River Thieves (4 page)

“This is where we spend the winter. Come the spring, we move across to our place on Burnt Island. We’re after the cod from April or May. My son works out there with me.” He nodded towards Cassie who was moving about the table. “Cassie is with us. And there’s three or four hired men come out around the capelin scull to help with the busy times.”

They had long ago finished their meal and Buchan had given Corporal Bouthland a nod to take the marines off to the hired men’s quarters for the evening. “You have salmon rivers as well, Mr. Peyton?” he asked.

“My father come across with his partner one season before he died and I took on his share of the fishery afterwards. There was hardly a Christian in the Bay of Exploits in those days. Harry Miller and me weired up a new river every couple of years, set them up with hired men. A dozen and more rivers now between Gander and Badger bays. Plus the cod, and traplines through the backcountry come the snow.”

“Your son is working out here with you, did you say?” There had been no mention of a wife and Buchan kept clear of the subject.

John Senior nodded. “He’s off on a trapline. Third generation on the shore,” he said.

“The Peyton dynasty,” Buchan offered amiably.

“I wouldn’t want to overstate the case, sir. John Peyton have yet to marry, let alone sire a child. But a man has hopes.”

“You don’t winter-over in England?”

“Not since John Peyton came out from Poole, sir. It don’t appeal as it once did. I’m happier where I’m situated.”

“A livyere, then. You’ve gone native.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Buchan nodded. “This area,” he said. “The last bastion of the Red Indians, I understand.”

John Senior looked at the officer. To his mind, there was something of the dandy in his appearance, in the spotless spats over the polished half-boots, in the buffskin-coloured kid gloves tucked into his tunic. His prematurely greying hair was oiled back from the high forehead, his face was narrow, well proportioned. He was prettier than a man was intended to be, John Senior thought. “There’s enough Indians to warrant taking precautions,” he said.

Buchan nodded. “You have much dealing with them?”

He laughed, a single half-choked barking sound. “You could say I have had dealings with the Reds, yes. That lot have got the face of a robber’s horse.”

Buchan stared across at his host. “Pardon me?”

“They’re brazen, sir. They’ll make off with anything not stood over with a musket. They are a shameless lot of thieves altogether.”

Buchan said, “I came across some signs of them on the coast this past summer, but had no luck meeting with a soul.”

John Senior picked at the remnants of food on his plate.
Luck
, this man was thinking of. He wasn’t the first naval officer to come nosing around, asking questions about the Reds. “From what I hear talk of,” John Senior said, “you’re meant to be drawing maps of our coastline, is that right?”

Buchan smiled at him and nodded. He had made efforts towards mapping much of the northeast shore as they’d travelled through it. The tightly packed offshore islands were an impossible puzzle, they hid and mirrored and nearly overran one another. The granite coastline was so deeply abraded with harbours and bays his drawings resembled a ragged saw-blade. He thought of the countryside first as untidy and wild, then as something less than that, devoid of any suggestion of design, of intent. In the Bay of Exploits the only English habitations they’d encountered were half-hearted little clearings at the edge of forest, or a collection of flimsy outbuildings on promontories of bald stone. The fishermen lived in single-room tilts roofed with bark, as if the land was already in the process of reclaiming them. It was as if the country existed somewhere beyond the influence of human
industry, of human desire. He had moments when he thought a map was somehow beside the point.

“Mapping the coast is part of my undertaking,” Buchan said, “Word gets around, I see.”

“I think you’ll find it’s nigh impossible to hold any story close on the shore,” John Senior told him.

They stared at one another for a moment then, the silence between them for all the world like a struggle of some kind.

“I suspect then,” Buchan said, “you already have some notion of the expedition I am planning to undertake this winter. To the Red Indian’s lake.”

John Senior shrugged. “Corporal Bouthland made some mention of it. The Reds is not to be trusted,” he said. “Mind I didn’t warn you.”

Buchan leaned away from his plate and brushed at his breeches. “What I’m proposing, Mr. Peyton, is the only way to end the thieving and vandalism you complain of.”

