The doctor turned slowly as if caught on the breeze of rotted fish guts blowing through the open window. His face was haggard but fortunately not livid. Craig believed that he had just won himself a significant gain in his battle with Owen. It hardly seemed possible.
“I must thank you,” the doctor said. “You have made matters very clear for me. If the choice is between the desperation of a good man and the snivelling, underhanded grasping of those for whom goodness doesn’t even exist, I know where I stand.”
Ah, well. Craig slid his toothpick back to the safe side of his mouth and watched the American stride out of the bar. Salmon have gone bad in their tins before. And the English market, while not exactly glutted, was tight. Besides, men who make grandiose statements about goodness usually come back to earth once their tempers cool and the realities of the world press in on them. If they don’t come back, they lose. Simple.
Craig dropped the toothpick from his tongue into his palm, then carefully pocketed it for later.
The riverbank was a gruel of rotting guts. Anson no longer took much notice of the loud smell or the mizzling layer of flies heavy on the mud as a matted scalp. He had the crushing weight of leaving upon him, which was not simply a matter of place but of time. And leaving time—or at least a particular inflection of it—was a more painful and palpable death than what the summer and the river had strewn around him.
Downriver the rebuilt cannery continued to pound, as if rendering the ghosts of all the flesh it had consumed. Anson blinked toward it, the cry of gulls washing lightly against him. He could hardly imagine that he had searched for Dare in such fierce workings, just as he could hardly recall his own right arm sawing off the limbs of a thousand soldiers. Everything he had lived, including his love for Elizabeth and his grief at her dying, shimmered with the same urgent unreality as the crimson, sunlit landscape. Yet the present was forceful enough. It still had the strength to pain him when he resumed his place there.
The other canners had frozen Dare out, even in his absence. They weren’t content just to ruin a man, they had to destroy whatever good his wealth might do for others. Well, Anson wasn’t about to let that happen. He wasn’t without means—if he couldn’t sell Dare’s property, he’d see to it somehow that Louisa would have the money for proper music instruction.
As always, the thought of the girl cheered him. She had recovered well. And it even seemed that the trial of the illness had deepened her musical talent, as if the nearness of death had imbued her with an even greater responsiveness to life. Every day she practised. And though Anson had left explicit instructions for her to rest, he knew that the parents were too busy with the new child and the cannery to pay much heed to Louisa’s care. But it didn’t much matter. The child’s health lay in her music; the more she played, the better and faster she’d recover.
He walked along the wharf slowly, to avoid bringing on another coughing spell. The mountains to the north shone luminous in the bright sun. With his eyes fixed on them, Anson could almost forget about the killing that continued on the river, continued despite the inability of the canners to process the catch. It was little wonder that Henry Lansdowne’s cattle were dying from the contaminated water. Anson suspected there’d be fresh cases of typhoid fever before the summer’s end too. The whole coast was awash in an indolent sensuality; it lay like an infected film upon the mud and the guts and the slowly blinking eyelids of the Indians who no longer even bothered to go out in the skiffs, but instead sat, hour after hour, gazing northward, no doubt thinking of more familiar, less repellent waters. Anson felt that he stood on the threshold of a brothel after a busy night’s debauch; the slack, flesh-drugged quality of the air and the overwhelming presence of something noble and precious bought cheaply sickened him and turned his thoughts also to home.
But could America be less repellent to him, now that the past, the very best of it, had sold itself just as cheaply and vanished into the common, present corruption? A weight pressed on his shoulders. Anson resisted, but the natal impulse in him—the love for the country whose ideals he still believed he would die for, even if the country had dishonoured them—was too much.
When he turned at last to the south, it was as if all the hands of the wounded men he’d tended were directing him, laid one upon the other in gory ranks from his shoulder into the still, blue air. And then only one hand was touching him. A strange music vibrated at the touch, music of no regiment or nation or acknowledged genius, the music of what it meant to accept certain truths as given and to live in their service. Anson could almost hear it; it seemed to ring out from the bright air and rise in a shimmering reflection off the summer-drugged waters.
So when Louisa herself ran up, shouting, “Dr. Baird! Dr. Baird! You have a telegram!” he wasn’t so much surprised as confirmed in his appreciation for the music that the ancient Greeks and Romans must have absorbed in order to capture it in their poetry. Even so, when Anson took the cable from the smiling child, when he saw who it was from and what it meant, his hand trembled a little.
“Louisa,” he said and knelt to look closely at her. “Will you promise me something? Will you promise to meet me backstage after your first concert in New York?”
Her laughter flowed high and rippling, as if she played it with her fingers. “Oh, Dr. Baird, you’re so funny.”
But Anson had already looked over the girl’s shoulder, upriver, toward Crescent Slough.
“Yes,” he said. “But will you promise?”
When she realized that he was serious, Louisa paused a few seconds, her brow furrowing. She was, after all, a highly intelligent child, old beyond her years. Finally, she nodded. “I promise.”
“Then let’s shake on it.” Anson extended his hand and took the girl’s warmth into his palm. But already he was making his plans for Victoria; the cable had become a knife that he could wield with his old confidence and every expectation of success.
He knew even better than his enemies did what they expected of a nigger. If a nigger somehow managed to survive a murder attempt, he’d never stop running. So Dare, when he regained consciousness, lay on his back under the bunched stars and the flitting of bats, waiting for enough strength to return to his body. At last, very slowly, he pulled himself up, pain flashing in his shoulder. It took a long while, but he managed to remove his shirt and use the arm of it to stanch his wound. All the patience and care of his youth on the battlefields returned to him. He could almost see the ghost of his young face, calm, steady, looking down at him from just above and whispering, “Go slow, easy, there’s time enough.”
He knew it was true. He knew that he would not lie to himself, not now, so close to the end that was coming. The poisons sloshed in his lungs as he forced himself up, gasping and coughing raggedly. Then he whistled. No sound came back across the churned ground, but he did not worry. He whistled again. A rippling neigh broke to the south, in the direction of the marsh. It would take a while, but he would recover the horse. And when he had done so, he would not return to Crescent Slough until enough time had passed for the other canners to believe him dead. Five days or a week should do it. Long enough for him to make his private arrangements. One thing you could count on with the canners: their loyalty was to profit first, and to each other not even second. Five days to recover with the Indians in their camp at the ocean’s edge, where Chilukthan Slough spills into the Gulf.