When the next time came, they removed the boy’s pipe from its hiding place and lit it. Once again, Cho coughed until he gagged, and Joseph reminded him to go easy. He asked about the injuries. Once again, the boy refused to talk. He wanted to hear the story of how Cuchulainn killed his own son, Connla.

  Connla’s story was shrouded in secrecy, somewhat like Cho’s bruises. Joseph recounted that during Cuchulainn’s quest to win Emer, he tricked a warrior-woman who had the power to grant wishes. One of Cuchulainn’s wishes was to stay with her that very night.

  “Did she ride horses?” Cho asked.

  In the silence that followed, Cho unsuccessfully tried to blow a smoke ring.

  “Cuchulainn wished that she would bear him a son,” Joseph said.

  “But he was in love with Emer.”

  For a moment, Joseph remembered Myrtle on a late spring night, moving gracefully across the Ramseys’ lawn. Then he blinked her image away, as he did so many that came when he told Cho the stories.

  “Yes he was. The magic warrior-woman demanded that Cuchulainn name his infant son before leaving. ‘Connla,’ Cuchulainn said. He placed a gold thumb ring in the palm of the lady’s right hand. ‘When the boy grows up big enough to wear this ring, you must send him across the sea to me.’ Cuchulainn added that Connla must never reveal his name or refuse a fight. Connla’s mother cast a spell to ensure it.”

  “Why did Cuchulainn kill him?”

  Joseph stared at the boy’s bruised face, and for a moment saw a man at Keady mill, handing his son three coins. To the son, now, Ireland was as tenuous as a story. Did the old man ever wish for his children to return from their faraway land? Joseph pictured the gold ring on the man’s left hand. And what of Mam? Had he missed her? Did he miss her still? What did any of it matter? The questions didn’t make things better; they only wearied him.

  He blinked the man and the coins away, but discomfort lingered. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Why did he kill him?”

  “He didn’t mean to.” Joseph sifted carefully through memory now, intent upon finding only pieces that he wanted. “Cuchulainn killed him by accident. By the time the baby grew into a boy and found his father, Cuchulainn didn’t recognize him. They fought because they had to. Cuchulainn demanded to know the boy’s name; of course, Connla wouldn’t tell.”

  “And a sad thing happened.” Cho was almost smiling.

  “Yes,” Joseph said. “Before Cuchulainn fought Connla, the boy said: ‘If I wasn’t under a spell, you’re the person I’d tell my name to.’”

  “Why?”

  Unavoidably, Joseph’s father smiled down in his memory, the man’s warm hand on Joseph’s head.

  “‘Because I love your face,’ Connla said. When they fought, the hero light shone around Cuchulainn. When the boy saw that light, he knew who he was dealing with. Connla thrust his sword in such a way that it wouldn’t hit his father; but before Cuchulainn understood, he’d already thrown his most powerful weapon.”

  “The gae bolge!”

  “Ay,” Joseph replied. “The gae bolge, his magic sword.”

  “I want you to draw it for me.”

  “I will,” Joseph said. “As Connla lay dying he revealed his name.”

  “That’s sad,” Cho said, rocking and puffing and smiling slightly, almost satisfied. “What did Cuchulainn do?”

  “Cuchulainn’s sorrow was fearsome. To distract him, an old wizard made the waves of the sea stand up straight, like armed warriors. Cuchulainn fought them with his sword until he dropped from exhaustion.”

  “I want you to draw that, too,” Cho said. From his satchel he took a sharpened lead pencil and his elementary-school notebook.

  “May I draw the pictures here?”

  “Yes,” Cho said, carefully turning the pages. “Here.” He pointed. Cho supervised the drawing until the gae bolge appeared before him and the waves stood on end. Then William called, and Cho crawled under the back steps to hide the pipe.

  Joseph roughed in a warrior’s figure. Ink had bled through the other side of the page and he turned it over to where the words “I AM A DIRTY CHINK” had been scrawled in another child’s pen. “Cho,” Joseph said, tearing out the sheet of paper and crumpling it. “I can do a better one. I’ll have to finish at home.”

  “Let me see.”

  “Too late.” Joseph struck a match, and lit the page.

