On Canaan's Side

by Sebastian Barry

  Homesickness, he said, was like the energy surging into the electric chair. A soldier was a sitting duck for it.

  In the night-times now Joe would go out and work as a fire-warden, as if they expected those German planes and rockets to reach Cleveland shortly. He would knock on doors all night and tell people not to show their lights in the blackout. He said people were just plain stupid, and broke laws like Christians broke bread. He was mighty flustered sometimes, arriving in home, stumping up the narrow stairs in the small hours, wearied by the great law-breaking stupidity of Clevelanders, as he saw it. But it was really just that the war seemed far away, up to the time families were obliged to send their sons to it.

  The Italians went out to it, Mike Scopello one of the first, even though their country was on the other side. The Irish went out to it, even though England was on their side. The Poles, the Germans went out to it, the Japanese wanted to go, the Jugoslavs, the Quakers, the Protestants, the Indians, the Dutch – everyone was American then, completely and vividly, and everyone went. There were bands to send them off, and the boulder of God fell out of the ceiling of the heavens. It was an earthquake, tearing at the sons of America, trying to swallow them up. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful sons, that women had reared, had kissed and screamed at, and that fathers had stared at intently in their cots, to see themselves in the wondrous mirrors of their babies.

  If I had known Mr Dillinger then, he might have spoken to me of Thucydides and Herodotus, as he did when Bill was set to go, years later. How ancient it all was, he might have said.

  ‘The beginning of everything human,’ Mr Dillinger might have said, ‘and the end.’

  *

  Mike Scopello survived the war and came home, but he couldn’t get back his job as a proper police detective, and took up work in a private capacity, working mainly for poor haunted ex-soldiers, who wanted the movements of their wives watched, gloomy work like that. We all went out a few times, me and Joe and Mike and his girlfriend, but I always thought there was something bothering Mike, he certainly didn’t act with his old full-hearted nature. Joe thought it was because the war had hurt him, deep in him somewhere. Joe felt bad himself because he hadn’t had to go. Although he was as healthy as a goat on the mountain, the medical board had found him wanting in some way, Joe didn’t specify. He thought Mike was an absolutely A1 hero to have gone, to have put his life on the line for the safety of the world. And at the same time, the thought of it also hurt Joe. If you can be jealous and loving at the same time, that was Joe with Mike, more or less.

  Myself, I was pregnant.

  I was jubilant. I have to confess Joe was not as jubilant as I had hoped, coming home from old Dr Schwarz with the news. I was forty-three and just as I had begun to believe it would never happen, it had happened. I was not the sort of woman to believe that if my husband was not happy about something like that, he didn’t love me. I knew Joe was not playing to the normal rule-book of life. Someone had scribbled out for him a very particular scrawl of rules, only proper to him. I knew that. But I was hoping for joy, to give him joy. He said he was happy. He used the right words. But I knew he was not delighted, because now in the morning he seemed to redouble his efforts with his unguents and scarifiers. I thought he was going to rub his poor face away.

  It was beginning to be odd, confusing times. Not the great drama of a world war, but a little tiny war fought in the corner of a small Cleveland house. Wherever I stood those times, I was in confusion.

  Then Mike Scopello dropped in alone a second time, maybe carefully choosing an hour when he knew Joe was out at work. He had lost a lot of weight in the fighting of his war, there wasn’t a pick on him. He would have had to take in his old police uniform if he had got to wear it again. He was hard and lean now. He had always given me a great impression of honesty. Now he also exuded a sort of righteousness, maybe not all that attractive now I think of it. But he was one of those men who, in despair of the world, have decided that there is indeed a devil in things, evil abounding, and begin to think less about angels. Joe told me that Mike was a regular mass-goer now. He liked to chip in at church festivals, he had helped carry the Virgin Mary float during the last procession though Little Italy.

