River Thieves (7 page)

“What does that mean?” Cassie would ask then. “
To justify the ways of God to man.
What is Milton saying?”

Peyton’s eyes were bleary with exhaustion. He had been on the water since five that morning. He did not know what it meant. He stared at her in the hope she would pity him enough to explain it.

“A story is never told for its own sake,” she said. “True or false?”

“True,” he said. “False,” he added quickly.

Cassie sighed and worked her fingers in her lap.

He stared at her. He was the only person in the world she had to talk to about poems, to discuss her peculiar notions about stories. It was a disappointment to them both that he thought of her books as a discomfort, like being forced to walk in shoes full of gravel. She seemed so peculiarly out of place in their house, so lost. Almost as long as he’d known her, Peyton wanted to make that otherwise.

He’d kept his marital aspirations close for years, telling himself he had little to offer yet as a husband. Running his own trapline was a first step towards a station from which he felt he might legitimately declare his intentions, and the thought of this, along with the alcohol, had made him reckless in Reilly’s company.

He stepped outside to relieve himself a final time before he went to his own bunk, pissing into a snowbank at the edge of the trees. He said, “
Take note, take note, O world, To be direct and honest is not safe.”
Where was that from again? He lifted his head to stare up at the sky as he shook himself. Stars winking through the moving branches of trees like flankers rising from a distant fire. He was drunker than he realized. He raised his head a notch higher and fell over backwards into the snow, his cock still in his hand.

The morning John Senior and the officer left for White Bay, Cassie pulled a pair of John Senior’s leather trousers on beneath her skirt, turning the cuffs up at the bottom for length, and buttoned a sheepskin waistcoat over her bodice. She closed the animals up in their shed with a week’s supply
of hay and packed herself a bag with provision enough for two days’ travel. It was late November and there had been a steady week of snow. She followed the shoreline towards the headwaters of the river until she was in sight of Peter’s Arm. Joseph Reilly’s trapping tilt was at least five miles more up the Exploits from what she had gathered listening to the men talk among themselves. She decided to make her way to the river through the woods so as not to pass through Ship Cove.

Cassie started into the forest bearing southeast and the large Indian rackets she wore sank a foot into the loose powder with every step forward, coming away with a weight of snow like a shovel. It was heavy work and out of the wind the day was surprisingly warm. She removed her gloves and opened the heavy overcoat to the air and then unbuttoned the waistcoat as well.

Before dark she tramped a piece of ground firm and took off the rackets and sat on her overcoat against a tree. She had no clear notion of how much further a walk was ahead of her. Her right leg ached. She ate a cold meal of blood sausage and bread and closed her eyes long enough to feel the weather begin to steal into her body.

When she pushed herself up to start moving again the pain in her leg throbbed in time to her pulse. It seemed strangely appropriate to feel her heart swelling the hurt that way.

It was a clear night and the constellations watched her through the branches of the trees as she travelled and where she came upon a clearing she stopped to take her bearings by the stars. When she came out of the woods it was near dawn. The River Exploits still ran open but there were runners of ice along the banks. Cassie took off the Indian rackets and strapped them to her pack and headed south, keeping as
close to the shoreline as she could, watching all the while for signs of Reilly’s traplines or his shelter or rising smoke.

His tilt was built in the bush on the north side of a narrow stretch of river. His dog caught sight or sound of her as she approached and Reilly and his wife came out of the tiny shack to see what had raised the barking. Reilly carried a rifle, thinking it might be a wolf or a bear. Annie Boss was wiping her dark hands in the skirt of her rough calico dress. She whistled for the dog and kicked awkwardly at his shoulders when he refused to quiet down.

Reilly walked down to meet her and shook her hand. Cassie had not until that moment considered what she would say to these people and stood with her mouth open while Reilly smiled at her. He was sure she came with news but was in no rush to hear it.

“Come up,” he said, “the kettle is on. We haven’t had this much company in all my days on the river.”

“Company?” she said.

“Sure the Thames doesn’t see as much traffic in a week,” he said and motioned up the clearing towards the tilt.

Cassie looked up to where he pointed. John Peyton stood in the tiny doorway in his shirtsleeves, watching her come up the bank.

