I Sing the Body Electric (12 page)

“Off the Mount, Nolan,” said the priest, “and enough of the Sermon. What's your point?”

“The point is, Father, we have had no such influx of honorary Sicilians since the mind boggles to remember. For all we know, at this moment, they may be reading aloud to Mrs. Murphy, Miss Clancy, or Mrs. O'Hanlan in the midst of the park. And reading aloud from
what
, I ask you?”

“
The Ballad of Reading Gaol?
” asked Finn.

“You have rammed the target and sunk the ship,” said Nolan, mildly
irritated the point had been plucked from him. “How do we know these imps out of bottles are not selling real-estate tracts in a place called Fire Island? Have you
heard
of it, Father?”

“The American gazettes come often to my table, man.”

“Well, do you remember the great hurricane of nineteen-and-fifty-six when the waves washed over Fire Island there in New York? An uncle of mine, God save his sanity and sight, was with the Coast Guard there which evacuated the entirety of the population of Fire Island. It was worse than the twice-a-year showing at Fennelly's dressworks, he said. It was more terrible than a Baptist Convention. Ten thousand men came rushing down to the stormy shore carrying bolts of drape material, cages full of parakeets, tomato-and-tangerine-colored sport coats, and lime-colored shoes. It was the most tumultuous scene since Hieronymus Bosch laid down his palette after he painted Hell for all generations to come. You do not easily evacuate ten thousand Venetian-glass boyos with their great blinky cow-eyes and their phonograph symphonic records in their hands and their rings in their ears, without tearing down the middle. My uncle, soon after, took to the heavy drink.”

“Tell us
more
about that night,” said Kilpatrick, entranced.

“More, hell,” said the priest. “Out, I say. Surround the park. Keep your eyes peeled. And meet me back here in an hour.”

“That's more like it,” cried Kelly. “Let's
really
see what dread thing they're up to!”

The doors banged wide.

On the sidewalk, the priest gave directions. “Kelly, Murphy, you around the north side of the park. Timulty, you to the south. Nolan and Garrity, the east; Moran, MaGuire, and Kilpatrick, the west. Git!”

But somehow or other in all the ruction, Kelly and Murphy wound up at the Four Shamrocks pub halfway to the Green and fortified themselves for the chase, and Nolan and Moran each met their wives on the street and had to run the other way, and MaGuire and Kilpatrick, passing the Elite Cinema and hearing Lawrence Tibbett singing inside, cadged their way in for a few half-used cigarettes.

So it wound up with just two, Garrity on the east and Timulty on the south side of the park, looking in at the visitors from another world.

After half an hour of freezing weather, Garrity stomped up to Timulty and said, “What's
wrong
with the fiends? They're just
standing
there in the midst of the park. They haven't moved half the afternoon. And it's cut to the bone is my toes. I'll nip around to the hotel, warm up, and rush back to stand guard with you, Tim.”

“Take your time,” called Timulty in a strange sad wandering, philosophical voice as the other charged away.

Left alone, Timulty walked in and sat for a full hour watching the six men who, as before, did not move. You might almost have thought to see Timulty there, with his eyes brooding, and, his mouth gone into a tragic crease, that he was some Irish neighbor of Kant or Schopenhauer, or had just read something by a poet or thought of a song that declined his spirits. And when at last the hour was up and he had gathered his thoughts like a handful of cold pebbles, he turned and made his way out of the park. Garrity was there, pounding his feet and swinging his hands but before he could explode with questions, Timulty pointed in and said, “Go sit. Look. Think. Then
you
tell
me
.”

Everyone at Finn's looked up sheepishly when Timulty made his entrance. The priest was still off on errands around the city, and after a few walks about the Green to assuage their consciences, all had returned, nonplussed, to intelligence headquarters.

“Timulty!” they cried. “Tell us! What? What?”

Timulty took his time walking to the bar and sipping his drink. Silently, he observed his own image remotely buried beneath the lunar ice of the barroom mirror. He turned the subject this way. He twisted it inside out. He put it back wrong-side-to. Then he shut his eyes and said:

“It strikes me as how—”

Yes, said all silently, about him.

