River Thieves (20 page)

“Take it down,” Buchan shouted uselessly. “Take it down!”

The sound of voices reached him then, men on the line chanting a heave-up song from the docks, the words drifting beneath the fire’s racket like smoke.
Haul on the bowline, the bugger must come this time, haul on the bowline, haul, boys, haul
, the refrain growing stronger as the spectators on the street joined in. When the building suddenly crumpled and fell, men tumbled backwards over each other along the hawser. Another cheer went up as they got back to their feet and slapped the shoulders of those beside them. Buchan moved among the men directing the marines to begin clearing the debris from the lots. It was several minutes before he reached a dark knot huddled over a figure still lying in the street. A large bearded man wearing a patch over his right eye was cradling the head of the fallen man in his lap. He looked up as Buchan pushed near.

“Get him out of the street,” Buchan shouted.

The man with the eye patch shook his head. He said, “He’s gone, sir.”

The dead man still clutched his shirtfront in both hands, as if he was trying to tear it from his body.

The firebreaks preserved the last 150 yards of buildings on the north and south sides of Water Street, but an additional 240 homes and businesses were lost in the second fire of the winter.
One in three residents was left homeless and impoverished during one of the harshest winters ever recorded in the colony. Even those people with money had little or no access to food or other supplies, most of which had been burnt to cinders. During the course of the following months the most vulnerable starved or died of exposure in the pathetic temporary structures the governor could not prevent the homeless from cobbling together. The cemetery ground was hard as flint and the dead were salted with chopped ice in their coffins and kept in a storage room at the fort until graves could be dug in the spring.

Vice Admiral Francis Pickmore became the first governor of Newfoundland to die in office. He was already suffering longstanding and nagging illnesses when he took up residence at Fort Townshend in October. The severe conditions of the winter, the turmoil in the aftermath of the fires, the constant damp and cold of the governor’s residence overtook him like a predator running down a wounded animal. He died on February 24 of complications arising from bronchial congestion.

The constant frost of that year had sealed the coast in a solid band of ice from the early days of December. In order to return the governor’s body to England, Buchan pressed three hundred shoremen into service beside crewmen from the
Drake, Egeria
and the
Fly
to carve a passage clear of the harbour. Close to shore the ice was as much as five feet thick and the men used axes and ice-saws and simple stubbornness to make their way through it. Three weeks after the work began, the HMS
Fly
left St. John’s with the earthly remains of Governor Pickmore preserved in a large puncheon of rum. Buchan was present when the body was lowered into the murky bath of alcohol. The face darkened under the sepia surface,
the features bearing an expression of beatific indifference. A drowned man, Buchan thought as the cover was nailed into place.

The channel the workers had muscled through to open water on the Atlantic was 2,856 yards in length. Within a week the relentlessly cold weather had closed it over again and the harbour remained inaccessible to shipping until May.

To everyone’s amazement no lives were lost in the fires themselves. The man who died of what was assumed to be a heart attack while tearing down the firebreak houses on Water Street was the only fatality recorded during those two disastrous nights. The body was laid out for viewing before the burial in one of the few taverns not lost to the fire, a single-room affair owned and operated by the man with the eye patch. He introduced himself as Harrow when Buchan arrived to pay his respects.

“I was a navy man meself,” he said. “Years ago this was. Till I lost the eye.” He gestured at his head.

Buchan nodded.

The coffin was set up on the bar and there was a row of drunken fishermen standing beside it. It was built of plain board and the dead man inside it was dressed in a black suit several sizes too large for him and thirty years out of fashion.

“The suit was my own,” Harrow told the officer. He wore a slop smock tied at his waist that draped almost to the floor. “Haven’t put it on my back since my first year out of the navy. And he didn’t have a proper fit-out for burying, poor bugger.”

“Was he a relation of yours?”

“No sir, a business partner at one time. Before his wife died. He sold his share in the establishment afterwards and then drank away the works.”

Several men near them at the bar toasted the corpse’s legendary exploits as a drinker.

“When is the funeral?”

