No Country: A Novel (20 page)

A naturally reticent man, he had the habit of a half-smile and a pursing of his lips before he spoke. “You would not take it amiss if I offered you a piece of bread?” he said.

“Sir,” I joked grimly, “you might ask me if I would be offended to find a piece of gold stuck to my shoe. Introduce us to this piece of bread, if you will.”

From the large pocket of his old-fashioned peacoat, he took out a brown packet which held two thick slices of brown bread with a bit of butter between them, for he had realized we had not had a crumb overnight. The pig stirred and sat up with a lively show of interest, much like a dog at a supper table.

“Merry Christmas,” Mr. Chisholm said, for so it was, and Maeve and I ate the kind Anglican pastor’s bread, the first morsel I had on this land.

“Are you a farming man, Mr. McCarthaigh?” he asked me.

“Nay, sir,” I said between chewing the bread, “not much of one. I used to be a schoolteacher.”

“Is this your pig, Miss Maeve?” asked Mr. Chisholm.

“No, sir. He likes us for company because most people want to eat him,” said Maeve.

“Ah,” said Mr. Chisholm, who did not have the look of a pig dealer at all, in spite of this line of talk. I thought he was making small talk. “Tomorrow I will ask my friend Mr. Josiah Braithwaite to come. You may find him interesting,” he said.

“Any friend of yours, Mr. Chisholm,” I said cordially, “will be welcome at our residence.” I realized my humour was being affected by my sense of despair. In the rising fog, I wondered how long it would be before Maeve and I would fall prey to the miasma.

•  •  •

M
R.
J
OSIAH
B
RAITHWAITE WAS
an enormous man, pink and rotund, with large upturned nostrils. He twinkled his eyes at Maeve and said, “Fine Fine Fine Pig.”

“Good morning, sir,” responded Maeve.

Mr. Braithwaite tickled the pig and ran his hand on its haunches, and made snuffling sounds, while the pig wriggled with delight. After a point I was not sure who was making which noise. And to cap the absurdity, Mr. Chisholm and I spoke calmly about the weather. Mr. Braithwaite continued in his adoration of the pig; he looked amazingly similar to the creature, although he was in human clothes and enormous shoes, the bottoms of which I could see, since he was kneeling.

Abruptly Mr. Braithwaite, still kneeling, addressed us. “I would . . . ahem . . . I would like to offer you a Happy Proposition.” For an absurd moment I thought Mr. Braithwaite was going to ask my permission to marry the pig.

“My proposition is: Let Me Have Your Pig.”

“He belongs to himself,” Maeve asserted.

“Ah, I see,” he said, turning ceremoniously, and addressed the child. “Miss Maeve, I would very much, very much, like the company of the Pig.”

“Will you eat him?” Maeve asked apprehensively. “Everybody wants to.”

“Eat him!” Mr. Josiah Braithwaite was clearly shocked. “Eat him!” he repeated, as if it were unspeakable heresy. “Indeed not, miss. I will have him breed a magnificent stock, a great and notable line.” His eyes were staring into the middle distance, his nostrils flared, and his voice became dreamy, contemplating the glorious dynasty. “He will be the first, the Paterfamilias of an illustrious breed.”

Maeve and I listened, fascinated. But Mr. Braithwaite descended abruptly from this vision of porcine glory and spoke briskly to me. “I have a farm to the south, beside Lake Champlain.
I was going to leave today, but Mr. Alan Chisholm told me that I would meet the Great Pig if I accompanied him here. Hence . . .” he broke off and clapped his hands in joy, “my proposition is, let me, let me have the Pig. And in return, I will take you both to my farm. You said to Mr. Chisholm that you wished to find employment, Mr. McCarthaigh. Well, you can work for me on the farm or work the ledgers—for my brother Jeremiah takes care of our dairy business, which supplies the cities. As you wish, as you wish,” he said, “but I’d say, try our farm life for a while, and you will see for yourself how your pig prospers there.” He stopped suddenly in full flow of words. “We leave tomorrow.”

“Shall we get permission to leave so soon?” I asked.

“You could break for freedom with your pig,” suggested Mr. Braithwaite, his eyes shining with adventure. He snorted with glee at the idea.

“No, no,” interceded Mr. Chisholm with alacrity, “I will speak to Dr. Douglas immediately. With Mr. Braithwaite’s guarantee of employment, there should be no problem about your departure.”

“I have little experience on a farm,” I said candidly to Mr. Braithwaite, “but I can do the figures, if accounting is what you have need for.”

