On Canaan's Side

by Sebastian Barry

  After a moment, thinking I might be scaring him, I hunkered down to him. I was nearly afraid to embrace him. But he moved first. He came into my arms like a known child.

  *

  That night Mr Nolan told me his story. The beautiful, unexpected child was exhausted, and had gone straight to sleep. He lay in the sheets for one long moment with his eyes fixed on mine, burning softly in the soft light, and then the lids closed.

  Mr Nolan sat out on the porch with me. The fireflies burned themselves on the bulb above us.

  I knew he was tired from his journey, but he also needed to tell what had happened, and I needed to hear it.

  He had got down to Cherokee in about fourteen hours, he said. There was a friend of Ed’s waiting, a Cherokee called Nimrod Smith, who also had been in Vietnam, the man who a few weeks before had told him where Ed was, when Mr Nolan first looked into it. Now Nimrod Smith wanted $50 and Mr Nolan promised to send it when he got home. Mr Nolan waited all day while Nimrod Smith went into the forest on his motorbike. He wouldn’t just bring a person in unannounced. So Mr Nolan was left to twiddle his thumbs in the motel. But it turned out to be a good idea, all in all. Nimrod Smith came back in the darkness. Ed was anxious to see Mr Nolan, he had something he needed to tell him. He had said he would meet them about halfway along the trail. Next morning Nimrod Smith brought Mr Nolan into the mountains on the motorcycle. Ed was waiting in a small glade, and he had a child with him. Mr Nolan was overwhelmed to see Ed, he suddenly realised how much he had been worried about him, like he might his own son, if he had had one. Ed had let his nice hair grow, and he had a rough mountain man’s beard. He embraced Mr Nolan. He said the child’s mother, a girl called Jacinta Riley, had died in hospital in Knoxville, and the mountains just weren’t any place for a child. He said he was desperate for his son’s welfare. He asked could Mr Nolan take the child out, maybe take him back with him to me? He said his ma would know what to do.

  That I would know what to do! I hadn’t the slightest notion, except I was so grateful Ed was alive, and that he had had the sense not to try and keep his son in such a primitive place. Maybe I wished he had come home with his son, and sorted himself out, for his son’s sake. But Mr Nolan said there was something very sad about Ed. Mr Nolan was deeply affected by seeing him, I could tell. He wept when he told me how altered he was, ‘the boy’, as he called him, just as he always used to call him, when indeed he was a boy, in the days before he went to Vietnam.

  ‘Like an empty house with a ghost in it,’ said Mr Nolan. ‘God help him, Lilly.’

  ‘You did a good thing, Mr Nolan, you surely did.’

  ‘Bringing you a little lad two years old? What are you going to do, Lilly, rear him up? What the heck are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to live a long time,’ I said, not having any other plan.

  ‘You’re going to keep him?’

  ‘I’m going to keep him, till Ed recovers. Some day he will recover. That’s my prayer, Mr Nolan. Until then,’ I said, ‘I’m going to be looking after Bill.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Nolan. ‘You are certifiable mad. But I’ll help you. God knows I will.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Nolan.’

  Fifteenth Day without Bill

  I woke this morning so tired, so bone weary, I dragged myself more than walked to the lavatory. I am beginning to think this writing things down is as much hard labour as an Irish country washday.

  But I also got a little gift of happiness out of the morning too. The constipation that had been bothering me all week finally surrendered to my prayers and imprecations and what followed was a feeling that I do not think would disgrace the citizens of heaven, in their famous contentment.

  To remember sometimes is a great sorrow, but when the remembering has been done, there comes afterwards a very curious peacefulness. Because you have planted your flag on the summit of the sorrow. You have climbed it.

  And I notice again in the writing of this confession that there is nothing called long-ago after all. When things are summoned up, it is all present time, pure and simple. So that, much to my surprise, people I have loved are allowed to live again. What it is that allows them I don’t know. I have been happy now and then in the last two weeks, the special happiness that is offered from the hand of sorrow.

