The Tinsmith (39 page)

As the skiff glided the last few feet to the wharf, Dare stood, still as tall and lean as Anson remembered. Sweat glistened on his sunburned forearms. He wore a white cotton shirt, the thick sleeves pushed up, crushed like the petals of great flowers around his biceps. A wiry, grey-flecked tangle of beard hid most of the lower half of his face but focused attention on the eyes. They seemed even larger than Anson remembered, darker and worn, as if two mixed handfuls of river and blood were continually breaking apart and being replaced. Except, Dare's face also possessed a curious repose. Anson sickened at the contrast; it spoke too clearly of grave-grass pushing through the bars of a cradle.

He had expected the years to alter his friend's appearance. The deep lines on the brow, the grey flecks in the grizzle; these were predictable enough, almost comforting in the way they bound the man to his kind. But the alarming condition of the eyes! It seemed that at any second they'd break apart and no amount of river or blood could be gathered to return them to sight.

Anson's relief that the gunshots had not deprived him of their reunion quickly evaporated. At the edge of the wharf, a groan made him look away before speaking, down into the skiff. Thomas Lansdowne lay stretched along the thwart. His shirt was ripped open at the chest, and a chunk of the fabric served as a tourniquet around his upper right arm. He was conscious and moaning, but his eyes flickered constantly and his face was pale. Thin shafts of light cut across his body. Already a cloud of mosquitoes had begun to drip onto his exposed skin.

Anson locked eyes with Dare and all the finer distinctions between past and present dissolved into one long, continuous moment.

“John?”

Dare didn't smile. This close to him, Anson could see the deep lines etched into his sunburned face and the tightness of the skin pulled over the cheekbones. The eyes, however, possessed some spirit yet.

“He's lost a lot of blood. I got him here as fast as I could.”

“Leave him there. I'll come down.”

Anson lowered himself into the skiff and quickly studied the wound. It was a large spatter but clean, and no vital area seemed compromised. Unfortunately there was no obvious spot where the lead had exited the body. Even so, the situation was not hopeless. At Antietam and for years afterwards, the arm would have had to come off below the shoulder, but now, with the proper attention, things might go better, though there was always a risk that the wound might prove fatal. So much depended on the degree of the fracture and, of course, on the patient's strength. Thomas Lansdowne, Anson reflected grimly, had been in a weakened, worn-down condition of late.

The Englishman moaned. His blue eyes opened for a few seconds, glassy, apparently unseeing. Anson was sorry he did not have anything to give him for the pain.

“I'll send for some whisky,” Dare said with unnerving prescience, then, without using his fingers, he emitted a high, piercing whistle.

The sound startled the hovering gulls and set off an even wilder chorus of shrieks.

Meanwhile, the plashing of other oars sounded nearby. Soon the tiny, still scene of Antietam, like something captured in a daguerre­otype, would be invaded. Anson felt a rush of disappointment that he and Dare would not be given time for a reflective reunion, that they would have no immediate opportunity for a detailed talk. And yet, somehow the fact did not surprise him, was almost a natural extension of the haste and suffering they had known on the battlefield so long ago.

But Dare's face showed no sign that he, too, was disappointed. It flared, as always, with an attendance on the welfare of others.

“I brought him here because I knew you'd be here,” he said.

Anson nodded as he stood. “Yes. I've had some experience with gunshot wounds.”

Dare didn't appear to notice the irony. He clenched and unclenched his huge hands, which hung fish-scaled and brinish at his sides, and slowly turned his head in all directions. When the elderly Chinese, thin as a heron's leg, drifted over the wharf, Dare instructed him to bring some whisky. The Chinese drifted away.

“I'll carry him to the house.” Dare stepped toward the wounded man.

Anson gently touched Dare's elbow. “I left my bag at Chilukthan. We'll have to go there.”

Dare's eyes turned downriver but not his head. His corneas were as blood-streaked as Thomas Lansdowne's arm.

“I'm not welcome there,” he said.

“That much I know. But I'm not asking you to come to the house, just to the wharf. Besides, the circumstances . . .”

