River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  THIRTEEN

  “I have to admit,” Buchan said, “I came to this investigation with a number of preconceptions.”

  He was sitting in the Peytons’ kitchen, a long ways beyond three parts drunk. He had arrived in the cutter that morning, coming straight across from his interview with Noel Young on Tommy’s Arm River, and no one seemed that much surprised to see him. The day was passed in distant pleasantries and Buchan had the marines assist in taking down the cutting room and salt house to protect them from the ice that would rake the coast come spring. The supper was a staid event with little conversation and both Mary and Cassie excused themselves as soon as they had eaten. Rowsell had been with them for the meal as well but left to lie in with the other marines just before nine. Peyton and his father stayed at the table with the officer as the dark settled and a harsh autumn frost reached for them where they sat. Peyton laid more wood in the fire than any sober person would consider sensible and he kept it roaring through the evening. None of them had seen the bottom of their glass in a while.

  “Blindness,” Buchan went on, “to refuse to see what’s before your eyes because you have already decided on the truth of a matter. I have been half-asleep this whole time.”

  Peyton raised his glass. “Welcome back to the land of the living, sir.” He felt giddy with misery.

  Buchan slammed the table with the open palm of his hand. “I feel a little as if someone has pulled the rug from beneath my feet.”

  John Senior said, “That’s just the rum.”

  “I admire you, sir,” Buchan said to the older man. “I have said so on a number of occasions to a number of people, your son being one of them.”

  John Senior drank off half his glass. “I could give a good Goddamn what you think of me,” he said. “Sir,” he added.

  They all three burst into laughter and they went on longer than the thin joke warranted, until their guts ached from the effort and tears streamed down their faces.

  Buchan cleared his throat, trying to stifle a last giggle. “I will be taking Mr. Reilly into St. John’s to be tried when the Grasshopper returns,” he said. He was still wiping away the moisture from his cheeks.

  John Senior looked across at his son and then at the officer. “The hell you will,” he said.

  He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Fidelity to the law, Mr. Peyton. I have no choice.”

  “You promised a good word if ever it was needed.”

  “Concerning past offences, yes. This is another case altogether. Mr. Reilly will hang, I’m afraid.”

  John Senior said, “T’was me what killed him. I was the shooter.”

  “Shut up now,” Peyton told him.

  Buchan looked at the old man and then at his son. A squib of drunken uncertainty crossed his face. “An honourable gesture, sir. I expected nothing less from you.”

  Peyton held up a hand to keep his father in his seat. “Mind,” he said. He refilled the round of glasses and sipped at the rum. “You have concluded your investigation, Captain Buchan.”

  He gave a non-committal shrug. “I believe I have,” he answered.

  “We are pleased and relieved to hear it,” Peyton said. He turned to his father. “I’ll need a few moments alone with the Captain.”

  The old man looked to his son quickly, about to argue with him, but said nothing. In the few months since they’d gone down to the lake John Senior seemed to have lost his place in the world, everything around him had shifted, breaking up like ice rotten with spring heat. The nightmares he suffered off and on for years had become increasingly frequent and violent. He seemed sure of nothing any more. “I was just on my way to bed,” he said furiously. He got up from the table and he took his full glass with him up the stairs.

  Peyton watched Buchan from across the table. He imagined the small room where they sat suddenly in motion, the two of them in an open boat with a heavy sea running. The sickening rise on a wave’s crest, the sudden plunging descent. He got up from his seat and walking unsteadily to the daybed, bending to reach into the chill underneath. Back at the table he placed the journal between them. “I understand you misplaced this a number of days ago.”

  Buchan reached for the book. He held it in his hand and hefted it, as if guessing its weight. “I could have you flogged for this,” he said. He shook the journal at his host. “I could have you hanged.” He tried to sound more sure of himself than he felt. He let out a long breath of air. “But I suspect there was nothing much of use to you among the contents. And if I’m not mistaken, the actual thief is halfway to the gallows already.”

