River Thieves by Michael Crummey Page A

“I’ll have to have another go-round here this afternoon, I can see that.” Miller wasn’t looking for a partner and considered he was just being sociable.
    John Senior’s father owned a horse and cart and made a living selling coal from house to house, and he had never considered any other work. But his wife had recently begun sleeping in her daughters’ room and barely spoke to him any more, and the thought of living across the Atlantic half the year had an unexpectedly powerful appeal. He sold the animal, the property and business, and handed over almost every cent to Miller.
    He only managed to make one trip out to Newfoundland. When John Senior was fifteen his father died of complications arising from a syphilitic infection. For months he suffered lengthening periods of dementia that were exacerbated by steady drinking. He was tormented by uncertainties and constantly demanded to know the time of day, the time of night, never satisfied with the answers given him. He seemedto forget who his family were and treated them as if they were strangers present in the house to steal from him while he slept. He secreted valuables away in cupboards and beneath the mattress. After his death, hidden treasures turned up in the most unlikely places: a brass snuffbox under a loose floorboard, his silver pocket watch buried in a sack of flour.
    When the dementia was at its worst he was incomprehensibly abusive towards his children, towards his wife. The violence was completely out of character for the man. He had never said a harsh word to John Senior or his sisters, and never laid a hand on any of them, but for the one time he caught his son stealing sugar from a container in the pantry. It was something John Senior had been doing intermittently for years, a secret pleasure he admitted to no one, holding the rough cubes between his front teeth as he lay in bed, letting them disintegrate slowly as he drifted to sleep. His father made him replace the sugar but didn’t speak another word on the matter until weeks later when they attended a public hanging.
    A man convicted of robbing a fishing merchant’s home of silverware and pewter candelabra stood on a cart, a cord of rope about his neck, the other end tied to a gibbet overhead. John Senior sat on his father’s shoulders for a better view of the proceedings. The air smelled of coal smoke and leather. A dark knot of relatives stood with the condemned man, crying and offering words of encouragement, a parson stood behind them whispering prayers. After an allotted time, the cart was cleared of all but the thief and his eyes were covered with a cloth. At a signal from the sheriff the hangman lashed the horses and the cart jerked ahead. There was a murmur from the crowd, an almost imperceptible drift forward. The thiefswung and twisted in the air. Two of the men who’d stood beside him on the cart came forward and took hold of his legs, dropping their weight onto the strangling man to bring on the release of death that much sooner. He dangled there a full half an hour then, head lolling heavily over the rough collar of rope, before the hangman cut him down.
    They walked back to their home through the streets of Poole in silence. John Senior had come to the hanging at his father’s invitation and he sensed there was more than spectacle on the man’s mind. There was a cold air of dread about the day that seemed to work against words, that suggested the uselessness of language in the face of the things he had just witnessed.
    His father brought him to the pantry, opened the container of sugar and placed it before him on the counter.
    “Put your hands up there,” he said. “To either side.”
    He did as he was told. His father took out a long leather strap and proceeded to beat him savagely across the buttocks and shoulders, across the backs of his legs, until the boy could just keep his feet, until his father exhausted himself.
    John Senior stood there shaking and crying silently