The Outlander (15 page)

When he spoke again, his voice was already slurred with sleep. “She
won't believe it,” he said.

The wind picked up in the trees above them. The heat from the fire
tormented her feet, even through the soggy boots, and so she angled her legs out into
the dark. A rank smell came to her on the breeze, and she recognized it as the rabbit
meat in her bags. As repulsive as it was, her stomach growled. It was warmer down on
this plateau, even among the trees, even as the damp earth soaked into her clothing.
Down here it was summer. She felt a pleasant fatigue invade her body as she lay wheezing
in the dark.

WHEN THE WIDOW
awoke, she found she had rolled in her
sleep some distance from the fire, which was now going full strength. A coffee pot sat
tilted among the coals at the fire's edge, and steam issued from the sharp little
spout. She was alone in the clearing. She sat looking at the fire for some time before
she dug into her saddlebags for the tin cup and poured herself some coffee. She stirred
it with a twig and blew on the still boiling liquid until it was drinkable. When he
returned, she saw that he had been bathing. His dark hair was twisted into a rope that
hung down his back. He wore no shirt, and the water that ran down his back darkened the
waistband of his pants. She turned away, for she had always disliked it when men paraded
around with their shirts off. Even when her own husband had removed his shirt to cut
wood or work on the roof, she'd considered it prideful, vain, a
kind of taunt.
You can't do this, woman — but I can.
She
remembered her father's amusement when she had abused a hired boy.

“Why don't you take off your drawers too?” she'd
cried. “Why not hop around like a dirty old monkey?” And her father had
laughed while the boy flushed with shame.

The widow put her cup on the ground and began to walk away into the
trees.

“River's the other way,” he said, and she amended her
direction.

It was a wide, shallow creek of mountain runoff, thick with riverstones,
meandering among glacial humps in the ground. Meadow grasses grew right to the edge and
tipped over and waved in the current as if drowned. She washed her face and feet. A high
white cloud floated thinly over the mountain peaks. Dark pines stood in perfect
alignment to the heavens. The widow coughed a deep bubbling cough, then spat. She
squatted among tufts of water grass, her feet braced on uneven rock, and she peed.
Afterwards, she washed herself, wincing, for it was agonizingly cold. She stood by the
swift-moving river and looked out across the meadow to the mountains. William Moreland
was up there somewhere, hidden in mist.

She had thought she was alone, but he had come upon her when she slept.
How easily he could have tiptoed past, let her lie there sleeping, dying. Instead he had
waited. He had admitted to watching her sleeping face all that first night. “You
had this little strand of hair in your mouth,” he'd said. A wincing
tightness in her heart, just to think of it. Unbearable. She could still smell him,
still hear his soft voice in her ear.
The tent where they lay
entwined together, her mouth against his arm. . . . The widow's eyes welled with
angry tears and she began sobbing.
Turn your back, just as he did.

But how to do that? How had he done it?

When she returned, red-eyed, the man was properly dressed and his hair was
braided. He gave her some hard little lumps of cooked dough. She bit into one and
discovered that, while she had to chew endlessly, it contained dried berries and was
delicious.

“May I have some meat . . . please?” she asked. He pointed to
a rock on which he had laid out for her a blackened chunk of meat, already marauded by
ants. His face said he had put it out some time ago, why hadn't she noticed it
yet? She pounced on it, blew the insects away.

“I'm taking you to Frank,” he said.

“Who?”

“It's a town. From there you can go back to your home.”
He watched her gobble the last of the meat so fast it left her hiccupping. “Or
not. It's your choice.”

They packed up their gear and she hung her saddlebags over the
roan's shoulders. There was no saddle now, nothing to strap the bags to, so she
would be forced to hold them in front of her to ensure they didn't work their way
sideways and fall off as she rode. Without the saddle too, she could not mount the
horse, no matter how she hopped and struggled. The man watched bleakly for a while, and
eventually was obliged to dismount and come over to help her. Once she was up, he stood
back and assessed her posture on the horse, but what he saw seemed to worry him.
“Is that really your horse?” he asked and put a finger possessively around
one of the reins.

