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

by Tom Phelan

  “We fished in the Somme, Con and myself. We skinned hazel poles for rods. Unravelled a reins to make the line. Bent strands of barbed wire were the hooks. Con cut meat off a dead horse for bait. We caught nothing. No fish could be that stupid to be fooled with barbed wire and horsemeat, Con said. But we fished. That’s all we wanted to do. Fish. It didn’t even matter if there were fish in the water. We were terrible tired from carrying all the bodies out, and when we wakened it was the next morning and the rods were gone.” He paused for a long time again. These pauses, I’d decided, were for Matthias to give himself time to poke through a huge mound of memories, to carefully unravel the ones he wanted to look at. “Con said he didn’t know the names of all the fish till you wrote that composition for the school in Marbra; where the nuns wouldn’t take you for saying the sound of the Canal Song was better than Sheila Feeney singing at Benediction. Roach, perch, eel, pike, bream, carp, rudd and tench.”

  I was very happy to slip into the memory he was in. “That’s what Daddy said. Mammy said it was because I wrote what Uncle Martin said about swans’ names—pens and inkwells. But it was just that my composition wasn’t good enough.”

  “Con imitated Sheila Feeney singing Tantum Ergo,” Matthias said, “went up on his toes on the high notes and made the desperate faces she made like she was trying to keep in a fart. He made his jaw tremble and joined his hands at the belly. We’d be in stitches, even the lads who didn’t know what he was doing. Once he sang it in a shed with hay. A billet. Ah, the smell of the hay …” Matt paused again, and when he resumed talking I had to make a ninety-degree turn in my brain to catch up with him.

  “Do you think I’ve recovered enough from the War to be your husband?” he asked. My faltering brain took a few seconds to recognize the question as a marriage proposal.

  Even though there had been times when I was very cross about Matt and Sarah, I could have burst into green flames, I always knew Matt and I would get married sooner or later. Even so, now that Matt was beating around the bush in his attempt to propose to me, a weakness visited my knees briefly, but I had the presence of mind not to shout out my joy; there should be a little romance in a marriage proposal, I thought. I leaned over the parapet and looked down at the three roach.

  “If I was a roach I’d die of the hunger,” I said. “I’d never be able to eat flies.” The roach had had their fill of flies; they had tired of upsetting the striders and were now bunking each other with their heads.

  “Do you think your parents think I’m good enough for you?”

  I dribbled a spit over my bottom lip and dropped it within an inch of the smallest fish. It flew away in a flash of silver as if the dragons of fishwater were after it. Matthias didn’t take his eyes off the water. “Would you mind living in the Enderly cottage with me if we got married?”

  The roach began to circle, trying to figure out what direction would take them toward the Harbour. “That small fish doesn’t know his way home,” I said.

  I could feel Matthias looking at me, could see him frowning, even though I wasn’t looking at him. “Would you stay working for Missus Hodgkins if we got married?”

  Twilight had crept in, and the bats were skimming along the water in their unbalanced way, as awkward as bottom-heavy mice learning to fly. It was a year and three months since that day I’d washed Matthias in the Canal.

  Without Matthias even noticing, I picked a flat stone off the road and dropped it into the water. The fish fled in three directions and Matt looked at me. I looked at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “Are you listening to me at all, Kitty?”

  “Are you asking me to marry you, Matt?” I said.

  “I suppose I am.” He looked back to the water.

  “Matt, look at me.” I put a hand on each side of his face and twisted it toward me. “If you want me to marry you, then ask me to marry you.”

  “I’m afraid you might say no.”

  “Matthias!” I shouted in exasperation, and the word went skimming among the flying mice along the top of the water. “Ask me if I’ll marry you”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Who?”

  “What?”

  “Who are you asking to marry you?”

  “You.”

  “And what’s my name?”

  “Kitty.”

  “Then ask me again.”

  “Will you marry me, Kitty?”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “Next month?’

  “That would be nice.”

  “I’ll think about it, Matthias.”

  “You will?”

  “I just did.”

  “And?”

