Travellers May Still Return Read online

  Sunday, just into October, Danny was riding home. Tom walked out of the forest, strode stiffly toward him, lips moving.

  Danny reined in.

  “Trouble,” Tom said. “Come.”

  Danny dismounted, let the reins dangle.

  “A boy who works for me,” said Tom. “Hanged himself.”

  With what language can we approach this forest? It only exists now, as we enter the trees. Tom and Danny are not storytellers. They do not make meaning out of chaos. They tread together, grim, excited, into the story as if it doesn’t exist, down the muddy path to the clearing where Danny climbs onto the stump and slits the rope with his knife. Tom catches the body and carries it to the lane. They lay James across the saddle and lead the horse to his parents’ house. The house shambling, unsuspecting. Tether the horse. Tom carries the boy over the plank bridge, through the front door, and sets him on a couch. Danny follows, steps back when he sees the father, and watches. The father is still, and clearly in terror of the mother, whose voice from another room is asking, Who is it? James is pale and rain-wet. His black jeans and plaid shirt drip onto the couch, onto the floor.

  Soon the father produces a bottle of red wine and the men drink and the mother crouches beside the boy, speaking under her breath. My only one, my sweet boy, just raise your head and look at me, just raise your head and take a breath.

  What can I do? says the father. Tell me what to do.

  His head swings back and forth, loose.

  The parents were blind with shock. All I can do is tell the story. I have my own as well as the village’s to fit together, but to what purpose? How does obligation work? I know something of how they feel because Annie died, and even though no one listens and there’s no true telling, I know that I’m obliged to try. Elders come to sit with the family around the fire, cards in hand, suits in order, red black red black, their eyes aglitter, while James reposes in the next room.

  II

  5.

  Abi threw open the basement door and shook dust from her hair and sneezed. Behind her, Danny was sweeping around the trunks they’d just dragged to the middle of the cement floor, and his house was a mess, falling apart, windows cracked and dusty, and he hadn’t spoken all morning. It was time to let the horses out. She crossed the flagstones and climbed over the low wall onto the dead thatch of summer’s grass and headed down the path worn smooth by his family’s years and years of to and fro. Down the hill to the horses shifting in their fixed-up barn that Danny called foursquare, tiptop, neat as a pin, and she loved because she’d known the place forever.

  She paused at the door, listening, shivering. It was cold, below freezing maybe. Back at the house he was likely staring down at her. He knew, but not what he knew. He didn’t know what she knew, but he knew. The horses inside were banging hooves on the ground, sensing her presence. Of course they didn’t want to spend daytime shut in. She needed space to think. They needed morning light. She longed to run and run and run. There was such a difference between inside and outside, Danny’s barn and the pasture, her house and the pass, life and death. Danny had told her about the wild ponies descended from domestic animals who escaped long ago to live in their valley for hundreds of years until recent summers when they’d crossed the plain looking for something. She fingered the barn wall, painted wood, once a tree. Everyone was trapped inside something. James had gone. What could she do? What were her choices? If she did nothing it would happen. What was inside would be outside. Red was in there. She had ridden him to the foothills, told him everything. She peeled a long strip of paint from the wall and took a breath and watched the crystals in the air as she breathed out and cradled her belly. She’d grown up riding her bike in and out the vine rows, the rows like waves interrupted, up and down the hills surrounding the cemetery where James was in the ground. She loved Danny’s land because it resisted the vines; she loved to ride his land; she loved his beautiful barn, but not the ghost-house. Up there he was as restless as his horses down here, pushing furniture around, sorting boxes, throwing his stuff into the yard, piling it on his flatbed.

  She followed the track around the worn timbers of the barn, scuffing her feet against clumps of stunted weeds, trying to remember what she’d decided in the night. About leaving, about talking to Danny. He’d do anything for her. If she did nothing, sooner or later her parents would know. Could he help? She blew on her fingers. Her legs were cold through her jeans and her jacket wouldn’t zip up and she had on a thin shirt. Her mother was having a baby. Her sister had just had one. It was like a contagious disease. For fuck’s sake. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She was changing but didn’t know what she was changing into. Her baby was coming like a train.

