On Canaan's Side

by Sebastian Barry

  My stranger was infinitely kind to me.

  ‘We have the name of your cousin in New York, we can try him first. We’ll find out where the best bet for work might be. We won’t be long setting ourselves up, Lilly. You can be sure of that. I didn’t get through the war only to be letting myself down here.’

  The enormous ‘here’ rushed past the windows, its solid forms and darkening colours torn and blurred.

  ‘We have each other,’ he said. ‘That will be our kingdom. We’re not the first people to come to America anyhow. Jaysus, we’re not.’

  He said nothing for a bit, and then he said, maybe worrying about my silence:

  ‘I’m only glad to be off that ship. Jaysus, I thought I’d never feel right again. Jaysus.’

  ‘Thank God,’ I said.

  ‘Aye, aye,’ he said, much cheered suddenly by two small words. ‘We’ll conquer this place. It will be no trouble to us. Hard work, Lilly, and Bob’s your uncle.’

  Another great carpet of erased night scenes and burning lamps sped by.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said. Then with a huge effort added: ‘You’ll see – sweetheart.’

  His long face – suddenly moving into a sort of beauty, like a painted man, so that my heart stirred – was glowing now in the carriage. I thought we would be all right, just at that moment. I thought we would be. I didn’t think I knew who he was, but I adjudged him honest and good-hearted. And terrified, like me.

  *

  Coming into the city was a new fright all its own. I stood on the familiar enough pavement outside the station, and glanced up, but my head hurt with the great swoosh of the buildings, I had to stare down at my feet, or I would have fainted. I had vertigo, at ground level.

  I gripped Tadg’s hand, like a veritable child, trusting in his greater strength.

  You’d have been inclined to be trusting him, the way he took charge then when we entered deeper into the city, him clutching in his hand the piece of paper with my cousin’s name writ on it in my father’s black-inked policeman’s hand. Like the whole world before us we were speechless at this place. We were salmon in dark deep water at the bottom of a great system of sunken rivers, that had carved so deep into the soil that the sky itself was only half-remembered. Would human deeds here be similarly darkened? I almost laughed at the memory of Dublin, with its low houses, their roofs tipped like deferential hats to the imperious rain. In the first while I couldn’t understand how any human agency had built such a place. How were there ladders long enough to get bricks up so high? And every road in spate, with a flood of angry cabs, people shouting and calling, plunging along, horns raking through the noise, it was already a kind of assault, a terror you had to learn.

  My father’s little note said Mick Cullen, I think it was somewhere on the Lower East Side, or was it 8th Street it said?, I can’t recall. We had been given two addresses, this one, and another in Chicago, which for all we knew might have been near or far. The first address in truth was ten years old; he was a brother of the famous coppicer on Humewood estate – famous to us anyhow – and was known to be living there in New York, running some sort of lumber business, my father had said, but there had been no letters to and fro for a long time, in the way of these things. Even though he and Mick Cullen shared a grandmother.

  ‘You needn’t stay long with him,’ said my father, in that other life that already seemed a thousand years ago. ‘Just till you get your bearings. The Cullens are all right.’

  Canut Cullen had been able to harvest an acre of hazel rods in a day, and only his sons bringing him great jugs of buttermilk to keep him going. That was fame of a kind. True fame.

  They may have been all right, these new American Cullens, but they weren’t there, and no sign of them. We stood on the sidewalk like goms, holding the bit of paper, staring up at an old premises with a corrugated iron roof, and a long metal balcony up the side, and an air of dereliction so complete that even where someone had bolted doors and barred the way, perhaps Mick Cullen himself on some long vanished day, these things were sundered, and old metal openings showed drear and bleak against the darkening sky.

  We were so tired from the huge journey in the ship, but I think we had been buoyant enough till that moment. Tadg slowly put the piece of paper back in his pocket, and brought out the other one, with the Chicago address, like a cardplayer with a poor hand that was going to venture an even poorer card. Because the Chicago address was only the friend of a friend of a sort of a cousin. Tadg gave a laugh then in the cobbled street. It was going to be quite dark soon, except just as I thought that, the lamps started to light one by one, in a miraculous sequence. Were they singing, those lamps, did they make a tiny noise for themselves? It wasn’t that I was a woman and scared, it was that I was a human being and scared. The future, the following day, was as dark as the high sky, and suddenly what I had lost bore in on me, my father, stern and strange as he was, and my sisters, one a hunched unmarriageable girl, and the other a nervous, touchy person soon to be a similar bride – funny how I suddenly saw them like that, whereas before they had just been my eternal sisters – even the loss of poor Willie, that in some way had brought me here to this desolate, angry street in New York, all pushed through me like a flooded mountain stream through previously secure whin-bushes, pulling at their tremendous roots, assaulting their safety, and I quailed there, in the street, and shook, my travelling coat failing to keep me warm suddenly, my legs failing me. And that was another moment when Tadg might with profit have put his arms around me, but what was he himself? Only a boy returned from the war, and odd deeds done in his home place, and all his ordinary dreams put aside by a death threat, standing there in New York with a girl he didn’t know, and who didn’t know him.

