River Thieves (35 page)

Richmond leaned back from the table as far as his chair allowed.

“The second Indian on the ice. I don’t believe you were
the shooter, Mr. Richmond, there would hardly have been time to reload.”

“He run off,” Richmond said.

“He may have run, yes. But he was shot and killed as he did so. Without provocation. In cold blood. And I promise you, Mr. Richmond, someone will pay for that.”

Richmond stood from his seat.

“You have an opportunity now to save yourself from the gallows.”

“I have a fair bit of work to do before dark,” Richmond said. “I trust you enjoyed your tea.” He took the still half-f mug from where it sat in front of the officer and emptied the contents onto the floor, then made his way out the door into the piercing afternoon light.

Richmond strode past the marines outside the tilt and made his way to the shoreline where Michael Sharpe was lifting traps from the cauldron with a metal hook. He was in a fury and cursed at his green man and pulled the hook from his hands. “You’ll only make a shag of this,” he muttered. “Watch out now.” There was a large wooden bucket of water with a layer of beeswax floating on the surface beside the kettle. Richmond plunged the steaming trap into the bucket and waited a moment for it to cool, then lifted it slowly through the wax so it would take on an even coat.

Buchan and the marines came down to the cutter and pushed off into the water and they left without a word to the men on the beach. Michael Sharpe looked across at Richmond for some sign of what had gone on behind the tilt’s closed
door, but the older man refused to catch his eye as he went about his work. Richmond hung the freshly coated trap from a nail in the seine-gallows and went to the kettle for another.

He had never talked much of his time on the French Shore, of being burnt out by the navy, not even to Tom Taylor. He’d told the story to Buchan intending to get under the officer’s skin, and was surprised to find how savagely it burred at him as well. When they were released from the navy vessel in St. John’s, the two families booked passage on a ship bound for London. Mrs. Taylor attended Richmond’s mother when she delivered a stillborn child halfway across the Atlantic. Richmond hadn’t seen England in years and the filth and the noise he had taken no notice of at the time were terrifying. The families shared two small rooms near the Thames. All night an unruly tide of traffic and shouting roared in the streets below their windows. The crowds of people and animals roaming free and the slop in the street made his skin crawl. Even the Thames was slubby and clouded and stank like a bog pond.

In the mornings, Richmond and Taylor accompanied their fathers to the dockyards where the men sometimes took a day’s wages unloading a vessel arriving from Africa or the Caribbean. When there was no work the men took their sons to the skittles grounds where they gambled away bits of the precious little money they had, or sat with them in alehouses and drank it away instead.

In late November, Richmond’s mother secured a position as a wet nurse and housekeeper for a well-to-do family and he rarely saw her in the months that followed. Her youngest was still breast-feeding and the infant was nursed by Mrs. Taylor. Even if Richmond was awake when she arrived home, she
barely acknowledged him or her husband, stripping down to her small clothes in the dark and falling immediately to sleep. In the morning she was gone before he woke.

She used to sing her children to sleep at night — old Welsh songs of a beauty that made his toes curl — but that winter the songs he’d grown up with disappeared for good, though the change went practically unnoticed in the flood of changes that overcame them in England. Once it was decided they would head back to Newfoundland in the spring, Richmond expected things to return to normal and much about their lives did. But the Welsh songs that his mother had carried from her own childhood seemed to have died inside her like the daughter delivered on the Atlantic and buried now at sea. Richmond had never learned to speak but a few words of her native tongue and could bring to mind only the thinnest scraps of the melody or lyrics, though the sensation of hearing them never left him. And like the dead child, those songs came to occupy a hollow place in Richmond’s life, faceless and nameless and lost as they were.

John Senior came to himself in the dark, shaken awake by his own shouting, by the stifled thrashing of his arms. He stared into the blackness, his body roked in sweat, breath ragging in his throat like a branch of thorns. He could hear his heart’s
panic, like the manic barking of a dog behind a closed door. The rasp of the ocean’s surf through the open window. It always surprised him how dry a sound it was, like someone kicking through dead leaves in the fall. He turned to the window, hoping for the barest glim of light that might justify his getting out of bed.

