Away (37 page)

“I could be searched,” he said, “at any time. I left it with you because of that, but I’ll be needing to take it with me to Ottawa.”

Eileen sat upright in the bed, agitated by this new piece of information. Three of the men, besides himself, were going, Aidan had told her, and they would meet another two there. All of them had had their weapons seized when they were imprisoned at the time of the Fenian raids, and they dared not get more for fear of raising suspicions.

“You
are
Fenians, then?” said Eileen.

“No … no. Just interested bystanders.”

“Then why do you need the pistol?”

“It’s only for protection, Eileen, against bad possibilities. We’re just going to Ottawa to hear what McGee has to say in the House, to get the information first-hand.”

Eileen scrambled out of bed, dragging a blanket with her. She wrapped it around her body and sat firmly down on her case, refusing to move. “You’ll not get any pistol from me,” she said, “unless I go with you. I want information first-hand too. Besides, if I wasn’t here there wouldn’t be any pistol.”

“I would have come to Colborne to get it from you. And you
are
here, Eileen.”

“You were going to Ottawa before I came here. You were going without the pistol.”

“I told you, I would have come to Colborne to get it, and anyway things have become more serious since then. You can’t come with us, Eileen.”

“I walked a hundred miles at night.”

“With Liam.”

“I’ll be with
you
 … and you’re in a wagon.” She would not get up from the case, leaned back against the wall, her eyes filling with tears. “Don’t shut me out, Aidan,” she whispered. “I love you too much to be shut out of what you do. We are together now, isn’t it true, forever. I’ll do anything you want … but let me be with you.”

Lanighan looked at her crouched by the dirty wall. He walked around and performed a few half-hearted dance steps. “Eileen,” he said softly, “you cannot even begin to understand.” He paused, ran his hand through his hair, cleared his throat, and turned towards the window as if making an explanation to the whole world he inhabited. “You cannot even begin to understand what it is that I do. You couldn’t be a part of it even if I wanted you to.” He raised his hand, palm towards her, as if to halt an advance of carriages on the street below. “Which I don’t,” he added.

“You don’t want me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t want me with you.”

“Not for this kind of thing. Not this time.”

Eileen sat with her back curved, her hands resting on her lap. Rejected, excluded, the mythical journeys she had imagined with Lanighan snatched from her. She wanted his dramas, their urgency, as much as she wanted his body in her arms. She wanted to creep inside him, to be a vital part of his life, his politics. “Don’t shut me out,” she whispered again.

He sighed, placed his forehead against the wall, his hands in
his pockets. “You can’t come with me, Eileen. Give me the pistol.”

A terrible silence filled the room. The sun, entering through the window, reflected angrily back from the cracked heart of Jesus. Then abruptly Eileen jumped to her feet and ran to where Lanighan stood. “Aidan,” she said, her voice sharp and clear. “Aidan … isn’t it still possible that you could be searched?”

“Yes … it’s possible.”

“Then why not let me come with you.”

“Eileen –”

“No, listen … I could carry the gun. They’re not likely to search a girl.”

Lanighan looked hard into her face. “Jesus Christ …” he eventually said, “you’re right, Eileen. I’ll take you with me.”

She had pleased Lanighan and now would gain entrance to the vibrant centre of his life, be sister to his brothers-in-arms. There would be drama and power, and change would sweep from their love like a cave giving birth to an important river.

“How beautiful this all will be,” she said.

“Don’t expect too much, Eileen, we’re only going to hear McGee speak. And the pistol,” he said, “it’s just a precaution.”

“It will be beautiful,” she said, “to be with you among your companions and all of us thinking about the cause.”

“The cause … .” He began, but did not finish, the sentence.

I
N
June, dawn comes early to Loughbreeze Beach, lifting light with little difficulty over the flat eastern horizon of the Great Lake, just beyond the peninsula of sand that swallowed Esther’s father’s doomed hotel.

At this moment the midnight shift at the quarry stops for coffee: the machines rattle, purr, and are silent. It is an enchanted time. Men in dusty work clothes, whose passions, during other parts of the day, are focused on all-terrain vehicles and fast food, stroll up to the edge of the man-made crater, their styrofoam cups warming their hands, and look out over the calm water. They think about young women who are sleeping. They push their hardhats back and let the new sun touch their foreheads.

