The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

by Sebastian Barry

  When his captain arranges for his discharge he spends some months in the mental home for military casualties. Now these formerly fighting men look diminished and ridiculous to him in their standard issue gowns. First the uniforms for blood and bullets and now the uniform for nightmares and shouting. There are swards and swards of pale green grass stretching into the distance towards the fiery town. At night from his window glowing with the moon he catches a fanning glimmer of the fires and imagines the greensward like a beach with heroic nonentities fleeing the slight incline down from the dark fare-thee-well of the German guns. He sees the shadows like forlorn twigs scuttering across the useless acres. He feels impelled to set hedges into them and rows of vines, and to harvest the swollen grapes and to drink the fresh wine in tremendous swallows. Sheffield is full of owls..

  He writes at last to his mother and takes some solace from doing so in a manner he couldn’t have imagined before, not of course being given to letter-writing as a remnant of his humiliations at school:

  Dear Mam,

  Here I am in trouble in Sheffield with my head but not to worry. I am back from France and it is a release. I hope the harvest was good for my friend Jean who I was helping there to save the vineyard. France is a holy place and I am glad I was there to see that. The beaches were sorrowful things. I lost so many of my pals that I was unhappy and am unhappy still. Look at me a madman like Pappy knows so well and you knew once when you were an unmarried girl. I do long to see you all the lights of the furnaces in the city are strange to me. I read in the paper that the river has silted up the Garravogue is this true and how will the ships get up to the deepwater berths now. It was always a worry for a Sligoman the state of that river and it is just another sorrow of the war that it must be blocked by mud. I think of the mud coming in from Oyster and Coney Islands but maybe it comes in from further out beyond Strandhill where no one knows what’s what in the deep of deeps. What will happen to the great endeavours of the docks now I wonder do you know. It is hard enough here there are many misfortunate cases now the shellshock that we saw in the old war and the lads going about the town and screaming or falling down or eating refuse from the back of the hotels but a harder sort of madness from being so young and seeing too difficult sights. All here need rest and home and sigh for both you might say I am no different. The attendants are rough sorts and there is no seamstress to remind me of you with your needles and the flowers sewn into the linen and cotton. We are all in shifts of a sort and we are lucky to escape the famous jacket that no one relishes but sometimes what can be done the man is dangerous to himself and everyone else. What will cure us all but time and perhaps when the war ends we can be merry again.

  Your very loving son,

  Eneas.

  To no one’s surprise his mother sends a reply immediately, proving if nothing else that the post office is still a credit to Great Britain and Ireland, because it seems to him no more than a day when he gets her little envelope with the writing crushed on to a single page:

  Dear Son,

  Your letter arrives safely. When you are better please come home. Your brother Tom is mayor for ’43. Jack is made major in the Royal Engineers. Your father keeps well. I have sent Teasy for to be a nun in Bexhill-on-Sea. Her address is Nazareth House if it is not too much out of your way. You are twenty years gone next Thursday! Surely your old trouble is long put to rest. We are in a new house now on the Strandhill Road. We are a bungalow.

  The river indeed is full of silt. How time flies!

  Your unhappy mother,

  Mam.

  Order returns to his addled head, and God no longer breaks eggs there in the morning. As health returns he begins to feel a certain pride for all he has done as a soldier. What better thing than to spruce a French farm, better than maiming and killing he hopes. He is very proud about his brother Jack and tells the men in the bed about him. They are very cheery about it and offer their congratulations. One man says he is surprised two Irish brothers have given so much for England. Eneas laughs and mentions France also, France also. The depth of feeling for France … There’s an old geyser in the cliff at Garretstown in the county of Cork, he tells him, a pocket of air in the rock. When the sea swells it sends up a plume of saltwater like a dray-horse’s tail, or its breath in the cold fog. That is an Irishman’s feeling for France. And as Eneas speaks he knows he loves England also. He feels a depth of affection for this queer England of flinty furnaces and ruined soldiers. For the weird papers that everyone reads full of high talk and blame and football. Chelsea, the Gunners, Leeds … Maybe Sheffield aren’t so hot, but who is to mind? There won’t be proper teams till the war’s over, they say. His fellow inmates are romantic about association football, but not like Sligomen are romantic about hurleying and the GAA. An English team when favoured might as well be a sweetheart of the man affected. It is mighty peculiar but attractive. It used to be said that a person’s soul was revealed when he or she sang, whether behind a door for modesty or brazenly before the crowd. An Englishman’s soul appears when he speaks of his favoured team. His soul materializes before you like a bird with lampy plumage. How locked away he is till that moment, how dark, how complaining, how filthy-minded really but then they are all mostly damned Protestants. Ashes, dirt, hurt fall away when the heroic matches are remembered. The souls of the women are harder to see because he does not know wherein their passions lie. Not religion certainly, not sporting affairs. That is all a mystery. He has seen no Vivs among the women, no straightforward passionate ladies. But he accepts that they will not reveal themselves to him, a penniless foreigner astray in the wits. Nurses, orderlies, chars … All mysteries, jokers. When there’s cruelty in the asylum it’s as often the women orderlies as the men. They’re in cahoots. The wicked are beaten just as quick by the women. The severest punishment is a buggering, but that of course is always the men. Eneas is as good as gold.

