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

by Tom Phelan

  When I went down below to bed, Con had his blanket over his head. Something in him began to fade the moment he realized the grand plan had fallen apart, from the moment he knew India had slipped out of his grasp. The fading never stopped till he slipped out of the cellar in Ocean Villas nearly four years later.

  I got under my own blanket and while I was remembering lying beside Kitty in the bushes beside the Canal, my hand on her breast, I realized everything had changed for her too.

  THE WAR

  Dennis Hayes

  It had taken us four days and five changes of horse to get to Ballyrannel with a load of potash and phosphates in sacks because the hures in Dublin gave us too big a load. As well as that, one of the horses went lame after stepping on a piece of a ceramic cup that some fecker of a country fecker broke off a telegraph pole with a stone.

  The three of us—Paddy Finn, Jack Gleeson and myself—had to stay to the back of the boat trying to keep the nose from scraping the bottom. We couldn’t even get to the kitchen to make a pot of tea without stopping the horse. By the time we were halfway to Ballyrannel, we knew we’d arrive on Saturday night, wouldn’t get unloaded till Monday and wouldn’t get filled up again with Arthur J.’s gold till Tuesday.

  “If that place is so dead during the week, it must disappear entirely into the ground on Sundays,” Gleeson said.

  A little while after we floated out from under the Bridge, we could see people on the coping stones at the Harbour. The Canal is as straight as a die for that one mile between the Bridge and the Harbour. My father used to say that when you’re looking over water you can see clearer. We could easily see the people moving around on the quays where the wooden Windlass stands in the shape of a couple of black triangles that have their sides all entangled in each other. It must have taken a genius to figure out the workings of a windlass—had to be an Englishman.

  “Begob, they must be having a cock fight in Ballyrannel,” Paddy Finn said.

  A young buck-toothed lad was fishing off the bank near the burnt house. We had seen this youngster a hundred times before and he always asked us the same thing. The horse was on top of him before he pulled his line out of the water, one sock at his ankle, the other halfway up the calf, one leg of his short trousers higher than the other, the shirt neither on him nor off him, his hair like the flower of a Scottish thistle after an ass has been at it with its thick lips. He squinted at us and pulled his top lip further up his teeth. He was the ugliest child in God’s creation; only his own mother could see anything to look at in him, and that only if she was nearly blind.

  “Hey Chappie,” I called, “what’s happening down at the quays?”

  “Feis tomorrow. Getting ready. Can I get onto the ship?”

  “Will you stop asking that, you little scut?” Jack Gleeson growled. “You know we can’t take you on, so stop asking us every time we pass by. And it’s not a ship, it’s a boat. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “What’s going on at the Feis?” Finn called.

  “The Feis is.”

  “He’s so thick he doesn’t know he’s alive,” Gleeson said under his breath.

  The boy threw his line back into the water when we had passed. “Can I get on the ship the next time?” he called after us while he pulled at himself between the legs.

  “Will you feck off!” Finn shouted.

  Sitting beside each other on the wooden seat at the tiller, we watched the Harbour getting closer over the hump of the oilcloths covering the load of fertilizer. Except for the creaking of the horse’s collar, there wasn’t a sound in the world. I couldn’t even hear his hooves on the soft Towpath. A high, wide, disorganized flight of crows silently sailed toward the rookery on the far side of Ballyrannel, the birds drifting around in the sky as if already half asleep after their day’s work of cleaning up the world. A huge evening cloud was poking its forehead over the entire ridge of the mountain and it was hard to tell the deep blue of the mountain from the deep blue of the cloud. There could be rain for the Feis, I thought to myself. Then, about a hundred yards away, a girl came walking along the path coming out of the clump of sallies growing around Three Chimneys. We had our own names for houses and places along the Canal.

  “Here comes your sweetheart, Dinny,’ Finn said, and he poked me in the ribs with the sharpest elbow in Ireland. I hate getting poked in the ribs.

  Kitty Hatchel came up onto the Canal bank. She was carrying a folded barley sack in her hand.

