To Name Those Lost

by Rohan Wilson

  • • •

  Say now, Flynn said to the publican and he dropped his upturned hat on the bar. Say, you wouldn’t be having some food someplace?

  At the dimmest end of the counter, beyond the throw of light from the only oil lamp, the publican stood in conference with a long-coated fellow. Neither man looked at Flynn. They talked in hushed tones that were hidden from him for the singers at the tables had not ceased in their merriment since he entered. The fellow in the coat passed across the counter a hessian sack that was half full of something heavy and the publican stashed it below the counter in a cautious move. Flynn made a fist and knocked on the counter top.

  Say, you wouldn’t be having a scrap of grub, would you?

  Now the publican looked up. He was a huge man, wide through, his gut resting on the clearing bench behind the bar. Among the unwashed mugs was a bottle of Grumbleene, which he picked up and unscrewed.

  Speak up, Paddy, he said and took a draught.

  I’ve come after some grub.

  The publican lowered the bottle. His eyes were wet. His face inside the folds of his corpulent neck was tiny. Yet for a big man he was quick. Something caught his eye across the room and he fetched up a wooden mug and pegged it viciously in this direction. Oi, he called. Think I aint seen you there.

  A child, a girl, was fossicking below a table after flakes of tobacco. The cup struck her in the side and caused her to flinch.

  You want the whip again, do you? he called.

  The girl ran. She made for the door, tugged it, and vanished outside.

  So, the publican said and turned back to Flynn. It’s grub you’re after then.

  Flynn crossed his arms. He looked at the publican and looked at the door.

  Well, speak up.

  Aye, Flynn said. Aye. But I’ve only a few bits.

  Strange times indeed when the Irish walk in with nothin in their pockets, the publican said grinning.

  Listen, my friend, if you’re after having some food to sell be a good fellow about it and let me see it. Or else you can go and fock yourself. I shall be royally entertained by either.

  The publican laughed. He laughed and he reached down beneath the counter and brought up a tied cheesecloth and dropped it there. He loosened the knot. Within it was a lardy pork pie. Mould had coloured the upper crust and the filling was jellied and rank-looking. Flynn frowned at it.

  One shilling, the publican said. And you won’t find better tonight, owing to the troubles.

  Can you not do no lower than a shilling?

  The publican sighed and his face fell like a thespian.

  This is the last few bits I have, Flynn said and pulled a handful of coins, and you are welcome to them. Only, can you not give us something else as well? We are on the road, my daughter and I. We haven’t eaten today.

  There were kegs arranged along the rear bench, the contents of each being marked on the scantling behind, and the publican pointed at one among the row that had whiskey scrawled in chalk above it. I’ll pour you a finger of that there, he said. Let you numb yourself for the buggerin I’m about to give you. Eh? How’s that sound? I can’t be no fairer than that for the Irish.

  Flynn propped his elbows on the bar. He ran his hands over his thin hair. Be making it generous then, he said.

  The publican walked away to the whiskey keg, his great bulk rattling the glasses in the crate, setting the oil lamp on the counter jiggling. He loosened the tap and let fill a threaded jar one-third full.

  As he did this, Flynn leaned back from the counter and took up his hat and turned to survey the room. In the farthest corner a pair of men huddled over a hand of All Fours, the irregular light of the oil lamp leaving them in twilight. Pipe smoke suspended in geological strata dimmed the room to a yellow glow. He stood surveying it and replaced his hat. At the tables sat some coarsely bearded seamen and two whores in shawls of crocheted wool, rouged around the eyes and cheeks. They drank from wooden mugs, filled pipes from a common bowl of weed. A squalid man at the rear held cocked before him a tankard, his whiskers spumed with porter.

