The Outlander

  PRAISE FOR THE OUTLANDER

  “Gil Adamson’s The Outlander is, simply enough, a superb novel, and one senses in the fine writing the potential, or perhaps the eventuality, of a major writer. The frayed material of the North American west is rendered in astonishingly fresh light. The Outlander is also suspenseful to a degree that you are often in a state of physical unrest, a condition only occasioned by first-rate fiction.”

  —Jim Harrison

  “Adamson’s writing is superb. . . .”

  — Maclean’s

  “. . . uniquely tasty . . . If The Outlander were only this wry reconstruction of the turn-of-the-century woman, it would be worth the price of admission. It is much more. . . . A dark wonder.”

  — Globe and Mail

  “. . . the prose style of The Outlander is rich with natural details and metaphors. . . .”

  — Toronto Star

  “Gil Adamson has chiselled her characters, polished every word, and turned The Outlander into something magical. . . . Adamson’s characters are fully formed, described with nuances and details that make us feel that we really know them. And her writing is beautiful — poetic, descriptive, lyrical. . . . This is a book that lingers in the mind long after the final page has been read.”

  — The Guelph Mercury

  “In the tradition of Guy Vanderhaeghe, this is a dark novel with a long finish. It should age well.”

  — The Sun Times (Owen Sound)

  “Adamson has crafted a complex portrait of a natural landscape and the ways in which a motley crew of human misfits interacts with it. . . . Original and strikingly precise.”

  — Fast Forward Weekly (Calgary)

  “Throughout the novel, Adamson’s keen eye for detail and mastery of language are much in evidence . . . subtle and vividly imagined.”

  — Winnipeg Free Press

  Copyright © 2007 Gil Adamson

  Introduction Copyright © 2012 Esta Spalding

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  This edition published in 2012 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  www.houseofanansi.com

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Adamson, Gil

  The outlander / Gil Adamson; introduction by Esta Spalding.

  eISBN 978-1-77089-266-8

  I. Title.

  PS8551.D3256O98 2012 C813’.54 C2012-903565-3

  Cover design: Brian Morgan

  Cover Illustration: Genevieve Simms

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  INTRODUCTION

  by Esta Spalding

  HOW BEST TO equip you for a journey into the thrilling and whimsical landscape of The Outlander? I want to be a worthy guide, so I will step lightly and quickly, like a woman dashing across a river, and attempt to leave little of my own scent behind.

  She is unsure which way to go.

  Upriver or down?

  Pursued by dogs she wades backward

  through the cane brake

  to erase her scent.

  At a ferry, she crosses to a new world,

  hooded and rotting in her funeral skirt

  of curtain and bedspread.

  Gil Adamson penned these lines in a long poem titled, “Mary,” ten years before the publication of The Outlander. It turns out that the poem’s eponymous figure is our first glimpse of the novel’s protagonist, Mary Boulton, a woman “widowed by her own hand.” In an interview, Adamson confessed that when she finished the poem, she wasn’t entirely satisfied with it. “In retrospect I suppose it was because I wasn’t finished with the idea, I wasn’t finished with the story.” And so she followed Mary further into the woods.

  The Outlander’s gorgeous prose owes much to its origins as a poem and to its decade-long gestation. The language is as layered and rich as the mountain in the mining town where much of the novel takes place. Every line is pressurized; the prose harnesses a near-explosive energy. In the course of those ten years, Mary’s character also solidified. Whereas the poem ends with an image of her as “pitiless and spectral,” the novel depicts her as a flesh-and-blood girl with a hapless history. Raised in a house of mourning by a preacher father who loses faith after his wife dies, Mary has a melancholy childhood. She grows up to find herself even more isolated — a woman trapped in a loveless marriage on a homestead miles from anyone. Her circumstances beg for our sympathy. Yet the novel retains the poem’s original impulse: Mary murders her husband because he has had a hand in dealing her a great loss.

  The novel doesn’t confide this at first. Instead it begins in medias res, after the murder: Mary is being hunted, pursued across the mountains by her dead husband’s brothers, red-headed twins hell-bent on revenge. Her flight through the Banff Rockies is rendered in precise and stunning detail, but her precipitous journey is as much psychological as it is physical; the red-headed “abominations” drive Mary further into herself. Perhaps they represent the punishment and retribution of her father’s scripture, though one of the many paradoxes of Mary’s character is that despite her religious upbringing, she is haunted less by guilt than by grief. The demons she flees are those wrought by memory.

  But to speak of the book as a study of one character’s reckoning with her own grief is to reduce it in a way I’ve promised not to do. It gives no intimation of the great fun to be had here — the roiling, rousing interludes with Adamson’s wild pantheon of characters: the wealthy crone, Mrs. Cawthra-Elliot, and her sadistic maid, Zenta; Henry, the Crow Indian, and Helen, his Baltimore-born wife; the merry Reverend Bonnycastle who lives in a cock-eyed house; and McEchern, a dwarf who sells bootleg whiskey and runs a bathhouse. These delicious episodes trace Mary’s slow movement from the land of the shades back into the company of the living.

