Away (32 page)

“What’s that?”

“He charms skunks.”

Since the beginning of October the smell of skunks had increased in intensity at Loughbreeze Beach until now it permeated the air almost as far as the village of Colborne, and, when the breeze was from the east, well past the hamlet of Lakeport. Liam had never seen the culprits, though he kept his rifle handy for just such an occasion, but the smell of them was always with him. When there was no wind, the stench was overpowering, causing one of the hired men to quit in disgust and, once, disturbing Genesis and the other cows so much that their milk soured. Eileen did not mind the smell as much as the others did. To her it was a manifestation of the helplessness of her own state; Aidan Lanighan’s after-image clinging to her like a lingering odour. Often, while washing dishes in the kitchen at night, she would gaze out the window to the dark yard and see white, fleeting exclamation marks on the grass. But, by the time her brother entered the kitchen, they would be gone – on night duty. The skunks, according to the hired hands who could live with the stench, would hibernate soon, emerging in June with litters of five or six kittens. By the smell, one of the men said, you could tell there were at least a hundred of them already.

This irritant was added to that which Liam called his “other problem in paradise”: the squatter that he knew inhabited the north end of his woodlot.

A few weeks after Eileen had met and become friendly with Molly, Liam tramped out into the woods to investigate, and found Doherty, himself, working on a wind machine in the
cluttered yard. “The name’s Thomas J. Doherty,” he had said, forcefully, knowing the purpose of Liam’s visit and not looking away from the two pieces of coloured wood that he was attempting to join together.

Liam tried to ignore the torn banners that bounced in the air around him. “How long have you been living here?” he asked.

“That depends,” said Doherty, pounding a pedestal for yet another carved milkmaid into the ground, “on what you mean by living.” He stepped back and squinted at the post. “And, of course, what you mean by here.”

“Here, on this spot, on this farm.”

“A very short time indeed.”

“But I thought –”

“A very short time in comparison to the long history of English injustice to the Irish. You’re Irish, yourself,” said Doherty, smiling beguilingly. “You’ve got some of the music on your tongue.”

“Never mind that,” said Liam. “This is my land. You can’t just go on living here.”

“Now, look at that little girl go!” Doherty had fixed his wind sculpture to the top of the pole. “Isn’t she wonderful?”

“You must find a place of your own,” said Liam weakly.

“The last one let me stay.” Doherty settled himself down on top of a tree stump and slowly, casually, lit his pipe. “And he a Scotsman, name of McCormack. Sold out to you, did he? A shame that … the farm going so well: no pests, no problems, no bad smells. Said he wanted to write a book about some place called Patagonia. I don’t know how to write myself, but I can talk and I can paint. And I can –”

“I’ll give you two weeks,” said Liam. “Take it or leave it.”

“Well, I think I’ll be taking it and leaving it,” said Doherty. “Leaving it in that I’m not going anywhere, and taking it in that I’ll have the two weeks and many more.”

Liam saw the round face of Eileen’s black-haired friend in the window. She raised her hand as if to greet him.

“Two weeks,” repeated Liam in his new, landowner’s voice.

“I can make your life a lot easier or a lot harder,” Doherty called to Liam’s retreating back. “The last one had no troubles. Your sister, now, there’s a fine girl. She and my Molly have made friends.”

As Liam walked back towards the barn and house, the skins of white birches flickered at the edges of his vision and sumac burned. He could tell that the wind was dropping, the smell of skunk becoming even more powerful than it had been on the previous few evenings. It was the smell of an anger, milder, more subtle than that which he experienced in adolescence. The sumac was the colour of something else altogether, something that anticipated more than the fierce winter he knew would come sweeping, in just a few weeks, up the lake from the east. He tore two or three branches off as he passed, and placed them, when he got home, in one of the sealer jars which he had bought for Eileen and which she had not yet filled.

A week later Eileen returned from visiting Molly to find the lake in a furious uproar under the sullen sky, but there was no wind around the farm buildings and the smell of skunk was heavy in the air.

Liam was tossing hay in the barn, randomly but doggedly as if he were trying to create a new topography inside a closed, controlled space.

