Away (33 page)

E
ILEEN
took to reading the
Irish Canadian
, a Toronto hebdomadal she had discovered in Doherty’s shanty and one which she remembered hanging from a wooden rod in the old Seaman’s Inn. It contained an odd assortment of bad poetry, serialized romances, mildly stated manifestos, outraged letters to the editor, notices of eye and ear clinics, gossip, obituaries, birth announcements, reports of practical jokes, political satire, invitations to meetings of the Hibernian Benevolent Society and the St. Patrick’s Literary Society, exaggerated editorial rants and a Believe It or Not column of freakish facts, and was considered so dangerous a Fenian menace by the authorities that its editor was regularly thrown in jail – sometimes for as long as six months – thereby making its circulation and distribution highly erratic. By the time the paper reached Eileen it was clipped, torn, scribbled-upon, and months old, having arrived, weeks late, at the home of one of Doherty’s barn clients and moving from there into the barn embellisher’s hands. Eileen read every line, marvelling at the miscellaneous details which included references to the twenty-three horse-flesh markets of Paris, France, and to the fact that the poet Tennyson spent long days, reading, meditating, and writing seven or eight stanzas. She absorbed the eloquent lines of McGee’s latest outbursts against Irish nationalism and his denunciations of Fenian sentiment in Canada, which were reported with scornful comments attached. Her brother said the paper was nonsense and that he did not wish to see it lying around in his
parlour. After that Eileen read it in secret, the door of her room locked. She was not going to give it up. She knew it was full of hidden messages from Aidan Lanighan. In its sentences she could feel the throb of his pulse.

Outside the windows, the Great Lake had begun to toss floating chunks of ice towards the shore. All sails had disappeared. This paper became her only connection to the heat, which she kept in dream and in memory, a thin silver chain linking two birds flying. It was December. Snow covered the stones. Sometimes Eileen heard the sounds of a train travelling on the track a mile north of her, its whistle an animal’s cry. Her favourite poem from the paper was called “The Patriot’s Bride,” and it ended with the lines:

On December afternoons she ironed, sometimes the same blouses and shirts, over and over again, while she whispered lines from the
Irish Canadian
aloud to herself as though committing scripture to memory.
“Darkness,” said the young stranger after a silence of some minutes, “and light,”
or
Deeply regretted by all that knew him
, or
The fruit in the minds of the oppressed peasantry
, or
In Philadelphia one hundred able-bodied coloured men, all of whom served in the late war, offered their services to march to Canada’s border to fight for Irish liberty and independence
.

Sometimes she merely chanted lists of new words, words she had never used in ordinary conversations: “munitions, indignation, assertion, benevolence, infamous, conspiracy, contemptuous, oblivion, detrimental.” One headline caught her attention and stuck in her mind, the rest of the article having
been torn out.
D’ARCY MCGEE ON THE RAMPAGE
! it announced, followed by one disjointed phrase from the text which began “After his calumnious Wexford speech …” She had looked up the word “calumnious” – “full of trickery” – in her father’s old dictionary, which Liam had carried in his pack on their long night walk, then she had looked up the word “rampage.” “Storm, rage, rush about,” the dictionary told her. “To go about in an excited, furious, violent manner,” it said. It was what she wanted, she knew, this rampage, and she resented its excesses being in the custody of the betrayer.

She was ironing in the afternoon, applying heat and pressure to cloth, inhaling the smell of clean linen, the word “rampage” thundering in her mind when she saw Aidan Lanighan at the end of the lane. At first she thought that Liam, who had taken the cutter into town, had gone into the ditch and was returning on foot. Then she saw the colour of the walker’s hair against the snow. He was hunched into the wind, his hands pushed into his pockets. She couldn’t move, could barely blink. He was smaller than she remembered, his posture bent. Eileen watched herself run down the lane, her hair a fire in winter, but found she was locked in the pose she had entered when she first glanced through the window; one hand reaching for a clean shirt waiting on a chair back, the other holding the iron upright, her mouth still forming the shape of the last whispered sound. Then her joints unlocked and she sprang to the door, knocking over the chair, the iron as she ran out into the winter air. “Christ,” she thought, “Liam will see his foot-steps,” having believed all this time that his path to her would be a traceless journey moved by wind over the lake. When she reached him she grabbed his sleeve and dragged him towards the barn. He laughing in her grasp, his hair filled with snow.

