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

reading about him, a monster. Is that what my father was, a monster? How will I ever know? Can I ask St Peter?
    How I feared when first I worked for Mrs Wolohan’s mother that she would cast me out if she discovered who I came from. Of course like her daughter she was an Irish-American, who loved Ireland, and the idea of Irish freedom, which for her was heroic and inspiring. As it was indeed, I am sure, unless you were on the wrong side of it. And I did feel obliged to touch on that a little, because I did not want her to think me something other than I was. When I went to work for Mrs Wolohan herself I said a little more about it. Of course what she liked first about myself, and later Mr Nolan, was that we were Irish, pure and simple, even if Mr Nolan had never been to Ireland, but was third-generation, like herself indeed. But she showed no great surprise, no disapproval. She was
interested
in it. I remember her sitting me down and asking me questions. She was intrigued my father was a policeman of the old British regime. Her whole being lit up with
interest
, the hallmark of her personality. That is a person truly democratic in her thoughts. That is a merciful person. Because she knew who I was, I gradually came to see myself better. When a criminal gets out of prison, he looks for work, but must be upfront about his prison term. Whoever takes that man knows all about him, and if he is lucky enough to find such a person, he might well find a strange and unexpected happiness working for them. That is what I felt somehow, with Mrs Wolohan. Not so much on probation as given a new lease, a new term among the living and the just. And she did that it seemed to me with her whole heart.
     

    Tadg Bere wrote me his letter. It was a short letter, the work of a soldier. Soon he turned up in Dublin again, and wooed me. My father liked him well enough. There was little work for anyone in those times, but least of all for ex-soldiers, with the dark colour of the trenches in their eyes. So Tadg took a chance and when they were looking for men for a new auxiliary police force, he joined them. Most of the men in that force were survivors of the war also. They were set up to try and deal with the turmoil of rebellion in the country. But something of the despair of the war was in them. In the first days, Tadg was happy, aflame, even inspired. My father certainly had assisted him in his application. He was proud to be working, at something akin to soldiering, and something that would allow him to serve his country. He felt he was making a new beginning. He did not believe in any new Ireland, he devoutly loved the old one. The new force paid decently, but was otherwise poorly funded and put together in great haste. They barely had uniforms, and in the beginning wore bits and bobs of various forces, half army and half police, which is why they were dubbed the Black and Tans.
    It is like a dirty phrase. A curse. An expletive. Well I know it.
     

    My father was down in Wicklow now setting himself up in the old house. His brother had been farming the land all this while, in Kelshabeg above Kiltegan, and working as the steward on the Humewood estate, as his father, that is, my father’s father also, had done before him. It was a small cottage set into the hillside for shelter, and what shelter it did ultimately give him I do not know. At any rate he was spring-cleaning it, scraping off the old damp and whitewashing the walls inside and out, and he got a thatcher to repair the old roof, and a mason to put manners back on the ruined byre and henhouse. He aimed to be a retired man in the comfort of his old homestead, where seven generations of his family had been reared, and have a certain style to himself as a former officer high up in the police, with a pony and trap and, he hoped, one of his daughters to do for him. A noble ambition I am sure in its way. In any other country but Ireland, who may give freedom to her sons and daughters quicker