River Thieves (37 page)

If it was consumption, as everyone suspected, there was nothing to be done for her. But no one said as much.

Buchan said, “I wish my surgeon had accompanied us, he would have been interested to know what you are preparing.”

“No secret,” Annie Boss said and she laughed. She pushed herself to her feet. “Come up and see.”

They walked in together with one of Annie’s children. The tilt smelled of spruce gum and brine and potash. There was a mewling from the back of the room where a slut with a litter of new puppies lay beneath a wooden bunk. Buchan crouched to look in on them. The eyes of the pups were still closed and they nestled into the dog’s belly, fighting for the teats. The mother growled at his boots.

“She contrary today,” Annie said. She was standing next to the fireplace and looked down at her daughter who was clinging to her dress. “Know how she feels sometimes.” She laughed and covered the girl’s face for a moment with her hand. She spoke a few words in Mi’kmaq and her daughter skipped out the door.

Buchan stood and walked across the room. The pot on the crane was filled with a mixture of leaves and roots boiling in water. Annie stirred the concoction and lifted some of the lank green into the air.

“Wrap in a cloth,” she said. “Put it here.” She touched her breastbone with the flat of her hand.

“A poultice,” Buchan said, nodding. “What else do you use it for?”

“Bad head, broken bone. Burn.” Annie smiled. “Use it on Joe Jep’s hand, fix it right up.”

“Your husband?” Buchan said. His look shifted, his curiosity suddenly sharpened and focused. “How long ago was that, Annie?”

“When we meet, years now. John Senior bring him out to White Bay, his hand gone black then, bad, bad smell, whew,” she said, waving her free hand before her face.

“What did he say had happened to his hand?”

Annie’s smile flickered like a candle crossed by a breeze. She looked back to the pot of boiling leaves. “Willow leaf and Indian Cup,” she said pointing with the spoon, “bark of boxy fir.”

“Annie,” he said.

She looked back at the white man. She was still smiling, and pointed the spoon at him. “Joe Jep a good man,” she said.

Joseph Reilly cooked up a feed that evening of pan-fried salmon in pork scruncheons with boiled potatoes. The spuds had just been dug out of the ground and were served under spoonfuls of the pork fat and fried onions. There was fresh dark bread to wipe the plates clean. A large pot of black tea was kept hot over the fire. Down on the beach the marines made do with a stew of salmon tails.

Mary had no appetite and sat with the youngest children on the floor. They held blind puppies in their laps while the mother shifted on her haunches and whined beside them. She leaned her long snout into the laps of each person in turn to sniff and lick at her young and then lifted her nose as if testing the air. Mary began talking to the dog in the same way she spoke to the children, in a singsong mix of Beothuk and
English, and the animal cocked her head to listen, then stood and began barking in response.

The people at the table turned to the noise for a moment before going back to their conversation.

Annie Boss was saying she ’d grown up in Red Indian country, but they kept clear of the Mi’kmaq same as they did the whites. She never saw one in the flesh before she was a girl of ten, travelling with her mother and father and her brother on a river near Grand Lake. Her father had been hunting and they had killed and quartered a caribou, the dressed meat packed between them in their canoe. Before dusk they sighted the light of a fire through the woods ahead and landed their canoe nearby. They walked through alder bush and spruce trees towards the fire and came upon a Red Indian shelter. Her father went to the entrance and pulled back the leather doorway. An old man and woman sat there, a boy almost a man, a young girl about Annie’s age. They were roasting three tiny jays on sticks over the fire and they all looked to be—Annie paused and spoke a few words to Reilly in Mi’kmaq.

“Starved,” he said. “Starving.”

Annie nodded. They all looked to be starving, she said. They made no sign at first, no movement or sound, as if they thought the visitors might simply remove themselves if they remained motionless long enough. Her father smiled at them and made calming gestures, and after several minutes of miming back and forth, the young man followed Annie’s family back to their canoe where they gathered several portions of the meat and carried it to the shelter. They roasted the venison and ate together and in the course of their interactions they gathered that the family had had little luck hunting caribou and
were afraid to venture too much into the open to do so.

