Away

by Jane Urquhart

  Brian said nothing. Liam had partially relaxed and was now slumped in an arrow-back chair, fingering a crust of bread that lay before him on the table.

  Exodus Crow had more to say. Clearing his throat he began again. “When she had been in the woods for more than one winter she told me of the woman called Deirdre who had lived happily in the forest with three warrior brothers, one of whom she loved, until a bad king had killed them, and how she had died of sorrow.”

  And later she had told Exodus that she knew, now, why Deirdre had loved the forest for living in it, as she, herself, had, and learning it well, the branch of one tree could gladden her heart. After she had been in the forest for several winters she told him dark things; about the time of the stolen lands of her island, and of the disease, and of the lost language and the empty villages and how the people who once sang were now silent, how the people who once danced were now still.

  “It is true,” said Brian bitterly. “Those who haven’t died are scattered, and their voice is broken, their words are gone.”

  “She told me a frightening thing,” said Exodus after several moments of quietness. “She told me that on the big island there were once forests as thick as those here in this land but that the old kings and lords of England had cut down each tree until only bare hills were left behind.”

  “That is true also,” said Brian.

  Exodus leaned across the table and looked steadily at the Irishman. “And so I told her,” he said, “that some white men had seized my people’s land and killed many animals for sport and abused our women.”

  The hands of the two men lay flat upon the table but their eyes never left the other’s face. “What did she say then?” asked Brian.

  When Exodus replied there was a break in his voice. “She embraced me and said that the same trouble stayed in the hearts of both our peoples.”

  When the next day the men and the boy prepared Mary’s grave, they found that she had been blanketed during the night by snow.

  “We should find a hollow log and some more cedar boughs,” said Exodus.

  Liam was watching his sister who lay thrashing on the ground making snow angels. “I want to make a box,” he said.

  “We will not be able to enter the ground far enough for one of your boxes.”

  “I will make a thin box,” said Liam with such intensity and anger that the men decided to let him proceed, and moved to their own tasks.

  Liam worked in the carpentry shed that he and his father had built on the side of the barn, the smell of the cows seeping through the wall. While he hammered nails into pine he visualized his mother’s walk down the creek to the river that ran to Moira Lake, running the narrative against his own struggles with Moon and the baby. He took what he knew of the banks of the small stream and added the farms of the settlers he was acquainted with and those he had heard about – one or two villages such as Bridgewater and Hazard’s Corners – and with his mind caused both the stream and his mother to wander through them. He placed tracts of impenetrable wilderness between these pockets of civilization so that her journey away from him would be difficult; in places, barely manageable. He invented huge fallen trees that blocked the way and boggy areas that slowed her footsteps. Sometimes he stood still with a nail in his teeth and the hammer hanging, forgotten, from his fist, while his mind travelled the creek and then the river; the stones and boulders, the frills of the rapids, the hard rock bed of it.

  Occasionally, in his mind, he made his mother fall awkwardly to the ground and push herself slowly to her feet, twisting her neck and looking back to the place where she had left her children. She was staggering along the dark ribbon of water that threaded itself through forests and swamps. At any point she might have paused – when adjusting one of her boots, for instance, or when she looked at her own face when drinking from the inky river. She might have changed her mind and made this walk a return to him rather than a desertion, for until she reached the lake she would have still been his mother. He was certain of this. But try as he might to force his mind to lope downstream, to watch her approach rather than withdraw, he could see her only in profile, or with her back turned against him. He laid down the hammer and pounded his fist against the wall of the shed until slivers entered the soft flesh of his hand.

  By the time he had thumped the last nail into the shallow, slim box, his mother was a silhouette standing on the shore of a shining expanse of water; one of several trees rooted in an alien landscape. Sap was running through her veins, the blood that she shared with Liam forgotten in favour of a view of a lake.

  It pleased him to know she would be buried inland.

  AS the men bent forward to lift the woman into the box that Liam had made, Eileen came swiftly from behind them and thrust her child’s body between her father and Exodus. Then, sinking to her knees, she moved her small hands through the folds of her mother’s soft buckskin clothing until, from a pocket on the left of the breast, she removed a braided circle of red and black hair.

  “This is mine,” she announced with satisfaction. Then, running away towards the house, she called over her shoulder “It’s for me!”

  The men exchanged puzzled looks but did not speak of the incident.

  They dug a plot beside the creek the woman had followed, attacking the ground with pickaxes, Liam working with more passion and energy than the two adults. They covered the spot with logs and boulders so that animals would not disturb the grave, Exodus chanting words in his native tongue, Brian saying the rosary in Latin.

  Liam stood apart from them, staring upstream away from the direction his mother had taken. He could see neither the water, which was buried under snow, nor the ice which he knew covered the water, but the stream-bed to the north made a slender road through the forest; a neutral road, in that he knew his mother had not walked that way.

  The pickaxe he had flung to the ground when the work was finished, half of which was buried in a drift, became an exaggerated question mark in the snow. Everyone’s footsteps were visible everywhere, as if there had been a great crowd assembled for the woman’s funeral. Instinctively, however, no one had trod upon Eileen’s snow angels which looked, now, to her brother, like the remnants of sad, inexplicable skirmishes that had taken place in the yard between the house and the barn.

