River Thieves (36 page)

John Senior braced for a slap across the shoulders. He
looked up when it didn’t come and then into the harbour where Miller was staring. “Those bloods-a-bitches,” he said.

All summer Miller brooded over his losses in his misleadingly cheerful manner. He whistled and hummed as he worked and composed ditties to old tunes in his head, singing them with such regularity that they came to him unbidden and almost unnoticed. Once a month John Senior rowed in to Burnt Island to spend several days helping to finish Miller’s new home and the two sat up through most of the night drinking. Late into the bottle, Miller would sing all the new songs he’d come up with since their last visit. “This one, this one,” he said to John Senior, his index finger pointed at the ceiling.

John Senior fixed him with a drunken look of disgust for his childish rhymes, which Miller misinterpreted.

“Don’t pretend you’ve got religion on me, John Peyton. If it had been your house, you wouldn’t have waited till the fall to light into the bastards.”

In late September of 1782, when the summer’s business had concluded and before trapping began, Miller, John Senior and William Cull, who had stopped through on his way to St. John’s, rowed into Ship Cove and then took a jaunt up the River Exploits. There hadn’t yet been a significant fall of snow and the heart of the caribou migration was still several weeks off, so they expected to come upon Red Indians somewhere
well short of the lake. Each man carried a musket, bayonet and hatchet, and a pack weighted with eight pounds of hard tack, a piece of salt pork, ammunition and a quart of rum. The weather was poor with rain and wind, and they made slow progress through the dense bush along the riverside. After three days’ travel they came within hearing of a group of Indians in the landwash of a small cove. They crept close enough to make out four mamateeks in a clearing and half a dozen Indians crouched among canoes near the water, the hides of several caribou stretched on the shoreline. Each of the white men removed his pack and loaded his musket. John Senior poured thirty-six balls into the barrel of his gun. Miller smiled his gap-toothed smile across at him. He tamped ten fingers of powder into his own weapon. “No sense saving fire,” he said quietly.

As soon as they broke into the clearing the Indians began shouting and dispersing into the woods. Miller and Cull shot at the running figures but John Senior fired directly into the mamateeks, the fan of musket balls ripping through the bark coverings. As he reloaded, men and women ran or limped from the entrances into the trees, some of them carrying children.

Within minutes the sudden confusion of noise and motion in the cove had swirled into a quiet broken only by the muffled sounds of weeping and moans from within the mamateeks. The three white men approached cautiously, two entering each shelter in turn while the third stood guard outside. In one shelter they found an old man who had taken a musket ball in the gut and was unable to stand. He held a trap-bed in his lap that he had been working against a stone. He was bleeding through the fingers of the hand that cupped his belly, and the lap of his leather cassock and the trap-bed were red with it. He stared at the two
strangers standing before him and sucked air in gasps through clenched teeth. He wept and repeated a single grunted syllable between breaths.

“What do you figure he’s saying, Miller?”

“Couldn’t begin to guess. I’ll bet you two good oars that’s one of our traps though.”

John Senior stepped forward and bent to pick up the trap-bed. The Indian swung it then with a small fierce motion that caught the side of the white man’s face and sliced into his ear. Miller stepped back and levelled his musket, but John Senior had already pulled the bed from the Indian’s hand and was beating him about the head with it. The old man bent to the ground and raised a single arm uselessly against the blows until he lost consciousness, and John Senior continued striking with the sharp edge of the metal until he was too exhausted to lift it any longer. He stood catching his breath over the dead man. The battered skull showed through the long shearing wounds and tiny yellow flecks of bone had landed on John Senior’s boots. His trousers were sprayed with blood.

Miller stood in silence a few moments and then said, “That old fucker had all his teeth.” He tongued the array of spaces in his mouth. They were like palings gone from a fence. “Did you see that, John? That seems an unfair thing to my mind.”

“Shut up, Miller,” he said. He lifted his hand to his ear and then examined his fingers, but couldn’t tell if the blood he found there was his own or that of the old Indian man lying dead at his feet.

