“My legs want a stretch,” said the old man. “If we walk up around the point, we might see the Montreal boat coming in.”
Another town hard as Liverpool would smash you.
Didn’t have the wire for it, did you.
HE KEPT stumbling and tripping, his legs not adjusted to the buck of solid ground. The old man walked serenely. It was raining. Ormsby seemed younger, more limber, now, in his own country.
To get around the tip of the island they cut in through a thicket of fir, red willow, and birch not yet in leaf, the old man slashing at branches with his stick. There were fiddleheads waiting for the sun to open and lumps of grainy blue snow in the deepest shade.
They finally came out to a little headland with a view upriver. He could no longer see the ships downstream. Ormsby hoisted himself onto a boulder and began striking a steel to relight his cigar.
The green St. Lawrence seemed electric and forceful, flaunting a sense of hazard.
All she is, is a parcel of information traveling inside your brain.
You could always find another girl couldn’t you? Buy yourself another girl.
Pulling off his boots, rolling up his trousers, he waded out a few feet. The water was terribly cold.
What happens to the dead dropped into this river?
What he’d enjoyed was her smell. The sweet smell of her neck, nose, and lips. Also, her toughness; and her wicked determination to stay alive, which had been so powerful, and capable, he had believed, of carrying both of them through.
The bottom was pebbled and sandy. He made himself stand quite still while the water was numbing his feet and shins.
What you must do: Struggle. Watch. Proceed.
When he looked straight down, the water was a dozen shades of green.
He kept still, waiting for a fish.
After a minute or so, he saw one swimming. Almost near enough to scoop with his hands if only he were quick enough.
A fish knew what it wanted. A moving case of hunger.
Wading ashore, he began searching for a stick that was supple enough and sufficiently long for a lister.
“May I have use of your knife?” he called to Ormsby, perched on the boulder, puffing his cigar.
The old man dug into his pocket and tossed him down a clasp knife, and he began peeling the stick to the bright green underneath, then the heartwood. In a couple of minutes he had whittled one end to a sharp point.
You do not want feelings, but emptiness inside. Resilience, poise. No attachment.
Gripping the springy lister, he waded out until the water reached halfway up his thighs. He waited, letting the cold bite.
A kill is patience.
He saw a flash, and then the salmon rose almost to the surface, writhing through the water with a couple of elegant twitches.
A fish was always hunting.
He could feel Ormsby observing from his perch.
That old man knew enough to be silent.
Come, sweetheart. I will treat you nice.
Was Molly sleeping? Dreaming? Was he part of the dream?
Ought not think of her. Ought to turn her off.
Get another. Sure.
Feelings weigh nothing. Sorrow is a vapor.
A girl gets inside, though, just as a thief does.
Men get hard, don’t they? They coarsen.
He raised the lister and was about to thrust when the silence was broken with the shriek of a whistle. Glancing up, he saw the Montreal steamer, perhaps a quarter mile off, water cascading off her paddle wheel.
Even as he plunged the spear he knew he’d missed his chance. The fish touched him, writhing between his legs and swiftly out of reach.
Upriver
FROM MONTREAL IT WAS SEVEN weeks’ journey on to Rupert’s Land. “Make the trip with us and you shall have your apprenticeship,” Ormsby promised. “Apprenticeship leading to clerkship. Clerkship to factorship. You’d count for something then. Men get rich in the trade, see if you don’t.”
The old man had paid for a cabin with two neat berths. It was two days to Montreal by steamer, with stops at Quebec and Three Rivers. Emigrants slept on deck, and the only other cabin passengers were two pink-cheeked English officers traveling to join their regiment at Montreal, and willing to play cards all night with Ormsby in the captain’s saloon while Fergus lay in his uppermost berth, unable to sleep, aware of the seethe of William Molson’s boilers, the machinery of iron arms and gears turning her paddle wheel, stroking them upriver.
