The O'Briens (3 page)

For once he was impatient for his stepfather's return, and impatience kept him awake. When he tried to sleep, his thoughts fluttered on wings of their own, like birds caught in a house. It was possible Mick had been beaten up, even killed, in some tavern brawl — there were plenty of people, on both sides of the river, who had a score to settle. Maybe he was lying in a ditch somewhere, drunk or dead.

Restlessness pumped a kind of acid through nerves and muscle, and Joe couldn't keep from thrashing his limbs, from beating his pillow, from twisting and bunching his blankets. When he finally slept, he dreamed of a horse galloping across the river at breakup, ice slabs buckling under the pressure and rearing up in hunks to slash at the animal's legs. He awoke panting and lay in the dark with eyes open, not moving, waiting for the anxiety stirred by the dream to subside before he got out of bed, pulled on his clothes, and awakened his brothers. As he pulled on his boots he remembered watching his father put on his own boots; the memory was just an image of powerful hands and fingers drawing yellow rawhide laces tight. Joe shook his head. Dreams and memories never really added up, and he had always tried to leave them in the bedroom as coldly as he could, not to waste daylight worrying about them.

Before Tom and Grattan left for school, the three of them collected axe handles, staves, and rope and stored them in the cowshed. But Mick did not show that day, and the rest of the week didn't see his shadow either. In the bright, cold March afternoons Joe tied on snowshoes and trudged out to count and mark the pulpwood neatly stacked along the banks of the Ottawa, acres of forest transformed into piles of raw logs. He stood to make a good profit, but that week found him making elementary mistakes in his accounts, strewing pages of his ledger with smudges and blots resembling the spoor of some animal from the deep woods — a wolverine, or a lynx.

Joe was confident that he possessed the qualities needed for business success, and he was determined one day to have a family of his own. He knew the religious life was not for him; nonetheless, he could not stop feeling envious of the careful arrangements Father Lillis had been making for his brothers and sisters.

“What about me? Can you not found an order that would have me, Father?” He kept his tone light, so the old priest would think he was joking. Perhaps it was an eldest brother's instinct to dominate in all realms that made him wish the old priest saw in him too the makings of a Jesuit, or at least a Franciscan.

“Leave vocations for the others, Joe.” Father Lillis swallowed a piece of muffin, then used a damask napkin to wipe the buttery crumbs from his lips. “Holy Mother Church ain't what she used to be. How many fellows on your payroll this winter?”

“I got sixty-one.”

“Horses?”

“Most days, twenty. You think I ought to stay in the bush? Is that what you're telling me? That this is all I'm good for?”

“I don't say so! A fellow like you, with plenty of go, doesn't require an old Father writing letters on his behalf. Do you more harm than good. Follow your own nose, Joe. Stick with your business way of thinking and you'll do well for yourself.”

In fact the old priest had not been able to write any letters of introduction on Joe's behalf. He had tried, but after a few lines he was overcome with tears and a sense of desolation so palpable he could touch it. The priest recognized that this was his own death coming. He was seventy-four by then, short of breath; two or three more Pontiac winters would wear him out and the spring would carry him away.

At seventeen Joe wasn't tall and never would be. He was no longer slender, no longer a beautiful boy. He was stocky and tough. Everything about him, though, was meticulous. The quick blue eyes, the black hair, the pallor — Joe was a piece of energy, and the priest was certain anyone with half a brain could read the aptitude behind those eyes. Joe O'Brien didn't need an old Jesuit of tumultuous repute writing tear-stained testimonials on his behalf.

Joe had, in fact, been following a series of articles in the
Ottawa Citizen
about the latest railway boom out west. General contractors and subs, mostly Scotchmen or up from the States, were laying hundreds of miles of branch and spur lines across newly opened wheat country on the far prairies — “the Last, Best West,”
the newspaper called it, “Breadbasket of the British Empire”
—
while a second and third line through the sea of British Columbia mountains to the Pacific were being planned. It seemed clear there was opportunity out there for someone used to organizing gangs of men and working them hard, but he had always had a lurking sense that if he left the Pontiac for good, he would disappear. Not just lose touch with what was left of his family but also lose himself. The world had taken his father and not given him back.

