The Outlander, page 28
“That must smart,” McEchern said.
The giant shrugged.
Twenty minutes later, the widow was stirring a rabbit stew completely devoid of vegetables. They had plenty of meat, but not much else. It was the Cregans who had wandered about collecting fallen animals, dressing them, and salting or smoking the meat. They reasoned that there wasn’t much time left for the meat. Another week and nothing would be edible, every carcass rotting, though much of it might still be unmarauded from lack of living scavengers. So stew was the everyday meal. She made masses of it available to anyone who came by.
McEchern applied to the giant’s hands his recipe for burns, a grey-green glutinous sludge made from the simmered contents of a glass bottle on one of his shelves, full of what looked like loam — dried and powdered plants. He wrapped the hands finally in boiled rags and tied a medic’s knot. He kept up a happy one-sided conversation with Giovanni, who sat pale and silent within his barrel of a body, his head turned sideways to stare unseeing at the floor.
The widow watched them over her cooking. There had been much of this lately. One man tending to another’s wounds; sometimes the injured one rising and going to a worse-off fellow. Goodwill flowing downhill.
McEchern hefted the bowl of salve and shoved it at Giovanni’s face. The stink of it roused him immediately. “Ma, che puzza!” he said, and the dwarf laughed.
“I learned this from an Indian lady few years back, calls herself He Walks. I always thought that was a funny name for a woman. She comes in here every now and then. Has all kinds of tricks; like she can cure a toothache by blowing on the tooth. Anyway, she showed me how to fix a burn.” He rolled up his sleeve to expose his little muscular shoulder.
“See there? Lantern fell on me and got my sleeve. The skin burned before I could get the shirt off. Hurt like the very shit. I thought I was going to die. Wanted to chew my own arm off like an animal. Someone sent her round. Look at this. Where’s the scar?” he said. “You can’t see it ’cause it’s not there.”
The giant seemed not to hear. Rousing himself he turned to the widow and said, “Lady? When is ready, this food?”
His companions stood stunned, as if unable to understand him once he actually spoke English.
“Mary,” said McEchern eventually, “this man’s hungry.”
The widow hurried over a bowl, and the giant held it in his lap and bent over it, spooning the hot muck into his mouth with affected good manners, the spoon like children’s cutlery in his massive hand. He said nothing more but breathed with his bear’s lungs and ate more slowly than anyone the widow had ever seen.
After a few minutes she went back to her corner, backed up against the pile of buffalo hides, hopped up, crossed her legs, and rethreaded the needle. From time to time she looked up at the scene surrounding her. To someone else it might be a sideshow: Her torn costume in almost lascivious tatters; the dwarf wandering aimlessly in his ridiculous bowler, strangely intact for all the devastation around him; the giant slumped and drowsing by an empty bowl, hands bound in strips like a leper, shrouded in his gruesome patchwork coat. The widow felt a surging gladness in her breast. She was suddenly grateful that she was alive, relieved at how simple things were — an ascetic happy with her lot.
Afternoon light fell through the tent’s top hole and gilded the wood floor, fell glinting off lanterns and pots and pans. Buoyed by the moonshiner’s appearance, McEchern bustled about the place tidying among floating dust and late summer insects. A Cregan, possibly the youngest, came in from outside. He stood at the counter with McEchern, and together they inspected the handle on a lantern he had been repairing.
“I think that’s done it,” said the dwarf.
“Give me the other one.”
McEchern rooted under the counter and dragged another lantern out, this one with no bottom and so no place to keep the oil. The boy went out with it. Outside, the Cregans had erected a kind of forge and were busy repairing or recycling anything that came to hand. All eight had survived the disaster, camped as they had been outside town and half off the mountain, their prodigious familial luck holding. Their own horses had been hobbled for the night, so even when the landslide came, their animals did not run, but hopped and reared and fell harmlessly to the grass. The brothers had leaped up from their bedrolls and staggered about on the bouncing ground in the moonlight, bellowing to one another while their terrorized horses squealed. Finally, the fence had collapsed or was kicked down, and hundreds of dollars galloped off into the night. Of the eleven runaways, three survived. A few were found dead of exhaustion or injury, or floating bloated in the river like obscene rafts.
