Now & Then

by Jacqueline Sheehan

  “That’s the way,” cheered the men and women who had gathered behind the inn.

  Another contender, this time a larger man, bigger than Red, stepped forward, sure of his weight. Given weight or speed, a wrestler has the clear advantage with speed, and Red had speed. A few men from the crowd cheered the new challenger.

  “You can take him John. Jaysus, you could crush him.”

  John was a big man, broad in shoulders and gut. He had lived a life of assuredness due to his size, but Joseph could see from his clumsy movements that Red could sidestep him and use the man’s weight against him. John lurched forward like a bear, arms wide, and too much weight on the front of his feet. They grappled for a long bit, holding each other like star-crossed lovers. Then Red let the man fall and pinned him in three slick moves.

  Joseph saw a tree full of birds, funny-looking crows that Deirdre had said were hoodie crows. They cawed to each other, as if evaluating the wrestlers, and then grew silent, gazing down in unison at the two men in the center of the crowd. Joseph looked up as if to say, Should I? One of the crows made the strange quacking sound that they sometimes made. Joseph took that as a sign.

  When Big John got off the ground, slapping dirt off his pants and elbows, he shook hands with the champion. Joseph knew the feeling, the winner shaking your hand. It felt just like he was grabbing your balls and yanking on the short hairs. Joseph stepped into the crudely marked circle, a stick here, a rock there. He knew the boundaries by heart.

  “I’ll challenge you, sir,” he said, attempting to lower the register of his voice.

  Heads swiveled around. It was his accent. He knew by now that it was a showstopper, but there was nothing he could do about it except use it to his advantage, which is what he hoped for in this instance. Joseph gave the silence a few more seconds.

  “I’m traveling and I’d be honored if you’d accept my challenge,” he said, letting the words hang foreign and heavy in the alcohol-scented air of the crowd.

  Big Red was thrown off for a nanosecond. Joseph saw it—the slight downturn of his mouth, just the beginnings, before his brilliant champion’s smile returned.

  “You’re welcome to it, lad, but you best be warned, I’m the parish champion. Have you ever wrestled, wherever it is that you came from?” asked Red.

  “Oh, just take him and be done with it,” said a man from deep in the crowd.

  Red offered a welcoming bow to Joseph. “Come forward, lad, and prepare to get your finery stained with our best mud.”

  Speed, balance, and surprise. Accuracy and persistence. This had been drilled into Joseph since the first day of wrestling. And he had the advantage of having watched Red’s style for two rounds. That was all it ever took Joseph to read another wrestler.

  Joseph walked into the circle and they nodded to each other. As soon as the nod hit the downward end, Joseph struck, foot placed, hand on Red’s opposite shoulder, and slammed him to the earth, bouncing the smile off his face. Red struggled, and Joseph wrapped a practiced leg over him; with a sharp, persistent move that came from the core of his torso, he pushed both of Red’s shoulder blades into the earth.

  “Call it. He’s down,” said a man.

  Joseph released Red and held his winning hand out to the loser to help him get up. He gave the hand an extra squeeze.

  From the crowd, Joseph heard a familiar voice. The colonel.

  “So, lad, you’re a wrestler.”

  Joseph saw what looked like pride and admiration in the colonel’s eyes. He felt a void deep in his chest fill with warmth.

  “Yes, sir, I’m a wrestler.”

  Joseph knew that old people, like his teachers, had no idea what it was like to be a kid. Or they understood what it was like when they were kids, but they were clueless about being a kid now. How every rich kid in town had gone off to private school when high school had started, how the rest of the kids who’d been left behind had quickly closed ranks before Joseph had had time to figure out what group was his. And he’d been left on the outside of everything at school, along with the few other dazed kids who’d also been among the unaffiliated.

  He had tried to explain this to his grandmother, who was the head of the math department at the high school. At least she’d breathed the same wretched air as he had, every day, in the same building, which had looked like a backdrop for that Charles Dickens book they’d had to read.