  He goes south into different country through all the damped parishes by the Bexhill train. It’s a bit of a detour on his homeward journey, but nevertheless. He sits up like a clean child just out of his sickbed, with the alien and intriguing air of the released inmate. And the fields of England look fresh to him, starched, sentinel, precise, but empty as a catastrophic site, empty as certain districts of Sligo where there is nothing and no one to meet except lone cows and hobbled donkeys. The people hide in the nethers of their farms maybe. Here he can’t explain the absences. Nothing moves except the thrilling train and the sooty bushes of the cuttings.

  His sister Teasy is a girl in a starched hood and a black habit as sharp as a boy-scout’s tent. She’s small as always like a wet lamb. They bring him into a parlour in Nazareth House to see her, and he waits at a table loaded with sandwiches and two fine cakes. It’s like being at someone else’s meal. But Teasy makes it clear that the meal’s for him, as an honoured guest, the brother of a nun. After the cakes and the tea she takes him into the grounds to see the little marble slabs where the dead nuns are interred. Sister Benedict, Sister Catherine and a host of Victorian nuns from long ago. It’s a mendicant order and these would be all very fit corpses in their day from walking the hills and valleys about Bexhill, begging alms for the poor.

  ‘Poor old things,’ says Eneas. The salt-laden sky rears above him and his sister. He feels very honoured by the welcome of the cakes, an unfamiliar feeling. It all puzzles him. He thinks Teasy has landed on her feet, in the right place for her maybe. He hopes so.

  ‘You’re all right for things?’ she asks him with the deference of a younger sibling. ‘You seem grand now, Eneas,’ ‘Sure, terrific, I’m terrific — that’s an English expression,’ he says laughing. ‘It’s a nice ould place, isn’t it? Is the work hard?’

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ she says. ‘We have the poor orphans, you know, and they’re good lads in the main. They’re rogues, but it’s like a family. I always wanted a family, of my own, like, you know?’

  ‘Did you, Teasy?’ he says, surprised enough. Teasy.


  ‘It’s the ould husband I wasn’t keen on, you know,’ and Teasy gives her howl of laughter. ‘Not at all keen!’

  ‘Why would you be, sure, they’re all animals!’

  ‘They are, by all accounts. Excepting the Da.’

  ‘Pappy. Ah, yeh. Well, you can’t call him a husband.’ Teasy laughs again though neither of them knows what he means.

  ‘Was it hard getting you a place here, Teasy?’ he asks.

  ‘It was. Mam had to move heaven and earth.’

  ‘Literally, says you. I see,’ he says. ‘Well, just so long as you’re happy, girl. You’re happy enough set here?’

  ‘They say I’m the best beggar, I mean the best mendicant since who knows how long, that’s what they say. It’s a knack. You can go over all these hills up the back, you know, and the women come out when they see me and give me a shilling or so, for the orphaned boys. That’s how we keep going here. The other nuns are regal. They’re mostly regal! And yourself, Eneas, you’re sure you’re all right?’ ‘Tip-top,’ he says.

