The Outlander (36 page)

She would never know why she'd run after it, stumbling on the
leaping floorboards, the sound of other smaller impacts against the walls of the house
behind her, like uneven gunfire, but she'd followed like a dog to the jagged,
stove-sized hole near the eaves where the thing had escaped. Here she stood, the
Reverend somewhere behind her in the dark, when a shadow cut across the moon and the
screaming wall of rock hit the side of the house. The building flattened like a bellows,
and blew her out into the night. She remembered the wind and the cold, her body tumbling
through space, a body among many, all travelling together.

She was drinking now from a whisky bottle — mid-sip. She held the
bottle at eye level, uncertain where it had come from, then lowered it to her knee.

“Have another.” McEchern stood before her, his solemn face a
foot from her own.

“He's dead,” she said, unbelieving.

“I know.”

“He didn't move. He didn't get up out of bed.”

“No one had time to do anything. It happened too fast. Take a
drink.”

“But,” she sobbed, “look at me!”

The dwarf 's eyes left her face and skated aimlessly; indeed, how
was it that she was there, alive and intact? He retrieved the bottle and took a swig,
held it in his hand and pressed his wrist to his mouth. His face was dusty and
washed out, the exhausted eyes small and dull and redrimmed.
Behind him, the hubbub of the makeshift infirmary, men shouting. He gazed at his
collapsed establishment, burst like a balloon, the wormed sign pitched up at a woozy
angle, the lettering shaded by drifts of dust, now saying only
erns
. Strange
that in its collapse the little man's store had never been so popular. Given a
moment to think, every man who was still able to walk had come here.

“That pole broke,” he said, “and came down one foot from
my head. Then the tent came down after it, sort of floating. I know an avalanche when I
hear it. I just waited for the rest of it to hit. It never did. See over there, and over
there? It came down both sides. Missed the store completely.” He shook his head.
“You and me got an extra dose of luck.”

“How do we know he's dead, Mac?” she said, her voice
weak and empty.

“Drop it, Mary,” he said.

“But how do we know? Maybe . . . maybe he's all right.”
She had been plucked from the path of the disaster — why not him? McEchern was
silent for a long time, and she waited, unblinking, as a wife awaits explanation from a
wayward husband.

“That whole side of the mountain is gone,” he said finally.
His eyes grew moist and two livid streaks appeared high on his cheeks. “The
Rev's gone, too. Under a hundred feet of rock.”

He stayed with her a while longer, the two of them sunk into silence,
seated side by side on the tin bathtub, the widow in her tatters and bare feet, the
dwarf 's beard caked with dust and his bowler dirty and flattened on one side.
They remained like that until McEchern roused himself to shout
at
an old fellow working his way under the folds of the tent into the store.

“Get out of there!” he piped, leaping from his seat.
“You heard me, get out of there!” The miner only mumbled something and
turned back to his struggles. As the dwarf walked forward he extracted from the
waistband of his trousers the old Colt revolver and fired it once into the air. A
unified jolt of surprise ran through the assembly of men. A few of the injured actually
sat up to see what new calamity was coming.

“That's right,” McEchern said as the jabbering man
backed away from the collapsed door flaps. “No one goes in there but me. You hear
that?” His voice was shredding with emotion. “I catch any of you fuckers
helping yourselves, I'll make you sorry.”

DARKNESS FELL EARLY
that night, the sun setting cold and
shrunken in the dusty air. The widow moved slowly in the fading light, wandering the
face of the slide. Her hands were grimed with blood from nursing the injured and
dressing the dead. A cavalcade of horrors paraded before her eyes still. She now knew
intimately the colour of exposed bone, the silver sheaths on muscle, the whiff of
intestine.

All that day, she had gone barefoot among the barnyard racket of moans and
coughs and begging, helping where she could, and there was dried blood on her from a
dozen different sources. Those in terror would hold her hand and bless her for her
kindness; some of them called her by names that weren't her own.

But before long, one man had sat up and pointed at the widow, shouting,
“It's her. She done it!” until someone told him to shut up. And
eventually he did shut up, but there was
strained silence
afterwards, and there followed behind the widow something like a bitter wind, some men
actually pondering the issue, the possibility that this bedraggled creature in her torn
clothes had somehow brought destruction upon them. Men brought up on God and
superstition in equal measure, labouring in dark mines, where no woman had ever stepped,
its darkness full of ghosts. And now here she went among them, the living and the dead,
in her witch's garb and bare feet, scuffing up pale dust as if it were an infernal
smoke billowing from her skirts.

She had ministered to a young man with most of his hair singed off and
cuts to his face, washing carefully the jagged wound along his jawline, within which an
intact artery throbbed visibly.

“I don't blame you,” he had said. “You can't
blame something like this on a lady, no matter what she did.” The wet rag had
trembled in her hand.

She took up a needle and thread and willed her fingers still to sew the
boy's wound closed, while he winced and whined like a dog, the skin rolling
grossly away from the dull needle, like a worm from a hook, until punctured with an
audible pop. This, she thought, is what the embroidery lessons were for.

“The place was unstable,” another angry, quivering voice was
saying. “What'd ya think all that rockfall was about? Fun and
games?”

“I'm not saying it's her fault, just her doing.”
And all around the widow, in
sotto voce
, there sprang up impromptu debates on
issues occult, with the widow as the question to be answered. Where does misfortune come
from? What hand
brings it? Are the wicked among us? Does disaster
find them in the end?
Jonah fled from the Lord and hid among sailors, but He found
him and brought to them all a terrible storm.
McEchern stood by Mary's
side, his expression sour, and his eyes watchful of the men and full of warning. Pistol
at his waist.

Now, walking up the slope of the landslide at dusk, the widow paused. She
pressed these images away with the heels of her hands and went on, stumbling uphill.
Incredible that mere men, tiny as burrowing ants, could cause such geological
transformation. All the miners buried deep in the mine, their graves already dug. The
men sleeping in tents, rolled under tons of rock and spread thinly about, no more sacred
than a tree or a clump of grass or an entire meadow. And the pointless industry of the
living — pulling dead men from the mess, sometimes just to recognize them, only to
bury them again under the selfsame rock. There was no sound, not even the tinkle of
falling rock any more, no animal sound, no wind. The world was hollow and dead, as
closed and ghostly as the mine below. No moon. She simply clambered upward as the light
failed, holding a buffalo hide about her shoulders, her breath chuffing, drifting behind
her in the damp air. In her mind, she was heading for her buried home.

On her feet she wore a pair of McEchern's boots, another borrowing.
At first, he had tried to find boots among the upturned feet of the dead, pulling off
first one then another boot to test it against her foot, but they were all too big.
Finally, he tried a pair of his own boots. When she had slipped the first one on her
foot, she grinned. It fit perfectly. This seemed to her a terrible joke.

“What?” he'd said, but his face said he knew what. The
dwarf and the woman, lucky miscreants, outlanders, errors that should not exist but
lived on anyway.

She went on following a path more imagination than memory. Though she
could not know it, she had been moving laterally across the slope, toward the mine, away
from her buried home. Tumbled rock lay in her way alongside shattered trees, their
branches torn loose or tufted into bouquets. The silhouettes of old root systems reared
up before her like warnings, something brainlike in their clogged, venous gnarls, and
dangling there amid the damp earth like Christmas ornaments were pebbles and shards.
Soon, all was black, and she stood in weighty silence, uncertain how to go on. So she
huddled with her back against some large upright thing, waiting, although she knew not
for what.

She remembered the Reverend's face in the moonlight. His mouth had
been moving, so she knew he was speaking, but his words had been drowned out by the roar
of the approaching avalanche. What had he been saying? She tried to remember the shape
of the words. But it was impossible. The floorboards had been bucking under her feet.
She remembered the tuft of hair on his head, the way it had looked every morning, and a
wave of tenderness pierced her heart. Not her fault, but her doing. If not her, then
who? The widow put her face in her hands and wept herself into an exhausted sleep,
wrapped in the rough winter hide, her cheek on the cold rock.
Tired, tired, always
tired.
Even in sleep, she listened for him somewhere down in the earth.

