River Thieves (10 page)

“Terrible,” Cassie said.

Peyton didn’t know whether she saw herself stretched out in chains and helpless on that rock, or if she intended he should see himself there, or whether it was just a story the fire brought to her mind and nothing more. He swallowed against the ache in his throat and looked up at the blur of stars that were being slowly extinguished by the first light of the morning. “Cassie,” he said.

But she had already drifted back to sleep.

He decided to let her rest as long as she needed and even managed to doze off himself as the sun rose. A chill woke him where he sat and he stood to stretch the cold from his legs and then stirred the coals and blew on them while he held a dry branch of pine needles to their billowing heat. He had tea ready for her when she woke and more of the broth she could hardly stomach the night before.

“I can walk today,” she told him and he shrugged and said that was fair enough by him, although he doubted how far she
might be able to travel. He stripped the leather thongs from the stretcher and they packed their things and started back into the bush. He broke the path, moving as slowly as he could and stopping frequently to adjust the bindings on his rackets or to examine partridge tracks so as not to get too far ahead of her. They came out on the bay five miles down from the winter house and walked the shoreline as the dark of early evening descended. As far as they could see ahead of them there wasn’t a single light on the shore.

The air in the building was sharp with three days’ frost and Peyton laid a fire and lit candles and then filled the wood box while Cassie sat and leaned her weight onto the table, gathering each breath into her lungs as if she was trying to carry water with her hands. He knelt to pull Cassie’s boots from her feet and helped her out of her jacket and waistcoat. He crutched her to the daybed and covered her with flannel quilts. Then he made himself tea, pouring the mug half full with rum, and sat tending the fire and watching her sleep.

His father would be back from White Bay within a few days. He knew she would ask him to leave before then and that she’d go on as if nothing had happened on the river. When he came in off the traplines in January she would act as if they hadn’t seen one another since the early fall and he expected he would do the same. He had a long established habit of accommodating the wishes of others even if he couldn’t settle in his own mind what was right.

Peyton had just turned sixteen when John Senior announced that his son would leave Poole come April to work in Newfoundland. The family was sitting over the remnants of a boiled leg of pork that had been served with green peas
and gravy and there was a moment of dead stillness among them then, as if they were all waiting for a clock to chime the hour. The sound of John Senior’s spoon clinked against his cup as he stirred.

His mother pushed her chair back from the table and leaned across to take the spoon from her husband’s hand before he’d finished stirring his tea.

“What’s that now?” John Senior said.

She was almost too furious to form words. “Not,” she said.

“Sit down, would you? What are you saying?”

“You will not,” she told him. She placed the spoon carefully on her plate and took it away from the table.

John Senior was astounded by his wife’s disapproval of something he regarded as a foregone conclusion. It had been years since he’d thought of the woman as a person with opinions, with influence, and he never recovered sufficiently from his surprise to respond to her objections in any sensible way. He sat in a restless silence while she spent one evening after the next insisting her son would not leave England before he had finished his schooling and only then if he chose to do so.

Peyton was as disconcerted as his father. He had always assumed he would leave some day for Newfoundland. But he had never in his life done anything against the word or advice of his mother and the strength of her feeling on the matter made him feel strangely fearful.

One evening near the beginning of April, after delivering another variation of the near-monologue harangue that left her feeling exhausted and powerless, Peyton’s mother retreated to her bedroom. John Senior stayed on in the parlour, nursing a
pipe. Peyton and his sister had spent the time in the kitchen, avoiding the argument as much as was possible in the cramped quarters of the apartment. Susan was three years younger than her brother, but already the more practical and shrewder of the two. Peyton had his mother’s light blue eyes and an almost perpetually astonished expression that made him look defenceless. Susan’s eyes were grey like her father’s. She had a settled, disinterested stare that invested even her most innocuous statement with weight and portent.

“You’ll have to choose,” she told him.

“Choose what?” He could smell the sweet drift of pipe smoke from the parlour.

