River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  Buchan nodded. “Take Rowsell ahead and see if you can make something of the place, get a fire started. We’ll be along directly.”

  The two men set out at a near trot and made good time along the shoreline. They both smelled the woodsmoke before they came within sight of the tilt and remarked upon it. Rowsell worried it might be a group of Red Indians, but Peyton assured him they were too near the coastline for that to be the case. He thought it was probably one of his furriers making use of the camp for the night.

  As they came up towards the tilt from the riverbank Peyton shouted a greeting. The snow around the building was trampled and well used, a fine stack of split wood was laid against an outside wall. When he called again she came to the door and stood under the lintel, staring down at them where they had stopped.

  “Good afternoon, miss,” Rowsell said.

  After Rowsell and the other marines had come to the winter house for Mary in November, Cassie was overcome with an uncharacteristic winter enervation, as if she was suffering the onset of a serious illness. But nothing more came of it. She sat listlessly at the kitchen window, looking down across the banks of snow rolling to the expanse of sea ice or watching dark rags of cloud skirr the air, the blue that emerged beneath them so bright and clear it made her eyes ache to stare at it. She managed to keep a fire running, but she ignored the chores that normally occupied her days. She couldn’t even bring herself to read. When she ate her meals, she ran the flat of her hand across the surface of the table where Mary had drawn her map in Buchan’s journal, insisting she didn’t want to return to the lake except to retrieve her child. Cassie was still perplexed by that and puzzled over it for hours at a time.

  Her second day alone in the house she began packing books into the trunk, without stating clearly to herself what she was about. She had a detailed list in her head of her entire library and checked each item as it was put away. When she’d finished setting all her books inside she stood a few moments with her hands on her hips, then went up to Peyton’s room and rummaged through his few belongings until she found the hand-copied plays of Shakespeare. She carried them downstairs to the table and leafed slowly through the pages. It had been a mistake to give the plays to John Peyton, to expect the boy to fall in love with them and not with her.

  On the back of the title page of The Tempest she began making a list of the words Mary had taught her: the stars, the wind, thunder, islands. More than that she had largely forgotten. She sketched her own rough map of the Bay of Exploits: a scattered jigsaw of islands, hummocks of stone like obstacles strewn against the approach of the outside world. The crooked finger of salt water pushing inland to the mouth of the River Exploits. She drew a tiny box at Salmon Arm, the winter house snugged at the edge of the woods. At Charles Brook she used a series of strokes to indicate the hayfields above Reilly’s tilt, the green grass she had cut and stooked to dry to straw. Another larger square on Burnt Island, a squiggle running to the shoreline where the freshwater brook rilled into the cove.

  She stared at the map. Her refuge, is how she used to think of the place. Shelter. She had bunkered in on the northeast shore all these years, turning her back on anyone she thought might make a claim to her, deflecting, misdirecting, fighting to keep herself free and clear. And in the end she had failed.

  She sketched in a stick figure beside the summer house on the map, as Mary had done in her own drawing. And just as Mary had, she placed a tiny figure at the level of her waist.

  “A baby, Mary?”

  “Yes, yes. Baby.”

  Messiliget-hook.

  The child Cassie drew at her own waist was smaller than Mary’s, a smudge on the paper that anyone else would have mistaken for an accident, a slip of the pen. Unseen shame. Crest wounding, private scar. She bowed her head until her face was resting on the table. Each time she thought she’d lost everything that mattered in her life, she discovered there was always a little more to lose.

  The next morning she dressed again in John Senior’s old clothing, starting out towards Charles Brook with a following wind that threatened to tumble her face-first onto the ice when it gusted up. At Reilly’s tilt, Isaac, their oldest boy, was outside chopping wood. He stood and shaded his eyes as she came up the riverbank towards him, then turned to run inside for Annie Boss.

