The Outlander, page 22
The boy was standing out there, a question forming in his mind. It was only a matter of time.
She closed her eyes and felt a strange intimation — herself and the fly and the air of the cabin and all its contents were a simple, uncorrupted thing, a gesture still in process, something predictable, with a catalyst that long ago had started them on their forward motion, all heading to the end, and the end was ruin.
Well, here it was.
The boy called a few times more. And then he stepped in.
TWENTY
PACKED EXPERTLY INTO his sagged and weather-stained tent were the things McEchern judged to be the necessities of life in a mining camp. These were numerous and eccentric. Ropes, wooden buckets, tin buckets and baths, tobacco, knives of various degrees of nastiness and in various stages of rust, paraffin, blankets, sewing notions, snuff boxes, two rifles, a box full of mismatched door hinges, dubbin, grease, lantern oil, salt pork, flour, coffee, delousing remedies, raisins, stove piping, a pickle jar of lenses from eyeglasses, a Colt revolver with a walnut grip full of slivers, corn flour, rifle shells in four calibres, headache powder now aged into a solid block from which he was obliged to hack pieces for sale, nails (all used), pegs, hammers and pickaxes, two bowler hats (worn by him on alternate days, but still for sale), a child’s windup tin horse, a cigarette box filled with buttons, barrels of whisky, jugs and jars of rum, a watchmaker’s kit with loupe, ink, handsaws, two ten-foot logging saws, various planes and files, metal plates, spoons, knives, forks, and cups, and four small vials of laudanum.
One of these he presented to the widow when she came shopping on a late summer day. She was on her own, free of the Reverend’s paternal care. Laudanum, he said, was the very thing for what ailed her, the pain of the world would fade, and no more sorrow would mark her brow. He held up one little bottle and joggled its contents. The widow, thinking he was promising a cessation of womanly pain (and in a way he was), was appalled at his brazenness but amazed at the progress of modern medicine. With scarlet cheeks she scrounged in her purse for some of her carefully hoarded coins from Mrs. Cawthra-Elliot’s and purchased a bottle. She popped the top, took a sniff. The scent was sharp and arresting, much like a poultice. She put the bottle in her purse and went about the tent to finish her shopping.
McEchern followed her with his eyes but didn’t bother to step down from his stool.
From the shadows of the tent, the widow considered the enigma of Charlie McEchern. He wasn’t a very old man, and so it seemed unlikely that he had amassed all these oddments himself. The wormed sign over the store must be older than he was; even the stove that heated the place was weirdly antique, poxed with cherubs. There he sat, the little man, the dwarf proprietor, his child’s hands spread out on the counter and his shoes swinging. It was like he had broken into someone else’s abandoned shop and, faced with customers at the door, had simply opened up and amused himself by playing the part of merchant.
The store’s canvas door flap swept back and in came two malodorous miners. With their racoon faces and their helmets hung from their belts, they stepped heavily on the wood floorboards, awkward now that they were in a world not made of rock. The shorter of the two was white-eyed with some private anxiety.
“Where’s the little man?” he said, and the widow assessed his height wryly for a second before she stood aside to allow them a view of McEchern, sitting baleful and quiet at his counter.
“Mac,” the miner said. It was almost a question.
“Boys. Go on. The place is yours.” The small miner led the way, while the taller one followed. Shy as farmers they went about collecting their goods. The shorter one’s hands were shaking. Together they collected matches, two canvas sheets, a hatchet, twelve metal tent pegs, blankets, and a camp kettle. When they shambled to the counter McEchern regarded them with a fond, weary expression, a face that said, What now? “Aren’t you two usually below ground this time of day, Jim?”
The two men were silent, their eyes not meeting McEchern’s. A porcine scent of unwashed human wafted from their clothes.
“On your way somewhere?”
“Yeah. Away from here,” said the big one.
“No, we ain’t. Shut up, Ronnie!”
“Well, well,” McEchern’s grin was wide. “You two don’t know if you’re coming or going.” Their grimy faces coloured — it was obvious to Mary from the scarlet of their foreheads.
