On Canaan's Side

  I lifted my head from kissing Bill goodnight and thought I saw the outline of a person unknown in the dim window.

  I hurried to the front door to check the bolt was on, as fast as my arthritis would let me. I was my own watchdog in the world, so it behoved me to be fearless. I switched on the porch light by the inside switch. Now the narrow space gained a poor light, a few feet of it at any rate, and there was a person there, but he did not seem to care much about his sudden revelation. I knew immediately it was Ed. No creature ever unchained a door so fast. I nearly threw myself out on the porch, my dress catching in the hook a moment, ripping ever so slightly. When I tugged at it, freed it, and looked up, I half-expected Ed to be gone, gone like a ghost. But he was not. He was there.

  He stood immobile on the old planks, watching me, nodding his head, his face turned away from what light there was. He was crying like a child, trying to conceal his tears. But the moon betrayed them, catching into them, making moonstones of them. He didn’t wipe away the tears. The wind was interested in the open door, it wanted to go into the house and frolic about there, so I clicked the door shut.

  It may have been 1982 or so, so Ed was about thirty-six. His hair was cut very short, and there was a V of skin at each temple, where his hair had given up. He was dressed in a loose linen suit. I couldn’t see any sign of a suitcase or a knapsack. The brown weather scumbled about behind him, the strange dark yellow light of the fringe of a storm at night framed him, so that he might have been a creature issued by the storm, pushed forward by it. He didn’t say a word for a long time. I didn’t mind. The animal I was, all that I was, was exulting in his mere presence. I could think of nothing, no recrimination or argument, to meet him with, except that natural joy.

  ‘You’re looking awful well, Ma,’ he said.

  ‘Not bad for eighty,’ I said, or thereabouts.

  I was afraid to say anything except in answer to him. I was afraid I would scare him away, like a bird in the garden.

  ‘Bill’s looking awful well too,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you were able to keep him.’

  ‘He’s the best child ever was,’ I said. ‘And plenty of devilment in him too, thank God.’

  Ed laughed there, in the stormy darkness.

  ‘He has a good person to watch over him,’ he said, and followed the statement with utter silence, the silence that comes after a person has spoken their inmost mind, perhaps not meaning to.

  I wanted to say, it’s cold enough out here, won’t you step into the house? I wanted to say, why don’t you tell me what troubles you so? Why don’t you step in and see your son? I couldn’t say any of those things. I was afraid that by trying to get him into the house, I would lose him from the porch. I was content to shiver there. The wind was not so bad. It was something else was making me shiver. All the bits of the history of my life.

  ‘I want you to know, Ma, it’s not lack of love keeps me away. I often have thought maybe you thought that. When I try to write to you, my hand freezes. I often thought when I came down to the town, I might ring you. But I never have done any of those things.’

  ‘Sure I never doubted that,’ I said, noticing myself falling back into an Irish way of saying something. ‘Never.’

  ‘I often think of my father, which you might think would be a blank thought enough. But it’s not. I think of him, out here in America somewhere. Father and son. And all the time I am thinking of Bill. Do you know, Ma, his mother was a very dear person to me, but she died.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, still fearful to add anything, in case he would think I had been hunting him down.

  ‘I want you to tell Bill that his father loves him dearly, will you do that?’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  I was thinking, it’s hard for a child to understand a love like that. He would rather go fishing with his father than hear such a declaration. But I knew Ed existed in a parsimonious place. He had only the farthings and pence of love to give.

  ‘The war did something to me, Ma,’ he said.

  ‘I know, son,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t find the end of the string. I can’t remember the tune.’

  I nodded. I knew the least attempt to turn this conversation would make him disappear. I knew that. I knew he would disappear anyway, I knew it, but I didn’t want it to be me who had scared him away.

  All the same I went over closer to him. I could see he did not flinch away. I could sense Bill inside on his bed, maybe dreaming already, while his father, a dream figure, stood near him out in the dark. Ed was not a tall man, but he was taller than me, and I got so close I could see the dark grey stitching in his jacket. I put out my two arms, and held him gently at the elbows. He seemed to hang his head a moment, and then lifted it again.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ma,’ he said.

  ‘That’s all right, Ed,’ I said.

  He pulled away from me. ‘Wretched’ was the word that occurred to me. The saddest man on earth.

  Then he was gone.

  Sixteenth Day without Bill

  Bill liked to sit out on the porch alone, playing the guitar, aged sixteen. It was the remnant of his musical ambitions, maybe. I didn’t pay much heed to it, till he sang one day a song about the Cuyahoga River catching fire, from all the gas and oil and trash in the water. I sat up then and listened. I can almost hear it still, if I sit quiet enough. Burn on, big river …

  Bill, sprawled across the chair, one boot thrown up on the rail, head back, eyes closed … All he was missing was the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, to be the image of his grandfather Joe Kinderman.

  Unobjectionable.

  *

  If he began in wordlessness, he ended in it too, but only the general wordless condition of the teenager. Age ten, he was full of a beautiful intimacy. Age fourteen, he began a long retreating walk into silence. As a child, he was like the library of Alexandria, full of stories and rare items. Then life seemed to burn most of that away, page by page. I never knew, and still don’t, if there was anything I could have done about it. Maybe it was just growing up. Travelling light as a man. But I felt something was being traded, word by word, till there were no words, only a handful anyhow.

