Strum Page 5

  The night before she had tightly wrapped her favorite books in a large handkerchief and tucked them carefully into the small space between a pair of black shoes, two pairs of wool stockings, a dressing gown, undergarments, two dresses, and a spare wool coat. The half dozen books were the only ones that she allowed herself to take on her highly anticipated journey to the new territory. The others were returned to Father Pascal’s library. Her wardrobe was spare and she made the decision to leave most of it with the needier children of her village as they were now too small and not befitting a future school teacher, as she hoped to become one day at her uncle’s church in Canada. The new dresses were donations to the church where she and her mother had lived and worked for as long as the girl could remember.

  On the bed beside the large valise was the final, most valuable item for her journey — a beautifully worn hand-crafted guitar bequeathed from her dead mother. It was nearly one hundred years old, and as it lay now open in its case on her bed, it reminded her painfully of her beloved Maman. Lifting it gingerly and running her thin fingers delicately along its edge, she remembered her mother and the fevered wish she bestowed upon her before she died. It was late last year and the fever had already taken hold in the village and many of the frail and elderly had succumbed. The shock was palpable in their small parish when her mother succumbed as well. The memory of her luminous face and the fine bones of her long fingers lingered like a bittersweet aftertaste in her young mind. Her dreams were filled with her mother’s presence — teaching music to the children, a weekly Saturday occurrence that brought young ones happily to the church; making rounds to tend to the sick; providing meals for the children of the poorest villagers. Father Pascal missed her presence as well, but finding a replacement for the church’s caretaker became a priority. Mother and daughter had lived at the church for as long as Isabelle could remember. Her mother was cook and housekeeper for the now octogenarian priest, Father Pascal, and as the caretaker of the small church, she was seen as the mother of the congregation with its three hundred souls, and Isabelle felt she had a large family about her.

  While young Isabelle was still in her cloth nappies, music was her mother’s special gift to her. Even before she could speak her first cogent words she was taught to make beautiful sounds with strings and bows. She had her own child-sized guitar, which she gave away to a small boy from the next village when she outgrew it. Like her mother she wanted to encourage the love of music and nurtured talent when she saw it. Her mother’s regular Saturday musical sessions were a high point in all the children’s week. When her mother’s fever prevented her from holding the weekly gathering, children and their parents came to her bedroom window to play little songs for her. As the fever wracked her mother’s thin body beneath the crumpled damp sheets, Isabelle continued to play ever so softly. Starting with the very first song her mother taught her, and following with every piece she learned since then, Isabelle meditated slowly and deliberately on bringing forth the comfort of music to her sick mother, never believing that she would eventually succumb.

  Her final serenade played on its own accord as the mother’s fevered moans turned into a groan and ended just as the last breath was squeezed out. Mother, daughter, and guitar lay in silence on the bed for nearly two hours before the priest returned from the church to find the sad group. He sought to comfort the now motherless child by reading long passages of the Bible, but each night for two long months Isabelle cried herself to sleep in her small lonely bed.

  “Isabelle, my child,” Father Pascal reminded her, not unkindly, “you are a big girl now, and if your Maman was still with us, God rest her soul, she would not wish for such tears to be shed. Go to sleep now and remember all the goodness she provided to the people she cared for.”

  “But Father Pascal,” the distraught girl answered through her tears, “Maman comes to my dreams each night as if she was really still with us, and all I can feel when I awake is that she is no longer with us. She will never play her music to me again. I wish I could go to sleep and never awake again too.” Her sobs continued, the cries of a lonely dove.

  “Sleep now, my child. Your mother will play her music to you again. She may be gone, but surely she will play with the angels in their choir, and her music will be with us for an eternity.”

  Isabelle tried with each passing day to release her mother’s memory into a reliquary of the past which did not cause so much pain. She dedicated herself to taking over where her mother had left off until a new caretaker could be found. Father Pascal considered her too young at ten years of age to shoulder the immense responsibility of his congregation, but he did not rush as urgently as he might have had she not proven to be rather equal to the task. She cooked meals for the old priest just as her mother had, dusted and cleaned the church hall and his library to a spotless shine, ordered the poultry and meat from the butcher and shopped at the markets each week, just as her mother had done. Several of the village ladies volunteered their assistance in preparation for the Friday and Sunday mass, and even organized a christening. She tended the potager herself and learned through trial and error how to stake certain climbing vegetables, when to apply dressings of ash to others, and how to harvest pumpkins.

  Nearly six months passed and the harvest moon brought one evening a tall stranger to Isabelle’s attention. He was introduced to Isabelle as her uncle, Father Jacob, her only living relative, and he had arrived from his own parish in a remote part of eastern Canada — New France they still called it, although the British had wrestled control over the place just over a century ago — to take her back with him. They would set sail in less than a fortnight. He was dressed in black, resembling a much younger Father Pascal, but over his robes he wore a long traveler’s cape lined in red. At first Isabelle worried that Father Pascal would be left with no one to care for his and the church’s daily needs, but the old priest assured her, in front of her uncle, that he could easily find another caretaker. It seemed that quite a few petitions had already been made to him, but he had let her continue with the role for half a year knowing it would be curative for her young soul, so recently devastated by the loss of her mother.

