“So now you’re a landlord,” she said to her brother, her back turned to him.
“What do you mean by that?” he asked suspiciously.
“Well, you’ve got all this land and you’ve got people living on it and you’re going to evict them.”
“I bought it fair and square. I didn’t seize it or anything. I paid cash.”
“To whom?”
“To McCormack … you know that.”
“And who did he get it from?”
“It was granted to him by the Crown for being in the British Army. What’s this all about, Eileen?”
“And who did they – I mean the Crown – get it from?”
“They didn’t get it from anyone, Eileen, it was just here, that’s all.”
The bottom of Eileen’s skirt was covered with grain dust. She bent to brush it off. “I think they got it from someone.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a flat almost-rectangular stone, tapered at one end. Showing it to Liam, she said, “Molly says it’s a skinning knife. I found it on the beach.”
“Very interesting. Jesus, will this smell ever leave us?”
“I think that the English took the land from the Indians same as they took it from the Irish. Then they just starve everybody out, or …” she looked directly at Liam, “they evict them, or both.”
Liam did not answer.
“So now you’re going to evict some people from land you never would have had in the first place if the English hadn’t stolen it … and if they hadn’t stolen Ireland.”
“Ireland doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Yes it does … you bought it with an Irish landlord’s money.”
“Now, he isn’t a bad sort,” said Liam defensively.
“That’s because he isn’t a landlord any more. It’s you who are the landlord now.”
Liam threw down the pitchfork, “When did you get so high and mighty and political? Why don’t you run for Parliament if you know so much? And what is this anyway? Suddenly you’re three times as talkative as you’ve been in months, except that what you say is crazy. I just want to farm the land … is that a crime? You live here too,” he added.
Eileen walked towards the barn door. “If I were you,” she said, “I’d give Mr. Doherty a chance with the skunks.”
“Doherty has six days to get out.”
“Give him a chance with the skunks, Liam,” Eileen stepped over the barn’s threshold. “You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”
Liam did not speak to his sister for two days, but on the morning of the third day she saw him disappear into the cedar bush, then reappear an hour later with Doherty and Molly in tow.
As they passed the house Eileen saw the saints’ medals jingling on Thomas J. Doherty’s cap, and she heard him explain to Liam that the moss was growing on the west side of the maple trees and that this could only mean that the winter would be fiercely severe. They were heading for the beach. Eileen grabbed one of Liam’s jackets and joined them there.
Molly had two large baskets in her hands. “Dad’s making me collect the white stones,” she explained to Eileen, “while he does the prayers. God, there’s a powerful smell of skunk around here.”
“Does this mean –”
“If the skunks go your brother says we can stay. And Dad’s thrown a barn portrait of some cow called Genesis into the bargain.”
Doherty was telling Liam that it was necessary to pray to saints that had connections with animals. “St. Jerome because of his lion, St. Francis because of the birds, and St. Patrick because of the banishing side of things. I come to you as a barn embellisher and a skunk banisher,” he said proudly. “And as an Irishman and a devout Catholic.
“Now, it’s a sad thing about skunks,” he went on, “in that they have no patron saint of their own … they being native to North America and saints being native to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. And the poor little devils could never stow away to get across, in that their whereabouts is so easily detected. So they have to be contented with the saints of other animals. It’s a sad thing, that.”
Liam nodded and looked over at Eileen, raising his eyebrows sceptically.
“Now, if St. Patrick could only have returned to do something about the English snakes,” Doherty was saying. “But God must have had some larger plan.”
Eileen bent down to pick up a white stone for Molly’s basket, then she straightened and searched the horizon. At the edges of limestone shelves, seaweed moved in the water like long green hair. She felt comfortable, almost happy, occupied with searching, stooping, gathering. The Great Lake was speckled with pinpoints of brilliant light, as if some large power had flung down handfuls of stars. The white stones, when she found them, were cool and smooth and rested easily in the palm of her hand. Molly chatted noisily and taught Eileen how to skip flat shards of limestone over the ruffled water. “I like your brother,” she said, “and he’ll be better-natured after the skunks go.”
