River Thieves (25 page)

“You come up to work for Master Peyton?” Michael Sharpe asked.

Taylor shook his head. “Harry Miller was the one took us on, me and Richmond.”

Three weeks after John Senior had carried them across to Miller’s property from Fogo Island, Tom Taylor kissed his new bride goodbye on the steps of Miller’s winter house. He and Richmond followed Miller into the woods for their first season of trapping, each man carrying packs that weighed in at eighty-five kilograms. There were two sledges hauled by dogs over the first snow of the season. The weight of the sledges and the thin snow made for heavy going and at times the men took it in turns to replace the dogs in the harness to haul over rough or exposed ground.

For the next three months the men bunked in together as winter came on in its full strength and snow filled the woods slowly like the bilge rising in a boat shipping water. They marked their lines through the bush, long crooked spokes extending from the hub of the log tilt. They were out for up to a week at a time and they took beaver, fox, marten and an occasional wolf. Miller tutored them on the skinning of the animals and how to separate the thin layer of fat from the hides without ruining the coat and how to mix the combination of wood ash and animal lard that cured the pelt.

Michael Sharpe said, “Did you see much of the Reds in there?”

Taylor shook his head. “No, not the winter. I didn’t get my first look till the spring. Miller had us build a new weir on a salmon run beyond Charles Brook.”

As soon as the thaw was well underway Richmond and Taylor began constructing a log-and-rock dam at a narrow, shallow bend in the river. For two weeks they worked waist-deep in frigid water, weighting a frame of spruce logs with stones to construct a wooden weir across the river. Each afternoon when he stripped out of his soaked clothing Taylor’s feet were white and numb, the shrivelled skin of the soles embossed with patterns like frost on glass. His scrotum was as tight as a shell, the testicles drawn up into his torso, and he had to force them back into the sac with his fingers.

In the second week of June, a canoe carrying five Beothuk came up the brook. Siobhan was inside the tilt, Richmond had gone into the woods to cut logs to build a gallows for drying the salmon nets. Taylor was in the water, rooting around at the base of the weir and didn’t see or hear them. He didn’t know how long they had been watching when he finally took notice. They had pulled the canoe to the side of the river and stared at him in silence. They were close enough that he could count them where they sat and guess at their ages and relative physical strength.

All at once, as if by some signal he couldn’t distinguish, the five men in the canoe began shouting and shaking paddles or bows. Taylor stumbled on the wet stones on the riverbed and once he’d regained his footing he pissed through his pants into the brook while the wild shouting and gesticulating went on
and on. He bolted across the river finally and crawled on his hands and knees up the bank. He ran towards the tilt, sloshing water from his boots and the waistline of his trousers, screaming all the way. He shouted at his wife to keep inside and ran out with a single-shot rifle and a powder horn which sent the Beothuk into a retreat, though they continued yelling as they paddled downstream towards the ocean. Taylor dropped most of the shot intended for the barrel of the gun and was shaking so furiously he couldn’t hold the powder horn still enough to pour. The Indians had disappeared around a bend in the river before he looked up from his sloppy loading and he threw the gun down in disgust. He swore at the trees as he paced. He kicked the powder horn into the river and had to wade in after it, swearing all the while.

Taylor looked across at the face of Michael Sharpe. He was shaking his head. “You pissed your pants, Tom Taylor,” he said. He seemed profoundly disappointed.

Taylor nodded. “That I did,” he said. “That was the summer they killed Harry Miller, not more than a month after I seen them.” They found the body on the way to the clearing in the trees behind his tilt that he used as a toilet. There were half a dozen arrows piercing the flesh, in the back, arms and legs. The area around the corpse was trammelled with recent tracks of animals and the body had been picked over for days, the bloodied clothes torn and pulled away from the torso. Most of the flesh was eaten away from underneath. Grey lengths of bone showed through, the surfaces pocked with tooth marks. Richmond had said, “That’s hardly worth burying.”

Taylor leaned in close to the green man. “They cut off his head and left the rest of him to the scavengers, they did. Same
as they did for those two marines the last time we came down to the lake.”

Peyton sat up in his blankets. “Tom Taylor,” he said. “Don’t be poisoning the boy’s mind.”

