Outer Dark

In the cabin, Rinthy changes from her shift into her dress and puts on her shoes. As she gathers her own belongings, she doesn’t realize that Holme took their father’s gun and their meager stash of money. She walks toward the store at the crossroads, stopping a little short of it and hiding herself in the shadow of the woods to watch until Culla passes by. Then, she gathers her bundle and approaches the store.

Rinthy’s wasted appearance inspires pity in the store manager, who offers her a drink of cool water. He’s less helpful when she says she’s looking for a tinker (the one without any cocoa) who passed through two weeks earlier, since he doesn’t take kindly to itinerant salesmen and tinkers avoid his shop. Nor, he continues, does he sell cocoa. But Rinthy already knew that. She tells the manager her brother Culla Holme is one of the store’s regular patrons. The manager remarks that Culla stopped by earlier that afternoon and sold an old shotgun to another man. Rinthy is surprised at this news. She asks the manager not to tell Culla about their conversation if he comes by again.

After a while, Rinthy takes to the road again. It’s past sunset when she finally encounters a small house. A father holding a lantern answers the door. Behind him, Rinthy can see several women—a mother, two adult or nearly adult daughters, and an old woman without a nose—sitting around a table. The man is distrustful of strangers, but his wife eventually persuades him to let Rinthy in. Rinthy tells the family she’s looking for the tinker.

The family, which also includes a boy, dines on much richer fare than Rinthy is used to, including store-bought bread with butter and rich roasted meat. The father is proud of his ability to provide for his family, and he boasts that they always can eat whatever they want. After the meal, the father and mother offer Rinthy a place to sleep and a ride into town early the next morning. She accepts.

The mother shows Rinthy the family’s bedroom and the bed she can use, then offers her soap and a lantern and points her toward the well so she can wash up before she sleeps. The boy intercepts her on her way back to the house. He attempts to act casually, but Rinthy is on guard. A storm crackles in the distance as the boy comments about the unusual darkness of the night. Then he dares her to blow out the lamp, threatening to consider her cowardly if she doesn’t. But Rinthy’s not willing to play such childish games—or to blow out the lamp in his presence. Rinthy steps past the boy and back into the bedroom, where she changes into her shift, climbs into bed, and extinguishes the lamp. A little while later, the father and mother come in and climb into their own bed. Rinthy lies away listening to them breathing.

At first light, after a breakfast every bit as generous as the dinner from the night before, Rinthy, the father, mother, grandmother, boy, and daughters—all dressed in their best clothes—climb into the wagon and set out for town. The mother shows Rinthy the quilt she hopes to sell there. Her last one went for three dollars, but it was a much more elaborate double wedding ring patchwork pattern. After a while, the company lapses into silence. The sound of the grandmother spitting the juice from her chewing tobacco periodically punctuates the noise of the wagon as it loudly creaks over the rough forest road.

The travelers stop at a natural spring to stretch their legs and get a drink. The boy tries to engage Rinthy in conversation again, telling her about how the grandmother lost her nose when a falling section of stovepipe sliced it off. But Rinthy isn’t really interested in talking to him. Back at the wagon, when he tries to flamboyantly swing himself up onto the driver’s box, he slips and cuts his knee. He cries and thrashes in pain in an overly dramatic way until his mother bandages the knee with a strip of cloth.

As Rinthy descends from the wagon in the town, the mother invites her to join the family for lunch and to ride back with them that evening. Rinthy thanks her but says she expects she’ll be moving on.

The clerk at the first general store Rinthy enters hasn’t seen the tinker The goods the clerk sells, he says, are too expensive for itinerant traders to afford. He directs Rinthy to a cheaper store. On her way there, Rinthy is intercepted yet again by the boy. He invites her to a show. When she declines, he presses the issue. If she doesn’t have a husband (she’s told them she’s a widow) or boyfriend, why can’t he show her a good time? He even tries to impress her with wad of cash in his wallet, but she turns away.

The clerk in the second store tries to help Rinthy but her unwillingness to say too much, lest she betray her own secrets, and her inability to identify the tinker (since she never saw him) make it hard. She does learn that a tinker named Deitch trades at the store, but he may or may not be the one she’s following. As with the clerk at the crossroads store, she asks this man to keep their conversation to himself. 

Rinthy returns to the wagon, where the father, mother, grandmother, and daughters are eating lunch. The grandmother rises from her chair and stares at Rinthy’s approach as if she were an evil apparition, but the mother welcomes her to join them when Rinthy says she’s changed her mind and would like to go back with them that afternoon. Having seen his show, the boy returns to the group, exaggerating his limp when he sees Rinthy by the wagon.

It is late afternoon when the father, mother, grandmother, boy, daughters, and Rinthy leave the town. The darkness of night descends upon them—all sitting stone-still in the creaking, slow-moving wagon—while they are still on the road.