River Thieves (17 page)

In late August, Peyton and Cassie rowed across to the mainland for the haying. Richmond and Taylor had already arrived and were on the beach with Reilly when they rowed up to the salmon weir.

Annie Boss came down the narrow path from their tilt to greet them all, carrying her child. It was their first sight of the baby for all of the visitors but Peyton who had come to
Charles Brook twice that summer as he inspected the catch at John Senior’s salmon rivers. There was a round of handshaking and best wishes for the new parents. Richmond pushed Reilly’s shoulder roughly and said, “All this time we thought you was all powder fire and no shot.”

“Don’t pay no mind to the noggyhead,” Tom Taylor said, shaking Reilly’s hand. He and his wife had had their own difficulties and he couldn’t bring himself to ridicule others, even a Paddy and his Indian wife. He said, “The best to you both. And Siobhan would say the same if she was here, I know.”

They spent three solid days in the waist-high meadows. Fragments of the shorn grass worked into their shoes and collars and beneath shirts and the band of the haymakers’ underwear and it stuck there in the sweat on their skin. At the end of the third day, they came down to the river and walked into the water to wash away the dark stain of chlorophyll on their necks and wrists and ankles. They bobbed their heads beneath the surface to wash the sweat from their hair. Back on shore the men removed their shirts to wring them dry. Reilly walked up the bank to lay a fire in the tilt. Cassie paddled out onto the river, turning there to float on her back, the white muslin of her dress moving on the water’s surface like a leaf dropped from an overhanging tree.

Peyton waded in the shallows and watched her. Her hair floated loose in the river. Through the wet fabric of her dress he could see the dark aureole of her nipples and he looked down suddenly at his own soaked clothing, afraid the water might have revealed something of himself in the same way.

Richmond laughed on the beach behind him. “No way he ’ll get on the inside of a cold flinter like she,” he said.

Peyton spun in the water to stare up the beach but Tom Taylor had already turned on his friend. “Richmond, you got no more nature than a picket.” He stood with his hands on his hips and shouted, “You haven’t got the shame God gives a louse.”

“The devil haul you, Tom Taylor. I’ll speak my mind when it suits me.” And to prove his point Richmond slapped Taylor’s stomach and said, “You’ve fallen into flesh, you have. All chuffed out like a cock with the mites.”

Peyton climbed from the water and took off his shirt to wring it out, then pushed on his shoes and walked past Richmond and Taylor as their argument escalated into a shouting match. Reilly was sitting outside the tilt on a junk of wood, a pail of river water that served to cool several bottles of spruce beer beside him. He passed one to Peyton with his scarred hand. The beer was sharp and browsy as tree sap. Peyton drank off half the bottle before he pulled on his wet shirt and took a seat on the ground. He kicked at the dirt with the heel of his shoe.

“What are those two into it over now?”

Peyton shrugged, but didn’t look up at the Irishman.

Reilly said, “Your face is dark as the depths of January, John Peyton.”

He nodded, but said nothing and they sat in silence, listening to Richmond and Taylor carrying on down on the beach. Cassie was likely still in the river, drifting slowly downstream. Peyton closed his eyes against the late afternoon sunlight and leaned his forehead against a fist.

Peyton was eighteen the first time he and Cassie came across to Charles Brook for the haying without John Senior. The old man had insisted she go in his stead so she might have the chance of a little “female company.” Cassie was still tutoring Peyton in the late afternoons in those days, though he was allowing work to keep him away more often as he became increasingly dissatisfied with the thought of being her student. In the week before they crossed over to Reilly’s tilt, he sulked through several evenings of
Robinson Crusoe
, a book Cassie had thought he would find of particular interest, being cast upon the shores of a strange island himself.

“Are you missing England?” she asked him.

“No,” he said curtly. He was taller than she was now, which served to make him more impatient with the notion of being taught by her.

She could see he wasn’t willing to admit the specifics of his irritation and she carried on as if it was a general question she’d been asking, something related to the book. “Is there anything about England that you miss having here?”

He shrugged. “Orange marmalade,” he said. “And I used to have honey in my tea on occasion.”

