The Outlander, page 13
And so the courtship began. For Mary, it was like slipping into water and letting the current carry her, faster and faster, toward an unseen, roaring drop, out and away from her father, her childhood home, everything she had ever known. When John asked her if she would marry him, she said she would think about it, but they both knew what her answer would be. If she left, she might be free to change, to be something and someone else. Often, at night, she would press her face into her blankets and cry wildly, but she could not have explained why she was crying, for there was a delight in it also, an unaccustomed passion.
She continued to “think about it” and John’s impatience with the wait quickly became palpable. Maids advised her, in roundabout and polite ways, to stop fooling around and accept. When she expressed her doubts, saying there were things she disliked about him, her grandmother had said, “You’ll grow to love your husband, don’t worry, just as I did mine, and as your mother did. Nothing starts off right.”
The next time they walked together, when John pressed her again, she said yes. He clapped his hands together heartily and said, “Good girl!” Then he kissed her, and the memory of that contact tingled on her lips for a long, stunned moment. The wedding was held in her father’s former church, performed by another minister, her father sitting small and inconspicuous near the aisle, watching his usurper do an efficient job — a quick, simple ceremony attended by anyone interested enough to come, and no reception afterwards. There would be no more dawdling. John was in a hurry to get on.
Later in the day, as the train idled by the platform, Mary hugged her father and grandmother. She cried as they stood among her many trunks and leather bags and wooden boxes and crates. The expression on her father’s face was uneasy, almost guilty. Perhaps it said that he was not ready for the change, or that she was not ready. She was nineteen, her husband thirty-five. But there was no stopping it now.
“Will there be room for it all?” she asked, looking at her life as it was slung up into the baggage car.
“Where we’re going, there’s nothing but room,” John had said. “Wait till you see it.”
As the train pulled away, Mary was unaccountably blissful, as if drunk with the promise of transformation. This stranger, this landowner whose confidence was infectious, was now her husband. He was hers. She alone was allowed to kiss him, to touch his hair with her hand. Other girls had sat in the pews during the wedding with acid expressions, and they all flirted with him afterwards, wasting their charms in an effort to diminish hers. Or so she suspected. All her grandmother’s mysterious womanly advice about sex, nearly inscrutable in its refusal to be direct, had worked its magic, so that every time she looked at her husband, she found it hard to breathe. Eagerness or terror, it didn’t matter.
On her honeymoon night, the bride lay in her clothes on the bunk while the train rocked gently from side to side, and she waited for him. The groom never came to her. He spent the entire night at cards, and lost fifty dollars and his watch.
ELEVEN
HENRY APPEARED before nightfall, leading his horse by one hand and hefting a second saddle again his opposite hip. Helen seized the widow’s hand and said, “You will remember what I said about the Reverend Bonnycastle, won’t you? Stick to that man like glue.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Helen went to her husband and they stood close and spoke for a few moments. Then she turned without a goodbye and headed back toward the village.
Henry said nothing to the widow but merely nodded. The mare let him approach, and it craned round to watch, walleyed, as he laid over its back first a thin blanket, then the saddle with rough stirrups dangling off twisted rawhide thongs. He thumped the animal’s neck and the mare nodded and blew its lips.
Henry and the widow mounted and rode along a path by the river for an hour, two hours, until that path faded out to nothing, and then they cut laterally through the trees, brushes of pine and hemlock stroking them as they passed. Almost immediately there was the smell of smoke in the air, and the horses began to walk alert, their ears scissoring with curiosity.
The widow heard the first whiz. And then, without warning, a whistling rain of arrows fell around them. One small, singing thing went past, then many, the air hissing with them. So alien was this event to the widow that she imagined birds had begun to fall from the sky, embedding themselves like tiny suicides in the ground, in the trunks of trees. Henry was bent low, cocking his rifle, as the widow’s horse wheeled in confusion. It stood sideways to the assault, stamping its forelegs in terror. The widow screamed and hid her head behind the neck of her mare. There was silence, then a thud, and the widow felt something slap her calf just below the knee. A frigid twang went down clear to her foot.