  I knew Kitty when she was a babby, and God, she had grown up into a smashing young woman—the lovely face of her, the long legs of her. Missus Hodgkins had made her shine. She was the same age as my youngest girl. Somewhere in a little pigeonhole in my brain, I always thought of Kitty and her brothers as my children away from home.

  Walking off Three Chimney’s path onto the Canal bank, Kitty had her head bent as if trying to figure out something, or else making sure she didn’t step in animal dung.

  For the last couple of years, whenever I was told to bring a barge to Ballyrannel, the first thing I’d think of was Kitty; would I see her and get the chance to freshen up her picture in my head? I’d think too of the Canal Song slipping along the polished surface of the water to meet us before we even got near the Supply beyant the Bridge. How many times had I heard it and snatches of it?

  Come to my side, come to my side. My side where daisy petals have red rims. On my side the skylark has a nest of speckled eggs. My side. On my side the water hens polish the water with their yellow toes, on my side. My side.

  Of course I hadn’t heard the three of them singing that song in years. The two lads had joined up to see the world and Kitty was the only one left. Since the boys had gone away she hadn’t been herself. Since the War started she seemed to be walking around in a dream.

  When we floated within Kitty’s ears I stood up and called, “Hello Missy.” I always said the same thing to her, had been saying it for years now. “You’re as pretty as the Towpath flowers.”

  “Mister Hayes!” she said, as if she hadn’t noticed that a barge, a horse and three men were within fifty feet of her. Normally, she had a great smile, fresh and open like she was inviting you to play with her. But she didn’t smile at my compliment as she always did.

  “Any word from the lads?” I asked.

  Kitty stopped walking, waited for the horse to pull the barge level with herself. “Last week,” she said, “near a river in France called the Somme, waiting for something to happen.”

  “Song? I never heard of that one.”

  “Somme, Mister Hayes. S-o-m-m-e.” Kitty turned and started walking along the Canal bank with us.

  “They have quare names for places in France,” I said. “How’s Missus Hodgkins doing?”

  “She’s not doing bad, considering,” Kitty said. She could have been reciting the times table like a dreamy child in school. She spotted the two lads sitting on the seat at the tiller and, for a moment, she livened up. “Mister Gleeson! Mister Finn! Are you hiding back there or what?”

  Gleeson spoke up. “Ah, Kitty. Dinny here won’t let us do anything. He’s so good to us he hasn’t let us off this seat since we left Dublin three days ago.”

  “That means they overloaded you again,” Kitty said. She hadn’t been living on the edge of the Canal all these years for nothing. “Have things quieted down in Dublin?”

  Paddy Finn liked having Kitty’s attention too. “A lot quieter than at Easter,” he said with his terrible flat King’s County accent. “At least the big guns are gone. Now and then there’s rifle shots. If the English hadn’t shot the feckers the whole thing would have ended in a week. The leader was cross-eyed. Always beware the cross-eyed man, my mother said.”

  “Which of the lads wrote last week?” I asked.

  “Con. He’s still talking about missing India by a few days. And he said: ‘Tell Mister Hayes I said parley voo and stop scraping the bottom.’”

  Oh boy, oh boy, but I can’t tell you how good that felt
, being remembered by the boys like that, and they off in France. “Anything new about the Scarlet Pimpernel in the paper lately?” I asked.

  “Not for a month now. I just wish they were home.”

  Paddy Finn could see that the conversation needed to be turned again. “What’ll be happening at the Feis tomorrow?” he asked.

  Kitty dragged her mind home from France. “Oh, the usual. Dancing and singing competitions. A fiddler or two and then, of course, the tug-o-war to let the men show off how tough they are, and stupid. I have to get on home, Mister Hayes.” Kitty stopped walking and we slowly floated past her. “I was bringing a clocking hen to the Hippwells and I told my mother I wouldn’t be long.” She raised the hand with the sack like she was explaining something.

