A Map Of Glass Part 6

Why should she remain invisible to this hired person? How dare she pretend that Annabelle was not close at hand, breathing the same air, walking up and down the same staircases? Did she not have two legs one shorter than the other, it was true and a nose, and hands and a heart, just like this other girl? She was determined to exist, to take up some s.p.a.ce whether wanted or not in Marie's mind, along with memories of Orphan Island, of her journey to that destination, throngs of other splendidly independent orphans, children with no fathers obsessed by nautical calculations and the distribution of timber, and no distant mothers bent under the weight of the memory of green fields too far away to matter. She would have murdered her parents at that moment had it guaranteed a nod of approval from the girl, had it guaranteed an entry into the brotherhood, the sisterhood of those fortunate enough to be orphaned.

But that moment pa.s.sed and Annabelle realized that a less dramatic method of gaining the girl's attention and approval would have to be discovered. Late afternoon found her a solitary, bundled creature engaged in frantic activity mere feet beyond the kitchen window. She lay on the ground, scissoring arms and legs, making angels in the snow deposited by a late March squall. She created snow men and women, hurled s...o...b..a.l.l.s, lifted armloads of snow from the ground and flung them toward the sky, creating her own private, contained blizzard. As it grew darker the kitchen became a colorful, warmly lit stage where the girl, Marie, carried out her tasks under the instructions of Mackenzie or, when the cook left the room, on her own. During one of these latter periods Annabelle threw a s...o...b..ll at the kitchen window. The girl gave absolutely no indication that she had heard the sound of the impact.

Then, just as Annabelle was thinking of re-entering the house, Marie approached the kitchen window with a saucepan of hot water in her left hand. When the gla.s.s was sufficiently clouded, she extended her free hand and with one thin finger wrote the words No I will not No I will not on the steamy surface. Infuriatingly, Marie wrote the words backwards so that Annabelle would have no trouble reading them, and even more infuriatingly, she never once looked in Annabelle's direction. on the steamy surface. Infuriatingly, Marie wrote the words backwards so that Annabelle would have no trouble reading them, and even more infuriatingly, she never once looked in Annabelle's direction.

Annabelle marched inside and tramped snow all over the house looking for her brother. When she found him in his room upstairs, she said indignantly, "That girl downstairs can read, and she can write backwards and forwards. How about that?"

"So what," Bran said, not looking up from a novel ent.i.tled Ralph, the Train Dispatcher Ralph, the Train Dispatcher. He did not seem interested in the least. But he was absently pulling on his ear, a nervous habit he had developed in early childhood, and Annabelle knew, therefore, that any information concerning Marie was not something he was likely to forget.

The attic where Marie slept was not heated like the rest of the house by fireplaces and Quebec stoves, but it was made almost habitable by the fact that the two huge chimneys, through which the smoke of the half-dozen hardwood fires pa.s.sed, were fully exposed and their bricks were warm. Despite this, one night, after everyone else in the house was asleep, while Annabelle ascended the steep stairs with a combination of antic.i.p.ation and misgivings, her entire body was covered with gooseb.u.mps as the cold slipped under her nightgown and up her legs. It was dark as pitch on the stairs and she believed that she had not made one sound, yet when she emerged into the attic, which was partially lit by a quarter moon, she could see that Marie was sitting up in her bed.

"Get in here," the girl said. "Get in here or you'll freeze."

Annabelle made her way quickly across the room, then scrambled under the covers. Marie s.h.i.+fted to one side to allow some s.p.a.ce and Annabelle was aware, for the first time in her life, of the warmth that the recent presence of another body lends to flannel sheets. "Have you been to sleep yet?" she asked.

Marie shook her head.

"Nor me. But, then, I knew I was coming up here later."

"I knew that too."

Annabelle was surprised by this revelation but decided not to let on. "What's your favorite thing?" she asked.

"Night," said Marie, "now. My bed is all that is mine."

"But it's not yours," said Annabelle, proprietors.h.i.+p igniting briefly in her small self. Didn't her father own the whole house and everything that was in it? For that matter, didn't her father own the whole island and everyone on it, and all the s.h.i.+ps that were built there and sailed to and from it, and all the timber that was rafted down the river? There was something unfair about this distribution of owners.h.i.+p and Annabelle knew it, even then. Still she added, "Your bed belongs to my father," then to a.s.sociate herself with this awesome power, "to my family."

"But I am the only one here and I like that. And after I come up to bed at night and lie down, n.o.body tells me what to do."

"I'm here with you now," Annabelle persisted, "and if I told you to do something you'd have to do it."

"I would not," said the girl. "I would not because I'd say no."

Annabelle believed that that was precisely what the girl would would say and decided to pursue the notion of superiority no further. In truth she was relieved that she had been allowed entrance into the girl's world, not sent away as she had suspected she might be. say and decided to pursue the notion of superiority no further. In truth she was relieved that she had been allowed entrance into the girl's world, not sent away as she had suspected she might be.

Marie had the whole pillow. Her Her pillow, thought Annabelle. "Maybe," she ventured, "if I asked nicely you would do it." pillow, thought Annabelle. "Maybe," she ventured, "if I asked nicely you would do it."

"Maybe. What would you ask?"

