The Tinsmith (21 page)

“You hold! Swing the bow around!”

A few seconds of slack followed as the pole swung in front of Anson like a scythe. He drew in a deep breath, tightened the muscles in his thighs. In the skiff, the men who had been holding the coat tails now wrapped their arms around the pole man's lower body. He, in turn, crouched even lower.

With a jolt, Anson jerked forward, his arms tearing at their sockets. But his boots held firm to the raised beam. Second by second, the pole slid through his hands. He felt a stab of pain in his wrists, felt the skin of his palms tear. He lowered his head and hoped his muscles would not snap like weak rope.

The bow turned. A thump sounded on the wharf. Anson looked up to see one of the Chinese scrambling onto the dock and reaching out his hands to the others to pull the skiff safely in. The tension in the pole decreased. Another pair of boots struck the planks. The strange words were still loud but no longer panicked. The tension decreased again. Anson's shoulders and chest straightened. He drew several deep breaths. The familiar, enticing smell of opium engulfed him. He stared into his hands. Splinters were driven into the bloodied palms.

English again reached his ears. The Chinese surrounded him and grinned so widely that their faces threatened to crack like vases. One man said, “Thank you. You saved us. Thank you, sir.” Another man bowed, then reached out and shook Anson's hand in both of his. He did not appear troubled by the blood, but Anson grimaced at the contact.

Heavy boot steps pounded across the wharf. Anson looked behind him to see Henry Lansdowne approaching, his face as sad as it had been the night before.

To Anson's amazement, the thin Englishman barked out a few words in Chinese. All of the men but one cringed at the sound and turned away, busying themselves with the moored skiff. The remaining man's grin quickly vanished. He was about to speak when Henry Lansdowne held up a hand and silenced him.

“Are you all right, doctor?” he said with genuine concern.

Anson nodded and wiped his bloody palms on his trousers.

“I saw what happened from the window. You're stronger than you seem. I'm sorry I wasn't able to get here in time to help.”

“I'm only glad that I was here myself.”

“These damned Orientals. I don't know why they choose to work near water when they're so afraid of it. Not one of them knows how to swim.”

Henry Lansdowne scowled at the remaining Chinese—Anson recognized him as the one who'd held the pole. Alone of the group, this man did not wear a pigtail, and his face was fuller, healthier; the others had the emaciated, bone-showing, and skin-slack faces of nutritional deficiency so familiar to Anson from his war years.

“Why would you get it into your heads to travel on such a tide? You should have all been drowned or washed out to sea. Were you trying to get home to China? That's no way to do it.”

The lone Chinese almost jumped in his eagerness to explain. “Not our fault. He's crazy. He's gone crazy. Not like other white men. He used a gun!”

Lansdowne narrowed his eyes. Briefly, he looked beyond Anson, upriver. It was an almost imperceptible glance, but the silence that followed it could not be mistaken.

“He called us spies!” the Chinese continued. “He says we work for Owen. He's crazy! He says he will make more cans himself!”

Lansdowne said coldly, “He isn't crazy. Not about that. He can make the cans, right enough. And better than you can make them too.”

He turned to Anson. “I'm sorry, doctor. You'll want to return to the house. This is more of my brother's salmon business. These men make the cans for packing the fish.”

Anson clenched his hands, felt the blood stick.

“Spies?” he said to the remaining Chinese man. “Why would he call you that?” He knew from Henry Lansdowne's tight-lipped expression, if nothing else, that they were talking about Dare.

The Chinese shrugged. “He's crazy, that's all. He thinks everyone out to get him.”

Vivid light flooded over the mountain range. Some sort of marsh bird whistled by. Its flight turned Anson's gaze upriver.

“Maybe someone is,” he said, watching the Englishman.

But Henry Lansdowne did not take the bait.

“If you please, doctor. My wife will see to your wounds.”

Anson looked at his torn palms. “Thank you. But I wish to go to Crescent Slough this morning. As soon as possible. If it's a matter of payment . . .”

The Englishman frowned. “Once my wife has looked after you, and the tide is slack, I'll take you. We don't charge guests for our hospitality, doctor.”

