On Canaan's Side

by Sebastian Barry

  He looked like death, like Mr Death himself. In the usual gloom of his bedroom the boxes and whatnots of his life were ranged about him as always. Here was a man who had never entirely moved in, anywhere in his little series of abodes, the little series we all have a version of, in this restless country, where it is so easy to move, and oftentimes so troublesome to stay still. Cardboard boxes he had hauled about with him, and had thrown in here over thirty years ago when first he came to Bridgehampton, bringing his grey-looking skin, his ruined straw hats in all weathers, and his much-valued friendship into my life. The boxes that maybe held clues to this mysterious man, who had alighted on Bridgehampton like a storm bird so blown about by the storm that it no longer knew its own history, the name of its own species.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, a sigh reeking of silence, of being alone, and thinking, as if I had been in the room all along, or was not in the room even now, ‘and so we come to the moment I have been dreading all these years, and knowing it would come, and sometimes wishing an automobile might run me down before I would have to tell you. I would almost ask you to hold my hand, Lilly, so I can adjudge the precise moment you draw back from me. What I am going to tell you will not please you.’

  He stopped for about two minutes, just stared into space, his mind maybe gathering his story, I don’t know. Even the birds had gone quiet outside, because the sun had crept up willy-nilly, crossing the flooded bays, touching the rich houses, and this little house, inexpensive and bleached under its few trees, the sunlight slowly slowly trying to rub it out, but rather hopelessly, like a schoolchild with a dirtied page. Everything here was holding on, against the efforts of the childish sun. Nothing more so than he. How old was Mr Nolan now? Probably in his late eighties, and yet up to a few weeks ago he had been working as always, clearing the gutters for Mrs Wolohan, shimmying up roofs to fix shingles as if he was a very sprite of shingles.

  ‘The first day I ever came here, looking for you …’

  ‘Looking for me?’ I said. ‘How so, looking for me?’

  Old fears rushed back. Even after all these decades the very thought of anyone ‘looking’ for me put terror back in my heart, if the terror had ever left it, and wasn’t just there like a pile of kindling waiting for a spark.

  ‘I was looking for you, Lilly, if no longer under instructions indeed to find you, and the moment of finding you, which so happened to be for the third time, coincided with the moment I wished to be done with everything that had brought me that far, and, and of course I should have told you then, but.’

  Then nothing for a few moments.

  ‘In America,’ he said, ‘everything is possible. Everything is both true and untrue in the same breath.’

  It is possible that no one can tell you anything that you don’t already know. The brain, some part of the brain has picked up the information already, but not the ‘top’ brain, not the bit that thinks it knows things.

  ‘The old gun-case there,’ he said, ‘you see? The old black one. Yes. Lift out the gun, it’s not loaded, and do you see the little door in the velvet there? Yes, yes, put your hand in there, you’ll find them, photos and clippings and letters and documents and such things. Yes, yes. Fetch them here. Lay them out on the bed.’

  I did so, with strange obedience. I didn’t even have the papers on his coverlet when I recognised one of the photos. It was an old photo of Tadg in the long ago, in his Tan uniform, maybe that very morning he had joined up. Why did Mr Nolan have that? How did he have it? I did not even have it myself. There were newspaper clippings about Tadg’s murder in Chicago, an awful photograph of him lying up against the museum wall in a great welter of blood, and there was a letter with the letterhead of one of those American ‘Irish’ societies, with shamrocks and banners and harps and all. The letter was typed and it was addressed to someone called Robert Doherty. I glanced through and it was obvious even to me that it was a letter of instruction, telling this Robert Doherty to go and kill the traitor Tadg Bere, and telling him where Tadg might be in America, and they had intelligence from sympathetic places, port workers in New Haven, policemen here and there, and the letter also included details about myself, and that I was to be killed also, and the letter writer expected to have photographs of both of us when the post allowed.

  I looked up at Mr Nolan. I was in great perplexity and indeed he didn’t look any better. His face, already wracked by pain, had a further icing of pain on it.

  ‘Do you see what it is?’ he said.

  ‘What is all this stuff?’ I said.

