The sentry knew me by sight, but another man, one of Eben Callard’s it turned out, was standing guard beside him.
They called someone out of the guardhouse to take the horse. I didn’t know the boy. There was straw in his hair and his face was crinkled from sleep.
I was sorry to see the horse go. There was no easy way out of there without her, but my desire to know about the plane had overmastered every other thought.
All the omens were poor. The sentry gave me a sly and uneasy look as he hauled the door open. And on the far side of the parade ground, a rough wooden cross had been dug into the dirt, and from it was dangling a body.
The wind had sprung up, and when it blew, it caught him like a sail and made the joints of the crosspiece creak.
Though the face was black and swollen, I could see from his build that it was Boahwaite. There were wounds to his body and head, and his arms had been nailed through the wrists. His belly was all bloated with gas.
From the manner of his death, I guessed the prisoners had chosen it themselves.
He looked like he’d been dead at least two days. They must have turned on him in a fit of revenge soon after the plane landed.
I’ll confess I was taken aback. I’m no lover of mob justice. People making their own law is an ugly sight — and it’s not what I had expected of the men in the plane.
Shamsudin had said that civilization meant city life. I wasn’t sure about that. To me it meant streetlights, plumbing, schools, and things worked out by reason. I can’t see the reason in deliberate cruelty. It makes a fetish of what’s most base in us.
But I had to trust that the men in the plane were wise enough to know what they were about. No one else had died. The walls were intact. The place had not been razed. Maybe the body on the cross was the price of that order.
*
Whatever upsets there had been, I still held my old rank as a guard. My room was just as shabby as I’d left it. The dust on the window looked like milled gold in the sunlight.
Out of the window, I watched the place coming to life. First the reveille and the weary prisoners dragging their chains out the bunkhouse. How ragged they looked.
After fifteen minutes, one of the new guards came in and said Mr Callard would see me. By the time I reached the office, I had a pretty good idea what I’d find.
On the walk over, his man said to me that he’d lost his eyes defending a woman’s honour. That made me smile.
*
The first meeting was short. He wanted to know where I’d been. How come I’d survived. I told him as little as possible. They excused me to go back to my room and clean up.
Someone brought food and water and a change of clothes. They gave me a rough towel with a tablet of green soap on it. I scrubbed myself and cleaned my hair with it in the washroom. I could only think that it had come on the plane. It had been so long since I’d seen any. We used to make our own in Evangeline. Fat and lye is what you use to do it. Jezebel.
There was a little scent in this one. It seemed to make my hair go stringy. As I washed, I thought of how I would escape. First light. I’d take another horse. I’d take two.
Tears made my eyes go blurry. It was the disappointment of it. After all this. I was the one holding a garbled message. I thought I was a caretaker, shoring up the few things I could against annihilation, trying to be worthy of the traditions of my ancestors. I’d always been so proud that I lived in this world. But I was just like pa. I needed another world to redeem the present.
I’ve looked back at my pages and found I’ve written: I don’t need it to be otherwise.
You know how it is when the most cussed and determined bachelor falls in love, he colours what’s left of his hair and gets his heart broken? Or the total lady who does the flowers in the church, has her first sherry at sixty and dies a drunk?
I’d walked through life like a cat on ice, testing each step before I took it. Now it turned out I’d tiptoed into a beartrap.
It’s something when disaster walks in through an open window. But what could you do? Every life has some of that. But when you barred yourself into a strongbox, rubbed your hands, and spent years telling everyone how safe you are. That’s the trouble I’m talking about. Everyone sees it coming but you. That’s in the nature of a blind spot.
The years stretched off in front of me like a frozen winter road. The hope that I’d fed on, that I’d told in secret like a stash of hidden money, was gone.
How had I lived before Ping or the plane, without the sense that any other life was mortised to mine, or the thought that somewhere children were walking to school and the dead getting buried, and a pianola playing in tune? Sitting in the dark all winter, waiting for the candles to run out. Trying to catch an echo of the life that had been here. Waking in the dark. Cleaning my guns at night. Crunching out to the stable with the saddle over my shoulder.
My life didn’t even count as suffering. It was one long cruel joke that the wind had written on the snow.
5
THERE WAS AN odd smell in the air which I remarked on to the guards who came to get me towards midday. They said the stills were going full pelt to brew fuel for the plane. It meant the kitchens were short-handed and most of the inmates on half rations.
I questioned the wisdom of that, privately. For all his shortcomings and cruelties, Boathwaite never let the prisoners go hungry. The food was often dull, but it was plentiful. He’d known as well as I did that well-fed people were more biddable.
They escorted me across the parade ground. I knew the way as well as they did, but I guessed they’d been told to keep a close eye on me.
Up in the fields, the men were labouring as slowly as ever, weeding and mending fences, grumbling and moving livestock.
Things looked much like they always had. And yet some odd changes had taken place in my absence. With Boathwaite and Tolya dead, the running of the base had fallen to a man named Purefoy. He was settler stock himself, but a shy man who I’d always felt Boathwaite trusted because he didn’t have the dash and swagger of a natural leader, or carry much weight with the other guards.
Empty bellies, the old boss gone — there was more than the fumes from the stills in the air. I was almost too cast down to smell it, but sure enough, alongside the stink of brewing, and the dirt, and the latrines, was a sharp whiff of mutiny.
They had laid out Boathwaite’s room for a banquet. I didn’t feel like eating any more. Purefoy and a half-dozen of the senior guards were there. They had shaved and put on their best coats and three or four of them had brought their wives. You could see by the way the men bowed and scraped t Eben Callard and his men that they felt themselves to be country cousins.
The women sat by themselves at a separate table, wearing old-fashioned formal clothes. I couldn’t help wondering about Boathwaite’s widow and that little girl of his.
*
There was a place laid for me at the main table. Eben Callard sat at the head of it and there were fourteen or so places set round it. Much of the food had come from the base, but there was plenty there that must have travelled with them on the plane, since we had no way of growing or making it there. There was sweet wine for the women, little heaps of orange salmon eggs, bowls of lump sugar, candy, and canned crab meat, and bottles of cognac with labels on them.
At a signal from one of the guards, we took our seats.
It was a strained and nervy gathering. No one was sure if we were meant to start eating.
Eben Callard rolled a shotglass of cognac between his fingers. ‘We don’t visit often,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to leave a bad impression. Things have had to be done. Some harsh decisions had to be made. But I don’t want to dwell on that now.’