The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (6 page)

He sits fast in his Pappy’s house, not daring to go out in the daylight, expecting even so the sky to fall on his head through the dark blue slates. In his dreams all manner of talk flows swiftly, swiftly, like the intent waters of the Garravogue, mutters and threats, clear as the bells of death. He senses the fright of his brilliant brother Jack, just preparing himself for his own assault on the world and in need of no scandalous brother, and he knows his Mam understands only too well the ticket of terror flying in the wind, but they don’t speak about it. They’ve taken silence to themselves like an adopted dog. Because it’s all manner of talk, any manner of talk, might be the knife now. Luck in silence or at any rate a sort of murk and darkness. Only his Pappy is content to blunder about in words.

‘It’s a bad sort of time to have your head up, you know, in any class of a political manner,’ says his father, the two of them standing as of old by the back window, looking out over the eternal ruins of the Lungey House. How different it is now, Old Tom older, and Eneas a ruined twenty-year-old.

‘The worst of it is,’ says his Pappy, laying a hand in familiar fashion on the broad back of his son, a back indeed all strength and youth, hard as a saddle. ‘The worst of it is, I blame myself.’

‘Why so, Pappy?’ says Eneas, surprised.

‘Didn’t I steer you into the polis, with my talk of the under-surgeon’s son? Christ, and the same boy killed last month in Donegal, a stone tied to his leg and drowned in an estuary. Arra, child, I done you a bad turn that time, that I spoke of the peelers.’

‘Ah, Pappy, I don’t think so. A policeman’s there to take the villain out of the village. Trouble is, these times, a good citizen is a rare one. Or I don’t know, maybe that’s nonsense. But, Pappy, I feel it as a terrible thing to be hiding in my own town, from my own people, and what remedy will there be for it?’

His father stands fast by him in the dwindling light. Not a sound is there. Certainly no wild boys go sneaking to box the minister’s fox.

‘Maybe I should be just going away. Going away quietly with myself somewhere.’

His father says nothing at all for a long bit.

‘Trouble is,’ says his Pappy, ‘a man goes away like that and maybe he never comes back to his people.’

‘Better than to be killed here, Pappy.’

‘Trouble is, a man could go away, and the buggers would go after him.’

‘You don’t think they would, Pappy?’

‘I was reading, there was a fella got in Brisbane for something like this, now he was a fella that did something bad, or so it was believed, and he probably did at that, not like yourself’ — and he touches the back of his child’s head gently, hardly noticing himself do it, and stroking the bristles of the short back and sides — ‘and he was followed out to Australia, and that’s a long way.’

‘You can’t go further, I believe, Pappy.’

‘If you abide near us, sure, maybe that will content them. If you tuck yourself in near us. You’re only a young fella. Maybe they’ll content themselves with frightening us all. I don’t know. Maybe, sure, jaysus, the British Army in all its glory will deal with them. The Tans are a queer wild lot. Maybe they’ll settle their hash.’

‘Jesus, it’s not a good business, when you have to wish a thing like that.’

‘The matter of sons is above politics. Maybe you’ll see that one day, if you have your own. I hope so. I do.’

He can feel the odd thrumming of his father beside him, his heartbeat it must be, the same feeling as holding a wild bird in your hand, the ache and the muscle of it to be away free again. He has put his father under a strain certainly, and the old man is quiet and easy about it, but Eneas can sense that strain, that thrumming, that beating of the heart. Jesus, he’s sorry for the old man. He’s sorry for all the old fathers of foolish sons. Having to dip their heads in matters too foreign, too deep, too curious — too murderous. Truth is he doesn’t know what to do, any more than his Pappy knows.

‘A black-list,’ says his father, musingly, half a-dream. ‘A funny way to describe something. On the black-list. Funny, that.

‘Aye.’

‘You know, Eneas,’ says his father. ‘Well, you see me always going about, up to the asylum, to measure the poor fellas there, or over in better days with the orchestra to, well, to play for the people in Bundoran and the like, and you probably think, there he goes, Old Tom, my Pappy, there he goes, and maybe you don’t think much else about it.’

‘Well, I do, Pappy.’

‘Aye, well, it’s good for a young man to know certain things, and I often think of my own father, and the habit of silence he had, and why not, he worked like a slave all his days. And I suppose poor low people we’ve always been, and I used to be gassing to you here about the damn Lungey House, and all that codswallop

‘Ah, sure, well.’

