The Outlander (5 page)

BEFORE SUPPER
, a storm gathered to the east. Clouds
dimmed the air and smears of rain angled near the horizon. A blue haze of humidity hung
everywhere. Inside the house it was cool, the hallways shadowy. Evening seemed to fall,
then fall again. They had taken supper early, the old lady alone in the dining room,
mirthless, as if eating were a chore. The widow ate in the kitchen, sitting on a high
stool, holding her plate on her lap. Food! She was so grateful for it.

When the dinner platters came back, Zenta and Emily quickly devoured what
was left. Without seeming to do so, the widow watched them carefully. She remembered
from her father's house that maids did this. Ordering a little too much at the
meat counter, cooking a few too many potatoes, then scavenging afterward. She remembered
one thin girl who had been caught pocketing boiled eggs wailing, “But how else am
I to
eat
?” And it was a good question, considering the pay. Her father
had counselled tolerance; her grandmother had fired the girl. Secretly she watched Emily
scoop up broken potatoes with a serving spoon and shovel them into her mouth. It must
have been hard to manage when the old woman ate so little. But, as a guest of sorts, the
widow was given her own heaping plate, then begged a glass of wine, and to her surprise
was given one. Despite her bluster, Zenta believed everyone deserved a good meal.

The widow lay that night in the wide, cool bed. It was so much like her
old bed, in father's house, so familiar. The room around her was silent, dull as
an unrung bell. No wind outside, no rain yet. Just a heaviness in the air that yearned
to break. Was she safe here? Could she stay? Would the old lady keep her word? The widow
shivered in the heat. Silence invites
the mind to murmur; a dark
wall waits like a canvas for imagined shapes. As a little girl, she had lain awake at
night, staring hard into her lightless bedroom, imagining that the darkness congealed
and shifted — a shadow play, black on black — and she had waited for what
chimera might show itself. A strange child, she had been unafraid of these things,
monstrous figures reaching for one another, sickly shapes boiling up like dumplings in
dark broth. Her only fear was that they pantomimed her flaws and sins. Some nights she
said her own name over and over again, as protection, as explanation.

She had often been an insomniac, alone in a house of sleepers. Her father
could sleep anywhere, even sitting up at the table if he wanted; her grandmother, with
her creams and hairnets and blindfolds, snored raucously. Even the dogs lay like corpses
by the door, not a tremor betraying them. But she would be awake, wandering the house or
leaning on her windowsill to watch the moon rise and wither, to follow the predations of
foxes and cats. And then later, when she was married, sleeping in tents with her husband
and all the men, she would sit at the tent flap hugging her knees, following with her
eyes the wide paths of wolves round the camp. Praying that they would not yip, that the
men would not wake, that there would be no rifles.

In the cabin, with her husband asleep and late-spring snow blown under the
door and across the floor in sugary whorls, she had lain awake, standing over the baby
as he tried to breathe.

The widow shot up, nearly weeping, and staggered from the bed, hands out
in front of her. She hurried into the hall and felt her way downstairs to the drawing
room, finally opening the French doors. She rushed outside, panicked and
stunned. Lightning burst behind the hills, silvering them. She closed her eyes and
saw an image burned there, a hole-punch moon above.
In your underclothes, where will
you run, barefoot and half-dreaming?

Finally, distant thunder came riding down the atmosphere, booming, and the
widow stepped back indoors.

DURING THE NEXT
two afternoons the widow would peep into
rooms to see if anyone was there and, if not, tiptoe in and look around. In this way,
she familiarized herself with the house and the private habits and details of the women
who lived there. She scrutinized the blotter in the old woman's library and saw
incredible sums mirrored and crawling its lower border. The old lady's bedroom was
as simple as a nun's cell — two single beds separated by a bedside table and
nothing else. All her feminine clutter, what little there was, was packed into the large
closet, her late husband's clothes stuffed to the back. Of the two beds, only one
seemed to have borne any weight, and this was the husband's bed — now dusty
and yellowed.