  Brian was describing the construction of the long, pine table to Exodus. How he, himself, had seen the single board it was made from out at the sawmill at Queensborough. The huge tree trunk, he said, sliced like bread. And now there was this essential piece of furniture. Manufacturing, he announced, was flourishing in both Elzivir and Madoc townships. He chanted a list of new enterprises. “Sam Rawlin’s Tannery, Pringle’s Brickyard,” he said aloud and with some pride.

  His guest listened politely, and, after Brian was finished, he said, “I wore this hat and brought this pocket-watch to have a connection with the people that she came from. It is not the custom of my people.”

  “No, no of course not,” said Brian, suddenly embarrassed, his mind full of bricks and boards and machines.

  “Do they put boards on the ground in Ireland?” he asked. “Do they have floors?”

  “Sometimes … but often it’s only earth for the floor and straw for the roof.”

  “So I thought,” said Exodus. “She did not seem disturbed by the earth for a floor.”

  Liam entered the cabin, glanced at the men, and threw a load of firewood noisily to the left of the door. Then, aware that he had the men’s attention, he walked away from them to the farthest corner of the room.

  “We’re low on kindling,” said Brian. “The lamps need filling. And what’s the news of Moon?”

  Liam did not answer.

  “She’s a wonderful cow,” said Brian to Exodus. “She’s been with us almost from the beginning. Liam, here, is her favourite. I think they talk to each other. Does she talk to you, son?”

  Liam rose up impatiently and approached his father. “When is he leaving?” he demanded. “He’s been
here for days now, when’s he going?”

  Eileen, who had been playing with three cornhusk dolls near the fire, said, “He’s not going yet.”

  Turning abruptly in his chair, which made a shrieking noise on the basswood planks, Brian shot an angry look at his son. “That’s about enough,” he said. “I’ll not have you –”

  “Wait,” Exodus interjected. “The small girl is right. I’m not leaving yet.” The room around him held still as the tall man rose to his feet. He crossed the floor to the corner where the boy had retreated and where he now sat with his long legs bent over a squat barrel. “I’m not leaving yet,” he said. “Because of you.”

  The boy flung a lock of hair angrily from his forehead and then glared down towards his shoes. A thin film of perspiration had collected on the sparse, fine hairs on his upper lip. His Adam’s apple moved awkwardly up and down his throat. “Don’t stay on my account,” he hissed. “There’s no need to stay on my account.”

  “Look, Papa,” piped Eileen, “the sun this early in the morning.”

  “There is a need,” said Exodus to the boy.

  “And what’s that, then?” Liam’s skull lurched on his neck as he, once again, flung the hair from his eyes. The gesture was that of someone involved in physical combat with the invisible.

  “I haven’t given you your mother back,” said Exodus, “and I can’t leave until I do.”

  “She’s dead,” blurted Liam bitterly. “She’s out there under the ground.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Exodus was quiet. Then he said, “I will go out of this house now and when I come back I will know. I will tell you then what I mean.”

  “He’s a kind man,” said Brian, after the cabin door closed.

  Liam said nothing.

  “It’s not necessary for you to be rude to him.”

  “How long are you going to let him stay?”

  “As long as he wishes. He was your mother’s friend.”

  Liam laughed. “If he was her friend why didn’t he bring her back years ago? Why did he let her freeze to death? Why did he let her live out there like a savage?”

  “She wouldn’t have come.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “She was your wife. She belonged to you.”

  “She was my wife, but she did not belong to me.”

  “Who did she belong to then? Do you believe in this spirit?” Liam had risen to his feet to ask this question. “Do you?” he demanded. “Do you believe in this fairy tale?”

  “I didn’t used to.”

  “So, do you believe in it now? Have you gone mad?”

  But Brian did not answer, just shouldered his skis and set out, as he had done most every day for the last several years, to teach the children at the small log school.

  Liam returned to his seat on the barrel and Eileen brought two of her cornhusk dolls to the place where he was sitting and put one on each knee of his old grey trousers. “Yes, he believes it,” she made one of the dolls say to the other. The toys appeared to leap and twist when she made them speak. “He believes it,” the second doll said, “because it is true.” Liam watched the dry corn leaves, the skirts of the dolls quiver just above his knee.

  Later in the afternoon, as Liam crossed the space between the house and the barn, he saw Exodus sitting in the groin of the willow tree that grew on the other side of the creek. His back was turned and Liam was glad of this as he did not wish to be observed by anyone as he walked across the snow which still had Eileen’s angels and the men’s footprints pressed into it; these things and the oblong shape of the litter that had held his mother’s body.

  It was now that time, which comes on certain winter days, when a cloud-covered sky looks no different from the frozen earth beneath it, when branches of trees could be roots thrusting into an opaque earth. There would be no moon, no stars tonight. His father, Liam knew, would glide into sight on the edge of a darkness that would follow him down the road between the trees, waiting to settle over the house until the moment he closed the door and laid his books upon the table.

