The Outlander (18 page)

“Stay up,” he ordered. Then he focused his attention on the
arrowhead, whose side points had sunk into his palm when he'd seized it.
Carefully, he began to extract the points, wincing, his fingers trembling. When it was
out, he flung it into the weeds and pressed the little cuts to his mouth

She lifted her skirt to check the leg, her head bonging horribly. A thin
dribble of blood issued from the obscene little hole, like sap from a maple trunk.

“Oh God,” she sighed.

“Your leg's not bad enough for us to turn back,” he
said. And then he went off to the river to get water.

Later, after a rest and a cup of water, Henry frogmarched her to her horse
and impelled her into the saddle, and they went on. He took them on a path along the
river through deepening dusk. Bats came out above them, darting low over the water and
skirting the treeline. And the riders, too, avoided the trees. Then the bats vanished,
as if puffed away, replaced minutes later by nighthawks, swooping like acrobats in the
miserly light. A breath of snow on the air. They stood their horses in the frigid
shallows and let them drink, the mare like a toy next to the bigger horse, her homely
head raised, listening. Then they went on, the widow listing in her saddle like a
drunkard. He'd told her to let go of the reins and hold the saddle horn to keep
from falling. After a long interval, she did as he said. The mare followed like a pack
horse, and the widow was the burden.

Finally, all light fled. Henry halted, and they no longer heard the hooves
below them on the scree shoreline. The horses' breath sounded hollow and small in
the night. The widow felt Henry's hands about her waist, pulling, and she slid to
the ground. With only one good leg, she sat heavily and yelped with pain, and she
remained sitting, blind, as he took the horses away. Small dots of cold hit her cheeks,
motes of snow falling from the empty heights. He was removing the tack. She heard the
whup of leather cinches being undone, stirrups clacking against river stones at a little
distance. The horses shaking like dogs, blowing, glad to get the saddles off. The sound
of him currying the animals down with the blankets, then flapping the blankets out, one
by one, near her.

“Yours,” he said and stamped his foot. The nearest one. She
rolled over onto it, her arms across her chest, and slept on rocks. Slept despite the
howling of her wound. In the middle of the night, she dragged the blanket round her and
cocooned. Her face covered. Her breath like a furnace.

“Wake up.” His voice came in the dark. A thin edge of a
question in it — in her dream, he thought she was dead, that she'd died
during the night. A body wrapped in its shroud ready for the river, while inside, a sly,
dreaming ghost awaits. Her mind drifted off again. Then a boot, nudging her. “Up
now.”

They had bannock and coffee in the pre-dawn, two figures crouched round
the fire. Then they saddled up, the widow doing her slow part. They mounted and went on
uphill, moving laterally along the higher range, the mare's shod hooves sparking
as she slipped and scrabbled on the loose stones. Overhead, the morning sky glowed, cut
sharp by the inky edge of mountain ranges all around them like a bowl,
and everything in it was black and they were invisible. The widow gazed at the rock
faces and tried to recognize something, anything. The pass she had traversed, or even a
familiar peak. But all was strange and black. As the light grew, the air warmed quickly.
This brought forth from the trees a thin mist that ran in tributaries along the pebbled
ground like a grey river. The horses' forelegs waded through it.

By noon it was raining and they were going straight up, Henry sometimes on
foot, leading the horses by the reins on the switchbacks, then mounting again and
continuing uphill, both riders leaning forward in their saddles. The rain was fine and
light, hardly falling, blowing on the wind. It blew under Henry's hat and his face
streamed and shone.

They reached the town of Frank in the afternoon and went down the empty
main street followed by amiable dogs. It was hardly a town at all, just a federation of
camps separated by mounds and fissures in the ground, and by messes of cut lumber
stacked high and stained nearly black by the weather. Buildings stood next to tents that
stood next to hybrids of the two, unlighted and unpainted, made of hand-hewn boards,
some caulked with mud or moss so their listing walls were corduroyed and tufted. Few or
none had windows. Outside one tent, a pair of coveralls had been hung out to dry,
pointless in the drizzle, and a deep red mud dripped from its cuffs.

