The Outlander (2 page)

The widow considered the ticket booth, realizing suddenly that she had no
money. Behind her was the long, vacant road she had come down. It was stick-straight and
lined with trees,
and at the limit of sight it bent to the left where
no movement, no human shape was yet visible. Her mind had cleared a little because she
felt less afraid, and she now saw the world around her in a sharper, simpler way. Even
the wind, rising and subsiding and fluttering her collar, followed a less ornamented
rhythm than before. She could see it blowing, an infinite number of slack lines waving
before her.

A boy on the other side of the river came to the edge of the bank and
waved. One of the children waved back. He put his hands to his mouth and hollered. A
man's voice hollered back. The widow turned to see a tall figure in coveralls
coming down the road, his hand aloft. He must have emerged from an unseen path through
the trees. He unlocked the door to the booth, stepped inside, slid back a tiny window,
and leaned on his elbows. The woman and her children crowded in at the window and
together they debated in hushed voices. A child's hand reached up to finger the
dull coins and was slapped away. Once they had paid, the woman moved her children away
to the dock. The river swept by in lavish, syrupy whorls, over which the ferry now
laboured. The sky was withering with morning, whiter by the second, and over the
shallows and the slim line of sand, insects could be seen gliding, carried giddy on the
wind.

The widow roused herself, tucked a strand of hair under her shawl, and
went up to the tiny booth with its window. Inside, the ticketman's racoon face
floated in the dim, close air.

“I haven't . . .” she began.

He said nothing, simply waited. His hand lay on the counter before him,
knuckles heavy and cracked.

The widow gazed in disgust at his fingernails, pale and sunk into the
flesh, with a rim of dirt about each one. A cluster
of slumbering
things, and above them, darkness and the man's watching eyes.

“I haven't any money,” she managed.

“Can't get over if ye can't pay.”

Her mouth fell open. Part desperation, part surprise at hearing an actual
human voice. “Please, I need to get to the other side. I'm . . . late
getting home.”

“Out late, eh?”

The feral face came a little farther out of the gloom, fixing her with
eyes that were clouded and small. He seemed to be considering an alternative meaning to
her statement. She held her collar tight and waited as he gathered the unknown thoughts
together.

“Been visiting?” His face took on the shadow of a smile. It
was not an unkind face, exactly. The widow nodded, her heart beating hugely.

“Your mother will miss ye, won't she, if ye don't get
home?”

The widow had never known a mother, and yet she nodded vigorously.

The ticketman's smile became a leer. “Can't have
that.”

He rose and stepped from the wooden booth, taking the widow's elbow
in his massive hand. They walked together down to the river. The ferry, now docked,
churned and roared and dug up the river mud. A scarf of cloudy water made its way
downriver, where the current stirred the clear and the murky together. Black smoke
issued from the ferry's funnel and was snatched away by wind. The man helped her
to the railing, then went back to the shore.

The widow looked down into the boil of water, wood, and parts of fish
churning in the soup, the ferry rocking
deeply as if trying to tip
her in. Her stomach lurched and she moved over by the engine-room door. Inside, the
ferryman, who couldn't have been more than sixteen, struggled with various levers.
She closed her eyes and clutched her hands together as the boat backed away from the
shore, leaving solid ground, and swung slowly out into the current. The horn bawled
suddenly, then again, acknowledging the ticketman left on the shore, and he raised his
hand, standing among the flowering trees.

AN HOUR LATER
, two men stood waiting at the
river's edge — red-headed brothers with rifles across their backs. Large
men, identical in every way, standing close by each other, not speaking. Each with huge
chest and arms, sleeves rolled up, like two lumberjacks in a rustic play. But these were
not lumberjacks. The pallor of their faces, the close trim of their beards, belied any
suggestion of work. And they wore fine black boots.

