A Map Of Glass Part 8

Branwell nodded in sad agreement.

On her last visit Annabelle had noticed something she couldn't identify that seemed to be missing from her friend's expression, and from her gestures. She had never known Marie not to be quick in her movements and certain in her speech. Now all energy seemed to have vanished from her character. She had invented no new recipes as far as Annabelle could tell, and no matter how Branwell teased, she could not be coaxed into defending the politics of Quebec, a subject that would have always elicited pa.s.sionate declarations from her in the past, sometimes in English, sometimes in French. It was as if an essential component in her proud bearing had faltered and this frightened Annabelle. What faltered in Marie would falter in Annabelle as well.

"Is there a chance that the foreman is mistaken?" she asked.

Branwell shook his head. "He says it has something to do with the rotation of crops."

"But Maurice and everyone else for that matter has been growing nothing but barley. No one is rotating crops."

"That's it exactly. They haven't been rotating crops. None of the barley farmers along our stretch of sh.o.r.e have been rotating crops and now the soil is depleted. They were making pots of money," he said bitterly. "Why would they want to change?" Branwell lifted his arms into the air in a gesture of desperation. "All this sand," he whispered, "all this sand because of people's obsession with money."

Annabelle stood in the center of the room, bogs all around her. For the first time she thought about the tidy lush landscapes of her mother's past, and for the first time she found herself hoping that these landscapes were still there just as her mother had described them to Branwell, each field in place, crops rotated or left fallow every year or so. The oak her mother talked about came into her mind and she glanced out the window searching for the tree in her own yard, as if for rea.s.surance.

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 embarra.s.sed. 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 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." 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-st.i.tch. 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 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 b.u.mpy track and the deteriorating weather of a mid-nineteenth-century November. 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 b.u.mpy 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."

As 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 sh.o.r.e 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 Alma Lee, The Hannah Coulter The Hannah Coulter, The Minerva Cook The Minerva Cook, The Lucille G.o.din The Lucille G.o.din, The Nancy Breen The Nancy Breen, The Susan Swan The Susan Swan, The Mary Helen Carter 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 sh.o.r.e 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-gla.s.s 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 a.s.sured 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 gra.s.s 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, dest.i.tute, though" he had admitted with an uncharacteristically dreamy look in his eye "in certain lights, beautiful mountain." From where he had been standing, he a.s.sured Branwell, he had been able to see traces of neither gra.s.s 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 G.o.dforsaken 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 pa.s.sengers 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 sh.o.r.e. 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?"

"Thirty some miles to the west," said Ghost, his eyes narrowing. "Near a village called Colborne named after colonial administrator and rebellion crusher John Colborne, a merciless old powermonger if there ever was one. But that's the way things unfold. Your son will be a merciless old powermonger as well. There is no stopping destiny." He paused for a moment. "I think there is another hill in his future as well, in Ottawa. He's going to be a relentless, old political ranter, as far as I can tell."

Branwell laughed wryly, and for the first time in days.

"Yes, sir," said Ghost, reading Branwell's mind, "a henpecked man in politics is a force to be reckoned with."

The next morning when Branwell ventured out to the stables he found Ghost saddling up the white horse that had been given to him by the family as a Christmas gift just two years before and that, proud of his sense of humor, he had called Spectre. His carpetbag was packed, and his mandolin was tied to the pommel of the saddle. "Taking her away from this," he said, stroking the animal's muzzle. "It's back to Baden for us. There's a new tavern right across from the station where I can entertain, and I might get some kind of work out at Fryfogel's, though the old man's dead and the place is no longer an inn."

"How do you know he's dead?" Branwell was aware that the question was ridiculous as soon as it was out of his mouth.

Ghost didn't bother to reply but said instead that two of the sons, fair to middling farmers, now lived there with their wives and children, in the rooms of what had been the inn.

