The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

by Sebastian Barry

  Sunday bright early he hies to the Cathedral for the mass that all the big people of the town attend. For it is considered slothful and perhaps even evil to go to the later masses, unless a person is old, sickly or poor. The poor lads and lassies from the asylum are carted down for the evening mass, and no one goes to that who can help it, unless you are a travelling merchant or the like and would rather get late mass than rot in hell.

  Eneas is not a perfect mass-goer and rarely would he be out his door in the old days for the eight o’clock, though when he was a mere boy amid his siblings, his mother naturally herded them all out and around the ancient walls and up the mosaic steps of the Cathedral. And Old Tom is an immaculate mass-goer always and is respected for it in the town, considering the immense weariness that might be on a band-leader on a Sunday morning. Not everyone understands the deep spring of life in Old Tom McNulty as Eneas does.

  And though he lies as if abed that morning and allows Jack and Young Tom and Teasy to spill out into the little street, Teasy with a clutch of missals to beat the band and a mantilla of black lace on her poor head like a Christmas pudding boiling under muslin in the pot, he spruces himself as best he can before the small yellowing mirror on the landing, slicking his hair down with Jack’s hair-grease and fetching one of his father’s work ties from the leaning cupboard. It is a good tie for a man, with a design of swallows, and it’s very blue altogether, which Eneas obscurely thinks might be a help to him, why he could not say. Clothes maketh the man, as a tailor like his Pappy never tires of saying. And maybe his father is the worst tailor on earth like people say, furnishing jackets and trousers so tight for the lunatics that their arms are hitched up as they go, and the life is squeezed out of their poor bollocks. Maybe that is so, but in other respects he is a kingly man, a very Greek of a man.

  In the Cathedral he takes a dark seat over by the side chapel of the Virgin of Modena, and lurks there, trying to spy his target. He soon spots his family because his brother Jack’s hair flames out amid the mantillas and dark heads of ordinary Sligo people. Suddenly, sitting there like a thief, he realizes what a trench of distance his trouble has created between his shadowed form and their line of heads easy and open among the townspeople. As he is in a crowd, he wonders how many of them are against him or against his kind, how many would be indifferent to or ignorant of the whole matter and how many would be for him. For the latter he despairs.

  But keeps his eyes roaming over the multitude, and when he spots at last Jonno Lynch, he knows his quarry cannot be far away, and sure enough, there’s Mr O’Dowd in the dapperest coat in Sligo, a treasure of a coat, sleek and brushed and tailored to perfection. It wasn’t his father cut that coat, certainly.

  The great crowd spills out into the fresh and speckled sunshine. The sycamores once so sacred to Jonno Lynch blow about a little in the sea-breeze. No doubt the minds of the people are full of the canon’s sermon, about the evils of gold in the modern world, or merely the sense of their own cleanliness, both spiritual and in the matter of their shirts and blouses. Pounds of starch unite the crowd, and for a moment in his distress Eneas can think only of the clothes hung on the people, as if hearts and souls were in the materials and not in the bodies they hide from view. It is a rackety thought and no help to him as he tries to move through the mass of talking and laughing citizens. He sees O’Dowd now talking to the canon on the steps of the cathedral and he is abashed in his task by the sight but what can he do? He must pursue what feels now more and more like a stupid notion, feeble and even dangerous. But he’ll be a Greek in this now if it kills him, and when O’Dowd finally detaches himself from the little red mouth and chinless round face of the canon and descends the concrete steps with a smile of some grandeur on him, Eneas stands in his way. And Eneas has never seen O’Dowd up close, indeed has only glimpsed him passing in his Ford motorcar, and he is surprised by how young the man is, maybe not more than ten years older than himself. But he has a fierce balding head, which he is just covering now with an excellent hat, angling it expertly against the flow of sun and fashion. Eneas stands in his way as best he can, because O’Dowd is not inclined to look anywhere except further out over the heads, perhaps to his waiting car. And it occurs to Eneas, being trained in those matters, that there might be some D men about in their plainclothes so obvious to the world. Certainly there must be RIC men posted about quietly, because it would be part of their duties to guard a mass crowd. In Enniscrone only the last week two men were arrested by the Tans coming out of mass, which caused the most tremendous furore in the district. Not so much because the two men were undoubtedly murderers of a patriotic bent, but because shopkeepers’ wives were present and one at least fainted in terror of those large rusty-looking guns the Tans carried. At any rate, Tans, RIC, rebels, it was all the one to Eneas now, and he raises his right hand gently to impede O’Dowd.

