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

by Tom Phelan

  “Maybe he won’t be able to go anywhere, Ralphie. If what you say about him is right, then maybe it would be better not to ask for his help until we knock on the wicket gate and he answers it. Then we’ll give him a choice: help us or we’ll kill him on the spot.”

  “Will we have a gun, Johnjoe?”

  “There’s no guns, Ralphie.”

  “Then how will we kill him?”

  “There’s more than one way to skin a cat, Ralphie. A piece of thin wire around his neck is one way.” Johnjoe gave his thing a terrible shaking, and I knew some of his drops fell on my boots. The ignorant fucker.

  “Who’ll put the wire around his neck?”

  “You sound like you’re afraid of Wrenn, Ralphie.”

  Sweet Jesus tonight! I got very nervous and tried to cover up by making a joke. “If he was dead I wouldn’t be afraid at all to put the wire around his neck. But to tell you the truth, Johnjoe, Wrenn is the last man in the world I’d pick to have a fight with.”

  Johnjoe slapped me on the shoulder. “No one’s going to ask you to kill him, Ralphie.”

  “But what’s to stop him from killing us, you and the lads and myself?”

  “Six to one, Ralphie. No man could beat odds like that. Wrenn will back down very quick.” Johnjoe folded his thing back into his trousers.

  “Don’t you think that depends on what he’s fighting for, Johnjoe?”

  “Ralphie, I hate saying this, but it sounds to me like you’re getting afraid again to strike this blow against the English.”

  Again! I felt my arse tightening up. “Fuck the English,” I blustered. “It’s Wrenn I’m afraid of, one of our own.”

  “A little fear never hurt anyone, Ralphie, as long as it doesn’t make him so weak that he’d betray his friends.” He fiddled with the buttons in his fork and sent a watery spit across the cart into the street. “When you get the call to arms, Ralphie, be ready to answer. I’ll go over the plans with my second. We’ll be striking before Christmas.” Johnjoe pushed himself off the wingboard and went off to sweep his chimleys, leaving me and my guts as shaky as frogs’ spawn in a ditch.

  That night I couldn’t sleep until I convinced myself that Johnjoe would never find out if I became an informer, and that Matthias would kill me for a fact if I did anything against Enderly. Murder is the worst word for me. But for a lot of people in Ireland, “informer” is the worst word. When Christ told everyone to love each other, he pointed to Ireland and said informers were not counted. When an Irish informer dies, there is only one road for him to travel.

  It was because of how the Irish think of informers that it took me two days to go up to Enderly in the dark to tell Matthias what Johnjoe was going to do. In the end it was either be a live informer or a dead IRA man killed with a terrible lot of pain. Imagine getting stuck through the guts with a five-pronged dung fork.

  Kitty Hatchel

  Two months after Ballyadams had snickered off her veil in the Back Batens, Sarah went to the door of the Machine Shed after the men were gone home for the day.

  I was finishing up my work, and Missus Hodgkins was at the window again. “She’s gone in,” she said.

  In the Machine Shed, Matthias was lifting a pickaxe off its place on the wall. When he saw Sarah, he said, “You look different.” And being a woman, Sarah asked, “How?”

  Matthias banged the end of the handle against the floor and the loose head of the pickaxe slipped down along the smooth wood to the floor. He went to the workbench. Then he said, “I don’t know. You just look different.” He put the handle in the vice and picked up a handsaw.

  When Sarah spoke next she had walked over to the bench. “Do I look much different now?” she asked, and when Matthias turned around she had removed her veil and her knitted cap. To Matthias it looked as if Sarah had been secretly letting the sun shine on her face. Her freckles were back, and the paleness of the Back Batens was gone.

  “She had the wool cap in one hand and a comb and a scissors in the other. Her hair had grown to her shoulders since I saw it in the Back Batens, but it was still chopped like a child after getting hold of a scissors when the mother wasn’t looking.”

  “Will you cut my hair, Matthias?” Sarah said, and she touched the bunches of uneven strands. She held out the comb and the scissors.

  “Besides clipping a horse for the winter, I’ve never cut hair in my life,” Matt said.

  “All you have to do is even it up all around, make it all the same length.”

  They looked at each other for so long they almost entered a staring match. Then Matt asked, “Who cut it for you the last time?”

