River Thieves (11 page)

John Senior was as furious as his weakened state allowed. “It’s a goddamn fool’s errand,” he said.

“You were fool enough to sign on. And to send Taylor and Richmond and Reilly along.”

John Senior began to speak but fell into a fit of coughing that purpled his face. Peyton called for Cassie who came running from the kitchen and lifted the sick man forward and pounded his back with the open palm of her hand until he had coughed up a mouthful of green-and-black phlegm into a handkerchief.

“I had my reasons,” John Senior managed as she helped him back against the pillows. His lungs clawed at the air.

“Out,” Cassie said to Peyton. A lock of her hair had fallen out of the bun at the back of her head and she turned it behind her ear with a distracted motion that made Peyton’s stomach knot. “Go on now,” she said when he made no move to leave. “I mean it, John Peyton,” she said.

Cassie was already up and had lit the fire and boiled the kettle for tea by the time he made his way down to the kitchen. The dark play of light from the fireplace sent her shadow up the opposite wall like a vine. There was a single candle burning on the table where she’d put out a plate of brewis in pork fat for his breakfast.

“What way is he this morning?” Peyton asked after he sat down.

She set an earthenware mug in front of him. “Well enough to be contrary,” she said. “He’d be down here now if I hadn’t threatened to start the fire with his boots.” She pushed the sugar towards him and he ladled a teaspoonful into his mug. “Are you going to look in on him before you go?”

Peyton shook his head. “He’d just try to talk me out of it, I imagine.”

“He’s only watching out for you, John Peyton.” Cassie turned away from him to add wood to the fire.

“You think this trip is sensible?”

She shook her head. “I’m hardly a judge of what is or isn’t sensible now, am I?” She sat across from him and their faces hovered over the stunted light of the candle, an oily stem of smoke curling towards the ceiling. There were half-moons charcoaled beneath her eyes and Peyton knew there was more than just shadow working there. The day he’d come in off the traplines he’d found her scythed over in pain as she stood at the table. Her hands held the edge so fiercely that he had to pry them free to get her to the daybed.

“It’s just during my time,” she’d told him. “The rest of the month I’m not so bad.”

When she was nursing his father she gave no sign of discomfort at all and he could see how it exhausted her to disguise it. As he expected, nothing had been said about the whole affair since he brought her down from the river in November.

Cassie lifted the teapot to refill his mug. “John Senior says Lieutenant Buchan might try to talk you into setting aside the rifles before you come up to the Indians at the lake,” she told him. “He wanted me to warn you about that.”

Peyton slurped at the scalding tea. “What else did he want you to tell me?”

“He said to say shot is no good to get through those leather cassocks they wear. He said they double them up at the front and shot won’t be more than a bee sting through it.”

Peyton turned his head towards the window. Two inches of frost framed each pane of glass. The first grey of dawn was just taking root across the frozen bay. “Since we’re meant to be heading up there with friendly intentions,” he said, “it might not be such a bad thing the old man is down with that fever.”

“He just wants you back out of it alive is all.”

Peyton looked into his plate. He finished the last morsel of brewis and used his index finger to clean the pork fat from the plate, then he drank the last of his tea. He felt as if someone had dragged his insides through a field of nettles and at that moment he considered saying so. But all he said was, “I better get a move on if I’m to get across to Ship Cove today.”

The expedition left Ship Cove at 7 a.m. on Sunday, January 13, 1811. It was a morning of scuddy weather, with low cloud and blowing snow, and it was still not much above light when they started out. In all there were twenty-three men in the group, including among them Peyton, Richmond, Taylor and Reilly; four marines, six Blue Jackets and a boy of the HMS
Adonis;
William Cull and Matthew Hughster, James Carey and several other men in their employ. The volunteers were examined by the ship’s surgeon and all but one, a marine who was beginning to show signs of a tuberculosis infection, were pronounced fit for travel.

As well as their packs and firearms the party hauled sledges loaded with 3,600 pounds of provisions and goods — bread, sugar, tea and cocoa, salt pork, salt fish, 60 gallons of spirits, 270 pounds of cartouche boxes and ammunition, 10 axes, 6 cutlasses, and 40 pounds of culinary utensils. The sledges were also packed with a carefully inventoried array of gifts for the Red Indians: blankets, 30; woollen wrappers, 9; flannel shirts, 18; hatchets, 26; tin pots, 10; sundry knickknacks such as beads, thread, knives, fish hooks.