“What do you need with all this stuff, Ronnie? Heading out of the mountains, are you? Find better work elsewhere? I hear the CPR is hiring men if they can swing a hammer.” The big man’s eyes were nearly popping with his desire to speak, and his jaw began to work silently, but Jim cut him off.
“Lay off, Mac. Now how much do you want for it?”
“I want a hundred dollars. But I’ll take . . . four eighty-five.”
“What!?”
“All right, four twenty — and that includes a parting gift from me.” McEchern felt around under the counter and eventually produced a bottle of liquor. He held it up, a bottle of cloudy swill with a swollen wood stopper. The contents of the bottle was the colour and consistency of saliva. The widow guessed it to be Giovanni’s moonshine. Ronnie’s face was the picture of surprised admiration, and he reached for it like a toddler, but McEchern swiped the bottle out of reach. “You’re in a sharing mood,” he told them.
They passed the booze from hand to hand, the small man’s share rudely chugged away in one upturn of the bottle with a gurgling rush down his throat. He handed the liquor on and winced in silent agony, veins ropy in his throat.
The widow was the last to partake. She brought the bottle to her lip and took a gulp before the smell actually hit her. She let out a strangled gasp. The booze went on a leisured clawing down her windpipe, with a disastrous burn thereafter.
“Diabolical!” McEchern wheezed happily.
Jim was gathering up his and Ronnie’s purchases, stuffing what he could into the kettle and eyeing the change he’d left on the counter, counting again to make sure he hadn’t left too much. If he had, there was no way McEchern would mention it.
The widow was swallowing repeatedly, a hand to her agonized throat. She still hadn’t recovered her breath.
Out of nowhere Ronnie said, “We got blown over.”
With that, Jim stopped moving; he seemed to sag in his ripe and sweat-lacquered clothes. There was silence for a moment, the fire crackling in the stove.
“Blown over?” McEchern looked from one to the other of them. “By what?”
“Blast of air,” Jim said, his voice like that of a mourner in a chapel, afraid the dead might hear. “Blew me halfway down the drift, took Ronnie off his feet.” The widow and the dwarf looked at Ronnie, took in the size of the man, and tried to imagine a wind strong enough to make even him stagger.
“Knocked me over,” Ronnie repeated.
But now that Jim had started talking, he seemed unable to stop. “It come up the sump hole with a bang, Mac, the most awful sound you ever heard. Suddenly I’m on my ass, two yards away from my helmet. Shit raining down around us like someone set a charge right over our heads. Some moron down the drift was just laughing away. Probably the seam he’d been working on just fell out right at his feet. But it ain’t funny. There’s some as don’t care. Say you’re a ninny and the like. Some think they’re immortal, just cause they haven’t died yet. Well, I know when bad’s coming, and it’s by God coming. We been smelling fresh water for weeks. Smelled it but never saw any. Sure enough, yesterday here it comes, filling up the sump hole, and bringing . . . things with it.”
“Things,” said Ronnie stupidly.
“Like what?” said the dwarf.
Jim just shook his head in answer. “Tell you one thing, Mac. I ain’t about to leave this boy here,” he indicated Ronnie, the world’s most enormous boy, “ just on account of some jackasses think God gilded their balls.” He didn’t even apologize to the widow. “Nope, we’re out of here.” He gathered up his goods and, seizing Ronnie’s sleeve, dragged him from the tent.
The widow stood swaying, the alcohol still boiling her brain. Diabolical it was, and, she could see now, habit-forming. She eyed what was left in the bottle that hung in the little man’s hand.
McEchern chuckled and shook his head. “Poor old Jim,” he said. “He’s always been a bit soft. Thinks witches exist. Can you believe that? Thinks you can cure warts by burying your hair. And he scolds poor Ronnie like a wife. Some boys are just not cut out for mining work. Myself, for example. I wonder what ‘things’ he was talking about.”
“Flynn,” Mary said simply.
“Oh.” McEchern tipped his hat back with a little thumb. “I wondered where he’d got to. Nobody tells me anything.”
The dwarf pondered her face for an unguarded moment, and she let him. It gave her a chance to scrutinize him. Despite the disorder of his misshaped parts, the abbreviated legs, the infantile hands, the knobbed shoulders, a strange handsomeness had assembled in McEchern. His face was untouched by the disaster, the blue watching eyes more human for where they were set.
