Eileen could see a lighthouse through the window. She focused on this rather than on the lake. The quivering light around her gave the impression that the room was full of rain.
“My first memory,” her brother was saying, “looking back at me. I wonder if Father remembered it as well.” He turned towards the window. “Why didn’t I ask him?” The young man threw open the window and pitched an apple core out towards the lake, “Sometimes I have no idea where I am. If the light hadn’t been just right, if the lake hadn’t been in the windows, I would never have known where I was.” He pushed the window closed. “I’m going to buy it, Eileen. I think it’s supposed … that I’m supposed to buy it. A house … all those years in my memory. I’m going to buy it.”
“All right,” said Eileen, rapidly pulling on her skirt, “but where is it? All these wharfs and docks. Take me to see it.”
“I don’t have to take you to see it. I don’t have to take you anywhere.”
“Liam …”
“You are standing in it. The white house in my memory is the Seaman’s Inn.”
Negotiations proved difficult. The inn was owned by the two retired Captains O’Shaunessy, identical twins whose only differences lay in their Christian names – Sean and Seamus – and in their states of mind. Sometimes both stood behind the bar, sometimes only one. But which one? Sometimes it mattered which one, other times it didn’t. Sean wanted to sell, but Seamus didn’t. Then Seamus agreed to a fixed amount and Sean became maudlin after several whiskeys and gave a long, tearful speech about the lake.
“I’ve never taken her for granted,” he said to Liam, “but I’ve never left her behind neither. I’ve slept on her bosom and sprawled by her side. I wouldn’t sell the Seaman’s Inn for a pair of mermaid’s tits. Where are these boys going to dance, I ask you, if I sell this inn?” He gestured magnanimously around a room filled with burly customers. “And what about her?” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the lake. “If I were to sell the Seaman’s I might offend her and she’d send some of her weather to get me, no matter where I went.” He leaned across the bar and looked fiercely at Liam. “She’d send the magenta maelstrom to get me. And,” he added, darkly, “she’d send it to get you, too.”
“Well,” laughed Liam, “that would be a problem. My sister here says our family has the curse of the mines on it already and it would be a shame to add a purple maelstrom to that.”
“And why would that be now … this curse of the mines?” Seamus strolled towards them from the other end of the bar. He directed his question to Eileen, who sat primly on a high wooden stool near her brother.
“Because of the mines that will be all around our old property. We sold it, and someone said there would be a curse … but I don’t remember who.”
“And what kind of mines might they be, Liam?” Seamus solicitously poured several inches of whiskey into his lodger’s cup.
The young man sipped slowly, pausing for effect. He set the drink carefully back down on the bar. “Gold mines, Captain O’Shaunessy,” he finally said. “There’s a terrible quantity of gold on that property we sold. And we sold it,” he added, “for a very good price.” He placed a newly purchased felt hat on his head. “I’m off to take care of some business, now. You’ll look after my sister, I assume.” He eyed the men in the room suspiciously. “If one of them touches her,” Liam said, “there’ll be more than a purple maelstrom to deal with. I’ve lived in the bush for a long time. I know how to fight bears.”
Liam’s business took him into town every afternoon of the following week, leaving Eileen in a room full of Irish lake sailors, safe in the custody of one Captain O’Shaunessy or the other, often both. She remained near the bar with her back to the lake silently embroidering flowers on white cloth and listening to the captains argue about the sale of the inn. “You’re a fool, Seamus … the lad’s got gold money,” or “The lake’s in our blood, Sean … to sell the Seaman’s would show a lack of respect,” or vice versa, depending on the time of day or the mood of the speaker.
Both men specialized in a kind of monologue that could only be referred to as a rant, often breaking from private argument to preach to the entire room. “What do you think, boys?” one or the other would say. “Captain O’Shaunessy, here, says we should abandon you all, leave you to dance unsheltered by the walls and the roofbeams of the Seaman’s Inn, leave you with no home to return to after you’ve been out there paying your respects to her, not taking her whims for granted, enduring her tantrums, patient with her doldrums. Like Cromwell himself he’d rob you of your rightful home and cast you off to the four corners of the world for the simple want of a place to drink and a place to dance. It breaks my heart, it does, to think of you all scattered and the lack of respect this scattering shows to her.”
