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

to the smell of a baby’s mouth after drinking its mother’s milk, I do believe. And the rooks rowing in the old high trees above Kelshabeg, such fractious birds, yet married to the one bird all their life, like good Catholics, and the wren in its tiny kingdoms in the earthen banks, and the woodpigeon offering its one remark over and over, and when there were storms out in the Wicklow sea, we heard the seagulls bickering and badgering on the winds, and in the dense copses the badgers themselves in the night-time, choosing among roots, and the fox both feared and admired, the red renegade, coming down to test our henhouse for weaknesses in the dark, and the nightingales and in stormy spring the fresh arrowheads of the house martins and the swallows, could even God tell the difference between? And Maud and me, before any of our life took darkness to it, she content in her artist she had met in St Stephen’s Green, myself content in my ex-soldier, going along without a thought for tiredness, it did not exist, and when we got to the cottage there was the bucket at the door to pull a drink out of, and a stew stewing on the hearth, and bread perfected in the pot-oven out on the yard, and then tea to kill the thirst, the best drink for thirst, and then bright early in the morning to get up with the sun and set to all the tasks, the hens, the dairy, the butterchurn, the dry sheets harvested from the fuchsia bushes, whatever was needed, and when the tinkers came up the path, to hold down the latch against them if our father was up the land, and not let them in the yard, them with their wild fumes of hair and not caring a damn what they did, and all the sort of turmoil of music everywhere, didn’t even sunlight have a sound?, and the rooks, and the wrens, and the robin singing his desperate song, and my father singing
There was an old woman
, and the infinite, kind, searching mercy of the turf in the evening, our legs thrust out to it, the funny woodthin legs of girls, and not caring in that moment about the chilblains we were sure to engender. I am writing it, I am writing it, and I spill it all out on my lap like very money, like riches, beyond the dreams of avarice.
    It was after just such a day that my father came in all changed and dark himself. It was a short spring evening, but bright, with a small rain sparkling down on the packstones of the yard. He made a darkness in the room as he came in through the half-door. He put Maud and Annie out of the room, and sat me down on the stone perch by the fire, and took the old dark chair for himself. His face was bleakened by a sort of terror.
    ‘Big news,’ he said, ‘big news. I was over on Keadeen Gap looking for that damn ewe that doesn’t know any better than to be wandering, when two men I know slightly came to me. I thought for a moment they meant to do me harm, as I know for a certifiable fact they are in the Baltinglass brigade. So you might think they wished harm on an old policeman. And I am sure there are those that wish me harm, and wouldn’t mind shooting me.’
    ‘I hope that is not true, Papa,’ I said.
    ‘It may be true, and it may not be true. But this is what they told me. It was something quite other than I had been expecting. It was about Tadg and yourself.’
    ‘How so, Tadg?’
    ‘They were coming to me out of old association, in that their father worked for my father, and the like, and they had a strong wish, a strong wish to let me know … To tip me off, I suppose, is the term I am looking for. Lilly, Lilly, it is terrible serious, it is a terrible serious matter. And you are to go back to Dublin this very evening and find Tadg and you are immediately to … And I will write an order for the bank in Sackville Street, and they will give you money, and…’
    ‘What, Papa, what do you mean?’
    ‘I don’t know what I mean. I am trying to gather my thoughts. Oh, Lilly, Lilly,’ he said, ‘my own daughter. And maybe it is my fault. Maybe this bad