Chapter 10 #9
“Thank you.”
“You switched, though,” he says, looking at her sideways, “from a very beautiful, sad tune to something different. Why was that? Why did you cut short the first tune?”
“I…” Speech deserts Enda: she cannot think how to explain what happened.
“The first was so perfectly suited to your playing, and you delivered it so skilfully. It brought us out of the kitchen to listen. And then,” he brings up a hand and mimes something disappearing, his fingers opening, like someone releasing a moth, “it was gone.”
Enda shrugs, unable to speak. He regards her, arms crossed, his eyes searching her face. It comes back to her now, his way of looking, his unsettling ability to see through people’s dissembling and disguises.
“Forgive me,” he murmurs, after a moment. “I am told that I ask too many questions. And here I am, again, asking too many questions.”
She taps her knee with the end of her bow, shakes the hair out of her eyes.
“How is your wife?” she asks. “I still have her skirt. Perhaps she would like it back.”
“Wife?” he says. “Not wife. Sister.”
“Sister?” Enda absorbs this, twirling a button on her jacket around and around on its stem. He glances at her and they look away.
“You may keep the skirt—I’m certain my sister hasn’t thought about it since.
She lives up the river, in Québec, with some cousins of ours.
She preferred not to accompany me here, to Trois Rivières, but to stay in the city.
We talked many times about the girl-boy from Grosse ?le: one minute, you were there, and then you were gone. We wondered what happened to you.”
He looks up and down the street, at the men lurching out of the saloons, at the sputtering gas lamps.
“Tell me,” he says suddenly, with a frown, as if it has just occurred to him, “are you here alone? In this part of town? No one is with you?”
Enda shakes her head. “It’s fine. Dressed like this.”
He makes a sceptical huffing noise, and when she raises her eyes, she sees that he is looking over her head, gesturing to his companions, who are standing at the kitchen door. He says something to them in their language and they reply.
When he speaks to her again, it is in a low voice, almost a whisper: “I think perhaps you are tired, yes?” he says. “And also hungry.”
He leans forward and takes the fiddle from her hand with a gesture of surprising gentleness.
To her surprise, she lets him. She watches, as if from above, as he expertly loosens the bow, as he packs the fiddle into its box, as he collects up the coins and hands them to her, asking her name.
When he stands up, he loops the case around his own shoulders.
He tells her that his name is Anatole and that they can step inside the inn and eat together—he has finished his shift for the night and it is time for his supper.
This part of town is not a good place for her to be, he says, even if she is dressed like this.
He gestures up and down her outfit. He would not like his sister to be here at this hour, not at all.
Enda stands on the muddy street, uncertain, dithering, then remembers how he and his sister helped her before, how kind they were.
There can be no danger in this for her, she thinks, surely.
As if he has intuited her thoughts, he tells her that she need not worry, he is her friend.
So they turn and go into the inn, Anatole holding open the door for her.
He points her towards a table, then disappears through a doorway hung with sacking, returning with two steaming bowls.
Enda discovers that it is thick broth, purple in colour, and there are five dumplings bobbing on its surface, interspersed with discs of oil.
Her stomach stirs uneasily and seems to turn over, and she thinks she will not eat it, but she takes a small sip from the spoon, so as not to appear rude.
Then she takes a mouthful, and another, and suddenly her bowl is empty, and her body feels hot at its core, like a volcano, and Anatole laughs and nods, saying, It’s good, yes, it’s what you need, his teeth ripping at a crust of bread.
He tells her that in the evenings after work in the kitchen, he plays his accordion, mostly in his quarters, a room above the inn that he shares with five other men.
He has not thought of playing in the street or outside bars for money, as she does.
When the spring comes, he says, he will stop working at the inn and go upriver with a crew to a logging camp, where they will fell trees.
He has done this for the two previous summers: it is hard work but it pays better than the kitchen, and he must save money to pay for passages for his parents and remaining siblings.
From a chair in the corner of the inn, a musician begins to play.
