Away (38 page)

“From this distance,” said Lanighan. When they got closer, he told Eileen, there would be mud and broken wooden sidewalks and the shanties of the Irish lining a canal they had dug with their own hands. “But from this distance,” he agreed, “it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”

They met the other two men in the tavern at the Victoria Hotel on Wellington Street. Lanighan embraced the sandy-haired, better-dressed man, whose name was Patrick. He was younger than the rest of the company – except for Aidan. Eileen knew he was looking at her, his gaze a provocative, sweeping inquiry.

“My girl,” said Aidan, explaining her presence.

Eileen moved her hand to her breast where the pistol was hidden. One of the men ordered whiskeys all round and the group settled in at an oak table.

No one spoke. Outside, Wellington Street was empty of traffic, growing dark. A lamplighter walked by like a ghost creating his own aura.

“It will be a long night,” the sandy-haired man eventually said. “He doesn’t speak until late.”

Aidan straightened out his legs under the table, his chair pushing back slightly and scraping the floor.

A line from an emigration song her father had taught her kept running through Eileen’s mind. “Come fiddler, now, and play for me. Goodbye to barn and stack and tree.” She thought
she knew what each of these features of an intimate landscape looked like, even though they were far away in a country she had never seen.

“I can wait until the hour,” said one of the men who had come with them on the wagon.

Eileen touched Lanighan’s knee and searched his face. He was far from her and she knew it. The lamplighter passed by the window again, awash in a sickly pink light of his own making. Aidan’s arms were folded across his chest as though he were protecting his heart, denying Eileen access to it. She felt that she had displeased him, would do anything to regain his favour. She leaned forward, towards the table. “We are all fighters for freedom,” she said, uncertainly.

Lanighan shot her a brief, silencing look.

The sandy-haired man called Patrick threw his head back and laughed. “Was there any particular kind of freedom you had in mind?” he asked, suggestively.

Eileen’s face turned red and she lowered her eyes.

“She’s a beauty, this one,” the man said to Aidan, “and a rebel into the bargain. Here’s to her …” He lifted his glass. The men chuckled but avoided eye contact with one another.

“There’ll be a full moon tonight,” the smallest, roundest, and oldest of the wagon men commented, “after the street-lamps are out. And they’ll not leave the lamps on long after the moon is up.”

The men rose to leave the tavern, and Eileen bent down to tighten one of the laces of her white boots, her hand involuntarily clutching at the gun beneath her clothing. She was drawn sharply back to an upright position by Aidan’s hand on her arm, her shoulder-blade coming up hard against the back of the chair. Then, quite suddenly, Aidan was on his knees before her completing the task.

“Ah, yes,” said the man known as Patrick, grinning, but
looking at Eileen with intensity. He winked and sang quietly behind Lanighan’s back.

Ignoring him, Eileen placed one hand on Aidan’s dark head and for just a moment he rested his left cheek against her knee.

It was, though they did not know this, their last embrace.

B
ECAUSE
of their largeness, the Houses of Parliament appeared to Eileen to be an overwhelming natural phenomenon, permanent, indestructible, their faces the façades of cliffs. To enter them would be like stepping into the mouths of great caves, to penetrate the earth and look upon all that had been covered, disguised by trees and gravel. The huge windows glowed with a molten light which spilled out over the grass and changed the colour of the stones at Eileen’s feet. Behind the massive structures, on the other side of the river, the Gatineau Hills were covered by a dull sheen, grey under a full moon. Despite the crunching footsteps of her companions, Eileen could hear a continuous hiss of noise in the distance which made her feel as though her head was full of wind. “Chaudière Falls,” one of the men told her. “Half a mile up the river.” Aidan walked ahead of her, hurriedly, the intimacy of their moment in the tavern forgotten.

