On Canaan's Side

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘She don’t look like no queen to me,’ said the motorman, but he was also looking at Joe’s badge. ‘Just this once, I guess. But this in’t the Gold Coast, in general. Folk don’t like to see Negroes, all stuck in their faces, in general.’

  There was no one else on the streetcar, for all that the motorman had said. Despite the seeming jollity, I knew Cassie so well, I could feel her distress. She was wishing herself twelve hundred miles from that motorman, maybe Cleveland itself. She was wishing maybe she was back in Norfolk, not knowing about the world, getting decked out in her First Holy Communion frock. I knew what that was like. Proud as the first day of creation. And beautiful and shining in the eyes of your father.

  Catus Blake had gone living up along 55th Street, he had left the water for good and all. For something of the same reason. Things separating out in Cleveland, like a sauce that hasn’t mixed.

  These thoughts were still brand new when Joe Kinderman went for that man’s neck. He literally went for that man’s neck. The sentence the motorman had said had had a much worse effect on him than anyone could foresee. He put his big hands around that scrawny man’s neck and he shook the motorman.

  ‘You piece of human excrement,’ he said, like reciting a line of poetry.

  The motorman was just about to blow his emergency whistle then, and get some help, when Joe let his hands fall away. He smoothed at the man’s necktie, nodding his own head, muttering something.

  ‘No, sorry, buddy, but you just mustn’t got to say things like that in front of her majesty.’ And he smiled his useful Joe Kinderman smile, all nice teeth, and the clipped moustache buckling in an arc.

  ‘You get off this streetcar,’ said the man, ‘I don’t care if you are a police officer.’

  So we got down at the next stop and walked our way to the lower part of the city. In the distance we could see the humped-up train tracks of the famous dipper.

  Joe Kinderman was even lighter on his shoes now, all that muscle and hardness he had was put floating somewhat on the sea of the world, so at ease that I think not just me fell in love with him then, but every passing soul.

  And indeed, a lot of Italians lived down that way, and Joe in his line of work tended to bump into the Italians, he said. The kings of corn sugar, mayhem and such, but also, he said, thousands of ordinary folk, who got into trouble in times past for keeping a still in their yard. Those times were passing, but they knew Joe’s face from the fact it had been inserted into a dozen homes there. And it didn’t seem unwelcome as he wended down Woodland Avenue. They were on different sides, but they didn’t scorn to greet him.

  ‘Hey, detective, now we have a lovely day.’

  ‘How do, Mr Sorello,’ says Joe, floating on this air of his own making. ‘Good to see you.’

  *

  I feel so happy writing this down, because it is about happiness, and here is the day where Cassie was happy.

  Joe paid us through the entrance gates of Luna Park as if we were still his little gaggle of royalty. The morning now decided to be in cahoots with us, and the lid of thin mist, which until that moment did not seem able to lift itself away from the city, suddenly did so, and the generous American sky threw all its arms open above us, and above the brightened factories, and the stretching wilderness of the human streets. It was as if the possible paradise of America was revealed, something to replace the unhurt domain that the first white men had found, as Mr Dillinger had explained to me. Something to undo the hurts and terrors that had followed, that first little hut that Mrs Bellow claimed descent from, that first muddled village, then a town flooding its houses slowly across rough fields, and then the great shouting that the city was. Beyond the amusement park the Cuyahoga River, that sometimes had seemed to be like a broken creature slinking away, vast and stinking, abruptly and magically regained her ancient beauty, the filth and darkness of the water turned ever so slightly by the hand of the world, so that its filthiness had only been a humorous coat to hide its gemlike brilliance, its fantastical yellows, its gleaming greens, its browns as lovely as an Irish bogland. My heart lifted like a pheasant from scrub, as if utterly surprised and alarmed by this beauty, its wings utterly opened in fright and exulting.

