A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  Her brother, not anxious to return to account books and columns of figures, sometimes took to doing “the ranges”: an exercise in establishing a sort of mental aerial perspective. As he had explained earlier in his journal, and as he undoubtedly now explained to Annabelle, this involved the sorting of landscape by distance, beginning with the shore of the next island, followed by the intervening water, then the shore of the mainland, the barracks of the military school, the taller buildings and steeples of Kingston, and then the far-off deep purple of the now completely deforested hills to the north. Why ranges? Annabelle might well have asked. Like rows of mountains, her brother would have replied, one range behind another. Better would have been the sails of ships placed side by side in a harbour and looked at from the end of a peninsula, she had thought, but did not say so aloud. Instead she asked about Marie, about whether her brother ever thought about what might have become of her.

  Branwell, to Annabelle’s annoyance, probably would have continued to squint into the distance, and even more maddening from Annabelle’s point of view the young man probably would have been making all those self-conscious gestures with thumbs and fingers at right angles, gestures that suggest that artists are intending to frame one view or another. Stop doing that, Annabelle very likely would have said, judging from her character, stop doing that and answer my question. What he answered we will never know. In fact we will never know whether the question was posed, though my father seemed to think that it would have been, that it had been, because shortly after this Branwell began to write in his journal again. One of the entries for that spring included not only the direction and speed of the winds and breezes but also the fact that Annabelle had been lighting a great number of unnecessary fires, and that she had asked him a question that had caused his mind to become troubled in the extreme.

  Annabelle, meanwhile, had been visited by an unshakeable notion. The river was free of ice by now and each day ships docked at the island’s quays and unloaded an enormous quantity of timber onto the island—if it were to be used for shipbuilding—or into the bay opposite to that of the nautical graveyard if it were to be poled downstream to Quebec. Teams of Frenchmen were to be seen busily assembling timber rafts, leaping from log to log like frantic squirrels, and shouting a variety of curses and commands that seemed neither to be directed at any particular individual nor related to a specific task. Still, the rafts, which were like islands themselves, sprang into being and sprouted small bunkhouses on their surfaces with remarkable swiftness, and they could be seen moving away, like large swimming animals, into the current of the river, heading east, as they had for as long as Annabelle could remember whenever the river was open to navigation.

  Branwell’s father had informed him that, in order to better learn the business, and to familiarize himself with the timber merchants in Quebec City, he would be required to make several journeys on board these rafts over the course of the season. When he complained about this to Annabelle, one afternoon on Signal Point, she announced that when their father was safely away on business in Toronto or visiting the remaining forests of the upper Great Lakes, she would be boarding a raft herself, going with him out on the river.

  Her brother laughed, of course, at this ridiculous suggestion and told her, as he confessed in his journal, that she had taken leave of her senses. “There is something that needs to be done,” she apparently said to him, “something you will come to understand.” Her last fire would have been collapsing into embers as she said this, and the water that surrounded the island would have been lively with sails, the harbour bristling with masts. She had made her decision. Her fires had been on the wrong side of the island after all. Her brother was weak. He needed direction. He needed looking after.

  Annabelle recalled that the night Branwell had first visited Marie’s bed, she herself had been out in the yard until midnight painting the ships across the water in Kingston Harbour by the light of the August moon. Branwell had said that if she added fire to the scene its light would compete with that of the moon to bad effect. She had paid no attention to his advice. How am I to see the schooners at night if not by the light of the moon? she asked. You could slip across the water and set them alight, her brother had teased in response. And all the time he was thinking of Marie, of how to draw nearer to her.

