by Tom Phelan
“In my eyes, close to the road, he was standing ramrod straight, his high leather boots shining, his hands behind his back. The driver shouted, ‘Party, ’shun!’ and this officer said calmly, ‘It’s all right, driver.’ He looked at us, from one to the other, scattered about on the road. He looked at the man on the stretcher who was, in fact, dead.
“The officer put his hands on his hips. He looked at the lake of porridge we had just crossed, saw teams of plunging horses, saw other teams of stretcher-bearers wading their ways toward us carrying their loads at chest level. The muck-covered men and animals were moving slowly like ants after their nest has been flooded with treacle by a cruel child.
“The officer’s hands fell to his sides. He took a few steps forward as if he were making sure that the muddy lumps were really the bodies of men and horses, that the big things poking up into the sky were once shining guns that had shot one-ton shells two miles into the distance. And his eyes went all the way to the village on the hill, Passchendaele, and he seeing for the first time what the hell-fields of three battles look like.
“He joined his hands at his crotch, laced his fingers together like a man who knows he has to protect himself. He turned and looked back toward Wipers. In his spit and polish, his ribbons and stripes, he looked down at us; none of us wearing a helmet, our hair matted and stuck to our heads, the rest of our bodies coated in wet mud, the whites of our eyes all the whiter in our black faces. We were more like dug-up corpses than soldiers of the king. We were men exhausted beyond exhaustion, too exhausted to show him respect, too exhausted to talk to him. He looked again at the awful mud, six feet deep in places. The ground all around us, from Passchendaele to Wipers, was churned up, loose and watery like what comes out of a sick animal’s hole. The shell craters were lakes, and in the lake-water terrible things floated and at the bottom of the lakes terrible bits of things lay piled up. Bodies that had been buried here at Tyne Cot earlier in the War had been ploughed up in bits and pieces by the latest shelling. To this officer of rank, the smell of the rotting flesh must have been sickening.
“When he looked down again and saw what we had become, a sob shook his whole body, shook him violently because he had been fighting against what he knew was going to come out of him in front of subordinates. He stumbled back until he was leaning against the car. He snatched his hat off his head, and said, ‘Good God. Good God, did we send men to fight in this?’ He didn’t try to hide his face in his hands while he cried. Then he turned around and laid his forehead on his arms on the car’s edge. The sounds of his other fist pounding the roof of the car were mixed with the strange sounds coming out of his mouth, the high-pitched, sad sounds a pig makes when the long knife is pressing on its flesh above its heart. Then he threw up and his shining boots got splattered with his own vomit.”
Matthias stopped talking there, just like that, and I waited in vain for him to go on. But he was finished talking about that place called Passchendaele where my child had either drowned, been shot, or blown to smithereens. And I knew that, no matter what had happened to him, no part of him would be found and that he would never be tenderly buried, like a son should be, showered with tears. Somewhere in Belgium, beneath many feet of soil, my Lionel lay lost like a drowned swimmer, arms and legs stretched out in the clutching, hardening clay that pressed into his unprotected face.
On the Bridge over the Canal, I grasped Matthias’s upper arm and cried for Lionel and for Sarah, for my David, for Con, and for every young man who had died at Passchendaele, for every young man who’d been wasted in the War, for their mothers and fathers. I cried in shame, too, for making Matthias revisit that place whose very name spoke of the last passions of so many young lads.
Kitty Hatchel
Two mornings after Missus Hodgkins’s visit, Matthias was in the kitchen when I got up. Hope welled in my chest. In sleep-raspy voices we good-morninged each other. Silently, we drank tea and ate buttered bread. When I took my coat off the hook at the back of the door, Matt stood up and followed me into the yard. He already had Daddy’s battered, big-framed BSA bike lying against the gable end of the house when I wheeled Mammy’s bike out of the turf shed.
“Please, God,” I prayed.