  “Can’t you tell? I did it myself. I looked at myself in a mirror for the first time in four years that day Ballyadams pulled off the veil in the Back Batens.”

  Matthias finished sawing the notch into the end of the pick handle. He said, “You can’t blame me if I make it worse.” He took the comb and scissors.

  “You’d have to be blind to do that,” Sarah said, and she sat down on the round slice of beech, eight inches thick, that Charlie Coffey had put legs in years ago.

  Missus Hodgkins came into the kitchen. I was straightening my hair to look presentable for Matthias when I said goodnight to him before going home on my bike. Missus Hodgkins said, “Wait a minute, Kitty. I’m going out to look into the Machine Shed.”

  “What excuse have you this time?” I asked her.

  “There’s a goose hatching in the Turkey House,” she said, and she left. She was back in less than a minute. “You can’t go out to Matthias, Kitty,” she said. She was agitated, breathless. She sat down, put her elbows on the table, and put her face in her hands. Missus Hodgkins was not a woman to let anyone see her being less than strong. Her shoulders shook and she sobbed once. She took a deep breath, wiped her eyes with her fingers. “Matt was between Sarah and the door, but I could see she was sitting. Matt’s cutting her hair. I saw the scissors in Matt’s hand and I heard the snipping.” And then Missus Hodgkins sobbed. I stood behind her and put my hands on her shoulders while she wept in relief for the recovery of her lost daughter. Even though I knew Matt and I were about to be married, even though I knew he and Sarah were recovering from the War, even though I knew Sarah had helped to bring Matt home as much as he had helped her, my jealous self almost drove me out to the Machine Shed to scream and cause havoc.

  Missus Hodgkins put her hand on my hand as she calmed down. She said, “I know this is driving you mad, Kitty, this thing of Matthias and Sarah, and I thank you for being so strong for the two of them.” She stood up and took both of my hands. “Most women wouldn’t have been able to stand by and let them help each other this way. You have been very selfless. Do you mind if I hug you?” And she held me for a long time. And then I put my arms around her, and we stood at the kitchen table like that for ages. When we let go, the green dragon had retreated, but he hadn’t disappeared. Sharp nails were still clawing at my insides.

  It was two weeks later that Missus Hodgkins found a note on the table when she came down to the kitchen in the morning. “Dear Mama, I’m almost home. Today I will not be wearing the veil or the cap. Sarah.” Ten minutes later, as she raised her cup to her lips, she looked up and Sarah was in the doorway and she was beautiful and she was smiling and she was crying and she said, “Hello, Mama,” the first time she’d spoken to her mother since she’d gone away to France six years ago.

  When I came to work a while later, I swept up the broken pieces of Missus Hodgkins’s tea cup.

  During the week before our wedding, I talked to Matthias about my jealousy. It was my roundabout way of telling him that once we were husband and wife, I would not be able to endure that kind of distress. We were lying in Ali Baba’s Cave at the time, each of us fully dressed, each of us exhausted. Matt got up on his elbow and looked down into my face.

  He said, “Kitty, Kitty, Kitty,” and his voice was full of love and sorrow. “I’ve tried to figure out Sarah and myself in my head, because I wanted
to tell you what went on. I don’t want even a shadow of Sarah to ever come between us.” He placed the flat of his hand on my belly as if afraid I might not stay to listen. “Let me finish what I have to say, even if I say it wrong. At first I was afraid of Sarah. I thought she was madder than me. Then I saw we were two people quare in the head and still injured after being in the same train crash together. Then I was afraid you would start thinking wrong things about us. The only time she was womanness to my manness was the time she stood before me without her veil and cap and asked me to cut her hair.

  “The second time she came to the Machine Shed, in some strange twist in my brain, Sarah became Con. The rest of the time, me helping to bring Sarah home from the War was me holding Con after Knifey went into his heart. In some way, Sarah let me see that I had helped Con home from the War. I helped him home because I couldn’t let him be dragged out there and be shot like a dog for standing up to Haig. Getting Sarah away from the War is exactly what I did for Con. Sarah escaped out of the fog, and Con slipped away into it. And I am happy that Sarah let me see what I did for Con was exactly what I was doing for her—there was no difference, and I will never be sad again for what I did for Con. I will always be happy, always glad that I helped him home from the War.”

