She nodded. She got up and began stacking dishes to take them from the table.
John Senior pressed his eyes so hard he saw the white of stars behind the lids. There was a sullen insolence to the clatter she made, he thought, to the rough way she handled the plates and cutlery. Cassie reached across the table to take the plate sitting between his elbows. He crossed his arms in front of himself and they stared at each other a moment. He saw in her face something of the same misery and derision that twisted his mother’s expression the morning she walked in on him cleaning the diaper in his father’s sickroom, her neck and cheek marked by the deep indentations of sleeping on a rough straw pillow. He wanted to tell Cassie how it was his mother’s hurt still alive in him that led to the invitation that brought her to the Bay of Exploits. He said, “You know why I come for you in St. John’s.”
Cassie shook her head angrily. “You don’t know anything about why I left. Why I’ve stayed here.”
John Senior stared. “What’s that now?” he said. He pictured Cassie as the young woman who stood before him in the house beside the tavern when he offered her a position on the northeast shore. That old unanswered question hanging in the air again: His wife or his daughter?
He had never known what to make of the fact that Cassie and John Peyton hadn’t managed to hook, or who was to blame for it, though it was clear after enough time passed that it wasn’t to happen. And his own wanting had been kindled then, seeing her stand naked before him in a wash of sunlight in the kitchen of the summer house. He could still picture the stare she’d given him, bald and unequivocal, but he wasn’t able to settle whether it was meant as invitation or challenge. His uncertainty made him turn away from her and he never afterwards took it further than lying awake nights, having her in his mind. Even that he felt unaccountably ashamed of, wiping his thighs and belly clean with his shirt in the dark of his room, and he was unable to hold Cassie’s eye in the light of morning. Daughter or wife? Daughter. Wife.
The air went out of his lungs. He felt as if he had fallen from a height onto his back and was too stunned to move. “My gentle Jesus,” he whispered. “Your father didn’t, Cassie.”
“Of course he did,” she said. “Of course.”
It was contempt he heard in her voice. As if she was insulted to have to state something so obvious. She lifted the stack of dishes in her hands and walked away towards the pantry. Already making up her mind to leave, he could see.
“I been good to you,” he shouted after her.
ELEVEN
At Reilly’s salmon weir the marines were laying about the sand beach which caught and held the surprising afternoon heat of the sun. Most of them had removed shoes and stockings and covered their faces with handkerchiefs. A cast-iron pot on an improvised crane steamed over a fire.
Buchan found Mary and Peyton in the company of Joseph Reilly and Annie Boss and their three youngest children outside the tilt. Peyton and Reilly were sitting on stumps, leaning forward on their knees and talking until they caught sight of the officer. Reilly stood as he came up to them. The two Indian women were seated on the ground with the children. Mary was more animated than Buchan had ever seen her. She coddled and teased and clicked her tongue as the boy and two girls crawled across her lap.
Peyton said, “How was your visit with Mr. Richmond?”
“About what I expected.”
Peyton nodded and the men fell into talk about Reilly’s luck with the salmon this season and what the winter might have in store. Mary wandered off momentarily and returned with long strips of dry birchbark from wood cut and stacked near the tilt. As the white men talked she peeled the thin inner layer of bark from the sheet and folded it in half, then four, then eight. She spoke to the children in her native tongue, which they couldn’t understand, and she threw out an occasional phrase of English. “You wait,” she said as she pressed the bark between her teeth, turned and bit the bark, unfolded once and bit again. When she was done she held the bark at arm’s-length and lifted each fold slowly before the children who were completely still and silent. The men stopped speaking as well and turned to watch her. The opened sheet of bark showed the impression of a clearly detailed flower.
The children held their hands to their faces, the adults applauded. Mary folded another piece of bark and produced an image of a mamateek in the same fashion. Then a canoe, then a paddle. She seemed to have briefly forgotten her situation, lost in a child’s game she had practised a thousand times in her young life. A man wearing Indian rackets. A copse of trees.
Peyton said, “We’ve asked Annie to do what she can for the rattle on Mary’s stomach.”