The Outlander (39 page)

She put her face in her hands and wept dryly while the forest heaved
skyward in green and swaying protection.

IN PROFOUND BLACKNESS
that night, the widow ventured
forth with her arms out before her, proceeding as slow as mist along the ground, her
eyes warring with a blindness she could scarcely believe. The world revealing itself in
pure sound, the movements of small animals, wind above her in the trees, and something
more, some hint in the air that describes topography: a hollowness in the draws and
gullies, while up on the ridges sound goes wide. She would stop for minutes at a time
and listen. Small chirrups from above. Two cedars creaking together. Here she was again
fleeing in the dark, her heart cored out and empty, too tired even to cry. Only now she
had nothing. No little grey mare, no coat, no food. No rifle. No William Moreland coming
to snatch her away from death. Even the little Bible was gone, lost in the landslide.
What could it give her now? Could it light her way? Could it garrotte a rabbit? Alone
again, with only the clothes on her body, she stood among the murmurings. In
another time she might have wished herself by her father's
side, attending to his lectures on science and nature, but that life was also gone. She
could no longer recall clearly her father's face.

CLOSE TO MORNING
she smelled something rank on the air,
an acrid sweetness burned off to its essence and soaking in the dew. She followed it
until she reached a scorched line of grass, like a black rivulet along the ground. Just
beyond it was another, running along in the same direction, blown by the wind. She
followed these till they ran out to nothing, then she turned and followed them back the
other way. Small licks of blackness crawled up the trunks of trees, some as high as her
knees — scorch marks where fire had been. The smell absurdly strong, peculiar.
When she came upon the blackened clearing she suspected where she was. She cast about
for some proof and there it was — Giovanni's ruined still. She had stumbled
upon the cat skinner's home. No one else had ever seen it.

Nothing moved in the clearing. A raised, V-shaped wooden trough ran
downhill and along it gurgled a constant thumb's width of water. She stepped over
this and into the clearing. Everything was black or grey. Incinerated grass lay flat
along the ground, stiff and colourless. The copper kettle was the size and shape of a
fat man's torso. It had been standing within a low stone furnace, enclosed to its
widest point and probably boiling mash when the shaking earth caused it to blow off and
land twenty feet away with burst welding brads, a bent cap, and its steam pipe pointed
skyward. The furnace on which it had stood was made of rock and clay, now scorched and
topless, the mortar between the bricks baked
to a chalky white. A
condenser coil hung from a tree branch, like some enormous Christmas ornament. Here and
there a shattered gallon bottle, several metal hoops on the ground among the charred
remains of barrels. From the source of the explosion, which was the furnace, fire had
spread out down-wind in an ellipse. The trees around the still were bare of leaves and
their trunks were runnelled with seams of black.

The widow called out, “Giovanni?” then immediately regretted
it. Who else might hear her?

Nothing moved. No sound came from the trees.

She spent the morning scrounging among the ruins for useful things. She
found very little, for it seemed the cat skinner, despite the chaos of his appearance,
was a frugal, tidy man. She discovered a blackened knife with a brass tang where the
wood handle had burned away. Several leather gunny sacks cooked hard. Tin cups and
plates, a pot, an iron frying pan, neatly stacked and striated with ashes. Here and
there he had tacked up small skins to cure on tree trunks. Rabbit, perhaps a marten, all
hairless now, and smoked.

She followed the little water trough uphill and after a short climb
discovered a small, dry springhouse, a cold box with a metal lid built over a natural
spring. It would keep food cool in summer and unfrozen in winter. The widow fished it
open and peered inside where it was cool and dank. It was empty but for a can of coffee
grounds and a stained bag of flour. Trailing the trough uphill, she paused to palm up a
little water to drink. Turning to flick her fingers away she saw something move —
a door hung with some kind of blanket that swayed in a breeze. She had found
Giovanni's living quarters. She might easily have wandered past it, for it was
thickly camouflaged and partially dug into the hill. The
fire had
not reached here — Giovanni was sensible enough to live at some remove from his
still. She approached the strange, half-buried building. It was a towering lean-to with
a door made of thick hide and appropriate in size to a giant, and surprisingly spacious
inside. The widow ventured in, whispering his name, but the room was empty.

