From a Low and Quiet Sea

by Donal Ryan

  I was given a tour of the vaults of a bank one time years later by a man who said he didn’t believe in God. A squat man, but handsome in his way, with silver hair and steady eyes and a charming smile. He put gold in my hand, that shining standard, a bar of it, and I felt its coldness on my skin, leaking into me. Science would say the opposite should happen, that the heat of my body should have warmed that metal where I touched it, but gold has its own rules, it seems. I asked him what the bar was worth, and he said, Forty thousand pounds, and I bought it from him there and then. I paid that little alchemist by cheque and his smile was the same as it always was as he folded my cheque away and handed me my gold inside a small roped bag. I kept the bar of gold inside a combination-locked briefcase inside a safe that was set in the floor of my office, snug in the concrete. I took it out every now and then, and I set it on my desk and I twined my fingers together and looked at it. It shone no matter what the light. I lowered my face down onto it sometimes, and rested my cheeks against it, and thought how anyone watching would think me a madman, bowed and prone in a business suit, but my office had no windows and its door was always locked. I marvelled always at its coldness, how its frigid aspect belied its malleability, its ductile nature.

  Often I took that gold and laid it across the palms of my hands and lifted it, and closed my eyes, and I’d imagine the intercession I wished for, the small variation I wanted made, and when I opened my eyes again a calf was always standing on my hands, placid and sinewed, graven by some magic from the gold, gleaming in that lightless place. And as often as not my prayed-for thing would come to pass. Now what do you think of that? All the gold in the mantle and the crust of the earth fell from the heavens. That’s a fact. It came in a bombardment, four billion years ago, flung down from the darkness, from the spaces between stars.

  My brother’s name was Edward. O Father, if you’d seen him. He was beautiful, even I knew that, and I only a wobbling grey gosling in the corner of the field he commanded, adoring him. I knew my parents loved him best and I didn’t care; sure, how could it have been otherwise? I always saw the things people thought they’d concealed fully; I had a devilish knack for it. Edward was six years older than me and he was kind to me always, as he was to little Henry and to Julie and to Connie, who was three years younger than him and who worshipped him like I did, only with a more fervent intensity, a strange unsettling love. She’d follow him from room to room and moon over him, sitting quietly pretending to be reading while he studied or listened to the radio but I knew she was watching him, his lips moving as he read, a habit he had, like he wasn’t a strong reader even though he was – he read books my father wouldn’t have been able for, about science and history and all the things that happened and the ways people lived in faraway parts of the world – or laughing or whistling in amazement at something that was funny on the radio or shocking in the news, and she’d say, What? What is it? And he’d explain to her, patiently, the thing he’d been laughing at or amazed by, and she’d say, Oh, that’s really funny, Ed, or Oh, that’s really interesting, Ed, and Julie and Henry and I would smirk behind our hands and she’d pinch us if she caught us and tell us to get out, we were disturbing Edward and it wasn’t fair.

  I don’t think my brother Edward was able to commit a sin. He hurled and kicked football in a way that brought tears to old men’s eyes. He picked up Irish like another boy would pick up the baiting of a hook or the raising of a sliotar; he was a true Gael in learning and manner and strength. The teachers at school were nearly jealous of him. We drove one day to Thurles for the minor county final; we were in the lead car, Daddy and Edward, the captain, and me and a burlap sack of hurls, and I stared at him that whole winding way down to Semple Stadium. He only smiled at me now and again and squeezed my leg or punched my arm gently in play. He was quiet; I thought he must be nervous. Expectation must have weighed on him, although you’d never have thought it if you hadn’t known him like I did, every mannerism and tic and way of talking and of being silent. He hurled that day like a supernatural thing; he scored before him and was lifted off the field and applauded and cheered, even by the opposition, and going home in the car he turned a kind of a pale, sickly colour and he told my father he didn’t feel great and Daddy asked did he want him to stop and Edward said, no, he’d be grand, and Daddy said, Let me know, son. You played your guts out. I wouldn’t blame you for feeling sick.

