The Outlander, page 27
He stayed with her a while longer, the two of them sunk into silence, seated side by side on the tin bathtub, the widow in her tatters and bare feet, the dwarf ’s beard caked with dust and his bowler dirty and flattened on one side. They remained like that until McEchern roused himself to shout at an old fellow working his way under the folds of the tent into the store.
“Get out of there!” he piped, leaping from his seat. “You heard me, get out of there!” The miner only mumbled something and turned back to his struggles. As the dwarf walked forward he extracted from the waistband of his trousers the old Colt revolver and fired it once into the air. A unified jolt of surprise ran through the assembly of men. A few of the injured actually sat up to see what new calamity was coming.
“That’s right,” McEchern said as the jabbering man backed away from the collapsed door flaps. “No one goes in there but me. You hear that?” His voice was shredding with emotion. “I catch any of you fuckers helping yourselves, I’ll make you sorry.”
DARKNESS FELL EARLY that night, the sun setting cold and shrunken in the dusty air. The widow moved slowly in the fading light, wandering the face of the slide. Her hands were grimed with blood from nursing the injured and dressing the dead. A cavalcade of horrors paraded before her eyes still. She now knew intimately the colour of exposed bone, the silver sheaths on muscle, the whiff of intestine.
All that day, she had gone barefoot among the barnyard racket of moans and coughs and begging, helping where she could, and there was dried blood on her from a dozen different sources. Those in terror would hold her hand and bless her for her kindness; some of them called her by names that weren’t her own.
But before long, one man had sat up and pointed at the widow, shouting, “It’s her. She done it!” until someone told him to shut up. And eventually he did shut up, but there was strained silence afterwards, and there followed behind the widow something like a bitter wind, some men actually pondering the issue, the possibility that this bedraggled creature in her torn clothes had somehow brought destruction upon them. Men brought up on God and superstition in equal measure, labouring in dark mines, where no woman had ever stepped, its darkness full of ghosts. And now here she went among them, the living and the dead, in her witch’s garb and bare feet, scuffing up pale dust as if it were an infernal smoke billowing from her skirts.
She had ministered to a young man with most of his hair singed off and cuts to his face, washing carefully the jagged wound along his jawline, within which an intact artery throbbed visibly.
“I don’t blame you,” he had said. “You can’t blame something like this on a lady, no matter what she did.” The wet rag had trembled in her hand.
She took up a needle and thread and willed her fingers still to sew the boy’s wound closed, while he winced and whined like a dog, the skin rolling grossly away from the dull needle, like a worm from a hook, until punctured with an audible pop. This, she thought, is what the embroidery lessons were for.
“The place was unstable,” another angry, quivering voice was saying. “What’d ya think all that rockfall was about? Fun and games?”
“I’m not saying it’s her fault, just her doing.” And all around the widow, in sotto voce, there sprang up impromptu debates on issues occult, with the widow as the question to be answered. Where does misfortune come from? What hand brings it? Are the wicked among us? Does disaster find them in the end? Jonah fled from the Lord and hid among sailors, but He found him and brought to them all a terrible storm. McEchern stood by Mary’s side, his expression sour, and his eyes watchful of the men and full of warning. Pistol at his waist.
Now, walking up the slope of the landslide at dusk, the widow paused. She pressed these images away with the heels of her hands and went on, stumbling uphill. Incredible that mere men, tiny as burrowing ants, could cause such geological transformation. All the miners buried deep in the mine, their graves already dug. The men sleeping in tents, rolled under tons of rock and spread thinly about, no more sacred than a tree or a clump of grass or an entire meadow. And the pointless industry of the living — pulling dead men from the mess, sometimes just to recognize them, only to bury them again under the selfsame rock. There was no sound, not even the tinkle of falling rock any more, no animal sound, no wind. The world was hollow and dead, as closed and ghostly as the mine below. No moon. She simply clambered upward as the light failed, holding a buffalo hide about her shoulders, her breath chuffing, drifting behind her in the damp air. In her mind, she was heading for her buried home.
