No Country: A Novel (36 page)

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

I wept in complete happiness now, holding Jakob’s palm in one hand and clasping Papa Brendan’s with my other. “I miss Mr. Livesey,” I whispered, and Papa Brendan nodded.

•  •  •

I
BECAME PREGNANT
the following year. But one day, as I leant forward in my kitchen garden to pluck some basil leaves, I felt something tear in me and cried out. Jakob, who had come home from the fields for lunch, carried me inside. When he set me down, I noticed the droplets of red on my clothes. Then the pain subsided, and there was no more blood. In the middle of that night when I woke up shaken with worry, Jakob sat holding me, singing a kind of lullaby in his tongue, soothing me as he would have a fretting child. I burrowed my face in his chest, breathing him in, the smell of the outdoors, the odour of him.

But I lost our child at the end of the fifth month. I was carrying in the clean white bedsheets on a dazzling sunny day, when I felt a dull pain forming in me. The sheets on which I had sat down were wet with a spreading stain of blood that would not be stanched. I could not stop shrieking, as if that could wake me up from this nightmare. Papa Brendan heard my cries.

“I am losing my baby, Papa Brendan, help me, oh help me please!” But I knew that my poor mother’s luck had followed me,
and I wished, like my mother, to face death and let my child survive. But I lived, drifting from pain to pain, until I was washed up on a bank of grief. Who could understand me, I wept, I who had seen routine animal births all my life on our farm? Jakob held me, sleepless, unable to protect me.

I would lie on the rough grass, my fallow womb upon the sweet giving earth, and hug myself among the forget-me-nots and the frayed umbrellas of Queen Anne’s lace, waking to the yellow surprise of the wood sorrels and the fingers of the squawroot stems. I became a part of Jakob’s life in his honeybee glade, the world of tumid hives dripping honey, wandering like a bee among violet lupines, across tangles of morning glory and wild mint near the lake, or at the edges of meadows spiked by bull thistles and bergamot. Lying down at the far edge of the field, I would watch the bees skitter about and choose their flowers. But once they were heavy with honey, they would make a beeline, pencil-straight, back to the hives which teemed with life.

And though a dozen years passed, there were no more children.

•  •  •

I
NEEDED TO
speak of my dead. But so far had I come away from Ireland, that even when I wanted to talk to Papa Brendan about it, I could not bring myself to do so. No more could I ask Jakob of the land he left behind. One night, as I lay sleepless beside him, I heard Jakob call out in his sleep. Now and then, over the years, he would call out and mumble in his native tongue, but had subsided back into slumber. But this night, his frantic stirring, shallow breath choking, frightened me. “Tirzeh, O Tirzeh . . .” he groaned, reaching out for someone.

Next morning, I stirred his oatmeal, put an apple next to it, and said, “Tirzeh?”

He looked stricken. I was certain he was going to tell me it was his wife in Poland, then leave the oatmeal and the apple, and me, and go straight back to her. But he rose from his seat and drew near, leaning until his face was close, eye to eye. His breath stirred on my lips as it fell. “Sister,” he whispered, his eyes like broken glass. “Was killed,” he said, his face contorted, voice laced with pain. “In a fire . . . Pogrom in Odessa. So many dead.” What was this
pogrom
? I wondered fiercely, then thought,
He is safe here.

I held him, feeling the hammer blows of his grieving foreign heart until he had come back to this sweet world of our farm, the one I had made among the green and golden seasons, the lakes and meadows and trees, and familiar northern light.

Papa Brendan talks about the different nations. What use was this burden of nationhood, if it were no more than a bad dream trying to burgle its way in, through the sheltering leaded glass of our sleeping rooms on some unruly nights of the soul? What use was it when my father Padraig Aherne, for all his talk and dreams of nationhood, never finished his travels, and never did come back to me?

•  •  •

T
HE FIRST OF
my gray hairs appeared on my temples in the fall of that year, 1884, as the world around me broke into the usual russets, reds, yellows, and brown. The leaves on the sumac that grew around the lake had turned a sharp scarlet. It was twenty-two years into my marriage.

