Far North (10 page)

The man who trained us was called Bill Evans. He came out from Alaska and they gave him a classroom above the bank to teach us in.

I loved Bill Evans. He was fat and crusty. He smoked and swore and he had no patience with city folk and their anxiety about being true to their founding principles and the long arguments about what to call us.

‘Too few, too late,’ he said. ‘Little Quaker village at the end of the world. You don’t need a police force. You need an army.’

Some families would have no truck with it. In spite of what was happening to their city, they preferred to move away. In spite of being robbed by hungry people. In spite of what happened to their daughters.

 *

We provoked hate from people who said they didn’t believe in hate. Some would spit at us when we patrolled the town. The key was not to take it personal. They could feel the world they’d created slipping away, and we had become the symbol of it. The city was unsafe and they blamed us, the hated lawmen.

Now all that was ancient history. The towns were gone and the people thatpreyed on them had moved elsewhere. The Far North looked like it was me, and Horeb, and the scattered Tungus, and the ghost of a hope that tickled my chest with that piece of broken wing.

When Noah sends the birds out onto the flooded earth and one brings back a leaf – that was what the plane was to me. It meant we weren’t forgotten. Someone else had survived the flood. Someone was beached on Ararat and the waters were in retreat.

Sometimes I couldn’t help myself and I built a life in my head, planning what this new world would be like. And that’s when I felt I understood my father a little, because the world I wanted resembled the place he must have had in mind when he moved out to the Far North. And I realized that it wasn’t his fault. It was in the nature of the times. It was in the nature of the calamities that had struck our planet. People had all those possibilities in them, devil and angel, depending on how the times moved them. Like the seed that splits concrete, it was the appetite for life in them that made them so destructive. It was just everyone’s misfortune to be born in times when the wherewithal for living had got so scarce.

Well, it’s a fact with me that I like people more the less I see of them. And after two days of thinking like this I was almost ready to give the Reverend Boathwaite a hug. It may not seem it, but I have a soft heart. There’s a streak of fond soil in me that Ping put roots into, and they tore me up when she went.

 *

I didn’t see any game the first day, but by a stroke of luck I stumbled onto some caribou on the morning of the second. In fact, when I held out my bare hand and yelled ‘
makh,
makh
’, as though I had brought salt for them to lick, they came nosing up to find it. I knew from this they’d belonged to someone once.

Though they came up close, they soon dropped back when they learned there was no salt to be had, and they were leery of being roped. I could have chased around all day and not caught a single one of them, so I decided to work a little sideways.

I dropped my pants and crouched down, shuffling a little in my boots, to spread the piss around in the snow. You can’t keep caribou away from fresh piss. The heat and the salt is like apple pie to them. And while they were jostling each other to get to the freshest patches, I pulled up my pants and roped six of them.

It still wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to get them moving as a team. Every now and again, one or two would fix on a patch of lichen and I would have to tether the others while I tried to shift them, because I just wasn’t strong enough to manhandle all six. But it was gratifying to have gathered so much food, and I knew that with the hunger there was in Horeb there would be nothing wasted and they’d get eaten up hooves and all.

So we made our slow way back and arrived at the stockade towards late afternoon on the third day.

The gatekeeper slid open his spyhole and called for me to wait while he fetched the Reverend.

I greeted Boathwaite all friendly, since though I was tired I was proud of my haul, and the hard work seemed to have got the life flowing through me again. ‘I expect you’ll be wanting these,’ I said, and weigh my guns at him. He flinched, then saw I meant no harm, and smiled as he took them from me.

They must have fallen on me just as soon as I entered the gate, though my recollection of it is not clear. There was a heavy blow on my shoulders as though a branch had fallen on me, and a dull pain which made me sink to my knees.

