Away

by Jane Urquhart

  It was against all this that Liam and Eileen eventually made their way; the girl frightened, clutching her brother’s sleeve, having never in her life seen such crowds of people, the young man purposeful, bursting with such forward momentum that at times he believed he could actually feel the shield melting, like ice in the sun, around his lungs and heart. Behind them, at one end of a five-foot rope, and pausing to graze more than Liam would have liked, walked Genesis, chosen to accompany them partly for her name, which Liam considered to be suitably symbolic, and partly because she was the one who most resembled her mother. With them they carried only that which they could fit into the packs on their backs. In Eileen’s case this included watercolours, two small sketch pads, a geography book, some clothing, four linen napkins, a tiny braided wreath of red and black hair, a broken piece of blue china, and one black crow feather. Liam stuffed his pack with socks, an extra shirt, some overalls, and the thick bundle of pound notes. In his left hand he carried a lantern, which was fortunate because, finding the halfway houses full of gold seekers and the roads clogged with the same, he and his sister soon decided to travel at night. They slept during the day in cool morning rooms in which the smell of whiskey, tobacco, and sweat lingered after the departure of the previous night’s collection of prospectors, and which, in the afternoon, responded to the summer sun on the roof by heating to impossible temperatures.

  They were released from these periods of baked, drugged unconsciousness into the soft, windless twilights of one small town after another. Evening games were winding down, the hymns of choir practices poured out of open church doors. Liam and Eileen were aware that these worlds had nothing to do with them, but they were aware also that everything in these worlds paused and turned to watch two young people and a cow pass through the tidy residential streets and out into the night. When darkness fell they were often in a woods made silver by moonlight, surrounded by the ochre circle – four yards in diameter – provided by the lantern, and beating off the clouds of moths that flew into their faces or covered the glass that held the light. By daybreak they had usually walked through a couple of sleeping villages where dogs announced their arrival and departure and where cats were sometimes coupling noisily. There was always, they noted, one candle burning somewhere, and a toy – a doll, a hoop, a ball – left abandoned in a yard. Occasionally, a horse or cow, whose attention they had caught, would canter or saunter across a wet dawn pasture to meet them and strain against the fence rails while Genesis mooed softly.

  They were heading for Liam’s first harbour on the Great Lake, retracing the route their parents had taken over seventeen years before, but as the rhythms of their nights became established they believed they would walk like this forever, out of pattern with the life around them, discreetly moving from settlement to settlement. Deloro, Marmora, Blairton, Prevenau, Havelock, Asphodel, Indian River. Lantern light and swerving moths and a single candle behind glass their only points of reference.

  As they travelled steadily westward the land opened up revealing, at dawn, lush farms with huge porched barns and beautiful, well-maintained red brick houses, tree-lined lanes and formal front gardens. Now and then a flamboyant scarlet mail coach hurtled importantly past in the first part of the morning, leaving them choking in the dust it had raised.

  “I have never in my life,” Liam remarked, “received a letter.”

  Then one morning, remembering, he hailed an oncoming coach by flapping two white envelopes in the air. He handed the driver his father’s letters addressed to Father Quinn, Rathlin Island, County Antrim, Ireland; and to Exodus Crow, Moira Lake, Madoc Township, Upper Canada; these and a ten-pound note that happened to be resting on the top of the pile in his pack. The confused driver sat speechless, astonished, looking at the money in his hand, unable to continue on his route.

  After a week of walking, the morning sun disclosed in the distance the town of Peterborough – its river a ribbon of silver, its steeples shining. Eileen and Liam stopped for the day at the inn at Downers Corners, unable, after a night of travelling, to face the density of this large centre’s population. Liam explained to his sister that it would be necessary to pass through this place in order to reach the road that turned south and led to the Great Lake; a lake much larger than the long narrow one whose starlit company they had kept for the past two nights. An innkeeper told them the narrow lake was called Rice by the Indians because of the wild rice that grew near its shore, at its marshy edge.

