On Canaan's Side

by Sebastian Barry

  I laughed. It was very true.

  ‘We were obliged in my generation to go to Korea, that was my war, Mrs Bere. I was eighteen in 1950. Well! Considered a short war, but your William’s war was even shorter. Months? I want you to know, Mrs Bere, that I am very proud to have known him. What can I say? Desperately proud. Truly.’

  ‘He liked coming over to you as a young boy. He liked the lollipops.’

  ‘Ah, the lollipops. Still an institution. I couldn’t do my work without them.’

  In the porch, Mrs Pilat helped me back into my coat, and vigorously shook out the umbrella. She was laughing, laughing, brightly laughing.

  I set off along the sidewalk with my script.

  *

  Lord, we do not know to pray to you as we ought. That’s from Romans. Bill liked to quote that. He would be talking about something, trying to express to me a thought, and not getting anywhere with the thought. And all he really meant by it was, Do you know what I mean, Granma?

  It is God who acquits us. That is also Romans. I suppose when St Paul was writing his letter he would have had things in mind to say, and they were turned in a certain way because he was writing to Rome, where he was from himself. Lilly’s Letter? But to who? As the days have gone on, sitting here, sometimes I have my father’s face floating before my eyes, or behind my eyes, sometimes indeed Mr Dillinger, a bit incongruously, but oftentimes, more and more, the face of God the Father, beard and all, that I probably have from some painting in a book that I was shown in deepest childhood. I know I love God, because I love the world he has made. My sin is I do not want to linger in it without Bill. I don’t think it is the devil put this sin in me. I am an interloper at the feast of life, I am eating food and drinking drink meant for him.

  This choking up. One moment, fine enough, sorrowing, but fine, sort of. The next, a big bulge of grief in my throat, so that if I had to speak in that moment my voice would be high and squeaky. It feels foolish, because we are taught when we are small that tears are foolish. Grief is certainly comic at times. An eighty-nine-year-old crone choking up. I do not think that could be very graceful-looking. But I am at peace with that foolishness. I’ve put grace aside.

  *

  Running through Chicago in a bloodied dress, aged nineteen, and so frightened I knew I had peed down my legs, drenching my underclothes, all niceties well and truly cancelled, what a great conglomeration of gracelessness I was then also.

  The honest daylight was also adding to my terror, the bareness of me out there in that elegant city, reduced by the observation of murder to something not quite human, and certainly not civilised. In my mind’s eye I could see Annie and Maud, looking on me appalled. But my mind’s eye was not full of much sense, in that time. I tore along, making for the more ragged part of the city where we lodged. I could vividly imagine the police automobiles drawing up at the Art Institute, I could imagine a hundred shadowy moiling things, and above all that dark man who had run out somewhere before me, for all I knew in the same direction, for all I knew aware of me now, and following after. And mostly I saw Tadg, folded like a huge roofer’s angle against the splattered wall.

  As I crossed the river again, the wind found out all the wetted parts of my body, and even heavily running as I was, I felt an intimation of some shocking pneumonia to be got from it. My eyes, which felt like they were made of metal now, little dishes with something burning in them, painful and alien, seemed to be losing their sight. The lovely buildings were blurred and vague, and I was having difficulty navigating my way along imperfectly known streets and ways. All the while those various wolves following me, the thought of the murderer, the vision of my Tadg, and no doubt the four beasts and the four-and-twenty elders of the apocalypse wanting to avenge themselves on me for a Godless and guilty person.

  The truth was, good Hannah Reilly, with her clear, well-intentioned visage, had stepped a few steps away from me, because Tadg and I didn’t seem as intent to be married as she would wish. As my father’s cousin and mine she would never desert us, or ask that we go. But I knew she had the local priest to wrestle with, and unlike ourselves, who were hoping in every way to keep a low profile, she went off to mass every Sunday morning, in the church on the lake, and liked to increase her chances of a good spot in heaven with polishing the glimmering rooms of the rectory. So we were slowly becoming cousins to hide, and not to mention, especially as the nature of our flight from Ireland had only been sketched by my father. Though if Hannah had politics I don’t know to this day what they were.

