River Thieves (2 page)

“O unseen shame, invisible disgrace!”
Cassie said. She was still staring into the pan of capelin. “
O unfelt sore, crest-wounding, private scar!”

Some nonsense from her books. “Don’t be speaking high-learned to me this time of the day,” he said.

She smiled across at him.

He said, “You don’t know no more than me, do you.”

“It’s just the Old Hag, John Peyton. Some things don’t bear investigating.” She turned from the fire with the pan of capelin, carrying it across to the table. She shouted up at the ceiling for John Senior to come down to his breakfast.

By the second hour of daylight, Peyton was packing the last of his provisions on the sledge outside the winter house while John Senior set about harnessing the dog. He was going to travel with Peyton as far as Ship Cove, a full day’s walk into the mouth of the river, but both men were already uncomfortable with the thought of parting company. They were careful not to be caught looking at one another, kept their attention on the details of the job at hand. Peyton stole quick glimpses of his father as he worked over the dog. He was past sixty and grey-haired but there was an air of lumbering vitality to the man, a deliberate granite stubbornness. Lines across the forehead like
runnels in a dry riverbed. The closely shaven face looked hard enough to stop an axe. Peyton had heard stories enough from other men on the shore to think his father had earned that look. It made him afraid for himself to dwell on what it was that shook John Senior out of sleep, set him screaming into the dark.

His father said, “Mind you keep your powder dry.”

“All right,” Peyton said.

“Joseph Reilly’s tilt is three or four miles south of your lines.”

“I know where Joseph Reilly is.”

“You run into trouble, you look in on him.”

“All right,” he said again. There was still a sharp ache in his head, but it was spare and focused, like a single strand of heated wire running from one temple to the other. It added to the sense of urgency and purpose he felt. He’d come across to Newfoundland ten years before to learn the trades and to run the family enterprise when John Senior was ready to relinquish it. His father electing not to work the trapline this year was the first dim indication of an impending retirement. Peyton said, “I won’t be coming out over Christmas.”

John Senior had set the dog on her side in the snow and was carefully examining her paws. “January then,” he said, without raising his head.

Peyton nodded.

His father took a silver pocket watch from the folds of his greatcoat. He was working in the open air with bare hands and his fingers were bright with blood in the morning chill. “Half eight,” he said. “You’d best say your goodbyes to Cassie. And don’t tarry.”

The floor of the kitchen was strewn with damp sand and Cassie was on her knees, scrubbing the boards with a long, hard brush. She had tied her dress in a knot about her thighs. She sat back on her heels when he came in and looked up at him where he stood in the doorway.

Peyton’s mouth was dry and his breath stuttered in shallow gasps. The strength of his emotion surprised him. He’d been concealing his feelings for so long he managed to underestimate them himself, and they surfaced so sharply now his chest hurt. He coughed into his fist to try to clear the unexpected tightness. “We’ll be off,” he said. He thought Cassie might be able to hear his heart drumming under the layers of his clothing and he folded his arms firmly across his chest.

She raised a forearm to wipe her forehead and cheeks, the brush still in her hand. She said, “Mind yourself out there, John Peyton.”

“Don’t worry your head,” he said and he looked down at his boots, disappointed. Even her most soothing, affectionate words had an edge to them, as if she was trying to hold down another’s panic. She was like a person leading a skittish horse that could bolt at the least provocation. Something dogged and steady in her, like a hand gripping the bit.

It occurred to him Cassie might not even stand to see him off and the thought of this made the months in the woods ahead of him suddenly repellent. She had always been oddly disposed to him, her manner a mixture of aloofness and concern. As if she was waiting for him to prove himself somehow. She was six full years his senior. For the first two years they knew one another she was taller than Peyton, and for several more after he finally surpassed her in height she remained,
officially, his tutor. It was taking much longer than he hoped to overcome the distance those things had set between them. His one comfort was the distance she maintained between herself and everyone else around her. There were few women on the northeast shore and every year Cassie received proposals from men who could not spell their own names, who had lived by themselves all their adult lives and spent no more than an hour alone in the company of women since leaving their mothers. It was clear in Peyton’s mind that Cassie was saving herself for something that promised more than these men could offer.

