THE WIDOW SAT sewing atop a pile of buffalo hides with her legs crossed and her tongue working at the corner of her mouth in concentration. McEchern’s store now had a new central mast made from a fallen Jack pine, with the bark still on it but most of the branches sawn off. The wood was green and flexible, so the pole swayed with the breeze, the canvas flapped and bowed and there was a nautical air to the establishment. Across the widow’s lap lay several pieces of deerskin. She had begun to copy the clothing she had seen on Henry’s wife, Helen — the simple trousers and overdress. Her skill at sewing being what it was, she was reproducing the garment exactly.
The widow had been a good seamstress, unusually skilled when she concentrated, a fact that had only ever impressed other women. Her father had once called her “manually dexterous,” which she had correctly interpreted as a kind of slight. He valued only the mental skills, as men often did. He had no idea what hours of careful work had gone into the very shirt on his back, the sheets he slept on, the tablecloth on which he had his dinner — never mind the complex dresses and frocks on the women around him. Depending on the skill of the dressmaker, it might be an unutterable disaster to spill anything on a dress and stain it. There was no telling whether the garment, expensive as it was, would even survive washing. Fading was certain if you dried it in the sun, rot possible if you didn’t. Mary had seen very elderly women move with athletic speed away from an inkwell or soup bowl in the process of spilling. And always, in the background, were the peeved faces and bent backs and ruined hands of the washerwomen. The stench of lye. The solemn and impressive lines of laundry hung in the basement.
Normally, the widow would have sat back and relaxed into her work, the way a woman might do petit point by a fire, with a cup of tea at her elbow. But the deerskin was nothing like cloth. Extraordinarily spongy and elastic, it rolled away from the needle’s point in an organic way, and she was obliged to bend over it and fight with the seams. Much like sewing up a man’s injured face, only not wet, not squirming in pain.
The widow sighed and cricked her neck. She was not happy, exactly, but content. This was nearly a miracle of the heart. Three days earlier she had returned from a futile search for her home and the Reverend, her pockets empty, not even the little Bible to her name, and she had entered the tent, and lain on this very pile of hides, her eyes dully open. For three days she had neither spoken nor eaten, but lay as if dead. He is gone, he is gone. Crumpled and tattered in her ruined clothes, she was like any other cargo in the store, insensible to her surroundings, sunk into the black and miasmic horrors within. Tears streamed from her face into the rank hides. In little sinking moments of abandon, she dozed, dreaming repeatedly of the Ridgerunner, that he was among the dead now too, and that he hated her. The hours and days crawled by in procession, pointless, monstrously slow. From time to time the dwarf would wander by and pat her wrist or perhaps ply her with water.
Only hunger could penetrate the fog. In the end, it was the idea of cinnamon that drew her back. Porridge. She could make some hot porridge and put cinnamon on it . . . if she got up. Twenty years old and she had already reached the border of her heart’s endurance twice. When she rose, she felt like another woman, one direly accustomed to loss. With nothing to her name, she had simply let go, let go of everything. The widow rose and clumped around the store, rooting listlessly among the fallen goods and coming up with a cooking pot. She boiled some oatmeal, sprinkled it with sugar and cinnamon, and sat by McEchern’s stove and ate it slowly. Then she went about the place looking for scissors, a sewing kit. She flipped through the piles of hides, sorting out ones she could use. And here she had been for a day, bent over her work.
From his perch behind the counter, McEchern held forth on matters of current interest.
“It doesn’t matter what you do, they get in anyway.”
“I know,” she said soothingly.
“Stand here with a Gatling gun, they’ll sneak in and take what they want.”
“You’re right.”
“Two barrels, two goddamn barrels, Mary! Gone. We have three bottles of whisky left and that’s all. Can you believe that?”
“I can.”
“Well, good for you. That’s just wonderful.”
The thread snapped between the widow’s teeth and the dwarf winced to watch the procedure.
“Do you have to do that?”
“Do what?”
He watched her put the thread in her mouth, press the end with her lips to flatten it, and thread the needle. “I know who did it too,” he said. “It’s those two fat-faced boys. I’ll shoot the little bastards when I find them.”
“They’re long gone, Mac,” she said, “along with your barrels.”
“And rope. And all the knives. And my other hat!”
“Have a drink to calm your nerves.”
“Don’t you get cute.”
