The Tinsmith (22 page)

“You'll be wanting to stay on with us, then?” the Englishman said, his voice neither warm nor cold.

Anson turned and took a final look toward Dare's settlement. There still weren't any gulls keening above the cannery. The absence of the rhythmic sound of tin being cut suddenly struck him like the absence of the pulse in a body. The silence was gloomy, and not even the sunshine brought any warmth to the place.

“Yes,” he said. “For a short time. But I intend to pay for my room and board.”

The Englishman scowled. “If you prefer.”

Anson sighed. What he would have preferred was to go upriver to New Westminster and find a hotel, but, somehow, he felt the need to stay closer to Crescent Slough. If the place itself wasn't so unwelcoming, he might have made himself at home in the tent. But he well knew what sleeping rough would do to his aching body.

Slowly he lowered himself into the skiff, almost ashamed by how relieved he was to return to Chilukthan. And yet, the silence made him even more anxious to see Dare and talk with him. There was something unnervingly final about it that needed to be halted before the silence spread all along the river and spilled over into Anson's own crowded memories; he did not want the past blanked out this way, no matter how much it might haunt him. For the past, after all, was nothing less than a proof of life. Without its tug, how was a man to know his blood still flowed through his body?

Henry Lansdowne unmoored the skiff and settled behind the oars. Somehow his silence was of a different kind, and Anson had no desire to break it. Instead, the doctor sat in the stern and watched the black emptiness of Crescent Slough shrink to the size of a cave mouth, to the size of a horse's eye, to nothing.

IV

Three days passed, leavened only by Anson's keen interest in Chilukthan's preparations for the next salmon run. Rarely had he seen such a combination of skill and speed as evinced by the Indian women on the main wharf who wove the linen fishnets. But the Chinese crew who soldered the cans in back of one of the smaller buildings especially fascinated him, mostly because their hot, repetitive work with molten solder and tinplate and muriatic acid was exactly what Dare must have been doing for years. Watching the Chinese through the crinkled air of extreme temperatures as they doused pig lead in large, fire-enveloped crucibles of brick, it was in fact easy to see Dare through the smoke and steam, sweating as he carefully applied his soldering iron along the seams of each tin. Along with the heat and the dull rhythm of the pressman stepping on the treadle that activated the cutting of the tinplate sheets into appropriate sizes, the cloying smells of the chemicals quickly disoriented Anson's senses. But he could not easily pull himself away. There was something mesmeric in the rapid movements of the Chinese as they waved their brushes of acid in calligraphy strokes and fed sheets of tin into machines, all the while grinning as if delighted to be doing any kind of work that kept them away from the river. The explosive clash of red flame against silver, the endless billows of grey smoke and dripping steam, the blurred faces appearing and disappearing in the heat-curdled air held Anson in a thrall he could break only when he felt himself on the verge of passing out.

Despite the fascinating diversions of the fishing preparations, however, and many hours spent in his room reading his well-worn editions of Virgil and Tibullus, Anson grew increasingly restless. For the first time since Antietam, Dare had summoned him for help, and in this instance it was with words, clear and direct, not with an escaped slave's red-eyed look of terror. The significance was not lost on Anson: because Dare had cabled, Dare's life must be threatened. And if his life was threatened, and Anson could not help, then more than their shared past was in peril; his nobler sentiments, his love for his country and for Elizabeth, would be committed at last to the same cold grave. Each moment that passed in which he did not begin to act on Dare's summons in some practical way gnawed at Anson's nerves, at his sense of himself as a man who could be relied upon.

He tried to hire an Indian to row him the two miles upriver to New Westminster, but they were all too occupied with their cannery work to oblige him. And in any case, Anson wasn't even sure that Dare had remained in that city. According to Henry Lansdowne, Dare most likely took a ship along the opposite bank from New Westminster to Victoria, because that was where a cannery crew could be hired. When Anson mentioned that he ought to do the same, the Englishman looked at him soberly.

