River Thieves (34 page)

“Of course,” Buchan said. The voice had startled him and he moved quickly to pull the door closed. He turned back and squinted into the darkness. There was a rustle of movement and Richmond’s silhouette passed across the square of light in the window. He came forward rubbing his eyes and combing his beard roughly with his fingers as if he had just woken from a nap. He nodded to the visitor. He was wearing a large, closely knit gansey that hung halfway to his knees. “You’ve only just caught me,” Richmond said. “I was on my way down
to the water. Did you see young Michael?”

“He directed me up from the river.”

Richmond nodded and clanked a heavy kettle onto the crane over the fire. “Tea?” he said.

“May I have a seat?” Buchan asked, pointing at a chair beside the table.

“Wouldn’t force you to drink a cup of tea by the door. What did Michael Sharpe have to say for himself?”

Buchan smiled. “Only that I would best talk to you.”

Richmond nodded his head. “He’s a quiet lad, young Michael.”

They sat across from each other and Buchan looked around the tiny room as his eyes adjusted to the poor light. The packed dirt floor opposite the stove was stacked with Indian rackets of various sizes and shapes, traps, poles, coils of hemp rope, drag-twine, plain board, tools, netting, rolls of canvas, a bag of nails. The walls themselves were papered with what on closer inspection turned out to be the pages of a Methodist missionary magazine. Buchan leaned in to read a paragraph next to his head. “Regular subscriber?” he asked, nodding towards the walls.

“Can’t read meself,” Richmond said. “Bloody great armfuls of those things up at the church on Twillingate Island though.” He reached out and slapped the wall with the palm of his hand. “Keeps the draught down a bit.”

Buchan watched him a moment, the face almost masked — his beard covering the cheekbones nearly as high as his eyes, bushy mare-brows above them. “Were you born in Newfoundland, Mr. Richmond?”

“No sir. But I came here young enough to wish I had been,
when I was a boy of eight or thereabouts.” His family, he explained, settled on the west coast of Newfoundland, sharing a small sheltered bay with Tom Taylor’s family, building a stage-head and splitting room and several tilts framed with saplings handy to the foot of the harbour. The latest in the endlessly recurring conflicts between Britain and France was underway and the French Shore, as that part of the island was known, had been abandoned by French fishermen.

At that age he and Tom Taylor worked on shore with his grandfather and mother and Mrs. Taylor and several of the other older children, carrying mounds of wet fish in handbarrows from the press piles to wash them in the shoals, spreading the clean cod to dry on the flakes and constantly turning them to keep the sun from scorching the flesh. Richmond’s father and Mr. Taylor were on the water each day with two hired men, hand-lining for cod. They skiffed out to the grounds before the wick of first light was lit and worked there until they’d brought up the full of the boat or until the onset of darkness forced them ashore. They worked with thirty-fathom lines, their hooks baited in the first weeks of May with mussels dug from sandy beaches, then with seine-hauled herring, and by mid-June with the capelin that came ashore to spawn in such unbelievable numbers a boy could stand knee-deep in the landwash and dip them from the water in nets or baskets.

Richmond shook his head, as if that harvest still amazed him, the lavish roil of silver bodies about his shins, hundreds of the capelin shovelled onto a small patch of garden for fertilizer, thousands more simply rotting on the beach after the gulls had their fill.

The kettle, which was still warm when it was set over the fire,
came to a full rolling boil and Richmond got up to see to the tea. He had the permanent hunch of large men used to stooping under doors and low ceilings. It made him seem coiled, Buchan thought, unpredictable. Richmond picked up two cups from a sideboard and stared into them for a moment. He blew into them in turn, held them upside down and shook them and stared into them again. He poured without straining the leaves.

“How did you come to this part of the country?” Buchan asked.

Richmond looked across at him with a queer grin that made Buchan’s stomach turn. “The war ended is what happened,” he said cheerfully. He passed the officer his tea.

