River Thieves (21 page)

At Twenty Mile Pond they stopped to rinse their shoes and stockings in the water and to eat a meal of cheese and bread. There was a strong breeze in the clearing that kept the insects down and dried their clothes as they sat at the water’s edge. She lay back on the stones with bread still in her hand and fell asleep.

Cassie paused there, as if telling the story was exhausting her as much as the actual trip had, years before. Peyton watched her stare into the fire.

Beyond the lake the Indian path knifed into the trees, becoming so narrow that they couldn’t walk abreast of one another. Stones pushed up to block the trail, some as high as the axle tree of a wagon. Her father waded waist-deep rivers with Cassie on his back, both of them staring into the current, his foot shifting carefully ahead to feel out each step. They lost the path and found it and lost it again. They clung to tree branches, stepping across exposed roots to cross patches of thigh-deep mud. Their hands were cut and scraped and coated
in spruce gum. Cassie’s legs were numb with walking, the soles of her shoes caked with blood. It was nothing like she expected and everything she wanted it to be all the same. “Do you see what I mean?” she asked.

Peyton raised his shoulders. “I guess so,” he said.

She said, “I wanted whatever he wanted is the thing.”

Peyton only nodded.

It was dark by the time they reached Portugal Cove and her father approached the first tilt they came across to inquire after lodgings and food. The building consisted of a single room only and through the door they could see the light of a small fire laid against the evening chill. They were ushered in and introduced — Cassie as
Charles.
“A pretty young lad,” the man who had come to the door said. His name was O’Brien, an old Irishman whose high forehead and remarkable jowls seemed too large for the rest of his face, for his body. His wife, Margaret, was the only other occupant of the hovel, a small spry woman who they would learn later was nearly blind. She walked about the room with the confidence of a cat.

Margaret warmed a pot of seal meat in a stew of potatoes and turnip for their supper while they went outside to wash their feet in a brook running a few yards from the tilt. Her father lifted Cassie’s feet into his lap and dried them with his shirt-tail, then applied a little of the pork fat to the bald patches of blister.

Cassie had never tasted seal meat — her mother refused to buy or eat it where salt pork was available — and she was of two minds about the dark, oily flavour. But she was so hungry from the travel that she ate her bowlful and accepted an offer of seconds, using her index finger to clean every bit of gravy from
the earthenware. Her father was telling their hosts a fictional story about his son’s appetite, how insatiable it was, when she fell asleep against his arm. She woke up the next morning on a layer of spruce branches spread over the dirt floor near the fireplace. Her father’s coat laid over her as a blanket.

Cassie turned her head towards Peyton. Her face was sickly pale, which made her eyes seem black and spent, like bits of char left behind by a fire. Peyton said, “Perhaps you would like a drop of rum.”

She looked around the room suddenly and he realized she was thinking of John Senior. She ’d never touched a drop in his father’s presence that he could recall. The old man had gone down to the stage house to work on the nets or simply whittle wood as soon as she opened the letter and the news came out. He placed a rough hand to Cassie’s shoulder for a moment — his only comment on the matter — then stepped out the door without a word. Peyton tried to imagine Cassie telling this story to his father and couldn’t. The talking, at least, had always been left to them.

Down on the stagehead John Senior was staring out over the sea. No wind to speak of, but there was a heavy send in the water of the cove. The smooth slate-grey surface looked like a stone courtyard riding a swell of tectonic motion.

He had come down to meet the sloop when John Peyton hauled in from Fogo with a load of spring supplies. “There’s a letter,” Peyton said to him, jumping from the gunnel after they had collared the
Susan
to the stage. “From St. John’s.”

They’d walked up to the house then, the bearers of bad
news, neither of them doubted that. After she opened the letter John Senior put his hand to Cassie ’s shoulder and thought he might say something, a word for comfort. But nothing he could think of seemed the leastways appropriate, given the circumstances under which he first encountered Cassie and her father.

During their visits to St. John’s to market the catch of salmon in the old days, he and Harry Miller stayed in rooms let by public houses for as long as a week. They drank hard after the day’s business was complete and each night Miller availed himself of the services that were at a man’s disposal in the island’s capital. At first John Senior had resisted the undertow of his own loneliness and lust, holding himself apart from the women who circled the tavern tables like gulls over a cutting room. “I was beginning to wonder,” Harry Miller said, after finally goading his younger partner into bringing a woman back to his room, “what sort of oil you required to set a flame to your wick, if you follow my meaning.”

