River Thieves Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  RIVER THIEVES

  “This is a splendid novel reflective of a particular place and time. Michael Crummey is a tremendously gifted writer.”

  —ALISTAIR MACLEOD

  “River Thieves is a novel of exquisite craftsmanship and masterful artistry that should gain the broad attention it so richly deserves: a novel of intricately balanced storytelling and intriguing location but one also where the keen eye of a poet resides within the language. The writing is simple and beautiful, fully textured and gracefully rendered. Crummey has the rare ability to breathe his characters right off the page and into the reader’s mind, where they then lodge, living on well past the final page. River Thieves marks the emergence of a powerful, mature talent.” —JEFFREY LENT, author of In the Fall

  “River Thieves is a novel full of poetic metaphor and memorable images. The language and phrases of the time are richly used, and through meticulous detail it manages to breathe life into past ways. Most of all, it creates a vivid portrait of Newfoundland of another era.” —The Globe and Mail

  “A little-known historical atrocity—the extinction of the Beothuk (“Red”) Indians of central Newfoundland—becomes an authentic tragedy in this brilliantly constructed, immensely moving debut novel by an award-winning Canadian poet and short-story writer. … There’s a literary renaissance underway just north of us, and Crummey’s quite literally astonishing debut novel is one of the brightest jewels in its crown.” —Kirkus Review

  “In the tradition of such contemporary classics as Cold Mountain and In the Fall, this beautifully written novel is both a stunning adventure story and a profound saga of courage and idealism in an imperfect world…. The last of the Beothuks died 175 years ago. But thanks to Michael Crummey, they live on in River Thieves, a novel of great wisdom, great power, and great heart.”

  —HOWARD FRANK MOSHER, author of A Stranger in the Kingdom and North Country

  “A stunningly polished and powerful book…. Crummey’s craftsmanship is masterful.” —Maclean’s

  “Strongly reminiscent of William Faulkner’s writings … River Thieves is a fascinatingly complex piece.”

  —The Kingston Whig-Standard

  “River Thieves is a wonderful novel and Michael Crummey is a writer of enormous talent…. Michael Crummey writes like an old pro, and, not so incidently, also like an old soul, who has borne witness to tragic tendencies of humans for generations, and views them with awe and sadness and a clear-eyed compassion.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “A rip-roaring adventure tale if ever there was one … An exceptionally accomplished work of historical fiction that revels in the art of storytelling…. River Thieves is an auspicious debut for Crummey. His next novel can’t come soon enough.”

  —Calgary Herald

  “A haunting novel … An engrossing and complex story that feels as authentic as a contemporary eyewitness account.”

  —Elle Canada

  Various versions of this event have appeared from time to time in our histories and other publications, but as numerous discrepancies characterize these accounts, I prefer to give the story as I had it from the lips of the late John Peyton, J.P. of Twillingate, himself the actual captor of the Beothuk woman.

  — James P. Howley,

  The Beothuks or Red Indians,

  published 1915

  Before all of this happened the country was known by different names. The coves and stark headlands, the sprawling stands of spruce so deeply green they are almost black. The mountain alder, the tuckamore and deer moss. The lakes and ponds of the interior as delicately interconnected as the organs of an animal’s body, the rivers bleeding from their old wounds along the coast into the sea.

  A few have survived in the notebooks and journals of the curious, of the scientifically minded who collated skinny vocabularies in the days before the language died altogether. Annoo-ee for tree or woods or forest. Gidyeathuc for the wind, Adenishit for the stars. Mammasheek for each of the ten thousand smaller islands that halo the coastline, Kadimishuite for the countless narrow tickles that run among them. Each word has the odd shape of the ancient, the curiously disturbing heft of a museum artifact. They are like tools centuries old, hewn for specific functions, some of which can only be guessed at now. Kewis to name both the sun and the moon, the full face of pocket watches stolen from European settlers.

  Whashwitt, bear; Kosweet, caribou; Dogajavick, fox. Shabathoobet, trap. The vocabularies a kind of taxidermy, words that were once muscle and sinew preserved in these single wooden postures. Three hundred nouns, a handful of unconjugated verbs, to kiss, to run, to fall, to kill. At the edge of a story that circles and circles their own death, they stand dumbly pointing.

  Only the land is still there.

  The Lake

  March month, 1819

  The infant woke her crying to be fed and she lay him naked against her breast in the shadowed river-bottom light of early morning. No one else in the shelter stirred and she almost fell back to sleep herself in the stillness. She could smell a clear winter’s day in the air, an edge of sunlight and frost cutting the scent of leather and spruce.

  A crow called from the trees outside. The gnarled voice of the forest’s appetite. She sang crow’s song under her breath while her son’s mouth tugged at the nipple.

  When he was done nursing, she lay the child beside her husband and pulled on her leather cassock, tying the belt at her waist. She stepped to the entrance, pushing aside the caribou covering. Outside, the glare of sunlight off the ice made her eyes ache and she stood still for a moment as she adjusted to the brightness. The cold in her lungs pricking like a thorn. Thickly wooded hills on the far shore, a moon just visible in the pale blue sky above them. The crow called again, the brindled sound in the clear air like a shadow cast on snow.

