A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  Branwell spent his time, instead, aimlessly sorting through his wife’s few possessions: her dresses and coats, hairbrush and mirror, odd bits of jewellery, hairpins and nets, pots and pans, and a variety of other cooking utensils, her small collection of pine butter moulds (she had been touchingly vain about the look of her butter that she had churned herself), things he had barely paid attention to until now. He believed that something should be done with all of these abandoned objects, but he had no idea what, and knew, in any event, that the sand would claim everything in the end.

  When the winter arrived he was grateful for the heavy snow the season invariably brought with it because at least in winter he didn’t have to spend all his time watching sand and, unlike sand, snow could be kept out of his rooms, his clothing, his bedding, his hair. It could be shovelled, thrown to one side, arranged in piles that, more or less, stayed in place. He could open his door, walk to the lake and back, and an hour later, his footsteps would still be visible, small blue pools filled with shadow. This was strangely comforting in the face of what seemed to be a complete erasure of everything he had worked for and everything he had loved. He found it hard to remember that there had been a time when he had loved the beach and the dunes, the soft feel of sand under his feet, the ribs of sand he could see when he had waded through the shallows to bathe. He had also forgotten that the proximity of this beach, those dunes, had been one of the elements that had made the Ballagh Oisin so popular during the summers of the past. Sand was the enemy, had always been the enemy. He was certain of this. It was as if he was living in the bottom half of an hourglass in which, as the days passed, he was being buried alive.

  For the first time in his life he had begun to pray. In the evenings he would pluck Marie’s rosary from the nail in the wall where he had hung it the previous evening, and then he would whisper the words he had learned all those years ago at the orphanage just before his wedding, words he had never voluntarily used since. He liked the repetition of the name Mary, and was moved by the knowledge that his wife’s fingers had travelled over the surface of the beads that his own fingers were touching now. It was one of the ways that he felt he could speak to Marie, but in the end, like all his other attempts to reach her now, this would become unsatisfying, and one winter night he would not remove the rosary from the wall and fall to his knees near their bed. The beads would remain hanging near the wardrobe until the sight of them alone became too painful a reminder. Then he would take them down and place them in the small ivory jewellery box that would itself become too painful a reminder until it was finally consigned to a dresser drawer.

  His sister wrote to him often, but he rarely answered—sometimes he didn’t even bother to open the envelopes. His son wrote less often, and these letters, though always opened and read, were never answered. Branwell could tell that Maurice was suffering from the loss of his mother, yet, in spite of this, he found that he was unable to write with words of consolation. He would never be able to accept the idea of his son’s greed, his weakness, his role in the wreckage, and any correspondence between them could only be a reminder of all that.

  As it turned out, things would unfold just as Ghost had predicted. Maurice would run successfully as a Tory for the Northumberland County seat and would spend his time travelling back and forth from that County to Ottawa, while his wife presided over the building of another, even larger, brick house situated on a hill overlooking the town of Colborne. When Old Gilderson finally died of a heart attack (perhaps brought about by the shock of his son-in-law’s election to public office), he would leave just enough money for the building of the vulgar turrets and arched entranceways of which his daughter was so fond. There would be a ballroom on the second storey with a glass floor through which the light from the belvedere would shine. The property on which the house stood would be called Gilderwood, in memory of Caroline’s doting father. Branwell, after receiving this information, might have looked out his north window, where in the distance he would be able to see the first house that Maurice and Caroline had built, a house that would eventually be sold, at a great loss, to American summer people.

  As far as Branwell would be able to tell, no reversal of fortune was ever going to take place. On spring, summer, and fall mornings he awoke to a fresh drift of sand on the front porch. During the autumn that followed Marie’s death, dunes had completely swallowed her flowerbeds at the rear of the house—having already destroyed, in summer, those at the front. Pillows of sand sat on the seats of the wooden rockers that Branwell did not bother to put away for seasonal storage as he had in the past. The boat house in which he had stored such things was half-buried in any case; there was no hope of opening its doors. The three canoes and four rowboats that he set out at the beginning of each summer had been rarely used and had disappeared under so much sand he could not now be entirely certain of where he had last seen them. The vacated stables were rendered entirely inaccessible, and Branwell was forced to enter through the hayloft in order to dig for the firewood he had stacked in a corner of the ground floor. Sand accumulated on the hotel’s windowsills and inched up the glass. Each day it was becoming more and more difficult to open or close the front door and, increasingly, lengthy ribbons of sand had slipped under this door and into the large entrance hall.

  Whether the well had dried up was irrelevant in that the pump that surmounted it had utterly vanished. Three times a day, with sand capsizing like miniature avalanches under his feet, Branwell was forced to trudge with two galvanized pails down to the lake and back again in order to have water for washing, drinking, and cooking. Not that he cooked much anyway, living mostly as he did now on carrots and potatoes and sometimes an egg or two, all boiled in one pot on the top of one of the Quebec heaters. He had trouble even looking at Marie’s beautiful cook stove, The Kitchen Queen, which stood unlit in the kitchen, its decorative features and its copper boiler cold and unpolished. Furthermore, the last time he had opened one of its ovens, Branwell had been appalled by the sight of the tiny dunes that had formed inside it, and the excess sand that descended like a pale brown curtain to the floor.

