After Light

by Catherine Hunter

Overview

After Light spans four generations of the Garrison family, over the course of the twentieth century. Irish Deirdre, forced into marriage at sixteen, never stops trying to regain her freedom, though her ruthless escape attempts threaten to destroy her family. Her son, Frank, raised in Brooklyn, is a talented young artist, until he's blinded in WW2. With fierce determination, Frank forges a new life for himself, but the war has shaken him deeply. His two daughters, rebellious Von and sensitive Rosheen, grow up as isolated as the hothouse roses their mother breeds on the frozen Canadian prairie, and like the roses, they have scant protection against the violent elements that imperil them. Rosheen's son, Kyle, raised without his mother, knows nothing of the family's history until 1999, when he and Von gather Rosheen's art works for an exhibit at a Brooklyn gallery. The story of the Garrisons is shaped by powerful forces--a rogue north wind, a vengeful orphan, a sugar-dust explosion, an airborne jar of peaches, a scar that refuses to heal, a terrible lie, an unexpected baby, and a desperate drive across treacherous ice. In the midst of all their tragedy, the creative fire that drives them survives, burning more and more brightly as it's passed from one generation to the next, into the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781927426746
Publisher:	Signature Editions
Publication date:	10/02/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Poet and novelist Catherine Hunter has published three collections of poetry, Necessary Crimes, Lunar Wake, and Latent Heat (which won the Manitoba Book of the Year Award); three thrillers, Where Shadows Burn, The Dead of Midnight, and Queen of Diamonds (Ravenstone Press); the novella In the First Early Days of My Death; and the spoken word CD Rush Hour (Cyclops Press), which includes a bonus track featuring The Weakerthans. Two of her novels have been translated into German. Her essays, reviews, and poems appear in many journals and anthologies, including Essays on Canadian Writing, The Malahat Review, West Coast Line, Prairie Fire, CV2, The Echoing Years: Contemporary Poetry from Canada and Ireland, and Best Canadian Poems 2013. She edited Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier, and for ten years she was the editor of The Muses’ Company press. She teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Winnipeg.

Read an Excerpt

When Deirdre had been married nearly four years, Galen became embroiled in a bitter disagreement with his donkey. On several occasions, when the cart was loaded with pork and Galen was ready to take it to market, the beast refused to pull. One morning in March, the donkey drove Galen nearly into an apoplexy. He chased the animal around the barnyard, cursing so fiercely the children hid under the covers in their beds. Finally he cornered the poor thing and began to flail at it with a switch. The donkey twisted and bucked, dodging the blows. So Galen circled around behind it, trying to catch it unawares. Deirdre could see the donkey’s bared teeth, and knew this was a bad idea, but she did not call out a warning. She was not on Galen’s side in this dispute. Let him get himself in trouble. And he did. He brought the switch down hard across the donkey’s hind quarters, and the animal raised both hind legs and kicked him square in the chest. Galen’s mouth opened in astonishment. He walked into the house and sat down on a chair.

"Galen?" she said. "Are you all right?"

He seemed to be listening to some faraway sound and did not answer.

Deirdre hurried out to see to the donkey. It shied away, but she grabbed hold of its bridle and tied it up in the barn. Ten minutes later, when she looked in on Galen again, he was stone dead. This was the story she told the constable, who wrote it down in his ink-spattered book.

The story of the donkey’s kick spread through the nearby farms and some of the farmers arrived to help. The men gathered in the yard to build the coffin, and the women came into the house, bringing soup and pies. They fed the children and sent them back to bed.

Deirdre did not speak to anyone, except to thank them. She rode off on the blue bicycle down the road toward Galway. She was going for the priest, said some of the neighbour women. She was after buying new clothes for the children, said others, so they’d look respectable-like at the graveyard. They set to washing the body and preparing it for burial, and when Deirdre got home that night, Galen was snug in the coffin. Deirdre sat in a chair against the wall with her eyes wide open, apparently seeing nothing. The neighbours stayed up all night with the body, and some of the men got drunk on Galen’s whisky, but it was a quiet wake, a sombre affair, given the young wife and the seven children left behind and the fact that nobody, not a single person any of them could think of, had liked Galen O’Nolan or would miss him.

She had the children’s faces washed and their hair combed for the funeral service at the gravesite next morning. But the neighbours remarked there were no new clothes to be seen. The prayers were said. Deirdre tossed a handful of dirt onto her husband’s coffin and stood quietly by for the burial. Then she took the children home.

The day before, when she’d gone to town, she had not been buying clothes. She’d been at the office of George O’Malley, lawyer and real estate agent, who represented the Dublin man wanting to purchase the north field. Galen had refused that offer, but now, Deirdre told George, the entire estate was for sale. Not only the cottage and tower ruins but the house and fields. The barn, the chicken coops and chickens, the pigpens and the very pigs themselves.

As it turned out, the Dublin businessman didn’t want the animals, so Deirdre drove the pigs to the farmer’s market near Oranmore. She piled the cart high with Galen’s clothing and household items, a crate of chickens and the bicycle. She hitched the donkey to the cart, taking care to treat him kindly, and walked beside him, heading east, herding the pigs with a stick. Other women were walking to market, too, with smaller loads, a basket of eggs or a single sheep. But Deirdre did not want to be talking to anyone.

At the market, she sold the pigs and chickens for a good price and then she went into the shops of the town. She sold Galen’s pocket watch and his tools and his shoes and pants and even his hat and his handkerchiefs. She sold the butter churn and the pitchfork and the kitchen crockery. Finally she sold the donkey and cart to a carter from up near Sligo. By the time she pedalled the bicycle home in the dark, the moon was rising and her apron pockets were heavy with coins.

The following day she was seen on the road, the seven wee ones trailing after her. She marched them past the graveyard, heading east, and that was the last anyone in Galway ever saw of her.