The O'Briens

{ Acknowledgements }

Jenny Mayher of Newcastle, Maine, was this story's earliest reader. Her viewpoint and suggestions were invaluable.

James Holland's interview with Geoffrey Wellum at
http://www.secondworldwarforum.com/my-oral-history-archive/pilots-aircrew/geoffrey-wellum/
was an inspiring resource for some of the letters in this book.

Thanks to the Canada Council and to the Lannan Foundation for their generous support.

Tháinig an gála,

shéid sé go láidir,

chuala do ghuth

ag glaoch orm sa toirneach.

The storm came,

blew with force,

I heard your voice

calling me through thunder.

— Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,

from “
Cnámh
(Bone)”

translated by Michael Hartnett

Ashling

T
he old priest waltzed
with each of the O'Brien children while his pretty housekeeper, Mme Painchaud, operated the Victrola. She was a widow whose husband had been killed at the sawmill. Sliding the disc from its paper sleeve, she carefully placed it on the turntable and started turning the crank. As the needle settled onto the disc, a Strauss waltz began bleating from the machine's horn, which resembled, Joe O'Brien thought, some gigantic dark flower that bees would enter to sip nectar and rub fertile dust from their legs.

This was in Pontiac County, Quebec, in the early
1900
s. The Pontiac. Most of the people up there were farmers, though it really was a fur country, a timber country, and perhaps never should have been farmed. People from the longhouse nations had skimmed through in birchbark canoes, taking game, taking beaver, never so much as scratching the meagre soil. Lumbermen had come for the white pine and moved on as soon as they had taken the choicest timber. The early settlers were Famine Irish, and French Canadians moving up from overcrowded parishes along the St. Lawrence: people hungry for land, with nowhere else to go.

The children dancing with the old priest were two sisters and three brothers, of whom Joe O'Brien was the oldest. There were stories that their grandfather had been a horse trader in New Mexico and a buffalo hunter in Rupert's Land before taking up a farm in Sheen Township and piloting log rafts on the Ottawa. Every few years he left his wife and children and went venturing, sometimes as far as California, once back to Ireland. One spring he did not return, and he was never seen again. One story said he had drowned at Cape Horn, another that he'd been robbed and murdered in Texas.

There was a restless instinct in the family, an appetite for geography and change. On St. Patrick's Day
1900
, Joe's father, Michael O'Brien, left his wife and children and joined a regiment of cavalry being raised at Montreal to fight the Boers.

Joe O'Brien had inherited from his father the Black Irish colouring: pale skin, blue eyes, and jet black hair. The others — Grattan and Tom, Hope and Kate — were mostly fair (Hope was a redhead), with pale blue eyes and skin that was pink in winter, tawny in summer. They all had good teeth and long legs and rarely were ill. Their mother, Ellenora, had lived all her life in the clearings and knew the herbs growing wild, which mushrooms were safe to eat and which weren't, and by which streams the choicest fiddleheads could be found. She made sea pie, using every kind of wild meat. If a child took sick she brewed maroon tea with treebark and dried gooseberries. She made poultices from leaves, herbs, and scraps of cloth, and if someone had a fever she burned dried grass and brushed smoke over their heads, muttering spells using Algonquin and Irish words that no one, not even herself, really understood.

In the old priest's house the children were learning table manners and geometry as well as the waltz. And absorbing a way of seeing the world as a mystery — layered, rich. The old priest, Father Jeremiah Lillis, SJ, was a New York Irishman, short, barrel-chested, and nearly seventy when he came into the Pontiac. The remote parish was his first pastoral appointment. Before banishment to Canada he had been a scholar, a teacher, a dreamer. He had been sent into exile after it came to the attention of his superiors that certain funds belonging to the New York house were missing. In fact the old man had given away the order's money, as well as his own, to various men and women whom he loved. For these sins, and a few others, he had been dispatched to the Pontiac.

The stout little priest shaved infrequently, so the rasp of his cheek was always rough and sharp, and his breath smelled of cigars and sweet wine. Leading his partner, he would hum the melody, his shoes bussing the Tabriz carpet, building small static charges that sparkled at his fingertips.

