Read Online On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry - Free Book Online

time. Your Bill has fought far away, you have laid him to rest. I have nothing to give you but this, which is the honey of my father’s village.’
    And he pointed, he more or less introduced me, to a little pot, humble and plain enough, with a very austere white label, and a big yellow bee on it, and some Greek writing.
    ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘what you would give me from Ireland, if I was suffering your suffering. I wonder.’
    ‘I would give you the white heather from my father’s hillside,’ I said, trying not to cry like a child, and as soon as he noted my small distress, his left hand was on my shoulder, patting it – yes, I would bring him that white heather, I said, indeed I would, if such a thing had legs to travel, though I knew the little white pods would be blackened by the long journey from Kelshabeg to New York.
    ‘Ah, ah,’ he said, as if I had offered him the solution to an enormous problem, as if just by mentioning the heather, I had found at last the answer to the death of the earth and allied matters.
    Now I sit at my table, and today there is not just tea and milk in my cup, but also a spoon of Greek honey.
     

    Greece, America, Arabia, Ireland. Home places. Nowhere on earth not a home place. The calf returns to where it got the milk. Nowhere is a foreign place. Everywhere a home place for someone, and therefore for us all.
    A few weeks back Mr Dillinger was here, just across from me, sitting in Bill’s old chair. He was talking nicely as usual, with his blue eyes sunk into his long, lined face keeping a good guard over me, to see how I was liking his talk. Because he would stop immediately if he thought he was tiring me. No man I ever knew is less of a fool than he.
    ‘What is the greatest discovery in our lifetime? Moon rockets? Maybe penicillin? In my view, Mrs Bere, it is DNA .’
    ‘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,