A Long Long Way

by Sebastian Barry

  Oh, Willie knew all the details, and they were like embers now in his head, hurting him strangely. The darker details he had from Gretta’s father, of course, the dark, hard details that had seemed bad enough going into his head, but had grown and spread there since.

  Four men left killed. It was odd that those four men meant so much, when he had seen now so many others killed. But they did.

  Dempsey the builder of course would never employ a union man, and they had worked all through the General Strike, and so might be said to have the characteristics of scabs. That was a bother to Willie too now, looking back.

  Willie remembered coming home that night to this very room and his father was sitting alone in the dark, in his uniform still. Willie went up to him and asked him how he was, and got no answer. That silence in the dark room puzzled him that time and it still puzzled him. It terrorized him.

  And he wondered at himself that he couldn’t stand in his father’s quarters without rehearsing the story over again. He felt like a traitor really.

  Now his father came up from the yards with little Dolly led by the hand.

  And Dolly broke from her father’s grip and came running without a word to Willie and hugged his dirty legs. Willie stroked her head gingerly, adoringly. She was adding her happy tears to the soiled uniform.

  ‘There you are, Dolly,’ said Willie. ‘There you are at last.’

  ‘Ah, Willie, Willie,’ said his father, all the great height of him, and the wide waistband straining as ever. ‘The veritable hero returns.’

  ‘How are you, Papa, and I’ve missed you. I hope you got all my letters?’

  ‘And I hope you got all mine?’

  ‘I got many, and I suppose it was all of them, and you were very kind to think of writing to me.’

  ‘My God, Willie,’ he said. ‘It was my honour to write to you.’

  ‘Willie, Willie,’ said Dolly, ‘what are you after bringing me?’

  ‘He hasn’t had a chance to do anything, I’m sure,’ said his father. ‘Leave the lad be.’

  ‘We’ll go down to Duffy’s after, Dolly, and see what big gob-stoppers she has for us,’ said Willie, a little abashed.

  ‘You will of course,’ said his father.

  Then he cleared out the bigger girls and Willie stripped out of his uniform and his long-johns and his father bagged them up and opened the rear door and flung them out to Maud and Annie for ginger boiling. Dolly sat on an old chair. It was a finely carved one but very spindly, that had been their mother’s special chair in the bedroom of old, a dress chair. Dolly watched the show gleefully, swinging her legs like a clock gone mad.

  ‘Can we not come in?’ Annie teased, and her father roared back at her, like she was a rascally hen advancing into the house against the wishes of the yard woman.

  So James Patrick, a man of six foot six, stood his son William, a man of five foot six, into the steaming zinc bath, as indeed Willie’s mother had done a thousand times while Willie was a boy. And it was a strange enough thing, to see the policeman throwing on the accustomed moleskin apron kept for the purpose no doubt of washing Dolly still, and fetching in close the basin with the big sponge and the carbolic soap. And he lathered the sponge up mightily, and he started to lave his son from head to foot, cascading the water neatly over everything. And the lice must have been flying from Willie Dunne just like those poor men in Sackville Street from the batons, and soon the water was speckled with them, little writhing white creatures. He saw under the suds or through them that his skin was all blotched with red circles so he supposed he had the ringworm into the bargain. Certainly the nits must be in his head because it was terrible itchy now in the steaming heat. But his hair was only recently cut as short as the Viceroy’s lawn, so the nits had not much chance against his father’s nit comb, which he wielded now like a delicate surgeon, combing out the eggs.

  Then he asked his son politely to step out and he fetched the big sheet from the range in the scullery and came back in and wound it round and round his son, till he sucked the wetness off him.

  Then a pair of clean long-johns of his father’s was fetched and the legs had to be rolled up and the arms, and then Willie put on his old working suit from when he used to go out building. His uniform would be a while drying, what with the heavyish material in it.

  Then, when he was all shipshape, his father put his big arms around him, and held him close to him for a few moments, like an actor on the stage.

