Away

by Jane Urquhart

  “The place where you stand,” Old Eileen said. “The place where you stand is the centre of the world.”

  “Imagine,” the old woman said, pointing one talon-like finger towards the peninsula that unfurled itself out into the lake. “Imagine, everything over there is buried in sand, your father’s hotel included.”

  “I know about that.” Esther began to pass the book from one hand to the other.

  “But do you know about the slowness of sand. Do you know about that? One morning you wake up, walk into your lush garden, and in one corner there’s a small drift of sand sloping up the boards of the fence. The next week you are shaking sand out of the clothes you pull from your wardrobe. Soon there is sand mixed with the grounds of your coffee. No matter how hard or how often you sweep there is a thin layer of sand on your kitchen floor. Your garden disappears. Your neighbours have already disappeared. Where the orchard used to be there are curving dunes of sand. There is grit in every spoonful of food.”

  “I remember,” said Esther though she was not certain that she did.

  “Nothing but an ocean of sand.” Old Eileen pointed again to the peninsula which shone in the late-afternoon sun, its dunes alive with light. Then she looked into Esther’s eyes. “Politics,” she said, “are exactly like that – when they are not like being struck by lightning.”

  Her face softened and she leaned partially away from Esther. “And love too,” she added. “I only got the lightning not the sand in the garden, so I suppose I should be grateful to D’Arcy McGee for something.”

  “Why D’Arcy McGee?” Esther asked.

  “He put me in my place,” said the old woman, evasive now, wanting to step back into the territory of the child’s life.

  “Do you remember your father’s house on the hill?”

  Esther thought about how she and her mother always revisited their disappearing houses. At the site of the house on the hill, she remembered, they had discovered charred beams and irregularly shaped chunks of glass which had melted in the fire and resolidified into transparent boulders. She had found one of her doll’s saucers, so delicate you could see your fingers through the china, intact, undamaged, resting on the rubble. She knew it must have fallen fifty feet from the nursery on the third floor, and sensed that, underneath the wreckage, there would be more dolls’ dishes and other small unharmed objects.

  “This house is waterproof,” Old Eileen said. “We sailed it here, you know.”

  “Grandpa Liam told me.” Esther placed her Schoolbook with the others on a table in the corner.

  “If I were you,” Old Eileen smiled vaguely, “I would stay in this house all my life. If I were you, I would never go away.”

  “Have you ever been anywhere?”

  “Only once.” Old Eileen stared out the window towards the east. Esther believed the old woman could probably see as far as the Atlantic Ocean. “Of course, in the end you will be visited by the curse of the mines, but that can’t be helped.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It has to do with the landlord, this curse,” Old Eileen said, “and some furious digging in the ground.”

  “Grandpa Liam said there was a landlord who –”

  “On the other hand,” Old Eileen interrupted, “I’ve been away all my life.” She rose and crossed the room – straight, prim, but slow, old. “I can’t, you see, get the face of a certain young man out of my mind.” She began to rummage in the upper drawer of the rolltop desk, then she turned and moved back to the stationary child. “Here,” she said, handing Esther a braided skein of red and black hair, “and here.” She produced a black feather, a shard of turquoise china. “It will take a long time,” Old Eileen said, resuming her position in an upright chair. “It will take a long time to tell you the whole story. There are so many ways, you understand, of giving yourself away. I had a baby, you know, when I was very young; I gave her to Molly and Liam to raise. Call her Deirdre, I said to them, because of the sorrows.”

  AT 7:45 on a summer morning the night shift is ending. The men climb down from tin towers above conveyor belts and scramble over the sides of elephantine vehicles to the quarry floor. One pulls a lever and the rock crusher falls silent. A lakeboat called the Sir John A. Macdonald moans twice and, full of Canadian limestone – landscape and fossils – turns west, heading for another shore. The huge hole in the land beside the lake is fractionally larger.

  Esther O’Malley Robertson is sitting against the pillows of her old sleigh-bed. She has never, since she took over the management of the farm, been upstairs as late as 8:00 a.m. But this is the last morning.

  The crow completed his dawn monologue hours ago, is off in the cedar woods swallowing mosquitoes, murdering worms. In the distance Esther hears the shifting gears of several pickup trucks travelling the gravel roads too fast, driven by the men from the quarry who are eager to join their breakfasting families.

  Esther is at the end of the story. She knows, without consulting mirrors, that, after this night, her face is even more like her grandmother’s – is the face of an old woman. Just as, years before, while she sat listening to the narrative for the first time, her face had become more and more like that of a child called Eileen who had spent long summer afternoons behind the curtain of a willow tree.