Dare turned to face the incoming skiffs. When he turned back, his face was blank.

“He's already killed one of my Indians.”

“Killed? Who?”

“The bullet was meant for me.”

The last daylight trembled on the water. Only a bent sabre of red showed in the west. The seagulls began to fly inland, silently, in a loose formation. Anson shivered. If Thomas Lansdowne died or even lost his arm . . . Suddenly Anson realized why his old friend would be especially unwelcome at Chilukthan now.

“It wasn't your shot?”

“My shot?” Dare spoke with the same uninflected tone he'd used at the height of battle, as if matter-of-factness was the only sane way to face what couldn't be faced. “Not first. Not even second.”

Anson searched Dare's eyes for the truth; it was like seeing a long way down a country road at dusk—there was a great calm but also the pressure of darkness coming in, a sense of things disappearing that might not return at dawn. Anson didn't need to ask what had happened—Thomas Lansdowne had shot the Indian by mistake, had shot again, and would have kept shooting unless someone had stopped him. But for Dare, the first shot had done the damage. His presence on the river almost certainly wouldn't be abided after such violence, especially given the knowledge of his blood.

The elderly Chinese returned with the whisky and a blazing oil lamp. Its frayed glow, lowered into the skiff, cast the scene in sharp relief. Thomas Lansdowne was very white, trembling the whole length of his body. Anson looked up from him and down into the first of the other skiffs as it glided past. The dead Indian—a man of early middle age—lay on his back, his face a pulpy mess half blown away. The silent, implacable manner of the woman at the oars—husband and wife usually fished together—was somehow more disturbing than screams. A dozen silver salmon lay beside the body like an offering. Anson watched the fish slip out of the oil light's glow before he took the whisky bottle and knelt to the wounded man again. He managed to pour a little liquid between the trembling lips, then a little more. This close, he couldn't help but note the resemblance between father and daughter: the strong nose and brow, the distance between the eyes, and, more than anything, the proximity to death.

“Quickly, John,” he said.

In minutes they had left the slough mouth and joined the current of the main channel. With the tide not against him, Dare pulled the skiff along at a tremendous pace. His breathing was level but oddly rasping. The powerful muscles in his neck and arms moved rhythmically. Anson, seated beside the wounded man, keeping firm pressure on the wound, took a slug of whisky for himself, then gazed upward. There was no moon, but the stars had begun to emerge in the blue-black, most of them as faint as scales on wood.

A heron rose off the bank with a loud squawk and winged slowly away, as if dragging the slabs for two graves through the air. The smell of the river suggested the same final heaviness. With a chill, Anson recalled the gravediggers working the bloody Antietam ground after the sudden, heavy rain. Then he saw the corpse again, vivid, gore-spattered. Thomas Lansdowne floated away into the soft edges of the coastal dark, replaced by Dare's defining act. The blood glistened at the groin. The terrible rictus came alive in a grin. Anson closed his eyes, but Dare's old words still reached him: “He did not deserve to live. He was evil.”

Anson opened his eyes. Dare had paused in his rowing. He seemed to be studying Anson's face. That unsettling, uncanny prescience! Anson fought it off. He spoke clearly and calmly.

“They know, don't they?”

Now the silence gathered from all sides. The seconds passed. In the shimmering oil light, it appeared that a smile came to Dare's face, but that couldn't be; the situation did not call for amusement. When Anson looked again, the expression was gone.

“What is there to know?” Dare said evenly, his arms akimbo, resting on the oars.

“Why, who you are. They know who you are.”

“Who I am.” Dare spoke the words with a slight pause between each one. He straightened up, his knuckles tightened on the oars.

This should not have been so awkward. After all, Dare had asked Anson to come, he had summoned him for help. He knew the answer. But it appeared that he wanted to hear it spoken aloud.

“They know you're black, John.” Suddenly, Anson felt no reason to use the name he had given his friend at Antietam. The artifice seemed pointless now. “Some Southerner saw you in Victoria and—”

“I never knew my parents.”

Dare blinked slowly, as though his eyelids were crusted with salt brine. He seemed to speak to himself.

“The overseer told me they were white. That I was born of white trash and only raised as a nigger.”