"I would ask you about the orphanage."

The nuns have no money, Marie told Annabelle; all the money goes to the monasteries where "there is nothing but men." Some of the boy children in the orphanage would eventually enter monasteries themselves, hoping to experience comfort. It was a very good idea, if you were a boy, to pretend to have received a "call" from G.o.d, instructing you to become a monk or a priest. That way you wouldn't have to be a farmhand owned by a mean farmer. It was not, however, a good idea to pretend to have received a "call" if you were a girl "because nothing would change except your clothes and those for the worse."

Annabelle had paid very little attention to these details. "But how did you become an orphan?" she asked.

Marie was silent, staring at the ceiling. Then she rolled over on her side to face Annabelle, her dark head in the angle of her arm. "It was a wolf," she said.

Annabelle doubted this. "All the woods are chopped," she announced. "Father says so. They're chopped all the way to Lake Superior so there can't be any wolves here. All the timbers come down on boats from Lake Superior."

"Yes, this wolf came on a boat with the timbers and he came dressed as a soldier so no one could know. Then he got to our house and ate my mother all up and killed my father." Marie was silent for a few moments and Annabelle feared that this wolf was the only part of the story that she was going to tell. Then the girl added, "He was a royal wolf with blue eyes, and he had medals from the wolf kingdom."

"And he made you his orphan," murmured Annabelle. Drowsy now, it seemed to her that this change of status from daughter to orphan would be like a sort of marriage, would necessarily involve ceremony and a long significant pause in the action when the blue eyes would lock with yours and tokens would be exchanged. Perhaps even a kiss. Then orphanhood. And, yes, then beauty.

Annabelle wanted something to dream about, something that was all hers, an orphanhood, a wolf of her own.

"The wolf made you beautiful," she said, drunk with a combination of this thought and approaching slumber. "Where is he now?" she asked, her voice thick with sleep.

"He's here. He swam beside the boat to the island," said Marie. "He's always with me. He bought me when he killed my parents. He owns me."

Both girls began to fall seriously into sleep. "He's come down with the timbers, he's just outside the house," said Annabelle, who was already dreaming of a flash of blue eyes caught in moonlight and large, formal pawprints in the snow.

Annabelle, thinking of Marie, began that spring to light fires during the day at the Signal Point of Timber Island or so the story goes. This was the method of communication usually used by islanders for weddings and funerals and other newsworthy events, and was a kind of throwback to the bonfires lit on significant holidays in the distant British Isles from which many laborers in her father's empire had emigrated. However, Annabelle, had she been asked to explain it, wouldn't have been sure what she was trying to accomplish by doing this. Not knowing for certain where Marie was, she had little hope that a message would reach her friend, and so, eventually, she simply settled in to enjoy the flames. She loved to paint fire, and she loved to watch it.

Branwell, who despite Annabelle's best efforts was by now spending his days working with c.u.mmings, was sent out by his father to Signal Point to see what on earth his sister was doing, but she never confessed to him her original intentions, which, by the end of the first week, she had realized were quite futile, at least in respect to the messages being sent by the blaze.

Her brother, not anxious to return to account books and columns of figures, sometimes took to doing "the ranges": an exercise in establis.h.i.+ng a sort of mental aerial perspective. As he had explained earlier in his journal, and as he undoubtedly now explained to Annabelle, this involved the sorting of landscape by distance, beginning with the sh.o.r.e of the next island, followed by the intervening water, then the sh.o.r.e of the mainland, the barracks of the military school, the taller buildings and steeples of Kingston, and then the far-off deep purple of the now completely deforested hills to the north. Why ranges? Annabelle might well have asked. Like rows of mountains, her brother would have replied, one range behind another. Better would have been the sails of s.h.i.+ps placed side by side in a harbor and looked at from the end of a peninsula, she had thought, but did not say so aloud. Instead she asked about Marie, about whether her brother ever thought about what might have become of her.

Branwell, to Annabelle's annoyance, probably would have continued to squint into the distance, and even more maddening from Annabelle's point of view the young man probably would have been making all those self-conscious gestures with thumbs and fingers at right angles, gestures that suggest that artists are intending to frame one view or another. Stop doing that, Annabelle very likely would have said, judging from her character, stop doing that and answer my question. What he answered we will never know. In fact we will never know whether the question was posed, though my father seemed to think that it would have been, that it had been, because shortly after this Branwell began to write in his journal again. One of the entries for that spring included not only the direction and speed of the winds and breezes but also the fact that Annabelle had been lighting a great number of unnecessary fires, and that she had asked him a question that had caused his mind to become troubled in the extreme.

Annabelle, meanwhile, had been visited by an unshakeable notion. The river was free of ice by now and each day s.h.i.+ps docked at the island's quays and unloaded an enormous quant.i.ty of timber onto the island if it were to be used for s.h.i.+pbuilding or into the bay opposite to that of the nautical graveyard if it were to be poled downstream to Quebec. Teams of Frenchmen were to be seen busily a.s.sembling timber rafts, leaping from log to log like frantic squirrels, and shouting a variety of curses and commands that seemed neither to be directed at any particular individual nor related to a specific task. Still, the rafts, which were like islands themselves, sprang into being and sprouted small bunkhouses on their surfaces with remarkable swiftness, and they could be seen moving away, like large swimming animals, into the current of the river, heading east, as they had for as long as Annabelle could remember whenever the river was open to navigation.