  *

  I had to disclose our new arrival to Mrs Wolohan. I was obliged to, though a corner of my mind feared she might object. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Another child she could get ready to dine with kings. She took the matter into hand, and wrote on my behalf to the hospital in North Carolina, and was sent the death certificate of Bill’s mother, and his birth certificate was located also, and sent on. His full name, presumably entered by his father, was William Dunne Kinderman Bere. It was poignant to read this name, containing all and more of my own history as a human creature, and look down on the small bearer of it. He had more names to himself than years. He was in fact two years, three months, and five days old. He had had his mother till he was two. She had died of sepsis following on from peritonitis.

  I brought Bill to Dr Earnshaw, at that time not long in practice, as I remember. He seemed to take a dim view of the whole matter, or so I thought at the time. But in fact of course it was just Dr Earnshaw’s manner, which I grew to understand better over the years. He gave Bill a thorough going-over. Much to my surprise again, there wasn’t much wrong with the child. He had been fed wisely, and Dr Earnshaw pointed out to me the little tiny shellfish marks of his inoculations.

  ‘I will do these all again, of course,’ said Dr Earnshaw, ‘but this is not a neglected child.’

  I had no photo of Bill’s mother Jacinta, but something of her, even by these minute traces, seemed to come through to me, and I wondered about her story. I wrote to her parents in Knoxville, an address that Mrs Wolohan had from the hospital, but was much distressed to get a strange, hurt letter from a Mr Riley, her father. He went to the trouble of pointing out that since Ed was a white person, the boy could not be his, and for their part, said Mr Riley, they had no further interest in the matter, and were still grieving for the loss of their daughter, who had gone off the rails in her last years. He said that if I intended to have the child adopted or put into care, he would fully support me in my endeavour. However he enclosed three photographs of Jacinta, one as a baby, one as a high school student, and one on the day she married Ed. This I peered and peered at, marvelling at it. They had been married for whatever reason in Harris County, in Houston, Texas, a ‘furtive five-minute job, among what looked to us like Texican shotgun wedding-parties, not a word of English spoken, and all the brides expecting’ as Mr Riley described it, obviously not approving, or, more likely, deeply offended by it. But even in that present chaos, I was proud of Ed in his best jeans, and hair in a long Indian plait, which he wore down his left breast. And his wife Jacinta as glad as a rose, beside him, with the sign for the courthouse behind them. They looked like any other young couple, all their years ahead of them, blessed with youth. I prayed it had given Ed a few days of happiness, whatever ailed him generally.

  I prayed also that in time his wounded self would recuperate, atom by atom, at whatever pace it took, and that some day I might see him again, and that he might see his son, the one restored to the other. I prayed for that.

  *

  Some weeks later, Mr Nolan dropped down to me, as he was doing regularly, to see how I was getting on in this realm of great changes. I think he also liked just to clap eyes on Bill.

  ‘Did you get a chance to send that $50 down to Mr Smith?’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t know whether to tell you or not, but. I was glancing through Mrs Wolohan’s Times week before last. Just two lines about it. Cherokee man called Nimrod Smith found dead in Knoxville.’

  *

  In the Second World War, one of the tortures in the prisoner-of-war camps was to keep waking the captured soldiers all night. Not let them sleep, disorient them, drive their spirits into their boots. But a two-yea
r-old child will do just the same thing. For a whole year Bill woke every hour. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I think he was just checking I was there. One time I slept through his calling. He slept in the little bedroom near mine, just separated by the bathroom. He must have been nearly three. I opened my eyes, and I saw him there, in the dark room.

  ‘Hello, grandma,’ he said.

  And then, having got a taste for talking, he got talking as good as the next child. Somewhere in the dark gap between his bed and mine, he must have reached a decision.

  I do not want to dwell too much on the beauty of that child. I think my heart will break if I do so. But just to record the fact, Bill had beauty.

  My aunts in Wicklow used to say to us, when we were children, snagging up in their skirts, ‘You’re lovely, when you’re asleep.’ And I know what they meant. A child is hard labour. There is nothing so onerous and exhausting as a small child, nothing. I have sympathy for men digging on the road when I pass them by, in the height of summer as may be, and I always say hello, because digging a ditch is nearly the hardest work on earth.

  The hardest is rearing a child. Even when you’re young.

  Bill liked the little push-car I got for him, but boy, he really liked to be carried. He loved it. I would have to carry him till I was well-nigh about to die.