  “There are a number of things,” Peyton said, “which I had preconceptions about myself when all of this got started.”

  He still had not taken his seat and he reached a hand across the table and held it there until Buchan reluctantly passed the journal back to him. He felt a tight corkscrew of disgust spiral through his stomach but couldn’t identify the exact source of it, his father or Buchan, Cassie. Himself. He felt the bow of the tiny craft crest a whitecap and come down hard, the force of the impact shuddering through the entire vessel like a spasm of nausea.

  He flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for and he laid the book sideways before the officer. He pulled the candle closer. “You didn’t know about the child,” he said. “Did you, Captain.”

  Buchan looked up from Cassie’s words in the journal and Peyton could see reflected in the officer’s face a moment of sickening recognition, of bottomless panic. Dark sea pouring over the gunnels. Every seam leaking water.

  Part 3

  Bootzhawet sleep (verb?) K; … Isedoweet to sleep;

  — from a vocabulary compiled in

  Howley’s The Beothuks or Red Indians

  The Losing of the Moon

  1819–1820

  losing vbl n Phrase losing of the moon: the period of waning.

  — Dictionary of Newfoundland English

  ONE

  There had been an early fall of snow in St. John’s by the time Buchan returned from the Bay of Exploits. Near the chimneys of the governor’s house meltwater pooled and drained and dripped into strategically placed pots in the upstairs rooms throughout their meal.

  Marie Buchan was feeling unwell before she arrived and was forced to retire to the parlour before the meal was completed, apologizing repeatedly in her formal English. The governor’s wife, Lady Hamilton, excused herself to attend to her. The two men finished their food and then moved into the living room where they sat with snifters of brandy. It was mid-September. Buchan had already presented his report to the governor and the Supreme Court. He swirled his glass of alcohol distractedly. His head ached. The persistent damp smell of the house made it seem older and colder than it actually was.

  “I’ve read your report,” Hamilton said and then stopped. “You look peaked, old man. Are you coming down with something?”

  “A little tired is the extent of it, I believe.”

  “Quite unlike you,” Hamilton said. The governor’s head of thick, carefully kempt silver hair was the envy of many men in positions of authority. He looked at once serious and solicitous, benevolent but stern. “Perhaps,” he offered, “Marie has been overenthusiastic in her welcome?” Even his peculiarly adolescent sense of humour maintained something like an air of dignity in the shadow of his magnificent coiffure.

  Buchan managed a smile, but couldn’t sustain it. “She has not been well enough to offer the … that kind of welcome.”

  “Yes, well,” Hamilton said. “I see,” he said. “I’ve read your report, Captain Buchan.” He cleared his throat. “I must admit to feeling some relief.”

  Buchan had lobbied Hamilton for weeks to be permitted to conduct the investigation the grand jury requested. Left to himself, the governor, as he suggested to Peyton, would simply have allowed the jury’s verdict to stand and the questions surrounding it to decay a little further each season, until they had disappeared altogether. Sending a naval magistr
ate to interrogate other members of Peyton’s party would likely be seen in some quarters as a provocation. And if convictions resulted — Hamilton shook his head. It all added up to the kind of political trouble he preferred to live without in his first year as governor.

  Buchan won him over with his typical talk of justice and integrity, and in a calculated political move he made his impassioned speeches in the presence of the reformer, Lady Hamilton, whenever an opportunity presented itself. He shamed the governor into taking his side. “It’s what makes you so damned infuriating,” Hamilton told the officer. “And, I suppose I must add, so invaluable. Go, investigate.” He waved his hand towards the door. “Bring justice to the Indians or whatever it is you intend. Bring down the whole bloody Empire if you must.”

  “History will remember you kindly for this,” Buchan had said.

