A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  “More money than we’ve got here,” she replied but in a philosophic tone, with neither judgment nor malice in her voice.

  “More money than we have got here,” echoed young Maurice, who was home for Christmas vacation. There was a touch of malice in his voice.

  And so, clothed in fur and rugs, Branwell rode in the back of a sleigh bound for the mainland town of Belleville, where he would board the train headed for Toronto, where he would make yet another westbound connection. Mister Fryfogel had written a second letter to say that if Mister Woodman intended to use such an unholy method of transportation as the railroad, it was no business of his and added that he himself, having been almost ruined by the railroad, was only too aware of the double meaning of that phrase. Baden was the name of the stop, he wrote, “a most unpleasant village, born recently as a result of the cursed railroad.” He assured Branwell that he would be able to hire a sleigh at the station and, if conditions were favourable, he would be at the tavern in less than an hour. Sometimes, the innkeeper wrote, there were storms, storms that could make the going a little rough.

  When he alighted at Baden, it became clear to Branwell that conditions were considerably less than favourable. Not a sleigh in sight and there was a biting wind, with a velocity higher than any of the ferocious currents he had recorded in his Timber Island journal, which tore at his coat and tossed the beaver hat from his head. Though it was not yet dark, the air was filled with such a quantity of snow that he could see nothing at all beyond the walls of the small wooden building that served as the apparently deserted station. Then, just as he was giving up hope, a man could be seen walking in his direction across the platform. “Nice day,” the stranger said and was about to continue walking when Branwell caught him by the sleeve of his overcoat and told him his destination.

  “I need to hire a sleigh to get out there today,” he said.

  “Not likely,” said the man. “Not today, not tomorrow, probably not the day after that.”

  “For heaven’s sake, why not?”

  “Road’s closed. Road’s almost always closed. Snow in winter. Mud in summer. Waste of time if you ask me … roads.

  “ Branwell was speechless.

  “But,” the stranger offered, “judging by the good weather, you might get out there on snowshoes if you’ve got ‘em. Not today though. Too late. You’ll have to put up at Kelterborn’s Bar. Dreadful rooms, but good beer. Thanks to the railroad.” He touched his head and for the first time Branwell noticed the railway cap.

  The wind rose and the station master disappeared, enveloped by a shroud of white. “At least it’s not snowing,” the man said. “Nice sunny day.”

  “Not snowing?” said Branwell as the wind abated somewhat and the man came, once again, partially into view.

  “This stuff is just blowing around. There’s a storm coming through, though. We’re proud of our storms here.” The currents of air, the station master cheerfully explained, coming from the far-off Great Lakes encountered one another directly over this region and, “By Jesus,” he slapped his gloved hands together, “don’t we get snow!” He took Branwell’s arm. “No more trains today,” he said. “Let’s go for a drink.”

  That night, as Branwell lay on a straw mattress in a room above the bar, his sleep was interrupted by the wind rattling the windows and a strange, vigorous thumping. “Just the ghost,” Kelterborn told him when he inquired the following morning. “We’ve asked him to keep it down, but he won’t. He hates being imprisoned here, prefers to wander.”

  Kelterborn was a large, pink German fellow who presided over his bar with an air of pompous dignity mixed with that of boredom and mild disapproval. Branwell had already learned that his taciturn host was not inclined to give advice of any kind—political, elemental, spiritual—and he declined with a shrug to discuss the state of the road. He refused, in effect, to commit to anything beyond the price of the drink in your hand, or that of your bed for the night. His smooth, broad forehead glowed. The bottles behind him on the shelf shone. The Quebec heater roared. And, as the station master had said, his beer was good. Branwell was not, in fact, much of a drinker, but he had consumed enough beer the previous night to produce both a morning headache and a general sense of unreality into which the notion of the ghost fit nicely.

  “Like you,” Kelterborn offered, “the ghost has been trying to get out to Fryfogel’s. Been here for a couple of weeks at least, might be here all winter.”

