Away (22 page)

Exodus agreed that this was the case and that the two children, who had pulled their chairs close to the table, were her children. “And they still are,” he said. “In this world. She was from an island in the other world. And I was her friend. The one from the water was not
of
this world. He was her spirit-guide.”

“I taught her to read.” Brian looked instinctively towards a pile of books at the other end of the table.

“I know, and you taught her about distant lands. She told me. And she told me that you knew that she had been, as they say on the island you came from, ‘away.’ But because you did not believe this, you could not see when she went away again.”

“To live in the lake,” said Eileen.

“To live beside the lake,” corrected Exodus. “Perhaps now she lives in the lake.”

Brian lit the last coal-oil lamp. “Had she chosen to come
back … I loved her.” He paused. “But she didn’t come back,” he said.

“There is this fierce love in all of us for that which we cannot fully own,” said Exodus.

The interior of the cabin was so bright now that Eileen’s eye-lashes shone and several miniature candles were visible, reflected in her eyes. Beyond the walls, the light from the cabin windows moved across the snow, onto the face of the frozen woman. Then, as the night grew more agitated, and as snow lifted from the ground like large skeins of silk, her face darkened, and shone, like a beacon on a distant shore.

“The whole world is an island,” said Exodus, “and all who live in it are island dwellers – walkers on surfaces, floaters on water, Standers on mountains. No one is ever
in
anything until they have been touched by what she was touched by.”

“I wanted to be a poet,” said Brian, “but there was nothing in it, my poetry.”

“She had songs that she had made for the water-spirit from the otherworld island and they were pleasing,” Exodus addressed Liam, now, respectfully, as if he were a man of the same age. “She sang them with a good voice.”

“I haven’t heard my wife’s voice for seven years. Why didn’t you make her come back?”

Exodus turned to Brian. “After I had seen her the first time I dreamt I saw a golden fish who sang in words I did not recognize and I knew what I should do. I should help this woman to stay near her spirit and to live there in the forest. And when I told the others they agreed that that was what I should do. But to live near the spirit I knew the woman would have to learn concealment, accuracy, and endurance. I would build strong shelters so that she would be able to withstand the winters, and bring firewood for her comfort. I would bring her deer meat and
teach her how to boil the sap in April for the sugar that can be got from it. I showed her how to make tea from the young shoots of the hemlock, and she liked this. And I showed her how to sew together the skins I brought so that she might have clothing to cover her.”

Brian said nothing. Liam had partially relaxed and was now slumped in an arrow-back chair, fingering a crust of bread that lay before him on the table.

Exodus Crow had more to say. Clearing his throat he began again. “When she had been in the woods for more than one winter she told me of the woman called Deirdre who had lived happily in the forest with three warrior brothers, one of whom she loved, until a bad king had killed them, and how she had died of sorrow.”

And later she had told Exodus that she knew, now, why Deirdre had loved the forest for living in it, as she, herself, had, and learning it well, the branch of one tree could gladden her heart. After she had been in the forest for several winters she told him dark things; about the time of the stolen lands of her island, and of the disease, and of the lost language and the empty villages and how the people who once sang were now silent, how the people who once danced were now still.

“It is true,” said Brian bitterly. “Those who haven’t died are scattered, and their voice is broken, their words are gone.”

“She told me a frightening thing,” said Exodus after several moments of quietness. “She told me that on the big island there were once forests as thick as those here in this land but that the old kings and lords of England had cut down each tree until only bare hills were left behind.”

“That is true also,” said Brian.

Exodus leaned across the table and looked steadily at the Irishman. “And so I told her,” he said, “that some white men
had seized my people’s land and killed many animals for sport and abused our women.”

The hands of the two men lay flat upon the table but their eyes never left the other’s face. “What did she say then?” asked Brian.

When Exodus replied there was a break in his voice. “She embraced me and said that the same trouble stayed in the hearts of both our peoples.”

When the next day the men and the boy prepared Mary’s grave, they found that she had been blanketed during the night by snow.

“We should find a hollow log and some more cedar boughs,” said Exodus.