Enda and Anatole fall instantly silent. The musician is an old man with a set of pipes, his boots planted either side of the stool; he works the bellows with his elbow and alternately hums along or turns his head to converse with someone to his right as his fingers move over the dark holes of the chanter.
Anatole leans towards her to ask if the man is from her homeland and she nods.
They listen to the melody, which is at first playful, then mournful, then back again, and at the end they clap.
Anatole drums his spoon on the table, which makes Enda smile, and the old piper tips his hat at them, his eyes lingering on Enda with a fleeting piercing look, before he begins another tune, the name of which, Enda knows, is “The Girl with Red Hair.”
She rips the bread on her plate into small pieces and pushes them into her mouth, listening.
She cannot know that the elderly man with the pipes in the corner of the inn is, in fact, of great significance to her.
There is no way for either of them to discover that they are linked.
The old man tells no one these days about the family he left behind, his wife and all their pretty children, whom he intended to fetch and bring here when he was settled, and how even now he is twisted and bent inside with a bitter regret that he ever emigrated alone, that he didn’t have the money for them all to sail together, that he got on that boat with only his pipes on his back, leaving them there.
He tells no one that he went back to find them, but the cottage where they had lived was a ruin, inhabited only by stupid-faced cattle, and a neighbour told him they had all gone, died in the Great Hunger, but there had been one child, a daughter, who survived and was taken to the workhouse.
He never speaks of how he had rushed there to seek her out, to reclaim her, only to find no trace: she, too, had gone.
The old pipe-player keeps these things hidden deep inside him.
There is no way for him to know that this daughter, lost to inaccurate records of the workhouse, gave birth to the child he now plays a song for.
Perhaps there is something familiar to him about the oddly attired copper-haired girl who sits with a fiddle at her feet, next to an intense-looking man with rolled-up sleeves, in the corner, both of whom pay such close attention to his playing.
Perhaps the girl—or is it a boy?—reminds him of someone he knew long ago, a cousin or a sibling, or one of his own long-dead children.
Enda and Anatole stay for two more tunes, and then they leave, Enda passing, unaware, within arm’s length of her grandfather, and the old man will think of this red-haired girl, and how he would have liked to hear her play, until he dies, a year or so later, quickly and without warning, in his bed.
Enda, however, will walk out of the inn and never think of him again.
Anatole insists on accompanying her back to her rooming house: you shouldn’t walk about so late, he says.
He tries to carry the fiddle for her but she does not let him.
I don’t like to let it out of my sight, she says, and he says he understands.
He asks what her plans are, if she will stay in Trois Rivières, and she says she doesn’t know.
She doesn’t say that she cannot cast her mind forward, she cannot envisage the years ahead, here, in this town, in this country, and in that moment she discovers that there is an intention, nestled within her, like a fossil in a rock, to go home.
She could get on a boat and sail back. She could return to the peninsula, beg their forgiveness, tell them she will stay this time, she won’t ever leave again.
It’s not impossible. She could do this, if she saved enough, if she worked for several more years and didn’t spend anything.
When he asks her what she’s thinking about, she doesn’t tell him, but she finds herself instead speaking of how she wakes not long after she falls asleep, that she has horrendous dreams, that she feels so weighted down that she sometimes feels she cannot put one foot in front of the other.
“It sounds,” he says, as they round the corner to her street, “as if you are homesick.”
“Homesick?” she asks, in wonder.
“Yes.” He shrugs. “Why not? It happens to us all. This whole country,” he swings his arm around in a semicircle, “is full of homesick people. The homesick and the lonely.”
As she reaches the door of the rooming house, she hears his voice out of the darkness.
“Perhaps,” he says, “we can play one night. Fiddle and accordion. Together. What do you think?”
Enda considers this. She considers him, standing there in the blackness of the night, his arms folded against the cool air. She considers the faint anxiety in his voice as he asks her this question.
Yish, Enda thinks, and nods. “It’s a nice idea.”
When she goes into the house, her landlady is still awake, waiting for her to come back, she says, with only faint disapproval, because a letter has arrived for her. Finally, the landlady thinks but doesn’t say.