The O'Briens (4 page)

“Do you think the fellow's alive, Joe?”

“Did we kill him?”

“I don't know and don't much care.”

Joe sent the girls into their mother's room. Then he put the big kettle on the stove and he and his brothers stripped off their clothes. They were not accustomed to bathing in the morning, but all three stood together in the copper tub and scrubbed each other's backs. Joe and Grattan took turns sluicing the warm water over their heads. When he was clean and dry, Joe went out with a pail of water, a towel, a shirt, and twenty dollars he intended to give Mick, along with a warning to never again show his face. But the fiddle was gone from the porch and Mick was gone from the shed, leaving nothing behind but blood and straw.

~

Ellenora died in late April, hemorrhaging and coughing blood. The girls washed the body and scrubbed the room, and that evening Joe went in to take his turn standing by the bed where the long, narrow frame of their mother lay, rosary beads twined through her fingers. Her face was yellow and lined, and it seemed to him that every part of her had shrunken except the nose and ears.

He had seen men nearly killed in fights and logging accidents, but his mother's was the first corpse he had seen, and apart from its stillness what struck him was how fragile, insubstantial, and temporary her body seemed. Ellenora's struggles and losses, her hard work and suffering, had developed from meagre flesh and sinew, a collection of fragile bones. It seemed extraordinary that a body could house the energy a mind produced, the secret powers to love and hate, forget and remember.

No one was interested in buying the farm in the clearing at any price. Joe sold the livestock and equipment at auction, plus his wall tents, cookstoves, and logging tools. He split the proceeds among his brothers and sisters but kept the profits his pulpwood operation had made, the seed of another business that must eventually stand behind them all.

Hope and Kate were bound for the Visitations in Ottawa. Grattan had a job offer from a wealthy Santa Barbara citrus grower, a benefactor of Father Lillis's Franciscans. Joe would accompany Tom to the Bronx and see him settled at Fordham, then head for Calgary via Chicago, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg.

On the morning they were all due to leave, Joe went out early and set fire to his little shed, then stood watching it burn to the ground with everything — ledgers, eyeshade, snowshoes, ink bottle — inside. He had wanted to burn the house down as well, but the others begged him not to. They were thinking they'd come back some day. Joe thought they wouldn't — who returns willingly to a place of sorrow? — but the place was still standing when they left in a hired wagon, the girls up front with the teamster, the brothers on straw bales, all of them wearing yellow kid gloves Joe had bought for a going-away present.

They stopped at the priest's house for breakfast. After the buckwheat pancakes, gooseberry jam, and hot, sweet coffee, Father Lillis asked Mme Painchaud to crank up the Victrola, and as the waltz poured from the horn — to Joe it sounded like a twitter of birdsong mixed into a rushing, galloping rhythm of panicked horses — they each took a turn flying around the room in the arms of the old priest.

Joe was last.

“God bless you, God bless you,” the priest whispered.

“And you, Father.”

The old man shuffled a few more steps, then laid his head on Joe's shoulder and began to sob. Holding him, Joe felt the priest's frailty, and in his own throat he felt a metallic soreness, which he reckoned must be love. He kissed the old man, and then they all bowed their heads to receive his blessing; Joe could hear the teamster outside stamping his boots impatiently and the horses whinnying for more hay.

They made one more stop, at the Catholic cemetery. The inscription on the granite slab Joe had ordered and paid for gave the facts of his parents' lives. Facts were all that were suitable for stone; anything else seemed vain and vainglorious. Their father's birth date wasn't mentioned because they didn't know it.

Ellenora Scanlon O'Brien,

Born
1870
Died
29
th April
1904

Wife of

Miceál O'Brien,

Died
1900

Buried in S. Africa

The girls placed handfuls of tiny, pale wildflowers on the grave, and then they all climbed back aboard. They were only a couple of miles farther along when Joe heard the caw of a fiddle — and there was Mick Heaney stumbling out of the bush, a rancid grin on his face, plucking and sawing the instrument held in the crook of his arm.

