The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘I imagine I’ll pass down on the train to the Isle of Dogs and see what they say down there where I have pals, in London. Sailors and such are well understood there, if you want to know.’

  Then Bull Mottram the master gunner retired takes a hand of Eneas in one of his own hard hands and gives it a firm and hearty shake. There is nothing else to say but Bull Mottram says it anyway, for the sake of friendship.

  ‘Good luck to you, man,’ he says. ‘Take care now and so long. I have to go across the road there to the port doctor for I must ask him to attend to the waterworks promptly. Every visit to the jakes is a little hell. So long, brother.’

  There is nothing for it but to relinquish Bull and go on into the milling town. Where is his confidence in the daily beauty of the world, not meaning outstanding beauty such as is expounded on the question of paradise, but the simple beauties that he has ever relished in things? The vans and shire-horses seem cruelly to advance, their custodians leaning greedily and smilelessly into the whipping wind. He looks back and sees old Bull go from light into the shadow of the doctor’s door. Bull, spick and span, but for those fatal waterworks. Oh, freshly, stubbornly, he laughs in the street.

  His heart lightens. He has the world before him after all. The sorrow of leaving is yes also the joy of going forth or borders each upon each.

  And he hastens home to Sligo, with all the speed and trust of the swallow seeking the first fringes of summer. There is a wildness in him to see his Pappy and his Mam, and maybe even a lesser wildness to view his siblings. And there’s a rip in his head where Jonno Lynch’s friendship once was, and he’d like to patch it. So, away home with himself he goes.

  5

  MAYBE HE IS WRONG to have come back, he doesn’t know. The men that were soldiers have come home too — to a brief spit of celebration and a wide, deep sea of idleness. Great friendships and even sorrows dissolve in the meagre eternity of daily life. Veterans still in their twenties gum up the alleyways of Sligo and their eyes sometimes are as blank as their days. And it’s no better in England herself where the very heroes of Passchendaele and the Somme have survived to become the mighty fools of England with only time on their hands and something in their bleak he arts as devious as a cancer. Eneas sees all this clear enough. It’s written all about, in the measly faces of wives as they bargain for single rashers, for awful cuts of meat, for blackening wings of spinach. Maybe Eneas feels a thousand years of life have passed in himself, mysteriously. Fellas his own age look older and bleaker than him though, without the darkness of weather that he has on his face. He can’t find a niche in the world of Sligo to slot himself back into — not just a niche for living in, but a niche of time itself. The sea has put a different clock into him. He’s always got the wrong time in Sligo.

  And the war finishing was only the signal to the hidden men of Ireland to brew their own war, and sometimes in the ironic song of Ireland those selfsame cornerboys so recently out of the King’s uniform leak away into the secret corners of the town to drill and become another kind of soldier — dark, uniformless, quick-striking like the patient heron by the spratty stream, men to menace and harm, if they can, the huge confetti of troops scattered over the island in the old wedding of death. Troops of course composed of ordinary Irishmen. Their recent brothers in the ruined fields of France. And other men that kept their hands clean of the European war are inclined to get blood on the selfsame hands in a war for the old prize of freedom for Ireland.

  And Eneas knows that Jonno Lynch is one such, because two weeks home in Sligo he passes Jonno Lynch in Main Street and gets no nod or word. Now Jonno Lynch is the man he most wanted to see, because having knocked about the world he has a notion that he might be a fitting friend for him again, the two of them, one the sailor and the other the man of — business affairs, could he say? They could pick up now where they left off at school, and be going about, and have the odd quiet drink here and there like gents, and be dandy, be easy and open-hearted. Why not? And he has gone round to Mrs Foster’s hovel but by heavens she is dead of an embolism in the back of her knee and all her charges scattered into Roscommon and further. And across the town in O’Dowd’s premises he gets short shrift from the lassie on the counter, who will tender no information and take no messages. So it is left to chance, the smallness of the town and the will of God to bring Jonno Lynch along Main Street in a very, well, surprising blue suit, with a thread of quite striking green running down it, the latest fashion Eneas guesses of New York or suchlike. And he crosses the cart-cluttered street easy as a jackdaw, and tries to intercept his bosom pal, but his bosom pal presses on past him like he was only another stranger to negotiate on the thoroughfare.

