On Canaan's Side

by Sebastian Barry

  When I was first engaged by her mother, it was actually Mrs Wolohan, now I think back on it, then very young, who interviewed me. It was probably 1950, and it was odd to be questioned by one so young. But all her queries were politely put, and even at that age she showed a maturity beyond her years. She of course loved that I was Irish, being ‘Irish’ herself, and loving Ireland, where she had been as a child on many visits. People love Ireland because they can never know it, like a partner in a successful marriage. I am a bit the same way myself. Ireland nearly devoured me, but she has my devotion, at least in the foggy present, when the past is less distinct and threatening. When the terrors associated with being Irish have been endured and outlived. As much as I could of my story in America I told her. I cannot remember if I said anything about Tadg. I seem to remember doing so, and her being astonished at his fate, but in truth I do not know if I was in fact so brave as to tell her. I see in my mind’s eye her open, attentive face, her horror that a young man could be murdered in such a manner. I did not give her all the exact details about Joe, how could I? But I think she gathered that I had had my difficulties. More than anything else, it was no barrier against employment that I had a child, who was about four years old at the time. Ed hung about my skirts like a witch’s familiar. He was much admired by Mrs Wolohan’s mother for being ‘well behaved’. If he had not been, I could never have kept my employment there, and I am very grateful to him for that. The casual atrocities that young children commit now and then, however, were well within the bounds of the acceptable. Ed took down most famously a unique piece of Belleek pottery, with the picture of an Irish castle in a wild landscape, and did for it in such an absolute way that it never rose back to its shelf again. This was taken in a good spirit. Mrs Wolohan’s mother said she would tie him by the leg like a country dog to the kitchen table if it happened again, but luckily this resolve was never tested.

  I am saying all this because I want to record my gratitude. Gratitude has a place, as does commiseration and condolence. Wirra-wirra cried the old keeners round the coffins in vanished Wicklow days.

  Gerard’s salon on Main Street is always busy, because there are a thousand well-tended hairdos around here. This morning he was shouting something at one of his girls when we came in. Mrs Wolohan paused in the doorway, myself just behind her. She turned and gave me a look, as if to say, he is a great artist, and we must overlook his character. As if to say, the cave is full of lions, but we must enter anyway.

  One of Gerard’s other rather cowed girls took me in hand, and guided me over to the sinks, so she could wash my hair. Alas my hair is thin, and so when you wash it, I do have a sorry bald look to me. So that I would not willingly go to the hairdresser of my own accord. But she was very thoughtful, and whipped a towel around the offending mess, like seaweed on a stone, and brought me over to Gerard.

  ‘Mrs Bere,’ he said, as if the name alone spoke volumes, and he need say no more. But what he intended, what he implied, I do not know. With a certain brutal deftness, he peeled off the towel, and dropped it to the floor. He took my poor tresses in his fingers, and drew his fingers through them, again and again, so that he caused a little ache to begin in my scalp. Meanwhile Mrs Wolohan had come up behind him, and was looking not at me but at my reflection in the mirror.

  ‘Mrs Bere would like you to do something uplifting.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Something to cheer her up. Do you think you can do that, Gerard?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gerard, but with an unexpected sadness in his voice. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think she should have a bit of colour?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Wolohan, Mrs Bere does not let me put colour in her hair. I have tried to convince her. But she says, what do you say, Mrs Bere?’

  ‘I am content with the white.’

  ‘You see?’ said Gerard.

  ‘Well, I will not try to influence her. She knows her own mind.’

  ‘What I like,’ said Gerard, ‘is these bones. You have such good bones, Mrs Bere. I could shave your head and you would look just fine.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Mrs Wolohan in her best sensible voice, ‘don’t shave her head.’

  ‘It is very fashionable now in Manhattan.’

  ‘Nevertheless.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Gerard.

