The Piano Maker (23 page)

She talked to him as she cleaned his face and soaked up the vomit with snow. He did not respond. She shone her flashlight on him and put her cheek close to his mouth to feel his breath. She wondered if she should cut off his trouser leg to see to the injury. There was a small box with basic medical supplies on the sled. Iodine. Gauze. Tape. Scissors and Band-Aids.

Dear God
, she said.
Please help me now
. She would always remember this, reverting back to a child’s prayer in fear and helplessness.
Please
,
God
,
don’t let this be as bad as it looks
. But in clearer moments, when her panic allowed any thought at all, she knew that it was. The bars of the jaws that gripped him were as thick as her arms, and the teeth, as sharp as chisels, had broken bone and cut an artery.

Near morning it began to snow again, not the soft snow of mild weather but hard crystals that clung to the tarp and to the skull on the sled when she walked there to check on it.

In the thin grey light of morning she watered and fed the dogs. Just half a day’s meat left now. Jack was watching her intently; she feared he was reading her mind, the black turmoil in it. “It’s all right,” she said to him. “It’s all right.” He lifted his nose and sampled the air and looked at her again.

In the tent Nathan woke and passed out and woke again. For brief moments he seemed to regain a sense of control.

“Go to the moose,” he said. “Get the rest of the meat. Collect clean snow and pile it by the entrance. And then bring the first aid kit and whatever else we might need from the sled.”

The moose carcass was a one-hour hike from the tent. She reached it by mid-morning and saw that something had been eating at it. The wolves. She stood over it with the axe and chopped through hip and shoulder bones into the underside of it and put the chunks in a canvas sack. She left the axe there and dragged the sack back to the sled.

At the tent she made a kind of seat in the snow for him, with snow for a backrest and a blanket that she pushed around and under him for insulation. She melted snow and made soup and spooned it into his mouth. Chicken noodle soup with frozen peas in the Long Trail packages.

He said, “Helen, I want you to cut the trousers around that spot and soak it with iodine. Then keep me covered
with my sleeping bag. I’m freezing and burning up at the same time.”

The lower part of his leg below the jaws was blue-white. She daubed on iodine and wrapped gauze around where the teeth had sunk into his flesh.

That day went by, grey and cold, and the night. The wolves were back. Morning came and it was still snowing, that same persistent blowing snow that kept piling up and drifting and piling up. She looked after the dogs, watered them, fed them. They had dug snow holes for themselves and they lay curled up in them, nose to tail, blinking at her as she turned away, back to the tent.

“There must be something we can do,” she said to him.

“There is, Helen. We can wait. Somebody will come. Trappers walk their line.” He closed his eyes. His lips were pulled back, taut, chapped, bleeding. There was a freezing sweat on his brow and his teeth showed, bared to the gums. He grimaced with pain. “Are you sure we don’t have any morphine in that box?”

“I’m sure, Nathan.”

She looked again at his leg, and it was now purple around the knee and calf but the ankle and foot were turning black.

At some point on the third or fourth day he said, “Where is the gun?”

“I don’t know.”

“Go look for it. I had it with me to scare the wolves away. It can’t be far. It’s loaded, so be careful.”

THE COURT RECESSED
again, and when the matron took her outside to the car there was a second movie camera set up in the street. Photographers stood waiting. A reporter with a microphone called to her and asked for a few words for the Pathé company but the matron, who was gripping her elbow, said sternly, “Madam can’t talk now. Don’t be pesterin’ her.”

Lunch that day was a stew, and she was only half finished when Mr. Quormby arrived. She put the stew in the wall larder and sat with him. He told her she had done well. “The judge sees you as credible, and that is very good. Never exaggerate, and if it feels wrong, don’t say it. Be careful treading the line we’ve decided on. Never speak to impress. But you know all that.”

He told her to rest as much as possible now, because the next day would be the most difficult. He said he had a good feeling about it all, but the judge had told them that he had allowed only three days for this case. It was a
circuit court, he said, not some higher court where they could take months.

When he had left she opened the windows in the living room wide and stood at the one that looked out onto the roofs and the street, stood in the draft feeling the cold air on her face. She closed the windows and put on her coat and went down to the church to ask Father William if she could call Claire.

“Yes, of course,” he said.

In the office she pulled the coat tighter and then moved the desk chair to the telephone and called the long-distance exchange. In London she spoke to someone else but eventually Claire was on the line, and after the first few words her eyes filled and her heart ached. It was Claire’s voice, just Claire being there and wise in her young ways and knowing better than to prod about how the case was going.

“Are you all right, Mom?”

“I am, Claire. I’m fine.”

“You want to tell me?”

“Oh, Claire. I think it’s going all right. I don’t know.”

There was a silence in the phone while Claire waited for her to say more, and when she didn’t Claire said, “You’ll tell me when you want to. Listen, I’m on the short list for the position! There’ll be one more interview, but I’ll know before Christmas. And maybe then I can come over again. This time I could try Imperial Air. There’s a service to New York on an airplane. It’s a bit more expensive than the Zep, but it’s quicker. You won’t mind?”

“Mind? You mean the money? Oh, Claire, sweetheart. No, I don’t mind. Just use whatever we have. I’d love it if you could come.”

She wiped her eyes with the tissue in her cuff. “Claire,” she said, “I do think it’s going well. That’s what Mr. Quormby says. And Mildred too.”

