Chapter 10 #21
He has left the instrument with her, for safekeeping.
He couldn’t take it to the logging camp, he said: it was a rough place, the men crushed in together, the air too wet, the risk of fights and brawls too high.
Seeing her face, he smiled and said: Do not worry.
I know how to stay away from trouble. They had been in their alleyway, away from the streetlamp’s circle of light, and he had been fastening her blouse, button by painstaking button, and she had been watching his fingers working from hem to neck, recalling how, not so long ago, they had gone in the other direction.
She had been leaning up against a windowsill, one foot resting on the alleyway’s opposite wall, and his imminent departure had seemed abstract, far-off, but now he has gone, the accordion is silent, its pleats folded, stored away under her bed, and he will not be back until leaf-fall, when the men have done all the cutting and felling they can, before the biting winds of winter drive them back to town, and then he will be paid.
Enda feeds a log into the range, surrendering it to the fire.
The flames resist it at first, sniffing it like a suspicious cat, then curl themselves around it, satisfied.
She places another against the first—her mother coming, again, to mind—and then another, and soon she can swing the iron door shut, raise herself to her knees, and haul the bucket of cinders off to the back step, where she flings its contents onto the ash heap and slams the door.
Enda must sweep the stairs and the parlour. She must mop the hallway and the kitchen, then polish the mantels. When this is finished, she is free.
She would write him a letter but he had told her that no mail will come in and out of the logging camp all summer—the river is not navigable by boat, he had said, only canoe.
If she needed to reach him in an emergency, she could call at the timber merchants’ offices in town and they might be able to get a message to him.
He had held her head in his hands then and said, with his mouth pressed to her temple, that he would be back, at the end of the summer, he promised her this, and would she wait for him, please, would she make him that promise, would she wait and not go anywhere, because when he came back he would come to find her and he thought that then they should perhaps get married.
Enda had listened, wonderingly, and they looked at each other for a long moment, and the thought crossed her mind that their children would have either her very blue eyes or his very dark eyes, and which might it be?
And then she realised that his “perhaps” denoted a question, he was asking her and he was waiting for the response she had yet to give, so she nodded. Yes, she said, of course, yes.
So now she waits. She finds herself to be the woman in all stories, in all ballads and myths, waiting for her man to return—from battle, from sea, from mountain and, in her case, from forest. Against all her instincts, she has to stay put at the rooming house, so he knows where to find her; she must remain here, a limpet on a rock, until he gets back.
In these new and makeshift towns, people vanish all the time, move on, never to be heard of again: she can’t be one of them.
She made her promise and she is determined to keep it.
It is a long summer—hot and dry, the trees in the town unmoving, the flags in the square limp on their poles, the boarders in the rooming house fractious and thirsty.
Enda does her chores listlessly: she reasons that she can be done with the mantels quickly, with the merest flick of her duster, and that she can get away with just moistening the middle of the floors—the landlady’s eyesight is not what it should be.
She tries, as she goes about with her mop bucket, not to picture the axe-men and their swinging blades, the crash of immense trunks to the forest floor, the wild people said to inhabit the dense woodlands who release arrows and spears from the leaf canopies, who hide themselves in the branches and undergrowth to observe these tree-felling interlopers.
Her feet feel every day as if they are made of lead; her limbs seem to be silted up.
In the evening, she sits on the back step, her chin in her hand; at night, she can’t find a comfortable position in her bunk.
The days tick by with agonising slowness.
She is waiting, she is waiting, and she has no aptitude for it.
Her shoes slap and drag as she moves. The landlady, noticing at last that the house is steadily gathering dust and smut, reprimands her and tells her she could fill her position in a minute, so pull those socks up, girl.
Socks. The very idea makes Enda want to boak—their woollen clutches, their hot and sweaty interiors—but she lowers her eyes in a pretence of contrition and says, Sorry, madam, I’ll mend my ways.
And she does try. She clatters pail and brush about with apparent zeal. She unhooks all the curtains, without being asked, and beats the dust out of them in the yard. She takes a wire brush and cleans out the range. She polishes the brass door-knocker until it gives back a reflection of her face.
She imagines what she wishes might be happening: the loggers packing up the camp, clearing their bunks, cleaning their axes for the last time, throwing away their empty hooch bottles, then lashing it all to canoes.
She pictures Anatole carefully wiping his axe and rolling up his bedding.
She wills herself to see him hiking back through the forest, along the hidden trails, the other axe-men behind him, the whole gang of them returning, coming back to their wives and children and womenfolk, back to the sawmills and the paper mills and the inns and the taverns for the winter.
The weeks pass, day follows night follows day, the season turns; the leaves on the trees in the square, when Enda goes to stand beneath them for the relief of the shade, have a definite crisping to their edges.
She pulls one off, just to be sure, and carries it home, joyfully, where she pins it to the wall by her bed.
It won’t be long. Anatole will be back any day now. He will be coming through the forest, making his way through the cedars and the larches and the firs and the hopwoods, towards her.
On his third day in Dublin, the city of his birth, Liam takes himself to a particular street, the name of which he has seen all his life at the bottom of papers and on notebooks: Phoenix Park, which strikes him, when he sees it on a street-sign, as preposterously symbolic of his current state.
He walks the pavement one way, on the opposite side, he walks it the other.
He stands for a moment at the bottom on the steps, then grips the railing—much as his brother, Eugene, did, on the deck of the ship, but this is, of course, unknown to Liam—and he climbs the stairs.
In the vestibule of the offices of the Ordnance Survey, Liam removes his hat, he straightens the unfamiliar-feeling tie around his neck, and he tells the secretary at the desk he has been an apprentice to his father, he is a skilled mathematician, an experienced surveyor and is looking for employment.
He has thought carefully about this, lying awake at night in his inn; he has circled round and round the idea, in his mind, and also during his days wandering the city, the concentric shapes getting smaller and smaller until he sees he has no choice.
What other work would he possibly find? What opportunities would be open to a former priest?
He could teach, he supposed, which would involve enquiries about where he has taught before, and then it would come out that he had been in the Order, and he left, and the whys and the wherefores of that.
It would open him to judgement and questions he does not wish to answer; people would look at him with disgust and accusation. There is no other way forward for him.
He has swapped, at a market stall, his outlandish velveteen outfit for a jacket and trousers, discreetly patched, that more or less fit him.
He has wandered for miles, along the pavements, through the squares, around the edges of the parks, out to the docks, to the Lanes, where he stood for a long time, watching children playing with improvised swings tied to streetlamps, taking turns to fly through the air.
He has seen new houses half built, their roofs open to the sky; he has seen shop fronts and dray horses and carriages and trams and dogs barking at bicycles and men stumbling out of bars and young girls holding babies in their arms.
Women: he has watched them covertly and, for the first time, from under his brow: fair ones, young ones, older, slim, curved, smart, shabby, with curled hair, with straight, thin and careworn, young and smiling.
Would he ever? Could he? That it is a possibility for him now turns his mind to the sheer whiteness of unmarked paper.
What manner of woman does he like? He has watched a courting couple on a tram, the woman with her hand tucked through the man’s.
Her narrow wrists, her hair smoothed and tied back with a sky-blue ribbon, the way she held her drawstring bag hooked over a single finger, moved Liam almost to tears.
He has seen a barefoot woman—a lovely creature with large brown eyes and chapped lips, absently biting the seam of her glove—selling bound posies of flowers at the gateway to a park, and he had to hold himself back from proposing to her on the spot.