  Branwell rose at this point and, eager for some oxygen, headed for the porch, which, like the rest of the structure where he was sheltering, was made of rough-hewn logs. When he was finally able to push the front door open against the wind, it became evident that several Great Lake currents had collided during the night. A prodigious quantity of snow was falling from the sky, adding inches to the deep white sea that stretched off in all directions over the acres of townships that Branwell knew were named after the entrepreneurs who had cut them clean, divided them up, and sold them off. Everything else was named after European towns and villages. How absurd, he thought, that the spot where he now stood, a place where nothing happened but a succession of blizzards as far as he could tell, should be named after a tourist spa situated in a picturesque corner of the Austrian Alps. Even more absurd that the collection of squatters shanties and jagged stumps that he had heard existed farther west was apparently called London, and that the two major rivers in the vicinity became, therefore, the Thames and the Little Thames. Did this not show a singular lack of imagination? Branwell thought that it did.

  When a few moments later he went back inside he was introduced to the ghost, a certain G. Shromanov, whose unpronounceable Slovakian first name had been long ago contracted to “Ghost,” and who, according to his own admission, was primarily a stableman. Being born to love horses, he had worked at all three inns on the road, until the railway made the full-time care of horses almost completely unnecessary. Fortunately, however, he was also a rope-maker, a kettlesmith, and had been for at least a year roving through these parts searching for bears as a would-be bear trainer. He proudly confessed that, although he had been born in Europe, he could also read and write in English, and was occasionally able to acquire extra income by writing business letters, sometimes even love letters, for those who had never mastered the alphabet. Added to all this, he confided, he could mend pots, make medicine, tell fortunes, administer spells and curses, sing while accompanying himself on the mandolin, and perform a sort of speedy Spanish stomp that required much night practice to keep it up to the mark—hence the thumping that had interrupted Branwell’s sleep. With much clapping of hands on either side of his head, Ghost demonstrated several noisy staccato steps. The floor shook, the bottles behind the bar clanked, Branwell’s headache throbbed.

  “Fryfogel’s his best customer,” Kelterborn announced.

  For what? Branwell wondered. Bear training? Cursing? He couldn’t help but remember Fryfogel’s remarks about the people who worked the road.

  “Best customer,” Ghost agreed. “He’ll pay any amount of cash to get his fortune told, he’ll pour any amount of whisky. I already predicted that his walls wouldn’t be decorated, that you wouldn’t be arriving for damn near twenty years.”

  “Well,” said Branwell, “you were wrong about that because here I am.” He lifted the wooden valise that served as his paintbox as proof of his trade.

  “Oh, you’re here all right.” Ghost settled into the chair nearest to Branwell. “You’re here, but you’re not there, if you catch my meaning. Let me see your palm.”

  Branwell offered his hand to Ghost and then bestowed an amused smile on the other patrons in the bar.

  “No, sir,” said Ghost. “Not a sign of the Fryfogel in the immediate future. In fact, I see no trace of the walls of an inn at all … which is odd because I can see the Tavern Brook out the window. And wait … beside the window there is a painted wall—but it’s far, far in the future—and, even so, there is nothing about an inn in these p
arts, nothing about a tavern, wait, no, there is something about a tavern, but not that tavern, there’s a painted ceiling, of all things.” He glanced quizzically at Branwell. “Wouldn’t you go blind doing that? Wouldn’t you all the time have paint dripping in your eyes?”

  Branwell had no idea. “I never paint ceilings,” he said.

  “No you don’t,” said Ghost, “not yet. But, there’s no doubt about it, you will.”

  Five days later, in the midst of one of the continuing squalls, Branwell trudged through the snow to the station. He had not been able to reach Fryfogel’s Tavern; in fact, the weather had been so consistently bad that at times it seemed impossible to believe that beyond the somewhat greasy interior and smoky ambience of Kelterborn’s log establishment, a village of some sort existed. He had done absolutely nothing during the course of the preceding days except inquire repeatedly about meteorological conditions in hopes that he might be able to wait out the storm and listen to Ghost—whom he had discovered was a voracious reader of newspapers when he could get his hands on them—tell more tales than he cared to hear about Tiger Dunlop, John Galt, and some other confident tycoon called Talbot who was in full control of all the lands at the western end of the lakes. These much-talked-about capitalists were both resented and admired by frequenters of the tavern, a combining of emotions that generally lead to ill temper and barroom brawls. Branwell had written twice to Marie describing all this and lamenting the lack of palatable food—a state of affairs that he knew would gain her sympathy. The day before, when he had made the trek to the station in order to post the letters, the station master told him that word had it that no one could determine, any more, where the road was situated. In the old days, the man added, you could identify a road in winter by the cut it made through the forest. “Forest is all gone now,” he said, “and the stumps is all under the drifts.”

