The Tinsmith (20 page)

Anson took up his bags and said, “I'm looking for the home of William Dare. Is it far?”

Henry Lansdowne hesitated just slightly. “Crescent Slough. Best to go by boat, but the tide's against you now. Have to wait till morning.” His liquid eyes hardened to wet stone. “Are you expected?”

Anson admonished himself, remembering the telegram. The difficulties Dare had mentioned could refer to anything or anyone.

“Yes. But he didn't know exactly when I'd arrive.” Anson shifted uncomfortably, lowered his bags to the wharf. It hadn't occurred to him that he'd have trouble actually getting to Dare's house. Was he to hire a skiff and row there himself?

“I can take you tomorrow,” Lansdowne said. “He doesn't come to the Landing often.”

The agent, who had been waving a cloud of mosquitoes away from his face, suddenly went still.

“Dare, did you say?”

Annoyed with himself, Anson simply nodded.

“If you don't mind the question, doctor, what could a man such as yourself want with a man such as that?”

Anson stepped forward. “What do you mean? A man such as what?”

The agent glanced at Henry Lansdowne and then away.

“Oh, nothing, nothing at all. Dare is just, well, he's a little rough compared with yourself. How do you know him exactly?”

Anson could see no sense in answering, especially as the agent's tone was almost excitedly curious. So, when the thunking of the shears sounded again, he allowed the noise to end the conversation. In the silence that followed, he bent and picked up his bags.

The agent shrugged slightly and flicked his burning cigar onto the wharf. “Damnable insects! I've had enough. I could use a drink.”

Lansdowne scowled. He stepped on the cigar butt with his boot and strode off toward the gangway.

“A cheerful chap,” the agent said. “He suits the place. But there's no money to be made in the soft parts of the earth, eh, doctor? Come on, we might as well get indoors before the rain starts.”

Anson nodded and looked upriver where he adjudged Crescent Slough to be, given his host's slight hand gesture. In the near distance, a ramshackle collection of shelters, constructed of driftwood and planks of uneven sizes, sprawled under three trickles of white smoke. A long dug-out canoe rested half out of the tide, its brightly painted bow vivid as a smear of lipstick against the bank reeds. Nothing moved except a lone mongrel that loped along the sloppy tidemark, stopping to sniff every few feet. Anson looked away from the dog. The overcast pressed greyly on the tin-coloured water, as if to contain the force of the tide. The rain now fell again in wisps. From the distant fields drifted a low moaning. Anson coughed twice, each one like a seizure, leaving him shaken, teary-eyed. When he could see clearly again, just as he started to walk to the gangway, he saw a boy and a girl approaching along the slough bank. He stopped, blinking rapidly several times. He'd have been no more surprised if a boy and a girl had stepped out of a woodlot at Antietam. The sight calmed him, as the presence of children always did. A place could not be so desolate with children in it. If Elizabeth had only given him a son or daughter. Well, it was best not to dwell on such things. He'd known many men who'd be only too happy as childless widowers instead of what they were—the heroic dead, remembered less with every passing year.

Anson watched the children's slow progress for a moment. Then, lighter of heart, he followed the other men up the gangway.

III

Several hours later, Anson lay on a hard, narrow bed in an unadorned upstairs room of Henry Lansdowne's house, listening to the night sounds through a partly opened window. For a while the hooting of an owl kept up a steady, ghostly rhythm. Then only the sucking of the tide at the pilings thirty yards away disturbed the silence. The night carried a powerful smell of wetness—mud, river, earth, with something brinish mixed in. It was heavy, anaesthetic. Anson almost succumbed to its weight on his face several times, but then he recalled Henry Lansdowne's tight expression at the dinner table and opened his eyes wide again.

If such a man so strongly disapproved of salmon canning, that did not bode well. At the very least it gave, to those “difficulties” Dare had mentioned, a greater gravity. And when Thomas Lansdowne had arrived, his burly, stumplike figure so incongruous below a face restless with anxiety, it was as if the walls of the house had collapsed and left them all standing separate and vulnerable in the elements.