  That night Joseph drew three pictures for Cho: the gae bolge, the fight with the standing waves, and the man and boy staring eye to eye above the caption: “Because I love your face.”

  “What are you drawing?” Myrtle asked as she passed by him at the dining room table.

  “Just Irish stories.”

  She disappeared into her room and Joseph disappeared into the whiskey bottle, and once again, the waves of the sea stood on end. Later, when he opened his eyes and lifted his head from the table, Joseph realized her sewing machine had stopped. He ascended the stairs, paused at Myrtle’s door as he did every night, and listened for a moment. Nothing. She must be sleeping. He touched the wood lightly and kept walking.

  Cold water. Coffee. Smoke. In line for the tram, unshaven, but alert, he could walk straight and, more importantly, draw. But first he paid a visit.

  After Joseph delivered Cho the pictures, privately he told William about the message in Cho’s book and his concern about the schoolyard fights. William nodded. He and Jing had been to the school. They’d spoken to the teacher and hoped for change, though it hadn’t happened yet. “Difficult to learn,” he said, wistful.

  “What is that?”

  “Feeling separate and knowing you are not.”

  “But does he have to be beaten to learn that?”

  William smiled, but his eyes looked sad. “Do you?”

  30

  Sometimes, when Joseph came home early in the evening, he heard Myrtle singing before she knew he was in the house. Joseph closed his eyes, listening. Myrtle often sang verses from the St. Michael’s choir hymns. Eventually, “Lead kindly light, amid encircling gloom,” gave way to “Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde, and the band played on. He’d glide across the floor with the girl he adored …” Then, over the course of several minutes, “Just Another Fatal Wedding” became, “East side, west side, all around the town — the tots sang ‘ring-around rosie’ London Bridge is falling down.” When a knock came at the front door, Myrtle hurried down the stairs as she sang. Upon seeing Joseph, she let the music fade. Myrtle opened the door to the first of her evening customers.

  Women or their husbands frequently knocked at the door to take receipt of packages. Even on Sunday afternoons, Sherbourne Street ladies arrived to be fitted.

  “Your wife makes the best bell-bottomed skirts,” one told Joseph. “And her blouses! The lace! She knows where to draw the eye and how to make me look slender.”

  Another customer informed Joseph that she’d come for Myrtle’s sans ventre corset. “No stomach,” she insisted in a heavy Italian accent. “No stomach. She promise me. Today!”

  In the dry weather, Myrtle rode her bicycle to Robert Raymond’s shop on Spadina Avenue. Her divided cycling skirt elicited more knocks at the door.

  “Truly, Mr. Conlon, your wife Myrtle is something. She’s an emancipated woman.”

  Robert Raymond found her reputation good for business. He put a sign in his storefront: “Featuring the work of Mrs. Myrtle Conlon.” Soon Raymond dropped the “Mrs.” and the “Conlon.” The sign simply read “Clothes by Myrtle” beside a silhouette of a woman on a bicycle. A small, round-brimmed hat completed the woman’s forward-looking profile.

  While Myrtle’s daytime work at Raymond’s remained steady, she showed no sign of limiting her home business. The only evenings that Myrtle didn’t take customers were Tuesdays, when she took lessons from an experienced songstress on Parliament Street. Miss Dorothea Small taught her art songs. As far as Joseph could tell, the statues lately resurrected on her windowsill, and the dressmaker’s form, were her only audience apart from him, and then only when his arrival went unnoticed.

  Among the advantages of studying with Miss Small were her theatrical connections. Myrtle’s dressmaking talents became known to a Rosedale children’s dance school, and Myrtle found herself designing and sewing costumes for a children’s ballet. Over the course of one week in early December, a troupe of tiny dancers arrived, one by one, with their elegant mothers, to be fitted for a January churchbasement show. Joseph heard Myrtle and the children in her sewing room making plans.

  “I’m going to be a dancing fairy,” one distinctively pale child announced to Joseph as she entered the parlour. Shadows encircled her eyes.

  “She’s lost weight,” Myrtle whispered to the girl’s mother.

  “Yes,” the mother answered, faintly.

