IN THE DYING moments of twilight, when the widow’s cell was dark and the outside sky presented itself as pink and misty and cut by bars, there came over the muggy air the sound of bats, their voices dry metallic clicks, like someone trying to wind a rusty clock. The widow lay on her back on the bunk. Her fingers played with the grit that clung to the blanket, rock dust that had sprinkled down from her vain attempts to shake the window bars out. She could not stop considering the objects in her room as some kind of disassembled key to her escape: a chair, a cot, a dinner tray, a bedpan. She went over them all in her mind, unable to stop searching for a solution she knew was not there. A dog barked disinterestedly from inside some echoing place, a barn or shed, answered by other dogs in the dusk.
She sat up, took the tray from the floor, and set it on her lap again, trying to get a little more food in. She had eaten the angel food cake slowly. It was dry and fragrant and weightless. Now she began to work on the white slabs of chicken meat, dipping each slice in gravy. Pausing before putting it in her mouth. It tasted wonderful, and slowly the nausea subsided. Perhaps the sickness had to do with lack of food rather than the food itself.
She began to hear things. A woman’s voice. A thump.
Down the hallway came candlelight, trembling, growing in intensity. There were two voices. Then came the sound of a drawer being opened, a few words of argument between a woman and a man. The keys came out, and the light came up the hall toward her cell. The man was at the door again. He unlocked it and went away again, leaving a woman. She was slim and grey-haired and fit, holding a candle. She waited for a moment by the door, seeing the widow still at work on her dinner, and then she went and sat by the wall on the little chair. Prim as a schoolmistress, a woman of long hands and face, wasp-waisted.
“Is the food not good?”
The widow had heard that tone in her own voice, the undercurrent of bafflement that after such efforts in cooking the dinner was not appreciated. She nodded vigorously, still chewing.
“It’d be cold by now,” the woman said, dubiously.
“No, it’s very good. Did you cook it yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Then you live near here?”
The woman was silent for a moment, wondering, her grey eyes twinkling in the poor light. Then she laughed.
“You could smell it cooking! Of course.”
The widow picked delicately at the scraps on the plate, caught up the last of the yam with her fork, put the bowl down and the tray to one side and checked her mouth for crumbs, and sighed with contentment, despite her watcher.
The woman leaned out the open cell door and bellowed, “Allan, will you please come and get the tray?” There was a muffled curse, and the man came down the hall. He took up the tray and was about to collect the candle, but the woman said, “No, leave that.”
“Does her majesty want anything else?” he said.
She gave him a withering look, and he left again, trudging carefully down the darkened hallway, the tray jingling slightly, like dull bells. When he was gone, the woman leaned forward and whispered, “You know they’re out there, don’t you? Both of them.”
The widow didn’t have to ask who she meant. “Where outside?”
“Right on the stoop, sitting on chairs. With their guns, if you can believe it. It’d be funny if it weren’t so weird. They give me the screaming crawls, those two.” The woman looked quickly over her shoulder as if the twins might have impossibly good hearing and could take offence at her words. The widow smiled.
“Are they your brothers?”
“In law.”
“Brothers-in-law,” the woman said as if that made all the difference in the world, as if it explained away some niggling worry that had been afflicting her. She seemed much buoyed by the news, happier to be in her present company.
“Are you warm enough, my dear? Would you like another blanket? My husband has a few sweaters that might fit over that . . . outfit of yours.”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“Can I bring you a little milk for overnight?”
“Don’t bother yourself,” the widow said.
The woman sighed and put her hands on her thighs as if to get up, but she was debating something silently. In this posture, hesitant and tense, on the verge of speaking, the widow could see that she was in fact the mother of the girl who had run out earlier. Here were the same long cheeks, the same hooded eyes, only more deeply carved. Eventually, the woman stood up. Whatever thoughts might have been at work in her head, they had been pushed aside. “I’m sorry,” she said, taking up the candle. “I can’t leave this for you. They say you might burn the place down. I don’t think so, but no one listens to me.”
