The Outlander, page 4
DURING THE NEXT two afternoons the widow would peep into rooms to see if anyone was there and, if not, tiptoe in and look around. In this way, she familiarized herself with the house and the private habits and details of the women who lived there. She scrutinized the blotter in the old woman’s library and saw incredible sums mirrored and crawling its lower border. The old lady’s bedroom was as simple as a nun’s cell — two single beds separated by a bedside table and nothing else. All her feminine clutter, what little there was, was packed into the large closet, her late husband’s clothes stuffed to the back. Of the two beds, only one seemed to have borne any weight, and this was the husband’s bed — now dusty and yellowed.
Emily, it seemed, was an amateur artist. Among fallen cardigans and tumbled blankets, the floor was littered with pencil drawings of children: girls in bonnets, boys at the seaside poking sticks into the waves.
Zenta’s room had a strange, unpleasant smell to it, the odour of perfume gone bad with age. An inept alphabet sampler hung over her bed — the widow looked up close with an expert’s eye and saw a thousand minor struggles there. Bless This House Lord. Her father had often rolled his eyes at women and their petitions to God for blessings. “Shout down a well, and tell the frogs what you want,” he’d say, and her grandmother would huff and scold. He had teased her once that he would do his own sampler: Blast This House. “And not one of your tea cronies will notice, because none of them can read.”
He had been completely unaware that his own daughter did not, strictly speaking, read. She read the way others might make their way through a mathematical equation, each part decoded in turn, held in the memory while the next was decoded, the whole revealing itself over a long time. As a child, she was never expected to write anything. Her small hands got better at needlepoint, forming rows of letters; she listened as a young maid sang the alphabet song in the kitchen; she watched as her father set up block letters on the church sign. L-U-K-E. She suspected that for other people words might come fully formed and recognizable, not a jumble of parts, but as familiar as faces. For her, there were only letters, dull and flat as cars in a train. Words sounded out letter by letter, the sound often defying meaning. Friend. Enough. Go back and try again.
All she was ever asked to read from was the Bible, and that rarely, so she had relied on her memory, and had devised a way to mark the pages so that she could remember. And in this way she managed to hide her weakness. Asked to read from her own Bible, sing a hymn, or chirp along with other parishioners at the minister’s call and reply, she could give a good recitation. If her father had known, what would he have said?
The widow looked now at the woollen letters of Zenta’s sampler. She tried to tamp down a bloated B, plucking at a frowsy thread, but it was hopeless. She listened for the sound of footsteps and, hearing nothing, proceeded to dig through the maid’s closet. She discovered that Zenta’s bedslippers, faded and ugly, fit her very well. The skirts were all short, above the ankle, but this was true of all maids. A servant could not carry a tray upstairs if her skirts were too long.
She went through the little boxes and cloth bags and wrapped packages in Zenta’s cupboard, and she could guess what item of feminine arcana lay in each. She herself had had masses of them. When she had found herself finally in the cabin with her new husband and she had unpacked her trousseau, the dresses with silk-covered buttons had lain in her hands like artifacts from another world. She had stood in the damp bedroom and gazed upon these clothes as if her body still stood in them. She could see herself posing at parties, sitting by a lamp and listening to her father, or huddling under a blanket in a sleigh at night as a lantern swung back and forth behind her. It had been obvious what she must do. She had packed away her former self and begun sewing clothes, rough simple things to fit her new life.
And now here she was, peering into a maid’s cupboards and trying on a maid’s slippers. How shocked her father would be to see his daughter now. She could almost conjure up his uncomprehending, questioning face. And yet he had believed so firmly in the alchemical nature of existence — that the path of a person’s life could be predicted down to the last breath, if only one could see human interaction for what it was: a collusion of physics and chemistry.
What, then, would be his explanation for this? What billiard ball had come along to knock her into this decaying house? Could he have foreseen his daughter running through fields, dogs in pursuit? Or his son-in-law struggling on the cabin floor in his own blood while she stood watching? Could he have even imagined the small grave? The child dying, his breath fading? Surely that crisis should have wrung some forewarning from the very air, from the clouds. It should have come to her in dreams, raging. And yet there had been no warning, and no remedy. From that small devastation, all this had followed. Alchemy, physics, prophecy. Darkness erased them all.
