At Swim, Two Boys

by Jamie O’Neill

  The truth of it was, she couldn’t wait to be showing the little babba off. Oh not to the street, never mind the street, the street was only ignorant, so it was. And as for that curate, making her take off her ring for the christening, that was plain badness. No, but to show her off to the daylight and let her know there was a sun up there and a blue sky to shine out of, and she’d know, without even knowing she knew, the joy it was with the sun on your face. If only the hint of it, mind, for she kept her eyes out of the glare for fear it might wake the little mite and she’d go all dazzled.

  Jim come out of the shop, with a rug in his arms, and she said, “Did you bring that out for your niece?” He had. But wasn’t the little mite smothered, near or next to, as it was. So she bade Jim wrap the rug round her own shoulders instead. You’d swear she was nettles or briars the way he wouldn’t touch her, only let the cloth fall in place. “Is that out of your bed?”

  He said it was, coloring a touch. She drew it closer round her, the blanket Gordie had slept in under.

  Poor old Jim. There was a cloud hanging over him, she didn’t know what it was, only she hoped he wasn’t jealous of all the attention. Night the babba was born, he comes home, but he’s only hanging about the door. Say hello to your niece, says old Macks. And that’s exactly what he does. Hello, says he, like he’d be shaking her hand next. Then at the christening when he was standing godfather and they came to that bit about the gentleman below, do you denounce his works and pomps?—it took a while for him to answer till they all turned to look. Then out he thunders, I do, and the blaze in his eyes you’d swear ’twas old Nick himself at the font, and the little man defying him heart and soul. Even that twister of a curate looked startled out of his stole.

  Whatever it was, there was no touching him these days and he was for ever at the wash-bowl. He washed his face so hard, he rubbed the smiles away.

  He was watching one time when she was changing the babba. She could tell he was checking off the anatomy and muddling out the parts in his head. “See that,” she said, and of course he did, for he was gawping and blinking at it, the nubble out of the babba’s belly. “That goes down sure. We all had that, even you when you was little.” She breathed on a penny, placed it on the nubble, before wrapping the napkin round. “That grows into your tummy button,” she told him. Oh I know, says he, coloring away. Knew that all along, he did of course. And sure God love the dote. At home she had all the beasts of the field, let alone her brothers and sisters. She pitied the townie children who’d know no better than they’d learn off the chickens in the yard. Declare to God, and I laid an egg, ’twould put no pass on Jim.

  Not that Gordie was ever behind in catching on.

  But where would you be without Aunt Sawney? You’d wonder how’d she know it all. Would swear she had a street of them raised, the little mites. And her parched old face when she watched you at nursing. She liked to see the child at her feed. Well, you’d go that way had you never gave milk. Smacking her gums, like she’d be tasting it herself. Hairy old chin she poked at the babba and her cheeks all sunk. You’d often wonder had she mistook the boot-blacking for rouge. But if ever a face told lies, Aunt Sawney’s was the wickedest yet.

  She woke in the night one time, without the babba crying, and she could just make out Aunt Sawney in her chair, rocking and rocking, slow-like and deliberate, over the drawer from the chest where the babba slept. Queer old fright she looked by the nightlight. You couldn’t but think of them withered old jugs and for a moment the fear came on that she’d take up the child and—you didn’t know what with it.

  But Nancy hadn’t moved nor made any sound, and she was glad of that after, for Aunt Sawney only kept to her rocking, so slow and deliberate-like, nodding stiffly at each Jesus in her prayers. There was something the way she stared, something near fierce about it, the way with every rock of her chair she’d be willing her hopes inside the sleeping mite. Till a moan from the drawer broke the moment and soon enough the babba was looking for her feed. While the tiny mouth dribbled and the withered face watched, Nancy had prayed that Aunt Sawney would be spared to them, spared at least till the child would know her, and she’d love her Aunt Sawney for the true cause and source of her happiness, whatever share would come her way.

  She sighed now, and smoothed her dress over her knees. To and fro she rocked the crate, the wheels on cobbles scraped. She sighed again, and rhymed a music-hall snatch.

