A Map of Glass (28 page)

She turned to the Branwell. “You must tell Maurice to sell immediately,” she said.

“He’s been thinking of politics,” Branwell ventured, without much enthusiasm in his voice. “He’s joined the Tory party, so I suppose that’s a start.” He drummed his fingers on his father’s desk. “How can I convince him to sell? I wanted him to rotate the crops two years ago. I wanted him to sell out last year. But it’s clear that nothing I say will move him.”

“He’ll listen to Marie. He’ll listen to his mother.”

Branwell looked embarrassed. His hand moved again toward his ear. “Marie tried to speak to him,” he said, “but Caroline would hardly let her raise the subject. She became quite hysterical.” He paused. “It’s only Caroline that he listens to now.”

“Why doesn’t Maurice just put his foot down?” Annabelle could feel an angry flush travel up her neck and flood her face. Weakness, she thought, was the answer to that question. Weakness combined with ambition and greed. Spinelessness and, of course, the chains of romance.

Branwell shrugged and shook his head. He rose from the chair and began to pace up and down the room. “The hotel is Marie’s life. The only life we know, the only life we have. But my son, our son, is so wrapped up in his marriage, and so controlled by his father-in-law, he has given no thought at all to what is happening to his mother. She feels that she’s lost him. She suspects that we have lost the hotel. It’s as if she is being depleted along with the soil.”

“Depleted?” she said. “Marie?” Annabelle didn’t want to imagine this.

Branwell said nothing.

“Do you remember,” Annabelle asked eventually, “do you remember the time father took you with him to pick up the figureheads?”

“I remember that it was a long, long journey, and that we traveled by coach.” Branwell paused, shook his head. “And I remember the figureheads. But that’s about all.”

“He wanted you to see the workshops,” said Annabelle. “You were seven years old. It was the only time that he ever, ever considered doing something that might be of interest to a child. And it
is
wonderful, when you think about it, that there were men in Quebec who devoted their lives almost entirely to the carving of mermaids.” She stepped carefully around the maps and took two wax models from the shelves. “Look,” she said, “look at these models.”

Her brother glanced at the figures in her hands. One was made in the likeness of Napoleon, the other was a bare-breasted woman. “It’s not likely,” he said, “that Father would have allowed Napoleon to be fixed to the prow of one of his schooners. I remember a woman similar to this, though, and some kind of animal… a griffin, I think.”

“I expect he brought the models home simply because he liked them. But all that’s gone now, anyway,” Annabelle murmured. “Along with everything else.” She returned the models of the figureheads to the shelves. “What do you think would have happened to those young men who were trained to do nothing but carve figureheads?” she asked Branwell. “Once the ships that bore them were scuttled? No one knows the moment when something that seems permanent will simply cease to exist.” She thought of the last day in the sail loft, of the sea of canvas that was abandoned there, seams half-sewn, threaded needles halted in mid-stitch. Her father, she remembered, would not allow the half-completed sails to be removed. “They’ll find out they’re wrong to bring all the ships to full steam,” he had insisted. “And we’ll need the canvas for the return to sail.” But the needles had rusted and eventually the thread had begun to fray, to rot.

“What
I
remember,” she told Branwell, “was that you had been made to sit between the life-sized mermaids in the coach on the way back while Father and a griffin faced you.” Annabelle smiled, picturing the scene: the patriarch, the small frightened boy, two mermaids, and a griffin enduring the bumpy track and the deteriorating weather of a mid-nineteenth-century November.

“The money Father left to Maurice?” she asked suddenly.

“He still has some of it, apparently… enough, I suppose, to survive.”

“Good. Then he must sell immediately. Move down the lake a bit to the next County. Set himself up in another house and run for office.” How she longed to voice her opinion of her nephew’s wife, but instead she said, “Caroline will be content to be the wife of a politician once she knows there is no other choice. You can count on that. She’ll like the power, the attention. How’s her father’s company faring through all this, by the way?”

