Away (27 page)

E
VEN
before Liam and Eileen had decided how and when to leave the acres of light, the road parade, which had dwindled to a few miserable souls as settlers discovered the impossibility of farming solid rock, became more colourful and exotic than it had ever been in its short history. It had taken only a week or two for the news of gold, carried on the lips of the stonecutter back to Madoc, to fan out from there and into the wide world. Now the pageant that spilled out of the forest and by the cabin door was so intriguing that Genesis, Leviticus, Ruth, Acts, and young Numbers rarely left the road side of their pasture where they stood lined up like a military colour party, chewing thoughtfully, watching the action.

The usual collection of ragged, bush-crazed prospectors that are conjured by even the hint of a discovery of gold were joined by half-pay officers, members of parliament, enterprising American businessmen, a gaggle of scrapping orphans, cowboys on horseback, an escaped chain gang, sailors, coureurs de bois, and a quiet trio of sandalled and habited monks from Quebec. And then one day a chattering, laughing wagonful of whores from Montreal appeared, dressed in colours and fabrics the likes of which neither Liam nor Eileen had ever seen.

“Those, my dears,” said Osbert as this spectacle rounded the corner and came into view, “are, if I am not mistaken, ladies of ill repute.”

Their leader – and driver of the team that pulled the wagon – was a round goodnatured woman called Madame Beausejour
who explained, first in French, then in English, that although she and her
petites filles
intended to set up housekeeping they had, more important, brought along their
équipement de prospection
. The girls, then, proudly brandished pickaxes and pans, the latter of which they banged in a tambourine-like manner as they went joyfully on their way singing French log-driving songs.

Hamlets of hastily constructed huts, shacks, and hovels sprang up in the area overnight and gave themselves names such as Eldorado, Enterprise, Nugget Niche, Beaucoup D’Argent, Eureka, and Coeur D’Or. In the space of three weeks the population of the town of Madoc tripled. Barber shops, beer parlours, and the offices of barristers were born, fortune tellers flourished. Hardware stores and hotels came into being and board sidewalks unfurled on the edges of muddy new streets named after Aztec warriors and Inca gods.

The staid festivities, which had been planned months before, and which celebrated the confederation of the provinces on July first, escalated into a pagan display of gold fever. When Madame Beausejour’s
petites filles
walked into the town park, swathed in transparent blue silk and offering to represent
les lacs et les rivières duQuébec
in the Methodist women’s tableau entitled “The New Dominion,” for instance, a riot nearly ensued. Spurned by the town matrons, the girls broke into the Orange Hall from which they removed several colourful banners. With these they marched through town demanding
liberté, égalité, fraternité
. The town band concert, which was to include some hymns and a few recently composed possible national anthems, was drowned out by talented prospector-fiddlers playing reels, strathspeys, waltzes, and hornpipes. Aged Canadian veterans of the War of 1812 began arguments with aged American veterans of the War of 1812, each claiming that they had won the day – and small, fierce re-enactments
of various notorious battles ensued. A group of would-be Fenians, made bold by the liberal supply of whiskey, rescued the Orange Order banners from the girls and rode around the perimeter of the park on white horses, calling themselves Silly Billys and Worshipful Masters and hurling insulting replies in the direction of the hecklers in the crowd.

A second invasion of gold seekers followed close on the heels of the first. Two or three weeks after the last of the celebration’s fireworks had faded from the night sky, the roads began to fill with German, Swedish, Polish, and Finnish immigrants diverted from their original destinations by the news which had now reached the docks at Quebec City. These were joined by the odd recently emancipated American slave and some thin, worn Civil War veterans who, despite their artificial limbs and obvious shell-shock had made the long journey from Virginia to Canada.

