Away

by Jane Urquhart

  His mother placed one hand on top of his head, then moved it down to rest flat against his back while the other hand remained firm across his stomach. He looked beyond the house and the small harbour town, for a moment, to a line of hills and heard his father say, “That darkness there … that darkness would be the forest.”

  His mother did not answer but shifted, instead, the boy’s weight on her lap. He was six years old and he had forgotten how to walk. She had come looking for him after they had been separated at the quarantine station at Grosse Isle in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. She had lifted him out of the bed. He had scarcely been out of her arms since.

  A free land grant awaited them in Hastings County in Upper Canada and they should have disembarked at Belleville. His father had been standing at the railing when this town was pointed out – a bouquet of spires in the distance – and, realizing that they had taken the wrong boat, he had run back and forth on the deck pleading with various lake sailors to make the vessel stop. But they had told him that the boat went to Port Hope, that he must hire a wagon there to take him north, then back east. Brian spent the remainder of the journey pulling the few pounds he had been granted out of his pocket and putting them back in again, knowing all would be gone once he had paid the fare for the vehicle and purchased a few supplies.

  The boy heard the mother of the dead child ask again and again, “Is there no priest, is there no priest to bury her?” until his own mother said “Oh God,” and wept and rocked him and called him by his name, “Liam, Liam,” while the white house he was looking at moved from side to side with her motions.

  They had set foot on the new land twice before – at the quarantine island and the docks of Quebec – but Liam did not remember either time, so this crowded harbour and the gleaming white house with memories of the Great Lake painted on its windows was to be his kept point of entry, the beginning for him of the long story – a remembered birth. The child was being flung into a world it would take him years to know and understand. Even as he sat in his mother’s arms, and twisted his neck to keep the white house in view, the great forests had been felled twenty miles back from the lake and, further north, trees at this precise moment were groaning and crashing through their neighbours’ arms to the forest floor. In a few years’ time, Liam would know corduroy roads and rail fences and stumping machines, horses and cutters and banks of snow taller than a man, and the webbed shoes shaped like teardrops that one must wear to cross fields in winter. He would know the smell of wood in newly constructed buildings and the view through glass to graveyards only half filled with alert white stones. He would come to be familiar with cumbersome tools invented to cut through the flesh of trees or to tear at earth and rock.

  During the next few days as the wagon on which the family rode rocked and swayed over the mire of the roadbed, through forests that sunlight barely penetrated, Liam held fiercely to the image of the white house, believing that at the end of this journey its brightness would greet him. It would be a huge, calm lantern in these frantic woods, its clapboard smooth and clean, the Great Lake shining and alive on each of its many windows.

  But when the wagon deposited them under the outstretched arms of massive fir trees and disappeared into the further realms of the forest they were filled with dread, knowing themselves to be in a region where nothing at all was constructed and everything was engaged in haphazard growth. What with illness, quarantine, and then waiting out the winter freeze in Quebec, it had taken the family a year to reach this spot. Now they were terrified of the paradise they had imagined. To the boy in particular, the flowers and grass had become huge and terrifying, he and his parents had been reduced in size, and the sky had been blocked, forever, from the world.

  Mary and Brian left Liam at the base of one of the trees and began to use what they remembered from the old place to drive away their own fears. While the forest shrieked, whistled, and moaned, his father tied branches together, constructing a shelter reminiscent of the abandoned hedge school at Ballyvoy. His mother had gone further afield and was standing, partly concealed by trees, looking towards the ground.

  She was far from Liam, gone from him. Now and then the wind moved low branches and bushes, revealing a portion of her grey skirt or the back of her head and gleaming red hair. She appeared so small beneath the trees Liam feared that she might fade altogether into the forest. There was nothing about her, from this distance, that faced her family. She was fragmented by the confusion of the trees, their shadows making her appear and disappear, and she flickered like a flame about to go out. Panic moved its cold hand down the child’s spine. He drew back from a shadow that propelled itself towards him, and then again from a magnificent sunbeam that followed in its wake. He called his mother but the surf sound of the leaves and a flock of screaming crows masked his voice. He had scarcely been out of her arms since she had lifted him from the bed at Grosse Isle.

  Liam rose shakily, and for the first time, to his feet and began to move unsteadily towards her. A tremendous amount of noise from fallen and breaking twigs, from branches pushed aside and snapping back into place, made him think that she must turn to him and witness the miracle of his steps.

  But she was calling instead and looking away from him towards Brian. “Brian!” she shouted. “If there’s a stream like this, should it not lead to somewhere … to a lake or the sea? Should it not lead us to somewhere else?”

  THE first night the family huddled under a roof of cedar limbs on a mattress made from the boughs of the same tree. They lit the lantern, which had miraculously survived the ocean journey, the lake voyage, and the jolting of the wagon on the road to this spot.

