The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  Spring filtered slowly into the Pontiac that year. Some days, looking up, Joe saw patterns of geese winging north in a soft blue sky, and the air had a sweetness and smelled of mud. He postponed the future and waited for Mick Heaney to show up, and watched his mother dying.

  Ellenora took no food and only a little water. The girls washed her every afternoon with soft yellow sponges and rubbed an ointment made from fat and mashed herbs on her sprouting bedsores. On the first of April it snowed a foot, and the old priest, wrapped in a buffalo robe and complaining bitterly of the cold, rode out from Sheenboro on a sleigh, heard Ellenora’s confession, and offered her the sacrament of extreme unction. She refused to see a doctor, and no one knew how much longer she would last. The wise woman with her blue bottle had been dead for years.

  The morning after the priest’s visit, Hope was hanging laundry on the porch when she caught sight of Mick Heaney coming up the road, and she hurried inside to tell Joe. Their stepfather had set his fiddle down on the porch and was pissing in a snowbank when Joe came up behind him, threw a harness strap over him, and knocked him down.

  Kate and Hope, shawls around their heads, breathing steam into the chilly air, watched Tom and Grattan kneel on Mick’s chest and Joe wrap his wrists and ankles with the same thick cord they used for tying up hogs and sheep. It had started snowing in large, wet flakes.

  Lemme gah, yuh sons a’ bitches.

  They tried to carry Mick into the barn but he writhed and bucked so frantically they dropped him on the frozen mud, where he lay snapping like a turtle, eyes violet against the skin of fresh snow.

  Tear yuh lip to hole, yuh crowd a’ skunks.

  “Come on, boys, let’s pick him up,” Joe ordered.

  Tom stood back, looking worried. “Do you really think we ought to?”

  “Yeah, Joe, are you sure?” asked Grattan.

  Ah’ll fuckin crack the jaysus outta yuh. Lemme gah.

  Joe kicked Mick in the ribs, hard. Mick grunted and sucked breath, too startled to scream.

  “Listen,” Joe said. Hunkering down, he caught the acrid stink of Mick’s breath. Their stepfather was flopping like a fresh-caught trout, sucking and biting air.

  “We don’t care if you live or die,” Joe said softly. “There isn’t anyone to hear you, and no one to care if they did. So save your breath.”

  Mick stopped writhing and lay still. The whites of his eyes were stained yellow, his nose and cheeks strewn with a raw lacework of red and purple veins.

  Joe stood up and glanced at his sisters on the porch, wrapped in their shawls, fine faces pale with cold. His sisters’ thoughts and desires had always been obscure to him, as unknowable as the mental lives of animals, but he felt packed, latent, charged by his responsibility to protect them.

  Tom and Grattan were rubbing their feet on the ground like nervous cattle.

  “Boys,” Joe said, “this is the first of many.”

  Using the toe of his boot, he rolled Mick onto his stomach, then kicked as hard as he could. Mick yelped.

  “You know what that’s for. Stay off those girls.”

  The snow was changing to a hissing, freezing rain. Powerful spring storms would soon be breaking down the last hunks of old snow, skid roads would be turning to mud, and another season in the woods would be over. Joe could smell open ground somewhere. If his father had not been killed in a skirmish on an African farm none of this would be happening. This day, he thought, might not exist.

  Mick snuffled. Joe pressed his boot firmly between his stepfather’s shoulder blades to prevent him rolling over or trying to stand up.

  It was the sort of day when a horse might slip on the skid road and break a leg. Rain would lacquer bare branches with drippings of silver, and soon it would be mud season, when nothing moved, when the ice on the river was too soft to bear weight, when everything was an argument for staying put, counting up, waiting. The whole country locked down under a kind of mystery.

  “You next, Little Priest. Everyone must take a crack,” Joe said.

  Tom stopped scratching the ground with his boot and gazed down at their stepfather. On the porch the two girls had clasped hands.

  “Go on. Give him one, but hard.”

  But Tom still hesitated.

  Joe squatted, seizing a handful of Mick’s hair. “Listen to me. Touch any one of us, and we’ll do you worse and worse. We’ll cut off your old pecker and put it up your nose.”

  Tom suppressed a wild giggle as Joe stood up.

