Away (15 page)

A great silence filled the field where those who were illiterate had gathered to hear the reading of the list, and the child – a boy of twelve – who had read it to them, hung his head
afterwards as though he, himself, were responsible for the cruelty of its contents and the wretchedness of the group to whom he gave the information. One woman, who had recognized only eight or ten of the words recited, asked, hopefully, if perhaps the words were French – the only language other than Irish or English of which she had ever heard. The boy said nothing but walked away with the other quiet members of his family.

For days after the reading of the list, each man, woman, and child who had heard it was away in contemplation of possessions that had been loved and lost. One remembered a chair with a carved pattern on its back, another a brooch given to her by the butcher’s son who had later jilted her. A few china pitchers painted with flowers came to mind or silver-plated spoons. One recalled the head of a china doll she had found on the side of the road and had kept carefully in a secret spot until her brothers had discovered and smashed it. The men thought mostly of livestock, a beautifully marked calf or a particularly healthy lamb or piglet. One old man, with tears in his eyes, thought about his cherished, bad-tempered rooster, whom he had called Cromwell and whom he had been forced to eat only two weeks before. Fiddles, flutes, and pocket-watches sang and ticked in the minds of the people and well-made harnesses and trusted turf spades squeaked and crunched. A middle-aged man thought, with great longing, of a wheelbarrow, picturing clearly the way the boards had aged and weathered and the two smooth spots that his grasp had worn on the handles.

So concentrated had the people been in the past few months on the effort required to balance the idea of leaving Ireland against the cold and their hunger that they had forgotten the previous stages of hardship when the potatoes rotted in the fields, meat disappeared from the tables and then eggs and then milk, until finally the table itself was gone and the familiar
stools that stood near it. But now when they dwelt upon their vanished possessions they did so with a terrible sense of loss. Many had only the clothes on their backs and some only one rough blanket, and, knowing this, they gathered their thin families together and crept into the dark of their empty cabins where Colonel Tarbutt’s Guide was torn in anger and tossed hurriedly onto what remained of their turf fires.

During the course of the next few days, however, when storms painted the hills white or covered the rocks in glittering ice, another kind of possession began to build itself in the cottiers’ minds, and one by one men rose weakly from their attitudes of despair and began to describe to their wives and children what they had seen in their waking dreams.

She is the colour of mahogany, they said, and taller and larger than the hall the landlords inhabit. Forty-five wings unfurl from her and her body is studded with nails of gleaming brass and she is clothed in ropes made from silken threads. The planks on her decks are polished and golden and reflect the fire of the sun and below them are rooms filled with emerald light caused by the fine green glass of her windows. Swifter than the gulls she is and as smooth.

Slowly, the ship was built, timber by timber, in the crumbling cabins, until the emigrants-to-be held her in their hearts as the greatest possession of all. Then the little withered children staggered out into the rain where they built her themselves with sticks and bark and leaves, and sailed her on mud-puddle oceans, towards the other shore.

O
SBERT
and Granville expended several boxes of vellum paper making lists and tallying accounts. They had already demolished reams of writing material sending enquiries and requests off to passenger-brokers, most of whom, it turned out, were either completely corrupt or utterly stupid. One had offered the suggestion that all Irish peasants should sleep on the deck – for their own good – because people of this class were unused to beds and bedding and were therefore uncomfortable when provided with such amenities. Another had attempted to charge them three times the going rate for each man, woman, and child. By the time the landlords had selected fifty of the most destitute families for the passage, things were more or less settled. Some of their tenants had expressed the wish to proceed to the United States on arrival where they had family or friends who appeared to be already established. Others claimed they would look for employment in the cities of Toronto or Montreal. Only a few stated that they wanted Canadian land; those who were strong, or those whose characters had instinctively wedded them to the soil and who could imagine no other way of life.

Osbert was amazed to discover that he could acquire uncleared land for these emigrants – for little or no money – on the northern edges of townships with strange, unpronounceable Indian names. One particularly cynical land agent in Derry suggested that he should defer payment until the people arrived, since it was likely only half would survive the journey.

