Away (35 page)

Liam would not be able to remove Eileen’s footsteps from the stairs, suffering from the loss of her and anxious to keep some evidence of her. But Molly, strong and practical, in firm belief that Eileen would return, scrubbed the floors clean, and the stairs, step by step, ten days later when Liam brought her home as his new bride and mistress of the house.

In the future it would be Molly who made the farm pulse with energy so that barns would seem more substantial, the fields richer, the crops thicker; she who carried the cells of both the old world and the new in the construction of her bones and blood. As an old man, Liam would recall and then list all her accomplishments. She could carry a two-hundred-pound bag of salt on her back. She could stand at one end of the kitchen and skid fourteen plates down the long pine table and have each arrive at the correct spot. She could load sixty cedar logs
onto the horse sleigh, drive off to Hayne’s Mill, and return at dusk with enough shingles for a new roof.

“All I had to do,” Liam would say, “was hang my pants at the foot of the bed and she’d be pregnant.”

In the end Molly would successfully raise five children, four of whom were her own.

E
ILEEN
stepped from the train into ankle-deep water and into confusion. Disoriented and stunned by the overnight journey in the swaying railway coach, she stood entirely still for several minutes with her case hanging from her left hand and her skirts lifted and clutched into a lump near her right knee, watching the clods of mud that had collected on her boots during the walk to Brighton disengage, disintegrate, and float away from her – the last traces of her previous life. She wondered if the Great Lake she had abandoned had followed her here, unwilling to let go of its influence on her future. She recalled that she had always anticipated a sail, an arrival by water. Then she sloshed forward into the watery streets.

A boy in hip waders sidled up to her and, when she asked, he said, “C’est
le fleuve dans les rues –
the river in the streets – at each spring she is coming like this into the streets.” Then, laughing and splashing, he jumped away. “You will be wanting a boat,” he called over his shoulder.

She approached a policeman in rubber boots, assuming, because of his uniform, that he was a soldier. “Griffintown,” she said, “where is Griffintown?” Her feet were already aching with cold.

He pointed to the south. “Down there,” he said, “up to its arse in the river. As for me,” he added, “I always felt that the whole neighbourhood would be much improved if they held it completely under water for twenty minutes or so. It appears God agrees with me.”

Eileen stepped awkwardly forward in the direction he had indicated. When walking, she felt the water touch first her shins, then her knees, and she thought that the river was rising, but gradually she realized that the street, itself, was descending under her feet. Two small children bobbed by, singing, in a rainbarrel. Men approached her in punts, leering, and offering her transportation for free. She staggered away from them, frightened, pushing against the current, her lips blue with cold. I will die, she thought. I will die before I find him. Eventually a large woman, surrounded by baskets of clean linen, poled towards her on a section of wooden sidewalk. “Come on board,
chérie,”
she said, “or you’ll have no feet left to travel with.
Va
t’en!” she shrieked at a bearded man who was circling Eileen in a skiff. “Cochon,” she muttered under her breath, and then to Eileen. “Where are you going?”

“Griffintown.” Eileen’s teeth were chattering as she crawled onto the makeshift raft, then, remembering a hotel mentioned in the
Irish Canadian
, she said, “I’m looking for the Old Countryman’s Inn.”

“Oh, la,”
said the woman,
“en bas
. Down on the quays. It will be murderous there … 
vous avez besoin d’un bateau
. But I will take you part way.”

The whole population of the city had moved, depending on its location and elevation, one or two or several feet skywards. Business was being conducted from second-storey windows. Wooden sidewalks, chained to front doorsteps, were being used as landing docks, or, in some cases, as parlours where people in rocking chairs sat smoking and chatting in the sun. Small boats were rowed in and out of large ground-floor windows. A cabinet full of broken china swept majestically towards an intersection Eileen and the woman were approaching, and had to be poled out of the way. Heading in the opposite direction, his long ears floating on the surface of the brown water, a dog
paddled calmly past. Someone whistled from a rooftop and the animal turned left, swam through an open balcony door, and disappeared.

