The Canal Bridge: A Novel of Ireland, Love, and the First World War

by Tom Phelan

  That’s exactly what he wrote, and I’d send you the Woodbine box only I promised it to the lads down at the legion hall as a bit of the war.

  That’s all I can tell you, and I hope I have done right what Professor said to do.

  Billy Simkins

  Kitty Hatchel

  For the first few weeks after his return I did not believe the old Matthias could ever catch up with the body that had come home from the War. He didn’t know when he was hungry. He was barely able to take care of himself in the other departments, sometimes coming out of the bushes with dribbles on his trousers from crotch to ankle. We had to tell him when it was time for bed. He seemed unable to take his eyes off the past, to pull them back and put them on my face, on anyone’s face. Many times, when riding home from Enderly, I’d find him leaning on the parapet of the Bridge, staring down into the calm water. I could be leaning on the smooth stones beside him for five minutes before he’d notice me.

  In our efforts to rush him back into our world, we couldn’t see that Matt was not able to put one foot in front of the other. We did not understand at all that he had just stepped out of a gargantuan, screaming meat grinder, as Missus Hodgkins called the War; that he was still hearing the crunching gears of the grinder, still seeing the feeding of soldiers into the machine’s gaping mouth by the thousands, still smelling the freshly spilled, cloying intestines of young screaming men, still inhaling the steam that rose out of the ever-fresh streams of hot blood. We just did not know that Matt was still in Belgium or France, that we only had his body. He was a child still seeing whiteness no matter where he looked after lying on the Canal bank staring into the sun for ages, imagining the sun was a hole in the sky, an opening to be flown through on the quick wings of a woodquest.

  Without having been told, I knew Mammy and Daddy were keeping a wary eye on Matt, afraid he would do himself harm, afraid he would drown himself. Several times, Daddy had “accidentally” met up with him in the fields, had tried to get Matt to talk, had tried to talk to him. But Daddy told Mammy, “It’s like the time the house burned down and I found him sitting under the elm, and when I said where’s the others he didn’t answer because he’d only have to hear what he’d have to tell me. I’d say he can’t talk about the War now because he can’t bear to hear what he’ll have to tell.”

  But as the long days went by, bits and pieces began to come out of him. Daddy and Mammy and I, and eventually Missus Hodgkins and Sarah, told each other what we had heard. When we put them together we began to have some inkling of how he and Con had lived and survived among the tumbling blades and milling rollers of the grinder.

  It had taken a week to decide whether we should show Billy Simkins’s letter to Matthias. In the end, with encouragement from Missus Hodgkins, we decided that if Matt saw Con’s death from another man’s point of view, it would help to lighten his load of sorrow and remorse.

  And the reading of Billy Simkins’s letter was to Matt what the first unaided step is to a child learning to walk. His face didn’t light up with surprise and delight; he didn’t seek the applause of encouraging parents, but it brought a change. He straightened up, confidence seemed to have seeped into him. He combed his hair.

  But still he was mainly silent. After more futile interceptions in the lonely fields, Daddy said, “We know what he had to do to take care of Con. He told us he used the knife on others. We can only imagine how many.”

  On my way home from Enderly a week after he’d read the Simkins letter, I found Matt on the Bridge staring down. For many long silent minutes I gazed with him at the comings and goings of two eels in the coping stones under the Bridge; the playful slithering in and out of the openings between the stones was hypnotizing. As usual, it was difficult to tell if Matt was seeing what I was seeing or if he was looking at the War. I turned to him as if his face might give some inkling about what he was seeing. I might as well have been looking at a weather-worn stone.

  The newspapers had never told us what the War was like for the ordinary soldier, and even the “Pimpernel” reporter had spared us the truth about the trenches. All during the War, we had read of great victories and small defeats, of explosions in Belgium that were heard in London. The papers had told us what the governments had wanted us to hear. We had no idea at all what the state of the fields was after a battle, what they were littered with. We didn’t even know about the barbed wire.

  Without turning his head away from the water below, Matt said, “I have to tell you something, Kitty.” His use of my name upset the even rhythm of my heart.

