Peyton carried a halo of frost into the Irishman’s tilt as he stepped inside, as if his frozen clothes were emanating their own cold light after hours in the outdoors. “Get that coat off you now,” Reilly said. “Close the door behind you.” Peyton was propped near the fire with a glass of rum where he presented his frustrations with the scarce take of beaver and explained his decision to move his line closer to Reilly’s own. Through the conversation the Irishman helped Annie prepare the food, nodding and asking questions and throwing out good-natured insults at every opportunity. Reilly’s constant teasing was a kind of flattery, as ritualized and intimate in its way as dancing. Unlike John Senior’s rough silence, which Peyton couldn’t help thinking of as an implicit condemnation of his abilities, his aptitude, his judgement. He felt vaguely guilty about his affection for Reilly, as if he was being unfaithful to his father somehow.
They sat to a huge meal of salt pork and potatoes and afterwards the two men filled their glasses and their pipes while Annie Boss cleared away the dishes. Annie and Joseph had been married eight years, but she was still known to everyone on the shore as Annie Boss. She spoke over her shoulder with Peyton as she worked and bantered with her husband in a mang of English and Mi’kmaq and Gaelic.
Annie’s belly, which barely showed when Peyton last saw her during the haying, was now quite obviously pregnant. “She’s improving, that one,” he said to Reilly.
Annie turned with both hands on her stomach. She said the child was no time too soon, her mother was starting to have doubts about her choice in a husband.
Reilly smiled at her, his ears rising half an inch on the sides of his head.
Later that evening, after Annie Boss had climbed into a bunk at the back of the tilt and the men had coddled several more glasses of rum, Peyton said, “Can I ask you a question, Joseph.”
“Suit yourself.”
Peyton paused a moment, rolling his glass between the flat of his palms. “What did you,” he said and then stopped. He took a sip of rum. “How did you ask Annie Boss to marry you?”
The Irishman laughed. “Well we’ve all wondered what’s been holding you up, John Peyton. Have your sights set on some lass finally, is it?”
Peyton stared into his glass. “Never mind,” he said.
“There’s not many on the shore to choose from. I bet I could strike the name before the third guess.”
“Never mind,” Peyton said again, angrily this time.
“Don’t mind my guff now,” Reilly said. He was surprised by Peyton’s seriousness. He leaned forward on his thighs. “It was Annie’s doing more than mine is the truth of it. If it had been left me, it might never have come to pass. She sent me off to a have a word with her father.”
“I suppose it was different with her.” He glanced across at Reilly, but the look on his face made Peyton drop his eyes quickly back to his lap.
“Her being Micmac, is what you mean?” When the younger man didn’t answer him, Reilly said, “She’s a good Christian woman, John Peyton.”
Peyton nodded. He lifted his glass to his mouth and drained it. He said, “Could I get another drop of rum, do you think?”
Reilly cleared the heat from his voice. “Who is this lass now?” he said.
Peyton got up from his seat to fetch the rum. “Never mind,” he said over his shoulder.
Reilly asked no more questions and did the favour of not even looking much at him, which Peyton was grateful for. They went on drinking a while longer until Reilly excused himself and climbed into bed as well. Peyton sat up in the dark then, nursing a last finger of rum, upset with himself to have been such a stupid twillick. What he’d intended to say about Annie was altogether different than what he garbled out. And he had never discussed marriage with a living soul before. He wished now he’d had the sense to leave it that way.
Peyton was sixteen the first time he laid eyes on Cassie, shortly after sailing through the Narrows of St. John’s harbour, twenty-nine days out from Poole aboard the John & Thomas. A fine cold day after a night of heavy rain and the few ships anchored in the still water had raised their sails to dry. Running inland from the east side of the Narrows was Maggoty Cove, a rocky stretch of shoreline built over with wharves and stages, behind them the wide flakes used for drying cod. Each season wet fish fell through the lungers of the flakes and bred maggots on the ground. The dark, bottomless smell of rot rooting the clear sea air.
Peyton and his father made their way to a two-storey building on the east end of Upper Path, which housed the postmaster and the island’s first newspaper — a single sheeter folded to four pages that carried government proclamations, mercantile ads, parliamentary proceedings, local news, a poet’s corner on the back page. A small harried-looking man with a New England accent came forward from a cluttered desk at the back of the room to greet them. The two men exchanged a few words and John Senior handed across a large leather satchel of mail he’d carried up from the ship, then produced a letter from his own pocket.
The postmaster nodded as he scanned the page. “Got the trunk for you along this way,” he said, jerking his head repeatedly to indicate the direction they should follow.
The trunk was large enough to sleep an adult fairly comfortably. Peyton took one end and his father the other. Even John Senior showed the strain of the weight. They huffed it out the door where a crowd had already gathered for the calling of the mail. At the waterfront the trunk was rowed out to the Jennifer, a coaster scheduled to leave for Fogo Island in two days’ time.