Away

by Jane Urquhart

  The cloths of her bed were soggy with spilled milk and urine. The surrounding air was filled with the reek of her. But Liam had achieved silence. He opened the door and listened to the absence of noise from the barn, noticing a cold rain had begun to fall. With distaste but determination he undressed his sleeping sister and threw her putrid garments into a puddle beside the front stoop. He washed her with water from the bucket near the door and set her shrieking once again from the shock of the frigid cloth. He stuffed her arms into a flannel garment he had dug out of a wooden box along with strips of white material, which he tied around her legs and buttocks. She quietened once again.

  While he was performing these tasks, his teeth chattering with cold, he remembered a tin box, no larger than an adult’s hand, and the thin wooden twigs with coloured heads that filled it, and with this memory came the knowledge of how his mother had produced the heat, the light, the fire.

  Three days and nights passed in the company of the cow, the fire, the baby – the waxing and waning of heat and sound and light. Once or twice Liam heard the sound of a wagon rumbling on the rough concession road but, locked within the pattern of his tasks, he did not attempt to intercept it. Once, while he was carrying a bucket of water from the creek, someone he knew galloped by. The man waved and Liam barely returned the greeting, as if fearing that one gesture disconnected from the sphere of labour he had built would break the spell and cause his world to fragment.

  On the evening of the third day the baby smiled when he approached her cradle, and he stopped, then, and picked her up, holding her warmth against his chest for a long, long time. She had become his, they would always be connected.

  Brian, returning, heard his son’s high, thin, singing voice. As he approached the cabin he saw his wife’s apron shuddering, like a ghost, a memory, on the string between the trees. He was composing words of praise for the boy but his body was chilled and hollow because he knew, without enquiries, that there was an emptiness about the place. Something had claimed his wife as she had been claimed once before; some other history or geography had taken her away. But this time nothing at all would be left in her place, except two children, one of them unweaned.

  Tomorrow Brian would scythe the winter wheat, cutting down the summer green with the despair of a man who has known hunger and desertion.

  Now he would enter the warmth his son had made, and take the young boy’s body in his arms.

  SOMETIMES when Brian looked around the interior of his cabin he thought he could actually see his wife’s absence. The air seemed odourless, empty, and so clear that all the objects she had touched and then abandoned were well-drawn, unbearably distinct, their colours deeper, their edges sharper, so that it was painful for him to look at them. Her goods and her gear, he thought, remembering a song. Then the song itself ran over and over in his mind:

  The people they say that no two are well wed,

  But one has a sorrow that never was said.

  And she smiled as she passed with her goods and her gear,

  And that was the last that I saw of my dear.

  There were times when, humming this tune – looking at a churn or an apron – he thought he might go mad.

  Liam spent some of his time beside white birches, stroking the pale paper skin with his fingers or staring at clusters of the slender trees from a distance, until the snow came to stay and in the white world they were no longer startling enough to hold his attention. His mother’s disappearance tied him closer to his father. They shared the loss and a silent agreement that they would never speak about the loss.

  With the coming of winter a sad calm fell over the little family, interrupted only once when a well-meaning matron from Madoc arrived in a rattling sleigh with the intention of adopting the baby girl. Liam, sensing the purpose of her visit, crouched by the cradle, growling, and when the woman drew near he lunged and bit her ankle. She departed, then, in great wrath and declared to her friends at church meetings that, like most Irish and all Papists, the boy was mad and dangerous and his father dim-witted and unable to speak. As the sound of the sleigh bells grew fainter and fainter, Liam had sobbed in his father’s arms, the baby pressed between their bodies. “She’s mine,” he whimpered. “She’s mine, she’s mine!”

  Four years passed and the world around them opened. The forest parted its dark curtains and allowed the entrance of a few more ragged settlers, who did their best to till the rocky land, and a couple of wild-looking Scandinavian prospectors whose finds led to a scattering of iron and tin mines.

  Brian was introduced by one of these men to two thin boards, curved at one end, which could be strapped to a man’s boots. On these one could glide over the surface of the snow at great speeds, using a long pole for balance. His first attempts at this method of transportation were disastrous, leaving him trapped face-down in awkward positions in the snow while the prospector bent over with laughter near the barn. When the Finn departed for the foothills of California he left his strange equipment with Brian. “Learn to use them,” he said, “and you’ll go down in history as the first bog Irishman on skis.”

  Liam – now eleven – and Brian worked together, taking their grain to O’Hara’s Mill at Bridgewater, growing potatoes, corn, barley, oats, and breeding a modest menagerie of animals. A family of Holstein cattle was mothered and grandmothered by the cow Liam had called Moon in memory of the night he had spent with her, the ball he had seen in the sky, and the white circle of redemptive milk which had filled the oaken bucket.

  His father named the first-born bull McGee, after the editor of a newspaper called the American Celt that he was sometimes able to get his hands on at the mill when O’Hara had finished reading it. This man McGee is a poet, Brian would tell his son on winter evenings, and a great believer in the music and literature of Ireland. He is a wonderful champion of our people here on the other side, and younger than I can ever remember being. He gave a lecture tour throughout Upper Canada. He’s a man, Brian asserted, that any Irish man, woman, or child should want to listen to. He understands the injustice, he said, the terrible black heart of it.