Four years after they arrived on the west coast, the Treaty of Versailles returned the entire French Shore to France, extending the territory south of Pointe Riche to Cape Ray. In the months that followed, the French drove English settlers from Sop’s Arm, Holm Point, Noddy Bay, Hawkes Bay, River of Ponds and Port Saunders. News of these expulsions reached all the English on the French Shore as fishermen abandoned their homes further up the coast.

Richmond’s grandfather had died of pneumonia their second winter in the harbour and they’d wrapped his body in a sheet of canvas and buried him in a tiny clearing among the trees above the cove. It was like planting a flag. The hired men left as soon as they could secure a berth to St. John’s, but Richmond’s father vowed not to surrender his home and Mr. Taylor promised to stand beside him.

That fall Richmond and his father dragged three cords of spruce logs out of the woods with their dog and had set to splitting and stacking the junks behind their tilt. “I was just a
little bedlamer in them days,” Richmond said. The handle of the axe stood as high as his chin and he arced the heavy blade awkwardly overhead, coming off his feet to add his weight to each strike.

His father wiped the sweat from his face with a ratty handkerchief and looked away across the harbour. He stopped and stared, shading his eyes with his hand.

The vessel brought in its sails as it floated partway into the bay and anchored offshore. Three boats rowed up to the Richmond fishing room and the entire population of the harbour came down to greet the English marines. They stood at the edge of the wharf and shouted to the men in the boats and applauded. The Royal Navy had come to them. It was as unexpected and miraculous as a visitation of angels.

On the stagehead, a young officer with a face as sharp as a mole’s and a white powdered wig unscrolled a parchment to read a proclamation from John Campbell, governor of Newfoundland. He quoted King George’s promise to prevent his subjects from interrupting the French fishery by their competition and ended with the governor’s direct order to remove all fixed English settlements on the French Shore.

Richmond’s mother, pregnant with her eighth child and nearing her time, put a hand to her mouth and began crying silently. The officer escorted the men into the buildings and allowed them to gather any valuables that could be easily transported, then returned with them to the stagehead. He turned to the marines and nodded and they marched up to the shelters where they carried the split firewood inside the largest building and set it alight, then set fire to the tilt beside it and to the few outbuildings nearby. Everything of use was left inside and two
armed soldiers prevented the families from attempting any rescue. The marines removed the settlers under guard to the vessel waiting in the harbour and then they burned the stage house and the wharf as well.

Richmond recounted these events impassively, as if he was reading them from a text, but Buchan could feel the weight behind the words, their intent. The noise of the fire beside them like an echo of that earlier fire passed down through the years. He stared at Richmond with the same counterfeit impassiveness, refusing to give him the satisfaction of any visible response. He set his feet flat on the packed earth floor. He said, “Where is your family now, Mr. Richmond?”

“My father is dead some years now. My mother, I believe, is in London.”

“Is that where her people are from?”

Richmond drank from his cup and winced at the scalding heat. He turned his head to spit fragments of tea leaf from his mouth. “My mother is Welsh.”

Buchan nodded into his mug. It smelled of salt pork.

“You’ll be wanting to talk about what happened at the lake, I s’pose,” Richmond said then, to indicate he was through gaming about.

“I have a few questions, yes.” Buchan pulled out his notebook and rummaged in a pocket until he located a lead. He said, “You were one of the shooters, Mr. Richmond?”

Richmond raised his eyes above the rim of his mug.

“You were one of the men who shot the Red Indian,” Buchan repeated.

“He had Master Peyton on the ice by the throat.”

“John Senior.”

Richmond nodded angrily. “Yes, John Senior. By the throat, as I said. And he would’ve strangled him unless some action got taken.”

“An unarmed Indian man approached a party of eight settlers brandishing rifles and, unprovoked, he accosted one of the party. Is that correct?”

“That is how I feature it, as far as I can remember. He come down off the shore carrying a sprig of white spruce. He walked straight up to the lot of us and started in to talking. He went on with his arms flicing about and no sense to be made of a single word. We just looked at one another. He kept pointing to the woman and striking his chest” — Richmond used his own fist to demonstrate — “and waving at the wigwams on the shore. Then he stepped in and shook John Peyton’s hand and the hands of several others. It seemed we might come out of it without bloodshed at that point.”

