The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (13 page)

And now he has said the old name in his head, O’Dowd. Can he really return home? Although it is so long ago he can remember exactly what Jonno Lynch said to him in the garden. Pain of death. Step foot back on Irish soil. But life is clearly short and maybe his mother is right, maybe the years have healed such matters. And yet something of that moment returns to him, lowers him, defeats his optimism, Jonno terrible and full of precise information in the garden in Finisklin.

He leans now on the mahogany rail not for a moment doubting its strength but wondering suddenly what it must be like to fall into that golden water. He expects that the force of the fall might knock a person out and that would be that. Or you might bob about in the chill waves while the air was in your clothes, till only your upturned face was married still to the sky. They might lower a boat if your cries had been heard and search for you in the glimmers and glitters of the sea, being careful not to strike you with an oar blade. On the other hand if you were quiet and chose an empty moment on the deck you could slip away and no one would call after you or rouse the captain and his men. He imagines the panic of being alone in the water but he has heard that a queer peace intrudes on the drowning man, sailors have told him that. Momentarily he too longs for that peculiar peace.

Towards wintry dawn, Dalkey comes up to starboard. It’s lightly raining, spangling his overcoat. He must be drowning anyway because now a peace invades him like a love. The shock of the land invades him. Dalkey with its solemn island, the beseeching arms of Dunleary Harbour quickening the boat. He sees the little bathing places of south Dublin, Sandycove, the Baths, the Forty Foot, places he barely knows, maybe visited the once in the old days when his mother would bring him to the capital. They could be in Honolulu for all they meant to him. But his chest heaves with love, with peace, with pure need. It’s the tobacco, the opium, of returning home. There might be angels standing on the rocky shores throwing out one after another bright ropes with grappling hooks to dig into and find purchase on his heart. One after another the arms rise like fishermen in the ancient days. Shortly he goes down riveted by this love, with the bolts of this love fastened into his skin, and eats a large plate of sausages and rashers washed through with dark tea aching with bitter tannin. The soldiers transformed by De Valera’s wishes for Ireland sit about with heavy eyes, restored by sleep but still poisoned by beer, uncomfortable in their peaceable clothes.

In some manner to his surprise he sees sit down beside him a Negraman, perhaps he thinks a wandering townsman of Galveston, perhaps not. He wouldn’t be expecting to see such a personage on the Irish mailboat, in usual circumstances. But these are days of war, and the war throws up all inhabitants of the earth in strange places, rearranging and re-siting its creatures. However this man with his hearty plate of breakfast is in old civvies though the face is no more aged than Eneas’s. He seats himself with an easy groan and gives Eneas a matey wink and throws off his battered shoes under the scratched tabletop. A companionable smell of much-travelled socks wafts up, very much the smell of war. But there’s no war in this old panelled eating-room, just tired humans stoking their stomachs.

‘Good morning to you, brother,’ says the Negraman. ‘How you do?’ says Eneas. Straight off he knows this isn’t any Galveston man because he has no Yankee accent. His accent is not Irish or English but it dances differently to the Yankee all the same. This is someone new from somewhere new to Eneas.

‘I’m always hearing about the Irish breakfast from the priest back home. Irish lad from county Carlow. I don’t know where that is. But I think I do in another way. From all his talking. And it doesn’t disappoint, I tell you. Very fine arrangement here of the sausage and the bacon. But you’ll be saying rashers, ah?’

‘That’s it,’ says Eneas. ‘I’ll say rashers now on the Irish boat. No sense saying rashers to an English butcher. He’ll only stare at you. “What you want, Irish?” he’ll say. Like you were mad.’

‘Well, we’re all mad to the English, that’s for sure.’

‘We’re all mad?’

‘You know, Irish, African, Chinese man, all the boys from far away

Eneas laughs above his emptied plate like a moon over a moon. ‘Yeh! That’s it, right enough. Never looked at it just like that. But, you’re right.’