  While he worked, Mrs Wolohan remained at my shoulder. She seemed to get more and more lost in a daydream. Without thinking what she was doing, her hand eventually came up and rested on my right shoulder. She stood there like that for a long time. She was in Gerard’s way, but he contrived to work around her. What she was thinking, who could say? I often have thought that she has a lot to think about, if she cares to. If she doesn’t just block it out. Her sense of the delicious is maybe part of that effort, not to dwell on terrible things. To continue on. At length she breathed a great sigh, and patted my shoulder, and let her hand drop away again.

  Then she drove me home, all coiffeured up, or as much as Gerard could manage. Tested to the limits of his skill. Silent, because Mrs Wolohan was silent. What a long long time I had known her, I thought. I could be the mouse in the wainscot that could tell the whole story of her life, but from a mouse’s point of view. The true terror and suffering I cannot really envision. The heart torn out of her again and again. Her true victory over her life though, I have witnessed.

  She had brought an old woman out to get her hair done. Old, irredeemably so. Looking just as ridiculous and ancient I am sure, but cheered, as Mrs Wolohan knew I would be. Somewhat.

  *

  Telling his beads, o’er and o’er. That’s some old poem or ballad, I forget which.

  I seem to remember some matters well enough, even in the great mire that is my poor head, but it would give me a great fright to have to put a date on everything. Thank God it does not behove me to do so. For it is just me sitting here, telling my tale to myself, that’s what it feels like, mostly, old matters held in the fingers of memory, like those old beads in a family rosary, polished by a lifetime of prayers, and handed down, and slowly slowly no doubt diminishing and thinning as they go from creature to creature. When we were small, my father would occasionally take a great desire to saying the rosary, and we would be down on our spindly knees every teatime for a few weeks. Then this fervour would disappear for a long time, and what it was in his life that brought on these tremendous bouts of piety, in which we were obliged to participate, I of course could not say, then or now. The ordinary stations of a man’s life maybe.

  Not my father, not my mother, but it’s me, Lord, standing in the need of prayer.

  But there was a curious circumstance that allows me always to know the year at least of my marriage. You might think a person would be inclined to remember such a signal event anyway, whether or not subsequently they wished to forget. But I am obliged to remember it, for it was the year of the great suffering in Oklahoma and other parts. If this country was a marriage between hope and suffering, then one of the partners in the marriage upped and left mysteriously. Or in some great fire, hope was burned off, and suffering was discovered to be indestructible.

  *

  Ah, but how easily I slipped over the fate of Cassie Blake. How easily, even unbeknownst to myself. But I will set it down now.

  Two years Joe Kinderman ‘wooed’ me, as he called it. I think he thought it was a necessity, born out of some strange teaching of his mother maybe. Not that he ever spoke of her, or rather, he did, vaguely, but then another time would say something about her that sounded like another woman entirely.

  The one big story he gave me was one night walking in the lovely deep-summer smells of the park close by the Bellow house. The gates had been closed long since, the gateman ringing his poignant bell, but Joe though a policeman did not scorn to climb the railings and hoist me after. And there we were as private as foxes. Strolling under the low branches, the air there cooling after the long baking of the day, every green thing breathing out a sigh of gratitude,
the birds of Ohio skittering about in the hedges and undergrowth, the reckless squadrons of the night flies trying to keep up with us. And the moon burning in its own bowl of soft fire.

  ‘You see, Lilly, my great-grandfather was a bandman down in southern Ohio. I’m talking maybe 1860s, earlier even. They were building this great tunnel, a whole mile long, for a canal they were linking up to the Ohio canal. It was going to bring happiness and prosperity to that whole district. So, the great day of the opening of the tunnel came by, and my great-grandfather, Jürgen Neetebom was his name, was put into the very first state boat was going through. And they played up this colossal tune, louder and louder, the trombones and the oboes and the great drums, and by God it loosened a stone in the ceiling of the tunnel, and down it crashed, blocking the way. Men leaped down with hammers and picks and the like, to be breaking up that boulder. But now, Jürgen he was set to be married that afternoon in the town ahead, where he was living then. And he was to be wed to my great-grandmother, Hetty was her name. And it was taking a whole heap of time to get that boulder broke up. So finally he cries, “My time’s up, fellas,” and leaped, uniform and all, into the water, and swam all the way to the other end, and arrived in the church all draggled and soaked, and married his Hetty. And he was some sort of Hollandish man, I do believe, my mother’s mother’s father.’

