“Reilly,” Buchan whispered.
They were hammer and tiss about it then, Young said, and he laughed and shook his head. The two men rolled about in the snow like women and roused the rest of the camp with their cursing. They had a time of it trying to separate them and it was fifteen minutes or more of pushing and shouting before anyone realized the woman had made off into the trees.
“Reilly,” Buchan said again.
There was a commotion upriver, the sound of oars in the water. Rowsell was calling across the water. “Captain Buchan! Is everything all right? Captain Buchan!”
The cutter rounded the point of land and Buchan stood slowly, holding the torch aloft. He swore under his breath. “I’m all right,” he shouted back. “Everything’s fine.” He looked down at the Mi’kmaq man who was shaking his head slightly and smiling into the river. Buchan said, “Everything’s fine, Corporal. We’re fishing.”
TWELVE
Notes from Buchan’s interview with Richmond were the most recent entries in the journal. Peyton guessed the officer had made them in the cutter, as they rowed back to Reilly’s tilt or alone by the fire on the beach after all others had turned in for the night. Buchan had written Micmac furrier on return trip and underlined the first two words twice. Richmond was subtler and more cunning than anyone gave him credit for. “Bastard,” Peyton said aloud.
There were a number of pages then referring to the fruitless days of searching the coastline, observations on the weather, Mary’s delicate state of health, John Peyton’s solicitousness where the Indian woman’s comfort and well-being were concerned. There was a long entry written just after the conversation with Mary and Cassie in the parlour.
Two Red Indian men murdered during expedition, not one as reported by P. Jr. Second murder excluded from account of expedition during Grand Jury testimony. Clearly no justification for second killing. P only witness to travel to St. John’s to testify, would have expected nothing further in the way of investigation. Obviously an attempt to protect murderer from prosecution. Most certainly J. Peyton Sr.
Previous to this, a scatter of notes from the interview itself, Two men underlined and outlined in a box, the word Husband underlined and then crossed out. There were two pages of the naive maps of the River Exploits and the lake, of the coastline around Burnt Island, sketched and detailed by Buchan and Mary on the very table at which he now sat. An entry written following Buchan’s first unsatisfactory attempt to examine Peyton’s testimony directly: Refuses to answer any questions, defensive and dismissive. Definitely hiding something. Under the influence of J. Peyton Sr. in this, as in all other things.
Then pages of references to duties aboard the Grasshopper during the trip up the coast; meetings in St. John’s prior to departure; a summary of Peyton’s grand jury testimony; a list of the men who accompanied the Peytons on their March expedition.
He stopped there and hid his face in his hands. He rubbed his eyes fiercely and shook his head.
“John Peyton.”
He jumped back in his chair and quickly closed the journal, covering as much of it as he could with his arm. “Cassie,” he said.
She came into the kitchen behind him and sat in a chair across the table.
“How long were you standing there watching me,” he said as lightly as he could. Her face was as drawn and gaunt as the winter he carried her down from Reilly’s tilt on the river. “You scared me half to death,” he told her. Peyton reached out to push the candle back to the middle of the table. He crossed his arms over the journal and stared at the light.
“Did you know about the trip your father took with Harry Miller and William Cull down the river? After Miller’s house was burnt down?” She didn’t look at him as she spoke, staring across at the fire, and Peyton slipped the book underneath his seat.
“Where did you hear talk of that?”
“John Senior told me, just now. Before you came home with Mary.”
“I heard some of it from Cull. Richmond and Taylor used to talk of it now and then. John Senior never said a word to me about it himself.” Cassie was shaking her head and he thought she was on the verge of tears. He said, “John Senior’s a hard, hard man, Cassie.”
She looked across at him. “I want to know what happened on the lake,” she said.
The two Beothuk men came down off the shoreline and walked across the ice to where the Peytons and their men stood waiting. They stopped at a distance of about ten yards from the white men, and the larger of the two, the man holding the branch of white spruce, began to speak. His voice was clear and even and he went on for a long time while his audience alternately stared at him and one another. He beat his chest with the fist of his free hand. He held both hands in front of him in appeal. The cold of the ice stole up through the feet of the white men and they shifted and stamped where they stood and still the Beothuk went on. He made his argument in careful detail and with all the rhetorical flourish he could muster as if he believed simply the appearance of reason and civility would be enough to alter what his own experience told him was inevitable in the unfolding event. One of the Englishmen said, “Does anyone know what the hell he’s going on about.” But no one answered. When the Beothuk reached the end of his plea he surveyed the group before him, each man in turn. He stepped towards them with his right hand extended, first to John Peyton who stood beside his wife. They shook hands and he turned to those men standing nearby and took their hands as well.
The Beothuk man turned to the woman then and spoke several words to her, and he took her gently by the elbow to lead her away from the white men on the ice.
John Senior said, “You keep that savage off the girl, John Peyton.”
The younger Peyton began speaking to the Beothuk then while continuing to hold the woman’s other arm. He motioned and pointed with his free hand to indicate the Beothuk man would be welcome to accompany the party back to the coast as well, and as it became clear he would not be permitted to remove his wife to the shoreline, the Beothuk raised his voice in response and held more tightly to her elbow. The woman’s hands were tied behind her back, the loop of her arms mapping the shape of a heart as the two men pulled from opposite directions.
