Away

by Jane Urquhart

  AS the white clapboard building settled on its new foundation its former identity leaked slowly from it, the views from all its front windows, where the Great Lake still danced, changed utterly. From the west, the idea of orchard and pasture slipped into its rooms, from the east barnyard, pigsty and chicken coop, and, in the north, the dark tumescent shape of the cedar bush pushed its shape, and, in the late afternoon, its shadow towards the wooden walls. The smell of smoke and whiskey that had filled what used to be the tavern room diminished by degrees and was replaced by other, earthier odours. No longer vibrating under the pounding of sailors’ feet or the frenetic clatter of trains on the trestle bridge, the house assumed a state of sedateness that was almost refined. Then one night, about a week after their arrival at Loughbreeze Beach, both Liam and Eileen were awakened by a harsh noise followed by low guttural moans – the last ghosts taking their leave. The building would not be agitated by anything at all, now, for a hundred years, though its cells would hold onto a latent tendency towards this kind of experience. Liam would never again refer to the structure as “The Seaman’s” or “the Inn” and it relaxed, with grace, into its new, more banal existence as farmhouse.

  The tavern room, soon transformed into a large, comfortable parlour, would remain for Eileen powerfully lit by the energy of Aidan Lanighan’s dancing in the same way that the upstairs hall, even with its doors open to bright rooms, clung to the velvet darkness of his furtive caresses. At night, when she undressed by lamplight in her large room with its view of the lake, she examined her shoulders, neck, and breasts, certain that at some time or another she would be able to detect permanent evidence that his hands had visited there. She kept his only tangible gift, the derringer pistol, buried beneath her two white nightgowns beside the braided red and black hair and the one glistening black feather, whose significance she was never able to recall.

  During the day she watched her brother wed himself to the land. Often she saw him in the fields digging like a child with his hands buried in the rich soil. Sometimes he would run back to the house from the orchard with an oversized apple in each hand. “Look!” he would often shout as he displayed a packed corn crib, a fat ewe, or a basket of eggs from the chicken coop. Once he strode through the kitchen door and dragged Eileen across the yard to the barn where they stood silently in the dusty light, Liam with his hat clasped to his breast, his face rapt as if visiting a great cathedral.

  Eileen assumed the household chores, quietly and steadily. As if in a trance she moved easily, vacantly from task to repetitive task. Her brother, anxious to preserve every perfect vegetable in the kitchen garden, had provided her with a pantry full of sealer jars and three huge copper kettles. When the equinoctial gales of autumn began to toss the lake and rattle the stones on the beach, Eileen was immersed in a room full of billowing vapour and the smell of cooked fruit, her hands holding glass the colour of lake water and the floating swaths of gauze she used for straining seeds and skins. She cooked meals for her brother and the three hired men, who had been originally delighted by her appearance but whose ardour had cooled when their jests and compliments were met with absent-minded indifference. “She must be promised,” one had said to another.

  In the mornings she crossed the wind-twisted yard to milk Genesis and the half a dozen new cows she had not taken the trouble to name. Then she would feed the chickens and return to the order she had created in the house. The kitchen windows displayed her laundry shuddering like angry pennants against the dark cedar woods. In the parlour windows the lake churned, and clouds of golden leaves swept from the poplars through the air. Eileen’s fires, fed by equinoctial oxygen, burned with a sharp, orange brilliance, flames inside the Quebec heaters thrusting like blades out of the flesh of pine logs. While working, she kept one eye on the horizon for the sail she was certain she would be able to identify as his, and Aidan Lanighan’s voice whispered in her ears.

  Then one morning at the end of the first week in October she woke at dawn to a world from which turbulence had been removed. The autumn gales had finished. She walked out onto her upstairs verandah, searched the horizon for a specific sail, looked east towards the long arm of Presqu’ile Point and Bluff Island which formed its outstretched hand, then down to the subdued, clean lake water, licking the pebbles at the shore.

