Away (23 page)

It was now that time, which comes on certain winter days, when a cloud-covered sky looks no different from the frozen earth beneath it, when branches of trees could be roots thrusting into an opaque earth. There would be no moon, no stars tonight. His father, Liam knew, would glide into sight on the edge of a darkness that would follow him down the road between the trees, waiting to settle over the house until the moment he closed the door and laid his books upon the table.

The boy found Moon agitated, banging her hips against the boards of her stall, collapsing onto the straw, then rising again, awkward and groaning, to her feet. When she saw him she arched her back and lifted her tail as if she wanted to urinate, then she rotated her large head on her great neck and cried out in a voice so human Liam had to force himself not to turn away.

His father, he thought. Where was his father? Moon had always calved at night in the company of Brian, her bellowing touching the children’s dreams, causing them to stir and whimper but never waking them. Suddenly a picture of his father came into Liam’s mind, wrestling by lamplight with this beast who resembled so little the serene animal at whose side the boy had grown. “Jesus,” the boy said under his breath as the cow sank to her knees then rose again, pounding the left side of her ribs against rough pine planks.

The cow crashed onto the straw, where she lay on her side, her body swollen, the steam of her breath causing a veil of mist to obscure her contorted features.

Black and white, thought Liam mindlessly. This cow is so black and white. Nothing should be this black and white.

Just as he finished the thought, a river of clear liquid surged out from under the cow’s tail and onto the straw, freezing there on contact. A shadow interrupted the light from the door – Eileen’s white face. Moon’s eyes rolled back into her head. When Liam turned again, the child was gone.

By now he could see the white membrane of the birth sac emerging between the calf’s back legs, and two grey blocks floating inside it. Hoofs, he thought. A contraction moved through the animal’s abdomen and she groaned and panted. “Please hurry … please,” Liam whispered, fighting back the nausea that was rising to his throat. “Please, Moon, make the baby.” But the sac slid no further from the body of the cow, who now breathed as if she were speaking. “Awl, awl, awl,” she seemed to say.

Liam began to concentrate, helplessly, on the head of a nail that projected from the barn wall. Why was it there, what normally hung from it? Who had taken the hammer in one hand and this ridiculous, insignificant piece of iron in the other? He
would ask his father why this particular nail was here? It irritated and confused him and he flicked at it with his fingernail. Then, as Exodus exploded through the doorway and pushed him out of the way, the sleeve of Liam’s jacket tore on this nail.

“No,” shouted Liam when he saw the knife gleaming in the tall man’s hand.

Moon roared as another contraction ricocheted through her belly. Exodus had the steaming forelegs in his hands now. The whole stall was boiling with a fog composed of hot breath and the mist that rose from the blood and water. Liam focused on the three-cornered rip in his jacket – how to mend it, what needle, what thread? – until he could force himself to look at the calf that lay convulsing on the floor.

“It’s not breathing,” he said to Exodus. “You killed it with the knife.”

Exodus did not look at the boy. He lay the trunk of his body over the twitching calf and turned its face towards his own, one hand removing mucous from the tongue and nostrils. Then he placed his mouth over one of the cow’s nostrils and exhaled slowly. The calf shuddered and was still. Liam watched Exodus open the calf’s mouth and again press his face into the small animal’s snout. Moon struggled to her feet and, as she did so, the afterbirth slipped from her body. She was looking behind her for her calf. Liam watched Exodus remove himself gently from the small black-and-white body, then watched the calf rise, the thin legs trembling like young birches in the spring.

Exodus guided the baby animal by the neck, smoothly, towards its mother’s teat. “I know what to do now,” he said, passing Liam on his way out the barn door.

The boy followed him but stopped three paces from the barn, distracted by the sight of a figure coasting down the road,
pulling night behind him like a cloak. Brian waved. Liam tried to return the greeting but found himself instead bent over his stomach, retching into the snow.

No matter how often she was called, or how persuasively she was coaxed, Eileen would not come down from the tree, claiming that she had not finished thinking.