  We passed on in. Joe Kinderman said to me out of Cassie’s earshot that there were days when the ‘Negroes’ were not allowed in to the park, for fear of upsetting the good citizens. And he looked at me with his intense look that I was beginning to recognise. I was beginning to know him. It would have been difficult for me to say why Cassie, streaming along in her best clothes, her face ablaze with the surreal happiness of that day, could have done anything but delight a citizen, much less disturb them. She was the city, the citizen, and the gates of heaven all in one, as John Bunyan wrote in his ancient book. She was like a human person too good for any suitor like in a fairy story. Her tremendous arms, the shine and curve of her lower legs, her bosom that any old mariner would have chosen to grace the prow of his ship, to carry him miraculously through storms, all seemed to me like instances of never-to-be-repeated human grace.

  Joe Kinderman’s only law that day was that we must ride the amusements, all of them, despiting all fear and reluctance. He bought a handful of tickets like a posy in his fist. He led us magisterially, knowing everything about them, from one to the other. We shied at coconuts like Amazons defeating mere men. We collected two teddy bears and carried them with us carefully like the new babies of our strange marriage. All the time, circling about and about, we were deviously approaching the great central attraction, which like a guilty thought hovered in all its twists and turns and complexity above our heads. Whether heaven or hell we did not know.

  Then having tasted the mundane delights we were to endure the celestial.

  ‘Anyone ever fall off this thing?’ said Joe to the ticketman, just to further infuse me with dread. The ticketman had a long well-combed beard, which he had tied at the end with white string, and God had forgotten to pin his ears to his head properly.

  ‘We don’t have no one fall off this thing. You couldn’t fall off iffen unless you threw yourself.’

  ‘There, Joe,’ I said.

  ‘I heard of plenty people falling off rides just like this, all over America. That right, mister?’

  ‘Not in a regulated place like thissen. This the goddamn best-made fun park in all America.’

  ‘Where you from, mister,’ said Joe in his best friendly manner, not wishing to cause offence, ‘with your thissen and iffen?’

  ‘Blue Ridge Mountains. Ever been up there?’

  ‘I never been there,’ said Cassie, ‘but that’s Virginia. I come from Norfolk, Virginia.’

  But whether the ticketman didn’t care for Norfolk, or some other reason, he didn’t say anything more. He put Cassie and me into the front of a car when it came clanking up the tracks, and Joe in the row behind us. The seats were made of some grainy metal, and we had an iron bar clanged down across our stomachs to protect us from Joe’s stories. Wonderful generous bits of Cassie settled against the bar. The world was made for lesser mortals generally.

  ‘Slipstream,’ said Joe enigmatically.

  How pleasantly we drew away, some distant engine making mysterious clockwork move, this new beauty of the city uncovered more and more as we rose. The sunlight didn’t miss its chance, and as we approached the first high point of the ride, it moved in behind a brassy cloud high above the river, and then suddenly, like a very thunderstorm of light, dropped a cascade of brightness the size of Ireland down on the water, so that the river halved into blackness and brilliance, and you would half-suspect that there was a more mysterious ticketman somewhere, from the mountains of heaven, pulling heavenly switches.

  We poised, three beating hearts, three souls with all their stories so far in the course of ordinary lives, three mere pilgrims, brilliantly unknown, brilliantly anonymous, above a Cleveland fun park, with the wonderful catastrophe of the sunlight on the river, the capricious engineering of the tracks, the sudden h
appiness of knowing Joe, his clever kindness to Cassie, his shoal of looks at me, I could see him, I could see him, glancing at my face, my body, wondering, wondering, his own eyes lit not only by the strange weather of that day, but something as strange within, Joe’s gathered stare, like a photograph of some old poetman, that you would see in a magazine, all balanced for a perfect moment, the past somehow mollified, the journey so far somehow justified, Tadg’s murder, my own faraway condition, fatherless and sisterless, all poised in the gentle under-singing of the wind, coming up through the filigree of the fun car, raised to heaven, almost to heaven, Joe’s face behind me when I looked beaming almost ecstatically, almost frightening, his head back, his eyes closed, his teeth bared, and maybe even laughing, if it wasn’t the mechanisms churning, bringing us to the tipping point, bringing us, bringing us, Cassie and me and Joe, here we are, so high, so high, oh paradise of Cleveland, oh suffering America, long story of suffering and glory, and our own little stories, without importance, all offered to heaven, to the sky and the river, to the stories of the houses, the streets, the passing decades, the worrisome future, then, oh, oh, gone beyond, thrown somewhat forward, our weight somehow in conspiracy with this matter of acceleration, our weight as if tearing us downward, as if we were for a moment forgiven by God, and then rejected, in some sort of extravagant humorousness, and cast down, instantly at speed, and then at worse speed and then worse, so that I saw Cassie’s cheeks dragged towards her ears, and flappy hollows bubble and boil there, and in the roar of our falling I heard Joe not laughing but calling out, screaming out, words I could not catch, words infected with wildness and happiness, and in me only terror and sickness, and stampeding thoughts, until, until, dropping sheer and sheer, suddenly down to the level we came, bottoming out, and Cassie weeping, weeping, and then holding on to me, her brave arms around me, and me trying to get my arms around her, not succeeding, but holding on, holding, my lovely Cassie, and she was weeping and then laughing, laughing and weeping, as if we had lived all our life in two minutes, two minutes of falling and weeping, and I knew everything that had happened to me was just, because it led to this, and this was my reward, the infinite friendship of my Cassie.