The sailors nodded sagely, listened quietly, knowing that a similar speech would likely be delivered the next day by the other Captain O’Shaunessy.
After one of these passionate declarations, late in the afternoon towards the end of the week, when the room had resumed its discussions of dance steps and lake schooners, and the captains were polishing glasses and quarrelling quietly and more or less amiably, and Eileen had gathered enough courage to sit facing the front where she could glance, now and then, through the window to the lake, the door of the inn opened and within seconds the room’s population was on its feet. Tables were pushed back against walls, chairs were stacked in teetering piles, fiddles were brought to chins, accordions were squeezed between arms, and the crowd, which had pressed itself around the door, parted into two cheering halves as into the room danced a tall, straight, curly-haired young man. The two captains O’Shaunessy embraced and wiped tears from their eyes. “It’s him,” they said in unison to Eileen. “The brightest and the best. God be praised, he’s back. Aidan Lanighan.”
“The antidote to the poison of Cromwell,” said Seamus.
“The offspring of the sons of Usnach,” said Sean.
“The treasure of the old world.”
“The pleasure of the new.”
Aidan Lanighan twirled meteorically around the room, grasping, in welcome, the hands of everyone near him, slapping the biceps of all he knew, ruffling the hair of his special friends, and finally running his fingers almost absently through Eileen’s long red hair. In minutes everyone in the room had felt the ephemeral, lightning strike of his touch. He skidded to a momentary stop in the centre of the floor, then exploded into a jig that was at once an expression of vehement gaiety and furious lament. Head, arms, hips, legs, feet, fingers, and facial muscles engaged in a frenzy of precise motion, gathering energy from the lake, the light, the blood pumping through the arteries of all the other men around. It was as if Aidan Lanighan were at once creating and annihilating the room, taking it with him into his own space, his vitality causing the late afternoon sunlight to plunge recklessly through the west window, the lake to push its rhythmic song under the door, the old accordion to become orchestral, the hair and the eyes of the men to shine. He sprang out of the jig and into a combination of sudden leaps, step-dancing, and violent turns. In a miracle of tone, stress, time, pause, tempo, silence, and thrust, the histories of courtship, marriage, the funeral, famine, and harvest were present in the inn.
Eileen’s embroidered flowers fell from her lap to the floor. Her throat was dry, her heart flailing. An Irish phrase Rian fir ar mhnaoi rattled in her head, the sound of it in the gestures of the man before her; her father’s lost language, alive and leaping, miming its own story in a new world by a Great Lake. The Fianna, the Children of Tuireann, desperate departures, centuries of reunion, her mother’s withdrawal, and every wicked manifestation of Great Lake weather was in this dance which was now airborne and drumming at the same time. In the midst of the last alacritous gesture, a dive through yielding waters, Aidan Lanighan moved one hand again through Eileen’s hair and swept the other across the floor. He smoothed over her thighs the piece of cotton she had dropped, and disap
peared into the crowd of joyful lake sailors.
Eileen stared for a full minute at the unfinished rose on the white cloth. It is scarlet, she thought. The thread from which her needle still hung looked like a line of blood descending to the spot on the floor where Aidan Lanighan had bent to retrieve it.
She stood up and walked across this place, up the stairs, and into her room.
“Hey,” called one of the Captains O’Shaunessy, “I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on you. Your brother said …” But by the time he could tell Eileen what Liam had said she was leaning against the closed door, gazing directly across the room, through the window, out to the lake.
Liam returned in a new frock coat, gold watch, white shirt, bow tie, bowler hat, and spats, looking self-satisfied and prosperous. He was carrying a load of cotton dresses in his arms as he entered the inn.
“She’s gone to her room,” he was told by one Captain O’Shaunessy or the other.
“And she won’t come out.”
