River Thieves by Michael Crummey

Author:Michael Crummey [Crummey, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780307374882
Google: FkAeakxJ1hQC
Amazon: B00329UW2C
Barnesnoble: B00329UW2C
Goodreads: 13532505
Publisher: Anchor Canada
Published: 2001-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

He decided to walk the extra two or three miles to Reilly’s tilt on the River Exploits instead of kipping down in the lean-to at the end of the trapline. The sky was still grey with the day’s last reflected light when he reached it, but along the river it was dark, the forest unremittingly black and without definition. The tilt had been abandoned by Reilly years before when the rapidly expanding size of his family made the trip from Charles Brook unwieldy and he decided to run traps nearer to home. A gloom of light filtered through the broken roof, through the door hanging on by a single hinge. Peyton felt his way to the fireplace where a pile of rotten wood was stacked on the stone. He set about making a fire and once it was well alight he stopped a minute to listen as the dark gathered outside, trees swaying in the wind. Whatever had been with him most of the day, he decided, he had left behind.

It was a long, restless night. His body felt swollen and dull with fatigue, but he slept only in troubled snatches, the tiredness on him like a weight of water. The spruce logs of the tilt ticked steadily in the wind — the death clock, his father called it, a foreboding of someone’s dying. Several times he got up from his blanket to stoke the fire or to piss through the door into the snow and afterwards could not be sure whether he had actually done these things or simply dreamt them. He’d heard stories of men losing their minds in the backcountry. At some point through the night it occurred to him he might be suffering the first signs of that affliction.

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.

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