The Travellers and Other Stories (24 page)

But when Joseph Hine came back, he wasn't a ghost. When Joseph Hine stepped off the wet sand into the marshy grass of the foreshore, what Sonny Peen saw, through the small shellacked frame of the bottle-glass window in his little wooden hut, was a woman.

He is a sight, though I suppose most of us are used to it now.

It is more than a year since he returned and I have often wondered what it was like, his first meeting with Evangelina when he came back, the first time he walked in through the door in his woman's clothes. I have often imagined their conversation.

Joseph?

Evangelina.

A long silence.

How are you?

I don't know. I missed you. I wanted to come home.

Another long silence.

I kept your coat for you.

Thank you. Thank you, Evangelina. That was kind.

Another long silence.

Joseph?

Yes?

Come.

When they are out in cold weather Joseph wears the big grey coat on top of his woman's clothes.

For the forge he has his old apron as before, and though there are some, like Harold, who have chosen to take their business elsewhere, he appears to manage—he is still good, I suppose, at what he does.

It is hard to say exactly what he has become.

Underneath it all, it seems, he is still a man for they have a child now, the two of them—a little girl called May, and there is every appearance of Evangelina having another one on the way.

I have kept the china thimble I bought for her in Maryport and I would like, if I could, to give it to her, but Harold has forbidden it. He grows sweaty and uneasy if he ever finds himself within a hundred yards of Joseph Hine, coat or no coat. If he sees them in the street, Joseph and Evangelina and their little girl, he grips my arm firmly behind the elbow and marches us over to the other side.

In the evenings I watch him across the table, chewing on his dinner, the bones of his face moving and clicking at his temples, and from time to time he'll look up at me and nod, and with his mouth full and food brimming onto his whiskers, he'll say how good the dinner is, how tasty the meat, and afterwards, later, when we have drunk our tea and read a few pages out of our books or the newspaper and he is busy doing his thing above me in the dark, I'll think about being high up on the fell with Evangelina in the last of the winter's snows, her cheek against my neck, her arms across my heart.

THE REDEMPTION OF GALEN PIKE

THEY
'
D ALL SEEN
Sheriff Nye bringing Pike into town: the two shapes snaking down the path off the mountain through the patches of melting snow and over the green showing beneath, each of them growing bigger as they moved across the rocky pasture and came down into North Street to the jailhouse—Nye on his horse, the tall gaunt figure of Galen Pike following behind on the rope.

The current Piper City jailhouse was a low cramped brick building containing a single square cell, Piper City being at this time, in spite of the pretensions of its name, a small and thinly populated town of a hundred and ninety-three souls in the foothills of the Colorado mountains. Aside from the cell, there was a scrubby yard behind, where the hangings took place, a front office with a table, a chair and a broom; a hook on the wall where the cell keys hung from a thick ring; a small stove where Knapp the jailer warmed his coffee and cooked his pancakes in the morning.

For years, Walter Haig's sister Patience had been visiting the felons who found themselves incarcerated for any length of time in the Piper City jail. Mostly they were outsiders—drifters and vagrants drawn to the place by the occasional but persistent rumours of gold—and whenever one came along, Patience visited him.

Galen Pike's crime revolted Patience more than she could say, and on her way to the jailhouse to meet him for the first time, she told herself she wouldn't think of it; walking past the closed bank, the shuttered front of the general store, the locked-up haberdasher's, the drawn blinds of the dentist, she averted her gaze.

She would do what she always did with the felons; she would bring Galen Pike something to eat and drink, she would sit with him and talk to him and keep him company in the days that he had left. She would not recite scripture, or lecture him about the Commandments or the deadly sins, and she would only read to him if he desired it—a psalm or a prayer or a few selected verses she thought might be helpful to someone in his situation but that was all.

She was a thin, plain woman, Patience Haig.

