River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  Reilly said it was only an idiot that believed all he was told, which Richmond took exception to. He said, “A Papist should be one to mock believing what’s told us, I’m sure.” He and Taylor had worked with Reilly on John Senior’s rivers twenty years and more, but there was no love lost between the three. The fact that Reilly was Irish Catholic was enough to make him a target of Richmond’s hostility. Reilly’s marriage to Annie Boss was more fuel for the steady fire. Richmond stared at Reilly as he spoke now, daring him to contradict or interrupt him. “I have had occasion to come upon old gravesites of the Indians,” he said, “and once or twice to satisfy my own curiosity on the matter I have held a shank bone against my own. Now I am no small man by most measures and I was but a lad to the frame of those Indians.”

  There was a round of murmuring in the camp, a scatter of dismissive laughter. Reilly shook his head but said nothing.

  “Mr. Cull,” Buchan said. “I understand you carried one into St. John’s, didn’t you?”

  “I did sir, yes. Nigh on ten year ago now, as I recall, it was a young woman out in a canoe by herself and heading for a bird island in Gander Bay.” Cull pulled his coat up around his shoulders as if it was about to slip down his back. He had hardly a tooth left in his mouth and his face had a concave, half-starved look about it. “The governor in those days had offered fifty pound to bring one in friendly-like and it seemed as she was alone there’d be little trouble to do so. Took her up in the fall and they made a bloody great fuss over her, the merchants and their wives tripping over themselves to cultivate her good graces. In all the years I been going into St. John’s I was never so much as offered a barelegged cup of tea by the quality and they brought my savage into the shops on the waterfront and let her walk off with whatever caught her fancy. Mostly ironwork she wanted, pots and kettles and such, I can see her now waddling under the weight of it all in her arms and a bloody great pot on her head to boot. I tried to help her carry some of it, but she seemed to think I wanted to steal it away and wouldn’t allow me to touch an item.

  “They put on a dance for her one evening and invited all the quality in town to have a view of her. There was music which I remember she seemed fond of but she could not be prevailed upon to dance. She was a modest creature and very sensible to the presence of children as I recall and as long as she was in the company of women she seemed not to mind being where she was. I was the only man she’d permit to hang nearby. I s’pose as I had taken her, she allowed as I would watch out for her or some such thing. The governor paid me my fee and I was told to bring her back with her pots and set her loose.”

  Corporal Bouthland spoke up again. He was among the oldest marines who had volunteered for the mission, about his middle thirties. The pate of his head was nearly bald but he wore a pigtail stiffened with grease and flour at the back. He had a mole on his right cheekbone that sprouted a cluster of stiff hairs like the feelers of some blind insect. He said, “What did this one look like?”

  “She was tolerable fair for an Indian,” Cull said, then he looked across at Reilly and said, “No offence now, Joseph. But she was only middle size, this one. She dressed all in deerskins and was covered from head to toe in that red paint they wear and there was no way to persuade her to wash. And eyes as dark as hell’s flames.”

  “What was her name?” Buchan asked.

  “We never had a name for her as such, Lieutenant.”

  “Did anyone manage to speak to her while she was in your care?”

  “Not in so many words, sir, no. It was all a dumb show and grunts and such we managed with. There was no sense to be got out of her mouth as far as anyone could tell.”

  Buchan had refilled and lit his pipe and puffed quietly for a few minutes. “There are some that suggest the Red Indians are of Norwegian extraction and that their language is likewise related,” he said.

  Cull nodded, a quizzical expression on his face. “Is that right?” he said.

  “Private Butler,” Buchan went on, pointing out a marine with the end of his pipe, “is fluent in Norwegian and conversant in most of the dialects known to the north of Europe. I’m hoping he can assist us when we reach the lake.”

  Tom Taylor was incredulous. “Now how did such a young pup manage a feat the likes of that?” he asked.

  Butler sat up straight and hugged his knees. “My mother is Norwegian.”