Liam was watching his sister who lay thrashing on the ground making snow angels. “I want to make a box,” he said.

“We will not be able to enter the ground far enough for one of your boxes.”

“I will make a thin box,” said Liam with such intensity and anger that the men decided to let him proceed, and moved to their own tasks.

Liam worked in the carpentry shed that he and his father had built on the side of the barn, the smell of the cows seeping through the wall. While he hammered nails into pine he visualized his mother’s walk down the creek to the river that ran to Moira Lake, running the narrative against his own struggles with Moon and the baby. He took what he knew of the banks of the small stream and added the farms of the settlers he was acquainted with and those he had heard about – one or two villages such as Bridgewater and Hazard’s Corners – and with his mind caused both the stream and his mother to wander
through them. He placed tracts of impenetrable wilderness between these pockets of civilization so that her journey away from him would be difficult; in places, barely manageable. He invented huge fallen trees that blocked the way and boggy areas that slowed her footsteps. Sometimes he stood still with a nail in his teeth and the hammer hanging, forgotten, from his fist, while his mind travelled the creek and then the river; the stones and boulders, the frills of the rapids, the hard rock bed of it.

Occasionally, in his mind, he made his mother fall awkwardly to the ground and push herself slowly to her feet, twisting her neck and looking back to the place where she had left her children. She was staggering along the dark ribbon of water that threaded itself through forests and swamps. At any point she might have paused – when adjusting one of her boots, for instance, or when she looked at her own face when drinking from the inky river. She might have changed her mind and made this walk a return to him rather than a desertion, for until she reached the lake she would have still been his mother. He was certain of this. But try as he might to force his mind to lope downstream, to watch her approach rather than withdraw, he could see her only in profile, or with her back turned against him. He laid down the hammer and pounded his fist against the wall of the shed until slivers entered the soft flesh of his hand.

By the time he had thumped the last nail into the shallow, slim box, his mother was a silhouette standing on the shore of a shining expanse of water; one of several trees rooted in an alien landscape. Sap was running through her veins, the blood that she shared with Liam forgotten in favour of a view of a lake.

It pleased him to know she would be buried inland.

A
S
the men bent forward to lift the woman into the box that Liam had made, Eileen came swiftly from behind them and thrust her child’s body between her father and Exodus. Then, sinking to her knees, she moved her small hands through the folds of her mother’s soft buckskin clothing until, from a pocket on the left of the breast, she removed a braided circle of red and black hair.

“This is mine,” she announced with satisfaction. Then, running away towards the house, she called over her shoulder “It’s for me!”

The men exchanged puzzled looks but did not speak of the incident.

They dug a plot beside the creek the woman had followed, attacking the ground with pickaxes, Liam working with more passion and energy than the two adults. They covered the spot with logs and boulders so that animals would not disturb the grave, Exodus chanting words in his native tongue, Brian saying the rosary in Latin.

Liam stood apart from them, staring upstream away from the direction his mother had taken. He could see neither the water, which was buried under snow, nor the ice which he knew covered the water, but the stream-bed to the north made a slender road through the forest; a neutral road, in that he knew his mother had not walked that way.

The pickaxe he had flung to the ground when the work was
finished, half of which was buried in a drift, became an exaggerated question mark in the snow. Everyone’s footsteps were visible everywhere, as if there had been a great crowd assembled for the woman’s funeral. Instinctively, however, no one had trod upon Eileen’s snow angels which looked, now, to her brother, like the remnants of sad, inexplicable skirmishes that had taken place in the yard between the house and the barn.

Brian was describing the construction of the long, pine table to Exodus. How he, himself, had seen the single board it was made from out at the sawmill at Queensborough. The huge tree trunk, he said, sliced like bread. And now there was this essential piece of furniture. Manufacturing, he announced, was flourishing in both Elzivir and Madoc townships. He chanted a list of new enterprises. “Sam Rawlin’s Tannery, Pringle’s Brickyard,” he said aloud and with some pride.