She called for the man. After a long interval he arrived, and together they locked the door and he shook it to test the lock, and they went away with the candle so the light faded and then there was only darkness. The sounds of the arguing voices and the drawer and the keys repeated themselves in reverse order. She waited for the thump, and after a moment, there it was. The widow lay curled on her bed, listening to the sounds that came in through the barred window, attending to every animal call, every gust of wind through the branches, every distant voice. She listened for the brothers’ voices, but knew that she would not hear them.
The widow put her hands over her face and began to laugh, quietly and deeply, a laugh that verged on tears, and when she was done, her hands remained there, keeping the dark out, keeping a small, delicate light in.
THE COUPLE CAME again after dawn, bearing a breakfast tray, heralded by marital peevishness as they rambled down the hall arguing. They found the widow standing by her bed in her outlandish savage costume, the bed made perfectly as if awaiting inspection. It was the only house chore available to her. The couple bustled in like two wrangling dogs, nudging and contentious, worrying the tray and the widow and each other until the wife bluntly told the husband to get out, and he did. He retreated down the hall, grumping under his breath.
“My land,” the woman said tartly, sitting herself down with a defiant thump on the little chair. He had lost, she had won, and now she had taken residence. Because of this, the widow intuited that her presence offered something of a spectacle in the town. How could it not? A murderess, dressed to all appearances as an Indian, arriving restrained with ropes and sitting backward on her saddle, the horses strolling through a gauntlet of staring faces, some men following along on the sidewalk under the awnings to get a longer look, children running up through the mud to touch her horse or speak to her until shrilled back by their mothers. And now the two redheads sitting in bizarre vigil at the door of this abandoned bank, their rifles still across their backs. She was a curiosity, certainly, and this woman was likely being pecked to death with questions about her. During the night the widow had heard whispering at the window above her bed, the sound of young men’s voices, one saying, “I don’t see her,” another saying, “Here, get out of the way.” She had lain perfectly still, expecting a gunshot, or, if she was lucky, merely something vile dropped through the bars onto her where she lay curled on the bed. But nothing came and after a while she knew they had gone away. Her heart was frozen in her chest. They had called her name: “Mary Boulton.”
“Have your breakfast, dear. You must be starved.”
The woman’s voice was gentle. The widow sat down on the cot and carefully transferred the tray to her knees, contemplating the food on it. Eggs on two thick slices of seared ham, a cool slice of buttered toast, a glass of milk, tea. She took up the knife and fork and delicately sliced a wedge of ham, poked it into the steaming dome of the egg, bursting it, and drew the dripping result to her mouth. Every fibre in her body was grateful.
The woman watched this procedure with uncommon attention. After a moment she realized she was staring rudely, so she extracted a little wad of lace and a crochet hook from her pocket and set upon it with pinched efficiency. She put the unravelling ball of thread in the lap of her dress and held it there expertly as it jerked and hopped. Then, as if in the presence of an intimate, she held forth. “They’re out there again, those two, sitting like stone lions at a gate. You couldn’t get a smile out of either one of them if you paid him. It’s absolutely ridiculous. As if a girl like you could possibly get out of here on your own. You’ll be as perplexed as I was when I tell you they were here till ten o’clock before they finally went off to the hotel — ten o’clock! Allan thinks they’re the best thing he’s ever seen. He can hardly sleep for it. Neither can I, frankly. I’ve never understood what motivates a man. It’s a pure mystery to me. The older I get, the less I know about them. They seem simple enough when they’re little boys, don’t they? There’s no difficulty in seeing what ails them, it’s written on their faces. I just don’t know what happens to them when they grow up.”