What would you feel in the heart of a fire? The roar of the blaze hammering your ears, smoke packing your throat, flames dabbling at your skin. What would you feel as everything was collapsing? Whom would you see in those flames?
A THUNDERSTORM shook the sky after midnight. He heard rain beating down and knew it must be soaking them out on deck under their little shebangs of blankets and baggage. The old man’s berth was empty; he was still at cards, with the pair of shiny soldiers.
Men get rich in the trade.
He wouldn’t mind being rich. Being noisy in a carriage. Feet in glossy boots.
Shea’s gentlemen, in beautiful clothes, selecting girls.
Shea’s kindness to him. The memory of which would die with him. The world buries everything.
He did not wish to review the dead; it was painful sorting, no use.
He was for entering a trade.
Luck had kept you alive so far, and was holding.
A girl climbs inside your skin, though. It can be difficult to breathe.
Never very good at holding on, was she? Not constant. Didn’t have that in her.
ORMSBY RETURNED at dawn, red with victory. Sitting on the edge of his berth and counting his winnings, he was full of plans.
“We’ll find you a wife up the country. Fort Edmonton, the Christmas dances, Blackfoot girls on the hop — how they dance to a fiddle — you’ll not see a foot touch the ground. Passion is necessary, man! Nothing like warm feelings!”
Lying in his upper berth, none of the talk could touch him, it was insubstantial, it had no grip or feel. It was just noise. What was real was the pressure singing in the steam boilers and the crazy throbbing of the wheel.
His engine of days was bust, somehow. The world no longer convincing.
AT THE breakfast table the captain said eighteen fever cases had developed overnight among the deck passengers. Even the two English officers sipping coffee looked seedy and disarrayed, coats unbuttoned and hair unbrushed, whispering if you please and thank you to the little steward filling their cups.
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with them,” Ormsby said as he walked the cabin deck after breakfast, clutching Fergus’s arm like an old, powerful bird, a hawk with talons. “I beat ’em! Beat ’em all night and something ferocious. Losing a hundred at cards will give any young fellow a poor color, especially on his way to joining a regiment the dear old pater can’t afford in the first place.”
From the rail they looked down at the fever cases lying out on the main deck, wrapped in their blankets in the bright, hot Canada sun.
“God have mercy,” Ormsby shivered. “All my life, Fergus, I have watched people die, of broken necks, plague, fever, cold. Never understood what to make of it, or if there’s anything there. Only that it’s a ruthless sort of a business, and the secrets are all buried.”
THEIR FIRST death was off the town of Three Rivers. The victim had no friends aboard, his wife and children having died on the Atlantic crossing. From the cabin deck Fergus watched the bos’n sewing the dead man into a piece of oilskin with chunks of iron for ballast, then the deckhands picking up the shrouded corpse on a board, lifting it to the rail, and letting it fall into the river.
Three more of the fever cases died that afternoon between Three Rivers and the St. Mary’s current. He heard the captain tell the hands to put them over quickly, but this time their relatives refused to let crewmen near the bodies, insisting the dead be left in peace until they could be carried ashore at
Montreal and buried in the ground like Christians.
Water’s always moving, you can’t lie there. There’s no ending, down there. Perhaps for fish.
A body wants the ground.
Montreal
FROM THE CABIN DECK, he watched a collection of iron roofs and steeples panning white in the evening sun, and the hump of a mountain rising behind the gray stone buildings of Montreal town.
The captain had told Ormsby steamers were not permitted to land emigrants at the city quays; instead they would be put ashore at Windmill Point, where fever sheds had been erected. “Montreal certainly don’t want the Irish,” Ormsby remarked.
The current at Windmill Point was awkward and William Molson, coming in with steam up and paddle wheel flashing, banged into the quay with such force that passengers were knocked off their feet. The deckhands were already throwing lines ashore, making fast, and before the gangway was run out he could see people pitching their baggage onto the quay, and lodging-house runners seizing it up and throwing it into their carts.
Everyone screaming.
Fear, haste, thievery.