Two days later the smell of skunk was stronger than ever. Doherty, when consulted by Liam, reminded him that the darkest hour was just before dawn and that patience was the virtue the Lord God cherished above all others. The farmyard was decorated with circles, arrows, and question marks, all made of white stones. And Molly, following her father’s directions, had placed the words GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY ELSEWHERE on the grass where they shone in the sun in front of the long front porch.
Eileen feared for her friend. “What if they don’t go … the skunks, I mean?” she asked her brother on the evening of the second day.
Liam put down the book he was reading, “I think they’ll go … probably tomorrow. Besides, I don’t notice the smell as much,” he said vaguely, and then, as a great surprise to Eileen, he added, “Anyway, a portrait of Genesis would have been enough for me to let them stay.”
The next morning at sunrise, while she was clearing the breakfast dishes, Eileen looked through the window and saw a crowd of skunks stroll casually into the woods and disappear. Thomas J. Doherty and Molly arrived an hour later to gather up the stones. “They have to be thrown into the Great Lake one by one, these white stones, otherwise the skunks will be back next year with their young,” Doherty confided.
Liam emerged from the barn, shook Doherty’s hand, and accompanied Molly and Eileen to the beach for the stone-throwing ceremony. Even though her eyes were mostly fixed on the horizon, where any moment a particular sail might reveal itself, Eileen couldn’t help but notice that her brother was showing off, performing. With body twisted, his boots grinding into the beach pebbles, he attempted to fling his stones impossible distances out over the water.
It was a crisp day in late autumn. In Port Hope the last nails were being hammered into the latest version of the Seaman’s Inn while the O’Shaunessy brothers stood on the shore, admiring the new building and arguing about the date of the official opening. Further north, in Elzivir Township, Hastings County, Osbert Sedgewick was pasting a variety of brilliant-coloured leaves into an album he’d made himself out of birch bark bound together with fence wire, and watching a man he’d hired from Madoc install a decorative wrought-iron fence around the gravestones.
And in Ottawa, the new nation’s capital, the Irish-Canadian politician, D’Arcy McGee, excluded from the Dominion’s first cabinet despite his efforts to bring about Confederation, limping badly because of an ulcerated leg that had flared up in the stress of the past few months, made his way slowly towards Parliament Hill. In this first parliamentary session of the new Dominion he would occupy a seat he’d barely won in the autumn election. His enemies were stalking him, his political friends abandoning him, and his electorate, the Irish poor of St. Anne’s riding in Montreal, were confused by him, if not embittered. He was five foot three inches tall, uncommonly ugly, a sentimental and prolific poet, and his liver was half ruined by a lifelong fondness for the bottle. But when he opened his mouth to speak, the world around him stood at silent attention; his words a subtle net thrown over the
chaos of any crowd. He had the gift and the curse of this; the ability to entrance, then to cause either permanent devotion or rage. When McGee opened his mouth to speak no one within hearing distance had the power to turn away.
In recent months he had opened his mouth to speak far too often.
EILEEN took to reading the Irish Canadian, a Toronto hebdomadal she had discovered in Doherty’s shanty and one which she remembered hanging from a wooden rod in the old Seaman’s Inn. It contained an odd assortment of bad poetry, serialized romances, mildly stated manifestos, outraged letters to the editor, notices of eye and ear clinics, gossip, obituaries, birth announcements, reports of practical jokes, political satire, invitations to meetings of the Hibernian Benevolent Society and the St. Patrick’s Literary Society, exaggerated editorial rants and a Believe It or Not column of freakish facts, and was considered so dangerous a Fenian menace by the authorities that its editor was regularly thrown in jail – sometimes for as long as six months – thereby making its circulation and distribution highly erratic. By the time the paper reached Eileen it was clipped, torn, scribbled-upon, and months old, having arrived, weeks late, at the home of one of Doherty’s barn clients and moving from there into the barn embellisher’s hands. Eileen read every line, marvelling at the miscellaneous details which included references to the twenty-three horse-flesh markets of Paris, France, and to the fact that the poet Tennyson spent long days, reading, meditating, and writing seven or eight stanzas. She absorbed the eloquent lines of McGee’s latest outbursts against Irish nationalism and his denunciations of Fenian sentiment in Canada, which were reported with scornful comments attached. Her brother said the paper was nonsense and that he did not wish to see it lying around in his parlour. After that Eileen read it in secret, the door of her room locked. She was not going to give it up. She knew it was full of hidden messages from Aidan Lanighan. In its sentences she could feel the throb of his pulse.