  Liam paid him no mind. He was more interested in seed catalogues. He wanted to make everything he could grow out of the ground. He was only a boy but rumours had already reached him of farms with vast, lush acreages. Some day he would grow sugar cane and pineapples. All he remembered of Ireland was a flat stone beyond the threshold of a door, the rest of the past had fallen away.

  The first time Brian had applied to the Board of Examiners at Madoc, offering his services as a teacher, he was refused. Claiming that they objected to his lack of formal training, and the distance he would have to walk from his farm to the nearest schoolhouse, this group of Methodist men, many of whom were in the process of founding Orange lodges in their various villages, were in fact suspicious of Brian’s Irish background in general and his loose association with the “Popish church” in particular, and not a little put off by the large store of knowledge he insisted on displaying during the interview. After a few years, however, when the tiny log school on Concession Road Five remained untenanted, they overlooked their secret Orange Oath to stamp out all those of Papist inclination, and offered Brian twenty pounds a year to instruct between fifteen and twenty students, many of whom were of Irish parentage themselves. Liam did not attend the school. He was left at home to take care of small Eileen and the animals while each day his father walked or travelled on skis the four miles there and four miles back.

  Brian had been especially moved by the schoolhouse the first time he inspected it. Everything in it and around it – from the log frame to the benches for students and the master’s desk and chair – had been hand hewn by the earliest settlers twenty years before. It was neither made of wattle nor concealed by hedges, but it was kin to the forest that surrounded it. And its existence and survival seemed so unlikely and against the odds that, in spirit, it reminded Brian of the little, desperate academy that he had kept in Ireland. He decided he would te
ach some of the Irish language to his students, until the school inspector insisted that he stop. Liam was taught at home and he, in turn, instructed Eileen. This system operated so well that Liam was advanced in the classics at eleven and she, whom they called the baby, could read and write by the age of four.

  Brian’s loneliness for his wife was most acute in the evenings, though assuaged somewhat by the presence of the children. But, now and then, when he saw Eileen’s cloud of red hair glowing in the firelight or noticed a distant look in her green eyes, he experienced a chill of recognition and wondered if it were wise to tell the stories of the old sorrows deep in this forest so far from home. But because of his belief in the influence of landscape, he hoped that the tales were as divested of power, far from their native soil, as the German and French and Danish fairy tales that the children at his school were beginning to learn in their Upper Canadian Readers.

  The road that passed in front of the acre of light – which had, itself, become several acres of light – was becoming the site of a capricious and irregular parade, sometimes consisting of one or two appearances a day, sometimes allowing a week to pass before another spectacle revealed itself. Tinkers, peddlars, cobblers, mail coaches, circuit riders, and travelling medicine shows, all moved along its surface. Once, a small disoriented circus appeared, seeking its next engagement at Tweed. The ringmaster was horrified to discover that he was heading northeast instead of southwest and cursed so loudly and so eloquently that Liam decided the man must be a poet and an orator like the man McGee whom his father went on and on about. The resident parrot of this company, which the boy was told had originally belonged to a pirate, chanted “bones and blood, bones and blood,” as the troupe and its vehicles drew itself together, turned, and lurched away. When he had expressed his amazement, Eileen had simply looked at her brother and said, “Birds can talk the same as you and me.”

  In winter, after the ground solidified, visions sped past so quickly that Liam hardly had time to register the sound of bells and run to the window before the excitement had disappeared on steel runners. Sometimes he saw only an icy fog, composed of the breath of humans and animals and cast over the dark glimpsed shape of something he was never quick enough to interpret. And sometimes, when he was certain that he had heard bells, absolutely nothing at all could be seen beyond the white wall of snow created by the wind between the cabin and the road.

  ON an icy morning in February, before light, Liam’s seven-year-old sister woke him to tell him of a dream. While their father banged the stove lid and nudged the fire back towards flame, she spoke of a dark bird and waves frozen near a long stretch of beach.

  “But you’ve never seen a beach,” said Liam sleepily. “You’ve never seen a wave.”

  “And the bird talked,” she said, ignoring his interruption, “and wore a top hat and smoked a pipe.”

  “There’s a story like that in the reader.”

  “No there isn’t. The bird flew to my shoulder and said things … but I don’t remember.”

  “Get yourself dressed. You’ll catch cold.” Liam himself had been dreaming of a woman, and being fourteen, he wanted to go back to sleep to find out what was under the blouse she had begun to unbutton.

  “No, I do remember,” announced his sister. “No, I guess I don’t. But he’s coming here.”

  “Who is coming here?”

  Eileen looked at him with impatience. “The bird, the black bird,” she said.

  “McGee says here,” said Brian, reading a year-old newspaper called the New Era and dropping it page by page into the flames, “that Orangeism is a threat to all Canadians.”

  The frost on both the old window and the newer, larger one was turning faintly red. “It’s going to be a fine, clear day,” said Brian, straightening after his attentions to the stove and stretching his arms out so that they were level with his shoulders.