Joe ordered the teamster to pick up the pace, but the man complained of heavy mud and said he wouldn't be winding his horses for the sake of a two-dollar trip. Joe was furious — with the teamster, with Mick Heaney, and most of all with himself for not burning the old place down to a heap of black char, broken glass, and ashes when he'd had the chance, because now he realized that Mick Heaney would saunter back to the clearing and dig himself in, selling timothy hay off their meadow, gathering berries from bushes they had tended and fertilized, shaking apples off their trees, living to a fetid old age pickled in raw whisky, and probably dying in the bed their mother had died in.

Fiddling furiously, Mick stumbled after the wagon. Joe yearned to throw something at him but there was nothing at hand. If he'd kept his rifle he might have issued a warning shot, sent a bullet snapping past his stepfather's ear, but the rifle had been sold along with everything else. He thought of jumping down to deliver another thrashing, but the teamster would spread the story —
Heaney and O'Brien! Battling in the mud like a pair of roosters!
— and Joe hated the thought of people laughing at him after he was gone. He struggled to contain his anger. No use dirtying his boots and staining the turn-ups of his trousers with the mud of the Pontiac, which he meant to escape cleanly, and forever.

Instead of looking back he studied his brothers and sisters. The Little Priest was reading a novel by Joseph Conrad; Sojer Boy had slipped off his kid gloves and was cleaning his fingernails with a bit of straw. Kate and Hope were chatting with the teamster. It was suddenly clear to him that his siblings did not share his sense of deprivation, or the fury that was inside him. The strains of
“Bonaparte's Retreat”
gripped and taunted him, but to them the bleating, yapping fiddle was just the noise of something they were leaving behind. It had no claim on them. It was already slipping past, like the thin breeze and the stink of muskeg.

When he next looked back Mick had fallen a long way behind. The tune had faded like old snow deep in the woods in April. After another quarter-mile he couldn't hear anything, and when he looked back once more, there was nothing but trees, mud, and sky.

~

On the platform at Union Station in Ottawa they huddled together, sharing for the last time a sense of belonging to each other. He and the Little Priest were ticketed for New York with a change at Montreal, and their train was leaving immediately. Grattan would be escorting Hope and Kate to the Visitations, then catching an evening train for Toronto, Chicago, and California.

Before Joe and Tom boarded, Grattan presented them each with a twenty-five-cent cigar. “There you are, boys. Smoke the best!”

Joe felt his throat narrow once more with that metallic feeling as he shook hands with Sojer Boy. But he knew he had done his best for them. They were safe, and leaving behind the thin, acidic soil of the clearings. They were all on their way to richer ground. Hope and Kate were waving and laughing merrily as the locomotive chuffed steam and sucked air into its brakes and Negro porters hurried the last passengers aboard. The whistle howled, the engine gave a tug, steel couplings clanked up and down the length of the train, and the cars began rolling. Grattan and the girls ran alongside for a while, and Tom and Joe hung out the window and waved for as long as they could see them before falling into their seats.

At Montreal they boarded a Delaware and Hudson train. Later that night along the shore of Lake Champlain, while the Little Priest slept, Joe sat in the smoking car puffing his twenty-five-cent cigar, savouring a sense of majestic loneliness and freedom as the train raced south to New York City. He had done all he could to ensure that his brothers and sisters were safe and settled, but for himself he needed more than safety. He needed risks and danger and lots of room to grow, and that was why he would go out west.

~

Stepping onto the platform at Grand Central Depot at seven o'clock in the morning, Joe and the Little Priest were swept along in a herd of businessmen and handsome, well-dressed girls hurrying through the tunnels, riding up the electric stairs, and pouring out into a street howling with motor cabs and buses. Joe sensed energy and wanton danger. Eager for a glimpse of the ocean, he thought he smelled the tang of salt water on a bright breeze smacking up Lexington Avenue.

They both wanted breakfast. At a diner on Third Avenue they sat guarding their baggage at their feet while a Negro rattled handfuls of silverware on the counter and a waiter sloshed coffee into two mugs.

“Gosh, Joe, it all sure moves fast.” The Little Priest spoke so softly Joe could barely hear him over the clatter. They had fed at cookhouses packed elbow to elbow with Frenchmen, but never in such a hectic, steamy place as this. Joe ordered ham and eggs for them both from a greasy menu card. Dozens of strangers were gulping coffee, cramming doughnuts into their mouths, and leaving nickel tips.

