The O'Briens (2 page)

Apart from their studies at the priest's house, the children were taught catechism, arithmetic, British history, and penmanship at the Catholic school. Joe knew they could not afford to look as poor as they were, so he spent firewood money buying decent clothes from the Eaton's catalogue. He had one good white shirt and two celluloid collars that his father had left behind, and his father's horse boots, which had been returned from South Africa courtesy of the regiment, along with a belt, a knife, and an empty billfold.

The capitalists who leased the Pontiac's magnificent white pine forests from the Crown lived in Montreal, New York, and London, but there was also a local hierarchy, with Father Jeremiah Lillis, SJ, near the top and the O'Briens near the bottom. Joe understood how much better it was near the top than the bottom each time Mme Painchaud served them crumpets and blueberry jam while they worked at geometry proofs in the priest's cozy study or recited the poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

There was life in layers in the priest's house, an atmos-phere of incipient surprise. Persian carpets covered pine boards in a voluptuous mottle of red, purple, and gold. Small, dark oil paintings bought in Cologne, Louvain, and Rome hung on the walls. Father Lillis had sent a few paintings to auction at Montreal and spent the money on stained glass windows for his study and dining room. Rich shards of colour broke through those exuberant windows, and exotic scents — silver polish, English tobacco, China tea — drifted though the chiaroscuro rooms. The air was denser there, more laden than the pellucid, astringent atmosphere of the spruce clearings; in that light, even young children could pronounce German poetry and leaf through New York and London magazines.

They were encouraged to tell stories and make jokes. They learned to laugh in a way impossible at home, with the ghost of their father and their mother's stricken demeanour. Their own language became a supple, bending thing for them. It was in the priest's house that Joe began awarding nicknames. Grattan became “Sojer Boy”
because he liked to wear their father's belt buckle with its regimental crest. Tom loved to serve at Mass, so he became “Priesteen” or, more often,
“the Little Priest.” Both girls said they wanted to become nuns, and Joe nicknamed rambunctious Hope “Sister Merry Precious Aloysius,”
while dainty little Kate was “Sister Peevish Sacred Sublime.” The little girls loved organizing rituals in the woods, draping a tablecloth over a tree stump for an altar where the Little Priest could say Mass. Pouring spring water from a birchbark cup, the Little Priest baptized dolls Joe had made for the girls out of straw, moss, and scraps of moose hide.

No one ever called Joe anything but Joe, except their mother, who, when distracted or ill, sometimes called him Michael.

From the start, the priest ordered them to imagine lives elsewhere. “Plan on getting out of here,” he kept telling them. Learning the waltz was learning to live outside what they knew, a rehearsal, practice. Waltzing had always been the old priest's exercise of defiance, of his own grace and strength, as well as his assuage of loneliness, and to Joe it became a suggestion that life might hold more than one room — even a gorgeous room in a priest's house — could possibly contain. The lush strangeness of the music stimulated his ambition and determination, qualities that sometimes tasted like steel in his mouth.

There were perch and shad in the Ottawa, trout in some of the streams. In winter Joe and his brothers sometimes chipped through eighteen grey inches of ice before they could drop their fishhooks. There were ducks in the autumn, and woodcock and partridge. Beaver had been trapped out. As for game, there were few deer left in the Pontiac. In spring, moose tormented by blackflies went splashing into the river and sometimes were carried off by the current and drowned.

Joe raised a beef every year and cut and sold firewood. Sojer Boy ran sheep, the Little Priest kept pigs. The girls tended the milk cow and dug a potato garden every summer. They gathered wild strawberries in June and blueberries in July, raspberries and blackberries later in the summer. They sowed wheat or rye and had meadows good for one cut of hay.

Their stepfather was just another mouth to feed, and when he drank he was brutal, but he was absent for weeks at a time. The only other good thing about Mick Heaney was that his seed was infertile, so Ellenora did not bear any more children to share in what little they had.