  The air moved about the trees the whole while, like a crowd of shadowy people, listening, listening.

  ‘The legend of Jürgen Neetebom was that, as a very old man in his nineties, he was standing on one of the canal bridges, where he liked to go and think things out, when the first line of the great Ohio flood hit him. It came pouring down the canal system, bursting all the lock gates as it went, destroying everything, setting Dayton on fire and killing ten thousand souls. Whole cities disappeared. So the water caught up with him in the end. Although some say he was hanged as a much younger man for stealing horses in Texas. Take your pick.’

  ‘So your people always were from Ohio then, if a little more southward?’ I said, softly.

  ‘No, I do not believe so.’

  The dogwoods, their papery leaves massing in the darkness, whispered America, America.

  ‘That’s a beautiful story, up to the last bit,’ I said.

  ‘You say?’ he said.

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘Romantic.’

  ‘Romantic,’ he said, ‘I suppose. I suppose there was terrible work to get that uniform back in order, the drenching it got.’

  ‘I suppose,’ I said.

  The sort of things people say when almost any words at all give them pleasure, because what the words, any words, seem really to be saying is, Just walking like this and talking nonsense is the best thing I have found to do yet in the world.

  So I could not quite establish what part of the country he came from, but then I was grateful myself for some vagueness around such matters. I did not press him. He did tell me once also that he was Jewish, but I must confess, on having relations with him, he was not a circumcised person, that I could judge.

  ‘Joe,’ I said, beholding this, thinking I would broach the subject. But then I didn’t, on many counts, not least not wanting to embarrass him. Blindness is a great affliction, except for lovers.

  Lovers. When I think of Mr Bellow, with his half-height frame, the head narrowed by the hair being shaven cruelly, pestering Cassie, ‘lovers’ is not the word that springs to mind.

  He considered, without thinking much about it I am sure, that she was available to him in every way. I am sure that is true. I think of all the suffering servants and maids of America, lying down under the onslaught of their masters, which, if it did not always happen hidden from view, would have looked like the map of a great and terrible battle. In the American long ago. At least, I do hope so. Pray so.

  Mr Bellow wouldn’t ever leave Cassie alone, even though, ‘in poultry terms’, as she put it, she was no spring chicken.

  ‘He’ll get tired of me,’ she once said, when I implored her to tell Mrs Bellow. ‘You’ll see.’ But he never did. I nearly said, I don’t blame him. But I do blame him, and greatly. I blame myself. I should have done something, said something, better than I did. What would Cassie’s story have been without that? We could be neighbours now maybe, she might have a house there on the Sag Turnpike, we could sit on my porch and chinwag till our chins dropped off.

  But, but, in the end of her real story he got her with child, and Cassie couldn’t endure that.

  I was full of stupid plans. I said she could come away with me and Joe, and we would be a sort of family, and the child could run about our feet, and we’d be happy.

  She couldn’t bear the thought of carrying that child. She was a mighty woman, and thought she knew what she had to do.

  She went down to Lake Erie and started to swim out in the fabulous cold.

  The waves glittered all about her and the sun cast worshipful light down on her, as her beautiful back swam out. That’s how I imagine it. I read the note she left in our bedroom, and went tearing down on the streetcar to find her, but there was nothing to see, only the endless stitches of light on the water.

  Cassie must have scraped about on the bottom of the lake for a week, and then she floated up, it was a miracle she was found at all, but she washed up on the little bathing beach we had often frequented, and me and her father Catus Blake buried her. He didn’t have any money, but he found a place for her in the poor man’s section of the lakeshore cemetery, where a nice priest was open to his protestations that she was a Catholic woman, which she was, and not a Baptist as might have been assumed. But at the same time the priest was relieved that the casket we found for her would not be open, because he was mighty uncomfortable about putting a black woman in among the others, who were mostly Irish. The grave-markers were only wood, and mostly mouldering. And many of the graves were just bare heaps of clay.