  “He’s coming here,” said Eileen, “and he’s bringing something with him for me.”

  “You should spend some time with Moon today,” said Brian to his son, “and read some Latin to her. She always enjoys Latin when she is pregnant. Some Ovid, I should think, would be best.”

  “She’ll calf soon now.” Liam sat upright and shivered. “Jesus, it’s cold.”

  “No swearing,” said his father. And then, “It will be at least a month yet.”

  Eileen ran barefoot in her white nightgown to her father’s side. “He said that it’s for you, too, and for Liam.”

  “What is?” Brian asked.

  “Whatever he brings when he comes.”

  “Who? Eileen, dress yourself this instant.”

  The small girl walked across the cabin to the window and breathed an oval landscape onto the glass. “It’s shining,” she said. “All of the ground is shining. I’ll never catch cold because I was born here and I love the snow.”

  Brian selected three or four books from the shelf and bound them together with a leather strap. Among them was the geography book that had so delighted his wife. For the first time in several years her face came into his mind as he handled the faded brown volume, just as if he had seen her an hour before. He unbuckled the strap and removed the book, placing it on the right-hand corner of the table. “Teach Eileen some geography today,” he said to Liam. “Something warm … Asia.”

  “Asia,” repeated Eileen, liking the sound of the word. “Asia, Asia. When I have a little girl I will call her Asia.” She turned away from the glass, and the steam from the cast-iron kettle boiling on the stove immediately obliterated the miniature window she had made there.

  “He hasn’t come, yet,” she said, rummaging through the pine blanket box, looking for her woollen stockings. “There are no birds out there at all.”

  As his father predicted, the day was bright and clear and windless, and this caused the pageant on the road to thicken and become more colourful. Sleighs full of everything imaginable passed at intervals by the cabin, this being the ideal weather for transportation. In the space of two morning hours Liam had watched sail past his door cupboards, cookstoves, pigs, grandfather clocks, a collection of yapping hounds, an outhouse, stacked cages full of white geese, and a team of fine horses pulling a sledge while their owner sat, perched on a round stool, playing beautiful music on an upright piano. Then a group of French and Finnish loggers skied by, singing loudly, and heading in the direction of Madoc None of this could lure Eileen from the new window where she could see the forest and the place where the stream lay hidden under the snow. No amount of coaxing or threatening could lead her from this window and into the realms of geography. Finally, Liam, exasperated, wrapped himself up in several layers of wool and left the cabin for the barn in order to read to the cow.

  He and Moon were lost in the enjoyment of the Metamorphoses when Eileen, covered only by a thin shawl, flew through the barn door and announced, “He’s coming now, so you’d better come with me.”

  “Who’s coming?”

  “The black bird! He’ll be out of the forest soon.”

  Liam sighed, marked his place in the book with a piece of straw, ran his hand affectionately across Moon’s swollen side, rose, and took his sister’s outstretched hand.

  She led him to the cabin’s back stoop and they both looked between the two young maple trees that had once been saplings holding a rope and an apron, out towards the darkness of the forest, squinting in the intense light. Liam shifted his boots in the snow. “Eileen,” he said softly, after a few moments. “Eileen, there are no birds here.”

  “Just wait.”

  “I’ll wait until one hundred. I’ll start counting now.”

  At forty-one, Liam saw a group of men emerge from the woods at the place where the hidden stream bent towards the field. Six men were carrying what appeared to be cedar boughs on their shoulders. Another, who walked in front of the others, was wearing a top hat and smoking a pipe.

  He was no longer a young man, and because of this his face was lined and in some spots furrowed. He wa
s tall and straight, however, and the two braids that hung from his top hat were coal black and shining. The cut of his coat was exactly like that of an English gentleman, but made of buckskin, and beautifully, though not extensively, decorated with beads. The same material covered his legs and feet. His hands, even in these frigid temperatures, were bare.

  As he approached the cabin with his entourage he removed a gold pocket-watch from his waistcoat, looked at it for a moment, then snapped the case shut. “We have arrived,” he shouted at the amazed children, “exactly at noon, and that is good.”

  As he got nearer, Liam could see the crow feathers that stood like smoke-blackened toy soldiers all around his hat band.

  “That is good,” repeated the man’s followers.

  He walked up to the children and solemnly and formally shook their hands in turn, but he kept his gaze focused on Eileen. “Another one,” he whispered. Then, without turning around, he addressed the six men. “Put her down,” he said, “so the children can see.”

  The burden of boughs was lowered to the ground and there lay the beautiful, pale, frozen woman. Like the tall man she was dressed entirely in buckskin, though her jacket was lacking the ornamental beadwork and her hair was loose, framing her white face with a cloud of fire. Frost had collected on the edges of this cloud, in the wisps of curls that adorned her forehead, and on her eyebrows and eyelashes, and this had the effect of making her appear to be almost translucent beside the dark branches of the cedar boughs that had supported her. The skin on her face and neck and her bare hands was so perfect, so unblemished, it might have been created more recently than Eileen’s. Her lips were frozen into the shape of a faint smile.