  She spent two nights with them. The house was a cauldron of heat and activity and the clamour of the four children. Reilly was away on his trapline. Annie was pregnant again but hardly showing. The two women spoke little to one another during the days, Cassie settling into the morass of feeding and cleaning and comforting as if she had been hired on as a maid. In the evenings after the children had fallen asleep they sat together with cups of sharp spruce tea.

  Cassie smiled across at Annie. “It’s good to be here,” she said.

  Annie said, “You welcome to stay. Stay as long as you like.”

  She shook her head. “I’m going to follow Mary to the lake.”

  Annie Boss nodded. “Going to take some talk. Men not going to want to take a woman up the river.”

  “I’ll go on through the woods to your old place. Wait for them there. They’ll have no choice.”

  Annie gave her a troubled look and brushed her hands along the length of her thighs. “Hard chafe to the river,” she said.

  Cassie said, “I know the way.” Then she said, “Someone will need to look in on the animals at Salmon Arm.”

  “Joe Jep go over when he come in. No worries.” She nodded emphatically then and placed both hands to her belly. She said, “We going to miss you up here, Missa Jure.”

  Cassie looked beyond the two men to the river. Her face was grim, expectant. “I’d almost given up on you,” she said.

  Peyton said, “Mary’s gone, Cassie.”

  She nodded.

  “Captain Buchan did everything in his power that could be done for her,” Rowsell said.

  She nodded again. “Thank you, Mr. Rowsell.” She turned and went inside, leaving the door open behind her.

  Cassie had repaired the roof sufficiently to keep out the snow and boarded up the broken window and rehinged the door. An improvised crane served for boiling water and cooking in the fireplace. The floor was carefully swept, the bedding was tattered and insufficient to the weather but neatly made up. The wood outside she had cut and split herself. She had no candles or any oil to burn a wick of cloth and with the door closed the only light came from the fire. Her eyes, the hollows of her cheeks, were deepened and blackened by shadow.

  “What have you got here for food?” he asked her.

  “Partridge, beaver. I had flour for bread until the new year came in.”

  “We have men behind us that are wet and frozen,” Rowsell said.

  She nodded. “They’re welcome.”

  “I’ll take the news back to Captain Buchan,” he said.

  Peyton and Cassie shaded their eyes against the glare of sunlight reflected off snow that flooded in as Rowsell stepped outside. He pulled the door to behind him, shuttering the room into blackness.

  “How many will need a place inside tonight?” Cassie asked.

  “There’s three men have got their feet in a bad way already.”

  She got up and began shifting her few pieces of furniture in the dark. Peyton cleared his throat. He wasn’t surprised to see her, he realized. He had an urge to touch her, to place a hand to her shoulder, to hold the sleeve of her clothes between his thumb and forefinger. But she held herself off, as she always had, maintaining an old, familiar distance, and he found himself suddenly furious with her.

  “It was Buchan you were with,” he said then. “Buchan was the father.”

  Cassie gave a sad laugh. “That little man,” she said.

  “All along I thought —”

  “I know what you thought, John Peyton.”

  He’d known the truth for weeks now and still it cut him to hear it, to have her state it so plainly. He sat still, regretting having flushed it into the open, wishi
ng it back into the dark of his own head. Across the room Cassie’s figure emerged slowly from the shadows as his eyes adjusted to the absence of light and he noticed her limp as she moved, how the lack of detail emphasized it, made it seem almost a new thing to him. He gestured at her and said as lightly as he could, “You never once told me about your leg, Cassie.”

  She stood with her hands on her hips a moment, staring at him, a furious crease to her mouth. Peyton put his hands to his knees and looked down at the packed dirt floor. “I was just asking,” he said.

  Cassie nodded. “My father,” she said, but she stopped herself. He could hear the sound of her breathing from the other side of the room, the ocean rhythm of it, the jagged edges where it reefed and broke. She said, “I’ve never told anyone the truth of this.”

  “All right.”

  “My mother threw me down a flight of stairs when I was a girl. When I was twelve years old.”

  Peyton stared at her.