Everything was unearthly silent, and slowly there rose to her nostrils a
funk of human odour, profound and intimate and complex. Eventually her eyes adjusted to
the dim interior light and she saw the contours of Giovanni's furnishings. Most of
the room was bed, a wide, deep platform lavishly strewn with blankets and hides and two
strangely homey pillows. All along the wall stood a row of books, every one in Italian,
or so she guessed. There was a small fireplace at the back whose chimney must have poked
out somewhere uphill, hidden among the trees. Along the mantel he had set out a line of
fanged skulls, most of which the widow judged to be cats. A fox and a raccoon among
them. A line of waxen grimaces, one of which held a cigarette between its dry jaws. The
widow snorted.

She sat on the bed listening intently to the world outside. Not a
footstep, not a breath. She remembered a time when she had relied on her little horse to
alert her to the presence of other animals. Now she relied on herself. If anyone came,
what could she do? She had no defence but to remain still, a rabbit in the underbrush
trusting the murmuring instinct of its blood.

She woke with a start. Shot up out of the bed and froze. It was dusk and
it was silent. The widow had no recollection of falling asleep, nor of what had woken
her. She stood in the strange, capacious hovel, her heart pounding and a familiar
nausea rising in her. Hungry. She was hungry. She stepped from the
lean-to and made her way slowly to the clearing. The sun had faded to nothing — a
pale evening sky in which hung a crescent moon, while here, under the cover of the
forest, shadow reigned. It was the time for animals to come out.

In the dusk she made her way back up to the springhouse, where she reached
in and collected its contents. The bag of flour smelled vulgar, but it seemed dry, free
of bugs. She clumped back down to the empty clearing, went to the furnace, scraped ashes
out of its guts, and built a fire in the firebox. It was hard to find wood that
hadn't already been burned. Here she sat before the low, glowing firebox, mixing
flour and water into a ball of unleavened dough for hardtack bread. With no leavening
agent she was obliged to knead relentlessly. On the upper surface of the furnace she had
placed the tin cooking pot, now brewing coffee. She sat with the bowl between her
enclosing legs and bore down on the dough with both hands, watching the whitish, larval
substance roll and squelch under her knuckles.

Abruptly, she leaped up and strode a few paces away before retching dryly
over the ferns. Tears in her eyes. She spat, sighed hollowly. A racket of birds came
from somewhere far uphill. Then the widow returned to her bowl and blew a few ants away
from its rim and went back to work. She was so hungry.

When full night came she was watching the bright, little firebox, lost in
meditation, hunched and half-lit, like some infinitely old, primeval creature turning
its tired back on the dark.

She remembered a cold hand, once, holding hers — some old church
woman taking the miserable child on an outing
to give her parents
one moment of peace. The woman had led her through the gates of a travelling fair and
into an enormous crowd. They had hurried past a cacophony of little booths and tents in
the failing light of a fall afternoon, the girl craning to see stuffed animals and
wax-faced dollies swimming past. Tripping on her shoes. The cold hand leading her
urgently onward, then stopping suddenly to queue outside a large tent. An enormous
pot-bellied man with jacket and vest, holding a roll of tickets, looked down at
them.

“Little one won't like it,” he said. “And
she's too young.”

“She's twelve.”

“She isn't, either. You can leave her here.”

“I can't leave her.”

He looked down and sniffed, the tickets coming slowly from the roll.
“Well, she won't like it.”

So in they went, along a dark canvas tunnel hung with posters and placards
showing roaring beasts and recoiling women. And then they entered a small room full of
benches crammed with people — a scent upon the air, part sawdust and part rot,
reminding her of a butcher's shop. There was a barker whose diction was antique,
and he strutted the stage, bellowing about the wonders about to be revealed. Finally,
out ran a naked man slung with masses of weedy hair, incredible amounts of hair, which
obscured even his face and feet, and he roared and shook a bloodied rabbit, trying to
terrify the women in the front row, who merely pulled their chins in and fanned
themselves. Mary was not afraid at all, for she assumed he was wearing some kind of
ridiculous suit and that it was a ruse. So she sat among the crowd and scowled as they
did.