John Senior stepped up then and tried to loosen the Indian’s grip, shouting against the words of the Beothuk, and their senseless argument spiralled like loose snow in a gale until it seemed that both men were blinded by it. When his hand was pried loose from the woman’s arm the Beothuk turned on the old man, grabbing him about the throat and wrestling him to the ground, screaming into his face all the while, wetting the white man’s face with spit.
Peyton backed away from the fight, still holding the woman. “Get him off,” he shouted. “Jesus, get him off.”
Richmond and Taylor both reached for the Indian and grabbed him uselessly by the hair and the thick cloak of caribou hide. Richmond took up his rifle then and began slamming the heavy wooden butt against the back of the Beothuk’s head, succeeding only in silencing the man who clenched his teeth and refused to relinquish his hold on the old man’s throat. John Senior could be heard then, an intermittent tortured grunting like a fading heartbeat, and there was the dull thunk of the rifle butt striking bone.
The woman was shouting and pulling towards her husband. Peyton turned her around and pressed her face against his shoulder. “Shoot him if you have to,” he shouted.
Richmond turned to stare, the rifle held aloft in his hands like a spear.
Reilly said, “John Peyton.”
“Shoot the bastard,” Peyton yelled again.
Richmond turned the rifle around in his hands and held the barrel flush to the man’s back, the report of the rifle shot muffled by the thick caribou-hide clothing. The woman screamed into the collar of Peyton’s coat. The Beothuk man slumped forward and choked on a spurt of blood in his throat, though he held fiercely to John Senior’s neck a few moments longer like an animal dragging its useless hind legs after its spine has been broken. Richmond and Tayl
or leaned in and finally pulled him free of the old man, pushing him onto his back on the ice where he stared into the pale blue of the sky and worked his mouth around a word that would never escape his lips.
John Senior turned and pushed himself to his hands and knees, his face mottled scarlet and purple. His hat was off his head and sweaty strands of grey hair hung away from the pale scalp, as dank and listless as seaweed. Everyone else stood about in the very spots where they had been when the Beothuk man began speaking, as still as the trees on the shore.
John Senior coughed and pounded the ice with his fist as the cold air galled his throat. When he looked up from where he knelt he saw the second Beothuk man, still frozen in place like the white men around him. They stared at one another a moment, and without coming to his feet John Senior scravelled towards his rifle. He sat and aimed as the Beothuk man finally turned to run but the gun missed fire. He recocked and missed fire again. He threw down the rifle and rushed to Tom Taylor to haul his musket from his hands. The Beothuk had made barely twenty-five yards when the shot took him in the back and he crumpled forward onto the ice. He tried to stand but was unable and he began crawling awkwardly and inefficiently towards the shoreline on his hands and knees.
John Senior had fired hurriedly, before he had pulled the rifle clear of Taylor’s arms, and it had recoiled into his face, smashing his nose and knocking him onto his backside, and he sat there in a daze. Peyton continued to hold the Beothuk woman’s face against his chest as she sobbed and tried to struggle free of him. No one else moved but the wounded man, still inching away from the party on the ice.
It was Joseph Reilly finally who walked out away from the cluster of dark-coated white men, past the body whose failing heat rose into the still air, across the span of clear ice. Up close he could see that the Beothuk struggling to remain upright on his hands and knees was no older than himself when he was a thief among the crowds at Tyburn. He crouched beside him. Dark plugs of blood showed through the back of his cassock, blood poured from his mouth like water from a spigot. The Irishman stood and placed the muzzle of his rifle against the boy’s skull. He turned to look back at the silent group staring across at him like an audience in a theatre and then he pulled the trigger.
Cassie stood with her back to the fire while Peyton spoke. She placed a hand against her abdomen, clutching the fabric of her blouse, then releasing it, as if there was a thread of pain woven into her belly that she was trying to work free.
She said, “All along you’ve been lying.”
Peyton covered his eyes. “A story is never told for its own sake,” he said. “True or false.”
“You bastard, John Peyton.”
“I blame myself,” he said. “They wouldn’t have come down off the shore to meet us if I hadn’t waved that handkerchief.”
Cassie watched him, shaking her head. She said, “I wouldn’t have guessed John Senior to be such a coward to ask you to lie for him.”
He nodded. “Father wouldn’t have suggested such a thing, you’re right.”
Cassie strode across the room and leaned with both hands on the back of a chair. “Tell me then. What am I not seeing?”
“Sit down a minute.”
He took out his pipe and lit it with a coal from the fire as she settled at the table. He puffed slowly, drawing the smoke into his lungs, trying to calm his breathing. There was a threat implicit in her questions, a willingness to switch allegiances that he wouldn’t have guessed at.
“I’m waiting,” she said.
