Far North (8 page)

‘I really am from Evangeline,’ I said. And his confusion was so great that he actually put down the gun. I told you he was no soldier.

The other two were on his shoulder with a ‘What’s he say?’

‘He says he’s from Evangeline.’

That they took me for a man suited me fine. Those weeks of travelling certainly hadn’t made me any prettier.

I asked if anyone minded if I stood up, and one of the two woodcutters gave me a hand to my feet. Then I introduced myself by name, but didn’t get any kind of response out of them. They were staring at me in silence, so to prod them into conversation I asked where they were from. The woodcutter who’d helped me up said, ‘Horeb.’

So now it was my turn to be puzzled. By their appearance and their English, I took them for settlers, but there was no settlement in the whole of the Far North I knew of that went by that name. And the notion that anyone alive now could have dredged up the will and the strength to settle a new place – that was almost beyond my comprehension.

I had the feeling of something inside me that flipped like a fish in a net. It was hope. As much as I bad-mouth people in general and think the worst of them, I’m secretly waiting for them to surprise me. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to give up on them wholly. Even though they are nine and ninetenths dirt, now and again they are capable of something angelic. I can’t say that it restores my faith, because I really had none in the first place, but when it happens it does confuse you.

Still, my new friends weren’t in any hurry to weigh me down with their hospitality. I couldn’t help feeling that they wished I would disappear much as I’d arrived. I explained to them that I had two horses with me, that I’d been travelling for weeks, and I’d be grateful to water my animals and wash, if it wasn’t putting them to any trouble.

They weren’t as quick to agree or as cordial as you might expect, and a number of doubtful glances passed between them before the man with the gun nodded, and the friendlier of the two woodcutters came with me while I fetched the animals.

Then I waited beside the old man while the other two finished their job of cutting. He couldn’t but have been curious about me, or at least where I’d come from. And I had plenty of questions I wanted to put to him, but each time I asked him something he wandered off to poke his gun into the woods, as if at any minute he was expecting us to be surrounded.

We didn’t leave that place for another hour at least. The men loaded their sled with their logs, and put themselves into harness to tow it. They were a sombre bunch, hardly sharing a word with each other, and I wondered if they always talked this little, or if it was my being there that had m"0em" widtthem so shy.

I walked my horses, so as to keep the men company, and finally one of the two in harness asked me what it was bringing me to New Judea. It had been so long since I’d heard anybody call it that, that it took me a second to figure out what he meant.

It almost made me laugh to see these men barely perching on their piece of the world and still calling it by the old name.

I told him his question put me in mind of the old story about the hunter who goes to stay with his friend in the woods and on the way he gets mauled by a bear.

He shook his head at me to say the story rang no bells with him.

Our little walk together was pretty short on entertainment, so I decided to tell them how it happens.

The hunter’s going through the woods. It’s winter, and the bear’s what the Russians here used to call a
shatoon
– which is to say, a bear that’s woken up out of his winter sleep because he couldn’t lay down enough fat in summer on account of food being short, salmon not running, no berries, and so forth.

Their eyes were all big and fixed me on now, and it felt like I was telling the story to children. The one in particular who’d asked me the question had a pair of blue eyes that were as round and trusting as a couple of open mouths. His face spurred me to pad the story out with details because I liked the way he was drinking it all in.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you can imagine, there’s nothing ornerier than a skinny, wakeful bear in February, with its fur hanging all baggy from starvation. What should this bear see but a juicy hunter making his way through the forest. Now, the bear’s drooling with hunger at the idea of eating this man and it leaps out and takes a big bite of him.

‘The hunter and the bear struggle for a while, but the bear’s more hungry, more strong, and more desperate. Then just as those big jaws are about to crush the hunter’s head like a pine cone, he manages somehow to wriggle free and sprint away to freedom.