‘Aye, well, we are poor people, and God knows when there was hunger we felt it, and when there was cold we felt it, and we were never people above cold or hunger. No. But, child, though I learnt silence off of my father—’

And Old Tom stops there. Fact of the matter is, he’s weeping. Or something’s come up in his throat, more likely, a stopper that is the stopper on a father’s feeling for his son, generally. To a degree it’s worse than being shot by patriots, being shot by his father’s obvious love.

So he must resolve on something. A person can tire of being that mortal leaf twisting and shrugging on the galloping river. The scorch on his heart where Jonno Lynch snubbed him on Main Street doesn’t suggest to him that there might be a gap in the hedge where Jonno stands. There must be someone he can march out to beard, even if all the secrecy and terror of the days says otherwise. He fixes on a plan of sorts. He doesn’t know if anyone has succeeded, before execution, in being taken off a black-list, but then the history of Sligo is not the history of great escapes. They are more doomed and fixed in their courses, the men of Sligo, it seems to him, than those bewildered and doomed Greeks of old that the master used to relish.

Sunday bright early he hies to the Cathedral for the mass that all the big people of the town attend. For it is considered slothful and perhaps even evil to go to the later masses, unless a person is old, sickly or poor. The poor lads and lassies from the asylum are carted down for the evening mass, and no one goes to that who can help it, unless you are a travelling merchant or the like and would rather get late mass than rot in hell.

Eneas is not a perfect mass-goer and rarely would he be out his door in the old days for the eight o’clock, though when he was a mere boy amid his siblings, his mother naturally herded them all out and around the ancient walls and up the mosaic steps of the Cathedral. And Old Tom is an immaculate mass-goer always and is respected for it in the town, considering the immense weariness that might be on a band-leader on a Sunday morning. Not everyone understands the deep spring of life in Old Tom McNulty as Eneas does.

And though he lies as if abed that morning and allows Jack and Young Tom and Teasy to spill out into the little street, Teasy with a clutch of missals to beat the band and a mantilla of black lace on her poor head like a Christmas pudding boiling under muslin in the pot, he spruces himself as best he can before the small yellowing mirror on the landing, slicking his hair down with Jack’s hair-grease and fetching one of his father’s work ties from the leaning cupboard. It is a good tie for a man, with a design of swallows, and it’s very blue altogether, which Eneas obscurely thinks might be a help to him, why he could not say. Clothes maketh the man, as a tailor like his Pappy never tires of saying. And maybe his father is the worst tailor on earth like people say, furnishing jackets and trousers so tight for the lunatics that their arms are hitched up as they go, and the life is squeezed out of their poor bollocks. Maybe that is so, but in other respects he is a kingly man, a very Greek of a man.

In the Cathedral he takes a dark seat over by the side chapel of the Virgin of Modena, and lurks there, trying to spy his target. He soon spots his family because his brother Jack’s hair flames out amid the mantillas and dark heads of ordinary Sligo people. Suddenly, sitting there like a thief, he realizes what a trench of distance his trouble has created between his shadowed form and their line of heads easy and open among the townspeople. As he is in a crowd, he wonders how many of them are against him or against his kind, how many would be indifferent to or ignorant of the whole matter and how many would be for him. For the latter he despairs.

But keeps his eyes roaming over the multitude, and when he spots at last Jonno Lynch, he knows his quarry cannot be far away, and sure enough, there’s Mr O’Dowd in the dapperest coat in Sligo, a treasure of a coat, sleek and brushed and tailored to perfection. It wasn’t his father cut that coat, certainly.