They crossed from the schooner to Little Peter’s Point in an onshore gale and drifting snow that needled the eyes of the men. They walked single file and bent into the wind, their heads bowed low to protect the exposed skin of their faces. They wore creepers over their boots to help keep their footing but the ice on the bay was so tightly packed it had cracked and buckled into the air. Long stretches of pressure ridges and pinnacles made hauling the sledges a tricky, exhausting business. The men who carried only their knapsacks followed behind those dragging to keep the heavy sleds from tipping. They had been ordered to stay close to one another but the poor light and the blowing snow made it difficult to see a man ten yards ahead or behind. Buchan scampered back and forth along the line to ensure everyone was accounted for.

Peyton was partnered with Richmond and shouldered the back of the sledge through rough patches and heavy snowdrifts and stepped in with all his weight to keep the sledge from tipping over as it crested a ridge of ice. By the time they rounded a point out of the wind Peyton’s shirt and undergarments were soaked through with sweat. The men spelled off the sledges and chewed hard tack and sucked at handfuls of snow. Buchan made
his way through the milling group with the air of a busy man who is about to put something down to get to more pressing concerns. There was a relentless, wiry energy about him that struck the furriers and fishermen as incongruous and almost ridiculous in such a short, slight figure. He tugged nervously at the lashings on the sledges to make sure they were secure. “The ice is calm on the Exploits,” he told his crew. “We’re out of the worst of the wind for now, we’ll make good time from here.”

“If he’s so goddamned hearty,” Richmond said to Peyton, “maybe he should take a sledge and we could play sheepdog for a while.”

Peyton picked up the harness where Richmond had let it fall. The sweat against his skin was already cold and he wanted to get moving again before the chill settled any deeper. He watched Richmond walk across to Tom Taylor and repeat himself. Taylor turned his face up to the clouds and laughed. The two men continued talking and Peyton could see the nature of the interaction shift in their darkening expressions. They began to argue about something and fell into a shouting match, cursing one another with a practised ease that attracted the attention of the entire party. Buchan made his way across to Peyton. “Should I intervene in this?” he asked.

Peyton shook his head. “It’s just their way.” He leaned into the harness, resting against the weight of the sledge and staring at his feet. In the ten years Peyton had known them he had never seen Richmond and Taylor carry on a conversation that didn’t involve insults and disagreement. The rancour between them was so habitual it was possible to dismiss it as harmless, even affectionate. He found it an embarrassingly intimate thing to watch. “We’d best get started,” he said. “If we wait for them to
simmer down, we’ll be here till dark.”

Buchan began issuing orders and as the caravan trudged into motion Richmond turned away from Taylor to catch up with Peyton. His massive shoulders sloped like a barrel stave, his face hidden under a full beard of curly black hair. He was shaking his head and smiling to himself. He looked to Peyton like a man who had just quenched a thirst.

For two miles they travelled well in the lee of a heavy forest of birch and poplar growing right to the waterline of the river. When they reached Wigwam Point, the Exploits veered northwest into the wind and each man shouldered into the weight of it as if the sledges had twice the heft of a moment earlier. A mile further on they passed Hughster’s upper salmon station and carried on from there to the remains of a tilt William Cull had used while trapping the previous winter. It was near 3 p.m. with not much more than an hour of light left in the day and Buchan ordered the caravan to a halt. He took Cull and Hughster to reconnoitre the stretch of river ahead while camp was struck.

The tilt’s ceiling had caved in and one wall fallen and the snow had drifted six feet deep against the others. Most of the men were engaged digging out the shelter while Richmond and Taylor took the ship’s boy to cut fresh spruce for bedding and they gathered several turns of young birch and scrag for firewood. A studding sail was unpacked from the sledges and rigged up across the space left by the downed wall and folded across to form something of a ceiling along one side. Two rifle shots reported in the distance.

“Red Indians?” Corporal Bouthland asked.