On her feet she wore a pair of McEchern’s boots, another borrowing. At first, he had tried to find boots among the upturned feet of the dead, pulling off first one then another boot to test it against her foot, but they were all too big. Finally, he tried a pair of his own boots. When she had slipped the first one on her foot, she grinned. It fit perfectly. This seemed to her a terrible joke.
“What?” he’d said, but his face said he knew what. The dwarf and the woman, lucky miscreants, outlanders, errors that should not exist but lived on anyway.
She went on following a path more imagination than memory. Though she could not know it, she had been moving laterally across the slope, toward the mine, away from her buried home. Tumbled rock lay in her way alongside shattered trees, their branches torn loose or tufted into bouquets. The silhouettes of old root systems reared up before her like warnings, something brainlike in their clogged, venous gnarls, and dangling there amid the damp earth like Christmas ornaments were pebbles and shards. Soon, all was black, and she stood in weighty silence, uncertain how to go on. So she huddled with her back against some large upright thing, waiting, although she knew not for what.
She remembered the Reverend’s face in the moonlight. His mouth had been moving, so she knew he was speaking, but his words had been drowned out by the roar of the approaching avalanche. What had he been saying? She tried to remember the shape of the words. But it was impossible. The floorboards had been bucking under her feet. She remembered the tuft of hair on his head, the way it had looked every morning, and a wave of tenderness pierced her heart. Not her fault, but her doing. If not her, then who? The widow put her face in her hands and wept herself into an exhausted sleep, wrapped in the rough winter hide, her cheek on the cold rock. Tired, tired, always tired. Even in sleep, she listened for him somewhere down in the earth.
She dreamed and did not dream. The sound was like a little tin spoon clacking against a table. She felt it in her teeth. The rhythmic tapping was telling her something important, and in her half-sleep, she attended the lesson patiently. A clicking. Then a scrape. The sound of several voices, indistinct but very close. The widow sat bolt upright, letting the buffalo blanket fall, suddenly fearful in the pitch-black.
At first, there was a dim glow somewhere to her left. Like a match had been dropped between the fissures of rock and was guttering there. She heard a few more clicks, and then a small stone rolled away downhill, pushed by a human hand. The hand felt about, clawlike, and dragged a few rocks into the glowing breach. The widow screamed once and then clapped her hand to her mouth. In response came muffled shouts from below. There was a barrage of hammering, and eventually a hole the size of a pie pan opened in the ground, eroding and ever widening as the widow watched in disbelief. The light of several lamps could be seen, now flickering with the unseen struggle below. Then a lone miner emerged onto the surface of the slide, shoulders first and then sitting, like a man hoisting himself through an attic trapdoor, bringing with him a whiff of stale and gassy air. He did not see the widow there, for she sat sprawled in the darkness not moving, so he crawled like a newborn devil a few feet from his infernal fissure and stood upright on unsteady legs. He removed his helmet and put his face upward and took a deep, swooning breath of fresh air. And then he bent at the waist and bellowed, “Fuck me! ” collapsing again to his hands and knees. Behind him, coming from the bright hole, could be heard hoots and whistling, the voices of men, raw and weak and full of joy.
TWENTY-FOUR
THE WIDOW SAT sewing atop a pile of buffalo hides with her legs crossed and her tongue working at the corner of her mouth in concentration. McEchern’s store now had a new central mast made from a fallen Jack pine, with the bark still on it but most of the branches sawn off. The wood was green and flexible, so the pole swayed with the breeze, the canvas flapped and bowed and there was a nautical air to the establishment. Across the widow’s lap lay several pieces of deerskin. She had begun to copy the clothing she had seen on Henry’s wife, Helen — the simple trousers and overdress. Her skill at sewing being what it was, she was reproducing the garment exactly.