  ‘It’s always good to see you here, Mike,’ I said, hoping of course it was an ordinary visit, though he never did just drop in, aside from the previous occasion. I had never mentioned that to Joe, and between one thing and another, my pregnancy, not to mention an entire world war, it had fallen away helpfully into the past. But there was something tugging, tugging at me now, some intimation, like a drop of lemon in a jug of milk, to sour it for the soda bread.

  ‘You’ll be thinking me a bloody tenacious son of a bitch,’ he said, rolling the four words together in a less objectionable blur. ‘Always things nagging at me, worrying me. I don’t sleep at night sometimes. Becky tells me to go sleep on the sofa. The sofa is not comfortable, Lilly. Tossing and turning.’

  Again my best refuge was silence, polite silence. I smiled at him as beatifically as I could, to lance the boil of his coming words.

  ‘You’ll remember I came before. The reason I came was because Joe’s nice automobile, that he had in those days …’

  ‘He’s still driving it,’ I said. ‘The shine’s gone off it a bit, but it still goes well.’

  ‘Well, in that time we had this series of murders. They were attacks, followed by murders. Women, you see. We kept getting these descriptions of the man, but sometimes the guy would be a Negro, you know, sometimes a …’ – and he seemed to fish a moment for a word – ‘white guy. And. Then two times, two times this automobile was seen parked near a particular murder scene. One of the detectives noted the occurrence. He was writing down all the plates, you know, to try and get a picture. Because we didn’t know who was doing these things, we didn’t have a clue. So Detective Brady gets these two numbers, for the same car, parked at completely different sides of the city, a mile and more between them down by the water. So he goes looking for the name, and it comes up Joe Kinderman, which was really really strange, since Joe was working on these homicides himself. So what was going on? Joe never brought his machine into work. He was afraid of getting it scratched in the compound. No, he hopped the streetcar. So at that time I came to you, and saw how upset you were, I reckon I did hope for the best. And I did sort of let the whole thing drop, and Brady never said nothing further, and then the war came, you know.’

  He sat there at the little kitchen table. The mug of coffee I had given him sat untouched on the smooth, scrubbed wood. Now he was nodding at the mug, as if agreeing with something the mug had said.

  ‘So just this month I’m looking into something for this guy got himself in a whole heap of trouble, and I get this sergeant I know to, you know, slip me out some sheets, and I’m going over these sheets for this something, and I see these new homicide cases mentioned, that happened during the war, I mean, while the blessed war was on. I hadn’t seen a newspaper all that time, maybe you read about them. And whoever had written them up thought they looked like the same guy that likely did the murders years before. There was a way of going about them that I won’t go into detail about, but it was nasty, decisive, and, boy, I don’t know, my ears pricked up. All these new murders happened at night. And Joe, you know, what did he do for the duration? He was a fire-warden. In the goddamn blackout. I was thinking about that.’

  ‘Mike, you’re frightening me.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I’m sorry, Lilly. And you expecting and all. I know. I don’t feel good bringing this to you. I just need to ask you, you ever see blood on Joe, you ever see him flustered or worried about something, he ever come home really late, and you not knowing why, he ever act strange to you, maybe even, you know, rough you up a bit, I don’t know?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Mike, you look tired. You need a rest maybe. Mike, Joe loves you. I mean, you’re the only man he would give a one hundred per cent grade t
o, as a human being. He thinks the sun rises out of Mike Scopello.’

  Then Mike was shaking his head instead of nodding it.

  ‘I know,’ he said. Then unexpectedly, he started to cry. So he wept then for a good minute, a little waterfall down his weary-looking cheeks. Then he dried his face with a handkerchief and blew his nose. It was slightly comical, loud.

  ‘Sorry, I do that. It’s not Joe. It’s the war.’

  ‘I know, Mike,’ I said. ‘You were very brave. You got that medal in Italy. What were you doing there, Mike, that you got a medal?’

  ‘Tanks. Wounds received. Nothing,’ he said. That was it, Mike’s account of his valorous action in the war, that he got a Purple Heart for.

  ‘I do remember saying to you before, talk to Joe, man to man. He’s got this on its way now,’ I said, patting my belly, ‘Joe’s as straight as a preacher, he’ll tell you what you need to know, set your mind at rest.’

