In the morning he woke to several inches of fresh snow on the floor under the broken roof. A blue jay called from the woods outside. It was a fierce, lonely sound to Peyton’s ears, as if the bird was warning comfort away from itself.
He looked around the dilapidated shelter. The glass was gone from all four panes of the single window. He stared at the corner of the room where he once sat beside Cassie, her face ashen, one eye dark with blood. The pregnancy aborted to preserve the rules of her clandestine relationship with John Senior, to spare him siring a moss child, a merry-begot, a moonlight child. A bastard. “You’ll not say a word of this to your father,” she’d said. She was afraid of losing her position, he thought, of being sent away like the fallen servants in her books.
In all the years since her visit to Annie Boss, Cassie had never spoken of it to him. If anything, she became more insular, settling further into what he thought of as an iron-willed surrender, an obstinate, opinionated state of abdication. She had her books, the daily litany of chores to complete. She had John Senior’s bullish silence, his habit of indifference, which she preferred to anything Peyton might have been able to offer.
When Peyton was a boy of six or seven, John Senior abandoned his marriage bed and began sleeping with his son when he wintered in Poole. His mother saw Newfoundland as a vortex into which some additional portion of her husband disappeared each year. The months he was away were a relief to them both, a time when the emotional and physical facts of their lives achieved a kind of equilibrium. The relationship between his father and Cassie was something else again, but it had the same peculiar, monastic balance. He couldn’t imagine them as lovers now and he doubted there was ever much of a physical relationship between them. What Cassie chose was the old man’s distance, Peyton thought. She wanted to marry it to her own detachment from the world.
Out of loyalty to her he had kept his mouth shut about the pregnancy and he spoke to Reilly to make sure the story didn’t spread beyond their circle. But it galled him. He had no notion of what he wouldn’t do for her if she asked. He felt owned in sections, as if parcels of himself were under Cassie’s name, others under John Senior’s. And the prickle at the back of his neck that dogged him yesterday was like the itch of a brand healing. As if the place itself was laying claim to its piece of him.
He looked around the room before getting up from his blankets. A sparse row of Annie’s dried flowers and herbs still hung upside down over the hearth. They were grey with age and moved in each draught of wind like silent chimes.
The light fall of snow had blown in his tracks, the marks of his Indian rackets barely discernible where he’d passed through hours before. It looked like he had come this way years ago, almost in another life altogether. The wind soughed in the trees. Reilly’s tilt was the end of the line and he had no choice but to go back the way he’d come, tempting the panic he’d kept down all the day before.
He stopped on a small vale over the last set he’d made and looked down. The oval dimples of his rackets under fresh snow like a delicate pattern of lace on a tablecloth. And something else. A line of small regular depressions, nearly buried. Tracks. He breathed a short, tight sigh of relief.
Every one of his sets had been visited by the same animal and it looked as if it had turned and backtracked down the line as Peyton was now doing. Two hours shy of his halfway tilt he found a beaver in one of his dry sets turned on its back. The soft underbelly was eaten into, the cod, the liver and gizzard and a large chunk of the intestine picked out like delicacies. The fall of snow made it impossible to identify the tracks but he guessed it was fox. A cat wouldn’t have trailed him so brazenly. The animal was obviously used to the presence of men like himself and probably familiar with traps. He left the carcass as it was and went on his way. The snow was still coming down softly and it covered his head and shoulders in a thick spotless pelt of white.