Away

by Jane Urquhart

  After he had looked down at the woman for a few moments the tall man with the crow feathers in his hat sat abruptly down on the back stoop, and his companions walked back to the forest and disappeared from sight. The children had not uttered a word, had not made a sound.

  The odd trio that was left behind stood now with their heads bent, looking towards the frozen woman. Their motionlessness was so complete that, were it not for the steam that unfurled from their mouths and nostrils, they might have appeared to have been frozen themselves. Nothing around them moved – no bough on tree nor cloud in wind nor rabbit pumping over snow. The road was empty. A long silver tooth hung from the waterspout over the rainbarrel. Moon was quiet in her stall, as were all of her relations in theirs. Roosting hens fell asleep, their feathers unruffled. It was the dead of winter. Nothing in the deep earth had begun to pulse towards light, no sap ran and hibernating animals, curled in their burrows, drew breath at infrequent intervals. So fixed was the whole atmosphere, not a red-gold hair on the head of the beautiful frozen woman or the slender child quivered. The boy’s hands, which were normally never still, hung wooden and static at the ends of his sleeves. The man’s briar pipe no longer smoked.

  It was into this tableaux that Brian, having set his pupils free to enjoy the fine winter day, glided on his skis, singing.

  “Look Papa,” said Eileen as he swept towards her. “Look, it’s a big doll.”

  With Brian’s arrival the world unlocked. A frigid breeze blew a veil of powdery snow across the face of the dead woman. Brian sat down on the back stoop. He looked towards the forest and then began to weep. Eileen, terrified by her father’s outburst, kept repeating, “It’s a doll. It’s a doll.” Liam stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets and walked off angrily to join Moon in the barn, where he read the Metamorphoses aloud in a passionate voice for the remainder of the afternoon.

  Brian tried several times to persuade his son to come into the house but his words were drowned in a slew of Latin phrases. Even Eileen was unable to move him. At sunset the barn door creaked open and Liam, without looking up, recognized the smell of pipe tobacco and saw, on the straw beside him, the shadow of the feathered top hat.

  Liam continued with the Latin but the shadow did not move. Finally he closed the book and turned to face the visitor.

  “My name is Exodus Crow,” the man announced in a strong, clear voice. “The crow was my father’s spirit-guide and, in time, became mine. He is a wise bird who survives hardships and who loves that which shines. He is a bird with a strong voice who insists on being heard. Because he sits high on the top branch of the tallest tree in the forest, and flies even higher than that, he can see many things at once and so is a good guide. Because he flies fast and calls loudly he is a good messenger.

  “I am called Exodus because my mother, who was taught to read by a churchman, lost interest in the Bible halfway through the Book of Exodus. She loved the name Exodus and was doubly disappointed therefore in this book. Genesis, she said, was full of many stories: the man with the boat full of animals, the woman whom Snake made bite the apple, and many dreams and vision quests. There is a great deal of manitou in this book called Genesis. This book called Exodus, she said, was not worthy of its name because it was filled with battles for land and the making of laws. And the Great Spirit changes after this first book from making animals and trees and rocks and flowers and dreams and visions to making battles for land and sending down laws. My mother did not like this but she liked the sound of the word Exodus and wanted to give the name a better home. She called me Exodus.”

  Silence filled the barn after this series of sentences. Liam pretended to study the cover of the closed book on his lap but Moon twisted her great neck and looked with her liquid eyes at the figure in the doorway.

  This seemed to encourage the tall man to enter a little further into the barn and to resume his speech.

  “My mother, who is dead, believed in the manitou that is a part of everything,” he said. “Your mother was filled with this manitou. Now she is dead as well. But before she died she told me to go to her children and tell them her story, for they were small, she said, when she was forced to leave them. Her story will move through me as easily as a wind through the pines of the forest. Like Crow I will be heard. Your sister wants to hear the story, your father wants to hear the story. But you, who will move forward and make the change, must hear the story. And yet, by your silence you are telling me that you do not wish to hear it.”

  Liam still said nothing.

  “I will tell the story to the whole family. If you were one of my sons you would go into the forest now for a long, long time to find out who your spirit-guide is. And when you knew that, and when you had lived with this silence of yours in the woods for a long, long time, you would be a man. But you are not one of my sons and you are not of my people. If you hear your mother’s story it will be the same as seven long days and nights in the forest alone, you will be cold and afraid, but when you have heard her story it will be as if you had reached out and touched your own adulthood.”

  Moon dipped her large head and began to chew thoughtfully on some straw. Liam saw the calf shudder inside her body.

  “I am thinking,” said Exodus, “that this cow has much manitou. That is the spirit that is everywhere and that we, the Nishnawbe, believe in.”

  Exodus closed the bottom half of the door quietly behind him and left Liam bisected by its shadow. The boy resumed his Latin-reading to the cow, but he was having more and more trouble turning the pages. His hands were blue with cold, and, besides, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Moon was no longer listening.

