On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry Page B

Dillinger with great politeness, interspersed with the teasing. She asked Mr Dillinger why he didn’t give his garden back to the Shinnecock, since it bordered on their reservation. Mr Dillinger said he recognised that it was her duty to exaggerate in order to weaken his argument. I gathered he would indeed prefer if everyone else went away, Poles, Irish, Old Methodists, millionaires, and all the rest, and Long Island be given back to the Indians. They let this argument go round and round, and laughed a great deal, Mrs Wolohan more or less winning the bout, and then went out and got into their separate cars, and drove off, their friendship absolutely intact. What either meant to say to me I do believe was forgotten in the mêlée.
    So then I needed a good few minutes to let the noise clear from my room. And I just sat quietly. And then old matters started to drift again into my head.
    Cassie’s shapely backside, and so on.
     

    I came up from Chicago in that time of terror on the night train to Cleveland. There hadn’t been much choice in the matter because there were only the two trains going immediately, and the other one was New York-bound, and I didn’t think I could go back there.
    At least I looked quite shipshape by then, with my nice coat and my cloth bag. Thank God I had the few dollars that Tadg had kept in an old tin under the floorboards. I was trying not to scan the evening editions of the newspapers, ranged against me along the station concourse, in case my picture might stare out at me – highly unlikely, since no such thing existed in the world. But I didn’t know.
    I thought I heard the murderer’s step behind me, every step I made. If I stopped, he would stop, I knew, and anyway, I couldn’t bear to look around, in case he was actually there. As long as I didn’t look back, I could keep him as a phantom.
    Ridiculous.
    I was fleeing as if I was responsible for the murder, I knew that. But I do not think even now I was unwise so to do. If I had lingered, there would certainly have been a photograph taken, and my face would have been known not only to the indifferent multitudes of Chicago, but the nameless, secret men that had done for Tadg. I could be quiet and unmolested for a long time, and then, just when I felt safe, they would come for me, as they had come for Tadg. This at any rate I could imagine, it was the story of it I had in my head. I do not think it was so unlikely. I doubt if I would exist now if I had not run like crazy. Then there would have been no Ed, and ultimately no Bill. And maybe every life in America depends on tiny dark events like that.
    The huge metal snake poured itself through South Bend, through all points east of Lake Michigan, the strange dark city of Toledo, and slowly I substituted one lake for another lake. And all the while, as I clutched my bag, sitting on the dusty train seat, I heard the wheels repeating over and over, ‘
you’ll be safer now, you’ll be safer now, you’ll be safer now …
’ If it wasn’t the train, it was my own heart whispering up to me.
     

    I arrived alone in a new city, a few sad dollars in my pockets. I was already a prisoner in the open asylum of the world. My solitariness was nearly absolute. I knew as I descended from the train that the citizens of Cleveland already smelled my fear, an odour that drives back human help. I didn’t know what capital I possessed beyond the few dollars. My clothes were worn and shiny, and my shoes, once smart and good, chosen with Annie in Grafton Street, and admired by us both for the clacking sound they had made along the Dublin pavements, had an historical air. My best possession was youth, but that of course was invisible to me.
    For some half-forgotten days I wandered about. There were hundreds of wandering souls in the streets of Cleveland. My last bit of money was soon expended.
    The first night I spent curled up on wasteland, the backlot of a great steel-mill that spewed forth its smoke the