  It was that kind of fervour Hamilton associated with him: the belief that even in this unremarkable and casually overlooked corner of the Empire he was acting at the centre of the world’s events. The man he sat beside now was a different person, although the change was too subtle for him to place. Water dripped relentlessly into the containers laid out upstairs. For years there had been attempts to locate and fix the leaks in the slate roof, all without any significant degree of success. Buchan seemed to be struggling with the same kind of fundamental, insidiously irreparable damage.

  “There is no shame,” Hamilton said softly, “in proving the innocence of your countrymen. However much you might have believed it would turn out otherwise.”

  Buchan stood and walked across to the fireplace. He lifted the snifter to his mouth and emptied it.

  “Forgive me for so bold a question,” Hamilton said, “but is everything all right between you and Mrs. Buchan?”

  He made a motion with the hand holding the glass.

  “She seems delighted to have you back before the onset of winter.”

  “She isn’t well, Governor. Has not been, as you know, for a number of years. And I’ll likely be gone again within a fortnight.” He paused. “I once promised her, as all husbands do, no doubt, that nothing would ever come between us. I have not always been as faithful to that promise as I might wish.”

  “The life of a navy man, Captain Buchan. Unlike a governor, you cannot carry her to your every port of call.”

  Buchan turned towards him. “May I have another glass of brandy?”

  Hamilton motioned towards the decanter. “By all means.” When Buchan returned with a full glass he said, “Now what of our charge? This Indian woman?”

  “Mary.”

  “Quite, Mary, yes. You will be in charge of the expedition to take her up the River Exploits?”

  Buchan nodded. “I’m not at all convinced it is something she wants, but I can think of no better course of action. I’ll have to return before the freeze-up, as early as mid-October depending on the weather. The Peytons have offered what assistance they can afford in terms of mounting the expedition and acting as guides and whatnot.”

  “Good of them, I suppose, given the nature of recent interactions.”

  Buchan nodded carefully. He stared into his brandy. “I tried to ascertain from Mary the state of the tribe at this time, an estimate of numbers, the general level of health among her people, locations of their camps, that sort of thing. The little she had to say was not encouraging. Only a fool would wager on there being a hundred left alive.”

  “A hundred? In total?”

  “I would guess that to be ridiculously optimistic.”

  “Dear me,” Hamilton whispered.

  The two men sat in silence a moment, listening to the steady tick of water dripping into the half-filled containers above them.

  “I suppose it would now be safe,” Hamilton said, “to send a letter of appointment with you for young Mister Peyton to take up the duties of Justice of the Peace.”

  Buchan got up from his seat and walked across to the decanter of brandy.

  “I don’t remember you having such a fondness for drink, David.”

  There was a barely discernible note of reproach in Hamilton’s voice that Buchan would have ignored if he’d registered it. “In my time on the northeast shore,” he said, “I seem to have acquired a taste for it.”

  The HMS Grasshopper arrived back in Ship Cove on October 18 and Buchan immediately set about preparing the vessel for wintering over in the Bay of Exploits. The sails were dried and taken in and then folded and stored below. Chains fastened the ship securely to the shore. Marines were sent into the woods to cut trees for lumber and for fuel.

  News of his arrival meandered among the residents of the islands and bays, although he made no effort to visit anyone outside Ship Cove. The few people who travelled in to call on him found a man less gregarious and energetic than they remembered him being only weeks previously, though he was as professional and courteous as ever. He attended his duties and supervised those of others with a meticulous and curiously distant attention to detail. He spent each evening alone in his cabin without company. In mid-November he sent Corporal Rowsell to the Peytons’ winter home to request they send Mary down to the Grasshopper in preparation for the trek inland to the lake.

  After the exertions of travelling along the coast in the last weeks of August, Mary had enjoyed a brief period of relatively good health on Burnt Island. But by the time the move had been made to the winter house her illness worsened to the point that she spent most of each day in her bed and could not make her way to the outdoor privy or even use her chamber pot without assistance. Cassie fed her weak broths and tea and sat at her bedside when her work allowed it, as she’d sat for months beside her dying mother, a book open in her lap.