  In the five years since Marie’s arrival in their household, whenever Branwell was home from boarding school, Annabelle had watched him try various means to catch and hold the hired girl’s attention. He had taunted her unmercifully, and when she did not respond with enough vehemence to the suggestion, for instance, that her attic was filled with bats, or the kitchen alive with mice, he had taken to making jokes, usually on the subject of her French heritage. Sometime later, he occasionally refused to eat the appetizing and decorative pies and pastries Mackenzie allowed Marie to make, culinary creations for which the girl seemed to have a special gift and ones that she presented with pride at family dinners. Annabelle suspected that Branwell barely knew what he was up to, and half-despised himself when he did this. It hadn’t escaped Annabelle’s notice that when he trailed around after Marie while she was straightening up the house, or criticized her work, or now and then tugged on the one black braid that hung down her back, the bewildered expression on his face in no way matched the authoritarian tone of voice he was attempting to achieve. In the past year or so, though, her brother’s behaviour had ameliorated somewhat in relation to Marie: he had become quiet, almost thoughtful in her presence, and could be seen smiling at the girl in a wistful way across a room. And then, one Saturday afternoon, when she and Marie were busy with sewing, Annabelle had followed the direction of Branwell’s focused gaze and had realized that he was staring, with a considerable amount of intensity, at Marie’s downcast face.

  Their mother had been dead for a year. No one—not even the parade of doctors called in to examine her—had been able to say precisely what was wrong with her. It had been very apparent to everyone that the woman was dying—but of what exactly? She became weaker and weaker, her small frame diminishing, her vague expression changing to one of sorrow and resignation. Near the end, she had been brought each day to the parlour where she could see from the window the oak sapling she had planted years before, a sapling that by now had become a flourishing young tree. She could watch its trembling leaves lose green, gain gold, look at its thin arms bending in the autumn wind. Because he listened with real interest, she had described to Branwell the ancient oak that had grown near her old home in Suffolk. “Hundreds and hundreds of years old,” Annabelle had heard her mother tell him repeatedly. “If your father destroys it, I insist that you kill him,” she invariably added. It had never been entirely clear to Annabelle whether she was referring to the young oak on Timber Island or the old oak in Suffolk. Perhaps, she had thought, her mother meant both. “That will not take place,” was all Branwell had managed to say in reply.

  The tree remained after her death, had gained in height and breadth. If Joseph Woodman had ever detected an oak in his yard, he had made no comment on it. Unnoticed, the tree would be safe from the axe, Annabelle concluded, so Branwell would not have that reason to kill his father—though she didn’t doubt that there would be others. She knew that her brother was shattered by the loss of their mother, and she suspected that he resented the way their father was able to conduct business the day after the funeral and all subsequent days as if nothing on his island had altered at all.

  Annabelle remembered that on the night Branwell had first ventured to Marie’s room to give comfort, and perhaps to receive it, their father had rampaged through the house like a confused bear, shouting at Marie, who, with some help from Annabelle, had by now assumed most of the domestic duties therein, Mackenzie having decamped with her French husband. Equating all betrayals, imagined and real, with Ireland, Joseph Woodman believed the pair had gone to that country. “They’ll be drowned, I’m telling you,” he had said to Annabelle. “They’ll be ruined. They’ll be out
on edge of Dereen Bog, they’ll be stuck beside Loch Acoose with nothing but a ludicrous turf spade between the two of them and enough moisture to turn their flesh to water.” When he stopped lambasting Ireland, he turned to Marie for whatever had gone wrong, and everything he had lost. Annabelle had shouted at him to stop, but Marie, her face flaming, had finally run up the two flights of stairs to her attic to be rid of the hullabaloo, an Irish word that Annabelle knew she had learned as a result of living in this house.

  When Annabelle, confronted by her father’s temper, had been taken by the desire to paint burning ships by moonlight, Branwell had likely seen his way clear. Soon their father, exhausted by ill humour, would have been snoring angrily in his bed. Annabelle would be gone for an hour or more. Branwell had likely made his way toward the staircase.

  Looking back now with affection, Annabelle imagined Marie sitting up in bed, hearing Branwell’s footsteps, perhaps seeing his shadow on the wall, and she imagined that Marie would have opened her arms to the boy, even before he stepped into the room. She could not, and did not, imagine what happened next, but remembered the warmth of that bed and the pleasure of intimate talk in the place that was Marie’s alone.