  ‘What’s the whatsa?’ says O’Dowd, pleasantly, maybe not knowing Eneas’s face, as if Eneas were just another of the young men of Sligo with their heads sleeked like filmstars.

  ‘Mr O’Dowd, I’d like a word with you, if you had a minute.’

  ‘Sure, son,’ he says, ‘step over under the trees a little.’

  And Eneas, following O’Dowd’s bright shoes across to the grubby trees, is astonished by his success. Also, yes, he is even sicker at heart now because he realizes that O’Dowd has totally mistaken him for a decent man, a man with some decent request, a true man of Sligo. When they reach the dappled desert under the sycamores, and O’Dowd turns to him grandly, Eneas’s mind is turning over like a terrible engine. There are trapped animals in there, birds, lions, elephants, a zoo of panic and fear. This is so much harder than he imagined, him cool and measured, and O’Dowd at best silent and nodding. But the vast friendliness of the man is destroying him.

  ‘I don’t think you know me,’ says Eneas, obliteratedly. ‘Well, who are you, then?’ says O’Dowd, laughing a slight laugh.

  ‘McNulty is my name,’ says Eneas, ‘Eneas McNulty, that was a friend of Jonno Lynch’s.’

  ‘You’re a friend of Jonno’s?’

  ‘Well, I was, I was. Indeed I was, formerly.’

  ‘OK. So what is it you want of me?’

  Oh Jesus, this is bad, the pleasantness of the man. The ordinary chat and pleasantness of him. The fresh face and the fine clothes. Eneas senses his father’s tie on his breast, like a blue blight, absurdly. And he’s stoppering up himself now, like his father the night before, but with different causes.

  ‘I was hoping,’ he says, ‘no, I am hoping to say something to you, about my time in the RIC.’

  ‘What?’ says O’Dowd, entirely differently.

  ‘My time in the RIC, do you see?’

  ‘Your time in the RIC, do I see?’ And it’s terrifying how O’Dowd almost sings the words.

  ‘Look it,’ says Eneas. He can see only dimly what he wants O’Dowd to look at. But he presses on. ‘When I was in the RIC in Athlone there was two men killed by the Tans and it was said I was the man fingered them and so I was supposed to have been placed on a black-list by, by, you know, the, eh, insurrectionists, and the fact was, or is, or was that, I didn’t, you know, say a word about them, I mean, I knew nothing about them anyway, it was the Reprisal Man got them by his own intelligence network, do you see?’

  O’Dowd looks at him. He might be looking at ragworm in a fisherman’s fold of bait. He’s very quiet for a good ten seconds. Very quiet. Thinking, sort of secure, immaculate, not like Eneas, filthy now to himself, like the scum of time and birds on the sycamores.

  ‘What’s that to do with me?’ says O’Dowd. And now Eneas wonders why O’Dowd lingers. There’s something about it, the way he lingers, intent.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Eneas, stupid, stupid in his own ears. Of course he knows, for the love of Christ.

  ‘No, no, because, I’d like to know,’ says O’Dowd. ‘I’d like to know why you’ve come to me, I mean, I am concerned to know why.’

  Th
e politeness is awful. Yes, and the concern is awful. He realizes why O’Dowd lingers. Because of this concern. Eneas is suddenly in another realm altogether, the realm of O’Dowd’s safety, or O’Dowd’s sense of his own safety. And by God he is more lost there than he was in his own danger. O’Dowd leans in. Eneas can smell something like a woman’s scent off trim, he doesn’t know what it could be.

  ‘I am concerned to know,’ he repeats. ‘Did Jonno Lynch for instance say something about me to you?’

  ‘No,’ says Eneas, forceful as he can. Christ, now it’s Jonno Lynch’s safety he’s floundering in. Too many safeties! ‘No, Jonno Lynch won’t even speak to me since I was, what did they do to me, there’s a word for it, discharged me — no, I don’t know why I came to you. I had an idea.’