“From a lifetime of travel and thought, it comes to the top of my mind,” Timulty went on, “there is a strange resemblance between the likes of them and the likes of us.”

There was such a gasp as changed the scintillation, the goings and comings of light in the prisms of the little chandeliers over the bar. When the schools of fish-light had stopped swarming at this exhalation. Nolan cried, “Do you mind putting your hat on so I can knock it off!?”

“Consider,” Timulty calmly said. “Are we or are we not great ones for the poem and the song?”

Another kind of gasp went through the crowd. There was a warm burst of approval. “Oh, sure, we're
that!
” “My God, is
that
all you're up to?” “We were afraid—”

“Hold it!” Timulty raised a hand, eyes still closed.

And all shut up.

“If we're not singing the songs, we're writing them, and if not writing, dancing them, and aren't
they
fond admirers of the song and the writing of same and the dancing out the whole? Well, just now, I heard them at a distance reciting poems and singing, to themselves, in the Green.”

Timulty had something there. Everyone had to paw everybody and admit it.

“Do you find any
other
resemblances?” asked Finn, heavily, glowering.

“I do,” said Timulty, with a judge's manner.

There was a still more fascinated indraw of breath and the crowd drew nearer.

“They do not mind a drink now and then,” said Timulty.

“By God, he's right!” cried Murphy.

“Also,” intoned Timulty, “they do not marry until very late, if ever at all! And—”

But here the tumult was such he had to wait for it to subside before he could finish:

“And they—ah—have very little to do with women.”

After that there was a great clamor, a yelling and shoving about and ordering of drinks and someone invited Timulty outside. But Timulty wouldn't even lift one eyelid, and the brawler was held off and when everyone had a new drink in them and the near-fistfights had drained away, one loud clear voice, Finn's, declared:

“Now would you mind explaining the criminal comparison you have just made in the clean air of my honorable pub?”

Timulty sipped his drink slowly and then at last opened his eyes and looked at Finn steadily, and said, with a clear bell-trumpet tone and wondrous enunciation:

“Where in all of Ireland can a man lie down with a woman?”

He let that sink in.

“Three hundred twenty-nine days a damn year it rains. The rest it's so wet there's no dry piece, no bit of land you would dare trip a woman out flat on for fear of her taking root and coming up in leaves, do you deny that?”

The silence did not deny.

“So when it comes to places to do sinful evils and perform outrageous acts of the flesh, it's to Arabia the poor damn fool Irishman must take himself. It's Arabian dreams we have, of warm nights, dry land, and a decent place not just to sit down but to lie down on, and not just lie down on but to roister joyfully about on in clinches and clenches of outrageous delight.”

“Ah, Jaisus,” said Flynn, “you can say
that
again.”

“Ah, Jaisus,” said everyone, nodding.

“That's number one.” Timulty ticked it off on his fingers. “Place is lacking. Then, second, time and circumstances. For say you should sweet talk a fair girl into the field, eh? in her rainboots and slicker and her shawl over her head and her umbrella over that and you making noises
like a stuck pig half over the sty gate, which means you've got one hand in her bosom and the other wrestling with her boots, which is as far as you'll damn well get, for who's standing there behind you, and you feel his sweet spearmint breath on your neck?”

“The father from the local parish?” offered Garrity.

“The father from the local parish,” said everyone, in despair.

“There's nails number two and three in the cross on which all Ireland's males hang crucified,” said Timulty.

“Go on, Timulty, go on.”

“Those fellows visiting here from Sicily run in teams.
We
run in teams. Here we are, the gang, in Finn's, are we
not?
”

“Be damned and we are!”

“
They
look sad and are melancholy half the time and then spitting like happy demons the rest, either up or down, never in between, and who does
that
remind you of?”

Everyone looked in the mirror and nodded.

“If we had the choice,” said Timulty, “to go home to the dire wife and the dread mother-in-law and the old-maid sister all sour sweats and terrors, or stay here in Finn's for one more song or one more drink or one more story,
which
would all of us men choose?”

Silence.

“Think on that,” said Timulty. “Answer the truth. Resemblances. Similarities. The long list of them runs off one hand and up the other arm. And well worth the mulling over before we leap about crying Jaisus and Mary and summoning the Guard.”

