Away (25 page)

His father had known about the shield of rock and had never told him. Had known about the barrier that would keep Liam from everything he wanted. The enterprising men, he suddenly believed, had been right to dismiss him.

Still holding the book, Liam snatched a cloth from the top of one of the desks and reduced the final remnants of his beloved father to a grey smear. Chalk dust filled the sunlit air like snow as Liam turned and, after kicking closed the door of the cold iron stove, left the place forever.

Skiing back towards the cabin and finding that he had, unwittingly, brought the
Canadian Geological Survey
with him, he tossed it among the trees that lined the road. It disappeared immediately from view, immersed in a bank of heavy, melting snow.

As the cabin and the few acres of light came into view, Liam felt as abandoned and helpless as he had the day, seventeen years before, when he awakened to find his mother gone. He heard Eileen calling to him from the willow tree on the other side of the stream.

“The creek is open further upstream,” she cried. “It’s open and running because of the sun today.”

He glided over to the bank, then stopped, cautious about melting ice, and began to shout at her, “What are you doing up there? You’re not a child anymore. How will you get across this ice now?”

“I did everything,” she yelled back. “I baked four loaves of bread. Your shirts are clean. I’m thinking … and talking to the bird. Don’t worry about the ice, the bird says it will hold me.”

Liam ignored her answer. “We’re going to church tomorrow,” he called.

Eileen’s laughter tumbled across the field near the creek. “Have you gone mad?” Eileen was standing now, hugging the large branch on her left. “Anyway, there is no church for us. Father said we’d have to travel too far to go to church. Too far there. Too far back.”

“We’re going to the Methodist church in Queensborough,” Liam yelled. “And you’re going to wear some nice clothes. You’re seventeen years old and it’s time you got married.”

Eileen laughed again. “I’m not going,” she said. “Not ever!”

Liam shook his ski pole in the air. “You’re going,” he shouted. “You’re going to meet and marry a man who sells furniture, or who takes iron out of the ground, or one who owns a saw mill, a grist mill, a tannery!”

“Butcher, baker, candlestick maker,” chanted Eileen.

“You cannot,” he roared, “spend the rest of your life in a tree! This farm will never grow anything but boulders. We
live
on the Canadian Shield. Everywhere we walk we’re kept out of. You will go to church.”

“Boulders? What do you mean, the Canadian Shield?”

“A blanket of rock! So you’re going to make something of yourself. You are going to marry a gentleman. No farmers, no teachers, and no, no poets!”

“Are there any poets here?”

“No.”

“Then I’m not going to church. You get married. I’m never getting married. Last night,” she announced, “I dreamed I was a fox in a burrow.”

“A fox in a burrow,” Liam muttered as he skied towards the cabin. “A fox in a goddam burrow.”

“Don’t worry,” he heard Eileen shout from behind him, “everything’s going to be all right. The crow told me.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said, throwing his poles down in the snow, “the crow told her! No one but a goddamed poet would marry her anyway.”

The next morning, after walking six miles through ankle-deep slush, Liam and his sister entered the frame church and settled themselves in at the back. The whole congregation looked towards them, then each member turned to his neighbour and whispered the word “Papist.”

As the hysterical preacher raved about sin and death, Liam noticed that the sun had changed its position in the room and was now making a furnace of Eileen’s red hair. One by one the men in the church, as if drawn by its heat, turned their heads to glance at her, then quickly looked away, as if the fire of her hair might blind them.

“It is possible,” the preacher barked, “that you have already sinned to the uttermost.”

Liam felt a pressure on his shoulder and the warmth of his sister’s body next to his. He saw her coat move up and down with the rhythm of her breathing.

“To the UTTERMOST!” the preacher repeated.

The men kept twisting in their seats to look at Eileen, then quickly averting their gaze. Some of them brought their hands
up to the backs of their necks, nervously, or straightened their spines in a determined manner. His sister’s head, the fire of her hair, lay heavy on Liam’s shoulder. She had fallen fast asleep.

Until he saw the men twist in their seats, Liam had not known that his sister was beautiful. He had not known how dangerous beauty could be. The smell of fear was in the air. The broad backs of the men seemed ready to burst from their Sunday suits. His sister was asleep and her hair was on fire.