When she entered the house several hours after dark, she stamped the snow from her feet for longer than was necessary. Brian was putting fresh hay in the stall but Liam was in the cabin, huddled over a glinting needle, his jacket, and a long black thread. Soup bubbled on the stove and there was bread in the oven. The boy’s brows were drawn together over his nose as he squinted at the sleeve. Eileen unwound a long, woollen scarf from her neck, ceremoniously, waiting for her brother to look up.

“Have you seen the baby cow?” he asked, finally, when she neither moved from the door nor spoke to him.

She smiled then, and with an air of great confidence said, “Exodus says he knows what to do. He’s gone away now for a little while, but he’ll be back, that’s one thing certain.” She crossed the room to look into the pot on the stove. “I’m hungrier than ever,” she announced. “And the baby cow,” she added, replacing the pot lid, “he said the baby cow must be called Genesis.”

“He’s gone?” The needle was a miniature sword, bright, between Liam’s thumb and forefinger. “But I wanted … Did he walk back along the river?”

“No,” said Eileen, settling herself at the table to wait for her father to return from the barn. “First he turned into a bird, then he flew away, high up, very high over the trees.”

Liam was not satisfied with the look of the stitches but they held the fabric together. The needle moved in and out, smoothly, through the cloth. Eileen stood near his shoulder. “Papa says he’ll get me coloured thread in Queensborough to make pictures on the pillowcases. I could make a picture on your sleeve.”

E
ACH
spring from then on, Liam would set out in search of Exodus, nosing his canoe through the tributaries of the Black and the Moira rivers that crossed the two townships that made up his immediate geography. He would often portage, searching for hidden water, stubbornly moving away from the creek that crossed his own property, believing that to follow the route his mother had taken would never lead him to the man he was looking for. Moreover, he was often needed at the farm, and the journey to the lake that his mother had claimed as hers had assumed such hugeness in his mind he could not imagine a return from it except as an old man. Ulysses staggering home under the weight of the adventure, sailing back to an abandoned and completely altered family. He knew he could never leave Eileen for that long, could not leave her at all, he believed, for more than a few days.

Years later he would say that this was the time when he learned the woods. Until then, the edge of the forest seemed a wall, protecting darkness from the acre of light; a territory lacking the colourful, linear sequences that made up the road and its pageant. The picture it had presented to him had been flat, without dimensions, coloured by trees whose names he had learned only at his father’s insistence. Now, when he walked among these trees, their low boughs touched his face and hands while around him hidden life rustled and fled. He glimpsed fur bursting from the earth and heard the outraged
screams of winged creatures hidden from him by a canopy of leaves. Everything around him moved or was moved.

He never fell in love with the forest but came to admire and respect it. It had captured his interest, and as it broke apart in his mind into the millions of facts of its existence, he grappled with it, detail by detail, overcoming his vague fear. And his anger. No longer a beast who had swallowed his mother whole, the forest became, if not a lover, almost a friend. Once or twice, when the canoe was balanced on his shoulders, he met bears, large good-natured gentlemen who drew back and stepped aside to let him pass. He was never lost; no two parts of the forest were the same. With practice he had no trouble recognizing the singular construction of each of a thousand similar pines.

As the years went by, the late-spring forest quest became a ritual. The sombre river and creek waters, their surfaces like heavily varnished Renaissance paintings he would never see, turned into inviting highways. He would not find Exodus and eventually, by his nineteenth or twentieth year, he forgot that this had been his original intention. He would find, instead, rock and bark and swamp and cedar and strange, narrow liquid highways the colour of mahogany, and, for the time being, that was enough. And he would learn particular things about soil, decay, seeding, and growth. Light and air. Tender green. He knew he wanted to make things grow, wanted, above all, to nurture, to be a farmer.

