EACH spring from then on, Liam would set out in search of Exodus, nosing his canoe through the tributaries of the Black and the Moira rivers that crossed the two townships that made up his immediate geography. He would often portage, searching for hidden water, stubbornly moving away from the creek that crossed his own property, believing that to follow the route his mother had taken would never lead him to the man he was looking for. Moreover, he was often needed at the farm, and the journey to the lake that his mother had claimed as hers had assumed such hugeness in his mind he could not imagine a return from it except as an old man. Ulysses staggering home under the weight of the adventure, sailing back to an abandoned and completely altered family. He knew he could never leave Eileen for that long, could not leave her at all, he believed, for more than a few days.
Years later he would say that this was the time when he learned the woods. Until then, the edge of the forest seemed a wall, protecting darkness from the acre of light; a territory lacking the colourful, linear sequences that made up the road and its pageant. The picture it had presented to him had been flat, without dimensions, coloured by trees whose names he had learned only at his father’s insistence. Now, when he walked among these trees, their low boughs touched his face and hands while around him hidden life rustled and fled. He glimpsed fur bursting from the earth and heard the outraged screams of winged creatures hidden from him by a canopy of leaves. Everything around him moved or was moved.
He never fell in love with the forest but came to admire and respect it. It had captured his interest, and as it broke apart in his mind into the millions of facts of its existence, he grappled with it, detail by detail, overcoming his vague fear. And his anger. No longer a beast who had swallowed his mother whole, the forest became, if not a lover, almost a friend. Once or twice, when the canoe was balanced on his shoulders, he met bears, large good-natured gentlemen who drew back and stepped aside to let him pass. He was never lost; no two parts of the forest were the same. With practice he had no trouble recognizing the singular construction of each of a thousand similar pines.
As the years went by, the late-spring forest quest became a ritual. The sombre river and creek waters, their surfaces like heavily varnished Renaissance paintings he would never see, turned into inviting highways. He would not find Exodus and eventually, by his nineteenth or twentieth year, he forgot that this had been his original intention. He would find, instead, rock and bark and swamp and cedar and strange, narrow liquid highways the colour of mahogany, and, for the time being, that was enough. And he would learn particular things about soil, decay, seeding, and growth. Light and air. Tender green. He knew he wanted to make things grow, wanted, above all, to nurture, to be a farmer.
His father grew older, and with each successive winter, weaker, his journeys to and from the schoolhouse taking him a little longer each year until finally it was necessary for him to set out and return in darkness. His robust, kind face had collapsed into creases and folds, and there was something sorrowful about the sagging skin at his neck. On winter evenings he told grimmer and grimmer stories: black potatoes, cabins filled with skeletal families, children devoured by rats, the coffin ships, mass graves on Grosse Isle, Cromwell, and the long history of the persecution of the Irish race. He was troubled by the presence of flourishing Orange Halls in his own county, knowing that many of his Protestant neighbours had taken the pledge to eliminate Catholicism wherever they might find it. One of the men on the roads, a drifter who had joined then abandoned the Lodge, had recited the secret Orange Oath to Brian, laughing at its arrogance, but the words had burned themselves into the schoolmaster’s memory and after a few drinks at night he would sometimes repeat it to his children. “ ‘I swear that I am not nor ever will be a Roman Catholic or Papist,’ ” he would announce. “ ‘Nor am I married to nor will I ever marry a Roman Catholic or Papist, nor educate my children nor suffer them to be educated in the Roman Catholic faith, if in my power to prevent it.’ ” Afterwards he would strike his forehead in anger and disbelief. “They brought the hate with them across all that ocean … across all that water,” he would say, staring out the window at swirling snow. “It hardly seems possible.”
He told his children of an incident he had read about a few years before in a newspaper at O’Hara’s Mill. Aggressive crowds of Orangemen had attacked the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Toronto, causing a riot to occur during which a young Irish Catholic father had been stabbed in the back with a pitchfork. The murder had gone unpunished. He had never until now mentioned the incident to his children, but his knowledge of it had broken something inside him.