“Not likely this far down the river,” Peyton said. “If we’re lucky, they come upon some fresh craft for our supper.”

The party hung their wet stockings on sticks near the fire. Half an hour later the advance party returned, dragging the haunch of a caribou. Buchan announced there was clear ice and fair travel for at least the first two miles in the morning. The sleeves of Cull’s coat were laced with blood where he had paunched the animal and severed the back leg from the torso. Large strips of flesh were cut from the haunch and roasted over the fire. The men had not had a proper meal since before dawn and they ate the meat nearly raw.

Buchan made a point of sitting with Peyton. After they had finished eating, both men took out pipes and tobacco, drawing the heat of the smoke into their bodies. “Richmond and Taylor now,” Buchan said quietly. “Should I be keeping them apart?”

Peyton said, “You’d have an easier time parting the waters of the Red Sea.”

“Is that right then?”

“Like an old married couple,” Peyton said, nodding. “Their families fished together on the French Shore, then in Trinity Bay before they came our way.”

“They’ve been with your father how long now?”

“It was Harry Miller hired them. Long before my time,” Peyton said. And then he told Buchan the story as he’d heard it from others on the shore.

Richmond first met Miller on a schooner carrying goods and passengers north into Conception and Trinity bays and on to Fogo Island. He was not more than twelve years old. His family and the Taylors were just returned from a winter in England and heading for new fishing rooms in Trinity Bay. The weather blew hard as soon as they sailed into open water and forced the passengers to keep to the shelter of the steerage quarters.
Richmond’s father fell into conversation with a heavy-set man sprawled on the bunk opposite. He had unruly grey hair and bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows. “There’s land for the taking on the northeast shore,” Miller said. “Salmon galore and as fat as a whore’s leg. Traplines through the backcountry and not enough people to run them all.” He leaned back onto the bunk where he ferreted bed lice out of the straw and nipped them dead between his fingernails. “If you find Trinity not to your liking, you come down to the Bay of Exploits and look for Harry Miller. I’ll set you up.”

Richmond was sitting beside his father during this exchange. John Senior was on the bunk next to Miller though he never spoke a word through the entire conversation.

When Richmond and Taylor were in their twentieth year, their families suffered through a poor season that ended with a month of almost ceaseless rain from August into September that made it impossible to properly cure the fish. Most of it went green and mouldy with the wet and was fit only to feed their dogs. Even their garden was ruined, the potatoes and turnips rotting in the ground. Richmond’s father was barely forty at the time but he looked old enough to have fathered a man nearly his age. He walked with a permanent stoop and a list to one side, as if he was just able to resist letting his body topple over altogether. His mother was convinced that another season like the one they’d just suffered through would be the death of her husband. They had no choice but to look for poor relief in St. John’s or to return to England for the winter and she enlisted the support of Mrs. Taylor in lobbying their husbands to abandon the island for good. As the year darkened, the two couples spent their evenings arguing among themselves while they drank glasses of
a potent potato alcohol Richmond’s father brewed in a still at the back of the tilt. It was clear the women had more stamina and would win out in the end. Both Richmond and Taylor made up their minds to stay behind regardless.

Tom Taylor married Richmond’s sister, Siobhan, in St. John’s while the rest of their families awaited a passage to England. Richmond’s mother pawned a length of fine satin to pay the chaplain who performed the ceremony, and the entire party proceeded to get drunk at one of the dozens of filthy grog shops above the waterfront. Several men were already asleep on the straw lain against the wall when the wedding party arrived. There was an uneven sputter of light from half a dozen tallow candles. Siobhan wore a muslin gown over grey pantaloons tied at the ankle with a black twist. Richmond led the toasts to the new couple and the parents of the bride and groom, and the strangers in the room stood with the families to offer their best and wish the new couple well.

Neither Richmond nor Taylor had ever seen the northeast shore when they left St. John’s that week to look for Harry Miller. Richmond spotted John Senior on the wharf when they disembarked in Fogo. He didn’t recognize Richmond or remember meeting him. He was about to sail into St. John’s enroute to Poole for the winter, but he delayed his trip long enough to carry them across to Miller’s winter house.