They would come soon, her husband’s brothers. She could almost feel it in the air. There would be gossip among the church people, news travelling like a smouldering fire, driven by vindictive tongues. They could not fail to find her. And yet, she could not run away in the night as she had before, without thinking. She must have a plan, give no warning, take useful things. She picked up Zenta’s boots and slipped one on.
THAT EVENING, she met Mrs. Cawthra-Elliot in the gloomy hallway, the bird lady stepping like a feeble djinn out of the murk. The widow was again in her black clothes, which were now clean.
“Go and get your Bible. Come and see me in the drawing room,” came the order. “You can read to me.”
A few minutes later, the widow came through the drawingroom door. The fire was blazing against a perfectly mild August night, and the old woman sat near it, dandling a glass of amber liquor.
“Sit,” she said. “I’ll get you a drink.”
The old woman went to a table and unstoppered a crystal bottle. Beside it was a bowl filled with huge shards of ice hacked by Emily from the icebox. Each piece was perfectly clear and too big to float. It was not lost on the widow that she was being served by the old woman, as if she were an equal. So, with tinkling glasses, they sat together by the fire. The widow smoothed the fabric of her dress over her knee and sniffed the scotch in her glass. “I don’t drink usually,” she said.
“You will. You’ll find it helps. The way some people talk, you’d think the stuff was rat poison. For women, at least.”
The old woman became thoughtful, patted the overstuffed arm of the chesterfield. “You know, I don’t hold with the view that women can’t live like men. We’re not all that unalike, the two sexes. Drinking injures us no more than it does men. Neither does a year or two at university, as I had. Of course, my husband used to say that men are stronger and so must do the heavy work. I say fiddlesticks. Look at Zenta. That woman could throw a horse over a fence.”
The widow snorted and covered her mouth in glee.
“Well,” the old lady laughed, “it’s true, isn’t it?”
“It is. Zenta frightens me a little.”
“If I were you, I’d be afraid too.” The old woman gazed into the fire. “She’s a spiteful woman. And clever. For some reason, she dislikes you more than any other person I’ve brought to the house.”
The fire wheezed in the grate and settled, gushing a renewed brightness into the room. A door to the forecourt stood open and moths floated in, seeking the brighter indoors. It was unearthly quiet.
“Where are you from, my dear?”
The question was unexpected, and it startled the widow. She had not yet constructed a plausible deception, and so she froze, the question unanswered. A lie might have ended things, shrouded her in a dull, forgettable fog. But now, inescapably, she had been silent long enough to call suspicion on herself. There was nothing for it. She simply clammed up. For a few moments, the women sat awkwardly side by side on the massive chesterfield.
“Can you at least tell me where you were born?” The old woman’s voice was unexpectedly gentle.
Still, no lie rose to the widow’s mind.
The old woman simply carried on. “I was born in Dauphin. Do you know Dauphin? No? I’m not surprised. It used to take us a week by ox cart to visit Winnipeg. I thought Winnipeg very grand. Can you believe it? We had a hundred acres, a team of oxen, a large house — well, large for those days — and a barn. My father was a doctor, and my uncle farmed. We were all in the same house. I slept in a bed with my sister until the age of fifteen, at which point I feigned a sleepwalking habit and was given my own bed. That was wicked, I know, but it was the only way. We had no toilet, no plumbing at all. They melted snow in winter for water.”
The widow, too, had melted snow in the cabin. She remembered the taste of it, shovelfuls melting away to mere cups in the pan. She saw the metal pot on the stove, a lavish mist rising into the frigid air, bricks of snow skating the rounded edges as they hissed and melted. A basket of her husband’s long johns waiting to be washed. The baby nearly silent now, needing nothing, wanting nothing, his crying done, his life winding down. And her husband sitting, eating a bowl of soup. Humming. The widow brought the glass to her lips, her hand hovering, then drifting back down to her lap.
