The truth of it is that after the light went out the rest was hard to bear. The first gig he missed was really the end of the road, though we struggled along for a while after it, fighting, loving and hating. Too close, the obvious concealed itself from my eyes, and then one morning I awoke alone in a strange bed. There was noise in the kitchen, the soft clanging of plates being readied for breakfast but I seemed to wake a little too fully because the realisation of everything hit at once. I stood under the shower, less to wash than to cry. After that it was all just waiting and counting down. Jackie died probably two years before his heart finally stopped beating. He died the moment that the drugs made him walk and talk, and that was the same moment that the music lost its focus. His fingers could still find the right notes for a while, and only those of us who knew him well knew that his playing had lost its passion. To the watching eye, the addiction appeared slow in rotting him away, but it was brutal in its treatment of the soul and that was the real end, not just the beginning of it.
I lived through him, and now he is gone but I am still living. We were not so different, Jackie and I, except where talent was concerned. In the end, I think it was the talent that proved a curse, that caused his undoing. But maybe the temporal brilliance of that exploding spark was worth the inevitable burnout. All I know is that I live a half-life without my brother now, but I am thankful to him even for granting me that much, because were it not for his strength, his ability to take on all the suffering that came at us and bottle it up to exploit in different later ways, I would not have survived. He was my example then, and still is even now. With his passing, the world has lost its vigour, and not just for me. I see it everywhere I look; on the subway, in the streets and bars. People are existing, nothing more, the colours have been drained from the world. I get by because I have something they don’t have, the memories that crowd my dreams, and that makes me the lucky one, even though the memories that come are so blue and so laced with anguish that I can do nothing but bow my head and cry, or pray for these moments to pass and better, brighter ones to come.
The Dying Breed
He was just another old man back when I knew him, washed out and holding up one corner of Mac’s bar, fishing for drinks. Jack. Whiskey was his poison, and if I was flushed I’d help him out, but mostly he had to make do with beer, just like the rest of us.
‘Kid,’ he’d say; just that, his effort at gratitude without giving away too much ground, and he’d swallow from his glass, fighting to take his time. His voice had no music left in it at all. He called everyone Kid, everyone who stood him a drink, at least, and I doubt that he could tell us apart, one from the other.
We all knew who he had once been, back in a better life. Those were days long since gone, but the past dies pretty slowly for some men, especially in places where nothing much happens any more, and sometimes, when his sober edge had dulled, he’d get to talking. Chewing his tongue, the stories scraping free, telling about the old days.
Words made sick with what went unsaid, and if the snatches of memory were windows on to his life, then they were also badly recalled and rarely knew any kind of satisfactory resolution. He’d talk, but in spurts, and then his rheumy eyes would lose their focus and the words always fell away to nothing. After a while he’d flail a trembling hand for the solace of his glass, needing it suddenly like breath.
That was the 1930s, the cusp of everything. America’s real turn of the century; forget what the calendars say. Civilisation had finally taken hold, and the Depression, which had broken many a farmer’s heart, was beginning to ease its grip. The future looked bright.
They wrote about Jack, though in the pages he was always Jack Beam. 5’7’, lean as a post, hard as bedrock. History books designed to chart the west devoted entire chapters to his life, or the slice of his life that counted for anything in their eyes, and they recalled in glamorous hand his various exploits, painting them from the desperate to the spectacular. I knew the myth and I knew the man, and I guess the truth was some lost place in between.
He ranked with the best of them, though; that much is for certain. A hard man who did bad things for all kinds of reasons and, occasionally, for no reason at all. At times, an outlaw hunted down and almost hung; at other times still, a hero. But, for good or bad, he was one of those who helped to tame the wild country.
There was law around here by the 1930s; with society came rules. The sheriff’s department accommodated him when he needed a cell for the night, and even allowed him to continue carrying his gun, a battered old Colt revolver that looked like nothing but had done for plenty in its time. Mostly though, they tended to leave him alone.
He wore that gun in the old way too, slung low on his left hip, tanned leather holster bound to his thigh with a rawhide thread. I had seen that gun up close, had even handled it. The iron of the barrel was a brackish shade of grey, and the frail-grained sandalwood butt set a roughness through the pale, sweaty veneer of varnish. In all the years I knew Jack, I longed to see him draw the thing, but the one time he did, I missed it.
The lawmen tolerated him, really, because he had become something of an attraction, and the town council recognised his intrinsic worth. Enough time had passed, it seemed, for the West to take on certain nostalgic hues, and both the romantics and the commercially minded were hungry to start creating myths and capitalising financially from their work. Jack Beam was an ideal character, of a value with Billy the Kid, Jesse James and Doc Holliday, but what raised him above those legendary outlaws was that he had beaten the odds. He had seen and done it all, and survived. Now, he was the last of his kind; a dying breed.