Anson had excused himself shortly after the meal, out of courtesy, knowing that business was to be discussed, but he also longed to escape the tense gloom. It was no exaggeration to say that Henry Lansdowne despised the rat-faced agent and his cigars, nor that he resented his younger brother's inviting such a man into their lives. On several occasions, he had made pointed references to farming and ranching as the foundations of community, references that raised his brother's chest like a billows. Oblivious to the Lansdownes' unspoken disagreement, the agent praised the younger brother for his foresight. “A man can do nothing greater for British Columbia,” he had said, “than to invest in the salmon. It's silver gold.” No one had joined him in the chortling pleasure he'd derived from the phrase, but that hadn't stopped the agent from repeating it.

At that point, fatigued from his journey and depressed by the atmosphere, Anson had decided that a few hours with Virgil's
Eclogues
would be recondite.

A long shriek pierced the stillness, then faded away in a choked strangle. A wildcat of some kind. Anson recalled the terrifying cries he'd heard in the swamps of the Peninsular Campaign and sat up, aware of his heartbeat; it was stronger than usual. He took his left wrist in the opposite hand. Of course it was natural that he would think of the war while on his way to see Dare for the first time since 1866, when the former slave and soldier had spent a few days at Anson's home before heading west to make a fresh start for himself. And yet there was something in the heaviness of the air, in the fraternal tension between the Lansdowne brothers, that made him feel he'd crossed some invisible line and re-entered the past. But how could it be? He wasn't even on American soil.

Difficulties, the telegram had said. What difficulties, other than the approach of death, could there be after what they'd endured together, after the torn bodies they'd tried to repair? Yes, he had lent Dare money, but that was nothing to the help the man had given him at Antietam. That service had changed Anson Baird's idea of himself, had brought him face to face with the fundamental questions of honour and justice. Yet as the long shriek rose and fell again, the word “difficulties” reeked of blood and chloroform and deceit. No war ever ends, Anson thought, seeing Odysseus, hooded and plotting, as he returned to his home ten years after the fall of Troy. But Anson was no Odysseus. Dare was not his son, there was no Penelope, no kingdom. The only parallel was the memory of death and the palpable sense of violent change. Cold sweat formed on Anson's temples. Slowly he brought his feet down to the bare wood floor and stared at the window.

This darkness had a weight unlike anything he'd experienced, yet it was disturbingly familiar. He didn't want to know why, but the answer drifted to him through the thin opening between the glass and sill, one word like a light-dazed moth: Dare. Anson rubbed his eyes, could almost feel the blood slosh behind them. He stood and began to pace.

“O mihi longae maneat pars ultima uitae, spiritus et quantam sat erit tua dicere facta!”

But recitation was futile. The ancient language wore blood- and pus-stained dressings, and each word dropped on the cold wood like an amputated limb. Anson stopped before the window. As he stared through it, he thought the glass might shatter any moment. Out of old habit, he reached into his pocket for a bottle of opium pills, but he had not taken opium for years. The struggle to stop, for his wife's sake, had almost killed him, but Anson had not savoured the drug in this way for a long time, not even after Elizabeth's death, when grief so easily could have weakened his resolve.

He remained at the window and watched the sky turn pink over a blue-black mountain range to the north. He stood until his feet ached and the cattle of the Lansdowne brothers began to low in the fields. A terrible familiarity had wrapped itself around his heart.

Dare. It was, after all, a false name, the name of a dead farm boy that Anson had given, out of an impulse he'd never regretted, to a runaway slave fortunate enough to look white. Dare. The name dropped from Anson's lips just like Latin, a word in a dead tongue. He wondered why the household did not wake at the sound. Anson closed his eyes as light moved swiftly over the river and marshes.

When the air greyed outside the window and the first pips of bird-sound drifted up from below, Anson could bear it no longer. Moving quietly, he put on his coat and boots, tiptoed down the hall past the Lansdowne's bedroom, walked softly down the stairs to the front door, and left the house. Outside, the musky smell wrapped him like a buffalo robe. Other than the intermittent lowing of cattle, bird pips, and river trickle, the pre-dawn was silent. Anson negotiated his way through the muddy field to the dew-slick gangway, walked to the edge of the wharf, and looked at the river. It was very broad, several miles across; he could see nothing but water. The agent had explained, in his boosterish manner, that millions of salmon swam right past this very landing on their way inland to spawn—a man could throw a net off the wharf and fill it in minutes during one of the big runs. And this year, he had said, a glint in his eyes, was expected to be very good indeed; there was no telling how many fish might choke the river.