  “Go on then,” Taylor said to the marine. “Give us a listen.”

  Bouthland prodded the young man in the back. “Get up, laddie,” he said.

  “Sir?” Butler asked, looking across at Buchan.

  “By all means. Perhaps the gentlemen who have heard the Red Indians’ language will recognize a similarity.”

  The marine stood up from his place as if he was about to give a speech or recital. He held his arms ramrod straight at his sides and stared off into the woods as he spoke. He had straight blond hair braided down the length of his back, and an earnestness that made him seem childlike. When he finished his speech or recitation, his shipmates began applauding and slapped his back.

  “Well?” Buchan asked.

  Cull snuffled his runny nose on the sleeve of his coat. “It’s nigh on ten year, as I said, sir. But it’s like to be the same gibberish I heard then, as near as I can tell.”

  Peyton lay awake a long time that night. The girl was in his mind for the first time in years, stood up on her tabletop in Poole. An impatient crowd of Englishmen pushed towards the front of the high-ceilinged room. They had all paid their two pence expecting to see a savage child, some mooncalf of the isle, something rich and strange. Not this pale, silent girl in an English dress with strips of white paint or lime daubed on her cheeks. There were shouts, a scatter of boos. The discontent of the crowd frightened her, as if she knew she had disappointed them in a way she was helpless to correct. The English audience pressing in on her must have seemed like the half-wild and savage creatures they had come hoping to see.

  It was Richmond who had taken the girl captive, though no one in the party had mentioned this in the company of Lieutenant Buchan for fear of the questions it would raise. Peyton thought of Richmond picking through an Indian grave, holding shanks up to his leg as if he was checking the length of a garment. It was a heartless thing and cold, to Peyton’s mind, disturbing a grave that way. Something he wished he could say he ’d had no part in himself.

  There were Red Indian burial sites all over the Bay of Exploits, though none of those Peyton had seen appeared to be recent. During his first summer on the shore, John Senior had taken him on a tour of the salmon rivers in the bay to meet the men he employed and to show him the country he would some day own a good portion of. They were crossing an open run of water in a scull with sixteen foot of keel. She had a single eight-foot mast and a square sail taking a full sheet of wind. John Senior was in the stern, leaning on the tiller. Peyton was dozing in the bow, lulled by the heavy swell that the boat was riding easily. He was almost asleep when he saw his father lift his head. John Senior stood then, one hand still on the tiller, looking across the bay in the direction of the wind.

  “Get the oars in the water,” he said. He turned to lash the tiller steady. “John Peyton,” he shouted.

  Peyton sat up and looked to the horizon where a low bank of dark cloud was blotting light from the water’s surface, scudding fast. He was just on his feet when the first knuckle of wind tore in, the boat tilting sideways in the air and slamming back, knocking him onto his backside. John Senior scrambled to the mast and hauled in the strain of the sail as the seas came up around them. “The oars, goddamn it,” he shouted. But Peyton couldn’t manage to get to his feet at all, and John Senior let the sail flap loose when it came down, crawling to the tawt and setting out the oars.

  The seas were running eight and ten feet high suddenly, the bow of the boat lifted nearly perpendicular and then slamming down hard like a maul being used to sink a fence post. The crest of each wave broke over the gunnels, gallons of sea water sloshing
around in the bilge. Peyton struggled aft and took hold of a wooden container, scooping and heaving water back over the side. They crested again and he braced himself as the boat hammered down.

  “Bail ’er, Johnny,” his father yelled. He came back on the oars as they shifted into the face of another ten-footer. “For the love of Christ,” he shouted.

  Peyton had never heard his father call him Johnny before and as he laced back into bailing he glanced up towards him. He froze in mid-motion, bracing himself with a hand on the gunnel. When John Senior saw his face, he looked over his shoulder towards the bow. Every seam was leaking water.