  “That’s one of Arthur J.’s sacks,” Finn called, pretending to accuse her of robbery. “I can see the red letters on it.”

  “It’s the same one you gave me four years ago, Mister Finn,” Kitty called back, smiling at last.

  “Are you going to the Feis?” I shouted to her.

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe,” she called, and she turned toward home.

  I sat back down on the bench beside Finn and Gleeson. It was like Kitty’s mood had settled on us, had sent the three of us to trenches full of men waiting to go over the top into a storm of bullets.

  Finally Finn said, “I tried to learn the fiddle once. My father could play and my sisters. My mother and myself had tin ears, is what my father used to say. Tin ears. I always thought that was funny—going round with a pair of tin ears sticking out of your head.”

  “I love hearing a good fiddler,” Jack Gleeson said. “Maybe tomorrow won’t be as bad as we thought.”

  Father Kinsella

  I didn’t like it when there was a boat in the Harbour when we had the Feis. Because they were from Dublin the boatmen thought we were all bumpkins—you could see the superior sneers. And I thought we were lucky that year until about six o’clock on Saturday evening, when I was looking over the site with the committee. I looked up and there was a boat floating out from under the Bridge. There’s some things you can’t control.

  Only for the organizing committee going over to the soldiers in Marbra with cap in hand every April we’d never have had the Feis. I wasn’t expecting we’d get permission in 1916 after what went on in Dublin that Easter—that cross-eyed Pearse and his crowd; so badly he wanted to be a mythical or mystical hero he just couldn’t wait to get himself killed. He read too much poetry, that fellow, including the rubbish he wrote himself—moved to heroism by his own words. Him and his crowd just couldn’t wait for the War to be over. There was no need for anyone to be a martyr for Ireland, unless they wanted to occupy a niche in the national pantheon of mindless zealots, have bad songs written about them to be sung in drunken and tuneless voices forever. Home Rule was on the books in London, and not even Lloyd George could wiggle out of it. Idiots, the whole lot of them. Dead idiots. Mindless zealots. Blind idealists. Pearse makes me very cross whenever I think of him—so vain he wouldn’t let himself be pictured head-on.

  All the other villages in the county had lost the Feis permission for allowing unpatriotic shouts about the king. But I had such a grip on Ballyrannel that the people knew if one of them sneezed the wrong way at the Feis, he’d have to deal with me. Someone had to be tough. The soldiers would have banned the Feis if the wrong song was sung, if there was too much green in sight, even if the fiddler sounded defiant. Of course the Redcoats knew I was connected with the Feis, but I kept out of sight, used Herby Kelly as organizer—scraping the barrel bottom there, I was. The English have been suspicious of priests since 1789, when all those French clerics came here with their continental notions.

  My reason for having the Feis at all was the dying culture—the language and the dancing and the singing and the fiddle-playing. We would have Home Rule the minute the War was over and we had to be up and running to restore our lost culture the minute the country was ours again.

  It was the dancing and music and singing and the sports that brought the people to the Feis. But every child in the school had to compete in the Gaelic-speaking contest, as well as all the adults in my Irish class. I made sure the best prizes went to the winners of the language competitions—silver medals bought out of parish funds with inscriptions in Gaelic, with harps and wolfhounds and round towers on the skyline, and not one shamrock in sight—lovely medals, heavy. I hate shamrock; it’s nothing but a bloody weed.

  Every year I was exasperated by the people’s lack of interest in the Irish-speaking competitions. But it was the very nature of the dancing and the music and the singing and the sports that attracted the people. Listening to someone going mad on the fiddle or looking at a group of children dancing like hares on the borrowed farmyard doors was far more exciting than standing around listening to one of the town teachers asking a child questions in Irish. But there were always the few thick boggers who not only cared less about the language but who would snigger at the ones doing their best to improve themselves. “Who does that one think she is?” are the discouraging words thrown into the hearing of anyone who’s trying to advance themselves in this country.