  Liam and the men were already active downstairs, banging stove lids, starting crackling fires with dried cedar kindling, and shouting to each other about the glorious day. Aidan Lanighan’s voice had gone from Eileen’s head in this weather, though she was not empty of his presence. The physical world, however, in the sharp autumn light, was engaged in an act of blatant exposure which cut through her preoccupation and allowed her to see, quite distinctly, not only the sand bars of the distant peninsula, but also coloured pebbles on the floor of the lake twenty feet from the edge. Since her arrival, she suddenly realized, she hadn’t moved further than three hundred yards from the house.

  Surrounded by the dark green of cedars that afternoon, her back to the lake, she remembered her solitary childhood – snow angels, her father’s voice, her mother’s frozen face and red hair surrounded by white, something that could be a wing the colour of a moonless night sky with blue highlights, a swaying green curtain. She recalled her father’s songs, cheerful tunes informed by grim narratives, or melodies suggesting the paralysis of great love. It’s you who have left my heart shaken, with a hopeless desolation, as before you I stand. Eileen, singing quietly, bending back the boughs of cedars, moved forward while the lake’s whispers faded. Sometimes she had only fragments of the songs, so she invented endings for half-remembered lines or created whole verses that resembled the original only in tone.

  It was some time before she discovered that she had been following a well-trodden path which had led her out of the evergreens and into another part of the woods altogether where she was surrounded by the rough trunks of hardwood trees, a steady precipitation of coloured leaves, and the sound of a second voice joining hers at the end of a verse of “Renerdine.” From between two sumac bushes there emerged a dark-skinned, blue-eyed girl, who looked directly into Eileen’s face, threw her head back, and laughed out loud.

  “Who are you?” the girls asked each other simultaneously.

  “I live here,” they both replied.

  “You are the new people, then,” said the girl, “with the big house that was a boat. I live here,” she announced openly, grabbing Eileen’s wrist and pulling her along the path between the twin fires of the sumac bushes. “I live with my father who has been here since ‘48. He got tired of the boat being so long from Quebec, and it was summer so he counted to twenty, jumped overboard, and swam to shore. He liked the look of the beach, you see, and there was no one on the land then. But he’s never been one for living right on the water. So he walked eight thousand and nine hundred paces into the forest – one for every week of misery inflicted on the Irish by the English – and he built his house and went further north, on foot, every day, looking for some kind of work. The work was hard to find, but he found my mother in a matter of days – days, he says, just like a miracle. She was Ojibway,” the girl announced, proudly. She stopped suddenly and searched Eileen’s face. “You’re not English, are you?” she asked suspiciously. “No … I thought not, you’re Irish, like my dad, and I’m half that and half Ojibway because of my mother. She’s dead now.”

  “So is mine … and my father, too.” Eileen was surprised at the ease with which she responded to the talkative girl. “But I have a brother,” she added.

  “We’re almost at the place now. My father has gone to work on a barn today. He said, ‘They won’t like it, Molly, that we’re on this land, them in that fancy house. We’ll just have to be quiet for a while and let our presence be known, gradual-like.’ This is a wonderful day because you’ve come to find us.”

  “I didn’t really come to find –”

  “And you and I having so much in common we’ll be like sisters, because of the Irish
and our mothers being dead.”

  “I have a black feather,” Eileen said to the girl for reasons she didn’t quite understand. “And I think there was a bird.”

  “Dad has birds all over him when he works, and chipmunks that run up one of his arms and down the other.”

  They had come to a small clearing in the woods. In it there was a shanty with a tin stovepipe, a modest-sized workshed painted bright orange, and a yard filled with logs, planks, sheets of tin, and sawhorses. Above the workshop a sign proclaimed, THOMAS J. DOHERTY: SIGN PAINTER AND BARN EMBELLISHER. But, most surprising, the surrounding area was scattered with a multi-coloured collection of wind machines that clattered and whirred in the breeze, and miniature mechanical figures churning butter, milking cows, running on the spot, riding horses, some solitary souls making ridiculous gestures with their arms or kicking wildly with their legs. Rags of various colours flapped frantically from wires supported by stakes at one end and attached by hooks to either the house or the shop at the other, causing both the surrounding forest and the clearing to look as if they had been torn to shreds. The walls of both buildings were covered with horseshoes, except those of the front and the side of the workshop, which were dressed with paintings of cows, rendered in profile and standing in a series of improbable landscapes.