The dwarf thought sadly about the state of things for a moment, then hopped lightly up onto his stool and sat leaning on the cracked display case, his cheeks in his hands, the picture of sullen defeat. “Pricks,” he said. “Sonsof bitches.”
In the days following the landslide, nearly all the miners had left town. The CPR had sent a massive rail-clearer that chugged up the valley in a cataclysm of acrid smoke and mournful whistling, a few boxcars in tow. It came ploughing through the flooded river waters, each set of wheels casting off a wake in which infinite numbers of V-shaped wings ran off across the glassy surface. The cowcatcher in front forced a perpetual fountain of brown water before it, in which drowned animals bobbed and rolled. In the wan morning light, the engineer slowed his engine at the curve, slowed almost to a stop, coming on languidly, hesitant to enter the disaster and become part of it, and so the train crawled and chuffed, bawling repeatedly. Men came running downhill in a panic, waving madly, as if they actually sensed this reluctance and were afraid the train might reverse its course and leave them in the valley.
They crowded at the tipple, waving their hats like men on a pier, and a few waded along beside the vicious black metal sides of the boxcars, banging hollowly on the doors, grinning like madmen. The engineer stopped when the first car came level with the tipple, where in better times ore cars were tipped and coal was dumped into open railway cars. That day, bound and shrouded bodies lay on the platform, and ropes lowered them stiffly down into the boxcars, where they were lined up and counted, like cigars in a box. Forty bodies — one-quarter of the number missing. There was silence among the living men who stood around and inside these eerie cars, their minds still boggling at such potent disaster. With no work, no hope of pay, foremen and headmen dead, the counters gone and buried, the survivors had crowded in a mass aboard the idling train, some huddling on the roof, preferring that to the charnel house below. Only a few men, those who looked like they had grown up in the wilderness, remained behind.
A reporter had come to do a story on the slide, but since the men were mostly leaving, he remained on board, interviewing anyone who spoke English, while a photographer hopped about from rock to rock, trying to get a good shot of the now collapsed mountain. The photographer bent over his large camera box, leaned to adjust the jointed tripod legs. He rummaged in his bags for new plates. Of the photos he would take, some were of people standing on the tipple platform, people milling and curious, some unaware of the photographer, others not sure what he was doing or even what purpose his little wooden box might have. McEchern in his bowler hat and the widow in her torn weeds had been there among the crowd. The photographer put fingers to his mouth and whistled. He asked them to stand together, the woman in the middle, please, and slowly the group obeyed. He snapped the photo, satisfied. But on the final print he would later see a blur of movement as the men closest to the woman shifted away, stepped back, turned their heads away from her. In the centre, the widow, clear as a bell.
She bent now and snapped the thread with her teeth, tied a knot with one hand. She held up the new costume, a strange admixture of the parlour and the wilds. Though in outward style the dress was Indian, the widow had added a high collar, a profusion of tiny buttons held by loops of twisted thread, and an attempt at a ruffle across the breast that, in deerskin, lacked refinement. Finally she tossed the garment aside and began tacking together the panels that would make up the pants. She hopped from the pile of buffalo hides and held this object against her, testing the length of the legs, kicking her feet out and marching around the store, holding the waist to her own.
The flaps of McEchern’s tent were drawn back and the door went dark. Giovanni had stooped to enter the store. The cat skinner seemed even bigger indoors. His impacted neck bent with difficulty as he tried to avoid goods strung from ropes above. His body gave the impression of being accordioned, and should he ever stand up straight, he would rise into something truly massive.
“Salutare, nano,” he growled.
McEchern gagged speechlessly for a moment, then rocketted off his stool.
“The very man himself!” he cried, his legs and arms askuttle as he hurried to the giant’s side, gabbling and welcoming like a court jester round the king.
“Dov’é il padre?”
McEchern, thinking he meant something about moonshine, nodded and gesticulated, “If you’ve got it, I’ll take it. By God, you got timing!”
Giovanni solemnly leaned over, hands on his knees, as if to address a child. “Eh, vive il padre?”
The widow froze in her dark corner, for all of a sudden she understood him. “Giovanni.”
He turned.
She shook her head.
The giant sagged and his eyes drifted away. He sat his bulk down on a creaking box. He brought a badly burned hand to his face and wiped the whole homely surface of it, as a swimmer does when rising from water. There grew a familiar smell in the closed confines of the tent: burnt whisky, burnt fur, burnt skin. McEchern stepped up and took the massive injured hand in his own and hefted it like a dinner plate. The widow hopped down from her roost. All three inspected the seared and blistered fingers where the creases shone with a clear liquid and the palms were caked with blackened dead skin. Clearly, Giovanni’s still had been incinerated and he had tried to save it.
