Chapter 10 #12
He likes these words: they are authoritative yet kind, they strike the right fatherly note. He is helping this man; he is doing what he came here for.
Several feet away, the man falls to his knees, like a tree struck by an axe. People gather and mass around him, murmuring.
“I need…” the man gasps, still with his hands cupped together “…your magic.”
“My magic?” Liam repeats uneasily, as he comes to a stop in front of the man. I have no magic, he wants to say, none at all, I am merely a servant of the Lord and magic could not be further from—
“Please,” the man says, and Liam realises it is not only sweat running down the man’s face, that tears are coursing from his eyes. “Help me.”
He lifts his hands, curving them open in supplication, and Liam glimpses, before he averts his eyes, a human child, small enough to fit within the nest of the man’s palms. Liam has to steel himself not to rear back in shock.
The child is perfect, a masterpiece in miniature: tiny curled hands, minute lips, eyes shut tight, a lick of dark hair on its head.
Liam swallows, his throat clicking with dryness. “I am sorry,” he says, “I cannot—”
“Please,” says the man, in terror, “you must do your magic. Make him live. My wife…The child came too early.”
“Ah,” Liam says, and sees with horror that the man is thrusting the tiny being towards him, intending for Liam to take it. Instinctively, he steps back, withdrawing his hands into his sleeves. “Forgive me but—”
“You. You can make him live. Everybody tells me, take the baby to the big stone house. The men there have magic.”
“No,” Liam says, “you…misunderstand. We have no magic, exactly, just—”
The man struggles to his feet, gulping, as if unwilling to swallow the fact that Liam cannot or will not help him, that his child will not be brought back to life.
A sizeable crowd has gathered around them now, people peering to see, shoving at each other, talking among themselves, in words so fast and slippery that Liam cannot grasp them.
The man begins to wail and ululate, holding the stillborn child in his hands, and Liam is reminded, in a flash, of Eugene, years ago, picking up a fledgling, found on the boreen, fallen from its nest: he had held it thus, lovingly in his palms, and taken it back to the house, where he fed it on mashed worms and milk, with unutterable patience, and it had survived.
How astonishing is his brother. Liam closes his eyes at the memory.
What a person, one in a thousand. He had the magic, Liam thinks, in a somewhat crazed way—the heat, the miniature and silent child, the man’s grief-filled howls are all perhaps conspiring to unhinge his mind.
For he is certain, as he stands there, uselessly, in his sandals and robe, that if Eugene were here, he would know what to do, how to console this poor man.
Liam recalls himself to the task before him. There is, of course, only one way to comfort this man, to assuage and alleviate his distress.
Liam clears his throat and, pressing his palms together, says: “Let us pray.”
The man’s head jerks up. He glares at Liam, or Father Gulielmus, clutching the body of his stillborn child to his chest, and he spits out a string of words that Liam recognises, with a cold spiral of dismay, as a hex, a particularly unpleasant one, involving the loss of loved ones.
Lunging at Liam, he shoves him, hard, with his free hand.
His face as he does so Liam will remember for the rest of his life: its expression of disgust, of betrayal, will rise to Liam’s mind, when he faces the committee’s interrogation, and again when he is an old man, far away from this place and this life, and it will never fail to fill him with shame.
Liam stumbles backwards, partly due to amazement and partly to the blow.
He feels the earth tilt, feels the rough and stony surface of the path come up to meet him, first his elbow and then the base of his spine.
Then he is sprawled in the dust and the grit, his back aching, spectacles knocked to the dirt.
He watches, mutely, as the man hurries away from him, back the way he came, as the muttering crowd disperses, until Liam is alone, the boats on the waterway sliding past him, like embarrassed and indifferent strangers.
Anatole waits for Enda each evening outside her rooming house.
Sometimes, he is smoking a cigarette and she can see the glowing tip moving like a firefly as he lifts it to and from his mouth, and she knows then where he is in the dark, where she must aim for.
When she gets closer, she can often smell the inn kitchen off him, a throat-catching scent of onions and oil, the odour of a hundred dinners.