  “Those are what he does,” said the girl, pointing to the painted cow. “Big on barns for money. He’s doing one today.”

  “And these … ?” asked Eileen, looking towards the frenetic wooden figures.

  “Those he does,” said Molly Doherty, “for art.”

  Molly Doherty was her first friend, and Eileen would always love her. Never impatient with Eileen’s quietness, her reticence, the dark-haired girl talked to her about anything that came into her mind – wild berries, the lake, her father, her mother’s people, horses, travelling medicine shows, coveted hats – allowing Eileen the luxury of occasional companionship. She never demanded that Eileen reveal her darker side though she guessed that that side existed. She told her about O’Doherty Island which was situated off the northern coast of Ireland, how her father had said it was full of yellow meadows, white cows, and three times fifty of the world’s most beautiful women. “Dad says he left the ‘O’ in his name with one of the beautiful women there, and he’ll take me back, some day, to retrieve it.”

  “My mother came from a northern island,” said Eileen. “One called Rathlin, where there were women who carried baskets of sea plants on their backs.”

  “O’Doherty Island is much different from that … you wouldn’t be able to compare them at all, those two islands.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, to you it would be invisible. O’Doherty Island can only be seen by members of the O’Doherty family.”

  “An otherworld island.”

  “Yes, one of those.”

  “My mother’s own island was closer to that than you think … but I can’t remember why. There was something about the sea and a lake. There was a bird that belonged to me, or her, but I don’t know which.”

  The girls talked everywhere: out on the jetty, sitting among the beach stones, walking through the woods or, if the weather was awful, as it often was, huddled inside the cluttered shanty. Only once did Molly search for information that Eileen did not willingly reveal.

  “Do you have a sweetheart?” she enquired with uncharacteristic shyness.

  It was early November by then and Eileen had been carrying the tension of waiting on her neck and shoulders like a taut bowstring. Still, she didn’t want to loosen the string by confessing Aidan Lanighan to her friend; wanted to keep even the pain of him private, jealously hoarded, close to her blood. His continued absence was a strong thread strapped to her body, pulling her towards him.

  “No …” she said, “not really.”

  “Me neither,” Molly confided cheerfully. Then, seeing that her friend’s face had clouded, she changed the subject. “My father can do something else, you know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He charms skunks.”

  Since the beginning of October the smell of skunks had increased in intensity at Loughbreeze Beach until now it permeated the air almost as far as the village of Colborne, and, when the breeze was from the east, well past the hamlet of Lakeport. Liam had never seen the culprits, though he kept his rifle handy for just such an occasion, but the smell of them was always with him. When there was no wind, the stench was overpowering, causing one of the hired men to quit in disgust and, once, disturbing Genesis and the other cows so much that their milk soured. Eileen did not mind the smell as much as the others did. To her it was a manifestation of the helplessness of her own state; Aidan Lanighan’s after-image clinging to her like a lingering odour. Often, while washing dishes in the kitchen at night, she would gaze out the window to the dark yard and see white, fleeting exclamation marks on the grass. But, by the time her brother entered the kitchen, they would be gone – on night duty. The skunks, according to the hired hands who could live with the stench, would hibernate soon, emerging in June with litters of five or six kittens. By the smell, one of the men said, you could tell there were at least a hundred of them already.

  This irritant was added to that which Liam called his “other problem in paradise”: the squatter that he knew inhabited the north end of his woodlot.

