Tim Bowling - The Tinsmith

Owen nodded and the doctor continued.

“I don’t know how you’ve kept the other canners from this meeting, but that means nothing to me as long as you meet my price. If you don’t, I’ll consult the others directly.”

Craig relaxed. Now the conversation was comfortable again. He replaced the toothpick in his mouth, probed gingerly near his sore molar, then said, “The market in England is glutted. You have only to smell the air to know why. I’ll be fortunate to sell my own pack, let alone whatever slop Dare’s squaws and Chinamen have managed to stuff into tins.”

The doctor shrugged and pointed the limp hand at Owen, who looked at it as if seeing a fish whose flesh had turned too ripe to be canned.

“Consult whoever you wish,” Owen said. “There’ll be no takers.” His voice fell like a block of salted granite. If Craig hadn’t already known that Owen had pressured the other canners into keeping their hands off Dare’s holdings, the cold voice would have chilled him straight through. As it was, he shuddered a little as he studied the doctor’s reaction.

To Craig’s surprise, the man stiffened. Something of Owen’s hardness settled into his jaw and bloodshot eyes.

“So that’s how it is?” he said and turned to face Craig. “A blood bond, gentlemen, or just greed?”

Craig repressed the desire to tell the fool everything, that Owen had even paid off the steamships—Dare’s whole pack for this last big run would just sit and rust on the wharf.

Owen’s grey eyes iced over, but no flush came to his skin. It was always a disadvantage to show too much; his genius lay in knowing that even better than Craig himself did.

“What you call greed, sir,” Owen said, “is what we call business in this province.”

“Business?” The doctor convulsed into another coughing fit. He pulled a small bottle from his pocket, poured some pills into his hand, and swallowed them. Finally, he said, “You won’t get away with it. I’ll see to it that you don’t.” But his voice lacked conviction. After all, Craig knew there was little the man could do. He was only a visitor here, and a doctor, not a businessman with the necessary connections. And no doubt Dare’s disappearance had come as a shock, especially as it followed so quickly upon the revelation of his being a nigger. Of course, a sensible man ought to expect a nigger to run. Just as a sensible man knew that a nigger, once he’d run, wouldn’t turn and rejoin the fight. No. If Dare wasn’t, in fact, dead, he was as good as dead. It wasn’t even necessary to guard his pack. Even if the nigger did the unthinkable and returned, he’d have a hell of a time selling his fish with no buyers and no shipping companies willing to transport the cans.

Owen reached for his coat on the back of his chair. “When you have a reasonable price in mind,” he said, “I’ll join you for another drink.”

“I wouldn’t drink with the likes of you if I was dying of thirst,” the doctor said and turned his back.

It was a handsome and noble gesture, Craig had to admit, as useless as it was foolish, as such things generally were. But just perhaps it left an opening.

When Owen had gone, Craig cleared his throat and threw a low number at the doctor’s back. If the man was indeed lovesick and needing funds to get away, he’d be apt to accept anything that wasn’t an outright insult. Dare’s pack would be large. Nigger or not, he’d built the biggest packs on the river over the past three seasons.

The doctor turned slowly as if caught on the breeze of rotted fish guts blowing through the open window. His face was haggard but fortunately not livid. Craig believed that he had just won himself a significant gain in his battle with Owen. It hardly seemed possible.

“I must thank you,” the doctor said. “You have made matters very clear for me. If the choice is between the desperation of a good man and the snivelling, underhanded grasping of those for whom goodness doesn’t even exist, I know where I stand.”

Ah, well. Craig slid his toothpick back to the safe side of his mouth and watched the American stride out of the bar. Salmon have gone bad in their tins before. And the English market, while not exactly glutted, was tight. Besides, men who make grandiose statements about goodness usually come back to earth once their tempers cool and the realities of the world press in on them. If they don’t come back, they lose. Simple.

Craig dropped the toothpick from his tongue into his palm, then carefully pocketed it for later.

The riverbank was a gruel of rotting guts. Anson no longer took much notice of the loud smell or the mizzling layer of flies heavy on the mud as a matted scalp. He had the crushing weight of leaving upon him, which was not simply a matter of place but of time. And leaving time—or at least a particular inflection of it—was a more painful and palpable death than what the summer and the river had strewn around him.

Downriver the rebuilt cannery continued to pound, as if rendering the ghosts of all the flesh it had consumed. Anson blinked toward it, the cry of gulls washing lightly against him. He could hardly imagine that he had searched for Dare in such fierce workings, just as he could hardly recall his own right arm sawing off the limbs of a thousand soldiers. Everything he had lived, including his love for Elizabeth and his grief at her dying, shimmered with the same urgent unreality as the crimson, sunlit landscape. Yet the present was forceful enough. It still had the strength to pain him when he resumed his place there.

The other canners had frozen Dare out, even in his absence. They weren’t content just to ruin a man, they had to destroy whatever good his wealth might do for others. Well, Anson wasn’t about to let that happen. He wasn’t without means—if he couldn’t sell Dare’s property, he’d see to it somehow that Louisa would have the money for proper music instruction.

As always, the thought of the girl cheered him. She had recovered well. And it even seemed that the trial of the illness had deepened her musical talent, as if the nearness of death had imbued her with an even greater responsiveness to life. Every day she practised. And though Anson had left explicit instructions for her to rest, he knew that the parents were too busy with the new child and the cannery to pay much heed to Louisa’s care. But it didn’t much matter. The child’s health lay in her music; the more she played, the better and faster she’d recover.

He walked along the wharf slowly, to avoid bringing on another coughing spell. The mountains to the north shone luminous in the bright sun. With his eyes fixed on them, Anson could almost forget about the killing that continued on the river, continued despite the inability of the canners to process the catch. It was little wonder that Henry Lansdowne’s cattle were dying from the contaminated water. Anson suspected there’d be fresh cases of typhoid fever before the summer’s end too. The whole coast was awash in an indolent sensuality; it lay like an infected film upon the mud and the guts and the slowly blinking eyelids of the Indians who no longer even bothered to go out in the skiffs, but instead sat, hour after hour, gazing northward, no doubt thinking of more familiar, less repellent waters. Anson felt that he stood on the threshold of a brothel after a busy night’s debauch; the slack, flesh-drugged quality of the air and the overwhelming presence of something noble and precious bought cheaply sickened him and turned his thoughts also to home.

But could America be less repellent to him, now that the past, the very best of it, had sold itself just as cheaply and vanished into the common, present corruption? A weight pressed on his shoulders. Anson resisted, but the natal impulse in him—the love for the country whose ideals he still believed he would die for, even if the country had dishonoured them—was too much.