  She had turned and begun walking towards the trees when the stranger’s voice carried across the clearing. He was standing on a finger of land behind her, a single figure in a long black coat, one arm raised in the air. A current of blood rushed to her head, the roar of it in her ears, and she screamed a warning then, running for the entrance of the mamateek. Inside she gathered her child in her arms as the others startled up from their berths around the firepit. A tangled maze of shouting and a panic for the light, adults carrying children outside, heading for the forest behind the shelters.

  She followed a small group led by her husband, running down onto the ice and making towards a distant point of land. Over her shoulder she saw the one who had called to her and the others who had lain in ambush, eight or ten of them moving on the camp, carrying their long rifles.

  The baby had come only three weeks before and the tearing pain below her belly burned into her legs and up the length of her back as she ran. The weight of her son like a beach-rock in her arms. She called to her husband and he came back to take the boy, still she fell further behind them. She heard the voice of the white man she had seen on the finger of land again and when she looked over her shoulder he was nearly upon her. She ran another hundred yards before she fell to the ice and knelt there, choking on the cold air and crying.

  She turned without getting to her feet and undid the belt at her waist, lifting the cassock over her head to reveal her breasts. The white man had taken off his long coat to chase her, his hair was the colour of dead grass. He set his rifle on the ice and kicked it away, then the smaller gun as well. The rest of the black-coated men were straggling up behind him. He spoke and came towards her with his hands held away from his body. He was terrified, she could see, although she could not imagine the source of his fear. He slapped his chest and repeated several of his words. She looked over her shoulder a last time to the point where her people had disappeared. She turn
ed back to the man approaching her then and she covered herself and stood to meet him.

  This was before her husband came down from the distant point to speak to them, before her face was pressed into the grain of a coat as pliant and coarse as deer moss, before the first muffled gunshot was fired. But even as she spoke her own name and reached to take the white man’s proffered hand she knew what was lost to her. Her child and husband. The lake. The last good place.

  The white man nodded and smiled and then he turned towards the others of his party as they came up to them on the ice.

  Part 1

  Hag n cp OED ~ 1 c obs (1632, 1696) for sense 1 …

  1 The nightmare; freq in form old hag…. 1896 J A Folklore ix, 222 A man … told me he had been ridden to death by an old hag…. 1937 Bk of Nfld i, 230 Nightmare is called by fishermen the “Old Hag.”

  — Dictionary of Newfoundland English

  The Face of a Robber’s Horse

  1810

  have the face of a robber’s horse: to be brazen, without shame or pity.

  – Dictionary of Newfoundland English

  ONE

  It was the sound of his father’s voice that woke John Peyton, a half-strangled shouting across the narrow hall that separated the upstairs bedrooms in the winter house. They had moved over from the summer house near the cod fishing grounds on Burnt Island only two weeks before and it took him a moment to register where he was lying, the bed and the room made strange by the dark and the disorientation of broken sleep. He lay listening to the silence that always followed his father’s nightmares, neither of the men shifting in their beds or making any other sound, both pretending they weren’t awake.

  Peyton turned his head to the window where moonlight made the frost on the pane glow a pale, frigid white. In the morning he was leaving for the backcountry to spend the season on a trapline west of the River Exploits, for the first time running traps without his father. He’d been up half the night with the thought of going out on his own and there was no chance of getting back to sleep now. He was already planning his lines, counting sets in his head, projecting the season’s take and its worth on the market. And underneath all of these calculations he was considering how he might approach Cassie when he came back to the house in the spring, borne down with furs like a branch ripe with fruit. A man in his own right finally.

  When he heard Cassie up and about downstairs in the kitchen, he pushed himself out of bed and broke the thin layer of ice that had formed over his bathing water and poured the basin full. His head ached from lack of sleep and from his mind having run in circles for hours. When he splashed his face and neck the cold seemed to narrow the blurry pulse of it and he bent at the waist to dip his head directly into the water, keeping it there as long as he could hold his breath.

  The kettle was already steaming when he made his way down to the kitchen. Cassie was scorching a panful of breakfast fish, the air dense with the sweet smoky drift of fried capelin. He sat at the table and stared across at her where she leaned over the fire, her face moving in and out of shadow like a leaf turning under sunlight. She didn’t look up when he said good morning.

  “Get a good breakfast into you today,” she said. “You’ll need it.”

  He nodded, but didn’t answer her.

  She said, “Any sign of John Senior?”

  “I heard him moving about,” he said, which was a lie, but he didn’t want her calling him down just yet. It was the last morning he would see her for months and he wanted a few moments more alone in her company. “Father was on the run again last night,” he said. “What do you think makes him so heatable in his sleep like that?”

  “O unseen shame, invisible disgrace!” Cassie said. She was still staring into the pan of capelin. “ O unfelt sore, crest-wounding, private scar!”

  Some nonsense from her books. “Don’t be speaking high-learned to me this time of the day,” he said.

  She smiled across at him.

  He said, “You don’t know no more than me, do you.”