Silence.

“I,” said someone, after a long while, strangely, curiously, “would like … to see them closer.”

“I think you'll get your wish. Hist!”

All froze in a tableau.

And far off they heard a faint and fragile sound. It was like the wondrous morning you wake and lie in bed and know by a special feel that the first fall of snow is in the air, on its way down, tickling the sky, making the silence to stir aside and fall back in on nothing.

“Ah, God,” said Finn, at last, “it's the first day of spring…”

And it was that, too. First the dainty snowfall of feet drifting on the cobbles, and then a choir of bird song.

And along the sidewalk and down the street and outside the pub came the sounds that were winter
and
spring. The doors sprang wide. The men reeled back from the impact of the meeting to come. They steeled their nerves. They balled their fists. They geared their teeth in their anxious mouths, and into the pub like children come into a Christmas place and
everything a bauble or a toy, a special gift or color, there stood the tall thin older man who looked young and the small thin younger men who had old things in their eyes. The sound of snowfall stopped. The sound of spring birds ceased.

The strange children herded by the strange shepherd found themselves suddenly stranded as if they sensed a pulling away of a tide of people, even though the men at the bar had flinched but the merest hair.

The children of a warm isle regarded the short child-sized and runty full-grown men of this cold land and the full-grown men looked back in mutual assize.

Timulty and the men at the bar breathed long and slow. You could smell the terrible clean smell of the children way over here. There was too much spring in it.

Snell-Orkney and his young-old boy-men breathed swiftly as the heartbeats of birds trapped in a cruel pair of fists. You could smell the dusty, impacted, prolonged, and dark-clothed smell of the little men way over here. There was too much winter in it.

Each might have commented upon the other's choice of scent, but—

At this moment the double doors at the side banged wide and Garrity charged in full-blown, crying the alarm:

“Jesus, I've seen everything! Do you know where they are
now
, and what
doing?
”

Every hand at the bar flew up to shush him.

By the startled look in their eyes, the intruders knew they were being shouted about.

“They're still at St. Stephen's Green!” Garrity, on the move, saw naught that was before him. “I stopped by the hotel to spread the news. Now it's your turn. Those fellows—”

“Those fellows,” said David Snell-Orkney, “are here in—” He hesitated.

“Heeber Finn's pub,” said Heeber Finn, looking at his shoes.

“Heeber Finn's,” said the tall man, nodding his thanks.

“Where,” said Garrity, gone miserable, “we will all be having a drink instantly.”

He flung himself at the bar.

But the six intruders were moving, also. They made a small parade to either side of Garrity and just by being amiably there made him hunch three inches smaller.

“Good afternoon,” said Snell-Orkney.

“It is and it isn't,” said Finn, carefully, waiting.

“It seems,” said the tall man surrounded by the little boy-men, “there is much talk about what we are doing in Ireland.”

“That would be putting the mildest interpretation on it,” said Finn.

“Allow me to explain,” said the stranger.

“Have you ever,” continued Mr. David Snell-Orkney, “heard of the Snow Queen and the Summer King?”

Several jaws trapped wide down.

Someone gasped as if booted in the stomach.

Finn, after a moment in which he considered just where a blow might have landed upon him, poured himself a long slow drink with scowling precision. He took a stiff snort of the stuff and with the fire in his mouth, replied, carefully, letting the warm breath out over his tongue:

“Ah…
what
Queen is that again,
and
the King?”

“Well,” said the tall pale man, “there was this Queen who lived in Iceland who had never seen summer, and this King who lived in the Isles of Sun who had never seen winter. The people under the King almost died of heat in the summers, and the people under the Snow Queen almost died of ice in the winters. But the people of both countries were saved from their terrible weathers. The Snow Queen and the Sun King met and fell in love and every summer when the sun killed people in the islands they moved North to the lands of ice and lived temperately. And every winter when the snow killed people in the North, all of the Snow Queen's people moved South and lived in the mild island sun. So there were no longer two nations, two peoples, but
one
race which commuted from land to land with the strange weathers and wild seasons.
The end
.”