A Map of Glass (24 page)

By the time Maurice, uniformed and capped, departed for school a few years later, his mother and father had moved away from Timber Island and, with the help of the elder Woodman, had purchased an inexpensive two-story clapboard hotel on the sandy beach at the end of the nearby peninsular County. The rafts had dwindled to a trickle by now, Old Woodman had retired, and Cummings had taken over what remained of the much-diminished business, a business in which, to Branwell’s relief, there was no longer any room for him. Annabelle and her father remained in the big house, she eventually nursing the cranky old man. The Badger, still devoted to his grandfather, would make the day trip from the hotel by way of his own sailboat in the summer or an iceboat he had constructed at the Christmas break.

Branwell, who had painted a number of landscapes in the upstairs and downstairs halls of the inn, was being encouraged by the more prosperous families in the County to decorate their homes. He completed these commissions in the winters when the dry heat thrown by the wood stoves would cause the paint to set, and when there were no guests at the inn. The summers brought a number of city families to the shores of the lake and the verandas of the inn, some from Toronto and Montreal, some from as far away as Albany or Chicago. In spite of his father’s annoyance, Branwell had called the inn “The Ballagh Oisin,” after the mountain pass in Ireland, the story of which had given rise to his name. “It’s a mountain pass,” he would tell inquisitive guests, “in Ireland.” At one point he had staged an evening contest to see who among the visitors could pronounce the name properly. Branwell was a jovial host, much given to jesting. His disposition was greatly improved now that he had left the timber business and had in his life almost everything that his sister had known all along he wanted: Marie, the painted hallways, and an open view of the lake uncluttered by islands of commerce.

D
uring their third or fourth year at the hotel a letter arrived for Branwell from a fellow-innkeeper in a distant part of Ontario known as the Huron Tract. This was a portion of Upper Canada that had been considered quite useless by Joseph Woodman in that it was situated too far from the Great Lakes – or any other navigable body of water – to make it suitable for timbering, despite rumors of incredible hardwood trees, many of which were twelve to fifteen feet in diameter. A couple of decades before Woodman Senior had established his island empire in close proximity to the relatively civilized town of Kingston, however, a hundred-mile-long inland trail known as the Huron Road was being hacked, sawed, chopped, and burnt through this forest under the direction of the Canada Company, which comprised a group of British and Scottish entrepreneurs, several of whom were named after the wild animals they had killed in other corners of the Commonwealth. Tiger Dunlop is someone who comes immediately to mind, but likely there were other colorful monikers as well – Rhinoceros Smith, Polar Bear MacLeod, Lion McGillivray. The trail ended at the Lake Huron port of Goderich into which the sorry, fly-bitten, half-starved party of blazers and engineers, axemen and surveyors had staggered in the autumn of 1828 after months of exhausting labor and bouts of swamp fever, only to be bullied by the company into making the trek back in the opposite direction in order that improvements might be made to the new road and the land surveyed and divided into saleable plots for would-be settlers.

A few years later, once the settlers started to arrive, several inns were established by the Canada Company at various points along the road – inns whose fortunes would suffer dramatically when, some years later, another company of entrepreneurs established a railway from the center of the province to the port on the lake. The innkeepers, or their offspring, managed, somehow, to keep the doors of their solid brick Georgian buildings open for a year or two afterwards – though it was clear that their trade had suffered and there was no telling how long their businesses would survive.

Branwell’s letter was from such an innkeeper, a certain Mister Sebastien Fryfogel Esquire, proprietor of Fryfogel’s Tavern, which was situated on the Huron Road between the town of Berlin and the hamlet of Stratford. He had heard about the colorful murals of the Ballagh Oisin from a traveller who had stayed there, and he felt that paintings of this nature might enhance the rooms of his inn. Would Branwell consider making the voyage to the west? Fryfogel allowed that he normally had no time for the thieves and rogues that roamed the roads of Upper Canada plying their various trades. He listed tinkers, medicine sellers, horse traders, dancers and singers, and itinerant painters as being among the most disreputable and offensive members of that already defective species of the animal kingdom known as human beings. But he had it on the best authority that Mister Branwell Woodman was, like himself, primarily an honest innkeeper, though one who occasionally painted pristine landscapes with no people – and, in particular, no shapely, sinful women in them. His own inn needed dressing up. Would Branwell oblige?

The letter arrived in early January when funds from the summer had all but dried up and the commissions from mainland locals had slowed to a trickle. Branwell hated the idea of the journey: he had heard the rumors (broken axels, mud, and malaria in summer, overturned sleighs, ghastly blizzards, frostbite, and pneumonia in winter) that circulated about this distant road, and he had no wish to test the accuracy of such rumors. But Marie, who wanted not only to feed her small family but to experiment as well with expensive French dishes in anticipation of hungry and appreciative summer patrons, insisted that he take the commission. “Not much money in it, I’ll wager,” he said, pushing the letter across the table so that Marie could read it.

“More money than we’ve got here,” she replied but in a philosophic tone, with neither judgment nor malice in her voice.

“More money than we have got here,” echoed young Maurice, who was home for Christmas vacation. There was a touch of malice in
his
voice.

And so, clothed in fur and rugs, Branwell rode in the back of a sleigh bound for the mainland town of Belleville, where he would board the train headed for Toronto, where he would make yet another westbound connection. Mister Fryfogel had written a second letter to say that if Mister Woodman intended to use such an unholy method of transportation as the railroad, it was no business of his and added that he himself, having been almost ruined by the railroad, was only too aware of the double meaning of that phrase. Baden was the name of the stop, he wrote, “a most unpleasant village, born recently as a result of the cursed railroad.” He assured Branwell that he would be able to hire a sleigh at the station and, if conditions were favorable, he would be at the tavern in less than an hour. Sometimes, the innkeeper wrote, there were storms, storms that could make the going a little rough.