  As you float on the lake away from Timber Island, then enter the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, the islands thicken until eventually you are aware of a number of shorelines composed of great rocks and tall trees moving soundlessly past the watercraft on which you stand. Sometimes you feel that you are not moving at all and that it is the islands themselves that are adrift, like icebergs sailing purposefully toward open waters. Branwell, however, trapped on the river by his father, was, at this stage, quite impervious to the beauty that surrounded him. Occasionally he would read to Annabelle a poem or two he had attempted in his journal to vent his frustration:

  Oh solitude where are they charms

  That Sages say they have seen in they face

  Better to live in the midst of alarms

  Than to dwell in this terrible place

  The wind was from the east this week

  It blew hard all the day

  The raft was stopped at Batiseau

  And there now do we stay

  Amused by her brother’s lack of literary prowess, Annabelle told him he was in no danger of becoming a poet, but suggested that there must be wonderful things to sketch all along the river. Branwell allowed that while this might very well be the case, he was in no mood to avail himself of these opportunities. “All I can think of,” he said, “is getting onto dry land. But it seems the minute I get back, before I can even catch my breath, I’m back at work again. My whole life is just raft after raft after raft.”

  Timber rafts were the most temporary of constructed worlds and seem to have been constantly engaged in the artificial evolutionary process that was thrust upon them. What once was part of a great forest became for the span of a few days the platform of a small village where people worked and ate and slept and overcame the sequence of difficulties that made up the course of the river, difficulties so dramatic that even Branwell felt compelled to comment in his journal that the sight of turbulent rapids frothing over the edges of the raft, not five feet from where he stood, “filled the spirit with awe.” Once the rafts successfully reached their destination, they were, of course, dismantled, their several parts dispatched to England, where eventually the wood that made up their construction might re-emerge in the shape of furniture in a multitude of Victorian parlours or, if the timbers were oak—and large and long enough—as masts on the decks of the pugnacious vessels of the Admiralty. One thing was certain, however, no raft ever made the return journey upriver, and Annabelle, knowing this, would have thought a raft to be the perfect vessel for the deliverance of her brother into the arms of the future she wanted for him.

  Annabelle worked up the nerve to get herself on board a raft in mid-July and was, oddly enough, able to do so with her father’s permission. It wasn’t entirely out of the question for a sightseer or two to be taken on board, especially in the warmer months, as it was well known that this was by far the best way to experience the thrilling power of the rapids. Furthermore, because his mind was almost always fully occupied with business, any curiosity shown in some aspect of how it worked by one of his offspring—especially in the face of Branwell’s obvious disinterest—pleased Joseph Woodman even more than Annabelle had anticipated that it might. And she had anticipated that it might, had spent the previous evening, in fact, composing the following speech. “I just want to understand the business,” she had said to him, “how the rafts are taken down to Quebec. I just want to see what Branwell does when he is on the river.”

  On this midsummer day, once the raft moved away from the booms that held it, she grabbed her brother by the arm and began to dance with him, awkwardly, it’s true, because of her lameness and because her brother was an unwilling partner. “I don’t understand what has got into you,” he might have said to her as he disentangled himself from her embrace. He would have been irritated too, because now the journey was going to be longer than the usual three or four days. The raft would have to haul up in odd places along the river where lodgings could be found with families known to their father, there being no question of Annabelle spending the night on board with the men. Branwell would likely also be invited inside for an evening meal out of politeness, and the thought of this may have put his teeth on edge for he was becoming more and more unsociable as his unhappiness deepened. His bemusement regarding his sister’s behaviour would be exaggerated by the fact that, although in the past she had been suspicious and evasive about Frenchmen, she had now apparently developed a certain camaraderie with them, and before the raft was five miles downriver, she was laughing and conversing with them, and showing them the watercolours she was making of the river and the trees. His own artistic endeavours at the time were confined to the penmanship he practised while keeping the log—great, flourishing capital letters, for example, at the beginning of each entry, and the odd mechanical drawing of an iceboat or a sloop.