  Most evocative of all is Mary’s stirring romance with William Moreland, the Ridgerunner. Moreland is a wanted man, an outlander who shuns society. His heart is as frozen as the hills he lives in, and his solitude has been so protracted that he’s surprised to hear he’s missed the turn of the century. Mary has everything to learn from Moreland about self-sufficiency and survival. And he has something to learn from her about the pleasures of human connection and desire.

  What is the relationship between freedom and love? Can they co-exist or are they destined to snuff each other out? These are the questions that preoccupy Moreland. For her part, Mary is concerned with whether anguish and bereavement can ever adequately be overcome. But there’s little time for musing; the twins keep after her. Their pursuit is relentless.

  Will Mary’s struggle turn her into the nightmare apparition of Adamson’s poem — a “quick, descending fury” — or something else? I’ll not give away the answer, or anything more, wishing to preserve the great pleasure and surprise that await you in these pages.

  For Adrian, the good father

  Now goes the sun under the wood,

  I pity, Mary, thy fair face.

  Now goes the sun under the tree,

&
nbsp; I pity, Mary, thy son and thee.

  — ANON, THIRTEENTH CENTURY

  We could be meeting Jacob and the angel

  We could be meeting our sleeplessness

  — CHARLES SIMIC

  PART ONE

  NOW GOES THE SUN

  ONE

  IT WAS NIGHT, and dogs came through the trees, unleashed and howling. They burst from the cover of the woods and their shadows swam across a moonlit field. For a moment, it was as if her scent had torn like a cobweb and blown on the wind, shreds of it here and there, useless. The dogs faltered and broke apart, yearning. Walking now, stiff-legged, they ploughed the grass with their heavy snouts.

  Finally, the men appeared. They were wordless, exhausted from running with the dogs, huffing in the dark. First came the boy who owned the dogs, and then two men, side by side, massive redheads so close in appearance they might be twins. Dabs of firefly light drifted everywhere; the night was heavy with the smell of manure and flowering apple and pear. At last, the westernmost hound discovered a new direction, and dogs and men lurched on.

  The girl scrambled through ditchwater and bulrushes, desperate to erase her scent. For a perilous moment she dared to stop running, to stand motionless, listening, holding her dark skirts out of the water. In the moonlight, her beautiful face was hollow as a mask, eyes like holes above the smooth cheeks. The booming in her ears faded slowly, and she listened to the night air. No wind through the trees. The frogs had stopped shrilling. No sound except the dripping of her skirts and, far away, the dogs.

  Nineteen years old and already a widow. Mary Boulton. Widowed by her own hand.

  The girl stood in her ditch under a hard, small moon. Pale foam rose from where her shoes sank into mud. No more voices inside her head, no noise but these dogs. She saw her own course along the ground as a trail of bright light, now doused in the ditchwater. She clambered up the bank and onto a road, her stiff funeral skirt made of bedspread and curtain, her hair wild and falling in dark ropes about her face. The widow gathered up her shawl and fled witchlike down the empty road.

  AT DAYBREAK SHE was waiting for a ferry, hooded and shivering in her sodden black clothes. She did not know where she was but had simply run till the road came to an end, and there was the landing. A grand, warning sunrise lay overhead, lighting the tips of the trees, while the ground was in shadow and cold. The hem of her skirt was weighed down by mud. She whispered in camaraderie with herself, the shawl about her ears, while another woman stood uneasy by the empty ticket booth and held her children silent. They all watched her with large eyes. Even the smallest seemed to know not to wake the sleepwalker. Out above the river’s surface, fat swallows stabbed at unseen bugs and peeped to one another in emotionless repetition. The ferry sat unmoving on the other side, a great flat skiff with a pilot’s cabin in the rear.

  The widow considered the ticket booth, realizing suddenly that she had no money. Behind her was the long, vacant road she had come down. It was stick-straight and lined with trees, and at the limit of sight it bent to the left where no movement, no human shape was yet visible. Her mind had cleared a little because she felt less afraid, and she now saw the world around her in a sharper, simpler way. Even the wind, rising and subsiding and fluttering her collar, followed a less ornamented rhythm than before. She could see it blowing, an infinite number of slack lines waving before her.

  A boy on the other side of the river came to the edge of the bank and waved. One of the children waved back. He put his hands to his mouth and hollered. A man’s voice hollered back. The widow turned to see a tall figure in coveralls coming down the road, his hand aloft. He must have emerged from an unseen path through the trees. He unlocked the door to the booth, stepped inside, slid back a tiny window, and leaned on his elbows. The woman and her children crowded in at the window and together they debated in hushed voices. A child’s hand reached up to finger the dull coins and was slapped away. Once they had paid, the woman moved her children away to the dock. The river swept by in lavish, syrupy whorls, over which the ferry now laboured. The sky was withering with morning, whiter by the second, and over the shallows and the slim line of sand, insects could be seen gliding, carried giddy on the wind.