When he alighted at Baden, it became clear to Branwell that conditions were considerably less than favorable. Not a sleigh in sight and there was a biting wind, with a velocity higher than any of the ferocious currents he had recorded in his Timber Island journal, which tore at his coat and tossed the beaver hat from his head. Though it was not yet dark, the air was filled with such a quantity of snow that he could see nothing at all beyond the walls of the small wooden building that served as the apparently deserted station. Then, just as he was giving up hope, a man could be seen walking in his direction across the platform. “Nice day,” the stranger said and was about to continue walking when Branwell caught him by the sleeve of his overcoat and told him his destination.

“I need to hire a sleigh to get out there today,” he said.

“Not likely,” said the man. “Not today, not tomorrow, probably not the day after that.”

“For heaven’s sake, why not?”

“Road’s closed. Road’s almost always closed. Snow in winter. Mud in summer. Waste of time if you ask me…roads.”

Branwell was speechless.

“But,” the stranger offered, “judging by the good weather, you might get out there on snowshoes if you’ve got ’em. Not today though. Too late. You’ll have to put up at Kelterborn’s Bar. Dreadful rooms, but good beer. Thanks to the railroad.” He touched his head and for the first time Branwell noticed the railway cap.

The wind rose and the station master disappeared, enveloped by a shroud of white. “At least it’s not snowing,” the man said. “Nice sunny day.”

“Not snowing?” said Branwell as the wind abated somewhat and the man came, once again, partially into view.

“This stuff is just blowing around. There’s a storm coming through, though. We’re proud of our storms here.” The currents of air, the station master cheerfully explained, coming from the far-off Great Lakes encountered one another directly over this region and, “By Jesus,” he slapped his gloved hands together, “don’t we get snow!” He took Branwell’s arm. “No more trains today,” he said. “Let’s go for a drink.”

That night, as Branwell lay on a straw mattress in a room above the bar, his sleep was interrupted by the wind rattling the windows and a strange, vigorous thumping. “Just the ghost,” Kelterborn told him when he inquired the following morning. “We’ve asked him to keep it down, but he won’t. He hates being imprisoned here, prefers to wander.”

Kelterborn was a large, pink German fellow who presided over his bar with an air of pompous dignity mixed with that of boredom and mild disapproval. Branwell had already learned that his taciturn host was not inclined to give advice of any kind – political, elemental, spiritual – and he declined with a shrug to discuss the state of the road. He refused, in effect, to commit to anything beyond the price of the drink in your hand, or that of your bed for the night. His smooth, broad forehead glowed. The bottles behind him on the shelf shone. The Quebec heater roared. And, as the station master had said, his beer was good. Branwell was not, in fact, much of a drinker, but he had consumed enough beer the previous night to produce both a morning headache and a general sense of unreality into which the notion of the ghost fit nicely.

“Like you,” Kelterborn offered, “the ghost has been trying to get out to Fryfogel’s. Been here for a couple of weeks at least, might be here all winter.”

Branwell rose at this point and, eager for some oxygen, headed for the porch, which, like the rest of the structure where he was sheltering, was made of rough-hewn logs. When he was finally able to push the front door open against the wind, it became evident that several Great Lake currents had collided during the night. A prodigious quantity of snow was falling from the sky, adding inches to the deep white sea that stretched off in all directions over the acres of townships that Branwell knew were named after the entrepreneurs who had cut them clean, divided them up, and sold them off. Everything else was named after European towns and villages. How absurd, he thought, that the spot where he now stood, a place where nothing happened but a succession of blizzards as far as he could tell, should be named after a tourist spa situated in a picturesque corner of the Austrian Alps. Even more absurd that the collection of squatters shanties and jagged stumps that he had heard existed farther west was apparently called London, and that the two major rivers in the vicinity became, therefore, the Thames and the Little Thames. Did this not show a singular lack of imagination? Branwell thought that it did.

When a few moments later he went back inside he was introduced to the ghost, a certain G. Shromanov, whose unpronounceable Slovakian first name had been long ago contracted to “Ghost,” and who, according to his own admission, was primarily a stableman. Being born to love horses, he had worked at all three inns on the road, until the railway made the full-time care of horses almost completely unnecessary. Fortunately, however, he was also a rope-maker, a kettlesmith, and had been for at least a year roving through these parts searching for bears as a would-be bear trainer. He proudly confessed that, although he had been born in Europe, he could also read and write in English, and was occasionally able to acquire extra income by writing business letters, sometimes even love letters, for those who had never mastered the alphabet. Added to all this, he confided, he could mend pots, make medicine, tell fortunes, administer spells and curses, sing while accompanying himself on the mandolin, and perform a sort of speedy Spanish stomp that required much night practice to keep it up to the mark – hence the thumping that had interrupted Branwell’s sleep. With much clapping of hands on either side of his head, Ghost demonstrated several noisy staccato steps. The floor shook, the bottles behind the bar clanked, Branwell’s headache throbbed.

“Fryfogel’s his best customer,” Kelterborn announced.

For what? Branwell wondered. Bear training? Cursing? He couldn’t help but remember Fryfogel’s remarks about the people who worked the road.

“Best customer,” Ghost agreed. “He’ll pay any amount of cash to get his fortune told, he’ll pour any amount of whiskey. I already predicted that his walls wouldn’t be decorated, that you wouldn’t be arriving for damn near twenty years.”

“Well,” said Branwell, “you were wrong about that because here I am.” He lifted the wooden valise that served as his paintbox as proof of his trade.