On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry

imagine the police automobiles drawing up at the Art Institute, I could imagine a hundred shadowy moiling things, and above all that dark man who had run out somewhere before me, for all I knew in the same direction, for all I knew aware of me now, and following after. And mostly I saw Tadg, folded like a huge roofer’s angle against the splattered wall.
    As I crossed the river again, the wind found out all the wetted parts of my body, and even heavily running as I was, I felt an intimation of some shocking pneumonia to be got from it. My eyes, which felt like they were made of metal now, little dishes with something burning in them, painful and alien, seemed to be losing their sight. The lovely buildings were blurred and vague, and I was having difficulty navigating my way along imperfectly known streets and ways. All the while those various wolves following me, the thought of the murderer, the vision of my Tadg, and no doubt the four beasts and the four-and-twenty elders of the apocalypse wanting to avenge themselves on me for a Godless and guilty person.
    The truth was, good Hannah Reilly, with her clear, well-intentioned visage, had stepped a few steps away from me, because Tadg and I didn’t seem as intent to be married as she would wish. As my father’s cousin and mine she would never desert us, or ask that we go. But I knew she had the local priest to wrestle with, and unlike ourselves, who were hoping in every way to keep a low profile, she went off to mass every Sunday morning, in the church on the lake, and liked to increase her chances of a good spot in heaven with polishing the glimmering rooms of the rectory. So we were slowly becoming cousins to hide, and not to mention, especially as the nature of our flight from Ireland had only been sketched by my father. Though if Hannah had politics I don’t know to this day what they were.
    So I was obliged to enter her house in quietness, and reach my little wooden room, shut fast the door, and pant there on the bare boards, not in the least knowing what to do. I think it was the first time in my life I was actually alone, without prospect of seeing another soul who would want to assist me. I felt standing there as if my life had been indeed rescinded, as if indeed some strange cancellation had taken place in some hall of heaven, and I was now to be dispensed with in some ruthless dispensation. I wondered and wondered should I have stayed where I was, at Tadg’s side? Would the American police not have helped me, in some way I could not articulate or fathom? I knew Tadg was gone, his sentence of death carried out it would seem, even across the four thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean. I presumed my own murder was hotly plotted and would follow, but in truth I could not imagine what would happen in my story now as I bumped up against this new state of being alone, of facing what was to come, alone.
    At any rate, I took off the dress and the soaked linens. In my bare skin I remember laying the dress on the floor, making the arms neat and all shipshape, the stain of blood on it in the shape of some unknown country. Tadg’s blood. It was my very best dress but I knew I could not get the blood out of it, without some tremendous washday washing, with the dress boiled in the pot till it roared for mercy, and then spread out on some beneficent Wicklow bush – a thing that could never be now. The blood was also on my arms and on my shoes. Maybe it was on my face. I peered into the little broken mirror that we had shared there in that poor room. I didn’t know who it was, a woman with her face smeared and streaked not only with blood but long black marks of dirt, from what source I could not tell. And my hair all heaped and brittle-looking, like gorse after flowering. I was going to have to make myself again, anew, I saw. I was going to have to restore myself to some semblance of order, if I was ever to venture from that room again.
    So I set to, to do that.
    When nightfall