Away

by Jane Urquhart

  An answering cheer came from the assembled neighbours. And then, to Mary’s amazement, the word she thought was hers alone was flung across the landscape.

  “Away, boys, away,” the people were shouting, their fists punching the new, brisk wind.

  That evening was one of the few that the Sedgewick brothers had ever spent apart. Osbert, his expression sullen and private, disappeared into the library with a decanter of claret and Granville retired to his bedroom with cold compresses for his sick headache. There he lay, fully clothed in boots and breech-coat, with damp, white cloths covering his eyes and the mournful song running and running through his mind during the moments when he wasn’t mentally cursing his father and his father’s father for leaving such sensitive souls in the possession of this unholy mess.

  About midnight, when he was trying to summon the strength to put on his white nightgown and cap, he heard the sound of pounding footsteps in the hall and assumed, fatalistically, that the Whiteboys, the Hearts of Steele, and the Hearts of Oak had all come at once to get him. But it was only his brother who burst through the door, wildly excited, his forefinger marking a spot in one of the volumes of the new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  “I know what’s to be done!” shouted Osbert, breathlessly. “All we have to do is sell one or two Gainsboroughs and it’s fait accompli!”

  “What’s to be done?” sighed Granville, who was in fact experiencing a great deal of relief not to mention surprise that his brother would agree to part with any work of art for any reason.

  “Here … look at this.” With a triumphant flourish, Osbert slapped the book down on his brother’s featherbed. It was open at the pages that described the British colony of Canada.

  BY January of 1848, the rumour that the landlords were to send a number of cottiers and their families to British North America began to circulate, in various forms, from cabin to cabin. Some said that every Catholic in County Antrim was to be evacuated, along with their donkeys, chickens, and tools. Others announced that since the county was a sinking ship from which decency demanded they be removed, only the women and children would be going. Another rumour, one closest to the truth, suggested that families would be hand-picked for the adventure by the landlords, the rest left to work the fields until they dropped of starvation, harvesting food destined for the surfaces of British tables.

  As the talk increased, the word “Canada” was spoken hundreds of times a day – on the roads, in the fields, near the doors of dismal cabins, at firesides – and pictures of the country, itself, began to be assembled by those who claimed to know something of the terrain or those who had once spoken to someone who had received a letter from across the sea. The optimists maintained that all who went there became rich, that golden nuggets tumbled in the streams, that vegetable crops were acclimatized to grow in snow, that fruit trees bore blossoms and fruit all year round – the latter being preserved, always fresh, by a thin coating of ice. The inhabitants, they said, lived in beautiful houses made of unmeltable ice in which they moved on skates from room to room on ice floors. When questioned, these sages said that the cold was another kind of cold altogether, a cold unlike anything ever experienced in Ireland. More like a dryness of the air, this cold, which froze everything around it, produced comfort. The settlers, they said, were so comfortable that they skated about with bare arms protruding from light cotton shifts, plucking the fruit (which was a different kind of fruit altogether – transparent and jewel-like) from the unstoppable orchards. Snowshoes were described, to an assembly struck dumb with amazement, as boots with baskets on the bottom or shoes with frozen nets encircling them. These, they claimed, were issued to every settler on arrival; arrival itself being determined by the moment when the ocean stopped and the comfortable ice began. One was then expected to tramp away from the ship in search of the perfect home of ice (of which there were thousands – empty and waiting), the thatch on their roofs in perfect frozen repair.

  The pessimists, as is often the case, spouted theories that bore more, though not much more, resemblance to reality. They scoffed at the tales of the optimists, saying that, although the cold was extreme, there was little, if any, ice at all. This was because the country was too new and, as a result, like all new things, in a state of great agitation. Nothing, they said, ever held still long enough to freeze. The water in all the lakes and rivers (of which there were many) tumbled and cascaded and climbed mountains and flung itself over cliffs and hungrily gobbled boats with more appetite than the waters of the Moyle. Everything was growing, they asserted, all the time, and a man who stood still for too long was likely to be pinned to the ground by rambunctious vines eagerly seeking light. Because of this growth, the pessimists continued, everything became, or had already become, too large. The mountains were unclimbable, the rivers unfordable, the forests impenetrable, and the trees in them unchoppable. The potatoes, if planted at all, were, in the end, unharvestable, in that, because of their remarkable growth, they were too heavy to be removed from the ground. And if by some miracle they were harvested, they were inedible because they continued to grow in the digestive tract after they were swallowed, causing certain death.

  The optimists agreed that everything was larger there, but speed, they argued, more than made up for the problems caused by size and distance. Wagons, they said, swept through the countryside on long knives pulled by huge, strong horses and in the odd moment when there was no ice to be had, one could avail oneself of boats of paper (another kind of paper altogether) that were so light and so swift that even the natives who designed and built them were astonished by the progress that they made on a sunny afternoon. Furthermore, the natives were on such good terms with the “others,” – the faeries – that they could count on the crops growing and the farm animals multiplying and they would generously use their influence in order to improve the lot of any starving Irish peasants in their midst.