“Tomorrow noon.” Harrow shook his head. “I’m surprised the Church would have him. He never set foot inside one in all the years I knew him.”

“Is that a fact?”

“And so it is. He was a queer stick, I’ll grant you. Had a daughter, a clever girl. He dressed her up in men’s clothes one August and they traipsed off to Portugal Cove before there was a road. And I’ve heard stranger things that the presence of his remains prevent me from speaking of.”

Another round of salutes from the mourners.

Buchan looked around the dimly lit room. “Where is his daughter now?”

“She left twenty-odd year ago. She was in the employ of a northern man, one Peyton, owns half the country up there. No saying where she is these days. Would you take a complimentary beverage, Lieutenant?” Harrow had gone around the bar and was out of sight behind the coffin.

“No,” Buchan said. “Thank you. I just wanted to offer my condolences.”

Harrow reappeared at the side of the bar and leaned a shoulder against the head of the coffin. “We thank you,” he said. “On his behalf. Come back on a happier occasion, the complimentary will still be here.”

It was weeks afterwards before Buchan could bring himself
to take pen and paper to write a letter that would be sent on the first packet boat out of Portugal Cove after the spring breakup. He began,
Dear Ms. Cassandra Jure. It is with regret and the most heartfelt sympathy I write with news of your father’s passing from this world in the early morning of November 21, 1817.

Cassie was telling John Peyton about the first walking trip she took with her father as a girl, between St. John’s harbour and Portugal Cove. She was sitting next to the fire at the summer house, wearing a thick wool sweater and flannels beneath the pale linen of her skirt against the chill of early May. The letter carrying news of her father’s death was in her lap and she worried at the paper absently as she spoke.

“I was only twelve at the time,” she said. She and her father were travelling an Indian path, an overland route through miles of what the books she read would have called
impenetrable forest, impassable bog-land.
It had been decades since the Beothuk Indians occupied this part of the island and the trail seemed to be little more than a rumour of their passing, barely marked, sometimes petering out halfway across a marsh, sometimes disappearing in a copse of spruce. They would spend half an hour or more then, zigzagging aimlessly to pick up some hint of the direction it continued in, her father walking bent at the waist as if he might
be able to sniff out the path like a hound. He had thickly curled sideburns, a head of thinning hair showing pale scalp. He carried a nunny-bag packed with food and clean stockings, a costril of spruce beer tied at his waist. He squatted where depressions in the moss indicated the path might turn northward and pulled at the sideburns with both hands, considering.

He caught Cassie watching him and smiled across at her. “Yes,” he said, as if her watching was the deciding factor. “This way then.” He straightened and started off, and Cassie settled in behind him, her eyes at his feet, trotting every few steps to keep up. She was exhausted and near tears by this point, but refused to give in by naming it, by asking for relief. Her father was moving at the same pace he’d set when they began walking out of St. John’s in the dark that morning and she was determined not to alter it, not to slow him down. At the time she aspired to his indiscriminate appetite for the world. Just as her mother once had.

Her mother was a girl of barely seventeen years when she met the man who would become her husband, moving away with him to Newfoundland to protect her parents from unacceptable public embarrassment.

Cassie looked at Peyton, to see if he understood what she was saying. He nodded for her to go on.

Her mother wanted to live a respectable life, and before the years and her father’s increasingly dissolute behaviour exhausted her, she struggled to maintain some semblance of dignity. In her eyes, the pub operated by her husband was another humiliation she had to endure and she couldn’t speak of the place without a tremor of distaste in her voice.

Peyton said, “You’ve told me how she felt.”

Cassie nodded. Her father complained his wife had airs about her, but thought she had suffered enough at his hands to have a legitimate claim to some disappointment. He let her censure of the tavern stand without serious rebuttal. But the unresolved disagreement between the two spilled over into other areas of the family’s life, particularly when it came to their daughter. Her mother was fastidious and demanding, attentive, solicitous, firm. Her father was reckless, delinquent, uninhibited by notions of what was proper for a girl her age, particularly if he was under the influence of drink. He allowed her to read the early poems of John Donne, took her lining for conners off the wharves in the harbour, taught her to swim at Quidi Vidi Lake. He taught her to load and shoot a rifle in the hills above St. John’s.

