“Don’t thank me,” Duckworth said. “Don’t you dare.” He raised his hand in the air. “More brandy,” he shouted angrily.
The following summer, Buchan returned to the Bay of Exploits as a surrogate magistrate, and when not holding court or seeing to other duties, he carried out extensive searches of the mainland coast and the islands along the northeast shore. He visited occasionally with the Peytons on Burnt Island and shared a meal while gleaning all he could of their recent sightings of Beothuk. He took notes in his journal, drew free-hand maps to fix locations in his mind. Peyton had seen a recently abandoned camp at the mouth of this or that river. One of the hired men caught sight of a canoe rounding a point of land in one bay or another.
There was a quiet, almost elegiac tone to the discussions, as if they were discussing creatures who had all but disappeared from the earth, ghosts, spirits who drifted occasionally to this side of darkness.
Peyton offered all the information he had on hand and made suggestions for likely areas to search. John Senior sat by quietly, responding to direct questions but mostly keeping to himself. When the officer left he ridiculed the whole undertaking. “How he could leave two men dead on the lake and act like this is beyond me,” he said. He spoke softly, with a note of pained surprise in his voice. “If it had been someone from the shore been killed, there’d be hell to pay and proper goddamn thing.”
“I know what your ideas of the proper thing are,” Peyton said. He found everything the man said these days disagreeable, and he made a point of making sure his father knew it.
John Senior shook his head. “Richmond and Taylor are all for going back down the river come the winter and I can’t say I disagree with the sentiment.” He spat into the idle fireplace. He said, “If it had been you was killed, John Peyton.”
A picture of his father in Cassie’s bed came to Peyton and he got up from his seat and went to the window to drive it out. It was infuriating how they carried on around him as if nothing was happening between them. He said, “Lieutenant Buchan knows well enough what’s right.”
“He’ll wind up with his head ordained for an ornament in some wigwam on the lake. That’s how much he knows of what’s right.”
John Senior’s pessimism only served to goad his son into a state of blind enthusiasm for Buchan’s attempts at reconciliation. He collected stories from other men on the shore to pass on during the officer’s next visit, gathered artifacts from his own travel on the salmon rivers. On several occasions he abandoned his work to hired men in order to accompany Buchan to areas of the coast the officer was unfamiliar with.
“If I didn’t know any better,” John Senior said when he returned from one excursion, “I’d think you was after a Red bride.”
They argued then, standing inches from one another and spraying each other’s faces with spittle. Cassie came out to them, drawn by the shouting, and she put a hand to each of their shoulders. Both men took a step backward, embarrassed to have been seen in such a naked state of fury. Peyton walked off to the house and shut himself up in his room. He found it disturbing, Cassie’s touch obliquely connecting him and his father that way, and he wondered if he was the only one of the three of them to be bothered by it.
In late August, Peyton and Cassie rowed across to the mainland for the haying. Richmond and Taylor had already arrived and were on the beach with Reilly when they rowed up to the salmon weir.
Annie Boss came down the narrow path from their tilt to greet them all, carrying her child. It was their first sight of the baby for all of the visitors but Peyton who had come to Charles Brook twice that summer as he inspected the catch at John Senior’s salmon rivers. There was a round of handshaking and best wishes for the new parents. Richmond pushed Reilly’s shoulder roughly and said, “All this time we thought you was all powder fire and no shot.”
“Don’t pay no mind to the noggyhead,” Tom Taylor said, shaking Reilly’s hand. He and his wife had had their own difficulties and he couldn’t bring himself to ridicule others, even a Paddy and his Indian wife. He said, “The best to you both. And Siobhan would say the same if she was here, I know.”