  Word of Marie’s death had apparently been passed from tavern to inn to tavern, in a westward direction, and had finally reached Baden about a month later. The first letter Branwell received from Ghost had mostly concerned this sad event and was filled with his memories of Marie’s kindness, her spirit, and her outstanding cooking. Branwell eagerly opened every letter he received from his friend whose unpronounceable first name was printed neatly on the back flap of each envelope as Gzsrzt Shromanov and then translated in brackets (“Ghost”), as if to make clear which of the many men of Branwell’s acquaintance who were named Gzsrzt might be writing to him at this time.

  The strange thing about Ghost’s letters was that they were utterly reflective in nature and referred to events that had already happened rather than those that were about to occur. When Branwell wrote to inquire about this, his friend replied that not only had he never fully trusted the future tense in written rather than spoken English but he believed it was bad luck to commit to writing anything at all pertaining to predictions. Destiny, he wrote, has always been suspicious of notation. Destiny has never taken kindly to anyone that has kept a written record of its intentions. He described instead the fine new Baden tavern and its splendid stamped-tin ceiling that had no cracks in it and was full of decorative swirls. He made reference to the health of Spectre, who was flourishing, he said, in the company of the various other horses that were temporarily housed in the tavern’s stables now that there were enough settlers on the Huron Road and the surrounding concessions that a good quantity of horses were needed to get people to the places where the railway, mercifully, wasn’t.

  As all delivery vehicles and the rural post had given up trying to negotiate the dunes months before, Branwell had to stumble through one mile of sand and down two miles of decent road into the town of West Lake in order to purchase supplies and to pick up his mail. The trip was m
ade considerably easier in the winter because the sand was itself buried by drifts, and because of the snowshoes he had purchased, years before, after his visit to Baden. On one such trek, during his second winter as a widower, he made the return voyage with a sack of potatoes, several loaves of rapidly freezing bread, a freshly killed and also rapidly freezing chicken on his toboggan, and two letters in the pocket of his coat. The tops of his ears were frostbitten. There was not much to look forward to—beyond fried chicken—at the end of this particular journey.

  One letter was from Annabelle, who was passing on what Maurice had told her about the death of Gilderson: the date, the place of his interment, and other details about the old scoundrel that Branwell forgot as soon as he read them. The other was written in an unfamiliar hand and was postmarked Shakespeare, Ontario. The naming of places in this Dominion, he thought, was becoming increasingly preposterous. Branwell tore open the envelope, tossed it into the fire, and began to read the sentences written by Peter Fryfogel, son of Sebastian and current owner of the elusive Fryfogel Inn. Two charlatans, painters of naked women, had arrived in Baden at the request of an otherwise solid and successful citizen who was building a beautiful mansion right in the centre of town. This had reminded Peter that his late father had always wanted murals painted by the good and honest innkeeper, Branwell Woodman, but, if he remembered correctly, circumstances had prevented Mister Woodman from reaching the inn the one time he had been in the district. Would he once again consider taking up the task this winter when there would likely be few tenants at Mister Woodman’s lakeside hotel? Please advise and etc. Branwell read the letter twice, a bit confused that Ghost had predicted nothing about this possible commission in his letters, until he recalled that any reference to the painting of murals at the Fryfogel—if in fact this painting took place—would have required the written use of the future tense.

  Branwell opened the drawer of the desk at which, in the past, he had carried out the business of the hotel, riffled through a quantity of correspondence and sand, and finally found some paper that was blank except for the printed illustration of the Ballagh Oisin in better days. He unscrewed the top of a pot of ink and sand, dipped his pen, and began to answer in the affirmative fully aware, as he did so, that while he was obviously fulfilling Ghost’s prediction, he was also writing a letter of farewell to his cherished hotel. Once he began this second journey to the west, he knew he would not be returning. The sand had won; he would abandon the Ballagh Oisin to its fate.

  In fact, Branwell would return, but this would not happen for several years, and it would happen only once. As a much older and much crankier man, Branwell would insist that his son, Maurice “Badger” Woodman as he liked to be called, with whom Branwell had been living unhappily for some years, accompany him in the cabriolet on a journey back to Tremble Point. “I want you to see this,” he would say, having secretly never fully stopped blaming his son for the greed, for the barley, for the sand, for the death of his wife, and knowing full well that whatever it was they were going to view would not be an improvement on what he had left behind on this February day. When they arrived at the spot, they would have to climb a dune in order to enter the hotel by the door that had led to the upper veranda. They would crunch along the sandy second-storey hall as far as the central staircase, which Branwell would begin to descend, stopping on the fourth step down. The sand would have almost entirely filled the first floor by then; only the turquoise skies of Branwell’s murals would be visible. Branwell would think then of all that was buried: sofas, tables, chairs, umbrella stands, mirrors, door stoppers, Marie’s copper pots, the cook stove, and he would turn to his son, who remained blinking at the top of the stairs. Shaking his cane at him he would shout, “You are a creator of deserts!” On the way back to the cabriolet, descending the dunes, Maurice, the now influential politician, dressed in his waistcoat and top hat, would become caught in a slide and would fall directly on his backside.

