Marcel Theroux: Far North

The morning mist had lifted and it was a grey, frosty day of about twenty below, but there wasn’t so much as a curl of smoke from a household fire.

This place had been my life for as long as I could remember. I thought of the time before I was born when my parents had come to that city, along with all the other pioneer families. And in half a lifetime or so, it had emptied out again. From where I was standing I could see trees growing out of the bleachers round the softball field, which itself was a maze of scrubby bushes. The billboards along Main Street had shrivelled in the weather. The drugstore where I used to drink malted milk was a hive of blackened glass and wood. The train station that the line had never reached remained half-built and now would never be finished. All those hours and days of human struggle, thousands, millions of them, spent building up this place, only to have it kicked down like an anthill by a spoiled child.

This place had promised the first settlers everything. Now what was it? A ghost town, decaying back into wilderness.

*

There wasn’t a soul left in the whole place save us, I grew surer of it by the day. Imagine: a city of thirty thousand reduced to two women and a bump. And yet, the odd thing was, I liked it a whole lot better. I started going round it by foot. Something I hadn’t done for years. It made me feel closer to the place somehow, crunching the broken glass and paper underfoot, spying the discarded things — a filthy doll, some spectacles, broken shoes — that told the story of my city.

The houses where the Challoners and the Velazquezes had been living were abandoned. I put a ladder up to their outside walls and had a look in. There was a pitiful scrawny tabby in the Challoners’ yard but no sign of a person. At the Velazquez house, I could see the place had been left orderly, with its furniture intact, and some sign that the garden had been dug, but there was no doubt they were elsewhere too. That killer Rudi and his brute of a son, Emil.

With the last humans gone, it seemed like nature decided to reclaim everything. On Considine Avenue, I came upon a herd of wild pigs, at least twelve of them, rooting around the old garbage heaps. The adults were black and square, like steamer trunks. I emptied both pistols from horseback and managed to hit two of them while the rest of them ran off squealing. I butchered them then and there on the street and dragged them home, chucking the lights and offal into the Challoners’ yard for the tabby.

Once I reached home and glanced back at the long smears of blood on the ice in the roadway, a strange feeling came over me. I unbuckled my empty guns and laid them on the kitchen table. It occurred to me that that was the first time in fifteen years I’d been anywhere in the city withVelazquezeloaded weapon.

We ate to bursting for days, smoked a flitch for the summer, and tried not to think too hard about what they might have fattened on.

I later regretted my generosity to the cat because Ping knew a way to make dried sausage with intestines.

The other thing I noticed was the birds. By April, the birdsong was so raucous in the mornings that it was waking me up in the dark. And the types of them had got so various. I know my eating birds, but the smaller ones — I can name a sparrow and a robin, and that’s it. But I could see we had a whole new menagerie. The circumstances had changed so much. They had all the windfall and the berries to themselves. So many new places to roost.

Ping and I were beginning to find ways to talk to each other. I never had much of an ear for her language, but we had ‘chai’ for tea, and ‘dinner’ for pretty much every mealtime, and a bunch of other words that helped simplify our life together, though we were a way off discussing politics or sharing our life stories — which suited me, in fact.

The first time she felt the baby move, a look of astonishment came across her face and she gabbled in her tongue and put my hand on her stomach, but I couldn’t feel a darn thing, even though she was tapping my arm with her finger, trying to let me know what I was supposed to be feeling for. Six or eight weeks later, I was able to feel something stirring in that little melon belly of hers, and by April, I could make out distinct shapes, but I was never too sure if it was a foot, or a buttock, or a tiny head that I was feeling.

Ping was sure it was a girl. I don’t know how. She spent evenings cutting patterns for her tiny dresses. That little thing seemed to like the pianola. She got very lively after I had played one of my rolls. I hoped she’d be musical and maybe figure out how to tune it, because the songs didn’t sound much like they’d used to sound.

That whole spring was one of the great times in my life. Ping bloomed and she let her hair grow, and her belly swelled and swelled. I spent some happy hours in the farmers’ supply choosing seeds for the garden. They gave me a great feeling of hope for the future, those little brown packets: beans and corn, spinach, squash, and rutabaga, radish, melons, peas, tomatoes, zucchini, cabbage and chard. I started turning the soil with ash and horseshit as soon as the thaw began, and I thought, hell, let’s plant some flowers as well, so I got a whole bunch of them: cotoneasters, candytuft, marigolds, pansies. Waking early every day to that chorus of birdsong and planning my garden, it really felt to me that some sanity and colour and orderliness had come back into my world.

*

Late in April I was up the lookout again with a spyglass and I caught something moving out on the roadway far to the east: first dust, then a column of people moving out of the horizon and towards us. It’s eerie the silence when you look at a thing like that from far off through the glass. You know there are sounds: horses labouring under a heavy load, whips and sticks, chains clanking, men cussing out the stragglers, but you can’t hear them. And the spyglass flattens it all out like a tableau in a picture book.

The thing it called to mind as it came into view was the big colour picture of Moses parting the Red Sea in my Children’s Bible. It showed how the walls of water on either side were smooth lie glass, and between them, on the dry seabed, fish lay flapping and dying under the feet of the fleeing Israelites. Way in back, Pharaoh’s army was just about preparing to go between those high blue walls. Pharaoh’s chariot was pulled by a pair of big snorting black horses, and I had nightmares where I could hear their hooves as they gained on me, and I’d fall on my knees among the gasping fish, thinking ‘Let it be quick, let it be quick,’ before I woke up to the sound of Charlo’s open-mouthed breathing and the room still filled with that watery early morning light.

I wouldn’t normally have put myself in the way of trouble, but since Ping came with her baby, I felt less careful about my own life. I was, after all, the sole representative of the law in the municipality, and it didn’t feel right for me to be skulking round like a thief at a wedding while this huge caravan of people moved past right outside my city.

The highway skirted the north side of the town. A metalled road ran up to it, but ten years of freezing and thawing had broken it into rubble. I didn’t like to risk the mare’s legs on it, so I galloped across the open ground instead. The whole column must have had close to two hundred souls in it, and the whole thing slowed to a halt as they saw me coming. I wasn’t minded to get too close, so I stopped short about fifty yards away from them and waited to see if anybody would come.

My horse pawed at the dirt while I waited. I could feel hot eyes on me. There were five or six men on horseback bossing the prisoners. I counted at least three rifles and I was beginning to regret my boldness. Then a tall lean fellow rode out of the line, coming in close beside me, and tipped his hat. He had a sharp leathery face, blue eyes, and the fingers that held his bunched reins were long and thin.