The decanter, which Esther’s mother would pick up absently while crossing the floor in search of something else – a photo album, a letter from a deceased son or nephew – would glow in her grasp. The aunts would glide, then, like ships towards the cabinet that held the crystal glasses, returning with prisms caused by late-afternoon sun in their nervous hands. Then would begin the litany of loss and memorable funerals. Portentous dreams would be recalled and deciphered. Esther’s father would sigh and leave the room to make a sandwich in the kitchen. There would be no dinner on an evening like this until much later, and the meal, if and when it appeared, would be one made up of “leftovers and tears,” as her mother would say.
“Leftovers and tears,” whispers Esther now, as she hears the rock crusher being activated once again by men who have forgotten the beauty that held them only minutes before.
Old Eileen would sit silently through the descriptions of coffins and hearses, the references to the locations of graves, and the recitations of verses from various headstones. “Don’t talk to me of death,” she would say when the women were exhausted by memory and sorrow. “No, don’t talk to me of death. I murdered love.”
Then she would slowly climb the stairs, walk down the hall, and lock herself into the large bedroom with its wonderful view of the lake.
“Leftovers and tears” whispers Esther again as she drifts into the morning, into the last stages of the story.
EILEEN was always afraid that she would lose Aidan somewhere in the city, that he would dive into a crowd of strangers and disappear. She had only a vague exterior map of Montreal’s St. Anne’s riding – of Griffintown – in her mind, and no knowledge of what lay in the interiors behind its walls. She knew nothing of the rooms and hallways beyond one damp house, but could imagine intimate gatherings, intimate corners, and Aidan in them. He was often gone at night and would reveal nothing of his whereabouts, as if he were deliberately withholding information. Then she would find herself wondering about and sometimes inventing the subjects of conversations, the faces of the speakers.
When she wasn’t imagining the activities that occupied him when he was absent, Eileen thought about how often he had fallen asleep in her presence. She became unsure, then, of her place in his life and wondered whether her nearness bored, calmed, or exhausted him. All penned animals at the farm, she remembered, slept through most of the daylight hours, and then again at night as though wakefulness during confinement were an unnatural state.
Sometimes, however, he would practise dance steps in the room and Eileen would watch astonished by his skill, his grace. Often he called out the names of certain dances before he began. “O’Reilly’s Lament,” he would shout, or “Rolling Over the Waves.” He looked straight ahead at the wall or out the window, announcing his performance to no one in particular, perhaps to himself, never to Eileen.
She would sit on the bed and watch him, imagining the increase in his heartbeat or trying to guess the tune that played in his mind as he moved, until one day she realized that he was not dancing alone; that his hand was outstretched to grasp that of another – or a chain of others – that his arm was bent so that another’s could lock with his at the elbow.
She was devastated then, angered; she believed he had tricked her. Something she couldn’t understand was hurling him back and forth across the room. He was being embraced by a family of invisible partners. She lunged forward and caught his sleeve. “Who are you dancing with?” she demanded.
He stopped moving, startled, looked at her in confusion, sweat sliding over his temples.
“Who are you dancing with?” she repeated.
“No one.” He stood like a beckoning statue frozen in mid-gesture, one hand outstretched, muscles tense. Then he broke the pose. “Oh,” he said, understanding, “none of these dances is for only one person. They are for two or four, sometimes as many as eight.”
Eileen relaxed somewhat. “Then why do you dance alone?” she asked.
“Because,” he said, one foot stamping rhythmically, keeping time with an inner tempo, “because there’s no one else to dance with.”
“There’s me,” she said, looking up at him from where she crouched on the bed, “I danced with you once.”
“Yes,” he admitted, whirling away, “but you didn’t know the steps.”
Now, even though the day was sharp and full of sun, because of the numbers of wagons and buggies passing in the opposite direction and the dust on the road, Eileen had the impression they were travelling through fog or that they were taking a soft brown cloud, like a parcel, with them to Ottawa. The fine powder collected in the folds of her skirt and on the sleeves of Aidan’s jacket. When she put her hand over the fist in which he held the leather reins and took it away again, an imprint of her palm remained. Once or twice she leaned forward and brushed the dust from his eyebrows and eyelashes, and he looked at her in a puzzled way because he did not know what she was doing.
Aidan’s companions, whom Eileen had imagined as bright warriors, were in fact taciturn, balding men, responding only when spoken to, obviously uncomfortable with the presence of a woman in their midst. They sat on a bench behind the couple, facing in the opposite direction, solemnly drinking from a bottle of whiskey which they passed back and forth between them, turning at intervals to offer some to Aidan who always refused. He had instructed Eileen to be silent about the pistol. It was resting between her breasts, its steel the same temperature as her body.
This dry open plain was so unlike the mouldering walls that had held Eileen and her lover for the preceding days that she was almost grateful for the clouds of dust that obscured the distances. The intimacy of her encounters with Aidan and the intensity of her responses, the minutiae of political details, the long, precise catalogues of unfairnesses and cruelties she had gleaned during the previous months of reading and waiting did not include the possibilities of long views and far horizons. She wanted no impression of that which was being passed by, just forward motion, the firmness of the young man’s body, a conviction encircling them, and a long, hard look at the enemy.
