Jane Urquhart Page 13

  That evening, after adding a few more sentences to the sheet of paper on the desk, Sylvia worked on the map of the route to the lighthouse, an occupation that she hoped would both soothe her and permit her partly to overlook the fact that Andrew’s journals – his thoughts, his memories, his imaginings – were no longer close at hand. Jerome might even now be reading the words, the way she had read them night after night while Malcolm slept and rain or snow fell through the ocher path cast into the yard by the kitchen light. When she returned to bed those early mornings just before dawn, she would close her eyes and envision a world made up of islands, a world dependent on flotation. Andrew had written that on each island there had been a spot called Signal Point and that when significant messages needed to be sent quickly down the lake or up the river a fire would be lit on the shore of one island after another, a sort of telegraph of flame. Marriages and deaths were often announced this way, particularly during late fall and early spring, times when the ice was too dangerous for navigation yet not strong enough to support a horse.

  There had been no such fires lit for her. The answer to the final question, the source of her grief, had been presented to her in an impersonal way on a flimsy sheet of newsprint destined for the recycling box.

  “It presents in a very odd way,” Malcolm had often said, referring to some disease or another, and she remembered thinking that diseases were almost always in the present, in the now, unless they were cured, or unless they were in remission waiting to recur. Her own incurable love had been like that; it had shocked her with its insistence on the present, and with its persistence, how it had presented itself, and continued – along with the grief – to present itself to her each morning when she woke. It had always been and continued to be one of her few connections to the present tense.

  When she was busy with a map, however, she fully entered the landscape she was translating to touch, was able to see in her mind the rough edges of the road, the grass growing in the center, potholes here and there, sumac bending just beyond the verge. She cut a piece of pine veneer, now, into three octagonal shapes, each slightly smaller than the last, and pasted them one atop the other in a spot near the lake where the lighthouse would be situated, then knowing that Julia would want to walk beside the water, she decided that she must find some way to let her friend know that the beach was filled with small, smooth stones.

  Landscapes are unreliable, Sylvia thought, as she rummaged through her fabric bag, looking for something to define stoniness. Landscapes are subject to change. But shorelines are even less stable, shorelines are constantly changing.

  When designing a map, there was always the problem of the periphery. A person blind from birth is one dependent on intimacy, Sylvia had thought, the reach of one arm defining for them the extent of the known world. When she spoke about this to Julia, however, her friend had disagreed, had reminded Sylvia that she could identify and name distant sounds and could smell things – animals, various crops, a wind that has passed over the Great Lake, the approach of a storm – from very far away. Sitting in a kitchen she knew when the apples were ripe in an orchard that would not have been visible from that kitchen. So what does a location mean to you, Sylvia had asked, how much of a place do you want to know?

  “More than you,” Julia had replied, “I want to know it all. I want much, much more than you can possibly fit on a map. Just give me the center and I will move out from there, in the spirit if not in the flesh. Soon I’ll know all of the County by heart.”

  Thinking of this, Sylvia put on her coat and began to walk back and forth across the room. Each aspect of the County – her own territory – had been named, filled, emptied, ploughed and planted long ago; all harvests belonged to the dead who insisted on their entitlement. “I cut the trees, built the mills, sawed the boards, made the roads, fenced the fields, raised the barns,” they had told her in the dark of her childhood bedroom. I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow. “I drew up the deeds, made the laws, drafted the plans, invented the history, prescribed the curriculum,” the dead whispered. I, said the rook, with my little book. They beat out a telegraph in her blood, one that read, “I fought the wars, buried the dead, carved the tombstones.” I, said the fish, with my little dish, And I caught the blood.

  Sylvia opened the curtains and looked at the concrete wall stained a mustard yellow by the muted, artificial light that gathered democratically in all the corners of the city at night. I, said the lark, if it’s not in the dark. At this instant she found in herself the desire to walk in the city at night, the desire to be of the moment, time-bound. She looked at her watch. Nine-thirty. She decided she could be absent from the hotel for exactly one hour.

  She buttoned up her coat, switched off the lights, left the room.

  Once she was on the street, Sylvia stood for a while in front of a shop window behind which a variety of television sets was displayed, each relaying the same image of a well-dressed man energetically speaking and moving his hands. She was interested in his gestures, in the way his forehead wrinkled then smoothed again and how his shoulders moved up and down. He was like Malcolm during the period when he was teaching her the art of expression and she was forced, now, to suppress an impulse to copy his actions.

  The next window was filled with medical supplies: basins, pumps, walkers, wheelchairs – clean, shining – patiently anticipating a whole range of infirmities. Mannequins absorbed her in subsequent windows, their stillness and that of their clothing. No wind to move fabric, no weather at all to respond to. She liked that. The damp cement sidewalk glittered faintly beneath her boots, which were now at home on that surface. Behind her, brightly lit traffic rolled on patched pavement. No one paid any attention to her, and she knew then that the city had opened its indifferent arms to her, that she could move or stand entirely still, respond, or refrain from responding, and a strange calmness came over her. The feeling was not foreign, not new to her, but here in the city she did not recognize it for the contentment that it was. It was not happiness; she had experienced that particular exhausting state of alert only three or four times, always in the company of Andrew. Now in the midst of the kind of constantly altering stimuli she had believed she could never incorporate into her life she knew only something she had always known: that this kind of tranquility could never be brought to her in the hands of others.

