On Canaan’s Side

by Barry, Sebastian

  ‘You could cause a lot of trouble for me with Ella,’ he said. ‘And that would be right and just.’

  ‘I’m not going to do that, Joe. I probably don’t even know your real name.’

  ‘My name is Joe,’ he said, and smiled. Then I knew he was going to go. ‘If you want to tell the boy about me, you …’

  ‘You already said that, Joe.’

  ‘Right. So long, Lilly. I’m sorry, like I said. I’m real sorry.’

  Then he went off towards the door in that strange slow canter of his. There was something in his apology that touched me again. Maybe in some ways a useless man, maybe even a coward. A bigamous man for sure. Who had caused me immense grief and confusion. All the ways confounded. Everything that is once builded shall be torn down. So that again I thought, I could with justice kill this man now. Maybe when I stood up then, I stood up to do so. There is a part of me wishes it was so. Joe Kinderman, or not Joe Kinderman, just Joe, some Joe.

  He paused at the till, just to pay the cheque. Joe the gentleman. Then he was nearly out the door. Nearly gone. Nearly too late. I hurried after him, and arrested him, as one might say, I stopped him in mid gigantic step, the heavy metal door was propped against his right foot. I stared up at his face, and then my head went down, scrabbling about in my bag. I found the damn thing then. I handed it to him, the picture of Ed when he was off to his debs night with a vanished girlfriend called Janet. Joe took it, held it in his slender fingers, those ridiculously beautiful hands of his. He looked at the photograph. He looked at it. Big tears started in his eyes. He looked at me again with a last look, and almost fell out into the street, clutching the photograph. Then he plunged away, to what he thought was his proper life, into the river of people, the confused torrent of people, into Canaan itself.

  Fourteenth Day without Bill

  About this time, Dr King was shot.

  Ed came home on leave, and he was an absolutely unsmiling young man that time. The man on the TV said the tragedy was all the greater because Dr King had been killed in America, ‘on Canaan’s side itself’.

  All the cities I had lived in were burning, and all the cities I had not lived in also.

  Ed had never grown very tall, not nearly as tall as his father, but he was a serious person now, an army man, and it gave him a strange gravity, so he seemed taller than he was. He gave me a sort of vertigo looking at him, a panic. He was a very handsome-looking child, like his father also. He was so precious to me that my blood wanted to stop flowing through my veins until I could discover a way to help him. I was his mother. I had nothing to give him, nothing. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

  His first night back I made him his favourite dinner. He ate it all right, but he didn’t seem to notice it particularly, and he didn’t say anything about it.

  This wasn’t long after I bumped into Joe in New York, but I never said a word about that. I thought I would, sometime, but there was another emergency in my boy just then. It was the emergency in a child when he is full of new intent, whose nature I probably would not have understood even if he had taken the trouble to explain it to me.

  Ed went back to the war. Then yet another great soul was pulled suddenly from the song of life.

  I was watching TV in my quarters. It was my day off as it happened. We were still living in a few rooms in one of the wings of Mrs Wolohan’s house. I always tried to keep up with the war news. It was a way of getting Ed through it, a sort of magical procedure. If I watched the war unflinchingly, he would come through it. But a news flash came up. I stood up, gasping. Disbelief, horror, misery, all crushed into my heart. It wasn’t news of Ed, it was Mrs Wolohan’s brother. He had been gunned down in his own America. Murdered in his own America. The story of his life ripped right through by Death.

  I went down the wooden corridor. The little knick-knacks and things she liked, often worthless in themselves, were ranged as always on their calm tables. Photographs, the father she adored, her mother, her clan. There was a grey winter storm blowing outside, but it barely ruffled the peace of the house. I knocked on the door of her sitting-room, as I always would, and, hearing no answer, went in.

  She was standing at one of the windows. Her right hand rested on the window-bar, the other arm straight at her side. She was wearing a blue cardigan and white trousers. She was just looking out the window, at the silenced storm. The light of the storm played on her features, the blue eyes stirring with the light.