“I remember,” the old lady continued, “that all eight of us slept for a while on a large pallet, supported by beams. And we were separated by blankets, for privacy. Since I was at the end, the hired man slept next to me. I could hear him breathing. He had a little dog that snapped at me through the blanket every time I rolled over. It was a wretched dog, named Grenadier. As I recall, it was a hideous colour, like tobacco.”
The widow realized she had been only half listening. She glanced at her benefactor, expecting to see her lost in her own thoughts too. But there was the feral face, watching intently, the eyes moving back and forth as if reading a book. The old woman only talked so that she could observe.
“It was dark much of the winter, and cold. We women spent time in our beds after the chores, just to keep warm. We sat together with the sheets pulled up to our chins, and the dogs lay at our feet and the cats crawled in under the blankets. We all had fleas. You simply lived with that fact.
“One spring, we went off to Winnipeg to buy a new stove. We had a cart and two massive oxen that together could pull almost a ton. They had the ridiculous names of Maxwell and Minnie. I was terrified one of them might step on me and kill me. As they walked past you, the ground shook. My father had purchased this pair of monsters from a man outside Russell. They were tremendously stupid, gentle animals with huge woolly heads. They looked prehistoric. Well, we lumbered along all day and through the dusk into night. There was no moon overhead, nothing to show us our way, but we all trusted in my father. I remember we were lying under many blankets, and the moon was completely blurred by mist, and beautiful, you know? So I went to sleep. Now, when I awoke, it was to the most terrific uproar, my parents shouting, the other girls screaming, and the cart leaping as if the ground itself had begun to tear apart. I realized that we were speeding through the trees at top speed, the oxen apparently gone mad. It was all I could do to seize my younger sister and hold us both to the floor of the cart.”
“What was it?” the widow said.
The bird lady smiled to see how well her tale had taken hold. “Well, I peeped my head over the railing and realized the oxen were charging toward a small light, a house perhaps, I couldn’t tell at first. And then I could see it was a barn. Alone on a frozen field, surrounded by trackless forest, was a farm, and the oxen had found it. In fact, it was their home. This was the very same farmer who had sold them to my father. Without the moon to guide him, my father had drifted too close to Russell, and the oxen had smelled home and made for it, with a vengeance. A pair of oxen can move pretty quickly when they see oats in their future. It makes sense now, doesn’t it?
“The farmer and his wife were nice people, but perhaps a little childish. They put us up for the night and fed our oxen. The wife gave us biscuits and told my sister ghost stories that failed to frighten her but kept her up all night pondering the mysteries of death. She wouldn’t let me sleep, and I was at my wits’ end to shut her up. I remember sitting up and hissing, ‘Why don’t you just go ahead and die then, and let me sleep!’ Finally, in the morning, my mother’s beloved cat could not be found. We all went searching without success for almost an hour, until finally a plaintive mewing was heard, and we found him pressed between our hosts’ mattresses. The wife had hoped to keep him. I still remember her tears as my mother carried the miserable, limp animal to the cart in the frigid morning and placed him in his cage.”
“Your mother kept the cat in a cage?
“That strikes you as odd? I suppose it was odd. But we’d be here all night if I tried to explain my mother’s mind. I’m not even sure I could.”
The bird lady sat stiffly on the soft couch by the roaring fire, her drink almost finished. The thought of her own mother seemed to wither her, to redirect her mind along a sadder path.
“I remember only cold,” she said, “snow against the doors. My father on the roof shovelling it off. Even in spring it was unbearable. My sister was put outside to play one day, missing one mitten. My mother ignored her cries to be let in. You see, in those days children were supposed to get fresh air whether they wanted it or not. By the time she got back in her hand was frostbitten. Almost frozen through. Her fingers never grew properly after that.” The old lady drew a line across the pads of her fingertips. “Never grew past here.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Oh yes. Frostbite hurts a great deal, especially once the flesh begins to thaw.”
