They spent three solid days in the waist-high meadows. Fragments of the shorn grass worked into their shoes and collars and beneath shirts and the band of the haymakers’ underwear and it stuck there in the sweat on their skin. At the end of the third day, they came down to the river and walked into the water to wash away the dark stain of chlorophyll on their necks and wrists and ankles. They bobbed their heads beneath the surface to wash the sweat from their hair. Back on shore the men removed their shirts to wring them dry. Reilly walked up the bank to lay a fire in the tilt. Cassie paddled out onto the river, turning there to float on her back, the white muslin of her dress moving on the water’s surface like a leaf dropped from an overhanging tree.
Peyton waded in the shallows and watched her. Her hair floated loose in the river. Through the wet fabric of her dress he could see the dark aureole of her nipples and he looked down suddenly at his own soaked clothing, afraid the water might have revealed something of himself in the same way.
Richmond laughed on the beach behind him. “No way he ’ll get on the inside of a cold flinter like she,” he said.
Peyton spun in the water to stare up the beach but Tom Taylor had already turned on his friend. “Richmond, you got no more nature than a picket.” He stood with his hands on his hips and shouted, “You haven’t got the shame God gives a louse.”
“The devil haul you, Tom Taylor. I’ll speak my mind when it suits me.” And to prove his point Richmond slapped Taylor’s stomach and said, “You’ve fallen into flesh, you have. All chuffed out like a cock with the mites.”
Peyton climbed from the water and took off his shirt to wring it out, then pushed on his shoes and walked past Richmond and Taylor as their argument escalated into a shouting match. Reilly was sitting outside the tilt on a junk of wood, a pail of river water that served to cool several bottles of spruce beer beside him. He passed one to Peyton with his scarred hand. The beer was sharp and browsy as tree sap. Peyton drank off half the bottle before he pulled on his wet shirt and took a seat on the ground. He kicked at the dirt with the heel of his shoe.
“What are those two into it over now?”
Peyton shrugged, but didn’t look up at the Irishman.
Reilly said, “Your face is dark as the depths of January, John Peyton.”
He nodded, but said nothing and they sat in silence, listening to Richmond and Taylor carrying on down on the beach. Cassie was likely still in the river, drifting slowly downstream. Peyton closed his eyes against the late afternoon sunlight and leaned his forehead against a fist.
Peyton was eighteen the first time he and Cassie came across to Charles Brook for the haying without John Senior. The old man had insisted she go in his stead so she might have the chance of a little “female company.” Cassie was still tutoring Peyton in the late afternoons in those days, though he was allowing work to keep him away more often as he became increasingly dissatisfied with the thought of being her student. In the week before they crossed over to Reilly’s tilt, he sulked through several evenings of Robinson Crusoe, a book Cassie had thought he would find of particular interest, being cast upon the shores of a strange island himself.
“Are you missing England?” she asked him.
“No,” he said curtly. He was taller than she was now, which served to make him more impatient with the notion of being taught by her.
She could see he wasn’t willing to admit the specifics of his irritation and she carried on as if it was a general question she’d been asking, something related to the book. “Is there anything about England that you miss having here?”
He shrugged. “Orange marmalade,” he said. “And I used to have honey in my tea on occasion.”
She nodded slowly. She tapped the pages of the book. “Go on,” she said.
As they were preparing for that first trip together to Charles Brook, she packed an odd assortment of materials into a knapsack — a compass, several sheets of clean paper, heavy leather gloves, a brass container, molasses, an empty glass jar. At the end of the haying, after the hired men took their leave of Reilly’s river, Cassie told Peyton she wanted to spend a few hours more in the freshly mown meadows. They were on the beach with Joseph Reilly. He was adding wood to a well-burning fire. He said, “We’ll have a bit of bread you can carry home to John Senior if you bide a while longer.”
Cassie and Peyton walked half an hour into the meadows, stopping in one of the wide clearings of shorn grass and boulders. The day was warm though the northerly wind carried a nip when it gusted up and they settled in the lee of a large scaly rock that caught the heat of the sun. There were long white threads of cirrus cloud on the horizon. While Peyton gathered dead wood, Cassie laid out the contents of the bag she had packed.
She stood over the new fire with the container of molasses and poured a long string of it onto the flames, then sat back beside Peyton.
“What are you doing?”
“Just wait.”
The smell of the molasses lifted on the heat of the fire into the air around them. She laid the paper flat on the ground and used stones to hold the corners down.