So the man eats, and Eneas watches him.

‘What brings you to Ireland?’ he says.

‘Holiday! I’m always hearing about Ireland from that priest. Carlow. What’s that like, brother?’

‘I never was in Carlow come to think of it.’

‘Well,’ says the man, rising, ‘I’m going to go have me a shit as the soldier said. Goodbye now, brother.’ And he gets up and leaves the plate still swimming in yolk and a part-chewed but rejected rasher lonesome there.

Eneas gives him a nod. He’s worth a nod all right. Seems like a very pleasant person. But he’s gone, his untied shoes whacking gently at the metal floor up the deck a bit. How quick they come, how quick they go. Friendship. Oh, well. God sails his boats on the pond of the world and at fall of darkness goes off through the rubbed-out roses with the boats under his arms like a fabulous boy. The clock is the terrible high clouds fleeting to some unknown meeting. In the city encircling the park of the world lives are lived quickly, the admired baby soon the dreaming old bastard in the narrow suntrap under the lee of the church. Quickly quickly everything goes.

Mid-morning they are released out past the barricades and through the railway entrance and on to the bare seats of he mailboat train that signals somehow to the returning men that now there’s a pause to the music of an exile’s heart and for a time they may think of themselves as natives in their native place. Eneas rides again the river of home like a broken branch. He feels that old sense of power that comes from being fit and alive in his own country, as good as the next man. Perhaps after a minute or two he feels only a modicum of that power. Perhaps now with his boots on Irish soil for a good half-hour he’s not so sure of things. He has assumed that, as he has suffered in a mighty war and lain ill in a great asylum of England, his old sins will not be set against him. Now he’s not so certain. He smells Ireland outside the window of the train, and she smells very much the same as always, as twenty years ago she smelled. Trouble, trouble. In the sights of the railway, the Victorian stations, the pleasurable monuments set up beside the curve of the bay, the swimming baths, the backs of good houses, the mottoes of factories, the aching spread of the city with all its numberless children sprinkled on streets and in rooms like specks of gold, with its gangsters and respectable folk rubbing shoulders in the bleak thoroughfares, in the sudden luxuriance of the Liffey from Butt Bridge, the tidy cargo ships tight to the wharfs, the high cranes peering into their innards, the beaten-out surface of the river thick with salt from the devious tide, the thrum of the moiling salmon in the secret depths, the filthy prams of generations fixed in the muddy undertows, in the huge silent racket of history seeping into the very blocks of the river walls, the pocked custom-house and everywhere and on everything the ruinous effects of the rains, in all these things he senses as he sits in the knocking train the old strains and presences of trouble, even there, four hundred miles from Sligo.

I 2

12

He deems it prudent
to take advantage of the early winter dark and prefer the edges of the buildings and move carefully and keep his hatbrim tugged down over his eyes like Edward G. Robinson or Bogart himself. The joke of being an outcast in his own town isn’t lost on him as he passes the Gaiety cinema just as the women are lighting the bright foyer for the evening custom. The joke is he’s twenty years away and he can’t recognize a soul, let alone prepare against attack. Would anyone attack him, just like that, on the strength of an order of long ago? But nothing more current than hatred. He must for the moment go softly.