  “It’s just the Old Hag, John Peyton. Some things don’t bear investigating.” She turned from the fire with the pan of capelin, carrying it across to the table. She shouted up at the ceiling for John Senior to come down to his breakfast.

  By the second hour of daylight, Peyton was packing the last of his provisions on the sledge outside the winter house while John Senior set about harnessing the dog. He was going to travel with Peyton as far as Ship Cove, a full day’s walk into the mouth of the river, but both men were already uncomfortable with the thought of parting company. They were careful not to be caught looking at one another, kept their attention on the details of the job at hand. Peyton stole quick glimpses of his father as he worked over the dog. He was past sixty and grey-haired but there was an air of lumbering vitality to the man, a deliberate granite stubbornness. Lines across the forehead like runnels in a dry riverbed. The closely shaven face looked hard enough to stop an axe. Peyton had heard stories enough from other men on the shore to think his father had earned that look. It made him afraid for himself to dwell on what it was that shook John Senior out of sleep, set him screaming into the dark.

  His father said, “Mind you keep your powder dry.”

  “All right,” Peyton said.

  “Joseph Reilly’s tilt is three or four miles south of your lines.”

  “I know where Joseph Reilly is.”

  “You run into trouble, you look in on him.”

  “All right,” he said again. There was still a sharp ache in his head, but it was spare and focused, like a single strand of heated wire running from one temple to the other. It added to the sense of urgency and purpose he felt. He’d come across to Newfoundland ten years before to learn the trades and to run the family enterprise when John Senior was ready to relinquish it. His father electing not to work the trapline this year was the first dim indication of an impending retirement. Peyton said, “I won’t be coming out over Christmas.”

  John Senior had set the dog on her side in the snow and was carefully examining her paws. “January then,” he said, without raising his head.

  Peyton nodded.

  His father took a silver pocket watch from the folds of his greatcoat. He was working in the open air with bare hands and his fingers were bright with blood in the morning chill. “Half eight,” he said. “You’d best say your goodbyes to Cassie. And don’t tarry.”

  The floor of the kitchen was strewn with damp sand and Cassie was on her knees, scrubbing the boards with a long, hard brush. She had tied her dress in a knot about her thighs. She sat back on her heels when he came in and looked up at him where he stood in the doorway.

  Peyton’s mouth was dry and his breath stuttered in shallow gasps. The strength of his emotion surprised him. He’d been concealing his feelings for so long he managed to underestimate them himself, and they surfaced so sharply now his chest hurt. He coughed into his fist to try to clear the unexpected tightness. “We’ll be off,” he said. He thought Cassie might be able to hear his heart drumming under the layers of his clothing and he folded his arms firmly across his chest.

  She raised a forearm to wipe her forehead and cheeks, the brush still in her hand. She said, “Mind yourself out there, John Peyton.”

  “Don’t worry your head,” he said and he looked down at his boots, disappointed. Even her most soothing, affectionate words had an edge to them, as if she was trying to hold down another’s panic. She was like a person leading a skittish horse that could bolt at the least provocation. Something dogged and steady in her, like a hand gripping the bit.

  It occurred to him Cassie might not even stand to see him off and the thought of this made the months in the woods ahead of him suddenly repellent. She had always been oddly disposed to him, her manner a mixture of aloofness and concern. As if she was waiting for him to prove himself somehow. She was six full years his senior. For the first two years they knew one another she was taller than Peyton, and for several more after he finally s
urpassed her in height she remained, officially, his tutor. It was taking much longer than he hoped to overcome the distance those things had set between them. His one comfort was the distance she maintained between herself and everyone else around her. There were few women on the northeast shore and every year Cassie received proposals from men who could not spell their own names, who had lived by themselves all their adult lives and spent no more than an hour alone in the company of women since leaving their mothers. It was clear in Peyton’s mind that Cassie was saving herself for something that promised more than these men could offer.

  The dog barked outside, harnessed and anxious to set out.

  “I should make a start,” Peyton said, already moving through the door.

  Cassie dropped the brush then and he turned back to see her get to her feet and unknot the dress, the layers falling around her stockings. “Hold on,” she said. She went out through the hallway to her room off the kitchen and came back with six candles tied up in a strip of paper.

  Peyton lifted the candles to his face to smell the beeswax. Cassie made them herself and used them to read by in the evenings. The wax threw a cleaner light, she said, and lasted hours longer than tallow. John Senior thought it was a ridiculous undertaking and even Peyton felt the labour involved in collecting the wax and turning the candles was out of all order with the rewards. He had been brought up to think of reading as a leisure activity, but it was clear that in Cassie’s mind it was something else altogether. She read and reread Goldsmith and Fielding and Milton, fat novels by Fanny Burney all named for the main character: Camilla and Cecelia and Evelina. She knew many of Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart and sometimes had Peyton listen as she quoted a few lines aloud. He wanted to acknowledge her enthusiasm, to share in it with her, but the most he could offer in response was to say, “That’s pretty, I guess.” She shook her head. “You’re hopeless, John Peyton,” she told him. And there was an admission of helplessness in the statement that he was sorry to continually drag her back to.