Away

by Jane Urquhart

  Osbert did not answer right away, but looked at his long white hands which rested on the pine table. “I was his landlord,” he eventually said, “but I was not as bad as some.”

  “And who are your tenants now? Or did they all die?”

  “I have no more tenants.”

  “So they are all dead?”

  “We sent most of them away – here – some died on the voyage.”

  “Will you get more?” asked Liam eagerly, thinking of vast acreages under the plough. “Is there a great deal of grain?”

  The door slammed as Eileen left the cabin. An uncomfortable silence followed. Then Osbert answered. “There were tons and tons of grain. It was shipped to England. There was a terrible famine – worse in the south. Some of my tenants died. The rest we paid their Tenant Right and sent here. Your parents were among the first to go … and you.” He dipped his head towards Liam as he spoke the word “you.”

  “We sent so many away that there was no one left to work the estate and no money left either.”

  “So you came here?” said Liam.

  “No … not right away. My brother never saw it clearly. Men would drop dead in the fields, and he couldn’t see it. When there was no money left he couldn’t see that either. He wrote terrible poetry – even worse than your McGee did – just went on writing terrible poetry. Then he died.”

  “And you?”

  “I sold the demesne, all the stuffed wildlife, the cases, the library, the walks – everything – to the first person who wanted it.”

  Osbert got up and walked across the cabin to the corner where his pack rested. From it he pulled two tin cups and a bottle he had brought back with him from one of his trips to Queensborough. He poured the amber liquid into first one cup then the other, gave one to Liam and raised his own high into the air. “I sold it to a whiskey factory,” he said. “A goddamed whiskey factory. Afterwards I visited my brother’s grave and poured some of this stuff all over the grass. ‘Write a poem about that,’ I said.” Osbert swallowed the contents of the cup, coughed, and grimaced. “I, myself, do not care for the stuff, but drink it now and then, nevertheless.”

  “My father wrote poetry, sometimes,” Liam said. “He said it was bad poetry.” Liam felt the alcohol burn through his chest, at the place where, in dreams, the shield was lodged.

  “Your mother was the only one of them that had the real poetry … because she was ‘away.’ I never heard any of her poems but I knew she had them. She showed me a tidepool once and I never forgot. She changed something in me. I wasn’t in love with her but she changed something in me. Granville, my brother, could never comprehend it – though he wanted her story, you understand. We collected folklore. He thought he loved the legends – but you can’t love something you don’t believe in and he never believed a word of it.” Osbert poured himself another cup of whiskey. “A very bad poet,” he repeated. He swallowed this time without the grimace. “Rian fir ar mhnaoi,” he murmured.

  “What’s that?” said Liam, sitting up straight, his attention sharp.

  “Something I found written on a slate in the cabin where you and your parents lived. After everyone was gone there was just this slate lying broken on the floor. I pieced it together. Someone had written Rian fir ar mhnaoi.”

  “That … that’s what my father said just before he died.” Liam raised the cup to his lips. He allowed the liquid to rest in his mouth for a few moments before swallowing it.

  “I have no idea what it means,” said Osbert apologetically.

  “I know what it means.” Liam was beginning to enjoy the whiskey now. “It means that my father may have been a bad poet, but I think he believed in poetry.”

  “Here’s to bad poets everywhere,” said Osbert, lifting his cup a few inches off the table.

  Eileen spent the night in the tree, unwilling to enter the cabin where the man who had owned her parents sat drinking, believing that should she make the concession to return she might, somehow, declare herself to be his tenant.

  It was a clear moonlit night. Everything was either dimly luminous or shadowed. The stars resembled the gifts that the crow had given her: sparkling metals from the creek-bed, graphite, pyrite, sometimes crystals of quartz. He was her bird; her secret. She had tried once or twice to share him with her brother but his lack of belief had eliminated the possibilities for the crow in any other life but hers. Once, the bird had swaggered up to her with a glass button in his mouth, and later with one made from mother-of-pearl. He had brought her a drawer full of brilliant things: belt buckles, a silver ring, coins, watch fobs.

