Jane Urquhart Page 18

  Annabelle looked at the graveyard for quite a while, then, just before turning back toward the convent, she plucked a painted splinter from a tilting picket. “But you weren’t the dying type,” she said to Marie.

  “No,” laughed Marie, turning back toward the convent, “I certainly was not.”

  A few days later the small family (in the company of Aunt Annabelle, as she now liked to call herself) entered a rowboat skippered by a sturdy nun just as the morning sun rose over the river. On the mainland they caught a coach to Kingston and a skiff to Timber Island, arriving late in the afternoon. They knew that Joseph Woodman would still be at work at this time and so, with some trepidation, they approached the modest, unpainted building that he used as an office. Soon they were gathered in front of his large desk. The old man neither stood to greet them nor looked up from the account book he pretended to be studying, and, when he finally spoke, he talked only to his daughter, whom he accused of high treason and “Irish behavior.”

  Annabelle did not flinch. “This is Maurice,” she told him, placing her hand on the top of the boy’s small head. “You are his grandfather.”

  “I remember a certain Fitzmaurice from Ireland. Bog Irish and a complete fool. Maurice…an Irish name if I ever heard one.” Woodman eyed the boy suspiciously.

  “You know very well it is not an Irish name,” Annabelle replied. “You are perfectly aware that it is a French name. On the other hand, let me remind you that Branwell is an Irish name, and you were the one who chose it.”

  “Indeed,” said Joseph Woodman, “and we can all see what that brought him.” This remark was delivered without sarcasm. The patriarch had not the sense of humor to engage in sarcasm.

  Then, in the midst of the hollow silence that followed this declaration, to everyone’s amazement, Maurice, who had neither spoken nor smiled throughout the journey or the week that had preceded it, beamed at his grandfather, disengaged himself from his mother’s hand, and scrambled onto the old man’s lap.

  Joseph Woodman stiffened, but did not put the child down. The small boy settled into the crook of one unyielding arm, then reached up and touched the white beard. He looked with adoration into the stern face. “Monsieur Dieu,” he said, smiling first at his grandfather and then at his surprised mother, “Monsieur Dieu…il est là.”

  This was to be one of the first of Maurice’s fixations on personalities more powerful than his own, fixations that would rule his life. Maurice would always be drawn to those more certain than himself of how they wanted the world to operate, and these attachments would be the source of both his occasional joy and his chronic unhappiness. But that day, his deification of his grandfather was to be the key that unlocked his family’s future. No one is immune to the flattery of adoration, and Joseph Woodman was not to be an exception to this rule. Once Maurice was fully established on the man’s lap, the timber baron’s expression gradually changed from irritated astonishment to a kind of bewildered tenderness. “What is this clamoring all over me?” he was said to have remarked in a tone that was now a mere parody of bad temper. “It feels like a rat. Or is it perhaps a badger?”

  From that day on “Badger” was the name that his grandfather used, both when he spoke to Maurice privately and when he called to him from a distance as he often did when returning to the house for his evening meal. Sometimes he had a treat for the boy, a candy he had purchased at the island store, or one of the baker’s sticky buns, and no amount of scolding on the part of Marie could dissuade him from letting his grandson devour these sweets right before supper. The boy, for his part, followed the old man everywhere he could. He trailed around after him, from room to room, down the road to the office, sometimes even into the old man’s private chamber. “Badger, be gone!” was a teasing command that was often heard booming through the house. Sometimes the boy, anxious for the morning reunion, would be up at dawn, standing by Joseph Woodman’s bed, waiting for the levee. On one of these occasions, Joseph Woodman leapt from his bed and, still clothed in his nightgown and cap, chased his squealing grandson all over the house. It was obvious to Branwell, Marie, and Annabelle that the old man had come, quite quickly, to love the child and that this love was to be, at least for the time being, the bond connecting all the adults in the family.