His eyesight was becoming weak and he had no patience with spectacles so the pleasure he had taken in long bouts of reading could no longer distract him from the consideration of the old troubles. Brian now sensed old threats being reiterated, old wounds being reopened.
He knew his hero, D’Arcy McGee, had left the United States for Montreal, had entered Canadian politics, and was now Minister of Agriculture and Immigration. This gave Brian some comfort; this and the Irish revolutionary songs he loved to sing to his children – songs with such heartbreakingly beautiful tunes that his daughter, Eileen, had committed them all to memory by the age of thirteen. On winter afternoons she cheerfully sang about the hanging of brave young men, wild colonial boys, the curse of Cromwell, cruel landlords, the impossibility of requited love, and the robbery of landscape while she built snow castles under the brilliant slanting sun of several Januarys.
The year that Eileen turned fifteen and Liam twenty-two, Brian learned that his hero and hope for the future, McGee, had been sent by the government to the International Exposition in Dublin. It was 1865. While in Ireland, McGee returned to his native town of Wexford for a short visit. There he spoke about the problems of Irish immigrants in North America and the follies of political activism. Brian was well aware that as newly appointed Minister of Immigration McGee was an expert in the former topic, and as a participant in the disastrous Young Ireland uprising of 1848 he was an expert in the latter. McGee had railed against the demagogues he felt were promoting Fenian political activity in North America and had discussed the flaws in the Irish Catholic character that left that group open to manipulation by such creatures. He had announced that he and his fellow Young Irelanders had been, politically speaking, “a pack of fools.” The speech devastated many of his Irish Catholic supporters on both sides of the Atlantic, many of whom believed that McGee had been somehow bought off, bribed, or blackmailed.
On an evening in June, when his eyes were particularly tired, Brian asked Eileen to read the text of the speech to him from a newspaper.
She stood in profile beside the window where the light was good, her hands whiter than usual against the tan paper and the print on it, and read in a voice stripped clean of emotion D’Arcy McGee’s catalogue of the frailties of his own people. She had not yet the experience to respond to the words she was saying – growing up in the forest, she was innocent of identification with any group. No collective voice had made itself heard in her mind, and so she articulated words such as “squalor” or “illiteracy” or “idleness” in exactly the same tone of voice as she might have used when reading aloud a poem or a fairy story. Outside, birches were heaving in a brisk breeze. When she finished she put the paper down on a stool beside the stove and turned to ask her father a question concerning his supper. It was only then that she saw that he had been weeping.
“Such betrayal,” he was whispering. “And he an Irish Catholic himself. Such betrayal.”
After that he never mentioned McGee’s name again.
AT the school Brian began to teach the children an entirely different history of the British Empire than the one outlined by Egerton Ryerson in his prospectus for Upper Canadian schools. Speaking in the confidential tones of a man imparting wisdom by a fireside, he told of the land seizures which preceded the plantation of English and Scottish Protestants in Ulster. Turning slowly from the slate board as if his body were an old
hinge, he would glare out from under bushy brows at what was to him now a blurred sea of small faces and demand that some young scholar recite the rights that were denied Catholics in Ireland during the eighteenth century at the time of the Penal Laws.
He scratched the words “They could not …” on the board, and the children, delighted with the game, would shout out the answers, enthusiastically and in unison.
“Purchase or lease land,” they cried. “Become educated, practise a profession, vote, run for public office, practise their religion, own a horse worth more than five pounds, keep the profits from their rented land, or speak Gaelic.”
“And what is Gaelic?” he would say.
“Gaelic is the language of scholars and poets.”
He was warned several times about this approach to history, but because the men of the community trusted him – despite his Catholicism – and the children loved him, they were hesitant to let him go. Later, however, in June of 1866, when a small band of Fenians stumbled over the border from the United States, determined to fight for Ireland on the closest plot of British ground, their sad, ineffectual skirmishes caused such a widespread outbreak of anti-Irish sentiment that the Board of Trustees for Madoc Township voted unanimously that Brian should be retired from active duty.