  Soon their shelter was invaded by moths the size of the eagles they remembered from Ireland, and these frightened Liam to such an extent that Mary and Brian decided to abandon themselves, and him, to the impossible darkness. They lay, stiffly, side by side, eyes open against the inky black, certain that if they succumbed to sleep they would be torn to pieces by wild animals. Mary wept quietly and the boy pressed himself against her to absorb the comfort that her body gave. Brian measured his weakened frame against the forest outside and prayed for the strength to swing an axe. In their secret hearts Mary and Brian believed that having survived famine, disease, an unbearable ocean voyage, and separation at the quarantine station at Grosse Isle, it was their destiny to die in these moaning woods where heaven was blocked from their view by leaf and wood. The month was August, the air sultry. There was neither moon nor stars. The man, woman, and child were exhausted. Eventually they slept.

  The next morning they cooked some of the salt pork and cut some of the bread they had got in Queensborough, a rough village they had passed through shortly before the wagon stopped to let them out. In their confusion they had no idea how to return to this pocket of civilization, not being able to determine the direction from which they had come. Still, the road, hardly more than a track, and the indentations the wagon wheels had left in the soft mud, gave them some comfort. They ate squatting by the roadside, not speaking, and wiping their mouths with the backs of their hands.

  The boy heard the noises first and lifted his head from his food like a small animal that has smelled danger. Brian and Mary froze, became alert, stiffened their spines, as from every direction the noise of sticks breaking and twigs snapping moved towards them. Men with wild hair and unkempt beards began to emerge from between the trees, followed, in some cases, by women of indeterminate ages. The men carried huge tools, saws the length of curraghs and axes with blades the size of a horse’s head.

  Liam began to whimper as his parents rose cautiously to their feet. Then he heard the largest of the men speak to his father in a voice whose lilt was familiar and Irish, and out of the baskets they carried he saw that the women were pouring a river of food. More and more people arrived, from all directions, until Liam believed that some of the forest’s trees had been magically transformed into human beings.

  While the men chopped trees, their
wild hair flying, their bare backs glistening, the women sang the song of the axe; a metallic series of sounds, a brutal cry. When the men faced each other in pairs, swaying backwards and forwards in unison – sharp teeth of the saw cutting the wood between them – the women sang the song of the saw, the notes of the melody, long and thin and piercing. Soon the staccato song of the hammer filled the new raw field of light that had been installed, squarely, in the midst of the forest. When the roofbeam of the cabin was raised, the song became an announcement of victory, a celebratory shout in which the men joined. Later, even the children sang the mellow-toned song of warmth and comfort that accompanied the building of the stone chimney and hearth.

  Liam watched the crude cabin rise and remembered the white house which he now believed had abandoned him. He saw his mother move among the other women, shy and slight, in the midst of the enthusiasm of their songs. He recalled the shapes of the previous night’s menacing insects and imagined himself smothered by their wings inside the log house. Then he saw his father walking easily among the other men; his back straightened and arms strengthened by shared work and companionship and he straightened his own back and practised his new steps on the unfamiliar ground.

  Late in the afternoon the boy walked over to the stream that his mother’s attention had fixed upon the previous day. He looked through the clear water to a sand bed, where small fish swam, and downstream to a collection of bright pebbles. No boulder, no log stopped or changed the direction of the stream. His mother had said “somewhere else” and “elsewhere.” Eventually, Liam knew, this water would carry him to the bright home whose memories of water he had seen in its windows.

  WHEN summer was finished the family was visited by a series of overstated seasons. In September, they awakened after night frosts to a woods awash with floating gold leaves and a sky frantic with migrating birds – sometimes so great in number that they covered completely with their shadows the acre of light and air that Brian had managed to create. Sumac burst, in the course of one cold night, into clusters of red flame and the dark pines swayed in a strange wind. The autumn change was so profound, so convincing that both Mary and Brian felt that it was an aberration that might be permanent, and this, because it frightened them, they did not speak of. Only Liam sensed in the stir of the air a preparation for something else, and he responded to this by standing in the midst of the swirling leaves shrieking with nervous, wild laughter. He gathered the chestnuts that pummelled the ground and looked into the tiny demonic eyes of hysterical squirrels. When he visited the creek he often saw his mother standing quietly further downstream, passive, inert. He, fascinated by a swerving current, the twitch of a fish, the way gold leaves were swept towards the somewhere else that she had spoken of, wanted to know what it was that held her there, so silent, unmoving, entranced by water.

  Although Liam had almost forgotten the open breadth of the abandoned country, his mother’s songs could bring back to him the interior of the old cabin; the cot he had slept in and the black pot hanging over the fire. The flat stone near the threshold had appeared, once or twice, inexplicably in his dreams, dissolving just before he woke. Occasionally a Gaelic phrase would wander through his mind and he would say it aloud to a forest that had never heard its like before.

  Liam began moving less tentatively each morning into a world of unchartable visual richness – the shimmering planet of the forest. Leaf and leaf and shadow, shadow and sunlight scattered there, and over there, by the wind. In this vibrant September he remembered the terror of late summer storms that had darkened noon and thundered at the door while lightning tore at the tops of thrashing pines, and because most of his previous life had been erased he played with these memories and even the fear connected to them as if they were bright new toys.

