Away

by Jane Urquhart

  When she stood to leave, Aidan awakened and clutched at her skirt, pulling her down beside him. “Listen,” he whispered, “it was in the cell that I taught myself to dance, at night when the others grew tired and lonely and pulled into themselves. I could whistle, so I did that for a while, till the guard shouted at me to stop. But I wouldn’t stop. I whistled more and I began to dance and dance until the men came cheering to the bars of their cells. I was beaten once for dancing, but I wouldn’t stop.”

  “Did you dance for McGee?”

  “I tried.”

  “But he never understood it?”

  “No, he never understood it.”

  During the following two days she would sometimes slip out of the house with warm milk from the cow or a bowl of porridge, but mostly she kept close to the kitchen, not wanting to arouse her brother’s suspicions. The second night she undressed Lanighan and ran her hands all over the unfamiliarity of his body while he lay shivering and laughing in the cold. Then she flung her own clothes onto the straw and lay beside him, seeing her long soft leg beside his harder, darker one. His skin tasted of salt and dust, his mouth on her nipple the only warm spot in a frozen world. When they could no longer bear the chill they burrowed into the straw, the discarded clothing, and attacked each other’s heat, gasping with exertion. Eileen was devastated, torn apart by the new pleasurable sorrow. Lanighan wrapped her hair around his neck like a scarf and they both slept, bound together.

  Once, waking suddenly, Eileen shook his shoulder. “I remember you,” she said, her hand clutching his hair. “There’s something in me that remembers you from somewhere.”

  “The Seaman’s Inn.”

  “No … somewhere else. How could I know you this well?” She pulled on her woollen skirt, her boots. “We’ll never leave each other, even if we have to be apart.”

  Eileen reached for the knife she had brought with the bread and meat. Bending forward in the light she cut a length of her hair and handed it to him.

  “Keep this always,” she said. Wind shook the barn and pushed its way through several cracks. Aidan groaned and covered his legs with straw. “You take all the warmth with you when you leave,” he said.

  The next morning he was gone.

  Snow hurtled past the windows of the farmhouse at Lough-breeze Beach. Aidan had departed in the middle of the early-morning storm, leaving no footprints in the yard. Eileen stared hard at the straw, now, wanting it to hold some formal imprint of his body, a memory of his presence. But there was nothing of him there, no souvenir. Nothing except the long piece of her hair, looking discarded and dead in the weak winter light. He hadn’t taken this one gift she had given him and, she suddenly realized, he hadn’t even asked about the pistol.

  Walking through the house, Eileen felt helpless, grief-stricken, and enraged. For days, after cursorily performing chores, she toured the locations that had been touched by Aidan’s existence. The parlour that in another life had been shaken by his dance, the upstairs hall where he had first pushed his mouth against hers, the dark triangular mark on the kitchen floor caused by his appearance in the lane. Angrily scrubbing floors, she avoided the spots where he had stood or leapt, fearing that the brush and suds might erase any trace, any scent of him from the architecture that held her – from her life.

  At night she lay awake while storms howled and the house creaked in the wind, inventing a community for him – a brave and patriot band – composed of the few scraps of information he had given her, the Celtic sagas of “old sorrows” her father had told to her, and the bizarre combinations of fact and fiction she read in the Irish Canadian. In her dreams, McGee loomed, a crouching beast, an awkwardly shaped iceberg, she on a far shore and Aidan beckoning from its summit.

  Her father had often sung the Irish song about Castle O’Neill to her in the evenings while she sat on his lap near the fire. Once, she asked him to translate, and her child’s mind, drawn to the picture the words painted, had retained one verse. She had sung the words one winter day when the empty threads of the willow were covered with frost. She had been surrounded by glitter; the shadow of the tree’s branches a network of blue veins on the snow. Now she whispered the words as she toured the house, “No dowry I hope for of sheep or cattle or lands, but my two hands supporting your head like a clustering branch,” and never thought about the branches that had often supported her.