  ‘Aye, what idea? That’s my question to you, young fella.’ ‘I had an idea that I could say to you that, I, that someone in Sligo could have a go and see if I mightn’t be taken off the, the black-list, so that I could stay in Sligo as an ordinary man and get a job and just live among my people, you know.’

  ‘I couldn’t give an ass’s shite about that,’ says O’Dowd ferociously. That’s not what I’m asking, you little bollocks. Do you know what I do in Sligo? I buy and sell land. I buy and sell land. What do I do?’

  It’s like the master years ago, what seems like years ago. Amo, amas, amat. Repeat after me. I love, you love, he, she or it loves.

  ‘You buy and sell land,’ says Eneas obediently.

  That’s what I’m anxious for you to know.’

  ‘Right,’ says Eneas.

  ‘Got it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t come ever fucking near me again. Got it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The next night after the helpful dark has fallen on the town someone knocks on the door of his Mam’s house. He’s sitting almost toe to toe with his Mam on the old dancing hearth. He knows well there is no gold buried there. He has a powerful sense that he has made everything much worse. He would like to broach the subject with his Mam but he is afraid now to say anything more to anyone. He is afraid of the concerns of other people that he might awake like the spaniel raising birds willy-nilly on the bog. He could not say exactly how he is. But there is a shape of fear in him that is just a size too big for his brain, he can feel it trying to burst out there. His blood feels ill, and he can neither taste food or relish it. All night he saw his childish nightmares, just as potent as when he was four, the twisted hags leering and looming at him. And mixed in there, traversing his dreams, was poor Doyle with his foolish cheeks all burst by bullets and his foolish words strewn on the ground of the lane like pennies. He sits in his iron box of fear. Even so near to the hem of his mother’s big dress he is sweating, unwell, alarmed, banging about from thought to thought.

  She goes down the little length of the hall and lets in the visitor. He supposes it might be a gentleman come like of old to get the run of a tune off his Pappy or the like. Or sure, Jesus, a murderer to put bullets into his Mam and himself, like you read every day in the paper.

  The last man he expects is Jonno Lynch, stepping into the parlour with the slight spring fire ticking away in the grate.

  ‘Jonno,’ he says, leaping up.

  ‘Howaya,’ says Jonno, clearly under the restraint of the Mam’s presence.

  ‘Would you ever leave us alone, Mam, dear,’ he says, ‘in these special circumstances. I wouldn’t put you out of your own parlour.’

  ‘Ah sure, yes,’ says his Mam simply, and closes the black-stained door after her.

  The two friends of boyhood face each other across Mrs McNulty’s famished pattern of a rug. Jonno is almost as well turned out as O’Dowd, he’s very shipshape and tight with clothes. Jonno Lynch seems to be interested in the paltry rug, because he stares at it mercilessly.

  ‘Are you trying to get me killed?’ he says.

  ‘No, Jonno.’

  ‘Do you know where I was all evening?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was up the back of the town and I was being interrogated.’

  It does strike Eneas that he is a very clean man for an interrogated one, but maybe the rebels do things differently.

  ‘Do you have any idea, Eneas, of my position in Sligo?’

  ‘Your position?’

  ‘Yeh. Don’t make it sound like something else. While you’ve been in the British navy and going about as an RIC constable, you know, gadding about, gadding about, I’ve been working hard to make something of myself, you know. You know best of any man in Sligo where I come from. I never had no Mam and Pappy like you. I was whipped every night of my life by the old bitch in Kitchen Lane. Now, I’ve done something about all that. I’ve worked at it. And I believe in certain things. And one of those things, the biggest of them, is the freedom that’s coming to Ireland. Every sign is, Eneas, this will be the last year of war, and next year we’ll see something big, something good, yeh, and I’ll be pan of that.’

  ‘That’s good, Jonno.’

  ‘Yeh, that’s good. Right, now you’re concentrating. I can see you are with your big sweaty face there. Now, I was sitting the back of the town with some of the lads, you know, and I was wondering why they were so, well, what can I say, how can I describe it, so quiet, I think is the word I’m looking for. And then another man comes in, a divisional officer, a very high-up man, and he talks to me, talks to me, and I don’t know what’s going on, and I give my answers, and then your name is mentioned.’

