by Colum McCann
THE CANTEEN WORKERS finish at ten in the evening, but then his own staff trundle downstairs to light the stove, boil the water, stir the leaves. He will lift and pour, lift and pour. This whole memory, it will taste of tea.
THERE IS A swerve to Blair. The neat suit, the tie. A dishevelment to Ahern. A busy grief. Both of them sweeping in, taking over their offices. Second floor. Third floor. Meeting after meeting. Phone call after phone call. Blair says to him that he feels as if he is entering a caisson. The pressure slowly building. Beginning to swell. A common feeling, that, but what is the word for it? There is, surely, a word for it, a phrase. The Senator cannot recall. So tired now. The ache in his shoulders. Searching for the word, but he cannot find it.
FOUR IN THE morning. Blair’s office. The desk neat and meticulous. A pen balanced on the rim of a coffee cup. The Prime Minister’s shirt open to the second button. They are stuck now on a point of language. The British and their words. The Irish and their endless meanings. How did such a small sea ever come between them?
He watches Blair run his hands through his hair. Strange, that. The Prime Minister’s hair is wet. And the cheeks are glistening. Somehow freshly shaved? Did he manage a shower? Where, then, and how? Surely there is no shower in the building? There cannot be. All these months he has been here, the Senator has never seen one, nor heard of one. No need, back then, with hotel rooms. But a shower? He craves one now. Just the idea. The pourdown. The cleansing. He should ask straight out, but, then again, there is the matter of decorum. Etiquette. Impolite, probably, to tread upon the personal with the Prime Minister? Focus now. Focus. The issue is prisoners. And remand. And language. Eight hundred years of history. How is it now that they can manipulate the words? What is the right way to force the Unionist hand? Will Adams play along? Can Ahern have a word in McGuinness’s ear? What last words? Where is Hume? There is a leak of light, still, from under Trimble’s door. The intrusion of the ordinary. Tired. So very tired. He still cannot shake the idea that Blair’s hair is wet.
He leaves Blair’s office at five forty-five, and at six in the morning, he sends his staff searching. They arrive back, triumphant. There is indeed a shower. Unknown to them all this time. On the third floor. The only one in the building. Incredible, really. A closet hardly big enough to step inside. The Senator goes upstairs, undresses, steps in, leans his head against the tile. Slick and grimy. He doesn’t care. The water pounds down upon his shoulders. Warm and hard against his face. A caisson indeed. The bends. That’s it. That’s the phrase he was looking for. The bends.
He dries himself off with his shirt and walks out into the corridor, a little bounce in his step, his socks wet from where he has padded on the floor.
EARLY ON GOOD Friday afternoon Gerald hands him an envelope. He unfolds the sheet of paper. Sits back in his chair. He had forgotten altogether. Well, there you have it. The Sox. Bottom of the ninth.
He hears a cheer from downstairs, an applause along the corridor, as if the whole country has heard the news.
A FEW TAPS on the pane make him turn. It is lightly raining outside. Falling diagonally against the glass, catching a moment, as if surprised to be stopped. Rolling downwards. Accumulating and dropping farther. He crosses the room and leans across to lift the latch, opens the window wide. Damp air enters the office. Sounds from the street. A beeping of car horns. A cheer from the front gates. A distant sound of traffic and then a silence. He would like to hold this moment, suspend it, to surround himself with only this, to be bounded by it. He leans his hands against the frame. The small touch of rain against his wrist.
The Senator hears the ringing of the telephone and a gentle knocking on the door, slowly more insistent.
The cheers along the corridor growing louder.
He leans his palms against the window. Perhaps to contemplate such happiness is to diminish it. Sixty-one children. He knows, now, that there will be an ordinariness to that he will return to, other days of tedium and loss, and the Troubles will most likely crash into him from behind, when he least expects it, but for now, for the very briefest moment, this suspended instance, the impossible has happened.
The Senator touches his head against the cool of the glass.
