The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

by Sebastian Barry

  He is silenced.

  ‘You see,’ she says, ‘the long gawping mouth on you now. You don’t laugh so loud when it’s your own ould Mam is the topic and the figure of raillery.’

  ‘How is she?’

  And he wants dearly, fearlessly, and indeed hopelessly, to hit her. He has no courage to feel her damp knickers again because Jonno is not there, Jonno of the apple-booty, but by the good Christ, by the dark statue of Christ in the Cathedral eyeless in the glooms, he thinks he might find the courage now to strike her, the doll, the doll.

  ‘Your own mother,’ she says, lying back in the grasses with a great relaxation and contentment, ‘that was raised by another and never had a real certificate, never had a document with her name on it in her born days, the brat of some ould piece of dacency, my ma says, that didn’t want the whore’s melt, and threw her down to the muck!’

  He stands there and strikes his own breast, strikes it again and again, for want of striking her. He has the height but that chest is skinny as her legs and it hurts him to beat there, but he needs the hurt.

  ‘You dog,’ he says, ‘you low dog on all fours, you poor fighting pup with your tail bitten off by a tinker at birth.’ This is an obscure insult, and has no force even to him. ‘Go on,’ she says, raising her dress, and she is pristine, her linens are sparkling, the evening sun shows how dandy and scrubbed she is, what a jewel she is for cleanliness, like the breast of a cat, ‘I won’t ask you for tuppence, I knew your ould joke to yourself there, aren’t we the same, the one and the same, me and your ma, go on, put that little snaily thing of yours in there that has you dizzy in the bed, nights, from steering it, and we’ll be happy. There’s nothing to happiness only generosity. That’s a lesson more than you’ll ever learn, you boyo, you poor skinny bucko, look at you, burning like the toast!’

  And off he goes right enough, stumbling, burning, fit to burn. And he thinks of the ould ones staring at his Mam in the Cafe Cairo, and by God he’ll go off to war now if there’s terrible secrets to be endured, he will. Why couldn’t his father have told him, the good man that he is? Hasn’t he told him the why and the what of many a thing, why must he hear mysteries from Tuppenny Jane? By God!

  His mother cuts the thick-crusted bread with her usual artistry — which is to say, she saws lightly back and forth, putting no pressure on the loaf, creating perfect slices. If his father Tom got his hands on that loaf it would be askew in a trice, in the sewing of a wren’s mitten. Jack and Young Tom mill about. Eneas watches his Mam as is his present custom. Watches and rarely speaks. He cannot gain any proper sense of her shame in his heart. He knows he must. It is the key to everything. The world seems agitated by her condition of shame right enough. He thinks he must be unsuited to the world, if he cannot understand the strictures applied to his mother. Every Saturday in the month she goes down to Athlone on mysterious business, but will never say what. There she is, quietly cutting, quietly laying each piece on the blue and white enamel plate. He could be a-dream for all he really knows. His father sits over in the corner polishing a flute with the accustomed rag and at the same time searching in the morning paper for good japes. When he finds a jape he turns about and reads it to them, bouncing himself with glee. Maybe he likes them all better these days, now everyone is up on their pins, more or less. Although soon he will up himself and wander out, into the unimaginable splendours of a Sligo night.

  Is she not still an artist among mothers, cutting that bread? He has heard Micky Moore, a boy reared up in the deepest and poorest part of the docks, who is not understood in the better shops in Sligo itself his mouth is so full of black words, called an artist on horseback, because he won fourteen races in a summer, including two at the Phoenix Park in front of the Viceroy, in the capital. An artist. His mother is an artist with the breadknife. He is estranged from her a little maybe but, he admires her. He loves her.

  He sits through school all day, under the vast wall-map of the leviathan world, crisp Latin and the muddle of mathematics forming weather clouds over his head, trying to extricate the kernel of the matter. He knows that on the floor above in the higher class Jonno Lynch his bosom pal is conning hard for his certificate. Jonno is going serious on the world and because Jonno is but an orphan and has to live with Mrs Foley, the terror of all orphans, he is intent on escape into the world of shillings and employments. By God, he is. And no doubt rightly. Meanwhile in the lesser class, Eneas puzzles out his own ancestry. The master Mr Jackson is a person so wise much of his teaching pours over the shaved or narrowly cut heads of his pupils. When Eneas first came into the class Mr Jackson showed some interest in the name Eneas, pointing out it was taken from the Roman story about a long-suffering and wandering sea-captain. But Eneas was only called Eneas after some old great-grandfather of his father’s, maybe even the mighty butter-exporter himself. And the discussion was ended suddenly by one of the boys offering the information that in Cork the name is pronounced anus.