  Marie resumed her duties in the house with much enthusiasm now that her legitimacy afforded her the status of junior mistress rather than that of servant. Golden soufflés with one perfect crack down the middle and beautiful cakes with fruit slices arranged to represent bouquets emerged often from her ovens along with the more ordinary daily fare. She slept in Branwell’s room now in a brass double bed bought for the couple by Woodman Senior in a moment of weakness that could only be viewed as a complete surrender to the very turn of events that he had taken such pains to prevent from happening.

  On certain quiet afternoons Marie and Annabelle would retire to the old bed in the attic in order to talk, just as they had done when they were young girls. Their conversations mostly concerned Branwell. His virtues and his shortcomings, his various infirmities, and his mysterious inability to express himself continued to absorb them. Various theories about what he was thinking or how he was feeling were articulated, mulled over, dissected. Several conflicting conclusions were drawn, then reversed the next day or the following week. Branwell, unaware of all this, and thinking about nothing in particular, was, in fact, happier than he had ever been in his life. He went – albeit somewhat unwillingly – each day to the office and, once summer came, even more unwillingly out on the river with the rafts, but his marriage to Marie pleased and calmed him and made his tasks easier to manage, though the idea of painted hallways remained in his imagination.

  Still, both women tended to believe that, underneath it all, Branwell was tortured. This made him more mysterious, more interesting. Long, speculative discussions about what might be torturing him took place in the attic while Branwell was yawning in the vicinity of account books or while he was stretched out on a cot gazing at the temporary ceiling of a moored raft. He wasn’t tortured, he was just bored by duty. He wanted to embellish stark hallways with turquoise landscapes. Eventually he confessed his desire to his wife, who, in turn, brought up the subject with Annabelle. “It’s what he is meant to be doing,” Annabelle apparently announced, this time to a sympathetic listener, “and, in time, I expect, he’ll be given his chance.” Marie agreed and told Annabelle that she wanted pure contentment for the man who had made her so happy that even now, when she woke beside him each morning, she could hardly believe her good fortune.

  Annabelle, whose domestic work had all but disappeared now that Marie was back, took up the thankless task of educating her little nephew until it became obvious that the lessons in poetry and drawing did not hold his attention the way the columns of numbers in his grandfather’s office did. The old man eventually took over in the matter of Maurice’s schooling, teaching him accounting and bookkeeping. By the age of ten, the boy was a businessman to be reckoned with and knew enough about how to extract money from others that his grandfather determined that he should be sent to board at Upper Canada College in Toronto, the perfect place, the old man knew, for the Badger to become acquainted with the kind of boys who, when grown, would inherit the fortunes he hoped his grandson would find a way to benefit from.

  By the time Maurice, uniformed and capped, departed for school a few years later, his mother and father had moved away from Timber Island and, with the help of the elder Woodman, had purchased an inexpensive two-story clapboard hotel on the sandy beach at the end of the nearby peninsular County. The rafts had dwindled to a trickle by now, Old Woodman had retired, and Cummings had taken over what remained of the much-diminished business, a business in which, to Branwell’s relief, there was no longer any room for him. Annabelle and her father remained in the big house, she eventually nursing the cranky old man. The Badger, still devoted to his grandfather, would make the day trip from the hotel by way of his own sailboat in the summer or a
n iceboat he had constructed at the Christmas break.

  Branwell, who had painted a number of landscapes in the upstairs and downstairs halls of the inn, was being encouraged by the more prosperous families in the County to decorate their homes. He completed these commissions in the winters when the dry heat thrown by the wood stoves would cause the paint to set, and when there were no guests at the inn. The summers brought a number of city families to the shores of the lake and the verandas of the inn, some from Toronto and Montreal, some from as far away as Albany or Chicago. In spite of his father’s annoyance, Branwell had called the inn “The Ballagh Oisin,” after the mountain pass in Ireland, the story of which had given rise to his name. “It’s a mountain pass,” he would tell inquisitive guests, “in Ireland.” At one point he had staged an evening contest to see who among the visitors could pronounce the name properly. Branwell was a jovial host, much given to jesting. His disposition was greatly improved now that he had left the timber business and had in his life almost everything that his sister had known all along he wanted: Marie, the painted hallways, and an open view of the lake uncluttered by islands of commerce.

