The Outlander, page 16
In fact, the Reverend admitted later, he had fully believed the lunatic would not stop, that his horse would not preserve itself but would instead hurl them both against one of the building’s questionable support beams and bring the whole edifice down about them. The truth of it was, he had put out his hand to ready himself for the fall.
Now the lunatic held his wreck of a horse among a gathering crowd and swivelled his head on its scrawny neck in wild paranoia, like a man beset by wolves. The horse’s breath came ragged, with the deep, hollow-chested cough of the near-dead. Gently, men stepped forward to take the reins and calm the dancing animal.
“Settle down now,” said one fellow, speaking to the man, not the horse. A wordless howl from the lunatic, fists trembling at his throat. He was looking up at the trees, the tips of the pines where wind hissed among the needles. Poplar leaves flashed — light dark light dark — in secret insinuation.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Look at that horse. He’s nearly killed it.”
The widow hobbled up and stood among the crowd. The Reverend clambered down an outside beam in his claw-footed boots to stand at the gasping animal’s neck. He put his hand on the disintegrating leather of the police boot. It was a strangely tender gesture, the hand with its missing index finger, as if the Reverend were saying, “Trust me, we are comrades in ruin.” He shook the thin leg, and slowly the rider dragged his terrified attention away from whatever the trees were telling him. His huge eyes settled on the Reverend’s kindly face. He let out a sob.
“Arthur,” said the Reverend. “Get off that poor horse and come with me.”
THE LUNATIC HAD been cajoled into dismounting his horse, and the two of them stood together with trembling, withered shanks and swimming eyes. The Reverend turned toward home and the lunatic followed, mild as a lamb.
The horse was corralled in the empty church, not hitched, but standing with its head hanging among the rough pews, tidemarks of sweat on its hide and dry froth at its lips, eyes dull as granite. A congregation of worriers stood about, hands on chins, considering its chances. Food was a bad idea. Horses can neither belch nor vomit, so anything that goes bad inside might stay inside. A simple kink in an intestine can be fatal. Water was all right, but should it be warm? Cold? Finally the horse was given a wet rag to suck. A tentative hand pushed the wad into its cheek, but the animal would not suck, and eventually the rag fell to the floor. Finally, one bright fellow exclaimed: “A blanket!” And they all ran in different directions to find one.
Arthur Elwell — for that was the lunatic’s name, as the widow soon discovered — was not faring much better. He sat in the Reverend’s kitchen, a hollow-eyed cadaver, his razorous shoulder blades showing through the fabric of his uniform, hands knotted up under his chin like an old lady with the panics. His jaw worked constantly, and somewhere inside, the lunatic was speaking, for with each breath, barely audible words floated out and others were drawn back. The widow stood by the door and made not a sound.
“Give me your boots,” said the Reverend, kneeling before the man, and the thin leg came up, knee bone creaking, and hung trembling as the Reverend gently twisted it, toe and heel, and the boot slid off with a hollow sucking sound. The sockless yellow foot slowly lowered to the floorboards and lay there, as bloodless as a dead thing on a beach. The second boot came up.
“Bonny . . .” the voice croaked and then subsided. The madman’s head drooped and he shook it sadly. Unmistakably, it was an apology. The hands wringing in the lap now, and the eyes canted sadly to the steamed window, beyond which the wind continued to blow.
“Tell Mrs. Boulton about yourself, Arthur,” said the Reverend. “She’s never met you.”
“Mrs. Boulton?” Arthur repeated, then swallowed dryly.
“There,” the Reverend inclined his head sideways toward the terrified widow.
The widow fought an urge to run out the door. How hazardous it was to be fixed by those terrible eyes. To watch the white and red mouth open and the roiling tongue work within. To allow this madman to speak to her — the shame of it! — to share his infected thoughts, the illness spreading. The man sat there, an indictment of herself, of her own madness, a leper in his cave, warning, Touch me not. It will bloom in you.
The Reverend put Arthur’s sagging boots by the door. Then he turned, smiling, and took the widow by her rigid shoulders — the second time he had ever touched her — and guided her to a chair.
