RIVER THIEVES
By
Michael Crummey
Houghton Mifflin Company
Paper, $24
ISBN 0-618-14531-1
Previously published in Bloomsbury Review
The
book s cover sets the tone a yellow tint, as if from age, and the shadowy image
of an old canoe hauled up on the rocky shore, together with a white settler,
looking off the page, slightly away and down.
There s something here that draws you in, a mystery weaving in and out
of River Thieves, the beautiful first novel by Michael Crummey. You probably haven t heard of him, but you
should. He labors in the obscurity of
These
rivers and their thieves of the title are similarly connected: 18th century colonists taking land
for their own; criminals saved from hanging and banished to
What Crummey does, and does well, is tell the story of the transgressions between these two cultures. But he does it indirectly, with the dramatic focus on the Peyton clan the patriarch John Senior, his son John, their housekeeper Cassie, their rough hired hands. Their lives, too, are threatened, not only by the secrets of an unkind past, but also by the stubborn and narrow-minded idealism of Buchan, a British naval officer intent on saving the Beothuks at any cost.
As the story moves forward, Crummey deftly employs the technique of a slow reveal to show, piece-by-piece, what brings the characters to their current state. Buchan clings to his vision despite, or because of, surviving naval battles in which he saw men disemboweled by round shot, arms shattered by flying debris, where the wounded were laid in a row and treated strictly in turn, regardless of rank or the severity of the injury, and where, on the gun decks, the dead and those men wounded beyond hope were pitched through the gun ports to make way for replacements.
But John Senior has no room for idealism. His reality is harsh, rarely forgiving, where the land and natives are brutal and wild, both of which must be treated in kind in order to survive. His price for accommodating reality? Each night he yells out in his sleep nightmares which, in Newfoundland English, mean he s ridden to death by an old hag.
Caught between Buchan and John Senior is the younger Peyton. He s a hopeful man, wistful, dominated by his father s large shadow, who believes fairplay will induce a return in kind.
Between them all stands Cassie, her leg crooked from an accident she can t bring herself to describe, which instills in her a fierce, if self-destructive, independence. It is Cassie on whom the moral pendulum swings, both apparent and real. In such a world, a firm hold on reality or an unlikely ideal may be all that s left, and any moral ambiguity between the two can be fatal.
Take, for instance, Buchan s forced march of his men up the frozen River Exploits in the bitter depth of winter to find the Beothuk, give them gifts, and befriend them. In his folly, he doesn t know the story of a Mi kmaq who found a small family of Red Indians starving in their mamateek, hunched over a little fire, roasting a pitiful meal of three jays on a stick; nor the Mi maq s vain attempt to give them his gun, which they would not touch. As Cassie says: They just seem lost. As if they don t recognize the country they live in any more.
When Buchan s men approach the Beothuk s winter camp, Buchan insists they enter with no weapons, arguing that, We have little hope of inspiring them to trust us with rifles in our hands. That may be so, one man replies, But we ll be a damn sight nearer to trusting them. It s this conflict, and its disastrous consequences, which sustains the novel. As Buchan at one point attempts to placate John Senior by acknowledging how colonists protected themselves and their property against the Indians, John Senior tartly replies: You didn t have to bury what they d left of Harry Miller belly down in the woods. Waited for him in the bush behind his tilt and pierced him in the back like a crowd of cowards. And then run off with his head.
What John Senior doesn t disclose is what Harry Miller previously did, what gives rise to John Senior s ride with the hag at night. But Crummey presents a balanced view of brutality by all sides: the hired man ambushing an Indian family to capture a little girl, taking her to St. John s to parade her around for money; the Mi kmaq killing Beothuk for a French bounty; the British Navy burning the buildings of their own settlers to drive them out for a treaty with the French. This is a time, after all, when the sick and lame believed a cure came from touching the neck of a hanged man; when a woman who could not conceive touched a hanged man s hand to her belly so she might give birth to a child.
In a world of black and white, John Junior struggles to find what s right in the color of gray, a tragedy as old as Homer who first described the faint time between light and dark, when the two could not be distinguished from one another. In the end there s only us and distance, the recognition that the Beothuk, washed of their red ochre, appear European, and their indecipherable words the colonists believe might be European each word with the odd shape of the ancient: kosweet for caribou; annoo-ee for tree or woods or forest; mammasheek for each of the ten thousand smaller islands that halo the coastline; and kewis to name both the sun and the moon, the full face of pocket watches stolen from European settlers.
This is a fine novel, one which wraps itself around you and won t let go.
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