River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  He nodded uncertainly. She showed an easy forwardness with him that belied her position in the household. Her lazy eye winked at him. “I’m somewhat partial to invalids, Lieutenant,” she admitted. “I should have been a nurse.”

  When the kettle boiled she made tea and sweetened it with dark molasses. Buchan sat cradling the mug in his lap and she pulled a chair close to the fire to sit across from him. His face was chalky white, his eyes swollen to slits. He raised the mug towards her in thanks and then sipped at the hot liquid.

  “The secret to drinking with John Senior,” she advised him, “is to be the one refilling the glasses. Less attention gets paid to how far behind you are.”

  “I’d like to ask you something,” Buchan said suddenly.

  Cassie waited for his question. He seemed to be struggling with the proper words, or to have forgotten himself completely. “Lieutenant?” she said.

  He smiled but wouldn’t look at her. He said, “I’m afraid it may be somewhat indelicate.”

  She shrugged. “There hardly seems a point to standing on ceremony from here.”

  “That being the case, then,” he said. He looked unsteadily across at her. “I’d like to know why you are not yet married.”

  “You make it sound inevitable, Lieutenant. Like death.”

  “There are some that see it that way.” He closed his eyes. “And that’s not an answer to my question besides.”

  She said nothing.

  “Forgive my forwardness,” he said. And after a moment more of silence he said, “You’ve had proposals.”

  “A number, yes.”

  “And no one has suited you?”

  “Every one of them has talked of taking me away from here,” she said. She looked about the kitchen.

  Buchan followed her eyes. “From Mr. Peyton, you mean.”

  She shrugged again, but she didn’t dispute the statement.

  “Are you in love with him?”

  “The thing I most appreciate about John Senior,” she told him, “is that he’s never talked to me about love.”

  “I’m sure I don’t understand why that would endear him to yourself.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m sure you don’t.”

  Buchan sat a while, drunkenly considering the woman across from him and what he knew of her station. It seemed a lonely life for a woman too young to be a spinster to be leading and he said as much to her.

  She tipped her head side to side, as if she wanted to dispute the assertion but in all honesty could not. “There are worse things in life,” she said, “than loneliness.” And before Buchan could respond to this, she stood and placed the chair back in its place beside the table. “Can you make the stairs on your own?”

  He raised the mug again, as if to demonstrate the extent of his sobriety.

  “Just leave the shawl there when you go.”

  She turned to leave the room, but he stopped her. “Miss Jure,” he said. “I would be in your debt if you didn’t make a story of this.” He motioned helplessly about himself.

  Cassie folded her arms beneath her breasts and smiled. “Why is it that men are more afraid of being seen as a fool than they are of behaving like one?”

  Buchan nodded. “I can see,” he said, “why so many men have talked of taking you away from here.”

  The heavy weather continued through the next day, which kept Buchan and his men from leaving for Ship Cove as he’d planned. He was still feeling rough from the previous evening’s exercises and was happy enough to stay put. John Senior occupied himself with the officer as long as he could stand to sit about idly and then dressed to look in on the animals. Buchan offered to accompany him but John Senior motioned him back into his seat. “Pay no mind,” he said. “Cassie,” he shouted into the pantry. “Make the lieutenant some tea.”

  Buchan watched her with a shy, apologetic look as she set out the mugs at the kitchen table.

  “Are you feeling yourself today?” she asked him. There was no sympathy in her voice, but she wasn’t simply making fun of him either.

  “Better,” he said. “Thank you.”

  They spoke for a while about the violence of the weather and what it promised for the winter ahead. When they had exhausted the topic there was an awkward silence between them. Finally Cassie said, “How long will you be with us, Lieutenant?”

  “We’ll be leaving for Ship Cove as soon as the weather moderates, I expect.”

  She shook her head, but didn’t look at him. “I mean on the northeast shore.”

  “Oh. Of course. Just until the spring breakup. We’ll make for St. John’s as soon as we’re clear of the ice.”

