Northern souls

Michael Crummey’s River Thieves

By Josh Rogers

Michael Crummey reads at Bonomo, 1 Monument Way, Portland, June 27 at 7 p.m. Call (207) 772-4045.

NEW-FOUND CHRONICLER: Michael Crummey debuts with River Thieves.

Slipping out of the rapids of Modern Living and entering the cold, deep, slow-moving stream of reading a historical novel is a hard adjustment to make. To drop out of a world with PDAs, cell phones, IM, and fast food, and actually sit down for a few hours with a book takes some extreme mental gear-shifting. It’s fitting, for instance, that James Joyce’s Ulysses is considered by many the first modern novel, all of its 700-plus pages of action taking place in a single day. Michael Crummey’s River Thieves, on the other hand, sprawls over almost an entire decade: 1810 through 1819. And rather than following one man through an urban landscape, River Thieves tracks the lives of a bunch of wayward settlers, trappers, and soldiers eking out their lives in the harsh Newfoundland frontier.

One gets the feeling that Newfoundland in the early 19th century was much like America in the early 18th, or Australia in the late 19th: a refuge for ex-cons, men running away from marriages, women hiding from tarnished reputations, government officials who’d become an embarrassment to the homeland, people with secrets who just want to be left alone.

John Peyton is just a young boy of 16 when his father takes him from his home in England to work the traplines with him in Newfoundland. Ten years later, he finds himself an able outdoorsmen, but confused and troubled by the strange human society in which he’s grown up.

His father, John Senior, is a hard, unreadable man of few words. Both father and son live with a mysterious young woman named Cassie who tutored Peyton and takes care of the house for the two of them. Although Peyton desires Cassie above anyone, it’s clear to him that she only lives there because of John Senior, with whom Peyton guesses (but tries to avoid thinking about) she’s having an affair. When asked by a visiting naval officer named Buchan why she has refused so many proposals from the local men, Cassie responds: “The thing I most appreciate about John Senior is that he’s never talked to me about love.” It’s unclear exactly what’s going on between the two of them, but when the men leave for the winter to go trapping, Cassie tromps through miles of deep snow to a neighbor’s house. She’s gone to see a Mi’kmaq woman who’s married a trapper. Soon, it’s clear that Cassie has come for an abortion — even Peyton realizes what’s happening when he stumbles upon the scene after Cassie has ingested a poison brew.

As Peyton drags the weakened Cassie back home on a palette, the two tell each other stories about their past. They slip small vignettes that don’t quite add up to full stories back and forth to each other. Sitting by the campfire at night, Peyton reveals how his father took him to see a hanging in London when he was a boy. They fall silent as Peyton boils snow into water.

This is the pace of the novel: like the trappers who are constantly wrapping seal blubber in oiled canvas and burying the parcels in the snow for future consumption, Crummey unpacks small morsels of meat every now and then that reveal little in themselves, but work slowly to make a more complete stew. You just have to wait for the thaw.

Like the historian, the historical novelist works patiently. Steadily. Using The Dictionary of Newfoundland English, The Newfoundland Journal of Aaron Thomas, 1794, and Ingeborg Marshall’s A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, Crummey spends much of his exposition replicating minute historical details — getting the historical flavor just right. Trappers’ camps are called “tilts,” and back in those days to “have the face of a robber’s horse” was to be “brazen, without shame or pity,” dontcha know. Some of Crummey’s explanations of historical devices, processes, and contexts are decorative to the point of irrelevancy. He achieves success, however, as he slowly weaves the personal histories of these people into the narrative.

There’s a lot of sitting and waiting for storms to abate, a lot of pipe-smoking, whittling, net-mending, and stories told in confidence around campfires. These people aren’t going anywhere. They’ve got dark pasts, some with dark futures. There are secrets. There are half truths. There is shame.

Shame swells to a grand level in the central action of the novel, when the men, under the guidance of Lieutenant Buchan, embark on a journey up the River Exploits to bring tidings of peace to the native peoples living there. Called “Red Indians” because of the red clay they paint their bodies with, the Beothuk are a quickly diminishing peoples. Driven far inland and cut off from their coastal food sources, the Beothuk are also being hunted down by settlers. The governor’s pet project is to make peace with the Beothuk, but, of course, this only leads to bloodshed and confusion. Like a hunter trying to free a marten caught in a trap, the more the European settlers try to make good with the Beothuk, the more the victims are entangled and the more bloodied the settlers become.

Josh Rogers can be reached at jrogers@phx.com.