No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  The priest had sat with his back to the altar and faced them; big lumps of girls, as they felt themselves to be, with their breasts pushing the pleats of their gym-slips out of place. They had asked to be allowed to wear something different but the nuns wouldn’t hear of it; many bound bandages around themselves to flatten their busts. Their giggle was on a hair trigger and, having been warned to control it, they were on edge. The priest said nothing. They were embarrassed. The poor man had a worn cassock and no hair on his head: a pink dome with freckles the size of shamrocks and, half-way down it, a pair of demented eyes, bright blue like bits of a shattered Milk-of-Magnesia bottle. Sure enough, there were tears brimming in them. The priest must have been used to crying publicly for he just let them brim and overflow and spray all over his cheeks. When he did speak, it was a shock. He mustn’t have spoken to girls – maybe to anyone? – for years. Known gigglers were glared at by companions and drove their fingernails into the palms of their hands.

  ‘My darling and beautiful and pure and innocent little girls,’ said the priest, and a ripple of nervous hilarity ran from bench to bench. ‘How can I ever tell you the joy it brings to my heart to see innocence abloom today in this ancient, holy and sacred land of ours?’ Innocence, he confided, was a gift you could never appreciate until you had lost it and then you could never get it back. He could feel their innocence, he said, washing around him. It was restoring him. He was breathing it in. The girls, for the most part farmers’ and shopkeepers’ daughters, looked suspiciously at him, trying to figure out whether he was as cracked as he let on, or sly, or totally cracked but wise too in a saintly way. They were used to every kind of mental oddity in their villages, from which only the homicidally mad were ever sent away. When he finally started to sob, it was a relief. He kept it up for what seemed a long time, snuffling desperately into his handkerchief. What started him off was a story which he began to tell about a lovely and pure little girl called Eileen, who … But they were never to discover what had happened to Eileen or why this upset him so because, every time he reached her name, he broke down. ‘Eileen …’ he wailed and collapsed like a baby. The girls guessed that she must have died in Flanders defending her innocence. They knew a lot of stories like this. He didn’t mention Flanders, though, nor poppies nor the trenches. When he gave up trying to tell about Eileen, he turned to the dangers of desiring knowledge – Eve’s sin – and naming things. The girls perceived that their own peculiar virtue was one which could only be preserved by ignoring it. It was like a lamp held up to light other people but masked from the holder. Meanwhile, the priest wept and wept, tears still glistening and pouring even when his sobbing ceased. He bent over as though in pain and presented them with the bald top of his pink head. The girls were puzzled but knew that this was their proper condition.

  After the session in the chapel they were skittish, commenting with amusement on the way the tears had made patterns on his cheeks, like wax trickling down a candle. They were alight with vanity at the effect their feminine virtue had seemed to have on him, a ruined creature but martial, holy, and moreover male.

  This pride in the power of her own delicacy had, in Judith’s case, just been crudely violated by Sparky Driscoll.

  *

  Grainne heard Cormac sneak past her bedroom door and raced to catch him before he was down the stairs and out of the front door.

  ‘Cormac?’

  He paused, not turning to look at her. He had a weekend bag in his hand.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Still not facing her: ‘Out of your hair.’

  ‘Where? Cormac? Look at me!’

  ‘Does it matter? Uncle Owen Roe’s.’

  ‘To stay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about … your father?’

  ‘He knows.’

  And what else did Michael know, she wondered. Cormac’s back was still turned to her He stood, like someone playing grandmother’s steps, frozen on the stairway, waiting for her to take her eyes off him before bolting from the home she had contaminated. She had confirmed his worst suspicions and his fourteen-year-old morality condemned her utterly. What could she possibly say?

  Turning, she went back into her bedroom and seconds later heard the click of the front door.

