On Canaan's Side

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘What, Papa, what do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know what I mean. I am trying to gather my thoughts. Oh, Lilly, Lilly,’ he said, ‘my own daughter. And maybe it is my fault. Maybe this bad thing is all my fault, and if it is I was not meaning it at all.’

  ‘But what, Papa?’ I said, very unhappy and alarmed, because his face was so unhappy and alarmed.

  ‘There’s a death sentence put on Tadg, and he’s to be hunted and killed straight away. That’s just for certain. There isn’t a Tan that isn’t on a death list, I am told, but the order for Tadg was made in Baltinglass, after that ambush recent in Glenmalure, you see, a little crowd of IRA men lying in wait for a lorry of Tans, and Tadg in the damn lorry among them, and the thing set for a certain time, it’s a lorry that brings bread and victuals to the men in the Aughavannagh barracks, regular as anything, but there was a terrible preparedness in the Tans, there was no surprise at all, and four of the IRA boys were killed. And they were boys here from the mountainside. And one of the survivors recognised Tadg, because he has been down here visiting like any normal man, and doing a bit of drinking in Kiltegan, hasn’t he? And they were looking at the names after, and linking names with names, and they know you are engaged to Tadg, and since they know who he is, and since they know he was there that day in the lorry, and are desperate to avenge their comrades, they start to wonder, did Lilly Dunne hear something spoken in the fields, the way she is so friendly, and go telling her beau, and anyway, isn’t her father an ould policeman, so she’d be likely to do that, and be snooping about, and anyway, doesn’t she deserve worse than hanging for going about with a Tan, and now Lilly, all their tying-up and thinking has led to this, that Tadg Bere is to be killed immediately, but also, you yourself, Lilly, are to be hunted, and they only told me that, they said, out of old association, to give you a head start so to speak, so that in effect you could flee your fate, as they put it, and they were very nervous telling me, because it could be death to them in turn to do so, and it was gospel they were saying.’

  Such a sensation of utter terror descended on me. If my father had told me that wild wolves were to drag me off and eat me in the dark night I could not have been more terrified.

  ‘But, Papa, it’s not true. Tadg never tells me anything, and I didn’t even know he ever was in Wicklow on a lorry, and I never heard anything said in the fields, or anywhere.’

  ‘True or not true does not come into it, child. You know, I will bring you up to Dublin myself. They might be mustering now somewhere local, coming to get you. Throw your few dresses in your bag, and we must catch that evening bus.’

  *

  It was curious then to be sitting knee to knee on the Wicklow bus as it threw itself up and down the hills beyond Kiltegan.

  ‘This is a terrible difficult matter,’ my father said, keeping his voice low, so that the ould biddies and the working men and the flowery heads of children would not hear him. ‘We are going to have to be mighty clever people to get through this,’ he said. ‘Mighty clever,’ he said again, as if he was not quite sure we were such a sort.

  ‘I am very frightened, Papa. What is going to happen? What will Tadg do with the death sentence against him?’

  I don’t fully know what I thought about Tadg up to that point. There’s no point talking about love, what’s sure as sure is no human person knows what that is. A youngster uses the word as if it has no mystery, like it is a factual matter, like a nun says the word ‘God’. That clean look to him, a sort of scrubbed appearance, and the lovely liquorice-looking eyes he had, with pupils the size of farthings, and the feeling I had about that, could hardly be deemed love. It wasn’t till I sat in that bus, now weeping with terror, my bare leg banging against my father’s, I do remember that so vividly, and him thinking thinking at my side, that I realised that, if I didn’t love Tadg, I was certainly not willing to be torn away from him, by his death or my death. I had had a secret plan, unknown even to myself, to attach myself to him, and those black eyes. And this huge emergency did bring it home to me that I set a great value on him. His friendship with Willie was bound into his bones like the tendrils of a plant. His delight in his new job had delighted me. His curious Corkonian courtesy, the fact that when we were close to each other, at the music-hall say where he liked to bring me to see the mad clog-dances and hear the sentimental songs, and we were both melting with desire for each other, he was never so still as then, as if he were thinking about that desire, and was so hugely interested in it, that he was devoted to the purpose of forming a great philosophy about it! Not to be jumping my bones, as he might legitimately have done, since we were betrothed to each other. But his delicate, simple heart, that he had carried through slaughters more terrible than he had words to say during the war, and which he was now carrying into fresh scenes of turmoil and despair as a policeman of a kind, paid a sort of queer homage to our desire. We were Catholic people, of an ancient vanished category, and though we were eager to jump into each other’s knickers, we weren’t planning to do so till our wedding night. The fire that that engenders in a person has to be experienced to be believed. You are sitting with your beau and your private parts are melting. You need to eat well and drink a lot of water to survive it.