John Senior never shared the obvious relish with which Miller engaged in his annual ritual of debauchery. Miller’s drunken propositioning of every female he encountered, his howling orgasms that could be heard on all three floors of the public house, embarrassed him, pricked at his sense of propriety in the sober light of day. But for a time they became partners in this, as in all other things.

The two men had once spent part of an evening in St. John’s at the tavern owned by Cassie’s father and after joining their table for several rounds he’d brought them next door to his house. Miller shouted propositions to the two women who’d taken refuge upstairs and Cassie’s father, far from being insulted,
laughed and urged him on. He got up from his seat then and leaned low over Miller, as if he was crying on the man’s shoulder. They nodded together and Cassie’s father slapped Miller’s shoulder several times and then went drunkenly up the stairs. Miller sat on the edge of his chair, paddling at his thighs with the palms of his hands. He was singing tunelessly, wordlessly,
de dee dee dee, de dee.
He fingered at his crotch, leaning back in the chair as he made adjustments.

John Senior stared across at his partner. He experienced a peculiar moment of heaviness, as if the strangeness and uncertainty of the world suddenly weighed in on him. If things had gone differently, he knew, his father would be sitting beside Miller now with the same look of drunken, predatory expectancy.

John Senior’s mother had accused her husband of sleeping with prostitutes all their married life. When he was thirteen she moved into the room his sisters shared, in protest. It was a change that was never spoken of, the necessary accommodations and compromises within the family made silently, like sleepers shifting to make room for another body. But he felt the humiliation it was for both of them. It was like a sickness they passed back and forth, a virus surviving first in one host, then the other, and kept alive for years in this fashion.

Without setting out to, he had satisfied himself as to the truth of his father’s habits through remarks from neighbours and friends, through a more explicit awareness of the man’s routines and whereabouts. He said nothing to either of his parents but felt as if the knowledge made him complicit in the whole affair.

In the last weeks of his life, his father was bedridden, withdrawn and uncommunicative, babbling, incontinent. John Senior sat up with the dying man through the night while his
mother and two sisters slept in the adjoining room. Morning and evening he changed the square cloth diapers, scraping the inevitable mess of feces into a chamber pot. It was a kind of penance for knowing, an indignity he was determined to spare his mother. She came into the sickroom early one morning as he squatted over the pot with the diaper. The smell beneath him was putrid, an undeniable proof of rot at the world’s core. His mother said, “A man is all stomach where women are concerned, Johnny.” She shook her head then with a wounded contempt that he had never thought might have included him in its dismissal.

Miller’s endless racket was making him feel nauseous. He could hear voices from the upstairs rooms, a hushed argument. He stood up from his seat. “Miller,” he said, starting towards him. His stomach roiled and lurched, like a salmon writhing at the end of a spear.

“Jesus Christ, Peyton!” Miller yelled.

John Senior had him by the hair, hauling him across the room. Cassie’s father called from the top of the stairs, but they were already going through the door. John Senior pushed and kicked and slapped Miller ahead of him.

“Are you mad, man?” Miller screamed. “You Christly devil-skin,” he said.

They continued in this fashion down the tiny dirt alleyway, then along the entire length of Lower Path until they’d reached the public house where they were lodging.

John Senior went back the next afternoon and waited near the house until he saw Cassie’s father come out the door and nip across to the tavern. He stood before the two women with no notion of what needed to be said or why exactly he had
come. He rambled stupidly about the book Cassie held and offered an awkward apology for Miller as if he was a dog who had piddled on a good rug. The women clearly distrusted him and their distrust was heightened by what they could see of his own fear and uncertainty. They looked away and said nothing. And before he could settle on a proper way to take his leave of them Cassie’s father returned.

John Senior made his hurried excuses then and left, relieved to be released from a duty he didn’t fully comprehend. But before he went out the door, he ’d looked into the man’s eyes a long moment, searching the alcohol-dampened flicker of them, thinking he might be able to tell just from that. Which one had he gone upstairs for, his wife or his daughter?