Liam had just finished giving fresh feed to Genesis, Leviticus, Acts, and Ruth (Moon had died the year before of old age and had been buried tearfully by the small family near the spot where the mother lay) when he heard his father’s voice in the distance. “For freedom comes from God’s right hand and needs a godly train,” he sang as he strode into view. “And righteous men must make our land a nation once again.”
As she had the year before, and in the same month, Eileen stood by the window with a newspaper in her hands. This time she was reading the words of the Fenian Proclamation that General Sweeney had brought with him when he had attempted to invade Canada. Her father sat with his arms stretched out in front of him on the table and his head moving up and down. Liam, watching him from the other side of the room, could not decide whether his father was nodding in agreement or whether his head was becoming too heavy to hold upright because of weakness.
“ ‘We come among you.’ ” Eileen read, “ ‘as foes of British rule in Ireland.
“ ‘We have taken up the sword to deliver Ireland from the tyrant.
“ ‘We do not propose to divest you of a single right you now enjoy. We are here as the friends of liberty against despotism, of democracy against aristocracy.
“ ‘To Irishmen across the province we appeal in the name of seven centuries of British iniquity and Irish misery.
“ ‘We offer the honest grasp of friendship. Take it Irishmen, Frenchmen, Americans. Take it and trust it.
“ ‘We wish to meet with friends. We are prepared to meet with enemies.
“ ‘We shall endeavour to merit the confidence of the former. The latter can expect from us but the leniency of a determined but generous foe, and the restraints and relations imposed by civilized warfare.’ ”
“For this they took away my children,” Brian said. Then he walked into the back room and flung himself down on his bed.
Eileen turned to her brother. “I thought the words were beautiful,” she said. “I thought they sounded like poetry.”
A week later, after dictating a long letter concerning Ireland’s lost voice and stolen poetry, a letter that his daughter dutifully transcribed, Brian turned his face to the wall and died. He was fifty years old and his body was that of an ancient man: exhausted and withered.
Unable to bear the scene of his father’s death, Liam was sitting on the stoop outside the door when his sister laid a small hand on his shoulder. She placed the paper into his hand. “He said he wants one copy of this to go to Exodus Crow,” Eileen told her brother, “and another to some priest in Ireland called Quinn.”
Liam didn’t answer. He was thinking about how his father had died so quietly in the late afternoon, at the time of day when, in previous years, he had skied into view on the road, his coat a dark sail, night hurrying behind him as if trying to catch him up.
THE farm did not prosper despite the presence of Genesis, Leviticus, Acts, and Ruth; warming the barn in the winter with their large bodies and startling the calm green of the pasture in the summer with their precise black and whiteness. His few crops were meager and stunted. Shortly after his father died, Liam began to consider opening up two or three more acres so that he could grow feed corn for the cattle. Taking a carving knife in his hand he walked all over the land he now owned, plunging the blade into the earth every twenty yards. He found solid rock six inches under the soil in some locations and three inches under the soil in others. The rest of the property consisted of steaming muskeg, humming with mosquitoes in summer and projecting the ash-grey remains of dead cedars through a smooth, indifferent cover of snow in winter. Liam came to understand that his father’s salary, insignificant though it had seemed, had nevertheless provided much-needed cash. There were now times at night when the young man, awakened by a furious north wind late in winter, experienced the acid taste at the edge of panic and the high, shrill buzz of panic in his mind. The scattered neighbours whom he had come to know along the road, cabin Irish like himself, had either died out, leaving decaying log homesteads behind them, or were living a life of squalid poverty – sweetened now and then by the availability of homemade whiskey.
