A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  Branwell sat down again. “Almost completely out of business,” he said. “Or at least out of the business of transporting barley. The Americans slapped an enormous tariff on his shipments last month. On everyone’s shipments. They want to use their own barley now … and barley,” he lifted his eyes to his sister’s face, “the price of Canadian barley fell to twenty cents a bushel last week.” He raised one hand, then let it drop. “He still builds ships, of course. Gilderson was clever enough to change to steam early on. And steamships will go on forever.”

  “I doubt it,” said Annabelle, removing a ledger from the edge of Dereen Bog and watching the map slowly curl back into a cylindrical shape. “Nothing goes on forever.”

  As an old man, during his last visit to the hotel, while he and Branwell were sitting on the porch on a summer’s night, Joseph Woodman had put down the paper he was reading and had turned to his son. It’s odd, he had said, but we have no raft on the river tonight. Not one raft. And Branwell, who by then had nothing at all to do with the timber business, had experienced, to his astonishment, a feeling of loss so profound that tears jumped into his eyes, for it was the first time in decades that, when the river was open, that no Timber Island raft was making its way to Quebec. The cargoes of logs, you see, would have been arriving at the quay less and less frequently, the numbers of coureurs du bois thinning out as the men drifted to more dependable forms of employment. Branwell reported in his journal that while he and his father sat on the porch, one of the season’s spectacular full moons was hovering over the dark water and because that water was so uncharacteristically still (“nary a zephyr disturbed the serene silence,” he wrote), the silver path to the shore was like an invitation to walk on the lake. It was the beginning of the end, and both men knew it. Old Marcel Guerin was climbing the stairs to the sail loft less and less often to repair ropes and canvas because there were fewer and fewer sails on the lake. Shipbuilding of the kind for which Timber Island was famous was almost at a standstill. The steamers with their plumes of black smoke marked a horizon that was once busy with barques and schooners. And, most tragic of all, the last of the great forests were down.

  Until that moment, though, there had seemed to be a never-ending supply of wood from those forests and this inexhaustibility had suggested to Branwell that one raft or another would be present on the river for all the summers to come. Only much later in life was he able to realize that, even in a colony whose wealth was founded entirely on the slaughtering of wild animals and the clear-cutting of forests, there were moments of pure magic. His journal, when he was home, had been filled with announcements pertaining to the arrival of ships whose names put one in mind of a courtly procession of gorgeous women: The Alma Lee, The Hannah Coulter, The Minerva Cook, The Lucille Godin, The Nancy Breen, The Susan Swan, The Mary Helen Carter. Travelling downriver, he had been witness to spray in the distance and the men kneeling and reaching for their beads in the remaining calm minutes before the short, terrifying journey through the Coteau Rapids. And then there had been the evening meal on the river, the men singing and, the following day, the French villages along the shore coming into view, steeple by steeple.

  Now, Branwell and the white-haired Ghost were sweeping sand from the same porch on which his father had made his sad declaration. But this was an act of futility. The sandy fields were full of the scant beginnings of starved crops of barley that would never ripen. Just that week three farming families nearby had left their houses, their ruined land, and had moved out of the County, heading for the city and the hope of a factory job.

  “Horses don’t like sand,” said Ghost. “The going’s too tough for them. I’ll have to have to find some place more hospitable to horses.”

  Branwell wasn’t listening. He was thinking instead about an anecdote told to him by his father when he was a boy. He could see in his mind’s eye the Windsor chair that his parent had occupied and the glow of a pressed-glass oil lamp, so the story must have been told to him in the evening, probably in winter, he decided, as the old man was so busy in the summer there wouldn’t have been time for the kind of reflection the tale required.

  The elder Woodman, who had been young at the time when the story took place, had been in Ireland, standing on the edges of Knockaneden Bog. “A dreary waste if ever there was one,” he had commented, staring at Canuig Mountain when he noticed a surprisingly large procession making its way down the incline.