  It ain’t all honey and it ain’t all jam

  Wheeling round the houses with a home-made pram.

  It must be dinner-time for some boys came past, little tykes so they were, calling out “Maggie! Maggie!” and pointing their dirty fingers down the lane. Sure let them point. Soon enough now and it won’t be fingers they’re pointing. She took up the song herself, and sang as she’d heard it off the girls by the canal.

  O Maggie, hold your head up high

  Walk tall and proud and strong.

  You’re worth twice twenty score and more

  Than him that did this wrong.

  Well, she didn’t know what she was worth, not much she supposed, nor what Gordie was worth, little more now than a letter off the King. But you couldn’t call it wrong what they done together, not when you saw the little mite here. Oh sure Gordie, Gordie, I’ve mourned and missed you longer than ever I loved you. I love you yet, but I can’t be mourning for ever. Isn’t it enough I’ll never have my wedding-day nor never share your bed with you? Not once for my man to hold me in the night and wake with my man in my bed beside me. All that’s gone. The beginning of that was the ending of it. They’ll know me in years to come for the old maid does be watching at weddings. No, she never married, they’ll say, though ’tis known she was pretty once. Going into a hugger-mugger then, to relish the shame of the tale.

  She reached into the oranges crate and brought the bundle of sleep to her breast. Turning she saw the card in the shop window. Aunt Sawney had put it there after the babba was born. Gordon Mack, in thin black lettering inside of a thick black border. Gallipoli 1915. RIP. And he was a rip too. A rip and a bold particle. I was a girl then and he was a boy. You were after making a woman of me, Gordie, if you did but know. Though I doubt if ever I made a man of you. Is it only with men they can be made men of? Is it that why they rush to go?

  At the bottom of the card, old Macks had added, Corporal, “C” Comp., 7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers. For King & Country. Which last was a lie, but what harm, if it made old Macks happy.

  Poor old Mr. Mack. He has it harder than any of us, I sometimes think. There he is with his heart all set on being a gent. Will he never learn ’tis the mark of a gent, not that hats are lifted to him, but that he lifts his hat to others? And Mr. Mack is a gent to the bone. To the crown of the bowler hat of him.

  She went into the shop, where Jim looked up from the counter the way you’d be kind enough not to notice him there, and inside of the kitchen she heard Aunt Sawney giving a down-the-banks to Mr. Mack. The babba gave an egg-shaped yawn while the shop door closed behind. Home, said the clink.

  When the Dominican brother had called each boy privately to his room—this was on the last day of their retreat, two summers previous—he told them—or leastways he told Jim: Jim didn’t know what he told the other boys, for no boy ever spoke of that confession—he told Jim of the sins of the flesh, the horror of impure thoughts, the terrible consequences of the solitary vice. No sins destroy a soul so utterly as this shameful sin, he said. It steals the sinner from the hands of God and leads him like a crawling thing into the mire of filth and corruption. Once steeped in this mire, he cannot get out. The more he struggles, the deeper must he sink: for he has lost the rock of faith. My Spirit does not dwell in you, the Lord hath said, if you are nothing but flesh and corruption. And so God gives up the impure to all the wicked inclinations of his heart. Hear him laugh at the truths of religion. Delightful to him the stench of corruption. In the mire of passions he wallows. Yet even so he will seek to hide his shame, even from
his confessor, as if by darkness or solitude heaven were deceived. Will such a one at the last moment give a good confession, who has from his earliest youth heaped sacrilege on sacrilege? Will the tongue, which has been silent up to this day, be unloosed at the uttermost hour? No; God has abandoned him; heavy are the sins that already weigh him down; he will add one other, and it will be the last.

  This then was the spiritual sequel. The priest went on to tell the corporal sequelae, how God has set the mark of ignominy on the solitary sinner’s face. The sickly pallor, the eyes darkened with the shadows of vice, the listless restless joyless posture. Where once the future shone brightly in his eyes, now but gleams the dark road to lunacy. In this life the asylum is his sole hope, in the next the fires of hell.