  Two mourning doves somewhere near the decaying barn now resume their lifelong task of attempting to perfect the sound of loss. Soon their lament will be obliterated by the noise of the day shift at the quarry – the dynamiters, the drillers, the crushers – that and the roar of limestone hitting the steel bottom of yet another lakeboat, this one called the Daughter of Confederation.

  Suddenly Esther remembers the collection of schoolbooks she had brought with her into the parlour the day her grandmother finished the story, the leather bookstrap which held them together, the brown bookbag. The Dominion Workbook, The Canadian Speller, the beavers and maple leaves embossed on their covers. All that, she thinks, is lost now; dynamited, gone.

  When Liam died, a short while after his wife, Molly, his considerable savings were divided among his five children, one of whom was Esther’s mother. The farm was given to Eileen, who outlived him by only a few years. After Eileen’s death, Esther’s mother and father moved to a small house in the village and Esther was left alone to run the farm as Eileen’s will had determined she should. Esther had watched her parents depart, had turned and walked into the fields, dug her hands into the earth, examined the leaves of each crop. Later she ran her fingers over the bark of the orchard trees, strolled through the flickering woods. She was less staking out her territory than she was being claimed by something that was destined to be hers; the centre of the world, the ground on which she stood. She was, by then, thirty years old, tall and angular; with a banner of red-gold hair which she kept out of her way, bundled at the back of her neck.

  He was drawn to her shore by the threat of a storm only eight months later. He anchored his boat in the relative calm of her bay with a gale coming up and waves slamming against the jetty to which he swam. Esther, lighting the first evening lamp, was made aware of his presence as the sound of his footsteps grinding through beach stones gradually overcame the sound of the surf. When she opened her door she was unsurprised by his dark curls, his pale hand and his bright green eye.

  She was never to ask him about the rest of his life, though she knew he must have come from a fishing hamlet near the peninsula of dunes fifteen miles down the lake. But these details barely interested her. It was his swimming to her land, the storm, his journey over beach stones that mattered. The unpredictability of his arrivals and the certainty of his departures. Between his visits, when she found herself waiting, she knew it was for a kind of completion – his absence from, not his presence in her life.

  Winter came, freezing him into the distance. In spring, while men from the village worked her fields, Esther stood in the mornings in her large room with the view of the lake and searched the horizon. But by then, as she came to realize, he was
fishing other waters. The jetty, that fixed point of arrivals and departures, fell into disuse and then into disrepair as, storm by storm, it was dismantled by the lake until it became a rough collection of boulders.

  The lake would become no longer fishable, and the only sails it carried would belong to the yacht clubs of the industrial towns and cities that had grown along its shores. Esther stayed alone on the land, the farm becoming a miracle of prosperity under her hands.

  “Your mother – my daughter Deirdre – was brought up as Liam and Molly’s oldest child,” Eileen had told Esther.

  “Why didn’t she tell me? Why didn’t Mother tell me?”

  “There was no need – there was never any need – for Deirdre – for your mother to know. There is a calmness in her; she does not lean towards extremes. I had thought as I watched her grow up in this house, distant from me, believing that I was her aunt, that the past was finished, settled. I watched her grow up, marry your father, give birth to you. Her life is clean, I thought, clear of it all.” Esther’s grandmother looked into the distance. “And I was glad,” she added. “Then her houses were destroyed and she came home, with your father, back to Loughbreeze Beach, back to the lake. And, even then, nothing of the young woman I was was present in her, and nothing of Aidan either.” She paused then and looked hard into Esther’s eyes, “You, on the other hand, are both him and me.”

  Old Eileen took the adolescent child to see the burn mark on the kitchen floor, the place in the parlour tavern where Aidan Lanighan’s hand had brushed the boards, rescuing embroidery. Standing near these spots, traces of the sorrowful young woman she had been entered her attitude, her posture.

  “He was always there, where he stood,” she said. “He danced into rooms and utterly inhabited them. He was the energy of the real moment while I was always turning the moment into something else altogether. Inventing it. Interpreting it. You have this gift in you, the ability to be where you are, but I am in you as well and there will be times when you want to drift away. No more of this drifting,” she said, looking out towards the lake. She sighed, “I’m tired now. I’ll go back to my view of the lake. I always knew it was the only thing that would ever be mine.”