  I never, even in my own life, saw anything so sad.

  *

  1968, the year you could feel something ending. I didn’t have a name for that something. Ed said it was the death of hope, and many people said that too, everywhere you went. Mr Eugenides said it was the death of hope. Mr Pelowski at the cinema said it too.

  For Mrs Wolohan it was another great mountain of sorrow to climb, to plant her flag of courage on the top.

  As for Ed, his face grew all the graver.

  After all, he had met some of those poor killed people, at Mrs Wolohan’s table. He had talked to them, they had talked to him. He was just the cook’s child maybe, but in America a cook’s child might do anything, and Ed was bright as June sunrise.

  I don’t think he thought he should shoot his way out of his anguish in Vietnam. In fact, I know he didn’t. He was in the engineering corps, and had lately taken to specialising in landmines. He used a water diviner’s stick to find them, ashwood, like they were wells. It was a talent he had. Lots of his buddies were blown up doing that work. But Ed had some knack. He aimed to exercise that knack, to put something tiny in the scales of history, tiny, but the only thing he had. He stayed on in that country I had only strange glimpses of, on the murky black and white TV. He saw it all in full colour I suppose.

  Ed never spoke too much now. He had become a closed book as a young man. I myself had to divine things.

  *

  I don’t know what broke in him. Plenty of things maybe. Wires burned up in him, and then he couldn’t get a signal on whatever sort of radio he was. Or send one out. My Ed.

  I wondered if it was my fault, whether the nature of my life had affected him, innocent as he was. As soon as I had that thought, it shook my hand, and moved in with me. There is a price for everything, even in a story. How much truer that is in real life. I thought I had caused, if not the demise, at least the demolition of my son’s inner spirit, his secret self. I had contaminated him, like Typhoid Mary had unwittingly killed those who found themselves near her. The poison, the extract of deadly nightshade in me, was history.

  *

  I had needed help, sanctuary, deep sanctuary. I had found it with Mrs Wolohan. Her suffering was sometimes so great in that decade, she would heal you where you stood of your own troubles. She was never anything but constant to me. She offered me safety, she gave it, and she has never taken it away, in forty years, when oftentimes she had no safety for herself. When that strange angel of death chose, and chose again, among the members of her family, with his pointing finger. If the gunman following me had found me in the sixties, and shot me in cold blood on some street corner, no one would have taken much notice. Because that was a decade burned black by grief. There were a half-dozen men with guns waiting in dark spaces in those years to fire their weapons. Fixing their hats on their heads and laughing at the evil they were about to do. To kill America, and if she didn’t lie down, fire into her soul again. Point blank. Love and murder both just need intimacy. Many great souls were killed in the sixties, and my small soul would not have registered, that’s for sure.

  It’s so strange that I can write this, and feel that my years have no width or length, have no dimension at all, just the downturn of a bird’s wing. So quick, so quick.

  I am trying to catch things in this web of words, things that were important to me. But just like the stronger house-flies, sometimes they get free, in spite of all. There’s a big spider this year on the lavatory window, so I don’t clean just there. She tries her best to catc
h the big summer flies for me. Suddenly I’ll hear that mighty focused buzzing, which is the requiem of the fly. But now and then, one in a hundred, a fly does manage to gain its freedom.

  I am trying to gather my thoughts, finally. Some of the thoughts are strong enough to elude me, I know. They want to be wandering about generally, along the ditches, counting the wildflowers, then maybe float down to the flowers in the dunes. Casual, and free, and strong.

  I am thinking the thought, again and again, that I undid my own son.

  Ed must still be out there somewhere. In this big wide country. I would so love to see him before I go, but I don’t think that will ever be. Last time I saw him, I think I saw a man that could never come home, because the compass, that most people have, had been ripped out of his memory, out of his very heart. Ed died clearing landmines in Vietnam, I mean, he did not die, of course not, but in the long toil of defusing bombs, out in the wild jungle with a buddy to hold a torch on the work, or his own sweat making his hands dangerous to himself, Specialist First Class Ed Bere as good as died, or at least did not come home, or ever could find his way. This was the child I loved, fed in an automobile from Cleveland to Washington, and put food and words into for twenty years.