The widow had known many women who did this kind of thing, nattering energetically over their work, although the usual subject was the shortcomings of other women. Her grandmother used to call it gassing. Sometimes it was a way to burn off excess energy, to exhaust a lingering anger by talking it out. Sometimes it was a way for an overworked woman to stay awake when her leisure time had finally come. One simply talked, the way those who stand in the cold will step from foot to foot. No response was required. A drowsing husband, a cat or a dog, even a playing baby would do as a confidante. But in this case, the widow could see that something more urgent was at work. This woman was talking her way around some larger worry. The crochet hook stabbed anxiously at the little patch of potato-coloured lace, moving too quickly. The widow noticed that the woman was often obliged to stop and pull out sections and redo them. “What day of the week is it?” she asked.
“Tuesday the eighth. Already Tuesday. You have two days before the train comes.”
The woman did not look up when she said this, but her long cheeks were flushed. The ball of cotton skittered about the skirt, caught between the twin abutments of her equine legs.
The widow sat on her cot beside her now empty breakfast tray, waiting to see what was coming, working a finger into the little bullet hole in her pant leg. The edges of the hole were hardened, burnt to a crust by the heat of the bullet. Her finger touched the warm skin of her leg. She remembered the bullet whizzing past her cheek, the smell of her hair burning. John’s brothers had come so close to killing her — and she to killing them. Perhaps now they were even, a balance struck between two failures.
No murder but the first one. The bang. A mist on the air. Blood pumping from the meat of his leg, a viscous puddle spreading like honey. The widow yanked her finger out of the hole in her pantleg. She shook herself.
Her companion was watching her thoughtfully, the lace-work forgotten, the little blunt hook rolling slowly between her fingers.
“How do you feel?” the woman said. It was not a casual question.
The widow’s heart leaped and she wondered if she had spoken out loud.
“Are you feeling very sick?”
“Sick?”
The woman inclined her head toward the bedpan that stood at the far end of the bed, into which the widow had retched that morning. There was nowhere to hide anything in this barren room.
“How far along are you?” the woman said bluntly.
There was silence for a moment. The widow sighed. Some women can tell, almost as if they can smell it on you, see it floating about your body like a cloud of fireflies. “Far enough,” she said.
Of course, she had suspected for some time that she was pregnant. Suspected but not been sure. She had recognized the feeling: the sore and laden breasts, the bottomless fatigue, a welcome serenity invading her worried mind. A glimmer forming in her heart; how grateful she would be to know it was true. This woman, with one breath, had brought it out of the dream and into the real.
“Oh, my dear,” her companion said, suddenly overcome with emotion, “what are you going to do?”
THE JUDGE’S DOG clambered up the steps of the Willow Cane Hotel and trotted straight through the open doors into the lobby like a paying guest. He did a tour of the armchairs and chesterfields, then made for the manager’s office, which was already full of people.
“He’s here!” shouted the desk clerk.
The widow was sitting up front, next to the manager’s desk, with her wrists tied to the chair’s arm and her twin keepers behind her. The dog walked amiably among the crowd, scenting each pantleg, tail wagging in basic goodwill. A hand or two reached out to thump him on the back.
Then the judge arrived. He trudged slowly up the steps, his nose in a handkerchief, leather case under his arm, a short, bespectacled man in rumpled jacket and a homely knitted scarf. He, too, headed for the office, then turned on impulse and made for the front desk.
“Tea, please. Very hot, and nothing in it.”
“Yes, sir.”
When he entered the small room, many people were already standing. The others, the widow included, took the cue and rose as well. He settled himself gingerly behind the manager’s desk, put the case on the floor, and said, “Come.” The crowd fluttered a little in response, but it was the dog he was calling, and it came wagging to him, circled a few times, then lay down with a groan. There was silence as the judge sniffled. He regarded them all with a rheumy gaze — and one artificial eye. Its colour was a poor match for the other one, and it seemed to roam of its own accord, to roll and wander.
