He only managed to make one trip out to Newfoundland. When John Senior was fifteen his father died of complications arising from a syphilitic infection. For months he suffered lengthening periods of dementia that were exacerbated by steady drinking. He was tormented by uncertainties and constantly demanded to know the time of day, the time of night, never satisfied with the answers given him. He seemed to forget who his family were and treated them as if they were strangers present in the house to steal from him while he slept. He secreted valuables away in cupboards and beneath the mattress. After his death, hidden treasures turned up in the most unlikely places: a brass snuffbox under a loose floorboard, his silver pocket watch buried in a sack of flour.
When the dementia was at its worst he was incomprehensibly abusive towards his children, towards his wife. The violence was completely out of character for the man. He had never said a harsh word to John Senior or his sisters, and never laid a hand on any of them, but for the one time he caught his son stealing sugar from a container in the pantry. It was something John Senior had been doing intermittently for years, a secret pleasure he admitted to no one, holding the rough cubes between his front teeth as he lay in bed, letting them disintegrate slowly as he drifted to sleep. His father made him replace the sugar but didn’t speak another word on the matter until weeks later when they attended a public hanging.
A man convicted of robbing a fishing merchant’s home of silverware and pewter candelabra stood on a cart, a cord of rope about his neck, the other end tied to a gibbet overhead. John Senior sat on his father’s shoulders for a better view of the proceedings. The air smelled of coal smoke and leather. A dark knot of relatives stood with the condemned man, crying and offering words of encouragement, a parson stood behind them whispering prayers. After an allotted time, the cart was cleared of all but the thief and his eyes were covered with a cloth. At a signal from the sheriff the hangman lashed the horses and the cart jerked ahead. There was a murmur from the crowd, an almost imperceptible drift forward. The thief swung and twisted in the air. Two of the men who’d stood beside him on the cart came forward and took hold of his legs, dropping their weight onto the strangling man to bring on the release of death that much sooner. He dangled there a full half an hour then, head lolling heavily over the rough collar of rope, before the hangman cut him down.
They walked back to their home through the streets of Poole in silence. John Senior had come to the hanging at his father’s invitation and he sensed there was more than spectacle on the man’s mind. There was a cold air of dread about the day that seemed to work against words, that suggested the uselessness of language in the face of the things he had just witnessed.
His father brought him to the pantry, opened the container of sugar and placed it before him on the counter.
“Put your hands up there,” he said. “To either side.”
He did as he was told. His father took out a long leather strap and proceeded to beat him savagely across the buttocks and shoulders, across the backs of his legs, until the boy could just keep his feet, until his father exhausted himself.
John Senior stood there shaking and crying silently when it was done, hands still on the counter. He could hear his father moving behind him, sucking air heavily through his nostrils to catch his breath. There was the sound of glassware set on the table, a cork loosed from a bottle. “Have some of this now,” his father said.
John Senior turned from the counter and took the proffered glass of rum.
His father’s thick upper lip was beaded with sweat and his hair frizzed away from his head in all directions, as if he was standing on a charge of static. He said, “You see where thieving will get you.”
They never spoke of the incident afterwards. And nothing in his father’s demeanour or actions in the years that followed predicted the bouts of blind rage he would descend into once the disease overtook him. When nothing else could appease him or settle his outbursts, John Senior was forced to beat his father senseless, weeping with frustration as he struck the sick man about the shoulders and head.
Through the worst of his fever, fifty years on, John Senior relived those moments, thrashing on his sick bed and shouting. Cassie leaned over him and pinned his arms to the mattress. “I’m not your father,” she shouted at him, but he was too delirious to understand her.
The illness was still burning through the old man when Peyton arrived at the house from the traplines and Cassie sent him to Ship Cove to ask after Buchan’s surgeon. By the time he returned accompanied by both the surgeon and Buchan himself, the fever had broken. The doctor prescribed a regimen of salts and cod liver oil for strength and told him to put aside any thought of accompanying the expedition that was due to leave in three days’ time. Cassie echoed the doctor’s orders to the old man and sent the visitors away the next morning with salt fish and bread tied up in a cloth.