“But the ships are clean and well maintained,” Osbert had replied, “and the food on them is of the highest quality, yes?”

“Oh, absolutely,” said the land agent, turning away with a smile.

Granville, rereading the list of those who were to emigrate, was surprised to find the schoolmaster’s name pencilled in at the bottom.

“What’s this?” he asked his brother. “Is he so bad off then?”

“Bad enough,” Osbert replied.

“But he’s a smallholder … surely we shouldn’t have to bear –”

“He pays his rent to us.”

“Still, with five acres he should be able to grow enough –”

“Enough what … potatoes?” Osbert demanded sarcastically.

“Well, we certainly can’t start shipping away all the small-holders as well as the cottiers. Did he approach you?”

“No.”

“Well, then, surely
you
didn’t suggest this?”

“Not yet,” Osbert was busily tidying papers. “I’m just about to. This afternoon, in fact.”

“But why him? Why not O’Donovan or Flanaghan? What’s this all about?” Granville was becoming annoyed. “Why not the whole country? Why
him
in particular? Besides, he’s a good tenant, we should keep him.”

“It’s not him.” Osbert longed to be out somewhere on the Cave Walk with his pen and drawing ink. He wished he was looking at a tiny life-form through his microscope; one that was incapable of conversation.

“Why
him
?” Granville demanded again.

“It’s not him,” Osbert sighed impatiently, “it’s her. The wife … the woman who was away.” Osbert glared suddenly at his brother from beneath fierce bushy eyebrows. “I won’t have her starve,” he announced, “I won’t have it.”

“She petitioned you, came begging.”

“She certainly did not. She would never, never do that.”

“Perhaps they don’t wish to go.” He looked again at the paper in his hand. “Perhaps they don’t want this land you’ve obviously already arranged for them.”

“Perhaps.” Osbert twitched in his chair and began to pull on his left ear, a habit since childhood. “Perhaps … but I’ll have to persuade them. They must go,” he was thinking aloud now. “They must go because of the light.”

His brother regarded him in stunned silence.

Osbert looked towards the window. “There’s this light in her, you see,” he said, “and it must not be put out. I can’t explain it, but I know that it must not go out, must be kept, somehow, though I’m not certain at all that it will shine as well across the ocean as it does here. Nevertheless,” he added assertively, “I will not stand by and see it fade.”

“You’ve gone mad! How do you know this woman?”

“I don’t.”

“Then, what’s all this nonsense about the light? Surely you haven’t begun to believe their wild tales. Charming, I admit, but utter flights of fancy.”

“It has nothing to do with that,” said Osbert. “It’s just this subtle light. I saw it that day by the tidepool.” He was putting on his greatcoat and reaching for his walking-stick.

“What day? What tidepool?” demanded Granville.

Osbert did not answer. He was heading down the long hall past the glazed eyes of twenty stuffed puffins, towards the door.

From where she sat on the stone at the cabin’s threshold, Mary was able to watch the landlord approach for a long, long time. At first he was only a dark shape, small, moving down the path
that, from this distance, was no wider than your finger on the green hill. He caught her attention because, for the past few weeks, no one at all was to be seen moving confidently through the landscape. A few of the labourers in the morning and now and then the priest hurrying to administer last rites, but mostly the people’s energies were drained by the labour required simply to continue breathing.

Mary, herself, had remained in this spot – her head against the frame and her back to the door – since she had dragged herself from sleep in the morning. Several bouts of cold rain had drenched her, but she hadn’t the will to stir. Inside, her husband and child remained as motionless as she – the former staring at the same page in the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia hour after hour, the latter rolling his little wooden spool from hand to hand across the floor on which he squatted. Mary could not bear to see Brian wince when he looked at her. She knew all her beauty was gone.

They had stopped talking two weeks ago and now silence was a fourth among them. It had crept under the door and set up house in the kitchen the day that hope lifted like smoke up a chimney. Everything had been laid down to rust. Not just Brian’s spade, which Mary could see lying diagonally between her and the barn, but the child’s lists of new words and the man’s long rants concerning the unfairness of his lot.