  It was not a thing you would see in real life anyway, and there was a faraway look on his father’s face, like it was all years ago and otherwise and maybe they were still in Dalkey and he was a little lad.

  But he was a soldier now of some nineteen years and for all that he was glad of his father’s arms around him, strange as it was, strange and comforting as it was.

  ‘Come on and get a hat on, Willie, and we’ll go, and we’ll go!’ shouted Dolly Dunne.

  His furlough slipped by and seemed like only a handful of minutes. He spent some pleasing hours with Gretta, walking about the place, and she was very friendly to him really. Her father was thinking of deserting the army, that was the main news. He didn’t intend going to France, anyhow.

  His last evening Willie sat by the fire with his own father. He might rather have been out up the road to see Gretta, but he had a strong desire to linger near the bulk of his father. Whatever hard thoughts he had about him, his love for him was entirely undiminished. And he could hardly get enough of his breathing presence. The two chairs were pointing at the flames; there were four or five lumps of wood blazing generously. It was a plain dark blue fireplace made of slate.

  ‘That wood came up from Humewood,’ said his father. ‘The old fella sent me up a good load, and that’s the last of it.’

  It was pleasant though to think the very logs had grown up in the woods of Humewood.

  They said nothing for a little while. It was an easeful heat creeping out and into their bones, for all that it was April. Just to the right of the fireplace on the old wallpaper were still the ancient marks of the measuring, when his father used to put him up against the wall like a fella to be shot at dawn, and place the volume of Irish operettas on his head, and mark the height religiously with a thick-leaded policeman’s pencil. He could still in his mind’s eye see his father lick the lead and peer at the new mark, delightedly or not, as the measure of progress might warrant. Even in the murky firelight now he could make out the marks clearly, for if the wallpaper pattern was fading, the pencil marks looked freshly made. But it was a few years now, of course, since they had abandoned that ritual. Plain as day were the last ones, two or three marks from different dates, but one virtually on top of the other, where his growth had ceased. There was an angry look to those last marks.

  ‘I’ll be retiring now in a few years, Willie, so we won’t be here that much longer in the castle.’

  It was astonishing for Willie to think of his father retired. And old maybe too in due course. He could not imagine it at all.

  ‘How many years will that be in the force, Papa?’

  ‘Forty years, Willie. It was a good life till recently.’

  ‘How do you mean, Papa?’

  ‘Ah, it’s not the same now. There’s all sorts of new villainy now that you could barely be keeping up with.’

  ‘You’ll go back to Kiltegan, Papa?’

  ‘I will, of course.’

  ‘The girls will like that. Annie will like that in particular.’

  ‘She will, unless I get her married off first!’

  ‘You think?’ he said, laughing.

  ‘Well, sure, why not? She deserves her chance too.’

  And indeed and indeed, you never knew, and never mind the humped back.

  ‘And you might like it yourself, when the war is over,’ said his father.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said.

  Then there was another lengthy silence. Willie stared almost surreptitiously at his father, the big, serious face. Willie jumpe
d when his father fixed his eyes on him suddenly.

  ‘It’s rough out there, is it, Willie?’

  ‘Out where, Papa?’ he said. ‘Do you mean out in Belgium?’

  ‘Aye, I do, aye.’

  ‘It is,’ Willie allowed.

  ‘I gather it is, all right. That’s what everyone does be saying.’

  Then nothing for a while.

  ‘I think about it, Willie. I think about it. I think about a great deal of things. I pray for you.’

  ‘I’ll be all right, Papa.’

  ‘Of course you will, of course you will.’

  ‘The only thing I wish you’d get going at is the letter writing,’ he said to Gretta the next morning. He was walking her down to Capel Street where she worked as a seamstress.

  ‘I haven’t been good at that,’ she said. ‘I will improve now mightily. I do think of you all the time, Willie. I’m tired in the evening when I get home and have to make a supper and then I just sit in my chair like a ghost or fall into the doss.’

  ‘And I wish I could be in that doss beside you.’