  ‘Jonno,’ he says, ‘it’s me, Eneas, back from sea. Don’t you know me?’

  But nary a nod does he get, nor even a curse or a dark look, and Eneas is greatly puzzled. And he drifts home with a sober tread and sits in against the free wall of the little kitchen and talks to his Mam about other things, the piety of Teasy and the scholarship to the big secondary school that Jack has his sights on.

  ‘And when Teasy is right for it, I have her promised to an order in Bexhill-on-Sea, in England. By the good graces, we’ll have a nun in this pagan family at last. Father Moynihan is in and out of here all the time, taking tea and talking up a storm of religion to her, delighted with her. Delighted with us all.’

  ‘She’s only seven or eight yet, Mam,’ he says.

  ‘That’s right. High time to be turning in the right direction. Look at yourself, gone out sailoring at the age of sixteen.’

  And his brother Jack comes in laden with the books of a wise scholar and slams them on the rickety table and gives Eneas a grimacing look.

  ‘I met Jonno Lynch on the school road,’ says Jack, ‘and he says to lay off him.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ says their Mam, outraged.

  ‘Lay off him. Don’t be trying to talk to him in the street.’ ‘He was passing by and said it or what?’ says Eneas.

  ‘No, he came special. Came over the roundy wall special to tell me. To give me the message. And to stay well away from O’Dowd’s place, he says. In particular. He says are you the greatest eejit in the world or what?’

  ‘Don’t speak to your poor brother like that, John McNulty,’ says the Mam of peace. ‘You’re only a whelp. Have sense.’

  ‘Well, Mam, he may be older than me, but, Jimmy Mack, is he wiser?’

  ‘What nonsense is Jonno Lynch speaking?’ says the Mam.

  ‘Not so much, nonsense,’ says Jack, just a little smugly. ‘Anyway, Jonno Lynch told me to tell you.’

  And his brother Jack, who is old enough now to comment on the practices of Sligo, seemingly, because he is as bright as daylight, tells him this is because Eneas has been going about in ships as if he were an Englishman and busying himself during an English war. How can Jack have a grasp of these things? A low-looking red-headed lad as green as a cabbage? Is he even twelve years of age, the same scrap of wisdom?

  Oh, the British Merchant Navy, the British. You’d want to rise early to be up with them, the heroes of Ireland. Deep thinkers. The blessed British Merchant Navy! Poor sailors, afraid of sea, afraid of land. In rusty traders and toiling oceanic tubs. Desperadoes of salt dreams and wind as tall as heaven. Even that is enough for silence and suspicion, is it?

  Still and all it’s a sort of sorrow to him that Jonno Lynch will not greet the old going-about companion of his boyhood. What’s left of his boy’s heart is wrung by it. It’s a little thing maybe, a nod or a word flung across Main Street, or even to heel up, the two of them, like two cabbage carts against the wall of Plimpton’s or even God knows head into the Cafe Cairo for a citron lemonade and swap all the ould recent histories. But it’s recent histories indeed are the damnable problem. Jack, younger though he may be, has a better grasp of these affairs. He says bright boys and wide boys and bitter-hearted older men with tribes of brats and hard wives too are milling about up on the Showgrounds of a Su
nday night and under their floorboards are real guns and in their souls the foul pith of rebellion. So Jack says. Jack’s reading Tennyson noon to night. He’s a wonder.