  *

  Of course Ed came physically back from Vietnam. I knew the time of his plane’s arrival at the base in Pennsylvania, I had received the letters of notification, I had prepared his room for his coming, and slew the fatted calf in the form of Cassie Blake’s beef Wellington, his favourite food on earth. But he just never arrived.

  *

  I had to throw out the beef Wellington, uneaten. No news came of Ed. Like his father, he was out in America, somewhere. I wrote to every agency I knew of, and Mrs Wolohan, despite her own Himalaya of grief, helped me. Of course agencies try to be confidential. Even if they lock your child up, they don’t really want to tell you about it. But he seemed to have drifted out beyond the ken of agencies. He didn’t seem to be using a bank account, or drawing money, or if he was, he was doing so under an alias, another family tradition, because I couldn’t find a trace of him. Furthermore, I was trying to be careful, because I had an idea that he had more or less gone AWOL, in contrast to his previous devotion and strange meticulousness towards the army.

  At night in bed, trying to sleep, I kept doing the worst thing I could, playing in my mind the old reels of our times together. Simple films, of no interest to anyone else. Everyone’s private cinema. His first walking, that I nearly missed, and only caught because Maria Scopello, who was looking after him, screamed down the Washington street for me. His first word, which was ‘Dada’, of all things. His first day at junior high, in those blue shorts. Nonsense things, the deepest, most important poetry of my life.

  I was nearly going to write to Mike Scopello, who I hadn’t seen now for years, but who always sent me a card at Christmas, and I him. But like me, Mike was getting old, I knew. Also he had rheumatoid arthritis, his sister had told me in a letter, and I didn’t think he wanted to go slipping about the country, howling with arthritic pain.

  But unknown to me, Mr Nolan had begun his own enquiries. How he did it I do not know, but he got information on Ed. He took a Saturday and Sunday off – indeed, Mr Nolan never retired, until he got ill – and went off mysteriously. He said he was going to Tennessee, which was usually his way of saying he was on a two-day drinking batter. He liked to drink hard with some of the other gardeners round where he lived. He liked to ‘close the curtains’ as he called it. I suppose even then I knew he had his own demons, Mr Nolan.

  But he mustn’t have gone drinking that time.

  ‘Well, Lilly,’ he said, ‘he’s up in the Smoky Mountains, way way off in the backwoods, with some other vets and hippies. A crowd of pocaidí dubha and other such characters I guess.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ I said.

  ‘North Carolina,’ he said. ‘He’s in there somewhere, I’m told, back of the Cherokee res. Long long way in, in the old-growth trees.’

  ‘How did you find that out?’

  ‘You just have to keep asking round. You can trace a skeeter in America, if you know how to keep asking.’

  ‘And could anyone find them in there?’

  ‘Reckon I could. You’d need some class of a mountainy man anyhow. You want me to try, Lilly? He mightn’t want to see me. He might want to be left alone. Not be found.’

  I thought about that for a day or two, but then I had to ask him. I kept seeing the boy in his faded blue shorts. I knew he had seen the merciless mayhem of that war, I knew he was a grown man, but I kept seeing the boy.

  ‘I would like you to try,’ I said.

  *

  Mr Nolan now owned an old black Town Car, that Mr Wolohan had bought for a few dollars a few properties over, when some ancient millionaire died. He gave it to Mr Nolan, because he knew he needed something to fetch the plants in. Mr Nolan had the back seats taken out, and a wooden plate put in, which all worked as good as a pick-up. And Mr Nolan was more proud of that huge scratched car than he could ever have been of a truck.

  Anyway he begged a few days from Mrs Wolohan, but didn’t trouble her or himself to say why. He was most ever close by and often came over to do things outside his times, so she was graceful about letting him go. Indeed she wasn’t so much critical of his drinking as interested in it. She liked to hear of his adventures, and how things were over in the shebeens along the pike. As a Tennessee Irishman, it was expected he would like a drink, I suppose. So maybe she thought that’s what he had in mind.