In the loft he thrust his hands into her clothing, seeking her skin, and she gasped at the chill of his fingers, her face at his
neck and the breath from both their mouths visible everywhere.

“Are you alone?” he asked.

Her face was flushed, perspiration at her hairline in spite of the cold. “Liam’s not here, if that’s what you mean.”

“I need to stay for a few days.”

“But he’ll be back and he won’t let you in.”

“I can stay up here … just for two nights, then I’ll jump the train for Montreal.”

“Where have you come from? Where have you been?”

“Toronto.”

“It’ll be cold out here … you’ll freeze.”

“There’s straw … I’ll manage. If you bring me food, I’ll manage.”

At the sound of sleigh bells Eileen scrambled down the ladder, shaking the straw from her skirts as she descended. “I’ll come in the dark,” she whispered.

The kitchen, when she entered it, was full of the smell of smoke, though the air was bright and clear. Eileen righted the overturned chair and stooped to pick up the iron where it had fallen. It had burned a black triangular shape into the floor, some singed varnish was still attached to its underside. The mark, itself, she thought fleetingly, looked like the charred hoofprint of a huge beast.

Subsequent generations of the family would be superstitious about removing the board with the mark on it, but they wouldn’t know why. When they questioned her, Old Eileen would shrug and look the other way. But the young girl that she was now ran her fingers over its surface, feeling the heat still contained in the wood grain. To her it was evidence of her own emotion; the moment of contact with the dream, Aidan Lanighan’s hand burning the flesh at her waist.

Late that night she removed from a hook on the woodshed wall the lantern that had lit the dark summer walk, and with several matches in her pocket, and pork, bread, and butter wrapped in cheesecloth under her elbow, Eileen walked across the new-fallen snow, willing a wind to spring up before dawn to erase her footsteps. Standing under the loft she lit the wick and began to climb the ladder, placing the lantern on the overhead beam, so that her arrival was preceded by golden light and leaping shadows. Aidan Lanighan was curled up, trembling on the straw. The night was clear and cold; stars penetrated the spaces between the boards on the other, darker side of the barn. While he tore at bread and meat, Eileen assaulted him with questions, demanded the details of his life. He would not tell her why he had been in Toronto, and offered, instead, a scant account of his childhood in the Irish slum of Griffintown in Montreal. Like Liam, he had arrived in Canada a famine child, his mother dying in the fever sheds, his father becoming a poorly paid labourer. He told her that he, himself, had been apprenticed as a tailor by a neighbour. It was easy work, he said, could be done anywhere. He was thinking of moving to Ottawa.

He’d been in jail after the Fenian invasion, and his father as well and “as many Irish-Catholic wretches as the bastards could lay their hands on.” Many of his friends – even some priests. “None of us,” he said, “had anything to do with it. Some of them had never even heard the word ‘fenian’ before. It was a disgrace.”

“I know all about it,” said Eileen. “Do you know the editor called Boyle?”

“Yes, I know Boyle.”

“I’ve been reading his paper and understanding it. I’ve been understanding the injustice.”

“Injustice, is it?” he was amused by her use of the word.

“And about the man McGee – his speeches.”

“I’ve heard McGee, many times.”

“And he a turncoat. St. Anne’s is his riding is it not? Isn’t that where Griffintown is? And now he’s turned traitor.”

“How would you know about that?”

“It says so in the paper. You know Patrick Boyle and hasn’t he a way of saying things in his paper?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“But he has, you must see –”

“I don’t know,” Aidan Lanighan interrupted, “because I never learned how to read.”

Because of the cold, they gained, on that first night, a fractional, disjointed knowledge of each other’s bodies, Aidan allowing four or five inches of cloth to separate around a breast, Eileen unbuttoning six inches of shirt to place her cheek against the fur near his heart. The pain of his entry into her body caused her to cry out and he covered her mouth with the cool curve of his palm until she whimpered and quieted and began to feel the pain being replaced by a kind of sorrow which she would only later recognize as pleasure. Afterwards he wept, briefly, before collapsing into an agitated sleep during which his limbs twitched as if they remembered dancing. Eileen was aware of hot liquid on her inner thighs and the slight touch of his tears running down her neck. She covered him with the thick paisley shawl her brother had bought for her in Port Hope, and gazed at his smooth face for an hour in the lamp-light, his breath clouding the air between them, her own breath coming in convulsive jerks, and her hands, as she tried to straighten her hair and button her clothing, shaking.