  Grainne looked at herself in her mirror: a bad mother, that was what she was. Years later, Cormac would explain to some girl that what he had become – drunken? impotent? a terrorist? – was all due to his mother, a lustful woman, and the shock she’d given him when he found this out at the age of fourteen. ‘How awful,’ the girl would say, stroking his hair and longing to help, but it would be too late for that. Only his mother could have and now where was she? An alcoholic has-been in Southern California? Deserted by her sexy second husband? Or happily married to him still, having chosen pleasure over duty?

  Grainne decided to go to the hairdresser. She couldn’t cry there and would be cossetted by competent hands which wanted nothing in return but her money: such easy currency. Maybe she’d have her hair cut? Dyed even? Get a new persona. Quick, quick – no. Michael would be hurt by it. How could she hurt him more?

  Suddenly, ridiculously, she was jealous of the girl who would one day in the future hold Cormac in her arms and comfort him: a good, gentle girl with young eyes. ‘I feel I can trust you,’ Cormac would say to her. ‘You remind me of my mother but you’re more honest, more sincere.’ – ‘Oh, I hope so,’ the girl would answer.

  Grainne was crying into her powder-puff and at the same time trying to repair her face. ‘Idiot!’ she told herself. ‘Shut up, shut up!’

  *

  Michael woke and remembered his jealousy His saliva tasted of vinegar.

  Grainne’s body felt wet, No! His palms were sweating.

  Earlier, in the pub, he had had trouble getting his breath and had begun thinking of guns. Blunt instruments. Ways of registering with the careless pair who had counted without him. But he lacked conviction. Jealousy was gentle in him, oozing in like defeat.

  He felt himself too unemphatic a man to hold Grainne against her will.

  Grainne.

  Up her back and haunches ran his fingers. They could strangle her.

  He imagined – felt – the cold corpse lying there, then being taken off for burial. A death sweat on it? No. The clamminess was his.

  He felt soothed, was even falling asleep when it struck him that only the killing part of this story was a dream. The rest was real. This came as such a surprise that he was shocked all over again.

  Maybe he had always expected this? The way he expected death but managed to forget about it. He told himself that he forgot about life too, put off living it. That was why he hadn’t minded her being away in London. Not really. He’d felt her safely available at the end of the telephone line. Cloistered. Still his. Now, it was as if a Siamese twin’s twin had threatened to have his or her self – gender was not the point – surgically removed, taking some shared organ vital to both. That was what he felt, rubbing wet eyelids on her sleeping back. He had invested part of himself in her and here, she still was, he thought, but had no sense of contact. She was dreaming and in her dreams he was sure he didn’t figure.

  Owen Roe had rung him at work. ‘I thought you ought to know,’ he’d finished up, ‘that Cormac is my source. Not that I hadn’t my own suspicions. He overheard the fellow asking her to marry him. She didn’t say no.’

  ‘Cormac?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘This morning.’

  Michael had put down the phone and gone to the nearest pub. Responsibility, he thought, and had two whiskeys fast. Would she go? And would the boy suffer? Bugger the boy, he’d decided, flooded with guilt and then with panic – because if he felt this way, why shouldn’t she? Cormac was fourteen and tough enough. Not counting on his Dad, anyway. Went to the uncle with his tale. There you were. If discounted, how did you make yourself count? Michael had no leverage. Grainne had her own bit of income
. She’d have thought about Cormac already.

  Decided, had she? That weeping in front of the telly made sense now. Doubts. Didn’t fuck her enough, he supposed. Women wanted it. Well, couldn’t she get it round here? Why did she have to go to America? Wanted it because it confirmed their sense of themselves. Women. Basic creatures, really: simple. What was her vulnerable point? Cormac? Owen Roe obviously n.b.g. or he wouldn’t have been ringing up yours truly. Think of her wanting it that much, though! Convent girl when he married her: always wearing white cotton gloves. Hard on a man when women got so demanding. How fuck her now, knowing she preferred the other chap? A man had his pride. Besides, after years of marriage, you didn’t want it that much. Maybe he should take hormones or something? Damned humiliating. Cross over to London. Visit some Harley Street chap. First have to stop her leaving. How? Couldn’t face her tonight. Too drunk. She’d be sorry if she left him: a tolerant man. She should think of that. Passion wasn’t always lodged in the genitals. Real love, Grainne, don’t spit on it. Bloody Yanks very materialistic. Other things in life.

