The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (2 page)

2

They both have
a cargo of brown parcels — small but enough to fetter their hands — and it begins to rain. The rain comes in over Sligo deviously, searching them out in the sunken street. It is funny how quickly even such a light rain manages to cover the paper with its drops till there are precious few dry gaps. So the two go cantering along the sidewalk, his mother surprisingly agile, but maybe not so considering her dances, they are both in clothes quite black, running, and it is the Easter, and they are after having a gander at the big candle in the cathedral, and into the Cafe Cairo with them both, from the sublime to the ridiculous his mother gasps, for the shelter. Usually they would not go into such a place, out of respect for the expense of bought tea — a mere pot of it for ninepence, gracious. But his mother is too — too ashamed maybe to shelter without purchasing anything, so they tuck themselves into a table. They have to build a veritable wall with the parcels.

‘Look at the style of us,’ his mother whispers. ‘And us with a half-pound bag of best Fast Clipper tea.’

And the server, a mere girl of sixteen in an apron stiff as a nun’s hat, comes up to them lazily with a neat book and pencil stub and he stares up at her, at her ruby lips and her eyes loose with lights and the queer impression she gives that she believes that she will live and look so for ever.

‘Tea for the two of us, dear,’ his mother says innocently.

‘Is that it?’ says the server severely, as if millionaires like her are offended by such tiny orders, and Eneas relaxes because she talks just the same as himself, with the grey pebbles of the Sligo slingshot talk.

‘We were gone past the Abbey and there was two wildcats in it,’ he says to her. But the server scribbles on her book and clips away on her hard, hard shoes. There is a star on the arch of each strap. Her stockings are coal-black, she looks like two young trees in her stockings. His mother smiles at him in her odour of panic.

There are two ladies at a near table and they are staring at his mother he notices. Staring like there was no sin in staring, so he gives his mother a private signal and his mother gracefully swivels her head and meets their pesky eyes. The ladies are heaped up into huge hats and their coat collars are worse than wings. They might be insects. At any rate they are still whispering away like bees. Now his mother’s face has two plaques of red where her cheeks were. The red is seeping down her neck, into her collar with the blue stitching following the up and down of the lace. Eneas is staring at her too now, because of the fiery colour. If a flame were to lick out of her skin he would not express his surprise.

The tea comes down and his mother and himself take it in the blue cups, furtively. He has five sugars for the sake of the free bowl of it, despite his despair. The old hats across the way nod and tip at each other, the ragged feathers swept about minutely. It is not so long before his mother and himself can bear it no longer and up they rises and away with them. Happily the rain has let up. He thinks of the wildcats in the ruined yards of the Abbey. He wishes he were a wildcat, sheltering under the heavy leaves of the laurel, looking out in fearless alarm as wildcats do.

‘Pappy, how is it that the Mam goes puce in the Cafe Cairo and we’re getting stares?’ he says, under the shelter of the cloudy moon in John Street.

‘I don’t know rightly, Eneas,’ says Tom. ‘Were you getting stares?’

‘We were, Pappy, stares like staring was no sin, Pappy.’ His father is looking at him quietly. He has the old bedtime book on his lap, the one he likes to read, the one his own father used read to him in the old days. He saved the book for his own children.

‘On the other hand, Pappy,’ says Eneas, ‘we passed the Abbey and there were these two cats in the bushes.’

‘Cats?’

‘Wild ones, I would say, Pappy, desperadoes.’

‘No doubt!’

‘And we were after seeing the Easter candle in the Cathedral too, and had a great gape at it, the two of us. We were happy. And then down comes the rain and we ducked into the Cafe Cairo and then we got the stares.’

‘Don’t mind it,’ says his father.

‘A star on each shoe, she had,’ he says.

‘Who, boy?’

‘The poor wee girl giving us out the tea.’

‘She never.’

‘She did. Mam said she was just the sort of girl you’d see hanging out of a fella up the steps of the picture house Fridays.’

‘Who’d believe it, a star on each shoe.’

His father closes over the old book and folds his hands across the ancient cardboard and lets his eyes run out the window to rest maybe on the moonlit catastrophe of the Lungey House.