In the morning her father left much of the rest of the meat with the Red Indian family. He brought a rifle to the mamateek that he intended to leave with them as well. He tried to show them how to load and fire the weapon, but they refused to touch it and seemed somehow afraid of its very presence. Her father was exasperated by this and continued his demonstration and encouragement until Annie’s mother finally took the rifle from his hands and carried it back down to the canoe herself. They left the family later that morning in much the same condition they’d found them.

There was a long moment of silence around the table.

Reilly said, “They’d come down here on occasion.” He motioned with his head towards the river. “Looking for a few salmon.”

“Red Indians?” Buchan asked.

Reilly nodded. “They never caused no harm.”

“The Reds were on fairly friendly terms with this one, Captain,” Peyton said. “They’d walk out on his weir and take their pick of the fish. They called him by his Christian name.”

Buchan sat back in his chair. “Why hadn’t I been told of this before?”

Reilly laughed. “Let’s say it wouldn’t do much for my standing on the shore if it was general knowledge.”

“Do they still come through here?”

“You know yourself,” Reilly said. “They aren’t around in numbers like the old days. And the ones left are on terms with no one but themselves.”

“Yes, well,” Buchan said. There was just a trace of a smile on the officer’s face. He seemed perplexed by something. “It is
hard to know who to trust, isn’t it?” he said.

Early in the evening Mary took herself off into a corner of the room and lay down with a blanket of caribou hide. Annie Boss went to her then and pressed the poultice she’d prepared in the afternoon to the woman’s chest, using a long length of muslin around her torso to hold it in place. The men walked down to the beach where they joined the marines around a bonfire.

“When I was speaking with Mr. Richmond,” Buchan said, “he mentioned a Micmac furrier you encountered on your way from the lake in March.”

Peyton and Reilly hesitated, as if they were each waiting for the other to speak. “Noel Young,” Peyton said finally and he nodded his head. “He come upon us on the river and spent the night in camp.”

“He has worked in this area for some time?”

“As long as my father has been here at least. Runs traplines through the winter near New Bay Pond. Spends his summers off of Tommy’s Arm River, out past Sop’s Arm.” He paused for a moment. “He’s a hard man, Captain, and not much to be trusted. By his own count he’s killed ninety-nine Red Indians in his day and wouldn’t pass up the chance to make it an even hundred.”

“Is that a fact?”

“There’s no love lost between the Micmac and the Reds as a rule,” Peyton said.

Buchan rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Mr. Reilly, this is obviously not the case with your wife.”

“It’s the Irish and the English, sir,” he said. “There’s some look upon us with Christian civility and more wish us dead and
buried because we speak a different language and visit a different kirk.”

“A preposterous oversimplification, Mr. Reilly.” The Irishman nodded. His face glowed a bright copper colour in the firelight. He said, “It’s sometimes the simplest explanation is closest to the truth.”

In the morning as the marines prepared the cutter and gig for departure, Buchan requested a private interview with Reilly. “Just a few moments really,” he said, “to confirm testimony given to the grand jury in the spring.”

“All right,” Reilly said. He looked around the room. There were children scattered about the corners like furniture pushed aside to accommodate dancing. Annie Boss was clearing up from breakfast with some assistance from Mary. “We might find a bit of peace and quiet at the river.”

On their way to the shoreline Buchan said, “Her breathing does seem a little less laboured this morning.” Reilly was walking ahead on the path and seemed not to hear him. “Mary’s breathing,” he repeated. “It seems to have improved somewhat.”

“Perhaps,” Reilly said without turning his head. “I didn’t take notice.”

“From what I understand from your wife, that poultice is quite the miracle potion.” They had reached the wide sand beach and were walking side by side. The marines milled about the two boats that had been dragged partway up out of the water. Buchan said, “She tells me it did wonders for the injury to your hand.”

Reilly turned to look at the officer for only a moment. They had reached the point where the weir curved out onto the river and Reilly went ahead of Buchan and sat on the dam, facing upstream away from the marines. “You wanted to talk to me about what happened on the lake,” he said.

“I am interested in hearing the rest of your story first,” Buchan said. “The family of blacksmiths. In the old country.”