“Aidan, what will McGee speak about, do you think?”
He stared straight ahead. The road led directly to Ottawa. “The country,” he eventually answered.
“Which country, though?”
He flicked the whip in the air, trying to encourage the tired horses. “This country,” he said, a note of irritation in his voice. “This country,” he said again. “We’re in Canada now.”
Eileen put one of her hands in his jacket pocket, and when he did not respond or look at her she felt a flicker of panic. In Aidan she felt an anger, an emotion that excluded her, might even be against her. “I’d forgotten,” she said, thinking of something she had read and trying to join Lanighan wherever his subtle anger had taken him. “He cares now only for furthering his own political career at our expense … he doesn’t care any more about the Irish.” The idea of the oneness of the tribe, the imagined collective voice, calmed her. There were no uncertainties.
Lanighan twitched and shifted his position on the hard seat. A buggy driven by a well-dressed man hurtled past, replenishing the cloud of dust. “He cares,” Aidan said cryptically, “more than you know.”
It was as if he were not speaking to Eileen, not speaking to anyone at all.
The dust from the vanished buggy settled on his hair and eyebrows. Eileen did not brush it away this time but, looking at his profile, at his hair whitened by the fall of dust, she thought, This is what he will look like to me when he is growing old.
She leaned forward to brush the fine brown powder from her new white boots. It was late in the afternoon and the shadow of the wagon and its occupants stretched out far behind them on the road. The gun pressed painfully into her breastbone and she returned to her previous upright position. They had been travelling for almost ten hours when the river, the forested hills of the Gatineaus, and the spires of Parliament came into sight. The surrounding air was now clear of dust
, splotches of snow and puddles lay in the fields. Even from this distance the stone walls and slate roofs of Parliament – absurd in the middle of the wilderness – were visible. “It’s beautiful,” Eileen said, surprise evident in her voice.
“From this distance,” said Lanighan. When they got closer, he told Eileen, there would be mud and broken wooden sidewalks and the shanties of the Irish lining a canal they had dug with their own hands. “But from this distance,” he agreed, “it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”
They met the other two men in the tavern at the Victoria Hotel on Wellington Street. Lanighan embraced the sandy-haired, better-dressed man, whose name was Patrick. He was younger than the rest of the company – except for Aidan. Eileen knew he was looking at her, his gaze a provocative, sweeping inquiry.
“My girl,” said Aidan, explaining her presence.
Eileen moved her hand to her breast where the pistol was hidden. One of the men ordered whiskeys all round and the group settled in at an oak table.
No one spoke. Outside, Wellington Street was empty of traffic, growing dark. A lamplighter walked by like a ghost creating his own aura.
“It will be a long night,” the sandy-haired man eventually said. “He doesn’t speak until late.”
Aidan straightened out his legs under the table, his chair pushing back slightly and scraping the floor.
A line from an emigration song her father had taught her kept running through Eileen’s mind. “Come fiddler, now, and play for me. Goodbye to barn and stack and tree.” She thought she knew what each of these features of an intimate landscape looked like, even though they were far away in a country she had never seen.
“I can wait until the hour,” said one of the men who had come with them on the wagon.
Eileen touched Lanighan’s knee and searched his face. He was far from her and she knew it. The lamplighter passed by the window again, awash in a sickly pink light of his own making. Aidan’s arms were folded across his chest as though he were protecting his heart, denying Eileen access to it. She felt that she had displeased him, would do anything to regain his favour. She leaned forward, towards the table. “We are all fighters for freedom,” she said, uncertainly.
Lanighan shot her a brief, silencing look.
The sandy-haired man called Patrick threw his head back and laughed. “Was there any particular kind of freedom you had in mind?” he asked, suggestively.
Eileen’s face turned red and she lowered her eyes.
“She’s a beauty, this one,” the man said to Aidan, “and a rebel into the bargain. Here’s to her …” He lifted his glass. The men chuckled but avoided eye contact with one another.
“There’ll be a full moon tonight,” the smallest, roundest, and oldest of the wagon men commented, “after the street-lamps are out. And they’ll not leave the lamps on long after the moon is up.”
The men rose to leave the tavern, and Eileen bent down to tighten one of the laces of her white boots, her hand involuntarily clutching at the gun beneath her clothing. She was drawn sharply back to an upright position by Aidan’s hand on her arm, her shoulder-blade coming up hard against the back of the chair. Then, quite suddenly, Aidan was on his knees before her completing the task.
“Ah, yes,” said the man known as Patrick, grinning, but looking at Eileen with intensity. He winked and sang quietly behind Lanighan’s back.
And what’s to tell any man whether or no,
Whether I’m easy or whether I’m true.
As I lifted her petticoat easy and slow,
And I tied up my sleeve
For to buckle her shoe.
Ignoring him, Eileen placed one hand on Aidan’s dark head and for just a moment he rested his left cheek against her knee.
It was, though they did not know this, their last embrace.