  Half into the short bouncy ride to the dump, she swung to face Danny and said, “I’m pregnant,” and he said nothing.

  He swung the truck down the gravel road and parked and they got to work hauling out the boxes and bags, scaring up crows and a pair of ravens.

  “Your parents know?”

  “No. They don’t even know I’ve had sex.”

  “Who else knows?”

  “James knew.”

  “James.”

  “I’m not saying it’s his or yours.”

  “It might be James?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  An almost unwitnessed moment: dawn moonrise over the hills — all the vines picked clean leaving only the rows of eiswein grapes for the frost — and my old friend Danny out there riding the edge of the vineyard.

  Danny and Abi. He should go back to the sea, west to his drowning.

  I am avoiding doing something.

  Which is what I have done my whole life — substituted stories, descriptions of the world, and a snail’s eye view at that, for action. Fear, when all is said and done, is only a hand-written ticket, blurred and ratty, handed to the final captain, who has no time to punch it because the tide is turning. What do I do about Danny? Out there all is wonky horizon and a figure on horseback wandering away, irregular slant from the perpendicular, on a moonlit course. A speck in oil under a microscope.

  “Abi has a two-inch pussy,” Gee said to Harry.

  “Fuck off,” said Abi.

  “What?” said Harry.

  “You know, a five-centimetre slit. Duh.”

  “Shut up,” said Harry.

  “Fuck off,” Abi repeated.

  “He’s a shy boy,” Gee said, “but you are my fond friend, my best friend.”

  “Leave her alone,” said Harry.

  They were in a steep lane between frosty hedges, going to the town dump, a place Abi had discovered yesterday with Danny. He called it the nuisance grounds. She’d been amazed it existed. It had been here all her life without her knowledge. It had been here, he said, since the town was founded. No one was supposed to use it any more, but they’d carted boxes of junk in his rusty old flatbed to the swamp anyway.

  “It’s true,” said Gee. “Two inches. And she’s scouting around for a boyfriend.”

  Abi turned and pushed Gee and Gee gave Harry a shove and he fell and dropped his .22. Gee stood over him, then made a face at Abi. “Such a fond friend you are.”

  “You’re an airhead and a nincompoop,” said Abi. “That’s why nobody likes you.”

  “Bitch,” said Gee. “Tramp.”

  “You are both crazy.” Harry climbed to his feet and shouldered his gun. Mud on his rump and both knees.

  “She doesn’t like her pussy. You know why?”

  “You are seriously unhinged,” Harry said. “I’m not listening.”

  “James did it in there,” said Gee.

  They stopped at the gap in the hedge; there was a rough path through the black tree trunks.

  “Yeah,” said Harry.

  Gee stepped onto the trail. “Let’s go see. Let’s go see the place, hey?” She wrapped her fingers around her own neck and made a throttled sound.

  “Sto
p that,” said Abi.

  “Shut your mouth, Gee,” said Harry. “James was our friend.”

  “Fire your gun, Mr Harry,” Gee said. “Go on. One gun salute.” She pointed into the trees.

  They didn’t go in, but kept on, past the mouth of the trail, down the lane until they could smell skunky water.

  “There it is,” said Abi. “There is the old dump.”

  Birch trees grew up through the skeletons of cars and trucks. The white trunks rose straight out of frozen pools pierced at intervals by tall spiky dead grass. A shadow from a single cloud drifted over the antiques drowning in iced-over water, the rusting hulks hanging like bones in the mist, while a line of splayed fence posts cut across to a little cliff where a pair of crows shrieked.

  “Those are boxes Danny and me left yesterday,” said Abi.

  “What’s in them?” said Harry.

  “Who cares,” said Gee. “It’s spooky and it’s freezing and it stinks.”

