Far North by Marcel Theroux

I ask you to surrender those guns you’re carrying while you’re our guest.’
    He could see me hesitate. ‘I’ll vouch personally for them.’ What it was that made me trust him, I can’t say for sure, but there was something about him that reminded me of one of my uncles. He must have been around fifty. I could see that he wasn’t all seriousness, and I liked the way that he bossed them all without ever raising his voice.
    I unbuckled the belt and handed it to him, and we went inside.

     *

    The settlement seemed bigger in than out. It had a number of dwellings in the yard, and smaller shacks built right against the wall. There must have been thirty to forty people there altogether, including children, at least one babe-in-arms, and several barely old enough to walk. It had been a long time since I’d seen a child – at least, a living one. Their eyes followed me as I followed my host across the yard to the largest of all the dwellings. They all looked well enough, if a little grubby and underfed.
    We shucked off our footwear and our outdoor clothes in the porch and went into a long plain room that reminded me of the old meeting house at home, except it had a cross at one end, and some Mary and Child pictures, none of which they would have stood for where I came from.
    Reverend Boathwaite, which is what I came to know him as, invited me to sit with my legs under a low round table that had a kettle of hot charcoals beneath it and a thick cotton cover, somewhat of an asiatic style. Six or seven of us as sat there, with our feet under the cloth, warm enough over that brazier. The Reverend locked my guns in a box that he put back under the altar, and then he joined us.
    The man with the frost-pinched nose set down a battered urn and a dish of hard candy that looked like it was ten years old. The Reverend poured out the tea and passed it around the table.
    ‘I won’t pretend that these are good times for my flock,’ he said.
    ‘No,’ I said, ‘but compared to elsewhere, you’re thriving.’ The enamel mug they gave me had been part-cleaned at best, and smelled of caribou stew.
    ‘Are things bad in Evangeline?’
    The men round the table stopped fighting over the candies and waited for me to say something.
    ‘What things?’ I said. ‘There’s no one there.’ I told him what he pretty nearly must have known himself. The years of calamity and migration as starving people came out of the south. The hungry and the desperate who came to prey on a people gone soft with compassion. I said how we’d belatedly designated a few of us constables and set us to keep the peace, but by then we were overrun. ‘In any case, the townsfolk themselves were among the worst of them. It turns out that goodness only lives when the times permit it.’
    ‘Well, we allow more hope than that, Mr Makepeace.’
    ‘Esperanza’s the same,’ I went on. ‘I passed through on my way here. Homerton too, I expect.’
    ‘If that’s where you’re headed, I can save you a journey. All that you see here is what’s left of the place.’
    I told him that I thought the name of this place was Horeb.
    ‘Or New Homerton, you could call it.’ His grin hadn’t an ounce of humour in it. He rubbed his tired, unslept eyes with one hand as his other reached for a candy.
    Looking round at all their dark, smoked-meat faces, I though how much they resembled Tungus. It was as though they’d come here with their European faces as blank as bars of white soap and had new asiatic ones carved out of them by the cold and the wind.
    ‘What happened to the city?’
    Boathwaite shook his head. I felt such a weariness in him. ‘Much like you said. Rather late in the day, we had to adopt a more muscular variant of our beliefs. We had to let go of a lot of things that were precious to us.’
    I tried to imagine my father saying it. But to him that would have been total defeat. In his mouth it would have meant: ‘We came here and lost everything.’
    ‘Things