“Can you, can you indeed?” he sang out. “The figures keep me up nights and put me off my food. Will you do
all
the accounts?”

I sat up most of the night, tense and uneasy. All this seemed almost too good to be true. But some providence had reached out and saved us from utter ruin or shipwreck. From the time the Dutch ship arrived out of the ocean’s horizon to this present moment, I was amazed how much like a child—like Maeve—I had regarded the world, and not in my usual cogitative manner. The events were unfolding as if in a child’s storybook, as she turns the
pages and finds on them a benevolent golden-haired giant, an elf-like man bearing gifts, a deadly island sojourn ended by an absurd man’s obsession with a pig. I wondered if I should rub my eyes.

I looked at the sleeping child beside me and thought how this child would grow up one day find her mate, birth children. So would they, in turn. This human pyramid, at whose apex Maeve now lay asleep, increasing with each generation would not, otherwise, come into existence—and this earth cumulatively and surely—would be a very different place. It was no country I was destined to see in its entirety, in my lifespan. But all this would not have come to pass—were it not for a series of mischance, fortunate meetings, unlikely escapes, and, for the nonce, a pig.

The next morning Mr. Braithwaite came in his carriage with all the necessary papers. We got on. The pig, hoisted in an enormous crate, followed in a cart. We rode to Quebec, took the ferry to the south bank of the St. Lawrence River, and continued south, towards Lake Champlain.

As we drove away from the river and I glanced back to look out of the window, I could see another bedraggled ship entering the final stretch to Grosse Isle, bearing its dying, the desperate, and the ill, perhaps from County Sligo itself.

“What do you do all day, Son?”

The day after my sixth birthday, I had wandered into his room. I did not know what my father meant. He often looked surprised to find me around, as if he had been jostled awake from whatever he had been reading. But he never forgot my birthday. That year I got a set of storybooks with pictures, for I already loved to read, and a Hornby train set with its tracks, bogeys, and caboose, and a small station with signals, red and green. Baba and I shared my birthday cake.

Even after all these decades, I remember its taste—chocolate with flecks of toffee—my favourite. I have time now for memories, an old man alone in an old house.

I had grown up under the silence of large portraits which hung over me, looking down from the high walls. Most of the windows were kept shuttered, for the sun was often fierce. I would walk and play by myself under the eyes of my dead ancestors.

My grandfather Padraig Aherne’s hair was thick and coppery.
He had a dark moustache, and his jaw looked like it was made of stone. His bright blue eyes under thick eyebrows seemed to follow me as I moved about the room. I used to think he missed not being able to stride about. I was certain that his laughter emerged like a boom. His long hair was tied with a black ribbon. His hand on the back of a carved chair looked powerful, while the other rested gently on my grandmother’s shoulder. I wished he could place it on mine.

Once I got up on a chair to look closer, peeping into my grandmother’s face. She had a hovering smile which made me certain that she would have loved me. Whenever I entered this room, I felt she had just finished speaking to me, and in a moment might say something again. I stood at the edge of that silence, under my grandfather’s blue gaze.

“What do you do all day?” asked my father again.

“I don’t know,” I said. I had grown used to playing by myself in our backyard garden, climbing trees to scare the squirrels, or throwing the ball against the walls.

“You’re six,” he had said, looking thoughtfully at me, very like our tailor, Suleiman, who had come to our house two weeks ago to measure me for my suit, a birthday present from my father. “Joe Belletty’s boy also turned six, he told me the other day,” he said to himself. “Anthony.” He put his hand on my shoulder and added, “Would you like to go and play with him?” Yes, I nodded.

•  •  •

I
HAVE OFTEN
thought of that morning more than seven decades ago, the first time I went out to meet the world.

Sonu-amma, our maid, escorted me across Elliot Road to a
small flat on the third floor of a building, noisy as the street. It had only two rooms, both crowded with furniture and people, but no books.

Anthony had a baby brother who sat propped on a chair, banging his spoon on the spattered dining table, while his dad sat beside him next to an open window, scratching his chin and reading the sports page of the newspaper. Mr. Belletty looked far younger than my father. “Hello, Robert,” he greeted me. Anthony’s mother stood at the stove, frying eggs that smelt wonderful. She had not combed her hair yet. “Tony, look, your friend is here,” she called out to him.

Tony was on the floor, playing with a train that was not shiny like mine, but I felt lucky to be here. “Hello, Robert,” he said, as if a new boy to play with was no surprise for him. He tossed me a wooden block, and I caught it easily.