He heard footsteps underneath his bedroom, muffled activity in the kitchen. Cassie up and starting the fire. He dressed in the dark, then felt his way downstairs to the kitchen where Cassie was kneeling at the hearth, nursing the new fire.

“I woke you,” he said.

She turned from the frail light to look up at him in the doorway. “I was already up,” she told him. It was an old lie between them, one he never questioned. She poured the kettle full with water and set it on the crane. “Tea now the once,” she said.

He nodded at her and took the bucket she had just emptied and a second wooden container to go down to the brook for water. The stars were still bright. There was silver thaw on the ground from a spell of freezing rain some time through the night. The chill in the air made his skin feel tight across the shoulders. The freshwater brook ran fifty yards off the side of the house and rattled into the ocean at the foot of the cove. He walked towards the steady murmur of it, the dirt path under his feet trodden hard as rock. At the riverbank he balanced over stones as the buckets dipped and dragged full with darkness. Before he turned to start up the path he looked out across the water to the crooked arm of land that sheltered the cove.

He was a boy of seventeen the first time he arrived on the northeast shore, coming across from Poole with Harry Miller in April of 1766. They disembarked on Fogo Island and took
Miller’s sloop into the Bay of Exploits, a spill of rough country almost uninhabited by Europeans at the time, the coastline shadowed by a ragtag fleet of smaller islands. Humpbacked granite, dark pelts of spruce. Barely submerged skerries breaking white water. Most of the winter’s snow was still on the ground, which suggested there was no colour to the land but white and the wet black of the forest and grey shades of ocean and fog and stone. Just sailing through the raw country set John Senior’s heart on edge. It made him feel he was capable of anything.

Among the islands there wasn’t enough drift to allow the sloop to travel any direction in a straight line. Miller cut and tucked through the tangle of ragged rocks and sunkers as if he was making up the route as he went. They came to anchor in the same small cove where John Senior now stood, below what was nothing more than a single-storey spruce tilt with boarded windows at the time. Two boats were hauled high up on the beach and overturned, covered by canvas and a layer of spruce branches. An uneven ring of hills rose into a thickening shawl of fog behind the shelter.

Miller stood at the gunnel of the sloop and opened the spair of his trousers to piss into the harbour. “How does she strike you, Mr. Peyton?” he asked.

John Senior didn’t know if he was referring to the cove or the miserable-looking little tilt or to the country in general. “Well enough, I guess,” he said carefully.

Miller grunted. He fastened his trousers and spat into the water. “She’s a whore is what she is,” he said. The country he was talking about, the place itself. “She’ll spread her legs for you, but you’ll have to pay for the privilege, don’t forget it.” He
smiled across at John Senior. He was obviously content with such arrangements. He was happy to be back. The fog capped in the cove, the backdrop of hills disappearing behind it.

There was something in John Senior’s memory of that first arrival that brought the tidal bore terror of the dream back to him. He had carried it with him across the Atlantic from the old country, he knew. There was a long period of years when it lay dormant and he thought he had outgrown or simply outlasted it somehow and for a while he forgot it entirely. But it came back to him before John Peyton moved over from Poole and it was becoming more persistent as he grew older. The dream had changed only in the sense that it became murkier with time, less articulate. Like a cloth dyed with the colours of fifty years, it grew ever darker, the stain deeper and more sinister. Always he was flailing his arms, hands balled into fists or holding something cold and hard, and he was beating something helpless beneath him, something utterly defenceless. Each time he woke from the nightmare yelling, begging himself to stop.

He started up the hill from the brook, moving as quickly as his burden allowed, slopping water from both buckets as he went.

It was the first time in months that Cassie and John Senior spent time alone in one another’s company. They ate in silence but for the clatter and scrape of cutlery and the regular clicking of John Senior’s jaw as he chewed, the sound like a clockwork sprocket marking time. He had seemed unconcerned about Buchan’s prying while the officer was in the house and hadn’t mentioned him since he left with John Peyton and Mary, but his churlish manner seemed heavier than she
remembered. He refused to talk even about the course of the day’s work, the weather. Most nights the Old Hag dragged him out of sleep and he woke Cassie with his yelling.