  Branwell had immediately laid down the last of his money in order to purchase a ticket home.

  In Branwell’s company now, and moving considerably faster than he was because of the snowshoes on his feet, was Ghost, who just that morning had announced that he would soon be stabling horses for a hotel situated on a sandy point near water. Branwell had done his best to discourage him, had made a prediction himself of no room, no board, no money, but Ghost was not to be put off. “One does not argue with destiny,” he told his new friend, “for destiny always wins one way or another. I see horses again in my future. There were horses in my past as well, but since the railroad their numbers have diminished in these parts. I’m your man for horses.”

  Branwell, who was moderately alarmed, realized that it had been a mistake to tell Ghost that there was no railway in his County and therefore many horses. “You won’t find any bears there,” he said now, hoping to settle the matter. “There may be horses, but I’ve never seen a bear.”

  “No bears here either,” Ghost said. “No forest, no bears … that’s the way it is. Used to be bears, and there used to be horses, but it all went to hell around here faster than you could say knife.” He pulled from his pocket a train ticket that he claimed to have found late one night on the barroom floor and looked at it closely. “Only good until Toronto,” he said. “After that I’ll be in the baggage car. I’ll meet you at the other end. Did I tell you I saw a woman in my future too? And I saw plenty of good food … interesting food, not just your ordinary grub.”

  Poor Marie, thought Branwell. She wasn’t likely to be happy about this, though he did recall that the previous summer she had said that they needed someone to look after the state of the stables and the visitors’ horses.

  Annabelle was destined to witness her father’s decline and fall, his body weakening, his mind beginning to shed parts of the past. As if he no longer had any use for them, he sometimes forgot that he had married and sired children, but more often he forgot that his wife was dead. Annabelle wondered if perhaps this was because her mother had been so indistinct, so listless, that absence seemed a permanent quality of her character even when she was alive. “Where is that woman?” her father would ask. “Down with a migraine again?” When reminded of her death, he appeared to be surprised rather than shocked or grief-stricken. “Well, I’ll be bogged!” he would exclaim. “Why on earth didn’t anyone tell me?” On the rare occasions when he remembered Branwell at all, he forgot that his son was no longer in residence. “Out on the rafts, I suppose,” he would say when Branwell’s name came up. Or, more suspiciously, “Upstairs in bed with that Irish girl, I’ll wager.”

  Her father also failed to recall that not one serviceable tree remained in the vicinity of the tributaries and rivers that flowed into the Great Lakes and that, in consequence, his business was all but defunct. At least once a week he would rise much earlier than Annabelle, don his suit coat and hat, and depart for the office. Sometimes she found him in the sail loft angrily insisting that the long-gone sail master show himself and account for the lack of sails. Sometimes she found him standing, small and confused, under the gorgeous cathedral ceiling of the huge, vacant shed in which parts of his ships had once been constructed. It hurt Annabelle to tell her father, once again, that all the building and sailing and shipping was finished. “Finished? What do you mean finished?” he would demand. And when she told there were no more trees, he turned away from her, shook his fist at the sky, and reminded God that he had tried to tell both Him and everyone else this would happen if those damnable bogs were not drained. Her father’s brain had grown confused, and she began to think that this confusion was not unlike the rapidly spreading moss on the sagging roof of his daily place of employment.

