Buchan waited a few moments longer, staring at the boy. Then he got to his feet and walked up the path to the tilt. He left the four marines outside the door to avoid offering any hint of fear or uncertainty on his part and stepped alone into the near dark. He could make out a rough table and chair in the foreground, a wood box piled high with junks of split spruce. A fire muttered to itself in the stone fireplace. There was a single window in the back wall that glowed with light. A voice from underneath it said, “You’ll be closing the door behind you, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course,” Buchan said. The voice had startled him and he moved quickly to pull the door closed. He turned back and squinted into the darkness. There was a rustle of movement and Richmond’s silhouette passed across the square of light in the window. He came forward rubbing his eyes and combing his beard roughly with his fingers as if he had just woken from a nap. He nodded to the visitor. He was wearing a large, closely knit gansey that hung halfway to his knees. “You’ve only just caught me,” Richmond said. “I was on my way down to the water. Did you see young Michael?”
“He directed me up from the river.”
Richmond nodded and clanked a heavy kettle onto the crane over the fire. “Tea?” he said.
“May I have a seat?” Buchan asked, pointing at a chair beside the table.
“Wouldn’t force you to drink a cup of tea by the door. What did Michael Sharpe have to say for himself?”
Buchan smiled. “Only that I would best talk to you.”
Richmond nodded his head. “He’s a quiet lad, young Michael.”
They sat across from each other and Buchan looked around the tiny room as his eyes adjusted to the poor light. The packed dirt floor opposite the stove was stacked with Indian rackets of various sizes and shapes, traps, poles, coils of hemp rope, drag-twine, plain board, tools, netting, rolls of canvas, a bag of nails. The walls themselves were papered with what on closer inspection turned out to be the pages of a Methodist missionary magazine. Buchan leaned in to read a paragraph next to his head. “Regular subscriber?” he asked, nodding towards the walls.
“Can’t read meself,” Richmond said. “Bloody great armfuls of those things up at the church on Twillingate Island though.” He reached out and slapped the wall with the palm of his hand. “Keeps the draught down a bit.”
Buchan watched him a moment, the face almost masked — his beard covering the cheekbones nearly as high as his eyes, bushy mare-brows above them. “Were you born in Newfoundland, Mr. Richmond?”
“No sir. But I came here young enough to wish I had been, when I was a boy of eight or thereabouts.” His family, he explained, settled on the west coast of Newfoundland, sharing a small sheltered bay with Tom Taylor’s family, building a stagehead and splitting room and several tilts framed with saplings handy to the foot of the harbour. The latest in the endlessly recurring conflicts between Britain and France was underway and the French Shore, as that part of the island was known, had been abandoned by French fishermen.
At that age he and Tom Taylor worked on shore with his grandfather and mother and Mrs. Taylor and several of the other older children, carrying mounds of wet fish in handbarrows from the press piles to wash them in the shoals, spreading the clean cod to dry on the flakes and constantly turning them to keep the sun from scorching the flesh. Richmond’s father and Mr. Taylor were on the water each day with two hired men, hand-lining for cod. They skiffed out to the grounds before the wick of first light was lit and worked there until they’d brought up the full of the boat or until the onset of darkness forced them ashore. They worked with thirty-fathom lines, their hooks baited in the first weeks of May with mussels dug from sandy beaches, then with seine-hauled herring, and by mid-June with the capelin that came ashore to spawn in such unbelievable numbers a boy could stand knee-deep in the landwash and dip them from the water in nets or baskets.
Richmond shook his head, as if that harvest still amazed him, the lavish roil of silver bodies about his shins, hundreds of the capelin shovelled onto a small patch of garden for fertilizer, thousands more simply rotting on the beach after the gulls had their fill.
The kettle, which was still warm when it was set over the fire, came to a full rolling boil and Richmond got up to see to the tea. He had the permanent hunch of large men used to stooping under doors and low ceilings. It made him seem coiled, Buchan thought, unpredictable. Richmond picked up two cups from a sideboard and stared into them for a moment. He blew into them in turn, held them upside down and shook them and stared into them again. He poured without straining the leaves.
“How did you come to this part of the country?” Buchan asked.
Richmond looked across at him with a queer grin that made Buchan’s stomach turn. “The war ended is what happened,” he said cheerfully. He passed the officer his tea.