The captains exchanged meaningful glances and cleared their throats noisily, waiting for Liam to question them further. But knowing his sister was safe, Liam was swollen with his own news, bursting with it, eager to announce it. He tossed the bundle of dresses over the bar, where they reclined like a swooning woman, removed a map of the lakefront from his waistcoat pocket, smoothed it out with the palms of his hands, and prepared to address the proprietors of the inn.
“There’s a terrible lot of lake on that map,” said Seamus.
“She dominates it … she rules the map, she does,” agreed Sean.
“See how small Port Hope is compared with the vastness of her.”
“Insignificant.”
“Trifling.”
“Gentlemen,” Liam interrupted, before the captains could gather the steam necessary for a full-scale sermon on lake currents and nautical disasters. “Gentlemen, I have purchased a hundred acres of land, a mile and a half of lake frontage, ten cleared acres, a hardwood forest, two springs, and a creek.”
The captains were silent.
“Best farmland in Northumberland County, in Upper Canada, possibly in the world!” Liam thumped the bar with his fist. “Grows apples, potatoes, corn, barley, wheat, oats, alfalfa, and any kind of garden vegetable. Excellent pasturage for sheep, goats, horses, cows.”
“And how is she getting along, your cow, in the stables?” asked one Captain O’Shaunessy, politely.
“Fine. Comes equipped with two barns, toolshed, a wharf, and a boathouse.”
“A wharf?”
“A boathouse?” the captains raised their eyebrows.
“And a small log house, a well, and a chicken coop. It’s right here,” Liam pointed to a spot on the map, some twenty-five miles east of Port Hope. “Just below this village called Colborne.”
“Colborne, is it,” said Sean. “Now there’s a place.”
“A real hellhole,” said Seamus.
“What kind of a fool would want to start a village two miles up from the lake?”
“Only an American of British descent.”
“A United Empire Loyalist – Joseph Keeler – a cursed Orangeman.”
“He’s dead now, God be praised.”
“But his son isn’t, and he another cursed Orangeman.”
Liam ignored these comments. “All this year’s crops are up and flourishing, some harvested, barns bursting, livestock included in the price, and we take possession September first. Drinks all round!”
“What’s today?” asked Seamus.
“August twentieth.” Sean put his arm on his brother’s shoulder. “It’s a terrible pity, that, don’t you agree Seamus, and we willing to sell the Seaman’s Inn for a fair price.”
“Knowing, of course, that you and your sister would take such fine care of it.”
“And us planning to build another inn downshore a bit.”
“With a solid floor. Hardwood.” Seamus rubbed the toe of one boot back and forth across a worn pine board under the bar.
“What do you think of that, boys?” Sean addressed the room. “Captain O’Shaunessy and I planning a fine new inn for all of you and this youngster here breaking his part of the bargain … and he an Irishman.” He shook his head sadly.
“But you said you’d never sell the Seaman’s Inn,” Liam reminded them.
“That’s what we said.”
“But that’s not what we meant.”
“We meant we’d never sell it to an Englishman.”
“Or an Orangeman.”
“Or a Frenchman.”
“But you are an Irishman.”
Liam was dumbfounded. “It was a whim,” he said, lamely. “I remembered this building from when I was a child. I fell in love with it.”
“And now you’ve fallen out of love with it? Now there’s a fickle character.”
“Inconstant.”
“Listen, I can’t farm railway trestles and wharves and warehouses.” As if to prove Liam’s point, the six-fourteen roared overhead, heading west, towards Colborne.
One of the Captains O’Shaunessy slowly poured the young man a whiskey. “Now would you be calling that a problem, Sean?” he asked. “This youngster, here, wanting the Seaman’s for a house and wanting also to farm that land down by Colborne? Would you be calling that an insurmountable problem?”
“No, Seamus,” the other man polished a glass, thoughtfully. “I’d be calling the British Empire a problem, or the famine, or the coffin boats, or the fact that our own Prime Minister has become an Orangeman. Things like that are problems, but certainly not living in this building and farming that land.”
“Drinks all round!” cried both Captains O’Shaunessy in unison. “Drinks all round! On the house!”