Annie Boss was born and baptized on Cape Breton Island but she’d moved with her parents to Newfoundland at such a young age that she thought of no other place as home. When she was a child, her family spent winters in the country near White Bay where her father and brother trapped marten,
beaver and fox, and each spring they migrated down to St. George’s Bay on the west coast for the summer. Her mother was born the seventh of seven daughters,
a puowin
, with a rare gift for healing. Annie accompanied her when she was called to deliver a child or nurse an injury or comfort the dying. She inherited her mother’s knowledge of roots and herbs and the position of a child’s head in the womb that distinguished a boy from a girl in the same unconscious and predictable way she had taken on her gestures, her habit of hiding her eyes with her hand when she laughed, the way she rubbed the length of her thighs while considering a thorny medical problem.

By the time she married Reilly, Annie had seen all manner of births and their complications and most every form of human injury imaginable. She knew something of how people carried themselves when they had a wound to nurse or hide. And watching Cassie Jure walk up the bank to their tilt, she’d seen something in the woman’s gait beyond her customary limp that made her watchful and wary. She stood at the fireplace tending a pan of capelin and leftover brewis but she was eyeing Cassie where she sat with the men. Only something calamitous could have occasioned her visit up the river, but she drank her tea calmly while they discussed the number of animals on the trapline this year and how much snow was down compared to last winter.

Peyton inquired after his father’s health, as casually as he could manage. Cassie spoke briefly of Lieutenant Buchan’s visit and John Senior’s agreeing to assist in the expedition he had planned. She said he had taken the officer across to White Bay to meet with William Cull.

“That’s a queer turn of events,” Reilly said quietly.

Peyton hid his relief that Cassie hadn’t come with bad news of his father by nodding into his mug and wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

Reilly turned to his wife and asked after the food and she waved her hand to shush him up. “Fire don’t work no faster ’cause you hungry, Joe Jep,” she told him. “Missa Jure not going to starve this minute now, are you, Missa Jure?”

Cassie looked across at her and shook her head no.

When they’d eaten their breakfast and dawdled over more tea and gossip, Annie shooed the men outside and they dressed themselves and packed food for the day. Peyton looked to Cassie while Reilly checked the works of a trap-bed on his lap but she refused to acknowledge him. The men left the shack after guessing they’d be by again around dark and Cassie started in to clear away the dishes. “You walking all night,” Annie said, “you got to rest now.” But Cassie refused to sit and they worked in silence until they were done. Afterwards Annie boiled the kettle to make more tea and then sat across from Cassie with her legs spread to accommodate the size of her belly. “Must be more than one in there,” she said and she laughed and wiped her eyes with the palm of her hand. She said, “Annie Boss not so good at reading your mind, Missa Jure.”

Cassie looked towards the one tiny window.

Annie set her mug down and rubbed her hands back and forth along the length of her thighs.

Cassie said, “You’re the only person I could ask this of, Annie.”

Annie would not make eye contact with her. “Whose baby you got there?”

“Nobody’s,” she said. “It’s not going to be anyone’s baby.”

Annie nodded. “Make you real sick, Missa Jure, guarantee. Some women up and die with the sick.”

The white woman folded her arms and tightened them around herself. Her jaw was set awkwardly askew as if she was gnawing on the inside of her mouth.

“Missa Jure.”

“I know what I want,” she said.

“Maybe nothing happen but you get ill,” Annie said. “You sick and still got that problem.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

Annie nodded to herself and let out a long breath of air. “God decide, not you, not me. Okay?” She crossed herself and got up to gather maidenhair and bog myrtle and skunk currant from the dried bouquets hung from the rafters above the fireplace, talking aloud all the while in her own language as if to someone else in the room.

Cassie said, “Thank you, Annie.”

Annie turned towards her, waving her hands in front of her face. “No,” she said. “Don’t want to hear it.” She pointed a finger. “Whatever happen, I got to live with too.”

Cassie raised her hand, about to argue, and then thought better of it. She placed her hand back in her lap and simply nodded.