  His face looked like it was ticking, like a clock. The clock had lost its hands long since, but somewhere in the old face there was a ticking, or a whirring, like the works gathering for its chime. Perhaps I was so sensitised now, so alert, I could actually hear the blood pulsing through his neck. The old heart wearying itself with a last weariness, a final effort. Truth is everything. We do not know it, we do not know how to get it, we do not have it in our possession, God will slap it on us like a police warrant as we arrive breathless at the gates, it is entirely beyond us, truth, bloody truth, but it is everything.

  He did speak, but with all the charm and horror of a death rattle.

  ‘I am Robert Doherty,’ he said.

  ‘The man who killed my husband?’

  ‘I am that man. Lilly, they knew you were in America even before you got here on the ship. Our organisation had a cable through, and me primed to do the work before ever you set foot on land. And then Chicago, though it did take a while to track you down. Your real names were on the ship’s manifest, but I couldn’t find out where you had gone after that, and I thought you were going to get away with it. But then I thought you might try to link up with relatives here, so I worked that angle, and your cousin Cullen, wasn’t that his name, quite a well-known man in the lumber trade, I found him easy enough in Miami, and pretended to be a friend, and sure enough he’d had a letter from the old policeman your father that had reached him late, because it had gone to an old address in New York, and in his innocence he told me you had a second address to try in Chicago, and he was very distraught that he hadn’t been able to help you, and I said, ah sure, no bother, I’ll do what I can for them. And then, and then, the business in the gallery. Then I went up to Cleveland after to kill you, Lilly, when I found out you were there, and that wasn’t easy, because no one on earth knew where you were, until your own father wrote to the police in Chicago, and asked if they knew the whereabouts of his daughter Lilly Dunne alias Grainne Cullen, and he was very concerned about you, naturally, with Tadg Bere dead. And I had a good contact there among the detectives, and he was in touch with me, and said you might be in Cleveland, your name had turned up there, but I lost heart for the job when I saw you again. In Chicago I had had a clear chance to shoot you, as I had been bid, but had not taken it. And I was even less able that second time. You in your nice dress and as pretty as Bette Davis.’

  My brain was whirring, my compassion for him curdling in my breast, like lemon dropped into milk, and I was about to go and leave this wretched man, but I knew one thing in my confusion.

  ‘You should have killed me,’ I said. ‘You had no right to my friendship all these years. You took away my life when you took him anyhow. I should kill you now. If I had strength in my hands I would do it.’

  ‘I’ll be dead in a day anyhow. The doc just told me. He wanted to bring me into hospital, but I told him, never you mind. I have the little morphine pump going, do you hear it? He fastened it to my breast somehow. Oh yes. The nurse will come shortly to watch with me. Kill me if you want. I am so sorry, Lilly. So sorry. Please, please forgive me. We thought we were doing good for Ireland. When I saw you I could not harm you. I changed my name and my history. I never forgot you. And I went and had a life of sorts automobile-building in Detroit, and married and then when my wife died I didn’t know what else to do with myself, I came up here and found you, and decided to – what? – nest near you. Make a stop in the long trek. I always felt so
bad about what I did. I was trying to make it up to you. I know that’s ridiculous, all things considered, ridiculous, ridiculous, in a ridiculous world. The young know nothing, or worse, less than nothing. But I didn’t know what to do, and I always meant to tell you. And then bit by bit, I loved you. And then I could not tell you. Forgive me.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I cannot do that. I curse you.’

  And then I did turn about, and then I did go out, and leave him.

  My instinct was to stay with him, to assist at his going. It shocked me that such an instinct was so deep, so independent of a righteous anger, even of hatred. My heart, in some strange fashion, bled for him, as his own body bled. I knew his whole lower regions were destroyed, I knew he suffered monumentally, and that the borders between his intestine and upper body had so broken down that he had endured little bouts of faecal vomiting, a very terrifying and monstrous betrayal of the body, when the very shit itself comes out through the mouth. I knew what he was suffering, I knew what he was in essence, but now I knew more, and I could not stay. I did not think I would have to apologise to God for it. I would expect God to understand. Yes, I would.

  The nurse, a beautifully turned-out Jamaican woman I knew from the market, was just driving up in her battered sedan. She was round, shining, and wrapped in all the colours of the West Indies. I mustered the shadow of a smile. She gave me an infinitely cheery greeting. Happy in her work. Ushering out the souls.