“Better he knows what we’ll be facing on the morrow.” This was Richmond speaking. Everyone, it seemed, was still awake and listening. “There’s no sense keeping the truth from the lad.”

There was a giggle of laughter from the dark where Reilly lay in his blankets. “Well spoken, Dick Richmond,” he said. “Why don’t you tell young Michael Sharpe how you came to lay hands on the little Indian girl that wound up in Poole?”

“What little girl?” Michael Sharpe asked.

Richmond said, “Mind your goddamn business, Reilly.”

The two men began arguing and Peyton yelled at them uselessly, until John Senior sat up in the light of the fire and raised his pistol. He held the gun there until everyone fell silent and then he said, “I will shoot the next man to speak a word before daylight.” He looked around the circle of men watching him. “By Christ, so I will,” he said.

Everyone settled back onto their beds of spruce. Peyton covered his head with his blanket. Several times through the night he considered getting up to stand in front of his father and say something, any word at all.

Richmond hadn’t had a thought of the girl since the last time he’d come down the river with Buchan, when Peyton mentioned seeing her in Poole. He lay a while deliberately thinking of other things, but when he fell asleep he began dreaming of the summer
morning he’d set out for one of the half-dozen bird islands off the coast. It was a clear day when the sun rose but there was a shroud of mist around the base of the nearest island as he pulled towards it. Thousands of birds circled the sheer cliffs and pitched and took flight again like blackflies tormenting the stoic face of a cow. He rowed into the mist and along the shoreline. The bottle-nosed divers and hagdens and skurwinks and turrs were so thick on the water around his boat it seemed possible to walk ashore on their backs.

There was one small beach in the face of the island where a boat could be hauled up onto the shore. The Beothuk had arrived ahead of him and were already off along the cliffs to gather eggs, their canoe lying against the grey stone. His first notion was to turn about and pull for the mainland, but he looked down at the twelve-bore long-barrelled duck gun he’d brought for birding and the musket he carried with him at all times. There couldn’t be more than six people in the one canoe, he guessed.

He muffled his oars as he rowed into the shallows and stepped out into knee-deep water. He grabbed the painter at the bow and sloshed up onto the beach. Above the landwash was the only bit of woods on the island and Richmond flipped the skiff onto an edge and coopied underneath to heft it onto his back. He nestled the boat out of sight and sat as deeply in the droke as he could without losing his view of the canoe. He loaded both guns, humming tunelessly under his breath and stealing glances up towards the beach. He laid the shotgun near his feet and sat with the musket across his lap and waited as the day steadily burned off the mist.

Taylor startled him awake with the toe of his boot, kicking at his shoulder where he lay asleep. He looked up over the edge of
his blanket at the figure standing above him. It took a moment to register where he was, to place himself on the banks of the River Exploits, on the way to the Red Indian’s lake. “Your watch,” Taylor said and then turned to wake John Peyton.

“Leave him,” Richmond whispered. “Let him sleep.”

He laid an armful of dry scrag onto the fire for the quick heat and put water on to boil for a mug of tea. He ran his fingers through the length of his beard as if the dream’s greasy residue was tangled there and he was trying to ferret it clear.

His sister had been hanging out sheets on the line beside her house when he came up from the landwash at Tom Taylor’s river, carrying the girl. There was a sharp, warm breeze of wind and the wet clothing tailed out and snapped behind her. She had clothespins in a pocket of her white apron and held three in her mouth. Her long dark hair was tied back into a ponytail but fine wisps had come free of the ribbon and blew around her head and into her face. She took the clothespins from her mouth and stood to watch him as he came up the low grassy hill. She used both hands to keep her hair clear of her eyes. Richmond carried the girl awkwardly against his shoulder, as if he was shielding her face from the weather. When he reached his sister he held the staring child out in his hands. “Here,” he said.

She handled the girl but never took her eyes from his face.

“She haven’t made a sound since I found her,” he said. “Out on the bird islands.” He motioned over his shoulder with his head. “She was left all alone out there.”

Siobhan looked down at the girl.

“Where’s Tom?”

She motioned to the forest behind them. “After a bit of
wood.”