  In a voice he had not owned before he went away, Matt spoke with deliberation, with the gravity of a man who would not be interrupted by priest or nun. “Killing Con in that house in France was the right thing to do at the time. But now that I’m back home where Con always was with us, I can’t see how it was the right thing to do at all. I should have taken hold of him and run.”

  What was there for me to say? I couldn’t think of anything. I could have said, “It was the circumstances of the times that were in it, Matt.” But I didn’t know to say that. It was Missus Hodgkins who suggested I say that to him in the future if he spoke of rights and wrongs in the War, rights and wrongs that couldn’t be measured against the ordinariness of everyday life in Ballyrannel.

  The eels chased each other, head to tail, in and out of the coping stones. They looked like the rim of a bike wheel spinning on its side in the water, and I saw a barefooted boy with the tail of his shirt flying in the wind, a short stick in his hand and he joyfully running at full tilt beside a spokeless bike wheel.

  Finally, I put my hand on Matt’s shoulder—the first time I’d touched him since we’d knelt around him on the kitchen floor that day he came home. He didn’t shrug me off. Very gently, like I was lowering a baby into sleep, I moved my hand around Matt’s back. His shoulders heaved when he took in a deep breath. “I don’t know how many men I killed. Most of them were bundles of guts with a beating heart and maybe an arm or a leg sticking out.”

  I wanted to hide my face, turn away from his words, but I kept my hand on him.

  “I’d poke around looking for the heart in the mess. Sometimes I could see it, beating away like it was hoping the body would put itself back together again. I’d stick them with my knife the way I’d poke a pointed stick into soft clay to make a hole for a cabbage plant. Thousands of them, and that’s not a lie, not an exaggeration. The dying lads, more or less recognizable as men and still conscious, I’d lie down with, snuggle up to them, and sing while I was slipping the knife into their hearts, so they’d know someone was there with them while they were dying. Knifey was what I called my knife. She was a nurse, a nun, a Sister of Mercy.”

  With my right hand I kept a grasp on the capstone of the Bridge, my knuckles white, my eyes on the side of Matt’s aged face. He was speaking in a distant voice, no ups or downs.

  “Do you know what I sang to them, Kitty?” He turned as slowly as a loaded barge turning in the Harbour, and he looked at my face for the first time in four years. I had to make myself not turn away. His eyes were still far away, but he was making a huge effort to pull them home from the War, to focus them on mine, to speak to me the things he didn’t want to look at anymore. He moved his face flesh like a drunk man trying to show he wasn’t drunk. “Do you know what I sang to them, Kitty?” And quietly he began to sing, so quietly, that if a man had been standing on the Towpath below he could not have heard. His eyes sank into mine and mine sank into his and I felt something like I felt the first time I stripped off my clothes with Matt looking at me all over. “Here comes the pony, his day’s work is done, / And down through the meadow he now takes a run. / Up go his heels and down goes his head, / It’s time little children were going to bed.”

  Before he got to the last line, Matt’s face had begun to change, his eyes had flowed over, and streams were trickling down his face. Like he had his mouth full of sticky Bullseyes, he said, “Mammy used to sing that to me on her lap in f
ront of the fire before putting me to bed.” He lost all control over his voice and he cried out the agony of a big animal in pain; and I knew the sound of his anguish was speeding along the top of the water to the Harbour in one direction and on past the Supply in the other. He leaned into me, nearly fell. I took his head onto my shoulder and pressed the side of his face into my neck. He cried from the depths, as the De profundis says at the end of Mass. We both sank to the ground at the foot of the parapet, and I held him there until Daddy came looking, thinking someone was in the Canal and shouting for help. I moved my hand at him and he went away.

  Missus Hodgkins

  During the War I often thought that Kitty and I should have been sisters-in-anxiety because of our common fears. But the anxiety I suffered for Sarah and Lionel during the War did not get its grip on Kitty until Matthias returned from Europe; it was only when he got back that she became anxious about his survival.

