Far North by Marcel Theroux Page A

have a life built into them,’ said Boathwaite. ‘You just never expect to be in at the end of anything. You never expect to be among the last.’
    Around him, the men nodded, or sucked tea through their candy, rather untroubled, like children whose father was doing their fretting for them.
    Boathwaite went on: ‘The great blessing is that as our life becomes harder and simpler, I feel such closeness with my god.’
    The round-eyed man sucked up his tea in time to cap the Reverend’s words with an ‘Amen’, which the others followed.
    Then the Reverend stood up and told me I was welcome to stay as long as I wanted.

     *
    I felt light round my hips without my guns, like you do when you take off heavy boots after a long day walking.
    They gave me a bed in one of the shacks that belonged to a woman called Violet. She served me a dish of cold potatoes with a bit of fatty meat and watched over me while I ate it. The shack had a funky smell which put me off eating at first, but after a while I got used to it.
    I thought it was just the two of us, but a cracked old voice suddenly called out from behind a sheet that cut off one corner of the shack. ‘I’m dying!’ it said.
    Violet lifted the sheet and went in behind it. ‘Shut up, mother,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a visitor. A young man.’
    Which was wrong on both counts.
    I went round the sheet out of politeness. A tiny toothless old woman was sitting up in her sour bed linen. She looked like a bag of sticks. ‘I’m dying!’ she cried out at me.

    Violet rolled her eyes at me and let the sheet drop back. ‘Don’t mind her,’ she said.
    The bed she gave me was hers – no more than a cot slung just above the floor, and it creaked when I sank into it. Violet got into the bed with her mother, who kept it up all night, moaning and crying out, ‘I’m dying!’
    Violet woke me in the middle of the night when she got up to put a log in the stove. The stove door squeaked and the light in the shack sat up a little as the log took. She didn’t shut it immediately, but came and stood over me. I pretended to be asleep. The fire from the stove lit my eyelids orange. I could hear her breath sighing through her nostrils as she stood there a while, gazing down at me.
    Then I felt something like a tickle and I realized she was touching my head. It was gentle, but I didn’t feel altogether comfortable with it.
    ‘What are you doing?’ I said.
    She didn’t startle, but kept on. ‘What happened to your face?’ she asked.
    ‘Someone burned it,’ I said.
    ‘You poor thing,’ she said. She stroked my head for a bit longer, then she shut the door of the stove and padded back to bed with the old woman.
    I never feel sorry for myself, never, but that small tenderness upset me in a way I hadn’t been for a long time, and I was awake for a while, with thoughts of Ping and the baby roiling in my brain, and every hour like a cuckoo clock, the old woman would cry out, ‘I’m dying!’ in her high cracked voice that seemed like it was speaking for all of us.
    10
    L OOK AT IT how you like, there was something strange about Horeb and I wasn’t minded to stay, but my horses got colicky in the night and there was no chance of my leaving the next morning, or in the days that followed.
    I didn’t much like bunking with Violet and her mother, either. Something about the heat and the feety smell in their hut, and the old woman’s crying, gave me bad dreams.
    One night, it was women and babies, tumbling out of one another in an endless squalling chain of red bodies, all linked up with their belly cords, like one of those families you might snip out of paper, but this one went on for ever, and the babies were women themselves, with babies of their own, so that if you stretched it all out, it would reach back to Creation, and the first woman, with her pinched monkey face, who ever walked upright.
    You never expect to be in at the end of anything . That was what Boathwaite had