They walked with the horse out of the darkness of the stables into the vivid autumn light. Choked by sand, the dying trees in the vicinity of the hotel had shed their leaves in midsummer, and now their leafless limbs threw tangled shadows over the surrounding dunes. "Well, I wish I could offer you something here," said Branwell. "But, as you can see, there's not much hope of that. So I guess I'll say goodbye, then. I suppose I'll miss you, though."

"Not for long, you won't," said Ghost. "The walls out at Fryfogel's aren't painted yet, remember, and now you're going to need the money." He mounted the horse. "See you in the winter!" he called over his shoulder as the horse struggled through the sand in the direction of Maurice's monstrous brick house (which sported a large For Sale sign on the yard fence) and the sand-covered road that led to a more stable world.

"Not in the winter!" shouted Branwell. "I'm never going back there in winter."

"Oh yes you are!" the Ghost shouted back. "You can be sure of that."

Branwell watched what remained of the road until Ghost was out of sight. Then he turned to face the hotel. Some of the white paint had been scoured from the exterior by the sand-laden wind, and the worn grey clapboard was showing through. And then there was Marie's pale face at the kitchen window. He raised his arm to wave to her. She did not wave back but turned away, instead, and disappeared from view.

Annabelle, despite her fierce independence and her absolute practicality, was a.s.saulted by pa.s.sion in midlife, a.s.saulted and imprisoned for a brief time until sorrow released her. Yes, even Annabelle was caught, likely while looking in some other direction altogether. It began at sunset one early evening in the autumn of the following year. There was a cloud, engorged by sun, hanging like fire over the ships at Kingston pier on the mainland. She gathered together her watercolors and sketchbook and walked outdoors, delighted by the apparent effect of fire on pale brown sails. This was an atmospheric opportunity. She would have to be quick to capture it.

Yes, this had been the summer when everything fell into ruin: the hotel, Caroline's gazebo, the price of barley, the summer that Maurice, in spite of his wife's resistance, had finally gone ahead and put his house up for sale. Annabelle had just returned from the Ballagh Oisin and her clothes still danced on the line outside, shedding sand as they were "aired." All day long she had been worrying about Marie, who had been filled with distress at the thought of everything she and Branwell had so carefully put together being taken slowly, painfully apart.

Who would have imagined, though, that Annabelle would count herself among those who stumbled, who risked a complete collapse? She was just over forty years old and looking forward to a life spent earning a modest living and painting the decaying hulks in Wreck Bay, as well as the healthier ships that were across the water in Kingston Harbour. Moreover, she had been visited by the sin of pride. Despite her former dislike of it, she had been pleased by her mastery of the salvage business, delighted, in fact, by the independence it afforded her. She even dared to hope that she might be able to help her brother and her friend when the time came, as she feared it would, for them to leave the hotel.

What made her soften, then, and agree finally that Mister Gilderson could bargain with her for the island? Was it his own decline, his own loss of authority? Perhaps she wanted to see him sitting on the other side of her desk, his fortune diminished, his ability to bully those around him subsiding. Perhaps, despite her father's dying words, she believed that it would be impossible for her father's old rival to carry out his plan to purchase the property and what remained of her equipment. Perhaps she wanted to see him humiliated, grappling with that impossibility. She believed that she hated him.

But there was something else as well. She had to admit that, when all was said and done, she wasn't entirely against selling to Gilderson. In fact, it would have given her some satisfaction, a little taste of power in the face of her now safely dead but still strangely controlling father. Though gone now for years, he continued to speak often, in fact in her mind, dispensing advice and admonitions. She had never been afraid of him, and she wasn't now, but occasionally she felt he was voicing his disapproval as he had attempted to do in the past. "For G.o.d's sake, don't sell to that bandit Gilderson!" Annabelle could imagine her father shouting these words, flushed with rage, glaring at her from under his thick eyebrows that resembled grey broom straw. Though his rival had been a decade younger than him, and would therefore to his mind be permanently undereducated and inexperienced in the ways of lake transport, her father had always believed that his own business was threatened whenever Gilderson turned his attention to the eastern end of the lake.

