Peyton shrugged. He looked at Cassie as she carefully folded the linen and placed it back as she’d found it. “I couldn’t say, sir.”
Outside Buchan had two marines unpack a canvas tent from the sledges, and while it was erected next to the burial site of the Beothuk man, he had the coffin unpacked as well. The canvas and red-cloth covers were removed and Buchan inspected it carefully for signs of damage. The lid, which had been nailed shut, was pried free and they stood silently about the body of the woman. Twine had been used to secure the corpse in its place and the freezing temperatures had preserved her features throughout the trip up the river. There were a number of trinkets placed about the body, two wooden dolls that Mary had been fond of, gifts of jewellery and other things given to her by visitors who had come from across the northeast shore to see her.
Buchan motioned to have the lid replaced, but Cassie touched his arm.
“I have something I would like to leave with her,” she said. She unbuttoned the outer coat she wore to get at the pockets of a lighter coat underneath. Peyton watched as she leaned over the body. When she stepped away he could see it was the medicine bag his father had stolen from the grave of a dead Beothuk on Swan Island — the gift he had tried weakly to refuse and then passed on to Cassie. He could name the contents still: carved antler pendants, a pyrite fire stone, two delicately fluted bird skulls.
If he’d thought of it at that moment, he would have placed John Senior’s silver watch case beside the corpse as well, but it hadn’t entered his head since finding Mary dead in Ship Cove. Two marines stepped forward to nail the coffin shut. The watch case was carried back to the coast and he discovered it sitting in a coat pocket months later. Turned it over in his hands then. Held it to his ear, listened a while to the endless nothing of it.
The casket was draped in a brown pall and raised six feet off the ground from a tripod of spruce sticks to keep the body out of the reach of scavenging animals. The cassock and leggings Mary had been wearing when she was taken were laid beneath it along with the materials that had been carried up as gifts for the Indians: blankets, knives, linen, several iron pots. The sixteen blue moccasins Mary had sewn of stolen cloth in her bedroom were placed in a row just inside the entrance.
The entire expedition stood about the tent after these gifts had been arranged and the flaps pulled closed and tied. There was a silence among them born of awkwardness, of an awareness they stood together in a moment they were at a loss to articulate, that even the importance of the moment was somehow beyond their understanding. Someone coughed. Snow complained under the shifting of feet as the silence crept on.
Buchan stepped away finally and orders were given to lay a fire and to cover the frames of the two shelters still standing. Peyton stood beside Cassie in the loud clap of movement that followed and he turned to stare out across the lake where he had chased Mary down and taken her hand in his own less than a year before. The sun was falling into the trees on the opposite shore and the pale moon was already visible above the horizon.
“I was thinking,” Peyton said. “I thought it might be time I got married.” After a few moments of her silence he nodded to himself. He wanted to ask if she would have had him if things were different, if she had come to the northeast shore from another life. But he was afraid of what her answer might be. He gestured towards the far hills, to the forest so green under the sun that it was nearly black. He shaded his eyes against the light, the white of snow on the lake. He said, “All my life I’ve loved what didn’t belong to me.”
He turned to face her then but Cassie was already moving away from him towards the trees.
The red ochre used by the Beothuk to cover their bodies, to decorate their tools and shelters and their dead, is a mudstone with the wet texture of clay. It occurs most frequently in tertiary deposits that are not common on the island of Newfoundland. The Red Indians gathered it from Ochre Pit Cove in Placentia Bay and Ochre Pit Island in the Bay of Exploits. There is a deposit between Barasway River and Flat Bay, close to St. George’s Bay, which may have been used as a source. The ochre was mixed with oil or grease to make a stain that was applied directly to the skin and hair, to birchbark, to leather and wood, to stolen ironwork and canvas. When the ochre was unavailable in sufficient quantities, the Beothuk substituted a paste made of soil with a high iron content or a reddish dye extracted from alder bark.