“All right, sit down,” he said. “Court is in session.” There was a shuffling and scraping of chairs. He looked at the papers on the desk for a long time, reading a page, then holding it to his chest while he read the next. He hung over one page for a long moment, then he looked up at the widow, and his gaze drifted to the ropes around her wrists, then to the two big men behind her — one of whom was distinctly green in the face. He went back to his papers, read a little more, then laid them in a rough pile and put his elbows on them.
“My name is Justice Ulrich. I am what’s called a circuit court judge, which means I go from town to town hearing cases. This is not a trial today. We have an arraignment on a charge of murder. What else do we have, Allan?”
Allan had been too busy watching the twins and was caught off guard. He made a floundering motion before bolting out of his seat, while his peeved wife shifted her chair away from him, out of harm’s way. “They . . . they’re not here yet, Your Honour. We got a man and a woman having a cat-fight over a fence that runs between their houses. Neither of ’em will back down. Woman says she wants to sue him for trespassing, and neglect, and whatever else she can think up. The problem being, they used to be married.”
“Dispute over a fence?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see. Let’s say we’ll deal with the murder today, and I’ll come back next week to hear all about the fence. How does that sound?” His eye wandered toward the ceiling, and the audience watched it go.
“Good, good!” Allan said, then sat again, wringing his hands.
The judge’s tea arrived on a silver tray, and there followed a long interval during which everybody watched him slurp at his cup and blow his nose. The widow regarded this man with undisguised despair.
“Mrs. Boulton,” he said finally, “do you understand that you are being charged with murder?”
“Did you kill your husband?” He waited for a long moment, taking in the closed and hopeless face before him, then went on. “In the absence of an answer, I must enter your plea as not guilty. Just let me write this out . . .” He bent over a page and wrote in a quick, graceful hand. Without looking up, he said, “Everyone will leave the room now, except Mrs. Boulton.” There followed a short, confused pause, followed by a creaking of the floorboards as the crowd exited the room. The dog lifted its head only briefly before dropping it again and closing his eyes.
“Everyone, please,” said the judge. The twins, who had not moved, rose with reluctance and went to stand in the lobby just outside the door. The widow could hear murmuring behind her and the scratch of the judge’s pen on the paper. When he was done, he set the pen down and leaned over the table and addressed the widow in a low voice.
“Someone has been very helpful and written me an anonymous note saying that you are pregnant.” He put his index finger on one of many crumpled papers on the desk. “If this is true, it could be in your favour. However, let me be honest with you. A conviction on murder carries an automatic penalty of death by hanging, and from what I can see of your case, those two men will have no trouble getting a conviction. Not least because you confessed to Allan. A jury may look kindly on an expectant mother. Or not. It’s impossible to tell.” Here he leaned closer to the desktop and lowered his voice even further so that the widow was obliged to lean toward him, and they sat together in the empty room like conspirators.
“There is a possibility,” he said, “that they will wait until you have given birth before they execute you.”
The widow’s head began to swim. “No,” she said weakly.
“The child will most likely be taken from you immediately and given to your brothers-in-law, since they are its next of kin. You may never lay eyes on it.”
At that, the room began to pulse. She looked into the judge’s bizarre face, his eye almost properly focused on her, and let out a short gasp, a single syllable of anguish.
“I’m sorry,” he said and sat back, gesturing for the crowd to come back into the room.
THAT AFTERNOON THERE drifted through the bars of the widow’s cell a faint taste of dust on the air, and she could hear many voices in the street and the sound of wagons. The voices came and went, and there would be long periods of silence before she heard another voice, or the snort of horses and jingle of their traces, or children laughing and being shushed. The widow sat on her bed or paced her cell, her face vacant, her eyes constantly welling. Minutes would go by and she had not a thought in her head, as if all thought had been forced out by the one black, ghastly fact. Only it resided, only it mattered. You may never lay eyes on it.