They had arrived.
THE OLD man paid the deckhands to carry his boxes and trunks onto the quay, then hired a horse cart and told the driver to deliver his baggage to Donegani’s Hotel on Notre Dame Street. William Molson’s fever cases were being carried off to lazarettos, long wooden sheds exactly like those on the quarantine island. The English officers had hired a carriage and were offering a lift to town. “No, we’ll walk, gentlemen, thank you kindly,” he told them. “I want to find my land legs.”
The fever sheds were newly built and stood in a midden of mud and sawdust. In a sheep meadow out beyond, long fresh ridges of brown soil had been planted with whitewashed crosses, and gravediggers at work in a trench were so deep that only their hats showed, and the bites of soil flinging off their spades.
A blinkered horse stood placidly harnessed to a cart with six yellow coffins stacked aboard.
“They have come a long way to die,” Ormsby remarked.
You imagine her heat inside one of them boxes, nailed shut.
IN THE open fields that lay between Windmill Point and the town, emigrants were sheltering in hundreds of shebangs made from scraps of lumber, tin, and sailcloth. Traffic of drays and carts, wagons, and barrows began thickening as they came into Montreal. At every street corner were emigrants perched on piles of baggage, men sucking their pipes, women nursing red babies. All wore the same bewildered expression.
“I always expected to die in a river,” Ormsby’s voice sounded small, or perhaps it was just the noise all around, teamsters cracking whips, wagons groaning. Fergus looked at him. Something had lit inside the old man, a yellow energy burning. He gripped Fergus’s arm. “The North River, the French, Rainy River,” he gasped, “the Winnipeg, the Churchill, the North Saskatchewan. Columbia herself. We used to take any kind of chance, run any kind of a chute, to save ourselves a carry.”
“You’d be clean in a river,” Fergus said.
“Yes. You’d be clean.”
Fergus looked at him closely. His face had flushed pink. “Are you not well?”
“A little bit of a heat.” Ormsby began to laugh, the laugh became a sputter, then Fergus had to support him while coughing racked his body.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” the old man sputtered. “My knees . . . ache. Something dreadful. They do.”
That was fever.
Of course it was.
“How far is it to go? Shall I hire a cart?”
“No, no. I must walk it . . . walk it out. Dreadful cramps, that’s all. ’Tis all those weeks aboard . . . not natural. Come along, Fergus, come along, I ain’t stopping here.”
Wind fluttered the scent of hay through the muddy street. Horses and muck. Stone buildings with iron shutters. Flies humming.
The old man had halted again, this time on a little iron bridge humped over a canal; the canal lined with factories, their chimneys smoking. In the factory yards he could see organized stacks of yellow lumber and ash heaps big as houses. Dozens of workmen swarming over a steamboat that was being constructed.
“Busy is money,” Ormsby wheezed. “This is all upriver trade.” Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he mopped his brow. “Sometimes the world resembles an animal, Fergus. A bull. A lost sheep. A gray wolf. I’ve seen the world at Red River looking like a fox in autumn.”
Fever talking.
He watched a timber raft, sculling along the canal.
Thinking of Molly’s smell, touch, noise.
He remembered lying on his back in bracken on top of the world, hearing cattle, knowing every sound. Shadows of clouds speeding across the mountain.
But the past is nothing.
The world cuts you open. You don’t close.
“Plenty of Irishmen working in the timber.” Ormsby’s voice had a low, strained urgency. “The Canadians fight ’em . . . the work’s in winter . . . flooding out of the backwoods now. Drink up their pay . . . we’ll have a few of ’em for the brigade.”
Talking for the courage. Talking to hear himself alive.
“Here, you’ll need something in hand.” Taking out his purse, Ormsby withdrew a gold sovereign and held it out.
“What do you want out of me, mister?”
“You’ll need money for the town. Tomorrow we’ll get you a decent suit of clothes.”
“What do you care what happens to me?”
“You must learn to accept a gift. There is fortune as well as misfortune, you know.”