Outside the windows, the Great Lake had begun to toss floating chunks of ice towards the shore. All sails had disappeared. This paper became her only connection to the heat, which she kept in dream and in memory, a thin silver chain linking two birds flying. It was December. Snow covered the stones. Sometimes Eileen heard the sounds of a train travelling on the track a mile north of her, its whistle an animal’s cry. Her favourite poem from the paper was called “The Patriot’s Bride,” and it ended with the lines:
‘Tis the deep unrest of her pure white breast
For the fate of this hapless land.
And the spirit that sighs for the wild uprise
Of some brave and patriot band.
On December afternoons she ironed, sometimes the same blouses and shirts, over and over again, while she whispered lines from the Irish Canadian aloud to herself as though committing scripture to memory. “Darkness,” said the young stranger after a silence of some minutes, “and light,” or Deeply regretted by all that knew him, or The fruit in the minds of the oppressed peasantry, or In Philadelphia one hundred able-bodied coloured men, all of whom served in the late war, offered their services to march to Canada’s border to fight for Irish liberty and independence.
Sometimes she merely chanted lists of new words, words she had never used in ordinary conversations: “munitions, indignation, assertion, benevolence, infamous, conspiracy, contemptuous, oblivion, detrimental.” One headline caught her attention and stuck in her mind, the rest of the article having been torn out. D’ARCY MCGEE ON THE RAMPAGE! it announced, followed by one disjointed phrase from the text which began “After his calumnious Wexford speech …” She had looked up the word “calumnious” – “full of trickery” – in her father’s old dictionary, which Liam had carried in his pack on their long night walk, then she had looked up the word “rampage.” “Storm, rage, rush about,” the dictionary told her. “To go about in an excited, furious, violent manner,” it said. It was what she wanted, she knew, this rampage, and she resented its excesses being in the custody of the betrayer.
She was ironing in the afternoon, applying heat and pressure to cloth, inhaling the smell of clean linen, the word “rampage” thundering in her mind when she saw Aidan Lanighan at the end of the lane. At first she thought that Liam, who had taken the cutter into town, had gone into the ditch and was returning on foot. Then she saw the colour of the walker’s hair against the snow. He was hunched into the wind, his hands pushed into his pockets. She couldn’t move, could barely blink. He was smaller than she remembered, his posture bent. Eileen watched herself run down the lane, her hair a fire in winter, but found she was locked in the pose she had entered when she first glanced through the window; one hand reaching for a clean shirt waiting on a chair back, the other holding the iron upright, her mouth still forming the shape of the last whispered sound. Then her joints unlocked and she sprang to the door, knocking over the chair, the iron as she ran out into the winter air. “Christ,” she thought, “Liam will see his foot-steps,” having believed all this time that his path to her would be a traceless journey moved by wind over the lake. When she reached him she grabbed his sleeve and dragged him towards the barn. He laughing in her grasp, his hair filled with snow.
In the loft he thrust his hands into her clothing, seeking her skin, and she gasped at the chill of his fingers, her face at his neck and the breath from both their mouths visible everywhere.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
Her face was flushed, perspiration at her hairline in spite of the cold. “Liam’s not here, if that’s what you mean.”
“I need to stay for a few days.”
“But he’ll be back and he won’t let you in.”
“I can stay up here … just for two nights, then I’ll jump the train for Montreal.”
