Far North (25 page)

I knew otherwise but I said nothing.

‘Rudi said this thing had been preying on his mind. He was keen for me to know in detail and whether I forgave him or not, that was up to me. Confession’s a powerful thing.

‘He said it was him that had broken into the Hatfield residence that night with a gang of men he’d hired down by the old fire-house. He’d had to pay them half up front to get a deal, and they were drunk when he went to meet them. He had a bad feeling about it, but he went ahead anyway. The men were out of control. He lost a grip on things as son as they got to the house. You know the rest.

‘I told him it was
your
forgiveness that he needed, but for my part, I could see his remorse was genuine and it wasn’t up to me to judge him.

‘He seemed pretty happy with that answer and left soon afterwards. It didn’t rest so easy there with me, though. It didn’t feel quite right. I knew Rudi once, and it didn’t sound like the kind of thing he would do. We have all had to adapt, but for Rudi to break in and steal? It got to bothering me so much that I had some of my men follow him.

‘They said he was living with some distant relative of his in a street full of crippled houses that were sliding into their own foundations. He spent most of each day in bed in this wonky room, not a straight angle left in it, coughing up into a bucket.

‘So finally I went to see him. I said, “Rudi, something’s bothering me about the story you told. And don’t for a second think that I don’t forgive you, because I do – and in a way I ought to thank you, for if they’d never run me out of town, perhaps I would never have made it here like I have” – and I thought to myself, maybe it would have been me in this crooked room, preparing to die. “But what’s bothering me is this: I just don’t believe that you, on your own, would have decided to rob James Hatfield.”

‘And he said, in his rattling voice, “I didn’t.”

‘“If that’s the case, why did you do it?”

‘“Someone sent me,” he said.

‘“And who was that?” I asked.

‘“James Hatfield.”

‘For a moment, I thought I’d misheard or the consumption had reached his brain. But then, just after, it was like a big light going on in my head.

‘What do lawyers say?’ Eben went on. ‘
Cui bono
? We got fit up. Your father was running out of friends. Turning the other cheek sounded grand, but it wasn’t practical. He knew that – but how could he climb down from his mountain top and say he’d changed his mind? A man as rigid as him.

‘A wiser man would have known how to move with the times. He
could
have thrown his hands up and said: “I was wrong. This thing’s out of control. Mike Callard has the right idea. We need to arm ourselves and protect what we have here.” But the thing about your old man is he had no humility. He had to be right, even when he was wrong.

‘And what made it galling for him was my father, a newcomer to the town, who’d depended on your father’s charity, winning over all those wavering souls. Your father must have wrestled with himself, seeing the corner he was in. Yes, he had an uncomfortable choice to make.

‘Rudi said your father came to him and laid things out. He told him he needed a provocation. Rudi was supposed to break into your house with a gang of men, rough the place up a bit. No one was to be harmed, just smash up this and that. Enough for him to blame us for it, run us out of town and use it to excuse a change of heart on carrying arms. I can almost hear your father’s voice saying it: “Why even Simon Peter raised his sword to defend our Lord!”

‘Rudi didn’t want paying himself. He was doing it out of respect for your old man. Your father had given him a little money as wages for the men, but he didn’t take any. He was very particular that I know that. It was never meant to go as far as it did. Things got out of hand. That’s the tragedy. Rudi said your father couldn’t live with it and the remorse killed him.

‘He said he never felt anything but admiration for you. And he was sorry how it had changed you. He said you kind of went into yourself after it happened. You were always so outgoing, couldn’t keep still, always moving, like a ball in a bagatelle. You had big dreams, I remember. Move out east. The States. You never had the spirit of a small-town girl. He said there was a time when there was just a handful of you all living in the rubble of Evangeline like refugees. He said he’d see you every day, circling the place on horseback, like a – what’s the word he used? – a wraith. Said it depressed the hell out of him to see what had become of you. I remember how you were too, Makepeace, bright as a button. You were a pretty thing too. A lot of us were sweet on Makepeace Hatfield.