  “Yes yes yes!” I shouted so loud that my voice boomed along the Canal to the Harbour. And I already had flung my arms around Matt’s neck by the time the yeses came echoing back over the still surface to the Bridge.

  Ralphie Blake

  I didn’t sleep for ages after the Lamberts’ place. God, the nightmares when I did sleep! The two of them would be on the floor beside each other on their backs, their faces melting and little rivers of fat flowing out and their flesh spitting and hissing like rashers and sausages in a frying pan on a Sunday morning. Jesus! I’d wake up paralysed with the fright and for a minute I wouldn’t know where I was, the two of them still on the floor beside the bed and the smell of burning meat in the room. The state of huffing and puffing I’d be in, and the missus asking me what was wrong. The sweat would be running down my face and my feet freezing in the bed at the same time.

  Since the catechism and Cain and Abel in the school, I thought Murder was the worst thing; the very worst sin. Even the sound of it is terrible. You can feel the fear of the one getting murdered in the word and hear the evil of the one doing it. Murder. Murder is a Roman soldier sticking his sword through a baby in its mother’s arms in the Massacre of the Innocents, or Cain bringing down the branch of a tree on the back of his brother’s head. When Murder is done the sun should not be shining. And here I was in my bed in the dark and me, myself—me, Ralphie Blake—was a Murderer. I’d be lying there on my back looking up into the dark and saying, “Murderer, Murderer.”

  I didn’t light the match that lit the fire that killed the Lamberts, but I was down near the Canal Bridge with a whistle to blow if anyone came along. Protestants or not, the poor bastards were going to see their entire lives go up in flames. Even though they weren’t supposed to die, Father Kinsella said I was guilty of Murder because I was a helper. He told me, too, that if I kept on hanging out with men who might commit Murder again, his absolution would be no good because I wouldn’t be having a firm resolution to avoid the same sin in the future. “No resolution, no absolution,” Mister Bennett the teacher used to say.

  Like an eejit, I told Johnjoe Lacy what the priest said, and he nearly ate the face off me, called Father Kinsella a fucking eejit of a priest and said if I became a traitor to the IRA I would be shot like a deserter. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” Johnjoe said, and he took delight in saying it, like he had me by the balls.

  So when Johnjoe leaned on the wingboard of the cart fornent the Quaker Meeting House and said, “Enderly’s soon, me lad,” I got such a bubbling in the guts that I wanted to find a bush to shite behind. I knew this day was coming because lately Johnjoe had been often landing on the wingboard like a grey crow that eats dead animals “to keep my patriotic spirit burning hot for future forays for Ireland.”

  “Your man, Wrenn, will be our man on the inside,” he said.

  I didn’t look up from my brushing. I was so staggered with a sudden rush of fear that I had to squeeze my grip on the brush handle as well as tighten up my arse. I was between a rock and a hard place. I knew it would be suicide to try to burn down Enderly because Matthias Wrenn wouldn’t let it happen. There I was, Johnjoe behind me pushing, and Matthias in front ready to kill.

  The Lamberts’ place had been so easy
that Johnjoe and the lads thought all they had to do was waltz into Enderly and light a match. They were all so cocksure of themselves because the wind happened to take the fire through the Lamberts’ house and the outbuildings in a flash. To hear them talking you’d think God had something to do with it, had raised the wind and steered it to destroy what had taken hundreds of years to build. To hear Johnjoe you’d think God was a Catholic who hated Protestants and England. I always thought the catechism was wrong where it said man is made in God’s image and likeness; it should have said God is made in man’s image and likeness.

  When I’d lie awake in the dark after a Lambert nightmare, I’d start thinking about the burning of Enderly that I knew was coming. The way Johnjoe talked about it, you’d think Matthias Wrenn was a child, like Johnjoe didn’t know that Matthias going through the War was the same as a piece of metal going through a four-year furnace.

