On Canaan's Side

by Sebastian Barry

  And into a great hall, which in itself seemed a marvel to us. It had a high roof and hordes of dark-suited men and women in bright dresses. They were passing in and out through the many doors, little rivers of blackness and brightness going along you might think because of the slope of the earth. And then, like tadpoles gnawing away at pondweed, little stranded groups of them at particular pictures, gawping. And there were children doing their immortal traipsing, and here I spotted a pregnant stomach, and there I spotted a withered man, but in general as we entered we caught a strange note of gaiety and completion, as if this great building might be a hospital of sorts, but curing the unknown and non-specific maladies of the daily soul.

  And we felt it. All other matters fled away. It constituted a moment of clear thought, such as you might get only three or four times in a life. When the sea-fog clears from the sea and the blue expanse is revealed like an explanation. I loved my father and my sisters and the memory of my brother, yet would most likely never see Ireland again. But there was this new ease with Tadg, this pleasant wandering, and surely now we would be married soon, and both of us glad that it would be so. I suddenly for that second, and maybe never so clearly again, knew who I was, or thought I did, and knew who Tadg was, my husband, and God forgive me, he seemed to me a resplendent husband, a shining man. In my so-called clarity I thought I was lucky. I felt lucky. And I must have been giggling away to myself like an eejit.

  ‘What are you laughing at, Lilly?’ said Tadg, not entirely approvingly.

  Then he stopped by a particular painting. Just then there was no one else near us. He stopped, and I imagined in a crazy moment that everything stopped, his heart, his story, because he seemed to bunch himself up, he seemed to pause mightily. He began not just to look at the painting, but to gaze at it, gaze at it. I stood at his left elbow, looking at him, and looking at the painting.

  ‘What is it, Tadg?’ I said.

  ‘Look at the painting,’ he said, ‘look at the blessed thing.’

  It was a portrait of a man, young enough or not too old, it was hard to say, because it was to my eyes quite roughly painted. We were close up to it, and there was a label beside it, that said it was a self-portrait by the artist Van Gogh, with a date, and where he came from, and the name of a foreign town. I had never heard of such a person, and I do not know if Tadg had, but the name stuck in my brain, it printed there, Van Gogh, in the selfsame black letters of the notice. I smiled up at Tadg, not that he saw me, and put my hand on his sleeve, and said again, with an instinctive quietness, as if sensing an unusual mystery in him, he who was a haunted man, I said again:

  ‘What is it, Tadg?’

  ‘Do you not see, Lilly, do you not see?’

  ‘What, Tadg?’

  ‘It is a picture of myself.’

  I looked again with renewed effort. I was startled. What did he mean? Maybe there was a resemblance. The face in the picture had a rough red beard just like Tadg’s right enough. The strangely shifting lines of the painting, as if this Van Gogh had made his picture out of strings, one packed against the next, and of different colours, like from a darning bag of ends and oddments, made it difficult to decide. Whatever I thought of it, Tadg seemed to see his exact image. He was transfixed by it. He stared and stared.

  Now over to my right, in the very corner of my eye, I started to pick up a movement. Again pure instinct, no actual thought crossed my mind. And I looked over that way, towards one of the entrances into the deeper galleries. A figure, one among many, had issued forth from the blackness, and what it was about him that had caught my eye I do not know, unless it was his long coat in that improved weather, although there were plenty of men in coats. He wore a black hat, but there was nothing unusual about a hat, it was the great heyday of hats and caps, indoors and out. Maybe the person, the darkness of him, the thinness, matched something in some dream I had dreamed, as Cassie Blake’s book of dreams might claim. I do not know. I do know I followed his progress across the wide red marble floor, he was coming at the angle a trout does in its first strength after being hooked, when the fisher is exerting pressure, and the trout will not deign to come in a straight line. It was like this dark man found the floor at a bit of an angle, and was falling ever so slightly down that angle, and it was bringing him nearer and nearer to us.

  I plucked at Tadg’s sleeve.

  ‘Tadg, Tadg,’ I said. ‘Tadg, love.’