Gilderson and his servant were lodging in the ancient and no longer entirely satisfactory guest house that Annabelle herself, having no domestic staff of her own, had prepared for him. Shortly after his arrival, she had conducted him to the office where she had talked to him at length about what remained of the business. Later, while he was making a slow, private inspection of the island, she had prepared an evening meal of mutton stew, a meal they took together in the parlor while the servant ate in the kitchen. Annabelle had had difficulty concentrating on the polite conversation concerning Branwell and Caroline that the occasion seemed to demand. Along with her father's voice, an absurd list of all the goods Gilderson had trafficked up and down the lakes was building itself in her mind: barley, cabbages, weather vanes, sets of china, hacksaws, buggies, furniture, whiskey, horses, human beings. What a lot of things things there are in the world, she thought, and more all the time. Oran Gilderson, she realized, was a master of displacement, and now by the looks of things, it was she who was going to be displaced. there are in the world, she thought, and more all the time. Oran Gilderson, she realized, was a master of displacement, and now by the looks of things, it was she who was going to be displaced.

After dinner, he asked if he might smoke, and when Annabelle said by all means, he poured a small amount of golden tobacco out of a leather pouch and firmly pushed the flakes into the bowl of his pipe. He turned his chair away from the table and toward the window, then leaned forward to strike a match on the bottom of his boot. This match, though Annabelle didn't yet know she would want to save it, was destined for her sc.r.a.pbook, her splinter book.

Gilderson gazed with thoughtful satisfaction out the window. "Good," he said finally. "Not a single lighthouse in sight."

"There are several in the vicinity, however," Annabelle told him. "Two on either side of Kingston and one on Insignificant Island. Did you not see them on your walk?" She had painted all three at one time or another, always under stormy conditions and with a ship, sometimes two, smashing into the nearby rocks. "They can be seen quite clearly from several spots on Timber Island but never from the house itself."

Gilderson puffed away without comment for several minutes. "I was not looking at the view on my walk," he said. "I was searching for equipment." Then he stood and walked to the fire, where he began to remove the remaining ashes from his pipe by knocking it against the grate for what seemed to Annabelle to be an exaggeratedly long time. Eventually he turned to Annabelle and told her he would not be purchasing her property. She did not ask why he had suddenly taken this position, but he told her anyway. "Too many lighthouses in the district," he said, "and, despite what you may think, lighthouses are dangerous for my ships."

What nonsense, thought Annabelle, and then, He's had to sell almost all his ships anyway. "Very well," she said, gathering the dishes from the table and heading, through the wreaths of smoke left in the air by her guest's pipe, for the kitchen. Gilderson took his leave and walked off in the twilight toward the guest quarters. When he was gone, Annabelle gathered her camp stool, sketchbook, and brushes and went outside to capture the light.

So she would not be displaced after all. The island would remain in her possession. Whatever possibilities the sale had presented to her a small house of her own, perhaps some travel now faded and withdrew. But these had never really taken solid shape, anyway, in her imagination, beyond the images of the deck of an oceangoing vessel and a simple porch unsullied by fretsaw work. She let these pictures disappear from her mind without a great deal of regret and concentrated instead on the ships she could now see swaying in the distance and on the strange color of the light from which the warmth seemed to be leaking minute by minute. The sky that had been orange was now violet, and the lake, which was quite still, had become not silver exactly but rather pewter-colored, there being no glitter on its surface.

She felt his hand on her shoulder before she paid any attention to his voice, probably because the quay upon which she sat had always, in the past, been filled with male voices, French and English voices, voices she had very early on learned to ignore. A male hand squeezing her shoulder was an experience so new that it might have been a bolt of lightning judging from the effect it had on her system.

