River Thieves (6 page)

Buchan uncrossed his legs and crossed them in the other direction. “I know what it is to lose a mother,” he said.

Cassie tipped her head side to side. “It didn’t seem real, honestly. The stories I read to her seemed more real than her dying.” She seemed embarrassed by this notion and went on quickly. “I was at a loss as to what to do afterwards. I thought of moving to Nova Scotia, I thought of America. But I hadn’t the means.”

“And John Senior arrived at this time? The white knight?”

“It doesn’t suit you to scoff,” Cassie said, but she managed a smile. She said, “He’d heard news of Mother’s death on his way through St. John’s in October. He offered to take me to the northeast shore to teach his son and keep house when he returned in the spring. He told me Harry Miller was five years dead. He said I could take the winter to consider the offer. But I’d already made up my mind. I packed Mother’s books into a trunk and had it carried to the postmaster’s above the harbour. Then I wrote to John Senior in Poole.”

“You’ve never returned to visit?”

Cassie shrugged. “I have my memories of my mother. The rest of the life I lived in St. John’s is not worth revisiting.”

“So,” Buchan said quietly, “is this a penance of some kind?” He motioned around the kitchen with his arm.

“A very Catholic sentiment, Lieutenant.” She smiled across at him again.

“Perhaps,” he agreed and nodded. “Perhaps I have spent too much time among the Irish.” It was her entire face, he decided. The lines from her temples to the tip of the chin. By the tiniest of margins they were asymmetrical. As if a traumatic birth had skewed the shape of her face and it had nearly but not quite recovered itself.

Cassie said, “I have everything here I want.” She said it slowly, and it seemed to Buchan she was warning him not to question or contradict her.

“Your books,” Buchan said, lifting one from the table. “Your poetry.”

She shrugged and looked away from him. “A good book will never disappoint you,” she said.

John Senior came through the door then, stamping snow from his boots, slapping at his sleeves. Cassie turned her head and let out a little breath of air, relieved to have the conversation interrupted. She rose from her chair and went to the pantry to fetch another mug.

Three times in the following six weeks Buchan visited John Senior’s house, outlining his plans and seeking the old man’s advice on every aspect of the expedition as if the planter was
his senior officer. He agreed to include more men in the expedition than he originally envisioned. He changed the departure date to ensure the river would be frozen sufficiently to allow sledges to pass safely and then again to wait for John Senior’s most experienced furriers to come in off the traplines to accompany the party.

Although salmon stations and traplines had moved further up the River Exploits each year, William Cull had been the first Englishman to trek as far into the interior as the Red Indian’s lake in forty years. “Only man on the shore near as long as me,” John Senior said. “Not a young pup, you can imagine. But he won’t cry crack till a job is done.” In late November, after the first furious storm of the season that kept them housebound for several days, John Senior and Buchan took dogs and sleds across to White Bay where he helped the officer recruit Cull to the expedition.

Fall in the backcountry had been fresh with early snow and the cold weather made the land animals a little more careless than they might otherwise have been. Peyton did well in his early take of marten and weasel and otter. But his beaver line was a disappointment. At the beginning of November he shifted his traps to a line of brooks and ponds running within two miles of
Reilly’s tilt on the River Exploits. Three weeks later, at the end of a round of fresh-tailing this line, he walked the extra distance to look in on Reilly and his wife, Annie Boss.

Reilly held the door wide to the cold, staring at him. He was a tall, stick-thin Irishman, with a narrow face that tapered like the blade of an axe. “Is it you?” he said. “Annie,” he shouted over his shoulder, “the little maneen has got himself lost now, what did I warn you?”

Peyton said, “Shut up, Reilly.”

Reilly stepped back from the door to let the younger man in out of the weather, slapping his back to welcome him in.

The two men hadn’t seen one another since the August haying on Charles Brook. For years Peyton and Cassie had travelled to Reilly’s station at the end of the summer to spend several days in the large meadows of wild grass on the hills behind Reilly’s tilt. It was there that Peyton first heard he would be running the trapline alone this season. He and Reilly were sitting on the newly shorn grass, sharing a heel of bread. Reilly pointed at him. There was a confusion of scars like an angry child’s drawing across the back of the hand he pointed with. He said, “John Senior talk to you about running the line this season?”

