On Canaan's Side (22 page)

But unknown to me, Mr Nolan had begun his own enquiries. How he did it I do not know, but he got information on Ed. He took a Saturday and Sunday off – indeed, Mr Nolan never retired, until he got ill – and went off mysteriously. He said he was going to Tennessee, which was usually his way of saying he was on a two-day drinking batter. He liked to drink hard with some of the other gardeners round where he lived. He liked to ‘close the curtains’ as he called it. I suppose even then I knew he had his own demons, Mr Nolan.

But he mustn’t have gone drinking that time.

‘Well, Lilly,’ he said, ‘he’s up in the Smoky Mountains, way way off in the backwoods, with some other vets and hippies. A crowd of
pocaidí dubha
and other such characters I guess.’

‘Where’s that?’ I said.

‘North Carolina,’ he said. ‘He’s in there somewhere, I’m told, back of the Cherokee res. Long long way in, in the old-growth trees.’

‘How did you find that out?’

‘You just have to keep asking round. You can trace a skeeter in America, if you know how to keep asking.’

‘And could anyone find them in there?’

‘Reckon I could. You’d need some class of a mountainy man anyhow. You want me to try, Lilly? He mightn’t want to see me. He might want to be left alone. Not be found.’

I thought about that for a day or two, but then I had to ask him. I kept seeing the boy in his faded blue shorts. I knew he had seen the merciless mayhem of that war, I knew he was a grown man, but I kept seeing the boy.

‘I would like you to try,’ I said.

Mr Nolan now owned an old black Town Car, that Mr Wolohan had bought for a few dollars a few properties over, when some ancient millionaire died. He gave it to Mr Nolan, because he knew he needed something to fetch the plants in. Mr Nolan had the back seats taken out, and a wooden plate put in, which all worked as good as a pick-up. And Mr Nolan was more proud of that huge scratched car than he could ever have been of a truck.

Anyway he begged a few days from Mrs Wolohan, but didn’t trouble her or himself to say why. He was most ever close by and often came over to do things outside his times, so she was graceful about letting him go. Indeed she wasn’t so much critical of his drinking as interested in it. She liked to hear of his adventures, and how things were over in the shebeens along the pike. As a Tennessee Irishman, it was expected he would like a drink, I suppose. So maybe she thought that’s what he had in mind.

The next morning early he loaded his car up for a couple of days’ driving. I hovered about, waiting to say goodbye. He knew how to load his own automobile. He had an old knapsack which he threw in the back. It made a heavy noise when it landed.

‘That’s my old gun. Guess I shouldn’t be throwing old guns around. I sometimes put a Lilo in there and sleep,’ he said. ‘If I find myself over by Montauk, you know, late, done in maybe. This is the world’s best automobile.’

Then he climbed into the front seat and slammed the door, and wound down the window, hardly missing a beat.

‘I’ll hook up with Highway 81, and that will bring me nearly all the way where I’m going, New Jersey, Tennessee, North Carolina, and then I’ll just sling a left somewhere and get across to Cherokee.’

‘I am so grateful, Mr Nolan. It is so kind of you.’

‘You ever been in Tennessee, Lilly?’

‘No.’

‘All the tobacco fields you’ll ever need to see. I’d like to bring you down there sometime.’

Then he was singing some old song he knew, ‘Little Birdie’. He wasn’t in a rush to go, I noted. He was relishing something about the moment.

‘I knew another man knew that song,’ I said.

‘That so?’ he said.

‘He used to sing it when he was shaving.’

‘It’s a good shaving song,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t want to get carried away on that high note though, and slit your own throat.’

Then he switched on the big engine, and gunned the pedal.

‘I know another good song, “Oh Death”, but I’m not singing that.’

‘You can sing it if you like, I don’t mind.’

‘No, I better not sing it.’

‘Just sing a little bit of it,’ I said.

‘
Oh Death
,’ he sang, ‘
Oh Death, won’t you spare me over for another year.
’

Except he didn’t say
year
like I did, he said
yare
.

‘When you sing that song you sound more Tennessee.’

‘You can’t sing it any other way,’ he said.

Fact is, I wanted to kiss him, I felt so grateful. But he didn’t need a seventy-year-old woman kissing him.