  “What about that Indian, Exodus Crow?” asked Liam, lying by his sister’s side on the feather mattress while stunned summer flies buzzed at the margins of dusty glass. “And what did you mean about the gold and him knowing what to do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Eileen truthfully, vaguely, falling gently into sleep. “I think I used to know, but I’ve forgotten.”

  For the brother and sister the loosening and letting go of their physical past was as simple as making a left-hand turn after the commotion of Peterborough. Now the road they took south drew them down into a space forsaken by a vanished glacier towards the remnant Great Lake it had left behind. Hill by hill they descended in the dark, their lantern burning oil purchased at the previous inn and echoed by the rows of lit windows in the big houses of the prosperous farms they passed. Even in the darkness these estates pressed themselves so firmly into Liam’s visual memory that the old log houses and the small log barn began to lose shape, to melt away like the shield. Genesis veered to the right or to the left at the end of her rope, turning her head and enlarging her nostrils, inhaling the smell of healthy herds fed by fertile pastures. On either side of the road, maples grew so sturdily and stood at such precise distances from each other that Liam and Eileen put aside their memories of the thick, continuous pines and cedars that had lined the tracks of their childhood.

  At first light on the third southward day, at the crest of yet another of the hills that lay in succession before them like a huge, soft staircase, the boy, the girl, and the cow stood utterly still in the centre of a road that was, half a mile later, to transform itself into the main street of a hamlet called Rossmount. They watched, almost without breathing, as a blood-red sun quivered on the eastern horizon of an expanse of water unlike anything Eileen had ever seen and recalled only vaguely by Liam. It was twenty miles away and a thousand feet beneath them, yet it dwarfed every feature of the surrounding landscape simply by its presence.

  “Sweet Jesus,” said Liam. “Holy Mother, Sweet Jesus, look at that lake!” His sister had turned her back to the view. “Eileen,” he said, “look! We’re going to live somewhere on the edge of that.”

  The lake had already changed colour, the sun hovering, full now, an inch above its edge. “Look at that, Eileen!” Her brother grabbed her shoulders but she twisted away, unwilling to turn so that he was forced to circle round to examine her face. “What’s the matter with you? Look at that incredible lake.”

  “I can’t look,” she stammered, “I’m afraid. I think it’s mine but I’m afraid.” She leaned, exhausted, against Genesis. “It’s mine and I know nothing about it. It doesn’t have another side.”

  “Yes it does, yes it does.” Her brother was impatient, eager to join the world. In the fields that were spread like draped tables in front of them he could see the patterns of the August harvest of barley and acres of rich, green corn. The sight moved him. He wanted to run wildly down the hills, then fling himself, gasping, into the arms of the magnificent lake.

  “It has another side,” he said to Eileen. “It’s just that we can’t see it. You remember. America is over there on the other side.”

  “No,” said Eileen, turning slowly and resuming the journey, her eyes on the stones of the road. “I feel it in my heart. There’s no end to it, no end to it at all.”

  III

  The Trace of a Man on a Woman

  WHEN Esther was a child she collected stone snails from the beach, placing them in jars and baskets all over the house until her practical mother, ov
erwhelmed by the quantity, had demanded that they all be thrown back on the shore.

  “And if you have any white stones,” the old Eileen had added, speaking for the first time in a month, “throw them into the water.”

  “What do you mean?” Esther had asked. But the old woman had lapsed, once again, into silence.

  The midnight shift at the cement company is made up of men quite different from those who work the daylight, twilight, and first darkness hours.

  The midnight men begin their tasks, these summer nights, under a thick carpet of stars they rarely notice, their machines being so powerfully exposed by other forms of light that everything beyond the glare is a black wall. Because the spaces in which they move are enclosed by the night, the men might almost be redesigning the shapes of rooms. Unlike their colleagues on the day shift, not one of them has ever bent to the quarry floor to rescue a fossil released by dynamite. Neither have they taken fossils home as gifts for their children.

