A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  Teams of oxen removed the ruined trunks and roots of trees and, not much later, a steam-powered tractor churned up the earth. Hedgerows that had existed between previously smaller fields were removed. Barley crops were planted. The monstrous brick walls of the new house sprang up as if by magic overnight. What appeared to be a half a mile of gingerbread fretsaw work arrived at the beginning of July, along with big iron pipes for the plumbing, a boiler for central heating, six elaborate mantelpieces, and two claw-footed bathtubs, painted gold. By the end of July, Maurice and Caroline were installed in their new home, the huge shadow of which, at twilight, seemed almost to reach the steps of the Ballagh Oisin.

  The young couple’s departure from the hotel was met with general relief. There had been several monumental disagreements during their stay there—the furnishings of the interior were not, apparently, up to Caroline’s standards. Complaints concerning washing with a pitcher and a bowl could be heard some mornings when passing by the door of the couple’s room, and the lack of a private bathtub was a subject that was often raised. When the windows for the new house were delivered and proved to be pointed not curved, Caroline reacted with angry tears, blaming her husband, his parents, even a couple of guests for the mishap.

  There were two or three uncomfortable visits from Mister Gilderson himself, who had managed to outlive his third wife (mother of Caroline) by seven years, despite the fact that his frame was twisted by the arthritis that, he claimed, was made much worse by the presence of lighthouses like the one at the end of the small island just off the end of sandy Tremble Point. Lighthouses, he insisted, lured his ships into the path of destruction while, at the same time, they interrupted the currents of fresh air that he believed brought relief to his arthritis. “And,” he once announced, shifting his limbs on the velvet chair that had been offered him, “they accelerate my gout.”

  “Poor Papa,” said Caroline.

  The other thing that Mister Gilderson despised was discovered when, in attempting to dispel the tense silence that followed, Maurice described a spectacular storm in which he had been caught the previous winter. Gilderson had no tolerance for any story relating to weather in general, and snow in particular. “Do we really have to listen to one more tale concerning blizzards, squalls, drifts, ice, or falling barometers?” the older man said with irritation. “I will not hear of any reference to carriages abandoned by the side of roadways or ships being frozen in harbour. And, please refrain from any mention of November.” Weather was, to Gilderson’s mind, the enemy of business. Like a relative who had caused him embarrassment, he did not wish its name to be spoken and wanted its picture turned to the wall. Annabelle knew that November was the month when, for reasons of safety, all ships, except Gilderson’s steamships, went into retirement until the spring breakup. Several tragedies had occurred during this month, tragedies that, according to her father, Gilderson had measured purely in terms of loss of cargo and vessels with no apparent thought for the attendant loss of life. She looked at him with amused disapproval, then said, wickedly, “I quite like November. Things settle down and become quiet on the island then. Not so much coming and going. You can turn your mind to other things … reading, art.”

  Oran Gilderson, who had ignored her until this moment, turned in Annabelle’s direction, as if trying to determine just who she was. When, after a moment or two of concentration, recognition dawned, he smiled, nodded his head in a conciliatory fashion, and said, “Indeed, yes, reading and art, wonderful pastimes for a woman. But I, madam, am a man of business.”

  Before she began the journey back to Timber Island, Annabelle took her nephew aside to offer a warning. “Weather isn’t the only culprit,” she told him. “Greed can be an enemy of business as well. Remember that.”

  During the next two or three years it would happen that Maurice would prosper to such an extent that not only were his own parents impressed by his successes but he almost won the favour of his father-in law. Barley rose to a dollar a bushel, and more and more of Gilderson’s ships sailed back and forth across the lake carrying the golden cargo to the American market. Caroline added a conservatory to the house and a trellised gazebo to the yard. In the course of one year she bought no fewer than twenty hats, each piece of headgear more flamboyant than the one that had preceded it. When she became pregnant, one of the larger bedrooms was turned into an elaborate nursery, and soon that nursery contained a squalling baby boy who would eventually become my father and whom Maurice decided to call Thomas Jefferson Woodman in deference to the Americans whose thirst was making them so rich. Some of these Americans patronized the Ballagh Oisin, but these were Americans with modest incomes, usually of Irish descent, attracted to the hotel by its Gaelic moniker and its views of a lake that reminded them of the sea.