Then he drove off into the early morning glitter.

I suppose he had often driven down those roads, going home. Or did he ever go home? I knew his people were dead now, so he said. Well, he could be pretty mysterious, Mr Nolan, but it wasn’t as if he was the first mysterious man I had ever met. You can be expert in things you’d rather not be expert in. Or that weren’t so good for you, like Ed’s gift for bomb disposal.

At this time I had just retired, and Mrs Wolohan had arranged this house for me. She had spoken a little speech for about ten minutes in the hallway of her own house, by the old mirror and the knick-knacks I had polished a thousand times, itemising my years with her.

Mr Dillinger was in Africa, and there had arrived, with a dozen stamps and postmarks, looking weary but triumphant, a card with a picture of an elephant: ‘
Here’s to many happy years, Mrs B. Cordially, S.
’

So I was new enough into the house, and was still busy arranging the few things to my name to my satisfaction. Knowing that Mr Nolan was on his quest, on my behalf, felt like a fortune in the bank. I was rich with expectation anyhow.

Three days later, towards suppertime, I was in the backyard, and heard the chain of the lavatory going in the house behind me, and I turned to go back in. I didn’t fear intruders, not in those times. I hadn’t turned on any lights, and my kitchen was dark.

I almost didn’t see the child, because the child also was dark. He was about two years old, and was draped, swaddled nearly, in a shirt of Mr Nolan’s. I hadn’t heard the old Town Car drive up, but I could see its black shape outside, where Mr Nolan must have parked it on the road. The first call on his time had been his bladder.

The child just stood there, in the centre of the floor, looking at me. A thin little boy with a heap of black hair.

Mr Nolan issued forth from the lavatory.

‘Oh, sorry, Lilly,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you were in. Nature called.’

‘That’s all right, Mr Nolan. Who is this?’

‘I guess that’s your grandson, Bill.’

I stood there, and slowly slowly I put my hands on my head. Rested my two open palms on my head.

After a moment, thinking I might be scaring him, I hunkered down to him. I was nearly afraid to embrace him. But he moved first. He came into my arms like a known child.

That night Mr Nolan told me his story. The beautiful, unexpected child was exhausted, and had gone straight to sleep. He lay in the sheets for one long moment with his eyes fixed on mine, burning softly in the soft light, and then the lids closed.

Mr Nolan sat out on the porch with me. The fireflies burned themselves on the bulb above us.

I knew he was tired from his journey, but he also needed to tell what had happened, and I needed to hear it.

He had got down to Cherokee in about fourteen hours, he said. There was a friend of Ed’s waiting, a Cherokee called Nimrod Smith, who also had been in Vietnam, the man who a few weeks before had told him where Ed was, when Mr Nolan first looked into it. Now Nimrod Smith wanted $50 and Mr Nolan promised to send it when he got home. Mr Nolan waited all day while Nimrod Smith went into the forest on his motorbike. He wouldn’t just bring a person in unannounced. So Mr Nolan was left to twiddle his thumbs in the motel. But it turned out to be a good idea, all in all. Nimrod Smith came back in the darkness. Ed was anxious to see Mr Nolan, he had something he needed to tell him. He had said he would meet them about halfway along the trail. Next morning Nimrod Smith brought Mr Nolan into the mountains on the motorcycle. Ed was waiting in a small glade, and he had a child with him. Mr Nolan was overwhelmed to see Ed, he suddenly realised how much he had been worried about him, like he might his own son, if he had had one. Ed had let his nice hair grow, and he had a rough mountain man’s beard. He embraced Mr Nolan. He said the child’s mother, a girl called Jacinta Riley, had died in hospital in Knoxville, and the mountains just weren’t any place for a child. He said he was desperate for his son’s welfare. He asked could Mr Nolan take the child out, maybe take him back with him to me? He said his ma would know what to do.

That I would know what to do! I hadn’t the slightest notion, except I was so grateful Ed was alive, and that he had had the sense not to try and keep his son in such a primitive place. Maybe I wished he had come home with his son, and sorted himself out, for his son’s sake. But Mr Nolan said there was something very sad about Ed. Mr Nolan was deeply affected by seeing him, I could tell. He wept when he told me how altered he was, ‘the boy’, as he called him, just as he always used to call him, when indeed he was a boy, in the days before he went to Vietnam.