On the train north, leafing through the
Relations
of Brébeuf and the other Jesuit martyrs, he had read of the seventeenth-century black robes sent as missionaries into the same country only to have their hearts eaten by Indians. By the time the train halted at the Canadian border he was in tears, and very tempted to disembark, but he had nowhere else to go. He had his trunks and crates and what remained of his collections of oil paintings and china, his table silver and beloved Persian carpets, but the Monsignor had sent him off without enough cash in his purse even for a return ticket to New York. So he remained aboard the train and came eventually to his remote and lonely parish, St. Jerome the Hermit, at Sheen, where he met Joe O'Brien during that first, awful northern summer of mosquitoes and forest fires, of air limned with smoke and smutted with cinders.

The black-haired boy had come by the rectory, selling firewood. “You'll want nine cords, Father. What I have is mostly beech, with some maple and birch and some pine. No spruce, guaranteed. Four dollars a cord, bucked into two-foot lengths, split, delivered, and stacked. You'll not get a better price.”

Later the priest would decide that the young O'Briens, and even their haggard mother, had a strange, rough beauty. What was it about young Joe especially? The blackness, the pallor? The clear blue eyes? Was it the boy's gift for silence? On his own part, it wasn't lust. He had many times burned with lust, and he was done with it. At least, he would never again confuse it with love.

The priest was unpacking and shelving his books in the room he had decided to use for his study when Joe returned with a wagon and the first two cords. He began toting load after load of firewood up the rocky little path and into the woodshed, using a canvas sling and a tumpline around his forehead. Father Lillis had thought himself the loneliest person in the world, but watching Joe at work, he decided that the black-haired boy — in his silence, in the ferocious way he drove himself — might be even lonelier.

On the second day Joe got his two younger brothers at work on the stacking, but he did most of the carrying himself, the tumpline taut on his brow, neck muscles supporting the weight, body bent and braced. As if he were struggling down Broadway, the old priest thought, in the maw of a wicked wind. He brought out a jug of lemonade and insisted that Joe pause long enough to take a glass.

“Why so fast, lad? Now, what's the rush? You're killing yourself.”

“It's easier to run than walk, Father.”

The old priest believed in the accessibility of the spirit world, though the dogma of his own religion was against it. In Paris, in New York, and once in Worcester, Massachusetts, he had visited the sage-scented, candlelit parlours of table-rapping mediums. It was wicked and he risked burning in hell for his apostasy, but for much of his life he had been attending séances, wearing a cheap business suit as a disguise.

Perhaps the old priest was a fool for love. Or perhaps, as he hoped, exile and loss had clarified his vision. In any case, there it was: a black-haired boy; brackish, smoky air with shafts of nearly purple light falling between the shadows of big pines; and an old, disgraced priest feeling all of a sudden powerfully, mystically, spiritually needed. He gave himself permission to become the boy's father in spirit. Whether Joe ever reciprocated, ever felt himself to be his son, was never clear to the old priest, who tried telling himself that it didn't matter.

~

Joe O'Brien was thirteen years old when his mother, Ellenora, received a letter from South Africa saying that her husband had been killed in a skirmish at a place called Geluk's Farm. She brooded all day without revealing anything to her children. Then, in the middle of the night, she woke Joe. “Your father is dead,” she said. “Michael O'Brien is dead, and I'm alone with all of you, aren't I?”

Joe understood that his father had left his power behind, and that he, as eldest son, had inherited it. He believed this without having to think about it. The power was nothing supernatural or even extraordinary; it was just a sense of his own inner strength. It gave him self-confidence and boldness. And he wouldn't squander his power the way his father had; he would use it to protect them all.

Six months after her husband's death, Ellenora received a marriage proposal from Mick Heaney, who spoke a Pontiac dialect so warped and tangled with Irish and French-Canadian lingo that people in Ottawa, fifty miles downriver, had trouble understanding him. He was canny enough at trapping foxes and the rare beaver, and on summer evenings when the farmers' sons raced their traps and buggies on the good road between Campbell's Bay and Shawville — the only stretch of graded road in the county — he might earn a few dollars setting odds and holding wagers. But Mick Heaney was best known as a fiddler; he played at weddings and wakes on both sides of the river, unreeling tunes faster than the wind rushed through the pines in breakup season. “Angel Death No Mercy” was the name of one famous jig he played. “The Cheticamp Jig” and “Road to Boston” were others.