  As we came out back towards the huge gates, painted in their white and black squares like a racing flag, a tall man all kitted out in similar finery to Joe, but even sharper, a light linen suit, a sleek brimmed hat as if torn off the back of a seal, and in the colourful company of three laughing women, opened out his arms when he saw Joe and said:

  ‘Joseph, goddamn Joseph Clarke!’

  ‘Sorry, bud, I ain’t no Joseph Clarke,’ said Joe Kinderman, laughing. ‘You’re thinking of some other guy.’

  ‘Oh, I guess. Begging your pardon there,’ said the man, bringing up some elaborate lingo in his confusion, and his voice tinged with doubt.

  Anyhow, we passed on through the square frame of the gate into the blurred roaring of the city. The efforts of the new light were waning as the day waned, but nevertheless we trod along with contented steps.

  *

  That night in the bed Cassie said she was going to rub out the name of Jesus Christ in the New Testament and put in Joe Kinderman’s instead. Why, she didn’t just think he was Jesus Christ, she reckoned he was God the Father Himself. The Holy Ghost too maybe thrown in for good measure.

  *

  I had to stop writing a few minutes ago. In the dark of the evening there was a push on my bell, and I jumped in this skirt, yes I did. I was still at the bottom of that ride, still with Cassie and Joe, and I came back into my little house with a strange jolt. All day there was a series of short drenching showers, and now, being returned by the bell to the present, I could suddenly smell the potato plants in the field between me and the sea, luxuriating I am sure in the rainfall and the new warmth. I folded over this big accounts book, where I am now scribbling, because much to my astonishment I have needed so many fresh pages, thinking at the start I might be done in twenty or thirty. I do not even know why I had the accounts book still, stuck in a drawer, since it dates from the time I ordered for Mrs Wolohan, and is properly hers. So I write my little nonsenses on her paper, properly speaking.

  Anyway I rose with a stiffness as infinite as that previous happiness, and wended my way in the darkness of the corridor, where my photographs winked in the odd light, my brother Willie in his uniform that Maud sent me before she died in Dublin, thinking I might cherish it, and Joe Kinderman in his Cleveland police officer’s rig-out, looking fairly stupendous, and Ed in his uniform, and Bill in his – not that I could see them as such, but they were vivid and lit as always in my mind’s eye.

  At the door it was only Mr Eugenides with a covered basket. I turned on the porch light for him, and he stood there silently, the basket in one hand, and raising his nice fedora hat with the other, in his mannerly way.

  ‘I am not disturbing, Mrs Bere? God forbid. My wife says, take this up to Lilly Bere. It is no small thing. It is Mrs Eugenides’ best pot roast. She knows you are an expert, but she said, Lilly won’t mind me. I said, of course she will not. I hope we don’t offend, bringing owls to Athens?’

  He seemed immensely pleased and energised when I gratefully accepted his gift.