  ‘But Lilly,’ he said. ‘How could there be a picture of me in here?’

  ‘I don’t think it can hardly be of you, Tadg, look at the little notice, it is a picture from Holland or somewhere.’

  ‘I was never in Holland,’ said Tadg, as if offering an irrefutable fact that yet I might be about irrefutably to disprove. ‘Was I, Lilly? I never was.’

  The black-coated man was halfway across the floor to us. I don’t know if I was frightened in that moment. But in the next moment, I thought he made an odd movement, a sort of fishing movement in the drape of his coat, for he did not have his arms in the sleeves, I saw that now, and maybe that was what had attracted my attention, one hand was acting like a brooch and was clutching the two sides of his coat at the breast, but the other hand was invisible, except for that dipping motion, except for that dip also of one leg, a little stooping gesture, as if fetching something, fetching something out.

  ‘I have never seen such a thing, Lilly. I do not know what is going on. God bless us, Lilly.’

  ‘Tadg, Tadg, I am frightened,’ I said.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘No need. This is a wonder. It’s not a frightening thing.’

  ‘But Tadg, I am afraid of that man, there is a man coming over to us, I am afraid of him – greatly, greatly.’

  ‘What, Lilly? I am sure they will not like me to touch it. But I feel I could reach out there and feel the warmth in this face. Do you see? Is it not breathing? And right here, right here, where I am standing, I can still sense the lad who made this, occupying this exact spot, his arm out, like this,’ and he put out his hand and just tipped the paint, no doubt breaking some sacred rule – ‘and don’t you feel it, Lilly, the fierceness of him? I do feel it, my God, Lilly, my God, his face, and my face, these two faces, and his own is gone, and mine here in its place, and …’

  ‘Please, please, Tadg, I beg you, come away, come away. There is a man coming over to us.’

  ‘What?’ Now his gaze broke at last from the painting, and he glanced down at my face. ‘What man?’ And I heard the little policeman tone in his voice, the little seriousness. And now the man was just four feet behind him, four feet beyond the back of his head, turned as it was to me, and I was in enormous panic, because I thought, what can Tadg do?, he cannot defend us. I clutched at his arm, pulling at him, wanting him to run, to run, away out into the free Chicago light.

  Tadg at last turned his head fully about. He had looked for danger in a thousand places. We were weeks, months in America. I am sure there had been days he had crept along streets carefully, wondering were there enemies gathering against us, were there letters and words, and whisperings. He had sought no security from any police here, because he knew well that many were Irish and how could he judge their affiliations? It would be too dangerous to try and find out. Better to be quiet, careful, in our little room and his anonymous work. Yet now, in a clear instance of possible danger, he was almost at his ease, and I saw his face actually break into a smile, as if he expected the man, now just upon us, to greet him in some friendly fashion.

  Before I could quite see what had happened, before I could untangle in my mind the various blacknesses, the black coat, the hat, the awful darkness of the face under the hat, not something that made me want to smile, there was a huge sound, a huge violent sound that filled every niche and door of the hall, that swelled and swelled at an infinite pace, that battered against me, that seemed for a moment to cancel out the space, like the atom bomb all those years later, one moment lives and buildings and breathing souls, next dust and oblivion and burning, and
then the room righted itself, and though my ears were ringing with noise, ringing, I saw a queer blaze of whiteness and redness, as if quite unconnected to the noise, but not unconnected, because it was flames and noise issuing from a gun-barrel, existing just for a breathless instant, then gone, but never gone, never gone again, and the muddle of the gun in the man’s hand, and some bullet bursting into my Tadg, into his side, where his heart lay hidden, so that his whole body went banging against the wall, just under the fatal portrait, like a lorryman had thrown a sack of loose grain to the floor, he folded at the waist, and on his poor jacket all under the arm was a surprising hole, or maybe a bullet hole and a flower of blood, I didn’t know, and in that fraction of time, in that clumsy merciless falling, I saw life pulled out of him, I saw the face grow ashen, grow dark, I threw myself at his body, I held his face, I kissed his face, I begged him to return to me, I begged him, I begged him, but he could not.