  So I was obliged to enter her house in quietness, and reach my little wooden room, shut fast the door, and pant there on the bare boards, not in the least knowing what to do. I think it was the first time in my life I was actually alone, without prospect of seeing another soul who would want to assist me. I felt standing there as if my life had been indeed rescinded, as if indeed some strange cancellation had taken place in some hall of heaven, and I was now to be dispensed with in some ruthless dispensation. I wondered and wondered should I have stayed where I was, at Tadg’s side? Would the American police not have helped me, in some way I could not articulate or fathom? I knew Tadg was gone, his sentence of death carried out it would seem, even across the four thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean. I presumed my own murder was hotly plotted and would follow, but in truth I could not imagine what would happen in my story now as I bumped up against this new state of being alone, of facing what was to come, alone.

  At any rate, I took off the dress and the soaked linens. In my bare skin I remember laying the dress on the floor, making the arms neat and all shipshape, the stain of blood on it in the shape of some unknown country. Tadg’s blood. It was my very best dress but I knew I could not get the blood out of it, without some tremendous washday washing, with the dress boiled in the pot till it roared for mercy, and then spread out on some beneficent Wicklow bush – a thing that could never be now. The blood was also on my arms and on my shoes. Maybe it was on my face. I peered into the little broken mirror that we had shared there in that poor room. I didn’t know who it was, a woman with her face smeared and streaked not only with blood but long black marks of dirt, from what source I could not tell. And my hair all heaped and brittle-looking, like gorse after flowering. I was going to have to make myself again, anew, I saw. I was going to have to restore myself to some semblance of order, if I was ever to venture from that room again.

  So I set to, to do that.

  When nightfall claimed that little haphazard part of town, I had cleaned myself off as best I could, and put on my next-best clothes, and thrust whatever else seemed useful in one of the cloth bags. The thought of leaving Tadg’s bag there troubled me more than you would think it would. But it was like a proof that he would not be coming with me. His few shirts and his spare trousers also to be abandoned. It felt like I was betraying him somehow, leaving his things was an accusation that I had been unable to save him, to keep him in the story of life. I couldn’t help it that Hannah would find these remnants of our time together. She would bundle them up, blood and all, and dispose of them I was sure, and scour out the room, as if mere rats had got in after all. And hopefully we would fade in her blameless mind, and become a sort of half-muddled story, among the million wind-blown stories of America, countless as the stars.

  PART TWO

  Eighth Day without Bill

  It’s like a sort of TV, these memories. And I don’t even own a TV these times, ever since I put the black and white set out under the porch long ago, no longer wanting to see that Vietnam news. Bill very nobly as a little boy pretended never to want a TV, but he used to watch in the houses of his friends.

  I can actually see some of these old matters. I am here at my table, but I am also combing my hair in the little room I shared with Cassie Blake, away away there in Cleveland. I am using her beloved rat-tail comb. She liked Sweet Georgia Brown hair pomade, and I can smell it as I sit here, sixty years later. And with the smell is conjured lovely Cassie, her bac
kside up in the air as she digs about in her battered trunk for some elusive bit of clothing.

  When I was still a young child my father gave me a necklace of my mother’s. The first thing a child does with a grown-up necklace is burst the thread. The little cultured pearls poured out on the floor, and made a dash for the gaps between the floorboards. He was able to rescue only a half-dozen, and threaded them back forlornly on the necklace.

  The others must still be there, a queer memorial to me and my mother, in the darkness.

  A long bit of string and six chastened-looking pearls. Maybe my life is a bit like that.