“She’s probably half starved to death,” he said. “Find her something to eat, will you?”

By the time Richmond found Tom Taylor and the two made their way back to the house, the girl was sitting at the table with a fig tit, sucking at the flavour of raisins through a cloth. Her free hand held a wooden figure, a doll of some sort, to her chest.

“Well Jesus loves me,” Taylor said.

“We got to get her into St. John’s Tom.”

Siobhan looked from Richmond to her husband and back several times. “And what do you think you’ll be doing with her there?”

Richmond said, “She’s worth fifty pounds if we can get her to the governor.”

Taylor shook his head and looked at his feet, embarrassed to have it stated so plainly. Siobhan’s face was pale as milk despite her years of working outside and her pulse pounded in the blue veins at her temples. “And you think the governor is going to believe you found this child wandering around on her own on the bird islands?”

Taylor said, “I knew it was a mistake to let her see the girl.”

“I suppose you’re in for it as much as he is,” she said to her husband. “I never seen the likes of the two of you in all my born days.”

The girl stared and sucked at the cloth in her hand.

“Well now, there she is, like it or not,” Taylor said. He took his hat from his head and folded it between his hands. “We can’t go put her back on the island and leave her there, can we?”

Siobhan had suffered two miscarriages early in her married
life and had never managed to become pregnant again. The two men could see all the grief and anger she accumulated through those losses expressing itself now in her protectiveness of the child. Taylor turned to Richmond and said, “We’ll never talk no sense into her.”

“Well, we’ll see what Master Peyton has to say about it all then,” Richmond said.

They slept that night at the Taylors’ house. Richmond lay on the daybed in the kitchen and the girl was given a tiny room opposite the one where Tom and Siobhan slept. Taylor tied a string to the doorknob of her room and, once in bed, tied the end of the string about his big toe to guard against her sneaking the door open and wandering off in the night.

Siobhan shook her head. “She’s not five years old, Tom Taylor.”

“Those are not normal creatures,” he said. He leaned up on an elbow to blow out the candle.

The girl woke crying in the middle of the night and Siobhan went to her, nearly dragging her still-sleeping husband from the bed by his foot when she pushed the door open. She spent the early hours of the morning at the child’s side, offering what little comfort she could in the dark.

By noon the next day the two men were on their way to Peyton’s summer house on Burnt Island with the Beothuk girl in tow. After conferring with John Senior, it was decided she should spend the rest of the season with Siobhan and Tom Taylor. They would carry her into St. John’s when they brought the cured salmon to market and hope to catch the governor before he’d scuttled back to England for the winter.

They requested a meeting as soon as they made St. John’s
harbour, but had to wait three days for an audience. John Senior spent much of that time attending to business, leaving Richmond and Taylor to occupy the girl in some fashion. They carried her around the stores on Upper and Lower Path and shop owners offered her cubes of sugar to suck on or small sour green apples. Respectable women who would have otherwise passed the men by without so much as a nod stopped and spoke in singsong voices to the child and asked her name and age. Richmond tried once or twice to say honestly who the girl was, but the confusion this created led him to fashion a story that would better suit the questioners, telling them the girl was his sister’s child, that she was dumb and had not spoken a word since she was born. He became increasingly comfortable with the fiction the more he repeated it and he added details as he went, giving the child a name (Rowena, after her grandmother), an elder sister who had been stillborn, a love of old Welsh songs. Tom Taylor watched in disbelief as the tale grew in length and complexity, but never contradicted his friend until Richmond explained to one inquirer that the child was a bit unknown and had an unusual predilection for eating grass as an infant, which some now blamed for her inability to speak.

“Dick Richmond, that is the biggest load of gurry,” he said.

Richmond looked hurt. “It’s not my opinion neither,” he said, bristling. “I only said that some thought it so.”

He began referring to himself in her presence as Uncle Richard and each day bought her a block of hard taffy to occupy her during the evening. The streets near the harbour were ground to mud by carts and animals and the hundreds of people who came to St. John’s from across the island looking
for winter passage back to England. Richmond was afraid she would fall or that he might lose sight of her in the crowds and eventually he sat the girl on his shoulders and left her there much of the time.