  Jim had left that room, red-faced before the other boys who lined up outside waiting their turn, and he had walked the perimeter of the games field where other boys walked, each one alone, each with his head bowed down. He was burnt with shame and fear, but also he was scandalized. Why had no one warned him before this? Why wait till he was fifteen and he was confirmed in that vice? Indeed not confirmed only, but lost entirely, already abandoned by God. For the mark was on his face, plain to see, if he could bare to look, in his sallow skin, his dull eyes, in their maniacal blink. It was a scandal, and he had half a mind to go up to the national school now, burst in upon the classroom, cry it out to the young boys there, Don’t do it! Don’t think of it! Don’t start or you’re lost!

  But horror, at such a pitch, required a frequent refueling: his weekly confession attempted the task, but frequency of its nature makes horror tolerable. Time passed, and it was the discriminations and distinctions of sin, with regard to impure thoughts, that held Jim’s mind. That the Church should see so far ahead, so deeply inside the soul, that no contingency was overlooked but she planned for all the twistings and quibblings of conscience: it was a majestic thing to contemplate, a structure built of thought and logic, magnificent and complex as the cathedrals the Protestants had stolen from her. In the end, whether his hand moved to that solitary vice was neither here nor there. For already there was the sin of desiderium, which was the desire for what is sinful; of delectatio morosa, the pleasure taken in a sinful thought; of gaudium, the dwelling with complacency on sins already committed.

  It was round about that time when the notion first came on Jim that he might have a vocation for the Church.

  Then his brother came home on his embarkation leave. He spoke about Nancy. He spoke about—fetching off, he called it. Jim had never encountered the expression and for a moment he couldn’t think why his blood was rising. Then it hit him what his brother meant. It was worse, far worse, than confession. He felt his cheeks like coals.

  “Or have you given that up for Lent?” said his brother.

  “Shut up, you blackguard,” Jim told him.

  “Ah, shut up yourself, young ’un. Did you think I never catched on what kept you in the privy? I only wanted to say it’s all right, and don’t mind what they says. There isn’t much the army don’t learn you. ’Tis going without will drive you doolally.”

  “It’s a sin.”

  “Suit yourself. It does no harm. Better with a girl is all.”

  Whatever about its sinfulness and harmfulness, this last was transpicuously absurd. Jim couldn’t imagine doing it if a dog was in the room, let alone a girl. But living with a thing so long and so intimately could not but blunt the fear of its consequence. Besides, he was only half so wicked as he might be. His hand moved in actual sin, but his mind dwelt far away, far away from the efficacious sins of desire, perhaps on the sea, or on swimming there, or rocking amiably on the Forty Foot raft.

  Sophistry! Cruel deluded casuistry! The Crock’s Garden had been the end of that. He did not remember coming home, only lying in the dark later, in his settle-bed on his own. Even then he was not sufficiently steeped in the mire, but his hand must go below to the throb that was there, and moment by moment, touch by touch, he relived the scene, delighting in every strangeness, and the queer freedom he had felt in his submission, the relishing of his exposure, his bending to the seat and willing his vulnerableness, even of the pain savoring the memory, and hearing still the grunts of pleasure and his own compliant moans. And in his mind’s touch when he reached behind, it was not a soldier’s khaki he found, but a blue-gone shiny trousers.

  A holy draught had come in then under the window to shake the holy Sacred Heart flame. And in that flicker he saw it, the fiend that was his soul. His monstrous heart, his vicious flesh, nothing escaped that searing flash. Flickered the flame like the kitchen walls had gaped and before him blazed the fires of hell, to which his bed was inching, dragging its length along, ever and downward, to tip him finally in the pit of damnation.

  He leapt from the bed, giddy in flight, like he’d scut off a moving carriage. He found his Rosary beads. Quickly he prayed. So abandoned was he, the words would not come. He wound the beads round his hands. Let his beads now be the chains that bound him. Hindered in this way he dressed: he could not bear to be unclothed. He dug his fingernails into his palms. All night he prayed. On his knees by his bed, his elbows propped on the mattress, eyes held by the holy flame, smarting, stinging, watering, closing. And when they closed, his elbows slipped, shocking him awake, for he felt the bed itself had lurched. He had not thought a night could endure so long. While above strange noises he heard, a baby crying, a mother’s voice, the boards creaking with untimely passage.