  “What the devil is that?” young Joseph Woodman had asked the man who had conducted him to the vicinity of the bog, in order, he was to discover, that he might see the remains of an interesting buried trackway recently uncovered by turf cutters. The trackway, his father had assured Branwell, was nothing of the kind, was just a scattering of stones that the Irishman believed was proof of an earlier civilization when roads had flourished in the district.

  “That,” Joseph Woodman’s aged companion had told him, pointing up the mountain, “is the funeral procession of a man of only forty some years of age, called O’Shea, and him the last one being brought out of there. The last man being brought down out of Coomavoher,” he said. “All the rest gone away or dead before him. And isn’t the place only ruins and vacancies now with him gone.”

  Everything in the Iveragh was ruins and vacancies as far as Woodman could tell.

  “And I remember,” the old Irishman had said, “when he went in there after marrying a woman who had the grass of three cows from her father, he went in with a wardrobe on his back, straight up the mountain with a wardrobe on his back. He was that strong.” The speaker had crossed himself and added, “Heavens be his bed.”

  His father had smiled. “Now that is the definition of avoidable difficulty,” he said to his son. “Who but a fool would choose to live in such a wild, inhospitable place? No one but an Irishman would endeavour to haul furniture to such a grey, destitute, though”—he had admitted with an uncharacteristically dreamy look in his eye—“in certain lights, beautiful mountain.” From where he had been standing, he assured Branwell, he had been able to see traces of neither grass nor animal. This young O’Shea should have forgotten about the woman and her cows, his father insisted, should instead have walked in the opposite direction and got out of the place altogether, unless of course, he had been able to do something about draining the godforsaken bog, the vapours from which had undoubtedly floated up the mountain and killed him.

  Branwell remembered this story now as he and Ghost continued to sweep, sand crunching under their feet when they moved and filling in the areas they had cleared just a short while before. His father, he realized, would have met a courteous people in Ireland, a people delighted by the appearance of a stranger, eager to relate their own history that, not being able to write, they would have carried with them—letter perfect—in their minds. They would have had the whole of their vast territory—thousands of acres—in their memories: each rock, each bush, all hills and mountains and the long beaches called strands. They would not have understood (and, according to his father, could not have understood) the idea of maps, maps like the ones Annabelle had shown him, and probably would have been suspicious of the notion that all known things could be reduced to a piece of paper no larger than a tabletop. They had named everything already, and from the sound of the names his father sometimes recited angrily, wistfully, the poetry of the naming had entered their speech. Ballaig Oisin was such a name.

  “Ballaig Oisin,” he said, leaning on his broom. “Who but a fool would endeavour to remain in this impossible place just because it is beautiful under certain angles of light?” It was especially beautiful right at this moment when the dunes were painted mauve and pink by the lowering sun and the water beyond them was blue and black satin topped by white lace, made so by the same wind that was bringing sand into the interior corners of his hotel. In the bay, a stranded schooner tilted sideways, its bow driven deep into one of the new invisible sandbars just beneath the surface of the water. Even the lake itself seemed to have joined thi
s conspiracy of relentless sand. For all he knew it could be turning itself into a desert.

  “I’ve seen that boat,” Ghost nodded in the direction of the abandoned schooner. “I’ve seen that boat unfurl its sails and cross the bay in the middle of the night. Could see all the passengers too, and the crew, stretching out their arms and calling from the deck.”

  Branwell raised his eyebrows and looked at his friend. “You dreamed that,” he told him. “Everyone on that ship waded to shore. In another week they could have reached land without getting their feet wet.”

  “Dreamed it … saw it … makes no difference. A ghost ship is never a good sign.”

  Branwell could hear the sounds Marie was making in the kitchen, cleaning up after the evening meal she had prepared for the three of them. It was autumn; there were never many guests remaining in the hotel in this season, but Branwell had every reason to believe that, next summer, there would be no guests at all. The Ballagh Oisin was finished. He was certain of this.

  “You’ll be here for a while yet,” said Ghost. “You’ll stay here until your son moves and gets settled up in that big house on the hill.”