  “Now.”

  Tom stepped forward suddenly and booted Mick in his haunches. Mick screamed.

  “Not hard enough,” Joe said. “Now you, Sojer Boy. Give it to him good.”

  Grattan’s kick was powerful enough to flop Mick over on his back, where he lay groaning and rubbing his face with his bound wrists in what looked like a pantomime of someone waking from a deep sleep.

  “Let me try again, Joe,” Tom said. “I didn’t really get much of a piece of him.”

  Pig killing began that way. Slowly, almost shyly. Smoke and steam and nippy air. The tang of steel knives being honed. And ended, always, with frenzy, laughter and shouting, and black blood soaking the ground.

  “Hold on until we get him in the shed,” Joe said.

  Mick was snuffling again.

  “Cry all you want,” Joe told him. “You’ll still get what’s coming.”

  Seizing Mick under his scrawny shoulders, Joe and Grattan began dragging him towards the barn while Tom ran ahead to let the cow out. They laid him down on the straw and shit, then picked up their axe handles and hefted them.

  Joe struck first, then the others. Each blow made a smacking sound, like water bursting on rocks. Joe could hear his brothers breathing hard and see their breath fluting in the damp, chilly air. Tom was giggling and crying at the same time. Not all that different from a pig killing.

  “That’s enough,” Joe said finally. “Stop.”

  Mick lay gurgling in the straw, lips split like overripe berries. Pink blood foamed at his nostrils. He had soiled himself, and the air stank of excrement and blood. Reaching down, Joe seized Mick’s wet shirtfront. The backs of his hands had green bruises, big as walnuts. He was weeping.

  Standing in the muddy shed with the rain hissing outside and his stepfather flopping like a broken bird at his feet, Joe felt a heightened awareness of the world, its patterns of noise, light, and smell, and at the same time he saw his life’s path with new clarity and vivacity. He would not stay in this country, this forest, the watershed of the Ottawa. It was dark and restricted. He would head out west and take some position — junior clerk, say, or assistant purchasing agent — with one of the big railway contractors. Studying the business from the inside, he would see how money — eighty-five thousand per mile! — flowed through a big undertaking. Once he had learned the courses and channels money took, identified the dams and floods and leaks, he could assemble his own combination of men, money, machinery, and take on such works himself. Running timber gangs in the bush — sixty rugged fellows, half of them without a word of English — had taught him how to organize men, get the job done, and see a profit, always.

  And out there he must find a sort of woman who was a better, finer person than he was, and win her somehow, make himself live up to her beauty and ideals and protect her and the family they would make together. He’d spend his love on her and their children, be profligate with love, and she would teach him all sorts of fine, delicate, harmonious things.

  Ashling was his mother’s word for a strong vision, the kind that came at you, slightly disordered, at moments when you were living on your feelings because you had nothing else to go by, when you’d stepped outside the rules and the regular tempo of life.

  “Hear me now, you old buzzard.” Joe slapped him until Mick stopped snuffling. “Come after us, lay a hand on any one in this family, I’ll kill you and burn what’s left on the trash heap, understand?”

  Pulling off the harness strap, Joe threw it over a n
ail. Then, using his father’s knife, he cut the cords binding Mick’s hands and feet. They left him lying on the straw. Once they were outside, Joe herded his brothers towards the cabin.

  “Do you think the fellow’s alive, Joe?”

  “Did we kill him?”

  “I don’t know and don’t much care.”

  Joe sent the girls into their mother’s room. Then he put the big kettle on the stove and he and his brothers stripped off their clothes. They were not accustomed to bathing in the morning, but all three stood together in the copper tub and scrubbed each other’s backs. Joe and Grattan took turns sluicing the warm water over their heads. When he was clean and dry, Joe went out with a pail of water, a towel, a shirt, and twenty dollars he intended to give Mick, along with a warning to never again show his face. But the fiddle was gone from the porch and Mick was gone from the shed, leaving nothing behind but blood and straw.

  ~

  Ellenora died in late April, hemorrhaging and coughing blood. The girls washed the body and scrubbed the room, and that evening Joe went in to take his turn standing by the bed where the long, narrow frame of their mother lay, rosary beads twined through her fingers. Her face was yellow and lined, and it seemed to him that every part of her had shrunken except the nose and ears.

