“No” she told him, “Saint Benedict was the famous Benedictine. He founded the Benedictine order.” She was curled on her side, facing him, with both small arms wrapped around his larger one. He could feel her lips moving near his shoulder, the way her torso shook in a soft explosion of silent laughter. So this had nothing to do with him, these were not vows that she secretly hoped he would take.
“There is the vow of stability,” she was saying. “That means that you must stop, once you have entered a community, you must stop imagining that there is a monastery somewhere else that would be better than the one you are living in, stop thinking that you would be happier in another place. You must enter fully and completely each day of the life you have chosen, or the one that has been assigned to you.” She paused. Jerome said nothing, but he knew she could sense his attention in the dark. “Then there is the vow of the Convergence of Life.”
“Wait,” he said, “that last vow. Smithson said in an interview that one pebble moving six inches over the period of four million years was enough for him, enough to keep him interested.”
“He would have made a good Hindu.”
“Not sure … probably a meat eater. The other vow?”
Mira had rolled away from him now onto her left side, and he adjusted himself so that he could put one arm over her waist, their thighs touching, his kneecaps pressing slightly into the smooth hollows of her bent legs. “The next vow,” she corrected, “the Convergence of Life. I think it might mean that, while you remain stable, you must also accept that the world will change around you, and that you should remain open to and aware of those changes, though it also suggests that your life will converge with God’s, or something along those lines.”
Jerome remembered Sylvia’s suggestion that the relentless stability of her surroundings might have somehow caused her mysterious condition, that and what she said about being trapped, imprisoned by geography. “Aren’t those two vows contradictory?” he asked.
“A bit. But I’ve thought about that and they seem to work together somehow. The first vow has to do with what can be controlled—you can control yourself—the second is about accepting what you can’t control.”
Grant me the serenity, Jerome remembered, to accept things I can’t change, the courage to change things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. His father, returning from a meeting, had told Jerome about this. At the time this directive had seemed to the fourteen-year-old boy to be a miraculous solution to the chaos of a family made miserable by his father’s binges. He had allowed himself to become certain, as he had been so many times in the past, that his father would stop drinking forever, that sanity and predictability would visit their household even though, by then, he had forgotten—if he ever knew—what sanity and predictability looked like, what form they took, how they would feel. But, in the end, the prayer was of little use anyway. Within weeks his father had entered the prolonged bout of inebriation that would be his last. Jerome could recall the horror; the older man weeping, or shouting in anger, his own terror when he was wakened in the night by the sounds of retching in the bathroom, the terrible accusations, the furious silences. “What was the third vow?” he asked.
“Oh, that,” she said, and he could again feel the tremor of her laughter, “is the vow of chastity.”
“Too late for that now.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “far too late.”
His father had used those words. “It’s too late,” he had shouted when Jerome’s mother had begged him to stop. “It’s far too late to stop.” Jerome, wakened by the argument, had stood trembling with rage in a pair of old flannelette pyjamas that, in the past year, had tightened around his chest and thighs in the same way that the apartment, his parents’ drama, and all the cheap furniture of their lives had tightened around him. His father had turned to him then and had said in a voice suddenly calm and cold, “It’s too late for you too, pal. Don’t think that you are immune. Don’t think for a second that you are exempt, you judgmental little shit.”
There had been nothing left to break in the room, nothing that didn’t already bear the mark of his father’s anger, nothing of his own, so Jerome had wrenched open the glass door and had gone out onto the freezing balcony in his bare feet. He had dug with his hands though layers of snow, then had pulled the frozen, rusted bicycle from the corner where it lay and, only peripherally aware of his father’s attempts to restrain him, had tried to smash up this final piece of evidence of his childhood with his fists.
As he thought about this, an image of his mother’s ashen face and wide eyes came into his mind, but he willed himself away from the memory, turned instead back to the girl and placed his forehead against the warm skin on her back. He could tell by the small, involuntary twitches that passed through her body that Mira was asleep, and soon he began to drift into a dream where it was his father, not Andrew Woodman, that he found trapped in the ice near the docks of Timber Island, trapped but still alive. On his ravaged features was an expression of such tenderness that Jerome reached forward to touch the frost-covered face. But when his fingers made contact with his father’s cheek, the whole head fragmented, collapsing into a confusion of thin transparent pieces on a flat surface, and suddenly he was looking at Smithson’s Map of Broken Glass. Each shard reflected something he remembered about his father: a signet ring, a belt buckle, a dark green package of cigarettes, an eye, a cufflink, the back of his hand, and Jerome knew his father was broken, smashed. The toe of a shoe, a plaid sleeve, the seam of a pair of pants, an Adam’s apple. In the dream this was satisfying rather than distressing. In the dream it seemed that this alteration in his father was what he had wanted all along. And yet, when he awoke in the dark, he was weeping.