“No. I mean, the rest of your body growing and your fingers not growing.”
“No. Well . . . I don’t know.” The old woman smiled. “What a queer question.”
The widow took a little sip of her Scotch, and it burned slowly all the way down.
“You might read to me now.” The old woman’s voice was fading. She seemed to have shrunk even farther somehow, as if she were a miniature version of her already small self, sitting lightly on the soft cushions.
Obediently, the widow put down her drink and took up her Bible. She opened it to a page — it seemed like any page but was, in fact, a deliberate choice — and she began to read in a plain, loud voice. “The Lord roars from Zion and thunders from Jerusalem; the shepherd’s pastures are scorched and the top of Carmel is dried up.” The recitation went on from there.
The bird lady tried to conceal her fascination, but it proved impossible. Finally, she leaned closer to peek over the widow’s arm at the book. The page was covered in marks and illuminations, strange symbols and pictures. The widow read in halting rushes. She only looked at the book once in a while, as a navigator does to check a map. The rest, clearly, was recited from memory. Well-rehearsed and dreamy, it went on and on, rote memory never failing, a formidable performance. Like watching a sparrow dip and surge in the air, resting as it flies, tireless, without thought. Slowly, there came into the old woman’s eyes the pall of doubt. This pet was not turning out as expected, but was following perverse lines, unknown and covert routes. The old lady looked away, and let the widow babble as she wished. “Enter the narrow gate. The gate that leads to perdition is wide, and many go that way; but the gate that leads to life is small and the road narrow, and those who find it are few.”
When sometime later Emily arrived with a tray of hot chocolate, the old lady bolted from her seat and scolded, “Not now, Emily, not now!” So, the recitation went on unhindered, until the weird symbols petered out, and memory failed, finally, and the lesson died away senselessly, and the book was closed.
IN THE MORNING, they came up the drive under a canopy of tall oak, walking in the wheel ruts with their rifles across their backs. August dandelion seeds floated across their path, as if nature itself hoped to bewitch them from their purpose and dream them into the trees. But still they came on, over the tufts in their path, through floated cobwebs, their identical faces vigilant and sober. The first building to rise into view was the barn, a wide, unpainted structure with two massive doors standing open, a tin roof, and wooden filigree along its eaves. A little cupola on top watched them come. They could see the house now too but made for the barn, because it was closer.
Jeffrey was in the stalls sorting through old bridles when the door went dim, as if a cloud had passed over. He looked up to see the silhouettes of two large men standing side by side. They had guns. Jeffrey slowly removed his cap and held it uncertainly, his eyes assessing them; then, making a decision, he screwed the cap into his back pocket. He didn’t speak, he didn’t move. He waited. He was a man accustomed to waiting. And slowly, the men, who had been stiff and unmoving as statues, began to shift and shuffle as doubt overtook and annoyed them, impelled them forward on their fine black boots into the gloom of the barn. Two horses watched them come, the animals’ long faces hanging over the stall doors with the guileless, expectant gaze common to all horses, even the hellraisers.
What Jeffrey saw were two men as similar as twins. And yet, after a moment, he could tell they were not the same at all. To his eye one was a follower, a second, identical perhaps in size and shape, and certainly colouring, standing abreast of his brother as if he were his equal, but he was not. He was somehow subordinate, in shadow, a copy not entirely faithful to the original. As if to illustrate, the other spoke first.
“We’re after a girl. People say she came through here. Your missus maybe picked her up.”
“I don’t have a missus,” said Jeffrey. The two redheads moved closer — and he was right, one moved first and the other followed.
Their eyes were the problem, he could see that now — never mind the dour and brutal cast of their faces, the sheer size of their bodies — but in their eyes, a profound cunning. Of course people would talk, yammer helplessly looking into those eyes. The people in this town, normally clannish and suspicious of strangers, would find themselves suddenly blithering. Usually, when you saw that glint in a man’s eye he was a small man, mean, and resentful of being small. How calamitous, then, to see it in a big man, and doubled.