Peyton looked across at the Irishman. “He haven’t said anything to me different from other years.”

Reilly made a face. “Well I’m not meant to be saying anything about it maybe. But he’s not trapping, he tells me. You’re to have a go at it alone.”

“Since when did he say this?” He tried to keep the smile from his mouth, in case Reilly was simply making a joke.

“When he come over in June, checking the cure. I tried to talk him free of it is the truth. Sure you haven’t been but John
Senior’s kedger these years, you’ll be getting yourself lost back there.”

“Shut up Reilly.”

“What are you, twenty-six years old now? And haven’t skinned but a buck-toothed rat without your Da to hold your hand.” He was grinning at Peyton with just the tip of his tongue showing between his lips.

“Shut up,” Peyton said again. But he was too pleased at the thought of running his own line to feel honestly angry. “We’ll see who sets the most hats on the heads in London this winter,” he said.

“The little bedlamer with his own line,” Reilly had said then, shaking his head. “Next thing you’ll want to be getting married.”

Peyton carried a halo of frost into the Irishman’s tilt as he stepped inside, as if his frozen clothes were emanating their own cold light after hours in the outdoors. “Get that coat off you now,” Reilly said. “Close the door behind you.” Peyton was propped near the fire with a glass of rum where he presented his frustrations with the scarce take of beaver and explained his decision to move his line closer to Reilly’s own. Through the conversation the Irishman helped Annie prepare the food, nodding and asking questions and throwing out good-natured insults at every opportunity. Reilly’s constant teasing was a kind of flattery, as ritualized and intimate in its way as dancing. Unlike John Senior’s rough silence, which Peyton couldn’t help thinking of as an implicit condemnation of his abilities, his aptitude, his judgement. He felt vaguely guilty about his affection for Reilly, as if he was being unfaithful to his father somehow.

They sat to a huge meal of salt pork and potatoes and afterwards the two men filled their glasses and their pipes while Annie Boss cleared away the dishes. Annie and Joseph had been married eight years, but she was still known to everyone on the shore as Annie Boss. She spoke over her shoulder with Peyton as she worked and bantered with her husband in a mang of English and Mi’kmaq and Gaelic.

Annie’s belly, which barely showed when Peyton last saw her during the haying, was now quite obviously pregnant. “She’s improving, that one,” he said to Reilly.

Annie turned with both hands on her stomach. She said the child was no time too soon, her mother was starting to have doubts about her choice in a husband.

Reilly smiled at her, his ears rising half an inch on the sides of his head.

Later that evening, after Annie Boss had climbed into a bunk at the back of the tilt and the men had coddled several more glasses of rum, Peyton said, “Can I ask you a question, Joseph.”

“Suit yourself.”

Peyton paused a moment, rolling his glass between the flat of his palms. “What did you,” he said and then stopped. He took a sip of rum. “How did you ask Annie Boss to marry you?”

The Irishman laughed. “Well we’ve all wondered what’s been holding you up, John Peyton. Have your sights set on some lass finally, is it?”

Peyton stared into his glass. “Never mind,” he said.

“There’s not many on the shore to choose from. I bet I could strike the name before the third guess.”

“Never mind,” Peyton said again, angrily this time.

“Don’t mind my guff now,” Reilly said. He was surprised by Peyton’s seriousness. He leaned forward on his thighs. “It was Annie’s doing more than mine is the truth of it. If it had been left me, it might never have come to pass. She sent me off to a have a word with her father.”

“I suppose it was different with her.” He glanced across at Reilly, but the look on his face made Peyton drop his eyes quickly back to his lap.

“Her being Micmac, is what you mean?” When the younger man didn’t answer him, Reilly said, “She’s a good Christian woman, John Peyton.”

Peyton nodded. He lifted his glass to his mouth and drained it. He said, “Could I get another drop of rum, do you think?”

Reilly cleared the heat from his voice. “Who is this lass now?” he said.

Peyton got up from his seat to fetch the rum. “Never mind,” he said over his shoulder.