“Sit,” he ordered. “It’ll be good for him. And it’s a fair story.” He went to the stove to make tea. There was silence. Wind creaked among the shingles and moaned along every uncaulked seam in the place. The widow barely breathed. She and Arthur sat in mutual terror.
“I’m sorry, miss,” the lunatic said.
“It’s all right,” she lied. “Go on. I’d like to hear.” And without further encouragement, Arthur started talking, the words coming out smoothly and with uncharacteristic calm, as if rehearsed, or perhaps like a psalm, something to stave off the darkness. At first, he would stop, waiting for a comment from his audience, but neither of his listeners spoke. The Reverend didn’t even turn his head, and so the madman went on talking, the story after a while coming out unbidden, in a dry, quiet voice, like he was telling himself who he was.
He had grown up in an enormous suite of rooms in a hotel among eight bright, happy siblings and a phalanx of keepers who scurried after them, tidying. His mother was head of the women’s auxiliary, so she was always out visiting hospitals in her furs and silk stockings, wandering the wards with other ladies, worrying over the lumps in the beds. His father was a political man who spent much time in his library arguing points of policy with colleagues, while bouncing one or another child on his knee. There were parties during which Arthur affected the role of a butler. Guests chuckled and ruffled his hair. There were endless toys and trips out for tea and cakes and skating on the river. At one such skating party, the ice had broken suddenly and four young couples had drowned. And though Arthur had been there with everyone else and had watched the doomed struggling and crying out at the crumbling, frozen edge, he could remember none of it. A maid had dragged him stiff as a doll from the ice and set him in a sleigh, his hands pressed to his face, and for hours he could not be compelled to speak. It became a family story — Arthur’s lost day. His sister, playing the maid, would seize him round the middle: “Poor mite,” she’d say, squeezing him, “Poor little weaklin’!”
At fifteen, Arthur realized others did not hear voices the way he did, that others’ heads were mostly silent. This he puzzled out slowly, over a long period of time, watching the face of the cook as she rooted in cupboards, seeing no distraction there, nothing calling her out of her thoughts, no demands on her patience. He took to reading books because, for some reason, he heard nothing when he read. He became pale from lack of sleep. His father, in the way of all bright and active men, began to push the boy harder. Calisthenics, running, and finally military training. Arthur was sent to an academy to train as an officer. A small, strange, troubled boy, he had found only one friendly face at the academy, and it happened to be Angus Lorne Bonnycastle. It didn’t hurt that his new friend could fight.
“I stuck to Bonny — I knew where my bread was buttered,” he said, and the Reverend chuckled.
At semester breaks, he returned home, a little taller, a little worse in the head, and, to counterbalance, a little more self-controlled. He ate with his clamouring family at the dinner table and recounted tales of other boys’ exploits. When asked about his own, Arthur would affect an enigmatic air, as if he himself might be the ringleader, which he was not. When he was old enough, his father decided he would go west and join the North West Mounted Police. It was what he did with all his sons — this boy will go to architecture school, that boy into business. So, at the age of eighteen, with an officer’s commission, Arthur found himself on an afternoon train heading into the sun. Black billows of engine smoke blew past his window while the other recruits slept or played cards. He was alone again among men.
The train stopped at Maple Creek and Fort Macleod, and a few boys got off at each. Arthur Elwell was stationed with the rest in a small outpost called Strike Him on the Back, close to the disaster of Batoche. He found himself on a windy plain with a trunk full of books, a notepad or two, regular exercise and duties, and all this punctuated by brief clashes with whisky runners and the occasional small band of Indians. Many people in the area were glad to see the police, but some were not. They came in futile war parties of two or three men at a time. Usually the dead lay where they fell for a day or more before someone came to claim them, a splash of colour in the dry and antic grasses, the wind ceaseless and disquieting, weather brooding on the horizon.
One lingering twilight, Arthur stood watch by the gate, rifle at his shoulder, gazing at two bodies — one of them a man Arthur himself had killed — their shirts riffling in the wind. As he watched, he discerned movement, a jerky flailing, and incredibly the man rose up. This spectre stood, bent at the waist, hands held to his fatal wound, and staggered toward the trees — he was neither dead nor alive. At the last moment, he turned his terrible face toward Arthur. It was ashen and streaked with tears.