  “Your services are required over the seas, my dear,” Father Pascal began, “to work with your uncle in ministering to the needs of the loggers’ souls in New France. You have learned the tasks of providing for a congregation well while your blessed mother was alive, and over these past months you have acquitted yourself well.”

  “Thank you, Father,” she replied humbly, not daring to look at her newly discovered relative. Father Jacob sat silently and deferentially at the more senior priest’s table and listened tangentially, with his thin face expressionless but not unkind.

  “I am confident your uncle will be pleased that his new charge is so well equipped for the ministrations of a church, and skilled domestically at so much. In two weeks’ time, you shall gather all your belongings and make your way to your new home.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Go, my child. Go and be a dutiful daughter of Our Good Lord and light the way for others so that His Word will ring as loudly in the frontier as it does here in our small village. You are a daughter of the world. Be a blessing to your uncle, as you have been to me. May the Lord bless you, my child.” For the first time in many months Isabelle felt a faint stirring of hope. The possibility of honoring her mother by becoming her likeness in a faraway place appealed to the bright and earnest young girl.

  “It will be good to be needed, Father Pascal. I would like to do that. And … ” she looked hopefully to her uncle, “I would also like to teach the loggers’ children how to read and write. And play music as Maman did.” Her uncle did not volunteer a reply, for he was proving to be a man of very few words, but his overall appearance seemed amenable and her hopes rose further.

  Fourteen days later exactly, on the eve of her departure, Isabelle replaced the delicate antique music
instrument into its black leather case, which lay beside the larger trunk on her small bed. Wedging the instrument case lengthwise along the widest part of the trunk, with a silent prayer for the safe journey of her belongings, she closed the heavy lid of the leather trunk for the last time in her old bedroom and secured the lock. Her own self she laid down on bedding spread upon the floor beside her bed and blew out the diminishing stub of candle.

  As her eyes slipped closed and the half-light of the moon through her curtained windows retreated to slivers, she heard the strains of music from her mother’s favorite piece, a nameless tune she played with such passion and sadness that Isabelle often wondered from where the source of emotion could have come.

  “Good night, Maman,” Isabelle whispered as the soaring music reached its summit and loosed its final crescendo of falling notes. Angels and ordinary men wept from the sheer beauty of its sound.

  •

  Once they reached Liverpool and boarded the amazingly large steamer ship, Isabelle felt a new mixture of dread and excitement well up inside her. The future she saw before her was simultaneously laden with great possibility and terrifying unknowns, grand new vistas and frightening unseen savagery. If she believed the stories and idle rumors of those around her before she set sail, she would have been overcome with dread. But Isabelle was gifted with the ability to withhold judgment until she could prove to herself whether, behind cavalier words and well-meaning but unwarranted advice, there lay veracity or untruths. Quite precociously she had noticed that, when one was as young as she, others were wont to give unsolicited advice. Wisdom, she assured herself, came from those who had traveled far and wide, like her uncle Father Jacob, who would not see fit to take his niece to the New World if he believed it was full of danger and angry savages.

  Her desire for knowledge had begun at a very young age when she first entered the clergyman’s library with her mother and discovered that books were the source of the greatest knowledge and could transform a person who sought to be elevated by them. As she tidied the books on Father Pascal’s shelves and carefully ran the feather duster over them, her small hands caressed the numerous leather-bound volumes as if they were precious stones with mystical qualities. Following her mother around the large library, Isabelle marveled at the books he had collected from all over the world. Her fingers lightly brushed over the imposing tomes as they revealed themselves to her: La Commedia; Goethe’s Faustus; an eighteenth-century translation of the Tao Te Ching; a collection of Greek tragedies; a directory of New World medicinal plants.

  When her mother was busy in another room, she would creep back to the library and pull out a volume, admiring the cryptically printed letters and staring with wide-eyed amazement at the exquisitely executed ink drawings and the rare gilded figure of an angel swooning in ecstasy on a book sleeve. At eighty-two, the priest was well-traveled and revered, having witnessed new worlds discovered and old dynasties collapse. He considered himself a scholar of the New World Order and a messenger for God, placing his belief in the new scientific methods and the forward march of industry just a step behind his faith in the Holy Trinity.

  The heady embrace of the catechism and old books was Isabelle’s nursery; however antiquated they were, these tomes were the building blocks of her child’s playground. And, as her world contracted into the tiny constricted space of her small ship’s bunk, it was her steadfast belief in God and Knowledge, and her ability to recall in her mind the great uplifting magic of her mother’s music, that sustained her on the two-week journey across the vast open seas. To her dismay, her relationship with her uncle, whom she continued to call “Father Jacob,” as he was introduced to her, did not deepen during the long voyage.

