‘Jonno. What are you saying?’
‘What I’m saying is, you can get your name off the blacklist, it can be you and me going round again like the old days, and it isn’t a bad thing you have to do, it’s a grand thing, it’s a noble thing, and noble things are being done everywhere now on the island to try and be sure of this freedom, and to keep the party clean, and to act the whiteman.’ ‘What? What is it?’ And now Eneas’s head miraculously clears. He’s calm, he’s easy. It’s like he’s done the thing Jonno is suggesting and he’s Jonno’s pal and a hero of Ireland and everything is hunky-dory as the fella said.
‘You have to go and get in close to the Reprisal Man, I’m not saying in the open, but get in close to him some way when it’s just you and him, and you have to kill him.’
Eneas’s answer is right at the front of his head. He doesn’t even consider it for a second. Maybe he knew this is what was going to be asked of him, maybe somehow he knew.
‘I couldn’t do that,’ he says.
‘Why not?’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘It would be for Ireland. It would be for yourself.’
But Eneas just sees Doyle as Jonno speaks. He sees Doyle saying those last words, and the little snubby gun against his cheek, and then the other cheek, and the blood and uselessness of it.
‘Did you ever see a man killed?’ he says.
‘Eneas, you have got to do this thing.’
‘I seen it. I don’t mean I seen bodies. I mean, I seen a man killed just beside me, executed, you know, by the fellas you were talking about there.’
‘And?’
‘Look, maybe it would be a good thing, the way you think about it. Maybe the freedom of Ireland and all that is right and proper. But, killing a man is a very, particular thing, a particular thing, it is, Jonno, and I couldn’t do it. Even if I was able to get near a man like that, which is not likely, because he’s a brilliant man, he’s like the devil himself for brilliance, and sure he’d take the whistle out of my throat before I could do anything to him, but that’s not it, that’s not what I’m saying to you. I appreciate what you’re saying, and what you said there about our going about, but, freedom or no freedom, I can’t see that I will ever want to bring death to a man, not that I ever did, but, when you carry a gun, you could be using it.’
Jonno sits back in the old chair. He doesn’t say anything, but wipes his dry brow with his handkerchief. Jonno with a handkerchief, that’s a sight. Jonno looks at him. All his face is different. The passion, the simple force, are gone.
‘Pity,’ is all he says.
Jonno gets up and plucks his tie out a little from his gansey, so it sits up on it like a tongue.
‘So what do you say now?’ says Eneas.
‘You’re dead,’ says Jonno, and goes into the hall and away, not slamming the door even.
‘Well, why don’t you kill me now?’ says Eneas, risen to his feet, shouting like a madman. Like a madman up in the asylum. Oh, give him a suit to hitch his arms! ‘Why don’t you! Why don’t you!’
6
BUT THEY DON’T COME to kill him immediately, helpfully, and he doesn’t know why. He sits like an owl in the house and hears footsteps everywhere, but they are not the footsteps of real men. Weeks and weeks go by, and the leak of summer comes in under the door.
Slowly he salvages the daylight hours, going out one morning at six to walk along the river with the fishermen’s beloved flies blowing in perilous clouds along the bog-pewter of the Garravogue, going out another to the lip of the public streets, like a ghost of himself, peering at the early-morning children crossing the town to their school beyond the bridge at Finisklin.
What angel keeps him alive he does not know. Nor devil either. One morning equally early he climbs Knocknarea, carrying a stone from the foot of the mountain as is the proper custom and adding it to Maeve’s Cairn at the top. He looks around at the country that is his world and is not his world. He wonders how it is for the old dead queen in her pile of rocks and for the small tombs of her warriors that lie near her. He seems himself to be closer to their kingdom than his own. He can’t seem to get himself to sit in his own time. Drifting, drifting. There’s Coney Island below and the slow walk of the tide across the broad strand. Well, he is tearless. There’s Captain Midleton’s broken cove, where he still troubles the ruined house with his roars, there’s Rosses Point all pristine and exact, the shape of a bittern in the cold sea, and Strandhill where his own Pappy dreams of playing to regular dancers in a wind-bitten hall. And stony Eneas is, looking at it all, stony and separate. And afeared. A cold iron rod has been lowered into him, and he finds himself stiff and awkward with it. To the left and right of him is terror and terror. Even there at the top of the mountain as far from the world as he can go, there’s no aspirin for his fear.