—Come in, he says.
HE LEAVES FOR the airport at dawn on Easter Sunday morning. A bright day. As if it were designed for this somehow. He emerges from the Culloden Hotel, down the stone steps, towards the car. The tiredness in his eyes, his jaw, his shoulders. His whole body belonging elsewhere.
A helicopter hovers on the skyline. The distant trees sway. Fragments of white cloud slide on a layered blue sky.
A couple of journalists wait for him in the driveway of the hotel. The Irish Times. The Independent. Die Zeit. Le Figaro. They are already calling it the Good Friday Accords. He wanders over. Hands in his pockets. Still wearing his blue suit, but his shirt open, the small vee of sunburn at his neck, the rest a paleness. He has only ten minutes. He knows their trade: they will want to talk to him one on one. Fintan. Dirk. Lara. Dominique. Always their first names. He walks along the gravel, side by side. The gray dust scuffing his shoes. He is astounded by the calm of his answers. Yes, we must maintain a sense of composure. The real work is only just beginning. I am quietly optimistic. Hopeful in fact. We sensed all along that something could be achieved. We turn it over now to the people of the North and South. The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no. There were times when I thought we were teetering on the edge.
He would like for a moment to tell one of the journalists that there was a giddiness in the hallways of Stormont, that he could hear the champagne corks being popped downstairs in the canteen, that he leaned his head against the shower stall and wept with joy. Still, there is decorum to maintain. A need for parsimony. A careful tread. We have all been caught out before.
The true verdict, he says, will belong to history. The ordinary people own it now. We could not have found peace unless the desire for it was already here. Nothing could have been achieved unless it was, first, wanted. The collaboration was across the board. No, it doesn’t take courage to shoot a policeman in the back of the head. What takes courage is to compete in the arena of democracy. But let’s not pretend it’s finished. Yet let’s not pretend that it has only just begun either. It was not an expectation, no. It was a conviction. Generations of mothers will understand this. I do not find it sentimental at all, no, never, not that. Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
A catch in his voice now. Think about it, he says. It’s simple enough. We’re forced to change because we’re forced to remember. And we’re forced to remember when we’re forced to confront. Sixty-one children.
He watches the hovering helicopter. It dips sideways an instant, disappears behind the angle of the treetops. He feels a dull thump in his chest, but the sound of the rotors dwindles and the helicopter turns and fades off.
The journalists thank him. Shake his hand. He makes his way across to Gerald who leans against the car, grinning ever so slightly. The driver has a sheet in his hand. The Senator takes it, tucks it away. He will leave it for the plane.
The car rattles out onto the road. The blur of green hedges. The distant warehouses. The rooflines. The flags. The skirling flutes, the bright sashes, the echo of the lambeg drums. Enough now. The crossed armalite, the morose songs, the black berets. Gone, all gone. Whosoever brought me here is going to have to take me home.
It will be morning now in New York. He will fly to London, then home. He will get there by noon. First off the plane. He will leave, for a moment, all decorum behind. He will emerge through customs to see her there, leaning forward, over the barrier, waiting. Dark hair with a ray of gray. Sunglasses on her head. The most eloquent of welcomes. He will take Andrew in his arms. Lean down towards him. Fasten both of them in an embrace.
Or he will call ahead and talk to her and have her waiting downstairs. In the marbled lobby. Her hands against the glass. With his son
in the papoose against her chest. The quick kick of her heel backwards in the air. Like women from other wars. She will spin out through the revolving doors, four quarters, provinces of desire.
