No Country: A Novel (35 page)

As much as he loved India, he had died with a picture of Ireland, no country he had ever set foot upon—the vista of Glengesh Pass in Donegal, which he loved to look at, the last image in this world before his eyes.

Roused by the rooster at dawn, I went out to greet the morning and discovered a bright world. We had arrived at night, and I had been carried asleep to my own room. I immediately made friends with two dogs who raced out of the barn to greet me, their breath rising in steam as they gamboled. Making a snowball, I threw it for them to fetch; the silly dogs tried to, snatching it from each other, but of course it melted in their mouths.

I could see two more cottages in the distance, their chimneys smoking. From the farther one emerged Mr. Braithwaite. “Oh, hello, Miss Aherne,” he boomed. “Crisp morning, isn’t it? I’m off. Tell your Papa Brendan.”

“Will we be going anywhere else now?” I asked him seriously. The dogs were sitting quietly, and I could feel the sun on my cheek.

“Don’t you like it here?” He sounded worried. “The great Trumbull is cosy in his sty. He has eaten well.”

“I do not want to go anywhere else,” I told him.

“Ah, good,” he said, “of course, of course.”

“Can I play with the dogs whenever I want?”

“Don and Bonbon here?” He gestured with his large head, and I nodded.

“Well, they are yours from today,” he said, looking at the panting dogs. “You hear that, you two?” We laughed together, and then he was gone.

I went back in, followed by the dogs, and woke Papa Brendan, who sat up without complaint, but could not help yawning.

“They are my dogs,” I told him, and then asked, “Shall we ever have to leave this farm?” He stretched but did not yet open his eyes. “Papa Brendan!”

He rubbed his eyes hurriedly. “No, dear,” he said, “unless you want to.”

“I do not,” I said. “And you don’t either,” I added for emphasis.

He said nothing for a while, but smiled sadly. “Not unless I die.”

•  •  •

P
APA
B
RENDAN USED
to brood over the deaths and more deaths in Ireland from hunger and want, the cruelties, muttering about ships foundering, people hurting each other for small morsels, their bones sticking out sharp. The Good Lord sharpened his terrible sword on Irish bones, he would say on those bleak days, and the stench of mortality would not quit his nose, each mouthful reminding him that God held him hostage by his gut, waiting for the next black disaster.

One summer day, when I had turned ten, I just had to take him to the back of our house, where purple heads of wild bergamots and joe-pye weeds grew all about, and pitcher plants staked their stalky claims among the loosestrife.

“Sit down here,” I told him peremptorily.

“Yes, Maeve dear,” he said at last, hesitantly. So I told him. I certainly did not want to remember the starving dead, the drowned dead, the diseased dead, or any manner of death. Nor any ship, ocean, or anyone left on a chair at the edge of an iceberg.

As Papa Brendan listened to me, the pupils of his eyes narrowed and grew, again and again, as I raised my hand and brought down my fist for emphasis. I believe he even held his breath, and nodded—a very tiny nod—a very
very
tiny nod. Or was it that his face fell?

“Is there no part of the voyage you want to talk about ever, Maeve dear?” He looked grave. No,
nonono
, I shook my head vehemently.

“Mr. O’Flaherty?” he pleaded. I shook my head again. I had buried the Delft figure the Dutch sailorman had given me. I never told him what I had done.

Papa Brendan took a deep breath like a man getting ready to go looking for something precious, like a lost diamond, under a lake where he would have to hold his breath forever and ever, and perhaps never come back again. Then he breathed out slowly, and in my relief I caught him around his collar, holding his head against mine. He clung to me and breathed in long, and then out, as if exhaling all his stories of death.

“There is only one exception,” I told him. He waited, saying nothing.

“Once a year, on my birthday, you can tell me how my father left to find the world. You can tell me how when he has finished his travels, he will come back to find me.”

“I can talk about Padraig? Are you sure?”

“Of course,” I told him, “for my father Padraig is not dead.”

•  •  •

E
ACH MORNING AND
evening but the Sabbath, I sat and read with Papa Brendan, and wrote a tidy hand, though hastily enough, but I was happiest on the farm, amid the mooing cows, the thistles and cowslips, the small hills of grain put away in the silos and barns, the earth replenished over and over. The years flowed past us like the brook beyond our cottage, sparkling over its pebbled bottom, the sunlight preening its sides of emerald and velvet moss. In it swam slow wagging trout. Here the tilt of the world was just right, and the seasons came and went like friends.

