On Canaan's Side (17 page)

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’

All day I waited, trying to reach Joe all the while. His station-house was in a ferment, because the survivors had to be marshalled into a local schoolhouse, and some enterprising madmen were said to be looting out the abandoned homes, which was hard to credit. The whole area was toxic with that violent smell of gas that seems to run a spike into your tongue. When the cause of the disaster was opined, grief took up the places in the brain where terror had nested. Great grief spreading out through the city like a gas itself.

Joe didn’t come home at tea, or at suppertime, or even at midnight. I sat in my chair in the little hallway, with the door open, waiting for his patrol car to drop him off, waiting for his footfall along the dew-dampened concrete sidewalk. I heard my heart in my ribs the whole time, ticking away.

That’s when you know you love your husband, all things considered and taken into account. In balance. Love, which puts its two hands around your throat and starts to squeeze. Which bangs at your heart with an angry hammer, never ceasing, till the poor muscle flips and flaps in despair like a landed fish. Love so pressured it wants to unpack your body like a kit, just like Bill in the army had to learn to strip his gun, and reassemble it.

Joe disappeared.

He just vanished.

Vaporised, I thought. Joe, vaporised, made into a million million water drops of one kind and another, and then gone into the blue ether.

I sat in my chair then with my two arms neatly on my legs, all symmetrical and parallel. I was trying to hold on to my baby, for fear my fear would drive it out. I knew enormous shock could unmoor your baby. The little skiff of your baby slip its rope that tied it to your womb. Sitting there, holding on, holding on to Ed, probably an inch long. Inchelina.

J
oe’s last partner was an Irishman called Deacy and he arranged a ceremony to remember Joe. There were all the other funerals for the bodies they had found, and parts of bodies, and then a few ceremonies for the disappeared. Detective Deacy was a real Irishman, from Ireland, and I was still fearful of such a person, even in my fog of grief. I took some comfort that he was from Mayo, on the far side of the island from Wicklow. He had also been in the war, but all in all he seemed to me a cheerful soul, sociable and bright, although all such qualities dimmed by the passing of Joe. I don’t suppose he had had all that much time to get to know his partner. And it was his first time joining the cops. But nevertheless he was inclined to give the little ceremony full dignity. He was one of those persons who loved life, but was willing to give Death his due. He was a big hulking man, with a sort of stoop to his shoulders, that reminded me of Annie. He looked like he had carried a boulder across some great distance, and it had left him slightly crushed down at the top.

Anyway he spoke very finely about Joe and Joe’s many qualities as a person and a detective. It was poignant to hear someone I knew so well described by another, so that in fact he sounded like someone different. I didn’t really recognise Detective Deacy’s Joe. He told a story about him being taken captive by a bunch of corn-sugar merchants years before that I knew nothing about, and how Joe had convinced them not to kill him, and then when he escaped, made sure they were arrested and did their time for the corn-sugar, which would only have been a few years, tops. And how at Christmas time the men sent him a card, thanking him for convincing them not to kill him, which would have given them the electric chair. His fellow officers there were smiling wryly, chuckling a little. Stories of Joe unknown to his wife anyhow.

There was a bit of a desperate difficulty then because there was going to be a long process working out Joe’s bit of money, if any, due to me, because they had no body, and no death certificate, and I was going to have to wait before the courts could declare him legally dead.

‘It’s kind of strange,’ said Detective Deacy, in my kitchen, in just the same chair where his predecessor Mike Scopello had liked to sit. ‘It’s not just the death cert. We can’t even find a birth cert for Joe. We can’t find any sort of cert for him except his marriage licence. Any information he gave when he started his training doesn’t quite tally with any actual document. There’s not one piece of paper can tell you anything about him. But he died in the line of duty more than likely, so we’re not making much of that. But you might think, aside from the fact that you married him, and we did clap eyes on him every day, that he never existed.’

‘How would that come about?’ I said. ‘Do records get lost a lot?’