  “I told her a story about my father. About the walking trip we took to Portugal Cove. We stopped by a lake to eat on the way back to St. John’s and he took out his compass and his little brass container. He showed me why my mother fell in love with him.” She paused there and they could hear the stiff needles of spruce branches scraping against the walls of the tilt. She said, “I thought my mother would protect me.”

  Peyton nodded in the near dark and he went on nodding for a long time.

  “You wanted to know,” she said finally.

  There was a silence between them as Cassie carried on aimlessly shifting chairs. She straightened suddenly and turned to him. “I have stopped bleeding,” she said. “My monthly,” she clarified. “I haven’t bled in years.”

  Peyton, the two officers and those men most in danger of frostbite spent that night inside the tilt. It was the first time Peyton had ever slept in the same room as Cassie and he lay awake through hours of darkness, trying to disentangle the delicate skein of her breathing from the sounds of the others, the raw snoring, the discontented sighs as they shifted positions. In the morning Cassie dressed in the winter clothes she had taken from the Peyton house and walked down to the river with the men.

  Buchan had tried to reason with her, but stopped short of refusing her permission to join them. “You understand,” he said, “that we do not have the resources to offer assistance even should you require it.”

  Peyton said, “I’ll watch out for her.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Cassie said.

  It took four more days to reach the waterfall and convey the sledges and their contents up the Indian path, then across the marsh to the riverbank. Four men carried the coffin, which had been carefully wrapped in canvas to prevent damage during the trip. Each man stepped upward individually to find footing among the loose stone and ice, like a cat gingerly picking a way through fresh snow.

  The following morning the auxiliary party left to return to the coast, along with one man suffering from frostbitten feet. The rest of the expedition made camp on the spot for two days while the sledges, which had been severely damaged, were repaired. Several had to be abandoned and three catamarans were fashioned out of green spruce and alders to replace them. At night the noise of ice cracking under the force of running water further up the river shook and echoed like artillery fire.

  On January 31, five men including Buchan went through the ice and were soaked to the waist in the freezing current. A camp was struck and the men stripped off their clothes beside a fire while Peyton and Rowsell went forward to reconnoitre for the following day’s travel. They crossed the river a mile above the camp and Peyton was climbing a tree to observe conditions beyond a point of land when the ice began to seethe like the skin of an animal infested with lice. It lifted and settled and seemed then to move in several directions at once.

  Rowsell said, “Mr. Peyton, sir.”

  The ice was moving quickly in a honeycomb of large pans. They had to recross the river or risk being cut off from the party and its supplies. Several inches of water ran overtop from the river above and they soaked their feet as they ran. The pans gathered and separated in an unpredictable rush and the two men who had started out one behind the other were soon several hundred feet apart. They shouted to one another as they continued picking a way towards the far shore, the sound of their voices running between them like a cable they clung to until they’d gained solid ground.

  By the time Peyton crawled up off the ice, Rowsell was out of sight around a slight bend in the river and he moved in that direction as quickly as he could in his wet boots. He found the corporal sitting on the riverbank, staring across at the opposite shore.

  “Are you all right, Rowsell?”

  The man looked up at him, his eyes hooded by the large brow of his forehead. “You’ll pardon me for speaking freely,” he said.

  Peyton nodded.

  Rowsell shook his head. “What a bastard country you live in, sir.”

  The ice had moved them more than half a mile down the river while they crossed and left them only several hundred yards to walk to reach the camp where they sat wrapped in blankets beside the fire while their pants and boots dried over the heat. The force of pent-up water bursting through the ice had flooded the shore on both sides of the river, and the sledges which had been pulled up onto a bed of alders close to the bank were nearly washed away before the marines hauled them to safety further in the woods. Some of the expedition’s bread was ruined with wet in the process. The catamarans they had built were by this time battered to the point of uselessness and it became clear that not enough supplies could be hauled into the lake for the entire party. Buchan decided that a midshipman and thirteen marines, including two men who had developed badly frostbitten feet, would turn back to the coast the following day with packs of supplies to get them there.

