The Outlander (32 page)

This set off an alarm in her, a bark that shook her, and she was suddenly
much more awake. What followed was a series of careful steps: she bent to see that the
stove was properly stoked; that there was actually water in the pot; that her feet were
in boots; that she was indeed bare-legged; that the Reverend wasn't there to see
her thus, wasn't upstairs, wasn't outside; that his coffee pot was still
warm on the stove; that it was filled with a liquid so sour-smelling he could only have
had made it himself; and that his empty bowl lay daubed with dried oatmeal, hard as
buckshot. Last, she went to the window and winced up at the sun to gauge the time of
day. Her mind wandering its austere routines, unworried, like a beetle marching through
a forest of grass, looking down.

Two hours later she was washed and dressed, carrying the buffalo-skin
coat, walking along the path under the trees to the church, bringing the Reverend his
lunch as usual.
Floating along, smiling, the laudanum bottle tucked
into a coat pocket, the bitter taste again on her tongue. Give the taste a name. Things
must have names, mustn't they? Strange sentiments came and went through her
unburdened mind: that trees were possibly friendly; that her footsteps might count out
to some important number; that her father was thinking of her that very moment. As she
sauntered, she flushed up ground squirrels that shot to the high branches and glared
down on her, chittering. She passed a Cregan — who knew which one? — and
nodded to him, like any civil lady on her way to the shops. But something about her made
the boy turn and watch her go. A rhythm in her step more of the dance hall than the
shops, and her head canted cutely to one side. Hips swinging. He went on his way again
with an occasional glance back at her.

The church was almost finished, or so it looked from the front. She came
up the path toward the high frontage, the new surmounting cross. The warped wall boards
had only worsened the queerness of the edifice since they had been whanged into place
with an organic sense of the vertical. Wedges of empty space admitted the elements. It
was much worse than the house, as if the Reverend was actually regressing in his work.
She hauled open the heavy door only to find the place empty. Stupidly she called for
him, then sat down on a pew. The rear wall of the church was not yet erected, and a
palisade of tree trunks stood behind the altar. There was a slow stirring in her addled
mind, a sense that things were not as they should be. She had told him to go somewhere,
hadn't she? Where was it? She got up and went out to look for him.

By the time she got to McEchern's store, she had forgotten why she
had come. She had forgotten why she needed to see the Reverend, and now there was only
the rootless desire to find him. This dwindling spark of purpose was finally
extinguished when she saw the dwarf hurrying uphill toward her, his face livid under the
bowler, making admirable progress on his condensed legs.

“Where in the Sam Hill have you been?” he hissed.

The widow smiled beneficently down at him. “Me?”

“Yes you, goddammit! I've got two of 'em lined up
waiting for you, and one in the bath. Now get your ass down there.”

“Two what?”

McEchern's face closed in an effort to find patience, and he made a
goatlike noise of annoyance. Without a word, he seized Mary's cuff and dragged her
downhill to the bathing tents. There were two men on the store's platform, sitting
together smoking and swinging their feet. From the smaller tent came sounds of splashing
and humming.

“Gentlemen!” the dwarf bellowed. “If you didn't
have beards like Methuselah before, I guess you do now. But your wait is
over.”

“I go first,” said one massive fellow, his accent Norse. He
flicked the ember off his cigarette and pocketed the butt. Then he came forward and sat
on the chair, his weight punishing the wooden frame, leaned back with a perilous creak,
and waited to be shaved. Slowly, the widow set down her coat, pulled up her dark
sleeves, and went about her work, an unworried automaton. She stropped the razor on a
length of leather tied to the chair, watching the long, slow strokes come and go, her
slackened face all dreamy. She carefully
lathered the man's
face, patting the brush at his cheeks. The razor moved languidly, heavily, in a leisured
rasping of his weathered skin, the blade fetching up two distinct colours of hair, black
and white. She paused to squint at them. The Norseman sat with his chin in her palm and
stared ahead, a blissful and slightly cross-eyed cast to his gaze. The widow was in her
private study, and he was in his.