“That must smart,” McEchern said.
The giant shrugged.
Twenty minutes later, the widow was stirring a rabbit stew completely devoid of vegetables. They had plenty of meat, but not much else. It was the Cregans who had wandered about collecting fallen animals, dressing them, and salting or smoking the meat. They reasoned that there wasn’t much time left for the meat. Another week and nothing would be edible, every carcass rotting, though much of it might still be unmarauded from lack of living scavengers. So stew was the everyday meal. She made masses of it available to anyone who came by.
McEchern applied to the giant’s hands his recipe for burns, a grey-green glutinous sludge made from the simmered contents of a glass bottle on one of his shelves, full of what looked like loam — dried and powdered plants. He wrapped the hands finally in boiled rags and tied a medic’s knot. He kept up a happy one-sided conversation with Giovanni, who sat pale and silent within his barrel of a body, his head turned sideways to stare unseeing at the floor.
The widow watched them over her cooking. There had been much of this lately. One man tending to another’s wounds; sometimes the injured one rising and going to a worse-off fellow. Goodwill flowing downhill.
McEchern hefted the bowl of salve and shoved it at Giovanni’s face. The stink of it roused him immediately. “Ma, che puzza!” he said, and the dwarf laughed.
“I learned this from an Indian lady few years back, calls herself He Walks. I always thought that was a funny name for a woman. She comes in here every now and then. Has all kinds of tricks; like she can cure a toothache by blowing on the tooth. Anyway, she showed me how to fix a burn.” He rolled up his sleeve to expose his little muscular shoulder.
“See there? Lantern fell on me and got my sleeve. The skin burned before I could get the shirt off. Hurt like the very shit. I thought I was going to die. Wanted to chew my own arm off like an animal. Someone sent her round. Look at this. Where’s the scar?” he said. “You can’t see it ’cause it’s not there.”
The giant seemed not to hear. Rousing himself he turned to the widow and said, “Lady? When is ready, this food?”
His companions stood stunned, as if unable to understand him once he actually spoke English.
“Mary,” said McEchern eventually, “this man’s hungry.”
The widow hurried over a bowl, and the giant held it in his lap and bent over it, spooning the hot muck into his mouth with affected good manners, the spoon like children’s cutlery in his massive hand. He said nothing more but breathed with his bear’s lungs and ate more slowly than anyone the widow had ever seen.
After a few minutes she went back to her corner, backed up against the pile of buffalo hides, hopped up, crossed her legs, and rethreaded the needle. From time to time she looked up at the scene surrounding her. To someone else it might be a sideshow: Her torn costume in almost lascivious tatters; the dwarf wandering aimlessly in his ridiculous bowler, strangely intact for all the devastation around him; the giant slumped and drowsing by an empty bowl, hands bound in strips like a leper, shrouded in his gruesome patchwork coat. The widow felt a surging gladness in her breast. She was suddenly grateful that she was alive, relieved at how simple things were — an ascetic happy with her lot.
Afternoon light fell through the tent’s top hole and gilded the wood floor, fell glinting off lanterns and pots and pans. Buoyed by the moonshiner’s appearance, McEchern bustled about the place tidying among floating dust and late summer insects. A Cregan, possibly the youngest, came in from outside. He stood at the counter with McEchern, and together they inspected the handle on a lantern he had been repairing.
“I think that’s done it,” said the dwarf.
“Give me the other one.”
McEchern rooted under the counter and dragged another lantern out, this one with no bottom and so no place to keep the oil. The boy went out with it. Outside, the Cregans had erected a kind of forge and were busy repairing or recycling anything that came to hand. All eight had survived the disaster, camped as they had been outside town and half off the mountain, their prodigious familial luck holding. Their own horses had been hobbled for the night, so even when the landslide came, their animals did not run, but hopped and reared and fell harmlessly to the grass. The brothers had leaped up from their bedrolls and staggered about on the bouncing ground in the moonlight, bellowing to one another while their terrorized horses squealed. Finally, the fence had collapsed or was kicked down, and hundreds of dollars galloped off into the night. Of the eleven runaways, three survived. A few were found dead of exhaustion or injury, or floating bloated in the river like obscene rafts.