‘I understand why you lied to me about the Zone. But we’re not enemies. Look at me. Time hasn’t been kind to me. But two hops and you can be out of here. Take us to where those flasks are and we can ride that plane to Barrow. You’d love the place. People live very well. It’s like it was here in the old days. Very neighbourly. Very respectful. And bit by bit we’re building something we can leave our children. Not all fathers are like yours, Makepeace.’

He stood up and took something out of his pocket. ‘I brought you dessert,’ he said, putting it on the table in front of me.

‘I’m sorry if what I said has hurt you, but I thought it was better for you to know.’

He called to the guard to see him out of the room. There was a step down to manage on the way out, and he wobbled somewhat as he took it, but aside from that, you would never guess his eyes had gone.

 *

The guard loosened my hands.

I thought at first he’d left me behind an apple, but I soon knew what it was. The first I’d ever seen. An orange. I scraped the skin with my nail and it let out a smell that seemed to have flowers and mint and burned sugar in it. After a moment, I could smell sea spray too. But I couldn’t bring myself to eat the thing.

 *

There was an electrical storm that night, as big as any I can remember. It kicked off with a drum roll of thunder way out to the east of us, towards the coast, towards Evangeline. Then the sky darkened and flashed, throwing down chunks of ice so big that I thought we were under attack. It pounded the yard, and rustled the trees, and slammed the tin roofs of the prisoners’ barracks.

 *

I spent all my life with people whose whole task on earth was bound up with acting rightly and I guess I got the habit of it in spite of myself.

Now I had found myself standing in a world where right had perisnd flaI had always believed that right was like north to my father: a thing as real as sunlight, a place on the map, the arrow on a compass. It was the unalterable facts of duty, love, and conscience. But our world had gone so far north that the compass could make no sense of it, could only spin hopelessly in its binnacle. North had melted right off the map. North was every which way. North was nowhere. For so long the plane had been my north. And in a strange way, so had Eben Callard. I was anchored by the bad thing just as by the hope that in a distant city some semblance of order, of right, was giving meaning to my world. But we were long past that place. I was stood in the dark trying to make sense of a room that was lit by flashes of light through a keyhole.

Long past midnight the hailstorm ceased and the air grew quiet and fresh. I rattled on the door with my tin cup to get the guard, then I told him I had a message for Eben Callard.

7

I
T
TOOK
THEM
ANOTHER
DAY
and a half to distil ethanol for the plane’s spare tank. The plan was to take enough for two flights and miss out the base on the journey back.

They let me back to sleep in my old room and I was up at dawn, waiting by the plane in the caramel morning light as the horses were loaded up a ramp at the back.

The animals baulked at the stink of oil and spirit, but the guards shoved them in and fixed them in slings to hold them through the journey. I know in the old days that even the Tungus flew sometimes, and they moved their prize caribou by air. Then we took our places amongst them, some of us on boxes, others on the seats that swung down from worn latchings on each side of the plane. The inside was painted sky blue, with Russian words stencilled on it. I felt for all the world that I was in a shed. It didn’t seem possible that it would ever be able to leave the ground.

We were sat there for almost an hour before the props started turning, so I had plenty of time to think about what I had chosen. I felt that Shamsudin would have approved of the deal I’d struck.
Civilization and cities are the same thing
, he’d said. I wished he was coming with me. I wasn’t too old for a change.

Eben was the last to get in. He was helped up to a seat beside the pilot in the front of the plane and put on some headgear to talk to him with.

At the take-off, we rumbled across the grass outside the base so slowly I couldn’t see how we’d lift before we hit the trees. Then just when it seemed the pilot had misjudged the take-off, the note of the engine changed, and she rose up and an invisible weight pressed me into my seat.

The horses seemed more calm about the notion of flying than I was. They swayed a little as we lifted, but never stopped munching out of their feed-bags.

