On Canaan's Side

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘If I write you a letter, will you answer it? I am sorry to be so odd to be talking like this. But I live in Cork city, and to be sure, I will be back in Germany a while longer. Then I don’t know what I will do. I didn’t like to say to the Super, but my ould man is in the Irish Volunteers, and he don’t like me much in the army at all, so I don’t know if I can go back to Cork when I am finished with this uniform. So I may come to Dublin instead and see what work there might be. I am told there is little enough work anywhere.’

  I only nodded my head, he had given me such a fright.

  ‘You’re saying yes then to a letter?’

  I reached into myself for an answer, come on, Lilly, come on, Lilly, speak.

  ‘I am,’ I said, and it was a great victory that I did, worthy of a parade I thought.

  Then with a salute to the sentries off he went down the lane to Dame Street and away. As he turned the corner, he looked back, and seeing me still there shivering in my dress, looked surprised enough, and waved a hand, and waved again. And my own hand went up in a slight wave, the sentries gazing on all this and laughing, laughing.

  *

  I was deep in the memory of Tadg Bere when I heard a car draw up at my gate and thought I knew the engine. Here was Mrs Wolohan now after all. She came in my door as she always did, and why not, since it was her own house really that she had lent me after I retired? There had been no onus on her at all to do anything for me. It was such a nice sort of a cottage, she might have rented it out to the summer people for a tidy sum. But she hadn’t. Twenty-odd years I have been installed here, so she might have wearied of her generosity. But no.

  ‘Well, well, you are all shipshape here,’ she said, coming into the kitchen. She had a bundle of something wet wrapped in a cloth, which I supposed was the promised strawberries, which she ferried over to the sink. She was as neat as a starched pillow in her white trousers and light blue shirt. She is sixty years old and I suppose could with justice be ground down by all the sorrows of her life, but somehow she has learned how to wriggle free. There have been many brambles in her path, but she has ducked around them. Perhaps in truth that is a recent victory. For some of the years I tended her, she was so sad that her silence became habitual, she rarely sallied forth into the world. But now these new days after her husband’s death, and when the first deep grief of that has abated, have brought her onto fresh ground. There is a crispness to her, and to her talk, like someone had brought her basket of conversation and rinsed it all out, and washed it, and starched it; and an old wittiness that had been hers when she was young has returned. She likes to tease, never more so than when other people might have offered sincere platitudes, as now after Bill’s funeral. But her teasing was more welcome to me. I could not now be consoled, so I preferred her sharpness, and anyhow, I had been reared with a similar tongue, that had resided in my sister Annie’s mouth.

  ‘I think I will have to get you to do something about that hair,’ she said. ‘You will come into town with me next week, and Gerard will do something with it. Our good friend Gerard,’ she said, mocking the foreign pronunciation, ‘whose real name I understand is Chuck, but never mind.’

  ‘Do you think anyone cares what an eighty-nine-year-old person does with her hair?’ I said.

  ‘Never more important. When I am eighty-nine I will be having a makeover every few weeks. No one will be able to credit my beauty. It will be astounding.’

  So we were laughing then.

  After a cup of tea, I walked out with her to the front porch.

  ‘Is everything good here?’ she said. I feared we were to have the funeral conversation after all, and my heart sank. I had been so grateful to her for not saying anything, knowing full well it was uppermost on her mind. She who had waded through the fires of grief many times had usually infinite discretion. So my face dropped a little I am sure.

  ‘This is where I will miss poor Mr Nolan,’ she said. ‘I think that damn gutter is leaning somewhat. It was the snow last winter I’ll be bound.’

  ‘I suppose it is a bit more crooked than it was,’ I said, gratefully, though the mention of Mr Nolan disturbed me. Of course I had not attended his funeral. Nor I am sure had Mrs Wolohan, who did not like funerals, as a general rule, but had certainly liked Mr Nolan.

  ‘I know nothing about gutters, but I believe that gutter is lying the wrong way. You will have the summer rains in your sitting-room.’