Afterward she went back upstairs for a long nap. She took off her clothes and put on her nightgown, unpinned her hair and washed her face and closed the drapes on the bedroom window. She lay back under the cover and closed her eyes.

She considered praying, as she had done often in that tent. Prayer containing the words
please, God
gave the illusion of hope and of someone caring. It took her away from there. She remembered her despair and his stillness and sudden frantic gasping, the sickening odour of his leg. More vomit: his, and some time later her own.

She sat up in bed and waited for her heart to calm. She went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth and crawled back into bed.

She’d gone to look for the gun. She’d paced the area around the tent and poked in the snow with a stick. When the trap closed on his leg, how far and in which direction might he have thrown it? In what sort of involuntary
movement from shock and surprise? She wondered if there might be a second trap somewhere, and she prayed that there wasn’t.

“I can’t find the gun,” she told him.

But he was not conscious. She looked at the injury, and the thigh too was now turning black and swollen. Perhaps the tourniquet was too tight. She loosened it and black blood pulsed. She tightened it again.

She knotted herself a kind of harness with ropes for the sack, and then she hiked up again to the carcass. But there was hardly any meat left on it. She could see the paw prints and tooth marks of the wolves, where they’d crunched the spine and scraped away the meat down to the inside of the hide. She swung the axe and chopped out what was left of the bones and cracked the skull and made three trips with the sack filled with bones and hide. It took from early light until dusk.

This was how the next few days passed
, she might tell them in court tomorrow. She might begin to skip certain details. Such as the fact that when the dogs had nothing left to eat but bare bones chewed over and over, she briefly considered melting the snow with Nathan’s blood in it and feeding them that. It was possible she was beginning to lose her mind then. When the air in the tent became unbreathable, she would crawl out on all fours and vomit and wipe her mouth with snow and crawl back inside. She made herself a small breathing hole where the tarpaulin met the ground, and she’d lie in her sleeping bag with her nose close to the hole.

At times he sang with his eyes closed. She remembered that so well, how for some reason it had made her flesh crawl all the more. The hopeless, empty, croaking voice in the darkness.

He sang “Waltzing Matilda.” Then he sang “Spanish Ladies.”
Adieu and farewell to you
, and when the words would not come he would groan and croak the melody, and curse and pass out and wake and pass out.

She lost count of the days. She was so exhausted she was beginning to crawl to see to the dogs rather than walk.

One time he woke with a scream, and he kicked and the trap rattled. “Go find the gun,” he pleaded with her.

His face looked horrible, ghostly and thin and white with blood smears on it, and unshaven, with tears frozen on his cheeks. “Helen, I’m begging you, go find the gun. It’s out there. I’m full of poison. Look at this. Black. Stinking. You know what that means.”

She searched methodically with the stick, and this time she found it. It was down in a crack between rocks. She poked it out, mindful of the trigger. She looked for the safety and pushed it on, and then she cleaned the snow out of the muzzles and hid the gun under her sleeping bag. He had passed out again.

At the sled she found the last package of peas and the last rice, and she cooked the rice and then put in the lump of frozen peas. She shook him awake and spooned warm mush into his mouth. She ate some herself and followed up their meal with a portion each of Long Trail coconut cream
pie, hard as stone. Nathan sucked greedily and chewed and swallowed, but then he vomited it all up again. She wiped his face and his lap with snow and threw it out of the tent.

“I saw you hiding the gun,” he said with his eyes closed. “You need to shoot me and then carry on. In the heart, because the head’s too messy. There, I’ve said it. Listen, Helen, I’m of a clear mind at this moment. Never been clearer.”

“Nonsense, Nathan. Here, drink some water.”

“No. Listen, Helen. Have the courage. Do it and leave while you and the dogs still have some strength left. Maybe you’ll come across some game.”

She said nothing to that. Nothing. She heard him and did not object. It was the crossroads. Killing him was suddenly thinkable. A mercy death for him, survival for her.

She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. On her lips she felt the blackened and broken skin on his cheekbone above the weeks-old beard.

He turned his head and looked at her in surprise.

“Helen,” he said then. “Dear Helen. Please hear me. They won’t find us in time. I was wrong. How is the weather now?”

“Ice haze. Very cold.”

“But can you see the sun?”

“At times.”

“So just head southeast by the sun and your watch. I showed you how, remember? Leave, Helen. But help me with this first.”

His eyes were round and feverish, no spark left in them now, only emptiness and terror. He reached out with one hand across the steel trap that stood up in their tent like some hellish anchor that held them fast to this place. “Helen, in the heart. Here!”

He unbuttoned his parka and the coat underneath, and the shirt. He tore at the buttons and with greedy fingers ripped a tear into the shirt. And with the same fingers, thin and dirty, he paced off his chest. Three, four down; one, two left of the sternum. “Right here,” he said. He spoke with fresh hope. “Look! Here. Are you looking, Helen? I am making a scratch-mark for you. A bullet or a shot shell, it doesn’t matter. I will close my eyes. I’ll hold the muzzle, you pull the trigger. Make the decision and do it, hard and fast.”

He was weeping now, pleading.

“Helen! Do it! Do this one thing for me. You owe me. I saved your lives in France. You
owe
me, Helen. Help me now!”