  There was something about all the lads who’d been in the War. It was like they’d seen things, had apparitions like the girl at Lourdes and been changed, made different from the rest of us. Some of them were more than a bit touched, like Mad Bill Goodwin with the cat in his coat pocket, its head sticking out and it mewing—some people said it even pissed in the pocket; Joe Lawless snaking around against the walls of the houses like he was dodging bullets; Shaky Dick Porter shaking all the time and falling down in a fit when he heard a door banging in the wind. Most of them didn’t even know what the weather was doing, walking around in the spills like the sun was shining, or out cutting hedges or spreading dung in a farmer’s field in the middle of winter stripped to the shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the buttons opened down to the navel while the rest of us shivered in the frost. Some of them were such hard chaws that they could knit socks out of barbed wire and then wear them. And the way they’d look through you when you’d be talking to them, looking like they were looking at something forty miles away or a hundred years ago; none of them giving a shite about the IRA or about what happened in Dublin at Easter in 1916, except for being annoyed to hell with the Sixteeners for doing what they did when they did it.

  Matthias Wrenn was the hardest chaw of all the War lads. He was no relation of the Matt who went off to see the world with Con in 1913. His long hair and that headband of his gave him the look of an old warrior on the cover of a book wearing skins; all he needed was a shield and a sword. There was no knowing when Matthias would slip back into the state he was in when he came home, mad as a coot. And here was Johnjoe Lacy saying Matthias would be our man on the inside, whatever the hell that meant. I knew, sure as be damned, that Matthias would take the side of the Hodgkinses if for no other reason than that he was living at Enderly, for Christ’s sake, with Kitty and the child in the foreman’s cottage. And talking about Kitty! She wasn’t going to be darning her husband’s socks while we were outside running around setting fires, burning her house out from under her. Herby Kelly’s face still had the scars of her nails from the day Matthias came home from the War and Herby opened his mouth to let some of his old Fenian shite out. And as well as that, she’d been with Missus Hodgkins all during the War, and the two of them with men in the trenches. If two women spend time together in the same ditch fighting off the same enemy, they quick get more related to each other than sisters. Kitty would be as fierce fighting for Enderly as Matthias.

  Johnjoe Lacy said Matthias was just lucky, that it was luck that had kept him alive for those four years. Once Johnjoe got an idea in his head he used every kind of stupidity to back it up. Everyone said he’d got worse since the beating he’d taken from Dan Griffin that Fair Day a couple of years ago. Of all the people in the town it was only Johnjoe who saw his beating as heroic; the beating was his martyrdom for Ireland. Ever since the Fair, he used his face to draw more attention to himself, forcing people to look at him while he went on with his long-winded speechifying, the jaw all crooked from the three breaks, the wrecked nose twisted off to one side. Everyone in the town knew that Dan Griffin left Johnjoe nearly dead in the cowshite of the Fair Day. But many times from the wingboard of my cart, Johnjoe told me he had risen up out of the cowshite and it was this rising that had proved he’d been right to tell Dan Griffin he wasn’t an Irishman at all. Johnjoe was proud of his injuries; he believed the nose and the jaw made people think that if only he’d had the chance he would have got the same wounds in Dublin in 1916, that he would have been out there in the front lines laying down his life for Ireland twenty times over. He always managed to put his scars in front of the burning General Post Office with guns shooting all over the place.

  One night I was staring into the dark in the bed terrified that Johnjoe might be thinking of shooting me because I’d told him about confessing to Father Kinsella. The thoughts of getting a hard bullet in the head were enough to make me throw up; the noise of the shot and the burning of my skin from the powder! I knew I had to show Johnjoe I was a true IRA man, and it took an awful lot of thinking before I thought of something; I’d start acting like I was as good an IRA man as Johnjoe; I’d start talking about “us” and “we.”

  Every day after that, while I swept and shovelled along the town roads, I practised in my head how I’d talk to Johnjoe.

  So now fornent the Quaker Meeting House I went around the ass and cart to where Johnjoe was leaning on the wingboard, and I hoping I wasn’t walking like a man with the cheeks of his arse pinched together looking for a bush. I leaned on the wingboard beside him. I spoke softly, almost in a whisper like I was a conspirator.

