Inland Navigation by the Stars. Anne Coleman

as such, the leader. The book’s purpose was to be a guide for other lone wilderness venturers. All I am aware of about the book, apart from its title, is an image of my father in moonlit darkness of our Forest Hill kitchen, crouching over a shallow pan of a thick, gleaming near-liquid substance, placed on the high kitchen stool. I had an idea it was molasses but my brother claims mercury, which seems more likely, more scientific. The dark surface of the mercury — if mercury it was — caught reflected light. Moonlight? Starlight? Can this be a true memory? It is so odd! What precisely he was doing I had no idea then nor do I now, only that it had to do with his book.

      His book was never written (other methods of navigation presumably overtook it) but his attempts suggest to me in some hazy and symbolic way what I am doing in my own book: navigating darkness, a darkness that is sometimes shot with light; I am seeking him, and myself, and all of us who perch, dangle or almost entirely hide, in the branches and leaves of our family tree.

      Also I simply want his title to have its life.

       6

      But what of our mother? What dark secrets are hidden among the leaves on her side of our family tree?

      Mother’s immediate family was irreproachable. There were five children.

      The oldest, Edward, was very handsome, clever and athletic. I have pictures of him looking tall and stalwart in the uniforms of various Bishop’s University sports teams. He got his BA at Bishop’s and then was studying law at McGill but suddenly joined up and became a soldier in the Great War. There was some oddness about that. The story was that he and a few friends joined as a joke, and as Privates. With his education he ought to have been an officer. My grandmother was always bitter about that: his cousins were all officers and they survived. She was likely wrong about his increased risk: officers were killed in the droves, going over the top first as they were expected to do. In any case, Edward was killed on the Somme.

      Next came Catherine, her father’s favourite daughter — he had her always sit beside him at the table, his hand gently on hers. She died of pneumonia at age thirteen. Then came Hazel, pleasant enough looking but without the beauty of her sisters. (She got to sit down the table, out of sight. I find the insensitivity of that era astonishing! Everyone in the situation took such favouritism as entirely normal and my grandfather was considered a kind man.) My mother was five years younger than Hazel, and the most beautiful of all. There was a late arriver, Ellis, who was born the same year, 1916, that his older brother Edward was killed, and then, before the year was out, Ellis died too. My poor grandmother losing her two sons so close together — their hero, Edward, and the darling ten-month old “surprise” baby: the grief in that household must have nearly sunk them.

      Mother’s father was an Anglican canon, one of three brothers who were all clergymen. I have a photograph of the three Ireland brothers standing outdoors in a row, their white surplices blowing sideways in the breeze, Uncle Charlie, Uncle Austin and our grandfather James.

      No dark secrets so far, but now we come to my grandmother’s family.

      They were a large group, though that was not unusual in the mid-nineteenth century (Grandma was born in 1869). She had eleven brothers and one sister, if I have the number right, and she was one of the younger ones, with, I think, only one brother younger than she. I am shaky on the details as there was a certain amount of murk in that family, making the facts about some members sketchy.

      Several of her brothers also were Anglican clergymen — more rows of white surplices in photos. Another brother had a grocery store in what became Westmount. So far, so upstanding. It was other brothers who provided the murk: they owned considerable property in downtown Montreal, part of which later became the site of the Central Railway Station, and another part, later still, of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. When the Charters brothers had it, however, there were brothels on the site. I don’t know how hands-on the brothers were in running the establishments but they owned them. I do know that early in my own parents’ marriage the properties were being hastily sold, and sold for much less than even the land alone ought to have been worth. I have my own, perhaps wild, perhaps correct, notion that the situation became too hot for them. I picture criminal elements bringing pressure to bear and the brothers not being clever enough to play the game to their own advantage. It could easily be true, given Montreal at the time. Or indeed any time.

      There was also some other, I think unconnected, skullduggery about money that my grandmother should have inherited and that her brothers tricked her out of. My father tried and failed to sort something out for her but he was too young and inexperienced at the time for them to pay attention to him. But despite the incongruity of ministers and brothel keepers in the same family, and both sets cheating their sister, everyone got along in lively and affectionate fashion, the hypocrisy of the era serving them well. It was all rather like an Ibsen play, except nobody got the comeuppance the playwright would have arranged for them.

      There were other stories, set long enough ago that they had lost any sting they might once have had, that my grandmother used to tell us. When she was a small girl living in the family farmhouse, situated more or less at the corner of St Catherine Street and Metcalfe Street in present day Westmount, her own grandmother lived with the family. Her husband had been a sea captain, supposedly. Rank is sometimes enhanced in old tales. He may have been a common seaman. He rarely returned to his homeport of Aberdeen, Scotland. He was a drinker and his wife may also have suspected he had wives in other ports. In any case, after one long absence of his she determined to emigrate with her grown children to Canada, and did so. Years passed.

      “One winter’s night there came a knock at the door.” These are Grandma’s exact words. This sort of story is always told in precisely the same ones. The rest of the family being occupied, the old lady went to answer the knock. Outside in the snow stood “an old fella.” For some reason for the purposes of this tale it had to be “fella,” not a normal word for her. He was clearly an old bum and she made to close the door on him. But he had thrust a foot forward and over the threshold. “Janet, don’t you recognize me?” he said.

      Looking down, she saw the broken boot he had thrust forward. I picture her cringing with shame at the sad sight of that boot, unsure if the shame was for him or for herself.

      “No. I do not recognize you,” she said, trying again to close the door.

      “But Janet! I’m your own husband!”

      “I have no husband. I’ve been a widow for years.” And she struggled with the door again. At this point one of her children heard the commotion and hurried forward to sort out the situation.

      There was no escape from the facts for poor Janet: the old man came in, and stayed, for the rest of his life. However, until the day she died, she maintained that he was no husband of hers. My grandmother remembered him well, how he sat in his nook by the fire and pretended not to like the whisky he had to be allowed. He would purse his lips, pretending distaste, and say, “Oh my nasty medicine.” And he would take her side and save her when a brother teased by pretending to be a bear under the bearskin rug.

      How the stories in my mother’s family could have been taken as any sort of lessons is less clear than the ones in my father’s. The moral lines are more blurred; rascals are not necessarily cast out. There was more kindness, seemingly, also cheating and probably criminality. There was considerable hypocrisy. But moral lessons, or any lessons, are not overtly passed anyway. It’s more subtle than that.

      I keep returning to the same theme and images. I always felt, almost no matter how taxing or even dreadful and frightening a situation might be, that my life was richly interesting and I was its heroine. And I would survive. Yet those myriad generations, all those crowds of people, hang in the branches of a towering, hugely towering, family tree — those owls, as well as larks and wrens and woodpeckers, vultures even — and something of them funnels down into me. They were. I am. I am, at the moment. One day I will be past tense too.

      One of the most fascinating things of having lived this long and having known several generations is seeing personality traits and talents, as well as physical characteristics,