Eneas is almost gone over into sleep, gone over like a rose goes over into decrepitude, no one sees just when. He has almost left his father’s side for the monstrous side of sleep itself.

‘Some people have trouble that they never themselves did cause. Some people have a queer start in the world because those that have them in the first place don’t know what they’re at. Mams and Pappys are not the same, parish by parish. Some fall at the first fence, and little mites are left to fend for themselves. It’s a story old as mountains, your Mam’s own story. But, she’s a queen. She is. Who is it that talks under the stones, only slugs and weevils. I should know, the gardener! Never mind, child, what you hear, the whispers of a little town, the little whispers of Sligo. Some words have no tune for themselves,’ says Tom with the expertise of the musician behind his words, in the undeniable gloom. And mostly his own words are a delicious, lulling tune to his sinking son, benignant and eternal.

Three calamities befall him then, calamities that to his Mam and Pappy are contrariwise wonders and like to days of carnival and funfair. His three siblings pop into view, one after the other, with barely a decent interval between, Jack, Young Tom, and Teasy, the mite of a girl. And they are fine creatures in their way and indeed Jack sports a head of hair as red as a dog’s and in the beginning of these new times Eneas is much struck by the little length of boy in his lacy cloths and the crushed face like an Injun.

But it’s not long before Eneas is driven from his little kingdom, an exiled being, shorn of his mighty privileges. Five, three and two are their ages when Eneas comes into the double-numbered realm of ten, and a realm of scant attention and privacy it is. No more the Sahara of Strandhill with his Mam alone in the summer, no more Buck Rogers and the Dark Queen going about Sligo, marauding secretly from premises to premises. And what can he say about his siblings, except that they are devious, loved and needy for things at all times of day. There is no sacrosanct hour, the sun goes down on every day leaving each as cluttered and provisional as the last. Maybe his father too takes fright because there is less of the Pappy now, he is gone out to Finisklin on his own to dig out the remnant flowers of summer, and put in the contracted sacks of manure, alone, pristine, confused. And Eneas is not taken as before in the old glory days because his Pappy is not a man to be accused of favouritism. He likes to shun them all equally, though pleasantly.

Difficult for Eneas, these peopled years, the house buckling and banging under the weight of lives, John Street racketing to the fierce hands and feet, formerly so quiet, composed, intent. His serious nature is jolted out of its tracks, his small engine of interest and joy must jar along the wretched stones. He looks at his mother, he regards her, passing in her dark clothes, not a dancer any more, not a conspirator, but a kind of slave truly to four or five mouths, herself ever more silent, tetchy, windblown. The family blows through the sacred house like a bad wind and at every door there is an interloper, interloping about the place. So he imagines. If she is not scraping shit off Teasy’s nappies, she is trying to keep cuts on Jack together with her bare hand. Jack is a fierce one for the accidents. You couldn’t let him out with a ball of wool till he’d cut himself with it.

His rescuers are those pleasing and mighty kids that are the living death for the poor Presbyterian rector in his handsome house. A handsome house may boast a handsome orchard, but an orchard draws wild kids to it as bees to lavender, as hopes to the prisoner, and Eneas is an expert on the ways of those robbers long before he ever talks to one of them, because he can see them go nimbly along the glass-strewn wall, he can see them disappear down into the green bowel of the trees in the heavy musk of autumn, he can see the tips of branches moving as they pluck the fruit, as if dogs were moving through corn. Oh, they are the rabbits, the dogs, the very wildlife of the orchard, they are heroes and desperadoes and robbers and kings.

One evening, watching from his dark window, he spies the tormented rector returning to his house unknown to the stealthy robbers already within the trees. He spies the heavy door closing and a little while later the same door opening and the rector creeping from it like a very kid himself and going like a beetle along the base of his mottled wall. There is a little gate and for this gate no doubt the clergyman possesses a mighty key.