And he goes about in the nights and the fringes of the days and eats no more than a sickly baby and is a very strange man. And he is in danger of gathering to himself, his Mam says, all the odd stories of the place, he’ll be the man that scares the children through a hedge. He’ll be the man that robs the bread off sills and breaks the harrow while it lies idle in a yard waiting for its season, he will be the curse and the bogeyman of the district. So she say s. But what can he do about that, roaming round and round, and if there was a pencil under him what great useless circles he would make on the tricky map of Sligo and environs.
Nevertheless he is not murdered, and fill his days he must.
All the while he favours the more distant places, and one time he begs a perch for his bum on the early-morning van that goes out to Enniscrone with the papers.
And away out on the wild sea-marsh and grasses of Enniscrone he is able to spread wide his arms and have the sun sit along them as if they were the fierce white featherings of a seabird.
Sure enough he is seen and reported here and there. Some not knowing his trouble think he is simply mad, abroad so early and silent and never answering a nod or a greeting. And they say that the son has caught madness off of the father’s work. And maybe, he thinks, they are right.
He discovers districts of Sligo he never found even as a boy, odd beaches not used by bathers as a rule, isolated places. And out upon the strand that lies in a frozen arc beyond Finisklin one day towards midday he sees leaning in privacy against a rock a young woman in a blowing dress. White as a sail the dress is and the sea-wind has no bother taking it and tugging it and slapping it against her legs but she pays it no heed. She leans against the rock with its dried weeds and barnacles hanging on for dear life, and her head is turned back for to get the sun on her face. Her eyes are closed fast. And he knows she is pretty as a penny even in the distance and he stands against the dunes with their freckled grasses turned mightily one way and another by the combing wind and is stymied by the sight of her. The sand is powdered gold there where she is, all bucketed up against her feet. Her shoes are thrown off near her, little red summer shoes he thinks, and he has never thought of such a matter in his life. She is soft and hard and good against the rock.
He knows well he is a menace to her in his lonesome walk, and that if she sees him she’ll be fearful of him and rightly. Because it is far and without people over here, it is not like Enniscrone where the summer children swing back and forth on the huge swingboats and swimmers venture everywhere on the sunny acres. This is not a spot that visitors seek out, but a different matter, golden and windy and left alone. The sunlight is laying fresh strands of gold in her hair, he can see them, he thinks they must be solid were he to touch them. And he would love dearly to touch them, put his body close to her, quietly, welcomed, healing. Yes, he would. But instead he turns about to head back behind the dunes and across the wet sand and weeds betrayed by the tide, as his Mam might say.
He sets his left foot down in the normal thoughtless process of his stride and lets a bellow out of him to shame an ass. He doesn’t like to think of himself as a bellower, but the bellow rises and is out and gone before he c
an think about it. He lifts his foot from the sand and there’s blood dropping out of the sole of it and when he puts his hand gingerly into the sand he pulls up a long shard of glass, dark green glass off of a lobster float maybe, though it would be a hard job and a long one to smash a lobster float, he knows, the glass is that thick. You could throw a lobster float down a gully on to a rock and it wouldn’t break for you. You could be desperate for it to break, and it wouldn’t. What is he on about, sure the blood is ruining the sand and if the sand was a carpet there’d be hell to pay to the housekeeper.
