The Outlander (29 page)

In those days, Mary slept even less than usual. And when she did manage to
sleep, she often woke to see both of them at her bedside, her grandmother's
terrified face hovering over her. She was made to understand that she had been screaming
in her sleep, racketing out the dream's disaster.

“What did I say?” she asked.

“Nothing,” her grandmother had sighed. “You don't
say a blessed thing. You just shriek like a banshee.”

Her father looked down at her through his miasma of sorrow. “Was it
her?” he asked. “Did she speak to you?”

One night an elderly maid had slipped into her room, placed a dry, light
hand on the girl's forehead. “Who putteth her trust in thee,” the maid
had whispered, “and evermore mightily defend her, nor let the wicked approach to
hurt her . . .” Mary had looked up in bewilderment. When the old lady left the
room, she had put her finger to her lips.

Her father, too, was sleepless in those days. And staggering. Rum was his
drink, and so a sweet reek followed him about the house, burnt toffee cut with piss, and
his breath was rank. He would go whole days without responding to anyone; he would not
even meet his daughter's eye, but stared dully ahead, too deep in the smoking ruin
of his heart to see the world. In increments, the engine of his anger began to fail. He
took to his bed, sometimes for days, reclining in his rumpled clothes and barking at the
maids, accomplishing nothing, for nothing was the point. His mother kept up a constant
harangue — to him, to the kitchen girl, to the walls.
“Does he think she'd be proud of him? Does he believe the world stops?
When is enough for this man?”

Gradually, there were signs of repair. Mornings he sat watching sparrows
on the forecourt and held a bottle of milk to his chest. He found a book,
Lives of
the Caesars
, and began reading about the outrages and intrigues, the scheming
women, armies lost in the darkness. On one of her birthdays, he had actually smiled at
the cake, charmed by its little candles, perhaps ten of them. But when his eyes wandered
back to his daughter, the smile faded, and it was just his face again — solemn,
tired, patient. He gave the impression of a man who was waiting for something that never
came.

How long ago it all seemed to her now. If she had ever hoped that once the
emergency of her mother's life had ended her father might turn to her, she now
knew the truth — she had been invisible to both her parents. For her father, there
had only ever been one
her,
and once she was gone, so was his connection to
everything else. He drifted. He had never taken off his wedding ring. It was there
still, Mary knew, a cold, pointless thing warmed by his hand. This widower had not cut
the rope, even to save himself.

She, too, had lost everything, she, too, had drifted. But then, were the
facts of her case not worse than her father's? Was he not, then, weaker than she?
His wife, at least, had loved him back; at least he had a living child. How might he
have fared in her place? Alone, paupered, betrayed. Where would his extravagant grief
have taken him? Would he have done what she did?

She stood by the front door of the Reverend's house, looking out
into the trees, filled with gratitude. Everything was the same and yet wholly different.
Like a woman rising
from the damp sheets after a fever, the widow
looked about her at a new life.

All that was left now was her crime.

AT THE SOUND
of her husband's footsteps, she had
put down the black cloth and poked the needle into it. She rose to meet him.

John came through the door, knocking clods of dirt off his boots. He
handed her his rifle, which was his habit, and watched while she checked the breech,
removed both the shells, blew on the smooth brass casings, then reloaded them, and
closed the breech. Just as he had taught her and as she had done each time he returned
home. He had been her tutor in almost everything. He removed his hat. A robin was
calling outside and he was prying off his boot. She pointed the rifle at him and pulled
the trigger, blowing a hole in his thigh so the bone came out the back. A pink mist
suffused the air and she was abruptly deaf. She watched him crumple doll-like to the
floor.

Widowed by her own hand — or perhaps, since he lay struggling, soon
to be widowed — she had sat down to wait. Eventually, she took up her sewing.