  The orange light of the cabin’s window burned all night long, disturbing Eileen’s sleep, until she had to shift her position to place one of the tree’s limbs between herself and this beacon. Even then she was awakened several times by voices, howling, laughter.

  Although she didn’t know this, the man and the boy finally fell asleep at the table, three-fourths of the whiskey demolished. Liam with his head on his arms and a puddle of vomit near his left foot, Osbert sprawled back over the chair, his nose pointed skyward, his mouth wide open as if yelling at God. Neither had thought about Eileen, sensed her overnight absence.

  In the morning the crow awakened her by racketing around in the leaves and complaining in her ear. The willow tree in which she opened her eyes was a miracle; its feminine skirts and long hair passive in the breeze, exotic as a palm on the edge of a woods composed mostly of rigid jack pines and dense cedars. In winter, Eileen ran her hands over its supple bones, climbed high and watched the forest. In summer, she parted its curtains and stepped inside its mystery. She could hardly see out during the day. The long lip-shaped leaves moving in the wind and the shattered sunlight giving the surrounding air the look of green water. Her father had said the sea was green – the creek was the colour of polished wood. It had never occurred to Eileen that water could be blue.

  Blue was the colour of the crow – his sheen – a glaze painted over black. Black as the name of a river the colour of polished wood.

  Tilting his head, now, the crow fixed her with one bright eye and then the other. His beak glowed like the cabin window in the evening. Every morning for seven years Eileen had awakened to his laugh but this was the first time she had awakened into his world.

  “Is this landlord him?” she asked petulantly, pushing the hair back from her face and allowing her legs to unfold over the large limb where she had slept. “Is this landlord the one you said would come?”

  The crow rocked, laughing, on his branch. She heard him repeat the word “Landlord” and the word “Him.” Then, after performing a sort of side-step along his perch and looking coyly the other way as if fearful of being overheard, he told her that there were no landlords, there were no lords of the land.

  Eileen parted the willow fronds in front of her – just a few inches – so that she could see the cabin. The bird pecked fiercely under his wing, ignoring Eileen altogether, then dived through the soft green screen to the quick-running creek, splashed there and returned with what appeared to be a piece of the sun in his mouth. Eileen held out her hand but he scraped away across a twig, teasing.

  “Aren’t you going to give it to me?” she asked.

  The crow appeared to be panting, his beak held open by solidified light. He edged sedately towards Eileen, one step at a time, his eyes fixed on something in the distance. Then he dropped his most recent gift into her palm.

  Afterwards, he perched briefly on her shoulder, his talons clutching homespun cloth, before catapulting away, leaving Eileen immersed in flickering green. She was calm, decided, clutching a precious gift, and hungry for breakfast.

  It took Liam two days to recover from the whiskey, but something had broken open in him during its tour of his body. He was still in awe of the man who had poured it for him, but they had become closer, like soldiers who had been wounded in the same battle. They compared injuries and anecdotes, laughed about Liam staggering outside to pee, howling at the moon, le
cturing the cows in the barn. They recalled with astonishment that, at one point, Osbert had read aloud from a newspaper one of D’Arcy McGee’s long diatribes against Fenianism, embellishing it with wild gestures and a thick Irish brogue.

  Eileen noticed that the tone of her brother’s voice had changed; that he attempted to move his blunt peasant’s hands gracefully when he spoke, emulating Osbert – eager to please him – wanting some of his breeding to come to him through the shared light of the oil lamp. He did not seem to understand, as she did, that what Sedgewick was after was the children’s absolution.

  The old man walked as far as Madoc, returning the following day with an ox, a cart, two tombstones, and a stonecutter. Eileen presumed that one of the monuments was for her father, the other for her mother. But Osbert, having been greatly moved by Liam’s maudlin account of his childhood with the cow, had wanted a memorial for Moon. Appropriate verses were composed and chiselled onto marble surfaces. The stone-cutter was invited to spend the night. Another bottle of whiskey was consumed.