That evening, after adding a few more sentences to the sheet of paper on the desk, Sylvia worked on the map of the route to the lighthouse, an occupation that she hoped would both soothe her and permit her partly to overlook the fact that Andrew’s journals—his thoughts, his memories, his imaginings—were no longer close at hand. Jerome might even now be reading the words, the way she had read them night after night while Malcolm slept and rain or snow fell through the ochre path cast into the yard by the kitchen light. When she returned to bed those early mornings just before dawn, she would close her eyes and envision a world made up of islands, a world dependent on flotation. Andrew had written that on each island there had been a spot called Signal Point and that when significant messages needed to be sent quickly down the lake or up the river a fire would be lit on the shore of one island after another, a sort of telegraph of flame. Marriages and deaths were often announced this way, particularly during late fall and early spring, times when the ice was too dangerous for navigation yet not strong enough to support a horse.
There had been no such fires lit for her. The answer to the final question, the source of her grief, had been presented to her in an impersonal way on a flimsy sheet of newsprint destined for the recycling box.
“It presents in a very odd way,” Malcolm had often said, referring to some disease or another, and she remembered thinking that diseases were almost always in the present, in the now, unless they were cured, or unless they were in remission waiting to recur. Her own incurable love had been like that; it had shocked her with its insistence on the present, and with its persistence, how it had presented itself, and continued—along with the grief—to present itself to her each morning when she woke. It had always been and continued to be one of her few connections to the present tense.
When she was busy with a map, however, she fully entered the landscape she was translating to touch, was able to see in her mind the rough edges of the road, the grass growing in the centre, potholes here and there, sumac bending just beyond the verge. She cut a piece of pine veneer, now, into three octagonal shapes, each slightly smaller than the last, and pasted them one atop the other in a spot near the lake where the lighthouse would be situated, then knowing that Julia would want to walk beside the water, she
decided that she must find some way to let her friend know that the beach was filled with small, smooth stones.
Landscapes are unreliable, Sylvia thought, as she rummaged through her fabric bag, looking for something to define stoniness. Landscapes are subject to change. But shorelines are even less stable, shorelines are constantly changing.
When designing a map, there was always the problem of the periphery. A person blind from birth is one dependent on intimacy, Sylvia had thought, the reach of one arm defining for them the extent of the known world. When she spoke about this to Julia, however, her friend had disagreed, had reminded Sylvia that she could identify and name distant sounds and could smell things—animals, various crops, a wind that has passed over the Great Lake, the approach of a storm—from very far away. Sitting in a kitchen she knew when the apples were ripe in an orchard that would not have been visible from that kitchen. So what does a location mean to you, Sylvia had asked, how much of a place do you want to know?
“More than you,” Julia had replied, “I want to know it all. I want much, much more than you can possibly fit on a map. Just give me the centre and I will move out from there, in the spirit if not in the flesh. Soon I’ll know all of the County by heart.”
Thinking of this, Sylvia put on her coat and began to walk back and forth across the room. Each aspect of the County—her own territory—had been named, filled, emptied, ploughed and planted long ago; all harvests belonged to the dead who insisted on their entitlement. “I cut the trees, built the mills, sawed the boards, made the roads, fenced the fields, raised the barns,” they had told her in the dark of her childhood bedroom. I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow. “I drew up the deeds, made the laws, drafted the plans, invented the history, prescribed the curriculum,” the dead whispered. I, said the rook, with my little book. They beat out a telegraph in her blood, one that read, “I fought the wars, buried the dead, carved the tombstones.” I, said the fish, with my little dish, And I caught the blood.
Sylvia opened the curtains and looked at the concrete wall stained a mustard yellow by the muted, artificial light that gathered democratically in all the corners of the city at night. I, said the lark, if it’s not in the dark. At this instant she found in herself the desire to walk in the city at night, the desire to be of the moment, time-bound. She looked at her watch. Nine-thirty. She decided she could be absent from the hotel for exactly one hour.
She buttoned up her coat, switched off the lights, left the room.
Once she was on the street, Sylvia stood for a while in front of a shop window behind which a variety of television sets was displayed, each relaying the same image of a well-dressed man energetically speaking and moving his hands. She was interested in his gestures, in the way his forehead wrinkled then smoothed again and how his shoulders moved up and down. He was like Malcolm during the period when he was teaching her the art of expression and she was forced, now, to suppress an impulse to copy his actions.
The next window was filled with medical supplies: basins, pumps, walkers, wheelchairs—clean, shining—patiently anticipating a whole range of infirmities. Mannequins absorbed her in subsequent windows, their stillness and that of their clothing. No wind to move fabric, no weather at all to respond to. She liked that. The damp cement sidewalk glittered faintly beneath her boots, which were now at home on that surface. Behind her, brightly lit traffic rolled on patched pavement. No one paid any attention to her, and she knew then that the city had opened its indifferent arms to her, that she could move or stand entirely still, respond, or refrain from responding, and a strange calmness came over her. The feeling was not foreign, not new to her, but here in the city she did not recognize it for the contentment that it was. It was not happiness; she had experienced that particular exhausting state of alert only three or four times, always in the company of Andrew. Now in the midst of the kind of constantly altering stimuli she had believed she could never incorporate into her life she knew only something she had always known: that this kind of tranquility could never be brought to her in the hands of others.