Annabelle stiffened, examined the hand that had so unexpectedly come to rest on her person, and noted with relief that the fingernails were clean. She turned on the stool then and looked up into the not altogether unattractive but very hairy face of Oran Gilderson. His moustache, she realized, was stained yellow as a result of his fondness for tobacco. There were two deep furrows that ran from his cheekbones to the beginning of his lavish, well-kept, but far too long beard, furrows that could only have been gouged by a grimace of some sort visiting his expression over and over. There was a full crop of grey hair in his nostrils, also showing a jaundiced tinge. She decided to concentrate on her painting.

"I like a woman who can do dainty things," Gilderson said, referring, she supposed, to the watercolor on her lap. "Do you sing as well?"

"No," said Annabelle. She was mildly offended by his reference to her picture as something dainty. And the man had been into the whiskey; she could smell it. Still, there was the extraordinary warmth of his hand on her shoulder and this, like some unlikely force of gravity, bound her to her place.

"A widower is a very lonely man. A widower whose daughter has left him is lonelier still," said the voice behind her.

Annabelle had absolutely no experience with this kind of talk. Her father had reacted to neither her mother's presence nor her absence except with a kind of unvarying, vague irritation. Branwell had remained stubbornly silent on the subject of male affection of any kind, and Maurice... well, Maurice was, as far as she could tell, so frightened of his wife, and so in love with her, that had he an opinion on the subject it would be unreliable at best. The man's fingers were beginning to explore her collarbones, his other hand having now come to rest on the opposite shoulder.

Annabelle rose quickly to her feet, upsetting the stool as she did so, and letting the sketchbook fall from her lap. As she began to limp away from him, Gilderson followed, caught her arm, then embraced her and pressed a quant.i.ty of whiskers and a mouth smelling of tobacco and whiskey into her face. It was almost dark. Annabelle used more force than she knew she was capable of to push the man away, then walked, with as much speed as possible, back toward the house. He was calling her name and shouting sentences that she could have sworn included the word marriage marriage, but she was determined not to pay any mind.

Once she was safely behind the locked door, she peered furtively out the window, just in time to see a silhouetted Gilderson begin to walk unsteadily back to the place where he would spend the night. There was a certain poignancy about the curve of his back and the careful determination with which he measured each step that softened Annabelle. He is getting old, she thought, and he will get older yet. Then, just as she thought this, Gilderson stumbled, lurched forward, and fell on his hands and knees, and something in Annabelle stumbled and fell with him. She brought her hand up to her mouth as if to prevent herself from crying out. It seemed to take him an extraordinary amount of time to get to his feet. He was like a bear that had been shot and had not quite realized that his wounds were fatal; Annabelle half-expected him to throw back his head and roar. It occurred to her that she should be leaving the house to see whether he had broken any bones, but she found it quite impossible to move, and eventually she perceived that he was once again stumbling through the increasing darkness toward the guest house. Would he spend the night tossing in an agony of remorse and embarra.s.sment? she wondered. Not likely, she concluded, probably in the state he was in he would be snoring as soon as his head touched the pillow.

In the middle of the night, Annabelle sat bolt upright in her bed. Had he really used the word marriage marriage and, if so, in what context had he used it? She wished she had listened more carefully now, in order to have caught exactly what he had said to her. Annabelle lit the lamp there was to be no sleep for her that night and looked first at one of her shoulders and then at the other. Perhaps she hadn't heard him clearly. It could have been that he was simply inquiring about a carriage to meet him in Kingston the following day. But no, that was not likely because, like all shipbuilders, he would detest roads and railways and would insist on traveling, as much as possible, by water. She crossed her arms over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and put her own hands on her shoulders, trying to determine how these bony protuberances would feel under the touch of another. Bony, she decided, was the only adjective one could apply to such shoulders, bony and old. Her heart, on the other hand, was behaving like a young trapped animal, restless, pacing, eager to get out. and, if so, in what context had he used it? She wished she had listened more carefully now, in order to have caught exactly what he had said to her. Annabelle lit the lamp there was to be no sleep for her that night and looked first at one of her shoulders and then at the other. Perhaps she hadn't heard him clearly. It could have been that he was simply inquiring about a carriage to meet him in Kingston the following day. But no, that was not likely because, like all shipbuilders, he would detest roads and railways and would insist on traveling, as much as possible, by water. She crossed her arms over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and put her own hands on her shoulders, trying to determine how these bony protuberances would feel under the touch of another. Bony, she decided, was the only adjective one could apply to such shoulders, bony and old. Her heart, on the other hand, was behaving like a young trapped animal, restless, pacing, eager to get out.

