On Canaan's Side

by Sebastian Barry

  Her husband, a man actually of similar energy, but not applied to mere cakes, deserved her devotion. He did deserve it, and doubly so, because she thought he did. I cannot claim much expertise myself on the topic of husbands. But I cooked his breakfast for him from 1955 to 1970, when he was at home, which is no small thing, if you were to imagine all those pancakes piled up in some strange heaven in an aromatic pillar.

  Unobjectionable. Maybe it is servile in a former servant – for what else was I, in the little dictionary of life? – to admire her former mistress. To love her, and to feel brightened by her voice on – I noticed – a slightly grimy answering machine. It is queer the items in a house that never receive proper ministrations.

  Mrs Wolohan is like a landscape to me, a whole country. Or that pleasing lighthouse on the last spit of land, where the beach has become stony, more like the Atlantic where it gnaws away at Ireland. Even if her idea of ‘a little while’ might not result in her actual appearance. But I was able to sit down here at the kitchen table, the Formica beaming the sun on into the hallway behind me, like a great flat stone of light bounced on the sea.

  And be thinking, remembering. Trying to. All difficult dark stuff, stories stuffed away, like old socks into old pillowcases. Not quite knowing the weight of truth in them much any more. And things that I have let be a long time, in the interests of happiness, or at least that daily contentment that I was once I do believe mistress of. The pleasure in something cooked right, just the small and strangely infinite pleasure to be had from seeing, from witnessing, a tray of freshly baked biscuits. Like I had just completed the Parthenon, or carved Jefferson into a rockface, or maybe the contentment, felt in the very sinews, of the bear when he digs a salmon out of the water with his paw. Mightily healing, deeply, and what else could we have come here for, except to sense these tiny victories? Not the big victories that crush and kill the victor. Not wars and civil ructions, but the saving grace of a Hollandaise sauce that has escaped all the possibilities of culinary disaster and is being spread like a yellow prayer on a plump cod steak – victoriously.

  I am thinking of these things even as I am about to go. Mother sauces. The infinite delicacy of the bain-marie saucepot. ‘Heat is how the pot thinks, Lilly. It is like my grandma singing a lullaby, not too loud so you keep sleep away, not too soft and baby can’t hear the words. Try and hear the heat, Lilly. Hear the pot thinking. You hear it, you hear it? It’s there. You will. And when you do, you’ll be able to do any sauce in the world.’ And her big arms showing me, oh yes. Arms that could punch out your lights, but never used for such. Dear Cassie Blake, who gave me these guns and bullets for the long fight of life. And was herself shipwrecked on the rocks of life in the upshot.

  I am dwelling on things I love, even if a measure of tragedy is stitched into everything, if you follow the thread long enough.

  The one thread maybe, from Bill to my brother Willie, all the way back, through how many wars is that, it must be at least three? No, it is four. Four killing wars, with all those sons milled into them, and daughters these times too. And I have felt all that, for those that went out for the good of America, for the love of her. Oh, and I knew what safety and haven was America to me, so how could I not understand that something had to be given up for her? Something so close in to me, it was really part of me. Oh, Bill.

  He used to like to look at the photos in the corridor, going down to my bedroom. It’s not bright there, because it has no window of its own, but you can see them plain enough, even in daylight. There’s a picture of Willie in his uniform. Bill used to gaze at that when he was very small, he spotted it quite early, because, truth to tell, he had a look of Willie, and he didn’t just grow into his own face, but eventually into Willie’s. Willie went out to the Great War as they called it, he was only a boy, just like Bill in the desert, and he was very happy to go, and when he was a few years in it, I don’t know if he ever came home, even when he did on furlough. Something of him was lost in France, buried into the ditches they dug there, so that he would appear in our house in the castle right enough, but dressed in shadows, disguised by the thin dust of terror he carried on him maybe. But he was a sweet boy, I do remember that, or let me say, that is how I remember him, as sweet. What his true nature was I will leave to God, but I have a sense still that I loved him, I mean to say, I feel that love still. Even as I sit here, I don’t know what I am, I suppose like any grieving person, I am broken-hearted, but even so, in the centre of that, in the heart of things, sort of beyond reach, I can hear my love for Willie still abiding, like the heat in the bain-marie. The thing put away most carefully in a drawer can sometimes be the very thing beyond finding. It is beyond finding, right enough – but it is still there.

