On Canaan's Side: A Novel by Sebastian Barry

Author:Sebastian Barry [Barry, Sebastian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychological, Family Life, Fiction, Literary, Coming of Age, Historical
ISBN: 9781101544259
Google: HF3PDsrJcYAC
Amazon: 0670022926
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2011-09-08T07:00:00+00:00

Telling his beads, o’er and o’er. That’s some old poem or ballad, I forget which.

I seem to remember some matters well enough, even in the great mire that is my poor head, but it would give me a great fright to have to put a date on everything. Thank God it does not behove me to do so. For it is just me sitting here, telling my tale to myself, that’s what it feels like, mostly, old matters held in the fingers of memory, like those old beads in a family rosary, polished by a lifetime of prayers, and handed down, and slowly slowly no doubt diminishing and thinning as they go from creature to creature. When we were small, my father would occasionally take a great desire to saying the rosary, and we would be down on our spindly knees every teatime for a few weeks. Then this fervour would disappear for a long time, and what it was in his life that brought on these tremendous bouts of piety, in which we were obliged to participate, I of course could not say, then or now. The ordinary stations of a man’s life maybe.

Not my father, not my mother, but it’s me, Lord, standing in the need of prayer.

But there was a curious circumstance that allows me always to know the year at least of my marriage. You might think a person would be inclined to remember such a signal event anyway, whether or not subsequently they wished to forget. But I am obliged to remember it, for it was the year of the great suffering in Oklahoma and other parts. If this country was a marriage between hope and suffering, then one of the partners in the marriage upped and left mysteriously. Or in some great fire, hope was burned off, and suffering was discovered to be indestructible.

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