The next morning everything in the house and outside its windows seemed just slightly unfamiliar, as if a series of minor alterations had taken place in the physical world overnight. Not since she had been young had Annabelle looked at objects with such intensity: the hairbrush on her dresser, the leather of her boots, the veins in her own hands as she laced up these boots, the cloth-covered b.u.t.tons on the pale blue dress that she removed from the wardrobe, each chip and crack in the ironstone dishes she a.s.sembled on the kitchen table (two place settings for breakfast,) the dull sheen of an unpolished silver spoon, the oily yellow of the b.u.t.ter, the blue tinge of the milk. Waiting at the parlor window, from which the guest house was visible, she became absorbed by the dusty, disintegrating ta.s.sels on a worn velvet curtain. What could be the purpose of ta.s.sels on parlor curtains? The shadows of the leaves on her mother's oak tree trembled on the carpet at her feet. What exactly was the purpose of that tree? While she was pondering such questions she saw Oran Gilderson emerge from the guest house along with his servant, who carried a valise in his hand. Without looking in the direction of the house, Gilderson walked as briskly as his age would allow toward the quay where the skiff in which he had arrived the previous day was anch.o.r.ed. A murky blend of anger and disappointment was awakened in Annabelle by this sight. This was followed by a sense of distress so overwhelming that she was affected physically, could barely manage to remove herself from the window. For the first time in her life she went back to bed in the morning and stayed there until midafternoon.

This was to be the beginning of a spate of days so disorganized that Annabelle would not have been able to fully recall them in the future, had she the inclination to recall them, which would be far from the case. She lit no fires, she cooked no meals. When she ate, which was rarely, she picked up an apple in pa.s.sing, or a crust of bread, perhaps some cheese. She made no drawings, and beyond fixing a particular match to a page in her sc.r.a.pbook, she did no work of any kind. Weeds were appearing in her vegetable garden, flowers in the parched plots bordering the house died of thirst in the dry autumn heat. The bed into which she flung herself at any hour of the day or night remained unmade.

She neither dressed nor undressed, wearing the same blue cotton shirtwaist she had put on the morning of Gilderson's departure. As the days progressed, the stains under the arms of this dress darkened and the cuffs at her wrists became more and more soiled. She did not wash; her fingernails became filthy and cracked. It was as if she had forgotten about her body and its functions altogether, as if her physical self had become simply a bothersome bundle that, as the result of an evil spell, her racing mind was required to haul around with it wherever it went. And in this racing mind sat Gilderson, as grim and pompous and unpleasant as ever, but tenacious the idea of him like a warm hand glued to her shoulder as she moved from place to place. She was always moving from place to place because except for the few hours when she fell into the delirium that she now called sleep, she could not stop walking.

