Entry Island Page 32

  *

  After many stops and starts and a break for lunch, it was nearly dark by the time that Michaél paced out his tract of land. We were almost hoarse with the amount of singing we had done. Never, I was sure, had the 23rd Psalm been sung so often in the course of a single day. As we walked back to the village in the falling dusk Michaél said to me, ‘It’s too far to my bit of land. So I’ll just help you do yours first, and we’ll leave mine till later.’

  And I was secretly pleased that I wasn’t going to have to face the task on my own.

  *

  Last night Michaél and I spent our first night in my new home.

  We have been working all the daylight hours of every day for the last two weeks to clear an area of land big enough to build a log cabin. Hard, hand-blistering work with saws and axes loaned to us by folk from the village. Felling the trees was simple enough, once you got the hang of it. But moving them once they were down was another matter, and digging out the roots next to impossible. Someone promised to lend us an ox in the spring to help pull out the worst of them, but the priority has been to get a basic cabin up before winter arrives. Temperatures have been falling, and we’ve been working against nature’s clock. One of the older villagers told me that I might have experienced the odd sprinkling of snow on Lewis and Harris, but nothing would prepare me for the snow that would soon fall here.

  The last few days we have been stripping trunks and cutting them to length, and then yesterday the whole village turned up for the raising of the cabin. Certainly, we could never have done it on our own, and would have had no idea how to notch and interlock the logs at the four corners.

  The walls are seven feet high – which is as high as men can lift a log. The roof is steeply pitched, laid with hand-split shingles and covered with turf.

  I would never have believed it possible, but by the end of the day, the cabin was done. A pretty sorry-looking dwelling, but it was a roof over our heads, with a door to shut against the weather.

  Someone brought an old box bed on a wagon and reassembled it for me in my newly finished home. On the same wagon came a kitchen table that someone else was donating, and a couple of rickety chairs that might just about take our weight. A bottle of spirit was opened, and everyone took a slug of it to christen the new house. Then a prayer was said as we all stood around the table. The next priority will be the building of a stone chimney at one gable, which is something I might even be able to do myself. Then we’ll be able to light a fire and heat the place.

  The problem is how to keep ourselves warm in the meantime.

  When the villagers had finally gone, and Michaél was hauling water up from the river in buckets, I gathered some kindling and split some logs to build a fire in the centre of the cabin. There are no floorboards yet, just beaten earth, so I made a stone circle to contain the burning wood.

  Although the room quickly filled with smoke it would, I knew, soon disperse through all the cracks and crevices between the logs, just as the smoke in our old blackhouse made its way out through the thatch.

  But the next thing I knew, the door had burst open, and Michaél came running in, yelling, ‘Fire, fire!’ at the top of his voice, and threw a bucket of water all over my carefully tended blaze.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I shouted at him.

  But he just stared at me with big, manic eyes. ‘You can’t light a fire in the middle of a wooden house, man! You’ll burn the fockin’ thing down!’

  I didn’t speak to him for the rest of the evening. And it wasn’t long after dark that it became so cold that there was no option but to turn in for the night. It was Michaél who broke our silence finally and wanted to toss a coin to decide who got the bed. But I told him that since it was my house it was my bed, and he could sleep on the bloody floor.

  I don’t know how much time passed after I extinguished the oil lamp, but it was black as pitch when I became aware of Michaél slipping into the bed beside me, freezing hands and feet bringing all of his cold air with him. I thought long and hard about kicking him out again, but in the end decided that two bodies were likely to generate more heat than one, so pretended that I was still asleep.

  This morning, neither of us have commented on it. By the time I was awake, he was up and had built a fire out in the clearing and got a pan of water boiling on it. When I came out with my tin mug to brew a cup of tea, he mentioned very casually that he intended to build a bed for himself today. ‘That fockin’ floor’s far too hard,’ he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  I

  At Chemin Kirkpatrick, Sime turned off to drive north into the town of Bury. It nestled among the trees in the valley of a small river of the same name. Bury had sent men to die in two world wars and commemorated them on plaques at the Bury Armory.

  The road that led down to the town was called McIver, and it cut past the Bury cemetery. The last resting place of Sime’s parents lay on the slope on the west side of the road. Carefully cropped grass was punctuated by headstones that bore the names of Scots and English, Irish and Welsh. But in the town itself almost all traces of English and Celtic culture had been supplanted by French, with the exception of some street names. And even those were gradually being replaced.

  He had arranged to meet Annie at their grandmother’s house in Scotstown, but he wanted to stop off first to visit his childhood home. A pilgrimage to the past.

  He drove by the end of Main Street and followed the bend out of town, then turned left to cross the river just beyond the timber yard. A restored, bright red fifties pickup truck stood in the drive of a green and cream-painted clapboard cabin with rockers on the porch. A little further on, set back behind the trees, stood the house that had always fascinated him as a child. A folly with turrets and a multifaceted red roof. The house itself was clad with rounded shingles, like fish scales, and painted blue and green, red and grey and peach. Like a fairytale house made of coloured candies. It hadn’t always been so colourful. The old lady who lived in it when he was a child had despised children.

