Away

by Jane Urquhart

  “The men spoke of starting a school,” said Brian. “Three miles to the east on the other side of Queensborough. They are looking for a master.”

  “What good will Greek or Latin be to the children here?”

  “What good were they to the children in Ireland?” Brian was excited by the possibility of education. “The Greeks,” he continued after a moment, “could never provide anything but intellectual food.”

  Liam thought suddenly of the visit of the man they called the itinerant preacher some weeks back. “I’ve come to provide some spiritual food!” he had announced at the door. “What?” he had said later, “You are Papists? Well, never mind, it’s the same God, the same Christ.” There was something, however, that made the boy believe that there were many Gods, and many Christs, and that theirs and the preacher’s were not the same at all.

  Liam watched the shadows of twigs, just beginning to leaf, move in a startling rectangle of sunlight that lay on the floor between his parents.

  “We didn’t go far,” said Brian. He began to scrape dried mud from one boot with the toe of the other. Clods of it littered the floor at his feet. “Not far at all. Only to the small lake below Madoc. We worked, mostly, on the bridge.”

  “What lake is that?” Mary asked.

  “It was the one we crossed on our way here.”

  She remembered the bridge from before, when they had first come to the forest, the sound of the wagon wheels on the planks and how she had looked over the edge towards the water, dark beneath a silvered surface. She remembered looking to the left and to the right where the lake blossomed, a mirror image of itself, beyond the pinched narrows that the bridge spanned. “Used to be,” the driver had told Brian, “that we’d raft settlers across, and all their belongings and horses and wagons too – before the bridge.”

  Brian sat down, stretched forward to unlace his boots, then leaned back in his chair, sighing. Even in the interior gloom Liam could see that his father’s face had been tanned by the outdoor labour. “Not far,” Brian said again, adding that he had seen men in narrow boats on the lake dressed in the skins of animals, their hair long like a woman’s. He turned to address his son. “They passed right under the bridge but did not speak to us. And what manner of men, Liam, do you suppose they might be?”

  The boy leapt to his feet and ran to his father’s side. “Indians!” he shouted, and then asked more quietly, “Were you afraid?”

  Brian laughed. “They were as mild as pups … but fine-looking. Talking they were, and singing, among themselves.”

  “Were there women with them,” asked Mary. “Or children?”

  “No women … no babies. The pathmaster said they were a company of hunters from a village of them somewhere at the western end of the lake. They are called Algonquins, or sometimes Ojibway.”

  “Algonquins,” repeated Liam, slowly. “Ojibway.”

  That night Liam heard his parents talking in bed, his father lamenting the lack of oxen of his own and worrying over the logistics of clearing more acreage. The men, he said, claimed there was a shield of rock six inches under some of the earth here, that a man could do better by burning the trees on his land for potash. Liam wondered if the ash was the same as that which collected under the cooking pots his mother used. Then he heard his mother say hesitantly, “Our stream, does it run to that lake, then?” and his father telling her that it ran to a river called “Black” and that it, in turn, ran to the lake below Madoc.

  “The lake,” his mother asked, “does it have a name?”

  The cabin was dark and outside the night was very still. Somewhere in the forest an owl asked a persistent question; a familiar sound, now, to the child who knew that no one – nothing – answered.

  “Brian,” Mary asked again, her words thickening with the suggestion of sleep, “what is the lake called?”

  “Moira,” he said. “It’s Moira Lake.”

  After this, the silence in the cabin was so prolonged that Liam assumed his parents had gone to sleep, and he closed his eyes and turned on his side towards the wall.

  THAT summer, during the final months of her pregnancy, Mary experienced an attack of energy so intense, a surge of such pleasurable strength, that she began to savour industry. Various new tools made their way to their cabin and became intimate companions – extensions of her new, vibrant body. She loved her largeness, her presence filling every space she occupied. Even the forest seemed to be comfortable with her confidence as she strode among its trees or searched the bark of maples for the lungwort that she used instead of yeast to make her bread rise.