Straight brown hair scraped back from her forehead so severely that there was a small bald patch where the hair was divided in the centre. It was tied behind in a long dry braid. Her face, too, was long and narrow, her features small and unremarkable, except for her nose which was damaged and lopsided, the right nostril squashed and flattened against the bridge. She wore black flat-heeled boots and a grey dress with long sleeves and a capacious square collar. She was thirty-six years old.

If the preparation of the heart is taken seriously the right words will come
. As she walked, Patience silently repeated the advice Abigail Warner had given her when she'd passed on to Patience the responsibility of visiting the jail. Patience was always a little nervous before meeting a new prisoner for the first time, and as she came to the end of Franklin Street and turned the corner into North, she reminded herself that the old woman's advice had always stood her in good stead: if she thought about how lonely it would be—how bleak and frightening and uncomfortable—to be shut up in a twelve-foot box far from home without company or kindness, then whatever the awfulness of the crime that had been committed, she always found that she was able, with the help of her basket of biscuits and strawberry cordial, to establish a calm and companionable atmosphere in the grim little room. Almost always, she had found the men happy to see her.

‘Good morning, Mr. Pike,' she said, stepping through the barred door and hearing it clang behind her.

Galen Pike loosened the phlegm in his scrawny throat, blew out his hollow cheeks and hawked on the ground.

‘I have warm biscuits,' continued Patience, setting her basket on the narrow table between them, ‘and strawberry cordial.'

Pike looked her slowly up and down. He looked at her flat-heeled tightly-laced boots, her grey long-sleeved dress and scraped-back hair and asked her, in a nasty smoke-cracked drawl, if she was a preacher.

‘No,' said Patience, ‘I am your friend.'

Pike burst out laughing.

He bared his yellow teeth and threw back his mane of filthy black hair and observed that if she was his friend she'd have brought him something a little stronger than strawberry cordial to drink.

If she was his friend, he said, lowering his voice and pushing his vicious ravenous-looking face close to hers and rocking forward on the straight-backed chair to which he was trussed with rope and a heavy chain, she'd have used her little white hand to slip the key to his cell off its hook on her way in and popped it in her pretty Red Riding Hood basket instead of leaving it out there on the goddamn wall with that fat pancake-scoffing fucker of a jailer.

Patience blinked and took a breath and replied crisply that he should know very well she couldn't do the second thing, and she certainly wouldn't do the first because she didn't believe anyone needed anything stronger than strawberry cordial to refresh themselves on a warm day.

She removed the clean white cloth that covered the biscuits. The cloth was damp from the steam and she used it to wipe the surface of the greasy little table which was spotted and streaked with thick unidentifiable stains, and poured out three inches of cordial into the pewter mug she'd brought from home that belonged to her brother Walter.

She told Galen Pike that she would sit with him; that she would come every morning between now and Wednesday unless he told her not to, and on Wednesday she would come too, to be with him then also, if he desired it. In the meantime, if he wanted to, he could unburden himself about what he had done, she would not judge him. Or they could talk about other things, or if he liked she would read to him, or they might sit in silence if he preferred. She didn't mind in the least, she said, if they sat in silence, she was used to silence, she liked it almost more than speaking.

Pike looked at her, frowning and wrinkling his big hooked nose, as if he was trying to figure out whether he'd been sent a mad person. When he didn't make any reply to what she'd said, Patience settled herself in the chair opposite him and took out her knitting and for half an hour neither she nor Galen Pike spoke a word, until Pike, irritated perhaps by the prolonged quiet or the rapid clickety-clack of her wooden needles, leaned across the table with the top half of his scrawny body and twisted his face up close to hers like before and asked, what was a dried-up old lady like her doing knitting a baby's bootie?

Patience coloured at the insult but ignored it and told Pike that she and the other women from the Franklin Street Friends' Meeting House were preparing a supply of clothing for Piper City's new hostel for unwed mothers. A lot of girls, she said, ended up coming this way, dragging themselves along the Boulder Road, looking for somewhere to lay their head.

