A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [98]
Until that moment, though, there had seemed to be a never-ending supply of wood from those forests and this inexhaustibility had suggested to Branwell that one raft or another would be present on the river for all the summers to come. Only much later in life was he able to realize that, even in a colony whose wealth was founded entirely on the slaughtering of wild animals and the clear-cutting of forests, there were moments of pure magic. His journal, when he was home, had been filled with announcements pertaining to the arrival of ships whose names put one in mind of a courtly procession of gorgeous women: The Alma Lee, The Hannah Coulter, The Minerva Cook, The Lucille Godin, The Nancy Breen, The Susan Swan, The Mary Helen Carter. Travelling downriver, he had been witness to spray in the distance and the men kneeling and reaching for their beads in the remaining calm minutes before the short, terrifying journey through the Coteau Rapids. And then there had been the evening meal on the river, the men singing and, the following day, the French villages along the shore coming into view, steeple by steeple.
Now, Branwell and the white-haired Ghost were sweeping sand from the same porch on which his father had made his sad declaration. But this was an act of futility. The sandy fields were full of the scant beginnings of starved crops of barley that would never ripen. Just that week three farming families nearby had left their houses, their ruined land, and had moved out of the County, heading for the city and the hope of a factory job.
“Horses don’t like sand,” said Ghost. “The going’s too tough for them. I’ll have to have to find some place more hospitable to horses.”
Branwell wasn’t listening. He was thinking instead about an anecdote told to him by his father when he was a boy. He could see in his mind’s eye the Windsor chair that his parent had occupied and the glow of a pressed-glass oil lamp, so the story must have been told to him in the evening, probably in winter, he decided, as the old man was so busy in the summer there wouldn’t have been time for the kind of reflection the tale required.
The elder Woodman, who had been young at the time when the story took place, had been in Ireland, standing on the edges of Knockaneden Bog. “A dreary waste if ever there was one,” he had commented, staring at Canuig Mountain when he noticed a surprisingly large procession making its way down the incline.
“What the devil is that?” young Joseph Woodman had asked the man who had conducted him to the vicinity of the bog, in order, he was to discover, that he might see the remains of an interesting buried trackway recently uncovered by turf cutters. The trackway, his father had assured Branwell, was nothing of the kind, was just a scattering of stones that the Irishman believed was proof of an earlier civilization when roads had flourished in the district.
“That,” Joseph Woodman’s aged companion had told him, pointing up the mountain, “is the funeral procession of a man of only forty some years of age, called O’Shea, and him the last one being brought out of there. The last man being brought down out of Coomavoher,” he said. “All the rest gone away or dead before him. And isn’t the place only ruins and vacancies now with him gone.”
Everything in the Iveragh was ruins and vacancies as far as Woodman could tell.
“And I remember,” the old Irishman had said, “when he went in there after marrying a woman who had the grass of three cows from her father, he went