Away (19 page)

At twilight he turned his back to the eastern trees and walked towards the log structures feeling terribly the chill of the approaching evening. Inside, night had already arrived and Liam had no skills with which to combat it and none to combat the hunger that had, quite suddenly, attacked his belly. Eventually he found a bucket of water near the door and a crust of bread on the table. He ate and drank, warily, uncertain as to whether he might be punished. Then he groped his way through the cabin’s objects until he recognized the soft skin of candles, and he held them, one in each hand, for at least an hour, willing them to produce light. The baby had begun to cry again so the boy crawled back and forth across his father’s bass-wood floor until his hand brushed the pointed end of one of the
cradle’s rockers, and he pumped it fiercely up and down attempting to achieve silence. He heard the thud of the small body hitting the sides of the interior as the wailing increased in intensity. Digging his fists into his ears, he shouted what he could remember of the lullabies his mother taught him, until, magically, a slim bar of light appeared on the table before the window. He staggered across the width of the cabin to the door and out into a world of icy wind and moonlight.

It was then that he saw his mother – or what he would later, in his dreams, call his mother – slipping in and out among the pines on the opposite side of the stream as she had sometimes done in playful moments during their happy summer, making a game of it. Her form appeared and disappeared, multiplied, and then reduced itself. The moon was a huge ball thrown by her into the sky and the boy stretched his arms up towards it gleefully for a couple of moments before he ran towards her, laughter bubbling out of his lungs and over the dark field of winter wheat. As he approached she withdrew behind the cedars and spruce where thick black erased her. Liam crept away across scrub chalky with moonlight and frost. Humiliated. Then he half-turned and saw the multiple versions of her, straight and thin and white. His blood thundered in his ears at the sight of the many hers – one for him, one for his father, one to silence the baby – and he was running again towards the stream. Dark boughs moved up and down like huge wings across the bodies of these women. Liam stopped short. His vision changed. He ran his hands, in agitation, back and forth across his homespun sleeves. “White birches,” he said aloud, using the name his father had taught him, and repeating it, his voice a high song no one heard, “white birches, white birches.”

He spent the night underneath the cow. He took one blanket from the cabin, after flinging another hastily over the wailing cradle, covering it completely. Then, frightened of the barely discernible shape it made in the dark, he slammed the door behind him. In the barn the animal’s heat drew him to her side. He placed his face against the tough, warm wool until, becoming drowsy, he scrambled down to the straw where he was strangely comforted by the slight shift of a hoof or the involuntary shudder of flank muscles.

During the early, still-dark hours of the morning Liam dreamed the baby had grown to huge proportions, had burst through the cabin walls, its arms and legs flailing in forest and fields, its cry a deafening roar. He opened his eyes and clawed through the dark to the barn doors, swinging them open to a weak, grey dawn, then realized the monstrous sound came from behind him where the cow bellowed in pain in her stall. Relieved, he stumbled back and burrowed into the straw near her front hooves. As she groaned, the faint light from the opened doors revealed a cloud of fog issuing from her mouth and nostrils into the cold air. The child, remembering his mother’s cries, the baby’s wails, and now hearing this hollering cow, turned in the straw away from the source of the sound and saw the udder stretched tighter than his mother’s swollen belly and bluish milk drooling from the end of the teats.

At first, while the cow howled with impatience, Liam held the cylinders of flesh in his two small hands, willing the milk to stream forth as he had seen it do under the attentions of his mother and father. When nothing happened he wrapped his arms around the engorged udder and embraced it until the cow roared in agony and the boy was hurled back onto the straw under the assault of the sound. The animal moaned and then became, for a moment, silent, and Liam was able to hear the faint cry of the baby in the cabin before the cow began again
her desperate noise. Lying helplessly in the straw, Liam recalled the frail replica of the cow that his father had sold in town two months before and thought of his own mother’s frail replica now singing its hysterical song in the cabin, and he wept into his rumpled sleeve, adding his own voice to the chorus. He was linked by need to this sorrowful orbit of flesh and he shrieked in anger at the unfairness of his own appetite. In fury he searched the barn for an oak bucket which he subsequently flung under the grotesque skin bag. Then, grasping the teats with all the violence of his desertion and desire he crushed the warm flesh in his hands and the liquid gushed into the wooden receptacle.

He was awkwardly moving into what he remembered of adult rhythms, while the cow moaned softly and was comforted.

Liam pushed open the cabin door and stood listening in the half-light, the bucket steaming under his hand. When he heard nothing he dropped it heavily to the floor, spilling some of the liquid and causing the noise to issue again from the cradle. He seized a tin cup from the table, dipped it into the pail, and drank with his back to the howling wooden box. The milk calmed him and eventually he walked to the cradle and threw aside the blanket.

His sister stopped crying and regarded him with clear, green eyes while he recoiled from the stench which rose from the cradle and filled the room. Then, as he withdrew, she began again a sound that reminded Liam of the call of a sheep. The boy collapsed on a stool, put his head in his hands, and shouted the words of a lullaby towards the floor. “Sidhe sail their boats till dawn upon the starry bog!” he yelled.