“If he's gone to Victoria, he'll soon be back. The salmon are on their way, doctor. With respect, you are a stranger here and do not recognize the urgency. The salmon are a curious harvest, most unpredictable. They are not like the apples in the trees or even the potatoes in the ground. They live far out at sea for years before they are called back to the very waters inland in which they came to be. Theirs is a blessed and miraculous travail. It is much harder to be sure of their bounty.”

“Then how is it that you know they are coming in such numbers?”

The two men had stood on the dike above the cannery at Chilukthan, looking north over the river. Henry Lansdowne rubbed a bony hand along the white side whiskers of one cheek. His voice, though low and somber, suddenly trembled with a distinct quality of awe.

“You ask how I know that the salmon are coming in such numbers? Doctor, I know as only a devout man knows his God. They are coming. Theirs is a cycle designed by the Lord, and He has made it Truth that in every fourth year, the salmon return in abundance. Even the Indians, savage though they are, understand this. And Mr. Dare . . .”

Anson's blood quickened. He waited for the insult, prepared to refute it, but it did not come.

“. . . appears to understand the salmon's habits better than most. He'll be back before they are here.”

Reluctantly, Anson accepted his host's logic. The wisest course, as so often proved to be the case, was the hardest course. And if it was so hard to wait, Anson consoled himself finally that waiting was the right thing to do.

And so, in the days that followed, he tramped the soft peat bogs, scaring up flocks of red-winged blackbirds, their scarlet bangles shaking like rose petals in the wind. Once, he had met Thomas Lansdowne's daughter, Louisa, along the way. She was a pretty girl of ten years, with long black hair and a winning, dimpled smile. The day had been blustery, and her hair had blown out behind her in a rippled stream. Anson had been gripped by a sudden, not unpleasant sensation that he had encountered the childhood ghost of his late, beloved wife, except that this girl, Louisa, while she possessed Elizabeth's same delicate cheekbones and rosy complexion, was more animated; it seemed, in fact, that her vital nature was straining against the very proprieties and gloom of the settlement. He had exchanged only the briefest of pleasantries with the child before she had skipped off over the peat, her small hand holding the straw bonnet to her head to prevent its flying off on the breeze.

Other than that rare encounter, Anson met no one, not even when he walked back and forth along the short dike—only a hundred feet long—that fronted Henry Lansdowne's property. Sometimes he walked a half-mile along the slough bank, to a point opposite Thomas Lansdowne's house, drawn there by the cry of crows building nests high in one of the great bell tower fir trees. Often, too, he watched the Chinese and Indians at work, and he always sought to keep out of the way of the industrious Lansdownes. But most of all, he tried not to place the silence at Crescent Slough alongside the image of Dare's terrified face at Antietam and the mutilated corpse of his murdered master. But the thick clouds of black flies and mosquitoes hanging over every foot of the settlement, as well as the palpable sense of anticipation in the air about the salmon's return, which was almost akin to the tension preceding a military engagement, only increased Anson's unease.

Finally, one morning, he stood trembling on the wharf in heavy rain, watching the progress of the paddlewheeler coming up the river from the Gulf. Large drops fell off his hat brim, blurring his view. But there was little enough to see. The wind had raised a chop on the black river, and the steamer's smoke plume immediately dissolved above the boat, which crept relentlessly up the channel, black as a bull pulling a plough. The dull thump of the paddles rose and died with the gusting wind. Anson willed it to arrive faster, eager to know if Dare was on board.

The black shape broadened gradually in the channel as the tide-weighted paddles thumped out the heavy minutes. It was a dismal process, and so the sudden apparition of Louisa running up the gangway lifted Anson's spirits.

She was, indeed, a regular whip of a child, crackling with energy, her dark hair and eyes vivid and shining like black fire. In the days since meeting her on the peat bog, Anson had grown very attached to the idea of her presence, perhaps too attached. For he had begun to pity her, and he was in no position to feel that way; he had no right, and no manner of helping even if he overlooked the insignificance of their bond. To be so filled with joy in such a joyless place! But perhaps the child's lot was simply the human one, and the reason he felt so removed from God.

“Dr. Baird! Dr. Baird! We're going to have a house guest! He's coming on the steamer!” The child's hair gusted around her bright cheeks, her words danced on the air.

