The Outlander (20 page)

“What're you boys gonna do with this lady when I find
her?”

“Leave that to us,” said one of them.

“You just do your job,” said the other.

The tracker regarded them a moment more. He wasn't fearful of them,
but he saw why others might be. There was an animal quality to them, the way one was
dominant — his eyes were steady, his voice was steady, he always spoke first. By
now, the old man could tell the difference between them at a distance, simply by
watching their movements. That was no problem. But which was Julian and which Jude? He
just called them “boys.” Mostly because they didn't like it.

“You realize we're gonna find her dead, don't
you?” he said.

Neither man replied. But he saw it in their faces — one brother
didn't give a damn, and the other did.

The tracker chuckled and swung his horse around, and they all went on.

THE AIR GREW WARMER
by the hour and sun came through the
trees in filtered shafts, soft and indistinct. Mary sat with the Reverend outside while
he smoked his pipe, she on the stoop with her knees up to her chest. She rubbed her sore
leg. He tamped down the tobacco with a ruined galvanized nail, and when he was done, he
wiggled the nail into a well-worn hole in the side of the stump he was sitting on. The
smoke hung in the still air and drifted about his face. She knew the brand —
Orford, a poor tobacco prone to mould and bitterness. She remembered her father saying
about a man he disliked, “He's an Orford man,” a sly smile suffusing
his face. “He believes in moderation in all things, including sense.”

A distant rumble crawled the hills, and man and girl looked up through the
trees. The sky above them was clear, the storm having moved on down the pass. The widow
got up awkwardly with her sore leg and clumped back into the house. When she emerged,
she had her own tobacco pouch and her pipe. She set to work packing the bowl, pressing
it down firmly with her thumb, testing the suction.

The Reverend watched this procedure with veiled admiration, taking in the
curved stem, the ornate stag's head
bowl, the antlers that
came off in a hinged lid. “That is a mighty fine pipe,” he said.

“I stole it,” Mary said bluntly. She lit the pipe and handed
him the pouch and glanced obliquely up at him, daring him to say something. But he said
nothing, and his expression pretended that she had not spoken. Together they sat in
silence and smoked. The Reverend brought the weathered pouch to his face and sniffed the
fragrant compost within.

“Much better than your Orford,” she said.

“Quite,” he said.

“Go on, Bonny,” she waved her hand at the pouch. He smiled
eagerly and knocked out his own pipe, put his boot heel on it to snuff it out, and began
fixing a new pipe with her tobacco.

She put an arm round her knees, gazed out into the cedars, and reflected
on the Reverend Bonnycastle. His friend Henry had found her staggering out of a mountain
pass without her horse, and with no idea where she was. He had taken her into his house
without a word, fed her, cared for her. Over the weeks, Mary had seen many private
questions pass over the Reverend face, and though she had braced herself for the
predictable prying, it never came. He simply didn't ask. She was allowed to keep
her secrets. It began to dawn on her that she could trust this man. She was suddenly,
intensely grateful to him. And that came with a stab of regret, for who else had ever
done that for her?

SOMETIMES DISCONTENT
is unknown to the sufferer, a
shadowed thing that creeps up from behind. It had been that way for Mary. Of course, she
knew there were reasons for her unhappiness, there are always reasons. One thinks, I am
unhappy, I am discontent, because of this or that. But such
thoughts are like a painting of sorrow, not sorrow itself. Then one day it comes, hushed
and ferocious, and reasons don't matter any more.

Her husband had trudged into the cabin, bringing new snow on his boots. It
was not even dark yet. She had turned slowly, waddling with her pregnant belly, a spoon
in her hand, surprised by an unexpected guest barging into her house — and
discovered it was her own husband.

“You're home,” she said stupidly.

“I'm home indeed,” John answered.

She saw immediately that his demeanour was different; he seemed cheerful,
smiling almost coyly. The spoon hovered and she blinked at him.

“What is it?” she said bluntly.

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you smiling, John?”