  He had seen men nearly killed in fights and logging accidents, but his mother’s was the first corpse he had seen, and apart from its stillness what struck him was how fragile, insubstantial, and temporary her body seemed. Ellenora’s struggles and losses, her hard work and suffering, had developed from meagre flesh and sinew, a collection of fragile bones. It seemed extraordinary that a body could house the energy a mind produced, the secret powers to love and hate, forget and remember.

  No one was interested in buying the farm in the clearing at any price. Joe sold the livestock and equipment at auction, plus his wall tents, cookstoves, and logging tools. He split the proceeds among his brothers and sisters but kept the profits his pulpwood operation had made, the seed of another business that must eventually stand behind them all.

  Hope and Kate were bound for the Visitations in Ottawa. Grattan had a job offer from a wealthy Santa Barbara citrus grower, a benefactor of Father Lillis’s Franciscans. Joe would accompany Tom to the Bronx and see him settled at Fordham, then head for Calgary via Chicago, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg.

  On the morning they were all due to leave, Joe went out early and set fire to his little shed, then stood watching it burn to the ground with everything — ledgers, eyeshade, snowshoes, ink bottle — inside. He had wanted to burn the house down as well, but the others begged him not to. They were thinking they’d come back some day. Joe thought they wouldn’t — who returns willingly to a place of sorrow? — but the place was still standing when they left in a hired wagon, the girls up front with the teamster, the brothers on straw bales, all of them wearing yellow kid gloves Joe had bought for a going-away present.

  They stopped at the priest’s house for breakfast. After the buckwheat pancakes, gooseberry jam, and hot, sweet coffee, Father Lillis asked Mme Painchaud to crank up the Victrola, and as the waltz poured from the horn — to Joe it sounded like a twitter of birdsong mixed into a rushing, galloping rhythm of panicked horses — they each took a turn flying around the room in the arms of the old priest.

  Joe was last.

  “God bless you, God bless you,” the priest whispered.

  “And you, Father.”

  The old man shuffled a few more steps, then laid his head on Joe’s shoulder and began to sob. Holding him, Joe felt the priest’s frailty, and in his own throat he felt a metallic soreness, which he reckoned must be love. He kissed the old man, and then they all bowed their heads to receive his blessing; Joe could hear the teamster outside stamping his boots impatiently and the horses whinnying for more hay.

  They made one more stop, at the Catholic cemetery. The inscription on the granite slab Joe had ordered and paid for gave the facts of his parents’ lives. Facts were all that were suitable for stone; anything else seemed vain and vainglorious. Their father’s birth date wasn’t mentioned because they didn’t know it.

  Ellenora Scanlon O’Brien,

  Born 1870 Died 29th April 1904

  Wife of

  Miceál O’Brien,

  Died 1900

  Buried in S. Africa

  The girls placed handfuls of tiny, pale wildflowers on the grave, and then they all climbed back aboard. They were only a couple of miles farther along when Joe heard the caw of a fiddle — and there was Mick Heaney stumbling out of the bush, a rancid grin on his face, plucking and sawing the instrument held in the crook of his arm.

  Joe ordered the teamster to pick up the pace, but the man complained of heavy mud and said he wouldn’t be winding his horses for the sake of a two-dollar trip. Joe was furious — with the teamster, with Mick Heaney, and most of all with himself for not burning the old place down to a heap of black char, broken glass, and ashes when he’d had the chance, because now he realized that Mick Heaney would saunter back to the clearing and dig himself in, selling timothy hay off their meadow, gathering berries from bushes they had tended and fertilized, shaking apples off their trees, living to a fetid old age pickled in raw whisky, and probably dying in the bed their mother had died in.

  Fiddling furiously, Mick stumbled after the wagon. Joe yearned to throw something at him but there was nothing at hand. If he’d kept his rifle he might have issued a warning shot, sent a bullet snapping past his stepfather’s ear, but the rifle had been sold along with everything else. He thought of jumping down to deliver another thrashing, but the teamster would spread the story — Heaney and O’Brien! Battling in the mud like a pair of roosters! — and Joe hated the thought of people laughing at him after he was gone. He struggled to contain his anger. No use dirtying his boots and staining the turn-ups of his trousers with the mud of the Pontiac, which he meant to escape cleanly, and forever.