Eneas on an impulse without word or thought flies from his perch and out on to John Street and up the Lungey and hard left like a demon into the old cathedral lane, where the rector’s house is built into the boundary wall. He is a blue flame passing up the lane thick with the wet scent of mosses and the dirty shadows of the sycamores in the pitch cathedral copses. It is his joy to run so, to stop even at the hem of the rector and to cry out his famous warning to the robber Jonno and his crew within. And the robbers come up on the wall, they appear there, like winged boys, like cherubs, and they are all of them laughing like the mad, and flapping their jackets like birds and Eneas even in the dusk can see a long piercing cut appear on the leg of the leader Jonno as a shard of glass uncharacteristically catches him as he lets himself fall to the deep lane. And forever he is falling there, Jonno, boy of lightning, falling. And the rector, with his poor Protestant blind eyes Eneas has heard it mentioned, gropes into the vicinity for to capture at least some member of the gang, and takes a great hoult of the hair on Eneas’s head and grips there like a monster in a nightmare. And Jonno burgeons up and lets go a precise and perfect kick into the legs of the rector and an oath, polite but enormous, gushes out of him, and Eneas feels the loose growing-in bit of his gansey pulled, and the great velocity of Jonno’s strength hauls him back down the lane, spirits him back down, and the rest of the mob shouting and screaming like veritable Africans. And this is his proper and perhaps fateful meeting with the captain of his boyhood, Jonno Lynch.

Maybe it is normal and everyday the manner of their going about, but truth to tell Jonno Lynch is an upright man. He is a bucko. He doesn’t walk along the streets but marches, to his own hidden fife and drum. When dangers blow against him, as when the glass gashes his leg, there is a wonderful enjoyment in him of these disasters. He is a soldier through and through.

And he enlists Eneas simply and heartily into the small spinning thing that is the gang’s warfare and mischief. They spiral about, the gang of them, after school, boxing the fox of any orchard in their ken. There’s a mighty plan to construct a flying machine out of sheets filched from the Convent laundry that only comes unstuck on the superior battle capabilities of Sister Dolorosa, the nun from Mullingar. Always afterwards Jonno Lynch and Eneas gaze up at the wooded hills beyond the town and know in their souls that those would have harboured somewhere the site of their amazing flying achievement, the wonder and the news item of all the continents, but for the arms of Sister Dolorosa, six foot in span if they are a yard. It is the golden age of friendship, when to leave the gates of the school is to run in a fever to Mrs Foley’s two foul rooms in Kitchen Lane, where Jonno is fostered, and to embrace with always requited fervour the challenges of the evening, whether it is to remove the brasses moulded in Wales from the mayor’s carriage and attach them to the back of the dung collector’s cart, or only to fire at each other with catapults, using the dark blue seeds of the ivy beloved of the wood pigeons. And in this frenzy Eneas dances and is eternally pleased.

And it is some recompense for the loss of the older kingdom, where his Mam and his Pappy were enthroned. And maybe there is always a little secret yard, mossy and ill-frequented, where he is morose and unforgiving about the matter, where the character of himself is wont to moon about and say hard things about parents and life itself in general, yes. For a boy cannot be expected quite to survive the lovely rainbow and the blissful shower all streaked and freaked with sunlight that is the lot of the single child amid resplendent parents.

Maybe in dark moods he thinks Jonno Lynch for all his majesty is not the skirts lifted and the wild clacking dances of his mother’s former self, or the confidences at the exhausted breakfasts of his Pappy. Ah but, as the siblings come bawling out of babyhood and into the calmer country where children amaze their gaping fathers and mothers, perhaps he is reconciled a little to the terrible interlopers. And if Teasy seems eternally the baby, what harm? And in his position as elder brother he finds the elixir of superiority and a class of fearlessness, an adventurousness that they can never possess but which they infinitely admire in him. And if he has been wrenched a little from the breasts of his Mam and his Pappy he has also been released into the nether world, the interesting hell of Jonno Lynch’s heart, where Mrs Foley’s hideous manners are forever itemized, her teeth as loose as oyster shells, her arse as big as Ben Bulben, her striking hand as hard as a seagull’s head. On the other hand there are times he thinks that if a
pleasant
accident were to befall his siblings, if they were instantly crushed by rocks, or quickly drowned by a biblical sort of flood, he might regain his true happiness.