Satisfied, though a mite embarrassed by his unintended insult, Anson began to walk away. But a strange impulse, a prickling on his nape, made him stop and turn back. Lansdowne and the lone Chinese stood very close together. The Englishman's lips were moving. Against the pale sky the two heads were silhouetted as clear as cut glass. Anson began to shake. He wished it was only because his old weakness had returned, borne to him on the sweating terror of the men he'd pulled to safety. Because that weakness was something he knew, and knew he could overcome if he wanted to summon the strength. But there existed a curious kinship between this conversation whose words he couldn't hear and the Latin he could no longer recite with equanimity. The sensation was curious, more so than if he had heard Virgil's poetry in the mouth of a Chinese.

Anson noticed the empty skiff. If a soldier in a torn uniform had leapt from it, a dead man on his back, he would not even ask him about his purpose. The purpose didn't matter, not as much as the consequence. And maybe that didn't matter either.

The thought of life's futility—not entirely new to him, but never before draped in such black colours in such a lonely place—put the river beneath his feet, the salt of some great untraversable distance on his mouth. With a sigh, Anson continued his slow walk back toward the house.

•  •  •

Three hours later, as Henry Lansdowne steered the skiff into the wharf at Crescent Slough, Anson shivered at the eerie silence hovering over Dare's settlement. By the time he stepped out of the skiff onto a small, black wharf, even the almost-ceaseless gull cry above the river had stopped, leaving only the sighings and gurglings of the slight current, the drone of mosquitoes, and, every few minutes, the incongruously cheerful trill of a blackbird or robin. Anson looked up at the earthen dike, twenty feet above the wharf and stretching southward along the riverbank toward a cluster of buildings similar to those that constituted the Lansdownes' cannery. Similar but with some clear differences.

Dare's main building was several hundred feet long, low—perhaps a dozen feet high—open-ended at the riverside and without windows. And its lumber was almost blond compared with the dark planks of the Lansdownes' cannery, perhaps, Anson thought, because it had been more recently built. But there was something disturbing about this white building. It did not look new so much as scoured, like a beached whale that had been gnawed down to its skeleton by the elements. And it stood out dramatically, because all the smaller buildings—A-framed and also windowless, likely used, as at Chilukthan, for net storage—were darker and touched in places with a dark green slime.

“I'll wait here,” Henry Lansdowne said and lowered his head toward the gnarled fold of hands in his lap. “Just in case. Fifteen minutes, mind. No more than that.”

Anson shook off the foreboding caused by his first sight of the white cannery building and almost smiled. Just in case of what? That Dare might chase him off with a gun as well?

“Thank you. I'll come back as soon as I can to let you know if I'm staying.”

His calf and thigh muscles still aching from his rescue of the Chinese, Anson climbed the gangway and, upon reaching the dike, surveyed the immediate vista.

In a hollow about fifty yards away, a plain-planked, two-storey house sat in a foot of muddy water surrounded by huge weeping willows, their yellow fronds motionless. Another fifty yards off to one side of the building, near a cluster of cottonwoods, a canvas tent had been constructed. No one moved near the house or the tent, and no smoke rose against the blue sky. Anson approached the house. A single window, facing riverward, was boarded up, with perhaps an inch showing between boards. Anson peered in, conscious of not wanting to make Henry Lansdowne wait the full fifteen minutes. As he did so, a dog began to bark fiercely inside, its dark shape sliding across the broken sunlight falling into a large room filled with junk. Anson stepped back, then braved the dog's noise by staring through the gap again until his eyes adjusted to the gloom. Now he could see clothing scattered everywhere, cooking utensils, what looked like animal hides and pieces of fishnet. The barking increased, more shapes slid toward the window. Then Anson noticed the figures seated on the floor; they appeared to be weaving something. A body unfolded itself from the shadows and called to the dogs in a strange tongue. The dogs quieted and the body vanished. Anson stepped back again in confusion. Why should Dare have allowed his house to become an Indian village? At Chilukthan, the Indians camped on the riverbank, on the opposite side of the slough mouth.

