Away (2 page)

Esther knows that at that moment her red-haired great-grandmother would not have wanted to go on living, or at least to go on living in the way she normally had. Time would have frozen, her childhood would have disappeared, and the present would have descended upon her like the claws of a carnivorous bird. “Landscape,” Old Eileen had said to Esther, “shrank to a circle that could be measured by Mary’s arms, and in that circle the only familiarity was her own brown skirt swaying in a sea that had transformed itself into an undulating carpet of precious metal and wrinkled leaves.”

Mary heard the barrels creak as they touched and separated in the current. She heard the surf pant. But mostly she looked at the young man whose sodden shirt she held firmly in her hands – the dark curls pasted to his left cheek, the eyebrows like ferns, the lashes resting on the bones beneath his eyes. She absorbed, in these few moments, more knowledge of a man’s body than she ever would again. One of his arms rested, palm upwards, in the water, the sleeve torn open at the spot where his elbow bent. She saw the fortune lines on his hand, the blue rivers of veins under the marble skin, the creases on the vulnerable places of wrist and inner elbow. She saw the Adam’s apple and tendons of his exposed throat and the hollow between his collarbones just above his chest. By grasping his shirt she had revealed one of his nipples; the sun had dried the dark hairs around it so that they moved like grass in the breeze, as did the similar hairs that grew down from his belly towards the mystery that his trousers held. Fabric was glued by sea water to his legs and Mary could see the shape of the hard muscles of the thigh and the sharp slice of shinbone, and then the marble skin and blue veins of his bare feet. In the time that it took the sun to travel from one cloud to the next, Mary had learned so much of
him that she would have been able to scratch the details of his features on a rock or mould an exact replica of him from clay. She recognized, immediately, that he came from an otherworld island, assumed that he had emerged from the water to look for her, and knew that her name had changed, in an instant, from Mary to Moira.

“Never allow anything to change your name,” Esther’s grandmother had warned her when she began to tell this story. “My poor mother – your great-grandmother – was destined to live out the actuality of Ovid’s intention.
Of bodies changed to other forms I tell
. Never allow anyone, anything to change your name,” she repeated. “My name is Eileen, yours is Esther. Let’s keep it that way.”

The twelve-year-old child, Esther, had been, even in her short life, pushed towards beaches by lightning and sand. She carried with her the same red curtain of hair and the same disturbing necessity for water, for passion and pain, as had the girl in the north of Ireland. Esther, however, was learning her lessons early from an old woman who had herself been silenced by passion before the age of twenty, and who had only now chosen to speak of the past.

“You are changing your name,” Esther had said to her. “Right now you are changing your name from Eileen – from Great-Aunt Eileen to Grandmother. Everyone’s name is changing – Grandpa Liam, Grandma Molly – and all because
you
are changing your name.” Esther’s face had clouded. She pulled a blue hair ribbon from her head – an expression of anger. “You are the name changer,” she said.

“That is not quite the same.” The old woman stared hard at Esther, who was squirming uncomfortably on the sofa her
father called Wicklow Beach. “I always knew I was your Grandmother even if you didn’t. I am speaking of the kind of name change that turns you into someone else altogether, someone other than who you are, the change that takes you off to somewhere else. By the time I finish this story you will have decided to hug the land – the real earth – the trees in the orchard, the timbers of this house. You will have decided never to go away.”

“Oh,” said the child that Esther had been, trying to adjust her ears to the sound of the old woman’s new voice.

Now Esther stands on one of the house’s creaking verandahs and looks towards the jetty where everything had, at one time or another, moved away from her. A man, a few beloved horses, the possibility of children. It seems odd to her that a jetty this important could have disintegrated, could have transformed itself into a rough collection of rocks rearranged by storms and trees that have grown to maturity in soil that has collected among boulders. But she knows that were she to step into a boat and glide near the spot on a clear, calm day, she would be able to look over the gunwales and see the old pilings, waterlogged and green, wavering beneath the surface like an unconscious memory. Then she would be able to look along the shore and see an aluminum pier and a hulking freighter taking blasted limestone to a refinery.

