River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  Each of the women had come to his table through the course of the night and he had turned them away each time. He was so drunk now that he couldn’t distinguish one from the other. They smelled of lavender. For some unknown reason they called him Jimmy. “D’you like some company, Jimmy?” “Want a little time alone with a girl, Jimmy?”

  He had his arm across her shoulder and she was keeping him on his feet as they went through the door. He was trying to ask her name but the words would not come out right, they seemed to have no bones or cartilage to them and they flopped around uselessly. The girl led him down an alley between the tavern and the two-storey house beside it, already working at the spair of his trousers with her free hand. “That’s lovely, Jimmy,” the girl said. “That’s lovely.” Everything solid in him seemed to have dissolved but for what was concentrated where she touched him. He didn’t want it and didn’t want it and she pulled him to her where she leaned against the wall, wrapping a bare leg about his waist, his face awash in the sickening smell of lavender. He pumped his cock inside her with furious little motions, grunting into her hair, until his body shook with spasms and then there was nothing at all to hold him up. She let him fall back onto the ground and stood a moment straightening her skirt. In the pitch dark he couldn’t see her, only heard the motion of clothes rustling into place. He tried again to ask her name as she knelt beside him.

  “You got something for me, Jimmy?” she asked softly.

  She helped him raise his pants around his hips after he slipped several coins into her palm and she left him lying there with the slick oil of her and the soggy mess of his semen turning rank in the tight curls of his pubic hair. He rolled onto his side on the rough ground and held himself until the night finally overtook him and he passed out in the dark.

  EIGHT

  The officer seated himself at the plain board table and flipped through his notebook until he’d opened it to a blank page. He was impeccably dressed and his manner was creased and pressed in the same fashion as his uniform. His hair was carefully oiled and combed back from his forehead. Peyton thought it had thinned considerably, and there was a leaner, more severe look about the man than he remembered. He had been promoted since anyone in the household had last seen him. It was only the Indian woman, who had never met the man and whose English consisted of a few words and pidgin phrases, who didn’t find the change awkward and somehow foreboding. Captain David Buchan.

  Buchan dipped his pen and tapped it primly at the edge of the inkwell. He stared across the table, as if he was about to sketch them all — John Peyton in the chair opposite, John Senior behind him on the daybed and looking away out the window, Cassie and the Indian woman sitting side by side near the pantry. Mary wore one of Cassie’s muslin dresses and an apron and she held a tied bundle in her lap.

  Buchan cleared his throat. He said, “You and your party undertook the unfortunate expedition to Red Indian Lake in March of this year. Is that correct?”

  “As I testified in St. John’s, yes, that is correct.”

  “There were eight men in your party.”

  Peyton nodded a moment and turned to look to his father who was lying back on an elbow. John Senior spoke to Cassie then about starting supper and she and Mary rose from their seats and disappeared into the pantry.

  Buchan sat back in his chair and set the pen in the inkwell. He pulled at the hem of his jacket. “I am speaking to you now,” he said, “as a gentleman and a friend.”

  Peyton smiled severely. “You are welcome on this floor as always, Captain,” he said. “And if you and your man Rowsell” — he nodded to the corporal who stood handy to Buchan’s chair — “wish to stay to a bit of supper and spend the night, there’s food and a bed for you. But there’s nothing you can write in your little book that will change what happened on that lake, sir. It was told the way I felt it ought to be told when I testified before the grand jury in St. John’s.”

  Buchan sighed and templed his fingertips, considering. He reached for the notebook and buttoned it away in a pocket. “Supper,” he said, “would be welcome.” And he motioned Rowsell to take a seat with them at the table.

  The men sat to a meal of salt pork with boiled spuds, cabbage, turnip and greens. Their plates were spooned with food and then ladled with the salty liquor from the pot that the meat and vegetables had been boiled in. John Senior took up a mugful of the liquor and sipped at it through his supper. Cassie fussed about the table as they ate and carried empty platters away into the pantry. The Beothuk woman sat at the back of the room, working a square of leather with an awl fashioned from an iron fishing hook. Cassie had tried to teach her to use a needle and thread when she’d first been brought to the house in March, but she’d pushed the materials away impatiently and Peyton had to tell Cassie to leave her be. Her bundle of belongings sat beside her on the floor.