  The next morning early he loaded his car up for a couple of days’ driving. I hovered about, waiting to say goodbye. He knew how to load his own automobile. He had an old knapsack which he threw in the back. It made a heavy noise when it landed.

  ‘That’s my old gun. Guess I shouldn’t be throwing old guns around. I sometimes put a Lilo in there and sleep,’ he said. ‘If I find myself over by Montauk, you know, late, done in maybe. This is the world’s best automobile.’

  Then he climbed into the front seat and slammed the door, and wound down the window, hardly missing a beat.

  ‘I’ll hook up with Highway 81, and that will bring me nearly all the way where I’m going, New Jersey, Tennessee, North Carolina, and then I’ll just sling a left somewhere and get across to Cherokee.’

  ‘I am so grateful, Mr Nolan. It is so kind of you.’

  ‘You ever been in Tennessee, Lilly?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All the tobacco fields you’ll ever need to see. I’d like to bring you down there sometime.’

  Then he was singing some old song he knew, ‘Little Birdie’. He wasn’t in a rush to go, I noted. He was relishing something about the moment.

  ‘I knew another man knew that song,’ I said.

  ‘That so?’ he said.

  ‘He used to sing it when he was shaving.’

  ‘It’s a good shaving song,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t want to get carried away on that high note though, and slit your own throat.’

  Then he switched on the big engine, and gunned the pedal.

  ‘I know another good song, “Oh Death”, but I’m not singing that.’

  ‘You can sing it if you like, I don’t mind.’

  ‘No, I better not sing it.’

  ‘Just sing a little bit of it,’ I said.

  ‘Oh Death,’ he sang, ‘Oh Death, won’t you spare me over for another year.’

  Except he didn’t say year like I did, he said yare.

  ‘When you sing that song you sound more Tennessee.’

  ‘You can’t sing it any other way,’ he said.

  Fact is, I wanted to kiss him, I felt so grateful. But he didn’t need a seventy-year-old woman kissing him.

  Then he drove off into the early morning glitter.

  I suppose he had often driven down those roads, going home. Or did he ever go home? I knew his people were dead now, so he said. Well, he could be pretty mysterious, Mr Nolan, but it wasn’t as if he was the first my
sterious man I had ever met. You can be expert in things you’d rather not be expert in. Or that weren’t so good for you, like Ed’s gift for bomb disposal.

  *

  At this time I had just retired, and Mrs Wolohan had arranged this house for me. She had spoken a little speech for about ten minutes in the hallway of her own house, by the old mirror and the knick-knacks I had polished a thousand times, itemising my years with her.

  Mr Dillinger was in Africa, and there had arrived, with a dozen stamps and postmarks, looking weary but triumphant, a card with a picture of an elephant: ‘Here’s to many happy years, Mrs B. Cordially, S.’

  So I was new enough into the house, and was still busy arranging the few things to my name to my satisfaction. Knowing that Mr Nolan was on his quest, on my behalf, felt like a fortune in the bank. I was rich with expectation anyhow.

  Three days later, towards suppertime, I was in the backyard, and heard the chain of the lavatory going in the house behind me, and I turned to go back in. I didn’t fear intruders, not in those times. I hadn’t turned on any lights, and my kitchen was dark.

  I almost didn’t see the child, because the child also was dark. He was about two years old, and was draped, swaddled nearly, in a shirt of Mr Nolan’s. I hadn’t heard the old Town Car drive up, but I could see its black shape outside, where Mr Nolan must have parked it on the road. The first call on his time had been his bladder.

  The child just stood there, in the centre of the floor, looking at me. A thin little boy with a heap of black hair.

  Mr Nolan issued forth from the lavatory.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Lilly,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you were in. Nature called.’

  ‘That’s all right, Mr Nolan. Who is this?’

  ‘I guess that’s your grandson, Bill.’

  I stood there, and slowly slowly I put my hands on my head. Rested my two open palms on my head.