Pike slouched against the back of his chair. He twisted his grimy-fingered hands which were fastened together in a complicated knot and roped tightly, one on top of the other, across his lap.

‘Unwed mothers?' he said in a leering unpleasant way. ‘Where all is that then?'

‘Nowhere at present,' Patience replied, looking up from her work, ‘but when it opens it will be here on North Street. The application is with the mayor.'

When Patience Haig wasn't visiting the occasional residents of the Piper City jail, she was fighting the town's Republican mayor, Byron Lym.

Over the years, she and her brother Walter and the other Friends from the Franklin Street Meeting House had joined forces with the pastor and congregation of the Episcopalian church and a number of other Piper City residents to press for certain improvements in the town: a new roof for the dilapidated schoolhouse; a road out to Piet Larsen's so they could get a cart out there from time to time and bring the old man into town so he could feel a bit of life about him; a library; a small fever hospital; a hostel on North Street for unwed mothers.

So far, Lym had blocked or sabotaged each and every one of the projects. He'd said no to the new roof for the school, no to Piet Larsen's road, no to the library, no to the hospital and a few days from now, they would find out if he was going to say no to the hostel too.

‘He is a difficult man, the mayor,' said Patience, but Pike wasn't listening, he was looking out through the cell's tiny window at the maroon peaks of the mountains and when, at the end of an hour, he had asked no more questions about the hostel or anything else, or shown any desire at all to enter into any kind of conversation, Patience put her needles together and placed the finished bootie in her basket and told him that she would come again in the morning if he'd like her to.

Pike yawned and without turning his eyes from the window told her to suit herself, it was all the same to him whether she came or not. In another week he would be dead and that would be that.

Over the next three days, Patience visited Galen Pike every morning.

She brought fresh biscuits and cordial and asked Pike if he wished to talk, or have her read to him. When he didn't reply she took out her knitting and they sat together in silence.

On the fifth morning, a Sunday, Patience arrived a little later than usual, apologising as she stepped in past Knapp when he unlocked, and then locked, the barred door behind her; she'd been at Meeting for Worship, she said, and there'd been a great quantity of notices afterwards, mostly on the subject of the hostel, as the mayor had indicated he'd be making his decision shortly, possibly as early as tomorrow.

Pike yawned and spat on the floor and said he didn't give a shit where she'd been or what she'd been doing and the only thing he wanted to know was how she'd got that pretty nose.

Knapp, in his office, peeped out from behind his newspaper. He'd never known any of the men to be so unmannerly to Miss Haig. He craned his neck a little farther to see if anything interesting would happen now, if Patience Haig would put Pike in his place, or maybe get up and walk out and leave him to rot in there by hisself for the last three days of his life like he deserved.

‘I fell off a gate, Mr. Pike,' said Patience. ‘When I was nine.'

‘Ain't that a shame,' said Pike in his nasty drawl, and Knapp kept his eye on Patience, but all she said was that it was quite all right she'd got used to it a long time ago and didn't notice it unless people remarked on it, which in her experience they never did unless they meant to be rude or unkind, and after that the two of them settled into their customary silence.

Patience took out her knitting.

In his office Knapp folded up the newspaper and began heating his coffee and cooking his pancakes. The fat in his skillet began to pop and smoke and then he poured in the batter and when the first pancake was cooked he slid it onto a plate and then he cooked another and another and when he had a pile of half a dozen he drew his chair up to his table and began to eat. Every so often he looked up and over into the cell where Patience Haig and Galen Pike sat together, as if he was still hoping for some significant event or exchange of words, something he might tell his wife about on Wednesday when he was done keeping an eye on Pike and could go home. It was creepy, he thought, as he munched on his pancakes and gulped his coffee, the way the fellow was so scrawny and thin.

‘
QUIT SNOOPING
!
' yelled Pike all of a sudden into the silence, opening his mouth wide in a big yellow-toothed snarl that made Knapp jump like a frightened squirrel and drop his fork.