The All of It: A Novel (3 page)

A
T HALF-ONE, HE
rested his rod in the thorny tangle of a furze-clump and made his way to the ghillie hut.

Inside it, Seamus sat, his back braced against a post, his torso scrunched forward over his folded arms. “Giving up, Father?” he asked in an itching way.

He restrained himself: “No, Seamus. I’ve come for my lunch.” Then, acidly: “I don’t like to disturb you, boy, but if you could just manage to reach out and hand me the thermos, I could use some hot tea.”

“There’s not much left. It bein’ so cold, I—”

“I’ll take what there is, thank you, Seamus.” It was a blessing just to sit down. From the strenuous
efforts of casting, his shoulders ached, and his legs, too, from standing so long. Morosely, Seamus watched him as he ate his sandwich and drank a comforting cup of tea.

Of the two sheep grazing near the hut’s open door Seamus remarked, “Them’s lucky, havin’ them heavy coats.”

“I take it you’re cold, Seamus…. You might try going outside and moving about.”

“But for the rain—”

“Ah, the rain again, is it?” forcing a smile. “You’re right of course, Seamus. I’m sopped through myself.”

“You’ll take a chill, Father,” the boy argued. “You’ve given it a noble try, but Thomas is right, it’s no good in this weather, the water’s too high and the fish—”

“—just lie on the bottom, not moving,” he finished the cant for him. “You’d advise me to give off, then?”

“I would, Father.”

“Well now, Seamus, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do…. I’m going to nap for a few minutes, and then I’m going back to my fishing. Now if you’ll draw the door to against the wind—”

There’s benefaction to closing off vision: with your eyes shut you’re disobliged from keeping the show going for yourself or anyone else…. So thinking, he briefly dozed.

“Did I snore, Seamus?” coming awake a bit later.

“Aye,” Seamus grinned.

“Well…” he stretched. “It’s time I was leaving you again, Seamus.” He stood up. “Keep the net handy.” He had to say that.

It was raining still: fate of the day. And the midges swarmed, thicker than ever. Back on the beat, he saturated his face and neck and hands with a commercial bug-deterrent: but for its feeble effect, he’d be eaten alive. He’d try now, he decided, a Thunder and Lightning…and tied it on, feeling as he did so a hopelessness of purpose akin to anger. Then he positioned himself anew and in a kind of desperate, stubborn rage, he began again: cast, strip, cast, strip, cast….

What clue had he missed, what giveaway indication of Kevin’s and Enda’s sibling relationship? No inkling from an examination of their conjured physical and characteristic selves: he had been through that earlier in the day, had, all the long miles of the drive over from Roonatellin to the Castle, imaged in his mind their faces and bodies and the way they thought and the way they moved, scrutinizing every detail. To no avail. Kevin: with his straight, light, soft hair (the merest breeze could randomly part it); his blue eyes that tended easily to water over; the mould of his features expressive more of determination than of intelligence; his nimble-jointed body (he could go up a ladder and come down it with a crazy ease that drew smiles);
his tendency in leisure to keep to a ready neatness, as if he were subject at all times to an imperative call; his easy laugh, but his empty silences; his broad, blunt, capable hands; his tedious care of tools; his impetuous though untheatrical generosity; his near-dull, incurious adherence to the palpable perimeter of his immediate, personal world: for him, the horizon held no allure.

A far, far different coin of spending was Enda, daughtered historically, he fancied, of the race of Heber, the eldest son of Milesius, King of Spain, who, as Dublin-bred, educated schoolboys of his generation had learnt, colonized Ireland early on, way, way back. Hers the abundant, curly, enticingly coarse raven-dark hair of that Iberian breed; hers the black, changing eyes gifted, in conjunct with a subtle intellect, to sightings of the intuitive sort; hers the elegant, long-fingered, obscurely imperious hands; hers a spontaneity of response, sexually illusory; hers a sailor’s canniness (kindness came after); hers—Kevin’s never—the lit, brilliant face set in the direction of, and becalmed in, distance.

That disalike they were, one from the other.