When she looked down, she saw something pale protruding from her calf. The little mare sidestepped and swung around as the crack of the rifle racketed and swung off the hills. Mary reached down for the object sunk into her leg, but it began to bend and shimmer, and then she was slumped in a half-faint, flopping loosely as the mare, finally choosing flight, trotted aimlessly toward the river.
A minute later, Henry came back, trotting his huge bay horse and leading a second, saddleless young stallion. It bucked and reared away from his mollifying hand. He spoke softly to it, but it would not take the offer. It must have been a newly broken animal, for there was a thin strap of hide that hung from its lower jaw, looped into a hackamore, and the stallion pulled and tore at it in a panic until Henry let go, and the animal trotted away into the trees. He sighed as he watched it go. Then, wearily, he dismounted and came to look at the widow’s injured leg.
He folded back the black fabric and inspected the place where the arrow had gone in. The widow leaned vertiginously out so she could see too. A short, vaneless shaft protruded from a pucker of skin that was growing bluish. There was no blood on one side of her calf, but the metal arrowhead had passed through the far side and stood out scarlet. At the point’s edges were little shreds of matter like wet wool. Her head bounced once on its neck as consciousness flickered. He seized her by the upper arm and dragged her from the mare, ignoring her shriek of pain. She sat panting, glaring at him, her pupils dilated so her eyes appeared to be nearly black.
“Don’t touch me!” she hissed.
“I won’t,” he said.
“They tried to kill us!”
“No. They want us to take another route, that’s all. So that’s what we’re going to do.”
He sat down facing her and looked closely at the shaft of the arrow, blew on it where the wood had snapped.
“This hit something and broke before it hit you, bounced off a tree maybe,” he said, and there was something like relief in his voice. He leaned way down and peered at the underside of her calf. He sat up and fixed her with a look she couldn’t translate, a slightly dim-witted look, as if he was clowning with her.
“You want to know why you’re lucky?” he said. She was about to open her mouth and say “why,” but before she could, he grabbed the arrowhead and swiftly drew the length of the shaft through her calf and out. The slender tube came out with a squeak, like a finger on glass. She began to scream, but there was a rushing sound in her ears and suddenly the world swam away. She slumped into a faint, chin on her chest, and then drifted sideways to the ground.
SHE WOKE TO PAIN. Henry was pulling her by the front of her collar, hauling her back into a sitting position. Her head lolled a little, and then she was awake again, looking around in confusion.
“Stay up,” he ordered. Then he focused his attention on the arrowhead, whose side points had sunk into his palm when he’d seized it. Carefully, he began to extract the points, wincing, his fingers trembling. When it was out, he flung it into the weeds and pressed the little cuts to his mouth
She lifted her skirt to check the leg, her head bonging horribly. A thin dribble of blood issued from the obscene little hole, like sap from a maple trunk.
“Oh God,” she sighed.
“Your leg’s not bad enough for us to turn back,” he said. And then he went off to the river to get water.
Later, after a rest and a cup of water, Henry frogmarched her to her horse and impelled her into the saddle, and they went on. He took them on a path along the river through deepening dusk. Bats came out above them, darting low over the water and skirting the treeline. And the riders, too, avoided the trees. Then the bats vanished, as if puffed away, replaced minutes later by nighthawks, swooping like acrobats in the miserly light. A breath of snow on the air. They stood their horses in the frigid shallows and let them drink, the mare like a toy next to the bigger horse, her homely head raised, listening. Then they went on, the widow listing in her saddle like a drunkard. He’d told her to let go of the reins and hold the saddle horn to keep from falling. After a long interval, she did as he said. The mare followed like a pack horse, and the widow was the burden.
Finally, all light fled. Henry halted, and they no longer heard the hooves below them on the scree shoreline. The horses’ breath sounded hollow and small in the night. The widow felt Henry’s hands about her waist, pulling, and she slid to the ground. With only one good leg, she sat heavily and yelped with pain, and she remained sitting, blind, as he took the horses away. Small dots of cold hit her cheeks, motes of snow falling from the empty heights. He was removing the tack. She heard the whup of leather cinches being undone, stirrups clacking against river stones at a little distance. The horses shaking like dogs, blowing, glad to get the saddles off. The sound of him currying the animals down with the blankets, then flapping the blankets out, one by one, near her.
