Jane Urquhart Page 17

  Their mother had been dead for a year. No one – not even the parade of doctors called in to examine her – had been able to say precisely what was wrong with her. It had been very apparent to everyone that the woman was dying – but of what exactly? She became weaker and weaker, her small frame diminishing, her vague expression changing to one of sorrow and resignation. Near the end, she had been brought each day to the parlor where she could see from the window the oak sapling she had planted years before, a sapling that by now had become a flourishing young tree. She could watch its trembling leaves lose green, gain gold, look at its thin arms bending in the autumn wind. Because he listened with real interest, she had described to Branwell the ancient oak that had grown near her old home in Suffolk. “Hundreds and hundreds of years old,” Annabelle had heard her mother tell him repeatedly. “If your father destroys it, I insist that you kill him,” she invariably added. It had never been entirely clear to Annabelle whether she was referring to the young oak on Timber Island or the old oak in Suffolk. Perhaps, she had thought, her mother meant both. “That will not take place,” was all Branwell had managed to say in reply.

  The tree remained after her death, had gained in height and breadth. If Joseph Woodman had ever detected an oak in his yard, he had made no comment on it. Unnoticed, the tree would be safe from the axe, Annabelle concluded, so Branwell would not have that reason to kill his father – though she didn’t doubt that there would be others. She knew that her brother was shattered by the loss of their mother, and she suspected that he resented the way their father was able to conduct business the day after the funeral and all subsequent days as if nothing on his island had altered at all.

  Annabelle remembered that on the night Branwell had first ventured to Marie’s room to give comfort, and perhaps to receive it, their father had rampaged through the house like a confused bear, shouting at Marie, who, with some help from Annabelle, had by now assumed most of the domestic duties therein, Mackenzie having decamped with her French husband. Equating all betrayals, imagined and real, with Ireland, Joseph Woodman believed the pair had gone to that country. “They’ll be drowned, I’m telling you,” he had said to Annabelle. “They’ll be ruined. They’ll be out on edge of Dereen Bog, they’ll be stuck beside Loch Acoose with nothing but a ludicrous turf spade between the two of them and enough moisture to turn their flesh to water.” When he stopped lambasting Ireland, he turned to Marie for whatever had gone wrong, and everything he had lost. Annabelle had shouted at him to stop, but Marie, her face flaming, had finally run up the two flights of stairs to her attic to be rid of the hullabaloo, an Irish word that Annabelle knew she had learned as a result of living in this house.

  When Annabelle, confronted by her father’s temper, had been taken by the desire to paint burning ships by moonlight, Branwell had likely seen his way clear. Soon their father, exhausted by ill humor, would have been snoring angrily in his bed. Annabelle would be gone for an hour or more. Branwell had likely made his way toward the staircase.

  Looking back now with affection, Annabelle imagined Marie sitting up in bed, hearing Branwell’s footsteps, perhaps seeing his shadow on the wall, and she imagined that Marie would have opened her arms to the boy, even before he stepped into the room. She could not, and did not, imagine what happened next, but remembered the warmth of that bed and the pleasure of intimate talk in the place that was Marie’s alone.

  As you float on the lake away from Timber Island, then enter the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, the islands thicken until eventually you are aware of a number of shorelines composed of great rocks and tall trees moving soundlessly past the watercraft on which you stand. Sometimes you feel that you are not moving at all and that it is the islands themselves that are adrift, like icebergs sailing purposefully toward open waters. Branwell, however, trapped on the river by his father, was, at this stage, quite impervious to the beauty that surrounded him. Occasionally he would read to Annabelle a poem or two he had attempted in his journal to vent his frustration:

  Oh solitude where are they charms That Sages say they have seen in they face Better to live in the midst of alarms Than to dwell in this terrible place

  The wind was from the east this week It blew hard all the day The raft was stopped at Batiseau And there now do we stay

  Amused by her brother’s lack of literary prowess, Annabelle told him he was in no danger of becoming a poet, but suggested that there must be wonderful things to sketch all along the river. Branwell allowed that while this might very well be the case, he was in no mood to avail himself of these opportunities. “All I can think of,” he said, “is getting onto dry land. But it seems the minute I get back, before I can even catch my breath, I’m back at work again. My whole life is just raft after raft after raft.”

  Timber rafts were the most temporary of constructed worlds and seem to have been constantly engaged in the artificial evolutionary process that was thrust upon them. What once was part of a great forest became for the span of a few days the platform of a small village where people worked and ate and slept and overcame the sequence of difficulties that made up the course of the river, diffculties so dramatic that even Branwell felt compelled to comment in his journal that the sight of turbulent rapids frothing over the edges of the raft, not five feet from where he stood, “filled the spirit with awe.” Once the rafts successfully reached their destination, they were, of course, dismantled, their several parts dispatched to England, where eventually the wood that made up their construction might re-emerge in the shape of furniture in a multitude of Victorian parlors or, if the timbers were oak – and large and long enough – as masts on the decks of the pugnacious vessels of the Admiralty. One thing was certain, however, no raft ever made the return journey upriver, and Annabelle, knowing this, would have thought a raft to be the perfect vessel for the deliverance of her brother into the arms of the future she wanted for him.