  Cassie nodded. “You’ll be coming back this way again? This is your station?”

  “No,” he said. “This trip was a special assignment only. Barring any unforeseen events, I doubt I’ll be back.”

  Cassie continued nodding her head but said nothing, and they fell back into silence. Buchan slapped his knees with his hands. He said, “Did you say yesternight that John Senior is hag-ridden?”

  “Aren’t we all on occasion, Lieutenant?”

  “You said we would hear him if it happened.”

  “I’ve heard him come to himself upstairs in the middle of the night, shouting at something or other. My father had the Old Hag a time or two.”

  There was a defensive tone to her voice he wasn’t willing to test and he said, “I couldn’t help noticing your library.” He lifted a book that was sitting on the table. There were books scattered throughout the rooms of the house. “I have rarely seen a private library as large.”

  “Most of them were procured by my mother,” she said. Her mother was the daughter of a clergyman and a woman of some learning. She was hired by St. John’s merchants, in the absence of schools in the community, to tutor their children in reading and writing and she was paid with books imported from England on the merchant ships.

  “I understand from John Senior that you are a woman of unusual learning as well, Miss Jure.”

  “This surprises you, Lieutenant?”

  “You do strike me as being somewhat” — he shifted in his chair slightly — “somewhat unlikely, shall we say. How did you come to live here?” He held his arms wide, as if to say she could interpret the word “here” as broadly as she liked.

  “The short answer to your question is that John Senior hired me to tutor John Peyton when he first came across from England, and to act as housekeeper.”

  “And the long answer?” He let the pause go on a moment and then said, “There hardly seems a point to standing on ceremony from here, Miss Jure.”

  She smiled and cleared her throat. She grew up, she told him, in St. John’s. Her mother was born and raised in Nova Scotia, but she married against her parents’ wishes and then moved to Newfoundland with her husband to live beyond the constant light of their disapproval. Cassie looked about the room and then at her hands. “I’m not usually given to telling stories,” she said.

  He nodded. “I am quite discreet,” he said. He gestured with his hand.

  Her father owned a public house above the waterfront in St. John’s with a large portly man from Devon named Harrow. Harrow was a single man in his early forties who had served for years in the navy and lived in half a dozen countries around the world before settling in St. John’s. There was no time of the day or night when he couldn’t be found pouring drinks at the public house, suffering the drunken harassment of customers with a fierce good humour, clearing the chairs of those who had passed out at their tables to make room for others coming in the door. He had lost an eye in the navy and wore a patch over the dark hole in his face. He slept only three or four hours a night in a tiny room at the back of the tavern and seemed to have no interests or ambition beyond the walls of his desolate little dominion. His immersion in the place gave Cassie’s father more leeway than he would otherwise have had to wander the countryside during the summer, to read as much as he pleased, to drink freely and often. She said, “M
ostly to drink, is the honest truth.”

  As a result of her father’s habits, the family became an object of speculation and a kind of pre-emptive disdain within the town. Her mother had once enjoyed a modicum of respect as an educated woman, but her work as a tutor and the recognition it garnered her slowly disappeared. People began to avoid them in the way lepers were avoided in biblical stories, as if any physical contact might infect those who touched them. Their only visitors were men her father dragged home from the public house.

  Buchan said, “Is this where John Senior comes into it?”

  She nodded. This was in the fall, she told him, when the season’s catch was brought to market. John Senior and Harry Miller came to the house with her father in the course of a night of drinking in various taverns above the waterfront. After a round of stilted introductions the two women removed themselves to a room upstairs but they could hear Miller singing bawdy songs and inserting her mother’s name or Cassie’s wherever he could make them fit. He made lewd propositions to the two women, shouting to them through the ceiling.

  She saw Buchan’s look of incredulity. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence in their lives at the time, she told him.