  “She’s being employed as a servant,” Buchan said.

  Peyton shrugged. “We made an effort to give her a few regular duties in the household, which she did not take kindly to. As long as she isn’t ordered about she seems happy enough to help out.”

  “She don’t mind minding our business is what I find,” John Senior said. “And don’t think she’s not listening to us over there. Or that she don’t know we’re talking about her.”

  Buchan and the marine peered over the shoulders of their hosts. Mary stared at her work with the blank expression of someone hypnotized by the fluid motion of a fire. There was a clotted undertone to her breathing they could all hear, as if each lungful of air was being filtered through a wet cloth. In the months since the trial, she had begun showing unmistakable signs of a congestive illness.

  “She’s into everything not her own besides, and I would keep close account of my materials if I was you,” John Senior went on. “She could sneak a schooner’s anchor off in that bundle she carts around.”

  Buchan looked to Peyton who was tapping his fork impatiently against the table. “Has she been stealing from the household?”

  “There was the one occasion, yes.”

  Cassie interrupted. “It was not thieving as commonly understood, Captain.”

  “Uncommon thievery,” the officer said lightly. “I’m intrigued.”

  “I missed a bolt of cloth from the cupboard and turned the house upside down looking for it. In the course of these investigations I asked Mary if she had seen it.” Cassie smiled across at the Indian woman. “She is a poor liar.” Mary didn’t look up from the work in her lap. “I went to her room and began looking through her drawers. She followed me up there and was none too pleased with my presumption, but she didn’t try to stop me, only sat on her trunk in the corner and complained.”

  “And of course the trunk was the location of the missing material,” Buchan said.

  “I had to remove her forcibly from her seat and at that point she began trying to convince me that John Peyton had given her the material, so I called him up to join us, which ended that line of argument. She ran off before we opened the trunk. When we did we found, well, not the bolt of cloth exactly.”

  “Miss Jure, I am in the greatest suspense,” Buchan said in mock anguish. “Please.”

  “It has always been her custom to go up to her bed early. But she was sleeping less than we believed. We found sixteen pairs of blue moccasins, all of different sizes and with the finest needlework.”

  Peyton said, “The wigwam where we stayed that night on the lake. There were, as best we can recall, seventeen or eighteen sleeping pits around the fire.”

  There was a pause around the table.

  “She will of course be returned to her people,” Buchan said.

  Peyton nodded. “I’m not averse to the idea.”

  “We’ve yet to see any of the governor’s reward for our trouble,” John Senior said.

  Buchan said, “In the event that Mary’s return to the Red Indians leads to improved relations, the money will be forthcoming.” He sounded as if he was reading a public proclamation
he found personally distasteful.

  Cassie brought a full jug of water to the table and refilled glasses all around.

  “There’s a few weeks yet we might hope to find some of the Indians around the bay,” Peyton offered. “Otherwise we’ll have to wait till the freeze-up and carry her to the lake.”

  “We, Mr. Peyton?”

  “I feel some responsibility for her well-being given the circumstances under which she came to us. I’m at your disposal if you’ll have me.”

  John Senior forked into his plate of food and chewed fiercely, but said nothing.

  Buchan nodded. “You would be welcome.”

  After the meal was cleared away and the dishes done, Mary was brought to the table and sat in a chair beside Buchan. He used a blank page in his journal to trace a rough map of the Bay of Exploits. He drew a boat manned by marines and a figure he pointed to with the tip of the pencil and then touched Mary’s chest with his finger. On a point of land, Buchan roughed in triangular shelters and a fire to indicate their being inhabited. Mary leant over the table, the weight of her breasts pressed into the tied kerchief of clothing in her lap. She looked from the paper to the face of the artist and back again, as if she might be able to somehow influence what he would draw there. Buchan drew the boat along a dotted line to the point of land and placed Mary on the shore. Then he showed the boat travelling away without her.