‘Now you can picture for yourselves how battered and raggedy he is when he shows up at his friend’s cabin. He’s more or less alive, but the bear has taken a big chunk of his arm, and scratched up his face with its claws. Add to which, he’s dizzy with blood loss. So he’s banging on the door, in need of water and bandages to stanch the bleeding.

‘Now his friend opens up, takes one look at him, and says, in his gravelly deadpan way: “I see you already met Flossie.”’

Maybe I had just lost my knack of telling a story. I certainly hadn’t had the opportunity to visit with anyone for any length of time lately. There was a silence after I stopped speaking that reminded me of the
clang
when the two of them put down the saw on the tree trunk.

And then the man with the gun said: ‘It’s bad for bears round here. Seems like the fewer of us there is, the more there is of them.’

And the man with the round blue eyes said nothing at all, but looked a little disappointed, as if he’d been expecting some other kind of story.

I explained to them that I’d told them this because they’d call the place New Judea.

They still looked at me puzzled.

‘I guess I’m saying,’ I said, ‘that when a thing is terrible and dangerous, a man needs to find a pretty name for it to let himself sleep a little easier at night.’

That didn’t make it any plainer for them and my spelling it out bled any drop of humour from the story altogether.

‘What do you call this place then?’ said the round-eyed man.

I couldn’t answer him. In my mind, I didn’t gave it a name at all. I wasn’t like the Tungus, who had been there so long that all the places meant something to them. To me it was just the city, the land, the snow, the sky, the bears. If it was any place, to me it was the Far North.

My father had an expression for a thing that turned out bad. He’d say it had gone west. But going west always sounded pretty good to me. After all, westwards is the path of the sun. And through as much history as I know of, people have moved west to settle and find freedom. But our world had gone north, truly gone north, and just how far north, I was beginning to learn.

Our way turned off the road and onto a narrow track through the forest. We’d been going for about fifteen minutes. I said, ‘You gentlemen are awful choosy about the wood you cut.’

The man with the gun knew what I was getting at, so at least he wasn’t simple. ‘We don’t like to fell it too near the town. We live quiet and we don’t like to be bothered none.’

That made sense to me. I’d been lucky so far, but that road could bring you no end of trouble.

We picked our way a little further through the forest until finally we drew near to the place they called Horeb.

It wasn’t anything like I’d been expecting. They had put a lot of work into her, no doubt, but it wasn’t a settlement our parents would have thought too highly of.

The narrow path wound into a clearing about an acre square, and smack in the middle was a five-sided stockade with a gateway let in to it. It must have enclosed about a quarter of an acre of land. I guessed there were a number of buildings inside it, because there were separate plumes of smoke rising up.

The men asked me to wait and then disappeared inside with their logs.

They were a long time coming out, and I could see eyes peering at me through chinks in the palings, so that I began to wonder if some kind of ambush was being set for me. It must have been close to twenty minutes that passed before the front gate was raised up, and out came half a dozen men, led by one in a long black robe, and what was stranger, beside him a woman of about my own age, who laid a basket at my feet that had some grey salt in it, and the smallest loaf of bread I had ever seen.

It was a strange little welcoming party, and a couple of the faces in it were not exactly friendly. The man in black who led them stared at me with a holy look that made me want to giggle.

He embraced me, and I stiffened in spite of myself, because I didn’t like to be touched that way by a man, and I noticed that he had some kind of perfume on. ‘Welcome, brother,’said. ‘Our remnant. Remnant of a remnant.’

And before I could think of anything to reply to him, they were all on their knees and he was leading them in a prayer of thanksgiving. I stood there, feeling foolish, but knowing I’d feel more foolish if I joined them, so I snatched off my hat as a mark of respect, and waited for them to finish. And now instead of just feeling foolish, I felt foolish and my ears were beginning to freeze.

When the prayer was over, they stood up again and there was a pause as if they were expecting something from me. It reminded me that for all the hardships I put up with in my life, awkward silences weren’t generally one of them. I looked at them all and recognized the faces of the three men I’d encountered in the forest, and they were all of them waiting for me to speak.