  They are not dynamiters – the government does not allow explosions in darkness – and so they have never been present when the most recent wall of the quarry fragments, folds, and collapses, dust rising from it like curtains of rain. The noise they make is strong and relentless, and, because the wind and lake are often calm on summer nights, all pervasive. They are out of step with the rhythms of the rest of the world and, as a result, their family lives are sometimes troubled.

  Everything they do, everything they have done for the last thirty years, has crept into Esther’s dreams.

  They represent the most dangerous kind of shape changers: those who cannot see, because of darkness, beyond the gesture of the moment.

  A forest child, Eileen was disturbed by the immense fact of the lake. Her landscape had never included a phenomenon this imposing, this regular. But mostly she was disturbed by its familiarity; her sense that she was related to it in ways she couldn’t understand. She knew immediately what it would sound like when she stood on its shore and how it would change tone and texture as the sky changed. This ocean of a lake was hers; a possession she had inherited at birth, but one she had never requested – an unruly relative that must, sooner or later, be reckoned with. It frightened her. It’s mine, she had told her brother, not knowing at all what she meant by the assertion other than that it was true. She would have to live beside it, its voice forever in her ears.

  Liam refused to rest after their last night’s walk. “We’ll reach the harbour by nightfall,” he told his sister, “and sleep there in a real town hotel with a dining room and silver forks and spoons. We’ll use the manners Osbert taught us. Tomorrow we’ll buy some land and a house. We’ll buy a horse and a carriage and you can have a parasol.”

  “What’s a parasol?”

  “Something that looks like a big flower that ladies hold over their heads.”

  Eileen’s mind was filled with the left-over images from night journeys and the imposition of this lake upon her life; its invasion. “I don’t want a parasol,” she said.

  Her brother ignored her comment. “We’ll have a herd of a hundred cows,” he said, “and fourteen acres each of everything that grows. Well hire workers.”

  Later he said, “I’ve counted forty-three ships on the lake – nine steamers and thirty-four sails.”

  The road bent in front of them, leading them towards a village. They bought bread and cheese from a general store and ate it in the trembling shade of a maple tree. As evening fell, the harbour of Port Hope caught gradual fire below them as they witnessed from the last slope its gas lamps ignite one by one, and all the ships reflecting artificial light in the waters of the lake. Then a din from the west startled them as a train – its windows ablaze – flung itself across a trestle bridge which, from this distance, looked too delicate to hold the weight implied by its clamour.

  “That was a locomotive.” Liam was impressed, wide-eyed. “Soon we must ride on a locomotive.”

  Eileen was more comfortable with the lake in the darkness, though the air was moist with its presence, and only when the train rattled over the trestle bridge was she able to stop listening for the conversation she knew the waves were having with the shore.

  Liam and Eileen did not stay in either of Port Hope’s brick hotels with dining rooms and shining cutlery, their rooms being fully occupied by promoters, speculators, and financiers attracted by the town’s new prosperity. The proprietor of the British Hotel dismissed them curtly from his lobby, suspicious of their ragged appearance and more than a bit put off by the mention of the cow. His colleague at the American Hotel on the opposite side of the street was more garrulous. He told them the story of the railway and subsequent “boom” of the town, and directed them towards the harbour and an establishment sometimes known as the Seaman’s Inn and sometimes as Canada House.

  As instructed, they walked beside the steel lines of the railway which led to the docks. This harbour, Liam said, resembled nothing that he could remember. There had been no railway here, he told Eileen, when he and his parents had arrived, and none of these grand houses; he pointed to the few Gothic mansions, recently built or in various stages of construction, on the hill behind them. He said he thought there had been one white house with many windows near the shore but he supposed it would be gone by now with all the new wharfs – lost to the “boom.” In the unnatural light Liam looked paler to Eileen, thinner than he had on all their night voyages, his hair in the gaslight an odd shade of pink. “It’s a pity about that,” he said, referring to the house.