  I expected my own bullet then in the moment following, the back of my head tensed to receive it, I wasn’t sure if I had a terror of that, I just thought it would come, would come, but it did not.

  *

  Then indeed I seemed to cross over into another country. That Tadg-less country was not that first America, which his presence had made safe, a sanctuary, if an uncertain one. It was another America. Nothing could have prepared me for it. Some hidden drain of the world opened under me as I knelt beside him, and I was sucked down into its darkness. How do we survive? How are we not crushed? The pressure of sorrow is like being sent down to the core of the earth. So how are we not burned away?

  I stood up. He was so dead the rest of the world seemed to have died with him. The walls looked ashen as his face, as if some fire had after all torn through the museum. Maybe it was my tears, though I do not remember crying. I was gawping, at this picture of sudden and ruinous death. Only the portrait of Van Gogh shone out just the same as before, still and indifferent, acquiring now a terrible notice beneath, of a person destroyed, the one face troubled and eternal, the other beneath twisted by a last surge of pain. The Sunday crowd, when it was adjudged that the murderer had fled, gathered near us, watching, watching. I think they thought I was a figure of some threat and danger too. No one maybe had seen the act of killing, or few. I am sure it was hard to tell what had happened. I cannot say I was full of thoughts myself. But right or wrong I did have one thought, that I could not stay there. I was anxious to be with Tadg. For some crazy reason my only other thought was the task of unclothing him, washing his body, and laying him in his grave. I wonder where he does lie. I should have gone long ago to look for him, he must be in the city records of Chicago. Here lies … who? Did they know his name? His pocket book might have had something to identify him, old tickets or the like.

  I spun about to get away from there, and there was a multitude of people in my way, but I stretched out an arm, like a woman broadcasting seeds, and plunged forward, in among them and through them, reached the huge door all brightened by its harvest of sunlight, and went through that light as if it were solid also. Then I stopped, head down, staring at the huge pavers under my shoes. How could I leave him there? Was there something I needed to do, to say? The great pull of that strange inner civic being in all of us had stayed me. But as I looked down I saw the blood on my clothes, a continent of it, ragged and spread like an elephant’s ear, infinitely clean and dark-looking, glistening, slippery. The very selfsame mark I had seen as a child on my aunt’s apron, when she was bleeding the pig in Wicklow. The poor lonesome pig hung up by the trotters in the barn, and his throat slit, and all the black blood draining down into the bucket beneath, that the black puddings would be made of. Her lap so slippery with it that in that instant as a little girl I wanted to ask her if I could climb on her breast, and slide down the stain. And later that same day she was milking the cow, in a fresh apron, sun-dried on the bushes, and she turned the udder and skited me with milk, so that was a day of whiteness and blackness, and …

  Mad thoughts. But this grief was a madness, mixed as it was with terror. That a man, a living breathing man, lucky so lucky himself to be alive, to have the gift of life, should stride across a great public room, and take my Tadg’s life away. Unimaginable, even if it was the thing we had feared. No thought we had had about it, no conversation, no opinion offered since the death sentence, bore any relation to this. Because the ingredient we had missed was the actual enormous violence of it, the tearing out, the vigorous unstoppable intent, the distraction for Tadg of the portrait, me seeing the killer come, me trying to alert Tadg, and then the huge war of it, the suddenness, the completeness, the colossal ungenerosity of it, implacable eternal hatred of it, that they wouldn’t let us go, forgive us our trespasses. That they wouldn’t allow us to cross into Canaan, but would follow us over the river, and kill him on Canaan’s side. The land of refuge itself.

  I am sure I did not have all those thoughts. I am having them now.

  I sort of gathered my soiled skirt and coat, and hitched them up somewhat, and started to run. Running away from something or running towards something, I did not know. From danger to safety, or from danger to danger, I did not know. I began to run, and soon streets took me that knew nothing of what had happened, with eyes and faces and hats and coats that knew nothing, though they may have wondered at the sight of a young woman scampering, with what looked like blood all down her front. That was blood. The blood of a man that, just as he was leaving me, had become beloved.