  ‘Well, some day, maybe, Willie.’

  ‘If we could get an understanding, between ourselves, a kind of engagement, Gretta, do you know?’

  She stopped on the bridge, and stopped him, and turned him towards her, and surprisingly shook a finger at him.

  ‘We have to wait, Willie.’

  ‘For what?’ he said, a touch desperately.

  ‘For the war to be over and you to be home and you to know your own mind. There’s never any sense in a soldier’s wedding, Willie.’

  ‘I know my own mind. There’s nothing in the world more important than this matter, Gretta. I would like to be your husband.’

  ‘And I would like to be your wife, of all the lads in Dublin. Of all the lads in Ireland. Leave me here on the bridge, Willie.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t want the bossman Mr Casey seeing us. He’s like a bishop when it comes to his women courting.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Don’t look so sad. I’ll come tonight to the barracks gate and see you in safe, Willie.’

  ‘I do love you, Gretta,’ he said, feeling glum and unhappy in that moment.

  ‘And I do love you, Willie,‘ she said, and of course he was happier then, how could he help it?

  And she was there that evening, as good as her word, and kissed him under the big Lombardy poplars along the grand canal, where the gates of the barracks were. It was like a brief furlough in heaven, kissing Gretta. Then she drew him back into the deeper dark, till he was aware of bulrushes and the light stink of water. And they lay down together like ghosts, like floating souls, and she drew up her skirt in the greeny dark.

  Chapter Seven

  It was in the very seam of night and morning, and Willie woke with ease and freshness. His body was warm and his limbs did not ache. It was very odd really.

  His brain was merely human nonetheless, and for the first few moments he didn’t know where he was. The long room with its iron pillars stretched away and a fine muslin-looking light pierced in wherever the window shutters were not snug.

  The room was full of breathing, those private breaths of human sleep. His comrades lay in the iron beds like prison men. There was a smell of polish and the pleasing murmurs of men dreaming. His pecker was hard and had a powerful desire to piss. If it was not one thing it was another.

  Then well he knew where he was. He was in bloody barracks. His leave was over. Back he must go.

  He scouted under his bed and fetched out the pisspot and pissed into it.

  ‘What’s up?’ said a Southern Irish voice, and the soldier in the bed adjacent lashed upright, his travelling Bible falling off his pillow towards the floor, and into the wretched pisspot.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ said the soldier, obviously disorientated, ‘the Word of God’s in the bloody bucket. Who put that bucket there? Isn’t there hooks for those buckets?’

  He had a hollow face of uneven eyes and a twisted nose like a damaged bolt, and two queer little yellowshot eyes like the eyes of an ill-intentioned snake.

  ‘Listen,’ said Willie, deeply embarrassed, ‘I’ll fetch it out for you.’

  It was in a very sorry state. The paper of the Bible was that thin sort they put in Bibles, to fit in all the stories and suchlike.

  ‘Look it, I’ll give you my own,’ said Willie Dunne, though his own had been a present from Maud, with the same thin paper, and stuck in everywhere the letters sent to him, and a sacred photograph of all of them, made in a shop in Grafton Street before his mother had died.

  ‘Ah, don’t mind it,’ said the soldier.

  ‘What?’ said Willie. ‘You can’t still be wanting this one?’

  Now Willie Dunne held up the other ruined little Bible pragmatically in his right hand, the urine dripping off it. He could see that every page had been claimed by the wetness. Now the soldier also was gazing at it, as if reconsidering his reaction. The first instinct of a comrade was to be agreeable, because the life of a soldier was chancy, and this fellow after all was probably a new man. Nevertheless, the plain vision of his Bible seemed to overcome him suddenly, and he sat up roughly in the bed and swung out his stubby legs.

  ‘You fucking midget, you,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ said Willie Dunne.

  ‘Ah, you manky midget, you,’ said the man, now ferociously, and because his mouth of teeth was bad, he spluttered. What a change round. He had a Cork accent like an illness. And who indeed was he calling a midget? He wasn’t much taller than Willie.