  And having pronounced this certainty, she got into her car and drove off, leaving me staring up at the offending gutter. Summer rains. Maybe so. I did not think I would live to find out.

  Fourth Day without Bill

  A troubled night. There was a great storm that loomed in from the Atlantic. I kept falling into a half-sleep and the storm had no trouble following me there. Woods fell to it, it felt like, and seas reared up, galloping through my addled thoughts. I woke again and again, startled, not knowing if I were young or old, in America or Ireland. That’s what comes of raking through old coals. Dredging up the past.

  Yet I will confess there is a certain pleasure in this. I scratch away at the Formica table, coming down the pages of this account book with my pencil. I seem to see everyone and everything as I write. I am able in some strange way to greet my father again. I would like to say to him, Papa, I do not know where you are buried, I am so sorry.

  Pleasure, of a sort. It is always at the back of my mind the things I have read since about the time of the war of independence, the capture of rebels, and they being held somewhere in the castle, and I fear tortured, and I wonder did my father engage in that? He was in charge of B division, which was mostly a patrolling division. G division was the detectives and they did not all have savoury characters. I do not know how much such histories are weighted against the losers, in this case men like my father, loyal to kings and the dead queen, but I am sure there was evil and cruelty on both sides. I am not so great a fool as to imagine otherwise. I could not even if I wished, given Tadg’s part in that story. But even if my father were the cruellest, bloodiest, darkest man in history, which he was not, my simpler heart, the bit of myself that perhaps invented him as a child, created in my mind an idea of him, fabulously adding to it as I grew older, misses him greatly, and would be more than enchanted to see him again. So in dreams he is a welcome piece of human flotsam floating by, and I cannot fear or criticise him. I will not make excuses for him, but also I will not deny him.

  Perhaps in that moment, as Ireland stirred like a great creature in the sea, and altered her position, we should all have been taken out and shot, as a sort of kindness, a neatness.

  Now I am laughing in my kitchen, but who is to hear that laughter? There are many forms of freedom, and this is one of them, to be so old I can lay claim to those I loved, without my own mind qualifying, erasing, hiding. My father was chief superintendent of police under the old dispensation. He was the enemy of the new Ireland, or whatever Ireland is now, even if I do not know what that country might be. He is not to be included in the book of life, but cast into the lake of fire, his name should not be mentioned because it is a useless name with a useless story. But all I had from him was kindness. Perhaps the children of that lad in Russia, Stalin’s chief of police, would say the same. What was his name? To my eyes, reading about him, a monster. Is that what my father was, a monster? How will I ever know? Can I ask St Peter?

  How I feared when first I worked for Mrs Wolohan’s mother that she would cast me out if she discovered who I came from. Of course like her daughter she was an Irish-American, who loved Ireland, and the idea of Irish freedom, which for her was heroic and inspiring. As it was indeed, I am sure, unless you were on the wrong side of it. And I did feel obliged to touch on that a little, because I did not want her to think me something other than I was. When I went to work for Mrs Wolohan herself I said a little more about it. Of course what she liked first about myself, and later Mr Nolan, was that we were Irish, pure and simple, even if Mr Nolan had never been to Ireland, but w
as third-generation, like herself indeed. But she showed no great surprise, no disapproval. She was interested in it. I remember her sitting me down and asking me questions. She was intrigued my father was a policeman of the old British regime. Her whole being lit up with interest, the hallmark of her personality. That is a person truly democratic in her thoughts. That is a merciful person. Because she knew who I was, I gradually came to see myself better. When a criminal gets out of prison, he looks for work, but must be upfront about his prison term. Whoever takes that man knows all about him, and if he is lucky enough to find such a person, he might well find a strange and unexpected happiness working for them. That is what I felt somehow, with Mrs Wolohan. Not so much on probation as given a new lease, a new term among the living and the just. And she did that it seemed to me with her whole heart.

