The Outlander (12 page)

“Well,” Moreland said, “I guess you sweethearts have
been looking for me a long time.”

“Yessir,” said Roark.

“You wouldn't like to let me go, would you?”

“Not a chance.”

They took him to a cabin, one he'd broken into the previous May. He
chuckled as they struggled with the ruined padlock, and eventually they smiled too. He
was given a meal and some new clothes. The Ridgerunner's socks were so rotten they
could be put on from either end, and his captors held these artifacts up and marvelled
at them. He was not what they had expected. Instead of the rude delinquent they had set
out to capture, here was a polite, well-mannered man. They were also surprised at his
modest stature, for in their minds the Ridgerunner had become a behemoth. He sat
peaceably and ate hot oatmeal, dry venison, handfuls of nuts, and he drank coffee. He
asked for bread fried in lard, and Roark made it for him. They found two odd boots for
him — same make and size, different colours, but he pronounced them marvellous and
strode about the station floor with his arms outstretched. “Boys,” he said,
“I'm a dandy!” He slept handcuffed to the very bunk he had slept in,
months
ago and alone, but this time, when he rose in the morning, he
didn't make the bed, or tidy up, or take anything with him when he went out the
door.

His lawyer told him it would be a hot debate. On the one hand, ranger
stations were intended by the American government to be used as a refuge by lost
travellers, they were to be properly stocked, they were not to be padlocked. On the
other hand, had Moreland ever actually been lost? Twenty-seven times? In court, his
lawyer painted him as an individualist — as all men are, or have the right to be.
And he painted the Forest Service as a critical organ of the government that had been
corrupted by a rot that seeped downhill from the director's office.

The prosecutor, on the other hand, may have regretted his position, or may
himself have been an individualist at heart, for he chose to dwell on the cost of the
manhunt. This forced him to bring out account books and ledgers and other soporifics,
for which the jury began to hate him. In the end, it was the fact the rangers had
resorted to padlocks that turned things in Moreland's favour. That, and the
Ridgerunner's obvious charm when testifying on the stand. He was an amiable,
well-fed, well-rested man. In small doses he even enjoyed human company. He was amazed
at how much could change in a few years. He admired the dress styles of the women in the
balcony, the way the judge wore his moustache. He told the jury that if he'd known
jail was so nice he would have given himself up much sooner. Even the judge laughed.

But the trial went on for many days, and by the end of it,
Moreland's equanimity had fled. A man becomes a hermit for a reason, he told the
widow. Every time he was brought
back to his cell, he paced like a
dog and complained of a stifling lack of air. He could neither eat nor sleep, his gut
was anxious, nothing would help. He attempted civility, joked with his keepers, but his
eyes belied the attempt. It was like there was a hum coming from him that rose in pitch
every hour, and it began to jangle the nerves of everyone concerned. In a stunning lack
of correctional judgement, the Ridgerunner was let out of his cell to wander the halls
of the courthouse, but soon returned as if pursued by the furies, saying he didn't
see the point. He seemed unable to retreat within himself, as other men did, and find
solitude there. He lacked the practice, perhaps, but the more horrible truth was that he
knew of another, larger life.

“I can't shut the world out,” he said to the widow,
“any more than I can do without air.” So he had paced his open-doored cell,
clutching his last shreds of patience, and on the final day, when his keepers clapped
him on the back and wished him luck, they did it as much for themselves as for
Moreland.

The jury returned in ten minutes with an acquittal, and William Moreland
was free. As soon as he was down the front steps of the courthouse building, the
Ridgerunner was off again, walking in a straight line toward the edge of town. A wagon
or two drifted along beside him, occupants curious to see the notable little outlander
in new and oversized clothes, a pair of mismatched boots on his feet. Poorer than ever
before, he now had only the clothes on his back, for everything else had been
confiscated or thrown out. His lawyer had handed him two dollars, but the Ridgerunner
had gazed at the bills in his hand as if staring at some childish trinket. The next
afternoon, he was on a trail going along
the Clearwater River, where
two Forest Service workers were labouring on a firewall. He chatted with them and told
them who he was, and they betrayed unguarded excitement, offered him their lunch, and
asked him where he was headed.