  Before he got home to Ballyrannel at all, while he was still off out there someplace picking his way homeward across the terrible fields of Europe, I had told Kitty I wanted him back working at Enderly. “Getting back into the routine of a workday will be the best thing for him, will get his mind off what he’s seen,” I said. And when he came home and Kitty told me she wasn’t getting anywhere with Matthias, I told her that in three days’ time I would go out to the house and speak to him myself.

  The three days’ notice was my way of warning Kitty’s mother that she would be having a visitor; a rich visitor was about to descend on a poor house. Poorer people get embarrassed when someone they imagine to be of higher status comes into their houses. God forbid that the priest or the doctor is suddenly summoned to a poor house; the sweeping and the scurrying that go on, the hiding of old boots and coats and the throwing of buckets and baskets into the nearest hiding places, the dog shouted out from under the kitchen table. I know the poor do it because I do it myself whenever someone, rich or poor, is on their way to visit Enderly.

  But even if a poorer woman has time to prepare for a visitor, there is no way to change the things that speak of poverty: a front door that’s scarred and holed from the teeth and claws of generations of dogs frightened of thunder; a cement floor with the swirls of the smoothing trowel still in it; a thatched house without ceilings that drops bits of ancient straw into tea mugs; homemade furniture that can never be made to shine like ancient, tooled and polished oak; walls that begin to turn brown from turf smoke on the same day they are freshly whitewashed; a kettle-and-pot crane over the open fire, thickly enamelled in years of black soot splattering down the broad chimney whenever it rains. No visitor, except for doctor or priest, ever gets further than the kitchen.

  Most better-off people respect the pride of the poor and never put themselves in the position of having to be invited into the poor person’s house. But even if I say so myself, I have the knack for fitting into a poor woman’s kitchen; instead of arriving grandly in the pony and trap I use the infernal cycle, wobbling all over the place. I wear clothes that have seen their best days a long time ago; I plunk into the homemade kitchen chair, take off my headscarf, stretch out my legs with their good but worn shoes, accept the offered tea and eat the homemade bread. I admire knick-knacks that deserve admiration and compliment by talking about the never-ending job of keeping a house clean.

  Kitty said that when she told her mother about my impending visit her mammy got into a flutter, got as fussed-up as a brooding hen, as agitated as a sow making a nest for the arrival of her litter. When Mister Hatchel suggested that Matthias should “accidentally” intercept me on the Bridge and in doing so keep me away from the house, he believed he had relieved his wife of the need to clean the house from top to bottom.

  And so it was that I was accidentally “come across” by Missus Hatchel after I had accidentally “come across” Matthias on the Bridge that day. According to Kitty, “Mammy” had been on the lookout for my arrival. When Mammy “coincidentally” went for a walk and began to cross over the Bridge, she pretended to be surprised at the sight of Matthias and his visitor.

  I dislike the name Mammy. It reminds me of a pair of old, overused mammaries hanging down around the navel.

  “Oh, Missus Hodgkins, it’s grand to see you,” Missus Hatchel said, and she had a little chat with me about the weather. She finished up by saying, “Maybe you’d like to call in for a cup of tea on your way home.” And Missus Hatchel was so excited that she forgot to cross the Bridge. She went home and buttered the slices of bread she had carefully cut, making sure they were the same thickness at the top and the bottom. And she peeked under the spread-over tea towel to make sure there were no bits of straw in the cups she’d got for a wedding present from Poor Meg, decorated with yellowhammers in leaf-bare, red-berried winter bushes.

  On the Bridge, Matthias did not turn to look at me when I propped the Raleigh against the parapet. He glanced at my face when I began to talk, as if the voice was familiar and he was trying to place it.

  I never dreamed that the steely self-control I’d manufactured and wrapped around myself like a suit of armour would come apart at the rivets that day. I did not even suspect that instead of giving comfort and encouragement to Matthias, it would be he who would give those things to me.