  When, on the second day, Orphan Island hove into view and the raft moved toward it, Branwell would have thought nothing of it, as the French, who were both sentimental and pious, sometimes left a box of food or a bag of coal on the dock there out of respect for the nuns and the orphans in their care. He watched his sister step ashore and, searching the dock, was slightly puzzled by the sight of her nightcase resting there. Then he was seized from behind by two coureurs du bois who deposited him unceremoniously at the spot where Annabelle waited and who, after shouting orders to their comrades, swiftly poled the raft back into the current of the river. When he called to the men, they waved their caps and called back to him, “Bonne chance!” and “Vive l’amour!”

  By the time Branwell had collected himself enough to turn angrily to his sister in search of an explanation, Annabelle was running, as fast as she could with her bad leg, up the slope toward the large forbidding facade of the orphanage where a woman with a young child clinging to her skirts had come out to see who had arrived. He watched, dumbfounded, as the two women embraced so fiercely that they fell laughing to the ground, surprising the child, who began to howl. And Branwell, shaken by his arrival at the island and by the unhappiness draining out of him at the sight of his lost love, began to weep as well. He might have seen himself then as one of the minor characters in the painting he had admired in Paris; perhaps one of the wolves in the far distance; not one of the seductive wolves Marie had told him about one night as he lay in her bed but a wolf with neither ferocity nor charm.

  The orphanage that Marie and her child stood in front of was a large, unpainted, decaying pile of timber and clapboard, grey with neglect and adorned with many plain, ill-repaired, sagging porches. Grey might not be the appropriate word to describe its colour, for it would have been darkened by time, becoming almost as black as the habits of the nuns who cared for the orphans in its dusty rooms. Its windows were plentiful, but, by Branwell’s count, at least six panes i
n these windows had vanished and were replaced by waxed paper. The sight of the opaque windows, the dark walls, awakened a sense of shame in him. Why had he acquiesced so completely to his father’s wishes, which had resulted in consigning Marie to this dismal place? Why had he not insisted on marrying her, something he now knew he had always wanted? He was a distant, cringing wolf; a wolf without courage, he thought, and thinking this decided on the change that would determine the course of the rest of his life.

  For most men a reunion after desire, then intimacy, then distance, and finally an ocean of time is a terrifying proposition, one that often causes them to avoid allowing even the possibility of the encounter to fully form in the mind. Annabelle, having had absolutely no experience with romance, and unlikely to ever have any experience with romance, would have nevertheless known all this instinctively. But how did she know where Marie was? This part of the story was never explained. Perhaps she was visited by a lucky guess, or perhaps she was told of Marie’s whereabouts by the Frenchmen, who would have been well aware of the telegraph of rumours running up and down the river. Whatever the case, she would have walked toward her brother and, taking his hand, she would have drawn him toward his lover and the child who would become my grandfather. As they walked up the slope she would have told him that she always knew what he wanted, even if he didn’t know. And Branwell would have nothing to say for he would have known in his heart that she was right.

  After a week of Catholic instruction by the nuns, a week made somewhat easier by the marginal knowledge of Latin that Branwell had acquired while at boarding school, a visiting priest married him to Marie in the chapel of the orphanage. The ceremony was attended by a choir of orphans, a dozen nuns, Annabelle, and the small boy called Maurice, whose original status in life had been made legitimate by a ceremony of candles, incense, and chant, and who now had a full-blown temper tantrum just as vows were being exchanged and had to be taken from the room. Annabelle would never forget the sound of the boy’s cries echoing through the wooden halls of the dark building after one of the nuns had lifted him up and carried him away. These howls, to her mind, did not presage a happy life, and, in fact, her predictions would prove to be accurate. For although Maurice would become inordinately successful, he would never be particularly happy, would never, in fact, develop the capacity for happiness, and would eventually come to grief as a result of a combination of serial fixations, greed, and bad weather.