While I freewheeled down the far side of the Bridge, I slyly cast an eye back across the Canal, and he was there on the other side, off the saddle, pushing down on the pedals with all his weight as if he’d forgotten that the only way to beat the steep slope was to go at it with speed already gathered on the flat. Then I promised myself I wouldn’t look again till I got to the Harbour, but I couldn’t bear it that far. As I was passing the entrance to the Lamberts’, I glanced over my shoulder, pretended to be looking at the pile of ashes that had lain in the foundations of the big house since it was burned down by the IRA. Like I always did, I shivered at the remembrance of the two old brothers, struggling to escape the flames but dying inside—the pain, the screams.
In the corner of my eye, Matthias was two hundred yards back. By the time I wheeled off Harbour Lane onto Bops, I knew I was letting myself get carried away, that in reality Matthias still had years to travel before he finally came home; I knew he’d look at me again as if I were a stranger; knew I had to dampen my galloping hope that he had suddenly snapped back into our world. And what I hoped for outweighed what I knew.
When I was on the Marbra Road for a mile, he began to catch up with me. Just as I steered into the Hodgkins’s avenue, he drew level and his fat tyres made a grinding sound in the gravel. My heart was pounding, the palms of my hands so damp that they slipped on the handlebars. He said, “Kitty, I’m going to work for Missus Hodgkins and I’m going to marry you when I get better. I’ll be seeing Con all over Enderly.”
I got into such a wobble that I nearly fell off my bike. By the time I got around the last bend on the avenue, Matt had gone through the green wicket gate in the Famine wall surrounding the farmyard and the house.
Exactly one month later, on a wet day, Sarah Hodgkins went out to the farmyard just before dinnertime. She stood in the doorway of the Machine Shed and looked at Matthias, fat drops dripping onto her rain hat off the wooden lintel above her.
Missus Hodgkins had seen Sarah passing the kitchen window, and now she had her nose pressed against the glass, rubbing away the fog of her breath every few seconds with the corner of her floury apron. She was making little noises as she spied on her daughter, and her fingertips played against the glass as if she were a wild animal not knowing it was clawing for its freedom. She said later that she was suffering from the hope that this might be the beginning of the moment when Sarah’s mind would be snapped off whatever it was that was holding her in the past.
When Sarah darkened the doorway under the dripping lintel, Matthias glanced up from his work and said, “Come in out of the rain.” She did, and it was twenty minutes more before she spoke, asked Matt where Con was and he told her he was buried in a cemetery near Ocean Villas in France. She asked him how Con had died, and he told her that he’d been shot while loading a casualty onto a stretcher.
“At the time, I thought it was the easiest thing for her to hear,” he told me many months later.
Silently, Sarah looked at Matt shaving a new wooden handle for a drill harrow. He knew she was weeping, but he didn’t do or say anything, kept shaving the handle as if she weren’t there. After a long time, she went away.
Missus Hodgkins didn’t stop talking that day after Sarah came back from the Machine Shed. She dusted every piece of furniture on the first floor while she talked to me through the open kitchen door. Her speech was full of “Maybe this,” “Maybe that,” “I hope,” “I pray,” “Poor Sarah,” “Poor Lionel,” “David.” Then she said Con’s and Matt’s names, because she never recited her list of losses without remembering them.
On the day after their first encounter, Sarah suddenly appeared in the Machine Shed door again. It wasn’t raining, so she didn’t have to go in. It took her a long time to ask Matt if he’d been wou
nded.
“Just these,” he said, and rubbed the side of his face, “from tiny bits of a hot shell.”
After a long time Matt asked her, “Why are you wearing that veil?”
Her face had been burned in the same fire that burned five other VADs to death in a dressing station in France, she said.
“How long were you in hospital after the fire?”
“About nineteen months.”
“Where?”
“Pine Haven.”
“In Scotland?”
“Yes. Edinburgh,” Sarah said. She stepped into the shed and moved her fingers over the nearest of the centre poles that held up the roof of the wide shed. She looked at the barkless, age-polished pine pole the way a woman looks at a baby’s face while she traces her fingers over the soft flesh, as if she loved the wood like a woman loving the face of her baby. “I knitted a jersey for Con while I was there, diamonds in four colours.”