She walked through all the rooms of the house, up and down the halls, up and down the stairs, including those that led to the attic where Marie had once lived. She walked in and out of the guest house. "Lonely man, lonely man," she whispered, looking at the faintly greasy dent his head had left in the feather pillow on the unmade bed. She walked around and around the circ.u.mference of the island, pausing only to glare at the distant lighthouses she had in the past been quite fond of. She began to play counting games: mentally cataloguing all the door latches on the island, for example, latches attached to the doors of the buildings that still stood, then picking through the collapsed wreckage of those that had gone down during one of the previous winters and finding a surprising number of latches there. She repeated the process with hinges and porcelain k.n.o.bs, and then with panes of gla.s.s, broken (in the case of fully abandoned buildings) or otherwise. This inventory required a great deal of concentration; these phenomena, after all, had all been rejected by Gilderson, just as she herself, she now believed, had been rejected by him. Her table remained set for breakfast: two knives, two spoons, two forks, two folded linen napkins, her mother's best cups and saucers.

The curious thing, she would soon come to realize, was that her opinion of the man had not changed one whit. She knew exactly what he had been, and what he would have been had a reversal of his fortunes not taken place. She knew that he had abused his employees, misused the landscape, greedily h.o.a.rded his wealth, and had cared not a fig for any other human being with the possible exception of his overindulged daughter. She had not even considered what they might talk about had they been given the opportunity to do so on a regular basis. And yet this did not prevent her from going over and over in her mind the conversation they had engaged in during the one meal they had shared, searching for a hint of affection in remarks such as "d.a.m.n fine potatoes!" or questions such as "Have you much trouble getting supplies from the mainland in winter?" She was hoping to find a key to his behavior, to what it was that drove him out the door of the guest house with the object of placing his hand on her shoulder. The other curious matter was that she was able to think of such things while, at the very same time, counting the number of pieces of sc.r.a.p lumber left lying about on the island, sc.r.a.p lumber that Gilderson was clearly not interested in.

Throughout all the walking and counting and listing Annabelle became gradually convinced that all through her adult life there had been something lost in her that now, as a consequence of one masculine touch, had been found, and that having been found she was now going to have to come to terms with it one way or another. Even though the lost thing was now found, she was never able to bring clearly into focus what the lost thing was, only that it had been discovered far too late. Sometimes she was grateful for this. At other times she was angry. She knew that it had something to do with the two place settings that she had been unable to remove from the kitchen table, and something to do as well with the dent in the guest-house pillow, but her mind would take her no further than that. Her thoughts skimmed past the complexities of her condition and insisted instead on increased motion, this nonsensical accounting.

In the midst of her counting exercises, or while she was walking vigorously from one end of the island to the other, she would now and then stop for several moments and look toward Kingston. If she saw a skiff approaching she would scrutinize it intently and, once she had determined that it was not the skiff she was looking for, she would crouch behind a convenient bush until the vessel drew up to the quay, deposited whatever it had on board, and withdrew. Often what it had on board was the post: odd bits of business she should have been attending to but, during this period, had no interest in whatsoever. Sometimes the skiff contained a person who would walk up to the house and pound on the door until, confused by her absence, they too would withdraw, though not before puzzling over the damp letters that had been left in the open box situated near the water. It was only during these spells of concealment that Annabelle became aware of herself, the fact that she had not bathed, or changed her clothes, or cleaned her house, or picked up the mail. She would huddle in a kind of fever of shame behind a cedar bush or a gooseberry bush, as if her previous self had joined with the visitor and was judging her condition. It was only then that it occurred to her that, had the gentleman she was looking for magically appeared, she would be in no state to receive him, only then that she admitted that she was never again going to have to receive him.

Still, the idea of his arrival, the reception of a guest, set off another bout of industrious activity and, after pulling from the cupboard bottles and powders and cereals and sugars that had not seen the light of day since Marie had departed for the hotel, Annabelle began to bake. Various small insects had died in the flour, the vanilla had become a gummy paste, and the sugar had transformed itself from crystals to a solid lump, the baking soda had almost disappeared, but none of this stopped her. She had fresh b.u.t.ter and she mixed all of the ingredients she could find into its greasy texture along with several jars of preserves she found in the cellar. Then she added a quant.i.ty of water and poured the mess she had made into round cake tins, square cake tins, cupcake tins, and finally onto a number of cookie sheets. As she gathered together the kindling and split logs in order to light the stove and heat the oven, she became aware that she was weeping, and weeping the way a child weeps, loudly, and for effect. Once she heard herself, she stopped and concentrated instead on placing the racks in the oven so that she could push almost all of the tins inside it.