3

Oh, it is summer
. He is sitting in the high grass that infests the back field of the Convent where his little brother Young Tom and his sister Teasy learn their letters and their sums and gather to their minds the old stories of Little Jack Horner and the other Jack, of the Beanstalk. His middle brother, also Jack of course, though all of seven years old, is still too far off and young to make a companion for Eneas. And he feels this, the lonesomeness that five years have constructed between himself and Jack. Because he likes Jack now but Jack is bold with the Mam, and Eneas will shout at Jack. This puts the mufflers on Jack, and Eneas cannot get a word out of him because of the instances of shouting. He would prefer in the general run of things for him and Jack to be companions and rob the minister’s orchard but he has lost Jack by the shouting.

Also Jack shines at his schoolwork and he has been nominated brilliant by the schoolmasters and this never happened to Eneas. Well, he knows he is no fool himself, but you cannot compete with the brilliant. The brilliant are hauled up into a realm without mysteries, and scribble better and count better than such as Eneas. Even Young Tom is admired for his scholarship and God knows he is only four. If his sister were not a complete baby she too would he supposes be raised beyond his country of average knowledge and average comprehension.

His suspicion is that he has been given his father’s brains and they have got hold of the Mam’s. He ate a feed of sheep’s brains the once, and as he ate he knew sorrowfully that his father’s brain and his own brain were such as he toyed with on his fork. He never ate such a sorrowful meal before nor since.

There is the war now beyond and a few of the men of Sligo have departed and many more are saying they will go. There is a great feeling in the town that they must send soldiers to the war, and aside from that it is in the line of genuine employment. The docks are still a mighty enterprise, but people are saying the docks are doomed and the grass will grow between the old bollards yet and it is the devil’s own job to keep the channels clear. Some are saying that there is a new terrible drift of sea-sand come down from Coney Island and thereabouts, that the autumn tides have gouged the channel by the Rosses ever deeper and pushed a frightful tonnage of sand and silt and God knows up into the docks. Men have seen salmon in shallows of the Garravogue where formerly there were deeps, and they are dredging but some hold that dredging is a fool’s errand in that no matter where you dump the sand, as far out into the sea as you like, the tides will carry it back for you in due course. But there is a tremendous trade in butter from all the western farms. There is still butter going down the Garravogue and excellent things coming up it. Now the men, the few that are most willing, are getting into the trains for Dublin and shipping out to England and beyond. You can sense the press of men behind them, the truer flood of men, held in just as yet by the ramparts of the wishes of their wives. But all in all the war is there and the men of Sligo cannot resist for long, nor ever could, whether Africa or Turkey or long ago in France herself. There is a frightful, some would say a peculiar love among the men of Sligo for the land of France, it is an old feeling that has survived. Eneas himself has strong views for France. He thinks her pleasing rivers and fragrant meads must be solemnly, solemnly protected. And he has half a notion that he might up and depart in the fullness of time, and do his bit, as the papers put it. Why wouldn’t he? Isn’t Sligo such a little place and mightn’t there be realms beyond it of great interest and high tone aspects, as wonderful as the magic lantern show or the mighty flicks themselves, those galloping and well kitted-out cowboys? And that damp yard of his bitterness echoes with agreement. He feels betimes a sort of rage to go, temporary, but fierce and shocking while it blows. Trouble is, everything is imagined, a picture painted with hints and horrors and news items. But, by God, he might chance it, should he live to see sixteen. Comfortably enough, that is some time off.

Well he is sitting in the high grass at the back of the Convent for the moment, with Tuppenny Jane, and indeed it is warlike enough for him the while. The grasses are rich in meadowsweet and big yellow flares of ragwort, it is a sight. There is a thrumming of crickets to beat the band. How the world gets itself into such a state of heat, he does not know. Jane is no more than thirteen herself. Sometimes she acts thirteen and has a go at being with such as himself. But the world knows that Tuppenny Jane has been down the lanes often with some of the family men of the town. It is given out by some as a fact and, humorously, as the gospel truth, that the young priest, a man from the very cream of

Castleblaney, gave her one for herself in the depths of winter, the time he was so down in his spirits and on the sauce and not long before he hung himself on one of the oaks in Dempsey’s dairy fields. He has heard it said that the men go for her because she cannot take to herself or in herself babbies yet, and as she is loose she is preferred as a place of refuge by the family men. In the meantime the priest has died for her and in that respect she is like France to Eneas, remote but important, vague but fatal. It is tricky for him to picture the priest with her. Maybe it was something else drove him to the oak branch. Maybe it was the sweets of Tuppenny Jane. Yes, Jane herself hinted as much with a lovely little handful of golden and sparkling hints that she likes to entertain with.