It was against all this that Liam and Eileen eventually made their way; the girl frightened, clutching her brother’s sleeve, having never in her life seen such crowds of people, the young man purposeful, bursting with such forward momentum that at times he believed he could actually feel the shield melting, like ice in the sun, around his lungs and heart. Behind them, at one end of a five-foot rope, and pausing to graze more than Liam would have liked, walked Genesis, chosen to accompany them partly for her name, which Liam considered to be suitably symbolic, and partly because she was the one who most resembled her mother. With them they carried only that which they could fit into the packs on their backs. In Eileen’s case this included watercolours, two small sketch pads, a geography book, some clothing, four linen napkins, a tiny braided wreath of red and black hair, a broken piece of blue china, and one black crow feather. Liam stuffed his pack with socks, an extra shirt, some overalls, and the thick bundle of pound notes. In
his left hand he carried a lantern, which was fortunate because, finding the halfway houses full of gold seekers and the roads clogged with the same, he and his sister soon decided to travel at night. They slept during the day in cool morning rooms in which the smell of whiskey, tobacco, and sweat lingered after the departure of the previous night’s collection of prospectors, and which, in the afternoon, responded to the summer sun on the roof by heating to impossible temperatures.

They were released from these periods of baked, drugged unconsciousness into the soft, windless twilights of one small town after another. Evening games were winding down, the hymns of choir practices poured out of open church doors. Liam and Eileen were aware that these worlds had nothing to do with them, but they were aware also that everything in these worlds paused and turned to watch two young people and a cow pass through the tidy residential streets and out into the night. When darkness fell they were often in a woods made silver by moonlight, surrounded by the ochre circle – four yards in diameter – provided by the lantern, and beating off the clouds of moths that flew into their faces or covered the glass that held the light. By daybreak they had usually walked through a couple of sleeping villages where dogs announced their arrival and departure and where cats were sometimes coupling noisily. There was always, they noted, one candle burning somewhere, and a toy – a doll, a hoop, a ball – left abandoned in a yard. Occasionally, a horse or cow, whose attention they had caught, would canter or saunter across a wet dawn pasture to meet them and strain against the fence rails while Genesis mooed softly.

They were heading for Liam’s first harbour on the Great Lake, retracing the route their parents had taken over seventeen years before, but as the rhythms of their nights became established they believed they would walk like this forever,
out of pattern with the life around them, discreetly moving from settlement to settlement. Deloro, Marmora, Blairton, Prevenau, Havelock, Asphodel, Indian River. Lantern light and swerving moths and a single candle behind glass their only points of reference.

As they travelled steadily westward the land opened up revealing, at dawn, lush farms with huge porched barns and beautiful, well-maintained red brick houses, tree-lined lanes and formal front gardens. Now and then a flamboyant scarlet mail coach hurtled importantly past in the first part of the morning, leaving them choking in the dust it had raised.

“I have never in my life,” Liam remarked, “received a letter.”

Then one morning, remembering, he hailed an oncoming coach by flapping two white envelopes in the air. He handed the driver his father’s letters addressed to Father Quinn, Rathlin Island, County Antrim, Ireland; and to Exodus Crow, Moira Lake, Madoc Township, Upper Canada; these and a ten-pound note that happened to be resting on the top of the pile in his pack. The confused driver sat speechless, astonished, looking at the money in his hand, unable to continue on his route.

After a week of walking, the morning sun disclosed in the distance the town of Peterborough – its river a ribbon of silver, its steeples shining. Eileen and Liam stopped for the day at the inn at Downers Corners, unable, after a night of travelling, to face the density of this large centre’s population. Liam explained to his sister that it would be necessary to pass through this place in order to reach the road that turned south and led to the Great Lake; a lake much larger than the long narrow one whose starlit company they had kept for the past two nights. An innkeeper told them the narrow lake was called Rice by the Indians because of the wild rice that grew near its shore, at its marshy edge.

“What about that Indian, Exodus Crow?” asked Liam, lying by his sister’s side on the feather mattress while stunned summer flies buzzed at the margins of dusty glass. “And what did you mean about the gold and him knowing what to do?”

“I don’t know,” said Eileen truthfully, vaguely, falling gently into sleep. “I think I used to know, but I’ve forgotten.”

