Travellers May Still Return Read online

  16.

  She let the horses out and spent the day with them, well, not with them, but getting her shoes wet and the legs of her jeans dirty while they ignored her. But they knew she was there, part of their world. All was easier outside now it was spring, except having a baby or dying, which wouldn’t be easy anywhere any time. When it got dark, she leaned against Red’s chest to hear his big lungs working. “I got a baby,” she told him. “I won’t go home, I’ll never cross that little bridge again, I have quit my family.”

  She lay in a nest of blankets on Danny’s cot in a corner of the wind-creaking barn. Ghosts were flopping and bowing and having little fits up there behind the windows of his dead house. She could hear them ranting at each other in the dark.

  She slept in her clothes: three baggy shirts, a pair of unbuttoned jeans.

  The barn empty of horses. Barn with early sun. Spider webs aglint in a draft. Fuggy smell of feed, hay. Not just a place: her home. By first light, after a long wakeful sleep, she felt like the youngest in a herd, a foal on the straw, brand new.

  She would not stay. She would run. She had to stay. She could not run. Danny would not come home and she would have to look after the horses forever. She had not been to school since the end of January. Her parents didn’t care she was living with the horses. She was riding less. She was thin, except for her belly, feeding at Danny’s desk on the soups and casseroles Emma left inside the barn doors. Soon she would run. But the horses.

  One night for warmth and to challenge herself she slept in his ghost house, but the fire in the stove smoked and then went out, and she lay shivering on a split couch near the window, pigeons stepping over her. They found roosts on the plate shelf that ran around the room and she dozed off listening to them shuffling and scratching and ruffling their feathers. Something woke her in the dark and she got up and watched the barn, the sky, and a bright star eaten by clouds. A figure, head down, was trudging up the path with a heavy bag. A man slipping through the shadows toward the barn. She imagined James hanging alive, then dead. She did not want to see him, but mostly did not want his ghost to see her. When she looked again he had disappeared. A shiver ran up her spine.

  The next day was cold; rainy wind was whistling under the sashes, wetting the sills. She stuffed a tablecloth in the broken window and went into the kitchen. The taps no longer worked. The kitchen was freezing and dim, the floor rough with dirt. Danny’s money had dwindled. She counted the remaining bills, slipped them back into her pocket, the pigeons cooing, then walked the shabby hallway to the front door. Smell of mould. Patterns of green and black around a faint rectangle where a mirror used to hang. Probably no one had ever stood here and studied this little passage. She opened the door and wind sent her hair flying. There was someone on the path. Not James. Harry. His bag looked heavy. She leaned on the wall and stared out. Hadn’t there been a star in the middle of clouds? She shut the door and took quiet steps back into the house. A line of droppings marked the entrance to the front room. Finished with the place, she ducked her head and marched through the kitchen and let herself out the back door and locked it. She went round to the front, pushed the bills deeper into her jeans pocket. Harry was trotting up the path, his bag pitching him to the right.

  “Brought you some things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Sleeping bag. Air mattress. Camping stuff.”

  “What for?”

  “I know you’re camping out here.” He stood in front of her like a dog, half-faithful, half-stupid. Staring at her, but being nice. Wind whistled in the loose porch railings. The steps were rotted through.

  She hated Gee.

  She didn’t love Harry.

  She’d dreamt she was flying on a beautiful white horse.

  “Not here. The barn . . . ”

  He trudged back down the path, dropped the bag by the barn door, turned and left.

  Saint

  The horses welcome her with their noses.

  Danny lifted her onto her first horse.

  Who bore her through shadows, eyes on the sea.

  Each day she rides out, faster and farther.

  Let me go blind, she says. Let me go deaf.

  The barn safe at night, the horses like silk.

  Under her fingers, their manes, their eyelids.

  The baby draws blood and breath from her heart.

  She feels their captivities align, align.

  17.