  Then, suddenly, at the bottom of the stairs, Esther’s grandmother twirled around twice, her skirts swirling like those of a young girl at a dance, her face lit by memory. “Imagine this room,” she said, “alive with leaping men and politics!” She paused then and the light in her face disappeared. “If I were you I would be where I stand,” she said.

  THERE is light in the sky as late as ten o’clock on a June evening such as this one.

  A mile down the shore the cement company’s pier looks almost festive bathed in the reflected remnants of a pink sunset and covered in red and green lights. The New Dominion appeared on the horizon an hour ago and is now slipping into place beside the rusted steel casings at the end of the conveyor belt. It is lit as if its crew anticipates champagne, dancing, not the avalanche of rock that will soon begin to fill its hold.

  Night comes to the quarry somewhat earlier than it does to the water or the beach, its shadow moving from east to west across the raw, grey ground. Unthinkably bright floodlights are switched on causing the lines in the men’s dusty faces to look exaggerated and exposing the torn rock, the scars, the fractures.

  Now the land itself fragments, moves away from piers in boats named after brief histories towards other waters, other shores. No lamps at all are lit tonight in the empty house on Loughbreeze Beach. The men at the quarry, angered by something they don’t quite understand, set their jaws and shift the gears of their equipment with grim forcefulness. Under the glare of artificial light the fossilized narratives of ancient migrations are crushed into powder. The scream of the machinery intensifies.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book is a work of fiction; all characters, events, situations, relationships, and in some cases geographical locations are either a product of the imagination or have been worked on and transformed by the imagination. As a result, the physical and social make-up of nineteenth-century County Antrim in Ireland, or Elzivir Township and Northumberland County in Canada have occasionally been altered to meet the needs of the story.

  Nonetheless, many scholarly works inspired and informed parts of the narrative. Of these the most important to me were: The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith; Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland by Lady Gregory; The Great Migration by Edwin C. Guillet; and M’Cahan’s Local Histories published by the Glens of Antrim Historical Society. Two books by T. P. Slattery, The Assassination of D’Arcy McGee and They Got to Find Me Guilty Yet, were enormously helpful to my understanding of the political forces surrounding the assassination of McGee. To this day uncertainty regarding the identity of the assassin remains. This book does not pretend to solve the mystery.

  I first heard the traditional folksong “Bonny Portmore” on Loreena McKennitt’s recording entitled The Visit (manufactured and distributed by Warner Music Canada). “If I Were a Blackbird” is traditional as well. I have also used two lines from “The Emigrant” by Belfast poet Joseph Campbelle. The epigraph at the beginning of the book is a traditional Irish triad taken from Dánta Ban: Poems of Irish Women Early and Modern, selected and translated by P. L. Henry (Dublin: The Mercier Press, 1991). All other songs and poems are inventions of the author, influenced, in some instances, by the reading of anonymous Irish poetry in translation.

  Of the many people who either read and commented upon the manuscript or who aided with my research I would like especially to thank Stuart MacKinnon, David Staines, Dr. Palmer Patterson, Victoria Glendinning, Nelson Ball, Greg Murphy, Clifford Quinn, Mary Dalton, Tony Urquhart, Janet Turnbull Irving, Dr. Arnulf Conradi, Ellen Levine, and Alex Schultz.

  Thanks also to Pamela Fawcett for her excellent typing skills.

  I owe a great debt to the University of Waterloo Library and to Memorial University of Newfoundland Library where much of my research took place, and to the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for financial assistance during the tenure of this project. I would also like to thank the English Department of Memorial University of Newfoundland and the English Department of the University of Ottawa for enjoyable and productive writer-in-residencies.

  And, once again, a special thank you to Ellen Seligman.

  Jane Urquhart was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto. She is the author of seven acclaimed novels: The Whirlpool, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France; Changing Heaven; Away, winner of the Trillium Book Award and a finalist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Underpainter, winner of the Governor General’s Award and a finalist for the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; The Stone Carvers, which was a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize; A Map of Glass, a finalist for a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book; and, most recently, Sanctuary Line. She is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Storm Glass; four books of poetry; a biography of L.M. Montgomery for the Extraordinary Canadians series; and the editor of The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Her work has been translated into numerous foreign languages.

  Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award and the Harbourfront Festival Prize, and is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and an Officer of the Order of Canada. She has received numerous honorary doctorates from Canadian universities and has been writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa and at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and held the Presidential Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the University of Toronto.

  Jane Urquhart lives in Northumberland County, Ontario, and occasionally in Ireland.

 

 

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