I couldn’t tell you how many of them attacked me, or even what they used. The only face I remember belonged to the round-eyed boy I had met that first time in the woods, but now it was all snarled up with hate, and I could hear him screaming ‘traitor’ as he broke my arm with a club. I thought to myself,
so this is how it is
, and curled up, limp, on the ground since there was no way to fight all of them. But once I was down the beating eased, and they dragged me by my feet into a lean-to by the wall of the stockade that was not much bigger than a doghouse.

They gave me a few kicks as they squeezed me in it, and I lashed back at them, and called them foul names, saving my best expressions for the two-faced Reverend. Then someone had the idea of throwing a bucket of water on me to shut me up. It was still afternoon, but the air was cold enough that my damp clothes seemed to leech out all the heat in my bones. Still, I kept cursing them through clenched blue lips, knowing that if I fell unconscious now the cold might well finish me off. Luckily, the water had hit me at an angle and enough of my body was dry to keep me alive. But when they finally pulled me out, towards nightfall, I had ice in my hair and I was shivering as though racked with a fever.

Boathwaite and a few of the elders had set up chairs in the chapel. They sat me on a stool in the middle of them, lower than the others and placed so I had to twist according to who was addressing me. My hands and feet had been tied with rawhide thongs hard enough to cut into the skin and I had to half-hop, half-shuffle into their presence. And the break in my arm ached like hell every time I jarred it.

The Reverend had a sombre face on him and he told me he’d had no choice but to submit to the will of his flock in having me arrested.

I asked what possible reason they had for thinking that this was fair dealing towards me and one of the elders stood up in a rage and said, what right had a deceitful bitch like me to expect fair dealing? I said he was very brave in threatening me, bound as I was, but I still had no idea what I might have done to earn this hatred from them.

Boathwaite said they had a number of charges to examine against me, of which the most serious was spying, but that they were also concerned to find out for what reason I had tried to pass myself off as a man.

I said I never passed myself off as anything, but that if people were minded to think of me as a man I never felt the need to correct them. Think of me as you like, I said.

And the old man who had abused me before leaped up and said he would think of me as a deceitful, disfigured bitch.

I could tell that Boathwaite thought that this was taking things too far, and he told the man to be seated.

‘What is more serious,’ he went on, ‘is that among your possessions we found certain notebooks written in cipher. Show her the book, Dr Pritchard.’

Dr Pritchard was a ginger man of about fifty who had so far been silent but who I recognized as being the man who had thrown the water on me. He held a battered old book about the size of a hymnal under my nose and opened it up. Its frayed pages were covered with letters or signs that had been inked by hand. Someone had taken great pains to write it, but it wasn’t me, since I had never seen it before in my life and I told them so.

‘Then how did it come to be among your possessions?’

I said they ought to know that better than me since they put it there.

‘Do you deny that this is your work?’

‘I do,’ I said.

They seemed almost pleased with my answer, although they could have expected no other. I said nothing more to them that evening and they soon took me away to a cellar in another part of the stockade.

 *

For the most part of two weeks they kept me in the cellar, fed me slops, and hauled me out for questioning at odd hours of the night, or early morning. Dr Pritchard was sometimes the questioner, and sometimes Boathwaite.

Aside from the lack of sleep and the bad food there was no terrible hardship. Each time they questioned me, they produced more fake books that they said I had been carrying until it seemed they must have thought I was a travelling library.

They asked me about all sorts of things: where I was from, why I was dressed as a man, about my face. I answered them as straight as I could.

The bell went off in my head when they started talking about accomplices, and mentioning names of people in Horeb who I had never even heard of. Jacob Vetch was one that came up over and over again. And when I said I didn’t know him, they snorted and grew impatient with me.

It turned out that I was the liar that time. They brought me in the next day, hooded, and told me that I would now meet Jacob Vetch face to face.

They pulled off the hood and I stood blinking in the light for a moment. There were more of them in the chapel this time. Boathwaite sat apart from us, making notes.

Jacob Vetch sat slumped on a stool in front of them. Of course, I had met him before: he was the old man with the gun who had been guarding the woodcutters the first day I ever clapped eyes on Horeb.

