Away

by Jane Urquhart

  They had stopped talking two weeks ago and now silence was a fourth among them. It had crept under the door and set up house in the kitchen the day that hope lifted like smoke up a chimney. Everything had been laid down to rust. Not just Brian’s spade, which Mary could see lying diagonally between her and the barn, but the child’s lists of new words and the man’s long rants concerning the unfairness of his lot.

  During the last of these outbursts Brian had smashed his fist through a pane of glass in the lower part of the cabin’s south window and the shards were still scattered in the grass. Mary had spent at least one hour today picking up one fragment and then another, looking through each of them towards the sky, noting how cracks picked up reflections of stones at her feet or how bubbles in the glass distorted clouds. If you tilted the broken edge, Mary discovered, it would mirror this or that facet of their holdings, randomly. She had been doing this for a while, when she saw her own gaunt face reflected, and in shame and disgust she kicked the shattered glass away from her. She had forgotten all about her slate which lay near the hearth inside, a curved crack like a ghastly smile running from one side of it to the other, a few Irish words chalked on its surface. Sometimes she spoke to the darling, absent one in poems or in snatches of songs.

  By the time the shadow of the landlord fell across the door-way where she sat, Mary had stepped into the day of the black stones and was reconstructing her discovery of the beloved other. “Lay your head there,” she was singing or saying, “where the warm breeze can blow the sea from your hair.”

  Osbert touched her arm and pulled her back from the sea and the stones. Then he followed her into the cabin where she squinted at him, or at the places around him where the light came from the window.

  “You must go away,” he was saying, “emigrate to Canada. I’ve booked your passage. The ship sails from Larne in a few weeks – for Quebec. You will go with the others. There will be land there waiting for you – acres and acres – more than you can imagine. The ship leaves in a few weeks – at the end of May – from Larne. Her name is the New World.”

  Mary looked at the objects discarded on the cabin floor. A pot, a ladle. She had almost forgotten how they were used now they were no longer in their proper place. Her mind tidied nothing. Not until she looked at the lantern standing on the table. She would not want to lose the lantern, illuminator of journeys. She would protect it, put it in a cupboard until she needed it.

  No one inside the cabin spoke to Osbert and he tried not to look at their altered faces. He stood for some moments near the window with his tweed cap in his hand, turning it and turning it so that his fingers touched the peak and then the back of the sweatband, over and over. Then he coughed nervously and departed.

  No one inside the cabin had spoken, but as Osbert walked away he knew that even the child had agreed to go.

  SHE placed the geography book on a large boulder and herself beside it.

  In the early morning light the incised continents stood out in exaggerated relief and it seemed to Mary as if her own approaching journey had given them more weight and substance. The cracks on the spine, where she had repeatedly bent the book open, were even more visible; etched reminders of her paths through the words of the book. She would show the dark, darling one this Canada, this place where she was going. She would show him the long river that thrust into its body and the lakes shaped like boulders which Brian said were also inland seas with no salt in the water. There was some hope in her mind that the beloved other would follow her there, and there was fear that he would not. That the land that had grown him, the sea that had drowned him, and the lake that had housed him would keep him here, far from her, forever.

  Now the water of Lough Crannog licked the rushes near the shore. Mary waited as she had learned now to wait, calmly, her hands palm upwards on her lap as if she expected them to fill with pools of rain. Bright glimmers of life darted near the water on blurred wings and occasionally a trout leapt, then plummeted, a flailing blade, into the lake.

  He breathed and the air shivered with constellations of bright kindreds. “Now it’s you,” he whispered, “this is what you take with you and what you leave behind.” She saw obsessed kings and warriors, torn by grief and guilt, monks curved over hinged books in scriptoriums, gypsies with roads flung like banners in front and behind them, women, terrible in the beauty of their first youth, and hags in tatters, the knowledge of years hanging like rosary beads from their crooked hands. A line of pale young men appeared, their shirts open to white throats, their sole employment to sing the great sorrows and then to die for love. The great scholars, distant, preoccupied, came to her carrying pictures of medieval poets; men and women from the bardic schools, lying prone in windowless rooms with large stones resting on their stomachs and ten thousand metered lines preserved in their heads. Saints held still, their raised arms thrust up to heaven for so many years that birds had come to nest in the cups of their hands. “These are not being shed,” the dark other said to her, “they are accumulated.” Then came the gifted teachers, and with them the moment when knowledge is passed from one mind to another.

  He showed her the teachers poised on the edge of the moment – a brown-robed brother guiding the hand of an acolyte through the deliberate strokes of calligraphy, a gypsy woman demonstrating the exact turn of a bare ankle to a young girl eager to begin dancing, a sailor showing a cabin boy how to twist a length of rope into the patterns of various knots, a woman setting threads on a loom while her daughter’s fair head was illuminated by the window that lit the task. And everywhere around was the quiet that accompanies the act of passing skill from one mind and hand to another. Last he showed her Brian gently breaking open the marks of the alphabet to reveal meaning and the light of understanding on her own face.

  The phrases of lessons he placed before her. “No, like this,” he said, and “Let me show you,” and “Now you try.”

