Away (24 page)

A
T
the school Brian began to teach the children an entirely different history of the British Empire than the one outlined by Egerton Ryerson in his prospectus for Upper Canadian schools. Speaking in the confidential tones of a man imparting wisdom by a fireside, he told of the land seizures which preceded the plantation of English and Scottish Protestants in Ulster. Turning slowly from the slate board as if his body were an old hinge, he would glare out from under bushy brows at what was to him now a blurred sea of small faces and demand that some young scholar recite the rights that were denied Catholics in Ireland during the eighteenth century at the time of the Penal Laws.

He scratched the words “They could not …” on the board, and the children, delighted with the game, would shout out the answers, enthusiastically and in unison.

“Purchase or lease land,” they cried. “Become educated, practise a profession, vote, run for public office, practise their religion, own a horse worth more than five pounds, keep the profits from their rented land, or speak Gaelic.”

“And what is Gaelic?” he would say.

“Gaelic is the language of scholars and poets.”

He was warned several times about this approach to history, but because the men of the community trusted him – despite his Catholicism – and the children loved him, they were hesitant to let him go. Later, however, in June of 1866, when a small band of Fenians stumbled over the border from the United States, determined to fight for Ireland on the closest
plot of British ground, their sad, ineffectual skirmishes caused such a widespread outbreak of anti-Irish sentiment that the Board of Trustees for Madoc Township voted unanimously that Brian should be retired from active duty.

Liam had just finished giving fresh feed to Genesis, Leviticus, Acts, and Ruth (Moon had died the year before of old age and had been buried tearfully by the small family near the spot where the mother lay) when he heard his father’s voice in the distance. “For freedom comes from God’s right hand and needs a godly train,” he sang as he strode into view. “And righteous men must make our land a nation once again.”

As she had the year before, and in the same month, Eileen stood by the window with a newspaper in her hands. This time she was reading the words of the Fenian Proclamation that General Sweeney had brought with him when he had attempted to invade Canada. Her father sat with his arms stretched out in front of him on the table and his head moving up and down. Liam, watching him from the other side of the room, could not decide whether his father was nodding in agreement or whether his head was becoming too heavy to hold upright because of weakness.

“ ‘We come among you.’ ” Eileen read, “ ‘as foes of British rule in Ireland.

“ ‘We have taken up the sword to deliver Ireland from the tyrant.

“ ‘We do not propose to divest you of a single right you now enjoy. We are here as the friends of liberty against despotism, of democracy against aristocracy.

“ ‘To Irishmen across the province we appeal in the name of seven centuries of British iniquity and Irish misery.

“ ‘We offer the honest grasp of friendship. Take it Irishmen, Frenchmen, Americans. Take it and trust it.

“ ‘We wish to meet with friends. We are prepared to meet with enemies.

“ ‘We shall endeavour to merit the confidence of the former. The latter can expect from us but the leniency of a determined but generous foe, and the restraints and relations imposed by civilized warfare.’ ”

“For this they took away my children,” Brian said. Then he walked into the back room and flung himself down on his bed.

Eileen turned to her brother. “I thought the words were beautiful,” she said. “I thought they sounded like poetry.”

A week later, after dictating a long letter concerning Ireland’s lost voice and stolen poetry, a letter that his daughter dutifully transcribed, Brian turned his face to the wall and died. He was fifty years old and his body was that of an ancient man: exhausted and withered.

Unable to bear the scene of his father’s death, Liam was sitting on the stoop outside the door when his sister laid a small hand on his shoulder. She placed the paper into his hand. “He said he wants one copy of this to go to Exodus Crow,” Eileen told her brother, “and another to some priest in Ireland called Quinn.”

Liam didn’t answer. He was thinking about how his father had died so quietly in the late afternoon, at the time of day when, in previous years, he had skied into view on the road, his coat a dark sail, night hurrying behind him as if trying to catch him up.

