River Thieves (22 page)

Cassie stared at her supper a while, at the eyes so densely black they seemed sightless, the long feelers waving like insect antennae. “Why did she come up like that now,” she said, “with her tail wrapped on the hook?”

“You just have to slide the tip underneath, Charlie,” O’Brien explained. “A little tickle and they ball up to protect themselves. The poor buggers can’t help it, you see. It’s in their nature.”

The lobster’s thick half-moon claws opened and closed, opened and closed. What she now remembered, she told Peyton, was the unexpected pinch of sympathy she felt for it. The sudden urge she had to shove a finger into its desperate, blind grasping.

Peyton thought she had come to the end of the telling there, though he could feel the story pointing towards some unspoken third thing. The heaviness of it weighed on him, like the loneliness he’d always sensed in her that she refused to surrender
to scrutiny. He felt no less lost in her company for knowing so much about her. When she hadn’t spoken for what he thought was a long time, he said, “Is that it, Cassie?”

She looked up from the letter in her lap. She was crying and there was a sad, serious smile on her face. She said, “That is never
it
, John Peyton.”

At the end of that summer’s work, John Peyton and his men loaded the
Susan
with three hundred tierces of dried salted salmon and were waiting for a fair wind to make way for the market in St. John’s. It was colder than normal for the time of year and there was no sign of a favourable change in conditions. Peyton sent Reilly and Taylor up to the hired men’s outbuilding to join Richmond and young Michael Sharpe who’d already gone to get some sleep. John Senior was aboard, dozing under a thin blanket in the weather house. Peyton stood beside him in the dark, trying to guess from his breathing if the old man was awake.

“Father,” he said in a whisper.

“I’m all right.”

“You’ll catch your death of cold down here.” He leaned down and pulled the blanket away from the bunk.

“Jesus, John Peyton.”

“Go on up to the house.”

The old man muttered as he sat up and began pawing in the dark for his hat, his gloves. “Where is that now?” he said to himself.

“What is it?”

“My watch is here somewhere.”

“Leave it now, we’ll be back down in a few hours’ time and on our way. Go get some sleep.”

All evening it had been pitch dark under cloud but a nearly full moon was beginning to come clear as the cover dispersed. The light was pale, phosphorescent, it seemed to emanate from the ground itself, from the walls of the summer house. Peyton watched John Senior make his way up from the dock. He was seventy years old and Peyton could see the discomfort of that age in his walk though he still handled the work of men half his age, hauling nets or cleaning fish or cutting a cord of birch billets. There was something almost unnatural about the man’s capacities and it invested him with a peculiar authority that Peyton resented.

“Keep an eye,” John Senior said over his shoulder.

“Don’t mind me.”

Peyton spent the next hour wandering the stretch of ground above the beach, walking out the dock and back, the clump of his boots on the dry lengths of spruce like waves flobbing the hull of a boat. A thin line of moonlight laddered across the harbour towards open sea. The horseshoe of forested hills behind the house and outbuildings was a black wedge shimmed into the speckled dark of the night sky. On the summit of the highest ridge there was a single tree that stood head and shoulders above those around it, as if it had been ordained to afford an
unobstructed view into the cove. Peyton shivered as he looked up at it. There were still moments when something in the country moved through him this way, a wind in the woods approximating the sound of footfall behind him, a cold current of watchfulness on the shoreline when he sculled by to check the family’s weirs. He promised himself he would climb up there this fall and cut the bastard tree down. He checked his pocket watch. It was nearing one in the morning and he took a final look around. The
Susan
nodded lazily at her moorings. There was no sound but the contrary wind and the motion of the sea, inhale, exhale, against the beach.

He made his way up the path to the house, turned at the door to overlook the dock and the boat again, and went inside to the warmth of the kitchen. John Senior was on the daybed with his face to the wall. Cassie was asleep in a chair beside him, her head slumped forward so that her chin rested on her shoulder. They looked like an old married couple.

He moved the kettle as quietly as possible to the full heat of the fire and slipped into the parlour. He lay in the cool air on the high-backed settle and closed his eyes a moment while he waited for the water to boil.