  Next day was Sunday: there were no confessions to be had. Three Masses he heard, but without his receiving, there could be no solace. He thought to try St. Michael’s in Kingstown. It was St. Stephen’s day. He had never known the town so full with soldiers. He feared to look them in the face, yet hunted their profiles, as foundlings are said to, seeking their parents, though it was stray glances he sought, and feared to find them, cringing to think that any might know him. There were no confessions at St. Michael’s of course. He thought to stop a priest in the street. Father, I have sinned. But he dared not speak in the broad day. Another night he passed without sleep. The Monday, confessions were not till ten. He walked the streets while the shutters came down from the shops and the gas flared in the windows. Away on Howth dawn was only screaking. He heard early Mass, then did the Stations. In the second bench from the altar he told his Rosary. At last Father Taylor came in from the sacristy. A velvet shadow, he swept along the side passage. The door to his confessional latched home.

  Jim joined the queue of penitents. It was impossible he should say these things to Father Taylor. He had no words for these things. His mind would not consider them, but physically, in a twinge of his head, jarred their notion away. Would Father Taylor know him? The lamp that lit the priest’s profile would show his face if the priest turned. If the priest should turn and hunt him out of the confessional? There was a sin against the Holy Ghost that only a priest knew what it was. That sin could not be forgiven. If this were that sin? Was there truly such a sin?

  The queue shuffled its few feet closer to grace. And he with it.

  And now he was inside. The confessional evening closed round him. The crucifix glimmered in front. A woman’s mutters sounded through the space. Forgiven, Latin, click. A moment when all awaits. With louder click his own slide opens. Through the cruciform gauze in the grating the bristling ear of the priest.

  Jim told his sins that were commonplace and venial, hearing them for a national schoolboy’s at his first confession. When he finished the priest said, “Anything else, my son?” On Jim’s hesitating, he prompted, as Jim had known he must, “Sins of impurity?”

  Jim took a breath and in its exhalation outspilt the story, all the horrid notes, in quavers and breves as he stuttered and paused, how the black bushes he threaded between, and the waves had splattered the pathway, till he came to the shelter, and there he waited while the sea in restless motion moved, on and on, unmanning himself with the awful truths, and in his nervousness and dread perh
aps not entirely coherently, for the priest interrupted and asked, Was she a married woman?

  Jim was startled for a moment, so that he answered, No. Was she a fallen woman? It wasn’t a woman at all, Jim said. The priest paused. It was a girl, so. Jim began, but again the priest interrupted. Had he touched her? No, Father. He was certain he had not touched her? Father, it wasn’t a girl at all. Was she a Protestant woman and she did lure him on? Jim had thought this worst was over, but no, he must suffer the scandal of speaking it again. Father, he was truly ashamed to tell it, but it was a soldier, Father. An English soldier? Jim didn’t know. Was it the English soldier who lured him to the girl? It wasn’t a girl, Father. With a testy shake of his head that had Jim cowering lest he should turn, Father Taylor gave him to know it didn’t matter her age but it was the sin he should mind. He should thank God and His Holy Mother that She had looked down on him then and prevented his touching the fallen Eve. Where did this take place? Jim answered the pier. The pier, the priest told him, was a perilous place. The pier was an occasion only begging for sin. The pier in fact was a Protestant intrigue where they paid fallen women to parade in their finery and lure Catholic boys to their peril. Was he sorry for his sin? He was, but there really was no girl involved. It didn’t matter was she a girl or a woman, his guilt was the same, but if she was a married woman the sin was more grievous yet. Was he sure she was not married? Father, please, it was a soldier. The soldier must look to his own salvation. Father Taylor did not doubt he was a Saxon and a heretic and was most like lost to God. Either that or an Ulsterman. However, that he led Jim to the girl did not lighten one jot the blame attached to Jim. Did Jim promise never again to sin that way? It was a heinous sin even to speak to such a girl. Had he spoken? No, Father. Did he promise? He did. Would he promise never again to stray to the pier? He would promise that.