Anson proceeded slowly up the gangway, his eyes trained on Dare’s plain house. There was no sign of life anywhere near it. But then, Dare himself would be either at the cannery or on the river. Anson knew his old comrade-in-arms was every bit as industrious as the Englishman, and Thomas Lansdowne certainly would not have stepped foot inside any house during the past week had his daughter not lain delirious and fevered in her sickbed.
The smoke, therefore, brought Anson up short. It trickled thinly up from behind the house, its white almost transparent against the pale blue of the sky. Anson felt tethered by it, but he resisted the pull. Suddenly he realized that his eagerness to see Dare had been replaced over the past few days with dread. They had not met since shortly after the war, and there was no guarantee there’d be any ease between them. But much more disquieting than that was the old spectre of deceit that always seemed to accompany their relationship. Anson had lied to Thomas Lansdowne about Dare’s blood, he had shaken hands to “prove” that his old friend was white, just as he had once forged papers to prove that a runaway slave named John was a dead and forgotten farm boy and soldier in the Union Army. That had been a simple enough deception: the dead farm boy remained dead to everyone who’d ever known him, and Anson had made certain, initially, that Dare remained out of sight in a tent with some rebel wounded. Later, as it turned out, the deception proved even simpler: the dead soldier had been a recent arrival and had kept to himself. No one seemed to notice his resurrection in the form of a tall white soldier who was, in fact, the mulatto killer of his master.
Anson drew a deep breath of the mud-heavy air. Could it be that, at the bottom of that white finger of smoke, or even nearby in the cannery or on the river, breathed another man for whom the past was such a potent mixture of pride and horror? Somehow it was easier to believe that Dare was dead, that he’d gone into the grave at Antietam with the poor white farm boy at last. Of course, Anson knew he hadn’t, knew he had continued to reinvent himself, always keeping ahead of the deception until the deception itself inevitably increased the pace and caught him from behind, caught them both from behind.
But even as he walked across the yard toward the smoke, Anson knew he was lying to himself, something he had resisted doing for almost all his adult life. It wasn’t punishment or capture that worried him now: what could the world do to him that would change what he’d done in another life and been proud of doing? It was a nagging sense that perhaps, just perhaps, he’d been wrong in his pride. He had sheltered a slave, turned a black man into a white man as if he’d possessed a god’s power. But the Lansdownes’ hatred of Dare had eaten away at Anson’s confidence to the point where he had to concede that his friend, white or black, might have changed for the worse. It was at least possible. And Anson had just lied for him again on no greater basis than an old system of belief.
He stepped around the corner of the house and approached the canvas tent. It was even more familiar than before, its sag like an admission of the weight of the years. Anson walked to the fire. The coals were still red, still giving off heat. He looked around and let his eyes rest on the stand of cottonwoods just beyond the tent. The trees stood dark in the clear light. They seemed to breathe, to form something animal. Anson watched them and did not realize with how much anticipation until he heard his own short breaths.
“Hello? Is anyone here?”
Only silence returned his call. He fought off the feeling that the woods, the tent, and the absent man were part of the same unease. But the longer he stood by the fire, breathing the wood smoke, the more the feeling came back to him, intensified. So he walked to the house and knocked loudly on the front door. It opened on contact. Anson called out a greeting, then stepped in.
The air reeked of fish and sweat. He opened a door off the entrance and looked in on emptiness: no furnishings at all, just bare planks. Puzzled, he moved along the hall and tried another door. This time, he came upon a large room that looked like an Indian village of the sort he’d observed at spots along the Washington coast—clothes, hides, furs, cooking utensils, and a powerful odour, that curious mix of the human and wild that defined the riverbanks at Chilukthan and was captured here in an enclosed space. Some pieces of fishnet were stretched across the floor, no doubt for the purposes of mending. So Dare had given his house up to the workers for the duration of the season. That did not seem out of character for the man Anson remembered. Besides, Dare had never seemed like a man who’d prefer a parlour to an open field.
Outside again, Anson drew the obvious conclusion: if Dare had just left the fire, then he’d be at the cannery. He hurried toward the dike.
Now even the Indian children had vanished. He wondered if they’d really been there at all. Crescent Slough was disturbingly still. Where were the Indians? Surely not all of them went out on the boats? And the Chinese? If Dare had managed to replace his crew, they’d likely be somewhere nearby. At the very least, there should be some activity once he reached the cannery buildings.
But, at the campfire, evidence of recent activity was everywhere, from the smell of grease and oil and smoke to the slop of fish heads and guts over which buzzed clusters of flies. When Anson peered through the gaps in the wharf planks at his feet and saw a fleet figure rummaging in the muck of the low tide, he breathed a sigh of relief. It was just what the Indian children did at the Lansdownes’ cannery; they scavenged for the knives that had slipped out of the workers’ hands during the frenzy of making the pack.
He walked into the darkness of the main building. The sudden stifling of the gull cry was like the slamming of a door. The machines were silent, greasy with death.
“William! Are you here?”
He cried out in the same way that he’d throw a rope to a drowning man, only Anson could not shake off the feeling that he was the one struggling in the water.
But a living man did emerge from the bloodied shadows. It was the elderly Chinese with the smoky eye.
“Where is everyone?” Anson said.
“They sleep. Others fish. Much, much work to do.”
“Your boss? Is he sleeping too?”
The Chinese grinned so broadly that Anson could count his three gold-capped teeth.
“He never sleep. He not need it. Maybe he get all his sleep in winter.”
“Well, where is he then?”
“On the river. He just left. More trouble maybe.”
“Trouble? What sort of trouble?”
The grin disappeared. The Chinese scratched his chin with a long fingernail. “Very bad this year. Others try to fish our drifts. He take his gun.”
Instinctively, Anson turned toward the river. But all he could see through the open side of the cannery was a rectangle of blue sky.
“Which others?”
The Chinese shrugged. His good eye flickered. “All of them maybe.”
All of them? Anson struggled to shut out the image of dozens of armed white men surrounding Dare.
“When do you expect him back?”
The Chinese turned his palms up. They were like old parchment.
“I’ll wait,” Anson said.
As if the words were a spell, the Chinese slipped away at the utterance of them.
But wait where? Anson decided that a shady spot under a tree would suffice. Perhaps he might even manage a few hours of sleep. Outside again under the gull cry, he passed a towering stack of wooden crates stamped with the label “Fraser River Salmon Dare Cannery.” An arched silver salmon circled by bold red appeared above the words. It was a comfort to Anson to see that the season was proving productive for his old friend. Surely when the fish ran in such abundance, there’d be profits enough for all the canners. So why the trouble? Anson smiled at the question, pleased that it would even occur to him after all he’d lived through. The hope in it calmed his nerves, made death retreat. Soon, he’d ask Dare the question directly, perhaps over a campfire at the edge of a brooding wood.