Branwell's father had informed him that, in order to better learn the business, and to familiarize himself with the timber merchants in Quebec City, he would be required to make several journeys on board these rafts over the course of the season. When he complained about this to Annabelle, one afternoon on Signal Point, she announced that when their father was safely away on business in Toronto or visiting the remaining forests of the upper Great Lakes, she would be boarding a raft herself, going with him out on the river.

Her brother laughed, of course, at this ridiculous suggestion and told her, as he confessed in his journal, that she had taken leave of her senses. "There is something that needs to be done," she apparently said to him, "something you will come to understand." Her last fire would have been collapsing into embers as she said this, and the water that surrounded the island would have been lively with sails, the harbor bristling with masts. She had made her decision. Her fires had been on the wrong side of the island after all. Her brother was weak. He needed direction. He needed looking after.

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Annabelle recalled that the night Branwell had first visited Marie's bed, she herself had been out in the yard until midnight painting the s.h.i.+ps across the water in Kingston Harbor by the light of the August moon. Branwell had said that if she added fire to the scene its light would compete with that of the moon to bad effect. She had paid no attention to his advice. How am I to see the schooners at night if not by the light of the moon? she asked. You could slip across the water and set them alight, her brother had teased in response. And all the time he was thinking of Marie, of how to draw nearer to her.

In the five years since Marie's arrival in their household, whenever Branwell was home from boarding school, Annabelle had watched him try various means to catch and hold the hired girl's attention. He had taunted her unmercifully, and when she did not respond with enough vehemence to the suggestion, for instance, that her attic was filled with bats, or the kitchen alive with mice, he had taken to making jokes, usually on the subject of her French heritage. Sometime later, he occasionally refused to eat the appetizing and decorative pies and pastries Mackenzie allowed Marie to make, culinary creations for which the girl seemed to have a special gift and ones that she presented with pride at family dinners. Annabelle suspected that Branwell barely knew what he was up to, and half-despised himself when he did this. It hadn't escaped Annabelle's notice that when he trailed around after Marie while she was straightening up the house, or criticized her work, or now and then tugged on the one black braid that hung down her back, the bewildered expression on his face in no way matched the authoritarian tone of voice he was attempting to achieve. In the past year or so, though, her brother's behavior had ameliorated somewhat in relation to Marie: he had become quiet, almost thoughtful in her presence, and could be seen smiling at the girl in a wistful way across a room. And then, one Sat.u.r.day afternoon, when she and Marie were busy with sewing, Annabelle had followed the direction of Branwell's focused gaze and had realized that he was staring, with a considerable amount of intensity, at Marie's downcast face.

Their mother had been dead for a year. No one not even the parade of doctors called in to examine her had been able to say precisely what was wrong with her. It had been very apparent to everyone that the woman was dying but of what exactly? She became weaker and weaker, her small frame diminis.h.i.+ng, her vague expression changing to one of sorrow and resignation. Near the end, she had been brought each day to the parlor where she could see from the window the oak sapling she had planted years before, a sapling that by now had become a flouris.h.i.+ng young tree. She could watch its trembling leaves lose green, gain gold, look at its thin arms bending in the autumn wind. Because he listened with real interest, she had described to Branwell the ancient oak that had grown near her old home in Suffolk. "Hundreds and hundreds of years old," Annabelle had heard her mother tell him repeatedly. "If your father destroys it, I insist that you kill him," she invariably added. It had never been entirely clear to Annabelle whether she was referring to the young oak on Timber Island or the old oak in Suffolk. Perhaps, she had thought, her mother meant both. "That will not take place," was all Branwell had managed to say in reply.

The tree remained after her death, had gained in height and breadth. If Joseph Woodman had ever detected an oak in his yard, he had made no comment on it. Unnoticed, the tree would be safe from the axe, Annabelle concluded, so Branwell would not have that reason to kill his father though she didn't doubt that there would be others. She knew that her brother was shattered by the loss of their mother, and she suspected that he resented the way their father was able to conduct business the day after the funeral and all subsequent days as if nothing on his island had altered at all.

Annabelle remembered that on the night Branwell had first ventured to Marie's room to give comfort, and perhaps to receive it, their father had rampaged through the house like a confused bear, shouting at Marie, who, with some help from Annabelle, had by now a.s.sumed most of the domestic duties therein, Mackenzie having decamped with her French husband. Equating all betrayals, imagined and real, with Ireland, Joseph Woodman believed the pair had gone to that country. "They'll be drowned, I'm telling you," he had said to Annabelle. "They'll be ruined. They'll be out on edge of Dereen Bog, they'll be stuck beside Loch Acoose with nothing but a ludicrous turf spade between the two of them and enough moisture to turn their flesh to water." When he stopped lambasting Ireland, he turned to Marie for whatever had gone wrong, and everything he had lost. Annabelle had shouted at him to stop, but Marie, her face flaming, had finally run up the two flights of stairs to her attic to be rid of the hullabaloo, an Irish word that Annabelle knew she had learned as a result of living in this house.

