Tim Bowling - The Tinsmith

The agent’s orange suit in the red sunlight made Craig wince. He did not wait for any pleasantries. “Well? Who is he? What’s he here for?”

The agent wheezed a laugh out of his pasty, sparsely whiskered face. He looked like an underfed fox that the hounds had cornered, except that he was too stupid to even realize it. “Having your supper, Craig? I trust I’ll merit something better.”

Craig whistled sharply at a Chinaman lazing against a piling fifty feet away, and the toothless old man, wearing the usual blue smock, shuffled over.

“Get this into a tin,” Craig said and handed the piece of flesh to the coolie. “And tell Kwan I don’t want to see waste like this again. Or I’ll deduct it from the contract.”

A sharp pain flared along Craig’s gumline. He glared at the agent, but the man was too stupid and too English, which amounted to the same thing, to take the hint.

“A week from now,” Smith said and nodded southwest in the direction of the rivermouth, where the dingy sails of the returning skiffs could just be seen, “and you’ll be up to your knees in fish that you won’t be able to tin. That’s what the Indians are saying.”

“Whose Indians? Did you talk to Dare’s? Goddammit, man, I’m not paying you for your predictions on the next run.”

“All right, all right, just let me have a smoke.”

The agent delicately bit the end off a cigar, lit a match and held the flame to the tobacco, and was about to fling the match away when Craig grabbed his arm.

“Not on the wharf. Can’t you tell it’s like tinder in this heat?”

The agent shrugged, inhaled deeply, and blew out a puff of smoke.

“Well?” Craig said. “Did you learn anything or not?” He sucked at his molar and tried to shut out the shuntings of the cannery and the gurglings of the tide so he could better focus on the agent’s answer.

“He’s American, a doctor from the east. Doesn’t talk much, but he’s definitely come to meet with Dare. And I don’t think it’s to discuss whether he should set up practice at Crescent Slough either.”

“How do you know that?”

“Henry Lansdowne asked straight out. They wouldn’t mind having a doctor at Chilukthan, you know. The Landing’s large enough to support one.” Belvedere Smith shook his head. “But not this doctor. He’s not thinking of his prospects. At least that’s what he told me, and I believed him. Worn-out chap, really.”

Craig closed his eyes against the pain in his mouth. A doctor? Perhaps he was the source of Dare’s financing? Somehow or other, the damned nigger had the means to hire a new crew of coolies in Victoria. Now it looked as if he’d be ready for the big run after all. Owen, for all his shrewdness, hadn’t been able to stop him. Then again, Dare hadn’t been seen for days. Craig cursed under his breath. Not knowing what a rival was doing pained him more than any tooth could. He pushed his tongue hard against it and thought, Maybe this doctor doesn’t even know Dare is a nigger. Inspired, he phrased the thought into a question and asked it aloud.

The agent smiled through the grey rings of smoke. “I never brought it up. I could tell it wouldn’t have mattered. The doctor’s one of these noble chaps, you can tell just by looking at him. A good American. Apparently he saved a bunch of Dare’s coolies from drowning the first night he arrived.”

“Yes, I know about that,” Craig said. “So the Lansdownes didn’t mention that Dare was a nigger either?”

The agent guffawed. “Henry Lansdowne? He takes the Lord’s view of such things. And his brother, whether he likes it or not, follows suit. Anyway, I’m not so convinced that Dare is—”

“I don’t care what you think about that. Just tell me about this doctor. You think he’s a friend of Dare and that he’s here to help him?”

“I don’t see any other reason for him to be here. And he did ask a lot of questions about the canning business. About the salmon too. Seemed to expect me to know why the damned things come back to the river when they do.”

The agent wheezed out another laugh; it ended in a snivelling gasp.

Craig had had enough. Dare on his own was already a problem that had to be removed. And Dare with help? Well, that meant there was no waiting for Owen’s canny bribing of a magistrate. A more direct means of elimination would be necessary. And there were plenty of shiftless failures around who’d rather earn a dollar with a gun than with a set of oars and a net.

The white sails of the skiffs drifted closer. Craig could almost hear the lusty voices of the men crying out for a higher wage. Even the sun seemed to stick its bloodied hands into his pockets. He turned and started to stride away.

“Wait a minute,” the agent said. “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

Craig turned slowly back, one eye narrowed to a slit. “You’ve been paid. And too well for the service.”

The agent tossed his cigar into the river. His skinny face was like a bairn’s about to blubber.

“You promised me a meal, Craig. That was agreed upon.”

“So I did.”

Gleeful, Craig reached into his coat pocket. He could not believe he had almost forgotten. He pulled out two oat biscuits, dry as navy hardtack, and handed them to the peevish agent. The fool’s face looked as doughy as the biscuits. But before he could even protest, Craig suppressed a chuckle at the base of his throat and walked away, already wondering how little he could pay a lazy Irishman to get rid of a nigger.

Anson had no way to reach Victoria unless he waited for a steamer to stop at Chilukthan or else rowed himself upriver to New Westminster to board a Victoria-bound vessel there. While he seriously considered the latter option, he knew his health would not allow it. He had to accept the unpleasant fact: he was stuck at Chilukthan.

But stuck did not have to mean purposeless. Anson was determined to be of some use while he waited for the steamer or Dare’s return. As long as Thomas Lansdowne’s wife remained inadequately attended, the family’s gifted daughter would suffer, perhaps would suffer all her life if a domestic tragedy destroyed her chance of realizing her talent. The very thought of such a desecration urged Anson over the fields with no break in his stride. Elizabeth had not given him a child, and the Lansdowne girl was no replacement for that loss, but if the years weighted a man’s spirit, they also made clear his responsibility to his own character. He had come to the Fraser River to help William Dare. Before he left, he would do what he could to help the girl too.

He found the Englishman a considerable distance from his house, beyond the woodlot. Emerging from the trees, Anson felt as if he dragged the forest’s intimate darkness with him, as if the trees themselves housed human aspirations.

Thomas Lansdowne was even more violently red in the face than usual as Anson came up. His horse, yoked to a massive stump, pulled so that its eyes were moon-wide, and the Englishman, on his knees in the wet earth, grunted as he heaved his body against the black, sodden, many-rooted weight, trying to dislodge it from the mucky ground. He did not appear to notice Anson’s approach. So Anson waited, staring across the flat, unvarying distance that hardly merited the name of “field.” This was no easily broken soil. It was, in fact, hardly soil at all. Obviously the Lansdownes, in their diking and stump removing, were engaged on the noble work of the future. Anson respected them for it, but the future could not, should not, come at the expense of the present. If a man laboured for the sake of his children, he ought not to be allowed to neglect the wife who carried his child. Simply put, that went against nature.