Even Annabelle had to admit that things were going well. The spoiled Caroline had taken, with surprising enthusiasm, to motherhood. Maurice had been sensible enough to hire men knowledgeable in the ways of farming operations while he was kept busy by the very gratifying pastime of keeping the books and investing the returns. Branwell painted all winter and amused and saw to his guests all summer. Everyone doted on the child, whom they called T.J. for short, and when this child began to use language, Marie revived her stories, bringing into the occasional evening the wolf, her slaughtered parents, her own trip to Orphan Island, the epidemics that swept through that institution, small white coffins arriving on a dark brown sleigh, the delivery of stone angels, and a number of other wonderfully terrifying circumstances that might occur on the road from childhood to adolescence.
There weren’t many clients any more – the timber business being what it was. Annabelle mostly busied herself with annotating her splinter book, with painting, and, when the season permitted, she worked on what was becoming an impressive series of flower gardens near the house. Still, over the course of the next few years, she returned to her father’s office every now and then to record transactions concerning the salvage enterprise in one of his ledger books, an enterprise that had, in recent months, begun to pick up somewhat. When she was in the office she still sometimes made half-hearted, unsuccessful attempts to sort out everything her father had left behind. She had not been able to force herself to roll up the maps of the bogs, however, and they had become such a permanent – though dusty – feature of the place she began to look on them as a sort of parchment carpet. On one afternoon in August, she had brought a good-sized feather duster with her so that she could clean up a bit. Perhaps, she mused as she worked, this is how entire civilizations become buried. Dust that is not removed might, over the course of time, accumulate to such an extent that eventually all architecture would be buried: columns and amphitheatres, temples and palaces. Sooner or later everything would succumb. If, in a thousand years, an archaeologist visited Timber Island, what would be left for him to dig up? Not much, she decided, a few stones from the foundation of the big house and bricks from the chimney, an anvil from the smithy, perhaps. By the time the word anvil entered her mind Annabelle had stopped dusting and was looking out the west window toward the quay. Various sails and funnels were in view and among them she was surprised to see the sail of Branwell’s small boat, which was approaching her docks. She was glad to know he was on his way to the island: he hadn’t visited in months, and she, having resolved to pay more attention to salvage operations that had been left in her care, had several times postponed her planned visit to the hotel.
When she saw him alight at the quay, she stepped outside and called his name. Shortly thereafter her brother was standing quite still in the open doorway of the inner office, stunned by the sight of the maps all over the floor.
“Maps of the bogs,” Annabelle explained, not waiting for the question. She picked up the duster, bent over Gortatlea Bog, and brushed the dust from the beautiful colors.
“The villainous Irish bogs.”
“The very ones.”
Branwell began to weave around the topography in the direction of his sister. “He kept these maps.” He studied each map for several minutes and then, as if exhausted by the information they imparted, he collapsed in Cummings’s chair, which Annabelle had brought from the outer office after her father’s death. Remembering her own visits to her father’s inner sanctum, the coldness of the surroundings and the coldness of the welcome, she wanted any visitors who came her way to at least be able to sit down. As an older woman, and, though she wouldn’t have admitted this, a lonely one, she wasn’t adverse to a bit of conversation.
She asked her brother to stay for an evening meal, and offered him a room for the night. Then she began to speak about the maps. “Look at this,” she said, pointing again to the map of Gortatlea Bog. “Or this.” Her toe touched the center of Glorah. “He loved all of this. It’s obvious. Why did he want to destroy something he thought so beautiful?”
“People do what they have to,” her brother said quietly, “and sometimes things are destroyed in the process.” He began to pull on his right ear. “Poor Father,” he said. “He likely didn’t even know that he loved looking at landscape, figured it was only useful if you could exploit it in some way or another.”
Annabelle wondered if in fact persistence was part of the explanation she was looking for. Was it the knowledge of something you have loved continuing to exist after you have left it behind that had caused such fury in her father? Branwell was still pulling on his ear and looking out the window. Annabelle could see that though the revelation of the maps had moved him, he was nevertheless preoccupied by something else. “What is it?” she asked finally. “What’s on your mind?”