He held the oars so tightly that his two fists were against his chest.

Anson swallowed dryly. The glass of the whisky bottle was cold in his palm, but he didn't raise the bottle to his mouth. White? Both parents? The idea staggered him. He had looked past the colour of Dare's skin for so long that it simply never occurred to him that there was any question of his mulatto ancestry. Dare was black, an escaped slave who looked white. And Anson had saved him. To doubt these facts was worse than to lose faith in God; it was to abandon everything, to find nothing in life but deceit and shadows. He gave another drink of whisky to the gasping Englishman, who seemed even paler than before. Then Anson forced himself to address Dare's last statement.

“Did you believe him?”

Now Dare did smile, a slow unwinding of skin that revealed the slightest glimpse of teeth.

“For a time. Then I knew it didn't matter. Not if I owned myself. That was all I had to do. The owning's what matters.”

Anson tried to assess the conviction in Dare's tone. What struggles he must have endured to reach so blunt a philosophy! Yet Anson couldn't deny the stark truth of it. Was the North's ambition in the war any different? He decided to address the situation at hand.

“I don't see that this changes anything, John. Even if you're white but they believe you're not, that's trouble enough. These people want you gone. That's the point, isn't it? That's why I'm here. To help you stop them from getting their way.”

Dare made small circles with one oar by slightly moving one fist. Water dripped off the blade. “Yes. It was why I cabled.”

“Was?”

His nostrils flared. Several mosquitoes settled on his upper lip, but he did not brush them away; they sat there like a crooked stitch. Or another scar. The rough, whitened edges of an earlier one showed just above his beard on the right side; it looked as if Dare had been scratching desperately to get at the old wound but without success.

But his voice contained only a chilling calm.

“There's no help now. I thought I could fight and stay this time.”

Dare rowed swiftly for a dozen strokes, then let the skiff glide again. Finally he spoke. “I'll have to get myself away. But you can still do something for me. I need someone to protect my property.”

“Protect? But I can't—”

“It's all right. My Chinese knows the business. I'm asking only that you sell what you can. You won't get much, but it should be enough to give me another start.”

As Anson began to protest, Dare cut him off.

“You've put your own money into this. And . . .” He dropped the blades lightly to the river. “And we've known each other a long time.”

Anson bowed his head. All his unshakeable trust in Dare flooded back at the reference to their old bond. Here was a man, likely of mixed blood, once white in the eyes of this place, now black, for whom the past was more than merely inescapable; it was deadly. Yet he would not let the blade be driven into his back. He would pick up his gun and turn and then keep moving.

“Where will you go?” Anson said.

Dare began to stroke rapidly. “South” was the only word that slid between his breaths.

“South?” Anson could not keep the alarm from his voice.

“South of here. I have a piece of land in California.”

Dare bent to the oars again as another moan escaped Thomas Lansdowne's lips.

“Louisa,” he said, his eyes opening.

“She's fine.” Anson gave him some more whisky. “You'll see her soon.”

The eyes flickered shut again.

Dare suddenly stopped mid-stroke and began to cough violently. The muscles in his neck tightened and his eyes seemed to loosen in their sockets. Even the white edge of his scar appeared to expand toward his shaken look. After ten seconds he wiped a forearm over his brow, muttered something to himself, then picked up the stroke rate. He rowed so quickly now that Anson tensed, expecting another harsh fit of coughing to cut off the rhythm. But it remained steady as the Chilukthan wharf came into view and the clattering and hissing of the cannery echoed in the darkness. Anson noted the light blazing in Louisa's room. Her mother and aunt, no doubt, had been vigilant in their attendance.

As Dare moored the skiff to the wharf, the gravity of the situation settled over Anson's mood. Someone, perhaps Thomas Lansdowne, had murdered an Indian. And while it was likely the Englishman would never be charged with the crime, it might very well unhinge him; that is, if he didn't succumb to his own wound or at the very least lose his arm. Meanwhile, his daughter was very ill and might die, and there was no guarantee that her mother, pregnant, grieving, and already on the verge of hysteria, could survive further losses.