Away

by Jane Urquhart

  “Is that all, then?”

  “Is that all? The entire hope of the Irish population trampled into the dust by the political greed and ambition of the one we looked to for our solace and salvation? Are we to be ignored, used as workhorses, as badly treated here as we were there? I’d be silent myself if it were in my nature … but it’s not, nor in my brother’s neither.”

  “Is he a Fenian, this Aidan Lanighan?”

  “He is a patriot.”

  “But he can talk?”

  “Talk, is it? Talk? Oh, he can talk. But most important, he can dance.”

  Eileen was drugged by the lake, but, with repeated exposure, she was developing tolerance.

  This she accomplished by long vigils on the verandah, which were offset by pacing the dark hall of the second storey of the Seaman’s Inn – all the doors closed at noon, the noise of the Great Lake cushioned.

  We’ll be leaving soon, Liam had said, to go to the land south of Colborne. Then, he told her, everything would be perfect, forever.

  “Have you ever been in love, Liam?” she had asked him one evening.

  “No, but I intend to be soon. I’ll need sons for the farm, and a wife.”

  “Aidan Lanighan’s had his heart torn out by that man Father talked about … that man called McGee, the member of parliament. They say he’ll be silent as long as McGee is silent … about the Irish misery.”

  “What does this Irish misery matter, Eileen? We’re in Canada now, we’re Canadian, not Irish. I don’t even remember Ireland and you were born here. Soon we’ll be living on the new farm and I’ll have a wife, some sons, a hundred cows.”

  “And what will I have, Liam?”

  He smiled indulgently at his sister. “You’ll have a large room of your own with a wonderful view of the lake.”

  One night she opened the door of the room and walked hesitantly along the dark hall to see the eleven o’clock dance. She stopped on the third step down and, quite uncharacteristically, crossed herself, before continuing the descent. Once she entered the room, she dodged the galloping dancers and approached the bar.

  “So, you’ve come to see the last performance?” said one Captain O’Shaunessy.

  “The lad is off on a grain boat tomorrow to plead with McGee,” said the other.

  “And how will he do that if he won’t talk?”

  Both Captains looked at her with surprise. “Haven’t you been watching? He’ll dance. It’s what he’s been practising here all week … his petition to McGee.”

  “He’ll dance it?”

  “Yes, and he’ll break the man’s heart in his breast if he isn’t completely lost to us.”

  “But how will he know what Aidan is saying?”

  “A true Irishman always knows what a dancer is saying.”

  Lanighan, when he began to dance that night, broke Eileen’s heart in her own breast. His feet hammered the boards, his arms whipped like swords through the air. Eileen read the gestures as demanding space, territory, a promised land, hills, the sky. She heard the dance shout passionate declarations and make pleas for justice. She saw the young man’s pulse beat in his neck and the veins throb at his temples, his dance keening, then yelling with joy. Lanighan pivoted, lashed out, the sweat from his hair raining on the room. The Great Lake thundered, the trestle bridge rattled, and all of Aidan Lanighan’s beautiful, long muscles elongated further, making him larger than the tavern room that contained his prancing oratory.

  Eileen watched all this from under partly lowered eyelids. Then she watched herself rise and join the dance. Walls loomed and receded. She danced herself behind Lanighan’s eyes and knew, suddenly, the dark pitch of the bellies of lake-boats, intense political agendas, a sordid slum childhood, nights in crowded Montreal boarding houses. She knew Lanighan’s voice, his abandoned song, his pain, his silence. His hand, as it had once before, swept through her hair, his mouth was open and his breath was in her lungs.

  For a fraction of a moment a dark bird, unjustly forgotten, seemed to fly across her forehead, beating a tattoo of its own sorrows and betrayals. Then it was Aidan Lanighan’s hair, so close she could see the slashes of reflected gaslight on all his black curls. He was radiant, blazing, and she his attached shadow. If he shone his light elsewhere she would disappear. Her brother’s shocked face slid by, the grinning Captains O’Shaunessy, the huge sailors of the room on their feet cheering, clapping the rhythm of the dance; this protest, this proclamation, this celebration. Aidan Lanighan’s open mouth was so close to her ear, she knew she was being inhaled by him – herself a series of complicated messages sent by a network of nerves through his brain and body. She would share his silence, provide him with a voice.