“Worry.”
Annabelle waited. Then, when nothing further came from her brother’s lips, she asked him what it was that concerned him. “Sand,” he replied. “Maurice’s foreman has told me that the soil is changing. He says it’s turning into sand.”
“But that is nonsense,” said Annabelle. “Soil doesn’t just spontaneously turn into sand.”
“Yet it seems to be so. Caroline is in a state because her flowerbeds are beginning to be filled with sand and her lawns are not growing properly. There is a different kind of tough grass coming up and it is sparse, with a lot of sand showing through.” He sighed and looked at his hands, which were clenched in his lap. “And that’s nothing compared to the sand around the hotel,” he said. “There are dunes gathering beside the porch.”
Annabelle tried to call up this image of the porch, but could picture only white rocking chairs, swept steps, tidy lawns.
“Well,” she said, “perhaps that’s only natural that this should happen. Tremble Point is situated on the sandy end of the County, after all. Maybe by next year things will have returned to –”
“You have no idea,” Branwell interrupted, “what this is doing to Marie. There is sand some mornings in the corners of the guest rooms. Sometimes it gets into the bread she bakes or, worse, into her sauces. Almost always it is sprinkled on the top of her lemon meringue pies. It is bothering the guests. Some are leaving early. And Marie… it’s as if she is carrying the weight of this somewhere near her heart. She doesn’t really complain, but I can see it in her face, I can see it in her eyes.”
“Marie does not complain? About something this serious?” Annabelle recalled the fearless, outspoken little girl from orphanage, the strong young woman Marie had become. “Something is terribly wrong, then, and she is remaining silent so as not to make things worse.”
Branwell nodded in sad agreement.
On her last visit Annabelle had noticed something she couldn’t identify that seemed to be missing from her friend’s expression, and from her gestures. She had never known Marie not to be quick in her movements and certain in her speech. Now all energy seemed to have vanished from her character. She had invented no new recipes as far as Annabelle could tell, and no matter how Branwell teased, she could not be coaxed into defending the politics of Quebec, a subject that would have always elicited passionate declarations from her in the past, sometimes in English, sometimes in French. It was as if an essential component in her proud bearing had faltered and this frightened Annabelle. What faltered in Marie would falter in Annabelle as well.
“Is there a chance that the foreman is mistaken?” she asked.
Branwell shook his head. “He says it has something to do with the rotation of crops.”
“But Maurice – and everyone else for that matter – has been growing nothing but barley. No one is rotating crops.”
“That’s it exactly. They haven’t been rotating crops. None of the barley farmers along our stretch of shore have been rotating crops and now the soil is depleted. They were making pots of money,” he said bitterly. “Why would they want to change?” Branwell lifted his arms into the air in a gesture of de
speration. “All this sand,” he whispered, “all this sand because of people’s obsession with money.”
Annabelle stood in the center of the room, bogs all around her. For the first time she thought about the tidy lush landscapes of her mother’s past, and for the first time she found herself hoping that these landscapes were still there just as her mother had described them to Branwell, each field in place, crops rotated or left fallow every year or so. The oak her mother talked about came into her mind and she glanced out the window searching for the tree in her own yard, as if for reassurance.
She turned to the Branwell. “You must tell Maurice to sell immediately,” she said.
“He’s been thinking of politics,” Branwell ventured, without much enthusiasm in his voice. “He’s joined the Tory party, so I suppose that’s a start.” He drummed his fingers on his father’s desk. “How can I convince him to sell? I wanted him to rotate the crops two years ago. I wanted him to sell out last year. But it’s clear that nothing I say will move him.”
“He’ll listen to Marie. He’ll listen to his mother.”
Branwell looked embarrassed. His hand moved again toward his ear. “Marie tried to speak to him,” he said, “but Caroline would hardly let her raise the subject. She became quite hysterical.” He paused. “It’s only Caroline that he listens to now.”