Jakob was ill. In merely two months he had become gaunt, and
his skin looked like parchment. He seemed to eye foods as if they were strange objects on his plate. I noticed the blue veins stand out more and more on his delicate hands.

In all the past autumns, he brought home honey, sometimes pieces of honeycomb. He would stand behind, and holding me, put his fingers, one by one, in my mouth, each dipped in different kinds of honey, and I would lick off the variety of ambrosia. It was as if he had worked all year just to feed me. But this year he did not do that—as if he were grown immeasurably old and had outgrown this game of nurture. Also for the past two months, I had been consumed with a dizzy nausea—which I mistook for sorrow and tears shed within.

“I am ill too,” I told Jakob one morning in the kitchen. I wanted no breakfast. He reached over and held my hand. “Good,” he said.

I looked at him, surprised. “Oh Jakob,” I said, shaking my head, “you heard what I said?”

He nodded. “You are sick, no?”

“Yes,” I said, failing to see what he was driving at.

“You missed the last two months,” he said. I had thought that he did not notice, and I had thought that my meaningless cycles were winding down. “It is good. You will have baby,” he said, “I know.”

I stared at him, breathless for a moment.
No, no,
I shook my head. “I am too old.”

“I will be dead,” Jakob confided, “too soon now.”

“What nonsense are you talking, Jakob,” I began, when Papa Brendan knocked on our back door. But I could not get up. My legs would not stop shaking.

•  •  •

N
OW, AT FORTY-ONE,
surrounded by the signs of my husband’s mortality, I found myself nurturing a sprig planted within me that would not be denied. With my past experience, I expected to see the telltale pasty sludge of gore on my woollen night-robe that would dash my hopes; I dreaded the seismic shake in my nether belly that would reject the hold of life within me. But death was blossoming beside me, not within.

After the third month, afraid that any misstep would dislodge my baby, I lay down more and more. Jakob and I became twins on our bed, sensing that we were moving in opposite directions. He liked to put his palm on my stomach, feeling life growing there. I would hold him. When his wrist lay over my stretched hand, I could feel the ticktock of his blood, faint and lonely against my musky skin. This ebb and flow, of life coming and life leaving, made me feel like an island between contrary currents.

One morning, right after Christmas, in the beginning of my seventh month, my Jakob could not stand up anymore. Papa Brendan held vigil, sitting beside our bedside, woebegone. Two days later, Jakob died, as silently as he had lived.

We returned from the funeral on New Year’s morning. Papa Brendan said he would make a marker and showed me the pattern of a star he had drawn on paper—two nesting triangles. He looked frail and brittle, but first insisted on making me a fire. Then he went straight to his shed nearby. He had said not another word. I had sworn Papa Brendan to cease speaking of death and seemed to have become a captive of my own oath.

Light streamed into my silent kitchen, filled with food from my neighbors from adjacent farms. Mrs. Gabrielsen’s breads, Mrs. Eber’s tray of ziti, Mrs. Henderson’s covered plates lay on the counter. But I felt no need for food, and Papa Brendan did not
come back for lunch. I thought he found solace in making Jakob’s grave-marker in his carpentry shed with its smells of oils, lubricants, and shaved wood.

This was the table where we were sitting when Jakob told me with heartbreaking prescience about his death and my life. I sat and stared at the slate tiles of the floor which he had laid for me. I heard the distant bark of farm dogs, the lowing of cattle being herded back to the stables, the day already done, and all this time seemed just an hour, when Papa Brendan came in, carrying a newly made infant’s cradle. I looked up in wonder. He said simply, “The living have more important needs.”

“But Papa Brendan,” I began, my heart full of misgiving.

“No, no, Maeve,” he said, “no harm shall come to this child. Your child will be hale, I tell ye. You will see the child run, and I daresay you will see this child fly.”