Liam wanted them both to become children; to spend day after day playing the games he had invented, when much younger, for Eileen’s instruction. He wanted experience reduced to the simplicity of the problems in the arithmetic Schoolbook of which he had come to be so fond. He thought, now, of those restrained, strict narratives and of the uncomplicated desires of the people featured in them, and he wished to be a child again, interested in how much it would cost a nameless man to buy thirteen bushels of apples at eleven pence a bushel.

He put aside, for the moment, the man he was becoming, the one who had considered giving his sister away to men who were both drawn to and afraid of her beauty – men who would never know her.

Eileen slept on, untroubled by the tension in the room. When the service was over Liam shook her sleeve and took her hand. She looked around the church and then at him, startled and confused, not understanding, at first, precisely where they were. During those few seconds it was as if she didn’t recognize him at all.

H
ALFWAY
through the month of May, after a wet spring had swollen the creek into an impressive brown river, Liam and Eileen saw a man walking on the water.

The small crops of wheat and oats, which had been sown in oozing mud, were beginning to change the colour of the earth. Leviticus, Genesis, and the bull who had been renamed Acts by their father after D’Arcy McGee’s Wexford speech, were inching through the pasture, grazing. Ruth was nursing her new calf. Liam was pushing the hand-plough through the garden near the cabin door, Eileen following – with seeds for tomatoes, cucumbers, beans and carrots – and singing.

Liam was certain that he could hear the scrape of the shield beneath the blade of the plough. In his dreams it hung like an iron collar around his neck, banging heavy against his breast-bone as he walked, creating such pressure on his lungs that he awoke gasping. Pushing the plough before him, now, he was thinking of the lush land that bordered the Great Lake Ontario, land owned by men whose names were Smith or Johnson – not a Murphy or a Callaghan among them. Port Hope, he recalled, had been the name of the harbour where, as a child, he had seen the white house. The rivers and creeks in his county, he knew, flowed away, towards this fertile territory, as if fleeing from rock. He had seen raindrops hitting the water that swept by his property and had imagined their journey southwards, away from the granite barrier, towards prosperity.

Behind him, Eileen abruptly stopped singing. Liam, lost in a
terrifying daydream in which the shield had broken through the thin soil under his feet, turned towards her silence and saw her staring fixedly at the water, one hand still in the sack that held the seeds, her whole body tense, alert. He followed her line of vision, dropped the plough to the earth, and raised his arm to block the interfering glare of the sun, holding it there until he appeared to be locked in a gesture hovering somewhere between welcome and self-protection.

Genesis, Acts, Ruth, Leviticus, and young Numbers had all glided towards the creek end of the pasture and were now facing the opposite shore, their tails swinging in unison.

There was an old man walking on the water, towards the acres of light.

The figure, dressed in white trousers, jacket, and shirt, and outlined by the dark firs behind him, had long white hair, streaming out from under his pith helmet. He looked so much like the engraving of Moses Liam had seen at O’Hara’s Mill that the young man wondered, for one split second, if he shouldn’t have paid more attention to the preacher in the Methodist church. He abandoned that thought almost as quickly as it formed, however, in favour of the one that followed. This was no ordinary Old Testament prophet, he decided, this was a ghost.

“The crow said –” began Eileen, but before she could finish, the ghost began to shout gleefully. “You’re here!” he cried, staggering on top of the water. “You’re here … magically unchanged, and in the middle of a forest! I’ve
so
much to show you! You’re here! I’m here! And see how much of
it
is here. Isn’t it wonderful. The flora! The fauna!”

“Yes,” Eileen called back, “it’s wonderful.” And then to her brother she whispered, “I wonder what he means? The crow said that –” She was interrupted, again, as the ghost, having successfully crossed the surface of the water, crashed into a
heap at the feet of a group of vaguely curious cows who responded to this invasion by slowly lowering their heads to observe the visitor more closely. Liam and Eileen ran to where he had fallen on the bank.