The ticketman, like most superstitious country people, mistrusted twins,
disliked the puzzle of them, the potential for trickery, the sheer unnaturalness.
He'd been to sideshows to see the horrors in which twins figured as highlights:
bottled “punks” and rubber replicas, conjoined monsters melted together by
the breath of hell. He'd stood with his neighbours, scandalized, all of them
sharing the barker's opinion that human birth is a treacherous thing, and woman is
its greatest dupe. Now, studying the brothers from the gloom of his little booth, he
tsk-ed in sour disapproval. Twins or not, he overcharged them anyway.

THE WIDOW HEADED
down an empty cart track with the river
to her right. She was two hours from the ferry and already the day promised to be
scorching. So keen was the sun's heat that she was forced to pause in the shadows
of trees to cool herself. Once, she sat on a fallen trunk and cracked the mud from her
hems and shook them hard, sitting back to watch the dust eddy about her like fairies.
Even in shade the ground griddled back the day's heat; it came through the soles
of her shoes. She brushed dust from her bodice, smoothed the dark fabric over her hollow
stomach. She tried not to look at her hands. Who knew what was painted there?

Roosters crowed in the distance. She regarded the river passing by in its
curious patterns and tried to deduce the shape of the riverbed by its gurgling signs.
Her eye naturally followed any floating thing, then the next, moving as if reading line
by line, watching a leaf or any small body scrolling along the surface.

They would come after her, follow her, even across the river. Of course
they would. She stood up and hurried on. Past massive oaks, and in the ditches and
hollows, sumac tufts with their blood-red cobs, the morning grand and white and arid
over the scrawny maples. At a wide bend in the river
she passed a
stone house where a caramel-coloured dog exploded against the rickety slats of a fence.
The widow stood in a comic posture, hand at her breast, while the animal abused her in
its own tongue, spittle flying. Finally a human voice shouted from inside the echoing
house. “Shut up, you bastard. I said shut up!”

The widow staggered into the hot morning, invective fading in her ears.
There had always been something about her that disturbed animals. She knew how to ride
well enough, but the horses always reared and shied at first, jerked their heads and did
not want her to mount. Domestic animals merely tolerated her. Cats watched anything in a
room but her. Birds seemed not to know she existed. Bread tossed from her hand was
invisible to them. She remembered a girl from her youth standing on the sidewalk with
cubes of bread on her hat while sparrows alighted and squabbled, jostling with their
papery bodies. The smile on the girl's face had made her seem like an expensive
doll, dreamy and staring, her hair in doll's ringlets.

Now the widow was passing bigger houses and more garbage strewn about the
riverbank. The cart track broke in two and one branch forded a shallow swill that flowed
across the imaginary lines of property. The other track climbed a whitish and crumbling
hill above the river that meandered through scraggy trees. The widow chose the second
way, and she clambered between rutted cart tracks holding her skirts up in front. The
heat was leaden now, and she felt the blackness of the fabric draping her shoulders. In
the shallows fish ran in idle patterns, churning up little blooms of reddish clay, and
turtles lay dripping on the warm rocks, unseen in their camouflage.

She heard the voices of men and, later, children from below her, but she
could not bring herself to look over the bank to see whether anyone was really there.
There or not, they called to her as she passed, and their words were not words but
accusations and longing. The river opened into wide pools where one massive catfish
strafed in wearied bursts against the current and drifted in the shadows. She found a
backless chair set out upon the grassy edge, dragged to this spot perhaps by someone who
wished to fish or be thoughtful or watch a sunset. The widow sat herself within her damp
clothes and felt an ants-crawl of sweat down her belly. Her mouth open, panting. She
removed the shawl and shook it out and bent to pick at dollops of mud and crusted
vegetation that clung to it.

She looked closely at the bits of flora hiding in the shawl's nap.
The world is full of stowaways. Frowsy little flowered weeds that dry out and crumble
and float on the air to reproduce. Burrs carried on an animal's body until chewed
or scratched away; any dog trotting through underbrush wears clusters that cling to
clusters, and carries them far from home. She found each hooked fibre and picked it free
and dropped it to the grass. There at her feet were the knockings of a man's pipe
tobacco.