  But now, during his last few days at the hotel, Branwell became involved in a frenzy of essentially useless activities. He touched up certain areas of the murals that had become chipped and cracked over the years, he cleaned out the closets, and shook sand out of the bedclothes stored in the linen wardrobe. He puttied several loose window panes, oiled hinges that had become tight and difficult, took the carpets outside and beat them, and, as a last gesture to Marie, he polished up the Kitchen Queen. Then, after packing a few items of clothing in a leather valise and putting all of his paints and brushes into a wooden box, he placed these two pieces of luggage on top of a drift just beyond the porch. When he re-entered the hall, he looked for some time at the panoramas he had painted. Then he turned away from the fantasy of his landscapes and swept a quantity of sand—and himself—out the front door, leaving the broom standing upright in the snow like a scarecrow, or a kind of sentinel, guarding the empty hotel.

  The new Baden Tavern was made of brick, not logs, its windows were surrounded by decorative moulding, and there was a large wood-burning furnace in its deep cellar. These architectural details would be the only differences, as far as Branwell could tell, that would enable him to separate his current stay in the district from the one he had endured ten years before. Each day, he pulled aside the burlap curtains in his room and stared, as he had in the past, into a sea of swirling white. Each evening he fell asleep to the sound of howling winds tearing around the snowbound village, and each night he was awakened intermittently by the moan of train whistles. Kelterborn was gone; Lingelbach, the present owner, was so like Kelterborn, both in his taciturn manner and in his physical appearance, that he hardly qualified as a noteworthy change.

  Ghost, however, who had wandered all over the townships, insisted that there were changes. More than one track, a proliferation of new farms, villages like New Hamburg to the east and, now that the Irish had arrived in droves, places called Dublin and St. Columban were appearing to the west. “My father would have been beside himself,” Branwell told his friend, all the while thinking as he had in the past, Why these European names? Almost everyone had horses and buggies now, Ghost explained, and several blacksmiths shops had opened as a result. The gorgeous mansion going up across the street was said to have ten marble fireplaces, all made in Italy, and the two painters Fryfogel Junior had referred to were, indeed, painting naked ladies on the walls, “ladies so real you almost thought you could touch them.” He paused here, closed his eyes for a few moments, then said that he didn’t see Branwell painting naked ladies in the future, mores the pity. “General stores in every village,” Ghost said, “and churches everywhere. An undertaker. A tombstone maker.”

  “I imagine I’ll have to take all this on faith, though,” Branwell said. “I’ve never been able to see anything but the inside of a tavern, a different tavern, yes, but still a tavern much like all the others.”

  Ghost pointed heavenward, explaining that none of the other taverns had tin ceilings like this one. “Not a crack in it and there never will be a crack in it. Even if the tavern fell down there would not be a crack in that ceiling.”

  Branwell looked at the ceiling, the ceiling Ghost was so fond of. The decorative swirls were confined to borders that surrounded flat square panels like an embossed baroque frame. He wondered briefly about the machine that would be required to make such a thing as a ceiling. Must the tin be heated or was it soft enough to be pushed into the shape required? Nonetheless, to his eye, there was a monotony about the resulting effect, exaggerated by the rather dirty pale yellow paint that covered it, or perhaps it was white paint, discoloured by the pipe smoke that, he was beginning to discover, filled the barroom day and night.

  Ghost asked about Branwell’s financial situation, which, admittedly, was shaky at best but which he hoped would improve once he got out to Fryfogel’s.

  Lingelbach, who was pretending to be absorbed by the task of wiping down the bar with a damp cloth, moved closer to the side of the room where Branwell sat with Ghost. “Road’s disappeared,”
he offered.

  Again? thought Branwell. What was it about him that made particles of almost everything want to accumulate wherever he went? What else could possibly happen to him? He half-expected a plague of sawdust, or of iron filings to appear in his future. He wouldn’t have been surprised if brimstone began to descend from the sky. Lingelbach was speaking again. “You’ll have to pay me,” he was saying to Branwell. “There’s the room, the board. You’ll have to pay me one way or another.”

  On the fourth day of the storm Branwell descended the stairs at the tavern to be confronted by a strange scaffolding made up of two tall stepladders placed about six feet apart with a couple of wide pine boards resting between them. Ghost, who had clearly been supervising the placement of this scaffold, took Branwell by the arm. “I see pictures on this ceiling,” he said, “and,” he nodded his head in the direction of the bar, “so does Lingelbach. We both see you painting these pictures, starting this morning.”

  Branwell had no desire to paint a ceiling. He was tired, sad, and slightly disoriented by being in the company of others after his solitary life in the hotel. He thought about snow falling on the roof of his old home and wondered how the shingles would hold up if this storm were to travel eastward. Looking at the scaffolding, he said, “I’m not Michelangelo, you know, I’m not Tiepolo.”