  They threw pebbles at the iron protruding from the swamp. Throwing stones to keep warm. Amid the clangs and splashes, they were all out of breath, Harry and Gee waiting for her to tell them why they’d come. The crows cawed from the branch of a ratty fir tree on the cliff.

  “You don’t know anything,” Abi said.

  “You think?” said Gee. “Think I’m stupid?”

  “I know you are.” She flicked the back of Gee’s blonde head. “But I want to tell you. Both of you. You have to promise not to tell anyone else.”

  “Okay,” said Harry.

  “Gee?”

  “If it’s that you screwed James and that’s what messed him up and that’s why he killed himself, don’t bother. I know that shit. Shoot a crow,” she said. “Come on, Harry, shoot a mothershitting crow.”

  “Shut up,” Harry said.

  “I’m pregnant,” Abi said.

  “No way,” said Harry.

  “I was right!” said Gee. “I knew it!”

  “No way,” said Harry.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “That fucking asshole,” said Harry.

  “It wasn’t James.”

  “And then he strung himself up in a tree,” said Gee.

  “It wasn’t James.”

  “Who then?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “That’s fucked,” said Gee. “You’re a total idiot. That old man?”

  “No.”

  “Oh fuck,” said Gee. “We’re supposed to be your friends.”

  “You know it.”

  “What did you tell your parents?” said Harry.

  6.

  Danny rode home from the doctor’s surgery past Tom’s house, because of the girl. He often came this way after mass, after confession, the crossing spicy because Abi’s mother Lucy had been in the church and Abi was inside the house, his mind slow afterwards with images of resurrection and longings and guilty shivers. Today as he took the alley behind the main street toward Tom’s, the feeling gained in intensity. This was deep lust, more nuanced than mortality, and he welcomed it after the doctor’s news. Despite what was going on inside his body, he felt fresher, freer, and younger than he’d felt in a long time. Years ago he’d had similar feelings for every village girl and some of the boys, but simpler. Death, complex and mysterious, was in a corner of his body, spreading, and every impulse in him was fleeing to this house of daughters, and one particularly beautiful girl. At twilight, the lane was a tunnel for the prevailing wind and a jubilant maelstrom of ragged leaves and thick white flakes. The house walls writhed with the family’s wild indivisibility, at the centre of which was a well of clear water.

  He shut his eyes and saw Abi.

  Abi’s baby swayed through his yawing thoughts, and some little ghost of himself was following, leaving the diagnosis behind, heading for the old seabed.

  Next day he spoke to the girl as she curried Red in the dim stable, shocked at how pale and thin her arms were in the rolled-up sleeves of her old plaid shirt. In tight jeans, her slender body leaning next to the horse verged on the impossible. Her round belly astonished him. He told her in short unconfident sentences that he would help in any way he could, she could ask him anything she wanted to ask, that he would help, not judge.

  She kept silent.

  “Up in the northern hills there’s this valley,” he said. “All summer there’s wolverines, foxes, wolves, mountain cats, badgers and bears — and the ponies take to the slopes. You can camp up there the whole summer and never see a human soul.”

  “You’ve done that?”

  “That was where I lived after I got home.”

  “From the sea?”

  “Yeah. From the sea.”

  “I have never seen the sea.”

  She had not. She saw it now through him; she saw sea, ponies, hills, the married woman, her infant girls, through him, as if he were a window or a door or hidden entrance. Somehow she had the key to that door or window or tunnel, and might one day, not now, discover rooms. Not today. This was enough — his voice, his eyes, the barn, Red’s coat, all shining in a single burnished minute. The man, the night, stars through chinks in the boards. His voice, his eyes. Those waves. The sea.

  Different, he said, from here, the rain like curtains at the start of a play. Like a bolt of cloth, he said, trees and rain and beach and waves. A single fabric. Green and wet.