When Annabelle, confronted by her father's temper, had been taken by the desire to paint burning s.h.i.+ps by moonlight, Branwell had likely seen his way clear. Soon their father, exhausted by ill humor, would have been snoring angrily in his bed. Annabelle would be gone for an hour or more. Branwell had likely made his way toward the staircase.

Looking back now with affection, Annabelle imagined Marie sitting up in bed, hearing Branwell's footsteps, perhaps seeing his shadow on the wall, and she imagined that Marie would have opened her arms to the boy, even before he stepped into the room. She could not, and did not, imagine what happened next, but remembered the warmth of that bed and the pleasure of intimate talk in the place that was Marie's alone.

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As you float on the lake away from Timber Island, then enter the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, the islands thicken until eventually you are aware of a number of sh.o.r.elines composed of great rocks and tall trees moving soundlessly past the watercraft on which you stand. Sometimes you feel that you are not moving at all and that it is the islands themselves that are adrift, like icebergs sailing purposefully toward open waters. Branwell, however, trapped on the river by his father, was, at this stage, quite impervious to the beauty that surrounded him. Occasionally he would read to Annabelle a poem or two he had attempted in his journal to vent his frustration: Oh solitude where are they charms That Sages say they have seen in they face Better to live in the midst of alarms Than to dwell in this terrible placeThe wind was from the east this week It blew hard all the day The raft was stopped at Batiseau And there now do we stay Amused by her brother's lack of literary prowess, Annabelle told him he was in no danger of becoming a poet, but suggested that there must be wonderful things to sketch all along the river. Branwell allowed that while this might very well be the case, he was in no mood to avail himself of these opportunities. "All I can think of," he said, "is getting onto dry land. But it seems the minute I get back, before I can even catch my breath, I'm back at work again. My whole life is just raft after raft after raft."

Timber rafts were the most temporary of constructed worlds and seem to have been constantly engaged in the artificial evolutionary process that was thrust upon them. What once was part of a great forest became for the span of a few days the platform of a small village where people worked and ate and slept and overcame the sequence of difficulties that made up the course of the river, diffculties so dramatic that even Branwell felt compelled to comment in his journal that the sight of turbulent rapids frothing over the edges of the raft, not five feet from where he stood, "filled the spirit with awe." Once the rafts successfully reached their destination, they were, of course, dismantled, their several parts dispatched to England, where eventually the wood that made up their construction might re-emerge in the shape of furniture in a mult.i.tude of Victorian parlors or, if the timbers were oak and large and long enough as masts on the decks of the pugnacious vessels of the Admiralty. One thing was certain, however, no raft ever made the return journey upriver, and Annabelle, knowing this, would have thought a raft to be the perfect vessel for the deliverance of her brother into the arms of the future she wanted for him.

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Annabelle worked up the nerve to get herself on board a raft in mid-July and was, oddly enough, able to do so with her father's permission. It wasn't entirely out of the question for a sightseer or two to be taken on board, especially in the warmer months, as it was well known that this was by far the best way to experience the thrilling power of the rapids. Furthermore, because his mind was almost always fully occupied with business, any curiosity shown in some aspect of how it worked by one of his offspring especially in the face of Branwell's obvious disinterest pleased Joseph Woodman even more than Annabelle had antic.i.p.ated that it might. And she had had antic.i.p.ated that it might, had spent the previous evening, in fact, composing the following speech. "I just want to understand the business," she had said to him, "how the rafts are taken down to Quebec. I just want to see what Branwell does when he is on the river." antic.i.p.ated that it might, had spent the previous evening, in fact, composing the following speech. "I just want to understand the business," she had said to him, "how the rafts are taken down to Quebec. I just want to see what Branwell does when he is on the river."

On this midsummer day, once the raft moved away from the booms that held it, she grabbed her brother by the arm and began to dance with him, awkwardly, it's true, because of her lameness and because her brother was an unwilling partner. "I don't understand what has got into you," he might have said to her as he disentangled himself from her embrace. He would have been irritated too, because now the journey was going to be longer than the usual three or four days. The raft would have to haul up in odd places along the river where lodgings could be found with families known to their father, there being no question of Annabelle spending the night on board with the men. Branwell would likely also be invited inside for an evening meal out of politeness, and the thought of this may have put his teeth on edge for he was becoming more and more unsociable as his unhappiness deepened. His bemus.e.m.e.nt regarding his sister's behavior would be exaggerated by the fact that, although in the past she had been suspicious and evasive about Frenchmen, she had now apparently developed a certain camaraderie with them, and before the raft was five miles downriver, she was laughing and conversing with them, and showing them the watercolors she was making of the river and the trees. His own artistic endeavors at the time were confined to the penmans.h.i.+p he practiced while keeping the log great, flouris.h.i.+ng capital letters, for example, at the beginning of each entry, and the odd mechanical drawing of an iceboat or a sloop.