“I’ve been eaten alive by the buzzing air,” the man was saying to the cows, “and sick as a dog in the halfway houses.” Remaining in a seated position he unfastened a large pack from his back and dropped it to the ground with a groan of relief. “But it’s all been worth it,” he continued. “I’ve made one thousand and one sketches of everything.” He leaned forward to extract two long poles from the water. “These stilts,” he said proudly, “are my own idea. I’ve heard of men who would walk twenty miles to cross a bridge when all they needed was a pair of stilts.” He slid them under a rope that was tied around his pack. “They’re a tad troublesome,” he admitted, “in the bush when one encounters low limbs of trees and such, but well worth it when one encounters rivers. But this place,” he enthused, throwing his arms skyward, “that forest” – he waved a hand in the direction of the opposite shore – “is one vast tidepool teeming with life! I’ve made one hundred drawings of fungi alone! But my dear,” he rose to his feet and faced Eileen, “how perfectly splendid to find you – it took me longer than expected to find the spot.” He peered into the young girl’s face. “I
have
found you, haven’t I?”

“I don’t know,” said Eileen to the stranger. “Have you?”

“And who are you?” he asked Liam. “Not the hedge school-master, that’s certain.”

“My father is dead,” said Liam.

“Dead?” The old man bent forward, opened his pack and removed a pair of spectacles. Only one lens remained. He closed his naked eye and looked at Eileen through glass with the other. “Of course, dead, you’re just a child though strikingly similar. Your mother … where’s your mother?”

“She disappeared,” said Eileen, “then she died.”

“Oh,” said the old man quietly. “Then you wouldn’t know about the tidepool.”

“No,” said both young people together.

“But I know about you,” said Eileen. “Crow said you’d be coming.”

“Crow?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” said Liam, embarrassed. “It’s just that sometimes she thinks she talks to birds.”

“Good!” barked the old man. “Wonderful!” He shouldered his pack with remarkable agility. “My name is Osbert Sedgewick,” he announced. “I’m from Ireland. My brother and I knew your parents. He’s dead now, my brother. Everything has changed … quite completely. I’m very thirsty. Could I have, do you think, a cup of liquid refreshment? I was going to show her all the sketches. I left everything alone, you know, didn’t alter anything. I did
so
want to show her the sketches.”

“You can show me the sketches,” said Eileen quietly. “I would like to see them.”

Osbert Sedgewick stayed with Liam and Eileen for a month and a half, or rather, as it turned out, they stayed with him.

His presence filled the cabin with an air of pleasant formality, something like a precise contrapuntal tune. The young people were charmed by him. He allowed Eileen to use his tiny bricks of blue, yellow, red, and green to colour his drawings of flowers and leaves, and later presented her with four carefully sharpened pencils so that she could make the drawings herself. Liam showed him how to paddle the canoe so that the rivers and creeks might become an entry rather than a barrier to the forest. Brother and sister were both astonished by the old man’s
table manners. He had travelled with a linen napkin in his pack, encircled by a silver ring with his name engraved on it in flowing script. At meals he unfurled this piece of fabric with a flourish as though he were magically conjuring the plate, which steamed in front of him. While Liam gobbled his dinner with a spoon, Osbert’s long hands performed a graceful dance around his food. Eileen finally hunted up the four linen table napkins her mother had brought over on the boat and persuaded Liam to use one of them.

Though strong from a life-long addiction to walking, Osbert was utterly inept at farm chores, so he made himself useful in other ways: filling the oil lamps before nightfall, picking wild raspberries while out sketching, tramping six miles to Queensborough and six miles back with supplies in his pack and the news of the world under his arm. He was delighted by the progress of the new country; wanted to ride the Grand Trunk Railway that had been built between the cities of Toronto and Montreal, looked forward to the successful completion of the confederation of the provinces, admired the Irish-Canadian McGee whose speeches indicated that he was deeply involved in the logistics of this confederation.

“A wonderful orator,” Osbert told the young people. “A good politician, but a terrible poet. This latest speech of his – The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion’ – is a stunner!”

“Father was disappointed in him,” said Eileen. “He believed that the Irish had been betrayed by him.”

For many weeks Osbert had avoided all talk about Ireland, carrying on instead about the different species of fir trees in a particular patch of forest or listing the seven varieties of wood-pecker he had spotted during the day. Then, gradually, gently he had begun to introduce the topic by asking Eileen to sing “Kerriswater” or “She Moved Through the Fair,” turning to
Liam when she had finished and saying, “Those are fine songs,” and asking, “Do you know any?” until, finally, the young man, himself, began to ask questions.