“He was wearing it when he was killed,” Matt said. Sarah brought her hands to her face like someone who’s heard something they don’t know what to do with.
Missus Hodgkins stayed at the kitchen window until she invented a reason to go out and walk past the Machine Shed door. When she came back she was almost grinning. “She’s only ten feet away from Matthias,” she said, “and they’re talking.”
A black and spikey feeling swept around my chest.
Matt said to Sarah, “I was in a hole near the very end with an officer who’d just come back from Pine Haven. ‘And here I am,’ he says, ‘in a shell hole on my first day back, with a dead horse and a live Irishman.’ I asked him would he like it better the other way around—dead Irishman and live horse? He laughed with every part of his face except his eyes. He had dreadful eyes. His name was Owen, first or last I don’t remember; his name reminded me of Owen Egan. Poor Ownie’s all shell-shocked. I asked him about his wound and he said, ‘Pine Haven is for the head, not the body.’”
Matthias didn’t tell Sarah that when Owen said Pine Haven was for head injuries, that he’d put the tip of his index finger against his temple, twirled his hand and said, “Dottyville.”
Soon Sarah was finding Matt every day and staying near him. The long silences of one didn’t seem to bother the other.
And I knew what I was feeling was jealousy.
“Did you kill anyone?” Sarah asked Matt when he was putting in a new stile for the Lower Paddock.
And Matt said, “I did—men so wounded they had no chance of living.” He thought the conversation was over, but a long time later Sarah asked, “What about God?”
“What about God?”
“Only God has the right to kill.”
Matthias rested the heavy head of the mallet on top of the stile post. “I saw what was on the battlefield when the shooting stopped. God wasn’t there. I was. I killed men who were better dead than alive.” Matthias hammered the post down into the earth to the eighteen-inch notch he had cut with his knife. “There is no God, Sarah; that’s why he wasn’t in France or Belgium between 1914 and 1918.”
Sarah went over to the wooden paddock fence, put her hands on the top and looked for a long time across the field to the trees where the flocks of crows came home to roost every night.
Matthias used the partially constructed stile to climb into the paddock. With the crowbar, he pierced the earth and twisted it around in the hole. Before he pulled it out he said, “I am not a murderer, Sarah. I saved men. I saved the ones I brought back, and I saved the ones that were too bad to bring back.’”
Sarah turned away from the tall trees and looked at Matt. For the first time, they looked at each other’s eyes, stayed looking for a long time. Then Matthias told me they heard me whacking the gong to tell them dinner was ready.
Another day, Sarah and Matthias were coming back to the farmyard after moving sixty-two yearlings into a field of aftergrass. From one corner of the Big Pasture to the other, they were almost walking side by side, she a few steps behind.
“Did you know that Con thought you were a goddess?” Matthias asked.
Sarah said nothing, almost stopped walking, felt her veil to make sure it was tied properly.
“Con said you were the most beautiful girl in the world. When you were near him he couldn’t talk because you were so beautiful, and he said if he lived in a fairy tale you would kiss him and he’d turn into a wartier frog than the one he was already. He’d say, ‘Whenever Sarah came near me I couldn’t talk and all my warts lit up like the Christmas lights we saw in the Liffey that time.’”
Sarah made a noise and her veil swelled out in front of her mouth. “Con hadn’t warts,” she said.
“He felt he had when you were near him. Many times when we hadn’t spoken for a long time, one of us would ask the other what was he thinking about. Con had two answers: Sarah or the Canal, but most times it was Sarah. Under hedges, in trenches, under stretchers, on our backs looking up at the stars, looking at the faraway War at night, once in a shell hole where we’d been for five hours, it was always Sarah. He was in love with you, or at least he imagined he was, and you were someone for him to hold on to. You were with him all the time, Sarah, keeping him going. The only time he took off the jersey you knitted for him was to wash himself or it. Sarah’s diamonds, he always called it.” When Matthias came to the Back Gate he began to hold it open for Sarah, but when he stepped aside for her, she was standing twenty feet back. She was turned away from him. He knew she was crying and he didn’t know what to do. He went on and let the Back Gate swing shut after him.