“With respect, sir, it’s not the only way.”

“Yes well,” Buchan continued, “if I read you correctly, may I suggest that what I propose is the only humane way to end the thieving. Christian charity, Mr. Peyton —”

“You may read me any way you like,” John Senior interrupted. “The Red Indians are not like the Canadians. The Micmac are Christians of a sort and they’ll listen to reason if you mind to speak to them. Our lot haven’t got but a civil bone in their bodies and there’s no amount of charity will teach them any manners.”

John Senior lifted his empty tumbler and Cassie refilled it from the bottle provided by their guest, then proffered the rum across the table. The smell of salt beef and boiled greens
permeated the kitchen and made the heat of the fire feel close and stifling. Buchan was already feeling somewhat unpleasantly drunk. He shook his head almost imperceptibly and Cassie set the bottle down.

Buchan leaned forward and spoke into his folded hands. “I am well aware,” he said, “that those who have lived amongst the Red Indians have had to take extraordinary steps to protect themselves and their property.”

John Senior made a small disgusted sound in his throat. “What you are aware of amounts to a piece of dun fish. You didn’t have to bury what they’d left of Harry Miller belly down in the woods. Waited for him in the bush behind his tilt and pierced him in the back like a crowd of cowards. And then run off with his head.”

Buchan considered the man across the table. There was a passage from one of the letters the governor had passed to him at the London Tavern he recalled now.
Perhaps to expel Mr. Peyton from the Bay of Exploits
, Bland had written,
would be an essential point gained in the desired end.
He said, “There was an act of retribution, I assume.”

John Senior passed his empty plate to Cassie and she gathered up Buchan’s as well, carrying both to the pantry. “We had a right to spill some blood as I saw it,” John Senior said quietly, as if he was afraid of being overheard. “I mounted a party the following winter and we made our way up the river, swearing to kill big and small for the hurt they had done Harry Miller.” They’d walked in all hours of daylight and, when an early moon allowed it, in several hours of darkness besides. The ice was flat and clear and they made as good as twenty miles a day. They ate only hard tack and bits of boiled salt pork and seemed to subsist
on fury and talk of revenge. A day beyond the second waterfall on the river they came upon a camp of Beothuk nestled in a copse of trees and the men pulled up to load their weapons and shrug out of their packs.

Having come within hailing distance of the Indians, the mood among the men shifted suddenly to one of unease and uncertainty. “Some of the men overtopped their conscience and said they would not kill women and children,” John Senior explained. “And I could not argue with them on that point, so I says to the gang, ‘We’ll give them fair play.’” He was talking directly to the light of the candles on the table now, as if the officer wasn’t present. “We moved in at the ready then, prepared to take our pick of their materials if they run off. If they chose to stand, we swore to kill one and all and no quarter given.”

He told the officer how, at the first sight of them approaching, the occupants of the camp scattered to the woods. A few shots were fired to chase them off and they echoed back and forth across the river as the shouting of the Beothuk died away in the trees. They stood alone in the clearing then and looked at one another. A crow scolded them from a treetop. John Senior raised his rifle and fired at it and the bird sailed out above the river before circling back over the camp, then disappearing into the woods. They spent a night in one of the mamateeks with two men at a time on watch and in the morning they set fire to the shelters and left for the coast with all they could carry of furs on sledges and fresh caribou meat in their packs.

There was a silence in the room when John Senior finished speaking and Buchan sat back in his chair, sighing quietly. Without some concession from this man, he knew, nothing
would come of the governor’s undertaking. At the moment, it looked rather hopeless.

Cassie came back into the kitchen and he turned to look at her. It was odd that a woman of her age should have remained in service for so long and to be unmarried still. Her face was beginning to darken and line with weather and age, but there was a peculiar quality about it that he found compelling. Something of the whole was slightly off-centre, her nose or her close-lipped smile. She had one lazy eye that winked nearly shut as she went about her work. She had barely spoken a word all evening and it occurred to him suddenly that she might be an idiot. “Miss Jure,” he said, “I am curious as to your opinion on these matters.”