He nodded. “We never spoke much of it coming down the river, what to do about it all. There was going to have to be some sort of report, Governor Hamilton would want an account of what went on. A grand jury, I figured, just as it happened. We could argue self-defence in Richmond’s case clear enough, and even though it looked dark for John Senior, there was some chance he could plead his condition, given the beating he’d taken. The young one had an axe tucked into his belt besides. He might have got off as it was and he’d have taken his chances if that was all there was to it. But there was Reilly to think about.”
“What about him?”
“When he was a lad in London he was a thief. Caught picking pockets and sentenced to hang. You’ve seen those scars on his hand.”
Cassie nodded.
“They branded him a thief, you see, sent him across to Newfoundland.”
“I don’t follow what you’re telling me.”
“He killed the Indian.”
“That was an act of mercy.”
“A fine distinction, and not one our Captain Buchan and those like him would be interested in making. He was sentenced to hang once already, Cassie. He altered the mark on his hand. Not Jesus Christ himself could have saved the man from the noose a second time.”
Cassie leaned forward on the table. Her lazy eye drew down nearly closed, as if she was sighting down a rifle barrel. “You couldn’t have told it as it happened and left Joseph Reilly out of it?”
He opened his mouth to speak and hesitated a moment. “He’s my father, Cassie. And you —”
“What?” she said. “And I what?”
He lifted his hand, a dismissive gesture, an admission of helplessness.
She got up from her seat and walked three steps away before turning back to face him, shaking her head furiously, as if it was suddenly clear to her. “It was me you were protecting,” she said.
He shifted in his chair so she couldn’t see his face. “I wanted to spare you knowing if I could.”
She covered her mouth with her hand and walked to the doorway. She turned then and was on him, knocking his chair over backwards to the floor. He grabbed for her arms as she beat him about the head and face. She cuffed an ear and set his head ringing. “Cassie,” he said. She struck him across the bridge of the nose and he was nearly blinded by the shock of it, his eyes watering. Blood ran onto his lips and into his mouth.
Cassie was crying as she swung her arms, and when he finally corralled them and pinned them to her sides, he held onto her until the jag of broken sobs subsided. Her strength was a surprise to him. He hadn’t had occasion to take note of it since their first year on the shore, when she took to the ice to gaff seals. He thought if she’d had a poker or a stick of wood in her hands, she would have killed him there on the kitchen floor. When he let her go she stood up and walked across to the door.
She stopped there but kept her back turned to the room. She said, “I’ll stay here until Mary is brought back up the river.”
Peyton was on his knees on the floor. He wiped the blood away from his upper lip with the sleeve of his shirt. “You know she might die before the freeze-up.”
“Then I’ll stay until she dies.”
Peyton picked his chair up from where it lay on its side and moved it along the table, still trying to catch his breath. He sat sideways to hold his hands in the light of the candle so their shadows moved on the near wall. He brought the two together to form the outline of a rabbit’s head, then a dog. The shadow-dog’s mouth opened and closed on the wall and Peyton made a low barking sound in time to the motion, then howled quietly.
When he was eleven years old, he stole two pence from the pocket of his father’s short-cut spencer where it lay across a chair in the room they shared during the winter months. After school he ran straight to the waterfront and stood in line, the coins clutched so tightly in his palm that the outline was scored into the flesh long after he paid at the door. The room held close to one hundred men and boys and the girl was stood upon a tabletop at one end. People craned their necks and hollered for a better view, for the Indian to speak or dance. There was a gauzy drift of light through opaque windows, the room smelled of rain and tobacco. Someone had tied a feather in her hair and put three stripes of white on each cheek. Her dress was made of rough calico. There was a wooden doll in her hand that she gripped against her chest and she seemed to have no idea why she was there or what interest the assembly of white men might have in her. Af
ter five minutes of the crowd’s restless shouting and surging towards the table where she stood, the girl turned her head up and howled with all the force of helplessness a child her age could manage. She was the loneliest-looking creature he ever laid eyes on.
Peyton leaned to the floor and picked up the journal, placing it on the table. He used a finger to turn it in slow circles, flipped it end over end between his hands. He riffled the pages back to front and back again, until he found the blur of words at the edge of a page, the only place in the journal anything had been scribbled outside the careful margins. The words were smudged where the book had been closed before the ink was fully dry, but he recognized the expansive slant of the hand, the tilted looping letters of her handwriting.
There was a child. Before I ended it, David. I was pregnant.
Peyton lifted a hand to his forehead. His first thought was that Cassie had cheated on his father somehow. He left the journal open on the table and walked out of the kitchen, across the hall to the door of Cassie’s room, raised a fist to hammer at it. Held his hand motionless in the air then as it became clear to him finally. Blood still trickled at the back of his throat.
He placed his palm flat against the door, moving it back and forth across the rough grain. He waited there until he thought he might fall with shaking and then ran from the house, down the worn path towards the stage. He stumbled across the stone beach of the cove and sloshed into the frigid ocean water, until the cold stopped his breath, and he stared blindly out across the dark as the chill knifed into his skin. He could feel his intestines quivering. She had never been his father’s lover, though she let him go on believing it. All these years it was her who held him away. Cassandra.
River Thieves Page 31