When, on the second day, Orphan Island hove into view and the raft moved toward it, Branwell would have thought nothing of it, as the French, who were both sentimental and pious, sometimes left a box of food or a bag of coal on the dock there out of respect for the nuns and the orphans in their care. He watched his sister step ash.o.r.e and, searching the dock, was slightly puzzled by the sight of her nightcase resting there. Then he was seized from behind by two coureurs du bois who deposited him unceremoniously at the spot where Annabelle waited and who, after shouting orders to their comrades, swiftly poled the raft back into the current of the river. When he called to the men, they waved their caps and called back to him, "Bonne chance!" and "Vive l'amour!"

By the time Branwell had collected himself enough to turn angrily to his sister in search of an explanation, Annabelle was running, as fast as she could with her bad leg, up the slope toward the large forbidding facade of the orphanage where a woman with a young child clinging to her skirts had come out to see who had arrived. He watched, dumbfounded, as the two women embraced so fiercely that they fell laughing to the ground, surprising the child, who began to howl. And Branwell, shaken by his arrival at the island and by the unhappiness draining out of him at the sight of his lost love, began to weep as well. He might have seen himself then as one of the minor characters in the painting he had admired in Paris; perhaps one of the wolves in the far distance; not one of the seductive wolves Marie had told him about one night as he lay in her bed but a wolf with neither ferocity nor charm.

The orphanage that Marie and her child stood in front of was a large, unpainted, decaying pile of timber and clapboard, grey with neglect and adorned with many plain, ill-repaired, sagging porches. Grey might not be the appropriate word to describe its color, for it would have been darkened by time, becoming almost as black as the habits of the nuns who cared for the orphans in its dusty rooms. Its windows were plentiful, but, by Branwell's count, at least six panes in these windows had vanished and were replaced by waxed paper. The sight of the opaque windows, the dark walls, awakened a sense of shame in him. Why had he acquiesced so completely to his father's wishes, which had resulted in consigning Marie to this dismal place? Why had he not insisted on marrying her, something he now knew he had always wanted? He was a distant, cringing wolf; a wolf without courage, he thought, and thinking this decided on the change that would determine the course of the rest of his life.

For most men a reunion after desire, then intimacy, then distance, and finally an ocean of time is a terrifying proposition, one that often causes them to avoid allowing even the possibility of the encounter to fully form in the mind. Annabelle, having had absolutely no experience with romance, and unlikely to ever have any experience with romance, would have nevertheless known all this instinctively. But how did she know where Marie was? This part of the story was never explained. Perhaps she was visited by a lucky guess, or perhaps she was told of Marie's whereabouts by the Frenchmen, who would have been well aware of the telegraph of rumors running up and down the river. Whatever the case, she would have walked toward her brother and, taking his hand, she would have drawn him toward his lover and the child who would become my grandfather. As they walked up the slope she would have told him that she always knew what he wanted, even if he didn't know. And Branwell would have nothing to say for he would have known in his heart that she was right.

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After a week of Catholic instruction by the nuns, a week made somewhat easier by the marginal knowledge of Latin that Branwell had acquired while at boarding school, a visiting priest married him to Marie in the chapel of the orphanage. The ceremony was attended by a choir of orphans, a dozen nuns, Annabelle, and the small boy called Maurice, whose original status in life had been made legitimate by a ceremony of candles, incense, and chant, and who now had a full-blown temper tantrum just as vows were being exchanged and had to be taken from the room. Annabelle would never forget the sound of the boy's cries echoing through the wooden halls of the dark building after one of the nuns had lifted him up and carried him away. These howls, to her mind, did not presage a happy life, and, in fact, her predictions would prove to be accurate. For although Maurice would become inordinately successful, he would never be particularly happy, would never, in fact, develop the capacity for happiness, and would eventually come to grief as a result of a combination of serial fixations, greed, and bad weather.

But that day young Maurice recovered from his tantrum in time for the wedding supper and even submitted to being held, for a few tense moments, first by his father and then by his aunt, who repeatedly identified herself to him as such. Annabelle was enthusiastic in her new role; Branwell, fully attentive to his reawakened love for Marie, less so in his. He wanted all of his bride's attention and was a bit nonplussed by the notion that any other living creature could be in a position to make demands of her. Moreover, the child had become accustomed to occupying that most coveted spot by Marie's side in the warmth of her bed and, even during the first few days after the wedding, several discussions took place about this matter.

Marie seemed filled with joy, not only by her marriage to Branwell, but also by Annabelle's reappearance in her life, and, the day after the wedding, so that Branwell could spend some time alone with his son, she offered to take her friend on a tour of the home that had preceded her long and lively tenure in the Timber Island attic and that had provided her shelter since. There were fewer orphans in the dormitories now, Marie told her friend. "Not so many wolves, I suppose," Annabelle commented. Marie showed Annabelle the cot at the end of a long dormitory, the place that had been hers before she made the journey to the island. "I've always loved beds," she said as they left the room. "They are nests, really, a small s.p.a.ce you burrow into, a s.p.a.ce that comes to know your shape."

Annabelle's astonis.h.i.+ng sc.r.a.pbook a sc.r.a.pbook that would contain only one paper sc.r.a.p was begun during this tour of the orphanage, or at least the first relic to be placed in it was plucked from the rough surface of the rickety front steps of that structure as she and Marie walked out the front door to stroll around the property. Annabelle had long been intrigued by the idea of relics. A French riverman had once showed her a splinter of "le vrai croix," which he said he kept always on his person and which he claimed had been entirely responsible for the safe pa.s.sage through rapids of every raft on which he had labored. Should not, then, a splinter of this piece of architecture that had harbored her friend be kept by her as a magic charm?