Emily, it seemed, was an amateur artist. Among fallen cardigans and
tumbled blankets, the floor was littered with pencil drawings of children: girls in
bonnets, boys at the seaside poking sticks into the waves.

Zenta's room had a strange, unpleasant smell to it, the odour of
perfume gone bad with age. An inept alphabet sampler hung over her bed — the widow
looked up close with an expert's eye and saw a thousand minor struggles there.
Bless This House Lord
. Her father had often rolled his eyes at women and
their petitions to God for blessings. “Shout down a well, and tell the frogs what
you want,” he'd say, and her
grandmother would huff and
scold. He had teased her once that he would do his own sampler:
Blast This
House
. “And not one of your tea cronies will notice, because none of them
can read.”

He had been completely unaware that his own daughter did not, strictly
speaking, read. She read the way others might make their way through a mathematical
equation, each part decoded in turn, held in the memory while the next was decoded, the
whole revealing itself over a long time. As a child, she was never expected to write
anything. Her small hands got better at needlepoint, forming rows of letters; she
listened as a young maid sang the alphabet song in the kitchen; she watched as her
father set up block letters on the church sign.
L-U-K-E
. She suspected
that for other people words might come fully formed and recognizable, not a jumble of
parts, but as familiar as faces. For her, there were only letters, dull and flat as cars
in a train. Words sounded out letter by letter, the sound often defying meaning.
Friend. Enough.
Go back and try again.

All she was ever asked to read from was the Bible, and that rarely, so she
had relied on her memory, and had devised a way to mark the pages so that she could
remember. And in this way she managed to hide her weakness. Asked to read from her own
Bible, sing a hymn, or chirp along with other parishioners at the minister's call
and reply, she could give a good recitation. If her father had known, what would he have
said?

The widow looked now at the woollen letters of Zenta's sampler. She
tried to tamp down a bloated B, plucking at a frowsy thread, but it was hopeless. She
listened for the sound of footsteps and, hearing nothing, proceeded to dig through
the maid's closet. She discovered that Zenta's
bedslippers, faded and ugly, fit her very well. The skirts were all short, above the
ankle, but this was true of all maids. A servant could not carry a tray upstairs if her
skirts were too long.

She went through the little boxes and cloth bags and wrapped packages in
Zenta's cupboard, and she could guess what item of feminine arcana lay in each.
She herself had had masses of them. When she had found herself finally in the cabin with
her new husband and she had unpacked her trousseau, the dresses with silk-covered
buttons had lain in her hands like artifacts from another world. She had stood in the
damp bedroom and gazed upon these clothes as if her body still stood in them. She could
see herself posing at parties, sitting by a lamp and listening to her father, or
huddling under a blanket in a sleigh at night as a lantern swung back and forth behind
her. It had been obvious what she must do. She had packed away her former self and begun
sewing clothes, rough simple things to fit her new life.

And now here she was, peering into a maid's cupboards and trying on
a maid's slippers. How shocked her father would be to see his daughter now. She
could almost conjure up his uncomprehending, questioning face. And yet he had believed
so firmly in the alchemical nature of existence — that the path of a
person's life could be predicted down to the last breath, if only one could see
human interaction for what it was: a collusion of physics and chemistry.

What, then, would be his explanation for this? What billiard ball had come
along to knock her into this decaying house? Could he have foreseen his daughter running
through fields, dogs in pursuit? Or his son-in-law struggling on the cabin floor in his
own blood while she stood watching?
Could he have even imagined the
small grave? The child dying, his breath fading? Surely that crisis should have wrung
some forewarning from the very air, from the clouds. It should have come to her in
dreams, raging. And yet there had been no warning, and no remedy. From that small
devastation, all this had followed. Alchemy, physics, prophecy. Darkness erased them
all.

They would come soon, her husband's brothers. She could almost feel
it in the air. There would be gossip among the church people, news travelling like a
smouldering fire, driven by vindictive tongues. They could not fail to find her. And
yet, she could not run away in the night as she had before, without thinking. She must
have a plan, give no warning, take useful things. She picked up Zenta's boots and
slipped one on.

