Marcel Theroux - Far North

Boathwaite said they had a number of charges to examine against me, of which the most serious was spying, but that they were also concerned to find out for what reason I had tried to pass myself off as a man.

I said I never passed myself off as anything, but that if people were minded to think of me as a man I never felt the need to correct them. Think of me as you like, I said.

And the old man who had abused me before leaped up and said he would think of me as a deceitful, disfigured bitch.

I could tell that Boathwaite thought that this was taking things too far, and he told the man to be seated.

‘What is more serious,’ he went on, ‘is that among your possessions we found certain notebooks written in cipher. Show her the book, Dr Pritchard.’

Dr Pritchard was a ginger man of about fifty who had so far been silent but who I recognized as being the man who had thrown the water on me. He held a battered old book about the size of a hymnal under my nose and opened it up. Its frayed pages were covered with letters or signs that had been inked by hand. Someone had taken great pains to write it, but it wasn’t me, since I had never seen it before in my life and I told them so.

‘Then how did it come to be among your possessions?’

I said they ought to know that better than me since they put it there.

‘Do you deny that this is your work?’

‘I do,’ I said.

They seemed almost pleased with my answer, although they could have expected no other. I said nothing more to them that evening and they soon took me away to a cellar in another part of the stockade.

*

For the most part of two weeks they kept me in the cellar, fed me slops, and hauled me out for questioning at odd hours of the night, or early morning. Dr Pritchard was sometimes the questioner, and sometimes Boathwaite.

Aside from the lack of sleep and the bad food there was no terrible hardship. Each time they questioned me, they produced more fake books that they said I had been carrying until it seemed they must have thought I was a travelling library.

They asked me about all sorts of things: where I was from, why I was dressed as a man, about my face. I answered them as straight as I could.

The bell went off in my head when they started talking about accomplices, and mentioning names of people in Horeb who I had never even heard of. Jacob Vetch was one that came up over and over again. And when I said I didn’t know him, they snorted and grew impatient with me.

It turned out that I was the liar that time. They brought me in the next day, hooded, and told me that I would now meet Jacob Vetch face to face.

They pulled off the hood and I stood blinking in the light for a moment. There were more of them in the chapel this time. Boathwaite sat apart from us, making notes.

Jacob Vetch sat slumped on a stool in front of them. Of course, I had met him before: he was the old man with the gun who had been guarding the woodcutters the first day I ever clapped eyes on Horeb.

That wasn’t the surprise. They had given him a proper working over. One of his ears was torn and he had a raw stump for a thumb. It seemed like my coming had been a boon to Vetch’s enemies. I’ve often wondered what the poor man had done to deserve such usage. I’ve seen enough cruelty to know it lights on the unlucky more often than the guilty. Horeb was a place staring into the twilight, as my city had been once. Those last days were the worst for us too.

Boathwaite’s eye met mine and I felt a flash of understanding pass between us. Bill Evans used to call that the cold reading. He said that in detective work sometimes the very best can slip into a man’s skin and know everything that he knows, feel everything that he feels. Bill reckoned I had a gift for it because of being a woman. It’s hard to hate someone you’ve cold-read. You see there is a reason be their actions. And that even people with as much front as the Rev are split inside of themselves.

In that moment, I could see that Boathwaite lived in fear of the people he led. Love and mercy wouldn’t guarantee their obedience. They were disappointed and hungry. Boathwaite had to use the patterns of older gods to keep them cowed: terror and mercy, like twin shadows of an old totem that gets fed with blood. Poor Vetch would die to terrifiy those half-starved people. And all of this I sensed Boathwaite knew as plain as I did. That look told me too that a part of Boathwaite held himself in contempt for what he’d sunk to. But it was no consolation to me. Something in him was of the utmost dark and I knew he would want to stub me out for having seen it.

*

They built a gallows that evening and at dawn they marched us out. There were four of us. I don’t know where they’d kept the other three, but they were in much worse shape than I was.

Vetch’s hand and ear had been patched up, but his face was greyer than boiled beef.

Boathwaite said as ringleader of a treasonous plot against the people of Horeb, he could expect no sympathy, but he was entitled to his last words.

Vetch mumbled a prayer and then they pushed him off the scaffold. The drop was too short and he kicked until he strangled.

Time slowed down as they came to me. I must remember all of this, I thought. Odd thoughts were taking shape in my head. How strange to be hanged as a traitor. How strange to be hanged just when my broken arm was beginning to knit. Boathwaite said I had been found guilty of conspiring too and sentenced to death and what did I have to say?

All their eyes were on me, waiting for me to speak, but no words came. I looked at their dingy clothes, and the colours of all of them that seemed like the colours of the earth that would swallow me up.

That time at the lake I hadn’t been in my right mind. My brain was all mixed up, as though I hadn’t slept for a month, and the pain of leaving the world had seemed less sharp. But now, I felt sad.

Even out here in the cold, six weeks at least away from spring, the sky still had some beauty in it, and the light on the melted ice looked moist and clear as a child’s eye.

There was a creak as Jacob Vetch’s body twisted on the rope beside me.

With the practice I’ve had at last words, you’d think I’d be better at it. In fact, my intention was to face them out with silence and a look of loathing, but at the last moment, something blurted out of my mouth that makes even less sense now that I’ve had all these years to think about it.

‘What you take from me is not mine,’ I said, and the pause stretched out afterwards as they waited for something else, but I was wise enough to know that it would be even worse to add to it.

‘The death penalty has a biblical sanction,’ said Boathwaite. His voice was loud and it had a hoarseness to it that grated like an ice saw. ‘For a long time, our people preached against it. But Jesus came to fulfil the prophecies of his Father in the Old Testament. Jesus himself is God. And the one thing he cannot do is contradichimself. He never scrupled to punish with death the enemies of the Holy Spirit.’ There was a muttered amen from the people.

Good night, Makepeace, I thought. I prepared for the push in the small of the back, the panic, and the choking heat of blood in my throat. You have to lay back and breathe, I said to myself. I figured that submission would lessen the pain better than going tight and kicking.

‘Even so,’ he said, ‘the blood of Jesus himself was spilt in mercy, and that mercy can in some instances countermand the sternness of chastisement. In this case, since the condemned is a female, we have decided to commute the sentence to one of indefinite servitude.’

The Reverend like to lard his talk with jawbreaking words that were hardly English. But I understood that they were giving me a break for being a woman. It was the first time that things had ever shaken down like that for me.