  He tensed up. His muscles hardened and pulled on his bones. He lived in his private mind, but I didn’t know what he kept there, because the door was bolted. I didn’t get noisy, I didn’t bang on it, clamouring to be let in. I thought, I knew it was what they call a phase. He was going to grow through it, and eventually reopen that door, and step out into the light, bathe in it. I was absolutely sure of that. The reason was, he was a person so deserving of love. His beauty even as a child had turned into another sort of beauty. Mr Dillinger, who liked to take photographs, took one of Bill, that I have inside beside my bed. It was the day he was going to catch the army bus in Bridgehampton, to go down for training in Georgia, like his father before him. There were about a dozen boys on that bus, from the district, just as before, but a new generation. Mr Dillinger came by with his fancy-looking camera. He didn’t even pose Bill, he just took a snap, as Bill stood in his uniform, drinking coffee by the draining board. The light of Bridgehampton sits on his face, the salty strange potato-field light of Bridgehampton. Bill’s home, his native place. An American in America. A child in my heart. He is just lifting the old blue cup to his face, it’s got halfway there, eternally. He’s going to drink from it, without thinking. Just a cup of coffee. He knows nothing about the desert where he is going, to fight for his country. He has used that exact phrase, just seconds before, putting me back to my father’s old sitting-room in Dublin Castle, and Willie making the same fateful declaration. That’s how it begins, and it is there in that photo. There is no photo for how it ends.

  *

  When he finished high school, Mrs Wolohan came over to me and said she would be happy to help with college fees. She said it would be her privilege. This is her way of doing a great favour without attaching any burden to it. Bill did have half a thought that he might like to join
the Forest Service. He had read somewhere that away off in the national parks they had stations where men and women watched for fires, and studied the life of the forests. Mr Dillinger had spent many hours with him out on the porch when Bill was a child, telling him about the Native Americans, and all the things that interested Mr Dillinger. So all this must have been in Bill’s head. So in an odd way, his imagination was filled with scenes of the wilderness not unlike his father’s had been, but from another source.

  You had to have a qualification in forestry to do that work, and the college in upstate New York was expensive, far beyond my means.

  So that thought was in there, in his private mind maybe even, but there was other stuff too. He liked to drink beer with some friends of his over on Sag Turnpike, children mostly of the people there. Mr Nolan told me he had begun to see Bill over there, because that was the stomping ground for Mr Nolan’s binges.

  One night Bill brought a girlfriend back. He asked me was it all right if he slept on the couch, and she could take his bed. She was a slim, small girl, called Stacy. The first night, I heard them laughing in the small hours. I didn’t think he was spending much time on the couch, but I didn’t say anything. I must confess I was bothered by Stacy, because she would never speak to me. Maybe I seemed so old to her, I wasn’t worth the trouble. I just didn’t know. She came in and out of the house, and though she ate my cooking, I remained invisible to her. Mr Nolan knew her father, a gardener, ‘best gardener round here bar myself’, said Mr Nolan. Then I got to know her father, for a few moments, because we stood together in the courthouse, while Bill married Stacy. He just did it, suddenly. There wasn’t one scrap of preparation. They went away to Las Vegas for a week, honeymooning. I had been happy to pull a few dollars together for him.

  It was a time of some confusion. He bought a cheap bed for his room, and it just about filled the entire space. Stacy moved in there with him, and the house vibrated with their conversations, and their silences too. He got a job at the gas station, and all talk of college and forests ceased. Most confusing of all, most desolating, was I had no means to talk to him. He was like a shadow of the child I had known. I couldn’t read his face, and just to confess it privately here, I was hurt, immensely, immensely. I was raw with hurt, day after day. It felt like I was dying. It felt like a sickness. I wanted him so much to go out upon the world, as the man he was. To flourish, in America. I thought he had a good chance to have a life without fear. I thought he had a good chance to enjoy some sort of victory over fear. Because the heart of him was good, I was sure. I never stopped thinking that. I never stopped loving him.

  One evening about two years ago he came home on his own. His overalls were painted as always with oil, his hands were blackened by it, where he had wrestled with equipment maybe, I didn’t know. He came into the kitchen where I was baking, and stood there. Usually he would go on to the WC, where he had a bottle of stuff that washed his hands clean. But he didn’t go on there, he just stood, becalmed. In the corner of the kitchen was his guitar, propped up. He hadn’t played that for a long time. He hadn’t sung for a long time, the songs had died away into the general silence. Sometimes it had felt like everything had died away, everything I thought had significance, including my own strange history. Maybe, I had begun to think, I am near death. My story is dying in my mouth. I was eighty-seven years old, after all. I knew I was very old, because I hadn’t bought new clothes for about ten years. I don’t know why I thought that was a sign of great age, but I did. So that was a young, young man, spare of frame, with maybe a few beers in him, standing in the twilight near an old, old dame. The two of us, in some sort of present moment I didn’t understand, just as I had not understood any moment really for a long time.