~

When he was fifteen, Joe knew his mother was exhausted. There were days she hadn't the strength to get out of bed. That winter, using firewood money, he leased timber rights for fifty cents an acre on forty acres controlled by the parish, and he contracted to supply logs at such-and-such a price to a pulp mill downriver. The mill buyer told Joe he was too young to sign a contract, so he had Ellenora sign, with the priest adding his name as guarantor. Joe and his brothers spent the next four months felling and limbing leftover spruce into logs that they skidded over ice trails to the banks of the Ottawa. They saw no money until breakup season, when the logs were rafted downstream in big booms that undulated like something alive, like the skin of the river.

When Joe finally received a cheque, he was able to pay himself and his brothers wages for their winter's work and show a net profit of nearly one hundred dollars. The winter after that, he obtained timber leases on
320
acres that had been stripped of their valuable white pine, hiring neighbours with horse teams to harvest pulp logs from the tangled second growth of alders, birch, and spruce. He opened a savings account at the Imperial Bank of Commerce branch in Shawville and became the Township of Sheen's first newspaper subscriber, after taking out a mail subscription to the
Ottawa Citizen
. Whenever he went to Ottawa to see the pulp buyers, he brought back crates of oranges for his brothers and sisters, an unheard-of luxury in the clearings.

The next year he arranged to lease
1
,
280
acres. He rode the P&PJ to Ottawa City, bought himself a new pair of caulk boots, and hired thirty French-Canadian and Austrian lumberjacks from taverns in By Ward. When he returned, he was kept so busy dealing with his jacks, provisioners, and pulp buyers, not to mention temperamental camp cooks, that he did no sawing himself and never wore the new caulks. Instead he cleared out a log hut to use for an office, installing a window, stove, lanterns, table, and stool, ordered himself three white cotton shirts from Eaton's catalogue, and took to wearing neckties and even, sometimes, a green eyeshade. He found he enjoyed the scratch of pen on paper, the scent of ink, the columns of figures in his own clear hand adding up to a profit.

He was seventeen. The business had developed from nothing, nourished by his talent for organization and desire to provide for his mother and his siblings, and by the fury he felt whenever he thought of his stepfather, which made him restless and meticulous.

It was a harsh world in the bush. Because he was considered a boy when he started, he could not afford to stand disrespect. He hired rough, crude men and had to rule his camps. More than once he had to use his fists or a stick of wood, or whatever was handy. He prevailed because he was lithe and quick, and because he had to. He still went to the priest's house whenever he could, but there was no more time for jokes, for nicknames, for little girls' doll parties.

Two or three times a week he snowshoed into the bush, following trails used by wolves more than people. From a quarter-mile away he could hear axes ringing and the bite of the saws, and the noise gave him a sense of his own worth, as nothing else ever had in the years since his father had left them.

The old priest's house had stimulated Joe, allowing him to imagine riches, style, a singing depth of life. Now he had a business of his own and felt its spirit like a half-broke horse between his legs. He loved being alone in his hut, perched on a stool: ledger spread open, a fire snapping in the Quebec heater, the light of the frozen woods gleaming outside. Marking and turning pages in the ledgers gave him a beautiful sense of control. He knew that the stronger he was, the stronger they all would be.

That winter his mother's strength was tearing in a dozen places all at once. Dry in the hips, weak in the limbs, Ellenora was letting go of her life. Sitting on her bed, her daughters fed her spoonfuls of water with apple juice, buttered bread, and mutton cut up into small pink cubes she could barely swallow.

One evening Ellenora asked Joe to drag out a leather portmanteau from under her bed. After digging into it, she wordlessly handed him a letter from a man in Montreal who claimed to have served in the Transvaal with his father and wanted to be repaid seventeen dollars Michael had borrowed from him.

A dept of honour and I would forgive it of pore Michael but there is a wife my own and children, in circomstances, coud you if possible send it there way please.

There was an address on Sebastopol Street in Montreal, and Joe wrote a cheque that night and walked all the way to Fort Coulonge the next day to put it in the post. Trudging home, he could feel money's heft and flex, what it might do for a man and for those near him.

