Marcel Theroux: Far North

He licked his cracked narrow lips and spat into the dirt. ‘Looks like the rain is going to hold off.’

‘Depends how long you’re on the road,’ I said.

‘About four more weeks.’

The gun he was wearing on his hip had a long silver barrel as thin and dainty as one of his fingers. I sensed he was afraid there was more of me, dug in somewhere around. He seemed cool and relaxed, of course, as a Pharaoh should be, but what gave him away was the eyes of his men, fidgety, flicking around to see who was lying in wait.

‘What are you trading?’ I asked him.

Those blue eyes of his narrowed into steel splinters. He said nothing.

I looked at the sullen faces in the line, all those filthy clothes, taking the chance of a stop to rest on their haunches, peasant girls, some Chinese, some with chapped red cheeks, some darker, asiatic-looking, natives.

‘First time I’ve seen you come by here,’ I said. I knew if he was silent again it spelled trouble.

He gazed down at his hands, which were folded on the saddle pommel, and looked up slowly, as though to let me know he was in no hurry to answer my question.

‘We came through here in January.’

‘How about that,’ I said, to fill his pause. I was calculating how quick I could draw on him and then spur on the mare to get away from there. My heart was hammering, time seemed to be slowing down, and my eyes had that keenness that comes as your body dumps those fight chemicals into your blood. I could pick out individual grinning faces on horseback behind him.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he went on, ‘I lost a girl somewhere around here. You didn’t happen to come across a stray?’

I shook my head.

‘Too bad. I’d taken a shine to her.’ Leather creaked as he shifted in his saddle. ‘Nice visiting with you.’ He tipped his hat and spurred his horse back the way he’d come, and his men roused the sitting prisoners into moving again.

I stayed for a long time without turning my back on them, partly out of curiosity, wondering about all those people, masters and slaves, and where they’d come from, and what lives they’d been leading, but also in case any of them were minded to take a pot-shot when my eye was off them.

There were times when I wondered if I had done the right thing staying behind when everyone else had left or died. That day, watching the column of people vanish into the dust raised by their own feet, I was struck by a fear about what had happened to the world in my absence.

I SHOWED PING a map of the town and pointed out my house on it, and where we’d met, and asked her to show me where she’d been living before that.

She turned the map around and around to get a fix on it, and then put a cross just behind the old fire station on Malahide Avenue. There was something in her face when she looked back up at me, trepidation I’d call it, as though the place held bad memories for her, even when it was just lines on paper, so I smiled and stroked her cheek to reassure her that she wasn’t going back there.

The fire station stood at the north end of town, right off the highway that ran west to the old gas and gold fields and east into the empty tundra country where it dwindled to nothing a thousand miles short of the sea.

Sometimes travellers would bed down there for a night. The sheds where the water trucks had stood were empty, but the building was a sturdy one, and the old walls were as good a windbreak as any. There were scorch marks against the bricks, and discarded cans where people had passed through. I gave it a wide berth in general. You never wanted to get mixed up with the kind of characters that travelled that empty road for the reasons they did. In the old days, living on the road was a boon, because it brought in trade. You got the lowest prices and the freshest news of anyone. But after a time the news was only bad. First people turned up hungry, then desperate and begging. Finally they’d just arrive quietly in the night, cut your throat while you were sleeping, take everything they could carry, and vanish like smoke before first light. Even the worst of our town learned to shun that road after a time.

I had stopped getting orders from anyone a long time before that, but I had always hoped that in the other towns to the east there was still some kind of lawful life being led. That was my consolation as first I buried pa, and ma, and Anna, and then Charlo, and the life we had known seemed to pass and be forgotta cike an old tune nobody sings anymore. Maybe here it’s especially bad, I used to think. Or someone’s forgotten about us. But away from here, the old life continues.

Except the pitiful caravan of women in chains, and their hard-faced masters on horseback, none of that was part of the old life. That would almost lead you to believe the opposite, that away from here it’s even worse.

*

Sure enough, there was an old manhole near where Ping had marked her X on the map. It would have had a cover on it in the old days, but someone must have rolled it away to melt and cast tools or blades. It was small enough to miss if you weren’t looking for it, and I supposed that Ping had happened on it by chance.

I took a good look around me, but the town seemed quiet, so I climbed out of the saddle and crouched down by the hole to investigate. Behind me, the mare wandered off towards a tuft of grass at the side of the fire-house. I never hitched her anywhere away from home. I didn’t like the idea of her being tethered. I trusted her to have the good sense to run away from trouble and to come back to me if I called.

The empty hole returned the sound of my voice with a flat, booming echo when I yelled into it. ‘Anybody down there?’

I holstered my gun and dropped down.

The drain ran ten, twenty yards in the darkness. I lit a tallow candle from my tinderbox and shielded the flame from my eyes with my hand. Amazing, the construction of my poor old city. A storm drain you could almost stand upright in. Poured concrete for the walls, laid in sections. And down the centre, a runnel of twigs and leaf-mulch soft underfoot from the last fall rains.

In an alcove up on the sides I found what looked like an animal’s nest: twigs, gnawed bones, rags and scrunched paper. I turned over a blackened book with my toe. Ping’s home. Living in the dark like a groundhog under a porch and sneaking out to gather books for fire. I knew then for certain there wasn’t any love story behind her bump.

I hauled myself out of the drain and clucked my tongue to bring the mare back from out of the sheds. They must have berthed the caravan here when they came through in January, corralling the women in here, out of the weather.

One of the slave-masters must have cast his eye over the footsore and weary women. Your turn.

I would have liked to think she stabbed him with that blunt knife of hers. Most probably he fell asleep on the straw and she took her chance to run. Pitched into the hole and lay there in the darkness.

Close to three months she must have hidden here, wretched with hunger and cold. I hated to think how she lived, what she ate.

I found it hard to meet her eye when I saw her back at the house. Her happiness filled the house with something tinkling and bright, but I knew what she’d suffered and I couldn’t stop thinking of the bad thing that had happened to me.

I CAN’T DWELL on what happened next because it pains me too much to write it, but in June Ping died and the baby died with her.

It went very hard with me after that, and the purpose vanished out of my life. My bad thing and every other bad thing that had happened in the years before seemed like nothing compared to that.

I buried them together in a grave I dug to the south of the city. The place sits in a ring of birches where the old Fourways Crossing used to be. I set them there in a larchwood box and rolled a white rock over it for a headstone, but I couldn’t bring myself to write words on it.