She said, “I have a position, Lieutenant. Not opinions.”

Buchan smiled up at her. “I see,” he said. The barely perceptible imbalance he saw in her face niggled at him and he turned away, scanning quickly around the room as if something else might come to his assistance. “Would you excuse us for a moment?” he asked her finally.

Cassie looked to John Senior and he nodded his head without taking his eyes from the lieutenant. “Gentlemen,” she said.

“I would like to apologize,” Buchan said. “Perhaps I have misrepresented my meaning. If you think I have come here this evening with a threat, you misunderstand me. It is true that things can no longer be done as they once were. There is a court established in St. John’s. The Red Indians are under the protection of the Crown,” he said.

John Senior turned his tumbler in his hands and took a generous mouthful of rum and held the slow burn of the liquor there for a moment before swallowing. He reached for the
bottle to refill his glass and without asking topped up Buchan’s glass as well.

“You and your men have been a law unto yourselves for many years, out of necessity perhaps. It is not my place at this time to judge. But I have become familiar with many of the depredations carried out by both sides in these conflicts and as a magistrate I am duty bound to bring them to Governor Duckworth’s attention.”

John Senior pushed slowly away from the table and crossed the room to stand with his backside towards the fire, as if he had suddenly caught a draught.

“The governor,” Buchan continued, “would look quite favourably upon those who are willing to assist in our endeavour, Mr. Peyton.” He removed Duckworth’s proclamation from his coat and shook it open on the table. “I know you have no interest in financial reward. But you may wish to know that, as well as the money, the governor has promised that any man who exerts himself towards the successful outcome of our project ‘shall be honourably mentioned to His Majesty and shall find such countenance from the governor and such further encouragement as it may be in his power to give.’” He looked up from the parchment and folded it carefully before returning it to his pocket. “May we count on you in this regard, Mr. Peyton?”

John Senior took the silver pocket watch from his waistcoat and opened it. He stared a while at the face without paying any attention to the time. He said, “I have my doubts about what good it’ll do us to trek into that lake in the middle of hard weather.”

“Leave the good or bad to me, Mr. Peyton. All I am asking is that you help me try.”

John Senior looked at his boots and nodded his head distractedly. He said, “I expect a word to the good with the governor.”

Buchan nearly smiled but thought better of it. “If a good word is ever necessary,” he said, “you shall have it.”

The two men carried on drinking through the evening. John Senior threw back shots of rum with the heartsick determination of a man trying to drown an animal he can no longer afford to feed. Buchan worked to keep up with him, as if everything he had accomplished that evening was tenuous and dependent on his ability to match the older man’s enormous capacity for alcohol.

He managed to make his way to bed without assistance and removed enough clothes to satisfy himself he wasn’t hopelessly drunk, but he fell into a stupor as soon as he lay on top of the sheets in the cold and didn’t stir until the gathering squall of nausea woke him. He stuttered downstairs as quietly as he could manage and pushed out the door into a gale of wind, running around the side of the building to vomit into the snow. He held his stomach and stamped his feet as the convulsions passed through him.

Cassie was kneeling beside the fireplace when he came back into the kitchen. She was stoking the small pyramid of coals that had been covered in ash and preserved beneath an overturned pot to start a new fire. The timid light moved across her features as she stared into it. She held a woollen shawl about her shoulders.

“I was hoping not to disturb anyone,” he said.

“I was lying awake anyway,” she lied. “You set yourself there —” she nodded towards the daybed with her chin. “I’ll get you a cup of something that’ll settle your guts.”

Buchan shook his head, the motion exaggerated and vehement. “I won’t have Mr. Peyton awake as well.”

“Naught but the Old Hag can shake John Senior out of the state he gets into when he’s sleeping. And we’d hear him over any racket we might be making, I can tell you. Sit,” she said. “It’ll only be a few minutes to boil the kettle.”

He sat on the narrow bed, holding a forearm across his stomach as if he’d been stabbed. “I’ve not been feeling well these last number of days.”

“There’s not many can keep up with John Senior on the bottle. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”