It’s the town he recognizes as an old friend. This surprises him. John Street, the Cathedral, the Lungey. If his father’s new place is on the Strandhill Road, he has a deal of a way to go. He wishes he could cross the river and peer down into the Garravogue again but he’s all the while going away from the water. Perhaps this nostalgia is a treacherous river all of its own, and river enough to be negotiating for the moment. Dangerous love. And he remembers Mr Jackson the master explaining in his batlike voice years ago that nostalgia means something hard and tricky in the Greek, not a pleasing feeling at all, but the
sickness
of returning home. And how Greek mariners, Homer’s or just mariners of the wide and ordinary world in old epic days, suffered it, feared it, answered it, were led into the vales and isles of death by it,
where nothing is as it seems.
And yes, he understands it now, that mysterious claptrap of Mr Jackson. How wise he was after all. Here they are, the streets and houses of his boyhood, answering the roaring sickness in his blood. Memories and thoughts flash out of dark lanes, beam down from pub signs and chemist shops, leak from the doors of butchers with the slight stink of blood and sawdust. He thinks he remembers the butcher in John Street right enough, wheeling about all red-faced and rotund in the ship of his shop as Eneas passes. The fact is a butcher never grows old, he is eternal like the boatman at the river of death. This is a cardinal fact of life that he has often noticed. A chemist grows ancient, old and frail like mortal women. As does the grocer and the lady in the post office. Only the butcher goes forth into the centuries like a veritable vampire. It’s all that red-blooded meat he devours in the back parlour.

As he leaves the shops and the people of Sligo whom he no longer knows, the old exciting smell of the sea begins to lap against him. He strides now along the Strandhill Road, and maybe there’s a touch of the cock-a-hoop to his step, just a tincture. Look at him, in his black suit none too new and his slouched hat and not a soul in the world to call his wife nor a child to delight him and yet there it is, a touch of the cock-a-hoop to his step. Oh, he may be outcast, he may be taking his life in his own hands or putting it into the hands of others by being there in Sligo, but it isn’t how he thought it would be. He is heartened again by that sense of not caring, of not being as afraid as he had feared! The fear of fear is a mighty afflicter. The thought of seeing his mother makes his heart bang in his chest, he wants to take his father in his arms and cry out for love of him. It is insane. Surely he needs another and a longer spell in the asylum.

He feels quite buoyant enough to ask a man going back up the road where the McNulty house is. The man knows instantly in the fashion of Sligo people, but Eneas doesn’t think he is recognized. Perhaps after all he has been changed so much by life in the normal way that he can be another person here now, no longer the outcast of his youth.

At last he stands at the verge of his father’s little kingdom. Indeed and it is a bungalow, quite a decent one. Even in the poor light of the moon and the stars he can see, almost feel, the order of the large gardens about the house. He knows straight off that his father has bought it for the bit of land and not for the appearance of the bungalow. It is a style of house come out of the East perhaps and one of the offshoots and fruits of Empire. If it is really designed to accommodate the sun and the monsoon of somewhere far off, it suits also the lonesome dark days of the Sligo weather. Certainly in sunlight it must perk up the place mightily. It is the perfect Acropolis to the little Athens of his father’s garden. This is his euphoric suspicion anyhow as he lurks there alone at the gates. About him in the glooms all is composure, perfection and vegetables in a mighty order, he can be sure. His father’s garden will have the humility of parsnips and the pride of hollyhocks. The bit of land must have knocked the old man sideways with excitement, his own bit and hopefully paid for. The band must be doing well for to furnish a place of this amplitude. With excitement not dissimilar to his father’s, Eneas surges forward towards the rosy door. ‘Sit you down,’ says his mother, ‘sit you down. Poor Eneas,’ she says, ‘all the lovely colour gone from your hair. But, God help us, you still have a head of it, grey as it is.’

His father keeps to the fringe of the carpet in the sitting room, as if he doesn’t want to intrude too soon, as if he might do a mischief to himself or Eneas by leaping in too quick. He looks mighty wound up. He must be well into his sixties Eneas reckons and he has every year of his life worked into his bleached face. You’d say he was like a piece of pork that was washed out by water a few times, putty grey and soft in the skin. Neither of them thought to embrace Eneas and now already he’s in a decent sort of a chair and stuck somehow, at least as far as embraces go. The room might as well be an army of savages the way it has a go at him. His mother has sewn flowers into cloths and draped them over the set of seats, a sofa and these stiff, clerical chairs. It all looks like a priest’s parlour. His father is maybe afeared of the great cleanliness, of the great strangeness of it all. In John Street there was a lot of peaceable dust because things were old and nooks and crannies abounded. Here there is a fighting newness, a smell of newness like a fresh deal coffin. Of course there are a few winter pansies for colour as always which is familiar. He desires to kiss his old father’s face, to touch it at least with a hand and make sure for himself, for his own reference, that his father is truly there with him in the peculiar room. He longs for his father to drag out even the cello and press a tune upon him, but his father only lingers there like a hungry bird afraid to encroach while the humans are in the garden. He has a sudden terror of time, that time is robbing him, that the river is pulling at him too fast, too strong. He’s speechless with love and remembrance. Perhaps they are too, or without the words you’d need for to conjure up those notions, perhaps the three of them are in the ruination of time, betrayed, betrayed.