When her wailing grew louder he dragged the bucket towards the cradle, snatched a spoon from a shelf and, almost gagging because of the smell of urine and faeces, he began, quite gently, to pour milk into the small mouth. Most of the liquid travelled down either side of the baby’s face and into the folds at the side of her neck. That which passed her lips caught in her throat and caused her to cough so violently that her face turned red, then purple while her limbs pumped urgently beneath soiled cradle cloths. When the seizure passed, the boy carefully lifted another spoonful from the pail, holding it level, and the baby’s tiny lips moved towards it. Liam spent more than an hour bending first towards the pail, then towards the baby, concentrating so fiercely that the world became the circle of the oaken bucket on his left, the rectangle of the pine cradle on his right, and the white oval of the milk-filled spoon floating from one to the other. Then, scrutinizing the small face, he saw that she was asleep.

The cloths of her bed were soggy with spilled milk and urine. The surrounding air was filled with the reek of her. But Liam had achieved silence. He opened the door and listened to the absence of noise from the barn, noticing a cold rain had begun to fall. With distaste but determination he undressed his sleeping sister and threw her putrid garments into a puddle beside the front stoop. He washed her with water from the bucket near the door and set her shrieking once again from the shock of the frigid cloth. He stuffed her arms into a flannel garment he had dug out of a wooden box along with strips of white material, which he tied around her legs and buttocks. She quietened once again.

While he was performing these tasks, his teeth chattering with cold, he remembered a tin box, no larger than an adult’s hand, and the thin wooden twigs with coloured heads that
filled it, and with this memory came the knowledge of how his mother had produced the heat, the light, the fire.

Three days and nights passed in the company of the cow, the fire, the baby – the waxing and waning of heat and sound and light. Once or twice Liam heard the sound of a wagon rumbling on the rough concession road but, locked within the pattern of his tasks, he did not attempt to intercept it. Once, while he was carrying a bucket of water from the creek, someone he knew galloped by. The man waved and Liam barely returned the greeting, as if fearing that one gesture disconnected from the sphere of labour he had built would break the spell and cause his world to fragment.

On the evening of the third day the baby smiled when he approached her cradle, and he stopped, then, and picked her up, holding her warmth against his chest for a long, long time. She had become his, they would always be connected.

Brian, returning, heard his son’s high, thin, singing voice. As he approached the cabin he saw his wife’s apron shuddering, like a ghost, a memory, on the string between the trees. He was composing words of praise for the boy but his body was chilled and hollow because he knew, without enquiries, that there was an emptiness about the place. Something had claimed his wife as she had been claimed once before; some other history or geography had taken her away. But this time nothing at all would be left in her place, except two children, one of them unweaned.

Tomorrow Brian would scythe the winter wheat, cutting
down the summer green with the despair of a man who has known hunger and desertion.

Now he would enter the warmth his son had made, and take the young boy’s body in his arms.

S
OMETIMES
when Brian looked around the interior of his cabin he thought he could actually see his wife’s absence. The air seemed odourless, empty, and so clear that all the objects she had touched and then abandoned were well-drawn, unbearably distinct, their colours deeper, their edges sharper, so that it was painful for him to look at them. Her goods and her gear, he thought, remembering a song. Then the song itself ran over and over in his mind:

There were times when, humming this tune – looking at a churn or an apron – he thought he might go mad.

Liam spent some of his time beside white birches, stroking the pale paper skin with his fingers or staring at clusters of the slender trees from a distance, until the snow came to stay and in the white world they were no longer startling enough to hold his attention. His mother’s disappearance tied him closer to his father. They shared the loss and a silent agreement that they would never speak about the loss.

With the coming of winter a sad calm fell over the little family, interrupted only once when a well-meaning matron from Madoc arrived in a rattling sleigh with the intention of
adopting the baby girl. Liam, sensing the purpose of her visit, crouched by the cradle, growling, and when the woman drew near he lunged and bit her ankle. She departed, then, in great wrath and declared to her friends at church meetings that, like most Irish and all Papists, the boy was mad and dangerous and his father dim-witted and unable to speak. As the sound of the sleigh bells grew fainter and fainter, Liam had sobbed in his father’s arms, the baby pressed between their bodies. “She’s mine,” he whimpered. “She’s mine, she’s mine!”

Four years passed and the world around them opened. The forest parted its dark curtains and allowed the entrance of a few more ragged settlers, who did their best to till the rocky land, and a couple of wild-looking Scandinavian prospectors whose finds led to a scattering of iron and tin mines.

Brian was introduced by one of these men to two thin boards, curved at one end, which could be strapped to a man’s boots. On these one could glide over the surface of the snow at great speeds, using a long pole for balance. His first attempts at this method of transportation were disastrous, leaving him trapped face-down in awkward positions in the snow while the prospector bent over with laughter near the barn. When the Finn departed for the foothills of California he left his strange equipment with Brian. “Learn to use them,” he said, “and you’ll go down in history as the first bog Irishman on skis.”