  When we got to Dublin, Tadg was just as certain as my father that we had to go. It wasn’t just his name, he said, but mine, and while he might fight off assailants himself, he could not in all practicality protect me. And he said that indeed he had been on the lorry in Glenmalure, protecting in the normal way the delivery of supplies to the barracks, and it was terrible bad luck that he had been recognised, and he would never have credited it, and the man seeing him knowing me too, and my father, it was a horrible coming together of things, he said, and he said my father was right, there would be no safety for us now anywhere in Ireland, and go we must, and straight away.

  That very night I stood in our sitting-room in the castle, and embraced my father. He said not a word. He bestowed on me the tickets he had given big money for, two large long tickets with the name of the ship, the destination New Haven Connecticut on it, and our names written in a clear, flowing ink, like you might on a census. A little effort made to be clear. So that that particular person would be taken on that particular boat, taken out of that particular life into another particular life.

  My father walked me down to the gates and helped me onto the horse-cab that would bring Tadg and me to the North Wall. He put his left hand over his face, how strange I remember that, and his right hand on my hand where it rested on my lap. He stood there for a few moments, breathing strangely through his fingers. He took back his hand and waved on the jarveyman. He took his left hand from his face. He said not a word.

  On the damp cab, as we moved through the muddled lights of Dame Street, Tadg put his arm around me. He was wearing a rough set of civvies and didn’t look much more than a labouring man. Although we intended to be married correctly in America, we were really married in that moment, when my heart was so heavy that without his presence, without his arms, I would have perished of fear and loss.

  *

  Now I will lay up this writing for today, and wipe off the Formica table, set the chair carefully against it, make some tea, and go to my bed. The sea-light has crossed the potato fields to me, and touched the darkening room with the scent of salt, which, as an animal of this place, just as much I hope as the sparrows and the plovers, I take as my signal to seek my rest. Something presses on my crown, presses up against the soles of my feet, presses against my breast and my back. I suppose it is how a poor carrot feels in a pressure cooker – there is a huge stillness everywhere, a sharpness in the air, a sort of tingling, that puts a wave in my hair, which if it were the hurricane season might make me suspect a hurricane, although it is a feature of this district that hurricanes most often reach us only as echoes of their great Atlantic selves, in the form of benign downpour. My head is burning.

  Fifth Day without Bill

  Mr Eugenides, who
owns the drugstore at the corner of Main Street, came out onto the sidewalk after me, when he saw me passing and not coming into his shop, as I would most likely normally have done. Although I am beginning to forget what normal was, when I used to be almost another Mrs Bere, going about her business, secure in her love of Bill, even when he was far away in the desert, and I worried so about him in the long nights. I would hear our own sea fretting in the distance, across the wide reedbeds and the sleeping marsh birds, and wonder what was happening to him in that place of sealess sand, and try to work out on the complicated wristwatch he had given me what time it was in the Middle East, or Arabia as I used to think of it.

  Mr Eugenides came out, with his short steps, because he is a very small Greek man of very large character.

  ‘Mrs Bere, come back in to me, I have a certain delicacy for you, which will be delighting you. I tell you, my friend.’

