Anson stood in the midst of the chaotic order and looked desperately around. The pounding of the gears, shafts, and pistons reverberated up from the floor straight into his skull. Slowly his stinging eyes came to rest on the open wall of the building fronting the river. A tiny stitching of stars shone just below the roof beams. He started toward the light, vaguely thinking that he could regain his bearings outside and make a rational decision. But before he could escape the damp, blood-soaked interior, Anson glimpsed a dark figure slipping to the right of his vision. This time, however, the word did not come. Perhaps, he thought with horror, there was no longer any need for it. Though he had heard no shot, he knew that Henry Lansdowne was capable of a more intimate revenge. Anson began to move, the blue-smocked Chinese sliding away to either side of him as if they’d been stabbed by the grim labours of the Indian women invisible in the dirty steam. Now the word was on Anson’s lips, but he could not utter it. The letters were weighted down with blood. Anson waded through fathoms of stench with dead fish swimming around his legs, their entrails clutching like seaweed, threatening to pull him under.
The night air helped. Outside again, the name became a whisper he could hear a long way down, where he had helped to join it to flesh in the vague years already spent. He listened to himself as if the past were a compass. Then he knew where Dare would be. The knowledge came to him in a burst of clarity, the whole night’s hood thrown back off the shoulders of an indifferent, because non-existent, god. Dare would be where he had always been, where he had died even as he started to run, where Anson himself had died, where the salmon wanted to die even beyond the meaningless physical phase of their brief lives.
Anson hoped only that Henry Lansdowne would continue to search in the wrong place. If Dare could be warned, even moments ahead, he could yet prolong his dead run, as the salmon did, out of the inexorable hope of purpose inherent in generation, to pass on, if nothing else, the thrill of surviving until the blank eyes were torn by an equal hunger from the skull.
Away from the cannery, the darkness thickened as the air ran fresher. Time grew young. Despite the unceasing cramp in his side, Anson hurried along the dike and then down toward Dare’s house, which sat on the depressed earth like a doused coal. No one stirred as Anson passed. The night was suddenly fragile. Anson held the shotgun before him, pushing the seconds away like cobwebs.
The shot rang out just as the campfire winked its red at his approach. Anson covered the dark ground as fast as he could, keeping the trickle of white smoke straight before him. The gun seemed to come alive as he ran. He grasped the stock; it was slick as horse flesh.
A man stood beside the open tent, his arm lengthened by the weapon he held at his side. Feet away lay a body crumpled at odd angles: it looked like two halves of a body struggling to reconnect itself.
Anson came close, stared into the face of the standing man, who spoke with neither sadness nor disappointment.
“It isn’t him. I thought it was but it isn’t.” Henry Lansdowne was calm as only a man can be who has released his violence at last. “I should have known he’d be gone. But I thought more of him than that. I thought he’d face up to it.”
Anson bent to the now-still body, saw that it was the elderly Chinese, saw the hole in his abdomen and the long knife fallen from his hand onto the grass. And all that Anson could think was: that should have been my price, for my loyalty was older. As the last life of the Chinese drained into the ground, Anson’s scalp prickled. Slowly he looked around.
“John?”
Lansdowne tensed and brought his gun up. The campfire hissed, a fish spine of smoke stood against the dark. A throbbing of flies dripped out of the air and onto the corpse.
There was no answer except an old and ravaged echo of the voice of a trembling, runaway slave: “He did not deserve to live. He was evil.” And inside the echo, “A man can doubt everything. Even a good man.”
Anson peered into the darkness beyond where the flies were feeding. He could see no purpose there, hard as he looked. And the stars themselves were faint, sucked clean of light by the same murmurous flies near the grass.
“If he’s here, I’ll kill him.” Henry Lansdowne’s face shone pale in the starlight.
Suddenly Anson saw a trail, clear and direct and mysterious as the salmon’s trail from sea to river. It was lit with bloodshine and Dare walked it, and would keep walking it until his breath came no more and perhaps beyond that. It didn’t matter how it was walked, in what name—justice, truth, faith—Dare would walk and his feet would be covered in blood, his or others’, and that hardly mattered either.
Anson, however, still had a useful service to perform.
“Your brother’s recovering,” he said and rose. “But I must return to your niece. We’ll have to tend to this later.”
Henry Lansdowne nodded. Together they turned from the corpse of the old Chinese and walked with intent toward the river. They had not gone twenty paces before Lansdowne stopped and whirled around, his gun aimed in the direction of the black woodlot.
“Dare!” he shouted. “Come out and show yourself!”
There was no response.
Anson strained to make out the thousand tense faces between the trees, his body went rigid waiting for the burst of noise and motion.
Lansdowne lowered his gun very slowly. “I do not doubt,” he said in a level voice, “that he would shoot me in the back. Or…”
His jaw dropped and his eyes widened. He whirled around to the west and stared downriver.
Anson understood what the “Or” implied, but he could no longer be sure if the implication was unfounded. Henry Lansdowne had killed Dare’s Chinese, a man who’d clearly been in Dare’s employ long enough for a certain loyalty to accrue. And yet, to mete out vengeance on a slave owner who’d destroyed all you’d ever known of family, to so lose yourself in that act of vengeance to be reduced to savagery, was a particular brand of justice. Anson knew that Dare was not that same man—twenty years would cool any blood, white or black, but he couldn’t be sure how Dare would respond to the murder of the Chinese.
Henry Lansdowne obviously had no such doubt. He began to run toward the river.
Anson hesitated.
“John?” he said, facing the woodlot. “Are you there?”
He hoped for a response without really expecting one. The air bristled. Seconds passed. When Anson finally turned away, he saw that the darkness had already swallowed Lansdowne’s figure. There would be no catching him.
The smoke of the campfire had vanished. Near the ashes, a body lay under the faint stars, on the cool grass, with the dead salmon’s open-eyed vision on its face. It was there because of Dare, regardless of right and wrong, good and evil. It had been there since Antietam and it was never going to be buried. All the bones in Anson’s body felt the ache of the knowledge—it was like a dull saw blade scraping the memory off his skeleton.
Clutching his side as he ran, he hoped he could find an Indian to row him downriver again.
At first the red glow in the distance looked like nothing more than a soldier’s campfire on a hillside, a flicker of light in the surrounding dark. But as the skiff drifted in to the Chilukthan wharf, the glow became a fierce ball of crackling flame. Then Anson heard the frantic shouts of men. But it wasn’t until the skiff had landed and he was rushing along the dike that he connected Henry Lansdowne’s open-jawed panic with the fire. To connect the two, however, was not the same as accepting the cause and effect. Anson had seen the cannery in full operation, had seen the careless work in the boiler room where the hot ashes were not hosed down as regularly as they should have been. Even so, he was not a fool, not quite; he recognized that the timing was a damnation not even a friend of Dare could dismiss lightly.