  For a few short minutes things went as planned. I told Matthias how Charlie Coffey, our foreman, and his wife had died of the influenza. “I need a good man to take over the farm, Matthias. I think you’d be a better organizer than any of the other lads, and anyhow, they’re all afraid of the job; none of them will take it on. If everything works out all right then you can have Charlie’s cottage in a few months. We’ll give it a new coat of whitewash, paint the windows and the door.”

  And suddenly, for no discernible reason, my suit of armour collapsed around my feet and my brain escaped, took off on its own. “Oh, Matthias, they said Lionel got lost between Ypres and Passchendaele. And there’s Sarah … Oh, Matthias.” And then I was crying with my forehead on Matt’s shoulder. And I pleaded, a fistful of Matthias’s jacket in my clenched hand, “Tell me what it was like. Tell me about the place where my Lionel died. I know from the ‘Pimpernel’ stories that you were at Passchendaele too.”

  Matthias peered down onto the smooth surface of the Canal as if he were reading the mysterious tracks of the water striders. After a long, long time he spoke unhurriedly.

  “Passchendaele was higher than Wipers and the Germans were up there with their guns. Our lads were always trying to capture it.” He paused so long, I was afraid he’d come to a full stop. “If a soldier went missing in action there, it meant he’d gone down into the mud somewhere in the seven miles between the two towns. Besides all the other lads who got killed and were found, ninety thousand lads disappeared between Wipers and Passchendaele and were never heard of again, not a trace of them ever found. Ninety thousand.” He stopped, as if trying to imagine ninety thousand men.

  “Con would have said … I was there in 1917, lying on my back on the edge of a road just below Tyne Cot. I was getting a rest after pulling myself out of the muck the way a nearly drowned man would put his hands on the bank of a river and pull himself out shaking all over. There was a dressing station in Tyne Cot beside the old German pillbox. Rain, not heavy, was coming down onto my face, and the clouds were low, like home, like we were on our backs on the Canal bank, Con and Kitty, looking up at clouds so low we could reach up and make swirls.”

  Matthias went silent again and I wanted to shake him, to keep him going, to hand me whatever little scrap he had to tell me. “Everything was the colour of wet turf, brown-black, not a green leaf, not a blade of grass. The man on the stretcher had gone quiet, and I thought he might be dead after all our trouble, eight of us after carrying him out, sometimes with the muck up to our bellies, the stretcher up at our shoulders. But I didn’t care enough about the stretcher-case to bother myself with him. The other seven lads were lying down on the road too, catching their breath, trying to get the blood back into their sh
oulder muscles.”

  Oh God, I thought, will you keep going and tell me something about Lionel.

  “I was so dirty, so wet, so hungry, so tired that I did not believe I would ever get myself going again. I hadn’t been able, or maybe it was that I wasn’t interested enough, to unbutton my trousers for a long time, days, maybe a week, and I’d been doing in them what I had to do whenever I had to. I must have stunk worse than rotten potatoes.

  “I don’t know if I took out Knifey, but I do know that I thought about her, about how nice and easy she could do for me what she’d done for all the other lads. All I’d have to do was set her handle in a little hole in the road, put a slant on her blade, and roll onto her. And while I was thinking about Knifey, one of the lads said, by way of warning, ‘Staff car coming.’ But no one moved, no one looked up. The car had nowhere to go unless it ran over us first. It stopped within inches of the lad who’d warned us. ‘And fuck you too,’ the lad said, his arm a pillow to keep his head off the road and the wind-up handle of the car six inches above him. ‘Why don’t you just drive on over me and put me out of my misery? I don’t care a shite.’

  “My arm was a pillow too, and I was facing the car. The driver jumped out shouting, ‘Party, ’shun!’ No one gave any sign that they’d heard him except the lad under the wind-up handle. He said, ‘And fuck you too,’ and he didn’t know or care if anyone heard him. The driver didn’t know yet that he had crossed the boundary into hell a few miles ago. He roared at us again to jump to our feet for inspection. Then the car swayed on its springs and two more pairs of feet stepped out of the car. One of them could have been a lieutenant, from what I could see of his patches. The other one had so many stripes and ribbons and medals that he must have been someone near the top.