Cassie paused there, as if telling the story was exhausting her as much as the actual trip had, years before. Peyton watched her stare into the fire.
Beyond the lake the Indian path knifed into the trees, becoming so narrow that they couldn’t walk abreast of one another. Stones pushed up to block the trail, some as high as the axle tree of a wagon. Her father waded waist-deep rivers with Cassie on his back, both of them staring into the current, his foot shifting carefully ahead to feel out each step. They lost the path and found it and lost it again. They clung to tree branches, stepping across exposed roots to cross patches of thigh-deep mud. Their hands were cut and scraped and coated in spruce gum. Cassie’s legs were numb with walking, the soles of her shoes caked with blood. It was nothing like she expected and everything she wanted it to be all the same. “Do you see what I mean?” she asked.
Peyton raised his shoulders. “I guess so,” he said.
She said, “I wanted whatever he wanted is the thing.”
Peyton only nodded.
It was dark by the time they reached Portugal Cove and her father approached the first tilt they came across to inquire after lodgings and food. The building consisted of a single room only and through the door they could see the light of a small fire laid against the evening chill. They were ushered in and introduced — Cassie as Charles. “A pretty young lad,” the man who had come to the door said. His name was O’Brien, an old Irishman whose high forehead and remarkable jowls seemed too large for the rest of his face, for his body. His wife, Margaret, was the only other occupant of the hovel, a small spry woman who they would learn later was nearly blind. She walked about the room with the confidence of a cat.
Margaret warmed a pot of seal meat in a stew of potatoes and turnip for their supper while they went outside to wash their feet in a brook running a few yards from the tilt. Her father lifted Cassie’s feet into his lap and dried them with his shirt-tail, then applied a little of the pork fat to the bald patches of blister.
Cassie had never tasted seal meat — her mother refused to buy or eat it where salt pork was available — and she was of two minds about the dark, oily flavour. But she was so hungry from the travel that she ate her bowlful and accepted an offer of seconds, using her index finger to clean every bit of gravy from the earthenware. Her father was telling their hosts a fictional story about his son’s appetite, how insatiable it was, when she fell asleep against his arm. She woke up the next morning on a layer of spruce branches spread over the dirt floor near the fireplace. Her father’s coat laid over her as a blanket.
Cassie turned her head towards Peyton. Her face was sickly pale, which made her eyes seem black and spent, like bits of char left behind by a fire. Peyton said, “Perhaps you would like a drop of rum.”
She looked around the room suddenly and he realized she was thinking of John Senior. She ’d never touched a drop in his father’s presence that he could recall. The old man had gone down to the stage house to work on the nets or simply whittle wood as soon as she opened the letter and the news came out. He placed a rough hand to Cassie’s shoulder for a moment — his only comment on the matter — then stepped out the door without a word. Peyton tried to imagine Cassie telling this story to his father and couldn’t. The talking, at least, had always been left to them.
Down on the stagehead John Senior was staring out over the sea. No wind to speak of, but there was a heavy send in the water of the cove. The smooth slate-grey surface looked like a stone courtyard riding a swell of tectonic motion.
He had come down to meet the sloop when John Peyton hauled in from Fogo with a load of spring supplies. “There’s a letter,” Peyton said to him, jumping from the gunnel after they had collared the Susan to the stage. “From St. John’s.”
They’d walked up to the house then, the bearers of bad news, neither of them doubted that. After she opened the letter John Senior put his hand to Cassie ’s shoulder and thought he might say something, a word for comfort. But nothing he could think of seemed the leastways appropriate, given the circumstances under which he first encountered Cassie and her father.