Anson smiled. “A guest? What sort of guest? Another doctor?”

With a flutter of her hands, she pushed her hair back and leaned forward, blinking downriver into the rain. “I don't think so. Father didn't say.” She chewed on her full bottom lip. “But . . .” Her eyes widened. “He's an American, like you.”

No, child, Anson thought, not like me, a worn-out country doctor who suffers terrible nightmares when he can fall asleep at all, a veteran who served his country and his conception of God and now hardly believes in either. That kind of American doesn't generally travel the world. He stays home, among his people, quietly doing his work and waiting, like those under the grass at Antietam and Gettysburg, to be forgotten.

The paddlewheeler drew close enough for the dark water on the paddles to be visible. Smoke lay like a whipped cur along the stack. The rain bounced off the river and the planks of the wharf.

“Where's your bonnet?” Anson said. “You should be wearing one, Louisa.”

She laughed and tilted her face up into the storm. “I hope he isn't a doctor. They worry too much.”

She stood on her tiptoes at the very edge of the wharf. Anson was certain she was about to clap. But then her uncle emerged out of the weather, moving blackly and efficiently toward the moored skiff, and the sight of him automatically drew her back from the edge.

Slowly the paddles stopped their revolutions. Into the new quiet the rain swelled. Anson realized he had no desire to meet one of his countrymen. Such encounters were inevitably delicate, especially if the person was from the South. But, of course, he didn't meet many Southerners, and, in any case, he preferred not to discuss the war or current politics with Northerners either. Over the years, he had listened to patients who had served in the army, listened with sympathy to the catalogues of ailments that they'd picked up in the great conflict, and even held his tongue when some veterans complained that freeing the niggers hardly seemed an honourable accomplishment. Anson had heard such comments often enough and tried not to judge the speakers; usually they were suffering from old wounds and sicknesses, and then there was always the inexplicable sense of loss that followed a war. The ancient Greeks and Romans had experienced it too, and their battles had never been so momentous and violent in scale.

Well, whoever this American was, Anson recognized that he wasn't likely to be much involved with him. In fact, if Dare was on the steamer, Anson wouldn't even be staying on at Chilukthan.

To his surprise, this thought induced a wave of melancholy. He looked at the child again. How different his life would have been if he'd become a father! That responsibility would be enough to steady a man, to keep him working for the future despite whatever nightmares and plagues trailed after him from the past. Thomas Lansdowne, for example: he possessed an admirable resolve to succeed, a faith that Anson could hardly understand, though he deemed it the proper attitude for the head of a family. This child, then, was fortunate. He need not pity her.

They stood in silence as the driving rain weakened to a drizzle and Henry Lansdowne rowed evenly into the choppy channel to the steamer. Once there, he helped the passengers into the skiff and began rowing back again. Anson suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to flee. There was but a single passenger, a stranger. Dare had not returned.

As the skiff pulled closer, Anson's nerves began to fray. The passenger's appearance was disturbing. He was not young, so he would have knowledge and opinions of the war. But much worse than this was the one sleeve of the man's coat: it was empty and pinned to his chest. A wounded veteran, and all that remained to complete the dismal picture was the man's country. For Anson could not, even in his most patriotic moments, believe that the defeated Confederacy had gone away, at least not as a moral entity in the minds of its citizens.

He watched Henry Lansdowne moor the skiff and help the passenger out. Louisa ran forward but then turned to him, beaming. “Come along, Dr. Baird, come and meet our guest.”

And for the child's sake, certainly not his own, Anson stood in the drizzle and awkwardly shook the passenger's gracefully extended left hand.

“Ambrose Richardson. A pleasure to meet you, sir.”

The accent wasn't strong, but it was there, a mild lilt, a subtle music. By the time Anson had come close enough to the man to see his narrow face and pale blue eyes, receding hairline, and full handlebar moustache of pure white, he had expected the worst. Now the man, tall and compactly built, his long legs bowed, suggesting he'd spent considerable time on horseback, was scanning Anson's face, likely trying to estimate his allegiances and service record. It was wearying.