Tim Bowling - The Tinsmith

Cuffed to Robert, John felt no special wrath in the closeness, nor did their bondage unite them in any way except the physical. He experienced only a dull, low thrum of mingled despair and hatred, the former more powerful until the overseer approached the coffle of women, looked Daney straight in the eye, and announced that Caleb was dead.

“So there’s no reason to come back here on his account,” he said as Daney dropped to her knees, pulling her daughters down with her, and covered her face with her hands.

With a surprising show of energy, the trader marched over. “Our business is settled. You go on. You’re no help to anyone here.”

Along the chain John felt the tension in Robert’s body as he reacted to his mother’s wails. Tears streamed down his cheeks, but he kept his jaw raised and rigid.

The overseer spat on the frost-hard earth. His thin hair blew back in wisps off his skull as his white breath rose over him and broke apart. The smile on his raw-boned face was crisp.

John could not keep looking at him. His chest burned with the desire to kill. To ease it, he looked beyond the overseer to the back porch of the house. In the frame of the doorway stood the thin figure of the master. Leaning on a cane, his head bare, he looked like stone-struck water. In a few weeks he had aged a dozen years. As John watched, Charlotte came and led the master away. Even from across the barnyard, the misery showed on her face, which hung in the open doorway a moment, like a last autumn leaf, and then fell back out of view.

The trader stood above Daney and shifted from one foot to the other. He scratched the back of his neck. For several minutes he let the women cry out their grief. Then, taking a watch from his inside pocket, he frowned and bent to the rope. Pulling on it firmly, he said, not unkindly, “Come on, now, didn’t I agree to take you?”

Daney always said she could bear anything.

The sun dazzled on the frost.

She fell quiet.

So long as her children…

The line of women rose as one.

“Go sound the jubilee,” Motes sang softly into the birdsong.

In two heavy lines they commenced the journey south.

The doctor’s name was Anson Baird, but John could think only to call him “doctor.” He stood beside John now in the putrid air outside the tent and spoke quickly, almost imploringly.

“It doesn’t matter to me what happened with the dead man. I know you by your service on the field. A man owes me nothing who gives so freely of his courage and strength. Do you think your having been a slave changes that? I imagine you were driven to it. I don’t need to know. You were a slave, but now you’re white enough to get away clear. For good. Do you hear me? This is a chance that doesn’t come to many. Act like a soldier among soldiers, as you’ve already done, and you’ll be taken for a soldier. Keep clear of the contrabands. If you’re among them, someone might look close, as close as I did.”

John squinted into the setting sun, which spilled its bloody light across the rolling hills of battle-churned earth. A hundred yards away, pressed up close to the dark woods along the Smoketown Road, a mass of blue-clad troops sprawled and squatted and strode among a settlement of tents. Nearer, close enough for him to hear their low chanting, three black men dragged a dead horse by its legs along a stubbled, blackened cornfield toward a massive bonfire. Everywhere he looked, John saw another dead horse or a shattered wagon or a torn coat or knapsack. But the bodies of men had all been shovelled into the ground. With Caleb. Into the ground.

The bonfire crackled and spat and white smoke poured off its top like a horse’s rippling mane. From down among the troops floated the sad notes of a harmonica.

And the overseer too. With his bloodied ruff of beard. Into the ground. John’s pulse quickened as he studied the ravaged landscape for the mulatto’s vengeful charge. But it was only dead horses he could see, only chanting and the sad music he could hear. Into the ground with his pathetic lie about John’s blood. How could he be white and not know it? He couldn’t be. And even if it were true, he had no way to prove it. Not even the kind-faced doctor would believe him. But it wasn’t true. It wasn’t. He was black enough to love Daney and Caleb and the others. So he was black. Orlett knew it. But there was no trick the overseer wouldn’t use to weaken a man. Only Orlett was dead now, and his death had made John a man, a man with a new name and a different future. He felt the doctor clap him on the back.

“I’ll give you my address. I want to know how it goes with you. And if we both survive, perhaps I can be of some service.”

John took the extended hand and shook it. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

The doctor smiled. The red sunlight played over his tired face. “May God keep and protect you,” he said.

And John, who was to think of himself now as William Sullivan Dare, put his booted feet into the dirt of the Smoketown Road and did not look back until he had blended into the worn and tattered blue of his new life. By the time he turned, the doctor had already gone.

The smell of money rising off the river and drifting into the hotel bar almost made Jacob Craig smile. Instead, he touched his aching molar with the tip of his tongue, then sipped at his drink as he considered the company he’d called together: four Scotsmen, three Americans, two Englishmen, and a Swede. Most were seated around the bend of the long bar counter, though a few stood, heads tilted down to catch the conversation. This time, Craig allowed himself a brief smile through the pain. His competitors looked just like gulls perched on a cannery roof; one or two birds were always too restless to settle completely.

But these gulls had ordered drinks. Whisky all around. No, not quite all—Henry Lansdowne was a teetotaller, an odd fact given that the man’s brother was famous from Victoria to far up the Fraser for his resemblance to the squat bottle of a particular brand of Scotch that he favoured. A man could enter almost any saloon in the province and ask for “a drap o’ Tam Lansdowne” and there’d be no confusion. But the older brother had earned a different reputation and a very different nickname: most called him “Squire.”

Craig let the alcohol gather in one cheek and swallowed it with half his mouth. Then he looked along the counter at the two Englishmen and smiled inwardly. Farmers. Sheep for the fleecing. It gave him some small measure of national pride to know himself superior to the English Lansdownes. Besides, he knew about the debt they’d been steadily accruing and suspected he knew even more about it than the older brother did. They were easy enough to control without that knowledge, of course, but the extra advantage never hurt. He could see the worry writ bold as moonlight on the stockier brother’s face. It was a pleasing sight. How men could dig themselves into such holes, Jacob Craig never understood. But that they did so made things all the better for him.

The cigar smoke thickened, and as the party moved to the sparsely furnished drawing room with a window facing the river, the smoke trailed after them like a Chinese dragon. The Swede, Ben Lundberg, boomed out a laugh as he clapped Marshall English on the shoulder. In an hour, English would be too drunk to count his own fingers. By the end of the meeting he’d be excusing himself to vomit out the window. Craig doubted the American would last much longer in the salmon business. A Californian, he’d already lost one fortune during the stock market slump two years before, keeping only enough to invest in a cannery. But the high livers never endured. Craig had seen dozens come and go already, and this business wasn’t a decade old.