  The widow roused herself, tucked a strand of hair under her shawl, and went up to the tiny booth with its window. Inside, the ticketman’s racoon face floated in the dim, close air.

  “I haven’t . . .” she began.

  He said nothing, simply waited. His hand lay on the counter before him, knuckles heavy and cracked.

  The widow gazed in disgust at his fingernails, pale and sunk into the flesh, with a rim of dirt about each one. A cluster of slumbering things, and above them, darkness and the man’s watching eyes.

  “I haven’t any money,” she managed.

  “Can’t get over if ye can’t pay.”

  Her mouth fell open. Part desperation, part surprise at hearing an actual human voice. “Please, I need to get to the other side. I’m . . . late getting home.”

  “Out late, eh?”

  The feral face came a little farther out of the gloom, fixing her with eyes that were clouded and small. He seemed to be considering an alternative meaning to her statement. She held her collar tight and waited as he gathered the unknown thoughts together.

  “Been visiting?” His face took on the shadow of a smile. It was not an unkind face, exactly. The widow nodded, her heart beating hugely.

  “Your mother will miss ye, won’t she, if ye don’t get home?”

  The widow had never known a mother, and yet she nodded vigorously.

  The ticketman’s smile became a leer. “Can’t have that.”

  He rose and stepped from the wooden booth, taking the widow’s elbow in his massive hand. They walked together down to the river. The ferry, now docked, churned and roared and dug up the river mud. A scarf of cloudy water made its way downriver, where the current stirred the clear and the murky together. Black smoke issued from the ferry’s funnel and was snatched away by wind. The man helped her to the railing, then went back to the shore.

  The widow looked down into the boil of water, wood, and parts of fish churning in the soup, the ferry rocking deeply as if trying to tip her in. Her stomach lurched and she moved over by the engine-room door. Inside, the ferryman, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, struggled with various levers. She closed her eyes and clutched her hands together as the boat backed away from the shore, leaving solid ground, and swung slowly out into the current. The horn bawled suddenly, then again, acknowledging the ticketman left on the shore, and he raised his hand, standing among the flowering trees.

  AN HOUR LATER, two men stood waiting at the river’s edge — red-headed brothers with rifles across their backs. Large men, identical in every way, standing close by each other, not speaking. Each with huge chest and arms, sleeves rolled up, like two lumberjacks in a rustic play. But these were not lumberjacks. The pallor of their faces, the close trim of their beards, belied any suggestion of work. And they wore fine black boots.

  The ticketman, like most superstitious country people, mistrusted twins, disliked the puzzle of them, the potential for trickery, the sheer unnaturalness. He’d been to sideshows to see the horrors in which twins figured as highlights: bottled “punks” and rubber replicas, conjoined monsters melted together by the breath of hell. He’d stood with his neighbours, scandalized, all of them sharing the barker’s opinion that human birth is a treacherous thing, and woman is its greatest dupe. Now, studying the brothers from the gloom of his little booth, he tsk-ed in sour disapproval. Twins or not, he overcharged them anyway.

  TWO

  THE WIDOW HEADED down an empty cart track with the river to her right. She was two hours from the ferry and already the day promised to be scorching. So keen was the sun’s heat that she was forced to pause in the shadows of trees to cool herself. Once, she sat on a fallen trunk and cracked the mud from her hems and shook them hard, sitting back to watch the dust eddy about her like fairies
. Even in shade the ground griddled back the day’s heat; it came through the soles of her shoes. She brushed dust from her bodice, smoothed the dark fabric over her hollow stomach. She tried not to look at her hands. Who knew what was painted there?

  Roosters crowed in the distance. She regarded the river passing by in its curious patterns and tried to deduce the shape of the riverbed by its gurgling signs. Her eye naturally followed any floating thing, then the next, moving as if reading line by line, watching a leaf or any small body scrolling along the surface.

  They would come after her, follow her, even across the river. Of course they would. She stood up and hurried on. Past massive oaks, and in the ditches and hollows, sumac tufts with their blood-red cobs, the morning grand and white and arid over the scrawny maples. At a wide bend in the river she passed a stone house where a caramel-coloured dog exploded against the rickety slats of a fence. The widow stood in a comic posture, hand at her breast, while the animal abused her in its own tongue, spittle flying. Finally a human voice shouted from inside the echoing house. “Shut up, you bastard. I said shut up!”

  The widow staggered into the hot morning, invective fading in her ears. There had always been something about her that disturbed animals. She knew how to ride well enough, but the horses always reared and shied at first, jerked their heads and did not want her to mount. Domestic animals merely tolerated her. Cats watched anything in a room but her. Birds seemed not to know she existed. Bread tossed from her hand was invisible to them. She remembered a girl from her youth standing on the sidewalk with cubes of bread on her hat while sparrows alighted and squabbled, jostling with their papery bodies. The smile on the girl’s face had made her seem like an expensive doll, dreamy and staring, her hair in doll’s ringlets.