Arthur’s madness kicked into overdrive. In the morning, the bodies were gone, and so was Arthur Elwell. He was a deserter.
But his father was a member of Parliament and wealthy, and he had some influence. It would do no one any good, he explained, to have Arthur executed, would it? Arthur had been a fine officer, a quiet man, and a very good shot. It was difficult to get recruits in the first place, to convince young men to leave everything behind and become police officers in a country so wild and empty it was unfathomable to those who had never seen it. So the NWMP tolerated his frequent absences and always took him back.
The widow sat back in her chair. Her aversion forgotten, she pondered this sad chronicle.
“So, you just light out? Where do you go?”
“Sometimes I visit Bonny. Other times, I . . . don’t know where I am.”
“Why don’t you go home, Arthur?” she said gently. Such a fine, warm family. It seemed a glorious thing to her. Arthur’s eyes skated over her knees and shot away again.
“They wouldn’t know me any more.”
Behind Arthur, the Reverend shook his head at the widow.
And suddenly Mary’s heart withered to think of it. Of course they would not. Look at him: a restless ghost. Arthur could not return home any more than she could.
TWO DAYS LATER, it was a bright afternoon, and Mary came sliding down the mountain’s talus. Above her stood hard white peaks, clouds of snow caught there, blowing curlicues. She held her rifle high and waded through the loose pebbles as if she were coming down a waterfall. Boulders the size of horses lay among the smaller rocks, but mostly rivers of pebbles and sand flowed downhill in a hiss. She could feel dissolution with every footfall. Her leg was healing nicely now, and she had grown accustomed to the tug of stiffness in the ruined muscle. She turned and headed for the trees. The air crisp and dry, snow above, the sun pinwheeling through the cold, crystalline mist. A few summer flowers poked from rotted logs, but she knew that when evening shadow passed over them, they would grow filaments of ice along their edges. At the first touch of sun the next morning, the petals would melt to colourful slime.
The thick dark buffalo coat weighed heavy as a yoke on her shoulders, so she took it off, hung it on a branch, and sighed. She took up the rifle again and ventured through the trees, going laterally along the slope, which was carpeted by seasons of needles. Her footfalls were quiet. Her boots fit loosely, and so she slid continually downhill inside them and was glad they laced high up on her ankle or she might have slid right out of them. Birds whirred from branch to branch before her. After a short distance, she sat on her haunches and listened, elbows on her knees and the riflebutt on her boot.
Her little horse would have been no use to her now, she reflected. The ground was too sloped and awkward. In any case, the Reverend had sold her.
“To whom?!” she had burst out when he told her.
“Henry, in fact. And, uh”— he fiddled with his buttons —“I sold her for nothing. But, Mrs. Boulton, Henry did do you a wonderful service. Searching you out, bringing you here to me. I thought we owed him something.”
She’d thought about that for a long time afterwards. The word we.
So her hunting was done on foot, as it would have been anyway, and she was cognizant every morning when she rose that she did not have to feed and water the horse as well as the Reverend. There was some good in that.
She had washed and repaired her clothes, tidying the seams of her wide pantlegs, hemming up the shredded cuffs. Her original stitching had been utterly wild. She had sat by the Reverend’s homey stove and peered in disbelief at the pinched and buckled inseam, the inexplicable gaps. It was as if someone else had done the work. She remembered telling the bird lady she wasn’t mad — but perhaps she had been. She recalled sitting naked on a rock, bent to the work of making pants from her skirts, intent on dressing as a man, a mermaid wishing herself legs. Was she any better now? She held a palm up and looked intently at it, but she saw nothing in the lines of her hands, no patterns, no intimations of anything.