  Swan Island was the nearest point of land and John Senior angled towards it, the seas calming slightly as they veered into the lee. The island’s hump of granite hills and sparse patches of black spruce reared into sight at the tip of each swell, then disappeared as the boat pounded into the trough. It seemed a capricious, teasing game, a promise of shelter offered and then withheld, offered and withheld. Peyton stopped looking up at all at the last, bailing furiously, so numb with fear and fatigue he couldn’t feel a thing in his arms but the dull levering motion he repeated and repeated. He was scooping and flinging madly when the keel came up solid on the shallows of the beach. They hauled the scull by the anchor line till it was as far clear of the water as they could manage, then dragged the anchor up onto the rocks to hold her there. John Senior picked his way up into the hills until he found a pendant cave that offered some shelter from the wind and rain. They sat there a long time in silence, both men soaking wet and exhausted and breathing heavily.

  “You know where you are now?” John Senior asked him finally.

  “No sir.”

  “Indian country, this is.” His father’s rifle rested across his lap.

  Peyton looked at him. He was still shaking.

  “Graves all along this shore, in under these cliffs. We’re probably sitting on a Indian or two right now.”

  Peyton had considered his father was making a joke, but it was so unlike him and his manner so matter of fact that he finally accepted the possibility they were sheltering in a burial site. He coughed into his fist to disguise the violent shiver that passed through him.

  “Never mind now,” John Senior said. “Dead Indians are the least of your worries. It’s the quick you got to watch out for.”

  The wind went down as suddenly as it rose but the rain continued heavy, the steady drift of it stippling the roiling ocean, and water dripped onto their necks from the damp rock cliff above them. Where the dirty quilt of cloud met the sea on the horizon it was nearly impossible to tell one from the other. The noise of the downpour was steady and soothing and eventually Peyton fell to sleep.

  His father wasn’t beside him when he came to himself. The rain had slowed to a mauzy drizzle. Peyton rolled out into the open and looked up and down the shore.

  “Over here,” his father shouted to him.

  John Senior was crouching near a deep indentation in a cliff face about a hundred yards to the west. As he came up to him Peyton could make out a crumple of reddened material at the back of the cave under a loose pile of stones. They crawled in and knelt beside it.

  “Most of them got a winding sheet of birchbark,” his father said. He reached to roll away a couple of stones and fingered the rotten canvas. The red-ochre stain came away on his hands. “This one got part of some Christian’s sail.” He set aside the rifle and began moving the rocks and stones to one side. “Give us a hand,” he said.

  Once they’d cleared the grave John Senior lifted the shroud away from the bones of the corpse. They’d been picked clean by time and the brine of the salt-sea air. The body had been placed on its side, the knees fixed in the fetal position against the chest. The ribs had collapsed over the spinal cord’s shallow crescent. The left hand was missing the bones of three fingers. Only the thumb and forefinger remained, the digits extended like the stilled hour and minute hands of a timepiece. Everything was covered in a fine red dust. There was a small leather pouch beside the corpse. It was tied at the top with a plaited thong of caribou hide that John Senior cut away with a knife. Inside were several carved antler charms, a piece of iron pyrite and the skulls of two birds. He passed one to Peyton and the boy turned it over in the palm of his hand to examine the delicately fluted cavities.

  His father gathered the bag’s contents back together and carefully retied the brittle leather thong, then held it out to his son. “Here,” he’d said. “A keepsake for you.”

  It struck Peyton as a funny word to use and a peculiar gesture, given how close they’d just come to being lost themselves. It made him distrust his father in a way he was never able to articulate clearly. He disliked remembering the event and was sorry to have it in his head now, lying cold and exhausted and sleepless on the banks of the River Exploits. He shifted restlessly in his blankets, tapping his head against the rough mattress of spruce boughs. He turned onto his side then, drawing his legs up to lie in the exact same position as the dead man he’d uncovered years ago, and waited for sleep.