“Yours,” he said and stamped his foot. The nearest one. She rolled over onto it, her arms across her chest, and slept on rocks. Slept despite the howling of her wound. In the middle of the night, she dragged the blanket round her and cocooned. Her face covered. Her breath like a furnace.
“Wake up.” His voice came in the dark. A thin edge of a question in it — in her dream, he thought she was dead, that she’d died during the night. A body wrapped in its shroud ready for the river, while inside, a sly, dreaming ghost awaits. Her mind drifted off again. Then a boot, nudging her. “Up now.”
They had bannock and coffee in the pre-dawn, two figures crouched round the fire. Then they saddled up, the widow doing her slow part. They mounted and went on uphill, moving laterally along the higher range, the mare’s shod hooves sparking as she slipped and scrabbled on the loose stones. Overhead, the morning sky glowed, cut sharp by the inky edge of mountain ranges all around them like a bowl, and everything in it was black and they were invisible. The widow gazed at the rock faces and tried to recognize something, anything. The pass she had traversed, or even a familiar peak. But all was strange and black. As the light grew, the air warmed quickly. This brought forth from the trees a thin mist that ran in tributaries along the pebbled ground like a grey river. The horses’ forelegs waded through it.
By noon it was raining and they were going straight up, Henry sometimes on foot, leading the horses by the reins on the switchbacks, then mounting again and continuing uphill, both riders leaning forward in their saddles. The rain was fine and light, hardly falling, blowing on the wind. It blew under Henry’s hat and his face streamed and shone.
They reached the town of Frank in the afternoon and went down the empty main street followed by amiable dogs. It was hardly a town at all, just a federation of camps separated by mounds and fissures in the ground, and by messes of cut lumber stacked high and stained nearly black by the weather. Buildings stood next to tents that stood next to hybrids of the two, unlighted and unpainted, made of hand-hewn boards, some caulked with mud or moss so their listing walls were corduroyed and tufted. Few or none had windows. Outside one tent, a pair of coveralls had been hung out to dry, pointless in the drizzle, and a deep red mud dripped from its cuffs.
“This is a town?” the widow asked, incredulous. “Where are all the people?”
“People?” Henry craned round in his saddle. “The men are underground. In the mine.”
They came upon a strange low doorway cut in the side of the mountain. An air shaft, no taller than a playhouse door. The widow looked uphill and saw two others, cut discreetly into white rock, framed carefully in thick black wood, and standing no taller than four feet, as if some dandified gnome might soon step from his front door and greet the day. There were three shaft entrances in sight, but all were empty and there was no sign of men anywhere. Just then the horses crested a seam of rock like a great deep root of the mountain, and the travellers saw in the distance the grey and looming mine head, at the dark mouth of which human figures moved, stooped and hurrying. It seemed to the widow that they had moved from wilderness to wasteland.
The mine head looked almost like a grain elevator, a tall, boxlike structure with smaller boxes attached. The widow gazed about her in horror. Barrenness and ruin lay all about it, the building forming an epicentre of destruction. The ground was trampled and muddied and streaming, hatched with cart tracks, strewn with debris. Mounds of grey culm lay here and there, the chaff of coal mining, silvery rubble tipped out by the carts, through which ran negligible seams and chips of coal. Several of these knolls were smouldering, the coal on a slow burn, thin rills of smoke corkscrewing into the rain. The smell of it on the air. And pine and rain and mud. The horses stepped carefully over a narrow-gauge track for mine carts that ran from the head, heading downhill into the trees to some unseen destination.
But this vast ugliness seemed to flash and be gone, like a contained blight, a comet’s small impact. Then they were riding among the trees again, and even the dogs were silent, as if it had affected them too, and made them thoughtful about the ravages of man. If not for the simple footpath along which they rode, the widow might have thought herself miles from any town again.
