On Canaan's Side (11 page)

But Cassie did come home with him immediately on the streetcar and realised I was well-nigh starving, and fed me. Great banging about with the pan on Mr Blake’s humble gas-ring apparatus.

Then I was throwing up, and didn’t know where I was, and, like Greta Garbo in
Queen Christina
, was clutching at Cassie.

She fed me again, more sparingly.

Then I think I slept for a long, long time.

I heard Catus Blake playing his music on the quill-pipes.

‘Old tunes of Virginia,’ he said.

‘I do not know if I trust the Irish,’ said Mrs Bellow. We were standing, Cassie, Mrs Bellow, and myself, in her kitchen. ‘Trust is a great part in being a servant. The last girl was selling linen out the back door. All my linen is fine Irish linen. She likely got a good price for it.’

Mrs Bellow wore her dress like armour, expensive cloth with a curious unfashionable thickness to it, like an insulated wall. She was of course Cassie’s mistress, and this was Cassie’s effort to get me gainful employment.

‘I cannot give a job to every stray girl in Cleveland. At least you have the distinction of being Cassie’s stray girl. I will not say I do not have a regard for Cassie’s opinion of a person. I do. You can find good rich people all over, but good poor people, of the kind you might want in your house, are very rare.’

Throughout this, Cassie was smiling, smiling, her wide face seeming contented and amused. But she didn’t say a word. I suppose she knew her river well, and how the fish were in it.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Bellow. ‘I will give you a start. On probation. I dare say you will not find it easy work. You are very small, and you do not look strong.’

With this assessment, she went back into the main part of the house. Cassie gripped me on the shoulders with both hands, her own immensely strong fingers nearly hurting my bones. She turned her head from side to side.

‘Thank the good Lord,’ she said.

Then she showed me our little niche over the coachhouse. One big iron bed, and the walls hung here and there with Cassie’s few possessions, a housecoat, a few interesting hats, a washbasin with a big jug and a rough slab of possibly carbolic soap, her oddments and knick-knacks on a little rickety table, her bottomless trunk, and the room in general all spick and span, but I would say never shown a paintbrush since its first going-over with cream-coloured paint a hundred years ago. I could see bits of cloth stuffed into holes in the wall, no doubt the result of efforts in winter to keep out the seeping cold. She had a small gilt-framed mirror, with the gold paint coming off it like a tiny autumn.

She showed me how to boil up the linen pots, and boil the linen, and drag it like bodies into the washing tub, and get the suds going like deep snowfall, and then haul the sheets again into the big coldwater rinsing basin, and slap and punch out the soap, and then her mighty arms manned the mangle like a piece of army weaponry, and she powered the poor sheets through the rollers, the chill water sluiced out. Toilers in the realm of St Veronica, patron saint of laundresses. All the while she told me her story, the way lovers do when they first meet, of her childhood in Norfolk, old Catus a sharecropper there, getting deeper and deeper into debt, and finally breaking north like a child escaping the armlock of a bully.

‘A child knows nothing about all that. I just did love Virginia. Chickens coming into the little iron house we had, and birds of every colour and size flocking down, and all the creatures that come and go in the year, that’s like a big clock of things, Lilly, and you never saw such a spread of lovely fields, every direction.’

Then she was turning the handle with her fierce and endless strength.

‘My mamma was killed by some ruffians going through, they caught her out on a back road, when she was coming back from town with chicken feed. Catus found her lying there in the yellow mess, where they had bust the bag in taking her virtue. But he said nothing about that to me at the time, only that she had gone to her reward in heaven, which didn’t seem so bad, though I missed her. I was only five, and I knew nothing. And I don’t think Catus ever even
looked
at another woman since.’

I passed muster with Mrs Bellow, and grew into the household duties, my body strengthening from Cassie’s astounding cooking. She could make the dimmest-looking vegetables shine anew. Food loved her, and almost stood up and saluted when she came into the kitchen.