  His father, having sown his first crop of winter wheat, would leave the acre of light, for a few days, to open up the west end of the road with the other men, for government money, and on other days ride in a neighbour’s wagon into Queensborough for supplies. The yellow paper covering the cabin’s two small windows was replaced by bubbled glass and Liam learned the word “mullion” which sounded in his mouth like the liquefied view of trees he saw when he woke in the morning. When the wheat struggled towards the light, late in September, it looked stunted, embarrassed by its own uniformity near ragged stumps and untamed wilderness. Later in the season, his father would harvest it by hand and take bags of it in a neighbour’s wagon to O’Hara’s Mill, returning at night with five bags of flour and a weak calf in exchange.

  Sometimes Liam spoke to the calf, who looked at him with mild, brown eyes. The boy believed that they were both children, that the calf, also, had turned six years old.

  By the end of October, Liam spent his days running along the edge of the forest, his high laugh piercing through a golden and red shower of leaves. The woods appeared to be breaking apart, like a coloured-glass window, to let in light and air. His father brought back from the company of men a hundred words for trees and bushes and made the boy say them to his mother in the evenings. At night Brian told stories in Latin – a language that Liam didn’t understand but loved nonetheless for its soft sounds, the Ulli, arum, alla, orae, which tumbled near the fire.

  No one in the small family had ever seen fires such as these, their experience being limited to smouldering turf, and at first they spent full evenings staring, transfixed by the sight of the rabid flame that gobbled dry wood and became ash in the space of an hour. Mary, exasperated by the fire’s greed – its need for constant feeding – told her child about turf fires on the island where she was born that had lived, without the aid of a match, for two hundred years. You buried a piece of turf, she said, in the evening ashes and fanned the flame out of it the following morning. It was in those hearths, she maintained, to keep a fire at their centre. But she did not tell him of the cold ash of their last days in Ireland or how, in desperation, she had thrust the grey powder into his mouth and her own.

  Winter arrived suddenly and with fierce determination in November before they had learned how to make the fire last the night. Liam woke to a thin covering of ice crystals on his blanket and, not knowing that they had been formed by the moisture in his own breath, he thought that the coverlet itself had begun to freeze and wondered how it kept him warm. Three days later the first of the winter storms plunged down from the north while the boy and his parents huddled, stunned, against the cabin’s southmost wall and prayed that the pessimists back in Ireland would not be proved correct in their predictions. When they had survived the second and then the third of these catastrophic occurrences, their terror abated somewhat, though not enough that they went willingly, or often, into a world either darkened by white storm or painfully bright as a result of sharp sun on snow. Winter became a season of waiting, almost of hibernation, the odd neighbour breaking into the trance of the cabin, the calf growing miraculously, near the hearth, to adulthood, its dung burned daily on the hungry fire.

  Spring eliminated the visits of the neighbours altogether as the road became a river of mud, caused, first, by an unthinkable quantity of melting snow and then by unceasing rain. When the white flower they called “trillium” blossomed into an unbroken whiteness on the forest floor, Liam thought that winter had returned. He was able to walk about outside, then, and help his father, a little, with the building of a small log barn for the cow, or with the sowing of grain and potatoes until Brian departed for the government work on the roads and Liam was left alone with his mother.

  Mary had begun, as before, to stand beside the stream, late in the afternoon, with her arms hanging loosely at her sides, as if she were resting after the completion of a significant gesture, and when the wind came Liam could see the sun burn in the hair bundled at the back of her neck. He loved her fiercely, then, though he knew she was gone from him and that whatever she sought did not concern him. She had spoken of the stream only once in the winter, asking his father if it had been killed outright and whether or not it would be
likely to return. He had assured her that it would, that it was alive, even then, several feet under the snow, though the boy noticed that the certainty in his father’s voice when telling the names of trees was no longer there.

  When the stream did return, it was not at all what the father, the mother, or the child had expected. Swollen to five times its usual size, it hurtled past the acre of light, taking some recently ploughed earth with it. It was dangerous and untouchable and revealed nothing of what lay beneath its surface. It made a sound similar to the waters of the Moyle but unlike anything the family had heard in the new land.

  Liam was forbidden to approach the water at this time for fear he would be snatched by the monstrous stream and carried off to somewhere else altogether.

  Returning from the roads, Brian shone, brilliant, in the cabin doorway, then moved heavily into the interior across the bass-wood floor. Over the winter he had made five or six pieces of furniture: three chairs, a table and, as the thaw began, a hooded pine cradle. He touched this lightly in passing, ran his hands over Liam’s hair, then approached his wife, who stood beside one of the windows.

  “I need a wheel,” Mary said, “and some wool. I need some moulds and some wax for candles.”

  “How are you, Mary,” the man asked. “Does it move?”

  She stretched and placed her palms against the small of her back. “Yes,” she said, “I think I felt it kick.”

  The boy watched his father look at his mother’s belly. Out-side, the air erupted into urgent cries as a flock of geese travelled over the trees towards the north.

  “Was the work bad?” the mother asked. “Did you go far?”