Now the Cregans were scavenging what could be found among the wreckage, their industry imparting a meagre cheer to the former town. The metallic sound of hammering issued from the yard, and a yelp of annoyance as someone hit his thumb or, perhaps, from the tone of the voice, a brother’s thumb. After a while, Giovanni raised himself slowly from his box and shambled out to help.
“DON’T TALK MUCH, do they?” said the old doctor.
“Not so far,” said his son.
They had been watching the two enormous redheads for ten minutes now, where they sat on the other side of the hotel restaurant. It was a small, pretty town, with a view of the mountains. In fact, the doctor and his son had seen these men several times around the hotel — they were hard to miss. The two brothers were always together, and never had any other companions. They exuded the air of men with nothing to do and nowhere to go. It didn’t sit well on them.
The doctor’s wife put out a hand and plucked at her son’s sleeve. “Darlings, you’re staring.”
“Sorry, Mum.”
The redheads had caused a stir when they came in together, two identical gentlemen filling the doorway. There was a hush from the breakfast crowd, followed by innumerable comments, some of them indiscreet. And yet these men had ignored the hubbub — they seemed immune to the excitement of others, the way one ignores the upheaval of pigeons. The harried waiter had come beetling along through a sea of tables to seat them, only to find himself following, invisible as a dog, as they strode to a table of their choosing.
“Coffee,” said one, speaking to the tablecloth.
“Steak and bread,” said the other.
Now the brothers just sat there and ate their breakfast without a nod to the waiter or a glance round at the rest of the patrons of the hotel, or even out the window, beyond which stood two beautiful young women, talking and laughing. Of course they could hear the laughter, but it failed to interest them, even enough for one to turn his head. When they’d finished eating, one took up a newspaper, separated out a section for the other, and they both set to reading.
The doctor, too, held a newspaper on the table in front of him, but he’d already read it. And neither he nor his son could tear his eyes away from these strangers.
“It suggests mild gigantism, doesn’t it?” he ventured.
“But they look proportionate. No elongation of the face or limbs, no hypertrophy of the bones.”
“And then there’s the ginger hair,” said the old man.
“What? It’s not that uncommon.”
“Red hair and fair skin, tanned quite deeply in fact, but I can see no freckles. Can you?”
“Dad, it’s impossible to see this far away.”
“And, now that I think of it, look at the clothes. See the . . .”
“Boys, really!” his wife whispered, and they fell silent. The old man shook his paper and straightened in his chair, but he and his son continued to stare.
The doctor could see: impeccable manners on men who clearly had spent much of their time outdoors. Fine black boots, manifestly expensive to begin with, now ruined by overuse. A life of privilege, now gone, or perhaps abandoned. Their coats and breeches were tailor-made to accommodate their great size, and yet these men had chosen a design of deliberate simplicity, an aggressive kind of modesty in its lines, achieving in the end only the homeliness common to all oversized clothing. The coats were also worn and needing repair.
“Heavy-footed too. I’d guess they each weigh a lot.”
“I disagree, Dad. I think they are almost graceful. Good posture — another proof against gigantism.”
The doctor’s wife sighed with afflicted patience. And she started to talk brightly. “Well, since we’re talking incessantly about twins, I knew one once. What was her name? Darby. No . . . Darcy? Maybe Darcy was the other one.” The doctor’s eyes drifted to his wife’s face and stared through it for an interval, then wandered back to the giant men again.
“They disliked each other, isn’t that funny? But you know, it struck me as perfectly understandable. Why would you love a copy of yourself? Why does everyone else get to be themselves, but you don’t?”
The waiter swanned by and ignored the old doctor’s wave.
“Bloody,” he sighed and looked sadly at his coffee cup.
He took up his newspaper, passing disinterested eyes over the minute grey print.
“Diphtheria epidemic.” “Delays in the postal service — why can’t we be more like Britain?” “Worst landslide in mining history — superstitious miners predicted it.” He sighed and turned to local news where he saw a promising headline: “Church Group Ran Dog Fighting Club — Popular Parson Bookmaker.” He began to read that one.
There was a sharp laugh from the twins’ table. One of the men was shifting violently in his chair. The doctor glanced up and saw him holding out his section of the newspaper for his brother to see, folded neatly into four, and he was pointing at a photograph: the landslide at Frank. And the widow, the lone woman among the survivors.