  Cassie’s father had been a sharecropper in Virginia who ventured north when everything started to get worse for him, and got employment on the big cargo boats on Lake Erie. He was six foot six, Cassie told me, in his prime. Then he got sick in later life, and shrunk somewhat. He was a famous player on the quill-pipes. I don’t think I ever knew what he was saying when he spoke to Cassie, he spoke a queer old lingo then, and so did she, but with me they showed me the mercy of English. He was living in a rooming-house down by the water, and but for that we never would have met, Cassie and me, she never would have rescued me.

  She rescued me, and then some years later, she didn’t quite see Joe Kinderman coming, as you might say. But she wouldn’t have been able, and wasn’t able, to rescue me from that, because she was in deep trouble of her own, and …

  But I am rushing all about. Mr Dillinger would not approve. I am sure he has his own books under better control. This morning my head is like an unbroken pony, plunging about.

  This may be the result of the tumult of having Mrs Wolohan and Mr Dillinger in my house at the same time, as happened a half-hour ago. They both drove up, entirely without planning it I am sure, and brought their deluge of conversation in with them, Mrs Wolohan teasing Mr Dillinger as she likes to do, and Mr Dillinger manfully enduring it. They didn’t make much reference to me, but I didn’t mind that. Mr Dillinger was expressing a concern about the plight of the Shinnecock Indians that live not far from here. Mrs Wolohan, who used to employ a man before Mr Nolan to tend her garden who actually was a Shinnecock, didn’t think they had a ‘plight’, though she listened to Mr Dillinger with great politeness, interspersed with the teasing. She asked Mr Dillinger why he didn’t give his garden back to the Shinnecock, since it bordered on their reservation. Mr Dillinger said he recognised that it was her duty to exaggerate in order to weaken his argument. I gathered he would indeed prefer if everyone else went away, Poles, Irish, Old Methodists, millionaires, and all the rest, and Long Island be given back to the Indians. They let this argument go round and round, and laughed a great deal, Mrs Wolohan more or less winning the bout, and then went out and got into their separate cars, and drove off, their friendship absolutely intact. What either meant to say to me I do believe was forgotten in the mêlée.

  So then I needed a good few minutes to let the noise clear from my room. And I just sat quietly. And then old matters started to drift again into my head.

  Cassie’s shapely backside, and so on.

  *

  I came up from Chicago in that time of terror on the night train to Cleveland. There hadn’t been much choice in the matter because there were only the two trains going immediately, and the other one was New York-bound, and I didn’t think I could go back there.

  At least I looked quite shipshape by then, with my nice coat and my cloth bag. Thank God I had the few dollars that Tadg had kept in an old tin under the floorboards. I was trying not to scan the evening editions of the newspapers, ranged against me along the station concourse, in case my picture might stare out at me – highly unlikely, since no such thing existed in the world. But I didn’t know.

  I thought I heard the murderer’s step behind me, every step I made. If I stopped, he would stop, I knew, and anyway, way, I couldn’t bear to look around, in case he was actually there. As long as I didn’t look back, I could keep him as a phantom.

  Ridiculous.

  I was fleeing as if I was responsible for the murder, I knew that. But I do not think even now I was unwise so to do. If I had lingered, there would certainly have been a photograph taken, and my face would have been known not only to the indifferent multitudes of Chicago, but the nameless, secret men that had done for Tadg. I could be quiet and unmolested for a long time, and then, just when I felt safe, they would come for me, as they had come for Tadg. This at any rate I could imagine, it was the story of it I had in my head. I do not think it was so unlikely. I doubt if I would exist now if I had not run like crazy. Then there would have been no Ed, and ultimately no Bill. And maybe every life in America depends on tiny dark events like that.

  The huge metal snake poured itself through South Bend, through all points east of Lake Michigan, the strange dark city of Toledo, and slowly I substituted one lake for another lake. And all the while, as I clutched my bag, sitting on the dusty train seat, I heard the wheels repeating over and over, ‘you’ll be safer now, you’ll be safer now, you’ll be safer now …’ If it wasn’t the train, it was my own heart whispering up to me.