  Annabelle worked up the nerve to get herself on board a raft in mid-July and was, oddly enough, able to do so with her father’s permission. It wasn’t entirely out of the question for a sightseer or two to be taken on board, especially in the warmer months, as it was well known that this was by far the best way to experience the thrilling power of the rapids. Furthermore, because his mind was almost always fully occupied with business, any curiosity shown in some aspect of how it worked by one of his offspring – especially in the face of Branwell’s obvious disinterest – pleased Joseph Woodman even more than Annabelle had anticipated that it might. And she had anticipated that it might, had spent the previous evening, in fact, composing the following speech. “I just want to understand the business,” she had said to him, “how the rafts are taken down to Quebec. I just want to see what Branwell does when he is on the river.”

  On this midsummer day, once the raft moved away from the booms that held it, she grabbed her brother by the arm and began to dance with him, awkwardly, it’s true, because of her lameness and because her brother was an unwilling partner. “I don’t understand what has got into you,” he might have said to her as he disentangled himself from her embrace. He would have been irritated too, because now the journey was going to be longer than the usual three or four days. The raft would have to haul up in odd places along the river where lodgings could be found with families known to their father, there being no question of Annabelle spending the night on board with the men. Branwell would likely also be invited inside for an evening meal out of politeness, and the thought of this may have put his teeth on edge for he was becoming more and more unsociable as his unhappiness deepened. His bemusement regarding his sister’s behavior would be exaggerated by the fact that, although in the past she had been suspicious and evasive about Frenchmen, she had now apparently developed a certain camaraderie with them, and before the raft was five miles downriver, she was laughing and conversing with them, and showing them the watercolors she was making of the river and the trees. His own artistic endeavors at the time were confined to the penmanship he pract
iced while keeping the log – great, flourishing capital letters, for example, at the beginning of each entry, and the odd mechanical drawing of an iceboat or a sloop.

  When, on the second day, Orphan Island hove into view and the raft moved toward it, Branwell would have thought nothing of it, as the French, who were both sentimental and pious, sometimes left a box of food or a bag of coal on the dock there out of respect for the nuns and the orphans in their care. He watched his sister step ashore and, searching the dock, was slightly puzzled by the sight of her nightcase resting there. Then he was seized from behind by two coureurs du bois who deposited him unceremoniously at the spot where Annabelle waited and who, after shouting orders to their comrades, swiftly poled the raft back into the current of the river. When he called to the men, they waved their caps and called back to him, “Bonne chance!” and “Vive l’amour!”

  By the time Branwell had collected himself enough to turn angrily to his sister in search of an explanation, Annabelle was running, as fast as she could with her bad leg, up the slope toward the large forbidding facade of the orphanage where a woman with a young child clinging to her skirts had come out to see who had arrived. He watched, dumbfounded, as the two women embraced so fiercely that they fell laughing to the ground, surprising the child, who began to howl. And Branwell, shaken by his arrival at the island and by the unhappiness draining out of him at the sight of his lost love, began to weep as well. He might have seen himself then as one of the minor characters in the painting he had admired in Paris; perhaps one of the wolves in the far distance; not one of the seductive wolves Marie had told him about one night as he lay in her bed but a wolf with neither ferocity nor charm.

  The orphanage that Marie and her child stood in front of was a large, unpainted, decaying pile of timber and clapboard, grey with neglect and adorned with many plain, ill-repaired, sagging porches. Grey might not be the appropriate word to describe its color, for it would have been darkened by time, becoming almost as black as the habits of the nuns who cared for the orphans in its dusty rooms. Its windows were plentiful, but, by Branwell’s count, at least six panes in these windows had vanished and were replaced by waxed paper. The sight of the opaque windows, the dark walls, awakened a sense of shame in him. Why had he acquiesced so completely to his father’s wishes, which had resulted in consigning Marie to this dismal place? Why had he not insisted on marrying her, something he now knew he had always wanted? He was a distant, cringing wolf; a wolf without courage, he thought, and thinking this decided on the change that would determine the course of the rest of his life.