Then Anson remembered the tent, and the explanation came to him. Dare would not be the only veteran of the war who preferred camp life to more civilized surroundings. After years of living rough, away from furnished rooms with only a simple fire and simpler meals to afford any material comfort, many ex-soldiers struggled to adjust to society. Of course, in such a forlorn place as this, with society so lacking, a man like Dare was free to arrange his living conditions to suit himself. And besides, he
had
been a slave; there was no telling what degrading conditions he'd once known. In any case, Anson had never asked Dare about his enslavement; to have done so at Antietam would have been to pour vinegar in an open wound. And afterwards, it had never seemed useful or tactful to raise the subject in a letter.

As he started toward the tent, Anson even envied Dare that particular kind of domestic freedom; many was the time he'd felt trapped by genteel surroundings, not to mention genteel manners. For a long while after he'd resigned his commission, the opium had given him an escape, and finally his love for Elizabeth had made everything that confined him a rare and exhilarating openness. But his blood never ceased to quicken at the sight of a campfire.

Dare's fire was cold ash, however. And the tent, musty, stained green with mildew, was empty except for a few blankets. Anson decided to check out the cannery. If he did not find Dare there, he'd have to either send Henry Lansdowne back alone or go with him. While he understood the veteran's fondness for camp life, Anson wasn't entirely sure he'd like to forego the comfort and company of Chilukthan while he waited for Dare to come back from wherever he was.

On the earthen dike above the cluster of cannery buildings, he hesitated. The stillness below was somehow uninviting, but he descended and began to explore the dusky interiors, starting with the long, low building, which must have been new, since its walls exuded a powerful scent of cedar. But the freshness vanished as Anson stared at the long, waist-high wooden tables and sluices, the greasy bulk of silent machines, the complicated chains and gears and belts ominous in their static condition, like diseased animals waiting to die. The interior was a large, unpartitioned space, yet it felt cramped, oppressive. A strong smell of blood and salt rose off the planks, and several pieces of salmon—a severed tail, some gobs of red flesh—lay in the shadowy corners. Obviously the cannery had been working recently; even the machines gave off a burnt, acrid smell as Anson leaned closer to them.

In a smaller building, he discovered something remarkable: hundreds of thousands of empty, lidless tins, stacked fifteen feet high, right up to the rafters, gave a silver shock of brightness to the gloom. Anson stared at them in awe. How did Dare have so many? Perhaps this was the reason he could chase his crew away.

The doctor did not brood long over these questions. They seemed less important than the restless, shifting loneliness that prowled the wet rods between Dare's home and his cannery. As Anson stood by the tins, the breeze through the door brought a low whistling out of them, as though in warning. His skin prickled. Something alive in the emptiness of the whole settlement disturbed him. He had the eerie feeling that the machines were going to whir into action at any second and that the planks of the buildings and the dirt of the dike would be fed into them. The question of Dare's whereabouts had almost slipped his mind when he backed away from the tins and turned directly into the path of an elderly Chinaman holding a shotgun.

“What you want?” The Chinaman raised the gun before him, straight upright, and floated back a few steps, turning his head quickly from side to side as if convinced other white men unknown to him might appear at any second. Thin and tall, he wore a long pigtail and a faded blue smock. One eye was milky, likely blind.

Recovering from his shock, Anson grew irritated at the man's aggression.

“I've come to see your boss,” he said. “Where is he?”

The Chinese placed the long nail of his forefinger to his wispy-haired chin. “Who are you? Do you know him?”

“I'm an old friend. From the United States.”

“The United States?” The Chinaman grinned, revealing a front tooth that hung like a tiny ice pick and several gold-capped molars that seemed roughly jammed into place. “Maybe you a buyer, huh?”

“No. Listen, is he here or not?”

The Chinaman lowered the gun horizontally, to his waist.

“Gone to New Westminster. Back maybe one week.”

“A week? Why so long?”

The Chinese grinned even more broadly than before. “Business. Fish almost come. Much work to do.”

Anson wondered why this one man had not been forced away at gunpoint like the others, but he wasn't given the encouragement to ask. Almost as suddenly as he'd arrived, the Chinaman disappeared, fading away like smoke. The doctor had little choice but to return to the wharf and inform Henry Lansdowne of Dare's absence.