That was the beginning, and as soon as she had the splinter tucked safely inside her sleeve, she regretted not having plucked a similar specimen from the delivering raft.

Eventually, Annabelle's book of relics, her splinter book, as Branwell would come to call it, would contain samples from any number of wooden constructions: a splinter from an a.s.sortment of sad, decomposing vessels in Wreck Bay, for instance, shavings from the floor of the shop where s.h.i.+ps were being conceived, bits of bark from a delivery of rough timber all dated, identified, and catalogued. She also included several ominous-looking charred wooden matches that, according to their labels, had been used quite innocently to light candles and oil lamps in the house on significant occasions of one kind or another. There would be fabric in the book, square inches of canvas and short lengths of rope from the sail loft, given to her by Monsieur Marcel Guerin, the sail master. But the only paper sc.r.a.p in the book was the small half-inch of waxed paper she tore from the edge of one of the orphanage windows.

Marie also showed Annabelle the graveyard, an area surrounded by a white picket fence and filled with twenty or thirty small limestone pillars each topped by a lovely stone angel. An Italian monument maker in the town on the sh.o.r.e of the river had donated his services, she told Annabelle, and had carved an angel each time a child died. "I knew some of these children," Marie said, "not all, of course, but some. They almost all died quietly in the midst of some epidemic or another. Death seemed so romantic, somehow, to an orphan. You got attention, you got prayers with your name in them, and then a religious service just for you. Everyone thought about you for days and days. And," she paused, "and you got your own angel." To children with no possessions that angel must have seemed like a special gift, that and your own name carved on the stone beneath it. "In the winter after a storm," Marie said, "it looks as if there is a choir of miniature angels advancing like an army across the top of the snow."

Annabelle looked at the graveyard for quite a while, then, just before turning back toward the convent, she plucked a painted splinter from a tilting picket. "But you weren't the dying type," she said to Marie.

"No," laughed Marie, turning back toward the convent, "I certainly was not."

A few days later the small family (in the company of Aunt Annabelle, as she now liked to call herself) entered a rowboat skippered by a st.u.r.dy nun just as the morning sun rose over the river. On the mainland they caught a coach to Kingston and a skiff to Timber Island, arriving late in the afternoon. They knew that Joseph Woodman would still be at work at this time and so, with some trepidation, they approached the modest, unpainted building that he used as an office. Soon they were gathered in front of his large desk. The old man neither stood to greet them nor looked up from the account book he pretended to be studying, and, when he finally spoke, he talked only to his daughter, whom he accused of high treason and "Irish behavior."

Annabelle did not flinch. "This is Maurice," she told him, placing her hand on the top of the boy's small head. "You are his grandfather."

"I remember a certain Fitzmaurice from Ireland. Bog Irish and a complete fool. Maurice...an Irish name if I ever heard one." Woodman eyed the boy suspiciously.

"You know very well it is not an Irish name," Annabelle replied. "You are perfectly aware that it is a French name. On the other hand, let me remind you that Branwell is is an Irish name, and you were the one who chose it." an Irish name, and you were the one who chose it."

"Indeed," said Joseph Woodman, "and we can all see what that brought him." This remark was delivered without sarcasm. The patriarch had not the sense of humor to engage in sarcasm.

Then, in the midst of the hollow silence that followed this declaration, to everyone's amazement, Maurice, who had neither spoken nor smiled throughout the journey or the week that had preceded it, beamed at his grandfather, disengaged himself from his mother's hand, and scrambled onto the old man's lap.

Joseph Woodman stiffened, but did not put the child down. The small boy settled into the crook of one unyielding arm, then reached up and touched the white beard. He looked with adoration into the stern face. "Monsieur Dieu," he said, smiling first at his grandfather and then at his surprised mother, "Monsieur Dieu...il est la."

This was to be one of the first of Maurice's fixations on personalities more powerful than his own, fixations that would rule his life. Maurice would always be drawn to those more certain than himself of how they wanted the world to operate, and these attachments would be the source of both his occasional joy and his chronic unhappiness. But that day, his deification of his grandfather was to be the key that unlocked his family's future. No one is immune to the flattery of adoration, and Joseph Woodman was not to be an exception to this rule. Once Maurice was fully established on the man's lap, the timber baron's expression gradually changed from irritated astonishment to a kind of bewildered tenderness. "What is this clamoring all over me?" he was said to have remarked in a tone that was now a mere parody of bad temper. "It feels like a rat. Or is it perhaps a badger?"

From that day on "Badger" was the name that his grandfather used, both when he spoke to Maurice privately and when he called to him from a distance as he often did when returning to the house for his evening meal. Sometimes he had a treat for the boy, a candy he had purchased at the island store, or one of the baker's sticky buns, and no amount of scolding on the part of Marie could dissuade him from letting his grandson devour these sweets right before supper. The boy, for his part, followed the old man everywhere he could. He trailed around after him, from room to room, down the road to the office, sometimes even into the old man's private chamber. "Badger, be gone!" was a teasing command that was often heard booming through the house. Sometimes the boy, anxious for the morning reunion, would be up at dawn, standing by Joseph Woodman's bed, waiting for the levee. On one of these occasions, Joseph Woodman leapt from his bed and, still clothed in his nightgown and cap, chased his squealing grandson all over the house. It was obvious to Branwell, Marie, and Annabelle that the old man had come, quite quickly, to love the child and that this love was to be, at least for the time being, the bond connecting all the adults in the family.