Now the Cregans were scavenging what could be found among the wreckage, their industry imparting a meagre cheer to the former town. The metallic sound of hammering issued from the yard, and a yelp of annoyance as someone hit his thumb or, perhaps, from the tone of the voice, a brother’s thumb. After a while, Giovanni raised himself slowly from his box and shambled out to help.
“DON’T TALK MUCH, do they?” said the old doctor.
“Not so far,” said his son.
They had been watching the two enormous redheads for ten minutes now, where they sat on the other side of the hotel restaurant. It was a small, pretty town, with a view of the mountains. In fact, the doctor and his son had seen these men several times around the hotel — they were hard to miss. The two brothers were always together, and never had any other companions. They exuded the air of men with nothing to do and nowhere to go. It didn’t sit well on them.
The doctor’s wife put out a hand and plucked at her son’s sleeve. “Darlings, you’re staring.”
“Sorry, Mum.”
The redheads had caused a stir when they came in together, two identical gentlemen filling the doorway. There was a hush from the breakfast crowd, followed by innumerable comments, some of them indiscreet. And yet these men had ignored the hubbub — they seemed immune to the excitement of others, the way one ignores the upheaval of pigeons. The harried waiter had come beetling along through a sea of tables to seat them, only to find himself following, invisible as a dog, as they strode to a table of their choosing.
“Coffee,” said one, speaking to the tablecloth.
“Steak and bread,” said the other.
Now the brothers just sat there and ate their breakfast without a nod to the waiter or a glance round at the rest of the patrons of the hotel, or even out the window, beyond which stood two beautiful young women, talking and laughing. Of course they could hear the laughter, but it failed to interest them, even enough for one to turn his head. When they’d finished eating, one took up a newspaper, separated out a section for the other, and they both set to reading.
The doctor, too, held a newspaper on the table in front of him, but he’d already read it. And neither he nor his son could tear his eyes away from these strangers.
“It suggests mild gigantism, doesn’t it?” he ventured.
“But they look proportionate. No elongation of the face or limbs, no hypertrophy of the bones.”
“And then there’s the ginger hair,” said the old man.
“What? It’s not that uncommon.”
“Red hair and fair skin, tanned quite deeply in fact, but I can see no freckles. Can you?”
“Dad, it’s impossible to see this far away.”
“And, now that I think of it, look at the clothes. See the . . .”
“Boys, really!” his wife whispered, and they fell silent. The old man shook his paper and straightened in his chair, but he and his son continued to stare.
The doctor could see: impeccable manners on men who clearly had spent much of their time outdoors. Fine black boots, manifestly expensive to begin with, now ruined by overuse. A life of privilege, now gone, or perhaps abandoned. Their coats and breeches were tailor-made to accommodate their great size, and yet these men had chosen a design of deliberate simplicity, an aggressive kind of modesty in its lines, achieving in the end only the homeliness common to all oversized clothing. The coats were also worn and needing repair.
“Heavy-footed too. I’d guess they each weigh a lot.”
“I disagree, Dad. I think they are almost graceful. Good posture — another proof against gigantism.”
The doctor’s wife sighed with afflicted patience. And she started to talk brightly. “Well, since we’re talking incessantly about twins, I knew one once. What was her name? Darby. No . . . Darcy? Maybe Darcy was the other one.” The doctor’s eyes drifted to his wife’s face and stared through it for an interval, then wandered back to the giant men again.
“They disliked each other, isn’t that funny? But you know, it struck me as perfectly understandable. Why would you love a copy of yourself? Why does everyone else get to be themselves, but you don’t?”
The waiter swanned by and ignored the old doctor’s wave.
“Bloody,” he sighed and looked sadly at his coffee cup.
He took up his newspaper, passing disinterested eyes over the minute grey print.
“Diphtheria epidemic.” “Delays in the postal service — why can’t we be more like Britain?” “Worst landslide in mining history — superstitious miners predicted it.” He sighed and turned to local news where he saw a promising headline: “Church Group Ran Dog Fighting Club — Popular Parson Bookmaker.” He began to read that one.