  The publican placed the jar by Flynn’s elbow. Flynn drank. He sat down the jar. His eyes watering, the publican began to speak but then stopped. The door had clattered against the wall and they all turned to see outlined darkly on the doorsill the shadow of a boy. The boy came into the light, a young and lank and sickly-looking thing. Blood dripped from his nose, which he smeared across his face as he stumbled forward. He was barefoot and dressed in a torn smock. Across the tables eyes raised and settled on him, seamen, revellers, whores, wary of whatever trouble this was. He slumped at a bench and dropped his head.

  Fetch the lad a stiffener, someone said.

  Flynn set his hat upon the freckled dome of his head. He stepped past the bleeding lad, his mind at work on how he might make his way in the falling dark outside and find the bush road where his daughter was waiting. He had one hand on the door bolt when he saw where he’d left the pie, the only food he had, upon the counter. He slapped his thigh. He crossed past the lad who by now had attracted a crowd and fronted up at the counter and hitched the pie cloth upon the knob of his staff to carry.

  There was every sort of question being put to this lad about the nature of the violence unfolding in the city and the gangs going at it, the actions of the municipal police, the ruin being waged. They dragged up chairs and took seat about the boy, leaning close to hear what he had to tell. The boy was bony and frail but there remained a harder edge to his gaze that was not fogged by the pain he was in. Beads of blood formed and dripped off the point of his nose as he gave some answers. The gamblers, the seamen and whores, they all listened intently, as if in the listening they might show their hatred of the railway rate.

  We ought to be out there fightin, one said.

  You aint a fighter, John.

  No, I’m a fucker, he said and they laughed.

  Better if these dogs paying the rate are run out of town, the publican said. Better by a long shot. Run out or hung up and I shouldn’t care which.

  He came around from the bar and stood, hands folded on the great mound of his belly. And what in the name of Heaven have they done to your face, Oran Brown? Caught fiddlin something, was you?

  The lad threw back a decent part of his drink and sat the glass before him, twisting it in his fingers and shaking his head, looking a sorry specimen. It was couple of Melbourners is who, he said. One reckoned he felt me hand tuggin at his pocket. What a joke. I never went near his pocket.

  No, the publican said. Oh no. Course you never.

  Here the lad looked up and held his glass out. Pour us another, Rabbit, he said. I’m in a deal of pain.

  They ought to have killed you, the publican said and he hiked up his trousers and turned away. I bleedin well would’ve.

  They tried it and I took a fearful basting, the lad said. I believed I was done for. Then up come this third fellow. I thought he was some island chieftain or a Chinese digger or somethin cause he wore a braid of hair down his back like nothin I ever seen. He calls on the Melbourners to leave and they just up and ran.

  The lad paused to mop his blood. He was reaching for a rag among the detritus of clay pipes and bottles on the table when a heavy calloused hand pressed down upon his arm. He looked up at the face of Fitheal Flynn who was leaning in to him, blue eyes like insets of sea ice, the ruts of his brow grown hard.

  You saw him?

  Oran looked nervously at the others. Saw who?

  A man with long hair.

  I just said that, didn’t I?

  His hat?

  Eh?

  The hat, lad. How was it worn?

  Small I think. And black.

  Flynn leaned back, stepped away from the table. Where?

  Oran wiped his nose. Along by the town park.

  The taproom was quiet as everyone present watched the Irishman push back his creased, shapeless hat. Flynn looked around the room at the many men and women mustered in the smokey dark and
he gripped his staff and sighed. Without another word he stalked into the pallid dark of evening.

  THE LANEWAY

  DOWN THROUGH THE VALLEY STREETS. BARE unpaved paths. Homes of split peeling weatherboard. On the evening sky the smoke was mantled like sunset cloud with the glow of fires and as Flynn drew towards the centre of town there came drifts of it curling through the rows of townhouses and alleyways. In the distance the low thrum of mayhem. He walked further and shortly rounded into a wide thoroughfare and there spread before him was a crowd wandering in the dark, men and boys with slats and chains and rocks. He slowed as the racket of voices grew. They spilled from side lanes, streams of them, and some were staggering in liquor and others, wounded and red with blood, seemed to have left off from a war. Flynn watched them go by. They wore kerchiefs tied across their faces or were blacked up with charcoal. Men discharged from the lies of gentility. He studied it all with great satisfaction. He smiled.

