Away (14 page)

But, as they came nearer to the people, the bag in his hands seemed to shrink until its insignificance was painful to look at, to hold, or to offer. “No,” he blurted, just before they were to turn down the lane that led to the barn. “No … you’re right.” And, tapping on the glass, he motioned for the driver to turn around.

“These are very bad times,” said Granville.

Osbert did not answer. He was trying to remove from his mind the disturbing idea that his brother looked ridiculous in his velvet breechcoat, the lace cuffs of which danced in the jolting carriage; that and the even more disturbing idea that he was his brother’s mirror image. He removed his handkerchief and held it to his mouth and nose as they passed a particularly putrid potato plot.

“What are we going to do?” he asked as he pocketed the piece of cloth. “We must do something. I didn’t tell you this because I didn’t believe it, but the talk is that they’ve been fainting in the fields … from hunger.”

“There’s too many,” Granville thumped his knee with his fist, “I tell you, there’s always far too many of them! There ought not to be weddings like today – it ought not to be allowed. How are we to manage?”

When Mary had seen Father Quinn rolling a barrel of the island’s whiskey towards the barn, the morning on the beach three years before came into her mind with such clarity she believed she could recall each wave that had brought the darling one to shore, though she knew this was impossible – nothing being more complicated or unique than the breaking of the surf. Still, the inner picture had caused her to join, emotionally, with the other women in the singing of the sorrowful song. She, like them, believed that they would all soon die and she believed that death would sever her, not only from the world that included the straw under her feet and this pathetic whisper of a wedding, but also from the other world that it had been her privilege to visit, and so she doubly mourned.

The crowd had begun to organize itself into the various activities that accompanied such occasions, though at this time their celebrations were subdued; the dances quieter, more courtly and resigned. Couples circled each other warily and left a space between them for the third dancer that they knew was among them. Hands touched tentatively or did not touch at all. The girls, especially, danced as if in the grips of some great physical pain, bending over their own arms at the waist or twisting at odd angles away from the young men dancing near them. Faces were almost always averted.

With Brian beside her, Mary walked away from the agony of the dancing, across the barnyard, towards a group of young men who were quietly arranging themselves into a pattern she did not recognize. Concentrating fiercely, they were seated on the ground with their backs straight and their legs extended in front of them. In two long lines that gradually converged at each end they faced each other, while, in the centre of the shape they made, which was almost that of a diamond, a tall man and a boy loitered, slouching, their hands in their pockets, a much-mended bedsheet on the ground between them. Two
older men surveyed the group then turned at intervals to search the sky.

“What is it that they’re doing?” Mary asked.

“Waiting for the wind …” said Brian, “I think they’re waiting for the wind.”

“But why … why should they be waiting for the wind?”

“I’ve only seen this at wakes,” said Brian as if he were talking to no one but himself, “and indoors. But now I see that it’s different … and that will be what the sheet is for.”

“And what –”

“Wait and you’ll see.” Brian shook his head. “It’s a sad pass,” he lamented, “when the games for wakes come to be acted out at weddings.”

The fiddler had begun to play again, this time a livelier tune, and the old men were coming forward to take their turns dancing with the bride – a wraith composed of bones and bed-clothes. One gentleman, diminished and ancient and totally dependent upon his stick, seemed to waltz with that object rather than with the girl. The wind, absent all day, appeared and unfurled her bridal veil which, in its fragmented state, looked like a collection of torn clouds.

Then the shout raised by the young men thundered across the crowd and echoed from the four principal parts of the land-scape: the town of Ballycastle in the distance, Knocklayd Mountain, the Sedgewick demesne, and the moors that rose up to the cliffs. The fiddler lowered his bow, the bride stopped dancing, the whole company froze, then turned.

Having leapt onto the shoulders of the tall man, the boy stood there balanced perfectly. With one hand over his head and the other by his side he clutched the sheet which had opened itself to the wind. The men who formed the diamond shape had locked arms, and their bodies sloped back from their hips. Mary stared, confused. Her husband cursed – then
laughed. Just as she was about to ask him again she understood: the men had used their slim bodies to construct the hull of a ship, their legs for the thwarts, their torsos for the sides, their arms for the gunwales, the young boy and tall man for the mast. Only the bedsheet – the inanimate – moved; a sail twitching in the wind. After the initial shout, the men held motionless; even their faces were entirely still.

An answering cheer came from the assembled neighbours. And then, to Mary’s amazement, the word she thought was hers alone was flung across the landscape.

“Away, boys, away,” the people were shouting, their fists punching the new, brisk wind.

That evening was one of the few that the Sedgewick brothers had ever spent apart. Osbert, his expression sullen and private, disappeared into the library with a decanter of claret and Granville retired to his bedroom with cold compresses for his sick headache. There he lay, fully clothed in boots and breech-coat, with damp, white cloths covering his eyes and the mournful song running and running through his mind during the moments when he wasn’t mentally cursing his father and his father’s father for leaving such sensitive souls in the possession of this unholy mess.

About midnight, when he was trying to summon the strength to put on his white nightgown and cap, he heard the sound of pounding footsteps in the hall and assumed, fatalistically, that the Whiteboys, the Hearts of Steele, and the Hearts of Oak had all come at once to get him. But it was only his brother who burst through the door, wildly excited, his forefinger marking a spot in one of the volumes of the new edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.

“I know what’s to be done!” shouted Osbert, breathlessly.
“All we have to do is sell one or two Gainsboroughs and it’s
fait accompli!”

“What’s to be done?” sighed Granville, who was in fact experiencing a great deal of relief not to mention surprise that his brother would agree to part with any work of art for any reason.

“Here … look at this.” With a triumphant flourish, Osbert slapped the book down on his brother’s featherbed. It was open at the pages that described the British colony of Canada.