“Between them.”

“Susan,” he said. He had till that moment believed it would somehow be possible to satisfy them both.

After a period of bruised silence John Senior called him into the room. He knocked his pipe into the fireplace and refilled the bowl, tamping the tobacco with his thumb. There was a small coal fire hissing in the grate.

“I’ll only ask you the once,” he said. “Do you want to come across with me this year?”

“Yes,” Peyton whispered.

When they sailed out of Poole there was a steady breeze of wind on the open water and a sea running that rolled the vessel heavily port and starboard, the motion as eerily steady as a metronome. By nine in the morning Peyton was vomiting over the rail. John Senior stood beside him, holding his son upright against the rocking of the ship while he dry-heaved and bawled helplessly.

“You said this was what you wanted,” John Senior shouted.

Peyton managed to nod his head. But he knew he would have said just the opposite if his mother had asked him the same question first. He didn’t know what to call this tendency of his but cowardice.

The new fire roared in the chimney draught as it took hold, the sound of it steady and subterranean, like a waterfall thrumming in the distance. Peyton poured his mug full this time with rum and drank it straight. Cassie turned on the daybed and spoke meaningless syllables in her sleep and then settled again. He could hardly blame her for the choice she made, wrong-headed and impossible as it was. It was pity he felt for her then though he wished it could be otherwise. Even his willingness to forgive her seemed cowardly and he swallowed a mouthful of rum to choke it back.

Besides himself, John Senior committed Reilly, Tom Taylor and Dick Richmond to Buchan’s expedition. John Peyton was to be left to watch over the winter house with Cassie. But shortly before Old Christmas Day a cold that had nagged at him the better part of December deteriorated into something more serious. John Senior slept fitfully through a burning fever and suffered hallucinations while awake. Cassie changed the sweat-soaked sheets and heated beach stones to warm the bed when John Senior was taken with a fit of the shakes. He mumbled and moaned and spoke at length to his dead mother and to Harry Miller who had been killed some fifteen years before. At the height of his fever he thrashed wildly about the bed, swearing and weeping uncontrollably, and Cassie was forced to straddle his stomach and hold his arms to keep him from injuring himself while he carried on urging helplessly against the weight of her and cursing her for his father.

Shortly before John Senior’s father died, he had invested all the family’s little money in a fledgling cod and salmon fishery on the northeast shore of Newfoundland. His partner, Harry Miller, was a man he’d established a nodding acquaintance with at one of the local brothels in Poole and they occasionally drank together after their
entertainment.
Without intending to, Miller talked the man into joining his enterprise. “Land for the taking,” he had said. “Salmon galore and they’re fat as a whore’s leg.” He fingered the crotch of his trousers, making awkward adjustments, as if the thought of the money to be made across the Atlantic stirred up an immediate erection. He said, “I’ll have to have another go-round here this afternoon, I can see that.” Miller wasn’t looking for a partner and considered he was just being sociable.

John Senior’s father owned a horse and cart and made a living selling coal from house to house, and he had never considered any other work. But his wife had recently begun sleeping in her daughters’ room and barely spoke to him any more, and the thought of living across the Atlantic half the year had an unexpectedly powerful appeal. He sold the animal, the property and business, and handed over almost every cent to Miller.

He only managed to make one trip out to Newfoundland. When John Senior was fifteen his father died of complications arising from a syphilitic infection. For months he suffered lengthening periods of dementia that were exacerbated by steady drinking. He was tormented by uncertainties and constantly demanded to know the time of day, the time of night, never satisfied with the answers given him. He seemed
to forget who his family were and treated them as if they were strangers present in the house to steal from him while he slept. He secreted valuables away in cupboards and beneath the mattress. After his death, hidden treasures turned up in the most unlikely places: a brass snuffbox under a loose floorboard, his silver pocket watch buried in a sack of flour.