He wanted to think about the things his father had taught him: the various names for trees, a few Irish revolutionary songs, the love of animals. He thought instead about his mother’s hair in the sunlight. It was she who had told him how a field could be created, over a period of years, by the patient application of seaweed on dry rock. The weed, she had said, must be carried on the back in a basket strapped over the shoulders. She also said that the walk from any sea was always uphill. His child’s mind had envisioned an ocean growing the wildflowers he was familiar with – Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans – as she spoke. But it didn’t matter now. Here he had neither the sea nor, it seemed, the time, never mind the patience. These things were as irrelevant to the ground on which he now stood as was his father’s Greek Lexicon or Oxford Anthology of British Verse. Neither the English poets nor the Greeks had anything at all to say about farming the Canadian backwoods.
One warm sunny day in late March of the following year, Liam remembered the small library of reference books at the back of the log school, and he removed the skis from the place where they had rested against the wall since his father’s death, strapped them on his own boots, and set out over the old route. He sailed by a pine forest that was a slash of green on either side of him, past squatters’ shanties and abandoned farmsteads. Sometimes, he glided through a section or two of hardwood trees among which the sun ricocheted causing shadows on the snow that mirrored oddly the corduroy construction of the road bed. His father lay underneath the snow now. A mild man, enraged, then made silent. His grave had not yielded to the shape of the earth as Liam’s mother’s had, almost immediately, and as Moon’s had in the space of a few months. Rian fir ar mhnaoi, he had said to Eileen just before he died, the Irish already sounding unfamiliar, untranslatable in their ears. When he called for Mary they had not known whether he wanted the Blessed Virgin or his own wife, whose bones lay whitening a hundred yards from where he raved. Liam remembered sitting on the back stoop, avoiding the moment of his father’s death. It was then he had recalled that Rian fir ar mhnaoi meant the trace of a man on a woman. He had whispered the phrase to himself, over and over, until he felt the pressure of Eileen’s hand near his neck.
The school of which Liam’s father had been so proud sat boarded and nailed, a late-winter drift on the west side almost reaching its eaves, the glass in each of its four windows, if not broken, was covered with a coating of dust from the previous dry summer. The bell for which Brian had fought long and hard was gone from the little wooden tower, and now a frayed grey rope swung in open air like a mutil
ated memory. Liam removed the skis and, with the sorrow and anger upon him, waded through the heavy spring snow to the front door which was easy enough to kick open, the force of this carrying him in one stride into the centre of the dim, remote room, where he saw before him the remains of his father’s world in a new land.
On the slate board at the head of the room was chalked a map of Ireland, spotted with the Gaelic names of territories, towns and villages, bays and rivers. A series of arrows twisting in improbable directions, suggested fierce, unprincipled, alien invasions. Between the tiny shape that represented Rathlin Island and the large mass of Ireland itself, were three white dots, and Liam knew from the stories his father had told that these were the Children of Lir, biding their storm-tossed tenure as swans on the waters of the Moyle.
Next to the map was a list of Gaelic nouns written in his father’s hand, and beside them their English equivalents written in the hand of a child: “famine,” “sorrow,” “homeland,” “harp,” “sea,” “warrior,” “poet,” and the word “castle,” interrupted after the first syllable – the chalk that wrote it resting on the ledge beneath the board.
Liam saw in his mind, then, the scene about which his father would not speak. The child dutifully writing what she had learned, the few other students squirming in their seats, their teacher standing to one side with his arms folded, nodding as this collection of words flowed down the board, a map filled with violent arrows and forbidden words occupying the space that separated him from the small scholar. And then the surprise entrance of the trustees, their anger and his father’s arguments, the child in the midst of this abandoning the word “castle,” carefully placing the stub of chalk on the ledge, and returning quietly to her seat.
What was it that lodged the homeland so permanently and so painfully in the heart of his father? What terrible power had that particular mix of rock and soil, sea, grass and sky that its sorrows could claim him and cause him to draw its image on a wall built in the centre of a forest thousands of miles away. Concentrating, Liam suddenly recalled, quite vividly, his father’s turf spade, its worn handle and the spots of rust on its blade; that and a steaming haystack. About the departure, and the misery that preceded and followed it, he remembered nothing at all. His first real souvenir was the act of arrival – immigration – and a white house with water dancing on its windows.
Away Page 18