Two other elements mightily distinguished Enda from Kevin. Firstly: Enda could read—a bit (Kevin not at all)—and she had sought and acquired this skill, however limited, as an adult, by going and sitting over a period of months with the “beginning
learners” at the state school in Roonatellin; and though her ease with the printed word was rudimentary—no more than that of a child—she regularly pored over and practiced her skill on the instrument of the district newspaper. Her progress, as one watched her at it, through the prose of that simple sheet, was slow-gaited and awesomely sombre, but, for the gist and feel of fact and life which she arduously gleaned from it, terribly satisfying to her.

Secondly: she possessed a naturally aristocratic and emotionally connective approach to the spoken word; she cared about how she said what she wanted to say. In the middle of a sentence she would often hesitate, and one knew she was searching for the better phrase or the more telling word. This concern particularized and lent to each of her relationships an intrinsic delicacy. Her verbal falterings had always fascinated him for the ways in which they revealed the workings of her mind and for the fact of their being infatuatingly expressive of herself.

Yet, of Kevin and Enda as a pair—shouldn’t he have guessed
something
? But by what means? The habits of their lives had been so ordinary-seeming, their expectations so simple, Kevin tending to his small acreage and his sheep and taking on odd jobs for the extra, and Enda abiding so gladsomely over the home-hearth, the two of them showing every
evidence of love of God, being regular and humble and joyful in their worship. Enda especially; Sunday after Sunday—Sundays were the day for Enda—she’d be on her knees at early Mass, the rosary in her hands and the world lost on her for all her raptness. Thrilling, the grace of her gathered self at prayer.

Still—and he perceived it in a rush—there
had
been something, a signal, if he’d but put it to use, whose possible significance he himself, within himself, had always sought to gainsay. For there: the fact of it, that in all the parish, no other pair of any age—displaying engaged twosomes or quick-talking new-marrieds or elderly couples bonded in long wedlock—none but Kevin and Enda gave off, as they were seen standing together or sitting next to each other, that stirring element, that
given
, like a scent of unalterable persuasion, of hardness.
Purpose
: that was the word which sprang consequentially to mind.

What he would never get over, as Enda told it to him that late afternoon after Kevin’s death, was the sorrow of the usualness of her and Kevin’s early childhood: their mother dying giving stillborn birth to her third child—that when Kevin was three and Enda two; and after their mother’s death, their young, distraught, overburdened father going queerer and queerer, colder and colder, caring fi
nally for nothing—not himself or his children or his land or livestock—finding in drink his only refuge.

“You’ve been up Donegal way, Father? So you know how it is there, the mountains like walls and the thick hills between one glen and the other and the land in the glens sweeping up and off as far as ever you can see, stretches of no one and nothing but clouds and rocks and sheep grazing and now and then a house set down in the reaches. Ours was such a one. Nowhere, it was. Just sheep-tracks making to it, and them wiped out often by the rains….

“Of course, I’m talking fifty, sixty years ago. Now it’s changed I suppose, Donegal being just as likely to change as anyplace else. There’s cars now for one thing, and cars get everywhere, wanted or not. But at the time I’m talking of, when Kevin and myself were children, there’d be weeks and weeks when we’d not see a soul except for ourselves and our dad…. Oh, of course, we got to Mass when we could, though the church was a fast hour’s walk from our house, that apart we were….”

He knew the image: the widower appearing on the Lord’s day with his haphazardly-clad children, the lot of them large-eyed and yearning and holding back like shy, uncertain creatures of the field. “You had no relatives, Enda? No aunts? No uncles? No relations of any sort? None at all?” he asked.

No one. Apparently there had been no one. Or perhaps—Enda’s memory was vague—there had been someone she recalled as being mentioned, a great-aunt of her mother’s, but there had been a rupture of the tie, a quarrel of some sort, so the great-aunt in reality was no more than a figure in a dream.

“…but at the best, had there been anyone, they’d not likely have ventured the distance to our place to look in on us,” Enda went on. Then, with a shrug: “These days of course, for a family in our fix, there’s all the State Social Services and the county officials looking into every nook and cranny of your life, and as I said, cars. It’s cars that’s made the most difference. But we’d none of that I’ve just mentioned. For us, back then, it was like we weren’t known as being alive.”