A crow outside the south bedroom awakens in a tree where he has always lived and begins to explain the dawn, the coming day, the previous night, the currents of the lake, the nature of the wind, which – though absent now – will soon stop dreaming and start moving everything it can. Esther has never slept through the bird’s strident announcements. But on this, the last morning, she has not slept at all.

She rolls over in the old sleigh-bed. Her hips ache and one hand feels numb, as if it has been taken from her, or as if a gift she held in it has been permanently removed

In her mind there hovers the face of an old lady – a replica of her own face which floats now on the square, white pool of the
pillow. In this family all young girls are the same young girl and all old ladies are the same old lady.

There were evenings, Esther remembers, usually in summer, when her mother and her Grandmother Molly, her aunts and great-aunts would drink sherry and review the family deaths. The aunts would have spent the long, hot afternoon under the poplars, having left behind stifling farm kitchens further inland to inhale the air above the lake and gaze at the colour blue. Sons and husbands would have stayed on the inland farms, active in bright fields, the skin on their faces having been furrowed over the years by sun. Esther’s father would sit at a desk in a far corner of the parlour, pretending to busy himself with a complicated tangle of family accounts, dreaming of his ruined houses.

The decanter, which Esther’s mother would pick up absently while crossing the floor in search of something else – a photo album, a letter from a deceased son or nephew – would glow in her grasp. The aunts would glide, then, like ships towards the cabinet that held the crystal glasses, returning with prisms caused by late-afternoon sun in their nervous hands. Then would begin the litany of loss and memorable funerals. Portentous dreams would be recalled and deciphered. Esther’s father would sigh and leave the room to make a sandwich in the kitchen. There would be no dinner on an evening like this until much later, and the meal, if and when it appeared, would be one made up of “leftovers and tears,” as her mother would say.

“Leftovers and tears,” whispers Esther now, as she hears the rock crusher being activated once again by men who have forgotten the beauty that held them only minutes before.

Old Eileen would sit silently through the descriptions of coffins and hearses, the references to the locations of graves,
and the recitations of verses from various headstones. “Don’t talk to me of death,” she would say when the women were exhausted by memory and sorrow. “No, don’t talk to me of death. I murdered love.”

Then she would slowly climb the stairs, walk down the hall, and lock herself into the large bedroom with its wonderful view of the lake.

“Leftovers and tears” whispers Esther again as she drifts into the morning, into the last stages of the story.

E
ILEEN
was always afraid that she would lose Aidan somewhere in the city, that he would dive into a crowd of strangers and disappear. She had only a vague exterior map of Montreal’s St. Anne’s riding – of Griffintown – in her mind, and no knowledge of what lay in the interiors behind its walls. She knew nothing of the rooms and hallways beyond one damp house, but could imagine intimate gatherings, intimate corners, and Aidan in them. He was often gone at night and would reveal nothing of his whereabouts, as if he were deliberately withholding information. Then she would find herself wondering about and sometimes inventing the subjects of conversations, the faces of the speakers.

When she wasn’t imagining the activities that occupied him when he was absent, Eileen thought about how often he had fallen asleep in her presence. She became unsure, then, of her place in his life and wondered whether her nearness bored, calmed, or exhausted him. All penned animals at the farm, she remembered, slept through most of the daylight hours, and then again at night as though wakefulness during confinement were an unnatural state.

Sometimes, however, he would practise dance steps in the room and Eileen would watch astonished by his skill, his grace. Often he called out the names of certain dances before he began. “O’Reilly’s Lament,” he would shout, or “Rolling Over the Waves.” He looked straight ahead at the wall or out the
window, announcing his performance to no one in particular, perhaps to himself, never to Eileen.

She would sit on the bed and watch him, imagining the increase in his heartbeat or trying to guess the tune that played in his mind as he moved, until one day she realized that he was not dancing alone; that his hand was outstretched to grasp that of another – or a chain of others – that his arm was bent so that another’s could lock with his at the elbow.

She was devastated then, angered; she believed he had tricked her. Something she couldn’t understand was hurling him back and forth across the room. He was being embraced by a family of invisible partners. She lunged forward and caught his sleeve. “Who are you dancing with?” she demanded.

