Jane Urquhart

by A Map of Glass (v5)

  Whether the well had dried up was irrelevant in that the pump that surmounted it had utterly vanished. Three times a day, with sand capsizing like miniature avalanches under his feet, Branwell was forced to trudge with two galvanized pails down to the lake and back again in order to have water for washing, drinking, and cooking. Not that he cooked much anyway, living mostly as he did now on carrots and potatoes and sometimes an egg or two, all boiled in one pot on the top of one of the Quebec heaters. He had trouble even looking at Marie’s beautiful cook stove, The Kitchen Queen, which stood unlit in the kitchen, its decorative features and its copper boiler cold and unpolished. Furthermore, the last time he had opened one of its ovens, Branwell had been appalled by the sight of the tiny dunes that had formed inside it, and the excess sand that descended like a pale brown curtain to the floor.

  Word of Marie’s death had apparently been passed from tavern to inn to tavern, in a westward direction, and had finally reached Baden about a month later. The first letter Branwell received from Ghost had mostly concerned this sad event and was filled with his memories of Marie’s kindness, her spirit, and her outstanding cooking. Branwell eagerly opened every letter he received from his friend whose unpronounceable first name was printed neatly on the back flap of each envelope as Gzsrzt Shromanov and then translated in brackets (“Ghost”), as if to make clear which of the many men of Branwell’s acquaintance who were named Gzsrzt might be writing to him at this time.

  The strange thing about Ghost’s letters was that they were utterly reflective in nature and referred to events that had already happened rather than those that were about to occur. When Branwell wrote to inquire about this, his friend replied that not only had he never fully trusted the future tense in written rather than spoken English but he believed it was bad luck to commit to writing anything at all pertaining to predictions. Destiny, he wrote, has always been suspicious of notation. Destiny has never taken kindly to anyone that has kept a written record of its intentions. He described instead the fine new Baden tavern and its splendid stamped-tin ceiling that had no cracks in it and was full of decorative swirls. He made reference to the health of Spectre, who was flourishing, he said, in the company of the various other horses that were temporarily housed in the tavern’s stables now that there were enough settlers on the Huron Road and the surrounding concessions that a good quantity of horses were needed to get people to the places where the railway, mercifully, wasn’t.

  As all delivery vehicles and the rural post had given up trying to negotiate the dunes months before, Branwell had to stumble through one mile of sand and down two miles of decent road into the town of West Lake in order to purchase supplies and to pick up his mail. The trip was made considerably easier in the winter because the sand was itself buried by drifts, and because of the snowshoes he had purchased, years before, after his visit to Baden. On one such trek, during his second winter as a widower, he made the return voyage with a sack of potatoes, several loaves of rapidly freezing bread, a freshly killed and also rapidly freezing chicken on his toboggan, and two letters in the pocket of his coat. The tops of his ears were frostbitten. There was not much to look forward to – beyond fried chicken – at the end of this particular journey.

  One letter was from Annabelle, who was passing on what Maurice had told her about the death of Gilderson: the date, the place of his internment, and other details about the old scoundrel that Branwell forgot as soon as he read them. The other was written in an unfamiliar hand and was postmarked Shakespeare, Ontario. The naming of places in this Dominion, he thought, was becoming increasingly preposterous. Branwell tore open the envelope, tossed it into the fire, and began to read the sentences written by Peter Fryfogel, son of Sebastien and current owner of the elusive Fryfogel Inn. Two charlatans, painters of naked women, had arrived in Baden at the request of an otherwise solid and successful citizen who was building a beautiful mansion right in the center of town. This had reminded Peter that his late father had always wanted murals painted by the good and honest innkeeper, Branwell Woodman, but, if he remembered correctly, circumstances had prevented Mister Woodman from reaching the inn the one time he had been in the district. Would he once again consider taking up the task this winter when there would likely be few tenants at Mister Woodman’s lakeside hotel? Please advise and etc. Branwell read the letter twice, a bit confused that Ghost had predicted nothing about this possible commission in his letters, until he recalled that any reference to the painting of murals at the Fryfogel – if in fact this painting took place – would have required the written use of the future tense.

