The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [101]
For better than a decade, Paul Seaton did no more than run away. He went first to America, to New York, where he thought the insatiable myth of the Irish diaspora made anyone with a Dublin accent fondly welcome. And the welcome there was warm enough. But it was only ardent if you had it in you to live up to the myth. You were only really warmly welcome, Seaton discovered, if you could play your predictable part in the great and panoramic drama of expatriate Irishness. But he couldn’t. Not at all, he couldn’t. In truth, he lacked the heart. Experience had robbed him of the easy equanimity required to enjoy the craic. He was a troubled soul and he could not conceal his torment. He was morose, fearful, haunted. And he was vindictive, too.
One night, an argument was picked with him by an exiled Provo in a Brooklyn bar. The man was an active-service volunteer from East Belfast with a hatred for Irish accents softened by life in London. That was his excuse, anyway, for singling out Seaton for abuse. Maybe he missed his wife or his children, back home. Perhaps, after a drink, he thought it might ease his frustration to give a Judas such as Seaton a therapeutic pasting. But when it went to the cobbles, all he got was decked twice and what looked to Seaton, running away from the scene, like a bad case of concussion after going down heavily the second time.
It wasn’t a case of being the better man, he thought later, nursing a cheap suitcase and bruised knuckles in the Greyhound station. I was just the angrier of the two of us, possibly the less drunk, certainly even more pissed off at my predicament than he had been at his.
Boston followed. He worked in a boatyard and was even cajoled into rowing in an eight-man crew in the harbour twice a week. He took shifts in an Irish bar, all the better to stop merely drinking in them. In Boston, he found himself able to be more congenial. So much so that one evening in the bar where he worked, an acquaintance got friendly enough to warn him that the East Belfast Provo he’d crossed in Brooklyn was almost entirely recovered and fully conversant with his current movements.
He travelled to Canada. An Irish passport was a wonderful thing to have, he realised, if you’d the instinct to travel at all. He discovered he didn’t mind the winter in British Columbia. He’d a mind by now to believe the chill in his soul would make even Nova Scotia in the winter warm and welcoming. He sensed the scent on him from the gunman he’d hurt grown cold, in Canada. He learned to ski there. He taught English and history at an elementary school. He gave evening lectures at a college running a twice-weekly course on practical journalism. And then he had an affair with a gentle and attractive woman of Danish extraction who taught ceramics there. And the catastrophic finish of it convinced him it was time once again to run away.
They went to a cabin owned by her father in deep woods on the edge of the National Park at Banff. It was snowing hard when they got to the woods. A trail reached, narrow through the dense endless spread of conifers. The going on this trail was heavy through the falling snow. And the woods swiftly enveloped them. The hush of the wilderness was profound, as though they had strayed into some undiscovered ancient place, somewhere humans had yet to intrude upon. Trees steepled over the trail, impenetrable to either side, so they progressed along a dark abyss of them, entirely still under the burden of snow weighing on their foliage. So it remained until they happened on a gap, after an hour’s hard walking, a break in the bank of trees to their left Seaton turned into, assuming it must be the path