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

so he looked less like a poor balladeer in a Dublin street.
     

    We were in the sort of situation that can show you pretty quick, and painfully, that you are travelling with a person that in effect you do not know.
    Neither of us were now what we had been. My father in great haste had put together some letters for us on his official paper, and gave our names as Timothy and Grainne Cullen, brother and sister, should we need them, but just to muddle everything, he had put our real names on the ship’s passenger list, in case using aliases would make our naturalisation eventually in America more difficult. But at least we would be able to travel for the moment in America as people other than what we were, and give our names that were not our names, until things might seem to die down, and we might marry at last as who we were, and give our real names at last to the minister. Like normal human beings. Without sentences of death on their heads.
    But Timothy Cullen, or Tadg Bere, I hardly knew who he was, either way.
    Perhaps in Ireland, right up to the moment we had to go, he had been Tadg. Perhaps it was fear altered him, like one of those small earthquakes under farms that alter the watercourse and make a well dry up, though there is no visible sign of alteration in the landscape. Now that I was grappling with an unknown Tadg, I was panicking in my thought that I had never really known him, had allowed myself to become engaged to a man because he had known my beloved brother, and had written me a gentle letter, he a boy who had survived years of unrestrained carnage. As if the love I had for Willie was strangely transferable, and while maybe even a real love, was a blind one, an unhearing one, an unseeing one.
    Fear is a force like a seasickness, could you call it a lifesickness, a terrible nausea caused by dread, creeping dread, that seems to withdraw a little in dreams while you sleep, but then, just a few moments after waking, rushes back close to you, and begins again to gnaw at your simple requirement for human peace. Gnawing, gnawing, with long ratlike teeth. No one can live through that without changing. A small measure of my terror was I was now moving through America with this stranger.
    I had the oddest sense as we sat on the train to New York that America was being built in great haste all in front of us, being invented for us as we went. I had only ever seen America in newspapers and the little film reels at the music-hall in Dame Street – where Maud my sister used secretly to take me – maybe that was why, and it seemed to me now an endless series of pictures, water towers, great coastal installations of unknown kinds, a multitude and an infinity of backyards and houses, the broken hems of the towns and small cities we passed through, another sort of shock to me, the poorness of it, although I suppose railway companies found it easiest to run their lines through the districts of the poor. I gulped the ham sandwich Tadg bought for me on the train, I gulped the strange dusty water, I gulped the air with its slight aftertaste of metal, gulp, gulp, gulp, like a fish in starved water.
    My stranger was infinitely kind to me.
    ‘We have the name of your cousin in New York, we can try him first. We’ll find out where the best bet for work might be. We won’t be long setting ourselves up, Lilly. You can be sure of that. I didn’t get through the war only to be letting myself down here.’
    The enormous ‘here’ rushed past the windows, its solid forms and darkening colours torn and blurred.
    ‘We have each other,’ he said. ‘That will be our kingdom. We’re not the first people to come to America anyhow. Jaysus, we’re not.’
    He said nothing for a bit, and then he said, maybe worrying about my silence:
    ‘I’m only glad to be off that ship. Jaysus, I thought I’d never feel right again. Jaysus.’
    ‘Thank God,’ I said.
    ‘Aye, aye,’ he said, much cheered suddenly by two small words. ‘We’ll