Perversions of nature were followed by the wonders of science, the barker
holding out his hands, inviting the assembled to imagine a benign future in which every
malady has its parallel cure, and even death might be conquered. Her caretaker seized
her hand and bent to whisper, “Oh, Mary, wait till you see it!” There came
the thin wail of an infant, and the old woman's hand shook hers in pure
excitement. Through a door to stage right came a slatternly, middle-aged woman done up
like a nurse in aprons and a stiff bonnet, wheeling before her a table, and on the table
sat a bizarre glass box festooned with pipes and bellows. Inside lay a squirming baby.
The barker hurried behind this woman, helping to lift and drag along an umbilicus of
insulated wires. In an instant there was a crush of onlookers around the object. Mary
was dragged from her seat to go and see.

A peculiar noise emanated from the box, a mechanical
whup-whup-whup
, and the baby's angry cries were strangely muffled.
Mary put her fingers against the glass; it was warm, with a slight accumulation of
vapour on the inside. The baby was impossibly small and had a bad colour. The
barker's patter diminished, and subsided in theatrical revelation, whispering that
this otherworldly glass object, despite its frightful look, was as warm and nurturing as
the mother's body, and that the child would die the moment it was taken from its
embrace. Quiet fell over the people, and they all gazed down on the infant, and the
baby, too, seemed to stop its struggles and open its fists. It appeared to be attending
to the movements of crowd, the whispering female voices just beyond the glass. And then,
almost abruptly, the moment was over, the barker swooping down on them with gestures
to depart, and they were ushered outside, goodbye goodbye, tell
your friends, tell your neighbours. The exit door loomed. Then Mary found herself
walking alongside the muddy skirts of her keeper. It was already growing dark.

Together, they settled side by side at a little tea tent. The waiter
brought them sugary sodas, and the old woman splurged on a cream bun, which they tore
into pieces and shared. She dabbed constantly at Mary's face and dress, worrying
about bringing her home a mess because someone else would have to deal with it, and
what's the point in offering help if you just make more work for people? The
gentle hand touching her face, the woman's soft voice, her bare wrists emerging
from the frilled black cuffs, so unlike her grandmother's, no jingle of charm
bracelets, no scolding. How to prolong this visit? How to stay with this woman? The
child looked into her soda, as if she could divine the answer from the drifts of sugar
at the bottom of it — the spoon going clockwise or counter-clockwise, the number
of stirrings, the left or right hand holding the spoon; everything seemed
significant.

A raised voice behind them said, “Well,
I
think it's
a miracle.”

“Oh, my eye,” said another. “They just put a sick baby
in a box and call it science. The whole thing was a crock.”

Mary had looked up at her babysitter with inquiring eyes and the old woman
looked down at her with something of the same curiosity. “I
think
it was
real,” the old woman said.

“But he was a fake hairy man?”

“That was genuine, I'm afraid. It's a disease of some
sort.”

But the girl's heart knew otherwise. Deception hung everywhere
around them, in the lanterns and painted signs, the music and voices, the antic delight
of it all, the dusty, costumed
barkers and the wretched touts full
of practised charm. Even in this kind old woman. It was all a diversion, an artifice
that stood in brief defiance of the real. By the fairground fence, a ring of exhausted
Shetlands with dirty manes slept on their feet. Someone had draped their shoulders with
bright garlands of paper flowers, and there was a lantern hung from the fence, and a
sign she could not read.

This had been her last image of the fair, for soon the old woman took her
by the hand and together they hurried along the graded road to home, where a maid met
them at the door and Mary was hustled off to bed.

Now, the widow put a weathered hand to her cheek and stared into the fire,
seeing again the waiting beasts, and the inscrutable sign, its message forever
undeliverable. Try as she might, she could not recall the words. Impossible, too, to
lean close to the little girl and whisper warnings or counsel in her ear, to tell her
the course of things. But if she could have, what then? What great benefit would come of
that magic? Time would pass just as surely, day turn to night. The hand on this cheek
might be softer, these trees not here. The Reverend would be unknown to her, and still
dead. Her baby boy would not have existed, just as he didn't exist now.