The widow had been a good seamstress, unusually skilled when she concentrated, a fact that had only ever impressed other women. Her father had once called her “manually dexterous,” which she had correctly interpreted as a kind of slight. He valued only the mental skills, as men often did. He had no idea what hours of careful work had gone into the very shirt on his back, the sheets he slept on, the tablecloth on which he had his dinner — never mind the complex dresses and frocks on the women around him. Depending on the skill of the dressmaker, it might be an unutterable disaster to spill anything on a dress and stain it. There was no telling whether the garment, expensive as it was, would even survive washing. Fading was certain if you dried it in the sun, rot possible if you didn’t. Mary had seen very elderly women move with athletic speed away from an inkwell or soup bowl in the process of spilling. And always, in the background, were the peeved faces and bent backs and ruined hands of the washerwomen. The stench of lye. The solemn and impressive lines of laundry hung in the basement.
Normally, the widow would have sat back and relaxed into her work, the way a woman might do petit point by a fire, with a cup of tea at her elbow. But the deerskin was nothing like cloth. Extraordinarily spongy and elastic, it rolled away from the needle’s point in an organic way, and she was obliged to bend over it and fight with the seams. Much like sewing up a man’s injured face, only not wet, not squirming in pain.
The widow sighed and cricked her neck. She was not happy, exactly, but content. This was nearly a miracle of the heart. Three days earlier she had returned from a futile search for her home and the Reverend, her pockets empty, not even the little Bible to her name, and she had entered the tent, and lain on this very pile of hides, her eyes dully open. For three days she had neither spoken nor eaten, but lay as if dead. He is gone, he is gone. Crumpled and tattered in her ruined clothes, she was like any other cargo in the store, insensible to her surroundings, sunk into the black and miasmic horrors within. Tears streamed from her face into the rank hides. In little sinking moments of abandon, she dozed, dreaming repeatedly of the Ridgerunner, that he was among the dead now too, and that he hated her. The hours and days crawled by in procession, pointless, monstrously slow. From time to time the dwarf would wander by and pat her wrist or perhaps ply her with water.
Only hunger could penetrate the fog. In the end, it was the idea of cinnamon that drew her back. Porridge. She could make some hot porridge and put cinnamon on it . . . if she got up. Twenty years old and she had already reached the border of her heart’s endurance twice. When she rose, she felt like another woman, one direly accustomed to loss. With nothing to her name, she had simply let go, let go of everything. The widow rose and clumped around the store, rooting listlessly among the fallen goods and coming up with a cooking pot. She boiled some oatmeal, sprinkled it with sugar and cinnamon, and sat by McEchern’s stove and ate it slowly. Then she went about the place looking for scissors, a sewing kit. She flipped through the piles of hides, sorting out ones she could use. And here she had been for a day, bent over her work.
From his perch behind the counter, McEchern held forth on matters of current interest.
“It doesn’t matter what you do, they get in anyway.”
“I know,” she said soothingly.
“Stand here with a Gatling gun, they’ll sneak in and take what they want.”
“You’re right.”
“Two barrels, two goddamn barrels, Mary! Gone. We have three bottles of whisky left and that’s all. Can you believe that?”
“I can.”
“Well, good for you. That’s just wonderful.”
The thread snapped between the widow’s teeth and the dwarf winced to watch the procedure.
“Do you have to do that?”
“Do what?”
He watched her put the thread in her mouth, press the end with her lips to flatten it, and thread the needle. “I know who did it too,” he said. “It’s those two fat-faced boys. I’ll shoot the little bastards when I find them.”
“They’re long gone, Mac,” she said, “along with your barrels.”
“And rope. And all the knives. And my other hat!”
“Have a drink to calm your nerves.”
“Don’t you get cute.”
The dwarf thought sadly about the state of things for a moment, then hopped lightly up onto his stool and sat leaning on the cracked display case, his cheeks in his hands, the picture of sullen defeat. “Pricks,” he said. “Sonsof bitches.”
In the days following the landslide, nearly all the miners had left town. The CPR had sent a massive rail-clearer that chugged up the valley in a cataclysm of acrid smoke and mournful whistling, a few boxcars in tow. It came ploughing through the flooded river waters, each set of wheels casting off a wake in which infinite numbers of V-shaped wings ran off across the glassy surface. The cowcatcher in front forced a perpetual fountain of brown water before it, in which drowned animals bobbed and rolled. In the wan morning light, the engineer slowed his engine at the curve, slowed almost to a stop, coming on languidly, hesitant to enter the disaster and become part of it, and so the train crawled and chuffed, bawling repeatedly. Men came running downhill in a panic, waving madly, as if they actually sensed this reluctance and were afraid the train might reverse its course and leave them in the valley.