Maybe it was just the shyness of the ill-born. He'd grown up in the backwoods, after all, and felt strong enough there; but his strength might not carry elsewhere. He figured he would stick it out in the Pontiac after his mother died and the others left to take up the lives the priest had designed for them. His brothers and sisters had grown up believing their mother's fairy stories. Believing the future was in a blue bottle. They loved talking about their dreams, the way she did; but dream talk and fairy stories had never made sense to Joe, and he'd shut them out of his mind, like troublesome insects.

There was enough scope for his ambition in the Pontiac. Pulp logging was money to count on until he had sufficient capital to enter the lumber trade, where solid fortunes were still being made. When he made his, he'd build himself a mansion house of stone or brick, like those he'd seen at Bryson, Renfrew, and Ottawa. And yet: it was astonishing to read that some railway contracts through the Rockies were being let out at eighty-five thousand dollars per mile.

Spring filtered slowly into the Pontiac that year. Some days, looking up, Joe saw patterns of geese winging north in a soft blue sky, and the air had a sweetness and smelled of mud. He postponed the future and waited for Mick Heaney to show up, and watched his mother dying.

Ellenora took no food and only a little water. The girls washed her every afternoon with soft yellow sponges and rubbed an ointment made from fat and mashed herbs on her sprouting bedsores. On the first of April it snowed a foot, and the old priest, wrapped in a buffalo robe and complaining bitterly of the cold, rode out from Sheenboro on a sleigh, heard Ellenora's confession, and offered her the sacrament of extreme unction. She refused to see a doctor, and no one knew how much longer she would last. The wise woman with her blue bottle had been dead for years.

The morning after the priest's visit, Hope was hanging laundry on the porch when she caught sight of Mick Heaney coming up the road, and she hurried inside to tell Joe. Their stepfather had set his fiddle down on the porch and was pissing in a snowbank when Joe came up behind him, threw a harness strap over him, and knocked him down.

Kate and Hope, shawls around their heads, breathing steam into the chilly air, watched Tom and Grattan kneel on Mick's chest and Joe wrap his wrists and ankles with the same thick cord they used for tying up hogs and sheep. It had started snowing in large, wet flakes.

Lemme gah, yuh sons a' bitches.

They tried to carry Mick into the barn but he writhed and bucked so frantically they dropped him on the frozen mud, where he lay snapping like a turtle, eyes violet against the skin of fresh snow.

Tear yuh lip to hole, yuh crowd a' skunks.

“Come on, boys, let's pick him up,” Joe ordered.

Tom stood back, looking worried. “Do you really think we ought to?”

“Yeah, Joe, are you sure?” asked Grattan.

Ah'll fuckin crack the jaysus outta yuh. Lemme gah.

Joe kicked Mick in the ribs, hard. Mick grunted and sucked breath, too startled to scream.

“Listen,” Joe said. Hunkering down, he caught the acrid stink of Mick's breath. Their stepfather was flopping like a fresh-caught trout, sucking and biting air.

“We don't care if you live or die,” Joe said softly. “There isn't anyone to hear you, and no one to care if they did. So save your breath.”

Mick stopped writhing and lay still. The whites of his eyes were stained yellow, his nose and cheeks strewn with a raw lacework of red and purple veins.

Joe stood up and glanced at his sisters on the porch, wrapped in their shawls, fine faces pale with cold. His sisters' thoughts and desires had always been obscure to him, as unknowable as the mental lives of animals, but he felt packed, latent, charged by his responsibility to protect them.

Tom and Grattan were rubbing their feet on the ground like nervous cattle.

“Boys,” Joe said, “this is the first of many.”

Using the toe of his boot, he rolled Mick onto his stomach, then kicked as hard as he could. Mick yelped.

“You know what that's for. Stay off those girls.”

The snow was changing to a hissing, freezing rain. Powerful spring storms would soon be breaking down the last hunks of old snow, skid roads would be turning to mud, and another season in the woods would be over. Joe could smell open ground somewhere. If his father had not been killed in a skirmish on an African farm none of this would be happening.
This day
, he thought,
might not exist
.