  The need in her was great to create objects where there were none before; to cause cloth, candle, butter, bread to come into being under her hands. Demanding nails and planks and a hammer from her husband, she passionately banged together shelves and a rough cupboard for her pantry and, beginning with one hen and a rooster, she raised a brood of chickens for whom she constructed a tidy henhouse, making her husband laugh with surprise. She named the fowl after remembered things – Rathlin, Antrim, Moyle, Crannog – and in doing so, destroyed, for a time, the awful power of memory itself. There was no desire in her to make and sing poems, and no wish to stand quietly in the late afternoon searching the stream.

  With money from the roads, Brian had been able to purchase crocks and sealer jars, cutlery, tools, dishes, farm implements, and finally, for his wife, a wheel and loom. Starting, as they had, with nothing, the two adults were like gods creating a universe. The arrival of a pewter jug or a soup ladle could be an occasion for celebration. Household goods were fondled or stroked like pets, and under such care developed an animate life, a soul.

  Once a week, in the late afternoon, while Brian worked outside and the child ran free, Mary heated water over the fire. She poured the liquid into the large wooden tub and removed her clothes in order to bathe. As there were no mirrors in the cabin she had lost the sense of her reflected face, had learned instead, during these afternoons, the skin and bone and muscle of her limbs, the tight drum of her belly. She was delighted by the soft skin of her thighs and the firm curve of her calves. She was powerful and resplendent, the child turning in her womb, the warm fingers of water seeking the hidden corners of her flesh.

  Afterwards, she’d take a stool to the front of the cabin and comb out her long, damp hair in the sun. To the child Liam, hidden in the trees, the unbound hair seemed like a river of secret thoughts flowing from his mother’s skull. He wanted to touch and become part of it, but he would never approach her at these moments, sensing that his presence would be an intrusion. He held still, kept himself concealed, and gazed from a distance.

  As an adult this was how he would remember her; her head unleashing a torrent of fire, her throat exposed to air, her pale hands sailing down the red banner, pulling it apart so that sun and wind could enter it, the wall of forest shimmering with heat and light.

  And himself excluded from all the drama that emanated from her.

  He would not remember how he had sat on a stump outside the cabin two months later while a forest the colour of his mother’s hair was shattered by autumn winds and the sound of her cries filled the air, how he had covered his ears and squeezed his eyes shut, painting a picture of the white house in his mind, its windows and porches, its simplicity, so unlike the exterior of the small, dark cabin.

  When the neighbour woman showed him the baby and told him that her name was Eileen, Liam turned away in disgust and demanded his mother so vehemently that he was allowed to enter the cabin where she lay on a rope bed with all her wonderful hair plaited in a thick braid. But when she opened her arms the baby was placed in them and Liam stood apart at the end of the room.

  In the weeks that followed, Liam spent the days squatting between the house and the barn, sulking and drawing lines in the dry mud with a stick while inside his mother bent over the baby, the fire, and wept. Her loom was silent, her spinning wheel still, until, one morning, Liam entered the kitchen and saw that there was co
lour in her face and a brightness in her eyes. She was packing a bread-and-butter basket for his father, who would leave that afternoon with the pathmaster.

  Liam wondered whether or not his father might be taking the baby with him on his journey and pictured quiet days spent alone with his mother. But his father laughed and said he had not the equipment with which to feed it and his mother laughed too and embraced him.

  That night Liam’s mother taught him lullabies, singing them in both Irish and English. “Dusk is drawn and the green man’s thorn is wringed in wreaths of fog,” they sang together, and “Slumber from the dark wood comes to hold the world in thrall.” Then she showed him how to change the soiled cloth that was wrapped between his sister’s legs. Shyly Liam told her about the great white house and asked her if she remembered it. When she said she did not, he announced that one day it would be his and he would bring her with him to live in it.

  “And what of your baby sister?” his mother asked. “Will she be invited as well? Will you look after her?”

  Liam was silent. He looked at the small fists curled like snails inside the cradle.