  The little man launched himself from the bed and put his two hands around Willie Dunne’s neck and squeezed. It was so sudden Willie might have laughed if he hadn’t been choking.

  Now most of the other poor men were awake and a few were ignoring the first event of the day and were dutifully setting up their shaving gear, and the doors were being unlocked and shortly the barracks orderlies would be bringing in the tepid water and the like. Willie Dunne was not fighting back one ounce and his face was going red now, and the other little man working away to strangle the living life out of him.

  Suddenly the Corkman stopped and looked at Willie Dunne, as if they were sitting at a bar and sharing a drink.

  ‘What?’ said Willie again, half dead.

  ‘They won’t let me go to France if I kill you,’ he said, smiling now.

  ‘Definitely not, no, they won’t.’

  ‘And you’ll give me your own Bible then?’

  ‘I will, if you want.’

  ‘Get it for me, so.’

  So Willie stooped to his pack and reluctantly ferreted out his fine Bible and looked at it and offered it to the man.

  ‘Ah, you’re all right,‘ said the man, laughing. ’I’m not taking your Bible, even if you did make a hames of my own.’

  The man smoothed his hollow cheeks with a hand and looked about for to see if the hot water was coming. And Willie put the Bible back in his pack.

  ‘Do you have a bet on?’ said the man, at ease now, in his shirt, the sleeves rolled up. ‘I have a little be on ’All Sorts“.‘

  ‘How’s that?’ said Willie.

  ‘The Grand National,’ said the man, surprised.

  ‘Oh, yeh, no, I don’t.’

  ‘The Grand National is the poor man’s friend,’ said the man, ‘and I’m the poor man.’

  Willie Dunne laughed. It was a fair joke.

  ‘Kirwan’s the name, Jesse Kirwan, Cork City.’

  ‘William Dunne, Dublin,’ said Willie Dunne, and they shook hands, despite the general presence of urine on Willie’s greeting hand. ‘Who are you with?’

  ‘The Dublins, like yourself. All the lads I came up with are mostly. We might have joined the Munster Fusiliers, but we decided to be awkward.’

  ‘Come on, the Dublins,’ said Willie lightly.

  ‘Come on, the Irish,’ said the little man. Then he turned on a sixpence and said, ‘What did the Irish ever do?’
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  Willie laughed. There was a bitter tincture to that laugh.

  ‘Lost a lot of lads at Mons, that’s what,’ said Willie. ‘And Ypres, and the Marne. Loads and loads of young lads. That’s what we Irish did, lately.’

  There was good hot water fetched in now, and he was setting-to to lather his own cheeks, and have a decent shave for himself.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Private Kirwan, very pleasantly, ‘that’s my answer.’

  Now the doors were rattled and the shouts went up.

  Private Kirwan was still looking now and then at Willie Dunne, as if he was thinking on what had been said to him.

  The girls of Dublin were out in force again at any rate, just like the year before, waving little Union Jacks. The soldiers in the transports were laughing and shouting at the talent on offer.

  Willie Dunne strained above the heads of his taller fellows to see if he could catch a sight of Gretta. It would be difficult to see her among the crowds, but she had told him exactly where to look for her, if she managed to concoct an excuse to get away from her work. The bossman Mr Casey was a pious bastard and if he thought she was going to wave off a soldier there’d be no chance at all.

  His new pal Jesse Kirwan had somehow got himself on the same lorry but he didn’t seem to want to be gazing out much on the passing sights. He was hunkered down against the side of the lorry, not even perching his bum on the rough benches.

  ‘Won’t you look out at old Dublin?’ said Willie Dunne.

  ‘Ah, it’s not my town.’

  ‘Can’t you take a gander at it even if it isn’t? There’s rakes of girls just as pretty as anything.’

  ‘Are there now?‘ said Jesse Kirwan, and hauled himself up after all, and peered out across the planking. ’Well, by God and all, Willie, you’re right there.‘