  Joseph had been at the top of his class in science and math until high school had come along and he’d been left in the outer perimeters, until the heart of school had gotten ripped out for him. His grandmother had said, “Your grades have dropped like a rock. What’s going on?”

  He’d tried to explain to her. “Do you know when the kids are passing in the halls and some kids always walk together and look kinda happy and they’re loud and talking to each other and stuff?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you notice how some kids hug the walls, keep their eyes down, and pray that no one says anything to them?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And there are the kids you don’t notice, because no teachers ever notice them, not the teachers, coaches, or the principal. They’re the kids who sneak up to you and say to Suzanna Emmons, ‘Bitch. Ugly fat ass.’ Or to the special ed-ers, they say, ‘Retard, go home and bag groceries.’ Or to me they say, ‘Don’t touch me, scumbag. Don’t walk on this side of the hall ever.’ But they say worse stuff too, but I can’t say the swear words to you that they use.”

  His grandmother had stopped grading papers. She’d taken off her reading glasses.

  “I’m on the outside, Gram, and it’s not going to change,” he’d continued. “This is how it will be all the way through high school. I didn’t know my life could suck this much. There is no one who will even sit with me at lunchtime. I spend lunch in the bathroom or the library.”

  He hadn’t told this to anyone before—certainly not to his father, and not to his aunt Anna, either. The world had turned such a miserable corner that he hadn’t even known if he could really trust his Gram, but he had always trusted her more than anyone, so she’d been worth a try.

  “Wrestling,” she’d finally said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Wrestling. It was the thing that saved your father, as much as he could be saved. He loved the hand-to-hand combat that wrestling offered. And I think he liked the physical contact too. When he and your grandfather were going through their bad times, your father won most of his matches. He went to state finals one year.”

  “I told you that my life is torture and you think joining the wrestling team is going to help?”

  “I think stepping inside one of these groups is essential; you can’t go it alone. Why not wrestling? It’s very unique, ancient and primal. And I know the wrestling coach.”

  That had sealed his fate. He’d gone to the wrestling coach’s office the next afternoon, suited up after school, and gotten his face shoved in a wrestling mat. What his grandmother hadn’t known was that on the hierarchy of sports in high school, wrestling didn’t even reach the bottom rung. But at least he’d gotten on the ladder, and for that he’d been grateful. And like his grandmother had said, you never knew when wrestling might be useful.

  Chapter 19

  Joseph reveled in his new status as wrestling champion. A champion? Who would have imagined that he would be a champion anywhere? His coach had told him that he would move up in the ranks as he got better, but Joseph had never guessed that wrestling could take him this far. He was especially pleased that he could wrestle without the embarrassment of the tight Lycra unitard that announced every boner to the sparse crowd in the stands. No mats; this was strictly on the ground. And of course no headgear, nothing covering his ears. He worried that someone would take the chance and rip on his ears just because they could. Finally, here was something that Joseph knew about. No, not just knew about: he was fucking fantastic at wrestling compared to these local guys. Well, to be honest, the local guys from the
past.

  If the colonel had treated Joseph like a privileged guest before, now he was a rock star. True, there had been no rock stars in 1844, but if there had been, he would have been one. Once the colonel saw that Joseph could pin the parish champion as if he had been no more than a hapless honeybee, everything changed.

  Over the next several months, Joseph competed in four wrestling tournaments and won all of them while barely mussing his hair. He had the benefit of an additional 164 years of science and study about wrestling. His opponents were strong men from the villages who called themselves wrestlers. They thought that hard physical labor from farming or blacksmithing or fishing should be enough to win at a sport like wrestling. But the colonel’s young lad from the Canadian Provinces—Joseph Blair, as he was known—cut through the local competition with shocking precision.

  Each match was the same. Joseph watched his opponent’s feet; that was number one. The second thing he did was shake his rival’s hand. So far, every wrestler he faced had been poorly trained. They went in for endurance grappling, circling each other to kill time, holding each other up and pushing hard into each other with their legs. Joseph had had two years of training from a hard-ass coach, whom he now silently thanked each time he wrestled a big, bulked-up Irish man.