She has a nose too big for beauty it is often said, and Eneas fears her. One night with Jonno Lynch he lay beside her in the ruined summerhouse in one of the old gardens in Finisklin, not his father’s, for safety. Jonno kissed her and put his hands in under her skirts and felt at her clammy crotch in a set of big school knickers. You might as well have tried to find the entrance in an Arab’s tent, Jonno avowed afterwards, a notorious difficulty in desert life. He got that out of a book — or
buke
, was his better word. Despite his erudition, she kept squirming Jonno’s hands away. Eneas put his own hand in for the heck of it and in the veritable tangle of Jonno’s fingers thought he felt something. He was truly surprised and all he could think of was that something unlikely had happened, unlikely but desirable, like seeing a rabbit in the door of its burrow and the creature for a change not running in immediately, not fearing his approach.

Oh, he cherished that moment. He felt something like a blow on the back of the head. Some great hand of Destiny, like they’d be saying in the flicks, clutched the column of his spine and yanked at it. For a year he had been dreaming of such a matter. He had tried to picture the tropical harbour of long leaves and hot storms that he imagined a woman’s sex might be. Suddenly he docked there, briefly.

Now he sits with her in the high grass, alone, without Jonno, because Jonno is off cutting turf on Mrs Foley’s patch of bog the far side of Knocknarea, that her bloody uncle left her, for the specific torturing of Jonno Lynch, but no matter, a man bows to his fate as best he can, and it is one of those dry and polleny June evenings with a rake of sunlight still to come. His heart is new halfpennies, all the more so as he imagines poor Jonno labouring. Not that he would fear the labour himself, he might like it, but Jonno is ever the town boy. He looks at her mousy hair and the nose and the breasts in her gansey that seem to shout of their own accord somehow, and now and then casts a glance at her skinny legs, and prays for courage. He wonders hard to himself why he is so overcome with fright and silence and uselessness and a sense of his own youth in her presence.

‘Do you remember that old time at all,’ he says, ‘with Jonno and meself in the summerhouse, do you?’

‘I do,’ she says, ‘and I do because I was mad that night to go and pee and nather of you boys would let me, it was cruel.’

‘Did you have a need to?’ he says, choking with sympathy, it being a particular curse on himself, a weak bladder and no courage either to declare it in many a pressing moment but a moment often crowded with other people.

‘Why,’ he says, ‘I never knew, the whole time.’

‘Boys never do know anything, boys are too busy with their roving hands.’

There is truth in this. Then he thinks to himself maybe she is a noble sort of a person after all, if he could reform her. He might, and if he knew where to start he would.

‘Jane,’ he says, ‘where do you stand with hollyhocks?’ ‘How do you mean, hollyhocks?’ she says.

‘Hollyhocks, do you care for them?’

‘What are they like?’ she says, reasonably.

‘Flowers, you know, my father grows them mightily there in his garden under Midleton’s and I would be now proud and happy to give you a bunch maybe going home if you liked, Jane.’

‘My mother wouldn’t stand for me bringing flowers into the house,’ she says. Quite noble in her demean.

‘Why?’ he says.

‘Because she married an American.’

He is puzzled now, greatly.

‘What’s that?’ he says.

‘She married an American my father, you know, and she will not allow herself pleasures now since he left us and not two pennies to rub together.’

He laughs. Two pennies for Tuppenny Jane.

‘What’s humorous?’ she says, very sharp.

‘Nothing,’ he says, laughing, secure, comfortable.

‘You’re cack-cacking there at me,’ she says, ‘and your own mother not better than me, in the upshot, really. I won’t say I’m a good one. But she’s no different.’

He is silenced.

‘You see,’ she says, ‘the long gawping mouth on you now. You don’t laugh so loud when it’s your own ould Mam is the topic and the figure of raillery.’

‘How is she?’

And he wants dearly, fearlessly, and indeed hopelessly, to hit her. He has no courage to feel her damp knickers again because Jonno is not there, Jonno of the apple-booty, but by the good Christ, by the dark statue of Christ in the Cathedral eyeless in the glooms, he thinks he might find the courage now to strike her, the doll, the doll.