John Senior watched the grey water of the cove billow towards the shore, fighting the same surge of nausea he’d felt sitting beside Miller in that room. Feeling the same peculiar heaviness come over him. He’d had no plan to offer Cassie a position in his house and did so on a murky whim, hearing about her mother’s death on his way through St. John’s years later. Soon after Cassie came north, it seemed likely to him that she and John Peyton would make a pair, so he let the question he’d been asking himself lie. It was sometimes better, he had learned, not to know. He left the two of them on their own when he could, sent them across to Reilly’s for the haying alone. Matchmaker is how he saw himself. The good father.

He shook his head at the thought now. The good father. He’d been on a round of his salmon rivers a summer some years after Cassie’s arrival, inspecting the cure, the state of the weirs. He was meant to stop in at Charles Brook, then go on to Richmond’s river, but had foregone the last leg of the trip for
an omen of weather. There was no one on the stagehead when he arrived, John Peyton and the hired men hand-lining for cod in shoal water at the backend of Burnt Island. He went up to the house and walked in on Cassie in the wooden tub in front of the fireplace. She was standing in water to her knees, a cloth in one hand, her hair pinned up at her neck. He stared a moment, stunned, as if someone had clapped the breath from his lungs. Sunlight slanting through the windows, dust motes moving in a slow waltz through the air.

It had never before that moment occurred to him he might have her himself. That he wanted her. She made no attempt to cover herself, just stared back at him with a fierce, knowing look. Her breath hard through her nostrils, her wet skin glowing like a pane of glass facing a sunset.

The memory of that look still made John Senior’s chest clutch helplessly about his lungs. He turned away from the steady thrum of the water and walked in off the stage. He felt ashamed of himself and fearful, as if he’d just woken from his nightmare.
His wife or his daughter?
He set out towards the hills behind the summer house. The ground beneath his feet seemed hardly more solid than the ocean and he could sense the earth’s dark, inevitable undertow. Eventually the earth opened up and swallowed a person, body and soul. Cassie’s father gone now and they were all, every one of them, being pulled along in his wake.

Peyton came back from the pantry with glasses. He poured two small shots of rum and added a splash of water to both. He sat back in his seat. “You woke up beside the fireplace,”
he said.

“Two more things,” Cassie said.

The old woman was already up and about the tilt, a fire burning to boil water. The smoke vented through a wooden barrel fashioned into a kind of chimney. Margaret squinted down at Cassie, at the blur of movement in the place where Cassie had been sleeping. Her eyes were nearly shut with peering. “Child,” she said and she held a hand in Cassie’s direction. Both men were still asleep on opposite sides of the room. Margaret took her hand at the wrist and smiled suddenly, staring off into the air as if there was something clandestine about physical contact between them.

“Now,” she said. “I wonder would you ever do us a small favour?”

Cassie shifted where she stood, resisting the urge to pull her hand away. Her feet burned where the skin had been galled from the heels, the toes.

Margaret said, “Tell me your name for real.”

“Miss?”

“You’re no lad, even I can see that.”

“Are you blind, miss?”

“Almost and nearly. Tell an old blind woman your name now.”

She stepped nearer. She was almost the same height as Margaret and lifted herself on her toes to speak directly into her ear. She felt as if she was betraying a confidence, putting herself at risk somehow. “Cassie,” she whispered. “Cassandra.”

The Irishwoman was still smiling and patted her arm. “I won’t tell a soul,” she promised.

In the afternoon O’Brien took them out in a small skiff to
hook lobsters for their supper. The water was dead calm and they drifted about the shallows near shore. O’Brien had a wooden staff fourteen feet in length that was tipped with a thin metal hook. He knelt in the bow, bracing his knees against the sides of the boat while Cassie lay across the gunnel to watch him at work. The water was so clear she could see the stones and dark fingers of seaweed on the mottled ocean floor. O’Brien held the staff near the bottom as they drifted, the shaft refracting under the water’s skin like a bone broken and bent at an impossible angle. His arms dipped suddenly, gently, and he brought the staff up hand over hand then to lift a lobster from the sea, the prehensile tail curled into a ring to grip the hook. He shook the lobster into a wooden tub half-filled with water.