McEchern, by contrast, was now keenly aware he had a problem. He knew
something was badly wrong with her; he had even deduced what it might be. He had also
reasoned that, as purveyor of the laudanum, he would be in no small part responsible
should her razor somehow find the Norseman's jugular. What was worse, the other
waiting miner had realized something was wrong, or maybe he had caught the look of alarm
in McEchern's eye, and was now beginning to shrink into himself.

“Well, young fella,” the dwarf said, “can I front you
for a drink?”

“No.”

Neither of them took his eyes from the rapturous scene of the widow nearly
hugging the chin of her customer, his imperilled throat exposed.

In the end there was no bloodletting, though the Norseman was unusually
closely shaved. Then came the steaming towel, wrapped round the face and coming to a
peak on the nose, like a dollop of whipped cream, the miner's leathery face barely
registering the heat. Once he was done, the widow brushed off the threadbare knitted
sweater that covered his shoulders, and he stood, stroking his cheeks and sighing,
“Åh, vad du är verkligen duktig!”

The dwarf hurried toward them. “That's all for today,
gentlemen. Shove off, now. That's right.” The second miner paused for only a
moment before allowing himself to be ushered away.

Small fissures of steam escaped from the flaps of the bathing tent and
rose into the air. Mud was everywhere — on Mary's boots, built up in crusts
round the feet of the barbering chair, around the tent, a deep puddle directly outside
the door flap. Some mornings this puddle was solid ice, and men would emerge from their
bath, faces florid and shining, and go skating on one leg, wheeling their arms, jerking
to a stop when they hit the crusted, frozen dirt. But today it was soft and smooth.
Edible-looking. The widow scuffed her boot heel back and forth and trowelled some up.
The dirt was almost red up here in the mountains. A deep red-brown, like a fox's
ruff.

Suddenly a soprano voice was at the widow's ear.

“How much of the stuff did you take?”

She discovered she had sat herself down on the barbering chair. McEchern
was at her side, his face inches from hers, eyes a pale, wolfish blue.

“How much?” he said again.

“I don't know.”

“One sip? Two? More than that?”

“Five, maybe.”

“Shitfire, he'll kill me! Where is it? Give it to
me.”

“No.”

“Give it to me, dammit!”

“Why don't you try taking it and see what happens?” Mary
showed him the straight razor. It hovered in the air between
them.
The dwarf returned her a baleful, fatigued look — it was an expression she'd
seen on many a piqued old woman. She couldn't help it; she bent over giggling.

“Very funny. Ho, ho.”

Unconsciously, her hand strayed to the pocket of her buffalo coat, where
the little vial hid. It was barely a twitch, but he saw it, and swift as a magician, the
dwarf 's little hand shot out and snatched it away.

She struggled out of her chair and stood swaying. “Mac! That's
mine!”

“Not any more it ain't.” He ran with it over to the
store and hopped up onto the platform.

“You give it back.”

“Listen to me, Mary,” he said, turning and fixing her with a
fiery glare. “Your doping days are over. Get used to it.” The bottle
disappeared with McEchern into the darkness of the store.

Meekly, the widow sat back down. Her mind tramped slowly around the
problem, gazing into its hot centre.
Want more. Can't get more. If I steal it
back, he' ll know.
In her simpleminded state, it didn't occur to
her that the dwarf had not refunded her money.

THE MINE'S HEADFRAME
clung to the sloped ground,
its small black mouth open. Tracks for mining carts streamed in all directions,
seemingly aimless until they converged and ran as one downhill to a loading platform by
the railway tracks. A black stain seemed to erupt from the mine's mouth and spread
out, ever wider, over the ground, like the scorch marks round a stove's door. As
the widow walked, or rather ambled unevenly in her drugged state, her boots scraped up
a heavy grey dust that fell as quickly as it rose. She could
taste it on her lips.

A mine cart stood outside, heaped with slag. The widow called out,
“Hello?” Called again. No answer came. A chilly breeze blew constantly out
of the tunnel. She had expected to see one or another raccoon-faced miner who'd
help her find the Reverend, but the entrance was deserted.

She had sat with some of these men at McEchern's store, cut their
hair, shaved a few of them, marvelling at the mackling of their cheeks; the beards hid
pallid skin, but wherever the black dust rested, its stain was as deep and permanent as
the colouring on a cow's hide. She remembered the name of every man she had
barbered. She had sussed out their likes and dislikes, ages and religions, their
propensity for gossip, their feuds. She had even learned some of their superstitions,
and these were numerous. Never say a dead man's name aloud. Never boast about a
lack of injuries. Never refuse help to another miner, though above ground you might be
murdering one another. Watch your footing at midnight, because the earth is upside down.
Say a prayer to St. Barbara each time you descend:
Keep me from Him, for I liketh
not to rush unbidden to Him
. All these things stood as talismans against
disaster, ways to avoid provoking the living mass around you or annoying it with your
bravado. But the greatest transgression was to allow a woman into the mine. This was the
terror of them all. No one could say for sure what devastation might await, because no
miner could remember seeing a woman even standing near the mine — a collusion,
perhaps, of superstition and women's utility elsewhere.

If the widow had been sober, had this been another day, she might have
remembered this. She might have waited for
the Reverend outside or
turned back and gone home. But on this day, her brain still boiling with laudanum, she
stepped into the mine, oblivious to the hazard she brought with her.

The tunnel was low and wide, banked slightly downhill into the mountain,
and went fading away from the light of day, straight into the dark. At her feet lay the
narrow-gauge tracks for the ore carts, like twin veins, shining dully in the poor light.
On the damp air, the smell of something familiar, something alive. Slowly, as she went
forward, she made out the prints of some hoofed animal, first one and then many of them,
small hooves, sunk into the dust.

Deer? she thought stupidly. She stopped, bent down to see the U of
horseshoes, each dotted with nailheads. That was the familiar smell — the sharp
and consoling scent of a stall. She remembered, then: pit ponies, working shifts like
the men, pulling the heavy mine carts along the sloped drifts, living their lives below
ground, growing old, retiring only when they went blind.

A small rivulet of water ran down the wall by the widow's shoulder.
It travelled with her for a few steps and then disappeared into a fissure at her feet.
Soon she saw dimly a metal cage, with gate open. Like a mouse trap, waiting for her. The
widow in her buffalo coat held the little bowl of food close to her chest, the disorder
of her mind stirring in its laudanum drowse. To go on or to retreat?

When she stepped into the cage her weight caused it to sink and then
jounce lightly over the void. Her boots rested on criss-crossed steel bars, and the
stale breath of the mine blew steadily upward, billowing her pant legs. A voice could be
heard, carried on the hollow air, overlapping in echoes,
the source
far away and droning. She froze and listened. The Reverend's voice was vaulting
along the tunnels to her. Eagerly she studied the cage for a way to make it work. There
was a chain made of wide, flat links. One end ran up into the shadows while the other
ran down through the mesh flooring, extending a pale finger into the pit. This was
attached to a contraption of pulleys and weights that allowed the miners to move
themselves up and down. She put the metal bowl of food at her feet, woozy now as the
cage bounced and swung, weightless. There was a giddy moment of holding her breath and
looking straight ahead. She stared hard at the wall of uneven stone, infinite shades of
grey foxed with brilliant black inclusions. There were white spots too, like
thumb-prints. The widow went from vertigo to earnest study of the rock face before her,
a comical transition, made as quickly as a child stops crying when handed a toy. It was
a minute or so before she was moved to reach out her hand and touch the chain. Almost
warm. With a slight pull downward, she rose a little. A pull upward, she sank. With
halting progress, she ferried herself deeper into the mine.

THE REVEREND STOOD
before a crowd of miners, each man
seated on his helmet. They had gathered in a cavernous central stope, off which ran
several tunnels like spokes. In the roof above them, two air shafts had been drilled,
holes the width of a man's trunk that went vertically into the rock and ended in a
speck of light. A constant dust rained down from the vault. The Reverend Bonnycastle
paced back and forth before the men, intoning a standard Christian sermon; it would seem
he was comfortable adapting to change. Unlike
his customary
pugilistic performance, this sermon was larded with Biblical stories, quotes read out by
the light of a borrowed headlamp, questions asked and waited upon, though no answer was
necessary, everything leading to a moral conclusion that was inescapable and broadly
true. The subject for today was unity.