When facing a decision, Ellenora always consulted a wise woman who lived on the other side of the river and owned a blue bottle she claimed to see the future in. The woman told Ellenora that for a widow with five children any man was better than no man at all. So she married Mick Heaney, but she never asked the children to think of him as their father or show him any more respect than he was worth — which was, as far as Joe was concerned, very little.

At weddings and wakes Mick would start things by drawing two or three scrapes as piercing and bitter as the scream of a bucksaw pinched in a green log. Then he would pause, wet his fingers in his mouth, and demand another cup of whisky-blanc before launching into the reel. Once he got going he'd play tune after tune, pausing only to gulp liquor or sip cold water from a ladle. For years he had fiddled at nearly every wedding and funeral in the Pontiac, whether people wanted him to or not. There was a restless spirit in Mick Heaney, a dark spirit; the tunes came in hot, ferocious spurts and would not be denied. At wakes he played so fiercely that his fingertips bled, crusted, and bled again. After fiddling all night he would follow the coffin to church in the morning, then stroll up and down the rows of pine slabs and crosses, sawing away while the priest inside was saying the funeral Mass. When the coffin was carried out and lowered into its grave, Mick always played at his quickest tempo, the frenzy of the music jabbing at priests and mourners, at grief, at death itself.

No one could tell Mick Heaney to stop playing. At one early summer wedding at Fort William, he struck up as the bride and her elderly groom were leaving the chapel. He fiddled through the wedding breakfast, the afternoon sleep, and the evening refreshments, and was still playing at midnight when the shivaree bachelors arrived. After dragging the nuptial couple from their marriage bed, the bachelors — accompanied by neighbours gripping pine-tar torches, wives beating pans, children howling, and Mick Heaney — led them out to witness the bull put to the cow, the stallion put to the mare. The mare rejected the stallion and turned to bite the forearm of the bachelor holding her. She shouldered him, nearly knocked him down, and then nipped him again. Both horses broke free and began screaming and flaring their lips, kicking their heels and intimidating the bachelors — mostly town men from Shawville, Campbell's Bay, and Pembroke, whose gamy banter could not conceal their fear. The young bride was sobbing while her elderly groom, dazed and bloody-nosed, puffed a cigar, and everyone recognized that the shivaree was finished, spent. Weary neighbours began climbing into wagons and traps.

The thing was over, except that Mick Heaney — who never could or would recognize any limit to anything — was still playing. He seemed to need to live unbound by custom, habit, expectation: a life perfectly organized to cause trouble for everyone it touched. All that night he wandered the farm, playing one tune after another. Whenever a bowstring broke, he replaced it from a spool of horsehair in his pocket and kept on fiddling. At dawn, with relatives of the bride threatening to drown him in the Ottawa River, he walked away from Fort William still playing. For days he was heard and occasionally seen wandering the range roads, fiddling for audiences of white pine and eagles, moose, bear, and lynx. Bush loggers heard jigs wafting over their timber slash, across burnt-over ground, through stands of birch and spruce, alder and pine. Farmers milking caught traces of “The Road to Fort Coulonge” drifting across their hay meadows and over bottomlands planted in corn. When a Portuguese section gang encountered Mick along the Pontiac and Pacific Junction right-of-way, he was playing a jig. The labourers dropped tools and began crossing themselves, and the ganger threatened Mick with a beating, but he just strolled off into the bush, still fiddling.

He returned home after ten days of wandering, playing “Banish Misfortune” as he sauntered into the yard. After setting his fiddle down on the porch, he went into the shed, milked the cow, and washed his face and hands in the warm milk. Entering the house, he slapped Ellenora's face for a greeting, then took to his bed for a month. He did not touch the bow again until the Christmas Eve
réveillon.

~

The old priest was the first person to recognize that Joe O'Brien needed to escape that world up there. Watching the boy sling loads of firewood with the tumpline was like watching an animal that would gnaw its way out of a trap or destroy itself trying. But it was no use trying to educate Joe apart from his younger brothers and sisters; their bond of family loyalty was too strong. If he would help Joe, the old priest knew he had to help them all, so he began inviting the whole bunch to stop at his house after school for lessons in geometry, table manners, and German. He had them memorize and recite poetry to each other so they would learn to speak clearly and forcefully. And he taught them the waltz.

It wasn't that he loved the dance. He did, but that wasn't the point. To waltz in the backwoods, and do it well, broke every notion of what was useful or possible. What he was trying to teach was courage.