Two months later, I gave birth at dawn. After the midwife left, as I lay on the childbed, my baby in my arms, I thought of my mother. Did she have the chance, just once, to hold her infant and look into my newborn face before they put her in her coffin? The jagged thought made its way through me, and I found myself whispering, “Brigid, Maeve, Brigid,” over and over under my breath. I saw my child open her eyes, blue and full upon my leaning face. “Maeve and Brigid,” I said, my first words to her. “It is Brigid and Maeve again.” I would protect Brigid against everything in the world. Brigid, yes, my baby named for my mother. I would take back all I could from death.

But my willful child named herself “Bibi,” my restless one, forever bridling at any restraint. I wish Jakob could have seen our child, who had his flaxen hair and vivid blue eyes, running about, adored by all the dogs and piglets of the farm.

•  •  •

B
Y THE TIME
Bibi was five she thought the stories of Papa Brendan magical, and through her he was reawakened into joy. He would often be found sitting on his chair, his white hair tousled, his pipe and tobacco forgotten on the small table, while around him, in a spellbound circle, sat the Ebers’ granddaughter Maisie from the next farm, the Gabrielsen boys—Eric and Jared—and little Philip Chase, the pastor’s son, and our Bibi, the hoyden stilled for the nonce by these stories. Bibi had turned our Papa Brendan back into the hedge-schoolmaster he used to be, by the simple magic of her childhood.

Those were our carefree years. The children grew apace, and suddenly the boys were tall with their peach fuzz, growing solicitous and awkward around Bibi. I wondered idly, enjoying the speculation which of them she would wed, which farm would become her home. She could just stay on here, and Papa Brendan and I could have a small cottage built an easy walk away.

One day, listening to the rumble of Papa Brendan’s voice in the next room, weaving some story, I was drawn in towards the magic circle, a child again. I stood just outside the door, leaning under the lintel, thinking how peaceful and tranquil our lives were, when the lines of that story entered my ears like a vial of poison. I felt as if my heart was pierced, for I could sense the danger, its dreaded fin barely breaking the surface of our calm lagoon. Oh, what was I to do about unwitting Papa Brendan?

He was telling them stories of wandering and seeking, of questing and going out into the great unknown. I heard snatches of names—Magellan and Oisin, Captain Cook and the far islands. . . . How had it come to this? His stories would turn their
eyes outward, to the tumultuous world out there. Little did they know about its shoals and dangers, I thought with a shiver down my spine.

I decided to break these story-tellings, misplacing Papa Brendan’s glasses, asking Eric and Jared for help with chores. I worried imaginative Philip, by mentioning the dark shadows descending under the maples long before they did so. I began to draw Bibi away, making lengthy business of kitchen matters, the cleaning, and the stove. I even steered Bibi’s interest towards Jakob’s beekeeping trays and hives—and tried to get Eric to help her, planning their chores, hoping that the sweet labor and youth would cleave their hearts, and they would draw together. I invited the Riegelmans’ son Charles too. When all else failed, I was not loath to feign a malady, God help me.

By sixteen, Bibi had begun to rebel. She set up feuds with me, thwarting my simple insistence on small matters that she said stifled her. She would run out in the summer rain, heedless of her wet clothes clinging to her comely body, and the boys glancing. Oh, we had raging tiffs over all that nonsense. She would sulk at me for telling her not to go into the hard sun with all the boys during harvest time and set her face against me when I forbade talks about trips to Albany or Burlington, for whatever trivial foolishness was taking place there. They dreamed of a jaunt to Philadelphia to see the famous bell about which Papa Brendan had waxed eloquent, about liberty and all the great men and their doings. I did not see the point. A cracked bell was a bell with a crack. Why go all the way for that, I ask myself!

But then, a year later, he appeared, with stories of places far enough to take one’s breath away. He endeared himself effortlessly, it seemed to me, to guileless Papa Brendan. I said something
about this—and Papa Brendan looked at me, chiding, perturbed, in a way he has never been with me.

“Do you doubt that I know what is best for her, that I love my daughter?” I asked him with the fierceness of my maternal care. Papa Brendan looked somberly at me, and said, “If the end of loving is sorrow beyond bearing, is it not better from the first to forswear love?”

I felt he had burned my heart. I struggled to speak. “You—you say this to me?”