  But he was miserable. Got into an argument with some chap about what? Pubs, when you were a young fellow, were a refuge from the smothering of home. Now had a look of refugee stations. Commuters passed through en route to serious living. The permanent pub population talked of fictions so large or so minute as to protect them from seeing dead-on the society in which they had failed to get a niche. Funambulists, they doddered in the stratosphere.

  An ancient, titled gent, an habitué of bars, who had sold inherited estates thirty years back to pursue and marry a chorus girl – she’d been a Bluebell, danced across Europe before dancing circles round the fool – now a pauper but for some tiny pension, tried to tell Michael about the evils of sodium nitrite in bacon. Sounded cogent as a judge. Rapt brimming eye, rickety wrists extending from a ruff of sleeve. Spent the time he couldn’t afford the pubs sitting in libraries for warmth. His chin wobbled. Cloning interested him too. Acupuncture. Cures for arthritis.

  ‘ABC,’ said Michael insolently. ‘Acupuncture, Bacon, Clones! Your mind’s slipping. Clones is a medieval monastery.’

  ‘I assure you …’

  ‘What happened to the Bluebell? Fuck off, did she?’

  In the end, a friendly barman had to put Michael into a taxi and send him home. The price of the journey would go on the slate. Cloyne? Clones? Boyne? Clonmacnoise?

  *

  She finally decided that poor Sparky Driscoll had a deformed mind and that she should empty her own of the bilge he had poured into it. Men were unstable creatures, capable of dangerous plungings about; like stallions who injure themselves in their loose-boxes, it could be unsafe to come too close to them and this wasn’t only true of the American.

  Owen had been in a suspicious, snappish state when he first got home from gaol. It was no wonder that Sparky should have thought his feeling for Kathleen had blown cold, for he treated her, as he did everyone, with a gloomy imperiousness. But was that to be wondered at? The man had spent eight months in gaol and had never been easy-going. Seamus had been crazy to think Owen would be on the side of the compromisers. Owen was a man of vision. Eyes fixed on distant horizons, how could he have time for the day-to-day? Naturally, he would line up with the faction which spat the Treaty out of their mouths and were now calling themselves ‘the sea-green incorruptibles’.

  In spite of herself, Judith had to admit that the name suited Owen. He was an admirable man but there was something, well, fishy about him. His small head was set high on his neck and when he wore the trenchcoat favoured by the fighting men, it stuck up from it like a turtle’s from its shell. His eye-glasses gleamed in a scaly way and sometimes, in argument, spittle flew from his mouth. The word ‘slimey’ occurred to those who didn’t like him. There were quite a few, for Owen was careless about giving offence. He had the spoilt priest’s mania for self-justification and would grind opponents into the ground. ‘I have examined my conscience,’ he liked to say, ‘and found it clear.’ Then he would stare his adversary accusingly in the eye. Kathleen had had a dose of this treatment recently. She seemed frivolous to him, took too much care with her appearance and was too gay at a time when Ireland, said Owen, was traversing a time of trial. A more tolerant man might have guessed that one reason they were all in high spirits was nervous relief over the Treaty and because they had been getting ready to welcome him home. Perhaps excitement had run away with them a bit? Owen was like a man arriving late at a party.

  His return coincided with Christmas and for weeks before there had been anticipation of revelry. A pig had been slaughtered ahead of time and, for the festivities themselves, Kathleen had killed two geese. For toasting the peace and future prosperity, there was port and porter, whiskey, sherry wine, and strong tea for followers of Father Mat. Plum cakes and puddings were soaked in one or other of these fluids until they were as heavy as rained-on-peat.

  Sparky had wanted to learn some Gaelic toasts, so Seamus had translated a few. The shortest was ‘gob fluc’, meaning ‘a wet mouth’ or ‘may you never lack liquor to wet your whistle’. The longest was:

  Health and long life to you,

  The woman of your choice to you,

  Land without rent to you

  And death in Erin.