  Three days before Christmas, Thomas J. Doherty dragged a fir tree down the path that emerged from the cedar bush and into the parlour, then returned the following day with an assortment of birds he had carved and painted for its branches. Eileen cooked a goose for her brother, the Dohertys, and the hired men. She made plum pudding with hard sauce and cut star-shaped cookies from damp flat oatmeal batter. But the house seemed to her to lean in odd directions as if in memory of its lake cruise, and the jagged chunks of ice which filled the little bay looked sharp and threatening. Liam and Molly sang Christmas carols together and one of the hired men had an accordion. Eileen fought the desire to dig her elbows into her side and bend over in pain. The bright ice on the lake was impossible to look at. Neither the winter orchard nor the dusky cedars surrounded by snow soothed her. There was no neutral view.

  She created Aidan over and over, gave him lines he had never uttered. “I love you,” he said in her imagination. “You are my heart’s darling.” Then, looking into the hell of the cookstove fire, she would think, He forgot my hair; he didn’t even remember that he gave me the gun.

  The bands of wild rovers, desperate warriors for justice, and heartbroken Irish nationalists that she had concocted as a family for Aidan Lanighan were never still in her mind. They galloped over hills with the wind in their hair or leapt back and forth on the trunks of enormous, floating trees as she had seen men do in logging season in Elzivir Township. They ran by night with the moon on their shoulders, and when they sat at the table and talked – using the new phrases she had learned from Boyle’s paper – they were tense, straight spined, poised for flight. They had in their bodies the energy of the young horses she remembered pounding recklessly through the dawn fields she and her brother had passed that summer. They were brothers-in-arms, fiercely loyal, and their arena was the new dominion. Though they were all men, she believed that she was one of them, that Aidan Lanighan’s touch had guaranteed her a role in the theatre, the performances, that made up their lives.

  Soon after the January thaw, and the arrival of the arctic air that always followed it, the bay beyond the stony beach froze smooth and deep in frigid, windless air and the population of the village of Colborne came by cutter to the Great Lake, bringing skates and iceboats with them. Molly and Liam joined them, as did Thomas J. Doherty, his own iceboat sporting colourful sails and tiny decorative windmills. Eileen stood at the window where Aidan Lanighan had brooded, where she, herself, had watched the shoreline of the Great Lake glide by; and noted that the bay had become a public gathering place. Where once there had been only shining, limitless water, and the expectation of a particular sail, there was now a collection of bundled parsons and grocers, elder sons and youngest daughters, farmers and millers, wives, and spinsters. Something else was steering Eileen from the ordinary, she knew; separating her, making it possible for her to join her patriot band and lie in the arms of her lover. Even those she loved, her brother and the Dohertys, were able to skate happily among the throng, shouting greetings, in exuberant goodwill, while she had affiliated herself with Aidan Lanighan’s unseen companions and all the old sorrows she believed they cherished. She put on her blue cloak and bonnet and drove the sleigh, as she did often now, to see the two-fifteen rattle by, heading noisily east, towards Montreal. She had, she realized, nothing of her own except her separation from the facile skaters, a memory of a young man’s body, the dream of a corps linked by passion, and her fixed state of single-minded desire. And in an upstairs drawer her underclothes and outer garments, and three or four significant objects, one of them a pistol.

  After the train ha
d passed, and all traces of its pandemonium had disappeared from the atmosphere, Eileen waited, as always, for twenty minutes, believing that Aidan Lanighan had stepped down from one of its coaches at the station in Colborne and was making his way towards her sleigh having completed some clouded mission in Toronto. Then, when he did not come, she pulled angrily on the reins, turned the cumbersome sleigh around, and sped back to the lake and the bright, forgotten room where Aidan Lanighan had danced; a room from which, she was beginning to believe, he would be forever absent.

  By the time her brother and Molly stumbled awkwardly on their skate blades into the house, she had already removed a fifty-pound note from the much-diminished pile which Liam kept in a cookie tin underneath his bed, and added it to her collection of special items in the drawer.