His father grew older, and with each successive winter, weaker, his journeys to and from the schoolhouse taking him a little longer each year until finally it was necessary for him to set out and return in darkness. His robust, kind face had collapsed into creases and folds, and there was something sorrowful about the sagging skin at his neck. On winter evenings he told grimmer and grimmer stories: black potatoes, cabins filled
with skeletal families, children devoured by rats, the coffin ships, mass graves on Grosse Isle, Cromwell, and the long history of the persecution of the Irish race. He was troubled by the presence of flourishing Orange Halls in his own county, knowing that many of his Protestant neighbours had taken the pledge to eliminate Catholicism wherever they might find it. One of the men on the roads, a drifter who had joined then abandoned the Lodge, had recited the secret Orange Oath to Brian, laughing at its arrogance, but the words had burned themselves into the schoolmaster’s memory and after a few drinks at night he would sometimes repeat it to his children. “ ‘I swear that I am not nor ever will be a Roman Catholic or Papist,’ ” he would announce. “ ‘Nor am I married to nor will I ever marry a Roman Catholic or Papist, nor educate my children nor suffer them to be educated in the Roman Catholic faith, if in my power to prevent it.’ ” Afterwards he would strike his forehead in anger and disbelief. “They brought the hate with them across all that ocean … across all that water,” he would say, staring out the window at swirling snow. “It hardly seems possible.”

He told his children of an incident he had read about a few years before in a newspaper at O’Hara’s Mill. Aggressive crowds of Orangemen had attacked the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Toronto, causing a riot to occur during which a young Irish Catholic father had been stabbed in the back with a pitchfork. The murder had gone unpunished. He had never until now mentioned the incident to his children, but his knowledge of it had broken something inside him.

His eyesight was becoming weak and he had no patience with spectacles so the pleasure he had taken in long bouts of reading could no longer distract him from the consideration of the old troubles. Brian now sensed old threats being reiterated, old wounds being reopened.

He knew his hero, D’Arcy McGee, had left the United States for Montreal, had entered Canadian politics, and was now Minister of Agriculture and Immigration. This gave Brian some comfort; this and the Irish revolutionary songs he loved to sing to his children – songs with such heartbreakingly beautiful tunes that his daughter, Eileen, had committed them all to memory by the age of thirteen. On winter afternoons she cheerfully sang about the hanging of brave young men, wild colonial boys, the curse of Cromwell, cruel landlords, the impossibility of requited love, and the robbery of landscape while she built snow castles under the brilliant slanting sun of several Januarys.

The year that Eileen turned fifteen and Liam twenty-two, Brian learned that his hero and hope for the future, McGee, had been sent by the government to the International Exposition in Dublin. It was 1865. While in Ireland, McGee returned to his native town of Wexford for a short visit. There he spoke about the problems of Irish immigrants in North America and the follies of political activism. Brian was well aware that as newly appointed Minister of Immigration McGee was an expert in the former topic, and as a participant in the disastrous Young Ireland uprising of 1848 he was an expert in the latter. McGee had railed against the demagogues he felt were promoting Fenian political activity in North America and had discussed the flaws in the Irish Catholic character that left that group open to manipulation by such creatures. He had announced that he and his fellow Young Irelanders had been, politically speaking, “a pack of fools.” The speech devastated many of his Irish Catholic supporters on both sides of the Atlantic, many of whom believed that McGee had been somehow bought off, bribed, or blackmailed.

On an evening in June, when his eyes were particularly tired, Brian asked Eileen to read the text of the speech to him from a newspaper.

She stood in profile beside the window where the light was good, her hands whiter than usual against the tan paper and the print on it, and read in a voice stripped clean of emotion D’Arcy McGee’s catalogue of the frailties of his own people. She had not yet the experience to respond to the words she was saying – growing up in the forest, she was innocent of identification with any group. No collective voice had made itself heard in her mind, and so she articulated words such as “squalor” or “illiteracy” or “idleness” in exactly the same tone of voice as she might have used when reading aloud a poem or a fairy story. Outside, birches were heaving in a brisk breeze. When she finished she put the paper down on a stool beside the stove and turned to ask her father a question concerning his supper. It was only then that she saw that he had been weeping.

“Such betrayal,” he was whispering. “And he an Irish Catholic himself. Such betrayal.”

After that he never mentioned McGee’s name again.