She said that cutting sentence, then shocked him by laughing. “…Not that we thought that then, for we knew no other life, and you can’t know what you don’t know, isn’t it so, Father? And we were busy, morning to night, Kevin at doing on the place—our dad put him early to doing a man’s work, and me hauling and fetching, washing and mending and cooking, both of us doing a grownup’s workaday. Only little we were—six and seven, no bigger than that.” Again, her strange, marvelling laughter and her following, “Aye; and we did our work well, too….”

She took a swallow of her tea. “The house in Donegal was of stone. Not grand, I don’t mean to say, but not a mere place such as this, having as it did an upstairs with one room. That room—” she seemed for a moment confused, but recovered herself quickly enough and went on: “—all the time we were small our dad kept the room forever locked. We never saw him go near the stairs that led up to it, though when he’d sit at table we’d often see his eyes stray up the stairs. But his feet, never. Kevin and myself…we’d got it hard once for playing on the stairs and it fixed us against going near them again…. Well, except for myself. On Saturdays. Our dad would have me put a dust-cloth to the steps each Saturday. He was fierce about that regular dusting. I’d do the cloth over one step at a time, and then I’d be at the top, you know, right at the door to the room—him watching me—and the minute I finished up there, he’d point for me to come down.”

“You never asked your dad about the room, Enda? You nor Kevin?” he asked gently.

She turned on him a face fired with frustration: “I can tell it’s hopeless, Father.”

“Hopeless?”

“Speaking of it. There’s no way to get it across to you”—she spoke through her teeth—“the fear we had of our dad.”

“Ah, I see. Forgive me, Enda. But I see now—”

“You
have
to see,” she said deeply. “If you’re to understand, you have to.”

“I do. I see now. Believe me, Enda.”

“So, I’ll go on then?”

“Please, Enda.”

“I can’t say I didn’t wonder about the room, but only to myself. I didn’t, I mean, ever talk to Kevin about it. That I didn’t had to do with the fear of our dad, like as if he’d
know
if myself and Kevin were to talk of it and get himself in a rage and take it out on us. Do you follow me, Father?” And at his nod: “One day, Kevin was twelve when this happened, and me eleven—and I don’t know what brought it on—our dad went terrible queer, called Kevin and me to him and told us, ‘We’ll be clearing out that upstairs room now.’ He had a big black key in his hand and he spent some time in showing it to us, holding it up close to our faces, all the time saying it was time now to clear out the room. He’d not been drinking but he was that queer-looking, very far off he seemed to be, but
there
, tall, right over us, but
not
at the same time…. I’m hard put to say how it was.”

“I understand all you’re saying, Enda.”

“Yes…. Well, he started us up the stairs, rough, having us go before him. I snatched a look at Kevin. He was white as a sheet. I took hold of his sleeve, just to hang onto like, but our dad reached up and tore my hand off it, I don’t to this
day know why, except maybe as he decided to come between us…. When he put the key to the lock he said to us, ‘It’s all to be cleared out and all of it burned.’ He had trouble with the lock and that got him frantic, but it let at last and he put us in through the door….” She stopped.

“It’s all right, Enda dear. Take your time.”

“I’ve not talked of it before,” she explained. “All these years, Kevin and myself never made mention of that day…. It’s necessary I tell you of it, though, Father, you’ll see why….” and to his encouraging nod: “It turned out the room had been our dad’s and our mother’s. The minute we were in it we understood that, the way you do, you know, not that you’re told, but that it comes clear to you. All our dad said was, ‘It’s to be emptied out,’ and he started in, pulling at the bed, raving at us to give him a hand down the stairs with the mattress…. It wasn’t a big job, the clearing-out, there being only the mattress and the wooden bed-frame and a chair. Oh, and a table, very small and rickety. Everything was filthy with mould from the damp. Green, you know. Mildew And creatures had got to the mattress so the stuff was out of it in places and it smelled….” She faltered, but only slightly. “There was one final thing in the room, a clothes-rack, thick with cobwebs and two dresses hanging from it—in tatters they were—and our dad…,” she raised her hand as if fend
ing off a blow, “…our dad flew at the dresses like a rook on a dead rabbit, ripping and tearing at them, his eyes wild. The dresses…” she seemed unable to go on.

“…were your mother’s,” he supplied for her.

She nodded quickly, and in the field of his resting gaze cast upon him a look that caused him to feel he was being greeted. “You do see,” she said with a linking show of relief.