“You’re going to ruin that girl,” her mother warned him.

“I’m through ruining girls, m’love,” he told her.

She gave him a dark, disparaging look. “I wish I’d never clapped eyes on you.”

Cassie sometimes worked the tension between her parents to angle for concessions from her mother that would otherwise have been out of the question. John Donne was a little beyond her comprehension, lining for tomcod was more or less a bore. But learning to swim, firing a rifle, these things were exhilarating and worth fighting for. When her father announced his plans for the walking tour to Portugal Cove, she began lobbying to accompany him.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” her mother told her.

“Leave the child be,” her father said. But his tone suggested it would take some convincing to bring him around.

“What kind of a creature are you raising?” her mother
wanted to know. “Dragging her down to the wharf. Stripping her half naked at the lake. What are people to think if they see you stealing her off through the country in her petticoat?”

“People? What people are you concerned with?”

“By all that is sacred, Garfield Izakiah Jure, I will not allow you to carry Cassandra off into the woods.”

“You won’t allow it?”

“No,” she said. “I will not. That’s no place for a girl.”

Her father nodded thoughtfully. “Indeed,” he said. He looked at his daughter who was sitting quietly while events took their course and then he looked back at his wife. “I quite agree,” he said. And he left the house without a word.

Cassie stared down at her shoes, studying the polished buckles. Her mother paced the floor. It was as if they had come to an impasse in an argument they’d been carrying on with each other. It was clear there was more to come. They were both expectant, apprehensive.

Half an hour later Cassie’s father came through the door carrying a pair of men’s trousers, stockings, a hat and a short Spencer coat. “We shall need a name for you,” he said to his daughter.

“Now, Izakiah,” her mother said.

“Try these on,” he said. “We’ll have to make some adjustments.”

“Where on earth did you get these clothes?”

“From the smallest gentleman I could find next door. Cost me a bottle and a half of Jamaican rum. Something regal would be in order, something with the ring of royalty about it. What do you think of Henry as a name, Cassie? Or Charles, I’ve always fancied Charles. That’s what we’d have called you if
you were a lad.”

The stockings were full of holes and filthy and the rank smell of them filled the room. Her mother stood helplessly in the centre of the floor. There was so much wrong with what was happening that she couldn’t focus on the order in which she should be objecting to things. Finally she said, “She will not wear an item of those clothes until they have been washed.”

It was a small concession to make and conceded so much to them in its turn that Cassie and her father immediately agreed to it.

They set out an hour before light, a week later. Her mother watching from the open doorway, her silhouette in the dim light of a candle behind her, her shadow cast on the dirt path. “You bring her home in one piece,” she shouted to her husband when they were almost out of earshot. Cassie turned and looked back down the hill as the door closed, cancelling out the square of light.

The first three miles beyond the town they walked a wide, well-travelled road to a place called Tilt House, making good time. The sun was well up by then. Cassie could feel the itch of new blisters already forming on the heels of her feet.

“It gets much worse from here, young Charles,” her father said. He tipped the costril of spruce beer to his lips and then replaced the cork. He took out a small jar of pork fat. He used two fingers to scoop a dollop from the jar and offered it to Cassie as he began liberally applying the white grease to his forehead, face and neck. He nodded ahead to the broken path of tree stumps and shallow bog. “Nippers,” he said.

Cassie nodded and began applying the grease in the same
manner her father had.

They travelled another three miles to Twenty Mile Pond, following a trail used mostly in winter to reach the lake. It was rutted and studded with tree stumps and stones and crossed by running streams of water. The mosquitoes hung about their heads in shaggy halos so thick and active they had to cover their mouths with their hands when they spoke. There were stretches of marsh spotted with deep, black-water flashes. Where the trail was most sodden, rocks or logs were lain at intervals for travellers but even these had begun to disappear into the muck. Cassie ’s shoes were slightly too big for her feet and she lost them both on separate occasions, rescuing them from the dark sucking mud with her hands.