By early afternoon Cassie had begun vomiting and between spells of throwing up she lay on the single bed in the room and held her stomach and keened. The cramps knifed at her stomach and crawled up her spine to her shoulders. Her head throbbed with fever. The dry heaves she fell into were so violent that a
blood vessel in her right eye had burst and the dark look she turned on Annie was so forlorn and foreboding that the Mi’kmaq woman crossed herself repeatedly.

There were no resident doctors or clergy on the northeast shore of Newfoundland before the turn of the century and Annie’s mother was called to the homes of the French and English settlers as often as those of her own people. At the age of thirteen Annie was sent alone to attend a birth while her mother nursed a boy who had fallen on a fish fork and punctured his abdomen. The pregnant woman’s husband had rowed two hours down White Bay to their tilt and Annie’s brother walked him an hour more through bush in the dark to the home of the injured boy. He was a tall rickety Englishman of no more than twenty-five with a pinched look of worry and he pleaded with Annie’s mother to attend his wife who was in distress when he set out three hours before and might be dead by now for all that he knew. But the boy was bleeding and running a fever so high that Annie’s mother was afraid it would kill him. She conferred with Annie quietly and sent her away with the Englishman and he walked Annie back to his boat in a stunned and furious silence. She sat in the stern facing him as he rowed and he watched her carefully in the sparse moonlight. He asked her age and then pulled at the oars so fiercely Annie could see the veins and muscles in his neck straining like anchor chains in a tide.

The pregnant woman was lying in a bunk along the back wall when they came into the one-room shack. Annie told the husband to light a fire and boil as much water as the pot would hold and then she knelt beside the woman. “You keep breathing now,” she said, and she used the curt, belligerent tone
she’d heard her mother use around whites who were ashamed to be so naked in front of Indian women and to need something from them besides. She put her hand between the woman’s legs and felt for the baby’s head and asked about the pain and how long it lasted. The husband clanked the pot on the crane and hovered nervously and asked Annie and his wife useless questions until Annie told him to wait outside and leave them to their business.

In an hour the baby was ready and Annie had the woman squat in a corner where the walls gave her some support. She had ripped a bedsheet into towels and boiled them and had a pot of fresh hot water at her side. It was just the end of April but they had struck a solid week of unusually fine weather and the tiny shack was stifling from the heat of the fire. “You got to push when I tell you to push now,” she said and the woman nodded and sucked air through her clenched teeth. “Nothing to be scared of but the hurt,” Annie said, and when the contractions shook the woman’s body again she yelled at her to bear down. The husband shouted through the door as if he thought Annie was doing something to inflict her pain. After the contraction subsided the Englishwoman lifted her chin to take air into her lungs and to tell him things were bad enough without him losing his head and they heard nothing more from him until they were through. Annie wiped the sheen of sweat from her face with a hot cloth and the woman managed a crooked smile until the next contraction ripped through her.

Three days later the Englishman came down the bay to their tilt with a small cask of pickled herring and a kid on a rope. He stooped under the low ceiling of the front room and hemmed his awkward and formal thanks to Annie, who was
too embarrassed to look at him. He proffered the barrel of fish and motioned outside to where the goat was tethered.

“You leave the barrel,” her mother told him, “but take the animal back home. Annie too young to expect all that, she just a child herself.”

The boy her mother stayed to care for was dead by the time Annie returned from delivering her first baby. Birth and death. She could never afterwards think of them as separate things. She saw them both now in the woman she was nursing, Cassie moaning helplessly on the bunk, her arms wrapped tight around her womb. Hours ahead of her and worse still to come, Annie knew. She cleaned the slop bucket and wiped Cassie’s forehead and forced her to drink warm water so she would have something in her stomach to throw up.

When Peyton and Reilly returned at dusk, Cassie was bleeding heavily and Annie refused to let the men enter the tilt. She stepped outside the door and told them they would have to set up a camp for the night and refused to answer any of Peyton’s questions. She spoke a few words in her own tongue to Reilly and the Irishman took Peyton by the arm and they turned away from the tilt. He looked up towards the sky for a moment and said, “Coarse night,” and it was clear to Peyton he wasn’t referring to the weather. They found a freshly killed rabbit in one of Reilly’s slips on their way towards the river. Reilly skinned and cleaned the animal while Peyton laid the fire. They roasted it on a length of alder, the dark flesh turning black in the heat.