For the brother and sister the loosening and letting go of their physical past was as simple as making a left-hand turn after the commotion of Peterborough. Now the road they took south drew them down into a space forsaken by a vanished glacier towards the remnant Great Lake it had left behind. Hill by hill they descended in the dark, their lantern burning oil purchased at the previous inn and echoed by the rows of lit windows in the big houses of the prosperous farms they passed. Even in the darkness these estates pressed themselves so firmly into Liam’s visual memory that the old log houses and the small log barn began to lose shape, to melt away like the shield. Genesis veered to the right or to the left at the end of her rope, turning her head and enlarging her nostrils, inhaling the smell of healthy herds fed by fertile pastures. On either side of the road, maples grew so sturdily and stood at such precise distances from each other that Liam and Eileen put aside their memories of the thick, continuous pines and cedars that had lined the tracks of their childhood.

At first light on the third southward day, at the crest of yet another of the hills that lay in succession before them like a huge, soft staircase, the boy, the girl, and the cow stood utterly still in the centre of a road that was, half a mile later, to transform itself into the main street of a hamlet called Rossmount. They watched, almost without breathing, as a blood-red sun quivered on the eastern horizon of an expanse of water unlike
anything Eileen had ever seen and recalled only vaguely by Liam. It was twenty miles away and a thousand feet beneath them, yet it dwarfed every feature of the surrounding landscape simply by its presence.

“Sweet Jesus,” said Liam. “Holy Mother, Sweet Jesus, look at that lake!” His sister had turned her back to the view. “Eileen,” he said, “look! We’re going to live somewhere on the edge of that.”

The lake had already changed colour, the sun hovering, full now, an inch above its edge. “Look at that, Eileen!” Her brother grabbed her shoulders but she twisted away, unwilling to turn so that he was forced to circle round to examine her face. “What’s the matter with you? Look at that incredible lake.”

“I can’t look,” she stammered, “I’m afraid. I think it’s mine but I’m afraid.” She leaned, exhausted, against Genesis. “It’s mine and I know nothing about it. It doesn’t have another side.”

“Yes it does, yes it does.” Her brother was impatient, eager to join the world. In the fields that were spread like draped tables in front of them he could see the patterns of the August harvest of barley and acres of rich, green corn. The sight moved him. He wanted to run wildly down the hills, then fling himself, gasping, into the arms of the magnificent lake.

“It has another side,” he said to Eileen. “It’s just that we can’t see it. You remember. America is over there on the other side.”

“No,” said Eileen, turning slowly and resuming the journey, her eyes on the stones of the road. “I feel it in my heart. There’s no end to it, no end to it at all.”

W
HEN
Esther was a child she collected stone snails from the beach, placing them in jars and baskets all over the house until her practical mother, overwhelmed by the quantity, had demanded that they all be thrown back on the shore.

“And if you have any white stones,” the old Eileen had added, speaking for the first time in a month, “throw them into the water.”

“What do you mean?” Esther had asked. But the old woman had lapsed, once again, into silence.

The midnight shift at the cement company is made up of men quite different from those who work the daylight, twilight, and first darkness hours.

The midnight men begin their tasks, these summer nights, under a thick carpet of stars they rarely notice, their machines being so powerfully exposed by other forms of light that everything beyond the glare is a black wall. Because the spaces in which they move are enclosed by the night, the men might almost be redesigning the shapes of rooms. Unlike their colleagues on the day shift, not one of them has ever bent to the quarry floor to rescue a fossil released by dynamite. Neither have they taken fossils home as gifts for their children.

They are not dynamiters – the government does not allow explosions in darkness – and so they have never been present when the most recent wall of the quarry fragments, folds, and
collapses, dust rising from it like curtains of rain. The noise they make is strong and relentless, and, because the wind and lake are often calm on summer nights, all pervasive. They are out of step with the rhythms of the rest of the world and, as a result, their family lives are sometimes troubled.

Everything they do, everything they have done for the last thirty years, has crept into Esther’s dreams.