“Where have you come from? Where have you been?”
“Toronto.”
“It’ll be cold out here … you’ll freeze.”
“There’s straw … I’ll manage. If you bring me food, I’ll manage.”
At the sound of sleigh bells Eileen scrambled down the ladder, shaking the straw from her skirts as she descended. “I’ll come in the dark,” she whispered.
The kitchen, when she entered it, was full of the smell of smoke, though the air was bright and clear. Eileen righted the overturned chair and stooped to pick up the iron where it had fallen. It had burned a black triangular shape into the floor, some singed varnish was still attached to its underside. The mark, itself, she thought fleetingly, looked like the charred hoofprint of a huge beast.
Subsequent generations of the family would be superstitious about removing the board with the mark on it, but they wouldn’t know why. When they questioned her, Old Eileen would shrug and look the other way. But the young girl that she was now ran her fingers over its surface, feeling the heat still contained in the wood grain. To her it was evidence of her own emotion; the moment of contact with the dream, Aidan Lanighan’s hand burning the flesh at her waist.
Late that night she removed from a hook on the woodshed wall the lantern that had lit the dark summer walk, and with several matches in her pocket, and pork, bread, and butter wrapped in cheesecloth under her elbow, Eileen walked across the new-fallen snow, willing a wind to spring up before dawn to erase her footsteps. Standing under the loft she lit the wick and began to climb the ladder, placing the lantern on the overhead beam, so that her arrival was preceded by golden light and leaping shadows. Aidan Lanighan was curled up, trembling on the straw. The night was clear and cold; stars penetrated the spaces between the boards on the other, darker side of the barn. While he tore at bread and meat, Eileen assaulted him with questions, demanded the details of his life. He would not tell her why he had been in Toronto, and offered, instead, a scant account of his childhood in the Irish slum of Griffintown in Montreal. Like Liam, he had arrived in Canada a famine child, his mother dying in the fever sheds, his father becoming a poorly paid labourer. He told her that he, himself, had been apprenticed as a tailor by a neighbour. It was easy work, he said, could
be done anywhere. He was thinking of moving to Ottawa.
He’d been in jail after the Fenian invasion, and his father as well and “as many Irish-Catholic wretches as the bastards could lay their hands on.” Many of his friends – even some priests. “None of us,” he said, “had anything to do with it. Some of them had never even heard the word ‘fenian’ before. It was a disgrace.”
“I know all about it,” said Eileen. “Do you know the editor called Boyle?”
“Yes, I know Boyle.”
“I’ve been reading his paper and understanding it. I’ve been understanding the injustice.”
“Injustice, is it?” he was amused by her use of the word.
“And about the man McGee – his speeches.”
“I’ve heard McGee, many times.”
“And he a turncoat. St. Anne’s is his riding is it not? Isn’t that where Griffintown is? And now he’s turned traitor.”
“How would you know about that?”
“It says so in the paper. You know Patrick Boyle and hasn’t he a way of saying things in his paper?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“But he has, you must see –”
“I don’t know,” Aidan Lanighan interrupted, “because I never learned how to read.”
Because of the cold, they gained, on that first night, a fractional, disjointed knowledge of each other’s bodies, Aidan allowing four or five inches of cloth to separate around a breast, Eileen unbuttoning six inches of shirt to place her cheek against the fur near his heart. The pain of his entry into her body caused her to cry out and he covered her mouth with the cool curve of his palm until she whimpered and quieted and began to feel the pain being replaced by a kind of sorrow which she would only later recognize as pleasure. Afterwards he wept, briefly, before collapsing into an agitated sleep during which his limbs twitched as if they remembered dancing. Eileen was aware of hot liquid on her inner thighs and the slight touch of his tears running down her neck. She covered him with the thick paisley shawl her brother had bought for her in Port Hope, and gazed at his smooth face for an hour in the lamp-light, his breath clouding the air between them, her own breath coming in convulsive jerks, and her hands, as she tried to straighten her hair and button her clothing, shaking.
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