“Why doesn’t Maurice just put his foot down?” Annabelle could feel an angry flush travel up her neck and flood her face. Weakness, she thought, was the answer to that question. Weakness combined with ambition and greed. Spinelessness and, of course, the chains of romance.
Branwell shrugged and shook his head. He rose from the chair and began to pace up and down the room. “The hotel is Marie’s life. The only life we know, the only life we have. But my son, our son, is so wrapped up in his marriage, and so controlled by his father-in-law, he has given no thought at all to what is happening to his mother. She feels that she’s lost him. She suspects that we have lost the hotel. It’s as if she is being depleted along with the soil.”
“Depleted?” she said. “Marie?” Annabelle didn’t want to imagine this.
Branwell said nothing.
“Do you remember,” Annabelle asked eventually, “do you remember the time father took you with him to pick up the figureheads?”
“I remember that it was a long, long journey, and that we traveled by coach.” Branwell paused, shook his head. “And I remember the figureheads. But that’s about all.”
“He wanted you to see the workshops,” said Annabelle. “You were seven years old. It was the only time that he ever, ever considered doing something that might be of interest to a child. And it is wonderful, when you think about it, that there were men in Quebec who devoted their lives almost entirely to the carving of mermaids.” She stepped carefully around the maps and took two wax models from the shelves. “Look,” she said, “look at these models.”
Her brother glanced at the figures in her hands. One was made in the likeness of Napoleon, the other was a bare-breasted woman. “It’s not likely,” he said, “that Father would have allowed Napoleon to be fixed to the prow of one of his schooners. I remember a woman similar to this, though, and some kind of animal… a griffin, I think.”
“I expect he brought the models home simply because he liked them. But all that’s gone now, anyway,” Annabelle murmured. “Along with everything else.” She returned the models of the figureheads to the shelves. “What do you think would have happened to those young men who were trained to do nothing but carve figureheads?” she asked Branwell. “Once the ships that bore them were scuttled? No one knows the moment when something that seems permanent will simply cease to exist.” She thought of the last day in the sail loft, of the sea of canvas that was abandoned there, seams half-sewn, threaded needles halted in mid-stitch. Her father, she remembered, would not allow the half-completed sails to be removed. “They’ll find out they’re wrong to bring all the ships to full steam,” he had insisted. “And we’ll need the canvas for the return to sail.” But the needles had rusted and eventually the thread had begun to fray, to rot.
“What I remember,” she told Branwell, “was that you had been made to sit between the life-sized mermaids in the coach on the way back while Father and a griffin faced you.” Annabelle smiled, picturing the scene: the patriarch, the small frightened boy, two mermaids, and a griffin enduring the bumpy track and the deteriorating weather of a mid-nineteenth-century November.
“The money Father left to Maurice?” she asked suddenly.
“He still has some of it, apparently… enough, I suppose, to survive.”
“Good. Then he must sell immediately. Move down the lake a bit to the next County. Set himself up in another house and run for office.” How she longed to voice her opinion of her nephew’s wife, but instead she said, “Caroline will be content to be the wife of a politician once she knows there is no other choice. You can count on that. She’ll like the power, the attention. How’s her father’s company faring through all this, by the way?”
Branwell sat down again. “Almost completely out of business,” he said. “Or at least out of the business of transporting barley. The Americans slapped an enormous tariff on his shipments last month. On everyone’s shipments. They want to use their own barley now… and barley,” he lifted his eyes to his sister’s face, “the price of Canadian barley fell to twenty cents a bushel last week.” He raised one hand, then let it drop. “He still builds ships, of course. Gilderson was clever enough to change to steam early on. And steamships will go on forever.”
“I doubt it,” said Annabelle, removing a ledger from the edge of Dereen Bog and watching the map slowly curl back into a cylindrical shape. “Nothing goes on forever.”