  Missus Hodgkins

  Everyone said the horse’s name as if it were one word—Jackdempsey.

  Dempsey was in the papers when the horse came into his prime, that’s why David gave him the name. “Big” was the word to describe Jackdempsey, but if the boxer had been as gentle as the horse when I got him, he wouldn’t have fought his way out of a paper bag.

  When the children went away, I couldn’t enjoy riding anymore, not with them facing the hardships of war. So Jackdempsey got fat and uppity—a little bit nasty. But when Lionel was killed and David died and Sarah came home, I had to start riding again, had to get out there and gallop away from it all. It was the old mare, Timahoe, I took out. By myself, in the depths of the countryside, I had to drive poor Timahoe too hard to get her into a gallop. So I told Phil Kelly to do something with Jackdempsey, bring him out every day until the horse was back in shape.

  Jackdempsey smelled Phil’s nervousness from the beginning, and instead of the man taking the horse for gallops, the horse took the man on wild rides, one of which ended with Phil going over the horse’s head and landing on the flat of his back, the wind knocked out of him. He could have broken his neck.

  That night after Matthias told me about Passchendaele on the Bridge, I found myself awake and in my head was the idea that Matthias and Jackdempsey would be good for each other: at full gallop on a horse with a nasty attitude, Matthias’s mind would have no choice but to be engaged with the present moment. And it worked perfectly. I firmly believe it was the wild gallops on Jackdempsey that cleared Matt’s mind of the War for a while and allowed him to be home, if only for the duration of the ride. And I believe, too, that it was through this new opening in Matthias’s mind that Sarah slipped. When they quickly realized they were both still plunging around in the muck and death of Europe—that each had even killed friends to save them—Sarah and Matthias, together, started the long climb out of the guilty trenches of their own minds. Poor Kitty; she was so selfless, so strong for the two of them. I know she suffered from painful jealousy. What woman wouldn’t?

  A few months after he began work, Matthias had subdued, retamed and retrained Jackdempsey; after his long hiatus, the big beast was gentle again and he was mine to ride. And two months after Matthias had cut Sarah’s hair in the Machine Shed, I galloped Jackdempsey across the far fields, pushed him to the point where he was quivering when I let him turn around to begin the canter home.

  I suddenly had the feeling that I had skipped forward in time, that I’d missed something. I wasn’t surprised at all that my eyes were full of blue, that the blue was framed in the stems of the long grass swaying around me. Not one cloud was visible, nothing but blue. A blue dress fluttered into my head, the one I had given Kitty that day she went to Dublin to see Matthias and Con off to India. The dress had been bought out of a London catalogue for my own nineteen-year-old Sarah to wear to her cousin’s wedding one year earlier.

  Sarah at nineteen!

  Sarah, home at last!

  The blue of her eyes, the blue of her dress, the tone of her skin, the russet of her hair. And she carried herself at the wedding in a way I had not been aware of before—I was seeing my little girl as a fully grown woman for the first time. All eyes were on her, and I was anxious, afraid the bride might think the groom’s relatives were trying to upstage her. The way David beamed every time he looked at her, his eyes wandering back to her all day. And to think that within a year of the wedding she would have begun the journey in which she would become so lost.

  I fell asleep in the long grass with the sun warm on me. In a very quick dream I saw Matthias, as lost himself as was Sarah, plunging back into the bloody mist of the war and bringing Sarah by the hand out of the gun-flashed fog, a whole person. And there she was, Sarah standing in the kitchen doorway more beautiful than she had ever been. “Hello, Mama,” she said. We ended up on the kitchen floor, me with my back to the wall, Sarah with her head on my breast, the two women of the family wailing in an ecstasy of joy and pain; out of Abattoir Europe we had snatched this remaining piece of our family; Enderly would have children again, children for David and Lionel and Sarah and me; the next generation would not know, could not know, the pain of the Enderlies who’d gone before them. We were the unlucky generation.

  The blueness was disturbed by a wandering crow flapping its black trail across the sky. As the crow flies, I thought, is not the best way to describe the shortest distance between two points. Any crow I ever watched wandered around in the air from one curious sight to the next—just like a solitary dog wandering from one tantalizing sniff to the next.