  When the order from Buchan arrived, Cassie argued with Corporal Rowsell and with John Senior about the wisdom or necessity of moving the sick woman to Ship Cove while she was in such a condition. “She’ll not be making a trip up any river,” she said.

  Rowsell nodded. “No miss,” he admitted, “that’s true enough. But there is a surgeon aboard the Grasshopper might offer her some relief.”

  Cassie looked at the marine. He had been present or in the wings during all the events of recent months and she had taken no notice of him. A head of dark frizzy hair, deep-set eyes under a large brow that disguised their clear blue colour. He stood with his hands clasped behind him and she had never seen him stand in any other posture. He had a look of resigned dignity about him, as if the hands were actually tied behind his back and he was perpetually making the best of circumstances beyond his control. She said, “Promise me she’ll be properly looked after.”

  He nodded again. “I promise to do what I can to ensure it.”

  John Senior accompanied Rowsell and the two other marines to Ship Cove. From there he would head inland to bring John Peyton down from his trapline for the expedition to the lake. The men outfitted a sledge with fur blankets to carry Mary across to Buchan’s vessel and they waited outside then while Cassie prepared the Beothuk woman for the trip.

  Mary was so exhausted by her illness that she was unable to comprehend why she had to get up out of bed and where exactly she was going. Cassie helped her into a sitting position, lifting her legs over the side of the bed, and even this effort brought on a fit of wet hacking that ripped at her like an oiled blade ragging through lumber. Cassie sat beside her with an arm across her shoulders and held a cloth filthy with dried and drying blood to her mouth. She could feel the woman’s bones through her skin, their effort to hold together under the barrage of convulsive coughing. Cassie recalled the grip of Mary’s hand on her wrist that first afternoon in the Peytons’ kitchen, the fierceness of it and the wild look in her eye that Cassie had thought of as Indianness, when it had been nothing more or less than terror, the desperate kernel of a will to live when it seemed certain she would not. All that energy was bled from her now. The fear. The resolution.

  In the kitchen Cassie helped Mary into her coat and boots and handed her the cloth package of le
ather clothes she had been wearing when Peyton and his party tracked her down on the lake-ice the previous March. She had folded the sixteen pairs of blue moccasins among the clothes before tying the package shut. John Senior came to the door to help her down the path and she reached for his arm. When she saw the white men waiting with the sledge she turned to Cassie. She said, “Mary go home.”

  Cassie nodded. “Goodbye Mary,” she said.

  There was a week’s interval between John Senior leaving Mary in the hands of Buchan at the Grasshopper and bringing his son down from the trapline to Ship Cove. By the time they returned, Mary had been set up in a large room aboard ship with a buzaglo stove for heat. To Buchan’s eye, she was genuinely delighted to see Peyton when he was shown into her room and the two talked quietly together. Her English was stunted but surprisingly effective, pared to its blunt essentials — subject-verb-object, the relentlessly present tense. Buchan set about boiling water for tea and exchanging occasional words with John Senior, whose English, he thought unkindly, was stunted in a much less obvious fashion. Mary fell asleep as he passed mugs to the men and they carried their chairs to the furthest corner of the room to avoid disturbing her.

  The weather, which earlier in the season promised a harsh fall, had turned surprisingly temperate. Peyton told Buchan that the River Exploits was open almost the entire distance they had just come down, with only the thinnest runners of ice at the banks that would be treacherous for sledges.

  “We’ll have to wait until the frost comes on,” Buchan said.

  John Senior shook his head. “That one is thin as the rames of mercy.” He nodded towards the bed where the Beothuk woman lay. “No way she’ll make it through to the lake alive.”

  Buchan said, “You say that almost as if you cared one way or another.”

  John Senior gave his curious half-choked bark of laughter, placed his mug on the floor and then walked across to the door. His huge stooped figure disappeared in the rush of light as he opened it and walked outside.