  So I was obliged to follow him, out of the half-hearted sunlight, into the deep cave of his store. In the seventies he used to have a counter, with swivel seats and soda fountains, but he had done away with all that, though I always noted the round marks on the lino where the metal chairs used to be bolted, and besides his few isles of medicines and the like, he imported certain goods from his home place Trikala in the region of Thessaly. But he was rather old now, and not ambitious for a new line, and these items were really for himself and friends, to allay his extreme homesickness. He would have big metal tins of olives in olive oil, and eggplants Greek-style, and a tray now and then of baklava, although I wasn’t sure if that wasn’t made by his cousins in Queens, of which he seemed to have legions. As always, as I stepped in, a low music was playing, the plangent and beautiful strains of ‘the great Tsitsanis’ as Mr Eugenides called him. The great Tsitsanis had also been a native of Trikala. ‘We marvelled at the speed of his playing,’ Mr Eugenides would say, as if that was the final test of great music. ‘His hand flying like a sparrow over the strings of the bouzouki. It was great genius.’

  And Mr Eugenides would stop, and cock an ear to the playing, and look at me, and nod his head, as if to say, ‘Don’t you think?’

  He had taught me some Greek, just for friendship and fun, and he liked to hear me say the phrases he had taught me, and when there was a Greek friend in the shop, he would get me to speak, and the friend might pretend amazement and delight.

  ‘Apo ti poli erchume, e sti corifi canella.’

  I would only have to say the first half, and he or his friend would finish the saying, because it was that sort of saying.

  Amazement and delight were Mr Eugenides’ bywords. When Bill was going into the army, just a couple of years ago, Mr Eugenides bought him a copy of Homer in translation, which Bill dutifully brought with him to the war.

  In this way, Bill and I, on very separate occasions, received the same book, in different editions and translations, as a gift.

  ‘There has never been a better book about these matters. Friendship, loyalty. The bricks and mortar of Greece, and of America.’

  He had that extravagant patriotism of the immigrant. He had been just too young for the Second World War, in which his father had been killed, and too old of course for Vietnam.

  ‘Now dear Mrs Bere, tell me I do a bad thing. Tell me I do not understand you. See, see … I offer you this, as a solace, in this great time. Your Bill has fought far away, you have laid him to rest. I have nothing to give you but this, which is the honey of my father’s village.’

  And he pointed, he more or less introduced me, to a little pot, humble and plain enough, with a very austere white label, and a big yellow bee on it, and some Greek writing.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘what you would give me from Ireland, if I was suffering your suffering. I wonder.’

  ‘I would give you the white heather from my father’s hillside,’ I said, trying not to cry like a child, and as soon as he noted my small distress, his left hand was on my shoulder, patting it – yes, I would bring him that white heather, I said, indeed I would, if such a thing had legs to travel, though I knew the little white pods would be blackened by the long journey from Kelshabeg to New York.

  ‘Ah, ah,’ he said, as if I had offered him the solution to an enormous problem, as if just by mentioning the heather, I had found at last the answer to the death of the earth and allied matters.

  Now I sit at my table, and today there is not just tea and milk in my cup, but also a spoon of Greek honey.

  *

  Greece, America, Arabia, Ireland. Home places. Nowhere on earth not a home place. The calf returns to where it got the milk. Nowhere is a foreign place. Everywhere a home place for someone, and therefore for us all.

  A few weeks back Mr Dillinger was here, just across from me, sitting in Bill’s old chair. He was talking nicely as usual, with his blue eyes sunk into his long, lined face keeping a good guard over me, to see how I was liking his talk. Because he would stop immediately if he thought he was tiring me. No man I ever knew is less of a fool than he.

  ‘What is the greatest discovery in our lifetime? Moon rockets? Maybe penicillin? In my view, Mrs Bere, it is DNA.’

  ‘Deeny what?’ I said.