  There’s times when I think the Irish begrudge and belittle each other more than the English humiliate us. If they can’t do something themselves, they’ll keep everyone else from doing it with their belittling. I don’t know how the people in the singing competitions mustered the courage to face that rude and scoffing multitude, especially Sheila Feeney, who was always winning. She’d be about to reach for the highest note in Fáinne Geal an Lae, a fiddle humming along with her, when someone in the crowd would ambush her with loud fart sounds. Of course, Sheila Feeney made the rest of us feel excluded from the heights of Olympus, except for all the young lads who wanted to get at her in the bushes. It was Jimmy Nannery who got her in the end, but I think she never sang the same once she had sexual intercourse.

  It was the sports that would make a cat laugh. Nobody would have practised for anything, and suddenly you’d have all these young men competing against each other—the high jump, the long jump, the tug-o-war, the big-stone throw, the long-distance puck with a hurley, and the ball a thing of rags sewn into a lump with twine. They used to have the hop-step-and-jump until one year Paddy Conroy, at full speed, forgot what came after the hop and ended up with a broken arm when he crashed into the ground after a short flight.

  The lads were all so serious and ungraceful, there were times I laughed into my handkerchief. They thought they were showing off how strong or quick they were, but they only emphasized what big ungainly galoots they were—young, long-legged bulls not yet used to the weight of their own heads.

  The sports became part of the Feis more by accident in 1908 when a few of the lads started running to the far hedge and back again. And there you are—we had sports in the Feis. Then one year someone on the committee asked Kevin Walsh to bring his ass’s reins for a tug-o-war, and that’s how that started. I was nervous about the tug-o-war from the beginning, because all the cheering might draw the attention of the Redcoats to the Feis. But it was all over in a couple of minutes with nothing, only cut hands and dirty clothes, to show for the monumental efforts.

  Let them get their steam off, I said to myself, let them pull their rope and shout and fight. The tug-o-war is only an extension of the vying, the striving, the competing that goes on the whole year round between them. They try to out-scythe each other in August fields—out there in the golden straw in their collarless shirts with sleeves rolled up on white arms, shouting loud-mouthed, good-natured insults at each other across the hedges. On the bog in June, there’s the racing against each other in the cutting of the turf; in March they’re out-ploughing each other; on summer Sundays out-swimming each other when they race from the Bridge to the Harbour and back again, out-diving each other when they do their suicide jumps off the Bridge into the four-and-a-half feet of water below.

  As long as there’s young lads there
will be outdoing to be done. I wonder is that what keeps all the lads in Flanders and France at it—is the War just another version of a scything race, a ploughing race, a tug-o-war? Get a crowd of young men together and they turn into a pack, a herd, a flight of starlings that twists and turns like a solid cloud in the sky at the mercy of the will of the group. They drive each other to deeds of wonderful stupidity they would never even dream of doing if they were alone and unobserved.

  In the name of outdoing each other, the tug-o-war warriors will ruin their Sunday boots and pull their only set of decent clothes apart at the seams. If they would rather pull on a rope than exercise their brains, then let them pull and be damned. As well as that it will cool their ardour, put a wrinkle in their determination, keep their foreskins from stretching.

  I wonder how Con and Matt are doing.

  Matthias Wrenn

  The Canal. The Canal. A million miles away. A million miles.

  Millions of miles away, so far away I think I’ll never … And then I imagine I’m on my way and it’s only two more miles. Cork Corcoran’s house is in sight on the bog road. I have walked a million miles—walked and marched and run and crawled and clawed and crept and cried. Con with me everywhere. Con.

  My side, my side. The plover … It’s going to save me again, the Canal, like it saved me the night of the fire.

  There’s no water in the Canal, only warm sanctifying grace, grace so clear you can see the little weeds on the bottom, green completely, like they’d been dipped in green paint the colour of springtime’s hazel leaves. Every little branch of the taller weeds green too, like the greenness of new-grown moss, where the perch and the roach hide in the shade on summer days, not bothering with the bait even when it touches their lips. Fish lips. Fish eyes never close.