The Outlander, page 29
She ran until she could not run any more, nor breathe nor think, and then she ambled along on jouncing, shaking legs, blood clabbering in her veins, willing herself to keep going, until finally her knees gave out, and she knelt with a thump on the ground, empty-headed and desolate. Thirsty, thirsty. A waking dream of bending to a mountain stream, drinking the way a horse does, sucking at the surface, a painful coldness going down.
She didn’t know how long she stayed in the clearing, motionless and empty as a nun in patient contemplation. A Cooper’s hawk regarded her from its nest. It stood straddle-legged and levered over the edge, a curious onlooker, a low purr in its throat. The widow stared dumbly up at it, seeing the feathered pantaloons and the smooth, ermined chest. Black inquiring eyes. The neck seeming jointless and fluid with each small tilt of the scowling head. She wondered momentarily whether this creature was her watcher, her keeper. But the thought fell in on itself, because the widow knew she had no keeper.
She put her face in her hands and wept dryly while the forest heaved skyward in green and swaying protection.
IN PROFOUND BLACKNESS that night, the widow ventured forth with her arms out before her, proceeding as slow as mist along the ground, her eyes warring with a blindness she could scarcely believe. The world revealing itself in pure sound, the movements of small animals, wind above her in the trees, and something more, some hint in the air that describes topography: a hollowness in the draws and gullies, while up on the ridges sound goes wide. She would stop for minutes at a time and listen. Small chirrups from above. Two cedars creaking together. Here she was again fleeing in the dark, her heart cored out and empty, too tired even to cry. Only now she had nothing. No little grey mare, no coat, no food. No rifle. No William Moreland coming to snatch her away from death. Even the little Bible was gone, lost in the landslide. What could it give her now? Could it light her way? Could it garrotte a rabbit? Alone again, with only the clothes on her body, she stood among the murmurings. In another time she might have wished herself by her father’s side, attending to his lectures on science and nature, but that life was also gone. She could no longer recall clearly her father’s face.
CLOSE TO MORNING she smelled something rank on the air, an acrid sweetness burned off to its essence and soaking in the dew. She followed it until she reached a scorched line of grass, like a black rivulet along the ground. Just beyond it was another, running along in the same direction, blown by the wind. She followed these till they ran out to nothing, then she turned and followed them back the other way. Small licks of blackness crawled up the trunks of trees, some as high as her knees — scorch marks where fire had been. The smell absurdly strong, peculiar. When she came upon the blackened clearing she suspected where she was. She cast about for some proof and there it was — Giovanni’s ruined still. She had stumbled upon the cat skinner’s home. No one else had ever seen it.
Nothing moved in the clearing. A raised, V-shaped wooden trough ran downhill and along it gurgled a constant thumb’s width of water. She stepped over this and into the clearing. Everything was black or grey. Incinerated grass lay flat along the ground, stiff and colourless. The copper kettle was the size and shape of a fat man’s torso. It had been standing within a low stone furnace, enclosed to its widest point and probably boiling mash when the shaking earth caused it to blow off and land twenty feet away with burst welding brads, a bent cap, and its steam pipe pointed skyward. The furnace on which it had stood was made of rock and clay, now scorched and topless, the mortar between the bricks baked to a chalky white. A condenser coil hung from a tree branch, like some enormous Christmas ornament. Here and there a shattered gallon bottle, several metal hoops on the ground among the charred remains of barrels. From the source of the explosion, which was the furnace, fire had spread out down-wind in an ellipse. The trees around the still were bare of leaves and their trunks were runnelled with seams of black.
The widow called out, “Giovanni?” then immediately regretted it. Who else might hear her?
Nothing moved. No sound came from the trees.
She spent the morning scrounging among the ruins for useful things. She found very little, for it seemed the cat skinner, despite the chaos of his appearance, was a frugal, tidy man. She discovered a blackened knife with a brass tang where the wood handle had burned away. Several leather gunny sacks cooked hard. Tin cups and plates, a pot, an iron frying pan, neatly stacked and striated with ashes. Here and there he had tacked up small skins to cure on tree trunks. Rabbit, perhaps a marten, all hairless now, and smoked.