  ‘You could be right. I shouldn’t be bothering you. I’ll talk to him. You’re right. And look, Lilly, I don’t see him killing nine women. I don’t see him killing anyone or anything. It’s just when these bits of evidence are put before me, I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop thinking about it.’

  Then Mike went off. I noticed his thighs didn’t rub together any more. I don’t even know if he got talking to Joe, he probably did, but I never knew for sure.

  *

  I only heard it, then quite swiftly smelled it.

  Next day the paper had the story of it, but in the moment that it happened, it sounded like Babylon falling as promised in Revelation. Or the Japanese had decided to send a last squadron of bombers and sadly drop them onto Cleveland, though the world and its uncle knew Japan was on its knees and her emperor dead. But the thought flew through my mind. Or that Hitler had risen from the dead and was flying a host of ghost airplanes. A sense of vengeance was in it, great harm, evil intent. But it turned out it was only an accident.

  A bit of gas started to leak out of a new storage tank, that they had proudly built to help the war effort, up at the East Ohio Gas Company. It must have just put its white swirling face out, sniffed the Ohio air, liked the sense of freedom, and decided to sally forth. But it had not been born to know freedom, and as soon as it mingled with that air, it blew up. The whole storage tank blew up, in one vast end-of-the-world whoosh of fire, the fire grew into armies, and with a devilish hunger devoured whole streets of houses. You could imagine the wives of that morning maybe on their knees polishing their kitchen floors, the postman whistling between the open gardens, the birds sewing with their beaks through the cottony air, all the normal to-do of the day, seen and unseen. Old folk lying up in their beds, tapping the floors for attention with their sticks. Someone weeping. Then those ferocious flames cancelling them. Babies in their cots.

  You would pray to God that time that God did exist, to welcome their souls into the halls of heaven.

  Then a second tank went up. A whole square mile up beyond 66th blown flat, a miniature Hiroshima. And queerly, whole streets spared in among the charred ruins, the inhabitants staggering out, choking on the mean-hearted fumes. Then in a violent aftermath, such gas as had not burned off pouring along the gullies of the streets, down into the sewerage and the city drains, now and then erupting into explosions, like the fits of a thousand lunatics, manhole covers thrown a thousand feet into the burning sky, the very tunnels and crawlways and arrangements of the underground distorted and cast asunder.

  One hundred and thirty souls called early, many ‘vaporised’ as the paper said, and I thought of Willie in the war, when poor soldiers would be blown to atoms by the falling ordnance. In the moment of death all human persons are innocent. God takes everyone, I would hazard, and I rest my faith in that.

  Though I didn’t know what I heard and smelled, I heard it and smelled it. I rushed out into the street. A low-sweeping wind brushed against my lower legs, it seemed to be confined to a foot off the ground. It was like water, that wind, a sort of flood. Immediately I thought of Joe, out there somewhere in this unknown catastrophe. A colossal plume of black smoke cut through with white burgeoned and rose in the distance. Other women from other houses and lives stood on their steps, their hands over their mouths, gasping with wonder and terror.

  ‘Mrs Kinderman, Mrs Kinderman,’ my neighbour called to me, a little slight thing with a veritable swimming cap of black hair, all firmed down, ‘do you think the war has come back?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’

  All day I waited, trying to reach Joe all the while. His station-house was in a ferment, because the survivors had to be marshalled into a local schoolhouse, and some enterprising madmen were said to be looting out the abandoned homes, which was hard to credit. The whole area was toxic with that violent smell of gas that seems to run a spike into your tongue. When the cause of the disaster was opined, grief took up the places in the brain where terror had nested. Great grief spreading out through the city like a gas itself.

  Joe didn’t come home at tea, or at suppertime, or even at midnight. I sat in my chair in the little hallway, with the door open, waiting for his patrol car to drop him off, waiting for his footfall along the dew-dampened concrete sidewalk. I heard my heart in my ribs the whole time, ticking away.