  When we arrived into the yard at home Edward’s leg betrayed him getting out of the car and he fell onto the flags and he died there where he fell. There’s a spark that burns inside the heart that fuels its beating. Doctors know little about the working of it and less again about its random sudden extinguishing, only that it sometimes stutters and winks out without warning in the hearts of the fit and young. That’s what happened to Edward: all that long road home from the county final that tiny flame was being quenched and relit, as though darkness and light waged war on one another in his chest. And in the end, as dear Edward stepped from Daddy’s car and my mother watched out the kitchen window with a smile of welcome already on her lips, darkness won. My father stood outside in the yard that night and roared curses at the heavens and my mother sat whitely on a chair alongside Edward’s bed with her rosary beads, and I crept upstairs and knelt on the floor outside that sacred room and repeated my father’s curses word for word, and meant them, down to the centre of me. I cursed and blasphemed and swore and railed against Him, and never once repented for that yet. The Lord won’t hold me guiltless, Father, will He? That endlessly bargaining God, that meticulous exacter of tolls.

  The Lord won’t hold me guiltless for I took His name in vain. And never in the offhand way of the thoughtlessly profane, cursing at the flight of a ball or the turn of a card or some sudden mishap: I revelled in it; I knew what I was saying, what I was doing. Things that some men say by rote and habit I said with malignant design, with relish: God, blast you. God, damn. Damn you, God, damn you. You know how this would go if I went on. I hated that jealous God who visited the iniquities of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations, even while He showed mercy to thousands, to all those who loved Him and kept His Commandments. I watched Him visit iniquity; He did it in my father’s yard, before my eyes.

  It was a Sunday that my brother died and never after was it kept holy. My father continued to go to Mass and observe holy days of obligation, and folded notes into collections for the priests of the parish and the upkeep of the church, and my mother was unstinting in her duties and was always at his side, or a half a step behind him, but inside the boundaries of our farm there was no God; He was cast out, evicted, and all His pious furnishings destroyed. Statues carved or cast of stone or clay were smashed to pieces on the flags of the yard. Pictures of the Sacred Heart were ripped from their frames and the frames were snapped and kindled and the pictures and the frames were stacked and burned. The same flames will lick the flesh from your bones some day, my mother told my father, as he stoked the bonfire, and your flesh will grow back to be flayed away again, over and over for all of eternity. I don’t care, my father told her, I don’t care. And my mother said no more to him, just walked back into her kitchen and her chores, pale and bent from sorrow.

  So I took my lead where it was given and I never remembered the Sabbath day, nor did I keep it holy. Six days I laboured always, all my life, and did all my work, and the seventh day I kept for myself solely, for my especial interests. In truth I did the best part of my life’s work on the seventh day of every week, and my wife, and my daughters, and every man and woman that ever worked for me, and every stranger that was ever within my gates was harried into motion on that day, roused early and set to their tasks. The Lord busied Himself making the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day, and therefore He blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it, and I kept my worst excesses for that day.

  My days weren’t long upon the land my father bought. I never honoured him, nor did I honour m
y mother. And still I tried in every way to be a perfect son. I worked hard at my lessons and I read the books left thumbed and dog-eared by Edward, though I could hardly make head or tail of some of them, and I practised my Irish and my Latin and I hurled an hour at least each day in the long acre, pucking the sliotar high and catching it, running myself into the ground, collapsing exhausted at the end of the hour onto the rich, yielding earth. I remembered Edward playing hurling and my father roaring and screaming and breaching the sideline and threatening referees and breaking hurleys off of the ground in frustration or anger or joy. When I played, he watched in silence. Win or lose, he was quietly accepting. The odd day, he’d put his hand on my back as we walked to the car after I came out of the dressing room and my heart would soar. Then I’d wonder was he only doing that opposite the neighbours, and my doubt in him would stiffen my spine and he’d take his hand away.