She followed the little water trough uphill and after a short climb discovered a small, dry springhouse, a cold box with a metal lid built over a natural spring. It would keep food cool in summer and unfrozen in winter. The widow fished it open and peered inside where it was cool and dank. It was empty but for a can of coffee grounds and a stained bag of flour. Trailing the trough uphill, she paused to palm up a little water to drink. Turning to flick her fingers away she saw something move — a door hung with some kind of blanket that swayed in a breeze. She had found Giovanni’s living quarters. She might easily have wandered past it, for it was thickly camouflaged and partially dug into the hill. The fire had not reached here — Giovanni was sensible enough to live at some remove from his still. She approached the strange, half-buried building. It was a towering lean-to with a door made of thick hide and appropriate in size to a giant, and surprisingly spacious inside. The widow ventured in, whispering his name, but the room was empty.
Everything was unearthly silent, and slowly there rose to her nostrils a funk of human odour, profound and intimate and complex. Eventually her eyes adjusted to the dim interior light and she saw the contours of Giovanni’s furnishings. Most of the room was bed, a wide, deep platform lavishly strewn with blankets and hides and two strangely homey pillows. All along the wall stood a row of books, every one in Italian, or so she guessed. There was a small fireplace at the back whose chimney must have poked out somewhere uphill, hidden among the trees. Along the mantel he had set out a line of fanged skulls, most of which the widow judged to be cats. A fox and a raccoon among them. A line of waxen grimaces, one of which held a cigarette between its dry jaws. The widow snorted.
She sat on the bed listening intently to the world outside. Not a footstep, not a breath. She remembered a time when she had relied on her little horse to alert her to the presence of other animals. Now she relied on herself. If anyone came, what could she do? She had no defence but to remain still, a rabbit in the underbrush trusting the murmuring instinct of its blood.
She woke with a start. Shot up out of the bed and froze. It was dusk and it was silent. The widow had no recollection of falling asleep, nor of what had woken her. She stood in the strange, capacious hovel, her heart pounding and a familiar nausea rising in her. Hungry. She was hungry. She stepped from the lean-to and made her way slowly to the clearing. The sun had faded to nothing — a pale evening sky in which hung a crescent moon, while here, under the cover of the forest, shadow reigned. It was the time for animals to come out.
In the dusk she made her way back up to the springhouse, where she reached in and collected its contents. The bag of flour smelled vulgar, but it seemed dry, free of bugs. She clumped back down to the empty clearing, went to the furnace, scraped ashes out of its guts, and built a fire in the firebox. It was hard to find wood that hadn’t already been burned. Here she sat before the low, glowing firebox, mixing flour and water into a ball of unleavened dough for hardtack bread. With no leavening agent she was obliged to knead relentlessly. On the upper surface of the furnace she had placed the tin cooking pot, now brewing coffee. She sat with the bowl between her enclosing legs and bore down on the dough with both hands, watching the whitish, larval substance roll and squelch under her knuckles.
Abruptly, she leaped up and strode a few paces away before retching dryly over the ferns. Tears in her eyes. She spat, sighed hollowly. A racket of birds came from somewhere far uphill. Then the widow returned to her bowl and blew a few ants away from its rim and went back to work. She was so hungry.
When full night came she was watching the bright, little firebox, lost in meditation, hunched and half-lit, like some infinitely old, primeval creature turning its tired back on the dark.
She remembered a cold hand, once, holding hers — some old church woman taking the miserable child on an outing to give her parents one moment of peace. The woman had led her through the gates of a travelling fair and into an enormous crowd. They had hurried past a cacophony of little booths and tents in the failing light of a fall afternoon, the girl craning to see stuffed animals and wax-faced dollies swimming past. Tripping on her shoes. The cold hand leading her urgently onward, then stopping suddenly to queue outside a large tent. An enormous pot-bellied man with jacket and vest, holding a roll of tickets, looked down at them.