  Into the steel-cold earth she was slipped.

  Catus Blake stared aghast at the edge of the grave, as his daughter was put into the ground before him. A face of pure grief, like a stricken saint. I knew he had put his pipes in his breast pocket, but he never took them out in the upshot. They made a little bump there, rising and falling with his heartbeat, like a second heart.

  Down she went, the gravediggers in their surprisingly dirty clothes, even for gravediggers, slowly lowering her, one of them with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. Bizarrely enough, I noted it was the Parliament brand.

  A goddess among the Irish. So then I did not have my friend, no more. Weeping, weeping. Wept for seven days.

  Mr Bellow went around looking abashed. But a silence closed over his great sin. Fate didn’t say boo to him. He never paid any price, unless it was the sliver of matchwood he had for a soul, burning, burning to a cinder.

  So then Mrs Bellow didn’t have either of us. I don’t know what it is I could say she did have. I left her to her fate, whatever it was, and was resolved, if I had been ever doubtful, to marry Joe.

  *

  We got married in the Irish church in Cleveland, with his police buddy, Mike Scopello, as his best man. The priest said he could marry me to a man who didn’t know who he was much quicker than to a man who did, so Joe fitted that bill. Then Joe carried me off down to New York, and we spent a whole week there, getting the hang of our new condition. So, then I was Mrs Kinderman, wife to Joe, who maybe was Jewish but probably not, and might have been Catholic except he wasn’t.

  When Joe was shaving the first morning in our little hotel, I heard him singing a little hobo’s song called ‘Canaan’. At least, he said it was a hobo’s song, or a down-and-out’s, because he heard it sung once, he said, when he himself first came to Cleveland, and was down on his luck. That was the first true-sounding bit of news I ever had about his past.

  The whole of America was turning into a mission of sorts, in that time, unless by some miracle of chance you were a toff. Joe was going to hold on to that job of his for sure.

  ‘Somet
imes it’s the devil’s own work, and sometimes it may even be God’s, but it’s going to keep the meat on the table for us, Lilly.’

  There he was, with his surprisingly elegant table manners, eating heartily in a New York chophouse.

  Apart from the ashen skin, which he still had, Joe had no problems in the looks department. He was tall as befit a policeman, his limbs were long and smooth, and his teeth were good. I so wanted to write to my father and tell him all, but of course he was poste restante in heaven itself. I was sorely tempted to try and let Annie know. I knew Maud was married so why couldn’t I join in the feast of news? But no, I knew it couldn’t be, for the moment anyhow. That man in the shadows gave me pause. Then I wondered, was that man always with me? Was he a sort of secret husband, always creeping along near me, or finding out bits of news about me, and coming to find his prey? He might have shot me that day, and not much to be done about it. But he hadn’t. I peered out through the great window of plate glass at the flood of people and autos outside. A million lights of every shape and colour like all the souls of the earth since time began, twisting, flooding along the ways. And still that strange dust smell of America I had never become so American as not to notice. That’s what kept me a stranger there, a voyager in love with the place of her voyage. And Joe in his youth, making plans for us, eating the food as if it were a stain to be removed from the white plate, cut by cut, methodical. Methodical Joe.

  Then we went back to the hotel and took command of the big linen bed. There wasn’t too much modesty in either of us. We were glad to meet each other, naked. It was my secret self meeting his secret self. They shook hands. They went at it. He kissed my mouth for an hour. He kissed my legs for another hour. He gave my left ear fifteen minutes. It was like a long train journey, and I was the countryside, with assorted stations. How is it that the human body is designed sometimes to melt into a white lineny bed, in the city of New York, and couples on linen beds in all the cities of the world, trying to climb into each other’s skins? That’s one queer, wonderful creature.