by Patrick Gale
‘What are you . . . ?’
‘Do you need to be back for any reason before supper?’
‘No.’
‘Good. So. First we need a fire, because it’s cold when you stop walking.’ She swiftly gathered dry kindling, bark strips and a few larger sticks. ‘I could do this the old Cree way,’ she said, ‘with two sticks and patience, but . . .’
‘I picked these up in Hinton,’ he said with a smile, producing the matchbox from his inside pocket.
She smiled and took them off him. She flaked one of the sticks into a little heap with a very sharp little kitchen knife she produced from her reticule, lit the heap and, breathing steadily on it, added a few twigs then larger pieces of kindling as the fire grew.
‘This is an old campground,’ she said. ‘Very, very old.’
‘There doesn’t seem to be much room,’ he said. ‘Unless the cave is huge.’
‘Not for a tribe,’ she told him. ‘Just one or two people. People came here alone for a spirit quest.’
‘What’s that?’
She stared at him in examining silence for a minute before answering. ‘We all have turning points in our lives, when we could go this way or do that, sit and weave the basket or go hunting with the bow and arrow. The spirits show you the way to go.’ She laughed suddenly. Not her usual feminine chuckle but a startlingly big, manly guffaw, a sound of triumph. ‘God forgive me,’ she said, ‘but it has been a very long time since I did this.’ She reached up to her neck and unfastened her long string of beads with the crucifix on it. She handed it to Harry. ‘Put this somewhere so He can’t watch.’
He slipped the necklace into his coat’s inside pocket, where Jesus couldn’t see her.
‘Now,’ she told him, ‘you stay here and feed the fire and think about who you love, while I do some foraging. I won’t be long.’
Bemused, he sat on the ground, cross-legged, while, clutching her knife, Ursula followed the stream over the edge of the ledge and down the hill. The fire was burning well now, and its warmth and cheerful crackle was welcome, for the spot was in shadow. He fed in a couple of sticks, looked up where the smoke now rose in a blue column, and watched a buzzard impersonate a child’s kite, apparently riding the air currents for the uncomplicated pleasure of doing so. And then he made himself think about Paul.
He tried thinking about him not as a cruel memory would do it, reliving specific scenes, like waking beside him in the night, or swimming with him across the slough at evening. Instead he simply conjured up the pleasure of his physical presence, his kind brown eyes with the little lines about them, hinting at mischief, the small scar on the back of his left hand, the smell of him, bread-oven warm before waking, the breadth of his shoulders.
Oddly, he found that this conscious remembering did not make him sad but only – how to put it? – lambent with love. When Ursula returned, it was as though she saw this at once, for she reached out a quick bony hand to touch his cheek.
She had gathered a plant, some kind of flag or sedge, it seemed to him, though she called it something that sounded like wickers. Sitting across the fire from him, she trimmed it, throwing what she didn’t need to sizzle in the flames. She retained the long, thin roots, which she had already rinsed quite clean in the stream. Using the knife, she cleaned off any fibrous hair and much of their skin, quite as though she were preparing salsify for the table. When she spoke, she was no longer Ursula but Little Bear. Grave. Manly.
‘This is not the way,’ she said. ‘You should have been fasting for at least a day, and so should I. But it may be effective and the spirits won’t mind.’
‘Is it poison?’ he asked, a powerful recollection of Lily Thunder fed by the fire smoke. Lily, who he finally saw, hadn’t been entirely female either.
‘No,’ Ursula told him. ‘It does aid constipation, but for us, it will bring visions. Here.’ She passed him two lengths of root. ‘It’s bitter,’ she warned him, ‘like ginger mixed with cinnamon, but you must keep chewing it, even if you can’t swallow. You need the juice.’
She raised a piece to her mouth and chewed on it, fast and hard, as a squirrel might. Then she tucked in a second piece. ‘God forgive me,’ she muttered.
‘Ursula, please. Don’t do this if it bothers you so.’
The look she threw him was utterly serious. ‘I must do this,’ she said. ‘This is who I am. But what we do here, Harry, you will never speak of. Never.’