“Little one won’t like it,” he said. “And she’s too young.”
“She’s twelve.”
“She isn’t, either. You can leave her here.”
“I can’t leave her.”
He looked down and sniffed, the tickets coming slowly from the roll. “Well, she won’t like it.”
So in they went, along a dark canvas tunnel hung with posters and placards showing roaring beasts and recoiling women. And then they entered a small room full of benches crammed with people — a scent upon the air, part sawdust and part rot, reminding her of a butcher’s shop. There was a barker whose diction was antique, and he strutted the stage, bellowing about the wonders about to be revealed. Finally, out ran a naked man slung with masses of weedy hair, incredible amounts of hair, which obscured even his face and feet, and he roared and shook a bloodied rabbit, trying to terrify the women in the front row, who merely pulled their chins in and fanned themselves. Mary was not afraid at all, for she assumed he was wearing some kind of ridiculous suit and that it was a ruse. So she sat among the crowd and scowled as they did.
Perversions of nature were followed by the wonders of science, the barker holding out his hands, inviting the assembled to imagine a benign future in which every malady has its parallel cure, and even death might be conquered. Her caretaker seized her hand and bent to whisper, “Oh, Mary, wait till you see it!” There came the thin wail of an infant, and the old woman’s hand shook hers in pure excitement. Through a door to stage right came a slatternly, middle-aged woman done up like a nurse in aprons and a stiff bonnet, wheeling before her a table, and on the table sat a bizarre glass box festooned with pipes and bellows. Inside lay a squirming baby. The barker hurried behind this woman, helping to lift and drag along an umbilicus of insulated wires. In an instant there was a crush of onlookers around the object. Mary was dragged from her seat to go and see.
A peculiar noise emanated from the box, a mechanical whup-whup-whup, and the baby’s angry cries were strangely muffled. Mary put her fingers against the glass; it was warm, with a slight accumulation of vapour on the inside. The baby was impossibly small and had a bad colour. The barker’s patter diminished, and subsided in theatrical revelation, whispering that this otherworldly glass object, despite its frightful look, was as warm and nurturing as the mother’s body, and that the child would die the moment it was taken from its embrace. Quiet fell over the people, and they all gazed down on the infant, and the baby, too, seemed to stop its struggles and open its fists. It appeared to be attending to the movements of crowd, the whispering female voices just beyond the glass. And then, almost abruptly, the moment was over, the barker swooping down on them with gestures to depart, and they were ushered outside, goodbye goodbye, tell your friends, tell your neighbours. The exit door loomed. Then Mary found herself walking alongside the muddy skirts of her keeper. It was already growing dark.
Together, they settled side by side at a little tea tent. The waiter brought them sugary sodas, and the old woman splurged on a cream bun, which they tore into pieces and shared. She dabbed constantly at Mary’s face and dress, worrying about bringing her home a mess because someone else would have to deal with it, and what’s the point in offering help if you just make more work for people? The gentle hand touching her face, the woman’s soft voice, her bare wrists emerging from the frilled black cuffs, so unlike her grandmother’s, no jingle of charm bracelets, no scolding. How to prolong this visit? How to stay with this woman? The child looked into her soda, as if she could divine the answer from the drifts of sugar at the bottom of it — the spoon going clockwise or counter-clockwise, the number of stirrings, the left or right hand holding the spoon; everything seemed significant.
A raised voice behind them said, “Well, I think it’s a miracle.”
“Oh, my eye,” said another. “They just put a sick baby in a box and call it science. The whole thing was a crock.”
Mary had looked up at her babysitter with inquiring eyes and the old woman looked down at her with something of the same curiosity. “I think it was real,” the old woman said.
“But he was a fake hairy man?”
“That was genuine, I’m afraid. It’s a disease of some sort.”