There wasn’t an inch of her that wasn’t beautiful. You don’t share a room with someone without seeing all the inches. The depth of safety I felt with her, sleeping at her side, and taking her instructions in the house, caused great gratitude in me. Loving Cassie was where in truth I started to love America. Maybe for me Cassie was America, and if Tadg’s old friend the Armenian had seen her, I think he would have been proud to paint her. She was a big, big woman, and it was lucky there wasn’t too much of me, or we would never have fitted in that iron bed. Cassie boiled in the covers all night, but I didn’t mind. She sweated like those American Falls.

Eventually I dared to tell her my story. From that day on she always scanned the sidewalk first thing at dawn and last thing at night, in case there was a shadowy man standing there.

Mrs Bellow was not beautiful like Cassie. She was a woman who didn’t see anything and didn’t know anything, but then, she was married to an ignorant man, so I will not blame her. She had her money from a steel-mill down by the lake. We sometimes heard cries in the night, and Cassie would pull the sheet high to her chin, and put her hands over her ears and mutter nonsense, so she wouldn’t hear.

Mrs Bellow once told me that her ancestor owned the first house on the banks of the Cuyahoga. She had a map, hundreds of years old, and there it was, a little square house in the blank wilderness. So maybe she also was a sort of picture of America.

I was fifteen years in that house, long enough to learn all Cassie’s recipes.

There are all manner of terrors in the world, and bursting with life as she was, Cassie endured her own terror, in the shape of Mr Bellow. He was forever steering her into cupboards or empty rooms in the mansion.

What is a life? What is a citizen? How was it so arranged that a man like Mr Bellow could do what he liked with Cassie, and never a word said against him? It was only gradually I became aware of something amiss. Finally it was Cassie crying in the bed, making her own small cries, that made me beg her tell me what was wrong.

So she told me.

‘And I know if I tell Mrs Bellow, that will be the end of us, Lilly, and we will be out on the dusty dry roads of America.’

‘What he is doing to you is wrong, Cassie dear. He can’t make you do that. Won’t we go down to the priest and we’ll get him to do something about it?’

Because Cassie’s people were Catholic down there in Norfolk, Virginia.

‘Ain’t no priest going to do something about this,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand, Lilly.’

‘Why don’t I understand, Cassie?’

‘You don’t understand, Lilly, is all.’

‘He’s a low little louse of a man,’ I said, perplexed. ‘I tell you, he is a tenth-grade devil.’

‘Well, maybe so,’ said Cassie, laughing despite everything.

Some nights, the great fogs and smokes from the factories far below by the lake would come up the heights and visit us, banishing the fresh air. Big fogs from the lake itself also. In the deep core of winter every blessed thing froze, seven times over, so that the year became so hard you thought it would never thaw out. Then the whole district loosened itself into spring, the poor huddled trees suddenly like a thousand girls, all gold hair and ribbons, and the rows upon rows of blossom-trees in the streets shook out their colours on the air.

At some point that I cannot quite remember, I risked a letter to Annie in Dublin, just to say I was doing okay, and not to worry, and I gave her a P.O. box number to reply to. Well, a letter came back on blue-lined paper, I thought I knew the very shop where she had bought it, in her crabbed writing, like a line of ants held up by an obstruction, and she was loving and kind in her words, but also had to tell me that our father had died. He had died in the county home in Baltinglass, and he had had a peaceful death, she said, though his wits were ‘somewhat astray’. She had not been able to be there for the actual moment of his dying. He was buried in the little graveyard of the hospital, she said, under the sycamores, and a poor enough stone put up, she said, because he had only a tiny pension and there was no other money to be put to honour him. I thought it was a sad letter. I thought it was very sad my father had died in such a way. I do remember sitting reading that letter, and feeling as if something vastly important to me had happened, that I had had a great duty to attend to, and had not been able to, because of my wretched exile.

My wretched exile.

Letter-writing. Names, postmarks, locations. Unfriendly eyes.

And I had cause then, not so long after, to wonder if I had been so wise to write after all.

Every day I would be sent to the Main Street to get whatever provisions Mrs Bellow listed. It is almost strange to me that I did that for so many years, season by season.