They crowded at the tipple, waving their hats like men on a pier, and a few waded along beside the vicious black metal sides of the boxcars, banging hollowly on the doors, grinning like madmen. The engineer stopped when the first car came level with the tipple, where in better times ore cars were tipped and coal was dumped into open railway cars. That day, bound and shrouded bodies lay on the platform, and ropes lowered them stiffly down into the boxcars, where they were lined up and counted, like cigars in a box. Forty bodies — one-quarter of the number missing. There was silence among the living men who stood around and inside these eerie cars, their minds still boggling at such potent disaster. With no work, no hope of pay, foremen and headmen dead, the counters gone and buried, the survivors had crowded in a mass aboard the idling train, some huddling on the roof, preferring that to the charnel house below. Only a few men, those who looked like they had grown up in the wilderness, remained behind.
A reporter had come to do a story on the slide, but since the men were mostly leaving, he remained on board, interviewing anyone who spoke English, while a photographer hopped about from rock to rock, trying to get a good shot of the now collapsed mountain. The photographer bent over his large camera box, leaned to adjust the jointed tripod legs. He rummaged in his bags for new plates. Of the photos he would take, some were of people standing on the tipple platform, people milling and curious, some unaware of the photographer, others not sure what he was doing or even what purpose his little wooden box might have. McEchern in his bowler hat and the widow in her torn weeds had been there among the crowd. The photographer put fingers to his mouth and whistled. He asked them to stand together, the woman in the middle, please, and slowly the group obeyed. He snapped the photo, satisfied. But on the final print he would later see a blur of movement as the men closest to the woman shifted away, stepped back, turned their heads away from her. In the centre, the widow, clear as a bell.
She bent now and snapped the thread with her teeth, tied a knot with one hand. She held up the new costume, a strange admixture of the parlour and the wilds. Though in outward style the dress was Indian, the widow had added a high collar, a profusion of tiny buttons held by loops of twisted thread, and an attempt at a ruffle across the breast that, in deerskin, lacked refinement. Finally she tossed the garment aside and began tacking together the panels that would make up the pants. She hopped from the pile of buffalo hides and held this object against her, testing the length of the legs, kicking her feet out and marching around the store, holding the waist to her own.
The flaps of McEchern’s tent were drawn back and the door went dark. Giovanni had stooped to enter the store. The cat skinner seemed even bigger indoors. His impacted neck bent with difficulty as he tried to avoid goods strung from ropes above. His body gave the impression of being accordioned, and should he ever stand up straight, he would rise into something truly massive.
“Salutare, nano,” he growled.
McEchern gagged speechlessly for a moment, then rocketted off his stool.
“The very man himself!” he cried, his legs and arms askuttle as he hurried to the giant’s side, gabbling and welcoming like a court jester round the king.
“Dov’é il padre?”
McEchern, thinking he meant something about moonshine, nodded and gesticulated, “If you’ve got it, I’ll take it. By God, you got timing!”
Giovanni solemnly leaned over, hands on his knees, as if to address a child. “Eh, vive il padre?”
The widow froze in her dark corner, for all of a sudden she understood him. “Giovanni.”
He turned.
She shook her head.
The giant sagged and his eyes drifted away. He sat his bulk down on a creaking box. He brought a badly burned hand to his face and wiped the whole homely surface of it, as a swimmer does when rising from water. There grew a familiar smell in the closed confines of the tent: burnt whisky, burnt fur, burnt skin. McEchern stepped up and took the massive injured hand in his own and hefted it like a dinner plate. The widow hopped down from her roost. All three inspected the seared and blistered fingers where the creases shone with a clear liquid and the palms were caked with blackened dead skin. Clearly, Giovanni’s still had been incinerated and he had tried to save it.