B
Y
January of 1848, the rumour that the landlords were to send a number of cottiers and their families to British North America began to circulate, in various forms, from cabin to cabin. Some said that every Catholic in County Antrim was to be evacuated, along with their donkeys, chickens, and tools. Others announced that since the county was a sinking ship from which decency demanded they be removed, only the women and children would be going. Another rumour, one closest to the truth, suggested that families would be hand-picked for the adventure by the landlords, the rest left to work the fields until they dropped of starvation, harvesting food destined for the surfaces of British tables.

As the talk increased, the word “Canada” was spoken hundreds of times a day – on the roads, in the fields, near the doors of dismal cabins, at firesides – and pictures of the country, itself, began to be assembled by those who claimed to know something of the terrain or those who had once spoken to someone who had received a letter from across the sea. The optimists maintained that all who went there became rich, that golden nuggets tumbled in the streams, that vegetable crops were acclimatized to grow in snow, that fruit trees bore blossoms and fruit all year round – the latter being preserved, always fresh, by a thin coating of ice. The inhabitants, they said, lived in beautiful houses made of unmeltable ice in which they moved on skates from room to room on ice floors. When questioned, these sages said that the cold was another kind of cold
altogether, a cold unlike anything ever experienced in Ireland. More like a dryness of the air, this cold, which froze everything around it, produced comfort. The settlers, they said, were so comfortable that they skated about with bare arms protruding from light cotton shifts, plucking the fruit (which was a different kind of fruit altogether – transparent and jewel-like) from the unstoppable orchards. Snowshoes were described, to an assembly struck dumb with amazement, as boots with baskets on the bottom or shoes with frozen nets encircling them. These, they claimed, were issued to every settler on arrival; arrival itself being determined by the moment when the ocean stopped and the comfortable ice began. One was then expected to tramp away from the ship in search of the perfect home of ice (of which there were thousands – empty and waiting), the thatch on their roofs in perfect frozen repair.

The pessimists, as is often the case, spouted theories that bore more, though not much more, resemblance to reality. They scoffed at the tales of the optimists, saying that, although the cold was extreme, there was little, if any, ice at all. This was because the country was too new and, as a result, like all new things, in a state of great agitation. Nothing, they said, ever held still long enough to freeze. The water in all the lakes and rivers (of which there were many) tumbled and cascaded and climbed mountains and flung itself over cliffs and hungrily gobbled boats with more appetite than the waters of the Moyle. Everything was growing, they asserted, all the time, and a man who stood still for too long was likely to be pinned to the ground by rambunctious vines eagerly seeking light. Because of this growth, the pessimists continued, everything became, or had already become, too large. The mountains were unclimbable, the rivers unfordable, the forests impenetrable, and the trees in them unchoppable. The potatoes, if planted at all, were, in the end, unharvestable, in that, because of their
remarkable growth, they were too heavy to be removed from the ground. And if by some miracle they were harvested, they were inedible because they continued to grow in the digestive tract after they were swallowed, causing certain death.

The optimists agreed that everything
was
larger there, but speed, they argued, more than made up for the problems caused by size and distance. Wagons, they said, swept through the countryside on long knives pulled by huge, strong horses and in the odd moment when there was no ice to be had, one could avail oneself of boats of paper (another kind of paper altogether) that were so light and so swift that even the natives who designed and built them were astonished by the progress that they made on a sunny afternoon. Furthermore, the natives were on such good terms with the “others,” – the faeries – that they could count on the crops growing and the farm animals multiplying and they would generously use their influence in order to improve the lot of any starving Irish peasants in their midst.

But the pessimists maintained that the landscape swallowed almost everyone who approached it. Gigantic insects were described that tore the livers out of the sides of men, women, and children, and packs of wolves moved through crowds like threshing machines. Storms, they said, snatched infants out of the arms of their mothers – even indoors – and rivers over-flowed aggressively, demolishing everything in their path. Moreover, it was futile to attempt to make roads through forests because trees reappeared as soon as they were cut down. Thousands of Irish men, who were always enlisted to break trails and make highways, had been sealed forever into forests and never seen again.

For a few weeks the arguments between the two factions distracted the people from that fact that their children’s faces were becoming old and pinched, that their own bodies were
practically unrecognizable from lack of food, and that the winter that they were attempting to survive was the darkest and coldest of the decade. When, at last, the selected families were announced, those going rejoiced in the theories of the optimists and those remaining behind were consoled by those who maintained a negative view.

Then, into the cabins of all came a perplexing pamphlet, kindly donated by the landlords and entitled “Colonel Tarbutt’s Guide for Settlers in Upper Canada.” Both optimists and pessimists were snubbed, at this point, in favour of those, of either persuasion, who could read. Generally, the guide confirmed the opinions of the optimists and brought great joy to those about to depart. The perplexity was brought about by the appendix, which the Colonel had called “Suggested Accoutrements for a Gentleman’s Pleasant Pilgrimage,” and in which he had listed, in alphabetical order, various items that he, a veteran of the trek, felt should be taken along on a journey to the northern portion of the new world. These included ancestral armour, andirons, artillery, barometers, bath chairs, blazers for boating, bugles, caddies for tea, candelabra, castor oil, Christmas decorations, cricket bats, eau-de-Cologne, engraved prints of Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, and the Queen, Epsom salts, field-glasses, folio for pressed wildflowers, golf clubs, two good hounds for hunting, ledgers, maps, microscopes, pianos, port, quinine, rose bushes, scotch whisky, tennis racquets, umbrellas, and Wellingtons. A final entry at the bottom of the list suggested that several pots of marmalade be packed and that a type of British plant known as “haws” be brought along so that pleasant hedgerows might replace those infernal rail fences.