  Willie fought for three long years. He was nine months first in training down in Cork. I must have been twelve when he left, a child. When he didn’t come back finally, I was a young woman. Willie not coming back … There were thousands, millions, of boys in that war, that didn’t come back to their households. Parents grew old in the little aftermath of letters. Nice letters written conscientiously by their officers, lads themselves sometimes. Platitudinous, how could they be otherwise, with boys killed every day in trenches? Even unimaginable and murderous news has a formula, maybe it has to have, I mean, maybe it is better so. You have your marching orders then. You lose a child, a brother, whatever it might be, and you die in the aftermath, so you are walking about, breathing and thinking, but you are not alive.

  I am not alive. It is almost a comfort to me that although I will take my life, I am already dead when I do so. It seems less of a sin. Because I know it is a great sin. It is a sin that we were told as girls had no remedy, one of those, with hell to follow, for certain. I suppose it might be so. I don’t know.

  *

  My poor father got three communications about Willie. The first from his line officer, formal and distressing. That came to him among all his official post as an officer himself of the DMP. A letter, he said, that burned his hand as he read it. He came away from his offices at teatime, his big face flushed with terror, I saw it as he entered into our sitting-room, as if he had exchanged his own face for a lantern. He could have used his face to beam a light to Baltinglass. My sisters Annie and Maud were fussing about at the table, and I must confess barking at me to assist them, an eternal struggle I am sure, and my father in his big clothes and his burning face stepped in. He took the helmet off his bald pate. I caught the strange mood a few moments before Annie and Maud, and stood in the centre of the room, my bold mockery of my sisters stilled in my throat. I felt like a dog that has been reprimanded but cannot work out his misdeed. My father looked into the middle distance. I think he looked into it for the rest of his life.

  Then Annie at least caught up. She conscientiously put down the great platter she was bearing.

  ‘What is it, Papa?’ she said.

  ‘Terrible …’ said my father, but could offer no further words at that moment. He drew out a letter from his coat, with the elephant and pineapple on it of the Dublin Fusiliers. Not that we saw that then. But we examined that letter for flaws and lies many times in the days after, with no success.

  ‘He has been killed in Picardy,’ said my father. He gained his old bentwood chair and sat gently into it. He was a huge man, and the chair was spindly enough, and perhaps he loved it for that.

  There was a great clatter as Maud’s less lucky plate went down onto the floor and smashed enthusiastically into a dozen parts. No one even looked at her.

  ‘Aye,’ said my father, though we had said nothing, ‘in Picardy. A little village called St-Court. I wonder where that is? Yes, yes.’

  And he sighed out with the last sigh in all the world.

  Annie just stood. I got a fright when I saw her face. She was often cross, Annie, and rarely smiling, but I had never seen this look. And seeing the look seemed to bring the same feeling into me, and my father’s words found a nest in my breast. I heaved up great sobs, fee
ling also in my sixteen years a great embarrassment. I had never read any manual of grief certainly, and did not know if it were to be hidden or not. And anyway it could not be suppressed.

  ‘Poor blessed boy,’ he said, very vaguely, quietly. ‘Do you remember when he was home last and I cleaned him in the tub, and you three banished to the kitchen, and the terrible muck on him and the fleas and the lice, and the ringworm on his skin? Bless me. Do you remember that? And Annie, you teasing us at the door, saying you were going to come in, and Lilly laughing her head off. Poor blessed boy. And no meat on him at all, and when I put the big towel round him, I thought I would lose him in the folds, there was that little of him. But he was strong, he was strong in spite of that. That was Willie. And he was a good boy.’