  When she was ten she read Daughter of Dark, and her sky-blue bike was a pinto called Light, which she amended to Leon in front of her friends, and she rode Light from the glass school up a row of vines, down another, once round the village, always winding up at the barn from where came thuds and low voices in early morning and evening; but if she arrived during the day she found a thick dusty aromatic silence.

  She has just repeated the identical journey on a real horse and Red feels supple and both of them are smooth with sweat, up against the sunny side of the barn, away from the wind and from the sad eyes of Danny’s house. The sea after a storm. She breathes in his smell. Down there the river loops like writing or a wide silver snake, and the other horses run their own circles and loops in the riverbank pasture.

  She lets go the reins and wraps her arms around his neck.

  Red drops his head and drinks from the trough.

  All winter of her tenth year she wobbled and skidded on ice and gravel on her new mountain bike, blinking ice crystals from her eyes, imagining slipping under the wheels of a semi-trailer plunging down the highway, yes, no, yes, no, horrendous squeals and blasting horns, roll like a hamster, roll away from the traffic, roll into the ditch, and no one saw her, only truckers and long-distance travellers. She rode the soft shoulder until she was shaking, then returned home. Safe yet.

  “Stand at his withers and take his mane, gently.”

  She dreamed about James and Gee leaping off a cliff; down below were waves and rocks; they spread their arms to slow their fall.

  She worried about her thinness, more a slenderness and a knot. Once she met Harry on the barn path and hid her belly, tired of explaining. They went to the schoolyard to talk and Gee was there. She and Gee smoked hash on the tip of a cigarette. Harry took a cigarette but refused the hash. Gee laughed at her baggy coat, laughed and couldn’t stop. She went home stoned and snuck in and drank a bottle of wine and some vodka and went blind and her father put her to bed. When she woke up, her face was blue in the mirror.

  “Stand in the stirrups and give him his head.”

  Not flying but thundering toward something, into something, and not alone, not thinking, riding hard into those mountains: she is significant. Racing away from what she knows, dividing what she knows into girl/horse, baby/ man, girl/baby.

  Horse shadows and joy. She is a horse girl. She is bliss. She rides Light, no, Leon. She mourns Tortoise. She rides big Paraclete. She rides her own Red. She loves to ride Red, afraid of being thrown, wanting to be thrown. She rides the hermit horse, Solomon, more safe, less often. She rides Red who sees through her. They are inseparable under a sky pouring water she knows and water she’s never felt, never any closer to the mountains. She rides the horses one after another, her weight-distribution and shape weird. Horses she has never met, has no memory of learning. Horses that will never fill with rain. She rides an hour and pauses at a hollow rock that holds dark snowmelt, so Light, no, Leon, no, Red, can drink.

  She rides Red into the mountains to find the pass — there will be something, some weather or light peculiar to the place that she can wrap around the child she’s carrying.

  Everywhere were signs of spring, ice cubes in the river, tracery on the poplars. She reined Red in, returned him to the barn, stoked the stove, brushed the horses, talking to them.

  18.

  “What did you say?” asked Abi.

  “What?” Harry posed like a discus thrower, then skimmed his rock off the poisonous water against the engine block of a half-sunk truck.

  “W
hat did you say?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You said something.”

  “Did I?” He spun another stone; it bit a splash from the surface, rattled off the engine and fell back with a plop. “That’s my life — clink clank plop.”

  “At the end you sink.”

  “Are you going to tell me who it was?”

  “No.”

  “Have you told anyone?”

  “What does it matter?”

  Harry spun another stone and it sank without bouncing. “I’m going to the other side.” He pointed to this and that bit of junk, stepping places to the far cliff. “Hippity-hop. Watch this.”

  She paid attention to his long thin big-boned body as he made the cliff in several leaps — refrigerator to boulder to chassis to engine block to wheel-rim to a curving platform of roof shingles beneath the overhang. Once there, he crouched and called: “Lots of room. Come on over. It’s a little island.”

