In the afternoon O’Brien took them out in a small skiff to hook lobsters for their supper. The water was dead calm and they drifted about the shallows near shore. O’Brien had a wooden staff fourteen feet in length that was tipped with a thin metal hook. He knelt in the bow, bracing his knees against the sides of the boat while Cassie lay across the gunnel to watch him at work. The water was so clear she could see the stones and dark fingers of seaweed on the mottled ocean floor. O’Brien held the staff near the bottom as they drifted, the shaft refracting under the water’s skin like a bone broken and bent at an impossible angle. His arms dipped suddenly, gently, and he brought the staff up hand over hand then to lift a lobster from the sea, the prehensile tail curled into a ring to grip the hook. He shook the lobster into a wooden tub half-filled with water.
Cassie stared at her supper a while, at the eyes so densely black they seemed sightless, the long feelers waving like insect antennae. “Why did she come up like that now,” she said, “with her tail wrapped on the hook?”
“You just have to slide the tip underneath, Charlie,” O’Brien explained. “A little tickle and they ball up to protect themselves. The poor buggers can’t help it, you see. It’s in their nature.”
The lobster’s thick half-moon claws opened and closed, opened and closed. What she now remembered, she told Peyton, was the unexpected pinch of sympathy she felt for it. The sudden urge she had to shove a finger into its desperate, blind grasping.
Peyton thought she had come to the end of the telling there, though he could feel the story pointing towards some unspoken third thing. The heaviness of it weighed on him, like the loneliness he’d always sensed in her that she refused to surrender to scrutiny. He felt no less lost in her company for knowing so much about her. When she hadn’t spoken for what he thought was a long time, he said, “Is that it, Cassie?”
She looked up from the letter in her lap. She was crying and there was a sad, serious smile on her face. She said, “That is never it, John Peyton.”
THREE
At the end of that summer’s work, John Peyton and his men loaded the Susan with three hundred tierces of dried salted salmon and were waiting for a fair wind to make way for the market in St. John’s. It was colder than normal for the time of year and there was no sign of a favourable change in conditions. Peyton sent Reilly and Taylor up to the hired men’s outbuilding to join Richmond and young Michael Sharpe who’d already gone to get some sleep. John Senior was aboard, dozing under a thin blanket in the weather house. Peyton stood beside him in the dark, trying to guess from his breathing if the old man was awake.
“Father,” he said in a whisper.
“I’m all right.”
“You’ll catch your death of cold down here.” He leaned down and pulled the blanket away from the bunk.
“Jesus, John Peyton.”
“Go on up to the house.”
The old man muttered as he sat up and began pawing in the dark for his hat, his gloves. “Where is that now?” he said to himself.
“What is it?”
“My watch is here somewhere.”
“Leave it now, we’ll be back down in a few hours’ time and on our way. Go get some sleep.”
All evening it had been pitch dark under cloud but a nearly full moon was beginning to come clear as the cover dispersed. The light was pale, phosphorescent, it seemed to emanate from the ground itself, from the walls of the summer house. Peyton watched John Senior make his way up from the dock. He was seventy years old and Peyton could see the discomfort of that age in his walk though he still handled the work of men half his age, hauling nets or cleaning fish or cutting a cord of birch billets. There was something almost unnatural about the man’s capacities and it invested him with a peculiar authority that Peyton resented.
“Keep an eye,” John Senior said over his shoulder.
“Don’t mind me.”
Peyton spent the next hour wandering the stretch of ground above the beach, walking out the dock and back, the clump of his boots on the dry lengths of spruce like waves flobbing the hull of a boat. A thin line of moonlight laddered across the harbour towards open sea. The horseshoe of forested hills behind the house and outbuildings was a black wedge shimmed into the speckled dark of the night sky. On the summit of the highest ridge there was a single tree that stood head and shoulders above those around it, as if it had been ordained to afford an unobstructed view into the cove. Peyton shivered as he looked up at it. There were still moments when something in the country moved through him this way, a wind in the woods approximating the sound of footfall behind him, a cold current of watchfulness on the shoreline when he sculled by to check the family’s weirs. He promised himself he would climb up there this fall and cut the bastard tree down. He checked his pocket watch. It was nearing one in the morning and he took a final look around. The Susan nodded lazily at her moorings. There was no sound but the contrary wind and the motion of the sea, inhale, exhale, against the beach.
He made his way up the path to the house, turned at the door to overlook the dock and the boat again, and went inside to the warmth of the kitchen. John Senior was on the daybed with his face to the wall. Cassie was asleep in a chair beside him, her head slumped forward so that her chin rested on her shoulder. They looked like an old married couple.