  Annabelle began to feel that not only had the circumstances of the present changed utterly and irrevocably but that the facts of her own past were slipping away. When solidity and certainty began to slide away from her father, she herself was left feeling altered and disoriented. For the first time she realized that a very different Timber Island had existed before the Woodman empire had cluttered up its acreage and set sail from its shores. But, more disturbing, she could feel the indifferent future—a future that would have nothing to do with her or her family—stirring like a subtle tremor just below the surfaces of everything that until now had represented permanence.

  One by one, the outbuildings on the island began to fall into disrepair. Cummings had retired: there was little work for him to do in any case. The white paint on the clapboard was all but gone by the time he locked the door of the office for the last time and made his final journey toward the waterlogged pier, a journey that Annabelle watched, in some ways without regret, from her kitchen window. The empty smithy was next to show signs of succumbing to January’s howling winds and an unusually heavy weight of snow, and at this point Annabelle saw that her father’s arthritis had worsened, making it difficult for him to stand erect. When the huge, splendid building where the ships had been born was blown down by a March gale, and the beams of its vaulted ceiling lay scattered like the bones of a huge extinct animal, Annabelle knew that her father’s collapse would likely follow suit. And she was right. He took to his bed that May and after a few weeks of fever and delirium, he began to repeat the phrase devil’s steamships over and over again. Then, one early morning, he clutched Annabelle’s arm, told her that Gilderson would certainly attempt to steal the lake. Before she could ask him what he meant by this warning, he died. At the funeral only Maurice, her father’s beloved Badger, wept openly, though his sorrow was to abate somewhat when he discovered that he was to inherit the lion’s share of his grandfather’s still sizable though admittedly diminished fortune. The remaining sum would go to Branwell and Marie and would be used for improvements to their hotel. Annabelle would become sole heir to the empty, changed world of the island: the deteriorating architecture, the dwindling resources, the broken ships lying under the waters of Back Bay.

  Three or four weeks after her father’s death, on an afternoon in early June, Annabelle decided to take on the task of organizing and cleaning the sagging, a
nd now structurally unsound, office. In contrast to the sparse furnishings and generally stark appearance of this interior, the lacquered wooden shelves that lined the four walls of the large inner office were overflowing with a profusion of loose papers, ledger books, cardboard and wooden boxes, rolled maps tied with frayed cords, charts, and an assortment of small dusty wax models for what might or might not have become ships’ figureheads. There were several stacks of scribblers; each one, according to the labels carefully pasted on the cover, was an account of the journey of a raft down the river to Quebec. The first hundred or so of these logs were written in the hand of Annabelle’s father, the rest in the hand of her brother.

  This is all that remains, thought Annabelle, of the efforts of her father and those like him. She had no idea what to keep and what to throw away and though she had brought several burlap bags with her for trash, she had not as yet deposited a single object in any of them. Instead, she found herself removing great heaps of paper from the shelves, placing these in piles on the floor, moving them to no apparent end back and forth across the room while dust rose around her like smoke. It was while she was engaged in this random and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to organize her father’s voluminous archive that she discovered twelve maps of the bogs.

  They were drawn on parchment and were so old and stiff they were almost impossible to unroll. When, by securing their corners with heavy ledger books, Annabelle managed to prevent the maps from snapping back into tight scrolls, the varnish that had covered them cracked and lifted like a caramel glaze on one of Marie’s delicious desserts. Each time she unfurled another bog Annabelle gasped with pleasure, for these were beautiful works of art. Executed in what must have been hundreds of shades of brown that bled at the edges of the bog in question into infinitely varied shades of green, and occasionally criss-crossed by the tiniest of blue lines, intended, she supposed, to represent streams, these territories were drafted with such exquisite care they could only have been made with love. The calligraphy that spelled out the remarkable names of the bogs, and those of the arable green areas called cooms that sometimes existed in the centre of the bogs and the surrounding lakes and mountains, was also of the highest calibre. Coomaspeara, Coomavoher, Coomnahorna, Coomnakilla, Coomshana, and Knocknagantee, Knockmoyle, Knocknacusha, Knocklomena. Annabelle would remember always the shock and wonder she experienced when, at the bottom of each map, it was her father’s signature that she found. Then a terrible sadness came over her. She realized that the artist in him was someone he had never permitted her to meet.