Now Christ in His mercy, his shouting has alerted the woman, and she is over by him now, fearless and mighty after all. He shows her his bloody foot and by the Good Lord, she tears off her sweater and her shirt, puts the sweater back on herself with a show of her breast that almost dries the flow of blood in his foot, because he feels the blood rushing to the back of his head. Now he is dizzy and rocketing, it may be the loss of blood, but he thinks not, truly. She binds, the dear girl, his foot with the lovely shirt or should it be blouse you’d say about such a thing, light and starched and pleasant with a printing of forget-me-nots on the collar, he notices.
‘You don’t want to put a thing like that on my old foot,’ he says.
‘It’s nothing,’ she says, ‘just a rag. Two summers ago sure I bought that old thing.’
‘Well, it’s very good of you, mightily so, to trouble yourself.’
‘Aren’t you a wounded man, God help us? Come on and we’ll see if we can’t hobble back to the road.’
And she’s strong at his side and more or less carries him hopping but poorly to the sea-wall and the tarred road and fetches a lift for him off of a car heading back into the town. She puts him in the car but doesn’t get in herself.
‘Thanks, Mr Murphy,’ she says to the driver, and it doesn’t surprise him that she knows him, she probably knows everybody, because of her beauty. And away he goes with her blouse about his foot and yet the drops of blood venturing out on to the sandy floor of Mr Murphy’s Ford motorcar. But Mr Murphy is blithe enough and with her instructions no doubt ringing in his head drives Eneas to the public nurse, driving nimbly by clutch and brake, like a dancer, like a dancer. The roads and the town slide by, and Eneas is indifferent to his foot.
‘You wouldn’t know that girl’s name, by any chance, would you?’ he says.
‘Vivienne,’ says Mr Murphy, ‘Roche’s daughter, the stonemason.’
‘Roche’s, over by the old bridge?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Sideburns ‘Aye…’
A little cup of silence gratefully drunk.
‘You’ll be contacting her again, I suppose,’ says Mr Murphy pleasantly.
Eneas says nothing but his blood, so busy and disturbed of late, rushes into his ears.
‘Just to thank her, of course,’ says Mr Murphy mercifully.
‘Yeh, yeh,’ says Eneas. ‘Surely.’
They’re not far now from bandages and hooks. Mr Murphy stops the Ford and gets out to open the other door for Eneas.
‘I’ll go in and fetch the nurse for you,’ says Mr Murphy, ‘and we’ll help you in together. You’d be too much for me on my own.’
But it was nothing to that girl against the rock, to that Vivienne Roche herself whose father cut the stone for the new bridge this side of Enniscrone. He knows that about her but little else. Roche the stonemason is a well-known figure about the town, a man with sideburns on him like a shire’s blinkers. He keeps greyhounds and would be racing them all over the place, Dublin even, Harold’s Cross even, the premier track. And he put in that bridge good, and a good solid bridge it is, from the day of finishing to the end of doom no doubt it will stand, a monument to Roche and his mighty sideburns. That’s what he knows, because any fool knows Roche the stonemason. But nothing else. Except, she has a body warm as a stove. And eyes with little glints in them, little scraps of jewels like the stones out of engagement rings that people might have lost swimming on the strand when the cold water shrinks their fingers.
‘All right,’ says Eneas. ‘Thank you.’
‘All right,’ says Mr Murphy.
‘Tell us,’ says Eneas, ‘before you go. Where would I buy a decent blouse?’
‘Well, I don’t know like,’ says Mr Murphy for all the world as if it was spuds he just said.
‘Man to man,’ says Eneas. ‘Any ould blouse, if you don’t know a good shop.’
‘Would a fella try Greaney’s, in Mill Lane?’
‘I don’t know. Would he?’
‘He might.’
‘I’ll drop in there so.’
‘Greaney’s might do the trick.’
‘Rightyo,’ says Eneas.
‘Ah sure, yes,’ says Mr Murphy, pausing to make sure Eneas has no more to say, then turning softly from him.