T
HE
farm did not prosper despite the presence of Genesis, Leviticus, Acts, and Ruth; warming the barn in the winter with their large bodies and startling the calm green of the pasture in the summer with their precise black and whiteness. His few crops were meager and stunted. Shortly after his father died, Liam began to consider opening up two or three more acres so that he could grow feed corn for the cattle. Taking a carving knife in his hand he walked all over the land he now owned, plunging the blade into the earth every twenty yards. He found solid rock six inches under the soil in some locations and three inches under the soil in others. The rest of the property consisted of steaming muskeg, humming with mosquitoes in summer and projecting the ash-grey remains of dead cedars through a smooth, indifferent cover of snow in winter. Liam came to understand that his father’s salary, insignificant though it had seemed, had nevertheless provided much-needed cash. There were now times at night when the young man, awakened by a furious north wind late in winter, experienced the acid taste at the edge of panic and the high, shrill buzz of panic in his mind. The scattered neighbours whom he had come to know along the road, cabin Irish like himself, had either died out, leaving decaying log homesteads behind them, or were living a life of squalid poverty – sweetened now and then by the availability of homemade whiskey.

He wanted to think about the things his father had taught him: the various names for trees, a few Irish revolutionary
songs, the love of animals. He thought instead about his mother’s hair in the sunlight. It was she who had told him how a field could be created, over a period of years, by the patient application of seaweed on dry rock. The weed, she had said, must be carried on the back in a basket strapped over the shoulders. She also said that the walk from any sea was always uphill. His child’s mind had envisioned an ocean growing the wildflowers he was familiar with – Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans – as she spoke. But it didn’t matter now. Here he had neither the sea nor, it seemed, the time, never mind the patience. These things were as irrelevant to the ground on which he now stood as was his father’s
Greek Lexicon
or
Oxford Anthology of British Verse
. Neither the English poets nor the Greeks had anything at all to say about farming the Canadian backwoods.

One warm sunny day in late March of the following year, Liam remembered the small library of reference books at the back of the log school, and he removed the skis from the place where they had rested against the wall since his father’s death, strapped them on his own boots, and set out over the old route. He sailed by a pine forest that was a slash of green on either side of him, past squatters’ shanties and abandoned farmsteads. Sometimes, he glided through a section or two of hardwood trees among which the sun ricocheted causing shadows on the snow that mirrored oddly the corduroy construction of the road bed. His father lay underneath the snow now. A mild man, enraged, then made silent. His grave had not yielded to the shape of the earth as Liam’s mother’s had, almost immediately, and as Moon’s had in the space of a few months.
Rian fir ar mhnaoi
, he had said to Eileen just before he died, the Irish already sounding unfamiliar, untranslatable in their ears.
When he called for Mary they had not known whether he wanted the Blessed Virgin or his own wife, whose bones lay whitening a hundred yards from where he raved. Liam remembered sitting on the back stoop, avoiding the moment of his father’s death. It was then he had recalled that
Rian fir ar mhnaoi
meant the trace of a man on a woman. He had whispered the phrase to himself, over and over, until he felt the pressure of Eileen’s hand near his neck.

The school of which Liam’s father had been so proud sat boarded and nailed, a late-winter drift on the west side almost reaching its eaves, the glass in each of its four windows, if not broken, was covered with a coating of dust from the previous dry summer. The bell for which Brian had fought long and hard was gone from the little wooden tower, and now a frayed grey rope swung in open air like a mutilated memory. Liam removed the skis and, with the sorrow and anger upon him, waded through the heavy spring snow to the front door which was easy enough to kick open, the force of this carrying him in one stride into the centre of the dim, remote room, where he saw before him the remains of his father’s world in a new land.

On the slate board at the head of the room was chalked a map of Ireland, spotted with the Gaelic names of territories, towns and villages, bays and rivers. A series of arrows twisting in improbable directions, suggested fierce, unprincipled, alien invasions. Between the tiny shape that represented Rathlin Island and the large mass of Ireland itself, were three white dots, and Liam knew from the stories his father had told that these were the Children of Lir, biding their storm-tossed tenure as swans on the waters of the Moyle.