  It was a strange homecoming. Bittersweet. His had been a happy enough childhood, and yet he had never quite fitted with the rest of his family. He was sure he must have been a disappointment to his parents. He wished now that he could meet his ten-year-old self here on this road that he had walked every day to school and back. The things he could tell him. The advice he could offer.

  His old family home stood derelict in an overgrown garden. The sale of it had been left in the hands of a realtor, but there had never been a single enquiry for it. Sime had never quite understood why. It was a fine two-storey house with a front porch and a good bit of land, set in an area of cleared forest on the edge of town. His room had been up in the attic, with a semicircular window looking down on to the road. He had loved that room. It had set him apart from the rest of the house and given him what had felt like a commanding view of the world.

  He stood now on the road beside his idling car and looked up at that boyhood window on the world. There was no glass in it. Much of the clapboard siding beneath it had fallen away, or been stripped off. Pigeons were roosting in his old room. Crows lined up along the roof above it like harbingers of doom.

  What happened to happiness, he wondered. Did it evaporate like rain off a wet street in sunshine? Was it anything other than a transient moment that existed only in the memory? Or maybe a state of mind that changed like the weather? Whatever happiness he had known in this house was long gone, and he felt only sadness standing here, witness to something lost for ever, like the lives of his parents, and all the generations that had gone before them.

  He closed his eyes and almost laughed. The medicine prescribed by the sleep doctor was doing a pretty poor job of cheering him up. He got into his car and set off for Scots-town.

  II

  Sime had very little recollection of Scotstown. Although he knew it had been founded by Scots colonists in the nineteenth century, in school he and his classmates had bee
n disabused of the notion that it was so called because of the number of Scots who lived there. In fact it had been named after John Scott, the first manager of the Glasgow Canadian Land and Trust company, which had established the settlement.

  It had once been a thriving community, with a lucrative lumber business, and a hydroelectric dam on the River Salmon. The railway had brought freight and trade and people in great numbers. Sime supposed it had probably still been an affluent little town when he was a boy, but its population had dwindled now to a few hundred, most of its industry closed down. Sawmills stood in silent decay with weathered For Sale and To Let signs tacked on to peeling walls.

  It was during his first year at school that his mother had found a job at the dépanneur in Bury, and school holidays had become a problem. That first year, and for several thereafter, she had driven Sime and Annie over to Scotstown during summer and winter holidays before she went to work, dropping them off at their granny’s house. And it was during those years that their grandmother had read to them from the diaries.

  Her house on Rue Albert reflected the decline of the town. It stood, like his parents’ home, in a wildly overgrown garden. In its day it had been impressive. Two storeys, with a porch running from the front around both sides, and a large deck at the rear. It was painted in white and yellow, with steeply pitched red roofs. But the paint was faded and flaking and green with moss. The wooden balustrade around the porch was rotten.

  A car stood parked in the footprint of two towering pines and a maple tree that cast their shadows on the house. Trees that Sime remembered from his childhood. And he reflected that they had probably outlived by a hundred years or more whoever had planted them. He drew in behind the parked vehicle and stepped out on to the sidewalk. He recalled himself and Annie playing hide and seek here as children, shimmying down the slope to the river behind the house on hot summer days to fish in the shade. The sound of the river itself rose up from beyond the back garden, and he could almost hear the creak of his grandmother’s rocking chair as she read to them on the porch.

  He walked up the overgrown path and climbed steps to the front door, guilt descending on him now at all the years he had neglected to stay in touch with his sister. While Annie had sent him birthday and Christmas cards religiously each year, he had never responded. Never lifted the phone or sent an email. His apprehension at seeing her again tightened across his chest.

  The door swung open as he approached and his sister stood in the doorway, wide-eyed with expectation. He was shocked at how much older she seemed. Grey strands streaked once lustrous blonde hair that was pulled back now in a severe bun. She had put on weight, become almost matronly. But her green eyes were flecked with the same warmth he remembered as a child. Her expression changed the moment she saw him. ‘My God, Sime! When you said you hadn’t been sleeping, I never imagined …’

  His smile was wan. ‘It’s been quite a while since I had a good night’s sleep, sis. Not since I broke up with Marie-Ange.’

  Shock was replaced by sympathy, and she stepped forward to put her arms around him and draw him close, his years of neglect ignored and forgotten. The sense of relief he felt in that simple moment of affection almost produced tears. He hugged her back, and it felt like years since he had known such genuine warmth.

  They stood for a very long time like that on the porch, before finally she held him at arm’s length, and he saw how moist her eyes had become. ‘It’s maybe for the best,’ she said. ‘You and Marie-Ange.’ She hesitated. ‘I never did take to her.’

  He smiled and wondered why it was that people always seemed to think it might be a comfort to learn that no one liked the person you once loved.

  Annie looked beyond him to the mess that was the garden and her embarrassment was clear. ‘Gilles used to come and cut the grass every other week,’ she said. ‘And we tried to keep up the paintwork. At least maintain it to a basic level.’ She shrugged. ‘But when you have a family …’ Her voice tailed away. ‘It’s a fair way from Bury, and when the snow comes …’ She smiled her regret. ‘The winters are so long.’

