On Canaan's Side (7 page)

‘Deeny what?’ I said.

‘Three letters, Mrs Bere,
D-N-A
. Don’t ask me what they stand for. The
DNA
of every modern person goes back to one, or maybe three women in Africa. The good news is, we are all the same family. The bad news is, we are all the same family.’ This was his little joke. ‘The point is, all these wars, all these teems of history, all this hatred of difference, and fear of the other, has been a long, elaborate, useless, heartbreaking nonsense. America is not a melting pot of different races, it is where the great family shows its many faces. The Arab is the Jew, the Englishman is the Irishman, the German is the Frenchman, it is a wonderful catastrophe, no? It is the most important thing we have been told in our lifetime.’

Which might explain the strange feeling I had standing on the deck of our ship as it approached New Haven. There was a scent, the scent of America, that came off the land, so suggestive, so subtle, there was something in it that claimed my heart. Even before we got there, I was experiencing a sort of nostalgia for the land, I do not know how other to describe it. As if I had been there before, had left it, and was returning after a long voyage. We were drooping with fatigue, after the days of the voyage, because Tadg had felt seasick as we left the arms of the Great South Wall, and the sickness had never left him. The crossing was a torment for him, and my mind had turned round and round sleeplessly the images of my sisters and my father. We had kept to a tiny cramped corner of the ship as Tadg, even in his sickness, feared every man on deck, that he might have been placed on board to kill us. And indeed he barely looked now at the small city looming nearer, but I saw his eyes dart about, trying to judge the relaxedness or preparedness of other passengers, as if any man there in his belted overcoat might not have nesting in his clothes a cold metal gun.

As if to honour both the seasickness and the fear, Tadg had not shaved on the voyage, and had grown a reasonably successful reddish beard, which he allowed me to trim roughly to a point with a borrowed scissors, so he looked less like a poor balladeer in a Dublin street.

We were in the sort of situation that can show you pretty quick, and painfully, that you are travelling with a person that in effect you do not know.

Neither of us were now what we had been. My father in great haste had put together some letters for us on his official paper, and gave our names as Timothy and Grainne Cullen, brother and sister, should we need them, but just to muddle everything, he had put our real names on the ship’s passenger list, in case using aliases would make our naturalisation eventually in America more difficult. But at least we would be able to travel for the moment in America as people other than what we were, and give our names that were not our names, until things might seem to die down, and we might marry at last as who we were, and give our real names at last to the minister. Like normal human beings. Without sentences of death on their heads.

But Timothy Cullen, or Tadg Bere, I hardly knew who he was, either way.

Perhaps in Ireland, right up to the moment we had to go, he had been Tadg. Perhaps it was fear altered him, like one of those small earthquakes under farms that alter the watercourse and make a well dry up, though there is no visible sign of alteration in the landscape. Now that I was grappling with an unknown Tadg, I was panicking in my thought that I had never really known him, had allowed myself to become engaged to a man because he had known my beloved brother, and had written me a gentle letter, he a boy who had survived years of unrestrained carnage. As if the love I had for Willie was strangely transferable, and while maybe even a real love, was a blind one, an unhearing one, an unseeing one.

Fear is a force like a seasickness, could you call it a lifesickness, a terrible nausea caused by dread, creeping dread, that seems to withdraw a little in dreams while you sleep, but then, just a few moments after waking, rushes back close to you, and begins again to gnaw at your simple requirement for human peace. Gnawing, gnawing, with long ratlike teeth. No one can live through that without changing. A small measure of my terror was I was now moving through America with this stranger.

I had the oddest sense as we sat on the train to New York that America was being built in great haste all in front of us, being invented for us as we went. I had only ever seen America in newspapers and the little film reels at the music-hall in Dame Street – where Maud my sister used secretly to take me – maybe that was why, and it seemed to me now an endless series of pictures, water towers, great coastal installations of unknown kinds, a multitude and an infinity of backyards and houses, the broken hems of the towns and small cities we passed through, another sort of shock to me, the poorness of it, although I suppose railway companies found it easiest to run their lines through the districts of the poor. I gulped the ham sandwich Tadg bought for me on the train, I gulped the strange dusty water, I gulped the air with its slight aftertaste of metal, gulp, gulp, gulp, like a fish in starved water.