The Beothuk had watched the white men loading their boat for two days from a sentinel tree on a hill overlooking the cove on Burnt Island. On the second night of their vigil, when the ship was packed to the gunnels and ready for departure, seven men and a woman in two canoes paddled under the cover of darkness into the sheltered water of the cove. The voices of the fishermen on watch carried across to them as they mirrored
the uneven curve of the shoreline, moving slowly towards the dock. Their paddles worked soundlessly through the lap of salt water, each stroke perfectly synchronized, perfectly silent. They slipped beneath the spruce timbers of the wharf and sat there while the sporadic talk and farting and laughter of the white men went on into the late hours of the evening. Each breath they took was as measured and subtle as the paddle strokes that had carried them into the harbour and they waited until only the footsteps of a single white man echoed on the wharf lungers overhead. And some time later they heard the sound of the door to the house opening and closing up the hill.

They hacked the vessel free of its moorings and then leaned into their paddles, the boat sheering around with the silent grace of the moon travelling through cloud overhead. A fever of euphoria crept through them as they made for open water but no word was spoken, all their energies poured into hauling the weight of the ship that followed behind them like a well-trained dog.

Peyton came to himself on the settle when he heard the eruption of garbled shouting in the kitchen. And Cassie’s voice then trying to wake his father from his nightmare. He jumped to his feet and ran past them through the front door. He pulled out his watch and tried to read the time by the moonlight as he ran down the path towards the dock. He was halfway along the hill before he looked ahead to the water and stopped where he was. His breath came in shallow gasps and steamed in the night air. He looked around wildly, as if he expected to see the boat being carried up the hill on the backs of Indians. His father
shouted after him from the door of the house. He looked down at his watch. It was one-thirty in the morning.

The occupants of the house straggled down to the dock behind him in unfastened boots and holding their trousers up with their hands. They stood together at the edge of the wharf and stared into the blackness of the water and off across the harbour where the vastness of the sea was just beginning to run away from them on the new tide. The
Susan’s
mooring ropes still noosed the stage timbers.

“Red Indians,” Tom Taylor said.

“They can’t have got far,” Peyton offered.

“No bloody sense going after them in the dark,” Richmond said. “We couldn’t tell an Indian from our own arses in this.”

John Senior said, “Father’s watch was on that boat.”

“As soon as there’s a hint of light we’ll get after them,” Richmond promised.

The group turned and made their way back up to the house. Cassie set out tea and raisin cake for them all and they sat around the table to eat in silence.

John Senior emptied his cup and stood to go upstairs to his room. “They could have dragged her anywhere between Leading Tickles and Gander Bay. Let’s try not to sleep through the morning.” He looked across at his son, but said nothing more.

The next day was fair with a brisk wind. A perfect day to sail. Peyton shook his head. He and Taylor were sculling among dozens of islands that crowded the mainland like a flock of ducklings trying to keep close to their mother. The coastline offered
enough coves, bays and tickles to hide a stolen sloop somewhere different every day of the year. “Needle in a haystack, Tom Taylor,” Peyton said every thirty minutes or so, like a clock striking the half-hour.

Taylor said, “For all we know, the buggers might have dragged her out somewhere and scuttled her.”

By early afternoon they had reached Chapel Island and stopped in at Boyd’s Cove for a boil-up on the beach.

“Not much sense to go beyond here, I don’t expect,” Peyton said. “It would have taken the British navy to haul it much further than this.”

Taylor nodded. “If we turn back now, we might get in before its too far gone to dark.”

“All right,” Peyton said. He tossed the dregs of his tea into the sand and looked slowly around himself. Grey ocean, grey sand beach. Low cliffs up the shore behind them.

Taylor stood beside him and kicked sand over the embers of the fire they’d made. He said, “Maybe the others have had more luck than we.”

Late in the afternoon Richmond and the green man, Michael Sharpe, came upon the
Susan
abandoned on shoals near Charles Brook and in trouble on the rising tide. The sails and some of the rigging had been cut away and there was damage to the hull from the beating that was underway. They could see there was a chance she might be taken into the rocks and lost altogether, but there was no way to get safely aboard of her in the meantime.