Her father had smoked a pipe. How many times had she divined her own
father's nocturnal wanderings by the signs he left behind. The quiet, melancholy
man drifting away to be by himself in the dark, leaving a scattering of spent matches, a
splatch of tobacco ash. Not so secretive, not so private. The nests of dried filaments
seemed to the widow to be left deliberately by men to mark their presence. Here the
grass was trampled down and the chair legs sunk immovable
into the
soil. She shifted from side to side and the chair legs did not loose themselves from
their sockets. A heavy man, she thought, who sits and smokes. She smiled and spread her
legs and fanned her skirts to cool herself.

Raspberries, strawberries. These were easy, but if eaten too often would
cause cramping. She hoped soon to see an orchard, wondered about this part of the world
and whether people grew fruit. Behind some of the houses she had seen leggy chickens.
She knew how to deal with poultry; but where to find a knife and something to cook them
in? She had noted the chicks hovering about the scaly knee bones of their mothers,
ignoring the widow's warning shadow, running after their dams as if tugged by
little threads.

There was renewed booming in her ears. Her pulse huge and painful,
racketing in her head. She must not think of babies. Must not think at all.

The widow gripped her knees in apprehension, stared down at the dreaming
surface of the river, and held her breath. Would she see figures there? She hummed a
short hymn to stave them off. Rocked back and forth. A small breeze rose. The booming
subsided slowly. In the end, the river did nothing.

It was with grinding certainty that her mental lapses came, sometimes
accompanied by noises — a booming in her ears, yes, but also voices, strange and
distorted. Terrible things were imparted to her in non-words, in senseless howling. Or
the sound of a cricket chirruping. Or a clatter, like a spoon thrust into a fan. She
would press her hands over her ears — pointlessly, because the noise came from
within — press her palms there as if to keep the horrors from leaking out of her
into the room. First the sounds, then the visions. And every
time,
she suffered a sense of fatedness, of punishment. She was like a woman forever woken
from a nightmare, afraid to go back to sleep lest it pick up where it left off.
The
world has gone black before, and surely will again — because you make it
so.
What spooks will come? What hand come to startle the sleepwalker? She knew
there was a truth or near-truth in those terrifying moments, a lesson she must undergo.
She suffered the stuffing in of it all, while her body remained in the world, exposed,
her flesh in its clothes and shoes, going about its business, an empty, drifting
engine.

So now she hummed her little hymn, her incantation to stave off the
rolling darkness. Sometimes it worked.

THE REST OF THE
day the widow hurried along through the
heat, clutching her shawl. There were no houses now, only fields with roads crossing
them. Slowly her eyes fell till she was simply watching her boots swing forward and then
back, crescent puffs of dust in each footfall. Unslept for several days, she simply
walked, the regular pulse of her breath in her ears all that hollow afternoon, her life
reduced to rhythm. When the light faded entirely, she became part of the night. The dark
was heaven, and heaven was the night. She mouthed incantations to it:
As it was in
the beginning, is now, and ever shall be . . . world without end.
Walking
slowly now, she still followed the river. Trees stood in grand postures over the bank,
bushes in pools of their own shadow.

Finally, she found herself standing still. How long had she been here?
Swaying slightly, her mind vacant. After a moment, she crawled under a cascading bush to
sleep. But she could only lie awake, her eyes closed while ants explored her face.
Eventually she scrambled out again. The moon lay small and
not quite
full over the river, a pale lamp. Crickets thrilling in the grass. She skidded down the
riverbank to the sandy beach and stood there by the nearly silent flow, then squatted
and drank palmfuls of cold water.

Behind her there came a light exhalation of breath.

She whirled around to see two small figures sitting together under the
earthen overhang of the riverbank: two little girls holding hands, their eyes huge.

“Hello,” one said, her voice strangely deep. The child brought
something to her lips. A red spot glowed by her knuckles.

The widow sighed with relief and put a hand to her breast to calm her
leaping heart. “Goodness, girls! What are you two doing out of bed?” she
said.