He is usually already mid-sentence by the time she reaches his side: he talks about the other cooks in the inn, who has a cough, who always cuts his hands when chopping carrots; he talks about the logging work he will soon be doing upriver, how high the trees, how dense the forest. He talks about the different names for the lumber they will cut: Douglas fir, western hemlock, red cedar, spruce pine fir, yellow cedar, ironwood, hop hornbeam, white larch.
He describes for her the bunkhouse where they will all live, the snoring and the fights, those who hoard food under their bunks, inviting rats, which the loggers like to take turns to kill, with the blunt end of their axes.
And he asks her questions: what has she learned on her fiddle, who is staying at the rooming house, where has she lived before this in Canada, will she stay in Trois Rivières?
Each night they walk to the part of town where people gather to drink whatever wages they have scraped together.
The two of them might be invited to play inside one of these places, or if the weather is fair, they will play outside on the street.
Enda might pick the tune, and it could be from her country or his or someone else’s; if Anatole doesn’t know it, he will press his fingers to the buttons of his accordion, his ear bent towards her, his face watching hers, intently, carefully, and he will fill the pleated leather with air, pulling a low hum from the instrument, and then his other hand will start to inscribe the melody from the black and white keys.
Sometimes, he will launch a tune and she will listen for the chord sequences, and will join, lurking underneath the melody until, like a dancer, she knows she can bring her fiddle forward to assume the lead.
The box at their feet fills with coins, sometimes only a few and other times enough to feed them afterwards. Anatole is scrupulous in counting it out, dividing it equally, and handing her half. He tips the coins into her cupped palms with a nod.
One night, he reaches out and inserts two fingers into the pocket of her jacket.
They are standing at the mouth of an alleyway.
Not a good idea, he says, to handle money out in the street; and Enda watches his hand, as it latches itself into the fabric, as it tugs slightly, causing her to take a step towards him, and she has no idea why or what will happen next.
When she looks up at him, to find the meaning of this strange act, she finds that he is looking down at her, his gaze unflinching, his face suddenly serious and still.
Why, she wants to say, why do you pull me by the jacket towards you?
How dare you?, and she has no idea what might happen next and the breath is motionless in her chest, nothing passing in or out.
Then he simply lifts his other hand, still without taking his eyes from hers, and he slides her share of the coins into her pocket.
Later, she lies in her narrow bunk in the windowless cupboard where she sleeps, tucked in behind the kitchen range, and she gives herself what her mother would have called a good talking-to.
What a fool she is to have discovered within her even this faint flicker of hope.
She isn’t pretty, like Rose, she isn’t the sort of woman men go for: she is too unusual, too irritable, she spends half her life scrubbing floors in a filthy apron, the other half dressed like a lad and playing a fiddle, and she carries within her, like a thorn under her skin, the memory of once being laughed at for looking like a squirrel.
Anatole has a pleasing stance, a fine and open smile: she has seen women’s eyes linger on him.
She turns to the wall, furious with herself for her sudden tears, scrubbing at her face, disgusted by her self-pity.
She throws herself back down to the thin mattress, resolutely shutting her eyes.
This will pass, she tells herself, teeth gritted, whatever it is, this fancy, this weakness, it will disappear as abruptly as it came.
The next night, he does it again: the hooking of his hand into her pocket, and she wants to say, What are you doing, you’ll tear it and it was stitched by my mother for my brother and it’s all I have of them, but his touch is gentle, his musician’s fingers well used to the fine gradations and shifts in pressure, and he empties the coins into her coat, and then he does a strange thing.
He lifts his hand and slides his thumb along one of her eyebrows, and then the other.
Enda stands there, dumbfounded. His face is rapt and solemn: he applies himself to this task with seriousness.
She doesn’t think anyone else has ever paid any attention to her eyebrows, has ever touched them, these swoops of colour on her forehead, and she doesn’t know how to respond, but he lets his hand drop and he turns away, saying something about his visit to a flour mill that day, and about the foreman, a man no one likes, who tripped over a sack and fell into a heap of flour and how happy it made them all, how comical the man looked. Like a ghost, he says, then laughs.
That’s funny, Enda says faintly, a man covered in flour.