femme,” Buchan explained. “Elle est française.”

  Noel Young nodded. He was wearing a frock of coarse blue cloth, a scarlet sash tied about his waist. A silver brooch the size of a large watch held the shirt closed at his neck. His hair was done up in long plaits of grey. “Le repas est prêt” he said, then turned and went inside. Buchan sent Rowsell back to the boat for the bread and rum and he took the rest of the marines into the tilt.

  Inside they sat on junks of wood or on the dirt floor itself. The smell of food cooking emanated from a large bark bowl of water set beside a fire in the shelter’s centre. Noel Young used tongs to move heated rocks from the fire into the container to keep the water boiling.

  Through the meal the Blue Jackets ate in silence while Buchan spoke to Young in French, asking where the Mi’kmaq fished on the north shore and where they ran traplines in the winter months, and how many of them there were on the island all told. He refilled Young’s glass with rum at every opportunity. He said he had been told by the English on the northeast shore that Noel Young was a great Red killer.

  The Indian man washed down a mouthful of bread. He told Buchan that you couldn’t trust half what an Englishman was of a mind to tell you, and he smiled to say he meant no offence to the company present.

  Buchan asked if he could speak the Red Indian language and Noel Young shook his head. He said, “They all talk the same dog, bow-wow-wow.” He shifted back again to French. The Reds are a jealous people, he said, although it hadn’t always been so. There was a time when the Mi’kmaq shared the land with the Reds and there was peace between them. But years ago the French had placed a bounty on the Reds in retaliation for the thieving and other depredations suffered on the west coast. In that same year a small party of Mi’kmaq had come upon two Red Indians alone on a river and they killed these men and took their heads to claim the bounty. On their way back to the coast they encountered a great camp of Red Indians who hailed the Mi’kmaq party as was the custom at the time and invited them to join in a meal. The Mi’kmaq consented for fear of raising suspicion and a number of Red Indians came to the waterline to help them bring the canoe ashore. The heads of their murdered people were discovered there, hidden under a piece of caribou hide in the bow.

  Noel Young paused to wipe his plate clean with bread. No word was spoken, he said, the Reds gave the Mi’kmaq no indication of the discovery they had made. Instead they welcomed them in the camp as friends and seated them around a fire while the food was prepared, with a Red Indian seated at the right hand of each Mi’kmaq. There was laughter and stories and the food was served and eaten. And after darkness had fallen fully, at a signal unknown to the visitors, each Red Indian turned to the Mi’kmaq beside him and plunged a knife into his breast.

  Young put the bread into his mouth and chewed slowly, staring absently into the air. He said that since that time, which was before the time of his father and the time of his grandfather besides, the two peoples had been enemies and not a civil word had passed between them. And he himself had killed Red Indians, as they would no doubt have killed him given the opportunity. He said it was sometimes necessary to spill a little blood to keep body and soul together.

  Buchan nodded a while. It seemed to him, from the way the story had been told, that it was the Mi’kmaq who were mostly to blame for the enmity between the two peoples and for the bloodshed that followed, and he said as much to Young, as diplomatically as he was able in his stilted French.

  Young shrugged. He pulled the cloak of caribou hide across his shoulders higher around his neck. He said he would have expected an officer in the British navy to lay the blame on the French who posted the bounty in the first place. But given the nationality of his wife, he supposed it was understandable that Buchan proved to be an exception.

  It was night by this time and the only light in the shelter was cast by the fire. Noel Young pushed himself to his feet and announced he was about to go down to the river to fish and he invited the officer to come along.

  Buchan looked at him. “Vous alhez pêcker maintenant?” he said. “Dans le noir?” He’d seen no sign of it to this point, but he thought the man must be drunk to the point of senselessness.

  “Venez avec moi,” Young said, and he went out the door and headed down towards the river.

  Buchan got to his feet. “Rowsell,” he whispered to the corporal. “Take a couple of men down to the shoreline in a few minutes. I’m not sure what this one has in mind. He says we’re going fishing.”

  “In the dark, sir?”

  “Apparently, yes.”

  He found Young kneeling beside the canoe. A long torch lay on the ground beside him, the head wrapped with tightly woven dried reeds. The Mi’kmaq struck sparks into a ball of tinder and blew gently on the fragile ripple of flame, then held the torch above it, turning the head slowly until it was well alight. He stood and used a hand to invite Buchan into the canoe, then handed him the torch. He pushed the length of the canoe into the shallow water and stepped in himself, paddling out into the current and drifting slowly downstream.

  “Où allons-nous?” Buchan asked.

  They rounded a point of land and Young turned the canoe into a broad steady where the water ran twice the depth of the river. “Ici,” he said. He set the paddle down and took up a spear, its wooden shaft about five feet in length. The tip was barbed iron. There was a length of cord tied at the bottom and Young fastened the loose end to his wrist. He moved to the middle of the canoe and pushed his knees as wide as the sides allowed for balance. Buchan turned to face him, still unsure what was happening, or what might be expected of him. In the light of the torch he could see only the man kneeling across from him, the gunnels of the canoe, a six-foot circumference of river water. The shoreline, the forest, even the stars overhead were lost to him.

  “You think Noel Young crazy, hey?”

  “Not at all.”

  The Mi’kmaq smiled at him. “You think Noel Young drunk?”

  “No,” he lied.

  Young told him to hold the torch out over the water, about two feet above the surface. He lifted the spear to his shoulder and stared past the torchlight down into the river. Buchan watched his face, the hairless upper lip, the motion of muscles in the jaw as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. His ears were pierced and hung with pendants of birds and fish carved from bone or shells. “You were on the River Exploits last March,” he said, “when the Peytons carried the Red Indian woman down from the lake.”

  Young lifted a finge
r to his lips without taking his eyes from the water, then pointed. Buchan looked down to see one of the last salmon of the season rise to the light and turn from the surface, the pale length of its belly flashing in the glow of the torch before the spearhead drove through the water.

  Noel Young lifted the spear from the water and the writhing fish came out of the river with it. He looked across at Buchan.

  “Dick Richmond said that you spent a night with them.”

  “After they got the woman, heading down to the coast.” Young released the salmon from the barbed head of the spear and it slapped its torn body helplessly against the bark of the canoe.

  “They killed two Red Indian men. Did they tell you that?”

  He motioned for Buchan to hold the torch back out over the water and lifted the spear to his shoulder again.

  “Richmond shot one of the Reds, yes?”

  Young nodded.

  “And the old man, John Senior. He killed the other?”

  The Mi’kmaq turned his face from the river to stare at Buchan. “Richmond say it was Irishman.” He looked back to the water. “His wife Micmac.”

  “Reilly?”

  “Reilly. Joe Jep. He put the rifle behind the ear.” Young used his free hand to point to a spot above and behind his own ear. “Bang.”

  A second salmon rose staring into the light and torqued away too late. The canoe rocked and settled.

  Buchan was stunned. “Richmond vous a dit ceci?”

  Young nodded. He said that later in the evening after the party had turned in, he and Richmond tended the fire and kept watch. Richmond talked, talked, talked, he was a big man, Young said, but it was his mouth that made him dangerous. He told Young about the trip to the lake and the struggle on the ice when Richmond subdued the Red Indian who was the size of a bear and so drunk on rage that there was no choice but to kill him. Reilly sat up from his blankets and told Richmond he’d best keep his counsel, which Richmond took exception to. “Now Mr. Reilly here,” Richmond said then, “never would have guessed he had it in him. Just walked up to the other poor bastard and shot him.” Young again used his free hand to indicate the placement of the muzzle. “Bang,” he said again.