The temperature inside the room rose. Annabelle sat perspiring beside the window looking at the lake.

Finally a skiff she recognized, though not at all the one she was waiting for, was seen on the horizon, coming from the open lake and not from the direction of Kingston. It annoyed her that Maurice would arrive at this moment as if he knew she was not herself and was consciously intending to invade her privacy. Perhaps he had been sent to spy on her. Well, he wouldn't find her, she would remain hidden, and he would go away again. She looked at her forearms, which were almost unrecognizable: reddened by sun, covered with flour dust, and laced with scratches from long periods of time spent in the center of bushes. She remembered the man's fingers on her shoulder, the Masonic ring, the grey and black hairs that grew just above the knuckles.

It was the look on Maurice's face as he approached the house that caused Annabelle to become instantly sane. As if she had snapped shut a book she had been reading a fantasy about a foreign country, perhaps and the world of numbered things she had inhabited for the past few days closed with a bang and her previous life opened before her in a violent rush. She forgot all about the latches and doork.n.o.bs and piles of discarded lumber. She forgot all about Gilderson and his big warm hand and her own bony shoulders. She forgot all about the baking. She gazed with horror at her unkempt flowerbeds and vegetable garden. Then she looked again at Maurice's face, and the last vestiges of trance drained out of her. Even from this distance she could see he too had been weeping; there was sorrow in the way he carried his body, even his hands appeared to be sad. Annabelle rose to her feet and called her nephew's name. She was certain that he had come to deliver some terrible news. Marie, she suddenly knew, was dead.

When after a while they pulled away from the quay Annabelle remembered the small, dark figure she had seen arriving in the sleigh boat all those years ago and the Gilderson daydream fell forever from her mind. She realized, just for a moment, that in recent days while she had been wandering around her empty house and vacant island half-crazed, almost as if she had been acting out the silly Lady of stupid Shallot, Marie, her better, more beautiful self, lay trembling on the edge of death. Annabelle was filled with grief and shame, and fully herself again. She recalled her friend at the orphanage talking about the carved angels walking on the snow. Marie was not the dying type, they had agreed on that distant afternoon.

She would bring her back to the island to be buried. She would have a small white angel carved for her grave. What would any of their lives have been without the quickening that an orphan had caused in the only world that Annabelle had ever known?

Branwell remained at the Ballagh Oisin for another year and a half after his wife's death. Alone and miserable, he responded only now and then to messages from his sister, who begged him to return immediately to Timber Island. This was something he had decided he would never do for, despite the fact that his dear wife was buried there, he would not allow himself to be a grave-stander. His father, he remembered, had often carried on about the senselessness of an Irish poem ent.i.tled "I'm Stretched on Your Grave," and somehow the idea of the futility of such gestures had stuck for all these years in his mind. Even Marie would not have approved of him moping around her headstone under the spell of what his father would have called "Irish behavior." No, he would leave the tending of the grave to poor Annabelle, who had once told him she had always believed that Marie was her other, more beautiful self.

Branwell spent his time, instead, aimlessly sorting through his wife's few possessions: her dresses and coats, hairbrush and mirror, odd bits of jewelery, hairpins and nets, pots and pans, and a variety of other cooking utensils, her small collection of pine b.u.t.ter molds (she had been touchingly vain about the look of her b.u.t.ter that she had churned herself), things he had barely paid attention to until now. He believed that something should be done with all of these abandoned objects, but he had no idea what, and knew, in any event, that the sand would claim everything in the end.