  Late that evening he found Cassie sitting apart beside one of the fires built up in the camp. She had wrapped her back and her head in a blanket and had thrown open her coat at the front to let the heat of the fire reach her body. He stood over her.

  “I’m sending a small party back to Ship Cove in the morning. I think it would be best if you joined them.”

  Cassie motioned to indicate he could sit with her if he wished. “I prefer to stay with Mary.”

  “These are not conditions for a woman —”

  “Have I slowed you down, Captain?”

  Buchan said, “There is likely to be worse than this ahead of us.”

  Cassie nodded slowly and stared into the fire. “I have endured worse than this,” she said.

  Buchan felt a heavy turning inside him, as if his heart was shifting, settling into an unfamiliar position. He said, “I had no idea about the child, Cassie.”

  “I wasn’t speaking about the child,” she told him. And then she said, “I will stay with Mary.”

  He nodded a moment and then sat still. He said, “You were not the only woman.”

  She looked at him.

  “Since I’ve been married,” he said. He stared directly into the fire. “There have been others.”

  “A navy man, Captain. Surely your wife could have expected as much.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. There was a harsh note of ridicule in Cassie’s voice, but he ignored it and went on. “Early on, perhaps she might have. But it seems I am very convincing. Over the years she has learned to think better of me.” Buchan looked up into the darkness over the fire. “I’ve almost lost her twice now. In childbirth. Her constitution has become very delicate. I’m not sure how well she would survive knowing me for who I am.”

  Cassie said, “Men should be what they seem.”

  Buchan nodded and smiled briefly. He said, “I lost two marines on the Red Indian’s lake, I’m sure you know.”

  “I’ve heard the story.” She shrugged. She seemed too tired to maintain her animosity.

  “I’ve started to dream about them recently. About their bodies on the ice.” Buchan shook his head. “A friend warned me at the ti
me that regret would find me eventually. I didn’t believe him.” He turned and waited until Cassie was looking directly at him. “I wanted to say —”

  Cassie stopped him with a hand to his arm. “I can’t give you what you want.”

  He pulled his head back slightly, surprised. “What is it you think I’m looking for?”

  Cassie turned back to the fire. She shook her head. “I don’t know. Absolution.”

  “A very Catholic sentiment, Miss Jure,” Buchan said. He hoped she would smile, but she did not.

  They sat without speaking a few moments and then she said, “I would ask one favour of you, Captain. When this is over.”

  “Of course.”

  “I would like to come to St. John’s in the spring when you leave.”

  “As you wish,” he said.

  “There’s a trunk of mine at the Peytons’ winter house.”

  “I will send the cutter to retrieve it.” Buchan pushed himself slowly to his feet and turned away from the fire, then stopped. He lingered a moment with his back to her, waiting. Even two steps out of the circle of light the air was cutting, relentlessly cold.

  Cassie said, “I didn’t intend anyone to know of what passed between us.”

  A crow spoke in the trees, a harsh ratcheting sound like the dark turning a notch closer around them.

  “I never expected less of you,” he said.

  In the morning a portion of the remaining bread, pork and rum was buried for use on the return journey and the expedition continued upriver with only four of the original twelve sledges. Members of the party carried what couldn’t be loaded onto the sleighs in knapsacks.

  The ice conditions improved with the cold weather over the next four days and they made good progress up the river. On February 6, Buchan and Peyton came upon the tracks of Indian rackets during a late afternoon reconnoitre, but soon lost them on hard ice. Two days later they reached a storehouse constructed near three mamateeks, all of which gave the appearance of recent use and a hasty departure. One of the firepits, they guessed, had been used within the previous two or three days. Nearly everything of use or value had been stripped from the dwellings and from the storehouse as well. The tracks of the sledges used to cart away the food and furs were still evident. They found several paunches, liver and a quantity of caribou skins concealed in the snow. A raft of asp logs that was thirty feet in length and nearly five feet broad was abandoned beside the storehouse.