My stranger was infinitely kind to me.

‘We have the name of your cousin in New York, we can try him first. We’ll find out where the best bet for work might be. We won’t be long setting ourselves up, Lilly. You can be sure of that. I didn’t get through the war only to be letting myself down here.’

The enormous ‘here’ rushed past the windows, its solid forms and darkening colours torn and blurred.

‘We have each other,’ he said. ‘That will be our kingdom. We’re not the first people to come to America anyhow. Jaysus, we’re not.’

He said nothing for a bit, and then he said, maybe worrying about my silence:

‘I’m only glad to be off that ship. Jaysus, I thought I’d never feel right again. Jaysus.’

‘Thank God,’ I said.

‘Aye, aye,’ he said, much cheered suddenly by two small words. ‘We’ll conquer this place. It will be no trouble to us. Hard work, Lilly, and Bob’s your uncle.’

Another great carpet of erased night scenes and burning lamps sped by.

‘You’ll see,’ he said. Then with a huge effort added: ‘You’ll see – sweetheart.’

His long face – suddenly moving into a sort of beauty, like a painted man, so that my heart stirred – was glowing now in the carriage. I thought we would be all right, just at that moment. I thought we would be. I didn’t think I knew who he was, but I adjudged him honest and good-hearted. And terrified, like me.

Coming into the city was a new fright all its own. I stood on the familiar enough pavement outside the station, and glanced up, but my head hurt with the great swoosh of the buildings, I had to stare down at my feet, or I would have fainted. I had vertigo, at ground level.

I gripped Tadg’s hand, like a veritable child, trusting in his greater strength.

You’d have been inclined to be trusting him, the way he took charge then when we entered deeper into the city, him clutching in his hand the piece of paper with my cousin’s name writ on it in my father’s black-inked policeman’s hand. Like the whole world before us we were speechless at this place. We were salmon in dark deep water at the bottom of a great system of sunken rivers, that had carved so deep into the soil that the sky itself was only half-remembered. Would human deeds here be similarly darkened? I almost laughed at the memory of Dublin, with its low houses, their roofs tipped like deferential hats to the imperious rain. In the first while I couldn’t understand how any human agency had built such a place. How were there ladders long enough to get bricks up so high? And every road in spate, with a flood of angry cabs, people shouting and calling, plunging along, horns raking through the noise, it was already a kind of assault, a terror you had to learn.

My father’s little note said
Mick Cullen
, I think it was somewhere on the Lower East Side, or was it 8th Street it said?, I can’t recall. We had been given two addresses, this one, and another in Chicago, which for all we knew might have been near or far. The first address in truth was ten years old; he was a brother of the famous coppicer on Humewood estate – famous to us anyhow – and was known to be living there in New York, running some sort of lumber business, my father had said, but there had been no letters to and fro for a long time, in the way of these things. Even though he and Mick Cullen shared a grandmother.

‘You needn’t stay long with him,’ said my father, in that other life that already seemed a thousand years ago. ‘Just till you get your bearings. The Cullens are all right.’

Canut Cullen had been able to harvest an acre of hazel rods in a day, and only his sons bringing him great jugs of buttermilk to keep him going. That was fame of a kind. True fame.

They may have been all right, these new American Cullens, but they weren’t there, and no sign of them. We stood on the sidewalk like goms, holding the bit of paper, staring up at an old premises with a corrugated iron roof, and a long metal balcony up the side, and an air of dereliction so complete that even where someone had bolted doors and barred the way, perhaps Mick Cullen himself on some long vanished day, these things were sundered, and old metal openings showed drear and bleak against the darkening sky.