  She paused in her brushing to smile, to let him know she saw his kindness. The horse and man looking at her as if something else was going on. Something unavoidable, inevitable, but not at all graspable. Something from outside this moment. Danny said he had something to tell her. As he spoke, she heard the call of an owl. Beyond the man in the barn door, beyond the cold blue night. Steaming breath from the horses softened the timber edges and she and Red made a moon and one planet, the man a rough gate. He was pale. There were blue bags under his eyes. He was sick, might die. Was it time for her to go? And if so, where?

  Next day, she fixed breakfast for her sisters, made and packed her lunch and flew out the door, through the gate and across the plank over the ditch without a word to anyone. She didn’t care what they thought they knew. Her sisters knew nothing. Whispers around school every day for a month. A fog of lies. They didn’t know who she was.

  Lovely little humped plank bridge. She felt sorry for its worn slippery boards. They creaked underfoot. Her father had built it a long time ago. There was ice down there in the stream, but the water went on underneath, flowing. Freezing cold, yet not frozen.

  She passed nine wooden bridges on her way to Danny’s. Four of the houses were empty. The stream in the ditch went on, always the same, but people were leaving and she was changing. She’d be fifteen next May. She’d have a baby. There was a new quietness in the fresh snow, a new whiteness. All night long storms had called above her attic room. She’d been nervous, especially through the long evening, and hadn’t been able to keep still. “Got ants in your pants, fatty?” her sister’s husband had teased her. Her sisters lying on the floor under blankets, drugged or hibernating. It’s snowing! It’s snowing! And she couldn’t stop running to the window, running upstairs, running to the kitchen, and when their father brought smoky air in from the fields, she’d longed to follow the draft out to its source in the thickly falling snow. The house jostled by her father’s passage had woken up. Peter had swaggered, bragged, her sisters had quit Crazy Eights and gone to the window.

  Her body fizzed with danger. No one knew who she was. Nor did they know Uncle Danny, not the way she did. Last summer he’d begun to tell her his story. He’d told her about the landrace ponies, the small herd that still ran in the valley beyond the foothills, that no one else knew about. Last night he’d told her he might be dying, but not to tell anyone. He said her cells cantered unfenced, while his were trapped. Landrace. Her thoughts leapt in all directions. Secrets. What happened in Danny’s cabin, Danny’s barn, in the tent. Her dad was the only one who defended Danny. Her dad said Uncle Danny was a faithful person.

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nbsp; Nine bridges. Three times three is nine. Three men. Three possibilities. Lose the baby. Have the baby here. Have the baby somewhere else. Down the lane she was accompanied by kitchen sounds, until the village ended and the vine hills began. White hills combed by God into flowing lines, her mother said. An ice circle haloed the far-away sun. As she swung along the path curving up to Danny’s house, she saw the ethnologist, his head down. He looked haunted, like a sleepwalker or a ghost. She let her hand brush the hedge: ice crystals sheathed tiny new buds.

  Standing at her bedroom window for hours as the days grew shorter, fingers against her belly, she tracked the line of white horizon hills left to right, right to left, as she counted her breaths. At each limit, set by the frame, she pushed her lower belly against the sill. To see how it felt. And listened to others in the house whose lives would be changed by her change. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to carry the baby until it was ready for the world. Ran a finger, gathering a small dirt wave, through the grime on the windowsill and daubed her forehead. Looked for Double Mountain. She was so thin; the bump was a human person, already twitchy for something she probably hadn’t got. Who to talk to? Had she told? In dreams, she had, and told and told and told, the telling dividing the village into those who avoided her and those who attacked her. If she wanted to take the focus off herself, she just had to name the person. That was no relief. Relief was to walk alone to the nuisance grounds. Relief was to hike the vine hills and imagine them waves, steady and repetitive, creasing the land. Snowy waves cresting. Below them iron plates floated over magma.

  She would not be able to stay in the house much longer. Her mother would guess, her dad find out, and they’d send her away. She took good care not to show her belly, but her mother would guess anyway. Maybe Danny would let her fix up his parents’ empty house and she could live there. No. She felt sick to her stomach, and that house was a nightmare and this house was a trap. Every day was a bit more horrible.