Our nearest neighbours, the Ebers and the Gabrielsens, told me of the great towns, not just the small ones with factory stacks like Lowell down south, but fine seaside ones like Providence, and greater ones like Philadelphia or Boston with its busy port, but the passage from Ireland had taken out all desire for me to stir. I did not care to travel to any of these, nor did I brook any such talk in Papa Brendan. We had all we needed on this farm, wanting nothing, I have told him.

I have grown attached to all the things that nest here: I love the flicker woodpeckers, especially the clown-faced ones and their clicking beaks, the
quueeah
of their odd notes and calls as if they were questioning us, or the solemn nocturnal hoot of the great owls. I know the nests of the querulous kingbirds, the purple martins which never fail to show up seasonably and delight my heart. The bank swallows nest by the water, and I never did hear a high pitter in all of Nature like the one from the titmouse bird with its absurd peaked head. Nor have I seen any shade of yellow to joy the heart as I can see on our waxwings when they come to nest around us in the summer. In a vase beside my bed, like a bouquet,
I keep a bunch of ringed pheasant feathers which I picked up among the furrows of our fields. I feel the kernel of the day forming as I wake and come out to greet the light as it seeps into the mist, our silence broken only by the swoop of the osprey, the shrike, the flutter of doves.

During summer afternoons, we are always visited by pearl crescent butterflies, and occasionally the red admirals, or fuzzy duskywings. And once in my own living memory a swarm of fritillary made the vines behind our cottage appear smothered under tawny blossoms—until these butterflies rose in a vivid swarm and fluttered away to some other far meadow as through a silent daydream. I wanted to keep my precious world left alone, unchanging, with all my ferocity of hope.

•  •  •

P
APA
B
RENDAN’S FRIEND
was Richard Livesey, the postmaster, who lived a mile down the country road that bent along Lake Champlain. He had a taste for old books. A bachelor, he spent what money he had on his collection of pipes and fine tobacco, and made his own small stock of wine, which he refused to sell, but shared liberally with Papa Brendan. He was short and fine-boned, and sported a small grey beard, neatly combed, and a high forehead. Mr. Livesey told me once that his brother too had migrated like him, from Yorkshire, and settled in New Zealand. He also promised to dance a lively jig at my wedding, chortling, “With nary a thought for my bad back!”

On the occasional weekend I wanted to sleep away at my best friend Amanda Eber’s house, Papa Brendan would shut our cottage, walk me over, and stay at Mr. Livesey’s book-crammed
house. Once I came away early from Amanda’s for they were going to service for Easter, and I thought to fetch Papa Brendan and Mr. Livesey to accompany me and found them sitting together, Mr. Livesey’s arm around Papa Brendan’s shoulder as they chatted on the bench in his tiny backyard that edged onto the lake. He beckoned me over and enfolded me in his other arm, and I told him that it reminded me of the Three Musketeers, about whom Papa Brendan had told me.

A week later, Mr. Livesey brought over for me the Dumas novel with lovely pictures in them, which he had gotten shipped over from his Boston bookseller by the fastest mail. I was sad when he died in his sleep one winter night some months before I turned fifteen. He left us all his books, and the last couple of dozen bottles of his wine and his pipe collection to Papa Brendan. Over the years, I knew how keenly Papa Brendan missed his friend and sometimes asked him to read aloud from the Dumas book.

It was Mr. Livesey who told me once that from the very first time Papa Brendan used to drop by the post office to mail his monthly accounts of the farm for Mr. Braithwaite, he would also have a personal letter to be sent at great expense. They were all written to Ireland, but in all the years he never once received a reply.

I understood that we had, over the years, kept the same vigil in our different ways.

•  •  •

A
S
I
GREW
tall and straight, Papa Brendan would look misty-eyed at me and sigh, “Mrs. Aherne ’tis,” he would murmur. “Maire Aherne to the life you are, but for the red hair.”