  The more heed I took of his passionless presence, well back from the field’s edge, hands in his coat pockets or arms tightly crossed, the more I concentrated on what I was doing. And so my game never flowed, my deliberateness only translated into mistake after stupid mistake. I fumbled and tripped and swung wildly and cowered reflexively when I should have stood my ground, like Edward would have. And soon enough I was on the subs’ bench and never started, then got no game at all, and for a finish wasn’t even selected for the panel for what would have been my second year playing at under-sixteen. And I was relieved. I’d never again have to sit beside him in the car on the journey home with the ghost of my brother Edward sitting in the silence between us.

  I had none of Edward’s courage, though I tried and tried to make myself be brave. My father brought me once to town to help him nail election placards to lampposts. He was doing his damnedest to get a man called John Joe Burke elected into a seat left vacant by the unexpected death of an old soldier of destiny who’d held the seat for a lifetime. The old soldier had no son to be shooed into the seat, and his daughter was of no repute and not talked about. My father wanted to fill the seat with a proxy; he’d been worrying lately about the threat of compulsory purchase orders, the wounds they could inflict upon his sprawling fields, and John Joe Burke could be relied upon to scupper any plans for roads or railways or estates of houses on my father’s vast repining plain.

  I was thirteen, long-legged and gangly and prone to a violent reddening and an intractable mumbling when addressed by anyone bar my mother. I was strong, though, broad of shoulder and big of hand, and was well able for the labour, though slow and fumbling: I’d had a sudden shot of growth that summer and wasn’t wearing it well. I was up a ladder at the market square end of Silver Street. There were two men standing at the rails outside the bank on the far corner of the square, one facing me across the road with one foot on the lower rail and his elbows resting on the upper. His comrade leaned with his back to the rails and viewed my toiling image in the bank’s high glass door. The four streets that converged at that spot were empty save for me and them; it was early on a September Saturday, the sun was barely up. I was on my ladder’s second-highest step, proud of my daring, hammering happily. I thought they would just rest there in smirking observation of the work in the manner, I knew even then, of all corner-boys, until the one with his foot on the rail began to speak, loud enough so that I could clearly hear him. Do you remember that story, he asked his friend, about the three little republicans that were putting up posters above in Drumcondra at the very end of the civil war? I do, the friend replied, after giving the query a few seconds’ consideration, I remember Brother Frank telling us all about it, God rest him. Weren’t they about that boy’s age over there, above on that ladder? They were, I’d say. Was it Charlie Dalton of the Squad that shot them or who was it? It was Charlie Dalton, right enough, one of Michael Collins’s boys. He riddled them with bullets from a confiscated gun, the poor little puddlahauns!

  And they both snorted with laughter and the first speaker hawked and spat on the road, and when I looked down and across at them I saw in the bank’s door the reflection of the one with his back to me, as he slowly pulled something long and darkly metallic from inside his jacket. My breath caught in my throat and I saw that my knuckles were white from the fierceness of my grip on my hammer and the ladder’s top edge. I felt a blooming of warmth in my crotch as fear loosened my bladder. These men were going to shoot me, like the little lads above in Dublin all those years ago, and my father was streets and streets away and my mother was at home baking tarts, a platoon of sausages and rashers already assembled on the warming grill pan for the breakfast I would never eat.

  And then my father strode across the road from the doorway of O’Halloran’s the undertakers where he must have been standing unseen all along. My young heart sang at the sight of him and in the same second lurched in fear that he would be killed in my stead and in the next second broke at the realization that I was a coward. My father’s face was a furious, pulsing red; his fists were clenched. The man whose foot was on the railing straightened up all of a shot and his eyes were wide with the shock of my father’s sudden appearance. Ye dirty fucking blackguards. I heard ye, ye dirty fucking blackguards, trying to frighten the boy. The one that was facing away had spun around and it was only a length of copper pipe in his hand, twisted around on itself at one end, and not a gun at all. My father grabbed it off him in a blink and drew back his stout arm and hit him straight into the face with it. A sharp crack echoed off the walls of that ancient market square as the man’s nose broke in two. And then my father’s arm shot out again and the other man got the pipe into the teeth and my father was roaring, Ye blackguards, ye blackguards, and he was bent over the man with the broken nose who was on the footpath now, curled up on his side with his arms over his head and his knees drawn in to his chest and my father’s stout arm was still working, up and down, up and down, and the man with the smashed mouth was crying out, It was only a mess, it was only a mess, in the name of Jesus will you stop, and his hands were raised in surrender, and his words came wetly from his lips and his face and hands were dark with blood.