  Even Annabelle had to admit that things were going well. The spoiled Caroline had taken, with surprising enthusiasm, to motherhood. Maurice had been sensible enough to hire men knowledgeable in the ways of farming operations while he was kept busy by the very gratifying pastime of keeping the books and investing the returns. Branwell painted all winter and amused and saw to his guests all summer. Everyone doted on the child, whom they called T.J. for short, and when this child began to use language, Marie revived her stories, bringing into the occasional evening the wolf, her slaughtered parents, her own trip to Orphan Island, the epidemics that swept through that institution, small white coffins arriving on a dark brown sleigh, the delivery of stone angels, and a number of other wonderfully terrifying circumstances that might occur on the road from childhood to adolescence.

  There weren’t many clients any more—the timber business being what it was. Annabelle mostly busied herself with annotating her splinter book, with painting, and, when the season permitted, she worked on what was becoming an impressive series of flower gardens near the house. Still, over the course of the next few years, she returned to her father’s office every now and then to record transactions concerning the salvage enterprise in one of his ledger books, an enterprise that had, in recent months, begun to pick up somewhat. When she was in the office she still sometimes made half-hearted, unsuccessful attempts to sort out everything her father had left behind. She had not been able to force herself to roll up the maps of the bogs, however, and they had become such a permanent—though dusty—feature of the place she began to look on them as a sort of parchment carpet. On one afternoon in August, she had brought a good-sized feather duster with her so that she could clean up a bit. Perhaps, she mused as she worked, this is how entire civilizations become buried. Dust that is not removed might, over the course of time, accumulate to such an extent that eventually all architecture would be buried: columns and amphitheatres, temples and palaces. Sooner or later everything would succumb. If, in a thousand years, an archaeologist visited Timber Island, what would be left for him to dig up? Not much, she decided, a few stones from the foundation of the big house and bricks from the chimney, an anvil from the smithy, perhaps. By the time the word anvil entered her mind Annabelle had stopped dusting and was looking out the west window toward the quay. Various sails and funnels were in view and among them she was surprised to see the sail of Branwell’s small boat, which was approaching her docks. She was glad to know he was on his way to the island: he hadn’t visited in months, and she, having resolved to pay more attention to salvage operations that had been left in her care, had several times postponed her planned visit to the hotel.

  When she saw him alight at the quay, she stepped outside and called his name. Shortly thereafter her brother was standing quite still in the open doorway of the inner office, stunned by the sight of the maps all over the floor.

  “Maps of the bogs,” Annabelle explained, not waiting for the question. She picked up the duster, bent over Gortatlea Bog, and brushed the dust from the beautiful colours.

  “The villainous Irish bogs.”

  “The very ones.”

  Branwell began to weave around the topography in the direction of his sist
er. “He kept these maps.” He studied each map for several minutes and then, as if exhausted by the information they imparted, he collapsed in Cummings’s chair, which Annabelle had brought from the outer office after her father’s death. Remembering her own visits to her father’s inner sanctum, the coldness of the surroundings and the coldness of the welcome, she wanted any visitors who came her way to at least be able to sit down. As an older woman, and, though she wouldn’t have admitted this, a lonely one, she wasn’t averse to a bit of conversation.

  She asked her brother to stay for an evening meal, and offered him a room for the night. Then she began to speak about the maps. “Look at this,” she said, pointing again to the map of Gortatlea Bog. “Or this.” Her toe touched the centre of Glorah. “He loved all of this. It’s obvious. Why did he want to destroy something he thought so beautiful?”