The day was warm and dry and clear, sun falling through the trees overhead and moving on the grass in lavish, bright scraps. When she pressed her face to the bars she could see milling groups of people in the street. Women carried shopping baskets, their shapes passing vaguely in the shimmering day. Some voices seemed to leap out, sharp and urgent, the words clear as if they were spoken to the widow herself: “Never had that happen, did you?” and another voice as if answering, but it could not be answering: “Fourteen dollars!” She listened for anything that made sense, but none of it did. The widow sat back on her cot. After a moment she heard music on the air. There was a band somewhere in town.
Over the next few hours, the voices grew less frequent, and the sense of people on the road faded, and she now heard no horses, no children, and then it was quiet and solitary and there came only wisps of music, as if the town itself was slowly spinning away into space, whatever festivity might be at hand gradually unravelling and floating away on the wind. Mary lay on her bed as if almost asleep, but her heart was pounding and her hands cold and numb with panic. They are its next of kin.
She clawed her way out of the bed and went to the heavy, barred inner door, put a hand round one of the bars, and gave it a slight push. Nothing. So she seized it in both hands and gave it a terrific shake. It was so solidly made it did not rattle or grind or make the slightest sound. She could smell new oil in the brass lock. She put her face against the bars and looked down the inner hallway, but it was dark and seemed endless and she could sense nothing beyond it.
THE RIDGERUNNER came along the uneven crest of the rock-fall in the moonlight, thumbs in the shoulder straps of his pack, picking his way carefully over the stones. He stopped to gauge his direction. What he stood on amounted to a natural dam created by the recent landslide. On his right was a new lake, glassy and reflecting the night clouds in flat and eerie greys. To his left was an expanse of ragged boulders and rocks, a packed mass through which ran streams and trickles and even jets of water, forcing their way through the loose rock. Some distance away he could see the original riverbed that stood low and empty now, wide and slick and strewn with debris, and down its middle ran a scrawny stream, lifeless and foul-smelling. William Moreland went on scrambling over the boulders as surefooted as a mountain goat and his shadow went with him, plunging in the crevices.
Soon he gained the far side, where he turned and followed the shoreline until he came upon the railway tipple that jutted into the water like a dock. Somewhere beneath the staring surface of this endless water lay metal tracks, and the Ridgerunner searched for them, even knelt at the edge to peer down into the dark water, but all that shone back at him were the huge silver sky and the clouds in motion. He rocked his head to find his own reflection, but could only discern a dark silhouette of mountain, weird and vacant, and behind that the shimmer of moon and cloud. It was as if this lake held another more sober world within it, and he could not find himself in it. The silence of the place was beyond even his considerable experience. He could almost hear his own heart. It struck him suddenly, ridiculously, that this place would not acknowledge him, even in reflection. The human world erased in one brutal swipe.
A profound sense of unease invaded the Ridgerunner. He turned and gazed up at the collapsed and now unrecognizable mountain face, tracking the devastation of the slide in the moonlight. Finally his excellent eyes picked out a few small lights uphill, each one a tiny glimmer, perhaps nothing more than a lantern. People, alive. And maybe Mary. He hiked his rucksack up and went on uphill, bent and cautious, a shadow among other shadows.
Several revellers sat in chairs on the platform of McEchern’s store, the dwarf among them, cups of booze held hovering, staring apprehensively into the dark. They had been carrying on as usual but had fallen silent as something nimble and quiet approached through the mist and broken trees, over the uneven ground, hopping and trotting along. The men leaned out of their chairs, or slipped from the trading post’s wooden platform to step a little out into the dark to listen — some almost eager, as if they awaited a friend. Spending time among the recently dead had made them thoughtful about what the dark might hold.
Finally, Moreland walked out of the trees, looking in the moonlight like some terrible, hunchbacked revenant. And indeed he was much like a ghost, carrying the burden of his existence upon his shoulders, drawn by curiosity to the hearths of men.
The dwarf sat back with a thump in his chair. “Shitfire, you scared me,” he said, a hand pressed to his chest in relief.
Moreland was grinning now to see the effect he had produced, and he dropped the pack to the ground.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I’m looking for a girl.”