  “We’ll have to be very careful with Wrenn, Johnjoe.” I used Matthias’s last name so Johnjoe wouldn’t think I liked him. “The lads from the War can’t be trusted. They’re not Irish anymore after being in the English army so long. Some of them talk like they’re English. They don’t believe in God anymore and they don’t care if the Hodgkinses are Protestants or Catholics or pagans. Wrenn is the worst of them.”

  “He’s our man on the inside, Ralphie, and he’ll do what I tell him to do because he won’t have a say in the matter.”

  “We’ll have to be very careful about the way we get him to help us, Johnjoe. The Hodgkinses were in that house for two hundred years before the Famine, and they’ve always been good to the people of Ballyrannel. I’ve thought about this, Johnjoe. We have to remember that Wrenn worked for years for the Hodgkinses before the War. And the very minute he came home, when he was still going around stupid, Missus Hodgkins herself asked him to go back to work for her. She went down to the Canal Bridge on her bike. I don’t think he’s going to let anything happen to Missus Hodgkins or the daughter, or any part of Enderly for that matter.”

  When Johnjoe answered me, he was whispering too. “Wrenn and his ilk are only waiting for the chance to redeem themselves for fighting for the English. He’ll be glad we’re giving him the chance to fight for Ireland.”

  “But are we sure of that, Johnjoe? We have to remember that Wrenn lives in Enderly. His own father worked in Enderly from the time he was a chap to the day he got burnt to death. He worked the harvest from the cutting of the hay to the picking of the spuds; he ploughed for weeks every spring in Enderly. I think we’ll have a hard time getting Wrenn on our side.”

  In other words, I thought to myself, if we go to Matthias expecting him to help the IRA burn Enderly or harm anyone in it, he’ll run us off the place with the five prongs of a dungfork up our arses and you’re an eejit, Johnjoe, if you can’t see that.

  Johnjoe couldn’t see it. He said, “Them lads can’t forgive themselves for fighting for the English at the Somme when they should have been fighting against them at the General Post Office. The likes of Wrenn are all ashamed. They’re all panting, all waiting for the chance to fight the English to get forgiveness from the real Irish—the anti-English, patriotic, and Catholic Irish.” Johnjoe started fiddling with the buttons of his fork. I didn’t look down but I knew he was going to take a slash up against the wheel of my ass and cart right there in the middle of the town. Johnjoe’s wat
er started sloshing through the spokes of the wheel onto the road. He was worse than a dog.

  It’s funny how you can listen to a man saying words and hear him meaning something different altogether. I was only hearing Johnjoe talking about himself, that he was going to burn Enderly so he could show Ballyrannel that it wasn’t fear that had kept him from doing something against the English when the doing was possible and dangerous to do. Johnjoe was safely jumping up on the bandwagon so that at a future time when land was being divided, he would be able to say, “I fought for Ireland. I’m entitled.”

  Johnjoe talked like he knew Matthias, like he knew what went on inside Matthias’s head. “We’ll be offering Wrenn the chance he’s frothing for. I’m telling you, Ralphie, he’ll help us to burn down Enderly. He might even do it on his own without any of our lads having to go up there at all, if I went up there and explained things to him.”

  Dan Griffin must have damaged Johnjoe’s brain as well as his face when he’d battered him into the cow dung that time.

  “We still have to be careful, Johnjoe,” I whispered, and I pretending I couldn’t see or hear Johnjoe’s rush of yellow water. “Wrenn and Con Hatchel spent too many good years in that house. They played with the Hodgkins children, went hunting with the son. I think if Wrenn finds out we’re going to burn down Enderly he’ll kill every one of us.” Johnjoe must have had a bladder like a sow’s. God, the water that came out of him!

  “Maybe we’ll only tell him some of the plan.” I could hardly believe that Johnjoe had listened to me.

  “I don’t think we should bring him into this at all, Johnjoe. I’d say he’ll even go to the RIC for help if he has to.” And the minute I said that, I was afraid Johnjoe heard fear leaking through my pretending.