  There were times when Branwell felt that Ghost’s telepathy was intrusive, but he had learned, over the years, to trust what the man had to say. “ What hill?” he asked. “What house?”

  “Thirty some miles to the west,” said Ghost, his eyes narrowing. “Near a village called Colborne named after colonial administrator and rebellion crusher John Colborne, a merciless old powermonger if there ever was one. But that’s the way things unfold. Your son will be a merciless old powermonger as well. There is no stopping destiny.” He paused for a moment. “I think there is another hill in his future as well, in Ottawa. He’s going to be a relentless, old political ranter, as far as I can tell.”

  Branwell laughed wryly, and for the first time in days.

  “Yes, sir,” said Ghost, reading Branwell’s mind, “a henpecked man in politics is a force to be reckoned with.”

  The next morning when Branwell ventured out to the stables he found Ghost saddling up the white horse that had been given to him by the family as a Christmas gift just two years before and that, proud of his sense of humour, he had called Spectre. His carpetbag was packed, and his mandolin was tied to the pommel of the saddle. “Taking her away from this,” he said, stroking the animal’s muzzle. “It’s back to Baden for us. There’s a new tavern right across from the station where I can entertain, and I might get some kind of work out at Fryfogel’s, though the old man’s dead and the place is no longer an inn.”

  “How do you know he’s dead?” Branwell was aware that the question was ridiculous as soon as it was out of his mouth.

  Ghost didn’t bother to reply but said instead that two of the sons, fair to middling farmers, now lived there with their wives and children, in the rooms of what had been the inn.

  They walked with the horse out of the darkness of the stables into the vivid autumn light. Choked by sand, the dying trees in the vicinity of the hotel had shed their leaves in midsummer, and now their leafless limbs threw tangled shadows over the surrounding dunes. “Well, I wish I could offer you something here,” said Branwell. “But, as you can see, there’s not much hope of that. So I guess I’ll say goodbye, then. I suppose I’ll miss you, though.”

  “Not for long, you won’t,” said Ghost. “The walls out at Fryfogel’s aren’t painted yet, remember, and now you’re going to need the money.” He mounted the horse. “See you in the winter!” he called over his shoulder as the horse struggled through the sand in the direction of Maurice’s monstrous brick house (which sported a large For Sale sign on the yard fence) and the sand-covered road that led to a more stable world.

  “Not in the winter!” shouted Branwell. “I’m never going back there in winter.”

  “Oh yes you are!” the Ghost shouted back. “You can be sure of that.”

  Branwell watched what remained of the road until Ghost was out of sight. Then he turned to face the hotel. Some of the white paint had been scoured from the exterior by the sand-laden wind, and the worn grey clapboard was showing through. And then there was Marie’s pale face at the kitchen window. He raised his arm to wave to her. She did not wave back but turned away, instead, and disappeared from view.

  Annabelle, despite her fierce independence and her absolute practicality, was assaulted by passion in midlife, assaulted and imprisoned for a brief time until sorrow released her. Yes, even Annabelle was caught, likely while looking in some other direction altogether. It began at sunset one early evening in the autumn of the following year. There was a cloud, engorged by sun, hanging like fire over the ships at Kingston pier on the mainland. She gathered together her watercolours and sketchbook and walked outdoors, delighted by the apparent effect of fire on pale brown sails. This was an atmospheric opportunity. She would have to be quick to capture it.

  Yes, this had been the summer when everything fell into ruin: the hotel, Caroline’s gazebo, the price of barley, the summer that Maurice, in spite of his wife’s resistance, had finally gone ahead and put his house up for sale. Annabelle had just returned from the Ballagh Oisin and her clothes still danced on the line outside, shedding sand as they were “aired.” All day long she had been worrying about Marie, who had been filled with distress at the thought of everything she and Branwell had so carefully put together being taken slowly, painfully apart.