There was a sharp laugh from the twins’ table. One of the men was shifting violently in his chair. The doctor glanced up and saw him holding out his section of the newspaper for his brother to see, folded neatly into four, and he was pointing at a photograph: the landslide at Frank. And the widow, the lone woman among the survivors.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE TRAIN’S WHISTLE echoed as it departed down the valley. The track had been cleared finally, and the first regular train had come and gone. Curious survivors had wandered down to see it. The widow scrubbed the darkened wood along the platform of McEchern’s store, a bucket at her side, the vague bawdy smell of old meat rising to her nostrils, legacy of spilt blood.
“Hey, girlie!” shouted a bent old fellow. The widow turned a fatigued face to him, rag in her hand.
“You got company on that train.”
“What do you mean?”
The man grinned widely, a gap-toothed smile. “Couple of gents asking about you down there. Could be your lucky day.” He chuckled and went on mumbling.
THEY CAME UP the hill with rifles across their backs, following a newborn trail that went in gentle switchbacks through avalanche debris. Here and there the trunks of fallen trees were cut away, allowing a man to walk without bending or crawling; boulders were dragged aside or levered downhill to clear a path. Otherwise, human traffic acquiesced to the natural flow of the land, now jagged and white, and mostly motionless.
One brother touched the other’s shoulder.
“Smoke.” They’d been told to look for the trading post, the only place standing, the only place with a stove. And indeed, a thin ribbon of smoke rose into the air. But then they saw another, and two more, rising from the very earth. The whole landscape seemed to be smoking, smouldering. Someone passed them, striding quickly along, a barrel on his back, saying, “That’s the coal burning. Come back in twenty years and it’ll still be burning.” And then he was gone.
So amazed were the brothers at this that they began to wander among the burning culm, gawking at the ghastly place they had come to. Perhaps this was why they didn’t react to the first gunshot, but stood looking at where the bullet had pinged off and left a pale chip in the limestone. They heard the second shot, but failed to give it meaning. It seemed like the burning landscape was popping, like some hard-shelled, infernal oatmeal. It wasn’t until they looked up and finally saw the widow standing on the deck of a huge, cockeyed tent, struggling to reload a rifle, shells dropping from her shaking fingers, that they understood themselves to be under fire.
Immediately the twins split up, scuttling low and fast as rabbits, eyes white, pawing at their own rifles as they ran. On her perch, the widow slammed the breach closed and drew the stock to her jaw, choosing the leftmost man. She led him — aiming slightly ahead of the rushing, stumbling form — and squeezed down hard and fired. The roar and kick of the gun blinding her for an instant so that when she righted herself she saw only the mad wheeling of his arms as he dove, coattails tossed up arsewise, and then he was gone behind a rock. Cursing, she swung right to sight the other man, but he was gone too. Behind which tree? Which rock? Again she swung left, drifted to centre, her vision wide and unfocused, keyed on motion, on sound, the gun’s stock trembling against her cheek.
She’d missed them both. Three shots, all gone wide. The disaster of it was palpable. There was silence but for a voice or two from uphill, miners calling in question, curious at the unaccustomed sound. She stood outside the store, exposed, motionless, while somewhere out there her unseen brothers-in-law were loading up. Horribly, unbidden, the memory came to her of her husband cheering when out of sheer luck she had killed her first guinea fowl: “You hit meat!” Her mind stuttered and went blank; she didn’t know what to do.
McEchern, for his part, was crouched behind his counter, covering his head, after having given her the gun and the shells, then hurriedly removing himself from the impending show.
The world was unearthly still. And then the widow turned on her heel and dashed through the tent, dodging goods and the jutting counter, and ran out the rear flap. Without pause, she flew off the platform. Her boots hit the ground together, and she went crashing and leaping through the trees in her peculiar, hobbling gait.