  That night, while Liam walked Molly back to the shanty in the cedar woods, Eileen stared for a long time at the three-quarter moon over the frozen lake. The ice looked like tin, cheap and plentiful; the moon, itself, as though it could be easily flicked, like a coin, from the sky. No magic existed beyond the plans she created for Aidan Lanighan, and herself at his side. Since the arrival of the frigid air no new snow had fallen, and the ground beyond the porch was unyielding in the moonlight. She would search for her lover, leave this place.

  In her large room with its view of the lake Eileen turned her back to the moon and wrote a verse into the long, undeliverable letter she spent her evenings composing.

  I would know your shadow even outside in bright sunshine.

  Bright hero and love for whom I have suffered censure,

  It is your thick curling hair that has filled me with melancholy,

  And it’s parting with you that has left forever this pain in my side.

  She stopped writing and looked for a while into the flame of the oil lamp. If he didn’t appear at the end of the lane in two months she would have to go to find him. The paralyzed lake beyond her windows led to a wide river, and the wide river to Montreal. She imagined skating there while the ordinary throng lay sleeping in their beds. Then she remembered the silver rails she visited each day. She would wait until spring, and if he didn’t come she would go to find him.

  Eileen drew a thick line through the word “forever” in the last part of the verse. She would not wait, not suffer forever.

  Further north, in Elzivir Township, there had been a snowfall, and Osbert Sedgewick, extinguishing the last oil lamp in the cabin, looked out through the window. He was amazed at the delicate blue glitter of the acres of light and moved by the pattern that the decorative iron fence around the three graves drew on the drifts near the marble stones. He thought of Liam and Eileen, of their new prosperity in a fledgling land, how their children’s children would walk free, serve no master, worship where they choose, answer to no one. He did not know that there was an inner theatre where a girl could build a prison. He did not see Eileen translating from myth to life the songs her father had taught her.

  AFTER the fine day and the sudden bout of celebratory skating, winter attacked Loughbreeze Beach with exuberance, blizzard after blizzard shrieking inland from the centre of the lake. In odd, calm moments drifts crawled up the verandah steps towards the front door, frost blossomed on glass, the arms of fir trees bent under thick white capes.

  Liam snowshoed daily to the Dohertys’ home, often bringing Molly back with him in hopes that she would cheer up his sister, whose brooding had finally caught his attention. With Molly, conversation and companionship and laughter entered the parlour. She sometimes carried copies of the Irish Canadian. “Eileen likes to read it,” she insisted in the face of Liam’s objections, “for the poems.” His sister’s sadness confused and troubled him. If she wanted poems she could have them. It never occurred to him that politics and desire had seized her imagination, that during this short, severe winter they were creating a private blizzard in her skull, though the part of him that was like his father wondered why, if she wanted poetry, she did not turn to Latin or to the Greeks. But his own state of mind was joyous and electric. He had asked Molly Doherty to marry him – the sooner the better. He was anxious for sons, for more acre-age under the plough, and, most of all, though he would not admit it, for a woman to warm his bed. Thomas J. Doherty was delighted with the arrangement, though he said, himself, that love was the greatest of the seven sorrows, so powerful that it had made him forget the other six.

  For his birthday, which fell in January, Molly made Liam a cloth envelope in which to keep his two bow ties, and on its surface she had coyly embroidered the phrase “Not the Only Tie that Binds.” Their happiness hurt Eileen.

  In an old issue of the Irish Canadian she read about Thomas D’Arcy McGee, how he had threatened to expose the Fenians of Montreal and how he had made good on that threat in an early December edition of the Ottawa Citizen. Eileen scrutinized the list of names with a pounding heart, in the same manner that she had, months earlier, scrutinized the horizon for a particular sail. When she did not find the words “Aidan Lanighan” she was not sure whether it was relief or disappointment that she felt. In early February she read that McGee had been expelled from the St. Patrick’s Society as a result of his “blasphemous charges.” Eileen imagined Thomas D’Arcy McGee, a small man, a failed Fenian, no longer young, filled with envy, and self-serving to the end. She imagined Aidan, straight and shining, locked in debate with McGee; the beauty and virility of his dance. He was like Oisín in the land of the forever young; righteousness in his anger, the memory of a wronged brotherhood still hot in his brain.