BECAUSE of their largeness, the Houses of Parliament appeared to Eileen to be an overwhelming natural phenomenon, permanent, indestructible, their faces the façades of cliffs. To enter them would be like stepping into the mouths of great caves, to penetrate the earth and look upon all that had been covered, disguised by trees and gravel. The huge windows glowed with a molten light which spilled out over the grass and changed the colour of the stones at Eileen’s feet. Behind the massive structures, on the other side of the river, the Gatineau Hills were covered by a dull sheen, grey under a full moon. Despite the crunching footsteps of her companions, Eileen could hear a continuous hiss of noise in the distance which made her feel as though her head was full of wind. “Chaudière Falls,” one of the men told her. “Half a mile up the river.” Aidan walked ahead of her, hurriedly, the intimacy of their moment in the tavern forgotten.
In the gallery of the House of Commons, Eileen looked first at the huge wheel-shaped gasoliers which threw a relentless glare into the carved corners above her, then down to the orderly collection of heads below. Someone was talking about Nova Scotia. Aidan, who did not sit next to her, nervously fingered the ticket the porter had given him. Eileen worried for a few seconds that she had lost hers. The gallery was warm. She could smell sweat and whiskey emanating from the bodies of the men. She clutched at the insides of her skirt pockets until she heard the crackle of the paper stub. Feeling light-headed, distant from the life pressing in around her, she was unable to follow the thread of civilized debate taking place below. Her attention had been trained towards the anticipation of drama, could not focus on the mannered theatrics of men in a Gothic hall.
Eileen looked at Aidan’s profile, his dark lashes. He was blinking rapidly. Then she looked, again, down at the crowd of men below her. Were it not for the sideburns on one, the whiskers on another – the colour, the abundance, or the lack of hair – they would all have looked the same in their black topcoats and white shirts. This uniform, she suddenly understood, was a mark of power. She had never known men who dressed in clothes such as these. How was it possible that, attired in what Eileen imagined one might wear to a ball, these parliamentarians were engaged in arguments that were lengthy and dull. Hours empty of passion were crawling through the room.
“McGee will speak soon,” the man called Patrick eventually hissed into Eileen’s ear.
She was surprised, whenever she looked towards Aidan, at his alertness. His eyes were bright, his body poised, vibrant as if he intended to burst, shouting, into the centre of the room. After a few moments she saw him rise to his feet, bend, whisper something to one of the three men from the wagon, then to the man called Patrick, and leave the gallery.
“Where did he go?” she asked, the panic moving from her throat, down the insides of her arms. “What did he say?”
“Just a call of nature, darlin’.”
Despite his fancy clothes, the man’s sandy hair was greasy, unwashed. “He’ll be back in a jiffy,” he answered. “But,” Patrick tugged on his left ear, as if shaking a message out, “he said you had a little something for me down that lovely front of yours. You must be cold. Why don’t you wrap your shawl around you,” he carefully draped the paisley fabric over Eileen’s shoulders, “and pass the little something to me from under it so the others won’t see. It’s what Aidan wants you to do.”
Eileen’s blood beat in her brain. “He wants you to have it?” she asked.
“It’s part of the plan,” the man whispered, “part of the grand scheme. We’re all fighters for freedom and Aidan says he’s proud of you for being in sympathy with that.”
Gratitude, a warm rush of it, melted the tension in her arms. Eileen wrapped the shawl around her throat and moved her hands under it.
The pistol was warm and damp, covered with her sweat.
When Lanighan returned to the gallery, he squeezed into a spot beside Eileen. The crowd had thickened in response to the rumour, telegraphed, even at this late hour, through the streets and alleys and saloons of Ottawa, that McGee would be speaking soon, and the seats behind them were filled to capacity with stonecutters, streetsweepers, waiters, cab drivers, ladies of the night, e
ven a few ragged children.
“Are you watching?” Lanighan whispered. “Watch him and listen.”
Eileen saw a small man rise to his feet and incline his head towards a collection of tattered papers on the desk in front of him, his hands nervously leafing, sorting, stacking. He would be responding to a motion on the part of the Nova Scotia Assembly that Confederation be repealed.
“They want to take it apart again?” asked Eileen.
“Yes,” said Aidan. He was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees.
McGee was a long time organizing his papers, fussing.
The silence in the House turned into an almost audible apprehension. Eileen was certain that the light thrown by the gasoliers had changed, was more exaggerated, and that, as a result, there were more shadows in the room.
At length, McGee straightened, limped sideways to change his position behind the desk. Then he began to speak.
Aidan leaned against Eileen slightly. She could feel the heat of his upper arm move through the cloth of their sleeves and his thigh pressing against hers. She could feel his heat but she knew he was gone from her, lost in the quiet words being spoken by the man below, and she resented the fact that this person, of such insignificant physical stature, this turncoat, could lasso her lover’s attention, hold it hostage. Even the enemy, she thought, envy burning through her bowels, even the enemy should not have the power to come between us. Then, as the speech escalated in tenor and pitch, she was caught by some of the lines.
“It’s not only the lime and the sand and the hair in the mortar, but the time which has been taken to temper it.”
Eileen thought of the long seasons that her mother had been away and how all that time was preserved, exposed, placid and frozen on her face.
Away Page 29