On Canaan's Side (15 page)

The storm blew its sorrowful dust about all day, covering everything and everybody. It must be still there, anciently, in the cement mixes of that time following, lying in the little lines of the sidewalks, deep in the very heart’s core of the citizens. In Mr Dillinger’s newfangled
DNA
. The dust of that day, the day that the gigantic wind brought all that dust from Oklahoma, bringing it six hundred miles and more, all the way to New York. All the way I will be bound to Chicago and Cleveland. The dust of dreams, of farms, of Okie talk, of lullabies and lovers’ promises, the dust of America’s blood and spit. The wind brought that.
And the Lord was not in the wind.

The time of my marriage. Just after.

So then we set ourselves up in a small house in the Irish part of town, a fact which obliged me always to keep back from my neighbours. It put the wind up me to be surrounded by all the Irish names, but most of those families were second- and third-generation in America. They didn’t know much about my Ireland. Not that I did myself, or do now. I cannot imagine it. It is like a huge graveyard, with my father and my sisters buried in it. A blankness has grown up in my head over the years. Someone has been painting out those old scenes. White paint over everything. Willie is in Picardy of course.

Joe liked being married. One morning he told me to be sure to be standing out on the sidewalk at six o’clock when he was due home. I stood there faithfully in my best dress, thinking it was an occasion of some sort. It was a blowy day, and I felt strange standing out there, with the secret world of our house behind. The little brown kitchen that had only a small window looking out on the neighbour’s yard, our sitting-room the size of a cat litter-box, and up the tight stairs, our bedroom, or ‘the ring’ as Joe dubbed it, where we ‘wrestled for Cuyahoga county’.

Anyway in the blowing dust of the evening, and it may have been summer then so, up came a big new automobile, with huge white wheels, that you don’t see nowadays. Mrs Wolohan’s chariot is a very small affair beside it. How they got those tyres off I don’t know. It had enormous lamps, shining with chrome, and it was great excitement to me to see Joe sitting up in that behind the wheel. He must have brought his civvies in to work with him, because he was in his mass-going suit, and his white hat with the thick black ribbon. His ‘gangster’s’ hat, he called it, and indeed it had been given to him by an Italian gentleman he knew.

‘Some machine, eh, Lilly? Get in, Lilly, let’s go for a spin.’ We drove out along the lakeshore, and back into the city, and sped along Woodland Avenue, acknowledging as we passed the strange castles of Luna Park, then away out to Shaker Heights, the big engine surging and trembling, passing the turn to Mrs Bellow’s house that I knew so well. But we had done with all that, we were turning our faces to the future.

‘The past is a crying child, that’s for sure,’ said Joe, ‘but it will all be made up to him in the coming times. Yes, sir.’

Joe liked to make enigmatic statements like that. It cheered him up.

W
ell I remember when Joe’s partner Mike Scopello came to see me. We had been married about three years. A man had come into the Cleveland police department and started to clean everything up. There had been too much money sloshing around Cleveland, and Joe said there was a lot of officers and detectives on the take from the Italians. Mike was an Italian, and a Sicilian at that, but from the northeast part of the island. The first night he had supper with us, and I astonished him by serving ‘the best plate of fish’ he ever ate, he showed me a tattered but treasured photograph, not only of his grandmother and grandfather, who he had never really known, but also the old farmhouse where his family had farmed for hundreds of years.

‘I don’t know, Lilly,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s a ruin now. I heard it was all right.’

Mike didn’t like Mussolini much, but otherwise the Italians worshipped him. We could drive through Little Italy and see banners with the great man’s face on them. There was even a hope that Mussolini would come to America. He was going to make Italy like it was in the time of the Romans, people said. Anyway they took pride in their distant leader.

‘Old house still probably going to be a ruin, with or without Signor Mussolini,’ Mike said. No, he didn’t like him. ‘I don’t like all that show,’ he said. But he certainly liked that fish.

He was also mighty fond of Joe. Two times they were in gunfights together, with the racketeers. Joe said they were always looking for clever new ways to break the law. All the old still-men, all the families that had lived off the sugarcorn trade, all the kids that had gone to school with the dollars of that trade keeping them in shoes, they were young men now, and eager to make their fortunes.