  Their shared grief on the back stoop had created an immediate bond of trust between Brian and Exodus Crow, and when they had finished weeping the Irishman had opened the door of his cabin with genuine welcome. He knew that Exodus held the mysterious narrative of the past seven years in his mind, and that the tall, dignified man had brought the frozen woman home, not just to return her remains, but also to tell her story. But, so far, the Ojibway had revealed only three things: that he, his friends, and their burden had left Moira Lake one and a half days before, that they had walked on the ice of first the Black River, then one of its tributaries, and that he was sorrowful because the woman had been a friend to him.

  When the boy entered the cabin both men were devouring pea soup and large chunks of bread. His father motioned for him to join them but he shook his head and walked to the far corner of the room, behind them, where they could not see his face. The sound of the liquid entering the men’s mouths sickened him. They had betrayed his mother with their hunger. She was abandoned, lying in the snow, while they built fires, enjoyed food and warmth, and erased the sight of her by staying behind a dark log wall. He wanted his father’s grief to dramatize itself, there, in the room, wanted the words of his own anger to pass his father’s lips.

  “I will build a box for her,” Liam said, at last, his words a challenge.

  His father did not reply but Exodus turned fully around in his chair to address the boy. “It’s good that you said that,” he murmured. “It’s good that you spoke because now I can tell you about your mother.”

  Exodus, returning after an autumn hunt with a sledge piled high with deer and rabbit, had first seen the woman in the woods on the northwest shore of Chuncall Lake, which was now called Moira. It was not a lake in which people fished because a great number of Iroquois had been slaughtered nearby and their bodies thrown into the lake, producing, it was rumoured, flesh-eating fish so fierce that they ripped out the throats of those who attempted to capture them.

  “This is not really so,” said Exodus, “as I, myself, have passed many times over this lake in a canoe and have seen the peaceful fish gliding below the surface. Nevertheless, it is the custom to fish elsewhere.”

  He had seen her because of the sun on her copper hair and had almost taken her to be a deer or some other animal, so odd had been this colour. But then he saw her brow
n skirt move in the woods and her white face; these things and also her green eyes which looked at him through the trees. What was a white woman doing in the forest with the first coat of snow on the ground? Was she, he wondered, a ghost? Then he remembered that white ghosts stayed in the houses they had built and never in the woods which, it was said, they feared.

  She came towards him and with gestures of her hands made it clear that she was hungry and wanted food. By this time Exodus had seen that she had made a small hut of sticks and pine boughs, outside of which there were the remains of a fire and some fish bones and fish heads. It was as though she had been on a vision quest and had just, the previous day, broken her fast. Evidently she did not fear the fish of the lake and had somehow managed to catch them.

  Exodus indicated to her that he could speak English. “How are you?” he had asked.

  “I am fine,” she had replied, “but hungry.”

  “Where do you live?” Exodus wanted to know.

  “I live here,” she said, and with such certainty that Exodus had to remind himself that this could not be true.

  He built a fire then and cut some meat from a carcass on the sledge and began to cook some food for her. She did not speak while he was performing these tasks but watched him so closely that Exodus knew that every move he made was being memorized. He was studying her boots, which he concluded would never get her through the winter. At one moment, while he knelt over sticks and flame, the wind blew her skirt to one side exposing one alabaster leg, so soft and smooth that Exodus knew that she had not been in the woods for very long.

  They ate in silence, the woman squatting by the fire and Exodus sitting across from her. When she was finished she sighed and folded her legs under her body, sitting back on her heels with her hands clasped together on her lap.

  Then Exodus asked, gesturing towards the fish bones, “If you were able to catch fish and you were hungry, why did you not catch more?”

  “Because, yesterday morning when I went to the lake it was covered by an icy shield.”

  Exodus laughed, as much because of the strange lilt in her voice as because of what she was saying. “But you must make a hole in this shield,” he said. “Then the fish will come.”

  “Then they are not killed by this ice?”

  “No, even later, when it is very thick, they are not killed.”

  Exodus was uncertain how to discover where it was she had come from and uncertain also of how to persuade her to return. Finally, he determined to ask her directly if she had always lived in the forest.

  She told him then about her troubled country and how she had lived on a small island across the waters of the Moyle two miles off its shore. She told him about the Children of Lir who had lived for three hundred years on the waters of the Moyle, and how they had lived there as swans. She told him about Grey Man’s Path down to the water, about the beautiful woman who had danced over the cliffs and whose long hair floating near the rocks that killed her had given the name Fair Head to the point of land near where she fell. She told him about Finn Mac Cumhail and the Fianna, about Finn’s great dog Bran, and about the poet Oisín who had disappeared into Tír na nÓg, the land of the young, and who had returned centuries later to argue for the old ways and the old beliefs with he whom Oisín called Patrick of the Crooked Crozier. She told him of “the others,” those who lived under the ground and those who lived under the water, and how they were around always and in everything and how they made the most beautiful music – a music so sweet and so sad that once it was heard it was never forgotten. She said that on her island there was no man and no woman who was not somehow haunted by it.

  When she stopped she had been talking for a long, long time and she looked at Exodus almost as if she were surprised to see him there and asked “Do you believe me?”

  Exodus did believe because, he said, it was as if his own mother were telling the stories of the spirits.