  He walked the roads around town tracking the outflow of rioters back towards the source and before long that trace led him to arrive at the police house. Here a scene of pandemonium was unfolding. Men in their thousands, wild men, their sound like flocked crows, had laid siege to the barricades and were pelting the police with whatever came to hand. They scaled the police-house palisade in numbers. They threw burning chairs, burning stakes. The fence shook under the weight pushing on it. For a while Flynn simply stood and watched. It was a sight, good God it was. Toosey would be in there, he knew it. But he stood and stared and for a while he felt it might be the birthings of something bigger, a cousin to the sublime enterprise in France and the beacon-fire it had become for burdened peoples everywhere. He smiled with great satisfaction.

  A boy in Dublin he’d been once, starved thin as a stick and shivering in his duds, and he’d seen his father die in the front room of their tenement reduced to a grey frail fellow laid out by a fever and his mother stayed a full day beside their father after death, moaning, twisting her hair, and Fitheal and his older brothers waited as well but could not feel what she felt and felt only hunger and in the days and years to come he’d follow her to the foreshore of Dublin Bay to pick cockles in the morning to sell at the market for a night’s lodgings, his mother like a husk, hollow-souled, and he was an older boy by then, meaner, and he struck a fellow that grabbed his mother’s buttocks and knocked his jaw out of socket and that was the close of his youth, that instant, for he was taken and tried, a child still, at the quarter sessions with his mother screaming go bhfuil sé ina leanbh from the gallery and he was sent within a month to the arsehole end of the earth in the rat-swarmed hold of a British hulk beside a hundred just as young and that was so long ago that the green home of Ireland was fading in his mind like he’d left his thoughts exposed to the sun, his dear broken mother just an impression, his brothers the merest ghosts, faceless all and long lost to him, and he stood here in the street having passed the times of his life well nigh through and there was nothing of it that did not soon fade, nothing that lasted, save the thought of his mother in that bleached past of ancient crying go bhfuil sé ina leanbh, as he wanted now to cry for his own girls.

  Near the gates the mob surged and gave a roar that Flynn felt at the corners of his chest. He surveyed the crowd. Bonfires rose in the cutting wind and gave light that called men from the blackness and they were a mob of louts made up alike from respectability and the lower orders, revelling in the names and feats of rebellion. He wrung the neck of his staff and looked up at the hills from which he’d lately descended to where the faint lights of the shanties stood. His eldest girl up there, and elsewhere, far beyond, his youngest two. He gripped his staff. He walked forward.

  The crowd pressed in at the gates of the police house. He walked into the thick and was jostled side to side and in the ceaseless motion of that great body he pushed himself forward, shepherding men aside with his staff. A drunk lay trampled on the road holding up his hand for help but Flynn stepped over him and continued. Where the crowd grew dense around the palisade he lowered his shoulder and bullocked through, his head turning and his eyes sweeping about for sign of that man he’d sought across the districts of the north. The man he would not be kept from.

  He was some time at the task. He cut through the herd from hem to hem. He walked the tattered outer edge. It was as likely that Toosey had seen him first and fled. He walked on anyway, circling about and cutting back through. He saw the same faces every time. A woman with her dress torn away and her undergarments displayed. A group of well-mannered gents watching as if for sport from a distance. He was at this work an hour or more. The fence of the police house still stood and the crowd had begun to lessen. He crossed out of the crowd and found himself on clear road the far side of it, overlooked by tall and sombre town buildings, the piled coals of bonfires. He stood a moment and straightened his hat and when he turned to walk on he saw there by the wrought-iron palisade something hallucinatory, like the terminal moment of a dream. It was a fellow standing apart, standing and looking across the throngs, down his back a long braid of hair.

