John Senior said, “Go on up and get yourself a glass.”
They sat drinking a while, without John Senior saying anything to indicate what he intended and Reilly was superstitiously afraid to ask, as if he had now to wait until fate or the saints pointed them left or right.
John Senior reached out then and took Reilly’s hand in his own. Two of John Senior’s fingers had no nails, only a hard scrabble of callus and scar tissue from some ancient accident. He passed a thumb gently over the raised welt of the brand. He said, “There’s no one going to let you live an honest life as long as there’s a story that says otherwise.”
Reilly nodded. He didn’t want this man to let go of his hand.
“Are you willing to do something about that, Joseph Reilly?”
He nodded again, stupidly. He had no idea what was being suggested, what he would endure before the night was out. When John Senior let go of him Reilly turned his hand in the air with a little flourish and held up the man’s wedding ring. To show what he was ready to leave behind.
Peyton reached out then and took Reilly’s hand, much as his father had done in the grog shop above St. John’s harbour. He traced his fingers across the wild copse of scars there. He had never looked at them as anything but a blind injury, an accidental wound of some sort. “Why are you telling me all this, Joseph?”
He let out a long breath of air. “It’s just a story is all, John Peyton.” After a moment he said, “God bless the mark, but it’s a cold night.” He refilled their mugs and they sat in silence a long time then. There was a thick cloud cover and no moon or stars showed through.
Reilly said, “If it won’t offend you, I’ll be saying the rosary a little while.”
Peyton lifted his mug in acquiescence and then threw the cold remains of his tea into the snow. His companion took out his black prayer beads and rolled them through his fingers as he muttered those ancient prayers to himself. The dog got up from its place beside the fire, walked a little ways outside the circle of light and began barking wildly into the woods. Reilly interrupted his rosary to quiet the dog but it would not come back to the fire. The hair was ridged along its spine and it stood there growling at the dark. Peyton felt like crawling out beside the animal and joining in himself.
FOUR
Cassie was sitting at the table when Peyton and Reilly came into the tilt the next morning. The skin of her face was pale and translucent and showed the blue of veins beneath it. The bloodshot rim of her damaged eye was as bright as a partridgeberry.
Peyton sat across from her and watched as she fiddled with her fingers, worrying at them with an intensity that suggested she might fall from her chair if she looked away from her hands. There was a thin acrid smell of vomit beneath the aroma of spruce bark that Annie had put on to boil during the night. Reilly stepped across the room to where his wife stood near the fire and they talked quietly together, partly in Gaelic, partly in Mi’kmaq, like parents spelling words to keep them from the ears of children.
Cassie said, “You’ll not say a word of this to your father.”
Peyton stared at her. The liquid burn of fear that he’d carried all night congealed to something heavier then, something with the heft and solidity of stone.
She looked up to him with her wounded stare. “Promise me,” she said.
Annie refused to let Cassie leave for home until the following day and only then when Cassie agreed to allow Peyton to accompany her. Reilly promised to keep an eye on as much of Peyton’s lines as he could manage and they set out down the river about mid-morning. Cassie was so weak that they were forced to stop every half-hour or so and when they turned into the bush above Ship Cove the heavy snow sapped the last of her strength. She leaned on the trunk of every third or fourth tree and bowed her head while she sucked at the air. Finally she fell backwards in the snow and could not get herself to her feet again. Peyton cut two thin spruce trees and limbed them out, then lashed the thickest branches between the poles with leather thongs. He harnessed the head of the stretcher to his shoulders and dragged Cassie through the bush. She slept for most of the afternoon and woke only to tell him she felt well enough to walk on her own for a while, then dropped quickly back to sleep.