His guest listened politely, and, after Brian was finished, he said, “I wore this hat and brought this pocket-watch to have a connection with the people that she came from. It is not the custom of my people.”

“No, no of course not,” said Brian, suddenly embarrassed, his mind full of bricks and boards and machines.

“Do they put boards on the ground in Ireland?” he asked. “Do they have floors?”

“Sometimes … but often it’s only earth for the floor and straw for the roof.”

“So I thought,” said Exodus. “She did not seem disturbed by the earth for a floor.”

Liam entered the cabin, glanced at the men, and threw a load of firewood noisily to the left of the door. Then, aware
that he had the men’s attention, he walked away from them to the farthest corner of the room.

“We’re low on kindling,” said Brian. “The lamps need filling. And what’s the news of Moon?”

Liam did not answer.

“She’s a wonderful cow,” said Brian to Exodus. “She’s been with us almost from the beginning. Liam, here, is her favourite. I think they talk to each other. Does she talk to you, son?”

Liam rose up impatiently and approached his father. “When is he leaving?” he demanded. “He’s been here for days now, when’s he going?”

Eileen, who had been playing with three cornhusk dolls near the fire, said, “He’s not going yet.”

Turning abruptly in his chair, which made a shrieking noise on the basswood planks, Brian shot an angry look at his son. “That’s about enough,” he said. “I’ll not have you –”

“Wait,” Exodus interjected. “The small girl is right. I’m not leaving yet.” The room around him held still as the tall man rose to his feet. He crossed the floor to the corner where the boy had retreated and where he now sat with his long legs bent over a squat barrel. “I’m not leaving yet,” he said. “Because of you.”

The boy flung a lock of hair angrily from his forehead and then glared down towards his shoes. A thin film of perspiration had collected on the sparse, fine hairs on his upper lip. His Adam’s apple moved awkwardly up and down his throat. “Don’t stay on my account,” he hissed. “There’s no need to stay on my account.”

“Look, Papa,” piped Eileen, “the sun this early in the morning.”

“There is a need,” said Exodus to the boy.

“And what’s that, then?” Liam’s skull lurched on his neck
as he, once again, flung the hair from his eyes. The gesture was that of someone involved in physical combat with the invisible.

“I haven’t given you your mother back,” said Exodus, “and I can’t leave until I do.”

“She’s dead,” blurted Liam bitterly. “She’s out there under the ground.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What
do
you mean?”

Exodus was quiet. Then he said, “I will go out of this house now and when I come back I will know. I will tell you then what I mean.”

“He’s a kind man,” said Brian, after the cabin door closed.

Liam said nothing.

“It’s not necessary for you to be rude to him.”

“How long are you going to let him stay?”

“As long as he wishes. He was your mother’s friend.”

Liam laughed. “If he was her friend why didn’t he bring her back years ago? Why did he let her freeze to death? Why did he let her live out there like a savage?”

“She wouldn’t have come.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“She was your wife. She belonged to you.”

“She was my wife, but she did not belong to me.”

“Who did she belong to then? Do you believe in this spirit?” Liam had risen to his feet to ask this question. “Do you?” he demanded. “Do you believe in this fairy tale?”

“I didn’t used to.”

“So, do you believe in it now? Have you gone mad?”

But Brian did not answer, just shouldered his skis and set out, as he had done most every day for the last several years, to teach the children at the small log school.

Liam returned to his seat on the barrel and Eileen brought two of her cornhusk dolls to the place where he was sitting and put one on each knee of his old grey trousers. “Yes, he believes it,” she made one of the dolls say to the other. The toys appeared to leap and twist when she made them speak. “He believes it,” the second doll said, “because it is true.” Liam watched the dry corn leaves, the skirts of the dolls quiver just above his knee.

Later in the afternoon, as Liam crossed the space between the house and the barn, he saw Exodus sitting in the groin of the willow tree that grew on the other side of the creek. His back was turned and Liam was glad of this as he did not wish to be observed by anyone as he walked across the snow which still had Eileen’s angels and the men’s footprints pressed into it; these things and the oblong shape of the litter that had held his mother’s body.