  Did I really understand what he had told me? It is days and days after now, long after, and I am not sure I understand him even now. He had been young, we were young, Tadg and myself. I do not to this day know what Tadg did in his police work. There may well have been terrible crimes against his own soul. Of course. A killer perhaps, a young killer, in his own country in his own time. Not without guilt, dark guilt. Maybe the stories about the Tans are all true, I fear they might be. Dark lads. One story I read in a book, that gave me pause, thinking of Tadg, long after he was dead, a Crossley Tender on the move near Gort, a woman at a doorway with her baby, shot for the sake of cruel cruel devilment as the lorry passed, the bullet passing through the child into the breast of the mother, so that her family rushing from the cottage interior found them both slain on the threshold. The threshold of a new country. My own country that is foreign to me. Mr Nolan required, instructed in a letter, to fetch about America and her neatly drawn states, for my husband, for the life of my husband, his little handful of years, and all the years of his future. Mr Nolan had just told me what he had done, he didn’t need to tell me the story of it, because I knew it, I had been there, I had half-seen Mr Nolan approaching across the great entrance hall of the institute, for it had been he, half-seen half-sensed the approaching horror, I had plucked at Tadg’s sleeve as he stared and stared at the picture ‘of himself’ as he had put it, the face of another man long ago, the fierce, folded, suffering face of Van Gogh, I had tried, tried to alert him to his danger, no, no, just a moment, Lilly, just a moment, and that dark figure approaching, unknown, blank, in a dark coat, in a dark hat, drawing something from the dark interior of the coat, something blacker than black, lustreless, blunt, a gun of course, and me not able to turn the tide of the story, Tadg, Tadg, come away, come away, we are in danger, there is something, something terrible approaching, what is it?, come away. And then that figure so close, so close in, intimate, like he meant to embrace Tadg, oh, just an inch from him, and the arm stuck into his side, and the enormous blast, the enormous blast of a gun in such a huge marble space, oh my Jesus, and Tadg falling immediately, like a cow in a slaughter yard, the bolt into the brain, the bullet into his side, catching him somehow, maybe whirling around in his body, skidding off bones, because the bullet did exit, I saw it smash into the wall, just missing the painting, bizarre, terrible, and that bleak dark figure, that young man with his letter of shamrocks and harps telling him, instructing him, go and find and kill Tadg Bere, folded somewhere into his pocket, and now the old photograph loose on Mr Nolan’s bed, that young man … My deep dear friend of these last many years. Lying here destroyed by the devilry of his own pancreas. A story of misery and terror.

  I am an old foolish woman. I had loved Mr Nolan just as well as I loved Tadg Bere, and even, to give him his due, poor Joe Kinderman. Murder everywhere, and blood, and the very shit of his own body coming up out of his mouth.

  I stood on the sidewalk. Mrs Sanford’s fields were all to my right, her potato plants showing themselves shining and green in the sunlight, a queer forest, a thousand bonsai trees.

  If I had been cursing him, now I was cursing myself. Stupid, ancient, shrunken Irish cook that couldn’t even abide by her just anger.

  I would have to put revenge aside, lay it aside for the few hours it would require. When he died, when he perished, I would curse him then, I thought, in a great steam on the meagre little sidewalk outside his house, I would strike at his coffin, and wail, and wish him in hell, as was my duty as a loving and plundered wife.

  But I knew I had to go back in, and assist the resplendent and shining nurse, who doubtless needed no assistance, and be there at his bloody side while he, my former friend, the murderer of my husband, died.

  And he died that evening.

  Seventeenth Day without Bill

  It is a beautiful morning. Of this there is no doubt. I don’t think God is mocking me.

  *

  I come full circle. I feel it in my bones. Just after waking, as I brewed up the tea, and wondered did I have the true desire to drink it, I stopped what I was doing, and put my two hands to my face.