  And then the red-faced, fleet-fisted dervish who had taken the place of my quiet, fixated father was standing at the foot of my ladder, his blazing eyes fixed on the coward’s stain on the front of my trousers, and as he put his raw-knuckled hand up to help me down I knew in my churning gut and my chattering heart that he saw in that moment that what he had suspected about me but hoped against was after being proven to be true. And he was gone fully from me then; all hope was lost. I didn’t honour that man, that day or any day after. And nor did I honour my mother. She signed her full estate to me the day after we buried my father, and I sold it, God help us, in parcels and pieces but quickly, every last godforsaken acre of it.

  The cold slows the blood. Stillness makes things worse. A man would want to be moving around to keep it flowing, striding and stamping, stoking the heat in his muscles. There’s not much space for that in this box. My legs haven’t the will anyway. If you are the voice and hand of God on earth you’re doing a fair passable impression of the man Himself; you’re as silent as He and as dark. I wonder can you hear me at all, or if it even matters. Isn’t my contrition all the point, my throwing down of myself, my prostration before the chance of mercy? I never could talk about two things: regret or love. You’re a cold conduit, Father, and maybe that’s best. I wonder if I’m even talking at all. Which or whether I’ll persevere; the telling of these tales is taking something from me, something I’m as well off relinquishing, something I held to myself too long.

  As I’ve told you about my brother Edward I may as well tell you about my sister Connie. She turned wicked in her grief for him. What are you crying about? she hissed into my ear at Edward’s graveside, as he disappeared from my eyes into the waiting ground. You hardly knew him. And when I looked up at her she had darkness in her eyes as black as her funeral clothes, and her rage and her grief had coloured her face white. The contrast was vivid, like my shock; her words fai
r whipped. She was a womanly fourteen, and I noticed then for the first time how beautiful she was, dark-haired and elegant, dangerously proportioned. I stopped my tears and felt ashamed of them. I brushed them off my face and shed no more for my dear brother that day. She had regard for none of us, my mother or my father or my other sister Julie, who was a year younger than me, or my little brother Henry, who came along behind us all as an afterthought, a tiny, soundless incarnation of a short renaissance in my parents’ feelings for one another. He was always scared, his smallness and his way of slinking about unseen, inhabiting the background like a soft hiss of white noise behind the ceaseless hum and hubbub of life, even the curtailed, nervy life we lived after Edward, like an apology for his accidental existence. Connie tormented us all, but Henry the most. She tortured him. And I let her, gladly.

  Edward’s death extinguished whatever bit of a flame was rekindled between my parents that led to poor Henry’s appearance on this earth. I don’t think they ever saw each other again after they walked hand in hand from the Height the day Edward was lowered into the wounded ground, only existed silently beside each other for half a lifetime, looking inwards. There was the odd explosion, like the day of the poster-nailing inside in Nenagh – or have I told you that story? – or the time my mother had a fight with a young curate who came to the house uninvited one Sunday evening shortly after Edward died to offer the solace of his ministries. He glanced and glanced again at the unstained square of wall where the Sacred Heart picture had hung and in the end could contain himself no longer and asked why had it been taken down, and Mother said she couldn’t stand to be smirked at by a Jew. And the curate stood and shouted, God forgive you, woman, the tongue on you, you should be ashamed, there’s no grief great enough to allow for that kind of talk out of a Christian, and my mother said calmly that she needed no forgiveness, especially not from a snotty-nosed child like him, and he wasn’t to darken her door again.