  But there’s worse to come in all manner of things. A long year passes, a long round of weather and eating his mother’s grub. Eneas roams the town asking everywhere and anywhere for a job and finds oh, kindness here and there, but mostly indifferent no’s and even aggression. And gradually Eneas understands that the little rebellion that took place just recent in Dublin and other points, with barely a flare-up in Sligo, barely a flash of fire on the hill, has done nonetheless great altering in the hearts and minds of the townspeople. And if it isn’t that, it’s the worsening state of money matters cited, and true enough men are being let go everywhere in the country, not just Sligo, and wise people are pulling in their feet so the elephant of poverty won’t crush them. Even the Protestant businesses won’t touch him, which he tries in the last resort. Not that they would have been likely to employ him in the first place, inclined as they were, and rightly, to see to their own. Yet, having sailed about for the sake of France, though a little uselessly, is he not a hero of sorts? A servant of the King? A trustworthy man? No. He wonders what fear it is or weather that has changed everything so. It is that to-do in Dublin and its aftermath no doubt. And maybe he gets a grasp now of why Jonno Lynch calls him an eejit. There’s a lot of slip and tug and pulling of tidal waters that he can’t make out the pattern of. Not for want of banging his head against all the new stone walls of Sligo.

  Even his Pappy is beyond helping him and seemingly has no connection or debt due in the town that would jimmy up a job for him. Oh, this is all a tremendous shock for Eneas, to be this buffeted figure. His quiet nature is all blown about, all windy and ragged.

  The carefree mood as he bade farewell to Bull Mottram is no more. Now the days are heavy and bare and dangerous to him. Maybe he exaggerates the rejection of the townspeople, maybe everyone now has their troubles, but, his blood withers, his heart shrinks, his step on the rainy granite of the pavement shortens. And he feels afraid just as he used to as a little boy, half in the hands of sleep, the visages of old demons leering and looming at him.

  But in the end it’s his Pappy after all that has the remedy. Old Tom has been working the last while in the asylum, to the exclusion of his band work. He’d rather be raising the rafters in the hotel in Bundoran where formerly he excited the visitors. It’s been an atrocious summer for holidaying and little call has there been for music. But, a lad belonging to the under-surgeon in the asylum has just gone into the peelers, only back himself from Flanders. He’s a silent boy and a ruined one maybe by the ferocity of that war, but the peelers take him readily enough.

  Eneas looks at it all with simple eyes and having no desire to loiter the rest of his days, joins at the hint of his Pappy the Royal Irish Constabulary. He’s not the complete eejit as Jonno may believe, he’s not the last innocent on earth. He knows why there are places in the peelers when there are places nowhere else. The RIC is composed no doubt of lost men, ordinary fellas from the back farms of Ireland, fools and flotsam and youngsters without an ounce of sense or understanding. And the legends of the RIC are all evictions, murders and the like, though many an Irish family was reared on those wages, and many a peeler was a straightforward decent man. Still, the word Royal is there before all, and they carry arms, and the top men are all out-and-out Castle men. But no matter. He can’t live a life to please Jonno Lynch, much as his heart is grateful for the adventures of his youth. Or he would lead a life to please Jonno Lynch if Jonno still had a gra for him, a friendly love for him. But he does not, clearly. And a fella must work, must toil in the dry vale of the world.

  A fresh recruit by the wisdom and mercy of headquarters in the Phoenix Park is never let serve in his own town and especially so in the new world of guerrilla war and reprisal, for a policeman is a target now, like one of those wooden ducks in the fairground going round and round on the wooden hill. Every recruited man is suspected by both sides of informing, one way or another, and a man is rendered greater innocence by being posted to an unfamiliar town. So Eneas finds himself in Athlone with the bright peaked cap and the shining boots and the black suit. For a brace of months he is drilled and perfected in the barracks square. Out at six they are in their greatcoats, the peaks on the caps as black as blackbirds’ feathers, and rain or shine the boots making the crippled cobbles ring, and they wheel and stamp and take the orders as the one animal. A hundred boys in similar coats, and the fresh reds of the dawn cluttering up the lower gaps between the buildings. The name for a raw boy is a shoofly, and each man aims to be a constable, but the name among the historical-minded people of the town is the peelers, the polis. At end of training each man gets his gun and bullets. All about the barracks the countryside is boiling with sedition and treachery and hatred according to the sergeant, William Doyle of Leitrim, of Leitrim in these latter years, but an Athlone boy in times gone by, so he will tell you. As such a useful man to herd his men about the dangerous districts.