  When she returned to the hotel and walked into the lobby, the desk clerk caught her eye, then glanced toward the black leather chairs that, after the first day, Sylvia had always ignored. She recognized the trench coat first, the hat resting on a knee the coat covered, then, as the figure rose to his feet, the face, and the weary, tolerant expression on the face. Her husband spoke her name, then, “Syl,” he said quietly while moving toward her, taking her arm, “Syl, I’ve come to take you home.”

  The Bog Commissioners

  Timber Island is situated at the spot where the Great Lake Ontario begins to narrow so that it can enter the St. Lawrence River. Scattered islands with odd names appear at this point, islands that are premonitions of the famous Thousand Islands downstream where there is no longer any question about the water one looks at being that of the river. But one hundred and fifty years ago there was much discussion among the residents of my great-great-grandfather’s Timber Island empire as to whether the surrounding water belonged to the lake or to the river. The ferocious swells of late-autumn squalls ought to have put the argument to rest, but despite the evidence the populace had such definite opinions on the subject that they formed themselves into two camps, called “lakers” and “streamers.” Sports teams and spelling bees were said to have been assembled in this manner: “lakers” to the left, “streamers” to the right. The “streamers” were most often French: children of the coureurs du bois, or the raft makers, or the rivermen themselves. My father believed that they probably felt more at home with the idea of the river that had so influenced their lives touching this island territory. And from the point of view of geology a goo
d case could be made. The west end of the island is made up of Lake Ontario limestone, the east end of the kind of granite rock that lines the river. It could be argued that the island was a child of both the lake and of the river. And certainly the industry that flourished there made extensive use of both and could not have survived without either.

  Shortly before he emigrated to Canada to set up business on Timber Island, my ambitious great-great-grandfather, Joseph Woodman, an engineer by training, was hired by the Crown (along with five or six other men) as part of a commission whose job it would be to investigate and report on the state of the bogs in Ireland. The commissioners were dispatched to the various Irish counties and, as a result, Joseph Woodman was stationed on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry for close to half a year.

  According to my father, the fact that the only commerce in this bog-ridden district involved the carrying of butter on a footpath over Knockanaguish Mountain dozens of miles to Cork City had greatly irritated his forebear. He had been appalled to learn that, among other things, there was not a single road in the district capable of supporting a simple donkey cart, and bridges only of the rudest sort, so that the people of the region were often seen carrying baskets of turf, furniture, sacks of potatoes and cabbages, and sometimes even coffins on their backs. Something in him must have rebelled at the very size and scope of a landscape so undeveloped that it supported only scattered potato patches and hard-won fields occupied by few very poor cows. And, of course, the expanse of the bogs in the region, bogs from which men removed turf for their hearths with long, narrow handmade spades that Joseph Woodman would have considered to be almost comical. He wanted the people of Kerry to put down their spades, pick up some good English shovels, and begin the task of draining the bogs so that these murky territories could be replaced with fields of golden grain. But, on the other hand, he wondered if the Irish were capable of completing such a task. Paying little attention to the damp climate and rough geography with which Kerry farmers had always had to contend, he likely ascribed the persistence of the bogs to what he would have seen as the laziness of the men of the district. Yes, my great-great-grandfather was blind to almost everything about the people and the landscape of County Kerry, and yet, for the rest of his days, that landscape had never lost its hold on his imagination. When he returned to England with his report, he did so with the hope that he would be going back to the Iveragh in the company of a vast team of English laborers who would dig the required ditches with proper shovels. He wanted, you understand, to squeeze all moisture out of County Kerry, as if it were a dishrag, but parliamentarians more aware of climate and expense than he apparently was utterly rejected his suggestions. For his efforts, he was dismissed from the commission but granted a small island at the eastern end of Canada’s Lake Ontario. Filled with humiliation, he gathered together a few possessions and his wife and, one month later, set sail for that location.

  A few years later, when he gave his Canadian-born son the Irish name of Bran (which he extended to Branwell to make it seem more English), there were those who were surprised by the notion that Joseph Woodman would commemorate the dissolute brother of the by then famous Brontë sisters as he had never, to anyone’s knowledge, read a work of fiction. But, in fact, as family lore would have it, he knew nothing at all about the Brontës, had named his son instead after a magical dog in an intriguing story he’d heard from an old man with a ridiculous spade while they had been standing ankle-deep in a bog near a mountain pass named Ballagh Oisin in the old Irish Gaelic, a name that had been just recently and, to Woodman’s mind, sensibly changed by a British surveyor to the more easily pronounceable Ballagasheen.