  The boy found Moon agitated, banging her hips against the boards of her stall, collapsing onto the straw, then rising again, awkward and groaning, to her feet. When she saw him she arched her back and lifted her tail as if she wanted to urinate, then she rotated her large head on her great neck and cried out in a voice so human Liam had to force himself not to turn away.

  His father, he thought. Where was his father? Moon had always calved at night in the company of Brian, her bellowing touching the children’s dreams, causing them to stir and whimper but never waking them. Suddenly a picture of his father came into Liam’s mind, wrestling by lamplight with this beast who resembled so little the serene animal at whose side the boy had grown. “Jesus,” the boy said under his breath as the cow sank to her knees then rose again, pounding the left side of her ribs against rough pine planks.

  The cow crashed onto the straw, where she lay on her side, her body swollen, the steam of her breath causing a veil of mist to obscure her contorted features.

  Black and white, thought Liam mindlessly. This cow is so black and white. Nothing should be this black and white.

  Just as he finished the thought, a river of clear liquid surged out from under the cow’s tail and onto the straw, freezing there on contact. A shadow interrupted the light from the door – Eileen’s white face. Moon’s eyes rolled back into her head. When Liam turned again, the child was gone.

  By now he could see the white membrane of the birth sac emerging between the calf’s back legs, and two grey blocks floating inside it. Hoofs, he thought. A contraction moved through the animal’s abdomen and she groaned and panted. “Please hurry … please,” Liam whispered, fighting back the nausea that was rising to his throat. “Please, Moon, make the baby.” But the sac slid no further from the body of the cow, who now breathed as if she were speaking. “Awl, awl, awl,” she seemed to say.

  Liam began to concentrate, helplessly, on the head of a nail that projected from the barn wall. Why was it there, what normally hung from it? Who had taken the hammer in one hand and this ridiculous, insignificant piece of iron in the other? He would ask his father why this particular nail was here? It irritated and confused him and he flicked at it with his fingernail. Then, as Exodus exploded through the doorway and pushed him out of the way, the sleeve of Liam’s jacket tore on this nail.

  “No,” shouted Liam when he saw the knife gleaming in the tall man’s hand.

  Moon roared as another contraction ricocheted through her belly. Exodus had the steaming forelegs in his hands now. The whole stall was boiling with a fog composed of hot breath and the mist that rose from the blood and water. Liam focused on the three-cornered rip in his jacket – how to mend it, what needle, what thread? – until he could force himself to look at the calf that lay convulsing on the floor.

  “It’s not breathing,” he said to Exodus. “You killed it with the knife.”

  Exodus did not look at the boy. He lay the trunk of his body over the twitching calf and turned its face towards his own, one hand removing mucous from the tongue and nostrils. Then he placed his mouth over one of the cow’s nostrils and exhaled slowly. The calf shuddered and was still. Liam watched Exodus open the calf’s mouth and again press his face into the small animal’s snout. Moon struggled to her feet and, as she did so, the afterbirth slipped from her body. She was looking behind her for her calf. Liam watched Exodus remove himself gently from the small black-and-white body, then watched the calf rise, the thin legs trembling like young birches in the spring.

  Exodus guided the baby animal by the neck, smoothly, towards its mother’s teat. “I know what to do now,” he said, passing Liam on his way out the barn door.

  The boy followed him but stopped three paces from the barn, distracted by the sight of a figure coasting down the road, pulling night behind him like a cloak. Brian waved. L
iam tried to return the greeting but found himself instead bent over his stomach, retching into the snow.

  No matter how often she was called, or how persuasively she was coaxed, Eileen would not come down from the tree, claiming that she had not finished thinking.

  When she entered the house several hours after dark, she stamped the snow from her feet for longer than was necessary. Brian was putting fresh hay in the stall but Liam was in the cabin, huddled over a glinting needle, his jacket, and a long black thread. Soup bubbled on the stove and there was bread in the oven. The boy’s brows were drawn together over his nose as he squinted at the sleeve. Eileen unwound a long, woollen scarf from her neck, ceremoniously, waiting for her brother to look up.

  “Have you seen the baby cow?” he asked, finally, when she neither moved from the door nor spoke to him.

  She smiled then, and with an air of great confidence said, “Exodus says he knows what to do. He’s gone away now for a little while, but he’ll be back, that’s one thing certain.” She crossed the room to look into the pot on the stove. “I’m hungrier than ever,” she announced. “And the baby cow,” she added, replacing the pot lid, “he said the baby cow must be called Genesis.”

  “He’s gone?” The needle was a miniature sword, bright, between Liam’s thumb and forefinger. “But I wanted … Did he walk back along the river?”

  “No,” said Eileen, settling herself at the table to wait for her father to return from the barn. “First he turned into a bird, then he flew away, high up, very high over the trees.”

  Liam was not satisfied with the look of the stitches but they held the fabric together. The needle moved in and out, smoothly, through the cloth. Eileen stood near his shoulder. “Papa says he’ll get me coloured thread in Queensborough to make pictures on the pillowcases. I could make a picture on your sleeve.”