When the winter arrived he was grateful for the heavy snow the season invariably brought with it because at least in winter he didn't have to spend all his time watching sand and, unlike sand, snow could be kept out of his rooms, his clothing, his bedding, his hair. It could be shoveled, thrown to one side, arranged in piles that, more or less, stayed in place. He could open his door, walk to the lake and back, and an hour later, his footsteps would still be visible, small blue pools filled with shadow. This was strangely comforting in the face of what seemed to be a complete erasure of everything he had worked for and everything he had loved. He found it hard to remember that there had been a time when he had loved the beach and the dunes, the soft feel of sand under his feet, the ribs of sand he could see when he had waded through the shallows to bathe. He had also forgotten that the proximity of this beach, those dunes, had been one of the elements that had made the Ballagh Oisin so popular during the summers of the past. Sand was the enemy, had always been the enemy. He was certain of this. It was as if he was living in the bottom half of an hourgla.s.s in which, as the days pa.s.sed, he was being buried alive.

For the first time in his life he had begun to pray. In the evenings he would pluck Marie's rosary from the nail in the wall where he had hung it the previous evening, and then he would whisper the words he had learned all those years ago at the orphanage just before his wedding, words he had never voluntarily used since. He liked the repet.i.tion of the name Mary, and was moved by the knowledge that his wife's fingers had traveled over the surface of the beads that his own fingers were touching now. It was one of the ways that he felt he could speak to Marie, but in the end, like all his other attempts to reach her now, this would become unsatisfying, and one winter night he would not remove the rosary from the wall and fall to his knees near their bed. The beads would remain hanging near the wardrobe until the sight of them alone became too painful a reminder. Then he would take them down and place them in the small ivory jewelery box that would itself become too painful a reminder until it was finally consigned to a dresser drawer.

His sister wrote to him often, but he rarely answered sometimes he didn't even bother to open the envelopes. His son wrote less often, and these letters, though always opened and read, were never answered. Branwell could tell that Maurice was suffering from the loss of his mother, yet, in spite of this, he found that he was unable to write with words of consolation. He would never be able to accept the idea of his son's greed, his weakness, his role in the wreckage, and any correspondence between them could only be a reminder of all that.

As it turned out, things would unfold just as Ghost had predicted. Maurice would run successfully as a Tory for the Northumberland County seat and would spend his time travelling back and forth from that County to Ottawa, while his wife presided over the building of another, even larger, brick house situated on a hill overlooking the town of Colborne. When Old Gilderson finally died of a heart attack (perhaps brought about by the shock of his son-in-law's election to public office), he would leave just enough money for the building of the vulgar turrets and arched entranceways of which his daughter was so fond. There would be a ballroom on the second story with a gla.s.s floor through which the light from the belvedere would shine. The property on which the house stood would be called Gilderwood, in memory of Caroline's doting father. Branwell, after receiving this information, might have looked out his north window, where in the distance he would be able to see the first house that Maurice and Caroline had built, a house that would eventually be sold, at a great loss, to American summer people.

As far as Branwell would be able to tell, no reversal of fortune was ever going to take place. On spring, summer, and fall mornings he awoke to a fresh drift of sand on the front porch. During the autumn that followed Marie's death, dunes had completely swallowed her flowerbeds at the rear of the house having already destroyed, in summer, those at the front. Pillows of sand sat on the seats of the wooden rockers that Branwell did not bother to put away for seasonal storage as he had in the past. The boat house in which he had stored such things was half-buried in any case; there was no hope of opening its doors. The three canoes and four rowboats that he set out at the beginning of each summer had been rarely used and had disappeared under so much sand he could not now be entirely certain of where he had last seen them. The vacated stables were rendered entirely inaccessible, and Branwell was forced to enter through the hayloft in order to dig for the firewood he had stacked in a corner of the ground floor. Sand acc.u.mulated on the hotel's windowsills and inched up the gla.s.s. Each day it was becoming more and more difficult to open or close the front door and, increasingly, lengthy ribbons of sand had slipped under this door and into the large entrance hall.