Free On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry

in a miraculous sequence. Were they singing, those lamps, did they make a tiny noise for themselves? It wasn’t that I was a woman and scared, it was that I was a human being and scared. The future, the following day, was as dark as the high sky, and suddenly what I had lost bore in on me, my father, stern and strange as he was, and my sisters, one a hunched unmarriageable girl, and the other a nervous, touchy person soon to be a similar bride – funny how I suddenly saw them like that, whereas before they had just been my eternal sisters – even the loss of poor Willie, that in some way had brought me here to this desolate, angry street in New York, all pushed through me like a flooded mountain stream through previously secure whinbushes, pulling at their tremendous roots, assaulting their safety, and I quailed there, in the street, and shook, my travelling coat failing to keep me warm suddenly, my legs failing me. And that was another moment when Tadg might with profit have put his arms around me, but what was he himself? Only a boy returned from the war, and odd deeds done in his home place, and all his ordinary dreams put aside by a death threat, standing there in New York with a girl he didn’t know, and who didn’t know him.
     

    Scared as we were, we didn’t feel easy enough to linger in New York without the protection of those we knew, or who were related to us – maybe something to do with that DNA Mr Dillinger told me about. I remember reading in a book of palmistry and dreams or some such years ago, I don’t even know why I was reading it, it was a book belonging to Cassie Blake herself, who liked such things, books about the shape of the head and what you could tell from that, and books about dreams, and this book said that people liked train journeys because no one ever died on a train, and when you dream of trains it’s a dream of eternal life. Maybe there is something in that, because we were strangely content to get back to the great station, with its main room the size of an Irish county, and put some of our few last dollars to the journey west to Chicago.

Sixth Day without Bill
    A nd then to some degree God smiled on us, and forgave us.
    My cousin in Chicago was by some way more distantly related than Mick Cullen in New York, but at least she was there, married to a man that worked along the shore of the lake, and though they hadn’t two cents to spare, they did have a timber shack behind their few rooms, that was too cold in winter and too hot in summer for ordinary mortals, but we were not that. We thought the heavens were beaming down on us right enough, when Hannah Reilly, in her big American-looking apron, and her exhausted face, said we could nest there. And Tadg went out the next morning with her husband, and by another miracle, though jobs were not too scarce in that time, found some temporary work, I think it was clearing out land where they were putting in pilings for new buildings, and it was rough hard toil, but Tadg wasn’t bothered by that.
    Everything was wider than New York. They had pushed the great buildings further apart, built everything fatter and heavier-looking, in case the wind blew them away.
    My father had put us in some difficulty with his hastily made plans, in that our official-looking letter had us as brother and sister, but there was no point offering this fiction to Hannah Reilly, because she knew who I was. But I couldn’t give that name anywhere else, and when Hannah remembered, she called me Grainne. Tadg at least was able to be Tim Cullen for the taking up of the work, though we regretted my father’s hasty choice of Cullen, which after all was a family name. So in the matter of getting married we were already in a sort of knot, since according to my father’s official letter we were brother and sister, and clearly to Hannah we were not, and yet now sharing the little wooden room. And she was very anxious for us to put this right.
    ‘Do you know, Lilly,