  The dented fridge was yellow-green. She’d change places with her baby if she could, if that was possible. Couldn’t they switch? She closed her eyes. To float in an inner world. Wobbly boulder, narrow chassis, wheel-rim. But they were like horse and rider, fastened into their places, into who they were. If she was winter, the baby was summer out of spring. She was feeling so pregnant — not simply pregnant, but complicatedly pregnant. Somehow all boys and men were hurt by this baby. Her baby was no lie, but she had to nurture lies and keep guessing where it came from when she didn’t even know. She might talk to the man she’d called Uncle all her life, but he was in hospital and she couldn’t visit him because she was so big and it was too far for her to travel.

  It was easy to get to where Harry was, although she wobbled on the boulder. In the shadow of the cliff were drawings, it looked like, etched or sprayed onto the rock. She really wanted to talk, but didn’t know what to tell and doubted Harry’s ability to listen. He was lost in his purpose, hunched over with his back to her, busy with the cliff-face, and she was lost in hers.

  She couldn’t see what he was doing, but the place was peaceful. The asphalt tiles they stood on were layers deep, all different colours. Tell him. She wanted to. She felt betrayed by his ignoring her. Wanted to talk to him.

  “What will you do when you finish school?”

  Harry was adding his own marks to the others on the rock. “We’re only in Grade 10, Abi,” he said. He whipped off his toque, and flicked it to her and she sat down on it. She was shaking; her shoulders were shaking. She let the shake turn into a shudder. She felt weak, watery, bloated, sitting on the tiles. With the sun low in the sky the pond was in shade. Only the tops of spiky new grass and metal parts sticking up out of the water were lit. She laid her hand on the cold surface of a bent filing cabinet and squinted through her hair at the boy at the cliff face. The scene transformed: instead of a dump with the scattered castoff goods of the village, the place was gloriously red and ancient. Edges vibrated and there was symmetry to everything.

  “Are you okay?” Harry asked.

  “No.”

  She went to stand beside him and they drew simple animal outlines on the cliff face with bits of iron. Fish. Bird. Cow. Snake. Tufts overhead caught the sun; the tufts were like small ruby-green creatures rearing against the blue evening sky; long brambles looped down.

  A bird landed to her right and she closed her eyes to listen to it hopping, scuffling in the crusty tiles. “Crow,” she whispered.

  “Huh?” said Harry.

  “I know we’re only in Grade 10,” she said, “but I still ask the question. What will you do?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do. What are you going to do?”

  She didn’t answer, but felt tiny surges and questings of the small limbs inside her womb.

  “What are you going to do?” he repeated. “You know.”

  A train whistle blew, train rushing down the line from the west, and they both looked up.

  “What did you and James talk about that night?” she said.

  “Something,” he said. “He was loaded.”

  “Something about me?”

  “No. Someone else. James was really wrecked,” Harry said. “Bent out of shape.”

  “Who did you talk about?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Was it me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. I promised not to say anything.”

  She opened her eyes to a robin using its beak to forage through last year’s leaves. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  “I didn’t believe him anyway,” he said.

  “How about yourself?” she said. “Do you believe in yourself? Do you?”

  Harry was looking at her, puzzled, his face in a beam of sun, mouth curved in a pained expression. “Yes. Sure I do.”

  She scratched a mouth on the cliff face. “I bite my tongue all the time — you know that expression? I used to hate everything, but now . . . ”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “You are the only person I have ever felt comfortable with.”

  The robin found a bug. She heard the crunch. The bird cocked its head at her and said: You are no great maker of future plans, then flew low along the shore of the pond, lifted and vanished over the cliff.

  She watched buds explode into white blossoms over Nuisance Island. They wanted light. They wanted sun. Every morning she felt less and less safe: James here or James gone, Danny here or Danny gone, the ethnologist here or gone, Harry here or gone — amounted to the same thing: into her belly had poured a sharp fluid and now life was unstoppable.

  “Now rowel the horse on!”

  All around was the yellow-green world. She was on her way. She carried a baby she wanted. She was getting used to herself, forgetting to ask, Why am I so young? Who is the father? Who will help me? What should I do? She wrapped her fist round the horse’s mane and leaned in to smell him. She and Red were facing the mountains now, swirled round by steam. The smell was leather and sweat. The kid was sleeping in her belly, his fists closed. Back in the village people wandered back and forth.