  After two cupfuls, Liam began to rave about the shield. “It’s all over,” he said. “All over the country except on the front, down by the Great Lake. This land will never grow anything but scrub pine. There’s a shield, you see, that keeps the growing from happening.”

  “There are some lovely birches, though,” Osbert interjected.

  Liam remembered that he had thought a birch tree was his mother in the moonlight. Now birches looked to him like bones rattling in a winter wind. He knew the forest too well. He was losing interest in it. “There’s so much rock,” he said. “How’s a man supposed to farm when under everything there’s all this rock?”

  “Mines all over the place, though,” said the stonecutter. “Lots of iron ore – Marmora, the Seymour mine – some quarries, marble, lithographic stone.”

  Eileen was at the other end of the table, colouring Osbert’s drawings of daisies. She gently placed her brush beside the pad, rose to her feet, and ascended the ladder to the loft where she now slept. Within moments she returned to her place and began to watch the men carefully, her watercolouring abandoned.

  “The only metal worth pursuing,” announced Osbert, “is gold – the great stabilizer of the universe. A worthwhile quest … a wonderful healer. The moral question, of course, is whether it should be removed from a landscape fortunate enough to contain it. Personally, I would say not. Leave it alone, I would say. But human greed … well, there you have it.”

  “I’d get it out of the ground fast enough,” said the stone-cutter.

  “My point exactly.”

  “I don’t care about it one way or the other,” said Liam. “I just want something to grow in the ground … don’t want to take anything out of it that I didn’t put in myself. Anyway, the only gold around here is what’s in this bottle,” he poured an inch of liquid into his cup. “There isn’t any gold around here.”

  “Oh yes there is,” said Eileen.

  “Is that so?” the stonecutter grinned at her. “How can you be so sure?”

  Eileen unfurled the fingers of her right hand. Her palm glittered.

  “You see,” she said to her brother, “the crow knew all along about the gold, he knows what to do.” She was speaking to her brother but her eyes never once left the old man’s face.

  “Like particles of broken lightning,” Osbert was saying, “just like particles of broken lightning.”

  Sedgewick paid for the property with a large bundle of pound notes which had been lying, all along, in the bottom of his pack. They were filthy, mouldy, and smelled of the block of cheese against which they had nestled during Osbert’s trek through the bush, but, resting on the table, the notes stood half a foot high. Osbert removed an inch for himself and pushed the rest towards Liam. “Whiskey money!” he exclaimed. “Let us sing the praises of flowing streams: the one that bubbles through the demesne at Puffin Court and makes whiskey; the one that hurries towards the Black River and gives us nuggets of gold.”

  “How much is there? How much is this?” asked Liam.

  “Never counted.” Sedgewick folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. “But quite a lot, I should think. Don’t spend it all at once.” He laughed loudly at his own bad joke, then rapped his knuckles on the table as if bringing a class to attention. “A stable spot in the universe,” he said, “is all I ever wanted – and this forest tidepool of quivering life.” Then looking sharply at Liam, he reported, “Tidepools ruined all over England, you know. A man called Gosse wrote a book about nature near the sea and people of culture crowded the beaches seeking the tidepools, lifting the life out of them with nets.” His expression was grim. “She would have hated that. Your mother would have hated that.”

  When she had entered the green world of the tree, later in the day, the crow confided to Eileen that the only problem was that from now on her family would be visited by the curse of the mines.

  He dug his beak into the flesh of the tree several times as if to illustrate his point.

  Eileen was watching the way the leaf shadows moved across the skin on her arms, that and the way the spots of sun caused the crow’s sheen to roll back and forth across his feathered body like lamp oil on water. She would be leaving soon and hoped to take these things with her. She placed her index finger on the crow’s neck but he wouldn’t look at her and so she slipped between the green curtains, got into the canoe, and paddled to the opposite shore. As she was pulling the boat up onto the bank she heard the crow from inside the tree. But the foliage was too thick. She could no longer see him.