“But you did not.”

“He took the woman by the arm then as if to walk off with her, you see. And John Senior made it clear he would do no such thing.”

“Even though he was simply attempting to protect his wife.”

Richmond gave a little laugh. “Whether she was wife or no, as I said, we couldn’t understand a sound the savage made. And our party was attempting to bring out a Red Indian with the blessing of Your Lordship, the governor.” Buchan suppressed a grunt of dissatisfaction and Richmond said, “They got all in a roke then, both of them shouting, John Senior rhyming off the oaths. And the Indian grabbed him by the throat and commenced to choking him.”

“That’s when you and Mr. Taylor stepped in?”

Richmond nodded his head.

“Was there no other course of action open to you? There were eight of you to face a single Indian.”

Richmond said, “The facts are the facts and I regret your disliking them, sir. But dislike is not enough to alter the past. He was nearly as large as myself, an awful length of a brute. He had hold of a seventy-year-old man and was not about to give him up. Tom Taylor and I laid onto him with the butts of our rifles and we battered him about the head, but he would not relent.” He paused and considered the officer observing him. “A curious thing it is to me, sir, that you are more concerned with the death of this Indian than the murder of your own men on that selfsame lake.”

“Your curiosity,” Buchan said slowly, “is irrelevant.”

“And is the curiosity of those men you’ve got standing outside the door irrelevant?”

More than likely then, Buchan guessed, he had not been sleeping when they arrived.

Richmond said, “Odds of fifty years now, John Senior and his like have been fighting for this shore. You know yourself there’s been deaths on both sides. And you thought going up the river to hand out a few blankets would take the savage out of that lot.”

“I had hopes we might change their view of us.”

“You hoped to have the governor kiss your heroic little arse.”

“Mr. Richmond —”

“I know your kind.”

“Mr. Richmond —”

“You’d fuck your own mother if the King gave the order.”

“Mr. Richmond!”

He sat up at mock attention. “Sir,” he shouted.

Buchan gripped his tunic at the waist and pulled it straight. He wanted to take the pistol from his belt and shoot from inches away, to blow the man’s nose through the back of his head.

Corporal Rowsell stuck his head in the doorway. “Captain, sir,” he said.

Buchan raised his hand without turning his head. He waved the corporal back outside. He said, “You shot the Indian, Mr. Richmond, is that correct?”

“John Peyton ordered us to get the Indian off his father, yes. I stepped away and used my rifle. I shot him once in the back at close range and even then we had to pry his hands free of John Senior’s neck.”

“After the Indian had been shot, what did you do?”

“Sir, we collected spruce branches and covered the corpse on the ice, sir.”

“The second Indian. What became of him?”

“He run off, to the best of my knowledge.”

“No additional shots were fired?”

Richmond turned his head to look at the officer. “Not that I recall, sir, no.”

“And then what?”

“We spent the night in one of the Indian wigwams, sir. We collected our belongings what had been stole from John Peyton’s boat. We carried the Indian woman down the river to the Peyton house along with a quantity of furs we felt we had some claim to by way of compensation for losses.”

“Was there any contact with other Indians on the way down
the river?”

“Not of the Red persuasion, no.”

“Of which persuasion then?”

Richmond rapped the knuckles of one hand against the tabletop. “A Micmac trapper is all.”

“Does this trapper have a name?”

“Noel Young.”

“You knew this man?”

“Everyone on the shore knows Noel Young. He kipped down with us for the night and we went our separate ways in the morning.”

Buchan nodded and made a note in the journal. “Did the woman come down the river willingly?”

“She did not say, that I recall, one way or the other.”

“In your opinion,” Buchan said. “Based on your observations.”

Richmond settled back into his habitual slump. “She had little choice in the matter, now, did she?”

“She tried twice to escape, is that right?”

“Twice she took a stroll into the woods at an hour that might lead one to see it as an attempt to run off. Perhaps she meant to take care of some delicate business and lost her way.”

Buchan tapped his pencil against the page.

“We had the governor’s blessing to take a Red Indian back from the lake,” Richmond said again.

“But not, I believe, to murder two men in the process.”