Reilly shook his head. “There was no family of blacksmiths.”

Buchan made a noise in his throat. He leaned out over the water far enough to see his own reflection on the surface of the river. He said, “I am aware that a second Indian was killed on the lake last March, Mr. Reilly.”

“Is this what Mary is telling you?”

“The source of my information is irrelevant. The point is that with regards to that murder, you are lying to protect John Senior.”

“We were speaking about my hand, Captain.”

Buchan unbuttoned a pocket in his tunic and removed the journal and fished for a lead. “As you wish,” he said.

Reilly held his right hand over the pages of the notebook to give him a clear view. There was nothing of sense there that Buchan could see at first, a criss-cross of black lines that began at the base of the thumb and climbed across the back of the hand nearly to the other side.

“It’s still possible to see the truth of it, if you know it’s there to begin with,” Reilly said. He pointed with the index finger of the opposite hand, circling the triangular area of flesh between the tendons cabling the thumb and forefinger to the wrist.

It took a moment for the letter
T
to surface, for Buchan to register what it meant. He looked up at the Irishman. “There’s
worse that could have come to you,” he said.

“And nearly did. Commuted to branding and deportation to the colonies out of regard for my age and the fact it was my first offence.”

“The first offence you were convicted of,” Buchan said.

“A fine distinction, sir. Well noted. You’re a credit to the office of magistrate. I had quite the career behind me by that time.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen, sir. No age to be riding a horse foaled by an acorn, I can tell you.”

Buchan tapped his lead against the pages of the notebook. “What was the charge?”

“Lifting a watch from a gentleman among the crowd gathered at Tyburn to see the hangings. I was a poor pickpocket, I’m afraid. I came to it late, after a long apprenticeship as a river thief.”

“You speak of it as if it were an honourable profession, Mr. Reilly.”

Reilly shrugged. “Every honourable profession on the Thames had their hand in. A revenue officer could make thirty guineas a night to turn a blind eye to all the activity. There were rat catchers on the Thames would carry the same two dozen rats from ship to ship and get paid ten times over for clearing vessels of vermin. And all the while they’d be making note of all that was aboard. It was how we knew which ships were worth stealing from.” Reilly shook his head. “We never cleaned out a vessel, just skimmed from the barrels and then tapped the heads closed again. There was some were more brazen about it. They’d cut the hawsers at night and let the
barges drift on the tide to some spot out of the way and then strip it clean like crows picking a corpse.”

Buchan said, “You’ll forgive me if I see no reason to take notes.”

“It wasn’t my intention to sound nostalgic, Captain.”

“Perhaps you could tell me how all of this is connected to John Senior.”

The Irishman leaned over his knees and spat into the clear water. “I never chose to be a thief,” he said. “I’d rather have been selling milk about the streets of St. Giles. It was my father’s calling. He saw me off in London and he expected me back on the first ship out of St. John’s, which was the route taken by most sentenced to the colonies. I made up my mind to stay if I could scavenge a bit of work. Which proved more difficult than I would have liked.” Reilly raised his hand. “Not many men will hire a convicted thief. An Irish one at that.”

“So you concealed it by scarring your hand.”

“It never occurred to me is the God’s honest truth. It was John Senior’s idea.”

Buchan nodded as if this confirmed something he’d suspected about the elder Peyton for years.

“He told me I’d not be allowed to live an honest life if I appeared otherwise.”

“I would say he took the job rather too seriously.”

“I was just a lad still. He walked me out to Quidi Vidi Lake and got me drunk while we laid a fire to heat a poker. He gave me a rolled-up handkerchief to chew on and sat across my back and held my arm to the ground. When I came to myself, my hand was wrapped in strips he’d torn away from the shirt on his back. I didn’t look at it until the smell came through. Had
to be brought across to White Bay to have Annie’s mother clean it up, John Senior lost a full week’s work carrying me there and back.”

Buchan stared upriver where the spruce grew to the shore and leaned out over their slurred reflections in the slow current. He felt unsure of himself suddenly. He turned to Reilly. “Was all this enough to warrant lying about a murder?”