“I came back to see if these mountains were as beautiful as I
remember them,” he said, “or if I just imagined it all. I'm not going
to stay down here.” He headed for the first ranger station he could find, stocked
up, and headed north into Canada.

“They probably think I'm dead now,” he said. “That
was nine years ago. 1890.”

The widow thought for a second. “That's thirteen years
ago,” she said.

“Thirteen?” William Moreland reared back. “What year is
it now?”

“1903.”

He sat for a second longer, then stood and put his hands in his pockets. A
bunch of crows settled in the treetops above and argued hoarsely. It was a long time
before he spoke.

“I missed the turn of the century.”

THAT AFTERNOON
, they picked their way down the talus,
the Ridgerunner holding her elbow, then went along an alpine river and paused among the
wild roses, a soft, warm breeze coming from the lowlands. The widow took a rosehip from
the bush and ate it, as she had seen him do. It was dry and almost sweet. She bent to
touch the blooms where they drooped, pale pink. Altitude changes everything, she
thought.

After a while, they sat together quietly, he glancing at her from time to
time expectantly, as if she, too, might offer her autobiography. What could she possibly
tell him? What could she admit? Nothing. Her mind drifted down the mountain to where it
must be warmer, past the foothills, down onto the plains and the farms, where men would
be bent sweating over their work, and cows with dung-covered tails swatted away flies.
Women fanning themselves. Her grandmother would be having her midday lie-down, a Bible
open and ignored on her chest. And her father would be in his law office, sweating in
his dark suit. On the wall, the twin diplomas: law and divinity. The widow knew, because
she knew her father, that his feet would be up on his desk and he would be smoking a
pipe. He did contracts, and few of those.
No stirring courtroom
polemics for him. There would be few clients, only the ones he liked, because he had
married a rich and sickly girl, and employment was purely a caprice, a distraction,
meant to keep his mind off his mourned wife, her name a hex against the remainder of his
life, what he called “the interminable, pointless joke.”

Had he heard yet? Did he know what his quiet daughter Mary had done? Well,
that would shake him, she knew. He was now the father of a murderess. Divinity and law,
people would say he had failed at both. She looked ruefully at the Ridgerunner and
wondered whether she could tell him about herself. But how to tell him about a life she
wasn't sure she remembered fully?

She recalled her mother only in glimpses: the long, slim fingers, the brow
white and unmarked despite the woe it hid, white nightgown after white nightgown,
medicine vials and a porcelain bowl, a closed door, silence in the house, a glimpse of
blue-veined feet dangling above the floor, weak sighs and hanging head. It seemed that
this was all her mother was or ever had been. Perhaps, long ago, she had risen from the
bed occasionally or walked slowly in the garden. In an unimaginable past, the woman must
have been strong enough to have a baby. But everything is remembered by its moment of
greatest intensity. Dying was hers.

The invalid had to have rest; lupus took up all of her attention. So the
little girl became a spy, peering into her mother's dim room where curtains moved
like ghosts and nothing else did. The point of thin toes at the end of the sheet.
Slippers on the mat, ready for a walk that would never happen. A withered voice sighed,
murmured, beseeched no one:
I don't know what I've done wrong.
The
sweet smell of
sickness seeping into the hall where the girl stood
still as a panther, watching the hand that had never touched her, never stroked her
hair, floating about the sheets.
Oh
, the soft voice sighing,
this is
depressing.

Sometimes Mary would sit outside the sickroom with her hands in her lap,
and it was as if they were together, the two of them — the girl silent, listening
to her mother's despairing voice coming from the other room like a kind of
confession, whispers meant only for her:
He's always so certain. How can he be
sure?
Then a shallow half-sigh of fatigue.