Anson stared at the water and tried to imagine so much animal energy below the surface. But it was unimaginable. The river was dark, roiling. As the minutes passed, the surface grew lighter, became a rich brown, and moved faster, judging by the branches and what sometimes seemed to be whole trees on its surface. Anson stepped back from the edge. This was no eastern river; its wildness was far beyond the ken of his experience. His resolve to find a boat and row upriver in the direction of Crescent Slough weakened.

He looked nervously up the bank. Somewhere in that short grey distance, Dare was sleeping. The idea was no more fathomable than the idea of millions of fish pouring themselves against the river's flow. How rarely Anson had known his friend to sleep! In fact, he couldn't recall Dare's face in repose—always he had been awake, taking things in, helping, moving before being asked. It had been the same during those few days after the war, when Dare, at once grateful for Anson's friendship and restless to be on his way again, seemed never to relax. And to think of how much he had travelled since Anson had first lost news of him—a few months after Antietam, when ill health had forced Anson to resign his commission, though not before Dare was safe, as safe as a man could be while fighting a war. Anson did not even know all the places Dare had gone—south and west with the Army of the Potomac, then afterwards to Kansas, San Francisco, Victoria, and now the mouth of the Fraser River—no doubt there had been other stops along the way. Anson wondered how heavily those years of constant motion would be mapped on his friend's face. Dare would have aged; he could not have discovered any way to stop the progression of the suns. No, not even Dare could have learned that.

Faint voices swirled out of the grey. Anson tensed. Rapidly the voices grew louder—a harsh, guttural tongue suddenly exploded in the air. A wide, flat skiff filled with men emerged out of the half-light and drifted rapidly toward him. One man stood, hunched over, in the centre of the dark heads—like a flower with its petals torn off. Anson rallied to the panic in the voices; the shouts had turned to cries as the river hurled the skiff along the bank.

In a moment the faces took on definition. All were upraised, open-mouthed. They belonged to yellow men, Chinese, judging by the long pigtails dangling from their dark canvas slouch hats. Briefly, and for the first time, Anson had encountered the race and its language in San Francisco, but this shock meeting on the Fraser River transcended race and speech.

The skiff sped toward him. The faces, young and old, gap-toothed and darkly shadowed, loomed so close that Anson could attach the flung gutturals to individual mouths. The man hunched over in the centre of the skiff held a long pole and swung it toward the wharf. He shouted continuously, his lips peeled back, his hat fallen to the back of his skull and staying there by means of a string around his throat. Each time he swung the pole, the hat jumped up, as if he had a small monkey clutched to his back.

Anson suddenly understood the reason for the terror. The tide was running so fast, and the skiff was just far enough out in the main current, that the man with the pole could not secure a landing. The end of the pole bounced futilely on the first planks of the wharf, each contact threatening to upset the man's balance and plunge him into the river. Two of the other men grasped the pole man's coat tails, flailing instructions with their free hands, shouting words as harsh as retches. Another man had scrambled into the stern, where he held his arms out to the east, as if to embrace the sun he didn't expect to see again. His movements only increased the terror. Two others leapt to their feet and stepped, bent over, toward the bankside of the skiff.

Afraid they planned to jump, Anson shouted, “No! Don't!” and waved his arms frantically, at the same time looking around for a spot where he could plant his feet. To grab the pole would not be difficult, but how could he keep himself from being yanked into the river? The pole hit the wharf a few feet above him and he squatted, ready to drop backwards, his boots braced against the slightly raised crossbeam at the wharf's edge.

The Chinese had seen him now. A few words of English exploded out of the strange consonants and vowels, the surprising clarity and force of them almost as great as that of the skiff when Anson finally seized the pole.