  For most men a reunion after desire, then intimacy, then distance, and finally an ocean of time is a terrifying proposition, one that often causes them to avoid allowing even the possibility of the encounter to fully form in the mind. Annabelle, having had absolutely no experience with romance, and unlikely to ever have any experience with romance, would have nevertheless known all this instinctively. But how did she know where Marie was? This part of the story was never explained. Perhaps she was visited by a lucky guess, or perhaps she was told of Marie’s whereabouts by the Frenchmen, who would have been well aware of the telegraph of rumors running up and down the river. Whatever the case, she would have walked toward her brother and, taking his hand, she would have drawn him toward his lover and the child who would become my grandfather. As they walked up the slope she would have told him that she always knew what he wanted, even if he didn’t know. And Branwell would have nothing to say for he would have known in his heart that she was right.

  After a week of Catholic instruction by the nuns, a week made somewhat easier by the marginal knowledge of Latin that Branwell had acquired while at boarding school, a visiting priest married him to Marie in the chapel of the orphanage. The ceremony was attended by a choir of orphans, a dozen nuns, Annabelle, and the small boy called Maurice, whose original status in life had been made legitimate by a ceremony of candles, incense, and chant, and who now had a full-blown temper tantrum just as vows were being exchanged and had to be taken from the room. Annabelle would never forget the sound of the boy’s cries echoing through the wooden halls of the dark building after one of the nuns had lifted him up and carried him away. These howls, to her mind, did not presage a happy life, and, in fact, her predictions would prove to be accurate. For although Maurice would become inordinately successful, he would never be particularly happy, would never, in fact, develop the capacity for happiness, and would eventually come to grief as a result of a combination of serial fixations, greed, and bad weather.

  But that day young Maurice recovered from his tantrum in time for the wedding supper and even submitted to being held, for a few tense moments, first by his father and then by his aunt, who repeatedly identified herself to him as such. Annabelle was enthusiastic in her new role; Branwell, fully attentive to his reawakened love for Marie, less so in his. He wanted all of his bride’s attention and was a bit nonplussed by the notion that any other living creature could be in a position to make demands of her. Moreover, the child had become accustomed to occupying that most coveted spot by Marie’s side in the warmth of her bed and, even during the first few days after the wedding, several discussions took place about this matter.

  Marie seemed filled with joy, not only by her marriage to Branwell, but also by Annabelle’s reappearance in her life, and, the day after the wedding, so that Branwell could spend some time alone with his son, she offered to take her friend on a tour of the home that had preceded her long and lively tenure in the Timber Island attic and that had provided her shelter since. There were fewer orphans in the dormitories now, Marie told her friend. “Not so many wolves, I suppose,” Annabelle commented. Marie showed Annabelle the cot at the end of a long dormitory, the place that had been hers before she made the journey to the island. “I’ve always loved beds,” she said as they left the room. “They are nests, really, a small space you burrow into, a space that comes to know your shape.”

  Annabelle’s astonishing scrapbook – a scrapbook that would contain only one paper scrap – was begun during this tour of the orphanage, or at least the first relic to be placed in it was plucked from the rough surface of the rickety front steps of that structure as she and Marie walked out the front door to stroll around the property. Annabelle had long been intrigued by the idea of relics. A French riverman had once showed her a splinter of “le vrai croix,” which he said he kept always on his person and which he claimed had been entirely responsible for the safe passage through rapids of every raft on which he had labored. Should not, then, a splinter of this piece of architecture that had harbored her friend be kept by her as a magic charm?

  That was the beginning, and as soon as she had the splinter tucked safely inside her sleeve, she regretted not having plucked a similar specimen from the delivering raft.

  Eventually, Annabelle’s book of relics, her splinter book, as Branwell would come to call it, would contain samples from any number of wooden constructions: a splinter from an assortment of sad, decomposing vessels in Wreck Bay, for instance, shavings from the floor of the shop where ships were being conceived, bits of bark from a delivery of rough timber – all dated, identified, and catalogued. She also included several ominous-looking charred wooden matches that, according to their labels, had been used quite innocently to light candles and oil lamps in the house on significant occasions of one kind or another. There would be fabric in the book, square inches of canvas and short lengths of rope from the sail loft, given to her by Monsieur Marcel Guerin, the sail master. But the only paper scrap in the book was the small half-inch of waxed paper she tore from the edge of one of the orphanage windows.

  Marie also showed Annabelle the graveyard, an area surrounded by a white picket fence and filled with twenty or thirty small limestone pillars each topped by a lovely stone angel. An Italian monument maker in the town on the shore of the river had donated his services, she told Annabelle, and had carved an angel each time a child died. “I knew some of these childre
n,” Marie said, “not all, of course, but some. They almost all died quietly in the midst of some epidemic or another. Death seemed so romantic, somehow, to an orphan. You got attention, you got prayers with your name in them, and then a religious service just for you. Everyone thought about you for days and days. And,” she paused, “and you got your own angel.” To children with no possessions that angel must have seemed like a special gift, that and your own name carved on the stone beneath it. “In the winter after a storm,” Marie said, “it looks as if there is a choir of miniature angels advancing like an army across the top of the snow.”