“Jim might be right,” he said, “about bad coming. Maybe if you look for something long enough, it comes to look for you. Maybe you call the joke on yourself. I’m afraid of bears, for instance. Have nightmares about them. Go out of my way to avoid the bastards. And you wouldn’t believe how many I’ve run smack into. One old boy, in the pitch black, he was right by the path, just outside there, he woofed directly in my face. Ruffled my shirt collars he was that close. And then he turns and runs into the trees, making the biggest racket you ever heard. I would have pissed my pants, but I was too scared. They say you can smell ’em coming, but I never did. I guess I only run into clean bears. Hey, you seem like a clever girl. Want to see my new venture?”
“Whisky?” she said.
“Nope. Baths.”
He took her outside to the back of his store, where he had erected another, smaller tent — a tall, simple rectangle in which maybe eight cots could be arranged. It was crisp and as yet unweathered, the canvas almost white. McEchern had strung it up tautly with guy ropes and drawn the door flaps back cutely like the curtains in a lady’s window. Inside, there was a stove for boiling water, four deep tin baths, various small tables and benches set about so bathers could undress, and at the foot of each bath stood a rough clothes tree so a bather could keep an eye on his pockets. Considering the condition of the two recently departed miners, the widow saw the point in a venture like this.
“The way I figure it,” said McEchern, “a man will pay for a good bath if you don’t charge too much. I’ll keep to two days a week so I know when to get the stove on.” The widow, towering next to him, had contracted the hiccups. He waited patiently for her to get them under control, for it seemed she wished to ask him something.
“How are you going to get the water from there”— she pointed into the trees where there ran a thin mountain rill — “to here?” She pointed into the tent. “What if you get three customers at a time? You’ll be run off your feet.”
“All right. Yes. A few kinks to work out.” The dwarf ’s face went lemony. “Now, what I’m going to do is . . . I’ll, uh . . .”
“Well, do you know how to barber?”
“What?”
“Give a man a shave, trim his moustache?”
“Can’t say as I do. I trim my own. What do you think of it?”
“It’s a very fine moustache.”
“It is, isn’t it?” McEchern stroked it proudly with his child’s hand. He had lost the train of the discussion, derailed perhaps by whisky.
“Well, I only ask because . . . because I do know how.”
“To what?”
“To barber! I used to do it for my father, and my . . . for another man.”
“Did you now?” His face was suddenly serious, almost comically so, the hand poised at dragging down the long whiskers, the brow furrowed with thought.
“In fact,” she said, “I’m quite good at it.”
McEchern glanced around the little marshalling area, assessing the logistics. A bath. Then a shave. Who couldn’t find a few coins for that? And the fact that the shaving would be done by a girl — not some seasoned old dame with her face done up like a mortuary photograph, but a pretty young girl. Her hand on your cheek, her face bending close to yours in concentration. . . .
“You know,” the widow said finally, “men might haul their own water to the stove if you give them a free drink.”
McEchern’s mouth fell open in surprise at such a good idea. And then he gazed at her with such depthless affection that the widow couldn’t help smiling.
A FEW DAYS LATER, the Americans arrived. They came in from the west, having taken the long route overland, through Indian country, the better to avoid cities and police. They came up the footpath toward town driving four stolen horses before them, a slow rooster tail of dust rising in their wake. There were eight men, all brothers from a family of horse thieves, sun-blistered, nearly asleep in their saddles, their hats hard with age. They looked like they were fashioned out of mud, all eight washed to the same matte shade of nothing, the same colour as the ground they passed over. Even their eyes seemed to have faded away. The saddle horses on which they sat were slat-ribbed and surly, their rumps badly wasted, nervous as cats among the tents and buildings. They crowded together as they walked, clannish, and the men who rode them seemed to draw up too, to hide within their coats. In stark contrast were the four quarter horses that preceded them, captives run together, tied halter to tail, led by one man who rode in front. These animals were robust: sleek despite the dust, and they stepped high.
The widow saw them coming, and she ran back into the house calling, “Bonny!” He hurried out the door, still chewing his supper, wiping his hands on his pants, and showering them with greetings.