  ‘No one interested in buying?’

  ‘One or two at first. But you’ll have seen for yourself, Sime. The town’s dying, so selling’s not easy. And when it began to look like it had been lying empty for a while, any interest evaporated.’ She smiled, banishing the thought. ‘You’d better come in.’

  He nodded.

  Inside it was dark. It smelled fusty and damp, and felt like stepping back into a previous life. A house that had once been a home, populated now only by the memories of their younger selves. Sime walked slowly over floorboards that creaked painfully beneath his feet, looking around the living room which had occupied most of the ground floor. Although empty, apart from an old picnic table and a couple of chairs, he could conjure up from somewhere a memory of how it had once been. Full of big dark furniture. An old piano, a dresser. Indian rugs on the floor, ornaments on the mantel above a stone fireplace. All around the walls faded wallpaper still betrayed the telltale shadows of the paintings which had once hung there. A large pale rectangle above the fireplace was like the ghost of the picture that had spared the paper from discoloration. But he had no memory of any of the pictures themselves.

  They wandered out to the deck at the back of the house and heard the rush of the river rising through the trees. They stood, leaning on the rail, breathing the damp of the woods and feeling the air cool on their skin as a slight breeze whispered through the leaves. Annie turned to look at him. ‘What’s this all about, Sime?’

  And so he told her. About the murder on Entry Island. His certainty, on meeting the widow for the first time, that he knew her. About his ring and her matching pendant. And how that had sparked his first dream, and then his recollections of the diaries. She listened in thoughtful silence as he spoke, and when he had finished she said, ‘Come through.’

  A large leather satchel lay on the dusty picnic table. Annie picked it up and sat with it on her knee, then patted the seat beside her. As Sime sat down she lifted a bundle of books from the bag. They were small, cracked, leather-bound volumes in different colours and sizes, all held together by yellowed string wrapped several times around and tied in a bow.

  ‘That’s them?’ His voice was not much more than a whisper. She nodded and he reached out to touch them. Seeing the diaries, touching them, was like being witness to history, like being a part of it.

  She untied the string to open the top book as he watched in trembling anticipation. Folding back its leather cover, she revealed the brittle yellowed pages inside. Pages covered with a clumsy handwritten scrawl, faded now with the years.

  ‘This is the first one,’ she said. And with cautious fingers flipped back the pages to the inside cover. Di-ciadaoin 21mh latha de’n t-Iuchair, 1847 was written in a bold, copperplate hand.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It’s the date in Gaelic, Sime. Wednesday, 21st July, 1847.’

  ‘How in Heaven’s name do you know that? You don’t speak Gaelic.’

  Annie laughed. ‘Granny taught me the Gaelic numbers, and the days of the week, and the months. I was very little, but they’ve always stayed with me.’

  He was crestfallen. ‘Are they all in Gaelic?’

  She smiled. ‘No. Just the date. He wrote his diaries in English.’

  Sime stared at the page. Below the date was a signature. Not easy to read at first. And he canted his head a little and screwed up his eyes. ‘Sime Mackenzie,’ he read. The man who had bequeathed him his name. Sime. So that’s where his father had got the spelling. He was tense with emotion. ‘Can I hold it?’

  She handed it to him and he took it in his hands as if it might break. His ancestor had held this very book. His hand had wielded the pen that formed the letters and words and sentences that told the story of his life. Of the birth of his sister. His rescue of Kirsty. The death of his father. The clearing of Baile Mhanais. That dreadful voyage across the Atlantic. The nightmare th
at was Grosse Île.

  Annie said, ‘I thought there might be something symbolic about giving you the diaries here. Since this is where they were read to us.’ She put a hand over his. ‘But I think we should go home now. The family are waiting to meet you. There will be time enough for reading.’

  III

  Annie lived in a large, rambling, grey-painted wooden house on Main Street, sandwiched between the town library and the redbrick Bury Armory Community Center. Bury’s military history was still evident in the building that housed Branch 48 of the Royal Canadian Legion just across the road, beyond the Post Office. Main Street itself was quiet, leaves falling gently on to manicured lawns from the trees that lined it. There were three churches along its length. Anglican, United and Catholic. Bury had a strong religious as well as military heritage, and the Mackenzies had gone each Sunday to the United Presbyterian Church of Canada, which had absorbed most of the Scottish churches during the Great Merger.

  He parked behind his sister’s car in the drive and they climbed the steps to the porch. He glanced across the garden. Large maples dropped coloured leaves on to neatly cut grass. A double garage beyond them was almost completely hidden from view. His apprehension returned. While his sister had forgiven him his neglect, he was not so sure that her family would.

  She sensed it and took his hand. ‘Come on in and say hi to everyone. They won’t bite.’ She opened the door and led him up a dark hallway and into a much brighter family room with large windows opening on to the garden. He felt the atmosphere as soon as he entered it. His niece and nephew were playing a computer game on the television. His brother-in-law was sitting in a leather sofa pretending to read the newspaper. They all looked over as he came in. ‘Luc, come and say hello to your uncle.’