‘No, it ain’t that so much. No. People change their names. And then they cross state lines like invisible men.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

I didn’t want to talk much more about that.

‘Aliases. I arrested a man last month had thirty-nine different names. He kept a list, in case he forgot them. But I’d have never known that, except he was a nut, and was confessing to petty crimes across eighteen states. Eighteen. Wanted them all taken down and noted, and given to the press. The press couldn’t care less. He was very disheartened. He’s doing five to ten in the Cleveland correctional.’

‘And do good people change their names in America?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Good question. Maybe not.’

Then he gave me a bag of dollars he and his buddies had got together in a whip-around. He had asked his wife what would be a good move for me and she had said go talk to Sister de Montfort over at the women’s hospital.

‘All right?’ he said, rising like a bear. ‘Can’t tell you, Lilly, how sorry I am, how sorry we all are.’

‘Thanks, Detective,’ I said. ‘I know.’

So I eked out the dollars, and my baby grew inside me. How is it that we do not feel less lonely for the presence of our children? I think I thought that the little life gathering force and purpose inside me would assuage all my troubles. But it was fearsome lonely in the old bed, when there was no Joe with his long limbs stretched out, the feet hanging over the end of the bed, the cigarette in his mouth, gassing away about everything and nothing. And it was quiet, so quiet, all that summer, in the house, the cheap clock on the mantel timidly ticking and chiming, almost embarrassed to be breaking the convent-like silence. Every morning without mercy I threw up into the toilet-bowl, I retched so hard I thought my baby would pop out my mouth.

I risked a letter to Annie, though I hated the thought I might stir the dark man again. But I had to think, it was so many years later now, decades later, surely those old orders must be falling away. Surely even assassins grew older, indifferent to vanished causes. I prayed so. I wrote to Annie at the last address I had for her, telling her my story, more or less, and a couple of weeks later picked up her reply from the post office, still not daring to supply an actual street address. She told me that things were not going well for her, she had had to throw in her lot with our cousin Sarah Cullen in the townland of Kelsha, little farm, bed, and all. She also for good measure filled me in further on my father, telling me his pension after independence had gone mysteriously awry, and he had been obliged to throw himself on the mercy of the new state. Now she described his grave for what it was, a pauper’s one. Maybe her own increasing poverty, and single state, had worn her down, and she had reached the hard nubs of certain truths. Maud, she said, much to my alarm, though married to her painter and with two sons, had lost a little girl to scarlet fever, and having buried her in the angel’s acre in Glasnevin, where all the little ones of Dublin were put, had taken to her bed, and had not risen out of it for some years. Annie did not believe there was much wrong with her, except her head was not strong enough to endure her loss. This was all terrifying enough, and yet I pored over the letter even so with a strange gratitude, eager for details, no matter of what nature. I longed, longed to be home, out of this American chaos, and back in an Irish chaos I understood better, and would not be so alone in. And yet I sensed in my sisters a huge loneliness, each in her own way. I could imagine from all she said that Annie had no money at all, and yet she included in her letter a folded red ten-bob note. The bank on the corner gave me four dollars for it. I was so grateful to her for it, and wrote to thank her. That letter received no answer that I knew of.

I was about five months along now and thought I was doing quite well. I could just manage the rent on the house, and to feed myself. I went to the big Italian market once a week, and the wonderful ladies there filled my bag with spuds and carrots and the like. There was a butcher down there, Mr Donelli, who was a great expert on the cheap cuts of meat, because his customers didn’t buy much else. I had all of Cassie’s teaching to make me adept at cheering up these items with a bit of clever cooking. I was cooking for my child, I thought. I was setting out my meals, and had the magical sense that there, right in the heart of me, my little one was joining me in the repast. I used to chuckle to myself, thinking about it, I hardly know why. I was one of those daft women who talk to their bellies. When the baby moved the first time, as I was lying half-asleep on the bed, my eyes opened wide, and I could feel a sort of bright light as decent as the sun burning softly through me, through my breasts and my loins, a sort of wild happiness in the guise of light. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was as if some person inside me was signalling to me.
I am here.
Maybe in truth I didn’t feel any the less lonely, but I certainly felt
fiercer
. If any demon, devil or evil person had come near us, I might have torn out their throats.