  Branwell opened the drawer of the desk at which, in the past, he had carried out the business of the hotel, rifled through a quantity of correspondence and sand, and finally found some paper that was blank except for the printed illustration of the Ballagh Oisin in better days. He unscrewed the top of a pot of ink and sand, dipped his pen, and began to answer in the affermative fully aware, as he did so, that while he was obviously fulfilling Ghost’s prediction, he was also writing a letter of farewell to his cherished hotel. Once he began this second journey to the west, he knew he would not be returning. The sand had won; he would abandon the Ballagh Oisin to its fate.

  In fact, Branwell would return, but this would not happen for several years, and it would happen only once. As a much older and much crankier man, Branwell would insist that his son, Maurice “Badger” Woodman as he liked to be called, with whom Branwell had been living unhappily for some years, accompany him in the cabriolet on a journey back to Tremble Point. “I want you to see this,” he would say, having secretly never fully stopped blaming his son for the greed, for the barley, for the sand, for the death of his wife, and knowing full well that whatever it was they were going to view would not be an improvement on what he had left behind on this February day. When they arrived at the spot, they would have to climb a dune in order to enter the hotel by the door that had led to the upper veranda. They would crunch along the sandy second-story hall as far as the central staircase, which Branwell would begin to descend, stopping on the fourth step down. The sand would have almost entirely filled the first floor by then; only the turquoise skies of Branwell’s murals would be visible. Branwell would think then of all that was buried: sofas, tables, chairs, umbrella stands, mirrors, door stoppers, Marie’s copper pots, the cook stove, and he would turn to his son, who remained blinking at the top of the stairs. Shaking his cane at him he would shout, “You are a creator of deserts!” On the way back to the cabriolet, descending the dunes, Maurice, the now influential politician, dressed in his waistcoat and top hat, would become caught in a slide and would fall directly on his backside.

  But now, during his last few days at the hotel, Branwell became involved in a frenzy of essentially useless activities. He touched up certain areas of the murals that had become chipped and cracked over the years, he cleaned out the closets, and shook sand out of the bedclothes stored in the linen wardrobe. He puttied several loose window panes, oiled hinges that had become tight and difficult, took the carpets outside and beat them, and, as a last gesture to Marie, he polished up the Kitchen Queen. Then, after packing a few items of clothing in a leather valise and putting all of his paints and brushes into a wooden box, he placed these two pieces of luggage on top of a drift just beyond the porch. When he re-entered the hall, he looked for some time at the panoramas he had painted. Then he turned away from the fantasy of his landscapes and swept a quantity of sand – and himself – out the front door, leaving the broom standing upright in the snow like a scarecrow, or a kind of sentinel, guarding the empty hotel.

  The new Baden Tavern was made of brick, not logs, its windows were surrounded by decorative molding, and there was a large wood-burning furnace in its deep cellar. These architectural details would be the only differences, as far as Branwell could tell, that would enable him to separate his current stay in the district from the one he had endured ten years before. Each day, he pulled aside the burlap curtains in his roo
m and stared, as he had in the past, into a sea of swirling white. Each evening he fell asleep to the sound of howling winds tearing around the snowbound village, and each night he was awakened intermittently by the moan of train whistles. Kelterborn was gone; Lingelbach, the present owner, was so like Kelterborn, both in his taciturn manner and in his physical appearance, that he hardly qualified as a noteworthy change.

  Ghost, however, who had wandered all over the townships, insisted that there were changes. More than one track, a proliferation of new farms, villages like New Hamburg to the east and, now that the Irish had arrived in droves, places called Dublin and St. Columban were appearing to the west. “My father would have been beside himself,” Branwell told his friend, all the while thinking as he had in the past, Why these European names? Almost everyone had horses and buggies now, Ghost explained, and several blacksmith shops had opened as a result. The gorgeous mansion going up across the street was said to have ten marble fireplaces, all made in Italy, and the two painters Fryfogel Junior had referred to were, indeed, painting naked ladies on the walls, “ladies so real you almost thought you could touch them.” He paused here, closed his eyes for a few moments, then said that he didn’t see Branwell painting naked ladies in the future, more’s the pity. “General stores in every village,” Ghost said, “and churches everywhere. An undertaker. A tombstone maker.”

