The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘Where is that West they talk about?’ he asks.

  He is relaxed in the welcome gloom of a bar in Galveston, Texas, tucked in amid the huge decorated warehouses, where a British sailor may rest easy and drink unmolested. The bar is called Gabe’s and he was given the name on his ticket of shore leave because he is of course youthful and an easy thing therefore for a Galveston man to rob. But he hasn’t got but the four dollars in his britches anyhow, so they may roll him if they wish he reckons, though on second reckoning four dollars would buy a high old time in Galveston. Indeed he was told of a certain avenue, named for some dark reason Avenue 1½, as if it had no need of the extravagance of a full number, where all the fine loose girls had their quarters, among the general mass of Negramen and women.

  ‘Where is that West?’

  It is a question offered generally to the simple collection of men about him, dressed in clothes that were new a decade since, in hats of the same vintage, large, lop-sided, attitudinal. They have felt bound to mention in the manner of human persons everywhere on the homely earth the sameness of the weather in South Texas, provided always you allow for the tornado and typhoon at the back of everybody’s mind, but the freshening effect nonetheless of the gratifying sea. Shrimpers, waders, engineers, knockabouts, carters, boozers …

  ‘Where is that West, the West I hear often mentioned?’ asks Eneas.

  And it is generally then agreed among the gentlemen present that you will have to go a long way beyond Ohio these times to find that selfsame West. Ohio is so loaded under farmers it cannot be sanctioned with the term West. No doubt it was always East by the map, but wilderness, open plain, made West of everywhere beyond New England one time. Was Iowa West? This is discussed fervently enough.

  ‘No, friend. You would not be West till you saw South Dakota. Till you crossed the Plate River itself. And that’s a fact.’

  ‘How would you know that,’ says a weasely-looking man in a restitched sack for a set of trews, that has been shovelling shrimp all day to judge by the filthy pink stain up to his oxters, ‘you, that never saw a cow or a prairie or nothing like that, all your born days?’

  ‘I read the Galveston Echo,’ says the challenged man. ‘And,’ he says, ‘there never was, nor ever will be, a call for a shrimp-boat captain in South Dakota, so why would I go?’

  This is the definitive information. Eneas is reduced now to taking the fresh chilly beer into his gullet. He wonders how they get it so cold in these frightful climes. Broken Heart is the name of it. Broken Heart beer. He likes it. He feels a great liking generally lifting himself on to the terrain of these men, he would like to be an American. It is a matter of hailing himself as such, he supposes, in his own mind. But he could scarcely expect his own captain to relish him going off now to be an American Eneas. Still, he is sixteen, he is strong, he harbours no ties to anything above the ties of his childhood place, which sometimes he thinks might be overcome, and ought to be, all things considered. Nothing moors him only his feeling for this and that, of course his love for his Mam and Pappy is an ingredient there, and his enthusiasm for the proper dealing in friendship and so forth. The first effects of the beer are a ravaging hopefulness that dances through his brain. How easy, conquerable, perfectly interesting, engrossing, even ennobling, the bloody old earth is! He would not offend these drinking men for the world with a faulty remark. He plans every inch of what he says to them, as any man ought who wishes to be among friends and liked, and is hooded above his own words, watchful, as much as he can, easy though he is among them. He understands the force, the fooling, the arrogance and the victory of that very clock behind the Negraman tending bar, ticking away their lives and chances.

  ‘I heard there was a war in your part of the world,’ says the pleasant weasel man. ‘Our friend here is not the only poor fool reads the Galveston Echo with his dinner.’

  There is,’ says Eneas. ‘There is a big war back there in France, across the sea.’

  ‘I read as much. The President himself has concerned himself with your war, so you have no need to fear.’

  ‘Why has the boy no need to fear?’ says the regular Echo reader, with the added expertise on the Plate River, wherever it was. ‘No president I ever heard of could lessen the fears of a young man like him. A young man, drinking Broken Heart. Or any other young man.’

  ‘There are men dying all across the fields of France,’ says Eneas suddenly, startling the arguers. The few men listening at the bar look at Eneas. Funny how some men talk and some men listen.