When she stood to leave, Aidan awakened and clutched at her skirt, pulling her down beside him. “Listen,” he whispered, “it was in the cell that I taught myself to dance, at night when the others grew tired and lonely and pulled into themselves. I could whistle, so I did that for a while, till the guard shouted at me to stop. But I wouldn’t stop. I whistled more and I began to dance and dance until the men came cheering to the bars of their cells. I was beaten once for dancing, but I wouldn’t stop.”

“Did you dance for McGee?”

“I tried.”

“But he never understood it?”

“No, he never understood it.”

During the following two days she would sometimes slip out of the house with warm milk from the cow or a bowl of porridge, but mostly she kept close to the kitchen, not wanting to arouse her brother’s suspicions. The second night she undressed Lanighan and ran her hands all over the unfamiliarity of his body while he lay shivering and laughing in the cold. Then she flung her own clothes onto the straw and lay beside him, seeing her long soft leg beside his harder, darker one. His skin tasted of salt and dust, his mouth on her nipple the only warm spot in a frozen world. When they could no longer bear the chill they burrowed into the straw, the discarded clothing, and attacked each other’s heat, gasping with exertion. Eileen was devastated, torn apart by the new pleasurable sorrow. Lanighan wrapped her hair around his neck like a scarf and they both slept, bound together.

Once, waking suddenly, Eileen shook his shoulder. “I remember you,” she said, her hand clutching his hair. “There’s something in me that remembers you from somewhere.”

“The Seaman’s Inn.”

“No … somewhere else. How could I know you this well?” She pulled on her woollen skirt, her boots. “We’ll never leave each other, even if we have to be apart.”

Eileen reached for the knife she had brought with the bread and meat. Bending forward in the light she cut a length of her hair and handed it to him.

“Keep this always,” she said. Wind shook the barn and pushed its way through several cracks. Aidan groaned and covered his legs with straw. “You take all the warmth with you when you leave,” he said.

The next morning he was gone.

Snow hurtled past the windows of the farmhouse at Lough-breeze Beach. Aidan had departed in the middle of the early-morning storm, leaving no footprints in the yard. Eileen stared hard at the straw, now, wanting it to hold some formal imprint of his body, a memory of his presence. But there was nothing of him there, no souvenir. Nothing except the long piece of her hair, looking discarded and dead in the weak winter light. He hadn’t taken this one gift she had given him and, she suddenly realized, he hadn’t even asked about the pistol.

Walking through the house, Eileen felt helpless, grief-stricken, and enraged. For days, after cursorily performing chores, she toured the locations that had been touched by Aidan’s existence. The parlour that in another life had been shaken by his dance, the upstairs hall where he had first pushed his mouth against hers, the dark triangular mark on the kitchen floor caused by his appearance in the lane. Angrily scrubbing floors,
she avoided the spots where he had stood or leapt, fearing that the brush and suds might erase any trace, any scent of him from the architecture that held her – from her life.

At night she lay awake while storms howled and the house creaked in the wind, inventing a community for him – a brave and patriot band – composed of the few scraps of information he had given her, the Celtic sagas of “old sorrows” her father had told to her, and the bizarre combinations of fact and fiction she read in the
Irish Canadian
. In her dreams, McGee loomed, a crouching beast, an awkwardly shaped iceberg, she on a far shore and Aidan beckoning from its summit.

Her father had often sung the Irish song about Castle O’Neill to her in the evenings while she sat on his lap near the fire. Once, she asked him to translate, and her child’s mind, drawn to the picture the words painted, had retained one verse. She had sung the words one winter day when the empty threads of the willow were covered with frost. She had been surrounded by glitter; the shadow of the tree’s branches a network of blue veins on the snow. Now she whispered the words as she toured the house, “No dowry I hope for of sheep or cattle or lands, but my two hands supporting your head like a clustering branch,” and never thought about the branches that had often supported her.