The mansion was set at the end of its street, and the road ended there. Automobiles often came in unawares and had to turn in the little sweep at the top, where the gates of the Bellow house were. Every house had a coachhouse, and places for tradesmen to park. You didn’t see many automobiles on the sidewalk, so this day, coming home with the heavy bags, I did take note of an old jalopy stuck up on the dirt edge, under the old oaks that finished the vista. And leaning against the jalopy in question was a man. I don’t know what he had been doing up till then, but I felt that when he spotted me coming in the distance, he rather hurriedly turned the crank on his engine, and sat into his vehicle, slamming the loose, thin door. Then he didn’t look at me again the whole way, but kept his face turned towards the scrubby oaks, in an unlikely preoccupation with them. When, in some trembling, I reached the house, and turned down the great latch and started to swing the huge iron gates open just a little to allow me to pass through, he still didn’t turn his head.

I saw him make a little movement, and dip right towards the passenger seat. I don’t know why that startled me so, but a fear came into me like a great crowd of rats entering a warm house. Here is the moment, I thought, when he turns and gets out and points the gun, and I am to be killed. I pressed my weight against the gates, and even the tiny gap I had needed to enter seemed to take an age to close. I suddenly sensed how vulnerable I was, how vulnerable any human creature was, bones and flesh, all permeable to a bullet. I was trying to close the gate, I know not why, and he could have leapt out and shot me a dozen times. Why did I not just run like a demon? The human brain is not a logical machine.

It was dark under those oaks. The generous light of June, that ran its fingers through the dry leaves, made the shadows all the deeper. In a strange slow-motion, I closed the gate, and stood there, looking back. I thought, is this the man that took Tadg? Suddenly all I could think of was Tadg. The fact of Tadg, the remnant of him in me, how he lived in my heart, obliterated all my present fear. I was surging with love for Tadg.

My ‘messages’ as Dublin people say, my packages had fallen from my arms. I had not even noticed. They were lying now at my feet, outside the gate, carrots, sugar, coffee as may be. The man got out of the car and stood in the shadows. His dry-looking hat caused another shadow over his face and eyes. Then I said something that made no sense, and makes no sense even now.

‘Is it me?’ I said. That’s all I said. I waited for the answer with a weird patience. I could not see his face but I could feel him looking at me. I was dressed in my sole summer dress, with the pattern of olives and leaves all over it, well I remember it. Cassie loved that dress, though it was a cheap thing from the Hungarian market. As he watched me though I began to feel naked, like that dream I used to have when I was a schoolchild, the dream of being in class, and looking down, and realising I had forgotten to put my clothes on. I felt oddly out of place, clumsy. I don’t know how to describe that feeling. I felt like I was dying in front of him.

If he had a gun in his hand, and I couldn’t see if he did, he didn’t fire it. He swung round abruptly and got back into his bashed car. As he drove off, I saw he had a 1923 Tennessee licence plate, I did note that, in the great humiliation of my panic. He must have been driving that Model T drunk through forests to get it in such a state in only seven or eight years. My arms were useless to me, I could barely pick up my packages. My vittles, as Cassie would say.

But I went back into the house and tried to recover myself, get myself shipshape for work. I don’t think Mrs Bellow would have noticed if I had come into the kitchen missing my head. She wasn’t a woman to notice things maybe. I was even surprised to see her in the kitchen, she was rarely there that time of day, which she usually spent in her bedroom, curtains strictly closed. But she spent the whole afternoon there with Cassie, making three charity cakes for a fête, so I wasn’t able to tell Cassie anything till evening. By which time I was like a loosely corked bottle of soda, bubbling away wastefully. It was long enough after the fact now to feel the full whack of it. I couldn’t touch a bite of supper, not a bite. I was silent as a Benedictine nun. Which wasn’t like me, because whatever had gone on in our lives, Cassie and me liked to talk, we liked to sparkle away a bit at each other, making each other laugh. Well, we were queens of laughter usually.

Now it was well past nightfall and our tasks were finished for that day and we were side by side in the big bed. Her weight created a big dip, so I was always a little sideways, like a lean-to shed against a house in Wicklow. So I told her my little story. Now she was all for telling the police.

‘Mrs Bellow won’t like that.’

‘I don’t think she’ll want a strange man hanging about, Lilly, I don’t.’