But the girl’s heart knew otherwise. Deception hung everywhere around them, in the lanterns and painted signs, the music and voices, the antic delight of it all, the dusty, costumed barkers and the wretched touts full of practised charm. Even in this kind old woman. It was all a diversion, an artifice that stood in brief defiance of the real. By the fairground fence, a ring of exhausted Shetlands with dirty manes slept on their feet. Someone had draped their shoulders with bright garlands of paper flowers, and there was a lantern hung from the fence, and a sign she could not read.
This had been her last image of the fair, for soon the old woman took her by the hand and together they hurried along the graded road to home, where a maid met them at the door and Mary was hustled off to bed.
Now, the widow put a weathered hand to her cheek and stared into the fire, seeing again the waiting beasts, and the inscrutable sign, its message forever undeliverable. Try as she might, she could not recall the words. Impossible, too, to lean close to the little girl and whisper warnings or counsel in her ear, to tell her the course of things. But if she could have, what then? What great benefit would come of that magic? Time would pass just as surely, day turn to night. The hand on this cheek might be softer, these trees not here. The Reverend would be unknown to her, and still dead. Her baby boy would not have existed, just as he didn’t exist now.
Because the widow was lost in these thoughts, she failed to attend to the sounds coming through the trees. And when she did, it was too late. The darkness was suddenly full of noise and movement, all of it rushing toward her. They had come! They had followed her! She got to her feet, but there was no more running in her, so she simply stood and waited. Not bothering to blink or breathe or get on with her life in any way, bracing herself for the gunshot. It was so black. Where were they? And then one of the twins materialized out of the night and came at her with his rifle raised, moving slowly now, the way a dog stalks a squirrel. Moonlight on his hat, his long upper arms, the long barrel. He was within feet. She could smell him. She could hear his breath coming and going. And then they were together, joined by the rifle’s cold muzzle where it touched her above the left eye. Somewhere out in the dark, the other twin was making his slow, stumbling way toward them.
“Go ahead,” she said, willing her knees to keep her standing.
But he just looked at her, his eyes shifting leisurely in the firelight.
THE RIDGERUNNER sat primly on a log by the enormous fire holding a fistful of bannock and trying not to make eye contact with the dogs. There were at least eight of them and they circled him the way wolves do, heads low, making small yips to one another. The woman had gone away to gather a few things he might like to trade for, and a moment later these dogs had come out of the dark. The Ridgerunner did not move, but he watched them with his peripheral vision. If worse came to worst he could throw his bread. It wouldn’t work on wolves, but maybe it would on dogs.
The woman, Helen, had not been able to give him any information. She’d never heard of Mary Boulton, and she’d not seen another white woman in many months. Maybe years. He had nearly slumped when she’d said it. If not for these dogs, he would have hiked up his packsack, slipped away into the darkness again, and vanished. For what was the point in staying? But now he was pinned down by a pack of stealthy, slat-sided Indian dogs who neither knew him nor trusted him, and they figured he could do without his bannock.
First one dog turned, then they all froze and looked into the dark. The woman was coming back. They darted guiltily around, backing away from her into the long grass, skirmishing with one another as they went.
“There we go,” she sighed and placed on the ground a blanket that was wrapped around various objects. She handed him a bowl of stew with a tin spoon in it. Moreland regretted the offer of food, for he had done this with Indians before and he knew it was rude to eat and buy nothing, and he already knew what he would see inside that blanket — mostly ammunition and knives, but possibly needles and gut for repairs, things to eat, things to smoke, hats, shirts. He didn’t need or want any of it. He only wanted one thing. And it wasn’t here.
“Eat,” the woman said kindly, and she watched as he spooned up the stew. It was ridiculously good, fragrant and rich, and after so long in the cold upper world, Moreland was starving. He beamed a grateful smile at Helen, gobbling too fast to thank her. A man came wandering up and sat down close to her. He was tall and kept his hair in two braids, and his face was distinctly unfriendly. After a long interval he said, “What do you want that woman for?”