  There was not much done in the house that evening except grieving. The grief at first sat in us, and then leaked out into the chairs, and at last into the very walls and sat in the mortar. I will be bound it is still there, if there were only someone with the heart to sense it, someone there that knew Willie Dunne, a lost name in the history of the world.

  *

  The second letter or communication came later, a few months after that dread news. Like all the families of Ireland, of England, France, Russia, Germany, the whole wide world, we did our best to rub two sticks of life together to make a small fire to live by. My father, as the person who had after all created Willie I suppose, mourned him most deeply, most terribly. He had no remnant of him except his soldier’s smallbook, in which he had written his father’s name as his executor, and given our quarters in Dublin Castle as his home place, a battered volume of a strange Russian novel, and the little figure of a horse Willie had picked up somewhere. These items were sent back to my father by Willie’s unit. Annie was given the little horse, myself the Dostoevsky book, and my father kept the smallbook, a quite pristine object considering what it had been through, and I imagined Willie keeping it wrapped in a scrap of tarpaulin maybe, warmed by the heat of his chest. My father in turn kept the volume against his chest, in one of the inner pockets of his uniform, of which there were many, warming the pages in turn with the furnace of his own body. We, three quite grown-up girls already I am sure, especially in our own opinion, genuinely did grow up in that aftermath. One of the strange consequences of her sorrow was Annie lightened in an unexpected way, and was much nicer and gentler to me, so that mixed in with the treacle-heavy sorrow of that time is a little vein of goodness, because she had in other times a tongue that would shave your beard for you.

  What arrived now for my father was a letter from Willie’s sergeant. This letter, which probably does not exist now, thrown out on the scrapheap of things as families and all their small stories pass away, became as precious to my father as the smallbook, and was tipped into it. It is so strange to me that I still remember phrases in the letter, maybe because the sergeant, Christopher Moran, in the great effort of writing to my father, who he knew to be a policeman, fell into a queer kind of officialese. It was his ‘solemn pleasure’ to write to him, the letter said. But it gave an astounding account, astounding to us simply because it was uttered, and given freely, of Willie’s simple death in Picardy. How he had heard a German soldier singing, and had sung back to him across no man’s land, only to receive the bullet of a sniper.

  ‘Just like Willie,’ my father said, in equal simplicity. ‘Always singing.’

  I knew even at sixteen that Willie after three years of war had been hollowed out by horror and extinction, and my father maybe knew that too, so that the solace of the sergeant’s letter, describing Willie dying in a moment of generosity and ease, did not have a measure.

  Poor Willie. There is hardly anyone alive that remembers him besides myself and Bill. I am sure there is no one but me, Annie and Maud are dead, my father is long long dead, and of course Bill is dead. Bill that gazed on his great-uncle’s photograph in an American house, and knowing almost nothing about him, smiled at him across the many decades, and maybe, now I think of it, took something of a tune from him in joining the army.

  *

  Then came Tadg Bere to see my father. Willie had three memorialists, and the third was Tadg.

  Tadg Bere. He looked like he had swum the Channel and the salt had scoured him out, his face was that clean. Which was an achievement, considering he had sat in trenches for years. Trench dirt didn’t always wash out, I am sure. A beautiful rinsed-looking boy, or so I thought as he sat with my father, giving him his own memories of Willie, as a friend and fellow private in the platoon. He had stayed on in the army and spent some months with the South Irish Horse in Cologne on traffic duty, since his own regiment had been destroyed in the war, only itching, as he told my father, to be able to come to Dublin and speak to Willie’s people, as he thought Willie would have liked. It was then I really understood that Willie had been valued in the army, loved indeed I suppose. This boy we knew nothing about, except that he was from Cork city, and heading home directly after talking to us, had been part of Willie’s world, unknown, dark and frightening, but with friendship in it. I don’t know why that struck me in particular. I turned it over and over in my head.