  That’s just what I’m reading,’ says the weasel, distantly, as if he too suffered the terrible nostalgia for France that Eneas does, though neither truly has set foot upon her soil.

  ‘Like lambs,’ says Eneas.

  ‘Yes. Like lambs they die,’ says the weasel. ‘And before you object to what I’m saying,’ he says to his friend, ‘I went to war in my day, and wore that blue cloth upon my back,’ and he turns again to Eneas, ‘when I was young like you.’

  ‘I don’t object,’ says the other man, sincerely.

  Long into that night Eneas talks with the lonesome men. He fills them in on the great facts of France. How the fields of France used swell in the summer with the drunken fragrance of the vines. The men are dizzy with knowledge, they love this young man of knowledge. The beer makes him more than happy. Its chill instigates in him an unknown sense of distance and at last he senses the bitter, wholesome, liberating, lonesome idea that being an American must be. He hears now about the fine families of Texas that are still struggling with the Redman in the furthest West, in the morning fog and evening suffering of the desert. He hears about the big-boned women that such families feature. He is astounded again and again by the facts of Texas. They try to tell him how big this Texas is but it’s not within his grasp. He knows the blown lovely Azores, out there in the centre of the sea, but a land that they tell him is as big as the sea, he cannot grasp it. The pagan Redman out there in the West fighting the fine families excites him. He gulps at the beer. If he were aboard ship now, the topic of mothers would have been raised, as it always was when there was drinking, and he would be doubtless weeping. Here his mother seems too skinny and small to have much fire for him beside the Texan matriarchs. And she would not thrive in Texas, she could not be an American. Jonno might make an American, but not his Pappy or his Mam. There is something, what can he call it, an edge of murderousness that is new to him, in these peaceful companions. They are at repose in the bar and at the edges he senses the ghosts of death and hardship. What would his father do, all small with his piccolo in the cruel kingdoms of the Redman? They would eat him. They would stir the soup with the piccolo. He is thankful he has got tall and strong himself in the upshot. He gives thanks to the good God that he has got tall and strong. Why, here at the foot of America, where he is drinking, the Negraman humming the while with the struck lights of the drinking glasses at his looming back, and where a filthy sea leaks out into the sombre Bay of Mexico, and Jamaica is beyond, he is astonished at everything. Everything seems suddenly an accident, maybe even a conspiracy, his mother’s parentage, the glorious foolishness of his father, the brilliance of his brother Jack, Young Tom’s musical gifts, his sister Teasy’s weird piety. The things that have driven him away to be the saviour of France, to be a soldier of sorts for France, for those extraordinary vineyards, seem things now to make him laugh. America dwarfs him! He is laughing out loud, drunk as a tequila maggot. He is banging the bar joyously. It is unbearably humorous. He is a British sailor. It is death to say the words, he is tortured by the humour of it. He notices the weasel is so wickedly intoxicated now that his face has fallen forward from the forehead to the chin and he’s dribbling like one of his father’s lunatics. Simple facts under the bright pall of drink are wild and strange to him. A British sailor. A Christian. Now he laughs the loudest. A Christian!

  The captain makes Galveston the centre of their journeys so Galveston becomes as familiar to him as a district of Ireland.
He comes to understand all the natures of the sea creatures captured by the famous fishermen of Galveston, in their boats rusty but glamorous, and the scientific gradations of shrimps, their sizes and their characters. This is the talk of Galveston, along the water. The handsome brick wharfhouses stand cooly in the fiery middays. He cannot but have admiration for the citizens of Galveston, he cannot help it, some of the older sailors find grievous fault with matters and detest the sodden heat, but Eneas with his youthful heart rejoices in the clamour of talk and business of remote concerns, and when he is perforce crawling up the coast to attend to the captain’s ambitions in Bermuda, or crossing the strange ruckled shallows of the Bay of Mexico to have truck and trade with the small Mexicans, he misses the simplicities and carefree sights of Galveston, and thinks of himself walking there, and greeting the shrimpers and, in the curious avenues, the easy sorts of people holding court on collapsing stoops.