  SIX

  On the morning of the seventeenth Buchan had a cask of provisions and four gallons of rum buried at the campsite and the party began its ascent around the falls. They hauled the sledges through a winding path among high rocks until the going became too steep to continue. The goods were unloaded and the men carried the casks on their backs to the top of the falls, turning back to make two or three trips before the whole of their provisions and the sledges themselves had been conveyed up the path and across a half-frozen stretch of bog to the riverside. Around noon the wind veered to the southeast and the morning’s sleet turned to pouring rain. The group had made no more than a mile and a half all told, but the general state of fatigue and the soaking condition of their clothes and all their supplies led Buchan to call a halt to the day’s travel. A camp was prepared beneath the studding sail which was strung in the trees as a tarp. By nine in the evening the rain had stopped and the men dried their clothes over the fires and turned in for the night.

  As they started up the river the following day, the forest lining the river changed from poplar and birch to a dark corridor of black spruce, pine and larch. A fire had burned off the woods from the Bay of Exploits to the falls almost seventy years before and poplar and birch had replaced the old spruce forest across the burn-over. The change in the woods they travelled beside was abrupt and complete, as if a line had been drawn to separate two worlds.

  The river above the falls was so rough and wild that it ran open in the centre and early that morning one of the sledges fell through the poor ice near the shoreline. It went down on a shoal and James Carey, who was hauling it, was swept back and beneath the ice by the force of the current. There was a moment of wild shouting as Buchan cleared the rest of the party onto the shore. Richmond threw himself flat on the ice and stretched shoulder-deep into the freezing water to reach for the man, rooting blindly with his face turned to the shore, as if he were searching for stockings lost beneath a bed. Carey was caught up in the heavy leather harness of the sledge and could not get himself free even after he latched onto Richmond’s hand and was pulled into the open. His face bobbed to the surface and went under in the froth. Richmond yelled for help and Peyton crawled down as near as he dared.

  “An axe,” Richmond yelled over his shoulder, “a cutlass.”

  Buchan skittered a sword across the ice towards them and Peyton crawled with it to the ice edge.

  “Cut him loose,” Richmond shouted.

  In the drive of the current Peyton could make out only shadowed movement beneath the surface and he stabbed wildly into the river’s flow below the arm Richmond held. Water soaked through where his coatsleeve met his swan-skin cuff, so icy cold it felt like he was flaying his own skin with the blade. When Carey came free of the sledge the two men dragged him back to the shore where he lay shivering and spitting and bleeding like a gaffed seal.

  They built a fire and stripped Carey free of his sodd
en clothes while a small group of marines used rope and grappling hooks to recover the sledge and its gear from the river. There were a number of gashes beneath Carey’s arm that were staunched with raw turpentine from a fir tree. One cut had gone so deep in the flesh that it had to be cauterized with an iron heated in the fire to stop the bleeding. Afterwards Carey was covered in blankets. Peyton sat beside him and apologized for his injuries.

  Carey shivered uncontrollably, his teeth hackering from the cold and shock. “A damn sight better than being drowned,” he said.

  Richmond had taken off his coat and hung the wet sleeve over the heat. He said, “You have to spill a little blood to keep body and soul together sometimes.”

  Two of the Blue Jackets had ruined their shoes in the previous day’s rain and galled their feet almost clear to the bone and they’d found it difficult to keep pace with the rest of the company. Buchan decided to leave them with Carey while his clothes were drying and they were ordered from there to return to the Adonis. The rest of the party continued upriver, clinging close to the shoreline with ropes and poles at the ready.

  Four miles above the falls, when the ice finally settled and lay smooth, they encountered the first of the Indian caribou fences. It was like walking into a darkened hallway without doors. On both sides of the Exploits, as far as they could see ahead, trees had been felled one across the last to form a wall eight to ten feet high. The youngest Blue Jackets balked like horses at a hedge. Buchan ordered them up off the ice, a fire was kindled to boil water for cocoa, and William Cull spoke to them about the herds of caribou that cross the river each fall, hundreds and thousands beyond counting, how the swimming animals were led by the fences into slaughtering yards where the Beothuk stood behind wooden gazes and took them down with arrows and spears.