  Then all the pleasures of having a child also seem to carry a searing pain with them. A kind of after-pain. That day you ready them up for their first day at school, their shorts and shirt all shipshape, their lunch in its new box, and going along to the gate of the school, handing him over to Miss Myers, his young teacher. And her reassuring smile, and Bill, happily going forward with her, into the schoolhouse. The little crowd of mothers, heroic beings really. It was a curiosity of the district that in the time of Ed’s childhood, most of the kids in his class were white, and yet in the time of Bill’s, most of them were black. Mr Dillinger said Sag Harbor had been an important station on the freedom train long ago, which was one of the reasons some of the Shinnecock were black. So in that way, our district had a history of bright goodness, along no doubt with darker matters. Which was lucky for Bill.

  Wonderful, but then, going home along the sea lane with my heart scalded. The days of having him about the house over. The days of innocence so deep in him, it was like wisdom, like he knew something important that he was always on the cusp of telling me. The days of me and Bill knocking about. Bringing him to see what he called ‘the river’, but that was really just Sag Pond. The first time he swam in Mrs Wolohan’s pool, with his bizarre armbands, some strange creature off the TV. I never had a TV since Ed, so he would go down the road a bit, to a friend’s house. Every child in his class was his friend, and suddenly I had twenty new friends myself, the mothers of those children. Toing and froing, exhaustion, hard labour. Head down, no let-up. Every moment of your day filled, appointed, anointed.

  Paradise.

  *

  Mr Nolan liked to bring Bill fishing. They’d go off together to some bit of water. Mr Nolan had a favourite spot ‘near the Shinnecock hills’ and the two of them would head away in the aged Town Car. He started to teach Bill the songs he knew, from his own childhood. One day he put Bill up on the kitchen table, and had him sing a new song. Well, it was an old song, called ‘Kevin Barry’. A rebel song, as it happened, and I don’t think Tadg Bere would have liked to hear it sung, all things considered. But the strange fact was, Kevin Barry had been born in Rathvilly, as my father was, so that was a rebel song I didn’t mind, for old times’ sake. I didn’t tell Mr Nolan any of that. I didn’t tell him either that Kevin Barry had been exactly the same age as me.

  Another martyr for old Ireland,

  Another murder for the crown,

  Whose brutal laws to crush the Irish,

  Could not keep their spirit down.

  Bill sang it forth. He sang like a linnet. Mr Nolan beaming. The voice filled the kitchen, this very kitchen. Bill stood up on this very table, in his blue leather shoes, raised up his two arms as Mr Nolan had taught him, and gave the song everything he had. Which was considerable.

  ‘This boy has a sweet voice,’ said Mr Nolan. ‘I never heard a voice like that.’

  But I had. His own great-uncle had just such a voice, Willie himself, whose name he carried, who had asked my father once if he could go and try and make a go of it in the music-halls. My father horrified. ‘No, Willie,’ he had said. ‘That would never do. What would your poor mother in heaven think, if I let you do that?’ And the truth was, our mother, according to Annie, had loved Willie’s voice. She would have been proud if he had made a go of it in the halls. Willie and his Ave Maria, and his ‘Roses of Picardy’. I can hear him now. And as I hear him, I also hear Bill, chiming in. The two singing together in my old head, that never even knew each other in life, killed seventy years apart, in two different wars.

  I pointed out Willie’s picture to him in the hallway. From then on, Bill always said hello to Willie as he passed, or gave him a quick greeting with his hand, a sort of salute, because of Willie’s uniform. He was his great-uncle really, but Bill always called him just Uncle Willie.

  But he called me grandma. When he was seven, he began to ask me about his father and mother; he worked out somehow that he must have had such things once. All his friends’ mothers were still in their early thirties mostly, in their twenties. Why was he met at the school gate by an old crone? Not that he said that. He was never afraid to be seen kissing me, or holding his grandma’s hand. I was so old I could have been his great-grandma.

  I told him the simple stupid things I thought I should say. I told him his mother was safe in heaven, and his father was on a long journey, and I didn’t know when he would be back.

  ‘So is he going to heaven to see her?’ he said.

  ‘See who?’ I said.

  ‘My mother.’