The oldest brother came closer and calmed his uneasy horse. Late summer butterflies about his hat. He opened his mouth to speak and nothing came out. He cleared his throat.
“Bonny,” he croaked to the Reverend. “Been a while.”
“It’s been a year, Gerry. How are you?”
The man was swallowing hard now.
“Gerry? Are you not well?”
“Just been a while . . . since I talked to anyone.”
The Reverend glanced at the seven brothers behind the man, seven mud men on mud horses. “You talk to them, don’t you?”
“Not much point.” Gerry grinned. He noticed the widow where she hid in the doorway, and his eyes grew wide. “Pardon me, ma’am,” he said and removed his hat. Under it seemed to be another hat, this one white. And then all the brothers did the same, seven hats coming off to show various white brows on which sat bouquets of stiff and matted hair. A murmuring of ma’ams.
Mary delighted at the preposterous sight of them — like creatures risen from the grave, doffing their rotten hats. Gerry turned and pointed at the four quarter horses, now nipping at one another like colts. “We got these for you to look at. A kind of sample, I guess. They’re no better or worse than the others. We got twenty-three more penned up out of town a ways. We’ll need some feed soon, and salt. We’ve run out of salt.”
“Are you serious?”
“What?”
“You drove twenty-seven horses?”
“We had over thirty. Lost a few on the way. A couple got away, and we just couldn’t run ’em down. One got taken off in a river, thanks to Jamie.” A boy in the back glowered and set his jaw. Clearly he did not agree it had been his fault.
“Excellent!” said the Reverend, beaming. “You boys really did it this time. Now, can we offer you anything to drink? Mrs. Boulton, do we have food?”
“Well,” Mary thought for a moment. “I made bread. We have plenty of coffee. And I have all that stew . . .” She smiled politely and pointedly at the Reverend. His face fell, for she referred to porcupine stew — not the first batch but, incredibly, the second. The widow, it seemed, was totally incapable of snaring a rabbit, or killing a bird, or shooting a deer, but had easily bagged her second porcupine. A large mass of pungent stew sat congealing in a pot on the cold stove. Neither of them had had the courage to eat it yet. The two hosts assessed the bedraggled men before them, the hollow cheeks, the stave-chested horses they sat on. These men would eat grass if they had to.
“Heat it up,” the Reverend said, forcing a grin. “Nice and hot.”
THE NEXT MORNING, the widow was outside McEchern’s store, bent over one of the American boys, carefully shaving the difficult terrain of his Adam’s apple. He was nervous and kept swallowing, so the object would leap and sink without warning. She halted and huffed with annoyance. Of all the parts of a man’s body, the widow found this the most bizarre, the most unnecessary. The tiny knob in its centre, with a hollow divot just above. Impossible to shave! She seized the boy’s jaw and pressed his head against her shoulder, which caused him to freeze in terrified pleasure. She looked like she was about to slit his throat. On the other hand, he was reclining on her breast. He didn’t know whether to fight or faint.
McEchern strutted in and out of the bathing tent, where several other brothers lounged in tin bathtubs with their heads laid back against the sides. They all had bleeding knuckles and some were smoking cigars. Most of them were still drunk. A light rain fell, cold as snow.
The widow called for McEchern, and the dwarf hurried out and handed her a lavishly steaming rag that had been sitting in water on the stove. This she wrapped quickly about her customer’s face. A muffled cry came from under the rag and the boy’s arms and legs flailed. Then he sat still, clutching the chair seat, mouth in a pained O, a diaphragm of cloth blowing in and out with his breath.
“There you go, Jamie,” the widow said. “You just sit there for a minute. That is your name, isn’t it?” The boy moaned something and jawed his cloth like a puppet. It was not a bad haircut, now that she looked at it. The boy had wanted his sideburns cut like mutton chops, an outrageous fashion seen mostly on the covers of lurid books, and he preferred his hair to touch his collar. She ran a hand over the crown and pulled down on the nape hairs to check they were all the same length, and slowly the boy went all woozy and relaxed, and his legs went wide. McEchern stood watching her, a sly smile on his face. His pockets newly full of coins. Her apron jingling too.