  The room calmed, its blurred walls snapping back into focus. At the climax of the dance Aidan Lanighan had grasped Eileen’s arm just above the wrist and had thrust it up over her head where her fingers curled reflexively into a fist. She looked at this – her pale arm, the etched creases where her knuckles bent, the skin tight over the fragile bones, the ordinary button on the cotton cuff of her white sleeve. His hand, the colour of the Great Lake’s sand, clutching this. She broke from him, then, and ran to the wooden stairs.

  In the dark hall she searched her empty pockets for the key which was, though she didn’t know this, lying in the dust beneath the bar, having leapt from her clothing in the heat of the dance. She rattled the doorknob so furiously and loudly she missed Lanighan’s footsteps on the stairs, was made aware of his presence by the warmth of his breath at the nape of her neck. She placed her damp forehead against the cold wood of the door. Then she turned.

  While he caressed her she told herself the brief, brutal story of his life, composed partly of the things the captains had said to her and partly of the songs she had sung, innocently, as a child. Moonlight militias, love of comrades, humiliation, defeat. The blunders of revenge-crazed leaders. Brothers in arms left to grief-choked deaths near foreign woods. The trafficking of pathetic quantities of weapons back and forth across the Great Lakes, long nights creating vehement rants for political papers. It was Eileen’s first history of the world, told to her, she believed, by this man’s hands. She, who had spent most of her childhood behind the swaying curtains of a willow tree; she who had seen her own father strangle on his last, Irish words, knew suddenly that it was also her own story she was hearing inside her head while the young man’s desperate hands ran back and forth over her heart. She understood that he knew how to use silence as a weapon, that he would not speak the history until McGee turned back to his people, as he would do, could not help doing, when he saw Lanighan’s fervid dance.

  She believed everything, the urgency of his body, the touch of his hands, the pressure of his mouth, the insistence of the narrative that ran and ran in her mind. In his arms she was assaulted, stolen, by a learned mythology.

  She heard her brother’s footsteps on the stairs. Her body stiffened. “I know where you are going,” Lanighan whispered to her. “I’ll find you when I can.”

  He burst from her arms and over the sill of the open window at the end of the hall.

  “Where did he go?” Liam hissed. “What did he do to you? I didn’t even see him leave the room.”

  “There’s no one here,” said Eileen, her hand clasping the pistol Lanighan had hidden in her pocket. “I lost the key.”

  Each syllable was a blade cutting her throat, these first lies to her brother. She had given her real voice to Aidan Lanighan. He would bring it back to her, she knew, when he returned for her and the gun.

  ON Monday, September 2, 1867, the population of the town of Port Hope and most of the population of its neighbour and rival, Cobourg, turned out to witness the launching of the Seaman’s Inn. Crowds filled the wharfs and lined the boardwalks in front of the warehouses. Children shinneyed up lampposts. Carriages full of the well-to-do moved sedately down the hill from the mansions on Dorset Street, leaving behind a few prim old ladies who found the whole fuss slightly vulgar but who, neverthe
less, gazed at the lake through field-glasses from the widow’s walks on top of their roofs. All the stores on Walton Street were closed and, even though it was Monday, not a piece of laundry flapped on lines in the back gardens of less prestigious neighbourhoods.

  For the past few days while the Seaman’s Inn was prepared for its journey, Liam and his silent sister had occupied a suite in the American Hotel, the Captains O’Shaunessy being housed in rooms on the upper storey of the same establishment. In the fancy dining room at night, after Eileen had wandered vaguely away from a scarcely touched supper, the three men discussed her condition.

