For his part, Anson cared only about the girl’s condition. Though almost in shock himself at the terrifying image of the mother’s grief, he settled into a bedside chair and prepared for a night-long vigil. Even if he could do nothing to prevent a sudden death, or even if the crisis was yet weeks away, he realized that a doctor’s presence, at least, might comfort the patient’s family. And then, oddly, he felt that the mother’s grief was itself a threat, as if her initial black descent upon the child would, if given another opportunity, usher in the permanent darkness.
The night passed slowly. At times, Anson thought he heard a weeping in the air but suspected his imagination had been stirred by the proximity of death. Toward daybreak, with the girl’s fever unchanged, he stood and went to the open window. The sky was a blood-tinged gauze to the north, but the river and near distance were still a rich, impenetrable black. As far as he was concerned, it couldn’t lift fast enough. Night seemed a smothering contagion, a poxed blanket, not a sanctuary of calm. It was always so when a child lay sick. Somehow daylight was the earth’s equivalent of bracing health, perhaps because the sun draws children out as a field of flowers draws honeybees. For the old, of course, the night becomes almost a welcoming portal to whatever lies beyond the grave.
Shortly after the tin press began its usual thunking of the silence several rods downriver at the cannery, the girl’s mother and aunt appeared. They came in as softly as gusts of black snow and settled on each side of the girl, their drawn, chalk-white faces like twin moons. Anson knew his presence was superfluous. But before he retired to his own room for perhaps a few hours of broken sleep, he studied the mother’s manner.
Standing at her daughter’s bedside, bent over at the waist, she was certainly changed from the terrible, almost inhuman creature of earlier: her dark eyes had resumed their focus on the surroundings, her hair, in two tight braids, reflected the general control that had come into her body, and she looked, more or less, like any woman in the throes of concern for a child. Even the way she rubbed her hands together in her lap, one palm circling the knuckles of the other hand, was familiar to Anson, almost like an action taken from a primer on maternal behaviour.
And yet he could not forget the face as it had been revealed in the parlour. A slight trace, evident in the quivering of the nostrils, which looked unusually pallid in the dimness, suggested an almost failing balance on the side of sanity. And so, before retiring, Anson took Mary Lansdowne aside and pressed on her the importance of not leaving the mother alone with the patient.
“In my experience,” he said, “shock combined with solitude is a highly dangerous mixture.”
The woman nodded dumbly, but Anson felt he could depend on her.
Moments later, he lay on his bed and tried to find the memory of sleep among all the other memories that flitted through his consciousness, memories of dying men far from their mothers’ or wives’ attendance or even the comfort of familiar smells and sounds, memories of his own frail mother on her deathbed thirty years before, followed by the more painful memories of his beloved Elizabeth on hers.
What woke him, he did not know. But something drew him to the window and made him witness to a strange scene. On the wharf, in full morning light, the Lansdowne brothers stood profiled, face to face. Henry Lansdowne suddenly waved one arm dismissively, in a pushing away gesture that caused Thomas to lift his arm as if to fend off a blow. The older man, with surprising speed, turned and pointed at the house. Anson flinched. It seemed he was seeing something that should not have been conducted anywhere but behind closed doors. The fire of Henry Lansdowne’s distorted visage, however, might have burned away all privacy. Thomas Lansdowne appeared to step back from it, scorched.
Then he shook his head roughly and, at last, sagged in all his joints. With desperation he reached out and grabbed his brother on both shoulders. But Henry swept his arms away. He seemed to loom even larger above Thomas before finally striding off in the direction of the cannery.
For a few seconds, Thomas did not move. Anson realized what news the man had just received, and he pitied him. If he had been away from home for some inessential reason, he was still not to blame: illness can come on very suddenly, and he was obviously the sort of father who would rather die than be absent when his child was in danger. But the tension had been building around the Lansdownes ever since Anson’s arrival. Perhaps the child’s condition had brought matters to a climax. Something final certainly seemed to attend the motionless figure on the wharf.
Then, as if shot, Thomas Lansdowne dropped to his knees. He flung his head back, his posture like that of a wolf about to howl.
Anson couldn’t stop himself. He opened the window, as though to admit the man’s pain, but only the dull, relentless pulse of the tin press disturbed the silence.
At last, Thomas Lansdowne got to his feet and, like a blinded bull, lumbered down the gangway and into the yard. In a moment, Anson knew, he’d be wild at the girl’s bedside, feverish with questions.
Turning exhausted from the window, Anson braced himself for the charge.
PART THREE
I
All day he had felt the salmon coming, sure as nightfall. He stood, his long legs braced, in a flat-bottomed skiff in the middle of the broad, silty river and gazed toward the ocean. Out there, by the millions, the salmon waited, hanging like ripe fruit in the salt depths, ready to make their last fierce rush to the spawning grounds far inland. The brinish air trembled with the weight of the fish’s will, the sun burned yellow-white as it crept between the horizons, and Dare often had to raise one of his muscle-knotted forearms to his eyes to wipe away the sweat. All around him the delta of sloughs, sandbars, and marshes held its breath; the tall reeds and grasses close to where the river met the ocean shivered slightly, like the fine filaments beneath the gills of the salmon, and, behind him, along both banks, the serried rows of great firs and cedars silently pulled in their shadows as if they did not want to contribute their black nets to the harvest that would soon follow.
Dare knew he had done all he could. He had gone to Victoria and secured another crew of Chinese. He had readied the cannery for the great run of salmon that would soon begin. But the forces against him were strong, and he knew that his time in this place was ending. Even knowing that the doctor had come was just a beginning in the next part of his own journey, just as Orlett’s death had been an ending and a beginning as well. As everything was an ending and a beginning.
Dare looked at his forearms, already browned from the sun, and wondered at the blood flowing in the veins. That wonder had mostly gone, driven under by labour, by the ceaseless chase for fortune. But it could still surface, like whaleback on a calm sea, to shatter whatever peace his mind and spirit had found. Orlett’s desperate lie—“You’re white, boy, you’re not a nigger”—and the relentless pounding of the hooves of the mulatto’s horse mostly resided under his blood, but the world would not be still, it would not let the lie and the hoof beats fall completely silent. Dare had to take care of that himself.
The sun bloodied and the dusk fell and the first wave of fish struck the corklines of the linen nets spread across the rivermouth. The tide was approaching slack. Dare slipped the oars and let the skiff settle. He glanced at his shotgun resting in the thwarts and then stared downriver for the Englishman. They were still some distance apart, more than a hundred fathoms, but Dare knew Thomas Lansdowne by his barrel shape and slouch hat. It had become a familiar sight over the years, the Englishman, with his shotgun at his chest, glaring across the sun-dazzle of water.