  My father for his part sat quietly as Tadg Bere spoke, only nodding his head now and then, and sometimes shaking it. By now, I suppose somewhere in 1919 it must have been, my father was about to retire, and go home to Wicklow. There were those new murders everywhere in Dublin, dozens of Royal Irish Constabulary men had been done away with, in ambush, in pubs, in beds. My father had reached sixty-five just as all the world he knew had gone on fire, big flames, dark smoke and all.

  ‘The thing about Willie was,’ Tadg Bere was saying, ‘it wasn’t just you could be depending on him, you knew he was keeping a weather eye out for you, like you might a brother. So I was always thinking, that was a sorta compliment to his family, that they had reared him up in that frame of mind. And what I am wanting to say to you, and have wanted ever since that day we buried him, the poor lad, and stuck his rifle over the grave, and his helmet on top of that, me and the sergeant and Willie’s best pal Joe Kielty, that was kilt after also, ever since that day, over by St-Court so it was, and the war nearly over in those parts, and the bloody old Hun excusing my French driven back, was, was …’ And here Tadg drew breath, and for some reason looked over the bare boards and our little Turkish carpet in the centre, to me, and smiled, and in that smile, I swear to God, I read something of the future, like a proclamation. ‘Was, by Jesus, Chief Superintendent, by Jesus, he loved you all. We knew of Annie and Maud and yourself, and little Lilly there, and he never tired of telling us how good and pretty you were, Miss Dunne, so he didn’t. And I thought I had better come to ye some day and just be telling you that.’

  ‘And we are immensely grateful,’ said my father at last, heaving his voice out of the dark cavern of his breast up into the room. ‘We are. How tremendously kind of you to stop on your way home, and I am sure your family is longing to see you, and so grateful themselves that the war spared you. That the war spared you.’

  Then Tadg Bere stood up, feeling it was time to go and he had done what he had come to do.

  ‘There was no one like Willie,’ he said. ‘That’s a fact.’

  ‘Now, Lilly,’ said my father, rising also, and taking Tadg’s hand in a handshake, ‘you be walking this lad down to the gates. And look about you, Tadg, as you go through the town to the station. These are different times, and there are some will not like to see your uniform. We had a great procession just recent, you know, the victory parade, and thousands came out to remember, and thank you lads, but there are others now, tucked away in the crowds, that don’t like to see khaki. They do not.’

  ‘Well and, sir, I can surely look after myself. Thank you, sir.’

  I crossed the cobbled square beside him, feeling a bit strange suddenly, to be with a stranger, in my old summer dress. And I wished I had taken a cardigan with me, because it was autumn now and cold, and a huge lid of dark grey cloud sat over the city. And
a boy like Tadg, who had gone into the army at eighteen, and was coming out the other end at twenty-two or so, like Willie would have done, he had probably not been with the female species for a long time, unless I suppose those wild women that serve soldiers in broken towns. Not to say that there weren’t regiments of such women all up Montgomery and Marlborough Streets, because of the barracks, in that very city of Dublin, there were. But I did not think he knew much of talking to ordinary girleens like me, and he said almost nothing to me. But just as we reached the sentries at the Dame Street gates, those humorous lads let us say, who would not let me pass without some quip, Tadg surprised me. He stopped in the lee of the old granite gates, as if he had known me all his life, and spoke quietly and calmly.

  ‘Willie spoke of you so often,’ he said. ‘And he worried about you so. When the rebels rose those few years ago here, he worried all the more. I used to see him sitting there in trenches, like a lobster boiling, fretting and fuming and worrying. So I came particular to see you, and to say, if there is ever anything you need me to do, I will do it. And if you will let me say, now I am seeing you, I know everything he did say about you was true, and I am only so glad that I met you, indeed and I am.’

  And he held out his hand to me for shaking. I was dumbstruck. No one had ever made such a speech to me. In fact I wonder was it the first time I was ever spoken to as a grown woman, not a girl. And I suppose I was a girl still all the same. But I felt a heat flush all the way up my body, and I am sure a red rose of heat blushed up into my neck and face, I could feel it anyhow.