  “Surely it is in you to look after small Eileen,” his mother said softly.

  “Yes,” he said, wanting to please, “it’s in me to look after her.” He was basking in his mother’s warmth, the feel of her hand on the back of his neck. She rocked the cradle with her left foot but her hand was on the back of his neck and her eyes were on his face.

  The next morning, when Liam’s dreams were pierced by the infant’s voice, he rolled over and looked across the room. His mother’s bed was vacant, the coverlet pulled across it smoothly as if she had not slept there the night before or as if no one had ever been there at all.

  The day was bright and clear, though the low November sun threw the shadow of the forest wall a great distance until, in the middle of the afternoon, it covered both the barn and the cabin. The boy spent most of the day in the sun, just beyond the house. In these spaces he believed he was still connected with his home – could place his hand on the edge of the shadow of the roof – but was also separate enough to ignore the baby’s crying. By the time the sun was blocked entirely by the forest, silence had fallen inside the cabin.

  It was in this partial dusk that Liam began to learn his parents as beings detached from him. The small field of winter wheat, the rich, as-yet-unharvested green, which he had helped his father sow, bent in the breeze as if preparing for the scythe. Various implements his father’s hands had held were propped against the barn wall, and looking at them the boy remembered how the muscles in the man’s back changed when he worked. He tried to imagine the span of time until his father would return, mud from the roads caked on his boots. But because such things as time and work and journeys had always been defined by his mother and father, he was unable to conceive of the length of a week, a month, or even a night.

  At first he had not allowed the idea of his mother to enter his mind at all, but, as the day darkened, and the increasing wind set her solitary white apron flapping on a string tied between two saplings, he called her name once and, without waiting for a reply, ran towards the forest and peered into the gloom. Standing entirely still he saw birds dart and chipmunks leap, and when he had remained frozen at attention for some time a female deer sauntered with her fawn across his line of vision not ten yards away. It was not his mother. “I am seven,” he whispered, thinking for the first time about his age.

  At twilight he turned his back to the eastern trees and walked towards the log structures feeling terribly the chill of the approaching evening. Inside, night had already arrived and Liam had no skills with which to combat it and none to combat the hunger that had, quite suddenly, attacked his belly. Eventually he found a bucket of water near the door and a crust of bread on the table. He ate and drank, warily, uncertain as to whether he might be punished. Then he groped his way through the cabin’s objects until he recognized the soft skin of candles, and he held them, one in each hand, for at least an hour, willing them to produce light. The baby had begun to cry again so the boy crawled back and forth across his father’s bass-wood floor until his hand brushed the pointed end of one of the cradle’s rockers, and he pumped it fiercely up and down attempting to achieve silence. He heard the thud of the small body hitting the sides of the interior as the wailing increased in intensity. Digging his fists into his ears, he shouted what he could remember of the lullabies his mother taught him, until, magically, a slim bar of light appeared on the table before the window. He staggered across the width of the cabin to the door and out into a world of icy wind and moonlight.

  It was then that he saw his mother – or what he would later, in his dreams, call his mother – slipping in and out among the pines on the opposite side of the stream as she had sometimes done in playful moments during their happy summer, making a game of it. Her form appeared and disappeared, multiplied, and then reduced itself. The moon was a huge ball thrown by her into the sky and the boy stretched his arms up towards it gleefully for a couple of moments before he ran towards her, laughter bubbling out of his lungs and over the dark field of winter wheat. As he approached she withdrew behind the cedars and spruce where thick black erased her. Liam crept away across scrub chalky with moonlight and frost. Humiliated. Then he half-turned and saw the multiple versions of her, straight and thin and white. His blood thundered in his ears at the sight of the many hers – one for him, one for his father, one to silence the baby – and he was running again towards the stream. Dark boughs moved up and down like huge wings across the bodies of these women. Liam stopped short. His vision changed. He ran his hands, in agitation, back and forth across his homespun sleeves. “White birches,” he said aloud, using the name his father had taught him, and repeating it, his voice a high song no one heard, “white birches, white birches.”