  Flynn dropped his head and sighed. A terrible feeling rose in his throat with the sound of the crowd and he wanted to turn away but he would not. He sighed and when he lifted his eyes they’d grown hard and he lowered his staff and pushed through the people with it. The pie in its cotton cloth swayed. Now had come the culminating instant and he would not shrink from what was right and needed. He widened his grip and strode forward raising the stick wildly overhead and clubbed the madman Toosey across the neck in a foul blow.

  Toosey fell. Flynn swung his stick hard. He struck Toosey over the back and flattened him on the dirt. Segments of pie spun. The stick kicked in his hand. The world narrowed around the pair of them. The cave of their feud. He lifted again and Toosey like the bar brawler he was scurried back as the bulb bounced by his legs.

  Get up, Flynn said.

  Toosey rocked onto his heels.

  Get up.

  It’s a rum old business this, Toosey said.

  Flynn pulled away the strip of cloth. Make ready for it, he said.

  Toosey stood. He had drawn a knife and was letting it hang in his fingers. Proper little scrapper you are, he said. Proper little battler.

  Proper as a judge, Flynn said.

  They will kill each other, someone said.

  A second passed where they locked eyes, two veterans of combat, their stars aligned in deadly heat. The men around them had begun to push back the circle. They were calling and yelling but Flynn saw only that creature placed by God’s hand before him.

  Toosey was wavering though. He clicked his tongue and dropped his head. He broke away and bashed out through the crowd, knocking folk aside with his elbows, and Flynn hiked up his stick and followed.

  Among the press of bodies he could see the hat Toosey wore. He picked through the stragglers at the edge of the crowd, looking either way along the street, in the lighted upper windows of pubs and shops and stable houses the shapes of people in seclusion, below in the deep dark gloom men at war, and he turned his head, searching, and when Toosey came looming out of the night like some ancient miscreation with his long, sharply worn blade he had no time to defend himself.

  The knife caught in Flynn’s jacket. He hissed, for the point had stuck in his ribs. Toosey gripped his throat, his knife arm pushing, and there passed an interval of struggle where they tested strength. They strained. Grunted like bulls. Then Flynn planted his feet, leaned, and gave an almighty shove that sent Toosey staggering across the road.

  He touched his chest. A leak of blood in his shirt. He wiped his hand and clutched his primitive club and he cried out to Toosey, Well now I’m focking angry, is what I am.

  It seemed to cause some upset in Toosey and he stumbled and bolted, and Flynn went after him in a lumbering gallop. There were men everywhere in the street and Toosey sidestepped as he fled, barrelling by them into a narrow back lane fitted between the stone and brick buildings.

  Fly
nn slowed then stopped. The lane was dim its whole length but spoiled in parts by shears of moon that angled in over the rooves. Among the shadows stood the man Toosey. He was holding the knife at his side. He spoke.

  Let this lie, old mate. There is no good will come of it.

  She never hurt you, said Flynn.

  No she never.

  You miserable bastard, I will stove your head in.

  Listen to me, Flynn. I never meant—

  There is a vileness in your heart that I mean to quell.

  Listen now, fore one of us is killed. My son is without a mother. I required the money, you must understand that. I required it for him.

  In the darkness Flynn was deathly still, a figure of black. He switched grips on his staff and pressed the point of it to the ground.

  Maria is dead?

  She is.

  There was silence. Then Flynn said, She was a good girl.

  The best of them all.

  Tis not the money though.

  Toosey spat to the side. No, he said. I expect it aint.

  Sure, and I would rather it wasn’t this way. I’d rather Maria had lived.

  That makes the both of us.

  Flynn stood quite still, taking his measure. But it is this way, he said.

  I shan’t go easy, you know. Not even for a chum.

  Nor I.

  Toosey raised the knife, flexed his fingers on the twine, then lowered it again. You think I’m villainous? Is that what?

  Flynn stared quietly back at him. Hell is full of good wants and good wishes. Full up to the guts. You will add to it as well.