She nodded slowly. She tapped the pages of the book. “Go on,” she said.

As they were preparing for that first trip together to Charles Brook, she packed an odd assortment of materials into a knapsack — a compass, several sheets of clean paper, heavy leather gloves, a brass container, molasses, an empty glass jar. At the end of the haying, after the hired men took their leave of
Reilly’s river, Cassie told Peyton she wanted to spend a few hours more in the freshly mown meadows. They were on the beach with Joseph Reilly. He was adding wood to a well-burning fire. He said, “We’ll have a bit of bread you can carry home to John Senior if you bide a while longer.”

Cassie and Peyton walked half an hour into the meadows, stopping in one of the wide clearings of shorn grass and boulders. The day was warm though the northerly wind carried a nip when it gusted up and they settled in the lee of a large scaly rock that caught the heat of the sun. There were long white threads of cirrus cloud on the horizon. While Peyton gathered dead wood, Cassie laid out the contents of the bag she had packed.

She stood over the new fire with the container of molasses and poured a long string of it onto the flames, then sat back beside Peyton.

“What are you doing?”

“Just wait.”

The smell of the molasses lifted on the heat of the fire into the air around them. She laid the paper flat on the ground and used stones to hold the corners down.

Within a few minutes the first scatter of bees arrived. Cassie said nothing, though she smiled at Peyton as if they had wagered a bet on something and she was certain now of winning. “Take out your watch,” she said. She poured another dollop of molasses onto the paper and then opened the metal container, carefully shaking what looked to Peyton like some sort of red pepper or tiny metal filings onto the paper around the molasses.

Two fat bees landed on the paper and wandered about in skewed circles. When they lifted away, their bellies were red as a sunset. “Check the time,” Cassie said. She stood to watch the
bees hover into the woods, using the compass to note their direction. Then she sat back beside him without a word. Within four minutes the first reddened bee returned to the paper. The second was right behind it.

“Now,” she said. She tilted her head and squinted into the sunlight as if making an intricate mathematical calculation. “That would be somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and fifty yards, is my guess.” She stood and took the leather gloves and empty jar. They had carried a pouch of water from Charles Brook and Cassie told Peyton to put it on to boil for tea. “With any luck I’ll be back in twenty minutes or so.”

He was just beginning to realize what she was about. “You’ll never find it in there, Cassie,” he said.

She was sighting with the compass and didn’t look back over her shoulder. She marched off through the field, her habitual limp exaggerated over the rough rolling ground, and she disappeared into the trees without another word. Peyton set the water to boil and stared into it as it began to bubble at the base of the pot. He fished out the bag of tea and as soon as he had a full rolling boil he dropped in a handful of the leaves, then took the pot off the flame and set it beside the fire. He looked off in the direction she had gone.

“That’ll be froze over by the time she gets back,” he said to himself. He checked his watch. Seventeen minutes. Nineteen.

There was a sheen of sweat on Cassie’s face when she got back to the fire. She carried the heavy gloves under her arm and held the jar before her, filled nearly to the brim with honey and wax.

“I had to climb the tree a ways,” she said. There were half
a dozen startling bright welts swelling on her neck and face.

“You’ve been stung,” Peyton said.

“Pour us a mug.”

He strained tea into tin cups and Cassie heaped a spoonful of wild honey into each. She passed Peyton one and lifted the other in toast. They drank together and even through the scalding heat they could taste the clear, rich sweetness.

“Where did you learn to do this?”

“My father took me out when I was a girl,” she said. “We spent Saturday afternoons tramping around the backcountry above St. John’s. He taught me —” She looked shyly across at Peyton. She’d barely spoken of her family since coming north with John Senior and she seemed to regret it coming up. “He taught me to swim, to fire a rifle. He taught me this,” she said, lifting the jar of honey. “It was this made my mother fall in love with him, my father told me. He took her off into the valley when she was not much above a girl and he’d mine honey from the woods this way.” She shook her head. “Mother always said falling in love with my father was the biggest mistake of her life.”

“How old are you, Cassie?” Peyton asked.