  “Captain O’Shaunessy and I believe she’s been visited by ‘the terrible calamity,’ ” Sean told Liam. “She’s fallen in love with a patriot and there’s no cure for it.”

  “There’s nothing in it,” said Liam, annoyed. “She’ll be herself in a day or two.”

  My grief on the sea, how the waves of it roll.

  For they heave between me, and the love of my soul,

  quoted Seamus.

  And my love came behind, he came from the south.

  His breast to my bosom, his mouth to my mouth,

  added Sean.

  “There’s nothing to this,” said Liam, but without his former conviction. Even during the excitement of this time, as he stood on the edge of his future which appeared to tumble before him like a well-maintained road, Liam would pause now and then to study his sister. He was, as always, bewildered by her behaviour. Who was this girl to whom he was bound by emotion and blood, who had shared rooms and landscapes with him? She remained mysterious to him; the patterns in her mind as indecipherable as they had been on summer evenings in the cabin when, without speaking, she would step out the door, cross the creek, and enter the willow tree – sometimes not returning until after dark.

  Now it was as if she hadn’t returned at all, as if she were keeping apart from him, locked inside a shimmering green world to which he had no access. He wanted to pick her up and hold her against his chest as he had when she was small, to recall her to the real world of plans and schedules and accomplishments.

  Now the plans for the departure of the Seaman’s Inn were in full operation, the two Captains O’Shaunessy shouting orders, positioning their burly clientele in strategic positions, making use of the shiny new whistles they had bought on Saturday from Cooper’s Hardware Store. At the end of a series of four high-pitched blasts, the building groaned and rose from its original crumbling foundation in the loving arms of eighty lake sailors. They turned the structure around and set it down on a collection of spruce logs which lay across the sloping beach leading towards the water. At this point the building began to roll at a dangerous pace in the direction of the waves so that the eighty strong men were obliged to run beside it, grabbing at window and door frames in an attempt to slow it down. Eventually, a barge was pushed as close to shore as possible by a little steam tug. Then the eighty seamen sloshed through the water, and the inn groaned again as they finally shoved her onboard.

  Liam insisted that he, his sister, and Genesis make the journey to the shore near Colborne in their new home, the captains piloting the tug that pulled the barge. It took half an hour of complicated manoeuvring to place a gangplank successfully between the end of the pier and the verandah of the inn.

  Led by Eileen who looked neither to the left nor the right, Genesis walked calmly up the swaying plank as if she had spent most of her life at sea. Liam spun around, tipped his bowler hat to the crowd, waved, and blew kisses. This was his second-to-last excessive act and, years later, after seasons and seasons of farming, he would talk about it to anyone who would listen. “I turned, I tipped my hat, I blew kisses to the crowd, and we floated her downshore, twenty-five miles to Loughbreeze Beach” – the name he would give to his farm, a part-Gaelic moniker in memory of his father.

  The Captains O’Shaunessy had removed much of the old furniture from the building in order to use it in the new, but they had left a sleigh-bed and a dresser in the room which Eileen and Liam had occupied for the past few weeks. And, in sly deference to Eileen, they had not removed Lanighan’s table from its place by the window.

  Eileen sat at this table now and watched the town of Port Hope become small and distant as the tug pulled the barge out of the harbour, past the white lighthouse, and onto the lake. Soon the sand and stone beaches, poplars, soft bushes, willows, pastures, orchards, and forested areas of the Great Lake’s shore-line coasted by, wrinkled and distorted by the window’s irregular glass. Some of the trees, she noticed, were already tipped with red, and goldenrod was scattered like pollen in passing meadows. Once a seagull landed on the outside sill and looked at her quizzically before opening surprisingly large wings and wheeling away.

  The inner ledge of the window was pitted and scarred, its paint flaking or gone altogether in some places. Sometimes this held Eileen’s attention more than the beautiful, rocking shore-line, but mostly she examined the brown surface of the table on which Aidan Lanighan’s arms had rested. After she had stared at the wood grain for a long, long time, she glanced out the window and saw smooth, green hills like Aidan Lanighan’s shoulders and fields full of tall grass that moved in the wind like his hair.