  *

  I arrived alone in a new city, a few sad dollars in my pockets. I was already a prisoner in the open asylum of the world. My solitariness was nearly absolute. I knew as I descended from the train that the citizens of Cleveland already smelled my fear, an odour that drives back human help. I didn’t know what capital I possessed beyond the few dollars. My clothes were worn and shiny, and my shoes, once smart and good, chosen with Annie in Grafton Street, and admired by us both for the clacking sound they had made along the Dublin pavements, had an historical air. My best possession was youth, but that of course was invisible to me.

  For some half-forgotten days I wandered about. There were hundreds of wandering souls in the streets of Cleveland. My last bit of money was soon expended.

  The first night I spent curled up on wasteland, the backlot of a great steel-mill that spewed forth its smoke the whole night through. The steel dust was in everything, the air, the rivers, the gardens. Those first days, I wouldn’t have known if I was among angels or devils. My body became heavy to me, like a spaceman caught out on some planet with too much gravity. It was like dying and being in a queer afterlife. Oh, people were dying in Cleveland, every day. I saw two young policemen gather a body from a park one hazy morning, where an old down-and-out had got to his last breath. They wrapped him carefully in an old tarpaulin, and threw him up on a dustcart.

  I was a young down-and-out, right enough. I did not even have the inspiration to beg, though there were beggars all about. I might have been murdered then, and no one notice.

  I did have youth as I say. There was a price on that. I could have got a few dollars for my body, but I wasn’t at that point yet. There were men, not like the wanderers, well-to-do men that came up to me, importuning me. And there were willing girls and women, speaking every language God had invented, on every sidewalk. I wasn’t quite at that point, but it was the next thing, without a doubt.

  This memory ends with utter blankness.

  I woke in an unknown room, and heard voices talking, and after a little was able to see two forms standing in the square of a window, the bright sunlight burnishing their heads. For a brief second I thought I was back in Dublin Castle, in the care of my sisters and my father.

  I had collapsed outside the building where Mr Catus Blake, Cassie’s father, boarded, and he had carried me in, against his better instincts; ‘I didn’t want to bring you,’ he said later, in his odd, cold, friendly way. Then he put me on his own bed, ‘and you stinking up the place’, and decided I was all right there for a while, ‘I didn’t mind if you died,’ he said, and walked all the way over to Shaker Heights to try and borrow his daughter from Mrs Bellow, her employer, ‘and I tell you,’ said Mr Blake, ‘she didn’t want Cassie to go. She’s not giving Cassie four dollars a week to go out walking with her daddy.’

  But Cassie did come home with him immediately on the streetcar and r
ealised I was well-nigh starving, and fed me. Great banging about with the pan on Mr Blake’s humble gas-ring apparatus.

  Then I was throwing up, and didn’t know where I was, and, like Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, was clutching at Cassie.

  She fed me again, more sparingly.

  Then I think I slept for a long, long time.

  I heard Catus Blake playing his music on the quill-pipes.

  ‘Old tunes of Virginia,’ he said.

  *

  ‘I do not know if I trust the Irish,’ said Mrs Bellow. We were standing, Cassie, Mrs Bellow, and myself, in her kitchen. ‘Trust is a great part in being a servant. The last girl was selling linen out the back door. All my linen is fine Irish linen. She likely got a good price for it.’

  Mrs Bellow wore her dress like armour, expensive cloth with a curious unfashionable thickness to it, like an insulated wall. She was of course Cassie’s mistress, and this was Cassie’s effort to get me gainful employment.

  ‘I cannot give a job to every stray girl in Cleveland. At least you have the distinction of being Cassie’s stray girl. I will not say I do not have a regard for Cassie’s opinion of a person. I do. You can find good rich people all over, but good poor people, of the kind you might want in your house, are very rare.’

  Throughout this, Cassie was smiling, smiling, her wide face seeming contented and amused. But she didn’t say a word. I suppose she knew her river well, and how the fish were in it.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Bellow. ‘I will give you a start. On probation. I dare say you will not find it easy work. You are very small, and you do not look strong.’