When she returned to the hotel and walked into the lobby, the desk clerk caught her eye, then glanced toward the black leather chairs that, after the first day, Sylvia had always ignored. She recognized the trench coat first, the hat resting on a knee the coat covered, then, as the figure rose to his feet, the face, and the weary, tolerant expression on the face. Her husband spoke her name, then, “Syl,” he said quietly while moving toward her, taking her arm, “Syl, I’ve come to take you home.”
The Bog Commissioners
————
Timber Island is situated at the spot where the Great Lake Ontario begins to narrow so that it can enter the St. Lawrence River. Scattered islands with odd names appear at this point, islands that are premonitions of the famous Thousand Islands downstream where there is no longer any question about the water one looks at being that of the river. But one hundred and fifty years ago there was much discussion among the residents of my great-great-grandfather’s Timber Island empire as to whether the surrounding water belonged to the lake or to the river. The ferocious swells of late-autumn squalls ought to have put the argument to rest, but despite the evidence the populace had such definite opinions on the subject that they formed themselves into two camps, called “lakers” and “streamers.” Sports teams and spelling bees were said to have been assembled in this manner: “lakers” to the left, “streamers” to the right. The “streamers” were most often French: children of the coureurs du bois, or the raft makers, or the rivermen themselves. My father believed that they probably felt more at home with the idea of the river that had so influenced their lives touching this island territory. And from the point of view of geology a good case could be made. The west end of the island is made up of Lake Ontario limestone, the east end of the kind of granite rock that lines the river. It could be argued that the island was a child of both the lake and of the river. And certainly the industry that flourished there made extensive use of both and could not have survived without either.
Shortly before he emigrated to Canada to set up business on Timber Island, my ambitious great-great-grandfather, Joseph Woodman, an engineer by training, was hired by the Crown (along with five or six other men) as part of a commission whose job it would be to investigate and report on the state of the bogs in Ireland. The commissioners were dispatched to the various Irish counties and, as a result, Joseph Woodman was stationed on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry for close to half a year.
According to my father, the fact that the only commerce in this bog-ridden district involved the carrying of butter on a footpath over Knockanaguish Mountain dozens of miles to Cork City had greatly irritated his forebear. He had been appalled to learn that, among other things, there was not a single road in the district capable of supporting a simple donkey cart, and bridges only of the rudest sort, so that the people of the region were often seen carrying baskets of turf, furniture, sacks of potatoes and cabbages, and sometimes even coffins on their backs. Something in him must have rebelled at the very size and scope of a landscape so undeveloped that it supported only scattered potato patches and hard-won fields occupied by few very poor cows. And, of course, the expanse of the bogs in the region, bogs from which men removed turf for their hearths with long, narrow handmade spades that Joseph Woodman would have considered to be almost comical. He wanted the people of Kerry to put down their spades, pick up some good English shovels, and begin the task of draining the bogs so that these murky territories could be replaced with fields of golden grain. But, on the other hand, he wondered if the Irish were capable of completing such a task. Paying little attention to the damp climate and rough geography with which Kerry farmers had always had to contend, he likely ascribed the persistence of the bogs to what he would have seen as the laziness of the men of the district. Yes, my great-great-grandfather was blind to almost everything about the people and the landscape of County Kerry, and yet, for the rest of his days, that la
ndscape had never lost its hold on his imagination. When he returned to England with his report, he did so with the hope that he would be going back to the Iveragh in the company of a vast team of English labourers who would dig the required ditches with proper shovels. He wanted, you understand, to squeeze all moisture out of County Kerry, as if it were a dishrag, but parliamentarians more aware of climate and expense than he apparently was utterly rejected his suggestions. For his efforts, he was dismissed from the commission but granted a small island at the eastern end of Canada’s Lake Ontario. Filled with humiliation, he gathered together a few possessions and his wife and, one month later, set sail for that location.
A few years later, when he gave his Canadian-born son the Irish name of Bran (which he extended to Branwell to make it seem more English), there were those who were surprised by the notion that Joseph Woodman would commemorate the dissolute brother of the by then famous Brontë sisters as he had never, to anyone’s knowledge, read a work of fiction. But, in fact, as family lore would have it, he knew nothing at all about the Brontës, had named his son instead after a magical dog in an intriguing story he’d heard from an old man with a ridiculous spade while they had been standing ankle-deep in a bog near a mountain pass named Ballagh Oisin in the old Irish Gaelic, a name that had been just recently and, to Woodman’s mind, sensibly changed by a British surveyor to the more easily pronounceable Ballagasheen.
In time this son, my great-grandfather, Branwell Woodman, would be sent by his now widowed father to Paris to study painting. How his father justified this in a society that must have believed his artistic interests were pure foolishness was never properly explained, but it likely had something to do with getting the young man out of the way. There was whispered mention of a pregnant parlour maid who had been banished from the island once her condition was known. Branwell, however, may not have been eager to give the young woman up, and his father may have wanted an ocean between the pair. Perhaps studying art had been considered simply the lesser of two evils. Besides, the boy had talent—not as much as his sister, Annabelle, but enough that sending him to Paris for a year or two would not seem unusual in the eyes of the few families of quality with whom Joseph Woodman was acquainted and from whom the secret of his son’s indiscretion had to be kept.
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