  Instead of looking back he studied his brothers and sisters. The Little Priest was reading a novel by Joseph Conrad; Sojer Boy had slipped off his kid gloves and was cleaning his fingernails with a bit of straw. Kate and Hope were chatting with the teamster. It was suddenly clear to him that his siblings did not share his sense of deprivation, or the fury that was inside him. The strains of “Bonaparte’s Retreat” gripped and taunted him, but to them the bleating, yapping fiddle was just the noise of something they were leaving behind. It had no claim on them. It was already slipping past, like the thin breeze and the stink of muskeg.

  When he next looked back Mick had fallen a long way behind. The tune had faded like old snow deep in the woods in April. After another quarter-mile he couldn’t hear anything, and when he looked back once more, there was nothing but trees, mud, and sky.

  ~

  On the platform at Union Station in Ottawa they huddled together, sharing for the last time a sense of belonging to each other. He and the Little Priest were ticketed for New York with a change at Montreal, and their train was leaving immediately. Grattan would be escorting Hope and Kate to the Visitations, then catching an evening train for Toronto, Chicago, and California.

  Before Joe and Tom boarded, Grattan presented them each with a twenty-five-cent cigar. “There you are, boys. Smoke the best!”

  Joe felt his throat narrow once more with that metallic feeling as he shook hands with Sojer Boy. But he knew he had done his best for them. They were safe, and leaving behind the thin, acidic soil of the clearings. They were all on their way to richer ground. Hope and Kate were waving and laughing merrily as the locomotive chuffed steam and sucked air into its brakes and Negro porters hurried the last passengers aboard. The whistle howled, the engine gave a tug, steel couplings clanked up and down the length of the train, and the cars began rolling. Grattan and the girls ran alongside for a while, and Tom and Joe hung out the window and waved for as long as they could see them before falling into their seats.

  At Montreal they boarded a Delaware and Hudson train. Later that
night along the shore of Lake Champlain, while the Little Priest slept, Joe sat in the smoking car puffing his twenty-five-cent cigar, savouring a sense of majestic loneliness and freedom as the train raced south to New York City. He had done all he could to ensure that his brothers and sisters were safe and settled, but for himself he needed more than safety. He needed risks and danger and lots of room to grow, and that was why he would go out west.

  ~

  Stepping onto the platform at Grand Central Depot at seven o’clock in the morning, Joe and the Little Priest were swept along in a herd of businessmen and handsome, well-dressed girls hurrying through the tunnels, riding up the electric stairs, and pouring out into a street howling with motor cabs and buses. Joe sensed energy and wanton danger. Eager for a glimpse of the ocean, he thought he smelled the tang of salt water on a bright breeze smacking up Lexington Avenue.

  They both wanted breakfast. At a diner on Third Avenue they sat guarding their baggage at their feet while a Negro rattled handfuls of silverware on the counter and a waiter sloshed coffee into two mugs.

  “Gosh, Joe, it all sure moves fast.” The Little Priest spoke so softly Joe could barely hear him over the clatter. They had fed at cookhouses packed elbow to elbow with Frenchmen, but never in such a hectic, steamy place as this. Joe ordered ham and eggs for them both from a greasy menu card. Dozens of strangers were gulping coffee, cramming doughnuts into their mouths, and leaving nickel tips.

  “Do you suppose it’s like this in the Bronx, Joe?”

  Looking at Tom, he noticed for the first time his resemblance to their mother. The Little Priest had always been an anxious child, shy of strangers and especially terrified of the bunkhouse men and hoboes who roamed the Pontiac in logging season. When he admitted he was afraid of being “stolen,” Joe had reassured him that boys were never stolen except in the old stories of witches, Whiteboys, and roving spirits, but there was nothing much he could say to adjust the flame of such caustic anxiety. Nonetheless, the Little Priest had slept soundly aboard the train while Joe sat up the whole night, watching the dark country flash by, and the quick, yellow-lit platforms of upstate towns. And the Little Priest was now eating ham and eggs with gusto — Joe had observed that his brother’s anxieties rarely interfered with his appetite.