  “My people,” she whispered, thinking of how her father had explained Oisín, Finn, and the Fianna to her. “Our people.”

  She wanted to be like Deirdre, running wild in the woods in the intimate company of doomed brothers. “All stories,” her father had told her, “are born of sorrows.” She sensed her own story unfolding without her as she cooked or slept or built fires, trapped by winter in a house from which all action had fled. Powerless, she had not even the ownership of her sorrows, they being attached inexorably to that which was absent. She wanted the power, the collusion, the potential for tragedy. During the day she gazed through Aidan Lanighan’s abandoned tavern window, at storms out over the lake – storms of which she was not a part.

  At night she dreamed that her soul was caught in the teeth of these storms, had joined their forces, was hammering the house, her prison. Then she dreamed that her soul stayed wedded to the energy of blizzards as they headed east, along the lakeshore towards the river St. Lawrence, towards Montreal.

  BY the end of March the ferocity of the winter of 1868 began to lose momentum. Temperatures soared, soggy drifts were replaced by tufts of grey grass and by barnyard mud, except in the half-acre hardwood lot where a large handkerchief of snow still lay undisturbed and shining. Liam spent his days oiling and polishing his new collection of ploughs and his nights midwifing a menagerie of healthy baby animals. He seemed never to sleep, his hours filled either with courting or birthing or preparing for the opening up of the earth. All the same there was a crisp alertness about him, usually associated with the well rested, a tidiness about his activities. Eileen found it difficult to define the change in her brother. She had lost the ability to recognize contentment.

  On a Tuesday morning in the midst of this spring thaw, Eileen awoke resolved. She packed a case with blouses, clean underclothes, a hairbrush, a bottle of rosewater, and a pair of beautiful new white boots. To this collection of objects she added the braided hair, the black feather, the pistol, then closed the bag and hid it behind the cloth curtain that covered her closet. Humming an Irish revolutionary song, the fifty-pound note tucked in her camisole, she walked downstairs with an air of innocence and started the morning fires.

  Liam was anxious to get to the livestock, so bolted his breakfast. As he passed Eileen on his way out the door he pinched her waist and asked, “How’s the brooder this morning?” Teasing, not waiting for a reply. The other men, having been mystified by her for month
s, did not look at her or speak to her at all.

  When the house was empty and silent, she visited all its sacred spots: windows, marks, certain floorboards. Superstitiously, she felt compelled to look one last time at the loft where she and Aidan had made love, where the exquisite sorrow of pleasure had first made itself known to her. But when she had put on her old brown boots and walked halfway across the yard she remembered that her brother was attending to the calves and cows and turned back towards the house. She couldn’t bear to look at Liam’s innocent face on this morning, was frightened of her love for him, of her blood connection to him, and almost certain that she would never see him again. Walking away she heard him speaking the Latin words of Ovid to the cows and she hesitated, recalling a light in a forest window, three modest graves, a field of winter wheat.

  As she placed her hand on the door to the house, she could hear the sound of the past, her father’s skis approaching, the lessons Liam had taught her. The frond of a willow branch waved in her memory, her mind briefly greened. Aidan Lanighan danced, his feet drumming a tattoo, a command. She must travel the muddy, wrecked roads, twelve miles to the station at Brighton where nobody knew her, must compose herself so that she would look like an ordinary girl on an ordinary journey.

  She walked through the house and up the stairs to fetch her case, then came back down again. She left a track of muddy footprints going both ways; a confusing, remnant map of her intentions, suggesting a frantic uncertainty about the direction of her flight.