  *

  Scared as we were, we didn’t feel easy enough to linger in New York without the protection of those we knew, or who were related to us – maybe something to do with that DNA Mr Dillinger told me about. I remember reading in a book of palmistry and dreams or some such years ago, I don’t even know why I was reading it, it was a book belonging to Cassie Blake herself, who liked such things, books about the shape of the head and what you could tell from that, and books about dreams, and this book said that people liked train journeys because no one ever died on a train, and when you dream of trains it’s a dream of eternal life. Maybe there is something in that, because we were strangely content to get back to the great station, with its main room the size of an Irish county, and put some of our few last dollars to the journey west to Chicago.

  Sixth Day without Bill

  And then to some degree God smiled on us, and forgave us.

  My cousin in Chicago was by some way more distantly related than Mick Cullen in New York, but at least she was there, married to a man that worked along the shore of the lake, and though they hadn’t two cents to spare, they did have a timber shack behind their few rooms, that was too cold in winter and too hot in summer for ordinary mortals, but we were not that. We thought the heavens were beaming down on us right enough, when Hannah Reilly, in her big American-looking apron, and her exhausted face, said we could nest there. And Tadg went out the next morning with her husband, and by another miracle, though jobs were not too scarce in that time, found some temporary work, I think it was clearing out land where they were putting in pilings for new buildings, and it was rough hard toil, but Tadg wasn’t bothered by that.

  Everything was wider than New York. They had pushed the great buildings further apart, built everything fatter and heavier-looking, in case the wind blew them away.

  My father had put us in some difficulty with his hastily made plans, in that our official-looking letter had us as brother and sister, but there was no point offering this fiction to Hannah Reilly, because she knew who I was. But I couldn’t give that name anywhere else, and when Hannah remembered, she called me Grainne. Tadg at least was able to be Tim Cullen for the taking up of the work, though we regretted my father’s hasty choice of Cullen, which after al
l was a family name. So in the matter of getting married we were already in a sort of knot, since according to my father’s official letter we were brother and sister, and clearly to Hannah we were not, and yet now sharing the little wooden room. And she was very anxious for us to put this right.

  ‘Do you know, Lilly, we’re respectable people, and even if you’re in trouble, you know, at home, well, if you’re to make a new start here, you need to be married.’

  ‘We do,’ I said. ‘We’ll just have to decide which names to choose for that.’

  ‘Why did your father say you were brother and sister?’

  ‘I don’t know. It seemed like a good notion, in the great hurry of it all. But it was our real names anyhow on the ship’s manifest, and we don’t seem to be bothered much here. Maybe we can just go and be married as who we are.’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Hannah.

  But Tadg didn’t think that was very wise.

  ‘We cannot do that,’ he said, that evening. I had fried up some wondrous big sausages for him, and he was devouring them, even though they looked a little lonely on the plate, for want of potatoes. ‘The new names are no good to us either. It would be a very poor thing to use them, and then someone thinking later we were brother and sister. And the old names might be the death of us. It’s a third set of names we need, Lilly.’

  ‘And can we do that in America?’

  ‘There must be some way here of getting names officially and I am going to have to look into it.’

  But he had little enough time to be doing that. At six in the morning he went down to his work, and in the cold evening he returned, and in a few weeks he grew thinner and darker. And stranger.

  We had a narrow thin bed for ourselves and we lay on it side by side in the dark, with everything we had heaped up on us against the cold. The lake wind blew down from Canada and in through the slats of our room, and played about our faces and hands, and snuck into our layers of socks, and found out our vulnerable toes.

  In our courtship we had kissed. It felt like a long time ago, sitting on the farthing seats in Stephen’s Green in the traitorous sunshine of the Irish spring, holdings hands in the threadbare heat, or withdrawing into the shadows of one of the bandstands there, and trying our chances in each other’s arms. And I had delighted in his kisses, and loved the big bloom of warmth in me they caused, and how in the summer, such as it was, we started to be baked by our kissing, my breast sweating against his chest, in a far from disagreeable manner.

  But here, in those first weeks, with the wind, and the sound of the lake massively beyond our window, a dirty gun-grey in the darkness, and Hannah and her husband snoring the other side of the wall, when we might have gone at each other like the first lovers on earth, we lay close together but as utterly apart as if a priest had put a curse on us.

  And that I do think now was part of the terror, that though we were adrift in America – and for all we knew hunted, although Tadg said he was confident we might have slipped through – we were no longer united as we had been, but bizarrely sundered by the very threat of this intimacy.

  For my part I mightn’t have been so minded, because he was a lovely long man, but for that first while he was a person frozen, and fixed in an unknown intent. And maybe that was because, in some manner, with a death sentence on his head, he felt a little murdered already, at least his life greatly altered. He had not even had time to be in touch with his mother in Cork, and I don’t think he liked to think of her there, knowing nothing of him, or why he had disappeared.