Branwell sat down again. “Almost completely out of business,” he said. “Or at least out of the business of transporting barley. The Americans slapped an enormous tariff on his shipments last month. On everyone’s shipments. They want to use their own barley now… and barley,” he lifted his eyes to his sister’s face, “the price of Canadian barley fell to twenty cents a bushel last week.” He raised one hand, then let it drop. “He still builds ships, of course. Gilderson was clever enough to change to steam early on. And steamships will go on forever.”

“I doubt it,” said Annabelle, removing a ledger from the edge of Dereen Bog and watching the map slowly curl back into a cylindrical shape. “Nothing goes on forever.”

A
s an old man, during his last visit to the hotel, while he and Branwell were sitting on the porch on a summer’s night, Joseph Woodman had put down the paper he was reading and had turned to his son. It’s odd, he had said, but we have no raft on the river tonight. Not one raft. And Branwell, who by then had nothing at all to do with the timber business, had experienced, to his astonishment, a feeling of loss so profound that tears jumped into his eyes, for it was the first time in decades that, when the river was open, that no Timber Island raft was making its way to Quebec. The cargoes of logs, you see, would have been arriving at the quay less and less frequently, the numbers of coureurs de bois thinning out as the men drifted to more dependable forms of employment. Branwell reported in his journal that while he and his father sat on the porch, one of the season’s spectacular full moons was hovering over the dark water and because that water was so uncharacteristically still (“nary a zephyr disturbed the serene silence,” he wrote), the silver path to the shore was like an invitation to walk on the lake. It was the beginning of the end, and both men knew it. Old Marcel Guerin was climbing the stairs to the sail loft less and less often to repair ropes and canvas because there were fewer and fewer sails on the lake. Shipbuilding of the kind for which Timber Island was famous was almost at a standstill. The steamers with their plumes of black smoke marked a horizon that was once busy with barques and schooners. And, most tragic of all, the last of the great forests were down.

Until that moment, though, there had seemed to be a never-ending supply of wood from those forests and this inexhaustibility had suggested to Branwell that one raft or another would be present on the river for all the summers to come. Only much later in life was he able to realize that, even in a colony whose wealth was founded entirely on the slaughtering of wild animals and the clear-cutting of forests, there were moments of pure magic. His journal, when he was home, had been filled with announcements pertaining to the arrival of ships whose names put one in mind of a courtly procession of gorgeous women:
The Alma Lee
,
The Hannah Coulter
,
The Minerva Cook
,
The Lucille Godin
,
The Nancy Breen
,
The Susan Swan
,
The Mary Helen Carter
. Traveling downriver, he had been witness to spray in the distance and the men kneeling and reaching for their beads in the remaining calm minutes before the short, terrifying journey through the Coteau Rapids. And then there had been the evening meal on the river, the men singing and, the following day, the French villages along the shore coming into view, steeple by steeple.

Now, Branwell and the white-haired Ghost were sweeping sand from the same porch on which his father had made his sad declaration. But this was an act of futility. The sandy fields were full of the scant beginnings of starved crops of barley that would never ripen. Just that week three farming families nearby had left their houses, their ruined land, and had moved out of the County, heading for the city and the hope of a factory job.

“Horses don’t like sand,” said Ghost. “The going’s too tough for them. I’ll have to find some place more hospitable to horses.”

Branwell wasn’t listening. He was thinking instead about an anecdote told to him by his father when he was a boy. He could see in his mind’s eye the Windsor chair that his parent had occupied and the glow of a pressed-glass oil lamp, so the story must have been told to him in the evening, probably in winter, he decided, as the old man was so busy in the summer there wouldn’t have been time for the kind of reflection the tale required.

The elder Woodman, who had been young at the time when the story took place, had been in Ireland, standing on the edges of Knockaneden Bog. “A dreary waste if ever there was one,” he had commented, staring at Canuig Mountain when he noticed a surprisingly large procession making its way down the incline.