He doesn’t know if he is courting or wooing or what, he knows well he has not the freedom to court and woo. Certainly he knows it. Nevertheless he prospers in his purchasing of a blouse, presents it to her, brings her the next week up the steps between the dark green hedges of the Gaiety cinema, only half praying that he is not seen, the adventure of it bridging the great gap that fear has made in him, as if bridge-building was her talent too. And near the whispers of the little stream, by the old bridge, at the pillar of her father’s gate, she gives him a mighty kiss. She takes his face in her hands like a farmer’s wife lifting a swede in pride from the earth and plants her mouth on to his and in the same moment sucks the life out of him and forces the life into him. Or so he tries to settle the matter later, going home himself like a mechanical man, upright, young, but deeply shaken.
He is left alone in this fearful happiness all through the midwinter. There is great fighting in the country now worse than ever but the new song is the hints of peace in every report, just as Jonno said. He wonders how Jonno has been such a prophet, but then Jonno resides in that world. He wonders also does Jonno ever wake sudden in the morning and feel for a second a doubt or a guilt for what he does? Or is he so certain and firm in his truths? Maybe so. O’Dowd is clearly the leader of the town and is sometimes seen going out in a car into the countryside like a general, with his captains about him. There is a military air over Sligo and the barracks is teeming with the real soldiers. Astonishing stories of the ongoing reprisals hurt or enthral the citizens, depending on their allegiances. O’Dowd is not so afraid of being known for what he is, maybe now he wants people to know, in preparation for the tremendous days of freedom just ahead. So Eneas thinks. Eneas is in a position to know because he receives a letter from O’Dowd, signed right enough only with one initial, but who else could it be? And clearly the writer had no fear of any agency in the current state of things to accuse him of the writing of it, or a fear indeed that Eneas had anyone to show it to, or would. It is a succinct, businesslike letter, that arrives normally in the King’s post.
A chara,
It would be my opinion that the best for you would be at the present juncture to attend to the instructions of your former friend Mr Lynch. The nature of these instructions you understand, they having been communicated to you in the proper manner on a date of which you are well aware. In the interval since this instruction that came to you from the highest sources, it has pained us greatly to see no furtherance of the task or commitment to it, and we wish to absolve you from your reluctance in the first instance and urge you by obligation of your position as a man living under sufferance of the council of Sligo, to immediately and without further delay carry out the order as posited to you in good faith and honesty by Mr Lynch. The man we speak of is an utmost enemy of the Irish people, as you are yourself in the dereliction of this task. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Please to understand that we are very aware of your present conduct with an Irish woman to whom you have no right in your present cloud of disgrace. And we will take measures to rectify this situation and also in the event of your ignoring this order fulfil as heretofore promised the intent of your
place on the list of enemies.
Signed, by order, O.
Eneas sketches in his head various replies to this letter, some of them long and pleading, and in moments of defiance, abrupt and dicey, such as, No can do, yours M. But he sends nothing because when he searches out a pencil and paper in his Mam’s cluttered drawer, the image of O’Dowd rises up against him like one of those pagan schoolmasters at school who were the Deans of Discipline and could break the bones in a boy’s hand with sixpences sewn into the leather strap. And though he is a man himself, there is something about O’Dowd that stymies him, that stops him in a queer mud, something in the square set of O’Dowd, the confidence and how he bears down on you like a priest. Fear is the best name for it. So he sends nothing because his hand will not write. In a strange way he does not want O’Dowd to view his poor writing-hand, and know that he is an ignoramus and a fool.
Time is diminishing of course for reprisals, because peace will necessitate peaceful manners. It’s not just by this letter that Eneas suspects one last great round of killing, because the papers are full of such matters every day. Scores must be settled, and he supposes it is a measure of O’Dowd’s hurry and even desperation that such a letter has been written. He senses some dreadful door being not so much closed against him as closed on top of him. All is dark and bad within. The worst of the letter is not the renewed threat of death but the mentioning in such a context of Viv. That is the true hand of power and doom, threatening to reach in and cancel the ground of his love.
The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty Page 8