  During their third or fourth year at the hotel a letter arrived for Branwell from a fellow-innkeeper in a distant part of Ontario known as the Huron Tract. This was a portion of Upper Canada that had been considered quite useless by Joseph Woodman in that it was situated too far from the Great Lakes – or any other navigable body of water – to make it suitable for timbering, despite rumors of incredible hardwood trees, many of which were twelve to fifteen feet in diameter. A couple of decades before Woodman Senior had established his island empire in close proximity to the relatively civilized town of Kingston, however, a hundred-mile-long inland trail known as the Huron Road was being hacked, sawed, chopped, and burnt through this forest under the direction of the Canada Company, which comprised a group of British and Scottish entrepreneurs, several of whom were named after the wild animals they had killed in other corners of the Commonwealth. Tiger Dunlop is someone who comes immediately to mind, but likely there were other colorful monikers as well – Rhinoceros Smith, Polar Bear MacLeod, Lion McGillivray. The trail ended at the Lake Huron port of Goderich into which the sorry, fly-bitten, half-starved party of blazers and engineers, axemen and surveyors had staggered in the autumn of 1828 after months of exhausting labor and bouts of swamp fever, only to be bullied by the company into making the trek back in the opposite direction in order that improvements might be made to the new road and the land surveyed and divided into saleable plots for would-be settlers.

  A few years later, once the settlers started to arrive, several inns were established by the Canada Company at various points along the road – inns whose fortunes would suffer dramatically when, some years later, another company of entrepreneurs established a railway from the center of the province to the port on the lake. The innkeepers, or their offspring, managed, somehow, to keep the doors of their solid brick Georgian buildings open for a year or two afterwards – though it was clear that their trade had suffered and there was no telling how long their businesses would survive.

  Branwell’s letter was from such an innkeeper, a certain Mister Sebastien Fryfogel Esquire, proprietor of Fryfogel’s Tavern, which was situated on the Huron Road between the town of Berlin and the hamlet of Stratford. He had heard about the colorful murals of the Ballagh Oisin from a traveller who had stayed there, and he felt that paintings of this nature might enhance the rooms of his inn. Would Branwell consider making the voyage to the west? Fryfogel allowed that he normally had no time for the thieves and rogues that roamed the roads of Upper Canada plying their various trades. He listed tinkers, medicine sellers, horse traders, dancers and singers, and itinerant painters as being among the most disreputable and offensive members of that already defective species of the animal kingdom known as human beings. But he had it on the best authority that Mister Branwell Woodman was, like himself, primarily an honest innkeeper, though one who occasionally painted pristine landscapes with no people – and, in particular, no shapely, sinful women in them. His own inn needed dressing up. Would Branwell oblige?

  The letter arrived in early January when funds from the summer had all but dried up and the commissions from mainland locals had slowed to a trickle. Branwell hated the idea of the journey: he had heard the rumors (broken axels, mud, and malaria in summer, overturned sleighs, ghastly blizzards, frostbite, and pneumonia in winter) that circulated about this distant road, and he had no wish to test the accuracy of such rumors. But Marie, who wanted not only to feed her small family but to experiment as well with expensive French dishes in anticipation of hungry and appreciative summer patrons, insisted that he take the commission. “Not much money in it, I’ll wager,” he said, pushing the letter across the table so that Marie could read it.

  “More money than we’ve got here,” she replied but in a philosophic tone, with neither judgment nor malice in her voice.

  “More money than we have got here,” echoed young Maurice, who was home for Christmas vacation. There was a touch of malice in his voice.

  And so, clothed in fur and rugs, Branwell rode in the back of a sleigh bound for the mainland town of Belleville, where he would board the train headed for Toronto, where he would make yet another westbound connection. Mister Fryfogel had written a second letter to say that if Mister Woodman intended to use such an unholy method of transportation as the railroad, it was no business of his and added that he himself, having been almost ruined by the railroad, was only too aware of the double meaning of that phrase. Baden was the name of the stop, he wrote, “a most unpleasant village, born recently as a result of the cursed railroad.” He assured Branwell that he would be able to hire a sleigh at the station and, if conditions were favorable, he would be at the tavern in less than an hour. Sometimes, the innkeeper wrote, there were storms, storms that could make the going a little rough.