  Mr Jackson talks without much pausing always, and it is, Eneas supposes, to place a bulwark against the waiting tide of filth that passes among schoolboys for knowledge. He tells them extraordinary things and he likes to give them samples from your man Homer, in a funny little pip-squeak voice. In fact, his favourite talk is of the old Greeks, and their dooms and their wars, and how the Gods were forever decreeing the fates of the mortals, and girls were turned into trees, and the like. And from what Eneas hears him say, the fellas in Rome later on weren’t that much better fixed, nor indeed that other Eneas fella. But he can’t try and catch these curious trout of information now, he has other legends to puzzle out. Legends of Sligo. The master tries to swamp his head with decent information from what he magnificently calls the Classical Eras of the World, but the terrier of his mother’s origins sees him off every time. It means something for himself, this business of his mother, and he senses what it might mean hovering close by, but elusive and foggy. The death or the life of him, he cannot say. Just out of reach, just out of reach. The heads of the boys about him nod in the slow fever of the afternoon. The elms full of fresh leaves, all inflated and shining after the buckets of thick rain, wash about gently below the windows. Thank God the weather has brightness. The hard world mills about in the dark streets of the town. And is all the world of Sligo abreast of his mysterious Mam? The jokes of the butcher boys and the draper’s assistants are against him!

  That night his little room seems dangerous to him. The Lungey House swelters in the June night, accusatory, high-faluting. Shame is a sort of silence, slightly whistling, slightly humming. And he thinks of the young priest from Castle-blaney that hanged himself. There in the silent bed he thinks of him. He sees the grasses all sere and the yellow wind invading the lost fields. What a sough in the deep branches there is as the Castleblaney priest climbs to his early and possibly ignoble death, with the length of mooring rope stolen, it transpires, from the prow of a gillie’s salmon-boat. He has tasted the very honey of Tuppenny Jane’s damp crotch, eternally, generously damp and sweet and deep in the starched petal of her knickers. Higher he climbs and places the rope about his Castleblaney neck. He sits on the rough branch. What’s he thinking, what’s he thinking? He gives a little kick away, all that learning and aspiration rushing towards oblivion, in such a manner as Eneas often imagined doing while tree climbing, scaring the daylights out of his legs, paralysing himself aloft. Away he tips, the priest in his relic-like clothes, his dog collar under the collar of rope, his polished shoes, his fine linen, his handsome belt. The rope snaps tight, his neck-bone is banged sideways in a way it cannot endure. The tongue protrudes slowly as it fills with blood and the face goes black as sins. The maw of hell roars like an opened kiln. The once saintly bowels loosen into the excellent trousers, purchased, Eneas believes, in the particular shop in Marlborough Street in Dublin. Eneas sweats in the cosy bed. Shame is not sweet, shame is not like Tuppenny Jane’s crotch! Through and through he is shot with the arrows of shame. He understands it. It is a filthy pain
, an attack, an affront to lonesomeness. His little room is transformed into a chamber of shame. The priest dangles. By God, he will go to the war, Eneas, as soon as he is let, if his fine pride in himself is to be eroded.

  The images subside and the moon hastens over sleeping Sligo into the shapely hills of Ben Bulben and Knocknarea. Perhaps he ought to say, his mother is a woman of mystery. Well, it is not satisfactory, but still. Shame flees away. He feels for her. It is curious. Perhaps Tuppenny Jane has been his liberator of sons. He has a sudden sensation of freedom, a surge of it, like a bump in his heart, a lump in his throat. The love for his mother and his distance from her is a sort of freedom. It is liberty. Anything is possible with such liberty, he knows. Love, and distance. He loves her, he loves her. Perhaps he is to be a grown man soon, after all — old in the bed, at fourteen.