Startled, Harry nodded.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Chew.’
It was bitter, like biting directly into memory itself. It also rapidly had the odd effect of numbing his mouth, so that he became worried about accidentally biting his tongue. He certainly couldn’t have spoken clearly, even if he swallowed first. Ursula dribbled slightly but did not seem to notice. She had shut her eyes and was rocking gently, crooning some Cree song under her breath. Thinking about Paul again, Harry swallowed the piece of root in his mouth and hurriedly pushed in the second, as though eager not to be left behind. He pictured the buttons on Paul’s flannel shirts, and how the upper ones had a way of falling teasingly open on their own.
Unused to him sitting cross-legged, his knees were complaining, so he uncrossed his legs, lay down on the rock, cushioning his head on his arm, and closed his eyes. Over the crackling fire, he could hear Little Bear and Ursula apparently in conversation. They were talking Cree. Quite suddenly she fell silent, then a man’s voice, which sounded far older than hers, spoke to him from very close at hand.
‘Three men,’ it said slowly, almost in his ear, and he felt a hot hand press hard against his heart. ‘Three men haunt you.’
The ground seemed to sway rhythmically beneath him, inducing a momentary nausea, and Harry saw the inside of a railway carriage crowded with men. It was like being in a dream, only the physical details were a hundred times sharper. He could smell wet wool from soldiers’ uniforms and the stale sweat off their shirts, and here and there as he moved through the unresisting crowd a sour-sweet gust of tobacco. The youth of the soldiers was astonishing. They were so much younger than the men he had seen waved off at Winter. Some were little more than schoolboys, with down, not bristles, on their jaws. And as they parted for him, he saw, to his amazement, Jack, lovely, handsome, perfect, sitting there in a captain’s uniform, with his back to him, talking to Paul. He was sure it was Paul. They were talking happily, laughing.
Overjoyed, Harry plunged forward to meet them. He would sweep Jack into a tight embrace, understanding all, forgiving all as everyone cheered and clapped them on the backs. But just as he reached him, Jack turned and it wasn’t Jack at all, and it wasn’t Paul with him. Harry was driven forward by crazed momentum so seized the one who was nearly Jack anyway, hugging him tight, planting kisses in his dirty hair, then reaching out to grab the man who was nearly Paul. Which was when the other soldiers stopped being cheery and stared at him in disgusted silence. He tried to stammer out an apology before anyone hit him, but his mouth was full of swollen magic root and disobeyed him.
The train was passing through Unity and he saw himself through the window, slight and timid-looking, being pinned in place outside the shop by Munck. Handsome but really rather sad, Troels had been drinking brandy to overcome the shame of not being with the proper soldiers on the train, or in the parade. And looking from outside, as it were, Harry could understand how, for all his mockery and bullying, Munck saw in Harry things he wanted and could never have: Englishness, certainty of position, education in all the little things whose absence could make a man feel unacceptable. Troels, he now saw, wanted Harry’s approval and affection but was not equipped to win them. Drawing closer, he could hear his drunken words.
‘I had a fever, a bad one. It weakened my heart. They said I was more use recruiting than fighting; a mock soldier, a toy.’
There was a gentle pressure on Harry’s elbow. He
turned away to see Little Bear in real Cree clothes, time-worn and authentic, with feathers on a necklace around his neck like the one Lily Thunder had worn. He lifted Munck’s arm off Harry’s shoulder, showing neither fear nor hesitation. Then he led Harry along the front of the shop and up an alleyway. At its end he pointed.
The wooden sidewalk ran out and they stepped off it on to a patch of rough ground, such as so often lay behind the buildings in small prairie settlements. All the building energy went into the fronts, into a line of stores and banks and hotels that would convey prosperity and stability to the new arrival, but beyond the facades, which often were just that – high structures like stage flats nailed on at the front of low tin sheds – this was what one found. Grass. Mud. A pile of lumber. Perhaps wooden stakes optimistically marking the quadrants of a second street not yet built.