In the gallery of the House of Commons, Eileen looked first at the huge wheel-shaped gasoliers which threw a relentless glare into the carved corners above her, then down to the orderly collection of heads below. Someone was talking about Nova Scotia. Aidan, who did not sit next to her, nervously fingered the ticket the porter had given him. Eileen worried for a few seconds that she had lost hers. The gallery was warm. She could smell sweat and whiskey emanating from the bodies of the men. She clutched at the insides of her skirt pockets until
she heard the crackle of the paper stub. Feeling light-headed, distant from the life pressing in around her, she was unable to follow the thread of civilized debate taking place below. Her attention had been trained towards the anticipation of drama, could not focus on the mannered theatrics of men in a Gothic hall.

Eileen looked at Aidan’s profile, his dark lashes. He was blinking rapidly. Then she looked, again, down at the crowd of men below her. Were it not for the sideburns on one, the whiskers on another – the colour, the abundance, or the lack of hair – they would all have looked the same in their black topcoats and white shirts. This uniform, she suddenly understood, was a mark of power. She had never known men who dressed in clothes such as these. How was it possible that, attired in what Eileen imagined one might wear to a ball, these parliamentarians were engaged in arguments that were lengthy and dull. Hours empty of passion were crawling through the room.

“McGee will speak soon,” the man called Patrick eventually hissed into Eileen’s ear.

She was surprised, whenever she looked towards Aidan, at his alertness. His eyes were bright, his body poised, vibrant as if he intended to burst, shouting, into the centre of the room. After a few moments she saw him rise to his feet, bend, whisper something to one of the three men from the wagon, then to the man called Patrick, and leave the gallery.

“Where did he go?” she asked, the panic moving from her throat, down the insides of her arms. “What did he say?”

“Just a call of nature, darlin’.”

Despite his fancy clothes, the man’s sandy hair was greasy, unwashed. “He’ll be back in a jiffy,” he answered. “But,” Patrick tugged on his left ear, as if shaking a message out, “he said you had a little something for me down that lovely front of
yours. You must be cold. Why don’t you wrap your shawl around you,” he carefully draped the paisley fabric over Eileen’s shoulders, “and pass the little something to me from under it so the others won’t see. It’s what Aidan wants you to do.”

Eileen’s blood beat in her brain. “He wants you to have it?” she asked.

“It’s part of the plan,” the man whispered, “part of the grand scheme. We’re all fighters for freedom and Aidan says he’s proud of you for being in sympathy with that.”

Gratitude, a warm rush of it, melted the tension in her arms. Eileen wrapped the shawl around her throat and moved her hands under it.

The pistol was warm and damp, covered with her sweat.

When Lanighan returned to the gallery, he squeezed into a spot beside Eileen. The crowd had thickened in response to the rumour, telegraphed, even at this late hour, through the streets and alleys and saloons of Ottawa, that McGee would be speaking soon, and the seats behind them were filled to capacity with stonecutters, streetsweepers, waiters, cab drivers, ladies of the night, even a few ragged children.

“Are you watching?” Lanighan whispered. “Watch him and listen.”

Eileen saw a small man rise to his feet and incline his head towards a collection of tattered papers on the desk in front of him, his hands nervously leafing, sorting, stacking. He would be responding to a motion on the part of the Nova Scotia Assembly that Confederation be repealed.

“They want to take it apart again?” asked Eileen.

“Yes,” said Aidan. He was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees.

McGee was a long time organizing his papers, fussing.

The silence in the House turned into an almost audible apprehension. Eileen was certain that the light thrown by the gasoliers had changed, was more exaggerated, and that, as a result, there were more shadows in the room.

At length, McGee straightened, limped sideways to change his position behind the desk. Then he began to speak.

Aidan leaned against Eileen slightly. She could feel the heat of his upper arm move through the cloth of their sleeves and his thigh pressing against hers. She could feel his heat but she knew he was gone from her, lost in the quiet words being spoken by the man below, and she resented the fact that this person, of such insignificant physical stature, this turncoat, could lasso her lover’s attention, hold it hostage. Even the enemy, she thought, envy burning through her bowels, even the enemy should not have the power to come between us. Then, as the speech escalated in tenor and pitch, she was caught by some of the lines.

“It’s not only the lime and the sand and the hair in the mortar, but the time which has been taken to temper it.”

Eileen thought of the long seasons that her mother had been away and how all that time was preserved, exposed, placid and frozen on her face.