He stopped moving, startled, looked at her in confusion, sweat sliding over his temples.

“Who are you dancing with?” she repeated.

“No one.” He stood like a beckoning statue frozen in mid-gesture, one hand outstretched, muscles tense. Then he broke the pose. “Oh,” he said, understanding, “none of these dances is for only one person. They are for two or four, sometimes as many as eight.”

Eileen relaxed somewhat. “Then why do you dance alone?” she asked.

“Because,” he said, one foot stamping rhythmically, keeping time with an inner tempo, “because there’s no one else to dance with.”

“There’s me,” she said, looking up at him from where she crouched on the bed, “I danced with you once.”

“Yes,” he admitted, whirling away, “but you didn’t know the steps.”

Now, even though the day was sharp and full of sun, because of the numbers of wagons and buggies passing in the opposite direction and the dust on the road, Eileen had the impression they were travelling through fog or that they were taking a soft brown cloud, like a parcel, with them to Ottawa. The fine powder collected in the folds of her skirt and on the sleeves of Aidan’s jacket. When she put her hand over the fist in which he held the leather reins and took it away again, an imprint of her palm remained. Once or twice she leaned forward and brushed the dust from his eyebrows and eyelashes, and he looked at her in a puzzled way because he did not know what she was doing.

Aidan’s companions, whom Eileen had imagined as bright warriors, were in fact taciturn, balding men, responding only when spoken to, obviously uncomfortable with the presence of a woman in their midst. They sat on a bench behind the couple, facing in the opposite direction, solemnly drinking from a bottle of whiskey which they passed back and forth between them, turning at intervals to offer some to Aidan who always refused. He had instructed Eileen to be silent about the pistol. It was resting between her breasts, its steel the same temperature as her body.

This dry open plain was so unlike the mouldering walls that had held Eileen and her lover for the preceding days that she was almost grateful for the clouds of dust that obscured the distances. The intimacy of her encounters with Aidan and the intensity of her responses, the minutiae of political details, the long, precise catalogues of unfairnesses and cruelties she had gleaned during the previous months of reading and waiting did not include the possibilities of long views and far horizons. She wanted no impression of that which was being passed by, just forward motion, the firmness of the young man’s body, a conviction encircling them, and a long, hard look at the enemy.

“Aidan, what will McGee speak about, do you think?”

He stared straight ahead. The road led directly to Ottawa. “The country,” he eventually answered.

“Which
country, though?”

He flicked the whip in the air, trying to encourage the tired horses. “This country,” he said, a note of irritation in his voice. “This country,” he said again. “We’re in Canada now.”

Eileen put one of her hands in his jacket pocket, and when he did not respond or look at her she felt a flicker of panic. In Aidan she felt an anger, an emotion that excluded her, might even be against her. “I’d forgotten,” she said, thinking of something she had read and trying to join Lanighan wherever his subtle anger had taken him. “He cares now only for furthering his own political career at our expense … he doesn’t care any more about the Irish.” The idea of the oneness of the tribe, the imagined collective voice, calmed her. There were no uncertainties.

Lanighan twitched and shifted his position on the hard seat. A buggy driven by a well-dressed man hurtled past, replenishing the cloud of dust. “He cares,” Aidan said cryptically, “more than you know.”

It was as if he were not speaking to Eileen, not speaking to anyone at all.

The dust from the vanished buggy settled on his hair and eyebrows. Eileen did not brush it away this time but, looking at his profile, at his hair whitened by the fall of dust, she thought, This is what he will look like to me when he is growing old.

She leaned forward to brush the fine brown powder from her new white boots. It was late in the afternoon and the shadow of the wagon and its occupants stretched out far behind them on the road. The gun pressed painfully into her breastbone and she returned to her previous upright position. They had been travelling for almost ten hours when the river, the forested hills
of the Gatineaus, and the spires of Parliament came into sight. The surrounding air was now clear of dust, splotches of snow and puddles lay in the fields. Even from this distance the stone walls and slate roofs of Parliament – absurd in the middle of the wilderness – were visible. “It’s beautiful,” Eileen said, surprise evident in her voice.