It was the first time in months that Cassie and John Senior spent time alone in one another’s company. They ate in silence but for the clatter and scrape of cutlery and the regular clicking of John Senior’s jaw as he chewed, the sound like a clockwork sprocket marking time. He had seemed unconcerned about Buchan’s prying while the officer was in the house and hadn’t mentioned him since he left with John Peyton and Mary, but his churlish manner seemed heavier than she remembered. He refused to talk even about the course of the day’s work, the weather. Most nights the Old Hag dragged him out of sleep and he woke Cassie with his yelling.
She had always maintained a rigid lack of curiosity about what the old man was thinking, about his personal life or his past. Her affection for John Senior was clean and uncomplicated, a limited thing but genuine, and it had endured unchanged for years. She had overheard enough scraps of conversation in her days to know he had been party to rough dealings on the shore, but more detail than that she was willing to forego. Insisted on foregoing, in fact. She navigated her way around John Senior like a blinkered horse on a well-worn path, looking neither right nor left. It was enough for her that he was forthright and fair in his dealings with her, that his taste for drink never led to crying jags or fits of wild pacing and stammering. That he never laid a hand on her.
But she watched him now with a question in her head and nothing she did to distract herself from it was any help. She knew it was impossible to come at it directly and one evening after she brought him his tea she said, “Why did the Reds kill Harry Miller?”
John Senior shifted in his seat. “No saying why that crowd does what it does.” He looked at her steadily then as if something about her had changed, her hair or the colour of her eyes, and he was at a loss to say exactly what it was.
“Joe Reilly said he was a hard man.”
He nodded. “As hard a man as ever I seen. There’s any number of stories could account for the Reds disliking him. Not one of them is fit for a woman’s ears, Cassie.”
“I know hard things have been done on the shore.”
John Senior shook his head. “What you know,” he said softly, “amounts to a piece of dun fish.”
“I’ll let you know when I’ve had enough.”
He said, “I think I would prefer a drop of rum to this tea.”
In the fall of 1781, a group of Beothuk delayed their trip down the River Exploits to the winter camp until after Harry Miller left his house on Burnt Island. He was on his way into St. John’s with the season’s catch and from there was travelling to Poole. He rarely made the trip to England any more, but was making an exception to attend the wedding of his business partner.
On a clear night at the end of September, after they’d watched Miller and his hired men nail boards over the windows and set the sails of a sloop packed with barrels of dried salmon, they struck up a fire near the front step and lit long torches of dry reeds wrapped at the top of sticks and circled the building to set it alight. They shouted into the flames and sang as the wood popped and the windows cracked and melted behind their temporary shutters. Smoke poured from the chimney and then the roof began leaking smoke through its thatch. The fire climbed the lengthening vines of the song the Beothuk chanted into the night until it had lifted a second storey of red light above the building. When the walls collapsed, the Indians dragged up two boats that had been overturned and sheltered above the beach and added them to the fire.
By the next evening the square of char and ash had cooled enough to be picked through and the Beothuk used the ends of their torch sticks to turn the ruined wood and sharded panes of glass and cracked porcelain and pieces of leather. The long, square-headed nails they were hunting for were black with soot and still too hot to touch with a bare hand. They were flicked into piles and left another night to cool. Other bits and scraps of metal — blackened pots and cutlery, brass buttons and several buckles, the cast-iron crane from the fireplace — were gathered as well. All of this salvage was packed and carried up the river and at the winter camp hammered and worked to some use among the Red Indians or thonged into jewellery or simply displayed as trophy.
Miller and John Senior were at the rail of their sloop which had wintered in St. John’s. Miller was singing a bawdy song about a wedding night, a song he’d returned to repeatedly and sung at length during the trip back from England. There was no malice apparent in his rendition and it seemed almost a mindless occupation. Occasionally he would come to himself and the song he was singing aloud and the recently altered status of the man in his company would make contact in his mind. “Oh me,” he’d say and he’d slap John Senior’s back.
He was singing Her arse was white as a chamber pot as they rounded the point of land behind which his house once stood. The last of the season’s snow still covered the blackened ruins so that it seemed the building had simply vanished. For a moment Miller considered that he had mistaken Cox’s Cove for his own and that he still had half a day’s travel to reach his station. “Oh me,” he said.