Reilly asked no more questions and did the favour of not even looking much at him, which Peyton was grateful for. They went on drinking a while longer until Reilly excused himself and climbed into bed as well. Peyton sat up in the dark then, nursing a last finger of rum, upset with himself to have been such a stupid twillick. What he’d intended to say about Annie was altogether different than what he garbled out. And he had never discussed marriage with a living soul before. He wished now he’d had the sense to leave it that way.

Peyton was sixteen the first time he laid eyes on Cassie, shortly after sailing through the Narrows of St. John’s harbour,
twenty-nine days out from Poole aboard the
John & Thomas.
A fine cold day after a night of heavy rain and the few ships anchored in the still water had raised their sails to dry. Running inland from the east side of the Narrows was Maggoty Cove, a rocky stretch of shoreline built over with wharves and stages, behind them the wide flakes used for drying cod. Each season wet fish fell through the lungers of the flakes and bred maggots on the ground. The dark, bottomless smell of rot rooting the clear sea air.

Peyton and his father made their way to a two-storey building on the east end of Upper Path, which housed the postmaster and the island’s first newspaper — a single sheeter folded to four pages that carried government proclamations, mercantile ads, parliamentary proceedings, local news, a poet’s corner on the back page. A small harried-looking man with a New England accent came forward from a cluttered desk at the back of the room to greet them. The two men exchanged a few words and John Senior handed across a large leather satchel of mail he’d carried up from the ship, then produced a letter from his own pocket.

The postmaster nodded as he scanned the page. “Got the trunk for you along this way,” he said, jerking his head repeatedly to indicate the direction they should follow.

The trunk was large enough to sleep an adult fairly comfortably. Peyton took one end and his father the other. Even John Senior showed the strain of the weight. They huffed it out the door where a crowd had already gathered for the calling of the mail. At the waterfront the trunk was rowed out to the
Jennifer
, a coaster scheduled to leave for Fogo Island in two days’ time.

“What’s aboard of her?” Peyton asked, watching it being lifted awkwardly over the ship’s gunnel. He was soaked in sweat from hauling the weight of it. He took his cap from his head and wiped a forearm across his face.

John Senior shrugged. “Mostly books, I expect.”

When they boarded the
Jennifer
two days later, Peyton spotted the trunk set against the back wall of the fo’c’sle. There was a woman seated on the lid in the light drizzle of rain. She wore a dark hat and a long cloak of Bedford cord that showed only black worsted stockings below the knees.

She stood when they approached her and she extended her gloved hand to John Senior. “Master Peyton,” she said. Her face was misted with rain, tiny beads clinging to the long lashes of her eyes. Light brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, a small, full mouth. There was a suggestion of misproportion about the features that Peyton couldn’t assign to anything particular. He had no idea who the woman was or why she exhibited such a proprietary attitude towards the trunk they’d sent aboard the ship. She seemed to be dressed in a manner meant to bolster a questionable claim to adulthood.

John Senior said, “This is the young one you’ll be watching out for. John Peyton,” he said. “Miss Cassandra Jure.”

She reached out to shake his hand, bending only slightly, but enough to make him draw up to his full five feet five inches. “Are you a reader, John Peyton?” she asked, still holding his bare hand.

He was about to say he was and stopped himself. It occurred to him she was asking something other than whether he knew
how
to read. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Well,” she said. She seemed to wink at him then, giving her words a conspiratorial air. “We’ll soon find out.”

Through that first summer Peyton worked with his father hand-lining for cod morning and afternoon, and in the early evenings while John Senior cleaned and salted the fish with two hired hands in the cutting room, he did sums at the kitchen table or read to Cassie from
The Canterbury Tales
or Pope’s translation of the
Odyssey.
He decided early on that he was not, in fact, a reader. It was something he could easily have given up if he didn’t think it would upset Cassie, to whom it seemed to mean so much that he become one. They struggled through Blake’s
Songs of Innocence
and
Songs of Experience
, Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady.
They read
Paradise Lost.

She saw much in the poems and stories that he did not. She was sometimes cryptic and high-minded in a way he found off-putting. She could wander into flights of speculation beyond his interest or understanding, and this was usually the case when he was too tired to know what he was reading, the words on the page like beads on a string that he shifted from one side to another.