  He is dreaming of Avenue 1½. Two nights distant from America. The sea again below. This time they are heading back for England. Bull Mottram the master gunner — they are carrying two guns into the filthy storms of mid-Atlantic in honour of the far-off war — well, Bull Mottram has regaled the tribe of the poop with a tale of Avenue 1½ that was mostly about a whore’s drawers, a whore’s conversation, and a whore’s treachery. It is not the whore that Eneas dreams of, but the Avenue itself, in its chambers of heat, the Negramen parading and calling. Negramen came out of Africa to Galveston nigh on three hundred years ago, big fancy princes of men he is informed, with gold on their arms and high ways, soon battered out of them. Or they came in like dead men, side by side in gigantic rows, stuffed in like herring, or the playing bones of herring in the very herring of a ship. And he knows his own uncle went from Sligo in a ship not so unlike that kind, or his father’s uncle it was maybe, in the days of hunger, and became a trooper in the Union Army, and wrote home many’s the time to say so, but precious little damn tin in the letters, according to Eneas’s mother. He wonders now in the giant pitch and toss of the new Atlantic whether he might have been best advised to go out there into wide America and find his great-uncle and upbraid him on that matter — or better, join him in his Indian or kindred adventures? Somewhere out there Trooper McNulty bears a face like his but older. Good luck to him! Good luck to the old fellow! He does not suppose in his heart that that man would be seen again ever on Sinbad’s Yellow Shore, that’s to say, Sligo herself.

  There is a deal in America that reminds him not so much of home itself, but the dreams and the stories of home. Yes, it was a drastically interesting place, falling away though it might be behind him. To think of the Negramen coming in, all those long centuries past, only to have their gold taken, and now their many generations living the life of Reilly or not as the case may be on Avenue 1½. He could have lived easily there himself, peacefully, strolling down to the flyblown store in the cool refuge of the time between sunlight and dark when the insects’ murderous thrumming dies away, and the piercing violin music of the night crickets begins. Hey ho, Charlie, and How’s it goin’, Emmanuel, for all them Negramen got their names out of the Bible, and best of all out of that Old Testament. And if they cannot find a name they like in the Old Testament, to all appearances, they will go forward to the Book of Revelation, that the second St John wrote in fever on an island. In a pitch-dark cave on an island in the pure realms of Greece, like an Irish poet of the old times. Some of the sailors that have seen bad times and know the streets of big city ports only too well and know the doss houses and the soup kitchens, well, they have that book off by heart, from all the blessed times that crazy preachers sang it out to them that was waiting for a drop of soup. The great thing is not to get taken from the book of life, not to get your damned name taken out for sin and wickedness, of a kind that sailors outbest all other trades at, it must be allowed. Well, it is a tricky world for a sailor, all told. Preachers delight to read frightening things to poor hungry sailors down on their heels and on their luck.

  It is a drastically interesting country, America is, and you are lucky to get away without regret, loss of tin, or the Spanish clap. So he is sad enough in the bowel of his boat dreaming of Avenue 1½ but at the same time kind of glad to have passed up the whores. Everyone lets Bull Mottram know he is in for a right cruel dose as a sad memento of good times had on Avenue 1½.

  He has earned his own brass for a year and more now and the war is over and he feels the inclination of a pigeon to go home, to his proper home. It is farewell to Bull Mottram and all his fellows. He has been but a poor hand at the letter writing. Now in the night oftentimes he surrenders to the feeling that he has slipped the clothes of romance, of the Romantic Life at sea. The sea has gone grey for him and deep in himself there is a sea-change. There’s a tenderness in him, a softened thing about his heart like an old cloak, which makes him helpless before thoughts of his mother. It is as if she’s signalling to him over the wastes of England as he languishes in Southampton among the serviceable ships. Or he hears and attends to her unhappiness by some unknown but human arrangement of Morse or telegraph. The poles carry the hurt singing of the wires across the war-deserted Midlands, across Worcester and points west, that have fewer young men now to bring honour to their boundaries. England has fallen into victory. The wideboys smiling at the shop doors and barely a job of work even for them. The best lie under his beloved fields of France he supposes. In honour of France there’s no one to bring honour to lonesome England.