Or he will surprise her entirely. Arrive without a word. Make his way through the airport, walk quickly along the corridor, out the door into the brief light, Ramon waiting by the overhang in his flat cap. The highways. The bridges. The green signs. The crush of yellow traffic. Through the arc of the tollbooth. Over the bridge. Ramon will dip down through Harlem, speed west, swing south along Broadway. The families out walking in the hard yellow sunshine. Young women with dogs. Children in baseball caps. Near Lincoln Center, they will slow down, ease across the lanes. Ramon will pull sharply into the curved driveway. The Senator will leave the briefcase in the back of the car. No reporters please. No cameras. No notebooks. He will push open the revolving door. A series of nods and smiles. Ask the doormen not to call up. No warning. He will want to surprise her. At least for an instant. He will hope that she doesn’t hear the elevator bell. He will softly key open the door and ghost through the room, across the carpet, into the bedroom, catch them sleeping, a noontime nap. He will pause a moment, watching. Her hair askew. Her body long and slim and quiet against the sheets. The baby against her. Slip off his shoes, his suit jacket, his sweater. Lift the bed sheet. Easter Sunday. Crawl into bed beside them. The cool of the pillow. The sheer slice of sunlight through the room. Waken them to laughter. The pinch of his skin. Hers. The slow curve of her hip.
A walk, then, to Sheep Meadow. The grass cool to the touch. The skyscrapers gray and huge against the trees. To be allowed to feel small again. To embrace that insignificance. The sun over the west side of Manhattan. Falling. The dark rolled backwards.
The car drives on. Beyond Belfast now, into the countryside. The light on the slant of the fields. Fenced here, unbounded there.
There is always room for at least two truths.
book two
But this is not the story of a life.
It is the story of lives, knit together,
overlapping in succession, rising
again from grave after grave.
—WENDELL BERRY, FROM “RISING”
1863–89
icehouse
SHE STOOD AT THE WINDOW. IT WAS HER ONE HUNDRED AND twenty-eighth day of watching men die. They came down the road in wagons pulled by horses. She had never seen such a bath of killing before. Even the horses seemed incredulous. Kicking up dust behind them. Their eyes huge and sad. The wheels screeched. The line of wagons stretched down the path, into the trees. The trees themselves stretched off into the war.
She came down the stairs, through the open doors, into the wide heat. The wagons were already backed up on the road. A curious quiet. The men had exhausted their shouts. They were left with small whimperings, tiny gasps of pain. The ones sitting appeared to be asleep. The ones lying were packed so close together, breathing in unison, that they appeared as one mass. A contortion of blood and limbs. Rotting leather breeches. Stinking flannel shirts. Flesh ripped open: cheeks, arms, eye sockets, testicles, chests. The beds of their wagons were black with blood. It had fallen on the wheels, too, so that their lives seemed to circle and turn beneath them.
One soldier wore sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, and a gold harp stitched on his lapel. An Irishman. She had tended to so many of them. He was wounded in the neck. It was covered with a filthy gauze. His face was various shades of dark from the blown-back powder. His teeth were blackened from biting cartridges. He moaned and his head lolled sideways. She swiped the wound as clean as she could get it. His windpipe made a sad low noise. He would be dead within minutes, she knew. Small black strips of shadow moved over him. She looked up. Vultures flew overhead. They did not strike a wingbeat. Soaring on the thermals. Waiting. She had a brief thought that she should smother the injured man.
She touched his eyes. She could feel his life fall shut beneath her fingers. No need to stop his breath. It was much like drawing a small red curtain across. So many of them waited until they were in a woman’s hands.
SHE WAS TAPPED on the elbow. The doctor was small and rotund. They would have to lift the men from the wagon, he said, get them onto the grass. He wore a bow tie splattered with blood. A rubber apron over his tunic. There were twelve other nurses working the wagons: four women.
They lifted the soldiers as gently as they could and placed them in the grass in the imprints of others who had been there just hours ago. All around, the grass was exhausted by the shape of the war.
The doctors paced along the length of the dying. They chose which ones they might possibly save. The soldiers groaned and stretched out their arms. She wanted immediately to wash them clean. The other nurses had lined up wooden pails of water, with sponges at their heads. She thrust a towel down into a bucket.