  ‘Three letters, Mrs Bere, D-N-A. Don’t ask me what they stand for. The DNA of every modern person goes back to one, or maybe three women in Africa. The good news is, we are all the same family. The bad news is, we are all the same family.’ This was his little joke. ‘The point is, all these wars, all these teems of history, all this hatred of difference, and fear of the other, has been a long, elaborate, useless, heartbreaking nonsense. America is not a melting pot of different races, it is where the great family shows its many faces. The Arab is the Jew, the Englishman is the Irishman, the German is the Frenchman, it is a wonderful catastrophe, no? It is the most important thing we have been told in our lifetime.’

  Which might explain the strange feeling I had standing on the deck of our ship as it approached New Haven. There was a scent, the scent of America, that came off the land, so suggestive, so subtle, there was something in it that claimed my heart. Even before we got there, I was experiencing a sort of nostalgia for the land, I do not know how other to describe it. As if I had been there before, had left it, and was returning after a long voyage. We were drooping with fatigue, after the days of the voyage, because Tadg had felt seasick as we left the arms of the Great South Wall, and the sickness had never left him. The crossing was a torment for him, and my mind had turned round and round sleeplessly the images of my sisters and my father. We had kept to a tiny cramped corner of the ship as Tadg, even in his sickness, feared every man on deck, that he might have been placed on board to kill us. And indeed he barely looked now at the small city looming nearer, but I saw his eyes dart about, trying to judge the relaxedness or preparedness of other passengers, as if any man there in his belted overcoat might not have nesting in his clothes a cold metal gun.

  As if to honour both the seasickness and the fear, Tadg had not shaved on the voyage, and had grown a reasonably successful reddish beard, which he allowed me to trim roughly to a point with a borrowed scissors, so he looked less like a poor balladeer in a Dublin street.

  *

  We were in the sort of situation that can show you pretty quick, and painfully, that you are travelling with a person that in effect you do not know.

  Neither of us were now what we had been. My father in great haste had put together some letters for us on his official paper, and gave our names as Timothy and Grainne Cullen, brother and sister, should we need them, but just to muddle everything, he had put our real names on the ship’s passenger list, in case using aliases would make our naturalisation eventually in America more difficult. But at least we would be able to travel for the moment in America as people other than what we were, and give our names that were not our names, until things might seem to die down, and we might marry at last as who we were, and give our real names at last to the minister. Like normal human beings. Without sentences of death on their heads.<
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  But Timothy Cullen, or Tadg Bere, I hardly knew who he was, either way.

  Perhaps in Ireland, right up to the moment we had to go, he had been Tadg. Perhaps it was fear altered him, like one of those small earthquakes under farms that alter the watercourse and make a well dry up, though there is no visible sign of alteration in the landscape. Now that I was grappling with an unknown Tadg, I was panicking in my thought that I had never really known him, had allowed myself to become engaged to a man because he had known my beloved brother, and had written me a gentle letter, he a boy who had survived years of unrestrained carnage. As if the love I had for Willie was strangely transferable, and while maybe even a real love, was a blind one, an unhearing one, an unseeing one.

  Fear is a force like a seasickness, could you call it a life-sickness, a terrible nausea caused by dread, creeping dread, that seems to withdraw a little in dreams while you sleep, but then, just a few moments after waking, rushes back close to you, and begins again to gnaw at your simple requirement for human peace. Gnawing, gnawing, with long ratlike teeth. No one can live through that without changing. A small measure of my terror was I was now moving through America with this stranger.

  I had the oddest sense as we sat on the train to New York that America was being built in great haste all in front of us, being invented for us as we went. I had only ever seen America in newspapers and the little film reels at the music-hall in Dame Street – where Maud my sister used secretly to take me – maybe that was why, and it seemed to me now an endless series of pictures, water towers, great coastal installations of unknown kinds, a multitude and an infinity of backyards and houses, the broken hems of the towns and small cities we passed through, another sort of shock to me, the poorness of it, although I suppose railway companies found it easiest to run their lines through the districts of the poor. I gulped the ham sandwich Tadg bought for me on the train, I gulped the strange dusty water, I gulped the air with its slight aftertaste of metal, gulp, gulp, gulp, like a fish in starved water.