The dog barked outside, harnessed and anxious to set out.

“I should make a start,” Peyton said, already moving through the door.

Cassie dropped the brush then and he turned back to see her get to her feet and unknot the dress, the layers falling around her stockings. “Hold on,” she said. She went out through the hallway to her room off the kitchen and came back with six candles tied up in a strip of paper.

Peyton lifted the candles to his face to smell the beeswax. Cassie made them herself and used them to read by in the evenings. The wax threw a cleaner light, she said, and lasted hours longer than tallow. John Senior thought it was a ridiculous undertaking and even Peyton felt the labour involved in collecting the wax and turning the candles was out of all order with the rewards. He had been brought up to think of reading as a leisure activity, but it was clear that in Cassie’s mind it was something else altogether. She read and reread Goldsmith and Fielding and Milton, fat novels by Fanny Burney all named for the main character:
Camilla
and
Cecelia
and
Evelina.
She knew many of Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart and sometimes had Peyton listen
as she quoted a few lines aloud. He wanted to acknowledge her enthusiasm, to share in it with her, but the most he could offer in response was to say, “That’s pretty, I guess.” She shook her head. “You’re hopeless, John Peyton,” she told him. And there was an admission of helplessness in the statement that he was sorry to continually drag her back to.

He held the candles out to her. They were an extravagant gift and would be wasted on him. “I never packed any reading,” he said.

Cassie smiled at him and shrugged. She said, “The light is good for close work, if you’re mending your rackets or sewing a rent in your clothes.”

Peyton nodded. A quiver nearly buckled his legs. His feet felt heavy, as if he had just overtopped his boots in water. He looked at her steady and said, “You look after John Senior while I’m away.”

Cassie turned away from him, retying her dress around her thighs. “I always do,” she said. She knelt on the floor, leaning all her weight on the brush to scrub at the boards as he pulled the door closed behind him.

Cassie stood at the window to watch the two men move down to the landwash and away along the water. She followed their progress until they disappeared around the line of the beach and then turned back to scrubbing the kitchen floor. The boards were already spotless, but there was a knot of anxiety she was working against with the weight of her torso on the brush, the motion of her arms repeated and repeated until they burned. Sand grating against the bare grain of the wood.

She thought of John Peyton in the doorway, watching her. The naked emotion on his face that made her pity him and wish him away. He was a man who always and only wanted the best for everyone around him, which in Cassie’s mind meant he was fated to be disappointed. And likely to hurt a share of the people he cared for besides. It was a mistake to have given him the candles, she knew, there was that to worry about. And there were the weeks ahead of her, alone with John Senior.

Cassie was accustomed to having two months and more on her own in the winter house during the trapping season, the darkest time of the year. By December there were barely seven hours of light to the day to see her through the chores about the property, feeding the animals not slaughtered for meat in the fall and cleaning their stalls, carrying in her supply of wood, fetching water. Long evenings of pitch black outside the circle of her reading light and the fire tormented by wind in the chimney. Not a soul on the shore within a day’s hard travel. It was something she anticipated with equal measures of exhilaration and dread, the loneliness of relying on no one but herself.

When she first heard John Senior wouldn’t be trapping this year she was relieved at the thought of having his company through the winter, but now the idea distressed her. As if she was being cheated somehow.

After she had scrubbed every inch of the floor she swept it clear of sand. She packed bread and cheese into a pouch and collected a pair of Indian rackets, a rifle, powder horn and shot. She pulled on a heavy overcoat and followed the track of the sled down to the landwash. She turned in the direction opposite the one taken by the men, walking along the beach a
mile and a half, then following a brook inland to where the country opened into a clearing of bogland studded with clusters of bare alder. There was plenty of snow down to cover the ground, but it wasn’t cold enough yet to have frozen the hidden pockets of bog-water solid and Cassie skirted the clearing, keeping close to the treeline to avoid stumbling into them.