  They heard the inn before they saw it – music and men’s voices, laughter and the odd curse. When it loomed into view, lit against the dark lake, it appeared, even from the rear, to be in a state of great agitation, the structure vibrating with the activity it contained. Eileen heard a fragment of an Irish reel she recognized, then the sound of breaking glass. Through the back windows she could see the large torsos of rugged men lunge in various directions, meeting and parting in what looked to her like serious combat. After she and Liam rounded the corner and began to climb the wooden stairs that faced the beach stones and the lake, Eileen realized that the boards beneath her feet were shaking. She watched as Liam tied the cow’s rope to a porch railing, then allowed herself to be guided over the threshold and into a riot of male dancing.

  A shoulder swung by, inches from her face, a grizzly beard heaved into sight and disappeared again. Eileen flattened herself against a wall as a line of broad backs veered in her direction then dived away from her towards the other side of the room. The pandemonium of a train crossing the nearby trestle bridge – the longest and highest in Canada, the clerk at the American Hotel had told them – was all but drowned out by the thumping of hobnail boots. Arm in arm, five leaping men thrashed against the bar, from which several gleaming mugs instantly jumped and shattered. Men in pairs clasped each other by the shoulders, kicking their legs wildly to the left or the right, entangling themselves with stationary chairs which were held aloft for a few moments before being hurled against the wall.

  After a few more thunderous moments, all noise abruptly stopped. The men collapsed on tables, chairs, the floor, the bar, their great ribcages heaving from exertion. Then, as though ordered to do so by an invisible commander, they all turned in unison and calmly regarded the newcomers.

  “I’m Captain O’Shaunessy,” said a stout, grey-haired, bearded man behind the counter. “What can I do for you?”

  They were given a large, sparsely furnished room overlooking the Great Lake, whose waves they would hear all night long when the sound of them was not overwhelmed by a passing locomotive or sporadic outbursts of dancing downstairs.

  “They’re mostly all seamen from the lake,” Captain O’Shaunessy had told Liam as they climbed the stairs. “They’re all drinkers and they’re all dancers. They’ll all live to be a hundred so long as they don’t take the lake for granted or sail with anyone else who does. I’m about a hundred myself, though I’ve never counted. Never once took her for granted. There are
five hundred and forty different kinds of weather out there, and I respect every one of them. White squalls, green fogs, black ice, and the dreaded yellow cyclone, just to mention a few. There are quite a few that cannot be mentioned at all, for if you do they’ll come to seize you even on land – far inland. I’m retired now but I still don’t take the lake for granted. If you want anything just ask for my brother. His name is Captain O’Shaunessy.”

  “But your name is Captain O’Shaunessy too.”

  “Of course it is. I’m his brother. Because of the lady I’ll give you the room with the door that leads to the upper verandah. You can sometimes spot ten different kinds of weather from there. You should see the lake when winter’s coming on,” he added ominously, “or when she’s working up to a purple riptide.” He opened the door noisily with a large iron key. “Have a good sleep,” he had said as he turned again towards the stairs. Both Eileen and Liam thanked him, but their voices were lost in the deafening racket of accordion music and pounding feet.

  Mornings at the Seaman’s Inn were relatively tranquil; the dancers either snoring in their rooms or sailing respectfully over the surface of the Great Lake. Eileen awoke to a shimmering ceiling, an empty room, and the sound of a passing train. Shortly afterwards, her brother slipped through the door. He had already been out walking and had bought bread and apples for their breakfast. While he ate he paced back and forth through a patch of sunlight on bare pine boards.

  “It seems impossible,” he said finally, “but it has to be. I went down to the water, turned around, looked at the Seaman’s Inn, and there it was.”

  “There what was?”

  “The house … I could see the reflection of the lake in its windows. I though that it was gone, but there it was. All those windows.”