  *

  Tadg Bere wrote me his letter. It was a short letter, the work of a soldier. Soon he turned up in Dublin again, and wooed me. My father liked him well enough. There was little work for anyone in those times, but least of all for ex-soldiers, with the dark colour of the trenches in their eyes. So Tadg took a chance and when they were looking for men for a new auxiliary police force, he joined them. Most of the men in that force were survivors of the war also. They were set up to try and deal with the turmoil of rebellion in the country. But something of the despair of the war was in them. In the first days, Tadg was happy, aflame, even inspired. My father certainly had assisted him in his application. He was proud to be working, at something akin to soldiering, and something that would allow him to serve his country. He felt he was making a new beginning. He did not believe in any new Ireland, he devoutly loved the old one. The new force paid decently, but was otherwise poorly funded and put together in great haste. They barely had uniforms, and in the beginning wore bits and bobs of various forces, half army and half police, which is why they were dubbed the Black and Tans.

  It is like a dirty phrase. A curse. An expletive. Well I know it.

  *

  My father was down in Wicklow now setting himself up in the old house. His brother had been farming the land all this while, in Kelshabeg above Kiltegan, and working as the steward on the Humewood estate, as his father, that is, my father’s father also, had done before him. It was a small cottage set into the hillside for shelter, and what shelter it did ultimately give him I do not know. At any rate he was spring-cleaning it, scraping off the old damp and whitewashing the walls inside and out, and he got a thatcher to repair the old roof, and a mason to put manners back on the ruined byre and henhouse. He aimed to be a retired man in the comfort of his old homestead, where seven generations of his family had been reared, and have a certain style to himself as a former officer high up in the police, with a pony and trap and, he hoped, one of his daughters to do for him. A noble ambition I am sure in its way. In any other country but Ireland, who may give freedom to her sons and daughters quicker than a future. But he carefully limed his walls and set his new geraniums on the sills, bought his Rhode Island Reds and his bantam cock, his pig, his pony and his milking-cow. Maud was to be married and I was also, so it was Annie that was with him, scouring out and searing and poking and polishing. Poor Annie with her polio back was not likely to find a husband, so he was secure enough in his helpmate. He bought two Jack Russell terriers to terrorise the rats. Myself and Maud were lodged with our first cousins in Townsend Street, where they had a huckster’s shop, and every fortnight we went down on the Wicklow bus.

  Old Kelshabeg. The home place, despite the fact I had spent all my childhood in Dublin. A great fume of white heather on the hillside in the spring, it sometimes wouldn’t even wait for the snow to go, but show its million small flowers in the drifts, like a second snow itself. Annie so proud to have put order on the place, the flagstones in the kitchen shining, the plates on the dresser shining back to the flagstones, the wide fire with its stack of reddening turf, the companionable cricket in the hearthstone, the water in the rainbarrel to plash your astonished face in the mornings, the devious hens trying always to come into the house and live a human life, the helpful pig eating everything in the yards including all the spoils of the ‘quiet spot’ where a person would quietly do their business, and wipe their backside after with a moist dock leaf, a better thing than any piece of paper.

  We walked up the long green road, Maud and myself, in our best travelling attire, and in our cloth bags some more sensible country clothes, old grey dresses and white and blue polka-dot over-dresses. There were a hundred sorts of clean clinging muck to come at you on an Irish farm. A few stooping men digging over a quarter-acre, shovelful by shovelful, the land too steep and poor for a plough, lifted themselves and straightened their backs as we passed, no doubt glad of the relief in their obligement to greet us, as essentially local people passing. The English words gone muddy and lovely in their mouths.

  ‘That’s it, that’s it, there’s the two beauties passing,’ and this despite the fact that Maud did not consider herself a beauty, but she was indeed a beauty, with a thick hank of black hair tied in a bit of ribbon more cousin to string than fashion. ‘Are you going up to the father? You are? God bless ye.’