I cleared my throat and told them my name, and where I’d come from, and thanked them for their kindness. They still seemed to want more, so I added that, though I had never heard of a settlement called Horeb until just this day, they were a credit to their folk.

‘Amen,’ said the perfumed man in black, and he took my arm to lead me in, nodding at the woman to gather up the bread and salt.

‘Brother,’ he said, ‘we can stable your horses with ours. But, as a sign of peace, I ask you to surrender those guns you’re carrying while you’re our guest.’

He could see me hesitate. ‘I’ll vouch personally for them.’ What it was that made me trust him, I can’t say for sure, but there was something about him that reminded me of one of my uncles. He must have been around fifty. I could see that he wasn’t all seriousness, and I liked the way that he bossed them all without ever raising his voice.

I unbuckled the belt and handed it to him, and we went inside.

 *

The settlement seemed bigger in than out. It had a number of dwellings in the yard, and smaller shacks built right against the wall. There must have been thirty to forty people there altogether, including children, at least one babe-in-arms, and several barely old enough to walk. It had been a long time since I’d seen a child – at least, a living one. Their eyes followed me as I followed my host across the yard to the largest of all the dwellings. They all looked well enough, if a little grubby and underfed.

We shucked off our footwear and our outdoor clothes in the porch and went into a long plain room that reminded me of the old meeting house at home, except it had a cross at one end, and some Mary and Child pictures, none of which they would have stood for where I came from.

Reverend Boathwaite, which is what I came to know him as, invited me to sit with my legs under a low round table that had a kettle of hot charcoals beneath it and a thick cotton cover, somewhat of an asiatic style. Six or seven of us as sat there, with our feet under the cloth, warm enough over that brazier. The Reverend locked my guns in a box that he put back under the altar, and then he joined us.

The man with the frost-pinched nose set down a battered urn and a dish of hard candy that looked like it was ten years old. The Reverend poured out the tea and passed it around the table.

‘I won’t pretend that these are good times for my flock,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but compared to elsewhere, you’re thriving.’ The enamel mug they gave me had been part-cleaned at best, and smelled of caribou stew.

‘Are things bad in Evangeline?’

The men round the table stopped fighting over the candies and waited for me to say something.

‘What things?’ I said. ‘There’s no one there.’ I told him what he pretty nearly must have known himself. The years of calamity and migration as starving people came out of the south. The hungry and the desperate who came to prey on a people gone soft with compassion. I said how we’d belatedly designated a few of us constables and set us to keep the peace, but by then we were overrun. ‘In any case, the townsfolk themselves were among the worst of them. It turns out that goodness only lives when the times permit it.’

‘Well, we allow more hope than that, Mr Makepeace.’

‘Esperanza’s the same,’ I went on. ‘I passed through on my way here. Homerton too, I expect.’

‘If that’s where you’re headed, I can save you a journey. All that you see here is what’s left of the place.’

I told him that I thought the name of this place was Horeb.

‘Or New Homerton, you could call it.’ His grin hadn’t an ounce of humour in it. He rubbed his tired, unslept eyes with one hand as his other reached for a candy.

Looking round at all their dark, smoked-meat faces, I though how much they resembled Tungus. It was as though they’d come here with their European faces as blank as bars of white soap and had new asiatic ones carved out of them by the cold and the wind.

‘What happened to the city?’

Boathwaite shook his head. I felt such a weariness in him. ‘Much like you said. Rather late in the day, we had to adopt a more muscular variant of our beliefs. We had to let go of a lot of things that were precious to us.’

I tried to imagine my father saying it. But to him that would have been total defeat. In his mouth it would have meant: ‘We came here and lost everything.’

‘Things have a life built into them,’ said Boathwaite. ‘You just never expect to be in at the end of anything. You never expect to be among the last.’

Around him, the men nodded, or sucked tea through their candy, rather untroubled, like children whose father was doing their fretting for them.