Tim Bowling - The Tinsmith

The man, pinned on his back, cried, “Who are you? What do you want with me?” His small eyes swam in his doughy face.

Dare pushed his knee down into the man’s chest and placed one hand near his neck. “Who are you working for?”

The man’s eyes filled with knowledge. His nostrils dilated. “My God, it’s you.” His voice shared the horses’ wildness. “What are you going to do to me?”

Dare closed his fingers slightly. The man began to choke. He tried to buck but Dare held firm.

“Who is it?” he said.

“Craig. It’s Craig.”

He could do it this time. He felt the will in his hand but even more in his blood. He tightened his grip. The man gave a gargling sound, like that of a salmon strangled in a net. Dare stared at him. This man had plotted against him for money, he had set a fire and had probably even shot Thomas Lansdowne, and all for money.

The letters on his face burned under the old scars. As if he were still property, still a nigger. But the burning meant slavery; why should it burn? He was not a slave. He had a home, on his own land. He had a place to die free. He pressed down until the man’s eyes fluttered and the choking sounds ceased.

At last he stopped and stood, his chest heaving, the fingers of his hand tingling, his cheek aflame. He could not kill when he was a slave, so how could he kill now? As a free man, a dying man? The idea froze him. He looked down. The man’s jaw worked slowly, his breath came in rasps.

“Please,” he said. “My child…”

The man touched his throat in wonder.

Dare gaped at him, at the naked word on his mouth. “A child?”

“A boy. He’s just nine. Please. I can’t leave him alone. His mother’s gone already.”

Nine? Once he’d been that age too. A boy. A son. Dare tried to look far down into himself, but there was only darkness, a darkness that seemed to pull him in. He felt his body succumb to the warm pressure until he lost awareness of his surroundings. Vaguely he whistled for his horse. It trotted out of the field toward him.

Dare took a step, then looked at the stars. Once he had been both things. The idea was so strange that it stopped him from taking another step. The horse nickered softly, the musk of its damp flesh reached out of the dark. But very briefly a son. And it did not seem he’d ever been a boy. Perhaps, if he had become a father, his own boyhood would have grown clearer to him. But he’d never stayed long enough in one place, and how could he have risked a family, never knowing with certainty the colour he would pass on?

He lifted the well-worn pouch from under his shirt and carefully emptied the contents into one hand. They shone like a constellation, near and farther away than anything. His milk teeth. Not even an ounce worth. And yet what he held was all he really possessed. It didn’t even matter about his name or his skin. Not now. A man couldn’t own them. What mattered was that the blood had to be cool enough for a man to die properly.

The teeth were so light, as light as the past was becoming. Dare looked at the clustered stars. It wasn’t only the Englishmen who could plant themselves in this place. The teeth were as small as the stars; he understood that he no longer needed the guidance of either. With a graceful sweep of his arm, he sowed the teeth into the fields.

A second later, he heard the chilling shout of the past and the present—“Goddamned nigger!”—and whirled just as the near-simultaneous blast of the shotgun struck.

Then the earth rose rapidly to meet him and the darkness, no longer inviting, but cold and unyielding, rushed in.

Jacob Craig stood at a second-floor window of the hotel on Columbia Street and looked down at a drunken Indian weaving along the boardwalk. Near him, a grey mare tethered to a pole weakly flapped her tail at a cloud of flies, and two ravens pecked at a clump of dung. Craig counted carefully. Five seconds, six seconds, seven. Time enough.

He turned, slowly removing the toothpick from where it hung on his bottom lip, and took his chair again. He glared at the American doctor but immediately realized it was no use; he might just as well try to intimidate Owen sitting there across the table like some kind of statue filled with lava rather than stone.

“That’s a steep price for but a single cannery,” Craig said. He narrowed his eyes as the doctor blinked his heavy eyelids and smiled slightly. His lips were a red smear in his unkempt grizzle.

“That includes the pack. And you know how large that is.”

“Do I?” Craig reached for his glass and took a short swallow of whisky. “It seems to me that, with your friend gone and not likely coming back, there’d be some effect on production.”

The doctor hardly reacted. His face was loose-skinned above the beard, and his eyes had all the vitality of a whipped spaniel’s. He ought to medicate himself, Craig thought, then recollected the gossip that Smith, the agent, had passed on. The story was that this Yankee doctor had taken a keen interest in the Lansdowne girl, the one he’d carried through the typhoid. Smith said that with the mother nursing her sickly newborn and Thomas Lansdowne even more preoccupied with getting his cannery running again the doctor planned to take the daughter back east on the proceeds of the sale of Dare’s property and wait the appropriate four or five years until she was old enough to marry. Well, men had done stupider things, but Craig didn’t think this fellow, Baird, looked lovesick. In fact, he looked much the way a man does in a slump of the market when all his stocks prove worthless and he finds that he’s ruined. Then again, some men took love the same way, apparently. It’d be useful if Owen did, but Craig still hadn’t found a chink in that armour.

The doctor suddenly fell into a coughing spasm. His face reddened and he seemed to retch into the handkerchief he’d pulled from his vest. After several seconds, he stopped and, with a shaking hand, drank from his glass of water.

Owen spoke, his mouth hardly moving.

“How do we know he isn’t back already, Craig? He might never have left. Say what you will of his character, but Dare possesses a considerable talent for remaining unseen.”

Craig felt the smart to his intelligence. Owen never missed an opportunity to belittle him. It would have been so much easier if Dare’s body had been dumped in the slough. But you couldn’t trust an Irishman to finish anything, except a bottle. For all Craig knew, the mick was even lying about shooting Dare. Well, better to be safe, then, and play along.

“What of it?” he said, staring hard at the doctor and feeling himself competing with Owen for whatever information was writ on the man’s haggard face.

The American blinked so slowly that his lids seemed to draw the blood up into his eyes, which were red and wet around each small circle of brown. “No more doubt his absence than God’s presence,” he said dully.

Craig felt Owen’s grey eyes settle briefly on him, but he could not decipher the message. He knew that Owen had no more time for God-talk than he did. It was no asset in business, except for the connections a man could make in church, but they were as easily made in hotels and saloons. Easier, in fact, since worship happened but once a week. Craig almost allowed himself a grin at his witticism, but he wasn’t about to give Owen any more advantage than he already had.

From the direction of the bar came a volley of laughter followed by a clink of glasses. Craig waited. Just when it seemed that no one was going to speak again, the doctor stood, one hand flat, the other limp at his side.

“It matters little to me, gentlemen, if you believe what I say about Dare, except as it interferes with our business here. He’s no longer on the delta, or indeed in this country. And it’s not likely he’ll return. He’s not a fool, nor is he a spirit able to remain unseen permanently, despite your appreciation of his talent. And, that being so, I have a responsibility as an investor to seek what compensation I can. Clearly you recognize that?”