‘Why?’ Harry began, and found that Little Bear was no longer beside him.
The noise of the street had gone with him. The alley had gone. Harry turned back. An ox was lying off to one side, contentedly grazing whatever it could reach without moving. It was dark brown, with a black nose, its coat quite shaggy, suggesting it was shaped by life in a cold climate. Seeing Harry, it rose by lumbering degrees to its feet and tried to take a step towards him. But one of its front legs was wounded, snagged twice around with a piece of barbed wire. Harry felt no fear of it. In his experience, oxen were usually placid; it was cows that one had to approach with caution.
‘Hey, boy,’ he murmured in the low tone he had learnt from Jørgensen. ‘You’re in trouble, aren’t you?’
It collapsed heavily forward on to its injured leg, smothering the wire as its knees bent, then sank heavily down so that the wire must have been cutting into it in several places. As Harry came closer, he realised the beast had a ring through its nose. He took off his belt, slipped it through the ring as an improvised rope and gently pulled.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come on, boy. If you stand again, I can help you.’
But the ox only pulled back on the belt, shaking its head from side to side and snorting snottily. Then it mooed at him, bellowed almost, only the sound wasn’t the full-throated, belly-clenching cry he knew cattle could produce, but wretchedly muted.
He dropped the belt, crouched down close and reached out to touch the poor creature’s noble face and run his fingers through the shock of black-brown hair between its massive felty ears.
‘Come on, boy. Let me help you. Please,’ he repeated.
But all it did was moo sadly up at him.
He opened his eyes to see smoke rising from the dying embers that glowed just a couple of feet from his face. The Dvorak bird, or chickadee, or whatever it was called, sang so close at hand he fully expected to find it perching on his knee as he slowly sat up. As the confusion of visions left his head, he heard Petra’s voice pointing the birds out to Grace.
‘I miss you,’ she sang on the bird’s three melancholy descending notes. ‘Hear that? I miss you. I miss you.’
The sun was low in the sky. Very low. Could they have slept all this time and missed supper? After only a few weeks at Bethel, he was already sufficiently institutionalised by the place to suffer a flare of boarding school panic that he might have broken the rules. He stood, expecting to find Ursula lying on the other side of the fire, but there was no sign of her.
‘Ursula?’ he tried to call, only his mouth was still numb from the root and he could hardly form the sounds. ‘Little Bear?’
I miss you, sang the bird. I miss you.
She was only a short way back down the path up which they had climbed. At first glance he thought she was standing on a tree stump to see better into the tree above her, because she was suddenly several inches taller than him. Then he saw her turn slightly and realised she was suspended. She had strung herself up by the length of beads he had last seen as he slipped them safely into his coat pocket.
‘Ursula!’ he shouted and jumped to bear her up. However thick, the wire threading the beads and holding her up could only have been just strong enough to take her weight, for it broke the second he took the strain, and beads tumbled down into his face and all around him.
He lowered her to the ground, gasping. She normally wore the necklace as a double rope, and by using only one loop of this to hang herself, she had caused the second to pull tightly around her throat, where the beads and the crucifix cut so deeply into her skin that many remained stuck there, even now the wire was broken. Frantically he felt for the pulse in her neck, knocking beads free from her skin as he did so and making her bleed in several places.
‘Ursula, can you hear me?’
She had stopped breathing. He parted her lips with his fingers and found she still had a chewed root of the plant in there. As he pulled that free, she coughed violently and rolled to one side to retch and sob.
‘Why?’ he asked her. She said something but he couldn’t make it out. He brought his ear close to her mouth. ‘Why, Ursula?’ he asked again.
‘I don’t want to go to Hell,’ she whispered.
‘But you won’t. Why should you? Hell was only made up to frighten us, like the monsters in a children’s story.’
‘I’m a witch and a sodomite,’ she sighed. ‘I must burn.’
‘Don’t be silly. Only frightened men say things like that. Jesus never did. Here. You need water.’