“This is a town?” the widow asked, incredulous. “Where
are all the people?”

“People?” Henry craned round in his saddle. “The
men
are underground. In the mine.”

They came upon a strange low doorway cut in the side of the mountain. An
air shaft, no taller than a playhouse
door. The widow looked uphill
and saw two others, cut discreetly into white rock, framed carefully in thick black
wood, and standing no taller than four feet, as if some dandified gnome might soon step
from his front door and greet the day. There were three shaft entrances in sight, but
all were empty and there was no sign of men anywhere. Just then the horses crested a
seam of rock like a great deep root of the mountain, and the travellers saw in the
distance the grey and looming mine head, at the dark mouth of which human figures moved,
stooped and hurrying. It seemed to the widow that they had moved from wilderness to
wasteland.

The mine head looked almost like a grain elevator, a tall, boxlike
structure with smaller boxes attached. The widow gazed about her in horror. Barrenness
and ruin lay all about it, the building forming an epicentre of destruction. The ground
was trampled and muddied and streaming, hatched with cart tracks, strewn with debris.
Mounds of grey culm lay here and there, the chaff of coal mining, silvery rubble tipped
out by the carts, through which ran negligible seams and chips of coal. Several of these
knolls were smouldering, the coal on a slow burn, thin rills of smoke corkscrewing into
the rain. The smell of it on the air. And pine and rain and mud. The horses stepped
carefully over a narrow-gauge track for mine carts that ran from the head, heading
downhill into the trees to some unseen destination.

But this vast ugliness seemed to flash and be gone, like a contained
blight, a comet's small impact. Then they were riding among the trees again, and
even the dogs were silent, as if it had affected them too, and made them thoughtful
about the ravages of man. If not for the simple footpath
along
which they rode, the widow might have thought herself miles from any town again.

When they found him, the Reverend Mr. Angus Lorne Bonnycastle was standing
on the roof of the skeletal frame of the church he was building, a pencil drawing of a
stick cathedral with a dark little man on it. He had been working alone, down on one
knee, hammering away, but he stood when he heard the horses' hooves. Seeing Henry,
he waved eagerly, dropped his hammer, lost his footing, and fell on his back, nearly
toppling from the apex. The widow let out a little yelp, and Henry put a hand to his
mouth in unguarded dread. Eventually, the figure in black regained its balance,
clambered up again and waved. Through his fingers, Henry said, “Jesus
Christ!”

THE RIDGERUNNER
went on, shouldering his rucksack high,
yearning into the wilderness. A deserter amid the green, near blind with confusion,
having not slept yet, for every breath in the trees seemed to promise her arrival. The
movement of sunlight, a crack in the underbrush, woke him. He sat up round-eyed, a sorry
grin on his face, a lie forming in his mouth. And then nothing. She did not come. How
could she? So he rose and went on, looking back as a thief does. He had stolen
something, and he knew it.

And now, as shadows skated long over the ground, he stopped dead in his
tracks and held his breath. An irregular thing lay on the ground a few paces back. Here
was a fingerless hand. A mummified shoulder. He had stumbled upon a fellow traveller.
The shape of the fallen man expressed
clearly on the ground,
upholstered with grass. And five feet away, the upturned, jawless cranium with its
little amphitheatre of teeth. The Ridgerunner stood motionless, his eyes mere slits, a
hand to his face as if there might still be a lingering stench. But there was none, and
his leathery companion was as indigenous now as any fallen tree.

It was a cruel joke — not on this other man, for that was obvious
enough, but on Moreland himself. Even here, solitude was impossible, as if the world
were a nerve-jangling carnival where grotesqueries might swing out on springs and cackle
at him — lost and wild girls beckoning, dead men aping his own likely future. He
stepped wide around the shallow lump, wide and quiet, and went on quietly, as if some
unseen spirit hung in the trees, watching. Then he started toward higher ground. Moving
not north or west, but up, higher, toward the peaks. Away from man and woman. Away from
life itself.