  “I know where to find you,” he had said, as cold steel was slipped into her pocket. “Keep this for me.”

  “He’s had his heart torn out,” she whispered, now.

  The village of Lakeport nudged its way into the right-hand corner of the window, dipped out of sight, then appeared again, its small population waving from the shore.

  Genesis, looking bored and sleepy, stood placidly by the bar, stumbling slightly as the floor tilted. Liam was stretched out on the floor, his bowler hat on his face, seasick.

  Eileen turned from the landscape and rose from the table to pace the tavern room, searching the planks under her feet for the exact spot where Aidan Lanighan had lifted a fabric rose in his hand and then placed it carefully on her cotton skirt, a gesture that now seemed so intimate that, recalling it in this heaving, shimmering room, caused her to close her eyes in pain.

  She had spent the few days after Lanighan’s departure, before the Seaman’s Inn was emptied of furniture and clientele, moving in a seemingly random manner from table to table of the tavern room that now swayed around her. She appeared to be lost, drifting, but was, in fact, swimming in the currents of conversation that flowed among the men, absorbing information about Lanighan, focusing on anecdotes and opinions with such intensity that the faces of the speakers and the words they spoke would remain permanently in her mind. She felt that years later, were she to spot one or another of these sailors in a crowd, she would be compelled to greet him as though he were a lost confidante, so vital were the histories their memories contained. Listening to them, she had been stepping carefully through the episodes, real and rumoured, of Lanighan’s life; the way he, himself, was said to have journeyed among the garrison towns of the Great Lake and the long river as a regimental tailor. Now, she had learned, he stayed mostly in Montreal, doing private piecework, restlessly changing places of employment so that he would have time for the vague political activities that were described by the men in emotional rather than factual terms.

  “He’s had his heart torn out by McGee,” she had heard one of the men say, and another, “It’s how it is with all of us and how it always will be. We’re shaken by it.”

  But Eileen cared little how shaken they all were, wanted from them only the one man’s wound which she would claim as her own: the energy that caused him to dance frantically across a room and then to push her shoulders against a wall and bury his face in her neck. That and a view of the man McGee who had lured Lanighan into the role of a distanced petitioner, leaving her behind, dazed, entranced, utterly without power – a captive, now, of heaving architecture, afloat on a Great Lake.

  The engine of the tug shuddered and then stopped. Eileen looked through the window and saw a long sickle-shaped beach composed of smooth grey stones whi
ch became pebbles near the shore. Behind this, tall poplars flickered in a light breeze and the fixed, dark shape of a large barn loomed at the edge of a cedar woods. Mentally, she allowed Lanighan to press, again, his mouth to her ear. “I know where to find you,” he whispered, her own lips silently mouthing the words as she rose from his chair to disembark.

  In Liam’s last excessive gesture he tore off his coat and shirt and trousers and dived from the verandah of the inn into the lake. When he reached the shore he kissed the beach, one of the poplar trees, the barn, and the grass near the small, soon-to-be-demolished log house. “Then I dived from the verandah,” he would, in the future, tell anyone who would listen.

  While the O’Shaunessys, Liam, and a gathering of men from Colborne carefully manoeuvred the Seaman’s Inn onto the new foundation that awaited it, Eileen walked the stony sickle-shaped beach from one end to the other. Through the clear water a few feet from shore she could see small limestone plateaus extending out into the deepness of the lake. They reminded her of the maps in the geography book, the continents lying like oddly shaped tables on the floor of the ocean, each shoreline implying the form of the land mass opposite so that the whole world seemed unfinished – frozen in a state of perpetual separation – longing for reunion. She no longer feared the lake, its size and power, knowing it could cause Aidan Lanighan to appear, magically, on its horizon. The air around her was moist, expectant, the stones under her feet filled with etched memories of previous life-forms.

  She would speak little – become silent, a person who waits. She would hold Aidan Lanighan in her mind. And he would recover her.