  “People do what they have to,” her brother said quietly, “and sometimes things are destroyed in the process.” He began to pull on his right ear. “Poor Father,” he said. “He likely didn’t even know that he loved looking at landscape, figured it was only useful if you could exploit it in some way or another.”

  Annabelle wondered if in fact persistence was part of the explanation she was looking for. Was it the knowledge of something you have loved continuing to exist after you have left it behind that had caused such fury in her father? Branwell was still pulling on his ear and looking out the window. Annabelle could see that though the revelation of the maps had moved him, he was nevertheless preoccupied by something else. “What is it?” she asked finally. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Worry.”

  Annabelle waited. Then, when nothing further came from her brother’s lips, she asked him what it was that concerned him. “Sand,” he replied. “Maurice’s foreman has told me that the soil is changing. He says it’s turning into sand.”

  “But that is nonsense,” said Annabelle. “Soil doesn’t just spontaneously turn into sand.”

  “Yet it seems to be so. Caroline is in a state because her flowerbeds are beginning to be filled with sand and her lawns are not growing properly. There is a different kind of tough grass coming up and it is sparse, with a lot of sand showing through.” He sighed and looked at his hands, which were clenched in his lap. “And that’s nothing compared to the sand around the hotel,” he said. “There are dunes gathering beside the porch.”

  Annabelle tried to call up this image of the porch, but could picture only white rocking chairs, swept steps, tidy lawns.

  “Well,” she said, “perhaps that’s only natural that this should happen. Tremble Point is situated on the sandy end of the County, after all. Maybe by next year things will have returned to —”

  “You have no idea,” Branwell interrupted, “what this is doing to Marie. There is sand some mornings in the corners of the guest rooms. Sometimes it gets into the bread she bakes or, worse, into her sauces. Almost always it is sprinkled on the top of her lemon meringue pies. It is bothering the guests. Some are leaving early. And Marie … it’s as if she is carrying the weight of this somewhere near her heart. She doesn’t really complain, but I can see it in her face, I can see it in her eyes.”

  “Marie does not complain? About something this serious?” Annabelle recalled the fearless, outspoken little girl from orphanage, the strong young woman Marie had become. “Something is terribly wrong, then, and she is remaining silent so as not to make things worse.”

  Branwell nodded in sad agreement.

  On her last visit Annabelle had noticed something she couldn’t identify that seemed to be missing from her friend’s expression, and from her gestures. She had never known Marie not to be quick in her movements and certain in her speech. Now all energy seemed to have vanished from her character. She had invented no new recipes as far as Annabelle could tell, and no matter how Branwell teased, she could not be coaxed into defending the politics of Quebec, a subject that would have always elicited passionate declarations from her in the past, sometimes in English, sometimes in French. It was as if an essential component in her proud bearing had faltered and this frightened Annabelle. What faltered in Marie would falter in Annabelle as well.

  “Is there a chance that the foreman is mistaken?” she asked.

  Branwell shook his head. “He says it has something to do with the rotation of crops.”

  “But Maurice—and everyone else for that matter—has been growing nothing but barley. No one is rotating crops.”

  “That’s it exactly. They haven’t been rotating crops. None of the barley farmers along our stretch of shore have been rotating crops and now the soil is depleted. They were making pots of money,” he said bitterly. “Why would they want to change?” Branwell lifted his arms into the air in a gesture of desperation. “All this sand,” he whispered, “all this sand because of people’s obsession with money.”

  Annabelle stood in the centre of the room, bogs all around her. For the first time she thought about the tidy lush landscapes of her mother’s past, and for the first time she found herself hoping that these landscapes were still there just as her mother had described them to Branwell, each field in place, crops rotated or left fallow every year or so. The oak her mother talked about came into her mind and she glanced out the window searching for the tree in her own yard, as if for reassurance.

  She turned to the Branwell. “You must tell Maurice to sell immediately,” she said.