She dreamed and did not dream. The sound was like a little tin spoon
clacking against a table. She felt it in her teeth. The rhythmic tapping was telling her
something
important, and in her half-sleep, she attended the lesson
patiently. A clicking. Then a scrape. The sound of several voices, indistinct but very
close. The widow sat bolt upright, letting the buffalo blanket fall, suddenly fearful in
the pitch-black.

At first, there was a dim glow somewhere to her left. Like a match had
been dropped between the fissures of rock and was guttering there. She heard a few more
clicks, and then a small stone rolled away downhill, pushed by a human hand. The hand
felt about, clawlike, and dragged a few rocks into the glowing breach. The widow
screamed once and then clapped her hand to her mouth. In response came muffled shouts
from below. There was a barrage of hammering, and eventually a hole the size of a pie
pan opened in the ground, eroding and ever widening as the widow watched in disbelief.
The light of several lamps could be seen, now flickering with the unseen struggle below.
Then a lone miner emerged onto the surface of the slide, shoulders first and then
sitting, like a man hoisting himself through an attic trapdoor, bringing with him a
whiff of stale and gassy air. He did not see the widow there, for she sat sprawled in
the darkness not moving, so he crawled like a newborn devil a few feet from his infernal
fissure and stood upright on unsteady legs. He removed his helmet and put his face
upward and took a deep, swooning breath of fresh air. And then he bent at the waist and
bellowed, “Fuck
me!
” collapsing again to his hands and knees.
Behind him, coming from the bright hole, could be heard hoots and whistling, the voices
of men, raw and weak and full of joy.

THE WIDOW SAT
sewing atop a pile of buffalo hides with
her legs crossed and her tongue working at the corner of her mouth in concentration.
McEchern's store now had a new central mast made from a fallen Jack pine, with the
bark still on it but most of the branches sawn off. The wood was green and flexible, so
the pole swayed with the breeze, the canvas flapped and bowed and there was a nautical
air to the establishment. Across the widow's lap lay several pieces of deerskin.
She had begun to copy the clothing she had seen on Henry's wife, Helen — the
simple trousers and overdress. Her skill at sewing being what it was, she was
reproducing the garment exactly.

The widow had been a good seamstress, unusually skilled when she
concentrated, a fact that had only ever impressed other women. Her father had once
called her “manually dexterous,” which she had correctly interpreted as a
kind of slight. He valued only the mental skills, as men often did. He had no idea what
hours of careful work had gone into the very shirt on his back, the sheets he slept on,
the tablecloth on which he had his dinner — never mind the complex dresses and
frocks on the women around him. Depending on the skill of the dressmaker, it might be an
unutterable disaster to
spill anything on a dress and stain it.
There was no telling whether the garment, expensive as it was, would even survive
washing. Fading was certain if you dried it in the sun, rot possible if you
didn't. Mary had seen very elderly women move with athletic speed away from an
inkwell or soup bowl in the process of spilling. And always, in the background, were the
peeved faces and bent backs and ruined hands of the washerwomen. The stench of lye. The
solemn and impressive lines of laundry hung in the basement.

Normally, the widow would have sat back and relaxed into her work, the way
a woman might do petit point by a fire, with a cup of tea at her elbow. But the deerskin
was nothing like cloth. Extraordinarily spongy and elastic, it rolled away from the
needle's point in an organic way, and she was obliged to bend over it and fight
with the seams. Much like sewing up a man's injured face, only not wet, not
squirming in pain.

The widow sighed and cricked her neck. She was not happy, exactly, but
content. This was nearly a miracle of the heart. Three days earlier she had returned
from a futile search for her home and the Reverend, her pockets empty, not even the
little Bible to her name, and she had entered the tent, and lain on this very pile of
hides, her eyes dully open. For three days she had neither spoken nor eaten, but lay as
if dead.
He is gone, he is gone.
Crumpled and tattered in her ruined clothes,
she was like any other cargo in the store, insensible to her surroundings, sunk into the
black and miasmic horrors within. Tears streamed from her face into the rank hides. In
little sinking moments of abandon, she dozed, dreaming repeatedly of the Ridgerunner,
that he was among the dead now too, and that he hated her. The hours and
days crawled by in procession, pointless, monstrously slow. From
time to time the dwarf would wander by and pat her wrist or perhaps ply her with
water.