“Goodness,” he laughed. “Can't a man smile?
I'm just happy to be home.”

She'd never heard him say anything like that before. He said it
lightly, but his eyes were not on her and he was giddy. He looked taller, more robust
than he had in months. Happiness made him beautiful — she remembered that John had
looked that way when she had first met him. Slowly, a thankful smile crept over her face
and she went back to stirring the pot, swaying a little with fatigue.

“Dinner won't be ready for a while,” she said.
“I'm not used to you being home so early.”

“No hurry,” he said, rubbing his hands on his thighs. She
followed him with her eyes as he went into the bedroom and lay on the bed with his
coveralls still on, arms behind
his head. He looked at the ceiling
and smiled. A contented man come home to the wrong house.

“Mary, would your father let that old silk chesterfield go if we
sent for it?”

“What?”

“That long green one.”

“I . . . I don't know. Why do you ask?”

“I think it was big enough that we could lie together on it,
don't you? There's nowhere else for us to lie but here,” he said,
bouncing his hands on the sprung old bed. She did not say anything, for there was no
money for anything, let alone to ship an old piece of furniture hundreds of miles. She
bent to peer inside the dark oven at the biscuits baking, and as she did, she heard his
humming coming through the stove's wall, through the iron belly, a muted thrum she
could feel in her cheeks. His presence was resonating everywhere.

During dinner he talked and talked and never looked at her once. It seemed
to her that he was careful not to. He was full of ideas and plans, things they could not
afford and therefore would not happen. She was accustomed to having nearly silent meals
with her husband, so this was a surprise. Almost immediately her heart began to lighten.
His joy was contagious, and she found herself laughing, agreeing to ridiculous
things.

That night John seized her the way he always had done, pregnant or not.
But after a time, he became unusually gentle and yearning; he seemed to be trying to
please her. He was usually a silent lover, but that night he had sighed, “A”
— a single non-word that alarmed her with its incongruity. It was as if he were
play-acting — not for her benefit, but for some watcher, as if he imagined someone
else in the room
with them and he wished this audience to think he
was happy.

In the morning, a profound melancholy had come over him. He was like a man
who had been drinking and merry, but was now sober and sorry for it. Mary was stricken
by this reversion and did not know what to do. Austere and silent, he finally put both
elbows on the table and regarded her while she hurried his breakfast to the table. She
found this peculiarly calming, for it was so much their usual habit: him watching her
struggle to do the most basic things a wife must do, dissatisfaction written all over
him. Her grandmother would have blamed her. She was a poor domestic student — in
her ineptitude, Mary brought censure upon herself. Never mind that she was barely
nineteen, or that all her training had been for a different kind of life. There was, she
believed, something about her, or in her, that bred dissatisfaction. She remembered her
grandmother saying to her, “You must stop being such a gloomy child. Can you not
be pretty inside as well?” These things went through her mind as she stumbled and
clattered the dishes to the table.

Once John had gone out the door, a fretful energy overtook her and she
could not remain still. She forced herself through the morning's chores with the
patience of an ox, stopping only to lean on the broom and close her eyes and hold her
enormous belly with one hand. She found the bedroom a mess, the drawers in disorder. On
the chest stood a little box in which she kept what remained of her jewellery and
comforts. She looked at it: the box stood open, its contents jumbled. Her heart sank at
the possibility that she had done this herself and now did not remember, for that was
becoming common, and she did not know what to do about
it. Such
lapses were brief but profound, like waking disoriented from sleep. It did not occur to
her that John could have gone through the box — not until she discovered a comb
missing. She scrounged again through the box and then she searched the cabin. The comb
was gone. Slowly, she realized that John had taken it. A simple inlaid comb, worth
nothing.

Of course, at first, she could not fathom why John might want a comb of no
value, a pretty little thing only a girl would value. And then, she did. After that, it
was a process of seeing things again: his ebullience, his gentleness. In bed, he had
imagined not his exhausted and pregnant wife, but another girl, and he clasped her more
gently than the wife, sighed upon her, his imagination filling the gaps.