She ran downhill and out into a massive clearing, cutting laterally across the farthest extent of the landslide, her back wincing against the expected gunshot. Then she was back into the thick of the trees, throwing herself in long strides down the draw, grabbing saplings with her free hand and sliding on the loose groundcover, ploughing up huge drifts of pine needles with her boots. Nothing moved but she; no sound but her panting. She didn’t dare look behind, but ran, keeping to the lower ground, till she scrambled up a small rise and plunged over the other side.
Her husband’s flat voice in her ear, That’s how you find and kill something. Skylight it — wait till it runs over a hill, look for the silhouette. The slam of a door. The roar of the shotgun, whistling rain of arrows, the sound of laboured breathing. A crack like a cannon in the dark. Nightmare piled upon nightmare. Her breath came in ragged and helpless sobs from her aching chest. She was a brash and racketing thing, alerting her pursuers to her exact position, nearly shouting to them in her terror, and leaving a trail of broken branches and scuffs that anyone but the blind could follow.
She hadn’t fully believed it when she’d seen them. And clearly, they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Their faces, white and staring as she sighted down on them, the too familiar eyes, the wide, hard jaws. His jaw, his face, twinned, staring up at her in astonishment, and she, yearning to murder him again. His mouth falling open in surprise. A pink mist floating on the air, its dull taste on her lips, droplets on her hands, chin, forehead. His soundless open mouth as he fell. His mouth, saying, “You can have another,” saying, “They come and go, like calves.”
She ran hard, tall cedars stuttering past her, pickets in an endless fence, lines everywhere, flying depthless, her boots in syncopated beat along the ground, breath now regular and deep. She came over a shallow rise and immediately tumbled into the draw, falling into a stumbling chaos, the gun held aloft until she hit the thin trickle of water in a splash and thrashed through it, turned and followed the creek downhill like an animal. Boulders along the rill’s edge festooned with moss and white flowers. Not so far away, the whisper of a waterfall.
And then she realized she’d reached it, the Indian bridge. The widow stood gasping among the callow greenery while somewhere uphill voices echoed. For a moment, she did not move. Behind her stood the bridge, spidery and delicate. She was frozen, willing herself to drop the rifle, to open her fingers and let it go. In her mind she was assessing the sagging bridge, the slick wet bark that waited for her boots, the loose and half-rotted handropes. The fallen aspens sagged over the gorge, roots exposed. Could it take her weight? Could it bear theirs? She knew she could not make it across with the rifle in her hand.
Then she heard them, their footfalls, sounds of progress through water. She dropped the rifle.
The widow reached the sloped face of the chasm and hopped lamely down to where the nearest aspen cantilevered out over the void. She threw herself onto it in a hurried clip-clop, her hands snatching at the ropes. She was five feet out when the first swinging movement hit her, the organic response to her weight, ripping along the length of it in a tugging, heaving motion. She groaned and forced herself on, goat-footed, hunched, willing her feet to hold the slithering deck, which was no more than a single aspen pole. Ahead of her, it tapered to a point, on the other side the same thing, and between them was an unanchored span of some twenty feet, slung roughly with saplings and rotting rope, badly sagged.
The first rifle shot hit the air. She lurched and fell screaming against one of the hand ropes, slid to her knee. The drop below her was fifty, sixty feet. Mist rose from some unseen source of water, and she hung there suspended over it, gazing into the depthless white. The bridge rocked gently like a hammock. The percussion of the rifle was still in her ears. Her fingers closed round the simple, solid rope. She could hear her heart, hear herself swallow. And him at her heels. Following. No, he was dead and could not follow. He was not there. A strange calm went through her. Up she came in a rush.
“Stop, Mary!” came a voice, almost pleading. The echo of it carried on the hollow air. She did not stop but struggled on, carefully, conscientiously, until she was nearly at the other side. But as she hit the far side and began to run, to scramble up the cliff ’s crumbling switchbacks, there came a cannonade behind her. Trunks of trees exploded in pale coronas of splinters. Something ripped past her temple and her hair briefly burned. Her pantleg yanked hard where a bullet slapped through. And yet, it would seem, these hunters were as poor marksmen as she herself was, for every one of their shots missed, and she still ran, still alive. And then she was in the trees and invisible to them.