  A few weeks after Eileen had met and become friendly with Molly, Liam tramped out into the woods to investigate, and found Doherty, himself, working on a wind machine in the cluttered yard. “The name’s Thomas J. Doherty,” he had said, forcefully, knowing the purpose of Liam’s visit and not looking away from the two pieces of coloured wood that he was attempting to join together.

  Liam tried to ignore the torn banners that bounced in the air around him. “How long have you been living here?” he asked.

  “That depends,” said Doherty, pounding a pedestal for yet another carved milkmaid into the ground, “on what you mean by living.” He stepped back and squinted at the post. “And, of course, what you mean by here.”

  “Here, on this spot, on this farm.”

  “A very short time indeed.”

  “But I thought –”

  “A very short time in comparison to the long history of English injustice to the Irish. You’re Irish, yourself,” said Doherty, smiling beguilingly. “You’ve got some of the music on your tongue.”

  “Never mind that,” said Liam. “This is my land. You can’t just go on living here.”

  “Now, look at that little girl go!” Doherty had fixed his wind sculpture to the top of the pole. “Isn’t she wonderful?”

  “You must find a place of your own,” said Liam weakly.

  “The last one let me stay.” Doherty settled himself down on top of a tree stump and slowly, casually, lit his pipe. “And he a Scotsman, name of McCormack. Sold out to you, did he? A shame that … the farm going so well: no pests, no problems, no bad smells. Said he wanted to write a book about some place called Patagonia. I don’t know how to write myself, but I can talk and I can paint. And I can –”

  “I’ll give you two weeks,” said Liam. “Take it or leave it.”

  “Well, I think I’ll be taking it and leaving it,” said Doherty. “Leaving it in that I’m not going anywhere, and taking it in that I’ll have the two weeks and many more.”

  Liam saw the round face of Eileen’s black-haired friend in the window. She raised her hand as if to greet him.

  “Two weeks,” repeated Liam in his new, landowner’s voice.

  “I can make your life a lot easier or a lot harder,” Doherty called to Liam’s retreating back. “The last one had no troubles. Your sister, now, there’s a fine girl. She and my Molly have made friends.”

  As Liam walked back towards the barn and house, the skins of white birches flickered at the edges of his vision and sumac burned. He could tell that the wind was dropping, the smell of skunk becoming even more powerful than it had been on the previous few evenings. It was the sm
ell of an anger, milder, more subtle than that which he experienced in adolescence. The sumac was the colour of something else altogether, something that anticipated more than the fierce winter he knew would come sweeping, in just a few weeks, up the lake from the east. He tore two or three branches off as he passed, and placed them, when he got home, in one of the sealer jars which he had bought for Eileen and which she had not yet filled.

  A week later Eileen returned from visiting Molly to find the lake in a furious uproar under the sullen sky, but there was no wind around the farm buildings and the smell of skunk was heavy in the air.

  Liam was tossing hay in the barn, randomly but doggedly as if he were trying to create a new topography inside a closed, controlled space.

  “Mr. Doherty charms skunks,” she said to him. “Molly told me.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Eileen.”

  Eileen climbed two rungs of the ladder that led to the loft. Holding on with one hand and one foot, she allowed her body to rotate slowly. “I believe her,” she said.

  Liam snorted with contempt. “Yes, and you used to talk to birds.”

  “I did?” Eileen swung around in the opposite direction, her hand a hinge on the wooden post. “Molly is half Ojibway,” she said absently.

  Liam stood up straight for a moment and leaned on the pitchfork. “Remember that Ojibway, Exodus Crow, bringing Mother back? Father was marvellously taken with him. It took me a while, but in the end I liked him too.” A strong waft of skunk invaded the barn. “Jesus,” said Liam, “I can’t stand much more of this. Maybe this is why McCormack sold the farm, though Doherty claims he had no trouble at all with skunks.”

  “I don’t remember the Ojibway,” said Eileen.

  “That’s impossible,” said Liam. “You liked him best of all.” He resumed his work. Eileen stepped down from the ladder and walked along one beautiful board, which had been polished by grain. She could see her breath in the chill and her hands were numb with cold.