Half an hour into the bush she came upon the tracks of partridge in the snow, the distinct prints overlapping in wide arcs, as if the birds were incapable of walking in a straight line. She took off her heavy leather mittens and moved slowly forward with the rifle at the ready. The birds would have moulted their summer camouflage for the coat of white feathers that made them nearly invisible against the snow. It was movement she looked for, white against the dark background of spruce, white in motion on a field of white.

She came upon a cluster of three or four ahead of her. She aimed just above them, the birds bursting off the snow when the gun fired, a dull explosion of down in the blue air. One of the partridge fell back to the ground gracelessly, like a bag of sand, then scrambled into the undergrowth trailing a useless wing and a string of feathers spotted with blood. Cassie removed her rackets and laid aside the bag of food and the powder horn to push her way into the spruce. The bush was thick and heavy going, the ground under the canopy of branches almost bare of snow. When she came upon the partridge it was lying at the base of a tree, as if it had run blindly into the trunk and dropped there unconscious.

There was always a pinch of sympathy she had to set her teeth against, seeing the creature this close. She took a breath through her nostrils and reached for the bird, but it jumped
again, thrashing wildly under the branches. Cassie fell backwards, then struck at the partridge with the rifle butt until it lay still. She placed a boot on the bird’s broken wing to hold it against the ground and then twisted the neck backwards.

She laid a fire just above the beach, in a washed-out alcove of peat and tree roots that kept her clear of the wind. The sun was warm enough that she could take off her coat. She plucked the bird clean and singed off the pin feathers in the fire, then gutted the naked carcass and propped it over the coals on a stick.

When she was left on her own during the winter, she came down to this spot once or twice a month to hunt or just to sit by a fire for an afternoon. There was something stripped and pitiless about the land that she envied. The wind in the spruce trees, the surf muttering on the beach were hypnotic, so empty of meaning they could be mistaken for silence. A scatter of islands teetering on the ocean’s horizon. The sea a blue just this side of darkness, the colour of the sky when the first evening star appears. Out of sight of the winter house she could imagine the entire coastline was uninhabited but for her, and she found some comfort in that notion.

She reached for that feeling now, but couldn’t move past the anxiety she’d been trying to ignore since starting out. She turned away from it and away from it, like the partridge moving in wide overlapping arcs, and each time came back to that sullen heaviness. She leaned closer to the heat and turned the bird on its stick. Fat dripped into the fire, the smell of it darkening the air like a bruise.

All that day, the two men travelled along the bank of the River Exploits without speaking of more than the conditions of the
snow or the temperature. Peyton stood to the back of the sled and worked it over bald patches of rock, holding it upright over angled layers of beach ice. He was happy for the physical labour of it, the steady immersion into fatigue that released some of the tension in his body, but it wasn’t enough to keep him from going over his conversation with Cassie in his head. The candles like an afterthought or was she playing her feelings as close as he was? The light good for needlework and whether that meant anything like he hoped. How quickly she turned away then and her saying, “I always do,” when he spoke of his father. It seemed to Peyton there was a note almost of defiance in her voice as she said it.

John Senior stayed beside the bitch most of the day, using a hand in the harness to help haul or steady the animal when needed. Where the path or stretch of beach was too narrow to allow them to walk abreast, he travelled ahead and the dog adjusted her pace to keep close to his heels. She nearly bowled him over as they came into sight of Ship Cove, John Senior stopping suddenly in the dusk of late afternoon. The dog sat on her haunches behind him and whined.

Peyton said, “What is it, now?”

John Senior pointed with his mittened hand. “There she is,” he said.

The HMS
Adonis
was a bulk of shadow in the distance. They couldn’t see the chains about her waist that secured the vessel to the shoreline, but it was clear the sails and all the rigging had been taken down for the winter, the bare masts rising over the ship like a row of crucifixes atop the spires of a church.