‘Like trying to get bats out of your roof,’ said Joe, sitting that first night in the afterglow of the summer evening. Our little house had a view of the lake, just. You had to crane your neck, and all you saw were factories and jetties, but it was there, the water. The lake had its own aroma, from a hundred ingredients, mixed by the god of that lake. There was great soothing in that smell. I didn’t like to have to go away from it; sometimes we drove northward along the lake shore, there were places up there to visit, restaurants and the like, and that was fine, but I didn’t like it when Joe cut inland in the big motor. He loved cities, and wanted to see Toledo and maybe even Chicago, but I was loath to go, back along those shining train tracks.

I had told Joe as much as I dared about myself. In the end I did tell him about Tadg, but I didn’t say I was there, and I prayed to the good God that he wouldn’t look into it. I thought I owed him that much of the truth. Not that I seemed to get much truth back for my trouble, but maybe I wasn’t with Joe for truth exactly.

‘Your story,’ he said, lying up in the bed, his legs too long for the end of it, and his upper body naked, only the bottoms of a set of striped pyjamas to cover himself. His big right hand was holding a cigarette, which he was gratefully smoking. He loved his tobacco. ‘Your story there, about your Irish friend, reminds me of something. Mike would tell you the story better, but Mike isn’t here … There was this little Italian woman, from southern Sicily, very young and very pretty, the way those Italians can be, long jet-black hair, anyway, she was found killed out on Lakeshore Drive, riddled with bullets and shotgun pellets. This was maybe five or six years ago. Turned out, her brothers had killed her. They had all fired at the same time, so all would take equal share in the killing. Five boys seemingly. I never saw them. They were back on a ship to Italy before anyone like me caught up with what they were doing. But this informant guy, this little snitch guy,’ and he took a long draw from the cigarette, making it fizz with heat, and then blew the smoke slowly through his teeth, ‘yeah, this guy, I catch up with him, and he tells me the story behind it. She grew up in Sicily and wanted to make something of herself. Her brothers chose her a husband, but she wouldn’t take him. So she sneaks off on the boat and finally fetches up in Cleveland. The worst damn place ever in America she could fetch up in. All these Italians. In no time, her family found out where she was. The brothers are sent over. They kill her. Their own sister.’

Then Joe said nothing for a long while, not until he had burned the cigarette to the last ring of paper.

‘Mike’s not like that. He’s a good guy.’

He lay there, tapping his left foot on the brass bedstead.

‘Your story kind of reminds me of that.’

‘It’s something the same,’ I said, but nervously. I didn’t want to be talking about it any more. I didn’t want Joe to have married a shadow, even if he was a shadow. But it made me so fearful, stories like that, my story, and that poor girl’s story.

Anyway, Mike was not like that, he was just in mourning for that old house, and denigrating Mussolini. I was glad at any rate I had cooked him the fish, even though of course I hadn’t known his village was by the sea. He carried the photograph of the house about with him like a holy picture. There were long black rocks at the end of the land, reaching out into the water. I thought I could almost hear it, and wondered how that water smelled. What the god of that water had mixed for a smell.

So it was a couple of years after that, when I knew Mike quite well, that he came to see me, but there was no Joe with him, and it was the middle of the afternoon. I was just back in from the store, and was just blanching some potatoes, which I was going to fry then for Joe’s meal, with a length of the softest steak that a policeman’s pay-packet could finance. Mike Scopello usually took an interest in anything cooking, but not this day. He divested himself of bits and pieces, he even took off his gun-belt and gun and laid them on my kitchen table, because he had quite a stomach, Mike, and it was awkward for him sitting with a firearm digging into his stomach-folds.

‘We’re looking into something,’ he said. ‘It’s just routine stuff. I wanted to ask you a few questions.’

‘What about?’ I said. I didn’t think I knew anything about anything, living quietly there, but I was willing to assist him.

‘You know Joe’s machine, that fine automobile …’

‘I won’t answer any questions about Joe,’ I said, after a moment, holding up a hand, which happened also to hold a spatula dripping with fat. The oil splattered against the back of my hand, burning me ever so slightly. Mike jumped up and grabbed a cloth and put it under the cold tap.