Next to the map was a list of Gaelic nouns written in his father’s hand, and beside them their English equivalents written in the hand of a child: “famine,” “sorrow,” “homeland,” “harp,” “sea,” “warrior,” “poet,” and the word “castle,”
interrupted after the first syllable – the chalk that wrote it resting on the ledge beneath the board.

Liam saw in his mind, then, the scene about which his father would not speak. The child dutifully writing what she had learned, the few other students squirming in their seats, their teacher standing to one side with his arms folded, nodding as this collection of words flowed down the board, a map filled with violent arrows and forbidden words occupying the space that separated him from the small scholar. And then the surprise entrance of the trustees, their anger and his father’s arguments, the child in the midst of this abandoning the word “castle,” carefully placing the stub of chalk on the ledge, and returning quietly to her seat.

What was it that lodged the homeland so permanently and so painfully in the heart of his father? What terrible power had that particular mix of rock and soil, sea, grass and sky that its sorrows could claim him and cause him to draw its image on a wall built in the centre of a forest thousands of miles away. Concentrating, Liam suddenly recalled, quite vividly, his father’s turf spade, its worn handle and the spots of rust on its blade; that and a steaming haystack. About the departure, and the misery that preceded and followed it, he remembered nothing at all. His first real souvenir was the act of arrival – immigration – and a white house with water dancing on its windows.

His father’s stories, which had entertained him as a child while wolverines yodelled beyond the cabin walls on sharp winter nights, had left his centre untouched. But his sister, he knew, had ingested the stories, their darkness – the twist in the voice of the song, the sadness of the broken country – and had therefore carried, in her body and her brain, some of that country’s clay. She who was born into a raw, bright new world would always look back towards lost landscapes and inward towards
inherited souvenirs, while he sought the forward momentum of change and growth, the axe in the flesh of the tree, the blade breaking open new soil. He feared, more than anything, the twist in his sister’s song and the days she spent thinking in a willow which, all those years before, Exodus Crow had chosen for her. He could not imagine a future for the vast part of her that turned inward. She has spent, he thought, too much time in the woods alone.

Liam found the books he was looking for, standing on two rough shelves at the back of the room. They smelled of mould, were covered with dust. There, among the
Canadian Series of Reading Books
, among the
Elementary and Advanced Arithmetics
, between the
English Grammar
and one old stained volume of the Supplement to the fifth, sixth and seventh editions of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, he located the
Canadian Geological Survey
. His father, he remembered, had ordered this text for the school with great excitement, paying for it out of his own salary, claiming that it had important things to say about the composition of the new land. Liam wanted to know about this composition. He wanted to make things grow in it.

Opening the book to the first map of Upper Canada, he located the position of Belleville on the edge of Lake Ontario, then moving his finger due north past Moira Lake he found the approximate location of his farm, noting that the shading of the map had changed from a dot to a slanted line pattern. These slanted lines filled the enormous area that hung, like a lady’s fancy lace collar, from the neck of Hudson Bay, one ribbon falling into his own county. According to the words at the bottom of the page, this vast territory was called The Canadian Shield. It covered hundreds of thousands of square miles. There were no pauses in its pervasiveness, no exceptions to its continuity. It had been put there by an ice age that would
never happen again, it would be there for all time, and it was made of solid rock.

Liam looked up from the map and was confronted with the Irish word for famine; Brian’s handwriting, stark and white, on a black slate board. He closed the book with a snap, thinking of men more enterprising than his father, men who had started iron mines, who had burned acres of forest for potash, who talked about machines while waiting for their grain to be ground at O’Hara’s Mill. None of them was Irish. Some had stood at the door to this room when a child stopped halfway through the word “castle” and placed the chalk on the ledge.