‘Your own mother,’ she says, lying back in the grasses with a great relaxation and contentment, ‘that was raised by another and never had a real certificate, never had a document with her name on it in her born days, the brat of some ould piece of dacency, my ma says, that didn’t want the whore’s melt, and threw her down to the muck!’

He stands there and strikes his own breast, strikes it again and again, for want of striking her. He has the height but that chest is skinny as her legs and it hurts him to beat there, but he needs the hurt.

‘You dog,’ he says, ‘you low dog on all fours, you poor fighting pup with your tail bitten off by a tinker at birth.’ This is an obscure insult, and has no force even to him. ‘Go on,’ she says, raising her dress, and she is pristine, her linens are sparkling, the evening sun shows how dandy and scrubbed she is, what a jewel she is for cleanliness, like the breast of a cat, ‘I won’t ask you for tuppence, I knew your ould joke to yourself there, aren’t we the same, the one and the same, me and your ma, go on, put that little snaily thing of yours in there that has you dizzy in the bed, nights, from steering it, and we’ll be happy. There’s nothing to happiness only generosity. That’s a lesson more than you’ll ever learn, you boyo, you poor skinny bucko, look at you, burning like the toast!’

And off he goes right enough, stumbling, burning, fit to burn. And he thinks of the ould ones staring at his Mam in the Cafe Cairo, and by God he’ll go off to war now if there’s terrible secrets to be endured, he will. Why couldn’t his father have told him, the good man that he is? Hasn’t he told him the why and the what of many a thing, why must he hear mysteries from Tuppenny Jane? By God!

His mother cuts the thick-crusted bread with her usual artistry — which is to say, she saws lightly back and forth, putting no pressure on the loaf, creating perfect slices. If his father Tom got his hands on that loaf it would be askew in a trice, in the sewing of a wren’s mitten. Jack and Young Tom mill about. Eneas watches his Mam as is his present custom. Watches and rarely speaks. He cannot gain any proper sense of her shame in his heart. He knows he must. It is the key to everything. The world seems agitated by her condition of shame right enough. He thinks he must be unsuited to the world, if he cannot understand the strictures applied to his mother. Every Saturday in the month she goes down to Athlone on mysterious business, but will never say what. There she is, quietly cutting, quietly laying each piece on the blue and white enamel plate. He could be a-dream for all he really knows. His father sits over in the corner polishing a flute with the accustomed rag and at the same time searching in the morning paper for good japes. When he finds a jape he turns about and reads it to them, bouncing himself with glee. Maybe he likes them all better these days, now everyone is up on their pins, more or less. Although soon he will up himself and wander out, into the unimaginable splendours of a Sligo night.

Is she not still an artist among mothers, cutting that bread? He has heard Micky Moore, a boy reared up in the deepest and poorest part of the docks, who is not understood in the better shops in Sligo itself his mouth is so full of black words, called an artist on horseback, because he won fourteen races in a summer, including two at the Phoenix Park in front of the Viceroy, in the capital. An artist. His mother is an artist with the breadknife. He is estranged from her a little maybe but, he admires her. He loves her.

He sits through school all day, under the vast wall-map of the leviathan world, crisp Latin and the muddle of mathematics forming weather clouds over his head, trying to extricate the kernel of the matter. He knows that on the floor above in the higher class Jonno Lynch his bosom pal is conning hard for his certificate. Jonno is going serious on the world and because Jonno is but an orphan and has to live with Mrs Foley, the terror of all orphans, he is intent on escape into the world of shillings and employments. By God, he is. And no doubt rightly. Meanwhile in the lesser class, Eneas puzzles out his own ancestry. The master Mr Jackson is a person so wise much of his teaching pours over the shaved or narrowly cut heads of his pupils. When Eneas first came into the class Mr Jackson showed some interest in the name Eneas, pointing out it was taken from the Roman story about a long-suffering and wandering sea-captain. But Eneas was only called Eneas after some old great-grandfather of his father’s, maybe even the mighty butter-exporter himself. And the discussion was ended suddenly by one of the boys offering the information that in Cork the name is pronounced
anus.