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

conquer this place. It will be no trouble to us. Hard work, Lilly, and Bob’s your uncle.’
    Another great carpet of erased night scenes and burning lamps sped by.
    ‘You’ll see,’ he said. Then with a huge effort added: ‘You’ll see – sweetheart.’
    His long face – suddenly moving into a sort of beauty, like a painted man, so that my heart stirred – was glowing now in the carriage. I thought we would be all right, just at that moment. I thought we would be. I didn’t think I knew who he was, but I adjudged him honest and good-hearted. And terrified, like me.
     

    Coming into the city was a new fright all its own. I stood on the familiar enough pavement outside the station, and glanced up, but my head hurt with the great swoosh of the buildings, I had to stare down at my feet, or I would have fainted. I had vertigo, at ground level.
    I gripped Tadg’s hand, like a veritable child, trusting in his greater strength.
    You’d have been inclined to be trusting him, the way he took charge then when we entered deeper into the city, him clutching in his hand the piece of paper with my cousin’s name writ on it in my father’s black-inked policeman’s hand. Like the whole world before us we were speechless at this place. We were salmon in dark deep water at the bottom of a great system of sunken rivers, that had carved so deep into the soil that the sky itself was only half-remembered. Would human deeds here be similarly darkened? I almost laughed at the memory of Dublin, with its low houses, their roofs tipped like deferential hats to the imperious rain. In the first while I couldn’t understand how any human agency had built such a place. How were there ladders long enough to get bricks up so high? And every road in spate, with a flood of angry cabs, people shouting and calling, plunging along, horns raking through the noise, it was already a kind of assault, a terror you had to learn.
    My father’s little note said
Mick Cullen
, I think it was somewhere on the Lower East Side, or was it 8th Street it said?, I can’t recall. We had been given two addresses, this one, and another in Chicago, which for all we knew might have been near or far. The first address in truth was ten years old; he was a brother of the famous coppicer on Humewood estate – famous to us anyhow – and was known to be living there in New York, running some sort of lumber business, my father had said, but there had been no letters to and fro for a long time, in the way of these things. Even though he and Mick Cullen shared a grandmother.
    ‘You needn’t stay long with him,’ said my father, in that other life that already seemed a thousand years ago. ‘Just till you get your bearings. The Cullens are all right.’
    Canut Cullen had been able to harvest an acre of hazel rods in a day, and only his sons bringing him great jugs of buttermilk to keep him going. That was fame of a kind. True fame.
    They may have been all right, these new American Cullens, but they weren’t there, and no sign of them. We stood on the sidewalk like goms, holding the bit of paper, staring up at an old premises with a corrugated iron roof, and a long metal balcony up the side, and an air of dereliction so complete that even where someone had bolted doors and barred the way, perhaps Mick Cullen himself on some long vanished day, these things were sundered, and old metal openings showed drear and bleak against the darkening sky.
    We were so tired from the huge journey in the ship, but I think we had been buoyant enough till that moment. Tadg slowly put the piece of paper back in his pocket, and brought out the other one, with the Chicago address, like a cardplayer with a poor hand that was going to venture an even poorer card. Because the Chicago address was only the friend of a friend of a sort of a cousin. Tadg gave a laugh then in the cobbled street. It was going to be quite dark soon, except just as I thought that, the lamps started to light one by one,