  Wrestling was done barefoot, which Joseph at first saw as a disadvantage. He’d always worn wrestling shoes, light and flexible, which had given him a grip on the mats. But barefoot wrestling on the ground revealed his opponent even more quickly. Most of the men stood with one foot pointing slightly at an angle. When this happened, Joseph knew the takedown would be swift. With one foot pointing straight ahead and one foot even fifteen degrees out from center, he could fake to the turned-out leg, then lunge for the straight leg (which took longer for the opponent to move), reach in behind the thigh and lift it up, flip the guy on his back, and let two shoulder blades smack the ground. Then he’d hold him and release. The guy never knew what hit him.

  The added bit of information was in the handshake. If asked to explain it, Joseph would have had a hard time doing so. But he knew instantaneously, in one transmission of hand sweat and electrical impulses, if he could take down his opponent. It was a mountain of information that flowed from one person to another, and it happened in the two seconds that the hands touched. Joseph could tell each time that he was faster and more precise than every other wrestler that he met, even though his opponents were generally bigger and older. There seemed to be only the vaguest of weight categories.

  Joseph had to harness all his energy in every muscle of his body for no more than five minutes. So far, it had been for no more than three minutes. His matches had been lightning fast; he’d had the advantage of surprise in his first parish matches against local champions. Now, his reputation was spreading out like a wet stain and he could no longer count on the element of surprise. He would have to count on his precision.

  His last opponent had expected him to be fast.

  “Give us a true match, lad, not your fast flipping magic,” he’d said at the handshake.

  But all Joseph had noticed had been the plea and the hesitation in the handshake, the vulnerability in the outward turn of one foot.

  “Nice to meet you,” Joseph had said before doing a magnificent fireman’s throw. His coach would have said he was being too much of a show-off, but the euphoria of throwing a big man made him jubilant for days.

  The colonel had quickly seen the advantage of betting on Joseph Blair, the strange lad from Canada, and he was pulling in more money than he had made on his last horse races. He offered Joseph every luxury and squired him about like royalty. Joseph did everything he could for the colonel, earning him money on every match, and he drank in the praise of the most powerful man he had ever met.

  This was what it was like to have everything, to be in love, and to be admired. As he walked through the village of Tramore, children pointed to him and stage-whispered, “Champion.” Thoughts of home intruded from time to time, but if he saw the ghostly apparitions of the future coming toward him—his grandmother checking his math homework, his wrestling coach, Anna, his father—he batted them away like he used to do in T-Ball. His grandmother had been his T-Ball instructor, her baseball cap turned backwards, and she’d told him that if he had any troubles, he could make them go away by smacking that ball for all it was worth. He’d pictured the plastic bat sending all future thoughts into the air, far out over the ocean.

  In order for him to fit in as well as possible with the people in general, he decided that the best thing to do here was not to take sides, because even someone who had faked reading his history book could see that the Irish and the English had some smackdown problems with each other. He wished he could tell the Irish that everything was going to turn out OK for them, that they’d get to be their own independent country again someday. But for now, he wanted to ride the wave of living in both worlds, because clearly there were some disadvantages to being Irish—being dirt poor, for example. He could remain the favorite of the colonel and still be friends with the Irish, or at least with Deirdre and Taleen, and if he had Deirdre on his side, there were no Irish on the estate who would cross him.

  Only Con seemed less friendly to him. He didn’t know why at first. Con was a boy just like him. Well, not like him. He was Irish and the stonemason’s son. Joseph was Irish too, except it was different coming from the Irish and living in America; that’s hardly Irish at all, and nobody here needed to know anything about it. Joseph slipped down to the kitchen level of the house to talk with Deirdre.

  “That’s Con’s entire job, keeping the fireplaces lit?” he asked.