  But the pessimists maintained that the landscape swallowed almost everyone who approached it. Gigantic insects were described that tore the livers out of the sides of men, women, and children, and packs of wolves moved through crowds like threshing machines. Storms, they said, snatched infants out of the arms of their mothers – even indoors – and rivers over-flowed aggressively, demolishing everything in their path. Moreover, it was futile to attempt to make roads through forests because trees reappeared as soon as they were cut down. Thousands of Irish men, who were always enlisted to break trails and make highways, had been sealed forever into forests and never seen again.

  For a few weeks the arguments between the two factions distracted the people from that fact that their children’s faces were becoming old and pinched, that their own bodies were practically unrecognizable from lack of food, and that the winter that they were attempting to survive was the darkest and coldest of the decade. When, at last, the selected families were announced, those going rejoiced in the theories of the optimists and those remaining behind were consoled by those who maintained a negative view.

  Then, into the cabins of all came a perplexing pamphlet, kindly donated by the landlords and entitled “Colonel Tarbutt’s Guide for Settlers in Upper Canada.” Both optimists and pessimists were snubbed, at this point, in favour of those, of either persuasion, who could read. Generally, the guide confirmed the opinions of the optimists and brought great joy to those about to depart. The perplexity was brought about by the appendix, which the Colonel had called “Suggested Accoutrements for a Gentleman’s Pleasant Pilgrimage,” and in which he had listed, in alphabetical order, various items that he, a veteran of the trek, felt should be taken along on a journey to the northern portion of the new world. These included ancestral armour, andirons, artillery, barometers, bath chairs, blazers for boating, bugles, caddies for tea, candelabra, castor oil, Christmas decorations, cricket bats, eau-de-Cologne, engraved prints of Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, and the Queen, Epsom salts, field-glasses, folio for pressed wildflowers, golf clubs, two good hounds for hunti
ng, ledgers, maps, microscopes, pianos, port, quinine, rose bushes, scotch whisky, tennis racquets, umbrellas, and Wellingtons. A final entry at the bottom of the list suggested that several pots of marmalade be packed and that a type of British plant known as “haws” be brought along so that pleasant hedgerows might replace those infernal rail fences.

  A great silence filled the field where those who were illiterate had gathered to hear the reading of the list, and the child – a boy of twelve – who had read it to them, hung his head afterwards as though he, himself, were responsible for the cruelty of its contents and the wretchedness of the group to whom he gave the information. One woman, who had recognized only eight or ten of the words recited, asked, hopefully, if perhaps the words were French – the only language other than Irish or English of which she had ever heard. The boy said nothing but walked away with the other quiet members of his family.

  For days after the reading of the list, each man, woman, and child who had heard it was away in contemplation of possessions that had been loved and lost. One remembered a chair with a carved pattern on its back, another a brooch given to her by the butcher’s son who had later jilted her. A few china pitchers painted with flowers came to mind or silver-plated spoons. One recalled the head of a china doll she had found on the side of the road and had kept carefully in a secret spot until her brothers had discovered and smashed it. The men thought mostly of livestock, a beautifully marked calf or a particularly healthy lamb or piglet. One old man, with tears in his eyes, thought about his cherished, bad-tempered rooster, whom he had called Cromwell and whom he had been forced to eat only two weeks before. Fiddles, flutes, and pocket-watches sang and ticked in the minds of the people and well-made harnesses and trusted turf spades squeaked and crunched. A middle-aged man thought, with great longing, of a wheelbarrow, picturing clearly the way the boards had aged and weathered and the two smooth spots that his grasp had worn on the handles.

  So concentrated had the people been in the past few months on the effort required to balance the idea of leaving Ireland against the cold and their hunger that they had forgotten the previous stages of hardship when the potatoes rotted in the fields, meat disappeared from the tables and then eggs and then milk, until finally the table itself was gone and the familiar stools that stood near it. But now when they dwelt upon their vanished possessions they did so with a terrible sense of loss. Many had only the clothes on their backs and some only one rough blanket, and, knowing this, they gathered their thin families together and crept into the dark of their empty cabins where Colonel Tarbutt’s Guide was torn in anger and tossed hurriedly onto what remained of their turf fires.

  During the course of the next few days, however, when storms painted the hills white or covered the rocks in glittering ice, another kind of possession began to build itself in the cottiers’ minds, and one by one men rose weakly from their attitudes of despair and began to describe to their wives and children what they had seen in their waking dreams.

  She is the colour of mahogany, they said, and taller and larger than the hall the landlords inhabit. Forty-five wings unfurl from her and her body is studded with nails of gleaming brass and she is clothed in ropes made from silken threads. The planks on her decks are polished and golden and reflect the fire of the sun and below them are rooms filled with emerald light caused by the fine green glass of her windows. Swifter than the gulls she is and as smooth.

