Free On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry Page B

readiness of the Tans – my fault, my fault. I had said nothing to Tadg about anything, but it was still my fault. It was such matters, like a hopelessly knotted ball of wool, that kept us apart also in our apparent closeness, lying perforce arm to arm, the mere heat of his body so desirable in the cruel cold of that room, his red beard jutting from his face like a figure on a tomb in Christ Church Cathedral.
    Even as I write this, I long to be back there and turn to him, and hold him, and prove to him that at least one saving grace of us as a creature might be that everything can be unknotted by a simple gesture.
    That the darkness of a room can be solved by a single candle.
    I wish, I wish, that we had not wasted so much of our time together.
     

    But there was a loosening. Perhaps the few dollars and cents he was given for his work was little enough compared to his pay in the Tans, but it seemed to me a magical affair, because it guaranteed our ability to continue there, in what was beginning to feel like safety. My father had sent me a letter through a P.O. box number, giving me the precious details of Maud’s wedding to her Matthew, and although his account was spare and perfunctory, as was his fashion, my imagination supplied what was missing, and at the heart of it I thought I saw Maud smiling her rare smile. I hoped she would make a habit of that smile, because it was a good one, if rare, and I hoped, while knowing nothing about such a possibility, being in the dark myself about all things, that she might be well beloved by her husband.
    And as I read and reread the letter, I felt certain pangs of sadness too, and a homesick pain, and yes, jealousy.
    But Tadg and myself were beginning to thaw out, and as Chicago loosened itself from winter and spring, we loosened.
    ‘I’m going to say I like this place,’ he said. ‘I like it.’
    It was easier for us there certainly, because there was no history. I realised slowly that as my father’s daughter, unthinkingly, I had lived as a little girl and young woman through a certain kind of grievous history, where one thing is always being knocked against another thing. Where my father’s respect for the King was knocked against Tadg’s father being in the Irish Volunteers, where Willie’s going to war was knocked against his dying, where even Wicklow life was knocked against Dublin life, the heather that came up to us on the bus knocked against its eventual blackening, its little darkened flowers saying, time passeth, time flyeth. Where the very fact of my being alive was knocked against the fact that my mother had died in giving me that life.
    I just did not know yet what things knocked against other things here in America.
    Tadg had begun not just to like Chicago. He had begun to use the word ‘home’ and he no longer meant Cork or Ireland, but that wretched wooden room where we still boarded, able now to give my cousin something approaching a rent. And slowly all the things about us widened into a sort of personal kingdom, the nervy lake that thought it was the sea, the accumulated buildings of the city that we began to use as our landmarks in conversation and in dreams.
    And then something grand happened.
    We were lying side by side one Sunday morning and with one accord, without real thought, with the simple instinct of ordinary human creatures, we turned to each other and gently kissed, then fiercely, like wakening beasts, and before we knew where we were, like a sudden walking storm down the lake that we had witnessed in the deeper weather, we seemed to go into a stormy gear, we clutched at each other, we got rid of our damned clothes, and clung, and he was in me then, and we were happy, happy, young, in that room by the water, and the poetry that is available to anyone was available to us at last, and we breathed each other in, and in those moments both knew we would marry each other after all, and not a word needed to be spoken about it.
    A cold-minted