  “I imagine I’ll have to take all this on faith, though,” Branwell said. “I’ve never been able to see anything but the inside of a tavern, a different tavern, yes, but still a tavern much like all the others.”

  Ghost pointed heavenward, explaining that none of the other taverns had tin ceilings like this one. “Not a crack in it and there never will be a crack in it. Even if the tavern fell down there would not be a crack in that ceiling.”

  Branwell looked at the ceiling, the ceiling Ghost was so fond of. The decorative swirls were confined to borders that surrounded flat square panels like an embossed baroque frame. He wondered briefly about the machine that would be required to make such a thing as a ceiling. Must the tin be heated or was it soft enough to be pushed into the shape required? Nonetheless, to his eye, there was a monotony about the resulting effect, exaggerated by the rather dirty pale yellow paint that covered it, or perhaps it was white paint, discolored by the pipe smoke that, he was beginning to discover, filled the barroom day and night.

  Ghost asked about Branwell’s financial situation, which, admittedly, was shaky at best but which he hoped would improve once he got out to Fryfogel’s.

  Lingelbach, who was pretending to be absorbed by the task of wiping down the bar with a damp cloth, moved closer to the side of the room where Branwell sat with Ghost. “Road’s disappeared,” he offered.

  Again? thought Branwell. What was it about him that made particles of almost everything want to accumulate wherever he went? What else could possibly happen to him? He half-expected a plague of sawdust, or of iron filings to appear in his future. He wouldn’t have been surprised if brimstone began to descend from the sky. Lingelbach was speaking again. “You’ll have to pay me,” he was saying to Branwell. “There’s the room, the board. You’ll have to pay me one way or another.”

  On the fourth day of the storm Branwell descended the stairs at the tavern to be confronted by a strange scaffolding made up of two tall stepladders placed about six feet apart with a couple of wide pine boards resting between them. Ghost, who had clearly been supervising the placement of this scaffold, took Branwell by the arm. “I see pictures on this ceiling,” he said, “and,” he nodded his head in the direction of the bar, “so does Lingelbach. We both see you painting these pictures, starting this morning.”

  Branwell had no desire to paint a ceiling. He was tired, sad, and slightly disoriented by being in the company of others after his solitary life in the hotel. He thought about snow falling on the roof of his old home and wondered how the shingles would hold up if this storm were to travel eastward. Looking at the scaffolding, he said, “I’m not Michelangelo, you know, I’m not Tiepolo.”

  “Who?” asked Ghost.

  “Who?” echoed Lingelbach, once again pretending to be absorbed in sponging down the bar. When Branwell answered with nothing but a sigh, the owner of the establishment added philosophically, “No matter, whoever they were, they would have had to pay for room and board.”

  Maintenance, thought Branwell, is so central to human life, it’s a wonder the very enormity of it didn’t cause hopeless exhaustion in those who thought about it. Maintenance and money. There was a price to pay for sleeping at night and a price to pay for waking up in the morning. There was a price to pay for shaving your face and cutting your hair, for the clothes on your back and the food that you ate. And there was an even bigger price to pay, as far as he could tell, for having experienced happiness. I’ve lost everything, he concluded.

  “You haven’t lost me,” said Ghost, reading his mind.

  When he wasn’t eating or drinking, Branwell spent his remaining few days at the tavern lying on his back. As his friend had predicted several years before, paint did indeed drip into his eyes as well as into his moustache and onto his face. But there was one comfort, and that comfort had to do with weather. Branwell painted nothing but scenes relating to summer: a still millpond at twilight, a farmhouse with buggy tracks visible on a road leading to its door, a few sunny water scenes punctuated by the curve of a sail, several waterfalls.

  “I see another waterfall,” said Ghost enthusiastically as he watched from below, “a much larger waterfall that will be painted by you in the future. I see Niagara.” And then, in his new self-appointed role as supervisor, “So you can use turquoise… so show me something else! I see other colors! I see flowers. Paint some flowers every second square!”