  The next year Jonno Lynch launches himself into the informal suit of a messenger boy, full of whistles and wads of orders stuck in his important pockets. He must escape and he doesn’t care much whose heart he has to break to do it. He is employed by the auctioneer, O’Dowd, and some of the boys left in the school maintain that many of Jonno Lynch’s errands are peculiar and little linked to land deals and such. Indeed Eneas sees him shooting up back streets on his silver bicycle and the worst that is said about him is that he is the Mercury to all the dark men in the town, the big men, the boyos, the lads on the make and the lads all murky and serious with ideals and plots. It is all a mishmash of men and Jonno is the living spoon stirring it all about. So it is said, and Eneas would like to ask Jonno, but Jonno has become like his own bicycle, his Dawes premier machine, fleet and solemn and silent on the tar of Sligo. And Eneas’s heart is heavy and two prize-fighters of doubt and hurt are bashing away in there. He can conquer the horror of his mother’s mystery, but never the loss of Jonno, he thinks.

  So the following year after that it behoves Eneas to look hard about him for some spot to plant his sense of affronted liberty, or some avenue to preserve it. Jack only grows in his scholarly achievements, now Young Tom has shown a happy aptitude for the instruments beloved of his father, the bulbous cello, the reedy piccolo, and Teasy is a miasma of pious notions. Jonno is but the nickel shadow. No help to Eneas.

  He goes in to his Mam and Pappy’s room one night, a little tornado, a Texas twister, of youth and confusion. It is a place he has not gone often in the last years, though once he was the prince of their pillow, the saint of their windowsill, looking out, the two faces pressed to his each side, with space for nothing between them. He goes in and stands there and spots the surprise in his Mam’s face, as she lifts her head from peering into her big scrapbook, where she sticks all manner of stray items and illuminations, without rhyme or reason, he would venture to say. And his father, with his hands behind his head as nimble as a bather, though the hair is white as dandelion milk, lowers his hands and pulls the embroidered coverlet over his bony breast, maybe without thinking. That same white breast where once Eneas lay loose as a jellyfish, hours without end.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ he says, T’m thinking, Mam, of going out there to the war they have in France.’

  ‘What war?’ says his Pappy, ever the man up on current news. It is the first time Eneas has thought, for a second, a second, that his Pappy is a bit of a fool, a bit of a colossal fool.

  ‘The one they’re at over in France, this last while.’

  ‘Jesus, that’s for English boys, Eneas,’ says his Pappy, kindly.

  ‘No,’ says Eneas. ‘There’s rakes of Sligomen gone out.’

  ‘Now, but not boys,’ says his mother. ‘Not boys.’

  ‘I tell you,’ says Eneas, ‘they’ll have boys of sixteen if you present yourself. In some manner or fashion-. The navy might take me. Look at all the boys in sea stories. But I’d like dearly to go.’

  ‘What about your great friend Jonno, that’s made good now in the land trade?’

  ‘Never mind that,’ says Eneas, hard instead of tearful, he’s bone-weary now of crying in the nights because of Jonno and his bicycle. ‘I’d rather go fighting.’

  ‘Why?’ says his Pappy. ‘Why go so far? I never knew you to be footloose, Eneas. Sligo’s a good place. A dandy.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be for ever, Pappy. Wars don’t go on for ever.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d like you fighting in a foreigner’s war,’ says his Mam. ‘Nor any war, where my own first-born boy might be murdered.’

  ‘What’s foreign? If there’s Irishmen in it?’

  ‘Still, boy,’ says his mother. ‘I couldn’t see the use of it. No, but the lack of use. The waste.’

  ‘It mightn’t suit you once you’re there, Eneas, and the army’s fierce hard to get out of,’ says Old Tom.

  ‘It’s like prison,’ says his Mam, ‘so it is.’

  ‘When school’s done with, well, I’d like to,’ says Eneas. ‘Well,’ says his father, as if a-dream, as if singing the words secretly within, ‘think it over well.’

  ‘And I will, Pappy,’ he says, the stars jostling for room in the windowpanes. The two of them in the bed like one of them tombs in the Protestant church, where he and Jonno once crept, to fright their mortal souls, and steal what they could of missals, full of the deviPs words — the Knight and his Lady.