“What the devil is that?” young Joseph Woodman had asked the man who had conducted him to the vicinity of the bog, in order, he was to discover, that he might see the remains of an interesting buried trackway recently uncovered by turf cutters. The trackway, his father had assured Branwell, was nothing of the kind, was just a scattering of stones that the Irishman believed was proof of an earlier civilization when roads had flourished in the district.

“That,” Joseph Woodman’s aged companion had told him, pointing up the mountain, “is the funeral procession of a man of only forty some years of age, called O’Shea, and him the last one being brought out of there. The last man being brought down out of Coomavoher,” he said. “All the rest gone away or dead before him. And isn’t the place only ruins and vacancies now with him gone.”

Everything in the Iveragh was ruins and vacancies as far as Woodman could tell.

“And I remember,” the old Irishman had said, “when he went in there after marrying a woman who had the grass of three cows from her father, he went in with a wardrobe on his back, straight up the mountain with a wardrobe on his back. He was that strong.” The speaker had crossed himself and added, “Heavens be his bed.”

His father had smiled. “Now that is the definition of avoidable difficulty,” he said to his son. “Who but a fool would choose to live in such a wild, inhospitable place? No one but an Irishman would endeavor to haul furniture to such a grey, destitute, though” – he had admitted with an uncharacteristically dreamy look in his eye – “in certain lights, beautiful mountain.” From where he had been standing, he assured Branwell, he had been able to see traces of neither grass nor animal. This young O’Shea should have forgotten about the woman and her cows, his father insisted, should instead have walked in the opposite direction and got out of the place altogether, unless of course, he had been able to do something about draining the godforsaken bog, the vapors from which had undoubtedly floated up the mountain and killed him.

Branwell remembered this story now as he and Ghost continued to sweep, sand crunching under their feet when they moved and filling in the areas they had cleared just a short while before. His father, he realized, would have met a courteous people in Ireland, a people delighted by the appearance of a stranger, eager to relate their own history that, not being able to write, they would have carried with them – letter perfect – in their minds. They would have had the whole of their vast territory – thousands of acres – in their memories: each rock, each bush, all hills and mountains and the long beaches called strands. They would not have understood (and, according to his father, could not have understood) the idea of maps, maps like the ones Annabelle had shown him, and probably would have been suspicious of the notion that all known things could be reduced to a piece of paper no larger than a tabletop. They had named everything already, and from the sound of the names his father sometimes recited angrily, wistfully, the poetry of the naming had entered their speech. Ballagh Oisin was such a name.

“Ballagh Oisin,” he said, leaning on his broom. “Who but a fool would endeavor to remain in this impossible place just because it is beautiful under certain angles of light?” It was especially beautiful right at this moment when the dunes were painted mauve and pink by the lowering sun and the water beyond them was blue and black satin topped by white lace, made so by the same wind that was bringing sand into the interior corners of his hotel. In the bay, a stranded schooner tilted sideways, its bow driven deep into one of the new invisible sandbars just beneath the surface of the water. Even the lake itself seemed to have joined this conspiracy of relentless sand. For all he knew it could be turning itself into a desert.

“I’ve seen that boat,” Ghost nodded in the direction of the abandoned schooner. “I’ve seen that boat unfurl its sails and cross the bay in the middle of the night. Could see all the passengers too, and the crew, stretching out their arms and calling from the deck.”

Branwell raised his eyebrows and looked at his friend. “You dreamed that,” he told him. “Everyone on that ship waded to shore. In another week they could have reached land without getting their feet wet.”

“Dreamed it… saw it… makes no difference. A ghost ship is never a good sign.”

Branwell could hear the sounds Marie was making in the kitchen, cleaning up after the evening meal she had prepared for the three of them. It was autumn; there were never many guests remaining in the hotel in this season, but Branwell had every reason to believe that, next summer, there would be no guests at all. The Ballagh Oisin was finished. He was certain of this.

“You’ll be here for a while yet,” said Ghost. “You’ll stay here until your son moves and gets settled up in that big house on the hill.”

There were times when Branwell felt that Ghost’s telepathy was intrusive, but he had learned, over the years, to trust what the man had to say. “What hill?” he asked. “What house?”