  “He’s been thinking of politics,” Branwell ventured, without much enthusiasm in his voice. “He’s joined the Tory party, so I suppose that’s a start.” He drummed his fingers on his father’s desk. “How can I convince him to sell? I wanted him to rotate the crops two years ago. I wanted him to sell out last year. But it’s clear that nothing I say will move him.”

  “He’ll listen to Marie. He’ll listen to his mother.”

  Branwell looked embarrassed. His hand moved again toward his ear. “Marie tried to speak to him,” he said, “but Caroline would hardly let her raise the subject. She became quite hysterical” He paused. “It’s only Caroline that he listens to now.”

  “Why doesn’t Maurice just put his foot down?” Annabelle could feel an angry flush travel up her neck and flood her face. Weakness, she thought, was the answer to that question. Weakness combined with ambition and greed. Spinelessness and, of course, the chains of romance.

  Branwell shrugged and shook his head. He rose from the chair and began to pace up and down the room. “The hotel is Marie’s life. The only life we know, the only life we have. But my son, our son, is so wrapped up in his marriage, and so controlled by his father-in-law, he has given no thought at all to what is happening to his mother. She feels that she’s lost him. She suspects that we have lost the hotel. It’s as if she is being depleted along with the soil.”

  “Depleted?” she said. “Marie?” Annabelle didn’t want to imagine this.

  Branwell said nothing.

  “Do you remember,” Annabelle asked eventually, “do you remember the time father took you with him to pick up the figureheads?”

  “I remember that it was a long, long journey, and that we travelled by coach.” Branwell paused, shook his head. “And I remember the figureheads. But that’s about all.”

  “He wanted you to see the workshops,” said Annabelle. “You were seven years old. It was the only time that he ever, ever considered doing something that might be of interest to a child. And it is wonderful, when you think about it, that there were men in Quebec who devoted their lives almost entirely to the carving of mermaids.” She stepped carefully around the maps and took two wax models from the shelves. “Look,” she said, “look at these models.”

  Her brother glanced at the figures in her hands. One was made in the likeness of Napoleon, the other was a bare-breasted woman. “It’s not likely,” he said, “that Father would have allowed Napoleon to be fixed to the prow of one of his schooners. I remember a woman similar to this, though, and some kind of animal … a griffin, I think.”


  “I expect he brought the models home simply because he liked them. But all that’s gone now, anyway,” Annabelle murmured. “Along with everything else.” She returned the models of the figureheads to the shelves. “What do you think would have happened to those young men who were trained to do nothing but carve figureheads?” she asked Branwell. “Once the ships that bore them were scuttled? No one knows the moment when something that seems permanent will simply cease to exist.” She thought of the last day in the sail loft, of the sea of canvas that was abandoned there, seams half-sewn, threaded needles halted in mid-stitch. Her father, she remembered, would not allow the half-completed sails to be removed. “They’ll find out they’re wrong to bring all the ships to full steam,” he had insisted. “And we’ll need the canvas for the return to sail.” But the needles had rusted and eventually the thread had begun to fray, to rot.

  “What I remember,” she told Branwell, “was that you had been made to sit between the life-sized mermaids in the coach on the way back while Father and a griffin faced you.” Annabelle smiled, picturing the scene: the patriarch, the small frightened boy, two mermaids, and a griffin enduring the bumpy track and the deteriorating weather of a mid-nineteenth-century November.

  “The money Father left to Maurice?” she asked suddenly.

  “He still has some of it, apparently … enough, I suppose, to survive.”

  “Good. Then he must sell immediately. Move down the lake a bit to the next County. Set himself up in another house and run for office.” How she longed to voice her opinion of her nephew’s wife, but instead she said, “Caroline will be content to be the wife of a politician once she knows there is no other choice. You can count on that. She’ll like the power, the attention. How’s her father’s company faring through all this, by the way?”