  Deirdre was boiling apples for sauce, and she stirred the kettle with a large flat paddle. The kettle hung on a hinge that could be moved over the fire or back out again. She tasted the glaze of apple left on the wooden paddle and tossed in a pinch of cloves.

  “There are nine bedchambers, one ballroom, the gun room, the library, the conservatory (well, that doesn’t have a fireplace), the fine china room, several dressing rooms, the laundry room, and if you added all those up on a full and busy day when relatives from England are here, or when a hunt is in progress, Con would be up two hours before the sun rises and not entirely finished until long after the last person is asleep. That’s the winter life for him. The rest of the year he’s apprenticing with his father, the stonemason.”

  “How long does he have to apprentice, I mean before he could be a stonemason on his own?” Joseph sat hunched by the side of the fireplace. He had woken up chilled. Deirdre had given Joseph a mug of hot mead, and the odd warmth of it expanded his torso.

  “Oh, I’d say five years if he is bright, which Con is. Then if he is to become a master stonemason, that’s years more. But it’s all up to the stonemasons themselves. Half the time they speak their own language, not Irish, not English. I don’t try to get it, don’t have room enough in my head, but they speak the language of rock and the slow way that rocks move and sigh. I only know this because me own husband was a stonemason. My first husband that is, back when I was young and the babies were popping out of me like the seeds of a tree.”

  Should he ask what happened to her first husband, and would that have been Taleen’s father? He wanted to know everything about Taleen. And where was she? He got up from his warm perch and walked the length of the kitchen, past the wooden firkins of butter that had arrived yesterday, past the barrels of apples that Deirdre had drawn from just this morning. He opened the door to the garden courtyard and gave what he hoped was a casual peek outside.

  “She’s not here this morning,” Deirdre called to him.

  Joseph jumped, irritated that his intention was so obvious. When he looked across the long room, he saw that Deirdre’s back was to him. He shivered, knowing that she had seen through his intense need to locate Taleen. If his friend Oscar had been here, Joseph would have said to him, “I’m not shitting you man, Deirdre can see what you’re doing even without looking at you.”
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  Deirdre looked over her shoulder at Joseph.

  “She’s at the hedge school. She attends when the colonel is gone. He doesn’t see the need for her to attend school.”

  “What kind of school is a hedge school?”

  Deirdre swung the kettle of apples away from the fire.

  “You don’t know much, do you, lad? I suppose in the provinces of Canada, life is different. But here the English wouldn’t allow Irish Catholics to attend school of any sort, so those who could teach set up in a meadow or lean-to or a barn, and children go there to learn Greek and Latin and their computations. Not all scholars are good at teaching, but this one is.”

  Deirdre popped the top off a barrel and, with a frighteningly large knife, excised a hunk of lard, which she dropped on the worktable. She scooped a handful of flour from a bowl, plopped it on the lard, and began to push at it with the heel of her hands.

  Joseph had seen the colonel’s library, with its rows of musty books, floor to ceiling. But he was starting to get the picture of who could do what here, and he knew Taleen would not be permitted to touch the colonel’s books. Joseph was already concocting a plan, already imagined leaving the library with a book or two beneath his coat, which he could present to Taleen.

  The colonel was not due back for a week or so. A trip to London still held him. Surely Joseph could borrow books from the library without notice while the colonel was gone. And even when the guy came back, Joseph was sure he could tap into the abundance of entitlement that the colonel had cloaked him in. Joseph had even begun to ring the long cord that led to a bell in each room, which would bring a servant clipping to his call.

  “Thanks for the drink,” Joseph said to Deirdre, sliding the mug toward the wash table. He headed up the staircase to the main level of the house and went directly to the library, where he paused in midstep; he suddenly knew why Con was stiff with him now. He had wanted to hook up with Taleen, that was it. Con had had his sights on Taleen until Joseph had arrived. No one had ever been jealous of Joseph before, although he had been jealous of nearly everyone else in his former life as high school outcast. He stepped into the library and basked in the full glory of having everything.