By the time I was eighteen, I milked and cheesed with the best
of them, pruned the grape arbors, cooked my soups and pies. I paid no mind to the young men who came by, awkward and gawking, especially when I made bread, and our kitchen was a celebration of the odours and aroma of life itself. For all his earlier talk of the famine, Papa Brendan grew plump with my cooking. He took care of all the farm accounts, what was spent in seed and stock, details about transport and profits from the produce and livestock, especially the piggery where our Grand Trumbull reigned and spawned numerous progeny. He had lived to a great piggy age, his lineage growing famous for our Trumbull bacon, sausage, and links. Mr. Braithwaite, in his will, had left us this portion of the farm.

•  •  •

I
HAD ALMOST
turned nineteen when Jakob Sztolberg drifted to our farm looking for work. He spoke half a dozen words of English when he first arrived, but he knew bees, honey-making, and cattle. A silent young man with flaxen hair and the most vivid blue eyes I have ever seen, he could only tell us that he came from Poland, a village called Jedwabne.

Much later, after he managed to acquire a smattering of English, he told Papa Brendan a little about himself, and we learnt that he first left home for a town called Białystok, then on to Lublin, where he worked for some traders who used to send dry goods down to Lemberg. But he had heard that the goods were all taken to the great port of Odessa, so he begged to go there. At first the merchants scoffed at his idea, but when two of them received news of illness at home and had to return to Lublin immediately, they thought to give their landsman a chance.

Odessa, its blue walls, its winding old streets, its fat stone buildings, amazed Jakob. After work he would stroll along the beach. He loved the sea. But there were also dangers in Odessa. What that meant, he would not say. But one night, he escaped on a ship. He spoke vaguely of mobs, murderous people, and then could not explain anything more. He was happy now, back on a farm, half a world away. All this Papa Brendan understood from Jakob, bit by bit, over months. I have no idea how Papa Brendan can get everybody to talk.

Jakob was the most unobstrusive of people, quiet, whereas I was full of bustle. This trait, more than anything else, first made me notice him, a calm which I craved. He did not seek me out like the other babbling boys I had known all my life. He drew me out of myself by his silence. When I would watch him at his hives, or at any other task, like the pruning of the grape arbors, I could not help but notice the grace of his movements, his intentness, and his ease with himself. I found myself hastily looking away, pretending we had not been glancing at each other.

He had been at the farm for seven months when he made himself a small stringed instrument, very like a mandolin, and was plucking a quiet tune one evening when I came and sat by him. He played on, smiling at me once in a while. I kept thinking of his fingers on the strings, the simple melodies he played, the woody odour of him. Then he surprised me, handing me that mandolin. I did not know how to play, so I held it, caressing its blond wood, its fine strings, as if it were he I was touching instead, and a turmoil stirred within me. That summer night of honeysuckle and a small moon I saw him move under the horse chestnut tree, and went out to him. He took me in his arms.

“You,” he said, “I need like water.” We kissed and stayed up all night, watching the moon set.

I told no one of my love, did not know how to, or when. I wondered if it was because he was a wanderer, like my father. But it was clear that Papa Brendan knew it, everyone on the farm, my whole green world knew it. And soon, we were to wed.

We were Irish Catholic and Polish Jew—so no church or temple would unite us. Papa Brendan expostulated with Father Jim Bising, but to no avail. The priest sat in our kitchen, digesting my dinners and working his toothpick, but always said, “No,” followed by a shake of his thick neck, much like our stud bull trying to rid himself of gnats. I knew well it was an impossible cause, but Papa Brendan said, laughing, that being Irish he could not resist it. The nearest synagogue was very far away—and I persuaded him not to waste his breath and time.

Finally Papa Brendan decided to wed us himself—under the trees—with words chosen from the Old Testament. He said that all weddings are done under the eyes of God, not priests, anyway. At the end of his reading, we made our vows, Jakob partly in Polish.

Papa Brendan spoke from memory—lines of a poem which he used to whisper to me when first I came to this farm by our Lake Champlain, on those nights when I woke weeping for my Moomagy, my grandmother Maire, or Mr. O’Flaherty. Papa Brendan would cradle me, and in the darkness say these half-understood lines which soothed me into sleep. On my wedding day, he said them again, as if he knew I had need for these words now, a benediction: