Chapter 10 #7
The freeze lasts for months; the chill seems to hang in the air, like a solid entity, like something you could kick a hole through.
The snow is so thick it covers the windows, casting the rooms in a strange half-light.
Enda washes up the pots in the hotel scullery, she lays the tables, she pulls the sheets off the beds, plunges them into the laundry tub, hangs them out on a line where they freeze into stiff, agonised ghosts.
The strings on her fiddle shrink into themselves: she has to tune them and make sure she plays every day to keep them supple.
In the spring, which marks a whole year she has spent in the country, she decides on a whim to leave Québec, to go exploring.
She visits her friend the cook, who shakes her head and says that Enda must have ants in her drawers to be so fidgety.
Come back and see me soon, the cook demands, wiping her eyes. Promise?
Enda shoulders her bundle and her fiddle, waves goodbye and takes a ferry further down the river, to Trois Rivières, where she has heard from one of the guests at the hotel that a landlady is looking for hired help.
She negotiates a bed in the basement of the landlady’s rooming house, in exchange for the daily cleaning of the stairways, windows, kitchen and floors.
One afternoon, after she has finished her chores, she sits on the edge of her bed—no more than a bunk in a windowless cupboard—with a sealed letter on her knee.
She has written to Rose, at last. I’m sorry, she has written, I’m sorry.
I miss you. Please forgive me. Here is my address, if you would like to write back: I intend to be here for a while, perhaps even a year.
I live in a town in the far north where three rivers converge; there are many paper mills here and they use the currents of the river to turn trees into paper, can you imagine?
How are you? How is Eugene? Is Da doing well?
Suddenly decisive, she leaps from the bunk, seizes her fiddle and slings it on her back. She goes out and posts the letter, dropping it into the mailbox outside the main post office in the central square of the town.
After this, she walks along one of the three rivers, which cuts deep through a gulley, iron bridges arching over it.
At a corner, where the endoskeleton of a building is being constructed, joists forming promises of floors and stairs and rooms to come, she pauses, looking up.
A foreman with a book or ledger stands on what will be the first floor, a group of labourers around him.
Someone else walks along a beam in mid-air, a breathless feat of balance.
Two men are driving rivets through the ironwork, one hammer falling as the other is raised, a perfect synchronicity, an irresistible rhythm.
When she hears the language they are all speaking, she reaches for the fiddle on her back.
The tune she plays mimics exactly the strikes of the twinned hammers: it uses the marching, two-four time as a base for the melody, which begins as simple, four notes circling each other, but then builds and rebels, one note pulling away from the other, turns and twists appearing, until the tune is flying, soaring, at double-time, going one way, then the other, up and down, around and around.
It’s a tune she knows well but somehow there, on the corner by the river, next to a would-be building, constructed by her countrymen, it becomes strange to her.
It takes off in directions she hadn’t known before, it pulls her into its vortex, and when it ends, she is cast out of it, alone, and she is breathless, feeling as if her skin has been lifted from her, and she is surprised to find herself back on the pavement.
Above her, there is a noise of cheering and clapping.
The men have all come to stand at the front of the half-built frame, calling down to her, Play another, go on, so she does, a song this time, which they begin to sing, their voices colliding together, some more tuneful than others, but they all know the words, and even the foreman, an older man with a large belly, is singing.
At the end, they clap again, and she bows, there in the street, and she is surprised to find that something is raining down to hit the paving slabs beside her: they are throwing something, and for a moment, she can’t tell what it is.
And then she sees that it is coins. They are reaching into their pockets and tossing money down to her, saying, Good woman, there, come back tomorrow.
Astonished, she collects it: never before has she had such a reaction to her playing. She fills the pocket of her cotton print dress, given to her by the fur-trader’s cook. She takes the coins back to the rooming house, and puts them into a jar under her bunk.
The next day, she finishes her cleaning work in good time and she goes back, and plays for them again.
Afterwards, when she has collected the coins thrown down, the foreman asks her if she will play at his apartment the next week—they are having a party for his daughter’s engagement—and he will pay her for her trouble, of course.
The day after that, Enda goes up the river, to a paper mill, where she plays polkas to the Polish workers as they leave their shift, the tunes she picked up while in the quarantine hospital.
She positions herself in the logging district and plays drinking songs, or at the wharf to play sea shanties, and learns that it is perhaps best to dress herself as a boy if she is to make money in this way.
So she tucks up her hair, most days, exiting the door of the basement in a cap and trousers, tightly belted around her thin frame.
The landlady, watching from an upper window, her aged and malodorous cat tucked under her arm, takes a puff on her cigarette, narrows her eyes, then shrugs: she’s seen all types come and go in her line of business.
As long as the girl does her work and doesn’t bring back men, she can dress as whatever she likes.
Liam kneels at the prie-dieu in the frescoed study, his fingertips resting on its warm wooden grain, his shins pressed to its kneeling pad.
“Praeterea,” he is saying, “patres doctissimi, quid haec doctrina nos docet…”
Facing him are two fathers of the Society of Jesus, seated in armchairs. He is being examined in theological disputation, for the duration of one hour, and he must speak only in Latin.
“…fortis et…” Liam continues, and how his legs ache, how painful it is to keep up this kneeling position for the entire time, his legs may never straighten again, but he must give the impression of willingness and humility, he must “…interrogans responsum est et—”
“Interrogees?” the older priest repeats. “Quare interrogans?”
Liam is startled at the interruption. Questioning, the man has said, why questioning? Did he, Liam, say that, “questioning”? He doesn’t remember.
The heat in the room is thick and languorous—if it were an animal it would be a cat, stretched out in sleep.
Dust motes circle like fireflies in the ochre beams of light stealing in through the gaps in the curtains.
Beyond the windows of the study, Liam can hear the clatter of feet, moving up and down the college’s paths, the subdued chatter of other brothers, bursts of laughter, purposeful calls.
There is a general air of excitement as the Jesuits are preparing for the Corpus Christi procession, carrying back and forth candles, flowers, vases, wine, copes, dalmatics, tinderboxes, ticking each item off a list, exclaiming about the June heat, helping each other, dropping things and having to turn and pick them up.
How he wishes to be out there, offering to shoulder boxes of candles or to brush down the brocaded garments.
Instead, he is undergoing his examination.
He has, his spiritual director told him, excelled in his scholastic studies, and has completed them in a startlingly short time.
If he passes this examination today, he is to be sent away from Rome, far away, to India, where his Order is said to be making great strides and progress.
He has not told them that the journey fills him with dread—over a month at sea!
—and he fears he may not survive it. He has taken a vow of obedience and must go wherever they bid him.
Liam will soon earn the title “Father,” followed by the fuller, more expansive version of his name: Father Gulielmus.
People will then address him thus, and how strange it will feel to him, the moniker hitting him at an angle.
He will be a father and yet have no children, and never shall.
Everyone he looks upon will be his child—man, woman, young, old.
Still kneeling, with beads of moisture gathering on his lip, Liam tries to pull himself straighter.
His examiners are looking at him quizzically, one with a frown on his face.
There had been a question; one of them had asked him something.
What was it? Liam racks his brains, his gaze darting from one to the other.
Interrogans: that was it. They asked him why his response to this particular religious doctrine had been questioning.
Very well. Liam squares his shoulders, shifts his knees.
“Quia,” he declares, evincing a confidence he doesn’t entirely feel, “mens et spiritus…”
Outside, a candelabrum is being carried through sunlight, and the cast image of its outline ripples over the folds in the thin curtains, complex and stately, like the ghost of a tree.