So I was classing this as doing quite well.

Then I got a letter. The postman brought it, right to the door. It was in a scrawly black writing I knew. Out of the blue, the untrustworthy blue.

I had to fish into my box of things just now to find it:

Dear Lilly,

I am writing this to you without return address. I want you to know the rumors that Mike Scopello told you about and threatened to tell the cops are not right. I know for a sure cert if I stood before a judge and jury they would find me innocent. Anyway Lilly the reason why I went is not the rumors. I cannot even write it down here. Now I am writing this and my next thought is how much that I love you. Nothing is bigger than that. The thought that comes next is of what is in you. Our baby. I will send you money every month as long as I know where you are and can send it without seeming to send it from anywhere. I pray God who understands everything will forgive me.

Joe.

Then he wrote in Xs and Os like a child and then he crossed them out.

I got in touch with Mike Scopello. He hadn’t come near me in my present predicament. He too had thought Joe was dead, killed in the explosions. Now it looked like Joe had only used that as a cover. Mike said, yes, he had threatened Joe that he would bring his suspicions to the police. They already had the licence plates business on record, the mysterious presence of Joe’s auto at two of the murder sites. He said Joe was very worried, very black and angry about it. He swore blind he had had nothing to do with the murders. It was all coincidence, he said, about the damn automobile. He seemed really shocked, said Mike, which had thrown Mike a bit.

The thing was, Joe was telling the truth.

Just about the same time as the letter came, just a few days later in fact, it so happened the actual murderer was discovered, and he confessed all. It was some mad Swede from Illinois. It was in all the papers. Joe was sure to read about it, I thought.

Mike Scopello came back over as soon as he heard and said he was sorry he had suspected Joe. He said, anything he could do, he would. I didn’t know what to say. I asked if there was any way we could get a message to Joe. He said no one would find Joe Kinderman. I begged him to try.

‘I will try,’ he said. ‘And if there’s ever anything you need, anything at all, you just ring that number. I don’t feel good about this at all. Not one bit. And you expecting makes it all the worse.’

Even so, he said he would have to let the station know that there had been a letter, and that therefore Joe was still alive somewhere. I knew that meant there never would be a pension. But I thought, it doesn’t matter, Joe will come back now.

Then after a good many days, beginning to despair, I read his letter again. It was right there. He had already told me, it wasn’t the rumours had made him go.
I cannot even write it down here.
Write what down?

It was something else was keeping him away it seemed. That he couldn’t say.

It was nearly twenty years before I found out what that was, and I don’t know if I understood it even then, or understand it now.

And whether he could not risk the sending, or thought better of it, or his letters went astray, I never did find a letter from Joe with money in it, so I suppose that first and only letter, which I have kept – and have been copying out here, and marvelling at his atrocious spelling, and correcting it – was not all honest. Why had he left me, why had he left
us
? I thought about that, full with child. I thought about that. An anger flooded through me such as I had never known, even when Tadg was murdered, or anything else that had happened to me in my life. I had never been brought so low that I had cursed at someone, even, God forgive me, cursed at God. But I cursed at God and Joe that time.

Whatever society the human creature finds itself in, it tries to live in it. We desire so greatly to be respected. Otherwise even wide gardens and palaces are a sort of prison. I didn’t think there was going to be a lot of respect for a single woman with a child. It wouldn’t look right, plain and simple.

But Mike Scopello seemingly couldn’t shake off the feeling he was somehow responsible. Even though I said a half-dozen times he was not, he made it his business to try and help me. When I went into the maternity hospital, he told them he was my brother, and when Ed was born, contrived to delight in the birth of his nephew. He brought me flowers and cards and all the news of the city, and many nights he sat in by my bed, talking quietly. The other women were charmed by him, never questioning how an Irish woman and an Italian man could be sister and brother.