The raft was brought to a halt in front of a diminutive structure called Le Grand Hotel. “I stop here,” the woman said to Eileen, then shouted,
“Un bateau, un bateau pour la jeune fille! Maurice, es-tu là?”
A grey head appeared from a third-floor window.
“Un instant,”
a man croaked testily.

“He is my husband,
mon mari,”
the woman told Eileen. “He has a boat tied up inside which he will not allow anyone to row but him … so I have to push the sidewalk to bring home
le nettoyage. Il est très stupide
, but he will not bother you because he is afraid of me. Maurice,” she called again as an old rowboat nosed its way through the front door. The woman looked sternly at her husband, “She is looking for the Old Countryman’s Inn,” she said to him. “She is from some other place.”

As Eileen sat at the bow of the rowboat, heading south, the waterline crawled up the faces of the buildings she passed. She could see islands, now, in the wide expanse of river, and the amazing span of Victoria Bridge, arching like a rainbow inundated at both ends.

“She will start to go down tomorrow,” said the boatman shyly. “The ice is broken now, but you will need the third floor of the Old Countryman’s because it is down by the quays and because of the water level.”

Eileen was having trouble distinguishing between that which was afloat and that which was grounded. They had entered a poorer section of the city, now, where ragged families were huddled on thatched or tin rooftops, surrounded by tables, chairs, and a few miserable chickens. The odd stone building emerged at infrequent intervals looking like a ship moored in a harbour otherwise filled with wrecked vessels. Clumps of sod from submerged huts joined dancing chunks
of ice on the water’s surface. “Their huts,” the boatman explained, nodding in the direction of one particularly wretched collection of individuals, and then pointing to a small floating island of mud and wattle and straw, “their huts melt each spring. The
Irlandais
, the Irish.”

Then he asked, “Someone waits for you at the Old Countryman’s?”

“No … but perhaps I will find news of him there.”

“Then I will wait in case you wish to go somewhere else, Mademoiselle.”

The proprietors of the Old Countryman’s Inn were discovered in a third-floor room sitting atop the several wooden cases that contained the hotel’s entire stock of whiskey.

“Except for one or two bottles that floated away,” explained a round, balding man with a florid face.

“Mademoiselle is looking for someone,” the boatman said.

“And who might that be?”

“Mister Aidan Lanighan,” ventured Eileen, hesitantly, her face flushing.

The bald man beamed. “Lanighan, is it? Would you not be content with myself?”

“He said he lived in Griffintown,” she added, looking towards the boards at the bottom of the boat.

“Well, he does, but then so do I.” The man laughed aloud at her silent embarrassment. “Oh, go find him, then. Forty-three Rue Coleraine. Lucky for him he has the garret.”

Eileen recognized the name. “Is it the same Coleraine as in Ireland?” She remembered her father speaking of the market there.

“Of course it is. Would there be any other Coleraine?” As he walked away from the window the bald man unfurled the paper
that was tucked under his left elbow. Eileen was delighted to see that he was reading the
Irish Canadian
.

Eileen watched the partly submerged hotel withdraw, its waist encircled by water. A flock of large Canada geese dived, honking, from the sky, skidding across the surface on either side of the boat, raising a tremendous wake and filling the air with an argumentative babble. They swam towards a nearby bakery where loaves of bread had sailed into the street and now bumped gently against the shop’s exterior wall.

The garret of 43 Rue Coleraine turned out to be the upper storey of a wooden house, ancient by new world standards, its foundations washed away by years of spring flooding, its clapboards askew. Built on such uncertain ground, the structure managed to lean exaggeratedly to the right and to sag simultaneously in the middle. Above the water level only the cedar-shingled roof, one dormer window, and two or three feet of lopsided clapboard were visible. All around the building were a variety of other roofs in varying stages of dilapidation – some thatch, some tin, some holding the unfortunate inhabitants, others empty, the residents having fled to higher ground. One old man sat smoking a pipe, his back against a crumbling chimney. It was he who pointed out the open window which belonged to number 43. He stabbed the air with his pipe stem and winked at Eileen. “He got home last night,” he said, “late. Actually, he got home this morning.”

Maurice brought the boat up to the window ledge. “Look inside,” he said. “Is he there?”