‘There’ll be a good match on Saturday, there will be,’ says his father. ‘How long’ll you stay, Eneas?’

‘As long as … You know. Is Jack home?’ he asks his mother.

‘Oh, yes, Jack’s home, son. Sure aren’t they expecting the third child? Imminent. Oh, yes. They’ve let him back for that. Compassion, do they call it? But he was only in England, you know, liaison officer for the poor Yanks in Leeds. It’s the uniform I can’t get over. Not that I’ve seen the creature wear it. But photographs. A lovely brimmed hat and all very smart trim.’

‘Christ,’ says his father, ‘there’s no touching the British for tailoring. You should see our crowd, the poor buggers going around in little better than sacks. I might have made them myself, in my heyday! Thank God for neutrality. We’d be the laughing stock of Europe.’

This might be a great joke but Eneas is so taken aback he forgets even to pretend to laugh. His mother certainly doesn’t laugh.

‘And Tom, how is he getting on? Mayor, you said, in your letter. Mayor, no less.’

‘Tom’s doing well enough,’ says his mother grimly.

‘How so?’ says her husband. ‘Well enough? He’s king now!’

‘Right,’ says his mother, ‘king. We brought him through a bit of a mess just these months gone by. King he may be, Tom, but he’s still a fool in some things.’

‘Ogh…’ says Old Tom.

‘You’ll see him later, son,’ says his mother. ‘So you will. He’s staying with us at the minute, like yourself.’

‘Is he not married? I mean, I thought he would be by now, a musical man like him …’

‘Well, he is and he isn’t,’ says his father.

‘He is and he isn’t?’

Old Tom gives him a silencing look, pleasantly. What’s not familiar at all is the mire of talk he feels himself to be floundering in a little. He needs a good lamp to light his path.

‘We don’t like to…’ says Old Tom, dark as a ditch. ‘Your mother…’

‘You saw Teresa?’ says his mother.

‘I did. I did,’ he says. ‘Oh, she seems right set up there. Really set up. The very best at the job they do there, going about and seeking alms for the orphaned boys. I never saw her look so, so — well, set up is the word I fixed on at the time.’

Old Tom gives a grimace, a private sort of a grimace that maybe speaks its own volumes. No, you’d need more than a lamp for this. A lightship maybe. A good moon. A midday sun better.

‘She was sure of her vocation, so I didn’t stand in her way,’ says his mother.

Old Tom snorts ever so quietly.

‘I never knew anyone before nor since so pious anyhow,’ says Eneas, on safer ground he hopes. ‘I’ll never forget her praying for Collins that time in the old days. I suppose Tom’ll be for the other crowd

‘Well, he’s no blueshirt, if that’s what you mean,’ says his mother severely, but devoutly.

‘Blueshirts. Fascists, you mean, Mam?’

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ she says, and another warning glance from his father. ‘Anyhow, your brother’s for the other lot. I wish it was more than whiskey and land.’ His father raises a hand as if to prevent a torrent, but his mother subsides.

‘Any hope for the Garravogue? Any sign of the silt being dealt with?’

‘Maybe your other brother will have a go at that when the war’s done with all that engineering he has.’