‘Like an empty house with a ghost in it,’ said Mr Nolan.

‘God help him, Lilly.’

‘You did a good thing, Mr Nolan, you surely did.’

‘Bringing you a little lad two years old? What are you going to do, Lilly, rear him up? What the heck are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to live a long time,’ I said, not having any other plan.

‘You’re going to keep him?’

‘I’m going to keep him, till Ed recovers. Some day he will recover. That’s my prayer, Mr Nolan. Until then,’ I said, ‘I’m going to be looking after Bill.’

‘Well,’ said Mr Nolan. ‘You are certifiable mad. But I’ll help you. God knows I will.’

‘Thank you, Mr Nolan.’

I
woke this morning so tired, so bone weary, I dragged myself more than walked to the lavatory. I am beginning to think this writing things down is as much hard labour as an Irish country washday.

But I also got a little gift of happiness out of the morning too. The constipation that had been bothering me all week finally surrendered to my prayers and imprecations and what followed was a feeling that I do not think would disgrace the citizens of heaven, in their famous contentment.

To remember sometimes is a great sorrow, but when the remembering has been done, there comes afterwards a very curious peacefulness. Because you have planted your flag on the summit of the sorrow. You have climbed it.

And I notice again in the writing of this confession that there is nothing called long-ago after all. When things are summoned up, it is all present time, pure and simple. So that, much to my surprise, people I have loved are allowed to live again. What it is that allows them I don’t know. I have been happy now and then in the last two weeks, the special happiness that is offered from the hand of sorrow.

I had to disclose our new arrival to Mrs Wolohan. I was obliged to, though a corner of my mind feared she might object. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Another child she could get ready to dine with kings. She took the matter into hand, and wrote on my behalf to the hospital in North Carolina, and was sent the death certificate of Bill’s mother, and his birth certificate was located also, and sent on. His full name, presumably entered by his father, was William Dunne Kinderman Bere. It was poignant to read this name, containing all and more of my own history as a human creature, and look down on the small bearer of it. He had more names to himself than years. He was in fact two years, three months, and five days old. He had had his mother till he was two. She had died of sepsis following on from peritonitis.

I brought Bill to Dr Earnshaw, at that time not long in practice, as I remember. He seemed to take a dim view of the whole matter, or so I thought at the time. But in fact of course it was just Dr Earnshaw’s manner, which I grew to understand better over the years. He gave Bill a thorough going-over. Much to my surprise again, there wasn’t much wrong with the child. He had been fed wisely, and Dr Earnshaw pointed out to me the little tiny shellfish marks of his inoculations.

‘I will do these all again, of course,’ said Dr Earnshaw, ‘but this is not a neglected child.’

I had no photo of Bill’s mother Jacinta, but something of her, even by these minute traces, seemed to come through to me, and I wondered about her story. I wrote to her parents in Knoxville, an address that Mrs Wolohan had from the hospital, but was much distressed to get a strange, hurt letter from a Mr Riley, her father. He went to the trouble of pointing out that since Ed was a white person, the boy could not be his, and for their part, said Mr Riley, they had no further interest in the matter, and were still grieving for the loss of their daughter, who had gone off the rails in her last years. He said that if I intended to have the child adopted or put into care, he would fully support me in my endeavour. However he enclosed three photographs of Jacinta, one as a baby, one as a high school student, and one on the day she married Ed. This I peered and peered at, marvelling at it. They had been married for whatever reason in Harris County, in Houston, Texas, a ‘furtive five-minute job, among what looked to us like Texican shotgun wedding-parties, not a word of English spoken, and all the brides expecting’ as Mr Riley described it, obviously not approving, or, more likely, deeply offended by it. But even in that present chaos, I was proud of Ed in his best jeans, and hair in a long Indian plait, which he wore down his left breast. And his wife Jacinta as glad as a rose, beside him, with the sign for the courthouse behind them. They looked like any other young couple, all their years ahead of them, blessed with youth. I prayed it had given Ed a few days of happiness, whatever ailed him generally.

I prayed also that in time his wounded self would recuperate, atom by atom, at whatever pace it took, and that some day I might see him again, and that he might see his son, the one restored to the other. I prayed for that.