We were so tired from the huge journey in the ship, but I think we had been buoyant enough till that moment. Tadg slowly put the piece of paper back in his pocket, and brought out the other one, with the Chicago address, like a cardplayer with a poor hand that was going to venture an even poorer card. Because the Chicago address was only the friend of a friend of a sort of a cousin. Tadg gave a laugh then in the cobbled street. It was going to be quite dark soon, except just as I thought that, the lamps started to light one by one, in a miraculous sequence. Were they singing, those lamps, did they make a tiny noise for themselves? It wasn’t that I was a woman and scared, it was that I was a human being and scared. The future, the following day, was as dark as the high sky, and suddenly what I had lost bore in on me, my father, stern and strange as he was, and my sisters, one a hunched unmarriageable girl, and the other a nervous, touchy person soon to be a similar bride – funny how I suddenly saw them like that, whereas before they had just been my eternal sisters – even the loss of poor Willie, that in some way had brought me here to this desolate, angry street in New York, all pushed through me like a flooded mountain stream through previously secure whinbushes, pulling at their tremendous roots, assaulting their safety, and I quailed there, in the street, and shook, my travelling coat failing to keep me warm suddenly, my legs failing me. And that was another moment when Tadg might with profit have put his arms around me, but what was he himself? Only a boy returned from the war, and odd deeds done in his home place, and all his ordinary dreams put aside by a death threat, standing there in New York with a girl he didn’t know, and who didn’t know him.

Scared as we were, we didn’t feel easy enough to linger in New York without the protection of those we knew, or who were related to us – maybe something to do with that
DNA
Mr Dillinger told me about. I remember reading in a book of palmistry and dreams or some such years ago, I don’t even know why I was reading it, it was a book belonging to Cassie Blake herself, who liked such things, books about the shape of the head and what you could tell from that, and books about dreams, and this book said that people liked train journeys because no one ever died on a train, and when you dream of trains it’s a dream of eternal life. Maybe there is something in that, because we were strangely content to get back to the great station, with its main room the size of an Irish county, and put some of our few last dollars to the journey west to Chicago.

A
nd then to some degree God smiled on us, and forgave us.

My cousin in Chicago was by some way more distantly related than Mick Cullen in New York, but at least she was there, married to a man that worked along the shore of the lake, and though they hadn’t two cents to spare, they did have a timber shack behind their few rooms, that was too cold in winter and too hot in summer for ordinary mortals, but we were not that. We thought the heavens were beaming down on us right enough, when Hannah Reilly, in her big American-looking apron, and her exhausted face, said we could nest there. And Tadg went out the next morning with her husband, and by another miracle, though jobs were not too scarce in that time, found some temporary work, I think it was clearing out land where they were putting in pilings for new buildings, and it was rough hard toil, but Tadg wasn’t bothered by that.

Everything was wider than New York. They had pushed the great buildings further apart, built everything fatter and heavier-looking, in case the wind blew them away.

My father had put us in some difficulty with his hastily made plans, in that our official-looking letter had us as brother and sister, but there was no point offering this fiction to Hannah Reilly, because she knew who I was. But I couldn’t give that name anywhere else, and when Hannah remembered, she called me Grainne. Tadg at least was able to be Tim Cullen for the taking up of the work, though we regretted my father’s hasty choice of Cullen, which after all was a family name. So in the matter of getting married we were already in a sort of knot, since according to my father’s official letter we were brother and sister, and clearly to Hannah we were not, and yet now sharing the little wooden room. And she was very anxious for us to put this right.

‘Do you know, Lilly, we’re respectable people, and even if you’re in trouble, you know, at home, well, if you’re to make a new start here, you need to be married.’

‘We do,’ I said. ‘We’ll just have to decide which names to choose for that.’

‘Why did your father say you were brother and sister?’

‘I don’t know. It seemed like a good notion, in the great hurry of it all. But it was our real names anyhow on the ship’s manifest, and we don’t seem to be bothered much here. Maybe we can just go and be married as who we are.’