  ‘My name?’

  ‘Yeh. Your man McNulty, the black-listed man, he says. And he says you were just yesterday, in the bright open spaces of the cathedral, talking to a certain man, and you were saying all manner of peculiar things, and the connection between you and that man was yours truly. And the man asked you about this, and you were saying something about your feckin ould days in the RIC and so on. So I’m being questioned now all evening by this officer and I don’t know for sure at certain points if Fm going to be shot or not, the way they look at me. And then it eases up, and the thing appears to be settled and Fm thinking, I’m going to go over to Eneas McNulty’s house and knock his head off.’ Eneas is exhausted. He can hardly speak to his erstwhile friend.

  ‘I told him you had completely broken with me.’

  ‘Yeh, so they said eventually. Which luckily is what I said to them. Which luckily happened to be the truth.’

  Eneas sits down. ‘Jesus,’ he says.

  ‘You don’t know where you are, do you?’ says Jonno.

  ‘No, and I’m getting fed up with it.’

  ‘I bet.’

  Eneas sinks his head and even allows his hands to come up and cover his face. He wouldn’t normally want to show his despair to Jonno Lynch of all people but he’s too tired now. He doesn’t believe he could walk to the door. He supposes that when they kill him it will be with great force and pain. He wonders could he feel pain now, in his dead limbs?

  ‘You’ve one chance at this, Eneas.’

  ‘What?’ says Eneas.

  ‘They’ll take your name off the black-list if you do two things.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘First thing is, you’ll have to tell them everything you know about the RIC and especially that fella down in Athlone that heads up the Tans.’

  ‘I don’t know much about him.’

  ‘Maybe. He’s a clever bastard by all accounts. But you could get near him.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Jonno sits now in his Mam’s chair and leans off the edge of it, his dapper little arse on the hard wood.

  ‘Eneas, don’t you get it? There’s going to be independence in Ireland. You know what that means to a fecker like you? No force on earth could protect you after that. God himself will put a curse on you as a traitor and a betrayer of your brothers.’

  ‘Of my brothers? Jack and Tom?’

  ‘No, fuck you, you gammy cunt, your brothers in the nation. Me, you stupid cunt. There’s this freedom coming, and by God, Ene
as, you have to see how it will be for you.’ ‘This is kind of you, Jonno, but, I did what I did, and I was trying to make my way just like you, and I don’t see what you’re saying to me. I mean, I don’t mind being shot, not really. Lots of men have been shot. It’s not being part of the world, mind. It’s, well, it’s yourself walking by me in the street, and the whole mess of it. I don’t know what’s going on half the time.’

  ‘Right, well, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you, Eneas, so you know. Yeh, right, OK, I set some store by you. I remember all the going about that we did. You were always a brave bastard. I never had a complaint about you. OK, all those years in Kitchen Lane, right, I’ll tell you, you deserve it, you kept me going, boyo, you did, you were in my heart always, the friend, and there’s nothing really better than that, you know, you can kiss all the girls you like at the back of the Gaiety, but the friend of youth is the business, that’s the one there that’s important.’

  ‘Right,’ says Eneas. After a moment then, ‘I agree.’

  ‘So, see what we got here. They talk to me, I reassure them. Because Eneas, you don’t seem to realize what’s going on here. This is war, Eneas, we’re in the middle of a war. Do you think all I do is go about and run errands for, for your man? No, sir, I’m, and I take a risk saying this to you, but, I’m a soldier, Eneas, a real soldier with proper papers, and one of Collins’s trusted men, now, I don’t mean he knows me or anything, I’m not an officer as such, but, I will be, or I will be if you don’t go around mentioning my name, you know. No, no, but listen, Eneas, this is a grand thing, this is like Cuchullain and the like, you know, and Ferdia, and fighting, and Ireland, and freedom. It’s me who’ll be the hero of all that, you know, I don’t mean especially. It’s like when we robbed the orchards, or tried to build the flying machine, remember, we were going to take it up the hills or out to Strandhill and climb the grass dune and wait for a good wind in off the sea, remember all those plans, and going up to the town engineer’s house and asking him about it, and he says, “Drains, boys, drains is all I knows,” you remember, fuck’s sake.’