“Do you suppose it's like this in the Bronx, Joe?”

Looking at Tom, he noticed for the first time his resemblance to their mother. The Little Priest had always been an anxious child, shy of strangers and especially terrified of the bunkhouse men and hoboes who roamed the Pontiac in logging season. When he admitted he was afraid of being “stolen,” Joe had reassured him that boys were never stolen except in the old stories of witches, Whiteboys, and roving spirits, but there was nothing much he could say to adjust the flame of such caustic anxiety. Nonetheless, the Little Priest had slept soundly aboard the train while Joe sat up the whole night, watching the dark country flash by, and the quick, yellow-lit platforms of upstate towns. And the Little Priest was now eating ham and eggs with gusto — Joe had observed that his brother's anxieties rarely interfered with his appetite.

“I guess you'll get used to it,” Joe said.

New Yorkers swam in the noise and rush of the diner as naturally as trout in a swift stream. The brazen babble of voices, the clatter of dishes, the florid steam of a dozen steel coffee urns — it was all ordinary and entirely normal as far as these people were concerned, a complex of violent sensualities so commonplace that their faces looked, if anything, bored.

Unfolding a sheet of gilt-edged cream notepaper, Joe checked Father Lillis's instructions, which were written in thick black cursive.

N.Y. to St John's College, Fordham, The Bronx.

Strongly
advise take Harlem North train. Check sched. on G.C. board. Costs more than
3
rd Ave. El but direct to Fordham Sta. without change. Same route return G.C. Depot.

Penn Central Depot, Hoboken, N.J.

(for Chicago w. connect. for Minneapolis w. connect. for Winnipeg)

From G.C.D.
3
rd Avenue El, so. to
14
th Street.

14th Ave. car. w. to end of line. Walk so. to 10th St. Pier & Penn. Central Ferry crossing Hudson R.

If overnight in N.Y.

Society of Jesus, 39 E. 83rd St.

Show this note. They will give you a bed.

Your Father in Christ,

Jeremiah Lillis, S.J.

After breakfast they hurried back to Grand Central. The pace of the city forced everyone to speed, and it was impossible for them not to hurry. Clearly, though, some people had dropped out of the race. Vagabonds lay on the sidewalks, smothered in humps of rags. At the corner of
42
nd Street and Fifth Avenue a burly woman with a face like a purple pumpkin and slits for eyes held out a tin cup, the crowd streaming around her as if she were a rock in a river,

Help Me

I am Blind

scrawled on cardboard hung around her neck.

At the depot Joe looked up at the board and found a Harlem North train leaving in seven minutes. They raced through the tunnels and boarded it just in time. Their car was nearly empty, and they both claimed window seats just as the train started to roll. Soon it had left the tunnels and was running along elevated tracks. Joe stared down at long avenues hectic with horse cars and omnibuses, with children dodging traffic and boys at every street corner standing on crates, hawking newspapers. Streets flashed by in swords of light, offering glimpses of the shiny East River. Women with bare arms leaned out the windows of tenements, panting in the heat, so near Joe felt he could almost touch them. There was something charged and warm about such relentless, impersonal intimacy. Hundreds of people eating breakfast in tiny kitchens, with no one bothering to look up as the train rumbled past.

There were houses full of whores in Ottawa, women of all nationalities. He had overheard his cooks and bunkhouse men talk of whores who'd do anything for a dollar — and three dollars bought a fellow the whole night. This city was probably full of such women. He could certainly afford the money. But anyone with three dollars could have a whore, and it was purity that attracted him, purity and cleanliness. He must have the sort of clean girl whose family wouldn't let her have anything to do with a fellow from the clearings. Not until he had made something of himself, done something powerful — and even then they'd be wary.

He glanced at his brother across the aisle. The Little Priest was fast asleep, head thrown back, mouth wide open.

The train crossed the black ribbon of the Harlem River, more or less saltwater, Joe figured, and therefore an arm of the sea, which joined everything and separated everything: the rim of the world.