  “This is what you carry with you,” he repeated, “this is your ship’s cargo. And when you go, this is what you become part of.”

  Then she saw the world’s great leavetakings, invasions and migrations, landscapes torn from beneath the feet of tribes, the Danae pushed out by the Celts, the Celts eventually smothered by the English, warriors in the night depopulating villages, boatloads of groaning African slaves. Lost forests. The children of the mountain on the plain, the children of the plain adrift on the sea. And all the mourning for abandoned geographies.

  “And you,” she asked, “will I take you with me?”

  “Yes and no,” he said. She saw that he was clothed in the feathered coat of a poet, that clots of birds’ nests rested in his hands, and that small fires guttered near his feet.

  As he moved into the lake he said to her. “It will be, at times, as if it were less hardship to be sleeping in the graveyard of your native land, to be asleep underneath the stones that cover your island in the sea.”

  FATHER Quinn came to see the emigrants depart – their sacks filled with pots, their heads filled with the beautiful ship they had mentally constructed, hunger clawing at their bellies. He approached Brian tearfully and thrust his beloved copy of Cicero into his hands. “You’ll think of me,” he said, “in some Canadian forest when you read this, I believe, and the walks we had looking out to Rathlin, talking about it all in better times. And as to her,” he said, looking at the ground and reddening in the face, “she has been a gift to you, I think.” He walked away, then, to join the priest from Ballyvoy in prayers and blessings for his people.

  A year later Quinn and many of his parishioners were dead, their silver teapots left to tarnish in the far corners of their sad, dismantled cabins.

  Granville strode back and forth from family to family ensuring that each had their tickets and their papers, assuring them that the ship’s rations were plentiful, and speaking of the bene-volent government in the new country. As the people bounced away in the carts their landlord was not aware that each man, woman, and child was composing a poem o
f farewell to a land-scape they had believed would hold them forever. The groan that rose from the ones left behind would be part of a long eulogy that those who survived would never tire of passing down to their children and their children’s children.

  Osbert was not there. He was bent, instead, over his microscope, studying a drop of water. But the prolonged keening slipped under his window frame and filled the halls of Puffin Court, causing him to look up and around. He thought of the tidepool and the beautiful creatures he had wrenched from it and the light in the woman’s face, and fear and loss came to sit beside him at his table until he covered his ears to free himself from the wailing that seemed to be pouring out of all the familiar objects in his room.

  Brian turned towards his wife who was pale, closed off from him and the others in the departing wagon, her eyes lowered as if she were watching the edge of the road. Her lips were dry and cracked but they were moving and a thin sound emerged. Singing, she was singing. He leaned against her, wanting to share whatever prayer she had been moved to utter. The child’s head rolled back and forth across her thin chest as the wagon jolted forward.

  Brian caught the words of his wife’s song. It was not a prayer she was singing:

  If I were a blackbird,

  I’d whistle and sing,

  I’d follow the ship that my true love sails in.

  And in the top rigging,

  I’d there make my nest,

  And I’d cradle my head

  On my true-love’s breast.

  When Osbert slumped again over the microscope and peered down its miniature tunnel, he did so just in time to see that which he was looking at vanish. Although he had witnessed the moment of evaporation, magnified, many times before; this time it shocked and moved him to such an extent that he pushed the instrument away from him and drew the old red curtains all around the room.

  II

  A Bird on a Branch

  ESTHER knows exactly what she is doing as she lies awake in the night. She is recomposing, reaffirming a lengthy, told story, recalling it; calling it back. She also knows that by giving her this story all those years ago her grandmother Eileen had caused one circle of experience to edge into the territory of another. The child that Esther had been had drawn circles like this with her compass when she was in school, had shaded with her pencil the place where the two circles intersected; a small dense area with white empty pools on either side – a partial, a fractional eclipse. The grey shaded shape, she remembers, had been like a single willow leaf lying on the page.

  It is very dark now. Were it not for the cement company’s pier, which sheds its light faintly over Loughbreeze Beach, the room at this hour would be utterly black. Sometimes it had been so dark in the forest, Old Eileen had told her, that night became more than air and absence of light, became something you drowned in or swam through until morning.

  Esther lying still in her sleigh-bed feels like an Irish poet from a medieval, bardic school. She is aware that those men and women lay in their windowless cells for days, composing and then memorizing thousands of lines, their heads wrapped in tartan cloths, stones resting on their stomachs. Esther has neither rocks nor plaids with her in this bed but shares with the old ones a focused desire. Nothing should escape. Line after line must be circulated by memory among the folds of the brain. Not a single calf, for instance, should be permitted to stray from The Cattle Raid of Cooley; the scent of the herds must be kept, always, within the range of the nostrils.

  Soon cows will begin to saunter, casually, into Esther’s story, their black markings like continents adrift on polar seas.

  The cows are gone, now, from Loughbreeze Beach Farm, they have drifted into the cedars beyond the ruined pastures. There is no song, no call that will make them turn and begin the sedate evening journey homewards. They graze only in fields raked by the light of memory. Esther sees herself as a child recognizing the strength of memory, putting aside ephemeral, destroyable books as old Eileen’s voice built a story within the closed rectangle of a room.