‘You all right?’ he said. ‘You burn yourself, Lilly?’

‘No, I’m all right.’

‘Okay,’ he said, and sat back down, wary now I could see, a little different, maybe trying to figure out an acceptable way to ask his questions.

‘I love Joe,’ I said, after a short silence.

‘Of course you do,’ he said. ‘I love him too. I just need to ask some questions. It’s routine. We got all these new procedures now. Everything has to be followed up. We got rid of forty-three officers in the last three years. Forty-three. We’re a clean outfit now. I just need to ask some questions.’

‘But I won’t answer any question about Joe.’

‘I’m not saying he done wrong, I’m just clearing something up.’

‘I don’t mind answering when Joe gets back.’

‘Wouldn’t be any use asking you if Joe was here. I actually don’t want to upset Joe. He’s my partner. He’s pulled me out of things, plenty of things. This is a bad city sometimes. People want to kill people all the time. Joe has my back, the whole time. He’s the safest partner in the department, everyone says so. Even when some of the boys were taking money, big money, Joe never was. This isn’t about money.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘What is it about?’

‘That car of his, does he go out driving in it late at night sometimes? I mean, men do that. Blow off steam. I see them all the time, just cruising round. I don’t even mean going down through the markets, nothing like that. Maybe he does that? Some nights?’

Well, I knew Joe did do that sometimes, not often, just now and then. ‘Deviation,’ he called it. He had looked up the word ‘deviate’ in the dictionary, and was intrigued to see it meant to wander from the route, among its other meanings.

‘You better ask Joe,’ I said. ‘It must be nearly six o’clock now. He’ll be home soon.’

‘We’ll talk about it again,’ said Mike, getting up, and starting to put himself together again, throwing the gunstrap from long practice around his shoulder, and inserting the blunt-looking weapon into its nest.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘I’ll see you soon, Lilly. I would appreciate it if you didn’t mention this visit to Joe. I would. It ain’t nothing, and I don’t want him to make anything of it.’

‘You need to talk to him straight, man to man, eye to eye.’

‘That’s not how it works. I’ll see you now.’

And out he went, his thick legs rubbing at the thigh.

So then I was watching Joe, a little, I couldn’t help it. It put a disturbance under the wall of things, dislodging a few stones of the foundations. ‘There’s trouble making a start,’ Mr Nolan used to say, staring up at a gutter slightly fallen as may be, and soon he would be back with his ladder and his box of tricks. But we had no handyman to be seeing to us. The Celestial Handyman tends to let the house fall.

So I was watching him the next morning, as he performed his ablutions in the little bathroom, ferocious splashing of the face and neck, vigorous warblings, and him singing
Little birdie, little birdie …
Shaving always gave him some pain, because his skin was tender, and inclined to red spots and little weals, hardly noticed, so he might sing a line of the song,
Little birdie, little birdie
, and give a yelp, and then go on with
why do you fly so high?
, scraping away all the while, valiantly. There is a certain courage needed in a man like that in the matter of shaving, every morning. Then he was applying his unguents, whose nature I didn’t know, but it was called Silver Birch Balsam on the little tin, I do remember. And he was mixing up in a pestle and mortar some stuff he bought in little packets from the drugstore, and what they were I couldn’t know, and he didn’t say. But when he knocked a bit of water into it, there was a slightly unpleasant worrying acid smell, and as he applied it to his poor raw face, I was fearing for him, that he might burn the cheeks off of himself. Then a huge wash again, copiously applying the lovely cool water of America, and shaking of his head, and all the while the little song kept going, in broken snatches and silences, and groans.
It’s because I am
– silence –
a true little bird
– silence –
and do not fear to die …
Then he was throwing the uniform dutifully and excellently ironed by myself onto the bed, which was my viewing station just then, before I would launch myself into the day and fry up his eggs and bread. Grab the whole thing on the hanger and with a small violence cast it onto the bed. Dear Joe. And he was climbing into the trouser legs then, tottering in his vest and pants. A man dressing in the morning, in his youth. My husband. My beloved. And truly I loved that man.