She had always maintained a rigid lack of curiosity about what the old man was thinking, about his personal life or his past. Her affection for John Senior was clean and uncomplicated, a limited thing but genuine, and it had endured unchanged for years. She had overheard enough scraps of conversation in her days to know he had been party to rough dealings on the shore, but more detail than that she was willing to forego. Insisted on foregoing, in fact. She navigated her way around John Senior like a blinkered horse on a well-worn path, looking neither right nor left. It was enough for her that he was forthright and fair in his dealings with her, that his taste for drink never led to crying jags or fits of wild pacing and stammering. That he never laid a hand on her.

But she watched him now with a question in her head and nothing she did to distract herself from it was any help. She knew it was impossible to come at it directly and one evening after she brought him his tea she said, “Why did the Reds kill Harry Miller?”

John Senior shifted in his seat. “No saying why that crowd does what it does.” He looked at her steadily then as if something about her had changed, her hair or the colour of her eyes, and he was at a loss to say exactly what it was.

“Joe Reilly said he was a hard man.”

He nodded. “As hard a man as ever I seen. There’s any number of stories could account for the Reds disliking him. Not one of them is fit for a woman’s ears, Cassie.”

“I know hard things have been done on the shore.”

John Senior shook his head. “What you know,” he said softly, “amounts to a piece of dun fish.”

“I’ll let you know when I’ve had enough.”

He said, “I think I would prefer a drop of rum to this tea.”

In the fall of 1781, a group of Beothuk delayed their trip down the River Exploits to the winter camp until after Harry Miller left his house on Burnt Island. He was on his way into St. John’s with the season’s catch and from there was travelling to Poole. He rarely made the trip to England any more, but was making an exception to attend the wedding of his business partner.

On a clear night at the end of September, after they’d watched Miller and his hired men nail boards over the windows and set the sails of a sloop packed with barrels of dried salmon, they struck up a fire near the front step and lit long torches of dry reeds wrapped at the top of sticks and circled the building to set it alight. They shouted into the flames and sang as the wood popped and the windows cracked and melted behind their temporary shutters. Smoke poured from the chimney and then the roof began leaking smoke through its thatch. The fire climbed the lengthening vines of the song the Beothuk chanted into the night until it had lifted a second storey of red light above the building. When the walls collapsed, the Indians dragged up two boats that had been overturned and sheltered above the beach and added them to the fire.

By the next evening the square of char and ash had cooled enough to be picked through and the Beothuk used the ends of
their torch sticks to turn the ruined wood and sharded panes of glass and cracked porcelain and pieces of leather. The long, square-headed nails they were hunting for were black with soot and still too hot to touch with a bare hand. They were flicked into piles and left another night to cool. Other bits and scraps of metal — blackened pots and cutlery, brass buttons and several buckles, the cast-iron crane from the fireplace — were gathered as well. All of this salvage was packed and carried up the river and at the winter camp hammered and worked to some use among the Red Indians or thonged into jewellery or simply displayed as trophy.

Miller and John Senior were at the rail of their sloop which had wintered in St. John’s. Miller was singing a bawdy song about a wedding night, a song he’d returned to repeatedly and sung at length during the trip back from England. There was no malice apparent in his rendition and it seemed almost a mindless occupation. Occasionally he would come to himself and the song he was singing aloud and the recently altered status of the man in his company would make contact in his mind. “Oh me,” he’d say and he’d slap John Senior’s back.

He was singing
Her arse was white as a chamber pot
as they rounded the point of land behind which his house once stood. The last of the season’s snow still covered the blackened ruins so that it seemed the building had simply vanished. For a moment Miller considered that he had mistaken Cox’s Cove for his own and that he still had half a day’s travel to reach his station. “Oh me,” he said.