  At the quarry the men of the evening shift are growing restless. They began to work in the midst of heat and light and are now labouring in chill and darkness of the hour before mid-night. They are open-pit men, earth-movers, makers of dust and noise. They have never seen glistening rock walls lit by lanterns or experienced underground rain. All moisture is the enemy, they fear the Great Lake that is their neighbour. Hydraulic pumps work night and day removing groundwater from the quarry floor.

  Some of these men have handled fuses, have prepared the blasting caps of dynamite under the late-afternoon sun. Some of them have pulled the rope that activates the alarm – the five short and two long moans that remind Esther of extinct telephone exchanges. All of the men have watched showers of rock spring up from the earth and fall again like grey fountains. No matter how long they have worked at the quarry they are always moved by this display of danger and power.

  They are separated from the men on the lakeboat by an instinctive fear of water, a pier, and a conveyor belt, and therefore know none of the sailors by name. They are separated from the men at the refinery by forty miles of Great Lake. They never think about either of these separations.

  Not a single herd of cattle grazes in their dreams though many of their fathers and grandfathers were farmers. Sometimes they have nightmares in which they are buried by an unforeseen fountain of rock or drowned by the Great Lake pushing angrily through the south wall of the quarry.

  But mostly their sleep is untroubled, undisturbed or even comforted by the distant rumble of machinery activated by the men of the midnight shift who have come to take their place.

  Esther is thinking about houses: the one in which she lies, the one buried by sand, the one struck by lightning. When she spoke of the curse of the mines, could Old Eileen have foreseen the annihilation of the geography of Loughbreeze Beach? Hers had been a life during which houses were being constructed, kept, embellished, a life during which forests were torn apart in an attempt to reproduce the pastoral land-scape of the British Isles. This was one of the essential differences between them: in Eileen’s world abandoned structures decomposed, sinking back into the landscape from which they had sprung. In Esther’s lifetime she has seen architecture die violently. It has been demolished, burned, ripped apart, or buried. Nothing reclaims it. Just as the earth at the quarry is wounded beyond all recognition and no one remembers the fields that flourished there.

  IN truth, the white house nearly blinded the six-year-old boy. Although he had been in the new country for almost three months, it was, nevertheless, the first particle of the huge strangeness that he had allowed his gaze to rest upon. It shone in the Great Lake harbour like a lamp, brighter than the sun that lit it. As the lakeboat in which they rode moved through the waves towards shore, the house appeared to breathe heavily and draw itself up like something alive. The boy was afraid of it and enchanted by it and convinced that light was pouring out of, not into, its windows. In its rooms, he imagined there would be music like Mass being sung, but louder. Then he remembered Father Quinn’s visits to his parents’ cabin, and their own parish priest in the cold church, and suddenly he was not certain where he was.

  The white house had broken in, through the boy’s eyes, to everything that had closed in him, and now the stimuli of the place where it stood assaulted his senses. There were shouts from the men on the jetty as the boat drew alongside and the boy’s ears rang with the sound. The heat of the sun on his hair and the warmth of his mother’s hands on his stomach were suddenly heavy and oppressive, that and the moist air that did not smell of salt, though the water behind him rolled towards a naked horizon.

  Not far from the boy, lying motionless on the deck, was a girl not much larger than himself who had died on this journey from Quebec. Her mother and father crouched beside her and stared out over the lake while her brown curls twitched in the breeze and one fly crawled listlessly from eyelid to eyelid. The boy did not look at her, took the full brunt of
the white house into his sight, instead, until his eyes watered.

  What the child had forgotten and would not remember until years later were the crowded docks of Larne and the journey there, the suffering, starvation, the desperate throngs on the wharf. He had forgotten the dark belly of the ship where no air stirred and, as the weeks passed, the groans of his neighbours, the unbearable, unspeakable odours, his own father calling for water, and the limp bodies of children he had come to know being hoisted through the hatch on ropes, over and over, until the boy believed this to be the method by which one ascended to heaven. He had forgotten his own sickness which drew a dark curtain over the wet, foul timbers of the ship’s wall and the long sleep that had removed him from the ravings of the other passengers until he wakened believing that the shrieked requests for air and light and liquid was the voice of the abominable beast, the ship that was devouring a third of the flesh that had poured into its hold. And after ten weeks crouched on the end of his parents’ berth on the New World, and six weeks confined to a bed with five other children at the quarantine station at Grosse Isle (some lying dead beside him for half a day), he had forgotten how to recall images, engage in conversation, and how to walk.

  Now the white house burst out at him from the collection of darker buildings in the new harbour; glass and carved verandahs and whitewashed clapboard. The reflections in the large windows of the white house held his attention because he thought he was seeing the house’s own memories painted there. When he closed his eyes he could see a picture of the white house as clear and detailed as that which lay before him. Then, with his eyes open, he saw the Great Lake, some shoreline trees, and the masts of the boat jerking on the surface of the building’s windows.