  In time this son, my great-grandfather, Branwell Woodman, would be sent by his now widowed father to Paris to study painting. How his father justified this in a society that must have believed his artistic interests were pure foolishness was never properly explained, but it likely had something to do with getting the young man out of the way. There was whispered mention of a pregnant parlor maid who had been banished from the island once her condition was known. Branwell, however, may not have been eager to give the young woman up, and his father may have wanted an ocean between the pair. Perhaps studying art had been considered simply the lesser of two evils. Besides, the boy had talent – not as much as his sister, Annabelle, but enough that sending him to Paris for a year or two would not seem unusual in the eyes of the few families of quality with whom Joseph Woodman was acquainted and from whom the secret of his son’s indiscretion had to be kept.

  So Branwell took the boat to Le Havre and went to Paris, a city I myself have visited a number of times. Branwell remained in France for a year or two, living the bohemian life of a young art student, while back in Canada his father cursed the steamboats that were replacing schooners in the Great Lakes (“the ugliest species of watercraft ever to diversify a marine landscape!” he was said to have thundered), cursed the steel that was replacing wood, and watched his fortunes slowly recede. When they had receded further, he cut back Branwell’s allowance and demanded that the young man return. But by this time Branwell had seen one of his paintings hung in an “exposition,” had had a taste, a crumb, of artistic triumph, enough that he was able to at least imagine, if not devour, the whole cake, and, understandably, he did not immediately want to separate himself from a life warmed by these few small victories. Moreover, it seems that he had been quite close to his mother, who had been dead for only three years. Perhaps the memory of his father’s sternness, combined with the absence of both mother and lover, made the prospect of returning to the island simply too gloomy for a twenty-year-old boy.

  This was not the first time that Branwell had been away from home. From the age of about eleven onwards, while his mother was still alive, he had been sent to one of the English-style boarding schools that were beginning to spring up in a few places in the colonies. There he would have suffered, at least for a time, from unbearable homesickness and from the bullying of older boys until he himself learned to be a bully and learned as well to at least pretend to care about cricket. During the holidays, as an addendum to his education, his father insisted that he keep a journal, a nautical record of any and all of the variations of the wind that bore down on his island home, as well as a listing of the subjects of the sermons delivered by the various visiting Methodist clergymen. My father inherited this journal, which contained many personal references as well, usually written when the boy was miserably unhappy or terribly bored. Those particular entries were mostly about the progress Branwell had been making in the construction of a wind-driven iceboat in the winter and a small sloop in the summer. As for the sermons the young man dutifully recorded, my father could recite the titles of some of them verbatim. I can recall only two: “An Invitation – Incorruptible, Undefiled, and that Fadeth not Away” and “If Sinners Entice Thee Consent Thou Not.” The latter was, in Branwell’s words, delivered by “a real ranter” bent on giving his audience “a real raking up.” The journal (which has, sadly, disappeared) lapsed during Branwell’s seventeenth year and was only taken up again when he reached Paris.

  While he was overseas, his sister, Annabelle, stayed at home where she would remain for life, keeping house (now that both her mother and the maid were gone) for her father, and occasionally painting burning schooners or schooners smashed to kindling on shores that bore no resemblance to those of the Great Lakes. And yet it was not entirely unthinkable that the ships she was surrounded by would meet their end on the rocks at the base of foreign cliffs. Often, after they were launched at the quays of the island, and if they were not to be used for the timber trade, they set sail for the wider world, traveling sometimes as far as Australia or Ceylon, carrying an unimaginable variety of objects in their hold, as if at that time it was deemed necessary to displace all the objects of the known world.

  Branwell undoubtedly took up with several women in Paris – it would have been expected that this would be the case – in an attempt to forget abou
t the hired girl altogether. Hers was a different story, her story and the story of their child.

  Branwell, after a long night in Paris, perhaps a night of debauchery, had risen one day at noon and had decided to do penance by investigating the museums that would augment his scant knowledge of French history. He had already spent as much time as was required of any self-respecting art student in the Louvre and in the various churches and cathedrals famous for their art. Now he wanted war, he wanted Napoleon and his tomb, he wanted Les Invalides and the Musée de L’Armée. So, after his footsteps had echoed in the Pantheon, he entered the cool halls of Les Invalides with its rotting battle standards and its ancient swords and cumbersome suits of armor. He gazed for a while, no doubt, at Napoleon’s assorted costumes, and with a sort of grisly fascination at the great man’s two deathbeds. (It has been rumored that two camp cots were required during the emperor’s demise as he moved, albeit with great difficulty and in great pain, back and forth from one to the other.) Eventually, somewhat bored and wandering aimlessly past the detritus of battle after battle, Branwell, upon climbing to the third floor, came to a low wooden door with the words Défense d’entrer written on it, and the early recklessness, which later disappeared completely from his personality, caused him without hesitation to walk through the forbidden portal and up a flight of poorly lit narrow stairs.