  He spent the night underneath the cow. He took one blanket from the cabin, after flinging another hastily over the wailing cradle, covering it completely. Then, frightened of the barely discernible shape it made in the dark, he slammed the door behind him. In the barn the animal’s heat drew him to her side. He placed his face against the tough, warm wool until, becoming drowsy, he scrambled down to the straw where he was strangely comforted by the slight shift of a hoof or the involuntary shudder of flank muscles.

  During the early, still-dark hours of the morning Liam dreamed the baby had grown to huge proportions, had burst through the cabin walls, its arms and legs flailing in forest and fields, its cry a deafening roar. He opened his eyes and clawed through the dark to the barn doors, swinging them open to a weak, grey dawn, then realized the monstrous sound came from behind him where the cow bellowed in pain in her stall. Relieved, he stumbled back and burrowed into the straw near her front hooves. As she groaned, the faint light from the opened doors revealed a cloud of fog issuing from her mouth and nostrils into the cold air. The child, remembering his mother’s cries, the baby’s wails, and now hearing this hollering cow, turned in the straw away from the source of the sound and saw the udder stretched tighter than his mother’s swollen belly and bluish milk drooling from the end of the teats.

  At first, while the cow howled with impatience, Liam held the cylinders of flesh in his two small hands, willing the milk to stream forth as he had seen it do under the attentions of his mother and father. When nothing happened he wrapped his arms around the engorged udder and embraced it until the cow roared in agony and the boy was hurled back onto the straw under the assault of the sound. The animal moaned and then became, for a moment, silent, and Liam was able to hear the faint cry of the baby in the cabin before the cow began again her desperate noise. Lying helplessly in the straw, Liam recalled the frail replica of the cow that his father had sold in town two months before and thought of his own mother’s frail replica now singing its hysterical song in the cabin, and he wept into his rumpled sleeve, adding his own voice to the chorus. He was linked by need to this sorrowful orbit of flesh and he shrieked in anger at the unfa
irness of his own appetite. In fury he searched the barn for an oak bucket which he subsequently flung under the grotesque skin bag. Then, grasping the teats with all the violence of his desertion and desire he crushed the warm flesh in his hands and the liquid gushed into the wooden receptacle.

  He was awkwardly moving into what he remembered of adult rhythms, while the cow moaned softly and was comforted.

  Liam pushed open the cabin door and stood listening in the half-light, the bucket steaming under his hand. When he heard nothing he dropped it heavily to the floor, spilling some of the liquid and causing the noise to issue again from the cradle. He seized a tin cup from the table, dipped it into the pail, and drank with his back to the howling wooden box. The milk calmed him and eventually he walked to the cradle and threw aside the blanket.

  His sister stopped crying and regarded him with clear, green eyes while he recoiled from the stench which rose from the cradle and filled the room. Then, as he withdrew, she began again a sound that reminded Liam of the call of a sheep. The boy collapsed on a stool, put his head in his hands, and shouted the words of a lullaby towards the floor. “Sidhe sail their boats till dawn upon the starry bog!” he yelled.

  When her wailing grew louder he dragged the bucket towards the cradle, snatched a spoon from a shelf and, almost gagging because of the smell of urine and faeces, he began, quite gently, to pour milk into the small mouth. Most of the liquid travelled down either side of the baby’s face and into the folds at the side of her neck. That which passed her lips caught in her throat and caused her to cough so violently that her face turned red, then purple while her limbs pumped urgently beneath soiled cradle cloths. When the seizure passed, the boy carefully lifted another spoonful from the pail, holding it level, and the baby’s tiny lips moved towards it. Liam spent more than an hour bending first towards the pail, then towards the baby, concentrating so fiercely that the world became the circle of the oaken bucket on his left, the rectangle of the pine cradle on his right, and the white oval of the milk-filled spoon floating from one to the other. Then, scrutinizing the small face, he saw that she was asleep.