Richmond managed to throw ropes with grapples across the
gunnels while Michael Sharpe handled the oars, slewing around in the ocean roil, coming as handy to the sloop as he dared. They fastened one of the ropes to a killick to anchor the boat oceanward and secured the other line ashore in hopes of keeping the boat from slamming helplessly against the cliffs or the low-lying skerries. By this time it was near six o’clock in the evening. Richmond left Michael Sharpe with a rifle to keep watch over the sloop and then headed back to Burnt Island in the falling darkness.

When Taylor and Peyton arrived, Richmond came down to the water to meet them.

“Found her out at Charles Brook,” he said. “No surprise there, hey, Tom Taylor,” he said as the two men clambered up onto the wharf. “On the doorstep of our very own half-breed and his brood of Jackietars.” He laughed then, although there was no humour in his voice. The little civility that Richmond once showed the Irishman was long gone. Reilly had been Peyton’s choice for head man when his father gave up the day-to-day concerns of the family enterprise. It was a decision John Senior hadn’t disagreed with although the set of his head when Peyton told him, the slow thoughtful way he tamped his pipe full of tobacco, suggested there might be some trouble to accompany it. Taylor felt slighted, clear enough. But Richmond felt betrayed, as if his own flesh and blood had turned on him, and he seemed determined to wage a petty war of revenge. If Peyton could think of a way to sack him without John Senior taking his part, he would have done so long ago.

“The sails are gone,” Richmond reported, “but from the way she’s riding she still has a load of salmon aboard of her.”

Peyton said, “We’ll have to try to get on her at low tide
tomorrow if she doesn’t go down tonight.”

John Senior and Reilly came in from their search an hour later and the men ate together in the kitchen, drinking cups of tea liberally laced with rum before wandering off to sleeping berths, leaving Peyton alone with Cassie as she cleared the table.

He said, “A year’s work we could lose there. And the boat besides.” He was doing the calculation in his head to try and figure the enormity of the loss.

“You should have woke me when you came in last night,” she said without looking in his direction. “I would have gone down while you slept.”

“I only intended to close my eyes a
second,”
he said.

“Well you needn’t get cross with me, John Peyton.”

She said this so softly he could just make out her words and he was immediately ashamed of himself. Since the news of her father’s death reached them in the spring there was a change in her that no one but Peyton took note of. Something beneath the hard surface she showed to the world had given way. She seemed hollow to him, brickly, fragile as the first layer of ice caught over a pond in the fall. He sighed and placed his face in his hands a minute and then looked to the rafters. He said,
“But day doth daily draw my sorrows longer, and night doth nightly make grief’s strength seem stronger.”

She stopped fussing about the table to look at him. “I thought you lost interest in all that,” she said.

He shook his head and turned his face away from the light of the candle. “I never had the head for it is all,” he said. He looked across at Cassie where she stood beside the table. She was smiling, surprised by the scrap of verse he had managed to carry with him from those sessions years ago. He felt an
immense, infuriating rush of pleasure to have given her a moment of satisfaction.

“You should get some sleep,” she said softly.

They found the vessel at first light next morning in much the same condition Richmond had left her. When Peyton got aboard he found the ship’s cargo intact and largely undamaged although anything movable in the cabin and below had been stolen, along with the canvas sails and a good part of the rigging. The mast had been hacked at with rough blades, though it seemed solid enough when he leaned his weight into it. Michael Sharpe discovered the two rifles that had been aboard in the shallows of Charles Brook the previous evening. The barrels had been bent, the trigger works and flints were smashed and beyond repair.

On their way to the shoals that morning John Senior had stopped into Little Burnt Bay to request the help of several small boats and they arrived shortly after Peyton got aboard. He set about running lines across to them. The cord that was secured ashore the previous day was shifted to the top of the mast and half a dozen men stood holding the other end to try and rock her off the shoals on the rising tide.