  4

  AS THE BOAT COMES UP the river at Galveston his soul is sixteen summers old. And yet he knows this Galveston. Oh, like many a port he has noticed it possesses unexpectedly the qualities and signs of the port of home, though it is not. A queer romance enshrouds it. He will be at home among docks and shipping. The nearest to the war he could get was the British Merchant Navy and now here he is in Texas! Texas is hotter than the Tropical Plant House in Belfast, where he signed himself up for this French war. In Texas!

  It was better, and more discreet with the politics going about those days, to cross from wily Connaught into the indifferent and more English-minded counties, for to take the King’s shilling in Belfast. Or for to become an honest Jack Tar anyhow. And in the upshot the makeshift counter in the Plant House appealed to him, as if, though the decision was surely made, it was made lightly, even humorously. Because it was a queer thing for the recruiting captain of the British Merchant Navy, aping all the custom and ceremony of the navy proper, because of the times of shortage that were in it, to be set in his dapper white uniform against the gigantic fronds and flourishes of some lost South American world, adrift in a stormy, red-bricked Belfast. But with the local trouble a-flare in Dublin, with your man Pearse and the rest all shot and the public everywhere it was said in ferment about it, it was best, his Mam decreed, for a sixteen-year-old boy to make his compact with the British Merchant Navy in the privacy and ease of the Protestant counties, which indeed were more neighbour to Sligo by the atlas than Dublin herself. And though both had a thimble of politics between them, Eneas’s Pappy deemed it wise also.

  They are fetching machine parts in Galveston and he understands in his heart that he may still serve the King and save France from this vantage point. He may still gaze over France in his bunk-imprisoned dreams and bless her sacred vineyards and walk with the endangered French monks through the groves of threatened — what other blasted thing do they grow in France, peaches, apricots, bananas? Galveston is buried in its summer doldrums, the very river thick as treacle, oiling along between the wharves, past the shrimp boats and the toiling goods trains. The boats of America are never brightly painted, but to him as he leans as sailors must upon the rail they are informal as the men he likes, the quick men, the joking men, sorrowful, who cry after a few beers and drag out the mementoes of home lugubriously. There are fine times to be had in the absolute bleakness of the evenings playing cards for English pennies and weeping after the sights and girls of home. He is not a-feared of those men as he thought he might be, indeed as his mother said he would be. He has all his cloths of muscles now on the eternal frame of his bones. They are men bawdier than bawds, quieter sometimes than corncrakes when the scything men are near, lon
esomer than broken farmland, happier oftentimes than dogs, crueller betimes than Spartans. But they are men that know home, and every port in their company is home. It is a mystery dear to him, a mystery he thanks his stars for. That a handful of men can jimmy up a semblance of home, or nearly. And maybe it is because they are oftentimes so far from the warmth of wives and the enthusiasms of children that their hearts are in so great a fever always to make a world, if only a lean-to of a world that a boat is, nailed and angled to the dark emotions of the sea. His youth makes him a willing builder, adding his ha’p’orth of nails to the structure, placing something of his parents into the speckled wood, a tincture of his Pappy especially, so remarkable in the company of other people, tuneful and liked. He thinks it is not such a bad thing to be adrift on the limitless ocean, a creature itself so vast, so intimately gripping the hard earth herself, it cannot be seen entire, even in extraordinary dreams. Perhaps he has a talent for sailoring, he suspects he might, and it gives him great heart at his tasks, whether sluicing out the jakes or whatever he is assigned on the roster of muck duties, as they are rightly termed. Perhaps if he had been robbed off the quays and press-ganged as some of the old sailoring men were in the distant days of their youth, he might resent the bockety world of the boat. But as he has chosen to come out upon the sea, it suits him, if not down to the ground at least to the last timber of his vessel. He knows that if a man chooses to go, he may freely in the next breath choose to return home, wherever true home lies. And this is his liberty, his home reachable behind him, and all the different versions of home in the ports of the world, and the peculiar but adequate home in the person of the boat. He really does think the world is various and immense, and curiously homely. Happy thoughts, no doubt, happy illusions, on the great circus and stage of the sea, with the drug of youth in his blood. And he knows now many an important star, and he has seen the canopies of the Northern Lights, falling in light more blue than shells from the domains where no God abides. Many a moment his formerly bleak heart sings privately in the dark of the thrumming boat. The old sailors laugh at him for calling the ship a boat but everything was a boat in Sligo that sat upon the waters.