  And indeed ferocious events are afoot in the sacred web of fields and rainy towns. It isn’t just murders and such or killings, you couldn’t call them that. Wherever an RIC man uses a gun and wounds or kills in a skirmish, some man in his uniform is taken and God help him in the dark hedges and isolated farms. Such a man might be gutted with a big knife and his entrails fed to the homely pig in front of him, and the last leaks of life drained out of him then slowly and silently with terrible swipes.

  Next thing the RIC is augmented, as the official word goes, with an Auxiliary Force and now the merry dance gets wilder back and forth. For these are men as strange and driven as the Irish heroes themselves. They’re quaffing long bottles of beer and whisky at every juncture and resting-spot, and visiting themselves upon guilty and innocent alike with the fierce passion and separateness of lions. Perhaps this isn’t an easy matter for recruits like Eneas, jostled in the very police barracks by these haunted faces.

  They have come back most of them from the other war and what haunts them now is the blood and torn matter of those lost, bewildering days. Many of the Auxiliaries are decorated boys, boys that ran out into no-man’s-land and took positions that only bodiless gods could have, and rescued men from the teeth of slaughter and saw sights worse than the drearest nightmares. And they have come back altered for ever and in a way more marked by atrocity than honoured by medals. They are half nightmare themselves, in their uniforms patched together from army and RIC stores, some of them handsome and elegant men, with shining accents, some terrible dark boys from the worst back-alleys of England, but all with the blank light of death and drear unimportance of being alive in their eyes. As ancient as old stories. And every auxiliary has the strength of four ordinary men you would think, as if death and fearlessness were an elixir.

  And they are visited upon the countryside lethally and notoriously. Reprisals are daily sorrows, daily sad persons are found in ditches of a morning and no matter what allegiance was in their hearts at any daybreak. Because they are broken, bloody, vanished hearts now, auxiliary and guerrilla alike. Eneas’s principal duty is the finding and motoring of these remnants back to the coroner’s premises in Athlone town.

  The king of the Auxiliaries is the man called the Reprisal Man and Eneas knows him by no other name. It’s said generally that he comes from the dark north of England and killed seven Germans in a bomb hole somewhere in the muddy wastes of the Somme. He’s a person as big and real as one of the cowboys in the flicks — Athlone has its passionate cinema too. How he does it nobody can tell on his poor wages but the man is never but spick and span and the crease straight and ridged in the old trews from stores. A hero in other places no doubt, but a tongue of pure avenging fire in the backroads of the lands about the town. This is a fella never to be seen with and if the rule of thumb among the recruits and indeed the RIC men in general is to stay clear of the Auxiliaries, or the Tans as they are called by the people,
an article of faith is to avoid the Reprisal Man like the devil himself. To be spotted in the company of such as he either in hours of duty or relaxing in the bars of the town would be noted on some black-list of marked men.

  Even the sergeant Doyle stays away from him and Doyle is a policeman of the old school, loyal as a child to the kings and queens of England, Scotland and Ireland and the princes of Wales also. His father was a simple cabinkeeper in Leitrim after losing the huxter’s shop in Athlone when the sergeant was only a scrap. His grandfather died, it was said, during the hunger of the forties in the old century, killed by a mob for feeding Indian grain meant for paupers to his fattening pig. This isn’t information that Eneas gets from the sergeant, but the sort of thing you’ll get whispered to you by the older men less useful than the sergeant, less promoted.

  Well, the whole business is mightily complicated one way and another and Eneas in his heart cannot say that he enjoys the policing he is set to do. He had had in mind the more usual duties of the RIC, in days more peaceful, when he joined, and never had the ambition to be a carter of corpses or a young fella atop a cart weeping from bewilderment. No man fool or sage could get used to the scenes of murder, because they are ever changing and unnatural. Indeed older men long years in the force have taken their own lives in answer to the crushing horror of the times, and rakes of others in the country generally are said to be housed now in the county homes and the asylums. They were unfit for such sights. Eneas tries many a stratagem to water down what he sees, to satisfy his heart that it is a passing matter, but truth to tell each dead soul afflicts him. The trouble and sorrow of being a peeler is a revelation to him.