MORNINGS FOUND THE
widow making the Reverend his
breakfast on an old, spraddled stove that stoked hot as a forge and smoked at its poorly
welded seams. It stood on pale bricks, and the sooted pipe went straight up through a
hole in the ceiling, heating the single room above, and from there ran through the roof
to end in a blackened and smoking funnel. She made bread and biscuits, coffee, salt
pork, beef jerky, oatmeal with blueberries in it.

It had been a week or so, and now she had taken on the Reverend's
habit of rising when daylight was still hours off. Sitting up with the heavy blankets to
her breast and the forest's cold breath at her naked back, she could smell his
pipe from where he sat on a stump outside in the dark. Smoke. It reminded her of William
Moreland, his mouth speaking, sweetness puffing in wisps of smoke with each word, his
hand holding the pipe stem, and his sleeves rolled to the elbows. The widow would close
her eyes, sigh, and breathe in the scent.

The Reverend slept on one side of the upstairs room and she on the other,
a curtain strung between them. Her bed was of oddly naval design, foreshortened, with
high head-board and footboard and low walls to keep the sleeper in.
The wood was expertly lacquered and inlaid with a queer petal design where flowers
ran into flowers and fractured and blew tears all about. She followed the garlands with
her finger. It was a queen's bed, weighed down by striations of blankets and
hides, on the top of which lay a tattered silk chinoiserie, a black bedspread on which
birds hopped from impossible branches, every feather gratuitously real, every beak like
a yellow seed sewn into the cloth. Touching this finery, pressing its smoothness to her
cheek, she remembered her grandmother's quiet bedroom, the wide, soft bed and the
old lady drowsing there. Next to her new bed was a window, perhaps pilfered from some
railway car, pried out whole and set into the wall, held in its scored metal frame by a
line of rusted rivets. This was where she slept. The Reverend himself slept on a simple
straw tick. When the widow realized she had been given the only real bed, she tried to
refuse it, but he said simply, “It was never mine anyway.” He hammered nails
into the walls for her to hang her clothes. Smiling apologetically, he said,
“Luxury, for a woman accustomed to sleeping in the woods.”

His house was like his church: vaguely cockeyed, sketched in, made by hand
by himself alone, without a level, without proper tools, without one hour's
training in the carpenter's art. Every line in it was askew. It stood drunk
against the plumb of the surrounding cedars, with hammocked floors and rude walls
listing, everything held in place by a mad excess of nails. As the widow clumped lamely
down the stairs on her aching leg, the staircase wowed like a suspension bridge. Unless
she went very carefully, she was announced by the squalling of ill-fitted joints.

The Reverend Bonnycastle spent much of every day working on his church,
whanging gamely away with a hammer, using the warped and blackened boards from the
town's abandoned pile, which he said dated from when Frank was a lumber camp. As
yet, his church had no walls or roof, but was simply framed in. Up close, the
composition was anarchic, fascinating, joints meeting at organic angles. From a
distance, however, it was nearly comic. Miners would stop on their way uphill and stand
with hands in pockets, just looking. Of all the men in town, the Reverend may well have
had the least aptitude for building.

After breakfast, at the widow's request, they sat across the table
from each other and read from the Bible, just as she had done at home with her father.
It gave her a childish pleasure to read to the Reverend, for it felt so familiar.

“The Lord roars from Zion and thunders from Jerusalem; the
shepherd's pastures are scorched and the top of Carmel is dried up.” The
Reverend Bonnycastle sat merry and polite as the widow recited, but a furtive boredom
crept the edges of his attention, so after a few days these events ceased.

She tended to prefer some sections to others, queer things such as Amos,
and she returned to these often. She would not read from his Bible, only from her own,
and he didn't question this. He told her he'd been pleased enough to see
that, given her meagre possessions, she still carried a Bible. He had taken it up from
the table where it lay and opened the stained leather binding. Inscribed to an infant
daughter from her father. On many a worn page, in the margins, she had made tiny,
inscrutable drawings and symbols. Some were impossible ciphers. Others seemed to have
recognizable shapes.
He ran a fingertip over a tiny rain cloud, a
door, two women bending over a star. He flipped the page. A fist inside a heart. When he
closed the book again, his eyes canted curiously at her, but he said nothing.