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

than a future. But he carefully limed his walls and set his new geraniums on the sills, bought his Rhode Island Reds and his bantam cock, his pig, his pony and his milking-cow. Maud was to be married and I was also, so it was Annie that was with him, scouring out and searing and poking and polishing. Poor Annie with her polio back was not likely to find a husband, so he was secure enough in his helpmate. He bought two Jack Russell terriers to terrorise the rats. Myself and Maud were lodged with our first cousins in Townsend Street, where they had a huckster’s shop, and every fortnight we went down on the Wicklow bus.
    Old Kelshabeg. The home place, despite the fact I had spent all my childhood in Dublin. A great fume of white heather on the hillside in the spring, it sometimes wouldn’t even wait for the snow to go, but show its million small flowers in the drifts, like a second snow itself. Annie so proud to have put order on the place, the flagstones in the kitchen shining, the plates on the dresser shining back to the flagstones, the wide fire with its stack of reddening turf, the companionable cricket in the hearthstone, the water in the rainbarrel to plash your astonished face in the mornings, the devious hens trying always to come into the house and live a human life, the helpful pig eating everything in the yards including all the spoils of the ‘quiet spot’ where a person would quietly do their business, and wipe their backside after with a moist dock leaf, a better thing than any piece of paper.
    We walked up the long green road, Maud and myself, in our best travelling attire, and in our cloth bags some more sensible country clothes, old grey dresses and white and blue polka-dot over-dresses. There were a hundred sorts of clean clinging muck to come at you on an Irish farm. A few stooping men digging over a quarter-acre, shovelful by shovelful, the land too steep and poor for a plough, lifted themselves and straightened their backs as we passed, no doubt glad of the relief in their obligement to greet us, as essentially local people passing. The English words gone muddy and lovely in their mouths.
    ‘That’s it, that’s it, there’s the two beauties passing,’ and this despite the fact that Maud did not consider herself a beauty, but she was indeed a beauty, with a thick hank of black hair tied in a bit of ribbon more cousin to string than fashion. ‘Are you going up to the father? You are? God bless ye.’
    And up we did go, and it was the last house on the hill of Keadeen was our cottage, where nature ran out of patience with humanity, and struck out wild and pagan on the mountain proper, all heather and streams and sloughs. I am writing of these things, and as I do, as I sit here in my American clothes, clothed in my American self, all this long lost, long done with, all those people swept away, in the normal manner of the world, those stooping men, Maud, my father, the blessed hen and pony and pig, the whole sacred shebang, in a way we never give credence to while we breathe in and out as young women, as I sit here, an old person, a relic, even a grateful relic, for what I was given, if not for what was taken away, my sere heart calls back to it. I think again of the strange fact, plainly accepted, that that very heather would be sent up on the Wicklow bus in sprigs in springtime, so that my father could set a bit of it on his mantelpiece in the castle, a piece of home, a badge, a sort of poem really, a song, and we as little children would smell it, pull on its scent with our noses gratefully. And I am remembering other things, the bell-flowers on the ditches that we could burst between thumb and index finger, I suppose it was digitalis, friend to the heart attack victim, and the blackthorn blossom in April, a greyish white, and the mayblossom itself in May, a different white, a whiter white, and the gorse as yellow as a blackbird’s bill in May also, with its own smell, the smell as near as bedamn