  September 1917. It was in September our Lionel was killed near Passchendaele; in January 1918 the Hatchels got news of Con, wrapped in protective lies in a letter from Matthias; in March 1918 our silent Sarah came home—brought home by two other VADs—wearing a headdress like Moslem women wear, only her eyes showing. Her blue eyes! Poor silent child. In her damaged mind, the VADs told me, Sarah was covering the disfigurement she had seen in the disfigured faces of her friends when their dressing station caught fire. Sarah, the VADs said, might or might not regain her sanity, might or might not speak again—nobody knew. They told me about Pine Haven’s failure to get through to her. Poor Sarah: she fled when strangers came, avoided the workers, even hid herself from Kitty; didn’t leave the house at all; only reluctantly allowed David and myself to touch her shoulders. A month after her return my beloved David died of a heart attack in the kitchen. Lionel’s death and Sarah’s madness were so visibly dragging him down that I knew he couldn’t go on.

  The crow sank out of my eyes and I heard Jackdempsey close by, the metal of his bit rattling in its iron rings. It was then I suspected I had fallen off the horse. But I had no memory of it—the falling—didn’t remember if I’d tried to save myself with desperate grabbings at mane and saddle. I did remember that I’d been cantering along with Kitty in my mind. Later in the day Sarah and I were planning to visit Kitty in the foreman’s cottage. Kitty’s mother was coming to hold Cornelia and I had baked a dozen scones first thing that morning, had put the two jars—clotted cream and blackcurrant jam—in the basket, each covered with butter paper held on the rims with double-bowed pink yarn.

  The magnificent details a person remembers: double-bowed pink yarn!

  In August 1918 Kitty ran wailing along the Canal bank to meet her returned soldier, her Matthias who had survived four years of shells, bullets, disease, drowning, influenza, fleas and rats. “Le Pimpernel irlandais,” as the French journalist called him, had finally come home. “Does a stretcher-bearer in no man’s land worry all the time about getting killed, Monsieur Wrenn?” “No. Out there, you only think about what you’re doing at this very moment. The noti
on of getting killed belongs in the future. So, if you’re alive there’s no need to worry. If you’re dead you can’t worry. The ones who did worry went mad quickly.” Our very own Matthias speaking like an ancient sage, and all Ballyrannel proud of him. Matthias and Con, for four years, had danced together on the steely, interlocking, razor-edged blades of the War, while all around them—in their very close presence—men were unlegged, de-armed, eviscerated, blinded, unmanned, evaporated, made mad, exploded into red mist, made part of the mud in which they had learned to live like some unclassified species of animal. Matthias had scraped other men’s brains, other men’s eyes, other men’s blood, other men’s warm viscera off his face so many times that he simply wiped his hands clean on the seat of his trousers. “Le Pimpernel irlandais” came home and immediately plodded back into no man’s land to save our Sarah.

  Jackdempsey’s big bewhiskered nose was six inches above my face, the green juice of the munched grass oozing out at both sides of his mouth. His nostrils were two black holes against my face. When he sniffed, he made the noise of a windstorm in a winter’s chimney. He went away and I heard him maneuvering the sweet grass over the piece of iron across the back of his tongue. I was very comfortable lying on my back in thick grass, not concerned at all that a one-ton horse was stepping carelessly nearby.

  The big ship made the long slow turn away from the Suez Canal, back into the Mediterranean, but the implications for Con and Matthias meant nothing to Kitty. How could she have seen the connection between the killing of an Austrian prince in an unpronounceable city in an unheard-of country and the turning-around of a ship full of British troops bound for India? The going to India was far worse for Kitty than was the turning-around in the Mediterranean. She didn’t care if India meant adventure more than it meant danger. She could not accept that the young men had been handed the chance of a lifetime, were going on a poor-man’s Cook’s Tour of the world at the expense of the king. When she read Matthias’s letter about their ship pulling out of the queue within sight of the Suez Canal, she squealed with delight—Matthias was not going to be eight thousand miles away—he would only be in Belgium or France for a few months while the War lasted. “How can Matthias and Con be in danger? They’re only stretcher-bearers, and nobody shoots stretcher-bearers.” That’s what she said when I told her about that first day of July in 1916.