The great crowd spills out into the fresh and speckled sunshine. The sycamores once so sacred to Jonno Lynch blow about a little in the sea-breeze. No doubt the minds of the people are full of the canon’s sermon, about the evils of gold in the modern world, or merely the sense of their own cleanliness, both spiritual and in the matter of their shirts and blouses. Pounds of starch unite the crowd, and for a moment in his distress Eneas can think only of the clothes hung on the people, as if hearts and souls were in the materials and not in the bodies they hide from view. It is a rackety thought and no help to him as he tries to move through the mass of talking and laughing citizens. He sees O’Dowd now talking to the canon on the steps of the cathedral and he is abashed in his task by the sight but what can he do? He must pursue what feels now more and more like a stupid notion, feeble and even dangerous. But he’ll be a Greek in this now if it kills him, and when O’Dowd finally detaches himself from the little red mouth and chinless round face of the canon and descends the concrete steps with a smile of some grandeur on him, Eneas stands in his way. And Eneas has never seen O’Dowd up close, indeed has only glimpsed him passing in his Ford motorcar, and he is surprised by how young the man is, maybe not more than ten years older than himself. But he has a fierce balding head, which he is just covering now with an excellent hat, angling it expertly against the flow of sun and fashion. Eneas stands in his way as best he can, because O’Dowd is not inclined to look anywhere except further out over the heads, perhaps to his waiting car. And it occurs to Eneas, being trained in those matters, that there might be some D men about in their plainclothes so obvious to the world. Certainly there must be RIC men posted about quietly, because it would be part of their duties to guard a mass crowd. In Enniscrone only the last week two men were arrested by the Tans coming out of mass, which caused the most tremendous furore in the district. Not so much because the two men were undoubtedly murderers of a patriotic bent, but because shopkeepers’ wives were present and one at least fainted in terror of those large rusty-looking guns the Tans carried. At any rate, Tans, RIC, rebels, it was all the one to Eneas now, and he raises his right hand gently to impede O’Dowd.

‘What’s the whatsa?’ says O’Dowd, pleasantly, maybe not knowing Eneas’s face, as if Eneas were just another of the young men of Sligo with their heads sleeked like filmstars.

‘Mr O’Dowd, I’d like a word with you, if you had a minute.’

‘Sure, son,’ he says, ‘step over under the trees a little.’

And Eneas, following O’Dowd’s bright shoes across to the grubby trees, is astonished by his success. Also, yes, he is even sicker at heart now because he realizes that O’Dowd has totally mistaken him for a decent man, a man with some decent request, a true man of Sligo. When they reach the dappled desert under the sycamores, and O’Dowd turns to him grandly, Eneas’s mind is turning over like a terrible engine. There are trapped animals in there, birds, lions, elephants, a zoo of panic and fear. This is so much harder than he imagined, him cool and measured, and O’Dowd at best silent and nodding. But the vast friendliness of the man is destroying him.

‘I don’t think you know me,’ says Eneas, obliteratedly. ‘Well, who are you, then?’ says O’Dowd, laughing a slight laugh.

‘McNulty is my name,’ says Eneas, ‘Eneas McNulty, that was a friend of Jonno Lynch’s.’

‘You’re a friend of Jonno’s?’

‘Well, I was, I was. Indeed I was, formerly.’

‘OK. So what is it you want of me?’

Oh Jesus, this is bad, the pleasantness of the man. The ordinary chat and pleasantness of him. The fresh face and the fine clothes. Eneas senses his father’s tie on his breast, like a blue blight, absurdly. And he’s stoppering up himself now, like his father the night before, but with different causes.

‘I was hoping,’ he says, ‘no, I am hoping to say something to you, about my time in the RIC.’

‘What?’ says O’Dowd, entirely differently.

‘My time in the RIC, do you see?’

‘Your time in the RIC, do I see?’ And it’s terrifying how O’Dowd almost sings the words.

‘Look it,’ says Eneas. He can see only dimly what he wants O’Dowd to look at. But he presses on. ‘When I was in the RIC in Athlone there was two men killed by the Tans and it was said I was the man fingered them and so I was supposed to have been placed on a black-list by, by, you know, the, eh, insurrectionists, and the fact was, or is, or was that, I didn’t, you know, say a word about them, I mean, I knew nothing about them anyway, it was the Reprisal Man got them by his own intelligence network, do you see?’

O’Dowd looks at him. He might be looking at ragworm in a fisherman’s fold of bait. He’s very quiet for a good ten seconds. Very quiet. Thinking, sort of secure, immaculate, not like Eneas, filthy now to himself, like the scum of time and birds on the sycamores.

‘What’s that to do with me?’ says O’Dowd. And now Eneas wonders why O’Dowd lingers. There’s something about it, the way he lingers, intent.

‘I don’t know,’ says Eneas, stupid, stupid in his own ears. Of course he knows, for the love of Christ.

‘No, no, because, I’d like to know,’ says O’Dowd. ‘I’d like to know why you’ve come to me, I mean, I am concerned to know why.’

The politeness is awful. Yes, and the concern is awful. He realizes why O’Dowd lingers. Because of this concern. Eneas is suddenly in another realm altogether, the realm of O’Dowd’s safety, or O’Dowd’s sense of his own safety. And by God he is more lost there than he was in his own danger. O’Dowd leans in. Eneas can smell something like a woman’s scent off trim, he doesn’t know what it could be.