People came from everywhere, tourists willing to spend their hard-earned dollars on booze and dinner and maybe a couple of nights in some overpriced cat-house posing as a fancy hotel. They came, the stern middle-aged women with asses built for sitting, and the scrawny fellows from back East, all neatly shaven except for little toothbrush moustaches and decked out in stupid candy-striped shirts and the latest fashion of wire glasses, and I’d hear them muttering amongst themselves that the old boy didn’t really look so tough, just another decrepit drunk, nothing at all like the stories said. But they’d watch him anyway, as they would with animals in a zoo. Jack sat there with nothing to his name but his nearly empty glass and his memories of shining days and things debased, and I’d hope he couldn’t hear the talk that I was hearing.
He was slow with everything by the end, except with putting down the whiskey. That was a skill he never lost. It never so much as cracked a smile on him either, though he wasn’t built for smiling much, it has to be said. It did make him unsteady, but he was unsteady in many ways, by then.
The scrape that peppered his voice was put there from a bullet, marked by a fold that didn’t sit quite right down in the leathery jowls of his throat.
After about the twentieth time of asking, he told me that it happened down in Del Rio. He’d been working as a hired gun, during a land feud. Just like in the books, except that the books talked about a lot of rights and wrongs, and down there it was about greed, and nothing much else.
Spare with words, but still so full of colour:
‘Riggs, the feller’s name was that hired me on. Kilt men for him, more than he was worth. More too than the fifty dollars I took for doin’ it.’
The stories liked to talk in numbers, but Jack never offered a yield. Dead men should be worth more than a notch on a gun; that was something he said once, and I guess it stuck with me.
He sunk the stub of an index finger into the hollow, and winced, probably with remembered pain.
‘Got me this in a bar down there. I was drinkin’ and a gun went off over a game of cards. I took the stone for it, hit me like the kick of a mule. Only time I ever been shot, and the bullet wasn’t even meant for me. Every time I swallowed, there was a taste of lead. I thought that was it, for sure.
‘Anyhow, I kilt me the man what done it and rode for the border. Made it a ways but fell short of Mex
ico. Doc in some small place cut the bullet out, talkin’ ’bout how if it’d been an inch either way I’d a had it, that it was the devil’s luck really. Guess it just wasn’t my time. Took months ‘fore it healed enough to let me talk again, and I ain’t never been right with words since.
‘I carried the bullet around with me for a time, like for a souvenir, but then I done gone and lost the thing. At night though, I can still feel it. Like a boot heel, pressin’ down, chokin’ me.’
Time contrived against him, years spent a certain way, laid out on hard trails and on the wrong kind of women. But there was something that set him apart from everyone else I ever met, a strength that revealed itself in small ways even through the feeble body and the increasing creep of senility.
His face was thickset, stubborn around the white tufted brows and the cleaved line of jaw. He shaved, but not often; saw it as a dalliance, and said so. For an old man he wore his hair too long, but it was thin and losing colour and fell where it would without mattering much. He looked nothing like the pictures in the books, but his was a face that could finish the stories his mouth began. And sometimes, when he rose from the shadows to hit the day just right, that face could take on the merest hint of the way it used to be.
I knew little about Jack beyond the stories, but listening to him brought a modicum of understanding. The legend smothered him, but it was a coat, not really the essence of the man, at all. When he talked, what came through above everything else was the strength.
Beyond everything, dignity prevailed, and when death finally came, it seemed fitting that he fell to the very thing which had tamed the west. I wasn’t there to see it but plenty were, and they say he stood right in the road, drawing that old Colt just a heartbeat too late on the car that ran him down.
All That Glitters
That evening, our last together, my father cracked open a bottle of good whiskey. The room was dark except for the red glow of a settled fire in the hearth and the shadowy outpouring of a candle’s still leaf of flame from its place on the sideboard. Trying to ignore the tension in the house, I sat in my usual place, the armchair by the fire, and watched the ash smoulder rather than have to see him move about. He set the bottle on the small dining table and its cumbersome sound made me picture in my mind the glass butt ringing the scratched oak beneath the dirty tablecloth. Then he mumbled something about glasses and moved into the kitchen, taking on his back my noncommittally offered, ‘Hmm’.
His chair was opposite mine. He returned, the rubber soles of his boots smacking out damp notes on the flagstone floor, and I had to turn to take the offered glass. It felt small and shapely in my hand and I held it raised for him to fill. For the moment, though, I was ignored as he hauled his chair closer – it squealed like filed nails with the movement – and dropped heavily into its embrace. I heard the rim of his glass sing against the bottle’s lip and the soft river sound of the pouring whiskey. He cleared his throat and leaned forward until he was touched by the fire’s glow.
‘Here.’
He passed me the bottle and I took it, having to lean awkwardly forward myself. I nodded thanks and filled my own glass. It splashed from the bottle, making the sound of gasping breath and a drop escaped onto the soft curved pad of flesh between my thumb and index finger and ran up my sleeve. I wanted to slump back into my chair and raise the wetness to my mouth but my father continued to hold his forward crouch so I did too.