Eileen saw a form, sprawled on a mattress. “Yes, he’s there.”

“Eh
bien, au revoir.”

“I’ll pay you. How much?”

“No charge … this has been a few hours of quiet on a pleasant day.
Faites attention
, be careful, you can climb in the
window. You are in no danger. The river, she goes down tomorrow.”

Eileen stood just on the other side of the window, listening to the water lap against the outside wall and looking at one perfect hand which lay in the path of the late-afternoon sun, the shadows of the lightly curled fingers raking across the palm.

That hand has touched me, she thought.

As her eyes adjusted, the rest of Lanighan’s body came into focus, the chest moving under the even rhythm of deep-sleep breathing, one leg crossed over the other below the knee as if arrested in mid dance step, the arm that did not extend towards the sun flung across his forehead. The face was composed, washed clean of expression, the exact eyebrows mirrored by two dark circles under the closed eyes, the jaw shadowed by a three-day beard.

His beauty terrified her.

The wallpaper in the room was stained, missing altogether in some sections. Loosened by damp, in places it hung in large curls from the walls, rising and falling in the breeze which passed through the window. Above the mattress hung a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and Eileen was moved by this, imagining Lanighan finding the hammer and nail to hang it there. His mouth was open, like a child’s. Occasionally his arm twitched. When she looked at his boots, which lay discarded, far from each other, at opposite ends of the room, Eileen’s eyes filled with tears. She dropped her case lightly to the floor. The sound caused him to stir, then roll over towards the wall, but not to awaken. She didn’t know what to do. There was nothing in this room but a mattress and a sleeping boy with a bleeding heart above his head, and nothing beyond the room but a river that had tried to imitate a Great Lake.

Years later, Eileen would tell her granddaughter, “This is
what love is like, one is asleep and the other is awake but you never know which one is dreaming.”

She leaned against the ledge of the open window. The sun had already moved a half a foot across the mattress and was creeping through Lanighan’s curls towards his eyelid. When it brushed his cheekbone he awakened, leaping immediately to his feet, looking wildly around the room.

Eileen crossed the floor, her arm held out to steady him. “It’s me,” she said, her hand on his shoulder. “I’ve come to help the cause.”

“The cause,” he repeated, still stunned by sleep.

“I’ve come to help you ruin the traitor McGee.”

“You’ve come for
that?”
He shook his head to throw off drowsiness.

“I waited. I waited all the time,” she said, “for you to come. But while I waited I learned more about the truth of things.”

“The truth … ?”

“Our people … the oppression … the injustice,” she declared passionately. “My father said they took away our language and our voice.”

Lanighan walked slowly back and forth across the dark end of the room. “Your father,” he said, “knew all about this, did he? How was it that your father stayed alive?”

“He’s dead.”

“But while he was alive.”

“He was a schoolmaster … and a farmer, though Liam says the land was impossible.”

“He was privileged.”

“Privileged!” Eileen’s face flushed. “Privileged? He almost starved to death during the famine.”

“All of our mothers and fathers almost starved to death in the famine – many
did
starve! But your father … he had land, land and learning: two privileges. And now, Liam … land
and learning … the first bought with a landlord’s money, the second acquired in leisure time. What about
my
people? What about the rest of us who had neither the land nor the leisure? What about the rest of us who have to live in this soggy rotten mess they call Griffintown?”

Eileen did not answer but backed towards the window. She could hear the water slosh against the clapboard, and for the first time she realized that below her there were rooms under-water. Outside, men were whistling and calling to one another in boats.

Lanighan ran his hand through his hair. “I’m only half awake,” he said. “Never listen to me when I’m only half awake.”

“Do you want me to go, then?” Eileen’s voice trembled. “Do you not want me to be here at all?”

“I want you,” he said. A statement, a fact. “I’m awake now. For a while I must have thought you were a dream.”

That night the river water receded, unnoticed by the young man and the girl whose nightgown spilled like milk around them both in the dark. Eileen did not see that the mattress on which they lay was old and torn or that the blankets which eventually covered them were worn and faded, nor had she seen the crack in the glass that cut across the Sacred Heart poised above the bed.