A STEADY RAIN
had fallen during the night. It was quiet
in the cabin, though in her head there was ceaseless clamour, this time like wordless
shouting. In the morning, water lay in bright pools about the cabin while the sun shone
merrily. Among these puddles the widow went naked, holding a shovel. Pale and trembling,
her young body like a nymph's. She had hurried to a certain spot by the trees. The
grave there was nothing more than a shallow indentation, barely
visible under normal circumstances, now betrayed by a wide pool of water, and the
listing cross. On this spot she had buried her child . . . and the only thing of value
left to her: the ring. She put the shovel's edge down, but she could not bring
herself to push. Knuckles white on the handle, her face terrible, frozen in a silent
beseeching of the motionless water, or what lay beneath. Again she braced, and the blade
sank a little deeper into unresisting mud. Wind shook rain from the branches above that
landed on her back in little taps, an unseen hand recalling her to herself. She shivered
among the hackled trees, then dropped the shovel and went back inside.

SEWING IN THE EVENING
, by the light of a candle. Because
the cloth was black, she had had to do it almost by feel. There was boundless silence
except when the waxed thread snapped between her front teeth. She tied a knot with one
hand. Her husband had taught her so many things, but this was the one and only thing she
had taught him to do, to tie a knot with one hand. When it was nearly morning she rose
and went in search of something to eat, finding only a loaf of bread that was damp and
tainted by a species of mould that tasted of grass. She held it to her nose. It did not
smell like grass. She held it to her nose again, then began smelling the air around her.
Something fusty in the air of the cabin. She ate the bread anyway, naked, her long hair
running down her back like weeds. She was cold, still cold, and so she put on his coat,
which hung by the door, stepping carefully past . . . not him any more but
it
.

Warmer now, she sat with white knees protruding, finishing the sewing of
her widow's dress.

OF COURSE
, she knew the sound when she heard it: the
crackle of boots outside. A slow, steady gait along the recently dried ground — a
boy, sent by the others on the long trek to fetch the boss. The widow sat fully dressed
on the bed and waited, shawl across her shoulders, hands in her lap. The boy called out,
standing at a polite distance from the house, looking at the open door. A fly hummed in
the other room, searching for the blood that had called it in. She didn't so much
hear the insect hum as became aware that she had been hearing it all along — all
the long night before, and into the brightness of morning. Her husband's leg was
visible to her, strangely torqued within the pantleg, foot pointing the wrong way.

The boy was standing out there, a question forming in his mind. It was
only a matter of time.

She closed her eyes and felt a strange intimation — herself and the
fly and the air of the cabin and all its contents were a simple, uncorrupted thing, a
gesture still in process, something predictable, with a catalyst that long ago had
started them on their forward motion, all heading to the end, and the end was ruin.

Well, here it was.

The boy called a few times more. And then he stepped in.

PACKED EXPERTLY INTO
his sagged and weather-stained tent
were the things McEchern judged to be the necessities of life in a mining camp. These
were numerous and eccentric. Ropes, wooden buckets, tin buckets and baths, tobacco,
knives of various degrees of nastiness and in various stages of rust, paraffin,
blankets, sewing notions, snuff boxes, two rifles, a box full of mismatched door hinges,
dubbin, grease, lantern oil, salt pork, flour, coffee, delousing remedies, raisins,
stove piping, a pickle jar of lenses from eyeglasses, a Colt revolver with a walnut grip
full of slivers, corn flour, rifle shells in four calibres, headache powder now aged
into a solid block from which he was obliged to hack pieces for sale, nails (all used),
pegs, hammers and pickaxes, two bowler hats (worn by him on alternate days, but still
for sale), a child's windup tin horse, a cigarette box filled with buttons,
barrels of whisky, jugs and jars of rum, a watchmaker's kit with loupe, ink,
handsaws, two ten-foot logging saws, various planes and files, metal plates, spoons,
knives, forks, and cups, and four small vials of laudanum.