Lily herself had crossed more water than she cared to remember. She had often thought that she could use all the wide Atlantic to wash them.
THEY CARRIED THE living inside on stretchers. Slippery with blood. The injured sat, vacant, in their beds. The hospital had been a glass factory once. Some of the men had rescued pieces of glass and ranged them around their beds. Intricate vases, colored tumblers. There had been a small amount of stained glass made for the churches of Missouri, but most of it had been taken away and sold.
Occasionally a loud shattering went through the hospital when a soldier stumbled out of bed, or lost his mind, or thrashed his way out from the sheets, or knocked over his bedside table. In the basement below, large glass sheets were still kept. There had been dozens of mirrors, too, but they had been hidden away so the men couldn’t see what had become of them.
LILY HAD LEFT St. Louis in the same week as her son. To be near his regiment. He was seventeen years old. A head of chestnut-colored hair. A shy boy once, he had left, swollen with the prospect of war.
She had walked for days, found the hospital among a series of small buildings not far from the battlefields. At first she was given the laundry room to work in. They had set up a little makeshift hut out back. The hut was a collection of logs with a sloping tarpaulin roof. Under the snapping tarp sat a row of six wooden barrels, four to be filled with hot water, two with cold. She wore long gloves and thick boots. Mud splashed up on the back of her dress. Her hem was dark and thick with blood. She washed bed sheets, towels, bandages, medical uniforms, torn blouses, forage caps. She stirred the clothes around a wooden drum. Another barrel rolled two drums together to squeeze the dirt from the fibers. The handle circled endlessly. Her hands blistered.
When the water was finished, she sprinkled lime in the barrels. It was said to kill the smell of blood. She hung the clothes high on a washing line. At night coyotes trotted out high-legged from the nearby forest. Sometimes they leaped and ripped the clothes from the line. She could see strips of white scattered through the trees.
After eighty-six days a Negro woman had taken over the washing. Lily was brought inside to help the nurses. She donned a black Zouave jacket and a thin cotton dress. Her hair was tied in a bun at the nape of her neck and kept in place with a bonnet. A Union badge was pinned to the front of the bonnet.
She cleaned the bedpans, changed the sheets, stuffed the mattresses with clean straw, soaked cotton balls with camphor. Scrubbed the bloody operating tables clean with sand. Still, the smell was intolerable. The reek of excrement and blood. She longed to be outside with the filthy clothing once more, but she proved to be a good aide and the surgeons liked her. She did basic stitching and fever-soothing. She refilled their bedside basins and slopped out their chamber pots. Put her arms under their shoulders and shifted their weight. Patted their backs while they hacked up lungfuls of dark phlegm. Slopped up the mess from their terrible diarrhea. Held cups of cool water to their lips. Fed them oats, beans, thin soup, yellow horse fat. Gave them rhubarb for the fever. Ignored their desires, their catcalls. Ice baths were prepared for the soldiers who had gone mad. They were plunged down de
ep into a freezing tub until they were unconscious. She held their heads underwater and felt the freeze move up her wrists.
Some of the soldiers whispered obscenities when she approached. Their language was vile. Their erections were angry. To quiet the men, she told them that she was a Quaker, though she was nothing of the sort. They begged forgiveness from her. She touched their foreheads, moved on. They called her Sister. She did not turn.
Lily helped the surgeons with emergency operations: she had to sharpen the edges of saws to hack off limbs. The saws had to be sharpened twice a day. The men were given rubber clamps to put in their mouths. She held down their shoulders. They spat the rubber clamp out and she shoved it back in. She held bags of chloroform over their noses and mouths. Still, they screamed. Huge wooden tubs were kept under the tables to collect the blood that leaked down. Limbs sat in the buckets: arms next to thighbones, sawed-off fingers next to ankles. She mopped the floor and scrubbed it with carbolic soap and water. Rinsed the mop out in the grass. Watched the ground turn red. At the end of the evening she walked to the rear of the building to vomit.