This was the first shift, for Mary, the painful little kink in the flow
that forced all thought to adjust to the truth. These were the seeds of her despair and
madness.

Thinking about it now, the widow decided it was also the first step of
many that had brought her here.

THAT DAY
, once they had finished their pipes, the
Reverend did not go to work on his church as usual. Instead, they went off together
through the trees to the centre of town, heading for the trading post. He carried a
burlap sack over his shoulder, and she followed behind with her saddlebags held against
her stomach like a muffle. They stepped in unison, like grim twins in long black
pantaloons, the Reverend's dark hat on his head, dust and weather worn deeply into
the felt. Stepping gingerly along on humps of moss the size of sleeping men among the
trees and the rotting logs, the wild mushrooms fanning tiny staircases up the cedar
trunks while a fairy rain shook loose from the branches above.

The widow followed her keeper, hurrying along with her strange lame gait,
placing her boots where his had been, feeling the spongy give of forest floor. He
pressed it far down, and she pressed less deeply. And when they had passed, their trail
faded away again as moss and needles and leaves slowly uncompressed and tiny filaments
stood upright.

“Fox!” he said sharply. “Brown fox.” But when she
looked there was nothing but the gentle waving of underbrush. They waited. Not a sound
from the departing animal, as if it, too, was standing its ground, curious, listening or
watching from its secret station. The Reverend shifted the burlap sack to his other
hand. She could hear his breath, the strange catch in it.

“You're good luck,” he said. “A fox is a good
omen, and I never see them. Everyone else does, but never me.” He smiled
cheerfully at her, turned, and went on. The widow allowed herself to believe him —
he actually thought she brought him good luck.

Finally they emerged from the forest and ventured out over the
mine's debris. Deep runnels of cold rainwater still gurgled downhill across their
path, fetching up mud and sucking brightly in the hollows. He took her hand to steady
her, and one after the other they hopped from bolder to rock, keeping to the dry ground.
Then he let her hand go. The widow shambled on behind him, a dreamy smile on her
lips.

The trading post was no more than a large wood foundation on which had
been erected an oiled canvas tent, the kind seen at sideshows. The sides were squared
off at the height of a man, to approximate walls, and there was a vent in the roof
surmounted by a little cap with a red flag on it. Thin blue smoke issued from the vent.
The flag, an arcane and never official Red Ensign, drooped permanently, weighed
down by weather to form a kind of tongue that was unmoving thanks
to fusted rot years old. Above the door was a board that must have once said
McEcherns
in red-and-gold lettering. Wood borers had been lustily at the
sign and now it seemed to say
MEEEherns
.

The foundation of the building came up to their knees, and there were no
stairs, so the Reverend and the widow clomped up onto it. They went past overturned
chairs and a cluster of rain-filled booze bottles. The air inside the tent was dim and
smelled thickly of smoked hides. The Reverend said, “Mac?” No sound came
from the dark corners.

“Mac!” he bellowed, and there was a distant halloo from
outside.

By the door was a pile of hides that rose above the widow's head.
She went to it and discovered they were mostly buffalo, thick unwieldy things folded
like blankets. Next to that, she found the hides of cattle: black, ginger, the colour of
coffee, some with winter hair, others smooth as a hunting dog's back. Almost
hidden was a small collection of cured deerhides and soft chamois, rolled into tubes and
stacked like cord wood. She saw a bundle of rabbit skins packed into a wooden box,
little things you could fashion mittens from, or use to line the hood of a coat. She
pondered these for a moment. She stroked the thick shoulder ruff of a wolf, ran an empty
foreleg through her fingers to the cropped end where the paw had been removed. The
stiffened edges of eye holes, the jagged W of the mouth. She flipped it over and found
an enormous bullet hole. Inappropriate calibre for a wolf. Someone had gone hunting for
bear and run up on a wolf. The widow figured the impact must have knocked it off its
feet. She poked two fingers through to the fur and wiggled them in the softness.