When they found him, the Reverend Mr. Angus Lorne Bonnycastle was standing on the roof of the skeletal frame of the church he was building, a pencil drawing of a stick cathedral with a dark little man on it. He had been working alone, down on one knee, hammering away, but he stood when he heard the horses’ hooves. Seeing Henry, he waved eagerly, dropped his hammer, lost his footing, and fell on his back, nearly toppling from the apex. The widow let out a little yelp, and Henry put a hand to his mouth in unguarded dread. Eventually, the figure in black regained its balance, clambered up again and waved. Through his fingers, Henry said, “Jesus Christ!”
THE RIDGERUNNER went on, shouldering his rucksack high, yearning into the wilderness. A deserter amid the green, near blind with confusion, having not slept yet, for every breath in the trees seemed to promise her arrival. The movement of sunlight, a crack in the underbrush, woke him. He sat up round-eyed, a sorry grin on his face, a lie forming in his mouth. And then nothing. She did not come. How could she? So he rose and went on, looking back as a thief does. He had stolen something, and he knew it.
And now, as shadows skated long over the ground, he stopped dead in his tracks and held his breath. An irregular thing lay on the ground a few paces back. Here was a fingerless hand. A mummified shoulder. He had stumbled upon a fellow traveller. The shape of the fallen man expressed clearly on the ground, upholstered with grass. And five feet away, the upturned, jawless cranium with its little amphitheatre of teeth. The Ridgerunner stood motionless, his eyes mere slits, a hand to his face as if there might still be a lingering stench. But there was none, and his leathery companion was as indigenous now as any fallen tree.
It was a cruel joke — not on this other man, for that was obvious enough, but on Moreland himself. Even here, solitude was impossible, as if the world were a nerve-jangling carnival where grotesqueries might swing out on springs and cackle at him — lost and wild girls beckoning, dead men aping his own likely future. He stepped wide around the shallow lump, wide and quiet, and went on quietly, as if some unseen spirit hung in the trees, watching. Then he started toward higher ground. Moving not north or west, but up, higher, toward the peaks. Away from man and woman. Away from life itself.
PART TWO
FIREFLY IN THE DARK
TWELVE
MORNINGS FOUND THE widow making the Reverend his breakfast on an old, spraddled stove that stoked hot as a forge and smoked at its poorly welded seams. It stood on pale bricks, and the sooted pipe went straight up through a hole in the ceiling, heating the single room above, and from there ran through the roof to end in a blackened and smoking funnel. She made bread and biscuits, coffee, salt pork, beef jerky, oatmeal with blueberries in it.
It had been a week or so, and now she had taken on the Reverend’s habit of rising when daylight was still hours off. Sitting up with the heavy blankets to her breast and the forest’s cold breath at her naked back, she could smell his pipe from where he sat on a stump outside in the dark. Smoke. It reminded her of William Moreland, his mouth speaking, sweetness puffing in wisps of smoke with each word, his hand holding the pipe stem, and his sleeves rolled to the elbows. The widow would close her eyes, sigh, and breathe in the scent.
The Reverend slept on one side of the upstairs room and she on the other, a curtain strung between them. Her bed was of oddly naval design, foreshortened, with high head-board and footboard and low walls to keep the sleeper in. The wood was expertly lacquered and inlaid with a queer petal design where flowers ran into flowers and fractured and blew tears all about. She followed the garlands with her finger. It was a queen’s bed, weighed down by striations of blankets and hides, on the top of which lay a tattered silk chinoiserie, a black bedspread on which birds hopped from impossible branches, every feather gratuitously real, every beak like a yellow seed sewn into the cloth. Touching this finery, pressing its smoothness to her cheek, she remembered her grandmother’s quiet bedroom, the wide, soft bed and the old lady drowsing there. Next to her new bed was a window, perhaps pilfered from some railway car, pried out whole and set into the wall, held in its scored metal frame by a line of rusted rivets. This was where she slept. The Reverend himself slept on a simple straw tick. When the widow realized she had been given the only real bed, she tried to refuse it, but he said simply, “It was never mine anyway.” He hammered nails into the walls for her to hang her clothes. Smiling apologetically, he said, “Luxury, for a woman accustomed to sleeping in the woods.”