One of these he presented to the widow when she came shopping on a late
summer day. She was on her own, free of the Reverend's paternal care. Laudanum, he
said, was the very thing for what ailed her, the pain of the world would
fade, and no more sorrow would mark her brow. He held up one
little bottle and joggled its contents. The widow, thinking he was promising a cessation
of womanly pain (and in a way he was), was appalled at his brazenness but amazed at the
progress of modern medicine. With scarlet cheeks she scrounged in her purse for some of
her carefully hoarded coins from Mrs. Cawthra-Elliot's and purchased a bottle. She
popped the top, took a sniff. The scent was sharp and arresting, much like a poultice.
She put the bottle in her purse and went about the tent to finish her shopping.

McEchern followed her with his eyes but didn't bother to step down
from his stool.

From the shadows of the tent, the widow considered the enigma of Charlie
McEchern. He wasn't a very old man, and so it seemed unlikely that he had amassed
all these oddments himself. The wormed sign over the store must be older than he was;
even the stove that heated the place was weirdly antique, poxed with cherubs. There he
sat, the little man, the dwarf proprietor, his child's hands spread out on the
counter and his shoes swinging. It was like he had broken into someone else's
abandoned shop and, faced with customers at the door, had simply opened up and amused
himself by playing the part of merchant.

The store's canvas door flap swept back and in came two malodorous
miners. With their racoon faces and their helmets hung from their belts, they stepped
heavily on the wood floorboards, awkward now that they were in a world not made of rock.
The shorter of the two was white-eyed with some private anxiety.

“Where's the little man?” he said, and the widow
assessed his height wryly for a second before she stood aside to allow
them a view of McEchern, sitting baleful and quiet at his counter.

“Mac,” the miner said. It was almost a question.

“Boys. Go on. The place is yours.” The small miner led the
way, while the taller one followed. Shy as farmers they went about collecting their
goods. The shorter one's hands were shaking. Together they collected matches, two
canvas sheets, a hatchet, twelve metal tent pegs, blankets, and a camp kettle. When they
shambled to the counter McEchern regarded them with a fond, weary expression, a face
that said,
What now?
“Aren't you two usually below ground this time
of day, Jim?”

The two men were silent, their eyes not meeting McEchern's. A
porcine scent of unwashed human wafted from their clothes.

“On your way somewhere?”

“Yeah. Away from here,” said the big one.

“No, we ain't. Shut up, Ronnie!”

“Well, well,” McEchern's grin was wide. “You two
don't know if you're coming or going.” Their grimy faces coloured
— it was obvious to Mary from the scarlet of their foreheads.

“What do you need with all this stuff, Ronnie? Heading out of the
mountains, are you? Find better work elsewhere? I hear the
CPR
is hiring
men if they can swing a hammer.” The big man's eyes were nearly popping with
his desire to speak, and his jaw began to work silently, but Jim cut him off.

“Lay off, Mac. Now how much do you want for it?”

“I
want
a hundred dollars. But I'll take . . . four
eighty-five.”

“What!?”

“All right, four twenty — and that includes a parting gift
from me.” McEchern felt around under the counter and
eventually produced a bottle of liquor. He held it up, a bottle of cloudy swill
with a swollen wood stopper. The contents of the bottle was the colour and consistency
of saliva. The widow guessed it to be Giovanni's moonshine. Ronnie's face
was the picture of surprised admiration, and he reached for it like a toddler, but
McEchern swiped the bottle out of reach. “You're in a sharing mood,”
he told them.

They passed the booze from hand to hand, the small man's share
rudely chugged away in one upturn of the bottle with a gurgling rush down his throat. He
handed the liquor on and winced in silent agony, veins ropy in his throat.

The widow was the last to partake. She brought the bottle to her lip and
took a gulp before the smell actually hit her. She let out a strangled gasp. The booze
went on a leisured clawing down her windpipe, with a disastrous burn thereafter.

“Diabolical!” McEchern wheezed happily.

Jim was gathering up his and Ronnie's purchases, stuffing what he
could into the kettle and eyeing the change he'd left on the counter, counting
again to make sure he hadn't left too much. If he had, there was no way McEchern
would mention it.

The widow was swallowing repeatedly, a hand to her agonized throat. She
still hadn't recovered her breath.