“Mr. Doherty charms skunks,” she said to him. “Molly told me.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Eileen.”

Eileen climbed two rungs of the ladder that led to the loft.
Holding on with one hand and one foot, she allowed her body to rotate slowly. “I believe her,” she said.

Liam snorted with contempt. “Yes, and you used to talk to birds.”

“I did?” Eileen swung around in the opposite direction, her hand a hinge on the wooden post. “Molly is half Ojibway,” she said absently.

Liam stood up straight for a moment and leaned on the pitchfork. “Remember that Ojibway, Exodus Crow, bringing Mother back? Father was marvellously taken with him. It took me a while, but in the end I liked him too.” A strong waft of skunk invaded the barn. “Jesus,” said Liam, “I can’t stand much more of this. Maybe this is why McCormack sold the farm, though Doherty claims he had no trouble at all with skunks.”

“I don’t remember the Ojibway,” said Eileen.

“That’s impossible,” said Liam. “You liked him best of all.” He resumed his work. Eileen stepped down from the ladder and walked along one beautiful board, which had been polished by grain. She could see her breath in the chill and her hands were numb with cold.

“So now you’re a landlord,” she said to her brother, her back turned to him.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked suspiciously.

“Well, you’ve got all this land and you’ve got people living on it and you’re going to evict them.”

“I bought it fair and square. I didn’t seize it or anything. I paid cash.”

“To whom?”

“To McCormack … you know that.”

“And who did he get it from?”

“It was granted to him by the Crown for being in the British Army. What’s this all about, Eileen?”

“And who did they – I mean the Crown – get it from?”

“They didn’t get it from anyone, Eileen, it was just here, that’s all.”

The bottom of Eileen’s skirt was covered with grain dust. She bent to brush it off. “I think they got it from someone.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a flat almost-rectangular stone, tapered at one end. Showing it to Liam, she said, “Molly says it’s a skinning knife. I found it on the beach.”

“Very interesting. Jesus, will this smell ever leave us?”

“I think that the English took the land from the Indians same as they took it from the Irish. Then they just starve everybody out, or …” she looked directly at Liam, “they evict them, or both.”

Liam did not answer.

“So now you’re going to evict some people from land you never would have had in the first place if the English hadn’t stolen it … and if they hadn’t stolen Ireland.”

“Ireland doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Yes it
does …
you bought it with an Irish landlord’s money.”

“Now, he isn’t a bad sort,” said Liam defensively.

“That’s because he isn’t a landlord any more. It’s
you
who are the landlord now.”

Liam threw down the pitchfork, “When did you get so high and mighty and political? Why don’t you run for Parliament if you know so much? And what is this anyway? Suddenly you’re three times as talkative as you’ve been in months, except that what you say is crazy. I just want to farm the land … is that a crime? You live here too,” he added.

Eileen walked towards the barn door. “If I were you,” she said, “I’d give Mr. Doherty a chance with the skunks.”

“Doherty has six days to get out.”

“Give him a chance with the skunks, Liam,” Eileen stepped over the barn’s threshold. “You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”

Liam did not speak to his sister for two days, but on the morning of the third day she saw him disappear into the cedar bush, then reappear an hour later with Doherty and Molly in tow.

As they passed the house Eileen saw the saints’ medals jingling on Thomas J. Doherty’s cap, and she heard him explain to Liam that the moss was growing on the west side of the maple trees and that this could only mean that the winter would be fiercely severe. They were heading for the beach. Eileen grabbed one of Liam’s jackets and joined them there.

Molly had two large baskets in her hands. “Dad’s making me collect the white stones,” she explained to Eileen, “while he does the prayers. God, there’s a powerful smell of skunk around here.”

“Does this mean –”

“If the skunks go your brother says we can stay. And Dad’s thrown a barn portrait of some cow called Genesis into the bargain.”

Doherty was telling Liam that it was necessary to pray to saints that had connections with animals. “St. Jerome because of his lion, St. Francis because of the birds, and St. Patrick because of the banishing side of things. I come to you as a barn embellisher and a skunk banisher,” he said proudly. “And as an Irishman and a devout Catholic.