  That’s when you know you love your husband, all things considered and taken into account. In balance. Love, which puts its two hands around your throat and starts to squeeze. Which bangs at your heart with an angry hammer, never ceasing, till the poor muscle flips and flaps in despair like a landed fish. Love so pressured it wants to unpack your body like a kit, just like Bill in the army had to learn to strip his gun, and reassemble it.

  Joe disappeared.

  He just vanished.

  Vaporised, I thought. Joe, vaporised, made into a million million water drops of one kind and another, and then gone into the blue ether.

  I sat in my chair then with my two arms neatly on my legs, all symmetrical and parallel. I was trying to hold on to my baby, for fear my fear would drive it out. I knew enormous shock could unmoor your baby. The little skiff of your baby slip its rope that tied it to your womb. Sitting there, holding on, holding on to Ed, probably an inch long. Inchelina.

  Twelfth Day without Bill

  Joe’s last partner was an Irishman called Deacy and he arranged a ceremony to remember Joe. There were all the other funerals for the bodies they had found, and parts of bodies, and then a few ceremonies for the disappeared. Detective Deacy was a real Irishman, from Ireland, and I was still fearful of such a person, even in my fog of grief. I took some comfort that he was from Mayo, on the far side of the island from Wicklow. He had also been in the war, but all in all he seemed to me a cheerful soul, sociable and bright, although all such qualities dimmed by the passing of Joe. I don’t suppose he had had all that much time to get to know his partner. And it was his first time joining the cops. But nevertheless he was inclined to give the little ceremony full dignity. He was one of those persons who loved life, but was willing to give Death his due. He was a big hulking man, with a sort of stoop to his shoulders, that reminded me of Annie. He looked like he had carried a boulder across some great distance, and it had left him slightly crushed down at the top.

  Anyway he spoke very finely about Joe and Joe’s many qualities as a person and a detective. It was poignant to hear someone I knew so well described by another, so that in fact he sounded like someone different. I didn’t really recognise Detective Deacy’s Joe. He told a story about him being taken captive by a bunch of corn-sugar merchants years before that I knew nothing about, and how Joe had convinced them not to kill him, and then when he escaped, made sure they were arrested and did their time for the corn-sugar, which would only have been a few years, tops. And how at Christmas time the men sent him a card, thanking him for convincing them not to kill him, which would have given them the electric chair. His fellow officers there were smiling wryly, chuckling a little. Stories o
f Joe unknown to his wife anyhow.

  There was a bit of a desperate difficulty then because there was going to be a long process working out Joe’s bit of money, if any, due to me, because they had no body, and no death certificate, and I was going to have to wait before the courts could declare him legally dead.

  ‘It’s kind of strange,’ said Detective Deacy, in my kitchen, in just the same chair where his predecessor Mike Scopello had liked to sit. ‘It’s not just the death cert. We can’t even find a birth cert for Joe. We can’t find any sort of cert for him except his marriage licence. Any information he gave when he started his training doesn’t quite tally with any actual document. There’s not one piece of paper can tell you anything about him. But he died in the line of duty more than likely, so we’re not making much of that. But you might think, aside from the fact that you married him, and we did clap eyes on him every day, that he never existed.’

  ‘How would that come about?’ I said. ‘Do records get lost a lot?’

  ‘No, it ain’t that so much. No. People change their names. And then they cross state lines like invisible men.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  I didn’t want to talk much more about that.

  ‘Aliases. I arrested a man last month had thirty-nine different names. He kept a list, in case he forgot them. But I’d have never known that, except he was a nut, and was confessing to petty crimes across eighteen states. Eighteen. Wanted them all taken down and noted, and given to the press. The press couldn’t care less. He was very disheartened. He’s doing five to ten in the Cleveland correctional.’

  ‘And do good people change their names in America?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Good question. Maybe not.’

  Then he gave me a bag of dollars he and his buddies had got together in a whip-around. He had asked his wife what would be a good move for me and she had said go talk to Sister de Montfort over at the women’s hospital.