Behind the main cannery building, the Chinese had stopped punching out cans. The absence of the thunking sound on the air was somehow unsettling, as if the heartbeat of the entire coast had stilled suddenly, replaced with the erratic, wandering pulse of the dogs’ hunger.
There were darker changes too. Without telling anyone, the Chinese coffined one of their own and placed the plain box high in a fir tree, as apparently was their habit. Gold Mountain, the China Boss said when pressed for an explanation, gone to Gold Mountain. Fair enough, Anson thought, they could call heaven whatever they wanted, but he needed to know the cause of death because there was always a danger of epidemic. If the Chinaman had perished of typhoid, for example, the situation was suddenly more grave. Typhoid was highly contagious, but as long as he restricted Louisa’s visitors to those relatives who had already been exposed to the disease, Anson felt confident he could keep it from spreading. But after considerable awkward entreaties had led the Chinese to lower the box and open it, Anson discovered that the man, so emaciated as to be only transparent skin over bone, had likely died of nutritional lack, probably of scurvy. He ordered the Lansdownes to make sure some vegetables were added to the meagre rice meals at the China House, but Thomas, at least, was unmoved by the death.
“I’ll have to get another Chinaman,” he muttered and lowered his shoulder into the heated air as if trying to break through an invisible door.
With the excitement of the big run playing on everyone’s nerves, drink suddenly became a problem. Where the alcohol came from was never clear to Anson, but the effect was obvious enough, as several of the male Indians spent their non-fishing hours with the bottle, which led to games of chance that sometimes ended in violence. On two occasions, Anson had been called from Louisa’s bedside to stitch wounds, one from a broken bottle, another from a knife.
The comings and goings at the settlement began to blur; everything became caught up in the tidal flow. The self-righteous Southerner, Richardson, took the steamer to Victoria, though not before vowing mysteriously that he’d return soon “to help ease the family’s sorrows.” The fiscal agent had crawled onto the scene like a colourful rat, and Anson had done his best to avoid him, which wasn’t difficult, since, upon hearing of the child’s illness, the agent immediately hired some Indians to row him to New Westminster.
Much more dramatic than these various events, however, was the sudden arrival of the big salmon run. The fish had struck the rivermouth in numbers greater than anyone had known. Instantly the cannery’s belts and wheels and gears smoked and whirred as the now-sober fishermen returned with their skiffs heaped to the gunwales with rippling silver. The sun bloodied. The air filled with the stench of dead fish and guts as the cannery spewed offal into the river. Great swirling clouds of gulls shrieked constantly. It was an assault like nothing he’d ever seen, and Anson was sorry he could not spend more time watching the deft skills of the Chinese and Indians who slit and gutted the fish and fitted the deep-red sections into cans.
But then, even the excitement of the salmon run and the slow, tortuous drama of the child hovering between life and death became secondary to the news of Dare’s return.
One morning, as Anson checked Louisa’s pulse for the thousandth time, trying again to decipher her mumbled, semi-conscious words, Henry Lansdowne appeared in the doorway.
“A letter’s come for you,” he said.
It wasn’t exactly a letter, just a few hastily penned sentences on the back of an invoice for pig tin. But Anson knew the hand well enough, and the directness of the tone.
Back at the Slough. Come as soon as able. The difficulties I mentioned are unchanged and I have need of your counsel.
At last! After all the days of tense waiting—during which the Lansdownes certainly seemed to think that their fierce competitor had not gone away at all—Anson found the note an immense relief. But it left him in the same quandary. He looked at the girl, then back at the note. In the fetid gloom of the house, he wondered if Louisa could be left in her family’s care for a short while.
The girl stirred. Her teeth chattered rapidly, as if trying to keep pace with her pulse. She moaned and put a hand to her head. Anson knew she was suffering much pain there as well as throughout her limbs. Typhoid cases generally passed through three distinct phases, of which this was still the first. But with the violent chills generally came the fingertip-sized red spots on the chest and abdomen.
Anson gently lowered the top of the girl’s shift. No spots yet, but he suspected they would appear soon. In the meantime, there was little to do but to keep the linens clean and the air circulating through the room and to hope. Doses of quinine, broths for combating the fever, a light diet easy on the bowels and stomach (chicken broth, mostly): he went through all the required treatments but knew that, when the crisis came, it would be the child’s own will that determined the result. Anson could hardly believe, despite the slackness of the girl’s mouth and her pewter-dull eyes, that she might choose death over life. But his belief in a patient’s will to live had been severely tested before and had failed. So he tried not to make any predictions, even to himself.
He left the sick room, determined to head for Crescent Slough right away, determined to feel no guilt for leaving the child in the loving care of her relatives. After all, he had another loyalty to attend to, older and more powerful. And he knew he could trust the mother and aunt to follow his instructions for the child’s care in his absence.
Stepping into the light almost hurt; the clarity was such that he had to hold his hand over his eyes for a moment as he walked along the riverbank, idly following the sounds of work: the whining of conveyor belts and the clunking of cans from inside the cannery, and the sporadic shouted orders of men on the wharves outside.
As always, Anson found the slaughter both repellent and oddly attractive. There were so many salmon that whole fish were routinely thrown dead into the water if they’d been left in the sun too long. Of those that were processed, often only the midsections were used to fill the cans; the rest of the fish was simply dropped on the cannery floor to join the great red pulpy mess through which the smock-clad Native women and Chinese men trod heavily from task to task. It was little wonder to Anson that the settlement had known many outbreaks of typhoid fever; with so much fouling of the drinking water, along with the infectious rottening of the air, how could it be otherwise? According to Mary Lansdowne, there had been ten cases the summer before, with four fatalities, including Thomas and Edney’s eldest child. With so many guts sloshing back and forth on the tide, the atmosphere was decidedly poisonous. If he had not been so harried by recent events, Anson would have stressed more emphatically to the Lansdownes the need for improved sanitary conditions. But the English brothers themselves were too preoccupied to pay much heed to his advice on those occasions when he tried to raise the subject.
As he reached the wharf, Anson saw a thin, bare-chested young man standing in the middle of a scow loaded with still, apparently dead salmon. The stench of blood and slime was heavy and overwhelmed the usual muddy musk of the river. The man held a long wooden stick in his hand. At the end of the stick was a large curved hook. With much difficulty, the man was trying to hook the fish and flip them onto the wharf where the figure of Thomas Lansdowne, hands on hips, glowered down at him.