Marie resumed her duties in the house with much enthusiasm now that her legitimacy afforded her the status of junior mistress rather than that of servant. Golden souffles with one perfect crack down the middle and beautiful cakes with fruit slices arranged to represent bouquets emerged often from her ovens along with the more ordinary daily fare. She slept in Branwell's room now in a bra.s.s double bed bought for the couple by Woodman Senior in a moment of weakness that could only be viewed as a complete surrender to the very turn of events that he had taken such pains to prevent from happening.

On certain quiet afternoons Marie and Annabelle would retire to the old bed in the attic in order to talk, just as they had done when they were young girls. Their conversations mostly concerned Branwell. His virtues and his shortcomings, his various infirmities, and his mysterious inability to express himself continued to absorb them. Various theories about what he was thinking or how he was feeling were articulated, mulled over, dissected. Several conflicting conclusions were drawn, then reversed the next day or the following week. Branwell, unaware of all this, and thinking about nothing in particular, was, in fact, happier than he had ever been in his life. He went albeit somewhat unwillingly each day to the office and, once summer came, even more unwillingly out on the river with the rafts, but his marriage to Marie pleased and calmed him and made his tasks easier to manage, though the idea of painted hallways remained in his imagination.

Still, both women tended to believe that, underneath it all, Branwell was tortured. This made him more mysterious, more interesting. Long, speculative discussions about what might be torturing him took place in the attic while Branwell was yawning in the vicinity of account books or while he was stretched out on a cot gazing at the temporary ceiling of a moored raft. He wasn't tortured, he was just bored by duty. He wanted to embellish stark hallways with turquoise landscapes. Eventually he confessed his desire to his wife, who, in turn, brought up the subject with Annabelle. "It's what he is meant to be doing," Annabelle apparently announced, this time to a sympathetic listener, "and, in time, I expect, he'll be given his chance." Marie agreed and told Annabelle that she wanted pure contentment for the man who had made her so happy that even now, when she woke beside him each morning, she could hardly believe her good fortune.

Annabelle, whose domestic work had all but disappeared now that Marie was back, took up the thankless task of educating her little nephew until it became obvious that the lessons in poetry and drawing did not hold his attention the way the columns of numbers in his grandfather's office did. The old man eventually took over in the matter of Maurice's schooling, teaching him accounting and bookkeeping. By the age of ten, the boy was a businessman to be reckoned with and knew enough about how to extract money from others that his grandfather determined that he should be sent to board at Upper Canada College in Toronto, the perfect place, the old man knew, for the Badger to become acquainted with the kind of boys who, when grown, would inherit the fortunes he hoped his grandson would find a way to benefit from.

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By the time Maurice, uniformed and capped, departed for school a few years later, his mother and father had moved away from Timber Island and, with the help of the elder Woodman, had purchased an inexpensive two-story clapboard hotel on the sandy beach at the end of the nearby peninsular County. The rafts had dwindled to a trickle by now, Old Woodman had retired, and c.u.mmings had taken over what remained of the much-diminished business, a business in which, to Branwell's relief, there was no longer any room for him. Annabelle and her father remained in the big house, she eventually nursing the cranky old man. The Badger, still devoted to his grandfather, would make the day trip from the hotel by way of his own sailboat in the summer or an iceboat he had constructed at the Christmas break.

Branwell, who had painted a number of landscapes in the upstairs and downstairs halls of the inn, was being encouraged by the more prosperous families in the County to decorate their homes. He completed these commissions in the winters when the dry heat thrown by the wood stoves would cause the paint to set, and when there were no guests at the inn. The summers brought a number of city families to the sh.o.r.es of the lake and the verandas of the inn, some from Toronto and Montreal, some from as far away as Albany or Chicago. In spite of his father's annoyance, Branwell had called the inn "The Ballagh Oisin," after the mountain pa.s.s in Ireland, the story of which had given rise to his name. "It's a mountain pa.s.s," he would tell inquisitive guests, "in Ireland." At one point he had staged an evening contest to see who among the visitors could p.r.o.nounce the name properly. Branwell was a jovial host, much given to jesting. His disposition was greatly improved now that he had left the timber business and had in his life almost everything that his sister had known all along he wanted: Marie, the painted hallways, and an open view of the lake uncluttered by islands of commerce.

During their third or fourth year at the hotel a letter arrived for Branwell from a fellow-innkeeper in a distant part of Ontario known as the Huron Tract. This was a portion of Upper Canada that had been considered quite useless by Joseph Woodman in that it was situated too far from the Great Lakes or any other navigable body of water to make it suitable for timbering, despite rumors of incredible hardwood trees, many of which were twelve to fifteen feet in diameter. A couple of decades before Woodman Senior had established his island empire in close proximity to the relatively civilized town of Kingston, however, a hundred-mile-long inland trail known as the Huron Road was being hacked, sawed, chopped, and burnt through this forest under the direction of the Canada Company, which comprised a group of British and Scottish entrepreneurs, several of whom were named after the wild animals they had killed in other corners of the Commonwealth. Tiger Dunlop is someone who comes immediately to mind, but likely there were other colorful monikers as well Rhinoceros Smith, Polar Bear MacLeod, Lion McGillivray. The trail ended at the Lake Huron port of G.o.derich into which the sorry, fly-bitten, half-starved party of blazers and engineers, axemen and surveyors had staggered in the autumn of 1828 after months of exhausting labor and bouts of swamp fever, only to be bullied by the company into making the trek back in the opposite direction in order that improvements might be made to the new road and the land surveyed and divided into saleable plots for would-be settlers.

A few years later, once the settlers started to arrive, several inns were established by the Canada Company at various points along the road inns whose fortunes would suffer dramatically when, some years later, another company of entrepreneurs established a railway from the center of the province to the port on the lake. The innkeepers, or their offspring, managed, somehow, to keep the doors of their solid brick Georgian buildings open for a year or two afterwards though it was clear that their trade had suffered and there was no telling how long their businesses would survive.

Branwell's letter was from such an innkeeper, a certain Mister Sebastien Fryfogel Esquire, proprietor of Fryfogel's Tavern, which was situated on the Huron Road between the town of Berlin and the hamlet of Stratford. He had heard about the colorful murals of the Ballagh Oisin from a traveller who had stayed there, and he felt that paintings of this nature might enhance the rooms of his inn. Would Branwell consider making the voyage to the west? Fryfogel allowed that he normally had no time for the thieves and rogues that roamed the roads of Upper Canada plying their various trades. He listed tinkers, medicine sellers, horse traders, dancers and singers, and itinerant painters as being among the most disreputable and offensive members of that already defective species of the animal kingdom known as human beings. But he had it on the best authority that Mister Branwell Woodman was, like himself, primarily an honest innkeeper, though one who occasionally painted pristine landscapes with no people and, in particular, no shapely, sinful women in them. His own inn needed dressing up. Would Branwell oblige?

The letter arrived in early January when funds from the summer had all but dried up and the commissions from mainland locals had slowed to a trickle. Branwell hated the idea of the journey: he had heard the rumors (broken axels, mud, and malaria in summer, overturned sleighs, ghastly blizzards, frostbite, and pneumonia in winter) that circulated about this distant road, and he had no wish to test the accuracy of such rumors. But Marie, who wanted not only to feed her small family but to experiment as well with expensive French dishes in antic.i.p.ation of hungry and appreciative summer patrons, insisted that he take the commission. "Not much money in it, I'll wager," he said, pus.h.i.+ng the letter across the table so that Marie could read it.

"More money than we've got here," she replied but in a philosophic tone, with neither judgment nor malice in her voice.

"More money than we have got here," echoed young Maurice, who was home for Christmas vacation. There was a touch of malice in his his voice. voice.

And so, clothed in fur and rugs, Branwell rode in the back of a sleigh bound for the mainland town of Belleville, where he would board the train headed for Toronto, where he would make yet another westbound connection. Mister Fryfogel had written a second letter to say that if Mister Woodman intended to use such an unholy method of transportation as the railroad, it was no business of his and added that he himself, having been almost ruined by the railroad, was only too aware of the double meaning of that phrase. Baden was the name of the stop, he wrote, "a most unpleasant village, born recently as a result of the cursed railroad." He a.s.sured Branwell that he would be able to hire a sleigh at the station and, if conditions were favorable, he would be at the tavern in less than an hour. Sometimes, the innkeeper wrote, there were storms, storms that could make the going a little rough.

When he alighted at Baden, it became clear to Branwell that conditions were considerably less than favorable. Not a sleigh in sight and there was a biting wind, with a velocity higher than any of the ferocious currents he had recorded in his Timber Island journal, which tore at his coat and tossed the beaver hat from his head. Though it was not yet dark, the air was filled with such a quant.i.ty of snow that he could see nothing at all beyond the walls of the small wooden building that served as the apparently deserted station. Then, just as he was giving up hope, a man could be seen walking in his direction across the platform. "Nice day," the stranger said and was about to continue walking when Branwell caught him by the sleeve of his overcoat and told him his destination.

"I need to hire a sleigh to get out there today," he said.

"Not likely," said the man. "Not today, not tomorrow, probably not the day after that."

"For heaven's sake, why not?"

"Road's closed. Road's almost always closed. Snow in winter. Mud in summer. Waste of time if you ask me...roads."

Branwell was speechless.

"But," the stranger offered, "judging by the good weather, you might get out there on snowshoes if you've got 'em. Not today though. Too late. You'll have to put up at Kelterborn's Bar. Dreadful rooms, but good beer. Thanks to the railroad." He touched his head and for the first time Branwell noticed the railway cap.

The wind rose and the station master disappeared, enveloped by a shroud of white. "At least it's not snowing," the man said. "Nice sunny day."

"Not snowing?" said Branwell as the wind abated somewhat and the man came, once again, partially into view.