  “You’re going to be a magic ballerina,” Myrtle said to the girl. “Come with me, Effie. I’ll find your wings.”

  Joseph remained on his parlour chair, reading a day-old Telegram. He heard the child’s small squeal of delight: her wings, half-finished, had been revealed. “Hold the railing on your way down,” he heard Myrtle call after the child. Myrtle and the mother remained upstairs, speaking in hushed tones.

  For a moment, Joseph saw the dressmaker’s shop on Leader Lane — the old bolts of fabric and a twelve-year-old Myrtle perched upon a stack of dusty cloth. Then Effie Douglas, the spectral ballerina, descended in a loosely pinned dress, holding out her wand. “I’m magic,” she told Joseph.

  He put his finger to his lips in a motion for them both to whisper. “May I make a picture of you, Miss Marvellous Fairy?”

  “Oh yes,” she said solemnly. “Of course.”

  “Thank you.”

  Effie approached him to see the drawing. She stared at it for several seconds, breathing slowly and audibly. Then she regarded Joseph, looking satisfied.

  When Myrtle and Mrs. Douglas descended, Joseph tucked Effie’s picture away beneath the chair.

  Myrtle carefully removed the wings for beading. “So you’ll shine in the lights.”

  “May I stand with the angel?” the child asked.

  “The angel?”

  “Beside your door. My mother told me we were coming to a house with an angel.”

  Joseph couldn’t help but gaze at Myrtle then. He missed her tenderness, which he didn’t deserve. He missed her touch. When her eyes met his, he looked away.

  “I think you must be magic to make my dress so beautiful,” the girl said.

  “I’m not magic, Effie.”

  “Then maybe the angel helps you.”

  Myrtle paused. “When you come back, your dress and fairy wings will be ready.”

  “Mind you don’t work too hard, Myrtle,” Joseph said before he could stop himself.

  She looked pale and tired, yet somehow charged with fiery energy. “You’re one to talk.”

  “I’m just concerned.”

  “Please don’t be.” She closed the wings and went upstairs.

  For the first time Joseph wondered about the long hours Myrtle kept — not at home, but at Raymond’s. That night Myrtle sang without words. By dawn she was gone.

  The next evening, after supper was over, Joseph called up the stairs to say that he was going for a walk and opened the front door to leave, but something caused him to pull the door closed again. He walked quietly to where he had tucked away the drawing of Effie and began to fill in the picture. The more he worked, the more clearly the child seemed to be trying to tell him something.

  After a few minutes, Myrtle began to sing. This time, not only the sound of her voice but her words held him in the house. He wanted to be held. He stared at the figure on the page, listening:

  Sea-birds are asleep,

  The world forgets to weep,

  Sea murmurs her soft slumber-song

  On the shadowy sand …

  Joseph set his drawing of the dancer down upon the stair, wiped his hands on a towel, and wandered silently to the sideboard. He opened the bottom drawer and lifted the edge of a never-used linen table cloth that Bette and Danny Abrahms had given them for a wedding present. Joseph pulled the cloth from the drawer and pressed it lightly to his face. He inhaled the scent of wood. Joseph set it on a chair using his left hand to be sure not to smudge it.

  I, the Mother mild,

  Hush thee, O my child,

  Forget the voices wild!

  Hush thee, O my child,

  Hush thee …

  Beneath the cloth, his sack had remained undisturbed. Carefully, he pulled it from the drawer and set it on the table, aware that the pieces inside had become more fragile than they once were. The Brigid’s cross of woven rushes was brittle. He touched the crumbling edges. He dared not open the walnut shell, round and cool in his palm. He removed the leather-wrapped shard of glass that bore an image of Mary’s face painted by a young James Ramsey, still darkened with Joseph’s blood. Two hair ribbons had faded long ago: one pale green, one black. They were soft and veined. Beside them he set a series of unsent letters written in a child’s hand. The scrawled characters seemed to want free of the paper, slanting urgently toward the edges.