  “No, no,” she said. She waved her hands before her face. “No good for Mary.”

  Buchan looked around the table at the others, but no one offered assistance. “Why not, Mary? What is no good for Mary?”

  She continued shaking her head.

  “I don’t understand,” Buchan said. Finally he relented and placed the abandoned figure back among the crew of the boat.

  “Yes, yes,” she said. The relief she felt was obvious but listless, enervated.

  Peyton said there was no telling who they would happen upon in the bay, if they managed to find anyone at all. It was possible she wanted to be returned only to the group she was found with at the lake.

  “Very well,” Buchan said. He roughed in a sketch of the river and the northernmost section of the lake and the boat appeared there as if by magic.

  John Senior protested. “There’s no way on God’s green earth to get a boat from the bay past the falls on that river.”

  Buchan looked up at him. “It’s just a symbol,” he said. “A mode of transportation. This isn’t meant to be literal.”

  “And you see her following your meaning in all this?”

  Buchan stared at the old man for a moment, but turned back to the map before he said anything. Mary continued to stare at the paper. “Mary?” he said. “Good for Mary?”

  She nodded.

  He placed her figure on the shore, watching furtively for signs of how she would react to this. She placed her hand to her mouth. Buchan began drawing a dotted line to indicate the boat leaving the lake and Mary immediately sat back in her chair.

  “No,” she said. “No no no no no.” Her expression was pained, helpless. She covered her mouth with her hands.

  “We are meant to bring you back to your people,” Buchan said, but she continued offering her one word repudiation through her cupped hands.

  John Senior made a noise somewhere between disgust and satisfaction.

  Cassie said, “Let her do it.”

  “I’m sorry?” Buchan said, looking up quickly.

  “Let her draw what she would like.”

  “Can she draw?”

  Cassie leaned forward to examine the crude figures Buchan had sketched on the paper. “I’d say she would be able to meet the rigorous standard set by His Majesty’s Royal Navy.”

  Buchan felt himself beginning to flush. It was such an unusual sensation that his visible embarrassment compounded itself, until he had turned nearly the colour of his tunic. He held the pencil towards the Indian woman without taking his eyes from Cassie. The men around the table were doing a half-hearted job of suppressing their amusement. Mary looked back and forth between Cassie and the officer and would not touch the pencil for fear of seeming to take sides.

  “It’s all right, Mary,” Cassie prodded.

  Buchan smiled at her finally. “Please,” he said.

  She nodded and accepted the pencil. She turned the journal on the table several ways until it was arranged as she wished and she began fixing the drawing of the River Exploits. Her picture was minute and detailed, with a cluster of small concave strokes indicating prominent rapids on the river and a billow of vapour where each of the waterfalls was located. She dotted portage paths around each of these obstructions. She added a third mamateek to the two figures drawn by Buchan at the lake. She paused a moment and raised her head to the group of faces around her.

  “Go ahead,” Buchan said quietly.

  She drew something near the figure of herself on the shore, something the figure was holding at the level of her waist.

  “What’s that?” John Senior asked. “Is that the bundle of clothes she drags around?”

  “A child,” Cassie said. “A baby, Mary?”

  “Yes, yes. Baby.”

  “She has a child?” Buchan asked. He looked up at the men across the table.

  “That seems to be the gist of what she’s suggesting,” Peyton said flatly.

  “Did you know this?”

  “There wasn’t what you would call a proper round of introductions made at the time,” John Senior told him.

  “Mary’s baby,” Mary said.

  “You would like to go home to your child,” Buchan said, but she didn’t understand him and simply stared. He took the pencil from her and again indicated the boat leaving the lake. Again she protested. “All right,” he said, “all right.” He returned the pencil to her and pointed to the page. “Show me what you want,” he told her.