“Time,” McGee announced, “will come to the aid of impartial justice.”

In the words “impartial justice” she heard the song of her father’s tongue … the suggestion of poetry. She bent forward to scrutinize the speaker. The enemy, she thought, is a small, corrupt man. Where does his voice come from?

She looked questioningly at Aidan, her face registering the confusion that she felt. The country described by the speaker was one in which there would be no factions, no revenge for
old sorrows, old grievances. Everything about it was to be new, clear; a landscape distanced by an ocean from the zones of terror. A sweeping territory, free of wounds, belonging to all, owned by no one.

The man called Patrick was sprawled in his chair, apparently asleep, but Eileen sensed Aidan’s concentration – so fervent it enveloped his whole body.

McGee had come to a pause in his long address. Eileen was being shaken by sudden recollection; the privacy within the curtains of a willow, a dialogue with a blue-black bird. This, and a kind of music breaking into meaning. The words in the room had become like that, a significant message carried on cadence. She remembered now, for the first time, that as a child she had listened to a wise man.

“There was a man,” she whispered to Aidan urgently, “a man called Exodus Crow. He knew things. He told me once – a long time ago – he told me there were no lords of the land.”

Aidan pressed the air with his left palm, silencing her.

McGee was concluding; his performance now as mesmerizing as one of Aidan’s dances. He was speaking to the whole room, his notes forgotten in the hand that rested on the desk in front of him. He was addressing them, he said, not as the representative of any race, any province, but as the forerunner of a generation that would inherit wholeness, a generation released from fragmentation.

The House exploded into sound. Thumping of desks, cheering, applause.

Eileen, released by the monstrous single-voiced roar from the trance induced by the little man’s voice, allowed the phrase “not as the representative of any race” to strike her in the heart. This is the voice, she thought, this is the power that should be harnessed. Her father had talked about Irish
eloquence. Without the race of his blood this little man would not have had the voice. He has betrayed, she decided, the voice, the suffering voice.

The bird in her mind flew away again, breaking through green.

Aidan was rocking backwards and forwards at her side as if in pain. “Jesus Christ,” he was saying, “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.” Lost landscapes through which she had never walked were unfolding, hill by hill, in Eileen’s thoughts. To her, McGee was the worst kind of enemy, the truly guilty; the one who knows the beauty and betrays it.

Patrick was on his feet with the rest, clapping and cheering, his head thrown back.

Faking, thought Eileen.

Afterwards, Prime Minister Macdonald and the leader of the Opposition entered into a testy debate which Eileen was too distracted to follow. “Do we go … ?” she asked Aidan. “When do we go.”

“Not until it’s over.”

“Then?”

“Then we go.”

“All right,” he said when the House was finally adjourned shortly afterwards, “let’s get out of here.”

Outside, standing confused in the shadow of the colossal building, the men were anxious and jumpy. “We should get moving,” one of them kept saying. “We should be moving now.”

The spectators were beginning to drift homewards in various directions across the moonlit lawn.

“We’ll catch you up,” said Lanighan. “I want to see him up close. We’ll see you at Mrs. McKenna’s Saloon. She’s the only one still open.”

“You’ll recognize him,” one of the men said, “by his white top hat and gloves. He wears the hat to make himself look taller.”

“Where’s Pat?” another of the men asked.

“Gone on ahead, I guess.”

To Eileen’s great joy Aidan had begun to play, absently, with her hair.

“That voice of his,” she said as the men walked away through moonlight and chill, “that voice of his is something beautiful. It’s our voice, but he’s betrayed it.”

Without answering, Lanighan seized her wrist and pulled her behind him, running to the right, towards the building called the West Block. They moved swiftly behind it, along its sandstone wall and out its gate, across Wellington and into O’Connor Street. At the corner of Sparks and O’Connor, Lanighan pushed through a break in a six-foot wooden fence and, dragging Eileen after him, entered an empty lot. Releasing her, he moved to the south side of the lot and flung himself down near a spot where two boards were broken at the bottom, leaving enough space for a man to look through or crawl through. Eileen followed and stood panting behind him. “Lie down,” he gasped.