  ‘So I guess I’m getting divorced,’ he said.

  ‘Bill,’ I said. ‘That’s awful sad news.’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I guess there’s nothing to be done about it. She don’t love me no more.’

  ‘Why don’t you wash your hands, Bill, and sit down, and we’ll talk this whole thing through?’

  ‘I guess,’ he said. He didn’t go into the WC, he washed his hands at the sink, with the carbolic soap I kept there, for scouring things. I suppose he was scouring his hands, scouring generally speaking. I knew suddenly something about him, at last, even if it was such a sad thing. The thing I knew was that he had loved Stacy. He didn’t even weep for her, he was well beyond mere tears, but I could sense his suffering in the very curve of his back, the very slowness of the gesture of washing his hands.

  Then he sat down as I had bid him, and I made him a cup of tea, with due ceremony. He talked about things, for the first time in years. He said he was very sorry he never had a father, though he knew his father had had his own troubles. He said he just didn’t know what to do with his life, he didn’t know where to put his feet, as he phrased it. The boy I had known, I gradually saw, was quite intact inside this man. The true beauty of him was, he was no hero to himself. He had no opinion of himself, and therefore he was entirely without bitterness. I don’t know how I had interpreted his silence those previous years. I think I had committed the sin sometimes of thinking the worst of him. I think I had. It was a very great and serious sin.

  *

  Like other young men who don’t know where to put their feet, I suppose, he decided to enlist in the army. I tried to keep calm when he told me. I tried to believe it was a good idea. But my mind was shouting out Ed’s name. If I had thought it would do any good to get down on my knees and beg him not to go, I would have. But, if I didn’t know much about the world, I knew Bill. By the end of the year the war had come to the desert, and so Bill went there.

  He went off with Mr Eugenides’ book in his pocket.

  What he found, by the few small things he told me, was not Homeric. Whether it was heroic, I don’t know. I am sure it was, in part. I would like to say it was, for Bill’s sake. Like Willie before him, I know Bill loved his platoon. He loved his captain. But it sounded like a very curious war, to me, back home, in Bill’s few letters. Vietnam, which had hollowed out my son, was protracted and seemingly endless, and when it did end, ended in what they called defeat. If Willie had survived the First World War, he would not have been thanked at home for his efforts. Even though Ireland was a victor in the war, Willie and his like were banished from thought, in the upshot. He was part of his father’s world, of loyalty and empire, and all that passed away. So it is possible to come home unthanked, even in victory. How much worse for the boys of Vietnam, who came through ceaseless slaughter and defeat, only to be spurned and scorned at home. That was what put Ed into the mountains, partly. I am sure of that.

  Bill’s desert war was short, victorious. But he came home stunned, like a calf in the slaughterhouse. In the slaughterhouse, they drive a bolt into the brain of the animal. There is a moment when the calf balances between life and death. I mean, it is neither alive nor dead. Perhaps its short time in the meadow streams before its eyes. All the particulars of a life, human or otherwise. The unnoticed, myriad, unimportant parade of images, not prized in particular by anyone else, but surely beloved of God.

  He did not speak about it, not a word. He did say some things to Mr Nolan, whom he regarded as a man he could trust, in some ways as a father figure, or the best approximation of one. Mr Nolan in turn told me in great confidence what Bill had confided. He said Bill had seen the oil-wells burning, he had seen the desert set on fire. He had seen the enemy soldiers fleeing in a great convoy, defeated, trying to get home across the ruined landscape. Thousands upon thousands in cars and trucks. The sight had so terrified him, Mr Nolan said, he no longer understood the meaning of the word ‘victory’. The defeat of the enemy seemed to Bill like his own defeat.

  ‘I wish I could say I didn’t understand what he meant,’ said Mr Nolan. ‘But I did.’

  He spoke with his own private sadness. Mr Nolan had been unwell for some time. Dr Earnshaw had sent him down to the hospital in Brooklyn, whe
re he knew a specialist he could recommend. It hadn’t been good news, I knew, because Mr Nolan was famishing week by week, thinning and thinning.

  *

  It was early morning, the birds of Bridgehampton were singing to beat the band, as always seeming indifferent to us, to our suffering. And there was a great deal of suffering in that little room where Mr Nolan lay. Up to this point I may safely say I revered him, I loved him, in that simpler way of friendship, where everything more or less is known, accepted, and for the great part rejoiced in. A person who has attributes that excite in you a continuous desire to see them, who, on coming in through your front door, seems to create in you a strange satisfaction, may be deemed a friend, and the devil take the reason. My friend then, Mr Nolan, lay within in his room, as was usual now, with his laboured breathing, my own footsteps already like the beginning of a conversation. Where everything more or less is known.

  On his little battered radio, with the perished tape and the grubbied-up knobs, could be heard indistinctly the news, a dry report on the burning of the Kuwaiti oilfields … They had not ceased to burn just because my Bill was gone out of them.

  I must have made some slight clatter coming in, because Mr Nolan woke, his throat in the first instance full of a dreadful spittle, which he had to clear with a horrible effort.