“Now, it’s a sad thing about skunks,” he went on, “in that they have no patron saint of their own … they being native to North America and saints being native to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. And the poor little devils could never stow away to get across, in that their whereabouts is so easily detected. So they have to be contented with the saints of other animals. It’s a sad thing, that.”

Liam nodded and looked over at Eileen, raising his eyebrows sceptically.

“Now, if St. Patrick could only have returned to do something
about the English snakes,” Doherty was saying. “But God must have had some larger plan.”

Eileen bent down to pick up a white stone for Molly’s basket, then she straightened and searched the horizon. At the edges of limestone shelves, seaweed moved in the water like long green hair. She felt comfortable, almost happy, occupied with searching, stooping, gathering. The Great Lake was speckled with pinpoints of brilliant light, as if some large power had flung down handfuls of stars. The white stones, when she found them, were cool and smooth and rested easily in the palm of her hand. Molly chatted noisily and taught Eileen how to skip flat shards of limestone over the ruffled water. “I like your brother,” she said, “and he’ll be better-natured after the skunks go.”

Two days later the smell of skunk was stronger than ever. Doherty, when consulted by Liam, reminded him that the darkest hour was just before dawn and that patience was the virtue the Lord God cherished above all others. The farmyard was decorated with circles, arrows, and question marks, all made of white stones. And Molly, following her father’s directions, had placed the words
GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY ELSEWHERE
on the grass where they shone in the sun in front of the long front porch.

Eileen feared for her friend. “What if they don’t go … the skunks, I mean?” she asked her brother on the evening of the second day.

Liam put down the book he was reading, “I think they’ll go … probably tomorrow. Besides, I don’t notice the smell as much,” he said vaguely, and then, as a great surprise to Eileen, he added, “Anyway, a portrait of Genesis would have been enough for me to let them stay.”

The next morning at sunrise, while she was clearing the breakfast dishes, Eileen looked through the window and saw a
crowd of skunks stroll casually into the woods and disappear. Thomas J. Doherty and Molly arrived an hour later to gather up the stones. “They have to be thrown into the Great Lake one by one, these white stones, otherwise the skunks will be back next year with their young,” Doherty confided.

Liam emerged from the barn, shook Doherty’s hand, and accompanied Molly and Eileen to the beach for the stone-throwing ceremony. Even though her eyes were mostly fixed on the horizon, where any moment a particular sail might reveal itself, Eileen couldn’t help but notice that her brother was showing off, performing. With body twisted, his boots grinding into the beach pebbles, he attempted to fling his stones impossible distances out over the water.

It was a crisp day in late autumn. In Port Hope the last nails were being hammered into the latest version of the Seaman’s Inn while the O’Shaunessy brothers stood on the shore, admiring the new building and arguing about the date of the official opening. Further north, in Elzivir Township, Hastings County, Osbert Sedgewick was pasting a variety of brilliant-coloured leaves into an album he’d made himself out of birch bark bound together with fence wire, and watching a man he’d hired from Madoc install a decorative wrought-iron fence around the gravestones.

And in Ottawa, the new nation’s capital, the Irish-Canadian politician, D’Arcy McGee, excluded from the Dominion’s first cabinet despite his efforts to bring about Confederation, limping badly because of an ulcerated leg that had flared up in the stress of the past few months, made his way slowly towards Parliament Hill. In this first parliamentary session of the new Dominion he would occupy a seat he’d barely won in the autumn election. His enemies were stalking him, his political friends abandoning him, and his electorate, the Irish poor of St. Anne’s riding in Montreal, were confused by him, if not
embittered. He was five foot three inches tall, uncommonly ugly, a sentimental and prolific poet, and his liver was half ruined by a lifelong fondness for the bottle. But when he opened his mouth to speak, the world around him stood at silent attention; his words a subtle net thrown over the chaos of any crowd. He had the gift and the curse of this; the ability to entrance, then to cause either permanent devotion or rage. When McGee opened his mouth to speak no one within hearing distance had the power to turn away.

In recent months he had opened his mouth to speak far too often.