I had to turn awkwardly to look through the windows. I could see the ground dropping away beneath us as we turned in a wide arc over the base. It was spread out beneath us like a toy fort.

The men who were marching out to work all turned as one to look up. The bare ground around them was wn and faded like a worn bearskin. Summer and winter are the two moods of the north, but so different that you’d take them for different places.

And then we were over the taiga – one green vastness all the way to the horizon, here and there slashed with little rills of white water. The size of it made my neck prickle. At its distant edges I could make out the faint curve of the globe.

There was a roar in the cabin that was too loud to speak over, and some of the men dozed. The ones beside me were jumpy during the flight. They watched me carefully, not quite believing I would be helping them willingly.

It wouldn’t have been hard to grab hold of the steering and plunge all of us into the trees. But I was as good as my word.

 *

It took us half a day to cover the same distance it had taken weeks to ride. Towards noon we got a signal from the cabin that we were passing over the Zone.

You had to see Polyn from the air to see what a masterpiece it was.

It lay bleaching in the sun underneath us, like the bits of a broken machine: streets fanning out from the hub of the main square, the river alongside it like a sheet of hammered lead, reflecting the sun back up at us with a dull glow, and that big head, no more than a bronze pimple.

The pilot brought us down on a stretch of flat ground by the riverside. We seemed to speed up as we landed, until the trees were rushing past us, and it felt like we would certainly crash, but the plane bounced a couple of times like a skimmed stone and then pulled up to a stop.

The sunlight was fierce as I climbed out. The props died gradually into silence until all you could hear was the boisterous sound of the insects. The mosquitoes plagued us from the moment we touched down. We wore head-nets to fend them off, but any bare skin they’d settle on in a moment, and gorge until you killed them, or until they flew off, fat and giddy with blood.

It took a while to unpack the plane. The horses had to come down the ramp again, and they took some cajoling. The men smoked constantly and they bickered and shouted, nervous about the place we were in.

We made camp a good way from the bridge because the pile of bodies was stinking.

It was a lot different from my last time there. They’d brought bedding, fresh food, and clean firewood from the base – not to keep warm, but for smoke to put off the insects.

The pilot slept in the plane that night, but the rest of them spent the night in the open, sleeping in shifts so there was always someone keeping one eye on the Tungus – and another on me. They still didn’t trust my change of heart.

 *

Apofagato had told me I should shave my hair off as a safeguard – anything to stop dust leaving the Zone. So at first light I snipped it short with some clippers and finished it off with a razor.

The guards were asleep. Eben Callard had a private tent and two men to guard it. Like he’d said, he had to be careful how he did business.

I had some tools but no weapons to speak of and I knew there was nothing I could do to stop the double-cross. I just hoped if they’d decided to kill me, they’d do it quickly.

My hair lay all around me in mousy tufts. It was darker than I’d expected, but for the first time in my life I could see there was grey in it. I stroked my naked skull with my fingers – it felt queer and slick to the touch. It was a comfort to cradle it, somehow. It was warm and there was a pulse in it. It reminded me of Ping.

The last thing I did was to throw away the keepsake I had made from the wing. I’d been wearing it so long it left a smudge of grey on my skin. I took it off and pitched it into the river. It rose and dipped like a bird in flight, then vanished. I thought that whatever hopes and convictions she had cherished, Makepeace was just another mask that life wore as it fought to renew itself, unsentimental, unsparing, fighting ugly.

I didn’t doubt that Eben had told me the truth. Bill Evans had a rule of thumb he used to size up suspects. It wasn’t foolproof – what is? – but it helped to get a handle on people. He called it the law of opposites. He said the truth of a man is the opposite of what he wants you to know about him. If you want to understand someone, you have to find a way to catch hold of his shadow. By Bill’s reckoning, the man to fear is the one always harping on about goodness.

My father felt exalted by the thought of the things he had given up to live his life. He believed that he was a better man than those people who had clung on to riches and city life, who had been slower to see the changes in the world. But the truth was he wasn’t even as good a man as Eben Callard.