THAT EVENING
, she met Mrs. Cawthra-Elliot in the gloomy
hallway, the bird lady stepping like a feeble djinn out of the murk. The widow was again
in her black clothes, which were now clean.

“Go and get your Bible. Come and see me in the drawing room,”
came the order. “You can read to me.”

A few minutes later, the widow came through the drawingroom door. The fire
was blazing against a perfectly mild August night, and the old woman sat near it,
dandling a glass of amber liquor.

“Sit,” she said. “I'll get you a drink.”

The old woman went to a table and unstoppered a crystal bottle. Beside it
was a bowl filled with huge shards of ice hacked by Emily from the icebox. Each piece
was perfectly clear and too big to float. It was not lost on the widow that she was
being served by the old woman, as if she were an
equal. So, with
tinkling glasses, they sat together by the fire. The widow smoothed the fabric of her
dress over her knee and sniffed the scotch in her glass. “I don't drink
usually,” she said.

“You will. You'll find it helps. The way some people talk,
you'd think the stuff was rat poison. For women, at least.”

The old woman became thoughtful, patted the overstuffed arm of the
chesterfield. “You know, I don't hold with the view that women can't
live like men. We're not all that unalike, the two sexes. Drinking injures us no
more than it does men. Neither does a year or two at university, as I had. Of course, my
husband used to say that men are stronger and so must do the heavy work. I say
fiddlesticks. Look at Zenta. That woman could throw a horse over a fence.”

The widow snorted and covered her mouth in glee.

“Well,” the old lady laughed, “it's true,
isn't it?”

“It is. Zenta frightens me a little.”

“If I were you, I'd be afraid too.” The old woman gazed
into the fire. “She's a spiteful woman. And clever. For some reason, she
dislikes you more than any other person I've brought to the house.”

The fire wheezed in the grate and settled, gushing a renewed brightness
into the room. A door to the forecourt stood open and moths floated in, seeking the
brighter indoors. It was unearthly quiet.

“Where are you from, my dear?”

The question was unexpected, and it startled the widow. She had not yet
constructed a plausible deception, and so she froze, the question unanswered. A lie
might have ended things, shrouded her in a dull, forgettable fog. But now, inescapably,
she had been silent long enough to call suspicion on
herself. There
was nothing for it. She simply clammed up. For a few moments, the women sat awkwardly
side by side on the massive chesterfield.

“Can you at least tell me where you were born?” The old
woman's voice was unexpectedly gentle.

Still, no lie rose to the widow's mind.

The old woman simply carried on. “I was born in Dauphin. Do you know
Dauphin? No? I'm not surprised. It used to take us a week by ox cart to visit
Winnipeg. I thought Winnipeg very grand. Can you believe it? We had a hundred acres, a
team of oxen, a large house — well, large for those days — and a barn. My
father was a doctor, and my uncle farmed. We were all in the same house. I slept in a
bed with my sister until the age of fifteen, at which point I feigned a sleepwalking
habit and was given my own bed. That was wicked, I know, but it was the only way. We had
no toilet, no plumbing at all. They melted snow in winter for water.”

The widow, too, had melted snow in the cabin. She remembered the taste of
it, shovelfuls melting away to mere cups in the pan. She saw the metal pot on the stove,
a lavish mist rising into the frigid air, bricks of snow skating the rounded edges as
they hissed and melted. A basket of her husband's long johns waiting to be washed.
The baby nearly silent now, needing nothing, wanting nothing, his crying done, his life
winding down. And her husband sitting, eating a bowl of soup. Humming. The widow brought
the glass to her lips, her hand hovering, then drifting back down to her lap.

“I remember,” the old lady continued, “that all eight of
us slept for a while on a large pallet, supported by beams. And we were separated by
blankets, for privacy. Since I was at
the end, the hired man slept
next to me. I could hear him breathing. He had a little dog that snapped at me through
the blanket every time I rolled over. It was a wretched dog, named Grenadier. As I
recall, it was a hideous colour, like tobacco.”