Two months later, shortly after moving into the foreman’s cottage, Matt was sitting up with a mare, waiting for her to foal. It was two o’clock in the morning when Sarah quietly opened the stable door. In the light of the yard lamp she quietly placed a mug of tea and a buttered scone on an upturned bucket. Matt was lying in an armful of straw in the corner of the stall. Sarah went to the opposite corner and sat on the ancient crushed-oats chest, coated with the dried drool of fifty years of passing horses.
After a while, Matt whispered, “Is that for me?” meaning the tea and the scone.
“It’s not for Jackdempsey,” Sarah whispered back, the first glimmer of lightheartedness that Matt heard from her. The giant horse, Jackdempsey, was two stalls away, standing as he slept.
Quietly, Matt rolled out of the crinkling straw. When he finished eating he hung the mug on a hook in the door and sat on the upturned bucket, nearer to Sarah. He leaned back against the door. They looked at the big-bellied mare lying in the straw, her short, irregular pushes trying to get her foal started on its journey. Matthias already had the mare’s tail wrapped in sacking and binder twine.
“Do you ever feel bad about the lads you killed?” Sarah whispered. She waited the long time it took for Matthias to line up his words. “Guilty?” she prompted. “Do you ever feel guilty?”
When he finally answered, Matt spoke like a man in the confessional, but it was only because of the nervous mare that he was whispering. “I could have brought them back to the dressing stations to get patched up. They’d have lived the rest of their lives in pain and blindness and deafness and crippleness and loneliness, sides of faces gone, jaws and chins shot away, faces wiped clean by red-hot shrapnel, no noses, no eyes. There and then, at that moment when I was pushing Knifey into them, I was saving them from surviving another few hours as bundles of pain till all the blood soaked out and they roared with thirst, if they had tongues or throats to roar with. If I feel any guilt, it’s because I didn’t save more of them. I brought back too many that were stitched together like rag dolls, like worn sacks patched on a winter’s night, and sent to old soldiers’ homes to stare at white ceilings for the rest of their lives while someone else fed and wiped them because they were paid to do it.”
The mare made a sudden move with her head, made the pruttering-smuffering noise horses make with their big lips that sounds like they’re asking a question. Then the mare’s bag broke, and the water ran out of her
like a big splash flowing out of an overturned bucket. Jackdempsey rattled his lips in his sleep.
“It won’t be long now,” Matthias whispered.
“That’s what the monkey said when the train ran over his tail,” Sarah said. Matthias looked at her as if he was looking at a cat standing on its hind legs with a fiddle under its chin and a bow in its paw. Sarah didn’t turn her eyes away. Matt told me that it was because he believed she was smiling behind her veil, that she was strong for a moment, that he asked her, “Were they able to do anything at Pine Haven? Patch you up?”
Sarah felt the edges of her veil, satisfied herself that it was in place. The mare groaned. The two white hooves of the foal had appeared in the blackness of the vulva. Sarah whispered, “I know how to help. Daddy always let me clean the new foals.”
The legs slipped out and the nose was exactly between the legs near the knees. They sat and waited and watched and let the mare push out her foal before they stood, then made quiet noises to let the mare know they were close by. It was after four o’clock when Matthias and Sarah said goodnight to each other, sounding like two normal people.
It was a long time before I heard about the foaling, but even with all that time gone by, a cold, thorny, iron bar turned around inside my chest, tore at the strings around my heart.
Kitty Hatchel
Missus Hodgkins had not taken Jackdempsey out since Sarah and Lionel went to the War. She said she had lost the will to enjoy herself. Jackdempsey had grown fat and wild, and Phil Kelly had tried and failed to gallop him back into shape.
Seeing Matt stepping into Enderly that first time since he’d gone away with Con must have touched something inside Missus Hodgkins, maybe rekindled the joy she’d once known when the farmyard was all abustle with men and animals. The first thing she told Matt he had to do was bring Jackdempsey out for long rides to drain all the built-up energy out of him, to retame him.