  The aesthetes from across the road took a break from their trompe l’oeil efforts to inspect, scoffed at Branwell’s little landscapes, and went away. The blacksmith arrived, announced that tin was not a real metal, that it would rust in a decade, and that therefore all of this painting was a waste of time, and then he too went away. Branwell lay on his back for several afternoons, a brush in his hand and unsolicited memories of his childhood in his mind. He remembered an iceboat moving across Back Bay, snow falling on a young oak tree in the yard, a girl arriving at the wrong door in late winter. All this while he continued to paint a warm season, flower by flower.

  After a few days of intimate engagement with the tin ceiling, having slept late because there was no wind rattling the sashes of the window, Branwell was awakened by a spear of sunshine touching his face. He lay quite still, waiting for the wind to pick up, waiting for the light to soften as snow entered it. But the spear remained crisply defined on his pillow and the sharp, ferrous smell of water was in the air. When he opened the curtains he was delighted to see that the icicles hanging from the eaves above the window were releasing glistening drops of water from their tips, but even more exciting, the entire village was chiming with a sound he had never before heard in this district – that of sleigh bells.

  He was packed and downstairs in a minute and was standing halfway up the stepladder placing tubes of paint and brushes back into the wooden box when Ghost entered the room. “January thaw in February,” he said. “Better get out of here before Lingelbach gets back from the store. You’re not going to finish the ceiling.”

  This seemed self-evident to Branwell, but he told Ghost that he would get back to it after he finished the commission at Fryfogel’s.

  “Doubt that,” Ghost replied. “I don’t think I’ll be seeing you for a couple of years.”

  “Why not come out to the inn? It’s only a few miles.”

  “The current Fryfogel thinks fortune telling is un-Christian and, for some reason, Spectre doesn’t like his horses… maybe they are too pure. Besides, a January thaw in February is always short-lived. Don’t forget about Niagara Falls, though. I see it painted overtop a fireplace in a room upstairs on the brookside of the inn. And a mountain scene w
ould be good too, there being no mountains in this district. Paint a moonlit mountain scene in another room.”

  And so, time, it seems, will always apply its patina to human effort, and paintings completed on walls are destined to be altered, damaged, or erased. Stains blossom, cracks appear, and the men of maintenance arrive with trowels and plaster. Electricity and central heating are invented and installed. Meadows and rivers, mountains and night skies are stripped away, concealed, or scraped off. Walls are broken into, the pipes of indoor plumbing are forced into the structure, then begin to decay or burst suddenly in the midst of a deep freeze. Further surgery is required. Each decade insists on its own particular changes.

  A few years after Branwell had put the finishing touches on his Niagara and his Moonlit Night, the Fryfogel, having already undergone the hardship of trying to compete with something as relentless as a railroad, would begin to experience difficulties of a different nature. Peter Fryfogel would die and be buried next to his father in the small family plot to the west of the inn. There would be disputes among various heirs about ownership, and a series of “cautions” would be instated against the property. Eventually, parts of the inn would be leased to spinster sisters trying to make a living by serving home-cooked meals to motorists on what was now a paved highway between Guelph and Goderich. A cairn would be erected nearby to mark and memorialize the blazing of the Huron Trail, now more than a hundred years old. Halfway through the twentieth century, the provincial government would decide to widen the highway and would expropriate much of the front yard. A decade after that there would be an attempt to reopen the building as a hotel, but that attempt would amount to very little, the private company involved would decide to sell the property to the County Historical Society. Various pieces of the adjoining farm property would be subdivided and sold. Heritage easements would be applied for by the Historical Society and would be approved. A drunk driver would lose control of his car and mow down the tombstones in the family plot. Governments at all levels would become more interested in business than in history, and money to keep the inn standing would be in short supply. Squirrels would invade the attic and chew holes through the roof, rats would enter the cellar kitchens, fifth- and sixth-generation pigeons would roost under the eaves, but even so the inn, now entirely emptied of both people and furniture, would continue to stand, its small paned windows rattling each time a tractor trailer roared past its beautifully proportioned Georgian front door.