She got up from her seat and walked three steps away before turning back to face him, shaking her head furiously, as if it was suddenly clear to her. “It was me you were protecting,” she said.
He shifted in his chair so she couldn’t see his face. “I wanted to spare you knowing if I could.”
She covered her mouth with her hand and walked to the doorway. She turned then and was on him, knocking his chair over backwards to the floor. He grabbed for her arms as she beat him about the head and face. She cuffed an ear and set his head ringing. “Cassie,” he said. She struck him across the bridge of the nose and he was nearly blinded by the shock of it, his eyes watering. Blood ran onto his lips and into his mouth.
Cassie was crying as she swung her arms, and when he finally corralled them and pinned them to her sides, he held onto her until the jag of broken sobs subsided. Her strength was a surprise to him. He hadn’t had occasion to take note of it since their first year on the shore, when she took to the ice to gaff seals. He thought if she’d had a poker or a stick of wood in her hands, she would have killed him there on the kitchen floor. When he let her go she stood up and walked across to the door.
She stopped there but kept her back turned to the room. She said, “I’ll stay here until Mary is brought back up the river.”
Peyton was on his knees on the floor. He wiped the blood away from his upper lip with the sleeve of his shirt. “You know she might die before the freeze-up.”
“Then I’ll stay until she dies.”
Peyton picked his chair up from where it lay on its side and moved it along the table, still trying to catch his breath. He sat sideways to hold his hands in the light of the candle so their shadows moved on the near wall. He brought the two together to form the outline of a rabbit’s head, then a dog. The shadow-dog’s mouth opened and closed on the wall and Peyton made a low barking sound in time to the motion, then howled quietly.
When he was eleven years old, he stole two pence from the pocket of his father’s short-cut spencer where it lay across a chair in the room they shared during the winter months. After school he ran straight to the waterfront and stood in line, the coins clutched so tightly in his palm that the outline was scored into the flesh long after he paid at the door. The room held close to one hundred men and boys and the girl was stood upon a tabletop at one end. People craned their necks and hollered for a better view, for the Indian to speak or dance. There was a gauzy drift of light through opaque windows, the room smelled of rain and tobacco. Someone had tied a feather in her hair and put three stripes of white on each cheek. Her dress was made of rough calico. There was a wooden doll in her hand that she gripped against her chest and she seemed to have no idea why she was there or what interest the assembly of white men might have in her. After five minutes of the crowd’s restless shouting and surging towards the table where she stood, the girl turned her head up and howled with all the force of helplessness a child her age could manage. She was the loneliest-looking creature he ever laid eyes on.
Peyton leaned to the floor and picked up the journal, placing it on the table. He used a finger to turn it in slow circles, flipped it end over end between his hands. He riffled the pages back to front and back again, until he found the blur of words at the edge of a page, the only place in the journal anything had been scribbled outside the careful margins. The words were smudged where the book had been closed before the ink was fully dry, but he recognized the expansive slant of the hand, the tilted looping letters of her handwriting.
There was a child. Before I ended it, David. I was pregnant.
Peyton lifted a hand to his forehead. His first thought was that Cassie had cheated on his father somehow. He left the journal open on the table and walked out of the kitchen, across the hall to the door of Cassie’s room, raised a fist to hammer at it. Held his hand motionless in the air then as it became clear to him finally. Blood still trickled at the back of his throat.
He placed his palm flat against the door, moving it back and forth across the rough grain. He waited there until he thought he might fall with shaking and then ran from the house, down the worn path towards the stage. He stumbled across the stone beach of the cove and sloshed into the frigid ocean water, until the cold stopped his breath, and he stared blindly out across the dark as the chill knifed into his skin. He could feel his intestines quivering. She had never been his father’s lover, though she let him go on believing it. All these years it was her who held him away. Cassandra.
THIRTEEN