‘Sure, maybe he will,’ says Old Tom reasonably. ‘Let’s get ourselves into the kitchen for to be dealing with that nice bit of lamb, Mary. Why don’t we?’

In the morning he lies low in his room and feels no inclination to leave it. Instinct dictates. He hears children playing below his window and for a moment thinks it must be Teasy and Young Tom. But of course he realizes then that he’s back thinking of twenty years ago. Young Tom is a big man in the town and Teasy is the finest mendicant nun in England.

He parts the curtains and finds two round faces peering in at him. He’s surprised to see how near the ground is to the sill, because the bungalow is dug into the sloping lawn behind the house. The children shy away from the glass like they’ve come face to face with a monster and run off away around the house, screaming and laughing. It’s a little boy of about five and a big long streak of a ten-year-old girl. He expects they must be Jack’s kids if the wife’s in stir having the new baby. His niece and nephew no less. If he was a real uncle he’d have brought gifts. As it is, he must seem mighty strange to them, lurking in a darkened room at the very prime of the day. It’s not a thought that brings him comfort.

By the time he dresses and goes out into the kitchen, Young Tom has long left to attend to his no doubt magisterial duties as Mayor of Sligo. For a moment Eneas is unexpectedly offended that his little brother hasn’t gone in to greet him after all these years but then he is the stranger of strangers, the vanished elder brother. He can’t mean anything to any of them really. But there’s Jack all right at the square kitchen table, looking very smart in a sleeveless gansey and big puffy shirtsleeves gathered at the biceps with silver bracelets, if that’s the name for them. He looks like a sharp-eyed cardshark or the like, keen and sleek anyway as a shark, with a rich head of red hair pressed down with oil, shaved as a seal and scrubbed red by a pumice-stone you might think. He’s drinking tea mightily, legs crossed, good brown shoe-leather gleaming, deep in the
Sligo Champion.
Down goes the paper with a little catastrophe of salt-cellar and teacup.

‘Eneas, Eneas,’ he says, leaping up, clasping a hand with comradeship and fervour, businesslike, absolute, overwhelming, ‘How goes it, brother?’

‘Oh,’ says Eneas, ‘You know…’ His hand is shaken for some time.

‘Great to see you back, boy. Will you stay? Get yourself fixed? Why wouldn’t you?’ He surely spots Eneas’s hesitation. ‘Sure all that ould stuff is over now. No, no, all done and over. These are new days now. Look at me, a major in the Engineers, and they haven’t shot me yet!’

‘They’d never of wanted to shoot you, Jack. You’ve a touch with people I never had. You’re liked.’

This seems simple and good to Eneas, but nonetheless it causes a sort of obstruction in his brother’s talk for a little. Jack takes a pinch of the spilled salt in his fingers and throws it over his left shoulder against bad luck. They both sit down at the table and smile at each other and his mother silently pours him tea in an excellent blue china cup, the like of which he’s never seen before. The band must be doing bloody well all right.

‘Thanks, Mam. My God, the great style in everything these times. The band must be doing well.’

‘Not just the ould band,’ says Jack heartily. ‘Sure Young Tom has everything stitched. Land deals, whiskey deals. You’ve no idea.’

‘That’s enough of that talk,’ says their mother.

‘Ho, I tell you, brother Eneas, it might be wartime for Joe Soap, but for Young Tom it’s harvest time. Petrol, oil, chocolate, sugar, soap even — all legal and above board, of course. Nothing ever passes through his hands. It’s just — he accommodates the free flow of goods. In the interests of the town, the corporation. These are hard times for everyone.’ ‘And you’re married, Jack? And were them your children in the garden?’

‘Aye, little Des and Annie, you saw them? They weren’t tormenting you?’

‘Not at all.’

‘The wife’s up in the hospital. Ah yes, quite a little brood for ourselves. Wonderful.’

Their mother sets down a fry for Eneas with some vehemence.

‘No, it’s grand, Mam, it’s grand.’