That wasn’t the surprise. They had given him a proper working over. One of his ears was torn and he had a raw stump for a thumb. It seemed like my coming had been a boon to Vetch’s enemies. I’ve often wondered what the poor man had done to deserve such usage. I’ve seen enough cruelty to know it lights on the unlucky more often than the guilty. Horeb was a place staring into the twilight, as my city had been once. Those last days were the worst for us too.

Boathwaite’s eye met mine and I felt a flash of understanding pass between us. Bill Evans used to call that the cold reading. He said that in detective work sometimes the very best can slip into a man’s skin and know everything that he knows, feel everything that he feels. Bill reckoned I had a gift for it because of being a woman. It’s hard to hate someone you’ve cold-read. You see there is a reason be their actions. And that even people with as much front as the Rev are split inside of themselves.

In that moment, I could see that Boathwaite lived in fear of the people he led. Love and mercy wouldn’t guarantee their obedience. They were disappointed and hungry. Boathwaite had to use the patterns of older gods to keep them cowed: terror and mercy, like twin shadows of an old totem that gets fed with blood. Poor Vetch would die to terrifiy those half-starved people. And all of this I sensed Boathwaite knew as plain as I did. That look told me too that a part of Boathwaite held himself in contempt for what he’d sunk to. But it was no consolation to me. Something in him was of the utmost dark and I knew he would want to stub me out for having seen it.

 *

They built a gallows that evening and at dawn they marched us out. There were four of us. I don’t know where they’d kept the other three, but they were in much worse shape than I was.

Vetch’s hand and ear had been patched up, but his face was greyer than boiled beef.

Boathwaite said as ringleader of a treasonous plot against the people of Horeb, he could expect no sympathy, but he was entitled to his last words.

Vetch mumbled a prayer and then they pushed him off the scaffold. The drop was too short and he kicked until he strangled.

Time slowed down as they came to me. I must remember all of this, I thought. Odd thoughts were taking shape in my head. How strange to be hanged as a traitor. How strange to be hanged just when my broken arm was beginning to knit. Boathwaite said I had been found guilty of conspiring too and sentenced to death and what did I have to say?

All their eyes were on me, waiting for me to speak, but no words came. I looked at their dingy clothes, and the colours of all of them that seemed like the colours of the earth that would swallow me up.

That time at the lake I hadn’t been in my right mind. My brain was all mixed up, as though I hadn’t slept for a month, and the pain of leaving the world had seemed less sharp. But now, I felt sad.

Even out here in the cold, six weeks at least away from spring, the sky still had some beauty in it, and the light on the melted ice looked moist and clear as a child’s eye.

There was a creak as Jacob Vetch’s body twisted on the rope beside me.

With the practice I’ve had at last words, you’d think I’d be better at it. In fact, my intention was to face them out with silence and a look of loathing, but at the last moment, something blurted out of my mouth that makes even less sense now that I’ve had all these years to think about it.

‘What you take from me is not mine,’ I said, and the pause stretched out afterwards as they waited for something else, but I was wise enough to know that it would be even worse to add to it.

‘The death penalty has a biblical sanction,’ said Boathwaite. His voice was loud and it had a hoarseness to it that grated like an ice saw. ‘For a long time, our people preached against it. But Jesus came to fulfil the prophecies of his Father in the Old Testament. Jesus himself is God. And the one thing he cannot do is contradichimself. He never scrupled to punish with death the enemies of the Holy Spirit.’ There was a muttered amen from the people.

Good night, Makepeace, I thought. I prepared for the push in the small of the back, the panic, and the choking heat of blood in my throat. You have to lay back and breathe, I said to myself. I figured that submission would lessen the pain better than going tight and kicking.

‘Even so,’ he said, ‘the blood of Jesus himself was spilt in mercy, and that mercy can in some instances countermand the sternness of chastisement. In this case, since the condemned is a female, we have decided to commute the sentence to one of indefinite servitude.’