He fetched her water from the stream in his cupped hands, spilling most of it on the way. She drank eagerly, cupping his hands in hers. Water splashed on to her dress. ‘More,’ she whispered. ‘Please.’ So he had to make several journeys. He drank himself as well. The root had left his mouth acrid and powder dry. When he brought the last handful to her, he found her scrabbling desperately in the grass in what little light remained.
‘What?’ he said, letting the handful of water fall. ‘Your necklace?’
The dinner gong sounded, far, far below in the valley.
‘My cross,’ she said.
Gideon and the others were searching and calling as they arrived back at Bethel. Harry was carrying Ursula over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. She had walked at first, then grown faint. Luckily she was fairly light. It looked more dramatic than it was, but served at first to draw any anger away from Harry.
Gideon led the way to Ursula’s cabin, opening the door so Harry could carry her all the way to her bed. She stirred as he laid her down, and looked from him to Gideon in the theatrical glow of Gideon’s lamp. Gideon had seen the marks around her neck, Harry knew, but he merely asked if she wanted supper. She shook her head.
He turned gravely to Harry. ‘I will sit up with her,’ he said quietly, ‘but I must eat. And I’ll need to get word to a colleague. Please wait here until I can come back with supper on a tray.’ He looked drawn, as well as peevish, and Harry felt a pang of remorse at having caused such worry.
While Gideon was gone, Harry turned back to the bed, drew Ursula’s muddy boots off for her and pulled a blanket up over her. She touched a hand to his in thanks. ‘I’ll fetch the cross for you tomorrow,’ he told her. ‘It’ll be quite safe overnight, and easy to find with all those spilt beads to mark the spot.’
‘Thank you,’ she whispered and coughed again. The weals across her Adam’s apple now looked livid and angry, fringed by clotting blood. ‘Did it help, at least?’ she asked.
He nodded, returning the pressure on her hand, unable to put into words the thoughts the strange experience had suggested.
Gideon returned, and Harry was dismissed in such a frosty manner, he was almost surprised not to be sent to bed without any supper. Arriving so late at the meal, he was obliged to sit to one side, at the table where Ursula always put herself. People were courteous enough – Mabel made an aggressive fuss about making sure there were enough vegetables left for him – but there was pointed discretion where he had expected questions, and
he received a distinct sense of a collective twitching-away of skirts from an incident best left unacknowledged.
It transpired that Kenneth the Giggler, however irritating, had functioned as a social catalyst. With him gone, they had become like any group of patients, ill assorted, ill indeed. Conversation was desultory, even from Mabel, and all pretence that a kind of house party was in progress evaporated. People left the table without waiting for others to finish, and before long, Harry found himself eating cheese and fruit at one table while Samuel munched mournfully at another, neither of them talking.
Gideon kept watch over Ursula all night. Harry knew this because he hardly slept and twice pulled on his coat over his pyjamas to go outside to check. Both times the lamp was still burning and he could make out Gideon’s distinctive profile as he read in an armchair in the golden wash of its light.
Sleep claimed him in earnest shortly before dawn, and he was woken by the breakfast gong and obliged to dress in a hurry. He ran over to the house, unshaven and feeling disreputable and grubby. Gideon must have been looking out for him, for he stepped out of his study as Harry came into the hall.
‘Could I have a word?’ he said.
‘Of course.’ Harry stepped in past him and Gideon shut the door.
He looked more immaculate than ever, not like a man who had kept an all-night vigil. He was, Harry had come to believe, one of those formidable people – pillars of empire – who drew strength and purpose from self-sacrifice.
‘Please sit,’ he said.
Harry sat. ‘How’s Ursula?’ he asked.
‘Sedated. I’ve no option but to send him back to Essondale on the morning train. We don’t have the facilities to keep him safe.’
‘But you can’t! That’s so cruel.’ Harry jumped up. ‘You’re just punishing her for . . . And I promised to fetch her crucifix from where it fell.’
‘Sit down.’
Harry sat.
‘Fetching the crucifix won’t be necessary. He’d not be allowed to keep it with him in any case. All potential weapons are removed on admission.’