Mick snuffled. Joe pressed his boot firmly between his stepfather's shoulder blades to prevent him rolling over or trying to stand up.

It was the sort of day when a horse might slip on the skid road and break a leg. Rain would lacquer bare branches with drippings of silver, and soon it would be mud season, when nothing moved, when the ice on the river was too soft to bear weight, when everything was an argument for staying put, counting up, waiting. The whole country locked down under a kind of mystery.

“You next, Little Priest. Everyone must take a crack,” Joe said.

Tom stopped scratching the ground with his boot and gazed down at their stepfather. On the porch the two girls had clasped hands.

“Go on. Give him one, but hard.”

But Tom still hesitated.

Joe squatted, seizing a handful of Mick's hair. “Listen to me. Touch any one of us, and we'll do you worse and worse. We'll cut off your old pecker and put it up your nose.”

Tom suppressed a wild giggle as Joe stood up.

“Now.”

Tom stepped forward suddenly and booted Mick in his haunches. Mick screamed.

“Not hard enough,” Joe said. “Now you, Sojer Boy. Give it to him good.”

Grattan's kick was powerful enough to flop Mick over on his back, where he lay groaning and rubbing his face with his bound wrists in what looked like a pantomime of someone waking from a deep sleep.

“Let me try again, Joe,” Tom said. “I didn't really get much of a piece of him.”

Pig killing began that way. Slowly, almost shyly. Smoke and steam and nippy air. The tang of steel knives being honed. And ended, always, with frenzy, laughter and shouting, and black blood soaking the ground.

“Hold on until we get him in the shed,” Joe said.

Mick was snuffling again.

“Cry all you want,” Joe told him. “You'll still get what's coming.”

Seizing Mick under his scrawny shoulders, Joe and Grattan began dragging him towards the barn while Tom ran ahead to let the cow out. They laid him down on the straw and shit, then picked up their axe handles and hefted them.

Joe struck first, then the others. Each blow made a smacking sound, like water bursting on rocks. Joe could hear his brothers breathing hard and see their breath fluting in the damp, chilly air. Tom was giggling and crying at the same time. Not all that different from a pig killing.

“That's enough,” Joe said finally. “Stop.”

Mick lay gurgling in the straw, lips split like overripe berries. Pink blood foamed at his nostrils. He had soiled himself, and the air stank of excrement and blood. Reaching down, Joe seized Mick's wet shirtfront. The backs of his hands had green bruises, big as walnuts. He was weeping.

Standing in the muddy shed with the rain hissing outside and his stepfather flopping like a broken bird at his feet, Joe felt a heightened awareness of the world, its patterns of noise, light, and smell, and at the same time he saw his life's path with new clarity and vivacity. He would not stay in this country, this forest, the watershed of the Ottawa. It was dark and restricted. He would head out west and take some position — junior clerk, say, or assistant purchasing agent — with one of the big railway contractors. Studying the business from the inside, he would see how money — eighty-five thousand per mile! — flowed through a big undertaking. Once he had learned the courses and channels money took, identified the dams and floods and leaks, he could assemble his own combination of men, money, machinery, and take on such works himself. Running timber gangs in the bush — sixty rugged fellows, half of them without a word of English — had taught him how to organize men, get the job done, and see a profit, always.

And out there he must find a sort of woman who was a better, finer person than he was, and win her somehow, make himself live up to her beauty and ideals and protect her and the family they would make together. He'd spend his love on her and their children, be profligate with love, and she would teach him all sorts of fine, delicate, harmonious things.

Ashling
was his mother's word for a strong vision, the kind that came at you, slightly disordered, at moments when you were living on your feelings because you had nothing else to go by, when you'd stepped outside the rules and the regular tempo of life.

“Hear me now, you old buzzard.” Joe slapped him until Mick stopped snuffling. “Come after us, lay a hand on any one in this family, I'll kill you and burn what's left on the trash heap, understand?”

Pulling off the harness strap, Joe threw it over a nail. Then, using his father's knife, he cut the cords binding Mick's hands and feet. They left him lying on the straw. Once they were outside, Joe herded his brothers towards the cabin.