“Hello, Anthony,” I said.

“I’m Tony,” he said emphatically. “My mom calls me Anthony when she’s mad.”

His mother laughed and said, “Here are your eggs, Robbie and Tony—go sit down there beside Ned, you two.” She pointed at the chairs across from Mr. Belletty. I was dazzled. This is what it must mean to have a mother who is alive. I wondered if my mother had combed her hair right away when she got up in the morning. I hoped not. And nobody had ever called me Robbie before, but that is what she did ever after.

After eggs and fried bread, while we played on the floor, Tony told me that he wanted to be a soldier when he grew up. I immediately told him that so did I. By the time I left, we had decided to play together everyday until we could join the same regiment.

•  •  •

T
WO WEEKS LATER
my father told me that I was to go to St. Xavier’s School on Park Street. But Tony’s father had attended La Martiniere for Boys, farther from home, and that is where Tony would go. I set my will against my father’s and discovered it not very difficult to get my way.

In the classroom, Mr. Pantaky seated us in alphabetical order, and thus we—Aherne and Belletty—found ourselves next to each other. And outside the classroom, Tony and I explored our neighbourhood and discovered a world of children who lived across the street and in the lanes surrounding us. One of them was plump Krikor Aratoon, whose father was the largest man I ever saw, with ears like pieces of pink sponge. They had tons of relatives and went to their own Armenian church and celebrated Christmas in January.

We played cops and robbers, and wrestled with the Zachariah boys, Ben, Solly, and Mordy, who used to walk to their synagogue wearing little caps on their heads, like tea saucers, on Saturdays, and they were not allowed to come out to play. Their synagogue on Pollock Street had vivid yellow and green tiles from Spain, and pillars that looked like shepherd’s hooks. I went once to look around. All the adults there had beards, including one old lady.

Some days Tony and I played
golli-danda
and marbles with the twins Majid and Wajid Baghdadi, whose father, Muhammad, owned a cut-piece fabric store in Hogg Market—and who had to fast like good Muslims with the rest of their family during the summer month of Ramadan. Their great-grandfather had come from Syria. Rukhsana, their sister, had the best aim among us at marbles. But she had to sneak away to play with us, because their burka-clad mother said that she was almost a woman; Rukhsana was eight.

No one could beat the Tsang brothers, Ki Tieh and Liang, with the slingshot. Their father, who had a wispy goatee and sported a long pigtail, had come from Sichuan in China and ran a shoestore on Bentinck Street. The brothers, especially Ki Tieh, had unbelievable aim and shot down flying pigeons at will, which they took home to be cooked. But they never used their slings when Violet Stoneham was around, for it made her cry. We all liked Violet.

The Parsee brothers, Bahram, Feroze, and Jamshed, taught me chess and checkers. Their Aunt Perizaad was born blind, but noticed everything, cooked for them, and beat everybody at chess! They went to their Zoroastrian temple and worshipped fire. Their ancestors had come from Persia centuries ago. Tony told me that when Parsees died they were not cremated or buried, but left on a tower to be picked clean by vultures. I did not believe him and asked my father, who said that Tony Belletty was right, for once.

I asked Tony, “So what happens to their bones?”

“I expect they boil them to make glue for postage stamps,” he said. I have never licked a stamp since then. Although I did not entirely believe Tony, I did not want to accidentally taste any of Jamshed’s old relatives.

•  •  •

O
NE PARTICULAR AFTERNOON
stands out in my mind, clear as a shard of glass, even today. I liked sometimes to be driven to the Strand by the Ganges on our brougham, accompanied by Sonu-amma. I was dressed in my blue and white sailor-suit, my dark brown hair cut in bangs. I still have a picture taken around that time.

When we reached the gardens on the Strand, I noticed an ornamental
gate with marigolds all over it, decorated for some special occasion. I heard a military band playing for British soldiers in regimental uniforms and their ladies, some under hats with wagging feathers. Inside the gate, children ran about among streamers and coloured-paper decorations, some sucking on candy canes. Before the brougham came to a complete halt, I remember dodging out of Sonu-amma’s reach and racing through the gate towards the far counter with all the candy in the world. I tripped and fell, which did not bother me in the least bit, though my sailor-suit had a grass-stain on it. A regimental officer reached out and picked me up with ease. I took in with great admiration his navy-blue uniform, his red sash and stripes, and the splendid sword at his waist.