  *

  It is very late. When I looked up just now the security light came on and I thought there was someone crossing my little garden. A wind raked gently across the tiny shoots of the new potato plants in Yastrzemski’s field, and beyond them the long, still dunes showed their whale backs in the darkness, and then the cooling sand, and then no doubt the sea. Mr Dillinger says in the twenties the Ku Klux Klan used to gather on the beach there and burn their crosses, not so much because of the black people, but the Polish …

  I thought there was someone in the garden, but when I stood just now and looked out, my head quite dizzy from the past, it was just the flick, the blur, the flounce of a big dog fox. Just for a second he looked in at me as he passed. I was curiously grateful for his glance.

  I am tired. I will go to my bed – my doss, as my father used to say. I am tired, but just for a few moments I have been in love with Tadg Bere again. How strange, how strange. We may be immune to typhoid, tetanus, chickenpox, diphtheria, but never memory. There is no inoculation against that.

  Seventh Day without Bill

  This is a day when the land is being absolutely thumped by rain. Millions and millions of little explosions in the fields, making the soil jump. The roots of things I am sure are delighted by it, if it doesn’t actually kill them.

  I walked over to the other side of the pond to see Dr Earnshaw, because, even if my stay on earth is to be short from here on, I had to do something about the constipation that is plaguing me. I had my umbrella, and my long plastic coat, but the wind was very disrespectful of me, and blew the rain against every bit of me, so that I arrived at the surgery drenched.

  ‘Mrs Bere, did you fall in the pond?’ the receptionist said, with her spiky blonde hairdo. It is a wonder to me how caring and consoling she is, given the possible monotony of her job. But she apparently likes the world, her place in it is acceptable to her, and she seems to be happy to see her employer’s patients. But this is a quality generally in a small American town. It is one of the graces of America.

  ‘I did not, Mrs Pilat,’ I said.

  ‘Are you wet under the coat, Mrs Bere?’

  ‘I am fine. I shook it out on the porch.’

  Then I went in to Dr Earnshaw. He is one of the old Presbyterians of Bridgehampton, his family came up here hundreds of years ago. They must have been English settlers, and there is still a little touch of Englishness to him, I think. But he is very austere, and depressed-looking, and he never smiles. You can have confidence in a man like that, th
ough, in the matter of doctoring.

  He placed a thermometer under my tongue, which could only remind me of childhood, and my father looming solicitously at my ancient bedside, and he checked my blood pressure, he looked down my throat, and when I spoke to him of my constipation, he nodded in his sad way, but neutrally, and asked me to get up on the trolley. There he pulled down my skirt a few inches, and felt about my stomach, shaking his head all the while. You might think he was about to tell you the most distressing news.

  ‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘Perfect. Let me write out a script for you. You are a little backed up there. Just a little. This will settle you.’

  Then he sat down and wrote on his pad with his black ink pen.

  ‘It’s gentle stuff,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It is just hard to sleep when I am all blocked up.’

  ‘I quite agree. Of course.’

  And handed me the piece of paper.

  ‘You are all right otherwise, Mrs Bere?’

  ‘I am fine.’

  ‘I want you to know,’ he said slowly, turning his body in the chair a little towards me, so as not to stir anything, frighten anything, the infinite small bird of our persistence, not to scare it out of the garden, ‘we are very proud of your grandson. There was no onus on him to go. I gave him all his injections before he went out. I do believe no person ever went to war with so pure a motive, so clear a love of his country. What age was he when he came to live with you?’

  ‘He was two, Dr Earnshaw.’

  ‘He wasn’t a big child, was he? Quite skinny in fact, but he couldn’t care less what I did to him. I put what was virtually a horse needle into him, I remember very well, one time he had food poisoning. I had to get something into him quick, poor fellow. It is quite painful when it goes into the muscle. Not a flicker out of him. I remember that so well.’