On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry Page A

claimed that little haphazard part of town, I had cleaned myself off as best I could, and put on my next-best clothes, and thrust whatever else seemed useful in one of the cloth bags. The thought of leaving Tadg’s bag there troubled me more than you would think it would. But it was like a proof that he would not be coming with me. His few shirts and his spare trousers also to be abandoned. It felt like I was betraying him somehow, leaving his things was an accusation that I had been unable to save him, to keep him in the story of life. I couldn’t help it that Hannah would find these remnants of our time together. She would bundle them up, blood and all, and dispose of them I was sure, and scour out the room, as if mere rats had got in after all. And hopefully we would fade in her blameless mind, and become a sort of half-muddled story, among the million wind-blown stories of America, countless as the stars.

Part Two

Eighth Day without Bill
    I t’s like a sort of TV, these memories. And I don’t even own a TV these times, ever since I put the black and white set out under the porch long ago, no longer wanting to see that Vietnam news. Bill very nobly as a little boy pretended never to want a TV, but he used to watch in the houses of his friends.
    I can actually
see
some of these old matters. I am here at my table, but I am also combing my hair in the little room I shared with Cassie Blake, away away there in Cleveland. I am using her beloved rat-tail comb. She liked Sweet Georgia Brown hair pomade, and I can smell it as I sit here, sixty years later. And with the smell is conjured lovely Cassie, her backside up in the air as she digs about in her battered trunk for some elusive bit of clothing.
    When I was still a young child my father gave me a necklace of my mother’s. The first thing a child does with a grown-up necklace is burst the thread. The little cultured pearls poured out on the floor, and made a dash for the gaps between the floorboards. He was able to rescue only a half-dozen, and threaded them back forlornly on the necklace.
    The others must still be there, a queer memorial to me and my mother, in the darkness.
    A long bit of string and six chastened-looking pearls. Maybe my life is a bit like that.
    Cassie’s father had been a sharecropper in Virginia who ventured north when everything started to get worse for him, and got employment on the big cargo boats on Lake Erie. He was six foot six, Cassie told me, in his prime. Then he got sick in later life, and shrunk somewhat. He was a famous player on the quill-pipes. I don’t think I ever knew what he was saying when he spoke to Cassie, he spoke a queer old lingo then, and so did she, but with me they showed me the mercy of English. He was living in a rooming-house down by the water, and but for that we never would have met, Cassie and me, she never would have rescued me.
    She rescued me, and then some years later, she didn’t quite see Joe Kinderman coming, as you might say. But she wouldn’t have been able, and wasn’t able, to rescue me from that, because she was in deep trouble of her own, and …
    But I am rushing all about. Mr Dillinger would not approve. I am sure he has his own books under better control. This morning my head is like an unbroken pony, plunging about.
    This may be the result of the tumult of having Mrs Wolohan and Mr Dillinger in my house at the same time, as happened a half-hour ago. They both drove up, entirely without planning it I am sure, and brought their deluge of conversation in with them, Mrs Wolohan teasing Mr Dillinger as she likes to do, and Mr Dillinger manfully enduring it. They didn’t make much reference to me, but I didn’t mind that. Mr Dillinger was expressing a concern about the plight of the Shinnecock Indians that live not far from here. Mrs Wolohan, who used to employ a man before Mr Nolan to tend her garden who actually was a Shinnecock, didn’t think they had a ‘plight’, though she listened to Mr