  Foam glimmers faintly white

  Upon the shelly sand …

  “Deary,” Joseph whispered, pausing to touch a letter’s closing line. He pulled out the speller that the nuns had given him to replace the one he’d brought from Darkley. The new-world speller contained none of Joseph’s old-world prayers; those had vanished with the animals that had gazed serenely. “Rat, Rabbit, Badger, Dog …” He opened the back page of the Our Lady speller to a single name penned in ink: Annie. Then he realized that he did still pray; his prayers were the names he whispered. Joseph read the question written beneath: “Where are you?”

  I murmur my soft slumber-song,

  My slumber-song,

  Leave woes, and wails, and sins …

  Joseph gathered the items back into the sack, gently placing it at the bottom of the drawer, under the linen cloth.

  Ocean’s shadowy might

  Breathes good-night,

  Good-night …

  “Goodnight, Myrtle,” Joseph whispered.

  Quietly, he opened the door and stepped into the darkness.

  31

  The early December air was unseasonably mild. He could imagine sleeping in the ravine tonight. He felt safe exposed to the night air, the breezes through the willow branches and brittle grasses, the stars, as he had been when he’d lived in the valley under a tarpaulin. On his meanderings now, if he was too late for the last streetcar, Joseph found the valley setting more reassuring than a house, even when the house belonged to him.

  Tonight’s wandering took him south to Queen Street and east. Much of the land was still in small pastures and rough plots of tangled brush. To the north and immediately east of the river, brick homes were being built on what some city dwellers still considered wilderness. At the bottom of a tiny, unlit lane was a tavern, and Joseph immediately felt relief in a dram of whiskey. He sat at a thick chopping block of a table, above which was a shelf displaying several stoutly bound editions of The Leisure Hour and a pile of magazines. Joseph reached inside his pocket and found a pencil stub. He wished that he’d brought paper.

  “Fine journals, there,” the proprietor, a large man crowned with a shock of white hair, said. His wild eyes were decked by wiry, grey brows appropriate for someone railing on a heath. Instead of railing, he introduced himself: “I’m Tommy Blunt,” held out a set of stubby fingers and firmly shook Joseph’s hand. “I haven’t seen you at my place before.”

  “I haven’t come this far east.”

  “Enjoy your drink, then.”

  Joseph had a sense of something occurring that he wasn’t privy to. He also had the feeling of being watched, but he settled heartily into his whiskey. On his second glass, Joseph pulled a Christian Herald down from the shelf and identified it as the Thanksgiving issue of 1898 — already four years old. He flipped open to a section titled, “Remarkable Conversions” and read the stories beneath the captions: “Saved from Suicide,” “A Brand for the Burning,” and “She Prayed to the Devil.” Joseph longed to draw again, and would have done so happily over the newsprint columns, but Tommy Blunt continued to stare from his station behind the counter. “You’re holding the real thing, there,” he called. “My wife keeps every issue.”

  As Joseph flipped past the articles to the ads, several men entered with bulky satchels. One carried a bureau drawer covered over with a sheet. “Deliveries,” the man told Tommy, walking to the back and disappearing downstairs with the others.

  Joseph settled into the advertisements. Allcock’s Porous Plasters, Gold Dust Washing Powder, Dr. Worst’s Famous Catarrh Treatment, a cure for varicose veins with patented seamless heel elastic stockings — nothing to inspire thoughts about what to get Myrtle for Christmas. In spite of everything that had, and had not, gone on between them in the past two years, they still trimmed a tree and exchanged gifts. He finished the second whiskey, and before he knew it, Tommy Blunt came by with a third. On the house. A double.

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. What do you do and who are you? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  Joseph provided Tommy with a few basic facts.

  “You’re a long way from home.”

  “I felt like the trip.”

  “I like your style, Joseph. ‘I felt like the trip.’” He chuckled and shook his head back to the bar.

  On his way outside to the privy, Joseph heard several men speaking in low voices, until a patch-eyed white shepherd dog barked, causing the men to stop their talk. The dog wagged his tail and barked again, scampering up to Joseph and licking his hands.

  Joseph returned to his table, preparing to leave, when Tommy asked him: “What are your thoughts on gaming?”

  “Gaming?” The third whiskey had struck its mark. Joseph was aware of slurring his words and feeling slightly unsteady on his feet. “Do you mean cards, then? Do you have a rummy table here, somewhere?”

 

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