During the last of these outbursts Brian had smashed his fist through a pane of glass in the lower part of the cabin’s south window and the shards were still scattered in the grass. Mary had spent at least one hour today picking up one fragment and then another, looking through each of them towards the sky, noting how cracks picked up reflections of stones at her feet or how bubbles in the glass distorted clouds. If you tilted the broken edge, Mary discovered, it would mirror this or that facet of
their holdings, randomly. She had been doing this for a while, when she saw her own gaunt face reflected, and in shame and disgust she kicked the shattered glass away from her. She had forgotten all about her slate which lay near the hearth inside, a curved crack like a ghastly smile running from one side of it to the other, a few Irish words chalked on its surface. Sometimes she spoke to the darling, absent one in poems or in snatches of songs.

By the time the shadow of the landlord fell across the door-way where she sat, Mary had stepped into the day of the black stones and was reconstructing her discovery of the beloved other. “Lay your head there,” she was singing or saying, “where the warm breeze can blow the sea from your hair.”

Osbert touched her arm and pulled her back from the sea and the stones. Then he followed her into the cabin where she squinted at him, or at the places around him where the light came from the window.

“You must go away,” he was saying, “emigrate to Canada. I’ve booked your passage. The ship sails from Larne in a few weeks – for Quebec. You will go with the others. There will be land there waiting for you – acres and acres – more than you can imagine. The ship leaves in a few weeks – at the end of May – from Larne. Her name is the
New World.”

Mary looked at the objects discarded on the cabin floor. A pot, a ladle. She had almost forgotten how they were used now they were no longer in their proper place. Her mind tidied nothing. Not until she looked at the lantern standing on the table. She would not want to lose the lantern, illuminator of journeys. She would protect it, put it in a cupboard until she needed it.

No one inside the cabin spoke to Osbert and he tried not to look at their altered faces. He stood for some moments near the
window with his tweed cap in his hand, turning it and turning it so that his fingers touched the peak and then the back of the sweatband, over and over. Then he coughed nervously and departed.

No one inside the cabin had spoken, but as Osbert walked away he knew that even the child had agreed to go.

S
HE
placed the geography book on a large boulder and herself beside it.

In the early morning light the incised continents stood out in exaggerated relief and it seemed to Mary as if her own approaching journey had given them more weight and substance. The cracks on the spine, where she had repeatedly bent the book open, were even more visible; etched reminders of her paths through the words of the book. She would show the dark, darling one this Canada, this place where she was going. She would show him the long river that thrust into its body and the lakes shaped like boulders which Brian said were also inland seas with no salt in the water. There was some hope in her mind that the beloved other would follow her there, and there was fear that he would not. That the land that had grown him, the sea that had drowned him, and the lake that had housed him would keep him here, far from her, forever.

Now the water of Lough Crannog licked the rushes near the shore. Mary waited as she had learned now to wait, calmly, her hands palm upwards on her lap as if she expected them to fill with pools of rain. Bright glimmers of life darted near the water on blurred wings and occasionally a trout leapt, then plummeted, a flailing blade, into the lake.

He breathed and the air shivered with constellations of bright kindreds. “Now it’s you,” he whispered, “this is what you take with you and what you leave behind.” She saw obsessed
kings and warriors, torn by grief and guilt, monks curved over hinged books in scriptoriums, gypsies with roads flung like banners in front and behind them, women, terrible in the beauty of their first youth, and hags in tatters, the knowledge of years hanging like rosary beads from their crooked hands. A line of pale young men appeared, their shirts open to white throats, their sole employment to sing the great sorrows and then to die for love. The great scholars, distant, preoccupied, came to her carrying pictures of medieval poets; men and women from the bardic schools, lying prone in windowless rooms with large stones resting on their stomachs and ten thousand metered lines preserved in their heads. Saints held still, their raised arms thrust up to heaven for so many years that birds had come to nest in the cups of their hands. “These are not being shed,” the dark other said to her, “they are accumulated.” Then came the gifted teachers, and with them the moment when knowledge is passed from one mind to another.