I sipped whiskey; he just cradled the little glass tumbler in his big right hand. I stole glances at him and his face wore the split mask of shadow and light. The fire snapped out a spark and he used it as an excuse to give it his attention. He set the glass on the floor between his feet, picked up the dusty poker from the kerb and began to disturb the contented orange of the smouldering coals. The half block of beech shifted, revealing a charred ashen underside. Sleeping flames began to spout, licking to appease their risen hunger.
You won’t talk me out of it, Da. I’m going and that’s it. Words that, though unspoken yet, tasted sour in my mouth, even with the persistent intake of the whiskey. But I needed them, and I knew that I would have to use them. He would try something, some plea, threat or blackmail, some play for sympathy, and I would be glad of the words then.
‘Mooney bought himself a motor car yesterday,’ was all he said.
I held the glass to my mouth, and paused. In that pause the distilled scent floated from the spirit in tendrils of clear smoke or steam and filled my mind. In slow degrees, my shoulders relaxed and I realised that I had been tensed for one more argument. ‘What kind of motor car?’ I asked instead, and wondered if he picked up the tremolo that edged my words.
His mouth twisted in the firelight, a gesture familiar except for the shadows. ‘Don’t know. A motor car, that’s all Cannice Crane in the village said.’
‘New?’
‘I suppose so.’ He put down the poker, giving the fire back its peace, and picked up his glass. Still, he did not drink.
‘Must’ve cost him a quare penny, that.’
‘Hmm.’
It was our last night together, maybe the last time we would ever see one other again. In the morning I was leaving for Dublin and the ferry to England. I knew what he felt about it but I knew what I felt, too. He was an old man, and the land was a dead thing these days. I would be thirty in May, and if I went now, there was still a chance for me. Maybe. I had dreams about America.
He drank at last, a big swallow that he held in his bloated cheeks for a long moment. His eyes clenched shut as the burning whiskey took the jerking walk down into his stomach, then he gasped the dark air and raised his glass to me. ‘Health,’ he said, belatedly.
I nodded, raising my own glass. A span of darkness hung between his and mine but there was no attempt at reconciliation. ‘Health,’ I murmured, echoing my father. I had heard him use the salute so often; Christmases, Sunday nights, a hundred or a thousand unnameable other times, marking some event whose details were vague or insignificant enough to be forgotten. ‘Health.’ Just that; not good or bad. It made me think about my mother, many years gone, a part of the overgrown earth down in St Stephen’s graveyard in the village. There with the sister I had seen only as a blueness through a grey, threadbare bed sheet and in my mind, in the darkness, can see still.
He was seventy, but old. In the fire’s hue, the creases seemed etched in rock, caressing his forehead, cheeks and mouth. His eyes looked heavy and his hair fell in fragile, wispy turmoil, its snowy whiteness burned orange again only by the stolen reflection. It was this place that made you look like that; out in the fields through the blue from grey to dusky grey with the westerly ocean wind beating hardness into your back and shoulders and the low seething sky that brought rain and nothing more until all the world but rock was green, lush with nourishment, and you, finally broken, learned compliance. You lived for the dark loamy earth and the sustenance that it let you draw, and your spirit lived only in the bottom of a bottle. He was all those things. Not just all those things, but certainly those things, too.
I drained my glass and felt the loss when the last drops were consumed. He watched me, reaching for the bottle to fill me up again, but I waved him away. ‘No,’ I said, putting my hand palm-down across my tumbler’s yawning mouth. ‘I’ve an early start in the morning.’ But I didn’t rise and he knew that he could tempt me.
‘Have one more,’ he said, and I thought about it and shrugged. This time he poured.
I sipped at the refreshed heat. ‘You can’t talk me out of it,’ I said. A part of me felt a twinge of hurt that I could be wrong, that he wasn’t even going to try, but I was tired.
He just stared at the spirit in his glass. I sipped from mine.
‘If I can’t I can’t,’ he said, at last. ‘When I was a boy, younger than you are now, I wanted to go to London.’ He had never told me this. To me, he had always been old.
‘Really?’ I sat up straight from my crouch.
He nodded, doing that folding th
ing with his mouth that he always did. ‘Word had it that there was plenty of work to be found out there and plenty of money to be made, and it was all we had to do here just to put a few spuds or a bite of bread on the table. I was great with a fella from over Ballinure way, name of Shine. We were supposed to go together.’ He turned his eyes to the fire. It had burned itself out now, except for the colour. ‘Stupid,’ he whispered, so low I hardly heard, and he finished the second half of his whiskey as he had the first.
‘What happened?’ I asked, suddenly, at this eleventh hour, needing to know.
‘I was suited to the soil. And whether you know it or not, so are you, boy.’ He met my stare and his mouth formed a crinkled smile. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not trying to persuade you. I just wanted to tell you something about me. I might not get the chance again.’
I thought of arguing, of saying, Don’t be stupid Da, there’s years in you yet, but I didn’t because we would both have recognised empty words.
‘My father said not to go. ‘They won’t thank you for it, Jimmeen,’ he said, but I thought different. He was right and I was wrong …’
In Exile Page 13