  Speaking always quietly in dulcet tones, his calmness was fortress-like in its reserve. His gaze was set permanently upon the horizon and because of his great height he appeared to look perpetually above the heads of his fellow travelers. He almost seemed not of this world. But, did he simply choose to look beyond the mortal world to divine answers from the heavens and the greater universe, the girl questioned herself, or was his distance and lofty arrogance a sort of protective shield against wounds he feared to sustain in this very material world? She was filled to the brim of her small body with questions unasked and more unanswered, but feared her towering uncle in his pious and immaculate robes would be impervious to her questions.

  “Father Jacob,” she enquired timidly one morning, as they gathered in the dining cabin for a breakfast of bread, butter, and a dollop of bee’s honey, “how much longer will it be before we shall see land?”

  The priest looked beyond her to the flickering gas lamp hung from a peg above one of the cabin’s four portholes and at length replied, “Not long, child. One more week and we shall round the coast of Newfoundland, God and weather permitting.” Isabelle looked behind her briefly to see the porthole where her uncle’s eyes were fixated. A muted and barely perceptible arc of horizon floated between the lifeless sea and the colorless sky. No swoop of albatross or clot of cloud interrupted the grayness. The morning light was weak and uninspired but the unrevealing clouds belied the dawn of potential.

  Before the breakfast china could be cleared away and her opportunity lost yet again, Isabelle cleared her throat and addressed her uncle with a question that had niggled at her for weeks but she had little courage or incentive to pose.

  “Father Jacob,” she began timidly again. “I have a question that I hope you may be able to answer.” She waited for a reply, which did not come until much later, after she had actually forgotten she ever spoke. His words nearly startled her out of her chair.

  “Not now, child,” the man of cloth replied with only a hint of annoyance in his dry brittle-leafed voice.

  “It was about my mother,” she interjected quietly.

  “I must attend to my books this morning. Your question can wait until a more suitable time.” The towering cleric rose hurriedly from his seat and exited the cabin, leaving Isabelle to wonder if there was not a sliver of avoidance in his retreat. She felt suddenly ashamed and abandoned, as if she had proposed a war and her uncle chose not to be enlisted.

  Returning to her small cabin, she had no recourse but to seek exclusive comfort in her own company. For the first time during the slow journey west, a tiny imperceptible tug on her sleeve as from a small child emanated from somewhere underneath her tidy bunk. With barely room enough to move the large valise, Isabelle maneuvered herself nimbly and retrieved the instrument case from its dark cramped confines. Lifting the guitar from out of its case immediately transformed the small room; the sterile greeny-white eggshell walls turned a faint yellow-orange reflected with the half-light of the small porthole above. Even the scratchy gray wool of the cot blanket mellowed with softness.

  The instrument against her body felt alive and her drab mood fell away, warming to the soft dawn-lit patina. The first plucked sounds of the strings surprised her. Its pitch was preserved. The instrument had not lost any of its tonal perfection on the journey and now gave its music effortlessly, a meadowlark at the first flush of spring. Its familiar smoothness and comforting shape were welcome like a well-worn pair of shoes. Her mother’s arms seemed to close in about her. As she moved her fingers tentatively at first and then relaxed instinctively into the assuredness of the ancient strings, her tempo gradually coordinated itself with the steady rhythmic rise and fall of the boat on the sea, a troupe of Spanish dancers gliding across the wooden planks of a ballroom floor in a guileless glissando.

  Her mother’s compositions were haunting melodies, exacting in their mastery of form and by their beautifully balanced structure, first a major then a minor key with interwoven harmonies that caused a well-spring of emotion which seemed to rise from the very inner being of the soul in anyone who heard her play. Isabelle knew that it was as much the player as the compositions themselves that elicited that kind of emotion, and her mother was t
he most silently evocative person she knew. The guitar spoke for her, its words all bittersweet melancholy in homage to some place or someone now long gone. In the large rollicking boat en route to a strange new land, the daughter played the melodies as if in conversation: a vibrato was a question strung out to await an answer, a rubato a slowing to receive it.

  For the next several days, there was little reason to leave her small cabin. She responded once daily to the bells that announced the afternoon meal, the uncle meeting her at the German cook’s cabin, satisfied that his charge was safe, and not questioning her activities of the forward-marching morning and night. Isabelle counted the days and weeks, and the day on which almost a fortnight had passed since her last breakfast with her uncle, she turned eleven. She would address him again with her important question. This time, she resolved to herself, she would phrase the question differently and with hope elicit a less elusive and more favorable response from her relative.

  “Uncle Jacob,” she began confidently. “Today is my birthday; I am now eleven.” She paused, feeling her assurance slowly fade as Father Jacob, having been addressed directly by the girl, gathered himself up taller than ever at the table. She continued despite her waning conviction. “I miss my mother very much. Did you know her well when you were children?”

  “Yes, child,” the uncle replied.