They found a quantity of meat in the nearby shelters and two women huddled together in the last mamateek. The older
woman was crippled by shot, which made it impossible for her to hobble away into the woods, and the younger had stayed behind with her. The white men stoked the fire there and cooked a large meal of caribou which John Senior found himself unable to stomach. He sat off to one side while Miller and Cull licked and sucked at the fresh caribou and wiped the juice that dribbled down their chins with their sleeves. He had never particularly liked his partner, but the strength of the disgust he felt watching the man eat surprised and perplexed him. He felt suddenly nauseous and made his way out into the open air.

Miller watched him go with a shrug. “There’s food enough for all in that case,” he said to the two women. The younger of the two would not make eye contact with the white men or look anywhere but directly into her lap, but the older woman was vocal and defiant. Miller held a morsel of caribou on a stick towards her and she spit on it and laid into him with a stream of incomprehensible invective. Her face was darkened with red ochre and the accumulated soot of a hundred cooking fires.

“Now Old Smut,” Miller said, “that’s a fine piece of meat you ruined.”

He offered it instead to the younger woman. She would not look up from her lap and he touched it to her chin, leaving a dark stain there.

“Fancy a bit of dessert?” Miller said to Cull.

John Senior was folding the caribou skins into bundles and tying them to his pack. The bodies of the dead lay around and just beyond the camp. He kept his mind on the task at hand, refusing to estimate the number they’d killed, to guess at their ages. He dragged the birchbark canoes up from the shoreline, pushing them into the doorways of the abandoned mamateeks.
There were odd rustlings and grunts and the sound of a woman crying from the occupied dwelling. When Miller came outside he was buttoning his trousers and singing the wedding song he’d tormented John Senior with all the way across the Atlantic. He walked to meet his partner across the clearing. “Mr. Cull has chosen,” he said grandly and with a note of derision, “to abstain.” He gave a little bow and pointed towards the mamateek with a flourish. “She is all yours, Mr. Peyton, sir.”

John Senior could smell it off the man, the juice of seared meat, the marshy odour of semen, the sharp palpable fear of the Indian women. He gave Miller a look and then turned away to busy himself with his pack.

“Which just goes to show,” Miller said angrily, “that marriage sucks all pleasure out of a man’s life. And don’t say I didn’t tell you so.”

They set each mamateek afire before they left. The two women had been brought out into the clearing and there was some talk of carrying them up to the coast but John Senior would have none of it. They left them sitting in each other’s arms in the savage light, their backs turned to the white men’s sullen but leisurely retreat.

Cassie had poured a drink for herself as John Senior told his story. He’d never seen her touch a drop in all her time in the house and it seemed a clear sign that everything he knew was about to change for good. He topped up his glass and refilled hers as well. They sat drinking in silence a while. He felt light-headed and reckless. All the time he was speaking he’d
waited for Cassie to stop him, to say she’d heard enough. But she had let him go until he finished. He’d never told this story to anyone, although different versions of it had been told by others in his presence. It surprised him how complete his rendition was, how little he ’d censored it in Cassie’s presence, as if he’d composed it in his head years ago and was merely waiting for this opportunity to recount it.

Cassie turned the glass of rum in her hand. She had several times stopped herself from speaking for fear of her voice breaking. She took a quick slug and through the grimace she said, “I had no idea.”

He made a dismissive motion with his hand and a moment later he reached to touch her forearm. Cassie sat back in the chair, pulling away from him, shaking her head.

“Mary told him about the other Red Indian being killed on the lake,” she said. “He knows.”

“Who knows?”

“Captain Buchan.”

John Senior said, “That little man.”

Cassie set her jaw. “Was it you who killed him, John Senior?” She was whispering through her teeth.

The old man looked across at her quickly and then covered his face with his hands.

She nodded. She got up and began stacking dishes to take them from the table.