As an old man, during his last visit to the hotel, while he and Branwell were sitting on the porch on a summer’s night, Joseph Woodman had put down the paper he was reading and had turned to his son. It’s odd, he had said, but we have no raft on the river tonight. Not one raft. And Branwell, who by then had nothing at all to do with the timber business, had experienced, to his astonishment, a feeling of loss so profound that tears jumped into his eyes, for it was the first time in decades that, when the river was open, that no Timber Island raft was making its way to Quebec. The cargoes of logs, you see, would have been arriving at the quay less and less frequently, the numbers of coureurs de bois thinning out as the men drifted to more dependable forms of employment. Branwell reported in his journal that while he and his father sat on the porch, one of the season’s spectacular full moons was hovering over the dark water and because that water was so uncharacteristically still (“nary a zephyr disturbed the serene silence,” he wrote), the silver path to the shore was like an invitation to walk on the lake. It was the beginning of the end, and both men knew it. Old Marcel Guerin was climbing the stairs to the sail loft less and less often to repair ropes and canvas because there were fewer and fewer sails on the lake. Shipbuilding of the kind for which Timber Island was famous was almost at a standstill. The steamers with their plumes of black smoke marked a horizon that was once busy with barques and schooners. And, most tragic of all, the last of the great forests were down.
Until that moment, though, there had seemed to be a never-ending supply of wood from those forests and this inexhaustibility had suggested to Branwell that one raft or another would be present on the river for all the summers to come. Only much later in life was he able to realize that, even in a colony whose wealth was founded entirely on the slaughtering of wild animals and the clear-cutting of forests, there were moments of pure magic. His journal, when he was home, had been filled with announcements pertaining to the arrival of ships whose names put one in mind of a courtly procession of gorgeous women: The Alma Lee, The Hannah Coulter, The Minerva Cook, The Lucille Godin, The Nancy Breen, The Susan Swan, The Mary Helen Carter. Traveling downriver, he had been witness to spray in the distance and the men kneeling and reaching for their beads in the remaining calm minutes befor
e the short, terrifying journey through the Coteau Rapids. And then there had been the evening meal on the river, the men singing and, the following day, the French villages along the shore coming into view, steeple by steeple.
Now, Branwell and the white-haired Ghost were sweeping sand from the same porch on which his father had made his sad declaration. But this was an act of futility. The sandy fields were full of the scant beginnings of starved crops of barley that would never ripen. Just that week three farming families nearby had left their houses, their ruined land, and had moved out of the County, heading for the city and the hope of a factory job.
“Horses don’t like sand,” said Ghost. “The going’s too tough for them. I’ll have to find some place more hospitable to horses.”
Branwell wasn’t listening. He was thinking instead about an anecdote told to him by his father when he was a boy. He could see in his mind’s eye the Windsor chair that his parent had occupied and the glow of a pressed-glass oil lamp, so the story must have been told to him in the evening, probably in winter, he decided, as the old man was so busy in the summer there wouldn’t have been time for the kind of reflection the tale required.
The elder Woodman, who had been young at the time when the story took place, had been in Ireland, standing on the edges of Knockaneden Bog. “A dreary waste if ever there was one,” he had commented, staring at Canuig Mountain when he noticed a surprisingly large procession making its way down the incline.
“What the devil is that?” young Joseph Woodman had asked the man who had conducted him to the vicinity of the bog, in order, he was to discover, that he might see the remains of an interesting buried trackway recently uncovered by turf cutters. The trackway, his father had assured Branwell, was nothing of the kind, was just a scattering of stones that the Irishman believed was proof of an earlier civilization when roads had flourished in the district.
“That,” Joseph Woodman’s aged companion had told him, pointing up the mountain, “is the funeral procession of a man of only forty some years of age, called O’Shea, and him the last one being brought out of there. The last man being brought down out of Coomavoher,” he said. “All the rest gone away or dead before him. And isn’t the place only ruins and vacancies now with him gone.”
Jane Urquhart Page 21