  His father is sacrosanct again in the inner heart of Eneas. He does not know how. He was peering too closely at his father and now he has stepped back and it’s his old childish eyes that look upon Tom McNulty. Unhappiness infects the victory and even the dogs of Southampton slink about the harbour. The coin of joy is soon spent. It is a glorious thing he supposes to fight France’s war in Texas with the lonesome Negramen. No! He has a contempt for himself, for his smiling, his ould talking and his youth! There’s someone else or new habiting him who is grievous critical of that boy setting off to sea as if the world being his oyster he could really go like that, untrammelled, and with no price at length to pay. He yearns to hear a tune from his father’s hoard of tunes, to comment on it and to be easy with the slight man. He fears he will never be. And he fears the new man both critical of the fading boy he was and by the same token alas only too soft to face the truth of the world. For he believes he sees some of that truth — the iron waves, the iron waves rearing up.

  He is not so grateful for the fear.

  At the very edge of the huge port there are the huge gates. He will be a sailor no more and after he passes through with a nod to the gatekeeper Nangle — one of the host of Sligomen that have spread out upon the wide world, to hold gates, sweep dark English streets, muck out the stables of Newmarket and Chester — after he passes through, that will be that and he may consider himself a man unwelcome to such as Nangle. No more will the gates of ports open for him, no more will he pass through to the ships. Nor read the proud names and the names disgraced, know the flags of convenience and which ships are carrying the Chinese poppy or the Russian spirits. Once it was cognacs out of far France coming into the coves of the west of Ireland, coming into places without roads whose people would greet you with a stone in their fist held in readiness behind their backs. Now it’s other contraband in all the ports of the earth.

  He feels a sadness to be tendering up his kit. Farewell to blue cloth and the starchy hat. Farewell to the lofty captain and his infallible orders. Farewell to the king, the queen and the knave and the numbers two to ten, played fiercely under the singing timbers. In addition to Eneas Bull Mottram has taken a fancy to another life. The two walk for the last time along the private stones. There is a sudden and unpleasant hint that, in this new adventure and with this new freedom, they are, he and Bill, ordinary strangers to each other.

  ‘It’s foolish maybe to give away a year at sea,’ says Eneas. ‘Maybe, Bull, it’s flighty. Every trade deserves a lifetime I’ve heard it
said.’

  ‘But you’re going,’ says Bull.

  ‘Seems so.’

  ‘There’s an old saw you’ll also hear said below to the effect,’ says Bull, as they reach Nangle’s fearsome gates, and see the moil of more regular and even earthly traffic beyond, the gross shires and their mucky drivers, the smarter commercial vans and such, ‘if a boy don’t see himself shipwrecked before the age of seventeen then he may lay up his plans to make a life at sea.’

  ‘Is that so, Bull? And were you yourself in that predicament?’

  ‘I was, man, I was. In Madagascar many years ago I stood upon a sandbar of some half a mile in length with thirty other men and waited for rescue those five long weeks. We put up shelters and ate what we’d held back from the pilfering of the bloody storm. And we lived every moment in terror of storm on such a useless spit of land, and terror of thirst, and terror of being eaten by your mates. But I lived through and seven men lived through with me and it hardens your guts for the trade afterwards. I tried my hand at riding with cattle in Argentina for some years then, for the fear the sea had caused me, but in the upshot I was content to take a berth again and be a poor sailor.’

  ‘I expect that sort of high adventure makes the difference right enough,’ says Eneas, gloomily. It was another apparent fragment of gospel truth to torment him.

  ‘Don’t take it hard, man,’ says Bull. ‘The life at sea is an old life and men won’t go for it much longer the way they have it fixed for them. You’ll see now men will want their comfort after a war. See if they don’t. Even myself, that knows hardship like a street girl, won’t mind some ease.’ ‘What will you go for?’ says Eneas, passing at last through the gates into the earthly noise.