When the dementia was at its worst he was incomprehensibly abusive towards his children, towards his wife. The violence was completely out of character for the man. He had never said a harsh word to John Senior or his sisters, and never laid a hand on any of them, but for the one time he caught his son stealing sugar from a container in the pantry. It was something John Senior had been doing intermittently for years, a secret pleasure he admitted to no one, holding the rough cubes between his front teeth as he lay in bed, letting them disintegrate slowly as he drifted to sleep. His father made him replace the sugar but didn’t speak another word on the matter until weeks later when they attended a public hanging.

A man convicted of robbing a fishing merchant’s home of silverware and pewter candelabra stood on a cart, a cord of rope about his neck, the other end tied to a gibbet overhead. John Senior sat on his father’s shoulders for a better view of the proceedings. The air smelled of coal smoke and leather. A dark knot of relatives stood with the condemned man, crying and offering words of encouragement, a parson stood behind them whispering prayers. After an allotted time, the cart was cleared of all but the thief and his eyes were covered with a cloth. At a signal from the sheriff the hangman lashed the horses and the cart jerked ahead. There was a murmur from the crowd, an almost imperceptible drift forward. The thief
swung and twisted in the air. Two of the men who’d stood beside him on the cart came forward and took hold of his legs, dropping their weight onto the strangling man to bring on the release of death that much sooner. He dangled there a full half an hour then, head lolling heavily over the rough collar of rope, before the hangman cut him down.

They walked back to their home through the streets of Poole in silence. John Senior had come to the hanging at his father’s invitation and he sensed there was more than spectacle on the man’s mind. There was a cold air of dread about the day that seemed to work against words, that suggested the uselessness of language in the face of the things he had just witnessed.

His father brought him to the pantry, opened the container of sugar and placed it before him on the counter.

“Put your hands up there,” he said. “To either side.”

He did as he was told. His father took out a long leather strap and proceeded to beat him savagely across the buttocks and shoulders, across the backs of his legs, until the boy could just keep his feet, until his father exhausted himself.

John Senior stood there shaking and crying silently when it was done, hands still on the counter. He could hear his father moving behind him, sucking air heavily through his nostrils to catch his breath. There was the sound of glassware set on the table, a cork loosed from a bottle. “Have some of this now,” his father said.

John Senior turned from the counter and took the proffered glass of rum.

His father’s thick upper lip was beaded with sweat and his hair frizzed away from his head in all directions, as if he was
standing on a charge of static. He said, “You see where thieving will get you.”

They never spoke of the incident afterwards. And nothing in his father’s demeanour or actions in the years that followed predicted the bouts of blind rage he would descend into once the disease overtook him. When nothing else could appease him or settle his outbursts, John Senior was forced to beat his father senseless, weeping with frustration as he struck the sick man about the shoulders and head.

Through the worst of his fever, fifty years on, John Senior relived those moments, thrashing on his sick bed and shouting. Cassie leaned over him and pinned his arms to the mattress. “I’m not your father,” she shouted at him, but he was too delirious to understand her.

The illness was still burning through the old man when Peyton arrived at the house from the traplines and Cassie sent him to Ship Cove to ask after Buchan’s surgeon. By the time he returned accompanied by both the surgeon and Buchan himself, the fever had broken. The doctor prescribed a regimen of salts and cod liver oil for strength and told him to put aside any thought of accompanying the expedition that was due to leave in three days’ time. Cassie echoed the doctor’s orders to the old man and sent the visitors away the next morning with salt fish and bread tied up in a cloth.

Peyton thought she seemed immensely relieved to have settled keeping John Senior at home and to have the navy men out of the way. He studied her look of relief for a moment before going to the door. He called out and motioned them back up the path and volunteered to take John Senior’s place on the expedition. He told the lieutenant he would come down
to the
Adonis
on the twelfth. Buchan shook his hand and thanked him and nodded another goodbye to Cassie who stood behind Peyton in the kitchen. “Miss Jure,” he said.