“John Senior told me, just now. Before you came home with Mary.”
“I heard some of it from Cull. Richmond and Taylor used to talk of it now and then. John Senior never said a word to me about it himself.” Cassie was shaking her head and he thought she was on the verge of tears. He said, “John Senior’s a hard, hard man, Cassie.”
She looked across at him. “I want to know what happened on the lake,” she said.
The two Beothuk men came down off the shoreline and walked across the ice to where the Peytons and their men stood waiting. They stopped at a distance of about ten yards from the white men, and the larger of the two, the man holding the branch of white spruce, began to speak. His voice was clear and even and he went on for a long time while his audience alternately stared at him and one another. He beat his chest with the fist of his free hand. He held both hands in front of him in appeal. The cold of the ice stole up through the feet of the white men and they shifted and stamped where they stood and still the Beothuk went on. He made his argument in careful detail and with all the rhetorical flourish he could muster as if he believed simply the appearance of reason and civility would be enough to alter what his own experience told him was inevitable in the unfolding event. One of the Englishmen said, “Does anyone know what the hell he’s going on about.” But no one answered. When the Beothuk reached the end of his plea he surveyed the group before him, each man in turn. He stepped towards them with his right hand extended, first to John Peyton who stood beside his wife. They shook hands and he turned to those men standing nearby and took their hands as well.
The Beothuk man turned to the woman then and spoke several words to her, and he took her gently by the elbow to lead her away from the white men on the ice.
John Senior said, “You keep that savage off the girl, John Peyton.”
The younger Peyton began speaking to the Beothuk then while continuing to hold the woman’s other arm. He motioned and pointed with his free hand to indicate the Beothuk man would be welcome to accompany the party back to the coast as well, and as it became clear he would not be permitted to remove his wife to the shoreline, the Beothuk raised his voice in response and held more tightly to her elbow. The woman’s hands were tied behind her back, the loop of her arms mapping the shape of a heart as the two men pulled from opposite directions.
John Senior stepped up then and tried to loosen the Indian’s grip, shouting against the words of the Beothuk, and their senseless argument spiralled like loose snow in a gale until it seemed that both men were blinded by it. When his hand was pried loose from the woman’s arm the Beothuk turned on the old man, grabbing him about the throat and wrestling him to the ground, screaming into his face all the while, wetting the white man’s face with spit.
Peyton backed away from the fight, still holding the woman. “Get him off,” he shouted. “Jesus, get him off.”
Richmond and Taylor both reached for the Indian and grabbed him uselessly by the hair and the thick cloak of caribou hide. Richmond took up his rifle then and began slamming the heavy wooden butt against the back of the Beothuk’s head, succeeding only in silencing the man who clenched his teeth and refused to relinquish his hold on the old man’s throat. John Senior could be heard then, an intermittent tortured grunting like a fading heartbeat, and there was the dull thunk of the rifle butt striking bone.
The woman was shouting and pulling towards her husband. Peyton turned her around and pressed her face against his shoulder. “Shoot him if you have to,” he shouted.
Richmond turned to stare, the rifle held aloft in his hands like a spear.
Reilly said, “John Peyton.”
“Shoot the bastard,” Peyton yelled again.
Richmond turned the rifle around in his hands and held the barrel flush to the man’s back, the report of the rifle shot muffled by the thick caribou-hide clothing. The woman screamed into the collar of Peyton’s coat. The Beothuk man slumped forward and choked on a spurt of blood in his throat, though he held fiercely to John Senior’s neck a few moments longer like an animal dragging its useless hind legs after its spine has been broken. Richmond and Taylor leaned in and finally pulled him free of the old man, pushing him onto his back on the ice where he stared into the pale blue of the sky and worked his mouth around a word that would never escape his lips.