  He believed her so completely that for the first time he felt there might be some wisdom in the white people beyond what they preached from the Book of Exodus, and he knew, as he had said to Liam, that this woman was blessed with manitou, and because of what she had told him he felt a great kinship with her.

  So he told her about the manitou – the spirit that is in everything and that is moved by earth and air and water and light. And he said that her hair contained the light of the rising and the setting sun and by that she was blessed. He said that there were sky worlds and cloud worlds and water worlds, and spirits that live in them that were friends to men and women and upon whom men and women must rely for the food that grows out of the ground and for success in the hunt. And then he, Exodus, looked at the woman and asked if she believed him and she said that, yes, she believed him.

  Exodus said that he knew then that belief was everywhere in the forest around them and in the lake whose covering of ice shone through the trees and in the clouds and in the wind that brushed the boughs of the pines. So he told the woman of the first missionary who had visited his grandfather, and how this missionary had spoken of Moses and God and Jesus. His grandfather had listened and had believed what the missionary said. But when his grandfather told the missionary about the spirits that surrounded and protected his tribe the white man had scoffed at him.

  “I believe you,” the grandfather of Exodus had said. “Why don’t you believe me?”

  Exodus knew that the woman understood him and that he understood the woman, but he wondered about her survival in the woods.

  “How long have you lived here?” he had asked.

  “Three days.”

  “And you will return now to your house?”

  “No, I cannot return.”

  “But the winter will worsen.”

  “I cannot return.”

  But the woman read the questions in his mind, drew a long breath, and answered.

  “I am loved by the spirit of this lake,” she said, “this lake that shares my name – Moira. This spirit first found me when he lived under the waters of the Moyle, which I told you about. Then when I lived on the large island he came to me in a dark lake near my home. In this land I thought he had forgotten me until I heard of the lake called Moira. Then I knew where he was. I will stay near him now until I die. I am loved by him and he is loved by me.”

  Exodus Crow had kept silent. He felt that the ears of the forest were opening wider, listening. The sun had moved behind a cloud and the lake was a grey blanket on the other side of the trees.

  “Do you believe me?” the woman had asked him. And when he remained silent she said, “I believed you – why don’t you believe me?”

  “Her eyes,” Exodus said, now, to Brian, “glittered a little with amusement when she asked this.”

  Brian’s own eyes were shining with tears but he nodded, remembering his wife’s sudden, delicate displays of humour.

  “I finally answered her,” said Exodus Crow. “I said that I believed her, because I did.”

  Brian began to move around the cabin lighting lamp after lamp, pulling lanterns and candles out of cupboards and down from shelves and lighting them too. He wanted a sudden brilliance to fill the room, to clarify what the tall man was telling him. “But I am her husband,” he said, a taper burning in his hand.

  Exodus agreed that this was the case and that the two children, who had pulled their chairs close to the table, were her children. “And they still are,” he said. “In this world. She was from an island in the other world. And I was her friend. The one from the water was not of this world. He was her spirit-guide.”

  “I taught her to read.” Brian looked instinctively towards a pile of books at the other end of the table.

  “I know, and you taught her about distant lands. She told me. And she told me that you knew that she had been, as they say on the island you came from, ‘away.’ But because you did not believe this, you could not see when she went away again.”

  “To live in the lake,” said Eileen.

  “To li
ve beside the lake,” corrected Exodus. “Perhaps now she lives in the lake.”

  Brian lit the last coal-oil lamp. “Had she chosen to come back … I loved her.” He paused. “But she didn’t come back,” he said.

  “There is this fierce love in all of us for that which we cannot fully own,” said Exodus.

  The interior of the cabin was so bright now that Eileen’s eye-lashes shone and several miniature candles were visible, reflected in her eyes. Beyond the walls, the light from the cabin windows moved across the snow, onto the face of the frozen woman. Then, as the night grew more agitated, and as snow lifted from the ground like large skeins of silk, her face darkened, and shone, like a beacon on a distant shore.

  “The whole world is an island,” said Exodus, “and all who live in it are island dwellers – walkers on surfaces, floaters on water, Standers on mountains. No one is ever in anything until they have been touched by what she was touched by.”

  “I wanted to be a poet,” said Brian, “but there was nothing in it, my poetry.”

  “She had songs that she had made for the water-spirit from the otherworld island and they were pleasing,” Exodus addressed Liam, now, respectfully, as if he were a man of the same age. “She sang them with a good voice.”

  “I haven’t heard my wife’s voice for seven years. Why didn’t you make her come back?”

  Exodus turned to Brian. “After I had seen her the first time I dreamt I saw a golden fish who sang in words I did not recognize and I knew what I should do. I should help this woman to stay near her spirit and to live there in the forest. And when I told the others they agreed that that was what I should do. But to live near the spirit I knew the woman would have to learn concealment, accuracy, and endurance. I would build strong shelters so that she would be able to withstand the winters, and bring firewood for her comfort. I would bring her deer meat and teach her how to boil the sap in April for the sugar that can be got from it. I showed her how to make tea from the young shoots of the hemlock, and she liked this. And I showed her how to sew together the skins I brought so that she might have clothing to cover her.”