  Slowly, the ship was built, timber by timber, in the crumbling cabins, until the emigrants-to-be held her in their hearts as the greatest possession of all. Then the little withered children staggered out into the rain where they built her themselves with sticks and bark and leaves, and sailed her on mud-puddle oceans, towards the other shore.

  OSBERT and Granville expended several boxes of vellum paper making lists and tallying accounts. They had already demolished reams of writing material sending enquiries and requests off to passenger-brokers, most of whom, it turned out, were either completely corrupt or utterly stupid. One had offered the suggestion that all Irish peasants should sleep on the deck – for their own good – because people of this class were unused to beds and bedding and were therefore uncomfortable when provided with such amenities. Another had attempted to charge them three times the going rate for each man, woman, and child. By the time the landlords had selected fifty of the most destitute families for the passage, things were more or less settled. Some of their tenants had expressed the wish to proceed to the United States on arrival where they had family or friends who appeared to be already established. Others claimed they would look for employment in the cities of Toronto or Montreal. Only a few stated that they wanted Canadian land; those who were strong, or those whose characters had instinctively wedded them to the soil and who could imagine no other way of life.

  Osbert was amazed to discover that he could acquire uncleared land for these emigrants – for little or no money – on the northern edges of townships with strange, unpronounceable Indian names. One particularly cynical land agent in Derry suggested that he should defer payment until the people arrived, since it was likely only half would survive the journey.

  “But the ships are clean and well maintained,” Osbert had replied, “and the food on them is of the highest quality, yes?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” said the land agent, turning away with a smile.

  Granville, rereading the list of those who were to emigrate, was surprised to find the schoolmaster’s name pencilled in at the bottom.

  “What’s this?” he asked his brother. “Is he so bad off then?”

  “Bad enough,” Osbert replied.

  “But he’s a smallholder … surely we shouldn’t have to bear –”

  “He pays his rent to us.”

  “Still, with five acres he should be able to grow enough –”

  “Enough what … potatoes?” Osbert demanded sarcastically.

  “Well, we certainly can’t start shipping away all the small-holders as well as the cottiers. Did he approach you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, surely you didn’t suggest this?”

  “Not yet,” Osbert was busily tidying papers. “I’m just about to. This afternoon, in fact.”

  “But why him? Why not O’Donovan or Flanaghan? What’s this all about?” Granville was becoming annoyed. “Why not the whole country? Why him in particular? Besides, he’s a good tenant, we should keep him.”

  “It’s not him.” Osbert longed to be out somewhere on the Cave Walk with his pen and drawing ink. He wished he was looking at a tiny life-form through his microscope; one that was incapable of conversation.

  “Why him?” Granville demanded again.

  “It’s not him,” Osbert sighed impatiently, “it’s her. The wife … the woman who was away.” Osbert glared suddenly at his brother from beneath fierce bushy eyebrows. “I won’t have her starve,” he announced, “I won’t have it.”

  “She petitioned you, came begging.”

  “She certainly did not. She would never, never do that.”

  “Perhaps they don’t wish to go.” He looked again at the paper in his hand. “Perhaps they don’t want this land you’ve obviously already arranged for them.”

  “Perhaps.” Osbert twitched in his chair and began to pull on his left ear, a habit since childhood. “Perhaps … but I’ll have to persuade them. They must go,” he was thinking aloud now. “They must go because of the light.”

  His brother regarded him in stunned silence.

  Osbert looked towards the window. “There’s this light in her, you see,” he said, “and it must not be put out. I can’t explain it, but I know that it must not go out, must be kept, somehow, though I’m not certain at all that it will shine as well across the ocean as it does here. Nevertheless,” he added assertively, “I will not stand by and see it fade.”

  “You’ve gone mad! How do you know this woman?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then, what’s all this nonsense about the lig
ht? Surely you haven’t begun to believe their wild tales. Charming, I admit, but utter flights of fancy.”

  “It has nothing to do with that,” said Osbert. “It’s just this subtle light. I saw it that day by the tidepool.” He was putting on his greatcoat and reaching for his walking-stick.

  “What day? What tidepool?” demanded Granville.

  Osbert did not answer. He was heading down the long hall past the glazed eyes of twenty stuffed puffins, towards the door.

  From where she sat on the stone at the cabin’s threshold, Mary was able to watch the landlord approach for a long, long time. At first he was only a dark shape, small, moving down the path that, from this distance, was no wider than your finger on the green hill. He caught her attention because, for the past few weeks, no one at all was to be seen moving confidently through the landscape. A few of the labourers in the morning and now and then the priest hurrying to administer last rites, but mostly the people’s energies were drained by the labour required simply to continue breathing.

  Mary, herself, had remained in this spot – her head against the frame and her back to the door – since she had dragged herself from sleep in the morning. Several bouts of cold rain had drenched her, but she hadn’t the will to stir. Inside, her husband and child remained as motionless as she – the former staring at the same page in the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia hour after hour, the latter rolling his little wooden spool from hand to hand across the floor on which he squatted. Mary could not bear to see Brian wince when he looked at her. She knew all her beauty was gone.