  19.

  What is the relationship between our village and these thrown-away things? Did the village become lighter, less substantial, more joyful as the dump grew in size? And do we unbalance our world when we deem the rag-pickers rags? Now abandoned, the dump is more symbol than fact. We should look into what the village has lost, what we have collectively given up. Yes we should.

  I don’t believe that only strangers can see what’s broken down. We are inbred, it’s true, but surely we are adaptable and capable. When we filled the swamp with refuse, we found another location.

  At the beginning of time, after the first summer, we were all flying through the wilderness, founding villages. We had been holidaying in the mountains, valley to valley, following our noses, and then wind filled the trees and it got cold, so we took a path beside a stream and found a river that led to a dry meadow in a coulee of scrub teeming with antelope and set to work.

  We are survivors, castaways, searching the horizon for our ship, a steamer, liner, cargo vessel, fishing boat, tug, trawler, launch, dinghy, barge, ferry, tanker, raft, freighter, rowboat, but the sea is empty. We are sailors, bridge officers, engineers, stokers, deckhands hard at work, chartless stowaways, far from land. We are landlocked riders with a hard gallop ahead but alive, transfigured, in relationship.

  We live between our village and the land. What we have cultivated in the long view of mountains will vanish in the next human empire — a vast surface mine maintained by monster machines. Our next enterprise will have nothing to do with horses or the soil, only with machines and rock; our tribe will winter by tropical seas to escape such violent tedious labour.

  20.

  My heart leapt when I saw Danny walking slowly down the road and I ran out to greet him. He said the trip to the sun and back had been easy, but the waiting with other sufferers in a corrido
r among potted trees and cheerful nurses, views of endless roofs, water courses, golf hills, speeding highways, long evenings in the hotel room and forced marches through the city had weakened his spirits.

  He was pale and irritable and still had cancer.

  “I’ve been amazed by horses all my life,” he said. “I mistook them for humans. I was not wrong. How is Emma?”

  “Her arm’s better, but she still can’t lift anything.”

  “She fell off Paraclete, Charles. That’s a long fall. I’m going home to lie down.”

  21.

  He kept dreaming of that early spring camping trip through the basin-land, thirty-five years ago, his first pony in that meadow between two hills. Longing, granddam of Paraclete. His hand on her flank. Rainbow over the pass. The first stars.

  In today’s brief canter he’d twisted in the saddle and pulled a muscle near his heart, may have been his heart, and had smoked two joints. His thighs ached as he crossed through the vines back to the homestead. He would never forget the rope, crusty polypropylene, its fibres cutting into the boy’s throat. James’ body depending from this rope tied to a thick branch. New limbs, new muscles. What other chores had occupied the yellow rope? What had scarred and busted its petro-chemical strands? What vehicles had it towed, luggage tied down, what jetsam had it held together? The rope had had no smoothness left in it, despite the strain. He felt faint after the long weeks in the city, but the radiation in itself had been nothing and scopes showed the tumour reduced and in all just being home made him generally feel whole again, though still not able to figure out what had happened, except resentment had been burned out of him; errant cells were on the run; the surgery date was set. What should he do next? It wasn’t impossible to call it off, the operation, call it a day. He still had strength to ride north on a fierce little horse. The last wild pony he’d brought in had fought him all the way. Her grown foals were down there in the barn. Abi had taken good care of them. He hadn’t seen the girl yet, but there was evidence of her squatting with them in the barn. He thought about her all the time. Her face. Her knees. Her eyes watching him through a curtain of hair. All the clichés. It was the image of this girl that kept him going, the way she looked, sounded, sat a horse. She’d materialize at odd moments. On his way to and from the hospital. In the eyes of young nurses. In their bodies. A child with lovely simple perfect lines. Yearling. Expectant. Unaccountable. He still desired life, apparently.