Except at the front where the Great Lake pounds and the beach stones form ever-changing terraces – solid waves of their own in response – Loughbreeze Beach Farm spreads in ruin around Esther. The parts of it that are not being claimed by that which is unclaimable are being excavated by industry: the growing quarry, the impossible earth-wound made by the cement company. Meadows she played in as a child, woodlots,
cornfields, and pastures have disappeared into this gaping absence. Past midnight, when the lake is calm, Esther has, for the last ten years, been able to hear huge machines grinding closer and closer to the finish of her world. One morning a week she spends with the old wringer-washer laundering the cloths she uses to remove the limestone dust from her furniture. One evening a week she walks past the twisted unpruned trees in the orchard, past rotting snake-rail fences, past the obsolete nineteenth-century farm equipment that lies like the scattered skeleton of an extinct animal in the long grass. This evidence of decay the property of a cement company, and soon the evidence itself will be eliminated.

The girl in Ireland had let go of the young man’s shirt, placed her hands beneath his arms, and gently removed him from the two whiskey barrels that had served as his raft. Clearing a path through cabbages and teapots, she had dragged her treasure up onto the beach to let it dry in the sun. She had put her two warm hands on either side of his cool face and ran her thumbs along the bones above his eyes, the delicate skin of his eyelids. She traced his collarbones with her fingers and tentatively touched the soft hair on his belly. Disturbed by the chill of the sea that had enveloped his body, she lay down beside him on the beach, loosened her long red hair across his shirt, and placed her head on his chest. He stirred as she did this and spoke the word “Moira” once again. When she dropped her arm lightly across his narrow hips a cold hand came up to meet hers. The sun rose higher in the sky, drying her skirt, his trousers, causing the silver vessels to wax radiant. Mary relaxed, watching the steam rise from her skirts, measuring the
size of the hand she held against her own until the warmth of the stones around her and the sun above made her drowsy.

That is how her mother, the priest, and a handful of other islanders had found her early in the afternoon, surrounded by cabbages and teapots, asleep in the arms of a dead young sailor.

Esther’s mind is skilled at building inner landscapes, those she has never seen, those that lie beyond the views her windows frame. There was, for instance, a grand house built by her father on a hill three miles to the north. It was struck, because of its high elevation, by lightning and it had burned to the ground. There was a resort hotel built by her father on a peninsula ten miles to the east. It was buried, because of careless farming practices and because of its low elevation, by sand. And fifty miles to the northeast the original O’Malley home-stead – a territory of rock and scant pasture – is now composed of rotting log buildings and rock torn open by prospectors. The traces of wounds left behind by industry are permanent. Fragile architecture abandoned by settlers is not.

All of this propelling Esther towards her place; her large bedroom with its view of the lake, her barns and fields and orchards. Her father, defeated by houses and hotels, had collapsed himself into his wife’s family at Loughbreeze Beach, had kept accounts and had run for public office. He had opened a shoestore in the village of Colborne, two miles up from the lake. He had spent leisurely hours inventing names for the cumbersome pieces of furniture in the house. He had given his daughter access to water.

It was what her grandmother, daughter of an Irish girl named Mary, had wanted for the twelve-year-old Esther, and she had
wanted it despite her certain knowledge of the impending curse of the mines. “For God’s sake,” she had yelled, “stay where you are, be where you are.” She had thumped the floor with her cane, “Try to understand, but try not to interpret.”

“Any interpretation is a misinterpretation,” Eileen had told Esther. “Remember that.”

Delight and fear had broken over Rathlin Island like a pair of consecutive tidal waves.

It had been a hard winter and a long one, so the appearance of the cabbages had been met with general rejoicing – Mary’s widowed mother being one of the chief rejoicers. From the four principal points of the island, the sparse population set out for Mary’s beach where it collected cartloads of the vegetable, each family throwing in a few teapots for good measure. Never before had there been so bountiful a harvest. No potato patch, no garden plot, had yielded such abundance, and the smell of boiled cabbage would pervade the island for weeks to come.

As for the arrival of the whiskey, it was considered a miracle beyond all telling. Tempered over the centuries by scarcity and the slavish daily labour necessary for survival, the island’s population was neither wasteful nor foolhardy. A life of debauchery was, in fact, simply beyond the powers of its collective imagination. The liquor was put in the custody of the priest, stored behind the church, and distributed whenever wakes or weddings demanded it, thereby alleviating, for many years, the financial anxiety that normally accompanied such occasions.

But as the priest, Mary’s mother, and all the other islanders knew, no unplanned harvest was reaped without cost. Sudden wealth such as this was a gift from “the Formoire, the ones from the sea, the others.” All the green and brown and silver objects
on the beach could only have been deposited by them in payment for something stolen. There was fear in this. From the moment the first few islanders stood that day on the hilltop, surveying with astonishment the totally transformed beach – the prone couple, the new dark stones, the vegetable matter, the wooden casks, the fine silverware – they knew what it was that had been taken.