  She took with her only textures, slim leaf shadows on her arm, and a knowledge of how dark can shine. The bird would be, in the future, something she almost remembered when she awakened at the most silent hour of the night with an unidentifiable feeling of great loss upon her and a flutter of dark wings near her heart.

  EVEN before Liam and Eileen had decided how and when to leave the acres of light, the road parade, which had dwindled to a few miserable souls as settlers discovered the impossibility of farming solid rock, became more colourful and exotic than it had ever been in its short history. It had taken only a week or two for the news of gold, carried on the lips of the stonecutter back to Madoc, to fan out from there and into the wide world. Now the pageant that spilled out of the forest and by the cabin door was so intriguing that Genesis, Leviticus, Ruth, Acts, and young Numbers rarely left the road side of their pasture where they stood lined up like a military colour party, chewing thoughtfully, watching the action.

  The usual collection of ragged, bush-crazed prospectors that are conjured by even the hint of a discovery of gold were joined by half-pay officers, members of parliament, enterprising American businessmen, a gaggle of scrapping orphans, cowboys on horseback, an escaped chain gang, sailors, coureurs de bois, and a quiet trio of sandalled and habited monks from Quebec. And then one day a chattering, laughing wagonful of whores from Montreal appeared, dressed in colours and fabrics the likes of which neither Liam nor Eileen had ever seen.

  “Those, my dears,” said Osbert as this spectacle rounded the corner and came into view, “are, if I am not mistaken, ladies of ill repute.”

  Their leader – and driver of the team that pulled the wagon – was a round goodnatured woman called Madame Beausejour who explained, first in French, then in English, that although she and her petites filles intended to set up housekeeping they had, more important, brought along their équipement de prospection. The girls, then, proudly brandished pickaxes and pans, the latter of which they banged in a tambourine-like manner as they went joyfully on their way singing French log-driving songs.

  Hamlets of hastily constructed huts, shacks, and hovels sprang up in the area overnight and gave themselves names such as Eldorado, Enterprise, Nugget Niche, Beaucoup D’Argent, Eureka, and Coeur D’Or. In the space of three weeks the population of the town of Madoc tripled. Barber shops, beer parlours, and the offices of barristers were born, fortune tellers flourished. Hardware s
tores and hotels came into being and board sidewalks unfurled on the edges of muddy new streets named after Aztec warriors and Inca gods.

  The staid festivities, which had been planned months before, and which celebrated the confederation of the provinces on July first, escalated into a pagan display of gold fever. When Madame Beausejour’s petites filles walked into the town park, swathed in transparent blue silk and offering to represent les lacs et les rivières duQuébec in the Methodist women’s tableau entitled “The New Dominion,” for instance, a riot nearly ensued. Spurned by the town matrons, the girls broke into the Orange Hall from which they removed several colourful banners. With these they marched through town demanding liberté, égalité, fraternité. The town band concert, which was to include some hymns and a few recently composed possible national anthems, was drowned out by talented prospector-fiddlers playing reels, strathspeys, waltzes, and hornpipes. Aged Canadian veterans of the War of 1812 began arguments with aged American veterans of the War of 1812, each claiming that they had won the day – and small, fierce re-enactments of various notorious battles ensued. A group of would-be Fenians, made bold by the liberal supply of whiskey, rescued the Orange Order banners from the girls and rode around the perimeter of the park on white horses, calling themselves Silly Billys and Worshipful Masters and hurling insulting replies in the direction of the hecklers in the crowd.

  A second invasion of gold seekers followed close on the heels of the first. Two or three weeks after the last of the celebration’s fireworks had faded from the night sky, the roads began to fill with German, Swedish, Polish, and Finnish immigrants diverted from their original destinations by the news which had now reached the docks at Quebec City. These were joined by the odd recently emancipated American slave and some thin, worn Civil War veterans who, despite their artificial limbs and obvious shell-shock had made the long journey from Virginia to Canada.