  *

  When I received the phone call, asking me to come to the school, I had no idea what it was for. It was some years since Bill had attended, and it was a Sunday. Furthermore it was only nine a.m. But I went, dutifully enough. I wondered had they confused me with someone else, or had dialled the wrong number, and would be surprised to see me instead of the person they had in mind. I called a cab, and nice Mr Jensen drove me. He was giving out about all the new people in Bridgehampton, even though I suppose it gave him more work. He didn’t like what had happened to the price of land. He said his own children would not be able to afford to build houses there. He thought the government should do something about it, but he didn’t think they would. America was all for the rich now, he said.

  It was the usual cab talk, soothing in its way. Change happens everywhere, and we could never be immune to that here. I was grateful for my niche. It was a beautiful morning, and I was inclined to optimism. I was sure in my heart that Bill would recover from his difficulties. I knew he was drinking far more than he used to. Stacy had rung me just the day before, saying he had come to her house, and had stood outside and shouted up at the windows. She had asked me if I could ask him not to do that. I thought I might ask Mrs Wolohan to revive the college plans, and see how Bill responded to that. With all that had happened, even so, I thought, well, he’s young, and the heart recovers. All it needs is time, and people to be thinking about you. Somehow I could imagine him, manning a forest station, watching out for fires. The sunrise itself out there in the wilderness a sort of fire, the sunset a conflagration.

  Nonsense like that. Comforting stuff. Delusional, I suppose.

  They brought me down to the boys’ lavatory. I am not sure if I was ever in a male urinal before. They had already cut him down off the cubicle door. The hook was absurdly low, as if placed for a young child, high school though it was. I marvelled in a strange way that he had managed to hang himself on that. His army tie had been cut from his neck, and he was lying on a stretcher. I asked had there been efforts to revive him, and the ambulance man said he didn’t know. He said they had waited for me to come, but he had to get back as soon as possible, as there was a fire on the highway out past Southampton. There was a nice cop there I recognised from the town, and a nurse. The doctor had been and gone, apparently. All this I saw and registered nowhere except on the very top of my brain. Nothing sank in further than that.

&nb
sp; He lay on the floor, slightly turned, his legs bent at the knees. He looked awfully young. Not as young as when he came, but young. I wondered had he been brought out of the mountains to anything good. I just did not know. I knew that I had loved him and would have gladly given my life for his, a thousand times over.

  I suppose his face was altered by the way he had died, but I don’t remember it like that. In my memory, his face is beautiful and soft, his hands with their long fingers lie open like the flower Honesty. There is no breath in his body but the eyes seem to be still looking at the world, as if by looking on even after death he might penetrate to its mystery.

  *

  There should always be rain for a funeral, or if the weather is to be dry, frost, and snow deepening spoonful by spoonful, although this would make the work of the gravedigger harder. Nowadays they have a little digger for that work. They made a cut into the earth about three by seven feet, very expertly. I imagine the men finished off the work with the spade, it was so neat and clean. Like lads up on a high bog in the Dublin Mountains, slicing the sods of turf with a precision that only the water-hen and snipe can see.

  But that day – and long ago it seems, but really only the length of this strange ‘confession’ – the sun moved through the trees like water. The trees were solemn, full-leaved, and stately, and the sunlight poured through them. It might have been a liquid or a thing you could touch. Something you could take a portion of, weighing it out or cutting it, and add into a cake mixture. The sunlight moved through the trees like a gold wind. It was full of things, human things, whispers, old bits of talk, past matters, and the cancelled future. There was a thin, inching wind. They were lowering his body down in its veneered casket with the oak lines painted onto the pine, the idea of a better wood onto the true and honest wood. He was going down into the earth. The sunlight poured through the trees like a liquid. His companions in the army had come out, and one of the young boys blew a bugle, and his sergeant unfolded the lovely flag and spread it over the mock oak, and down he was lowered by his sundered friends, and soon enough he was there, at the bottom of the hole, and they, after their appointed ceremony, slowly went away, to do whatever young soldiers do after a burial like that. I cannot say, I would not say. The sunlight moved through the trees, approaching the rim of the grave with its own simple gravity, as if God Himself had taken the form of sunlight and was timidly looking in, afraid of his own creation, to view the matter bare and unadorned, afraid of what He had done, or what He had let happen. The old trees shrugged in their absolute magnificence and luxury, and the boy who meant more to me than my own sere life was packed away like a store of potatoes into a potato pit, for which the cottager will never return.