When Anson reached the cannery, the heat was intense even though the fire had been contained to one corner of the building. Madly, the processing continued inside. Anson watched in disbelief as the dark, hunched figures of the Indian women continued to slice away at the silver fish even as the smoke and flames crept closer. Outside, a long line of men and women—Chinese and Indian mostly, but also some whites who oversaw the cannery operations—had formed a bucket brigade down to the river. Each person stood about twenty feet from his neighbour and raced two buckets of sloshing water up the line where they were thrown on the flames by Henry Lansdowne himself. The Englishman hurled each bucketful with such ferocity that he might have been a devil driving a pitchfork into sinning flesh.
With his arm over his face, Anson ran forward.
Lansdowne did not pause. The fire glow in his beard made him look as if he’d been feeding on a piece of bloody meat. He shouted, “Get a bucket, man! Hurry!”
Anson staggered away from the heat. He found a place in the line and reached for the handles of the buckets. The Indian who handed them to him seemed to find nothing unusual in the emergency, but the man who burst out of the darkness below, his face greasy and red, was shouting as if on fire.
“Move it! Move it, there! For God’s sakes, hurry!”
It was Thomas Lansdowne. His blackened sling hung loosely from him as he ran. Anson opened his mouth to protest, but the next buckets were in his hands and the person above him was urging him on. With a heave of his sore shoulders, he set to the task.
To Anson’s amazed relief, the bucket brigade proved effective. After what seemed like hours, the fire was out, but not before the cannery crew had been forced to flee. Only the use of the steam pumps, in fact, had saved the building.
The riverbank hushed. Anson stood beside a barrow of salmon, the top layer of which was charred. Little flecks of red ash floated past him. He watched one rise until it disappeared against the stars. The night quickly recovered its rhythm. The river chewed almost docilely against the bank, an owl hooted somewhere beyond the smoking cedar of the ruined section of the cannery. Men and women trod heavily through the restored rhythm, their heads down. A few pairs of gumboots sloshed through the inches of water on the cannery floor. Buckets were strewn about like severed fish heads. A man kicked savagely at one. It was Thomas Lansdowne. His brother stood at his side, sniffing disgustedly at the smoking char. Anson did not have to approach them. In unison, they turned to him, and Henry Lansdowne said, “Now he’ll be running. At least he’d better be. And if he’s intelligent at all, he won’t stop.”
He never has stopped, Anson reflected, not since Antietam. Now Dare was gone, plunged somewhere into that darkness of the earth from which he had emerged, and would emerge again, with or without the imprimatur of goodness bestowed upon him by the diminishing belief of one for whom almost twenty years was enough of a church. But if the bricks had collapsed, the beams might yet remain; if it could be done, Anson vowed to transfer what belief he still possessed to where it might prove of greater benefit. There was no point in talking to Thomas Lansdowne about his arm; the man would not listen to him now. Without a word, Anson turned his back on the cannery and set out to resume his vigil at the child’s bedside.
As he neared the house, however, the sudden snorted breath of a horse startled him. But Anson did not see the animal; its hoof beats struck the ground almost immediately and died away in the opposite direction, to the south. When Anson reached the veranda stairs, a strange whimpering sound stopped him before he could fully absorb the idea of connecting Dare with the horse. He knelt and peered into the close, warm darkness beneath the stairs. The smell of blood and wet fur flowed up. It was the Lansdownes’ dog. She’d given birth to at least six puppies; he could hear them suckling, hear the mother licking and breathing. One of the pups was curious, already pushing its nose into the greater world. Anson reached out his hand and collected the soft creature. Then he stood and gazed in the direction the horse had gone.
A good man. What was he? Not vengeful, not remorselessly responding to misery and pain by inflicting it on others, most of whom, like most people, were innocent. The smell of charred wood on the air was suddenly the burnt evidence of an ideal Anson could no longer carry. To accept this revenge as an extension of the mutilation of the corpse almost twenty years before was to do more than allow his old friend to disappear without explanation of either the present or the past; it was to know himself, at last, for a fool, naive as those Southern planters had been in their romantic attachments to a non-existent code of chivalry. Now he had to accept what all the years of graft and scandal and retribution after Appomattox had held out to him, that the achieved glory was cold, blunt, and efficiently ruthless. Even so, it was not an occasion for tears, even if he could shed them: if he had not cried over the operating tables of the war, he would not cry over this final failed surgery of his antique values.
The wind blew over the ruined cannery and the battlefields of the slain. The pup wriggled in Anson’s hands. He gazed into the dark and let the small animal’s warmth sink into his chest.
Dare directed the horse over the marshy ground and let the briny air dissipate the smells of wood smoke and his own sweat. But if he breathed too deeply, he began to cough from very deep in his chest, so that he had to pull up on the reins and lie gasping along the horse’s neck for several seconds before he could continue on his way to Chilukthan.
He did not have a clear purpose. The Lansdownes were not the real enemy; he knew it was the Scots canners, Craig or Owen. They were certainly behind the current plotting against him; one or both of them were responsible for the shooting of Thomas Lansdowne, just as they had almost managed to block him from hiring another canning crew in Victoria. If he hadn’t been willing and able to pay twice the going wage, if he hadn’t made his own connections in the city, he’d not have been able to put up a pack at all.
But it didn’t matter now. The fact that the Lansdownes—and others—believed he was a nigger, and a violent one, only hastened the end that had to come. But the end could be different. It would have to be. Even if the words were the same. Goddamn ignorant. More of a slave than any nigger.
But a slave was not free to leave a place, and he had left many. A slave did not have property to sell, and he would sell. Or, at least, the doctor, his friend, would sell for him. And a slave did not have white friends. So Orlett was as much of a liar as ever.
Dare urged his horse along the slough bank, and thought, I will go to the house of Henry Lansdowne, I will tell him that I did not shoot his brother, that I will agree to sell at a fair price and leave the delta. Because he could not stay. There always came a point when the world required his hands on the throat of something that couldn’t be killed even if he used all his strength. That point had come again. It was no use fighting beyond it. There were always other places. But this time it had to be the last place, the piece of isolated California land he’d bought ten years before. He was dying from the poisons in his lungs. How long it would take he did not know; perhaps he had no more time than the salmon who struck into the river from the sea, perhaps more than that, but certainly not enough to waste.