  ‘Come into the kitchen,’ I said, ‘I will give the basket back.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I have fifty of them. Some of my Greek produce, hey, comes in such baskets. From the island of Samos, that sleeps in the arms of a Turkish bay. There. Keep it, you will have a little bit of the old country for yourself. Mrs Eugenides says this is of course not traditional Greek cooking, but she learned the pot roast from her best friend, and wishes for you to have it in turn. Her late friend was from Cape May, New Jersey. She has written out the recipe, see.’

  ‘That is so kind.’

  ‘She wishes to hand it on to you,’ he said, still in his excess of excitement.

  ‘Well, that is the purpose of cooking. The great purpose. It’s all about friendship.’

  ‘Orea,’ he said, beautiful, a bit of Greek I did understand, I had heard him utter it so often in his store. ‘Goodnight to you, Mrs Bere. Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight, Mr Eugenides.’

  It was a lovely pot roast, as I found when I had a little bit of it, with nuts, and cheese, perfection. The face of Mrs Eugenides’ entirely unknown friend from Cape May, New Jersey, seemed to hover before me for a moment, as if permanently attached in spirit to her cooking.

  Tenth Day without Bill

  Being a woman of her word and much more besides, Mrs Wolohan arrived this morning and reminded me she was bringing me to Gerard to get my hair done, which I had of course forgotten. I didn’t even know if I had known in the first place. She might have said something about it, and anyway, I could think of no excuse not to do it, and gathered up my bag and put on my road shoes and went out with her.

  ‘It is an absolutely lovely day,’ she said. ‘I was swimming this morning at six. That’s a.m.’

  ‘In the pool?’ I said.

  ‘In the sea. I went down alone. There was no one there at all. I slipped into the water. It was wonderful. Then I went home,’ she said, banging the car door on her side, and taking off with a little whoosh of sand from the roadside, ‘and I ate some strawberries and cream. Katherine Mansfield describes a woman in one of her stories as eating cream with a “rapt inward look”. That is so good. It is exactly like that.’

  Mrs Wolohan is a woman who has endured vast vicissitudes. What has saved her generally in life is not just her courage, which is signal, and her faith, which is solid, but her enjoyment of all the minute pleasures of being alive, something that always gave me pleasure also, in cooking for her. When she was served up, on a dark winter’s day, my famous Beef Wellington, which in fact was one of Cassie’s recipes, though Mrs Wolohan didn’t know that, followed by the simple body blow of my autumn pear tart, Mrs Wolohan would exhibit her happiness openly, and create a small speech to remember the occasion. No matter what else w
as going on all around her, no matter what crushing history was being presented to her. Her whole philosophy was to go on, like a soldier who has lost comrades along the way, and has buried them with due love and remembrance, but who also has assignments ahead that he must go to meet. I think, considering her life, this aspect of her is well-nigh miraculous. It is because of this that I cannot help but to love her.

  She is much younger than me, and I was already nearly fifty when I went to work for her mother, and some time after, for her, when she married. Why she has harboured me, why she has protected me, all these years of my retirement I do not know. Why she has allowed this long long tenancy of her little house, which might be put to a hundred other uses, and indeed, in being so near the sea, is very valuable, standing plumb on its little yard, remains to me a mystery.

  She is a tallish bony woman, who in a rather unusual way has got more lovely as she has got older. One of her sisters was considered a great beauty. But Mrs Wolohan, like one of those opera singers whose voices only come into full power at forty, is also beautiful, now. Her features are well defined, her eyes are blue, and she dresses plainly in trousers and shirts. She has about ten yards of haute couture outfits hanging in various wardrobes, and these she uses for her charity work, and dinners, and the like. Otherwise she is not too bothered, except I am sure that these seemingly inexpensive clothes cost a great deal and were bought on Fifth Avenue.

  Her car is an ordinary mid-range one, nothing fancy, and I love to drive with her in it. When I am close in to Mrs Wolohan, she will talk away. And there is something in her attitude that makes it so plain that she ‘has time for me’, as my father would say. That is so flattering that it brings out the best in me, and I never feel old with her, though there must be thirty years between us. I have known her since she was a very young woman, and worked for her or lived near her for over forty years. We have never, ever, had a bad word between us, which I think is very remarkable.