She watched him slyly from the corner of her eye, as if she was assessing him anew. “Why that is very forward of you, John Peyton. I am twenty-four years old.”

He turned his face to the sky and squinted against the sun as she had, making several quick calculations in his head.

“Is that older or younger than you expected?”

“Why did your mother say falling in love with your father was a mistake?”

Cassie looked off towards the border of trees. “My father
drank a great deal. He squandered money, he refused to set foot in a church.” For the first time since coming to the northeast shore she spoke of the public house her father owned, one of the dozens of grog shops near the harbour where fishermen and sailors drank away their season’s earnings. She told Peyton the tavern’s motto:
Drunk for a Penny. Dead drunk for tuppence. Free Straw.
The fishermen drank dark Jamaican rum as long as they could afford it, then callibogus or king calli, a concoction of spruce beer mixed with rum or gin or a locally stilled alcohol that was so harsh and potent it could be set alight and burned like a candle. Men slept on the straw against the walls and urinated in their clothes, arguments and fistfights spilled out the door into the streets. Two or three impoverished prostitutes drifted from table to table in the poor light.

Cassie lived with her parents in a narrow two-storey house consisting of a single room downstairs and two bedrooms up a steep, unrailed staircase. It was built adjacent to the pub, though she might have grown up in London, for all she knew of the tavern’s interior as a child. Her mother forbade her to step inside the establishment under any circumstances and she orbited the building like a moon all her young life, never coming within a few yards of the door. “My mother was a good woman, God rest her. She was ashamed to be associated with the public house,” Cassie told him. “And with my father too, I suppose. She used to say that love was a fire to warm fools.”

They fell into a long silence then, as if this idea embarrassed them both. They finished their tea and then set out the food they had brought with them. The day continued clear and mostly warm. Bees hovered over the sealed jar of honey and the crumpled paper stained with molasses, their steady buzzing
like the hum of a planet in motion around the sun.

Peyton lifted his forehead from his fist and looked across at Reilly. He was exhausted with the long days of work and the beer had gone straight to his head. His stomach felt hollow.

Reilly said, “I thought you were asleep over there, John Peyton.”

He shook his head. “I was thinking about the first year I came across for the haying with Cassie. The Red Indian,” he said. “Do you remember?”

Reilly smiled. “Thought you were going to come out of your skin when you laid eyes on him,” he said.

Peyton and Cassie had come out of the woods several hundred yards above Reilly’s tilt on their way back from the honey meadow that afternoon and followed the shoreline downriver. Reilly was on the beach with his back to the water. Peyton was about to call to him when another voice sounded across the river. On the weir near the opposite shore, a Beothuk man was kneeling and staring into the swirl of water. He had hair down his back as black as peat, his face and neck and his hands were darkened with an ochre stain the colour of blood. He was dressed in caribou leather and hefted a long staff of spruce wood or boxy fir at his shoulder. He drove the spear into the river and lifted it clear, a late-season salmon impaled and writhing at the tip so that the entire length of the staff vibrated. He stood slowly and looked across at the Irishman on the beach with an expression that was somehow proprietary. “Joe Reilly,” he shouted again.

Peyton ran ahead of Cassie to where Reilly was standing.
He kept his eye on the spot where the Indian had disappeared back into the woods and stumbled several times. “What should we do?” he shouted as he ran. “What should we do?” Even standing beside Reilly he stutter-stepped and flailed towards the opposite side of the river with his arm. He stopped suddenly and looked at the Irishman. “He knew your name, Joseph.”

Reilly turned his face down to stare at his boots. There was an uncharacteristic sheepishness about him. Cassie had come up to them, and Annie Boss was making her way down from the tilt. “This used to be their river,” he said. “They come by once or twice a week and take off a fish. It doesn’t cause any harm.”

“They murdered Harry Miller.”

“It’s not my place to speak against the dead,” Reilly said, “but Harry Miller was a hard, hard man.”

“Red man not bad man,” Annie said.

Peyton said, “They killed Harry Miller.”

“Truth be told,” Reilly said, “they could kill any one of us whenever they pleased and we’d never see them.”