  When he alighted at Baden, it became clear to Branwell that conditions were considerably less than favorable. Not a sleigh in sight and there was a biting wind, with a velocity higher than any of the ferocious currents he had recorded in his Timber Island journal, which tore at his coat and tossed the beaver hat from his head. Though it was not yet dark, the air was filled with such a quantity of snow that he could see nothing at all beyond the walls of the small wooden building that served as the apparently deserted station. Then, just as he was giving up hope, a man could be seen walking in his direction across the platform. “Nice day,” the stranger said and was about to continue walking when Branwell caught him by the sleeve of his overcoat and told him his destination.

  “I need to hire a sleigh to get out there today,” he said.

  “Not likely,” said the man. “Not today, not tomorrow, probably not the day after that.”

  “For heaven’s sake, why not?”

  “Road’s closed. Road’s almost always closed. Snow in winter. Mud in summer. Waste of time if you ask me…roads.”

  Branwell was speechless.

  “But,” the stranger offered, “judging by the good weather, you might get out there on snowshoes if you’ve got ’em. Not today though. Too late. You’ll have to put up at Kelterborn’s Bar. Dreadful rooms, but good beer. Thanks to the railroad.” He touched his head and for the first time Branwell noticed the railway cap.

  The wind rose and the station master disappeared, enveloped by a shroud of white. “At least it’s not snowing,” the man said. “Nice sunny day.”

  “Not snowing?” said Branwell as the wind abated somewhat and the man came, once again, partially into view.

  “This stuff is just blowing around. There’s a storm coming through, though. We’re proud of our storms here.” The currents of air, the station master cheerfully explained, coming from the far-off Great Lakes encountered one another directly over this region and, “By Jesus,” he slapped his gloved hands together, “don’t we get snow!” He took Branwell’s arm. “No more trains today,” he said. “Let’s go for a
drink.”

  That night, as Branwell lay on a straw mattress in a room above the bar, his sleep was interrupted by the wind rattling the windows and a strange, vigorous thumping. “Just the ghost,” Kelterborn told him when he inquired the following morning. “We’ve asked him to keep it down, but he won’t. He hates being imprisoned here, prefers to wander.”

  Kelterborn was a large, pink German fellow who presided over his bar with an air of pompous dignity mixed with that of boredom and mild disapproval. Branwell had already learned that his taciturn host was not inclined to give advice of any kind – political, elemental, spiritual – and he declined with a shrug to discuss the state of the road. He refused, in effect, to commit to anything beyond the price of the drink in your hand, or that of your bed for the night. His smooth, broad forehead glowed. The bottles behind him on the shelf shone. The Quebec heater roared. And, as the station master had said, his beer was good. Branwell was not, in fact, much of a drinker, but he had consumed enough beer the previous night to produce both a morning headache and a general sense of unreality into which the notion of the ghost fit nicely.

  “Like you,” Kelterborn offered, “the ghost has been trying to get out to Fryfogel’s. Been here for a couple of weeks at least, might be here all winter.”

  Branwell rose at this point and, eager for some oxygen, headed for the porch, which, like the rest of the structure where he was sheltering, was made of rough-hewn logs. When he was finally able to push the front door open against the wind, it became evident that several Great Lake currents had collided during the night. A prodigious quantity of snow was falling from the sky, adding inches to the deep white sea that stretched off in all directions over the acres of townships that Branwell knew were named after the entrepreneurs who had cut them clean, divided them up, and sold them off. Everything else was named after European towns and villages. How absurd, he thought, that the spot where he now stood, a place where nothing happened but a succession of blizzards as far as he could tell, should be named after a tourist spa situated in a picturesque corner of the Austrian Alps. Even more absurd that the collection of squatters shanties and jagged stumps that he had heard existed farther west was apparently called London, and that the two major rivers in the vicinity became, therefore, the Thames and the Little Thames. Did this not show a singular lack of imagination? Branwell thought that it did.