  Kathleen simpered in a silly way over the words ‘the woman of your choice’ and made doe’s eyes at Sparky Driscoll, who asked whether the last lines referred to the emigrants’ hope of returning before they died.

  ‘What else would they come back to do?’ asked the Da sourly. ‘Isn’t dying the national sport?’ He recited with scorn a line from a poem he’d heard the wet-behind-the-ears patriots declaiming in the parish hall. It too was from the Gaelic:

  ‘What can they know that we know that know the way to die?’

  Verse like that would make you howl like a dog with mange, said the Da, who had a tendency to get depressed at Christmas, thinking of his dead wife, his dead son, and his own foolishness in ever leaving America for this backside of a place. Patriotic argy-bargy got on his nerves. The eejits were squabbling now over the Treaty, a piece of paper. Oh, it was the price of them. Loneliness and the dead-end of the Da’s life were connected with the local mud roads, fog-smeared windows, weeping gutters. He did not want to be told that hope was here under his nose and he the only one unable to see it.

  Sparky argued with him, cutting the ground from beneath the old man’s feet. An American! Giving him the lie in front of people who for years had respected the Da as an expert on America! Old Clancy grew glummer as the young big-mouth declared this to be the promised land. Neighbours, alert to the irony, puffed their pipes and kept their faces straight. The young men in the Dáil, said the unconscious Sparky, were like the Founding Fathers.

  The Da was crushed. Judith saw no way to rescue him. Silent, he broke a red coal open, letting it flare then cover over slowly with a white crust of ash.

  ‘Ah,’ he said sadly, ‘you’ve been taken in by blowhards.’

  ‘Heroes!’ Driscoll’s face had the nuzzling vigour of a young animal’s. He was energetic, self-absorbed, careless.

  ‘Ah rameish!’ Clancy had a spurt of life. ‘Mother of God!’ He invoked help and patience with such rank rubbish and his hand trembled, spilling some drops of his drink. The fire glowed on them. ‘Sure the wee fellows beyond in the whatchamaycallit, the Dáil, those wee fellas couldn’t run a grocery store. They’ll be taking pot shots at each other in a coupla weeks. Mark my words. Sure all they know is how to handle a gun. And if they were geniuses itself. If Saints Peter and Paul were to come down from heaven to lend them a hand, how could they make a going thing of this country? Isn’t it crippled with debts to England? And what other market but England have they? Ask any farmer. Ask the Trades Unions. You,’ he told Sparky, ‘will be off home to the US, any day, on a liner from Queenstown, and damn glad you’ll be, I bet, to get back to a place where people have not only “vision”, as you call it, but the greenbacks to make s
omething of it.’ The Da laughed maliciously and rubbed the tips of his fingers against his thumb, as though he was feeling money. ‘Am I right?’ he challenged. ‘You bet I am! Your green, young fellow, is the opposite of our green! Don’t forget that. Don’t be taken in. Let me tell you something,’ the old man leaned forward so that the fire-light threw gleams on the roughened surface of his face. They deepened the grooves alongside his mouth and shone on the stubble of his chin and on his eyeballs, so that he looked like a stained-glass image ribbed with lead. Gold flared in his mouth: a tooth fixed in America. ‘When an American,’ he told Sparky, ‘has a vision, it’s of something he intends to do. When an Irishman has one, it’s something to die for or sing about, but,’ he prodded the air with a black-rimmed nail, ‘tis guaranteed,’ prod, ‘to stay visionary,’ prod, ‘forever. Ha! And another thing!’ He seemed to be drawing sustenance from the force of his pessimism; his head reared defiantly, ‘We hate work. Bowsies, over here, put more effort into figuring out how to slope off and avoid doing an honest stroke of work than Rockefeller into making his first million. You,’ the Da was incandescent with spite, ‘are a dangerous bugger and I’ll tell you why! You’re cheering on the Republicans …’