  Who would have imagined, though, that Annabelle would count herself among those who stumbled, who risked a complete collapse? She was just over forty years old and looking forward to a life spent earning a modest living and painting the decaying hulks in Wreck Bay, as well as the healthier ships that were across the water in Kingston Harbour. Moreover, she had been visited by the sin of pride. Despite her former dislike of it, she had been pleased by her mastery of the salvage business, delighted, in fact, by the independence it afforded her. She even dared to hope that she might be able to help her brother and her friend when the time came, as she feared it would, for them to leave the hotel.

  What made her soften, then, and agree finally that Mister Gilderson could bargain with her for the island? Was it his own decline, his own loss of authority? Perhaps she wanted to see him sitting on the other side of her desk, his fortune diminished, his ability to bully those around him subsiding. Perhaps, despite her father’s dying words, she believed that it would be impossible for her father’s old rival to carry out his plan to purchase the property and what remained of her equipment. Perhaps she wanted to see him humiliated, grappling with that impossibility. She believed that she hated him.

  But there was something else as well. She had to admit that, when all was said and done, she wasn’t entirely against selling to Gilderson. In fact, it would have given her some satisfaction, a little taste of power in the face of her now safely dead but still strangely controlling father. Though gone now for years, he continued to speak—often, in fact—in her mind, dispensing advice and admonitions. She had never been afraid of him, and she wasn’t now, but occasionally she felt he was voicing his disapproval as he had attempted to do in the past. “For God’s sake, don’t sell to that bandit Gilderson!” Annabelle could imagine her father shouting these words, flushed with rage, glaring at her from under his thick eyebrows that resembled grey broom straw. Though his rival had been a decade younger than him, and would therefore to his mind be permanently undereducated and inexperienced in the ways of lake transport, her father had always believed that his own business was threatened whenever Gilderson turned his attention to the eastern end of the lake.

  Gilderson and his servant were lodging in the ancient and no longer entirely satisfactory guest house that Annabelle herself, having no domestic staff of her own, had prepared for him. Shortly after his arrival, she had conducted him to the office where she had talked to him at length about what remained of the business. Later, while he was making a slow, private inspection of the island, she had prepared an evening meal of mutton stew,
a meal they took together in the parlour while the servant ate in the kitchen. Annabelle had had difficulty concentrating on the polite conversation concerning Branwell and Caroline that the occasion seemed to demand. Along with her father’s voice, an absurd list of all the goods Gilderson had trafficked up and down the lakes was building itself in her mind: barley, cabbages, weather vanes, sets of china, hacksaws, buggies, furniture, whisky, horses, human beings. What a lot of things there are in the world, she thought, and more all the time. Oran Gilderson, she realized, was a master of displacement, and now by the looks of things, it was she who was going to be displaced.

  After dinner, he asked if he might smoke, and when Annabelle said by all means, he poured a small amount of golden tobacco out of a leather pouch and firmly pushed the flakes into the bowl of his pipe. He turned his chair away from the table and toward the window, then leaned forward to strike a match on the bottom of his boot. This match, though Annabelle didn’t yet know she would want to save it, was destined for her scrapbook, her splinter book.

  Gilderson gazed with thoughtful satisfaction out the window. “Good,” he said finally. “Not a single lighthouse in sight.”

  “There are several in the vicinity, however,” Annabelle told him. “Two on either side of Kingston and one on Insignificant Island. Did you not see them on your walk?” She had painted all three at one time or another, always under stormy conditions and with a ship, sometimes two, smashing into the nearby rocks. “They can be seen quite clearly from several spots on Timber Island but never from the house itself.”

  Gilderson puffed away without comment for several minutes. “I was not looking at the view on my walk,” he said. “I was searching for equipment.” Then he stood and walked to the fire, where he began to remove the remaining ashes from his pipe by knocking it against the grate for what seemed to Annabelle to be an exaggeratedly long time. Eventually he turned to Annabelle and told her he would not be purchasing her property. She did not ask why he had suddenly taken this position, but he told her anyway. “Too many lighthouses in the district,” he said, “and, despite what you may think, lighthouses are dangerous for my ships.”