One afternoon near the end of that winter, he was working on his accounts when Grattan and Tom came out to the log hut and told him that Mick Heaney had been putting his hands up the girls' dresses and feeling their private parts. Apparently it had been going on for months, but Hope, twelve, had been too embarrassed to say anything until she realized that their stepfather was also bothering little Kate, who was so frightened she had been wetting their bed.

They all knew something about the sex urge, at least in animals. They had seen shivaree bachelors waving bloody sheets from newlyweds' windows. At weddings and at wakes they were used to seeing rowdies fighting, usually over a girl, and Joe had felt compulsions of which he was ashamed spilling inside his head like porridge boiling over on a stove.

Joe was hurt that Hope had gone to Grattan instead of coming to him, as eldest brother, but he had already sensed that his sisters were a little afraid of him. As boss of a timber gang, he had grown accustomed to giving sharp orders and being instantly obeyed. He could sound ferocious.

He considered consulting the old priest, then figured that the fewer the people who knew, the less it would harm the girls.

“Have you told Mother?”

“I haven't,” Grattan replied.

“Don't. We handle this ourselves, alone.”

“How?”

“Not sure. I'll figure out something.” The outline of a plan was already taking shape in his mind. “Mother doesn't need more trouble. Anyway, she couldn't make him stop.”

“What can we do, then?”

“We'll make him stop.”

Tom, the youngest brother, the Little Priest, gazed at Joe. “How?”

Joe shrugged. “There are three of us. Only one of him.”

“But he's a man.”

Tom looked as if the rolled neck of his sweater, which Ellenora had knitted for their father, could swallow him. It had come back in the box all the way from Cape Town, courtesy of the regiment, the oily wool smelling of sheep and flecked with crumbs of orange sawdust.

“Let me think it over,” Joe told them.

At the supper table he watched his sisters. Hope was bright-eyed, freckled, and noisy. Kate, the youngest, was fair, and quieter. They wore new dresses paid for with pulpwood money. He wouldn't have been able to tell that anything was wrong with his sisters just by looking at them.

Mick had been gone for days and was probably wandering the district, sleeping in sugar shacks and fiddling in taverns from Fort Coulonge to Shawville.

After supper Kate and Hope washed up while the brothers split and stacked a week's worth of stove wood. Then, kneeling around their mother's bed, they prayed a decade of the rosary while Ellenora lay with her head on a fresh linen pillowcase, reciting Hail Marys in a parched whisper, prayer beads knotted in bony fingers.

In the Pontiac it was common for people who fell sick in winter to die in spring. Once their mother was gone there would be nothing holding them to the country. Father Lillis had spoken to Hope and Kate about their vocations and had written to an old friend who was Mother Superior at the Visitation Convent in Ottawa.

“The Visitations are a very quiet bunch, Joe, unlike some orders I could mention. They'll welcome those girls of yours.”

Whenever Joe brought home a crate of oranges, Grattan had always peeled off the colourful labels and pasted them in a scrapbook. When the old priest asked him, Grattan said that, more than anything else, he wanted to go to California.

“I'll write my Franciscan friends at Santa Barbara,” the old priest told Joe. “We'll see if we can't find your boy something to land on. He has just enough polish, and he knows how to work, thanks to you.”

The priest had already written on Tom's behalf to the Jesuits. When the time came, the Little Priest would start his scholastic training for the priesthood at St. John's College, which had recently started calling itself Fordham, in the Bronx, New York.

“I still have a few strings to pull, Joe, some reaching as far as Rome. A Jesuit in the family polishes the apple you'll hand to God.”

The old man must have known he was hurting himself by sending the children away. But perhaps he felt he had no choice, not at his time of life, not after the sins he had committed. The O'Briens were his seeds and he was going to scatter them. They would be his sacrifice, his offering.

The younger children understood that the time was approaching when they would be cast into the world. In the meantime they needed to attend their mother, to hold on to her for as long as they could. When they finished saying the rosary, Hope untangled their mother's beads from her fingers and they each kissed her lips, which were dry and tasted of salts. Later, while the others slept, Joe lay awake, planning how to deal with his stepfather. It would be best for family solidarity if Grattan and Tom took a hand.