The Outlander (31 page)

Their own horses, the ones they owned and had names for, followed them
around like lapdogs. The widow had noticed this the previous day as the boys stood
attending to the tack or bending to untie their rain-bleached bags and panniers. The
horses nudged them with soft noses or hung curious heads over their shoulders. Once the
animals had been washed and curried down, they didn't look so badly used. And you
could see their types: bay, roan, sorrel. Points of white on this one's ears.
Flaxen forelegs on another. They were the kind of animals that grew not merely hairy in
winter but shaggy, their necks ropy with muscle, with big homely heads. As the men
washed them, the horses bent to the buckets of water at their feet and sucked loudly
with parched lips. One massive gelding with the mackled hide of an Indian horse had
wandered right into the Reverend's house seeking
its owner,
who was sitting at the table, happily eating the abominable stew. Everyone heard the
soft clop of unshod hooves and the warning cracks of the floorboards. The boy jumped up
from the table, bellowed, “Sorry, folks!” and, putting his arms round the
creature's neck and pressing his shoulder to its chest, impelled it backwards out
the door, knocking its head on the lintel. When he came back inside and sat down, the
gelding stood uncertainly on the threshold. Then it wandered round the side of the house
and waited by a window, like a governess peering into a playhouse.

A few miners drifted up to the house as the news of the Cregans spread,
and, like the horses, these men waited outside, sitting on stumps or crouching on their
own haunches, smoking, waiting for the Reverend to come out and talk business. Two
Indians came along later and hovered about the periphery, perpetual outsiders. The widow
wasn't sure whether they were Crow, like Henry — she couldn't tell
from the way they dressed. Plain pants held up with sashes, coats made of blankets, and
under those what looked like pyjama tops.

Finally, the Reverend emerged from his front door to a cacophony of
queried and offered prices. The crowd headed out together to McEchern's, the
Reverend and the Indians in earnest debate in front, a mass of miners following, and the
eight boys lagging behind, walking with that stiff-legged strut common to constant
riders whose feet rarely touch the ground. The widow had been left with mud everywhere
inside the house, spur marks in the table legs, and every last scrap of the stew gobbled
up.

Now, a day later, here she was, a hand on the shoulder of a Cregan boy,
who was freshly shaved and drowsing under a
hot towel. She gauged
the size of him. Six feet at least, and probably not yet fully grown. Fifteen boys. She
shuddered in silent sympathy with the doomed mother. Strangely, they all looked
different, not like brothers at all, each unique enough that it almost called their
paternity into question. Faces no more similar than those of an audience at a show, and
their temperaments just as varied.

By contrast, how similar were the widow's own husband and his
brothers, three men who, despite their different colouring, shared a common face, as if
their features had been pressed from the same living mask. The original had been their
father, certainly. There had been a picture of this man perched on her dresser in the
cabin — no picture of the mother; perhaps none had ever existed. The father was
standing alone before a photographer's fanciful backdrop, his face so mirthless
and severe that one felt sorry for the photographer. Behind this black figure, in the
watercoloured distance, stood a pastoral little bridge, a wide, soft river, and a
rowboat with two figures in it. Gaunt and impatient, he was an indictment of this
prettiness, as if he had walked in from some more sober place and stood deliberately in
its way. Here, then, was the progenitor, the father-in-law, Pater. She had never met
him, but she knew him well nonetheless. As the winter had come and darkness had
descended upon her — or, rather, as it had ascended upward out of her — she
had been alone in the cabin and seen that frozen and brutal face more often than her
husband's. Slowly, the resemblance had done its work. First she saw John's
father in him, then the two were no different, and finally John was his father. One day,
when she looked at the photograph, there was John. In that empty cabin, she had met no
face but theirs.

The widow realized her heart was pounding. She breathed deeply. Dropped
her shoulders. How different things were now. How surely life had crept back into life.
The bed she slept in now was surely her own, the roof over her head somehow more secure.
The Reverend in his kindness and routine was like a blessing she didn't
deserve.

She rubbed her damp cheeks. The pines above her were a natural canopy
protecting them from the misty rain that floated down. Sometime soon McEchern would have
to put up a tarp to keep off the rain and snow while she barbered . . . or perhaps, not
so much to keep the rain off, for not much of it blew laterally through the trees, but
to mark the place where she stood. She knew that in McEchern's mind, she was now a
fixture, belonging to him as much as did the stove that heated the water and the tubs
that held the bathers. And like these other things, he worried about her and was
protective, as if some sly bastard might steal her away from him. She smiled a little at
that — he was a peculiarly likeable little man.

Now McEchern himself came around the north side of the store hauling a
wheelbarrow in which a four-gallon barrel of rum rolled and bonged and leaked at its
seams. The two handles of the wheelbarrow were on the dwarf 's shoulders, and he
pulled like a dray horse. At the sound of booze coming, one of the brothers twisted
round in his bathtub, cigar in his mouth, and craned back to look out through the
tent's flap. This brother was tall and fair-haired, named Sean, and as the widow
gauged it, born somewhere middle of the pack. He saw the widow standing there, her hand
on the shoulder of one of his many brothers. McEchern rumbled past him into the tent,
met by whoops of joy, but Sean kept
looking. By now they all
understood that Mary was not the Reverend's wife. His was a feral and lovely face,
dark from weather, the eyes by comparison startling white. A wide, knowing grin broke
across it. He winked at her.

THE RIDGERUNNER
squatted by his little fire, for there
was nothing dry to sit on, and he held skewers of meat over the fire and twisted them
slowly, his mouth watering. The moon was on its way down for morning. Four gnarled twigs
soaked in a puddle extended from his hand like arthritic fingers and at the tip of each
a barbecued mouse. Tails and feet cindered away, heads mere nubs, but a mouthful of meat
at the centre, and it smelled good.

How many days had he paused here, under this rock overhang, watching the
valley, unable to bring himself to descend farther and follow the river? Once he
gathered his courage and went down, he might hunt or get some supplies, ask around . . .
ask about Mary. She must be down there somewhere, probably with the Indians or farther
on in the little mining town. He sighed deeply and closed his eyes. The warmth seemed a
miracle to him, the drizzling rain a consolation. If he could find a dry spot, a crag or
an overhang, he might even be able to sleep.

For days he had been watching. There would be nothing for hours, just
forest, the river, cloud. Once or twice he could spot a pale body moving by the river,
Indians bathing and splashing, so tiny as to be almost imaginary. And then a train would
come along the valley floor, its long wail both vulgar and cheery. A sign of life.

What was the town like? How big was it? There might be fences, roads.
There might be signs, simple wood planks announcing a name. Property. He might find
himself trespassing the outer reaches of some private habitation — and always, on
farms, there is an affronted figure in the distance watching. And of course, in any
town, a poor stranger like himself could not loiter on the grocer's steps as
others did. An outsider must keep moving, appear harmless and temporary. Curious eyes
might follow him as he made his way past. Even in the bars, among drunks, there was no
standing here, or there, for this was someone else's plot of floorboards;
there's the owner's hat, his drink, the invisible, ineffable stain of tenure
that develops over time and use and selfishness and belligerence . . . William
Moreland's hands sweated and he wiped them on his thighs.

This was where he was about to go. This was the pit into which he must
crawl in order to find her. He could not bring himself to consider the possibility that
she might rebuff him. Neither could he backtrack and leave. There was only one way to
go. Down.

IT WAS STILL DARK
when the widow sat up abruptly, put a
hand to her forehead, and groaned with annoyance. The headache had arrived during the
afternoon and settled in for the night. It would pass, she knew, but until it did, sleep
was impossible. She put her cheek to the cold window and closed her eyes. Her breath
slowly blew a fan of vapour on the glass that remained long after she had lain back
down.

BEFORE DAWN
, the Reverend came down his staircase,
heralded by the creaking proof of his poor carpentry. He found the kitchen empty, the
coffee not made, the doors still shut against the night. The emptiness of the room
surprised him, her absence like an affront. And it was chilly — as it used to be
before the widow had arrived. He told her later, “I thought you'd left
me.”

Then he heard her upstairs, shifting heavily in her bed.

“Mrs. Boulton?” He went to the foot of the stairs. She did not
answer.

“Will you get up, Mrs. Boulton?”

She made a peeved sound, a kind of half-moan, said, “No,” and
shifted irritably in her bed. More silence. He called a few more times, to no effect.
Over the next few minutes, the
Reverend earnestly meditated on his
faults, for it must be that some act on his part had caused her to go on strike. Had he
been rude? Had he been unfair to her? But he could remember no moment of inavertent
rudeness, no shadow of annoyance crossing her face, no little huff of frustration. Quite
the reverse. She had recently seemed to become quite happy — he thought she was
growing content with him, just as he was with her.

Sadly, he made his own breakfast. Sour coffee, burnt oatmeal with too much
salt. He couldn't find the dried blueberries, for it was now Mary's kitchen
and he was a stranger in it. The Reverend Bonnycastle grumped his way out the door and
headed off, not to his church this time, but to the mine. It was a new tack he had
decided to try. Attendance at church had recently dropped off to nothing. Perhaps
because there were no new volunteers for a “Bible lesson,” and anyone
who'd already had one wasn't keen on a rematch. The previous Sunday he had
spent waiting in his empty church, then later in solitary work, planing boards for the
walls.

“If they won't come to you, why don't you go to
them?” the widow had said.

“Where?” he'd asked.

“In the mine, Bonny. They must rest sometimes. They must eat
lunch.”

“I suppose.”

“And,” she had said, casually scooping a few bread crumbs off
the table into her palm, “you might offer a little variation in your sermons. A
different subject . . .”

“Variation?” he said uncertainly. The idea had bewildered him
at first, but gradually he saw the sense in it. No one wants to see the same show
repeatedly. He could go to them,
he could change his tack. So, that
morning, he went sadly out the door, walked to his church and right past it, and went on
to the mine.

Meanwhile, the widow lay in a deep fog of laudanum. Hours of ceaseless
thumping in her head had finally caused her to remember McEchern's remedy, which
still lay in the bird lady's opera purse. She had unstoppered the bottle ready to
swig, but realized she didn't know the dose, or how often to take it. In the end,
she had tippled a little of the bitter syrup and brought the bottle back to bed with
her. At first, she felt nothing but a vague desire to sleep. She took another little
sip, and then one more. By the time she took her fourth sip, the widow realized in a
visceral and dully alarmed way that the first one was only just beginning to bloom, huge
and gorgeous, the drug in a belated rampage through her blood. If this was what one sip
felt like. . . . The widow would have panicked if she'd been capable, but she was
no longer capable of anything. There was nothing to do but close her eyes and wait.

McEchern was right. There was suddenly no pain, none at all. It
wasn't simply that the headache was gone, nor that the chronic ache in her leg had
vanished, nor that her cold, stinging feet had warmed, nor that the stiff knuckles of
her work-worn hands had loosened. The release was total,
all
of it was gone,
from every muscle, every drop of her blood. She slipped unresisting into nirvana. And
when the Reverend called out to her, his voice barely penetrated the first layers of an
infinite covering that lay over her and protected her, and beneath which she
slumbered.

She saw things. For a time, there were cavalcades of dark sunbursts, discs
of light pocked with inclusions, something
resembling faces in
those burning stars. The closed eye sees itself, bright halo round the depthless,
staring hole. Later, a ragged thing struggled its way up through a heaped mass of
bodies, while overhead the red sky wrinkled. Arms parting limply to let it pass. The
widow's small body struggling up through heavy bedclothes. No worry. No pain. The
room full of figures; they simply jollied forth, meaningless, harmless. And so this
relief came to her as well: a release from fear.

She found herself at the stove, sleepy-eyed, stirring a pot of water. A
gentle sluicing sound as the long wooden handle cut the surface. She yawned. A dream.
No? . . . All right, not a dream. She looked down at herself and saw her thighs, pale
and bisected by a bunched pair of bloomers. She was only half-dressed.