“Whoever you are, you’re not this woman.”
“I will explain, Mr. Truitt. I’m not here to make a fool of you.”
“No. You won’t. Whatever else, you’re a liar.”
He turned, and she followed him across the deserted platform to a carriage tied up at the side. The nervous horses stamped and blew great jets of steam from their nostrils while Ralph Truitt put her suitcase in the back and strapped it on with thick leather straps. Without a word, he handed her into her seat.
He vanished in the hurling snow, reappeared and climbed into his seat. He looked at her, full in the face for the first time. “Maybe you thought I was a fool. You were wrong.”
He snapped the reins, and the horses trotted smartly into the white void. They rode in silence. The lights from the windows of the houses glowed softly, as though at a great distance. She couldn’t tell how near or far anything was from the carriage, in the snow. She couldn’t tell how many stores or houses there were. She never saw the turnings until they made them. He knew. The horses knew. She was a stranger here.
The snow silenced the wagon wheels. There was no conversation. She was floating in a soundless void in the middle of nowhere.
“Are there many people?”
“Where?”
“In town.”
“Two thousand. About. More or less every year. Depending.”
“On what?”
“On whether more die than are born.”
They said nothing else. They floated through the snow, the glow of houses in the distance, each one a family, each a series of entwined lives, while they sat entirely separate and alone.
Ralph had nothing to say. He had expected things, and now she was here, whoever she was, and suddenly everything was different. In every house they passed, there were lives that were wholly known to him. In these houses, the people knew one another; they knew him as well. He had held their babies, been to their weddings, been shocked by their sudden flights into madness and rage. He was and he wasn’t a part of their lives. He was there and he had done what was required of him, what was expected.
They went crazy in the cold; they went deep into the heart of their religion and emerged as lunatics. But even this was familiar. Sane, they wanted to believe that they were the sort of people whose babies had been held and cuddled by Ralph Truitt, and he found it easy enough to foster the illusion that these things mattered to him. Still, their glowing lives, their families, were intertwined in ways that he couldn’t even imagine.
But this woman was not expected. He was angry. He was confused. He had read her letter until it fell apart in his hands. He had looked at her picture a thousand times. Now it was clear she wasn’t the woman in the photograph, and he had no idea who she might be. His relation to every person in the town rested on the fact that he had complete control over everything that happened to him. Now this wild thing. The train late. The blinding snow. This woman.
It was a mistake. He felt it in the pit of his stomach, everything wrong, the letter, the picture, his foolish hope. It was a mistake to have wanted, to have felt desire, but he had, he had wanted something for himself. Now the object of his desire was here, and it was all, none of it, what he had wanted.
He had wanted a simple, honest woman. A quiet life. A life in which everything could be saved and nobody went insane.
He couldn’t turn her away, couldn’t leave her in a blizzard. He couldn’t be seen leaving her. There would be talk. He would appear to be unkind. So he would take her in from the storm, give her shelter for a night or two, no more. Her beauty troubled him the most, so unexpected, the sweetness of her voice, the fragile bones of her hand as he helped her into the carriage. Who, then, was the woman in the picture? It troubled him, enough so that he was sharp with the horses and would not look her in the face.
“I have an automobile,” he said, for no reason. “It’s the only one in town.”
She didn’t know what to say.
“It’s not good in the snow.”
I am in the wilderness, she thought. Alone with barbarians.
They were leaving town, and the horses were skittish in the wind. He was never rough with them, and now he could feel their nerves through the leather. They just wanted to get where they were going.
Catherine saw, through the snow, the endless flat fields on one side and, on the other, a broad river, clogged with ice. So bleak and forlorn.
She thought of the lights of the city, the endless activity, the beer halls lit up in the snowy nights, the music, the laughter, the girls pinning on their hats and rushing out to find adventure. The girls would laugh in front of warm fires with men who had written them love letters. They would eat roast beef and drink champagne and rush everywhere, their dresses hiked to their knees as they ran through the snow, the laughing girls, drawn by the warmth of the gaming tables and the fires and the music and the company.
Here, out past the lights of the town, there was no sound. There was nothing except them, their carriage, the lanterns shiny on the road.
The river looked hard as iron.
She pictured the music hall girls. The men with decks of cards in their pockets and revolvers tucked in their boots. The sweetness of the languid air in the opium dens, warm when the night was too cold to move, the Chinaman waking them with tea when the storm had passed or the dawn had come or all the money was gone. The trolleys would already be running, taking people, normal people, to work. And the girls would laugh, knowing what a ruin they looked.
A million miles away. Another life, another night, a million miles down the slick black river to the bright and clanging city. Her friends were already decked for the night, seeking the heat, the music washing over them, their beautiful dresses, and laughing at her folly. She was already a thing of the past, to them. They had no memory.
The deer came out of nowhere, racing, bucking with terror, and was gone in an instant. They saw its frightened eyes for only a second, as its antlers brushed past the horses. Suddenly the world was in white chaos.
The horses leapt back in terror, charging upward in their traces, jerking the carriage sideways and almost over, righting it again as they bolted. Catherine heard a single shrill whinny, like a scream, and they were racing off, bits in their teeth, cracking ice flying from their manes, Ralph standing now, standing in his seat and pulling at the reins with all his strength. She felt the terrible chill, the awful dread of the thing she hadn’t expected.
The horses veered, pulling them off the road, the wheels cracking into new snow, a sound like a blade through bone. The carriage hurtled through a thin fence and everything was noise and chaos and Ralph had one leg up on the front of the carriage, screaming the horses’ names, pulling back, swearing, and the cold seemed sharper, and Catherine, terrified, holding on, rigid with fear, felt the cracking thud as the carriage hit a rut, the leftover gash of some autumn rivulet, and Ralph was thrown into the air, the reins flying. She saw him just long enough to see the iron rim of the wheel strike his head as he fell beneath the carriage, and then they were off, jolting and careening wildly, the horses wild, too, off the road now, heading toward the black river.
Catherine groped blindly. The reins whipped in the wind, but she found them, took them in her hands. The carriage rocked in the pitted field, but she held on. Her foolish cloak was streaming in the wind, choking her, and she ripped it from her neck and it flew out behind, a momentary ghost in the swirling snow.
She knew enough to let the horses run. She knew enough to hope in their natural instincts. Her strength was no match for the terror she felt pulsing from the horses’ black rumps. She held on. She did the only thing she could.