And yet when anyone came into the room — the girl's
grandmother, for instance, standing by the bed, her stout hips wrapped in white aprons,
or her father sitting on the bed and kissing his wife's thin hands — there
was no such display, not a hint of self-pity. Just attempts at bright talk, a theatrical
wellness, the fiction that she would soon find her strength and get up. This, too, the
little girl heard, waiting spectral in the shadows. And her grandmother would stride out
to seize her, saying, “Off with you, now. Go and play.”

The end came in silence. The clock in the invalid's room had been
deliberately stopped to cease its chattering, syncopated war with the last laboured
breaths. A maid sobbing down a long hallway. A hearse moving slowly down an avenue of
trees under the heavy bell of summer sun, the mourners on foot behind it.

The widow stood slowly and brushed twigs off her wide black pantlegs. How
fiercely these long-unremembered things rose from the darkness. It was impossible for
her to shut them out, they came in floods, ringing in her ears. When she looked back up,
she saw a smoke-coloured thing among the trees, moving leisurely along, head down,
cropping.

“My horse!” she cried, pointing.

“Where?”

“Right there!”

“Where?” The Ridgerunner stood up now too. “What are you
seeing?” he said.

The mare's heavy head swung up and gazed at her, the mouth chewing.
Short blond sticks of hay fell from the churning jaw. Impossible; there was no hay in
the mountains. The horse shook its mane and went back to cropping, tail swaying gently
as it stepped forward. She heard the hooValls, smelled its damp hide, the dream floating
there, stunningly real. The widow sat down hard and could not speak. Tears ran down her
cheeks. She was helpless to stop the ghosts.

William Moreland came and sat with her. She felt the warmth of his thigh
next to hers. After a long moment he took her hand.

“It happens,” he said. “I see things too.”

“What things?” she said dubiously.

“Sometimes I see myself,” he laughed. “It's true,
my very own self. One time, I saw myself naked. I'll tell you now, that's
the last thing on this earth I wanted to see.” The widow managed an exhausted
smile.

“Can you learn to put them out of your mind?” he asked.
“Can you ignore them?”

“No,” she said. Then, thinking about it, she murmured,
“Maybe.”

AFTER THAT
, he set about cheering her up. Lessons, he
felt, were the way to merriness. He would not let the widow retreat into the tent. He
cajoled her into putting on his snowshoes, and she clomped gracelessly about the camp.
Zenta's
boots, heavy as they were, barely filled the leather
straps. And the snowshoes were impossible to manage. She found that she could proceed
only in straight lines. When she attempted to turn in any direction, her balance
abandoned her and she teetered and windmilled her arms until he was obliged to dash over
and steady her. Incredible to think that this man could somehow run in snowshoes, in the
dark, swift as a deer, and elude his pursuers. She looked at his smiling face and told
herself he was just a normal person, not much different from her. She had done something
similar — would he believe that she was able to outrun bloodhounds? Well, she
wasn't likely to outrun anything in snowshoes. She stormed like a drunkard around
the perimeter of the tent and finally collapsed against a tree, laughing.

“You're a vision,” he said, “a nymph on her fairy
wings.”

“Be quiet!”

“The picture of grace and beauty.”

“I'll make you be quiet!” She threw herself into the
task again, lumbering after him.

BY INCREMENTS
, they crept together in the tent. First,
they rearranged the blankets so both bodies were covered. It was all very polite. Each
watching the other's breath rise over them — his, hers, short white breaths.
She was the first to roll over and look at him. Hers was the first hand to steal along
under the rough blankets, where she found his leg, the worn outer seam of his pants. Her
knuckles lightly brushed the long thigh muscle beneath the cloth. He rolled too, took
her hand and pulled it up to his chest, where his heart raged. He kissed her fingers.
They lay motionless, as if to go no further, but, heedless, the communion between them
rushed invisibly
forward. Wind hissed in the trees. His arm stole
to her waist, hand tracing the contour of her back, exploring the rise of her shoulder.
They came together and her mouth was pressed against his throat. She felt his sigh pass
beneath her lips, the rough cloth of her widow's costume bunched up and tangled
with the blankets.