  ‘I don’t think you can go to heaven until, you know, you …’ And because I was a grown fool, I didn’t think I could say the word ‘die’.

  ‘Die,’ said Bill.

  ‘Yes, until you die,’ I said.

  ‘So where’s he going?’ he said, his voice clear and easy, just looking for information.

  ‘I don’t know. He never told me that, Bill. But I know he’s gone, and it’s a long way.’

  ‘As far as Montauk Point?’

  ‘Further than that.’

  I could tell he was impressed.

  ‘As far as the moon?’

  ‘Not as far as that.’

  *

  When Mrs Wolohan heard Bill singing, she didn’t think of a kitchen table for a stage, her mind went straight to the Metropolitan Opera. She got Mr Dillinger to phone his good friend Signor Devito, the famous teacher, who had one of the new mansions right down in the dunes. And then I was obliged by all these efforts to bring Bill to see Signor Devito, and have him sing for him. I sat in the big sunny room in one corner, while Bill and the Signor sat at the huge black piano. Bill was eight, but I was a mass of ageless suffering, on his behalf. Signor Devito was exceptionally kind, but asked Bill to sing some scales, which Bill didn’t know how to do. He had no training whatsoever, aside from Mr Nolan’s efforts. And Mr Nolan was just a mountainy Irishman from Tennessee.

  ‘So you sing me a song you like,’ said Signor Devito, his long brown fingers bedecked by rings, whose gemstones were so considerable I could see them quite plainly across the room, glinting in the shuttered light. He had his Italian name, suitable for opera, but Mr Dillinger had confided in me that Signor Devito was in fact Greek, from Alexandria. He might have been any age, with one of those smooth lineless countenances, with no trace of a beard. Mr Dillinger said he had helped Marian Anderson prepare for her debut at the Met, when she was already fifty-eight, but this meant nothing to me, beyond thinking that it sounded impressive, whatever it meant.

  So Bill began to sing ‘Roses of Picardy’, that he had got Mr Nolan to teach him, after I told him it was one of his great-uncle Wil
lie’s favourite songs. As I say he was only eight, and his youthful voice, singing a soldier’s song, made me cry, secretly, where I sat. Indeed I wished Willie could have been there to hear it; perhaps he was, his shade creeping near, from Flanders to Bridgehampton. To cock an ear to such sweet singing, with all his own suffering and the suffering of his companions contained in the song. As if, a ghost for some seventy years, he was hearing his own young self, magically renewed by the mercies of history. Through Mr Dillinger’s DNA.

  Afterwards, he sent Bill out into his vast hallway, so he could have a word with me.

  ‘Like others of his race, he has a good voice. I don’t know, Mrs Bere, if it is exceptional. I want you to bring him down to New York to hear some proper singing. I will organise the tickets. In the world of opera, you live in a storm of wind the whole time. Like the sailors who do the passage round Cape Horn. You have to have it in you to make such voyages.’

  Some weeks later, Bill and I sat in the magnificence of the New York Met, listening to a singer called Mr Shirley. The opera was called Turandot. Bill seemed to me very small, young, and slight in the seat beside me. As the opera progressed, I thought he became smaller, younger, and slighter. Before the end, the two of us slipped away, bought pizza, and ate it waiting for our bus home.

  *

  When I first put Bill into the single bed in the box-sized bedroom, he was about the length of a pillow. By the time he was eleven his feet reached halfway down the mattress. That’s how I measured the passing of time. Life may be brief, and childhood briefer, but there is a sumptuous brevity to a grandson’s childhood.

  The downturn of a bird’s wing.

  One time in the late fall I was just tucking him into bed when I heard, or thought I heard, someone stirring along the porch. For three days we had been buffeted by the very edge of a hurricane, which had blown itself out away somewhere on the sea, giving us only hints of its anger, enough to rattle my shingles and put my heart into my mouth. Huge rolling stumbling gusts had come in from the beach, pulled viciously at the earth of the withered potato plants, and given the impression that it might, with just a small effort more, tear our house from its foundations and deposit us elsewhere. Now in the glowering aftermath the moon was being snatched at by the last storm clouds, hurrying along like city crowds in the rain. The planks of the porch were firm enough, but they were ancient and twisted, and you could not walk across them without making a small screeching music.