Fergus took the coin. “I’m a loose rock, mister. I’m a ribbonman for all you know —”
“You put me in mind of my boy, Daniel. Many Gray Horses, in the Blackfoot language. The Constant Sky of the Crow. Not in looks. In spirit, perhaps.”
“— I might get a gun and shoot you in your bed.”
“You might. That’s a British sovereign, mind,” the old man whispered, “worth six Yankee dollars at least. Put it away — don’t flash your money — don’t let the quackers cheat you. If they offer French louis take fifteen at least. As for Spanish dollars, I wouldn’t touch ’em.”
Peering down through iron grillwork, Fergus watched the raft sweeping underneath the bridge. “I like money.”
“It’s very useful,” Ormsby agreed. “Here give me your arm again, Fergus, I’m not the fellow I was.”
They kept walking. The old man was stringy, rocky, tough. The fever hadn’t smothered him yet.
A red-haired girl passed, carrying a duck in a basket. He heard Molly’s voice
I’ve wanted to be a wheel
and then her whole shape — sleeping, disordered, sexual — was plangent in his mind.
Late-afternoon sun skipped off the river. Iron roofs stuttering light. In Notre Dame Street a small barefoot girl in a shawl and muddy skirts grabbed at his sleeve. “Come along, a ghrá, have a suck, only a shilling,” but he put her off and kept walking, the old man saying nothing but leaning heavy on his arm. He saw a horse dealer leading a string of black ponies and a pair of pretty girls swinging sacks of turnips off the back of a cart. Smoke of coffee leaking from somewhere.
The world is hard and real, the world is not private.
DONEGANI’S HOTEL
Wines Baths and Carriages
to
Pleasure Travelers
&
Men of Business
“No good comes of no good, Mr. Ormsby,” said Donegani the innkeeper, a thick man in a black jacket, wearing cowhide slippers. His small black eyes studied Fergus. “I don’t like the look of this fellow, Mr. Ormsby, to tell you the truth. Town is thick with Irish come up the river. Pack of wolves. It’s not the trade I’m used to in my house.”
A weak fire of logs sizzled in the grate — Donegani had been working his accounts when they arrived, and a ledger was spread open on the high desk, with a sheaf of bills alongside, a pot of ink, and a steel pen.
Ink’s aroma recalling the shack whe
re he’d scratched his mark, before walking up the hill to Muldoon’s.
Seeing her outside the shanty boiling wash.
“I told you, man, if you would listen: we are shipmates, traveling together from Liverpool.” Ormsby signed the register with a flourish. “He goes out a clerk with our spring brigade. Are you saying a young gentleman in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company ain’t custom for your hotel?”
Ormsby was holding himself together but Fergus could see the flush on his cheeks.
You could fight fever for a while but it couldn’t be renounced.
“With the Company, you say?” The innkeeper smiled. “Well that’s another matter, of course.”
Perhaps they didn’t see the fever on Ormsby because he was a gentleman.
“Put him in one of those small rooms at the front,” Ormsby ordered. “Fix him a bath. Give him a fire if he wants one. Myself as well. And he’ll dine with me.” Taking a sovereign from his purse, he flipped into the air. The innkeeper snatched it like a frog grabbing a bug.
A man has to lie down and die somewhere, doesn’t he.
* * *
A BRASS bed, made up with linen sheets and clean blankets. The servant girl, after opening the window and thumping the pillows on the bed, asking if he wished the stove to be lit.
A shock to find yourself alive in a new country.
Standing at the window, listening to birds clicking on the iron roof, he could see a narrow piece of the river.
“Mister! Will you have a fire, or won’t you?”
“No, it’s warm enough.”
“We had snow on the ground last week. Have you only just come over?”
“I have.”
“From where?”
“Liverpool.”
“But where in Ireland?”
“Dublin.”
“Aughnish, in Fánaid, that was our country. Do you know it?”
The Law of Dreams Page 35