  Mary moved the figure with the child in her arms from the shoreline beside the mamateeks back into the waiting boat. Then she drew a line up the river, across the portages at both waterfalls and around rapids into the Bay of Exploits. She drew Burnt Island and then a square house on the stretch of beach where they were sitting around the table and placed herself and her child beside it. “Good,” she said obstinately, though her stubbornness seemed somehow infected with her illness, drained of energy and confidence. She placed the pencil beside the journal. “Good for Mary.”

  Mary went to her room shortly after drawing her map. Cassie finished clearing up the supper dishes and then took a seat with the men who had settled into a bottle of rum. For six months in 1818 Buchan had been part of an expedition to the Arctic, attempting to reach the Pole by ship, and he was giving an account of his travels. He was in command of the Dorothea, accompanied by Lieutenant John Frankland in the Trent. They sailed out of Spitzbergen on June 7 and passed easily beyond the northwest boundary of the island. Near Red Bay they were icebound for thirteen days and then took shelter in Fair Haven. On July 6, they again headed out, reaching 80° 34’ North before they were forced to turn back due to the ice conditions. The weather was so cold and inclement at times that the ship’s canvas and rigging was encased in ice. Cauldrons of water were boiled and the steam used to free knots sufficiently to allow sails to be set. Men chopped the bows and decks free of thick galls of ice with axes and cutlasses.

  Cassie watched him from her chair across the room. His face seemed to be lit from within as he talked, like a man recounting an encounter with God. He used his hands to indicate the position of ships, the angle of rafted ice, the distance from ship to land. Their constant motion added to the distractedly busy air that rarely left him in the company of other men. The Peytons and Corporal Rowsell leaned forward on their thighs to get as close to the story as they could manage, as if they were drawing heat from a fire.

  Returning along the edge of the icepack towards Greenland, the two ships sailed into a gale. Buchan was tipped out of his bunk by the extreme pitch and roll. He dressed and clawed his way onto the bridge.
The storm was so furious they had no choice but to run before it into the Arctic ice. “The impact,” Buchan said. He slapped a fist into the open palm of the opposite hand. “Every man was taken off his feet, the timbers roaring. I don’t know what kept the masts from snapping at the base.” He used his forearm to demonstrate the severe angle they had somehow recovered from. “The ship’s bell tolling in the wind after we’d been brought up solid.” He shook his head. “I made my peace with God,” he said. “Rather quickly,” he added.

  Before the laughter died away Cassie rose and took her leave of the men and went to her bed. She lay awake listening to the murmur of surf drifting in through the open window and the louder tide of talk from the kitchen. She waited until she heard the scrape of chairs and the men dispersing to their rooms, John Senior going out the door with Rowsell to a bed in the hired men’s quarters, insisting Buchan sleep in his room. She waited longer still, until the tide had almost turned and the sound of one furtive set of footsteps descended the stairs above her. They sounded, she thought, like the steps of a man come to steal away valuables, to lift jewellery, silverware, hidden caches of sterling coins.

  She found him sitting on the daybed beside the fireplace. He’d lit a single candle and the acrid smell of the wick hung in the air.

  “No need for a fire tonight, I suppose,” she said.

  “I wasn’t sure you would join me.”

  “Nor was I, truth be told.”

  Buchan nodded and took a breath. “To be honest, I would have felt some relief if you had not.”

  She watched him a moment and then turned to go back to her room.

  “No, please,” he said and he rose to get a chair and set it in front of himself, motioning for her to sit.

  They stared a while. Cassie was forty-one years old and Buchan had seen that age in her face earlier in the day — crow’s feet fanning at the corners of her eyes, a tautness gone from the skin of her neck. In the near dark of the single candle those changes were imperceptible, but there was a more fundamental difference he could sense, something in her manner that had altered. The subtle disregard for station that could be mistaken for arrogance was still with her, but the ease of it was gone. There had always been an air of caution about her, though when he first met Cassie it was furtive, subterranean. It had come to the surface now, as if she was too exhausted to camouflage it any longer. The woman sitting before him had the intense, diffuse look of a person in the midst of a lengthy fast.