“Of course. I told you that.”

“You don't ride her very well.”

She glared at him and yanked the rein away. This seemed to displease him
even more; his face darkened. He snatched at the halter and dragged the roan toward a
beech tree that stood alone at the edge of the clearing. “You see that?” he
said, pointing to a scratch in its bark. He seemed to be pointing out one of a multitude
of scars.

“What?”

“That, you stupid woman.
That!
” His finger pecked at
the little slice. It might have been made by a knife, she could see that now. A wide Y
shape, or maybe a T?

“That is a Peigan sign. And our campfire over there? I made that on
top of their old one.”

“And you're not Peigan, I assume?”

“Lucky for you.”

She understood him, finally. He didn't trust her, didn't think
she could ride with him out of trouble, he was afraid that she would drag him down and
get him killed. As if in answer, he said, “Keep up, or I'll leave you
flat.” Then he turned and mounted his horse and together they rode out into the
bright meadow. Saddleless, the roan's spine ground into the widow's pelvis
in a way she knew would soon become painful. Her belly struggled with the first solid
food she'd had in days. And yet she felt well rested. She looked at this
Indian's back, gazed at the rump of his horse with its swinging tail — it
had finger-waves in it like a girl's hair. It occurred to her that this man could
have taken her horse, taken all her things, left her in the mountains. But he
hadn't, and that was something. She was clearly a burden to him, and nothing more
than curiosity had got him into this. She felt sure
she could veer
off and go a different direction and he would not try to stop her. The widow wanted to
repair things somehow, but didn't know where to start.

“What's your name?” she called to him. He was silent.
They went up over a hillock, the horses rocking their necks with each step of the
incline, and lightly trotted down.

“Do you mind my asking what kind of Indian you are?” The roan
strained to tug at grasses as it went and she hauled up on its reins. “You can at
least tell me your name, can't you?”

“What's yours?” he countered.

“Justine,” she said, choosing the name of a girl she once
knew. So, silence on one hand and a lie on the other; he had outdone her again. She ran
her fingers through her hair in consternation. They continued along the edge of the
creek together. Swallows skimmed over the grass and darted above the surface of the
water catching flying bugs, and everywhere was the hum of bees. He relented a little and
slowed his horse so that they were only a little off-parallel, but he radiated
impatience, as if even walking the horse was something she did poorly.

“You know I'm from Cooperstown,” she said. “You
know where I'm from. Why can't you tell me about yourself?”

“Crow.” He shook his head in its mottled hat. “I'm
Crow Indian. We say Absarokeh. My mother was born on the other side of that hill, right
there.”

She waited for him to elaborate, but his face remained closed.

“And where were you born?”

“Baltimore,” he said.

And with that he heeled the bay into a trot so he was ahead again. The
interview was over.

THE RIDGERUNNER
crouched at midday in the lee of a
massive cedar and waited and watched with his hunter's patience as all around him
the wind blew. Grasses swam, trees bowed and creaked, and there was a hissing in the
canopy above. He was the only still thing on this mountainside.

From his vantage point he could see the clearing, his own former camp, and
the cold ring of stones where once there had been a fire. Movement everywhere. It
promised a glimpse of human life, maybe even some small thing blowing across the ground,
and her chasing after it . . . but no. No scent but cold and pine, no voice. Here he
remained, hands squeezing the leather straps of his pack. He was whispering, his lips
forming half-words and the shadows of explanations, excuses passing in sequence over his
face.

After many minutes, he rose and eased the enormous weight from his
shoulders and rested it against the tree. And then, as if heading onstage, his face
brightened falsely, and he hiked up his pants and strode into the clearing. William
Moreland stood alone, hands dangling at his sides. Of course she was gone, everything
was gone, every useful or comfortable thing. He had taken his things, she had taken
hers. All that remained was the evidence of a camp.