  And up we did go, and it was the last house on the hill of Keadeen was our cottage, where nature ran out of patience with humanity, and struck out wild and pagan on the mountain proper, all heather and streams and sloughs. I am writing of these things, and as I do, as I sit here in my American clothes, clothed in my American self, all this long lost, long done with, all those people swept away, in the normal manner of the world, those stooping men, Maud, my father, the blessed hen and pony and pig, the whole sacred shebang, in a way we never give credence to while we breathe in and out as young women, as I sit here, an old person, a relic, even a grateful relic, for what I was given, if not for what was taken away, my sere heart calls back to it. I think again of the strange fact, plainly accepted, that that very heather would be sent up on the Wicklow bus in sprigs in springtime, so that my father could set a bit of it on his mantelpiece in the castle, a piece of home, a badge, a sort of poem really, a song, and we as little children would smell it, pull on its scent with our noses gratefully. And I am remembering other things, the bell-flowers on the ditches that we could burst between thumb and index finger, I suppose it was digitalis, friend to the heart attack victim, and the blackthorn blossom in April, a greyish white, and the mayblossom itself in May, a different white, a whiter white, and the gorse as yellow as a blackbird’s bill in May also, with its own smell, the smell as near as bedamn to the smell of a baby’s mouth after drinking its mother’s milk, I do believe. And the rooks rowing in the old high trees above Kelshabeg, such fractious birds, yet married to the one bird all their life, like good Catholics, and the wren in its tiny kingdoms in the earthen banks, and the woodpigeon offering its one remark over and over, and when there were storms out in the Wicklow sea, we heard the seagulls bickering and badgering on the winds, and in the dense copses the badgers themselves in the night-time, choosing among roots, and the fox both feared and admired, the red renegade, coming down to test our henhouse for weaknesses in the dark, and the nightingales and in stormy spring the fresh arrowheads of the house martins and the swallows, could even God tell the difference between? And Maud and me, before any of our life took darkness to it, she content in her artist she had met in St Stephen’s Green, myself content in my ex-soldier, going along without a thought for tiredness, it did not exist, and when we got to the cottage there was the bucket at the door to pull a drink out of, and a stew stewing on the hearth, and bread perfected in the pot-oven out on the yard, and then tea to kill the thirst, the best drink for thirst, and then bright early in the morning to get up with the sun and set to all the tasks, the hens, the dairy, the butterchurn, the dry sheets harvested from the fuchsia bushes, whatever was needed, and when the tinkers came up the path, to hold down the latch against them if our father was up the land, and not let them in the yard, them with their wild fumes of hair and not caring a
damn what they did, and all the sort of turmoil of music everywhere, didn’t even sunlight have a sound?, and the rooks, and the wrens, and the robin singing his desperate song, and my father singing There was an old woman, and the infinite, kind, searching mercy of the turf in the evening, our legs thrust out to it, the funny wood-thin legs of girls, and not caring in that moment about the chilblains we were sure to engender. I am writing it, I am writing it, and I spill it all out on my lap like very money, like riches, beyond the dreams of avarice.

  It was after just such a day that my father came in all changed and dark himself. It was a short spring evening, but bright, with a small rain sparkling down on the packstones of the yard. He made a darkness in the room as he came in through the half-door. He put Maud and Annie out of the room, and sat me down on the stone perch by the fire, and took the old dark chair for himself. His face was bleakened by a sort of terror.

  ‘Big news,’ he said, ‘big news. I was over on Keadeen Gap looking for that damn ewe that doesn’t know any better than to be wandering, when two men I know slightly came to me. I thought for a moment they meant to do me harm, as I know for a certifiable fact they are in the Baltinglass brigade. So you might think they wished harm on an old policeman. And I am sure there are those that wish me harm, and wouldn’t mind shooting me.’

  ‘I hope that is not true, Papa,’ I said.

  ‘It may be true, and it may not be true. But this is what they told me. It was something quite other than I had been expecting. It was about Tadg and yourself.’

  ‘How so, Tadg?’

  ‘They were coming to me out of old association, in that their father worked for my father, and the like, and they had a strong wish, a strong wish to let me know … To tip me off, I suppose, is the term I am looking for. Lilly, Lilly, it is terrible serious, it is a terrible serious matter. And you are to go back to Dublin this very evening and find Tadg and you are immediately to … And I will write an order for the bank in Sackville Street, and they will give you money, and …’