  I don’t think he liked that at all, and it was then I began to wonder, did he blame me to some degree for our predicament, or rather, I began to wonder, was I to blame? I had made his doings in Wicklow very personal by being from Wicklow myself. He had lost the anonymity of the policeman working far from his own district, as policemen always do. I had destroyed his namelessness, and put a name on something frightening in the landscape, a lorry passing through with guns and maybe laughter and certainly reckless, ruined hearts aboard, and then the ambush, and the local boys killed, and the seeming readiness of the Tans – my fault, my fault. I had said nothing to Tadg about anything, but it was still my fault. It was such matters, like a hopelessly knotted ball of wool, that kept us apart also in our apparent closeness, lying perforce arm to arm, the mere heat of his body so desirable in the cruel cold of that room, his red beard jutting from his face like a figure on a tomb in Christ Church Cathedral.

  Even as I write this, I long to be back there and turn to him, and hold him, and prove to him that at least one saving grace of us as a creature might be that everything can be unknotted by a simple gesture.

  That the darkness of a room can be solved by a single candle.

  I wish, I wish, that we had not wasted so much of our time together.

  *

  But there was a loosening. Perhaps the few dollars and cents he was given for his work was little enough compared to his pay in the Tans, but it seemed to me a magical affair, because it guaranteed our ability to continue there, in what was beginning to feel like safety. My father had sent me a letter through a P.O. box number, giving me the precious details of Maud’s wedding to her Matthew, and although his account was spare and perfunctory, as was his fashion, my imagination supplied what was missing, and at the heart of it I thought I saw Maud smiling her rare smile. I hoped she would make a habit of that smile, because it was a good one, if rare, and I hoped, while knowing nothing about such a possibility, being in the dark myself about all things, that she might be well beloved by her husband.

  And as I read and reread the letter, I felt certain pangs of sadness too, and a homesick pain, and yes, jealousy.

  But Tadg and myself were beginning to thaw out, and as Chicago loosened itself from winter and spring, we loosened.

  ‘I’m going to say I like this place,’ he said. ‘I like it.’

  It was easier for us there certainly, because there was no history. I realised slowly that as my father’s daughter, unthinkingly, I had lived as a little girl and young woman through a certain kind of grievous history, where one thing is always being knocked against another thing. Where my father’s respect for the King was knocked against Tadg’s father being in the Irish Volunteers, where Willie’s going to war was knocked against his dying, where even Wicklow life was knocked against Dublin life, the heather that came up to us on the bus knocked against its eventual blackening, its little darkened flowers saying, time passeth, time flyeth. Where the very fact of my being alive was knocked against the fact that my mother had died in giving me that life.

  I just did not know yet what things knocked against other things here in America.

  Tadg had begun not just to like Chicago. He had begun to use the word ‘home’ and he no longer meant Cork or Ireland, but that wretched wooden room where we still boarded, able now to give my cousin something approaching a rent. And slowly all the things about us widened into a sort of personal kingdom, the nervy lake that thought it was the sea, the accumulated buildings of the city that we began to use as our landmarks in conversation and in dreams.

  And then something grand happened.

  We were lying side by side one Sunday morning and with one accord, without real thought, with the simple instinct of ordinary human creatures, we turned to each other and gently kissed, then fiercely, like wakening beasts, and before we knew where we were, like a sudden walking storm down the lake that we had witnessed in the deeper weather, we seemed to go into a stormy gear, we clutched at each other, we got rid of our damned clothes, and clung, and he was in me then, and we were happy, happy, young, in that room by the water, and the poetry that is available to anyone was available to us at last, and we breathed each other in, and in those moments both knew we would marry each other after all, and not a word needed to be spoken about it.

  A cold-minted yellow light I remember that Sunday then as Tadg and me strolled into the city, like people restored to life. Maybe in truth the warmth of ear
ly summer had taken a step back, as if unsure of itself. But we were walking arm in arm, jubilant, exultant, and barely noticed, and anyway did not care.

  He was suddenly full of plans. It was as if he had awakened to being in America, abruptly made manifest to him as a place of safety, maybe infinite safety. As if he had suddenly remembered he was young, and though banished from his own country, might have come to America anyway, in the natural way of an Irish person, and now it was all laid out before him, before us, like a glittering Canaan.

  I will never forget his happiness in that ordinary Chicago afternoon, and I give God thanks for it.

  *

  I give Him thanks, I give Him thanks.

  We came up the wide steps of the Art Institute. One of Tadg’s pals among the pilings was an Armenian man, who in his former existence as an Armenian in Armenia had studied painting at some academy, before his people had been dissolved like sugar in tea by the Turks. ‘He said lonesome academy,’ Tadg said, ‘what do you think he meant by that? He has the most beautiful and interesting English. Or I suppose it is American.’ But his mother, Tadg said, had been killed before his eyes. She had died as it happened in his arms. He was wielding spades and pickaxes now in America, there by the shore of Chicago, and he had no money for brushes and paints. But he had told Tadg about a wonderful building in the city, where for nothing at all, not two cents asked, you could see room after room of paintings, windows of beauty, he called them, said Tadg. Now Tadg was not a man for such things, ordinarily, and it was maybe partly out of liking for his small and passionate Armenian friend that he had decided to bring me there that Sunday, added to which might well have been the enormous optimism that somehow or other our lovemaking had created in us.