WHEN in residence at the Seaman’s Inn, Aidan Lanighan danced twice daily, at five in the afternoon and then again at eleven. He spent the rest of the day sitting pensively by the window, brightening when greeted by an incoming sailor, then sinking again into a reverie that appeared to have nothing to do with his whereabouts. This state of mind was exactly the opposite to the one in which he exploded into the dance. The other men in the room glanced at him with fondness – sometimes adoration – often touched him on the arm or the shoulder in passing, danced a little better, themselves, in his presence, but mostly left him alone to think his mysterious thoughts.
Eileen, who had now taken to spending most of the day sitting on the upstairs verandah staring out at the lake, crept downstairs each afternoon, ostensibly to find her brother, but really to watch Lanighan perform. She was always wearing one of her new cotton dresses – high at the throat and tight at the sleeves. Her childhood had glided away from her on dark wings. She had only recent memories in her mind: the lantern-lit night walks, the rattle of the trestle bridge, the traffic on the Great Lake, and this man’s disturbing dance. His eyes, she realized, were greener than her own. She thought that he was beautiful.
She ate some but not much of the lake fish and potatoes presented to her in the tavern room. Slim already, she had begun, after her first glimpse of the dancing, to lose weight. Liam was distracted, paid little attention to her, embroiled as he was in long, difficult negotiations with the O’Shaunessy brothers or visiting the land agent on Walton Street. At night he stayed downstairs until two or three a.m. Eileen lay on her metal cot, watching the reflecting harbour lights flicker on the ceiling until she heard the sound of Lanighan’s dance begin at eleven o’clock. Fifteen minutes later, when it ended, she turned her face to one side and wept quietly until she fell asleep. She never remembered her dreams. Both she and her brother had forgotten her birthday, but she awoke on one of these mornings knowing she was seventeen years old.
On the fifth morning after Lanighan’s arrival, the weather became sultry, the lake agitated, pitching six-foot breakers at the end of the pier for no apparent reason – there being no wind – and Eileen, innocent, until quite recently, of large bodies of water, watched from her verandah with a combination of fascinati
on and horror; much the same way as she watched Lanighan’s dancing. It seemed the waves had become somehow trapped in her head so that when she moved she was dizzy with them. Her premonitions, which as a child she had never doubted, had completely deserted her. She realized she had no idea what would happen to her – believed that she might be trapped in this world of pounding waves and leaping men and shrieking trains and shuddering trestles for eternity. She stepped back into her room, walked around it three times, and decided to go downstairs.
Lanighan was sitting quietly at his table. Behind his head, through the window glass, Eileen could see the spray from the pier leap and descend.
She walked up to the bar and faced whichever Captain O’Shaunessy stood behind it. “I need to know one thing,” she heard herself whisper.
“And what’s that?” The Captain O’Shaunessy leaned towards her.
“Why does he never speak?”
O’Shaunessy beckoned her closer still. “He never speaks,” he hissed into her ear, “because he has had his heart torn out by the traitor McGee – who was our voice, mind you,” the bearded man gestured to all the Irishmen in the room, “until he turned his voice against us, a few summers ago in the old country, and has been doing so ever since, at every opportunity. And he having to flee the homeland when he was younger than Lanighan, there, with a price on his head because of the Young Ireland uprising. And now, in the Montreal Gazette, he says he will list, with no proof, mind you, the names and addresses of his fellow countrymen he claims were part of the Fenian uprisings. It’s a strange world, my dear, that allows a man to turn against the longings of his own native heart, and when he does there’s a cloud hanging over the heads of all Lanighan’s brothers.”
“Do you think he talks to his brothers?”
“I’m speaking of those of the spirit, not of the flesh. They all turned silent when D’Arcy McGee turned traitor to the cause, joined forces with that Orangeman Macdonald. This was to be our nation, you see – that’s at the heart of it. There’s more of us in the bowels of the lakeboats or in the city factories, or on the roads, or building the canals. McGee talked great lakefuls of words, but, in the end, he turned traitor. They’ll stay quiet until he turns back again, as, being Irish, he should, turn back again to the cause.”
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