John Senior pressed his eyes so hard he saw the white of stars behind the lids. There was a sullen insolence to the clatter she made, he thought, to the rough way she handled the plates and cutlery. Cassie reached across the table to take the plate sitting between his elbows. He crossed his arms in
front of himself and they stared at each other a moment. He saw in her face something of the same misery and derision that twisted his mother’s expression the morning she walked in on him cleaning the diaper in his father’s sickroom, her neck and cheek marked by the deep indentations of sleeping on a rough straw pillow. He wanted to tell Cassie how it was his mother’s hurt still alive in him that led to the invitation that brought her to the Bay of Exploits. He said, “You know why I come for you in St. John’s.”

Cassie shook her head angrily. “You don’t know anything about why I left. Why I’ve stayed here.”

John Senior stared. “What’s that now?” he said. He pictured Cassie as the young woman who stood before him in the house beside the tavern when he offered her a position on the northeast shore. That old unanswered question hanging in the air again:
His wife or his daughter?

He had never known what to make of the fact that Cassie and John Peyton hadn’t managed to hook, or who was to blame for it, though it was clear after enough time passed that it wasn’t to happen. And his own wanting had been kindled then, seeing her stand naked before him in a wash of sunlight in the kitchen of the summer house. He could still picture the stare she’d given him, bald and unequivocal, but he wasn’t able to settle whether it was meant as invitation or challenge. His uncertainty made him turn away from her and he never afterwards took it further than lying awake nights, having her in his mind. Even that he felt unaccountably ashamed of, wiping his thighs and belly clean with his shirt in the dark of his room, and he was unable to hold Cassie’s eye in the light of morning.
Daughter or wife?
Daughter. Wife.

The air went out of his lungs. He felt as if he had fallen from a height onto his back and was too stunned to move. “My gentle Jesus,” he whispered. “Your father didn’t, Cassie.”

“Of course he did,” she said. “Of course.”

It was contempt he heard in her voice. As if she was insulted to have to state something so obvious. She lifted the stack of dishes in her hands and walked away towards the pantry. Already making up her mind to leave, he could see.

“I been good to you,” he shouted after her.

At Reilly’s salmon weir the marines were laying about the sand beach which caught and held the surprising afternoon heat of the sun. Most of them had removed shoes and stockings and covered their faces with handkerchiefs. A cast-iron pot on an improvised crane steamed over a fire.

Buchan found Mary and Peyton in the company of Joseph Reilly and Annie Boss and their three youngest children outside the tilt. Peyton and Reilly were sitting on stumps, leaning forward on their knees and talking until they caught sight of the officer. Reilly stood as he came up to them. The two Indian women were seated on the ground with the children. Mary was more animated than Buchan had ever seen her. She coddled and teased and clicked her tongue as the boy and two girls
crawled across her lap.

Peyton said, “How was your visit with Mr. Richmond?”

“About what I expected.”

Peyton nodded and the men fell into talk about Reilly’s luck with the salmon this season and what the winter might have in store. Mary wandered off momentarily and returned with long strips of dry birchbark from wood cut and stacked near the tilt. As the white men talked she peeled the thin inner layer of bark from the sheet and folded it in half, then four, then eight. She spoke to the children in her native tongue, which they couldn’t understand, and she threw out an occasional phrase of English. “You wait,” she said as she pressed the bark between her teeth, turned and bit the bark, unfolded once and bit again. When she was done she held the bark at arm’s-length and lifted each fold slowly before the children who were completely still and silent. The men stopped speaking as well and turned to watch her. The opened sheet of bark showed the impression of a clearly detailed flower.

The children held their hands to their faces, the adults applauded. Mary folded another piece of bark and produced an image of a mamateek in the same fashion. Then a canoe, then a paddle. She seemed to have briefly forgotten her situation, lost in a child’s game she had practised a thousand times in her young life. A man wearing Indian rackets. A copse of trees.

Peyton said, “We’ve asked Annie to do what she can for the rattle on Mary’s stomach.”

The Mi’kmaq woman looked across at the officer. She rubbed her hands along the length of her thighs. “Got something
on to boil, keep it close to the skin when she sleep tonight.”