So very unlike him to leave such a wreckage, for any following ranger to
find. He had left too quickly. And there was too much evidence to conceal. The countless
footprints, bed of pine needles in the shape of a tent's floor, a nail hole in a
cedar where he had hung his mirror and then later removed the nail and packed it, the
rope burns halfway up a trunk from the tent's guy line, the small puddles of
coffee and rain,
now frozen . . . and one of her bare feet
expressed in mud, perfectly preserved.

He bent over this fossil, the small toes blurred by movement, but the
lines of the foot intimately clear and frosted. He knew the weight of that foot in his
hand. Faultless and warm. He closed his eyes, fighting an unnameable thing in himself.
Then he seized the fire-blackened stones one by one and flung them two-handed into the
trees.

He would erase it. All of it.

THAT AFTERNOON
the widow followed her companion through
a grove of scraggy, ivy-tented apple trees on an abandoned farm. She looked for
buildings but there were none. No house, no barn. No shadow of human presence. Nothing
left of the enterprise but this orchard in its decayed, marching lines. The mare tramped
along heavily and the widow slumped on its bare back. A perfume in the air, the ground
around them poxed with fallen fruit that lay in layers of years, squelching beneath the
horses' hooves. The rotting apples seethed with drunken wasps.

The country passed with a comforting sense of procession now, and the
widow was pleased at the way forest and rock-fall and pilings of scree seemed to sweep
along majestically, not so wheeling and vertiginous any more. Here she was, wandering
behind a man again, his purpose having become hers, just as she had gone with her
husband into the wilderness on their rumbling ox cart. She recalled his white shirt
sleeves, his clean black suit coat draped over his thighs.

How easily it had happened. Without understanding that she had agreed to
anything, she had simply followed John Boulton into a new life. Behind the newlyweds
rode several men on horseback and another cart pulled by heavy horses,
and the drivers, mounted on crates and bins that rocked wildly with every tilt of
the ground, were old and rough. They swore, then apologized to her, swore and
apologized. At night they camped, and she would retire alone to their large tent and
immediately put out the lantern to preserve oil, then lie in the dark and listen to the
men talk. She had to listen to what they actually said to know they were arguing, since
no one ever raised his voice. The fiercest accusation she heard was,
“There's been a lot of that going on 'round here,” which had
been met with a long, fuming silence. But no one denied it, whatever
it
was.

Sometimes one or another of them would sing, often without accompaniment.
One favourite was a teary song about a child left alone by his wicked parents and
finally devoured by wolves, the mawkish chorus of which always provoked laughter. Later,
she could hear the men snoring, murmuring in their sleep. When she rose in the morning,
the oldest man was already up and had cooked breakfast, and he brought her food and
fussed over how much she ate just like she were his own child. Nurture was not in her
experience, and she hadn't known how to answer it, coming as it did from such a
weathered old coot.

It was incredible how quickly an entire camp could be packed away onto the
cart and strapped to the backs of horses. The oxen stamped as the yokes were put back
on. The men whistled. Then they all moved on in a rambling, creaking train. At times the
path they followed would spread out and fade, like spilled water, and the wagons would
stop, and her husband would drop from his seat while everyone waited and walk ahead to
look at things, trying to remember the way back to his property. At those moments, she
would
gaze in dismay at the trackless territory where they stood,
dressed in their travel clothes, wondering what mote of memory or logic drifted there in
her husband's mind, what in the world was telling him the way to go? Where was he
taking her, and what did all this emptiness look like to him?

He had promised her a “well-appointed house” with hundreds of
acres of land. But when they arrived at the spot, there was no house. All that yet
existed was a small square foundation on which more workmen had erected their tent. The
newlyweds set up their tent in the trees, and it took two months before they had a roof,
or privacy, or anything resembling a bed.