Now the Reverend had two of them — lunatics — and he seemed quite content with it. Arthur followed him to his church every day, and she had taken up the rifle to find them all something to eat. Incredible to think it, but having Arthur in the house was almost a happiness for her — he was so unutterably mad, a chattering, trembling wreck of a man, and yet so benign in his character, his real self. Sleepless, he wandered the lower floor of the house at night, whispering, tidying. The widow would lie upstairs in her bed, listening intently, pacing the floor with him in her mind, her own head mostly silent, struck dumb by pure curiosity about the man. And she would wake in the morning to find him asleep in a chair, bony and slack-jawed as a corpse. His quiet thank-yous to her, his attempts to help at the stove, the alarming sight of him at the chopping block wielding an axe with badly palsied hands. She had begun to see what the Reverend saw in him. And that made her wonder what the Reverend saw in her . . .
A muffled boom came. The widow felt it through the soles of her boots. And then, from all directions, she heard the rattle of loosened rock seeking lower ground. She jumped up, wild-eyed, expecting the mountain to come down upon her. But after a moment, the world was quiet again. Eight feet away, a sparrow sat on a thread-thin branch and balanced itself with silly jerks of its tail, undisturbed by the noise. It bent and wiped its beak on the branch. So, after a wary moment, the widow took up her rifle and went on.
Cresting a rise in the land, she came upon a little door cut in the mountainside. An opening into the mine. Like the others she had seen, this one had been expertly framed and supported with rough wood beams; masses of cut rock had been cleared away from its mouth by hand. But how did the men get in there? A child would have trouble fitting in. She approached it and bent to peer inside. The floor and walls were uneven and jagged, cut without care, and it went in only a short way before angling sharply down. She leaned closer and listened. A discernable suck of air came from the hole, and when she leaned even farther into it, strands of her dark hair flowed forward against her cheeks. It was an air-shaft meant to ventilate the mine. The air was going in, downward, sucking constantly. And then she felt a boom again, and the airshaft’s damp breath puffed in her face like a hollow cough. Pebbles bounced downhill again. She stepped back, tasted rock dust on her lips. The miners were using dynamite.
Hurrying back to find her coat and collect her game, the widow chased a porcupine from its fetid hollow log. The animal set off downhill with a rolling, stump-legged gait she could barely believe — quills rattling. She’d never seen a porcupine move that fast. In the lowlands, where her husband had taught her to hunt, they merely waddled grumpily to the nearest tree, climbed ten feet, and hung there, stinking. John had never bothered to kill one. But now the widow pitched herself downhill after the beast, stopping to take aim, losing her target, then scrambling on. It began to dawn on her that she was not a wily hunter, and she was now lame as well. How different it was, this slalom through the trees, from standing by the cabin, shouldering a rifle on a hostage tree trunk with her husband behind her correcting her aim. Or walking with her father and a stable boy out into high grasses, a dog flushing game birds up into the air like cards in a shooting gallery. The widow lost her quarry at the same moment she began to realize she’d lost her bearings. The porcupine was somewhere nearby, hidden. She stood panting.
The sound of a waterfall. Wind in the trees. The scent of water on the air. She went a little farther, and the trees began to thin and then fell away completely into a deep gorge blurred by mist, across which stretched a strange contraption she could not identify. She ventured down the slope a little to look more closely. The thing in question seemed to be an assemblage of trees and saplings and rope spanning the gorge. Exceptionally slender, it swayed like a spine. It was, in fact, a suspension bridge made from two fallen cedars, one on each side, reaching across the drop, constructed without the aid of metal or milled wood, nothing but trees, branches, and rope. Something of it spoke of Indians, some whisper of flexibility and ultility. A rough elegance in the sway of its back. It was a shortcut for hunters, perhaps. Impossible to know how old the thing was or who had built it. She ventured out onto it a little way and discovered that, despite its spindly construction, it felt solid underfoot, possessing a strange elastic strength. She ventured a little farther. She could see the edge of the drop, the river below, misty and green. The widow bounced experimentally and, a moment later, received an alarming series of motions in return, fluid and uneven, as if something powerful stood at the other end trying to shake her off her feet. She backed cautiously off the bridge and stood watching it swell and heave. Then she went on her way, heading back uphill toward the spot where she had left her coat.