  John Senior came by the following day while her father was out. She was reading The Rape of Lucrece to her mother. Cassie closed the book and stood from her chair to face him. He smiled awkwardly, like a man confronted with evidence of someone he once was, someone he was now ashamed of. He asked what it was she was reading and how Cassie had come to learn to read and whether she had taken it upon herself to teach others. He nodded as she spoke and couldn’t seem to remove the smirk from his face.

  “My husband,” her mother said finally, “is not at home.”

  John Senior shook his head. He said, “I come to say my best to both of you and to apologize for Mr. Miller.”

  “An apology from Mr. Miller would be more in order,” her mother told him.

  He said, “When it comes to apologies, Mrs. Jure, it is sometimes a case of taking them where they can be got.”

  Cassie paused in her story there to pour the steeped tea into Buchan’s mug and then into her own. It had been sitting so long it was black and barky. She went to the pantry for sugar and fresh cream. Her movements were slow and slightly distracted, as if she was the stranger in this house and was unsure where things were kept. Buchan was surprised he hadn’t noticed the limp before, the buckle in her step.

  “What happened to your leg?” he said when she ’d taken her seat, already sure it was connected somehow to the story she was telling.

  She watched the officer a moment, then leaned forward, lifting the heavy layers of the skirts to her knee. She slipped her knee-length stocking to her ankle and traced a finger the length of the purple scar on her shin. When she was twelve, she said, she tried to separate her father from the bottle he was working his way through. He had thrown her down the stairs of their house.

  Buchan’s stomach came up into his throat. The fall. The impact. He could see in this revelation the same unexpected forwardness she had shown the night before, wrapping her shawl around his shoulders. There was something childlike about the intimacy she assumed, the disregard for markers of class and station. He felt a sudden flush of embarrassment, as if he had blundered into a room while she was dressing.

  She pulled her stocking up her leg and ruffled the skirts back into place. She had brown eyes so dark they seemed to be all pupil.

  The tibia had snapped and come through the skin. Where it protruded the bone was tinged a pale green and flecked with blood. Her mother sat crying at her head, holding Cassie’s clenched hands while her father knelt over her to examine the wound. “What have you done?” her mother said. “What have you done to our child?” She went on repeating the question, her voice escalating with each repetition until she was nearly hysterical with rage and her father began shouting back. “Shut up, Myra. Shut up.” Even after she had stopped he pointed a finger and repeated himself one more time. Both her parents were visibly shaking. “Shut up,” he said. He poured a glassful of rum then and handed it to Cassie. “Drink as much of that as you can,” he said. Then he topped up the glass and drank it straight off himself. “You hold her good,” he told his wife.

  Her mother mixed a paste of egg and flour to cover the wound after the bone was set and two straight sticks were wrapped tight to either side of the leg with cloth. The scar and the limp were not as severe as they might have been, she said, given the circumstances.

  “On the weight of your witness alone,” Buchan said quietly, “your father sounds like a beast.”

  Cassie stared at him with a bald look that was almost accusatory. “A man should be what he seems,” she said and then shrugged helplessly. “I knew him a different person when I was a girl. Before the drink got the better of him.”

  He had to turn away from her for a moment, staring down into his mug.

  She said, “My mother gave up everything for him, you understand.”

  Buchan nodded. “Are they still in St. John’s?” he asked.

  “My father,” Cassie said. “My mother died before I left, after an illness that kept her bedridden for the better part of a year. She had a head of black hair when she went to that bed and it was grey before the year was through.” Her arms and legs atrophied, the muscles beneath the skin slack and toneless as the flesh of a cod tongue. Her heels turned black against the mattress with blood blisters. Cassie said, “I never thought a bed could do so much damage to a person.”

  Buchan set his mug down on the table and folded his hands in his lap.

  “Near the end she wanted me with her through the night, she was afraid of dying alone in the dark, I imagine. If I fell asleep in the chair, she’d wake me, ask me to light a candle, to read to her.”

  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, reliev
ed 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.

  THREE

  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?”