  He sleeps that night among the boys because of course he is a man and what can you do with a stray man in a nunnery full of innocent women? The lads chat to him in the shadowy dormitory, and one by one they fall into slumber. Even in their dreams they chat with their own dark selves, chattering and giving out. His bed is narrow as befitting a boy, and it’s curiously restful being there anonymous and temporary. Better by far than the asylum. The boys are curative, a kind of balm to him. Some of them sounded pretty rough types to him and gruff enough, but he can sense the simplicity and the security of them. The nuns must be guarding them well. The older ones are apprenticed in the town and one of them works in the fairgrounds along the front, assistant to a candyfloss man. Another follows the manure cart of the city council, trailing the last of the horses. The war saw an upsurge again in the horses but they’ll fade away, everyone knows. He dreams of his pious sister traipsing the hills of Bexhill, a slight figure through the years of summers and storms. In the morning the boys compete in farting like dogs and go off down the wooden corridors to their prayers, leaving him to dress in the slightly foetid peace. At the gates again he embraces his sister and they wish each other well, a little awkwardly. He knows so little about her, and she about him. But blood is a bond nonetheless. She’s like bones in a bag when he hugs her. Rats of fear run about him for a moment. He hopes she wanted this and it isn’t some plan of his mother’s. He suspects his mother in the matter but maybe her plotting has had a good result. The best mendicant nun for who knows how long. A real accolade! The Irish Sea though narrow still accommodates the most hectic storms. It is hard to see God’s hand there unless He is a theatrical person. Eneas holds the rail on the steerage deck of the mailboat, scorning the teeming bunks below. But he knows the migrant men are sleeping there, four to a tier like one of those terrible military camps he’s heard about. Men from Mayo, Galway, Sligo, all the ruined kingdoms of Connaught. If they are soldiers they have changed their uniforms in Wales and lie on their beds in their civvies, respecting the neutrality of De Valera to that degree anyhow. Perhaps it is a shame to have fought for the freedom of far-off places. Eneas McNulty can not claim to understand a fella like De Valera and feels no sense of his kingship in Ireland. He never read a word of sense that man said, but then he rarely took a newspaper. Since the demise of Collins who could they elect anyhow? It is just O’Dowds and De Valeras left.

  And now he has said the old name in his head, O’Dowd. Can he really return home? Although it is so long ago he can remember exactly what Jonno Lynch said to him in the garden. Pain of death. Step foot back on Irish soil. But life is clearly short and maybe his mother is right, maybe the years have healed such matters. And yet something of that moment returns to him, lowers him, defeats his optimism, Jonno terrible and full of precise information in the garden in Finisklin.

  He leans now on the mahogany rail not for a moment doubting its strength but wondering suddenly what it must be like to fall into that golden water. He expects that the force of the fall might knock a person out and that would be that. Or you might bob about in the chill waves while the air was in your clothes, till only your upturned face was married still to the sky. They might lower a boat if your cries had been heard and search for you in the glimmers and glitters of the sea, being careful not to strike you with an oar blade. On the other hand if you were quiet and chose an empty moment on the deck you could slip away and no one would call after you or rouse the captain and his men. He imagines the panic of being alone in the water but he has heard that a queer peace intrudes on the drowning man, sailors have told him that. Momentarily he too longs for that peculiar peace.

  Towards wintry dawn, Dalkey comes up to starboard. It’s lightly raining, spangling his overcoat. He must be drowning anyway because now a peace invades him like a love. The shock of the land invades him. Dalkey with its solemn island, the beseeching arms of Dunleary Harbour quickening the boat. He sees the little bathing places of south Dublin, Sandycove, the Baths, the Forty Foot, places he barely knows, maybe visited the once in the old days when his mother would bring him to the capital. They could be in Honolulu for all they meant to him. But his chest heaves with love, with peace, with pure need. It’s the tobacco, the opium, of returning home. There might be angels standing on the rocky shores throwing out one after another bright ropes with grappling hooks to dig into and find purchase on his heart. One after another the arms rise like fishermen in the ancient days. Shortly he goes down riveted by this love, with the bolts of this love fastened into his skin, and eats a large plate of sausages and rashers washed through with dark tea aching with bitter tannin. The soldiers transformed by De Valera’s wishes for Ireland sit about with heavy eyes, restored by sleep but still poisoned by beer, uncomfortable in their peaceable clothes.

  In some manner to his surprise he sees sit down beside him a Negraman, perhaps he thinks a wandering townsman of Galveston, perhaps not. He wouldn’t be expecting to see such a personage on the Irish mailboat, in usual circumstances. But these are days of war, and the war throws up all inhabitants of the earth in strange places, rearranging and re-siting its creatures. However this man with his hearty plate of breakfast is in old civvies though the face is no more aged than Eneas’s. He seats himself with an easy groan and gives Eneas a matey wink and throws off his battered shoes under the scratched tabletop. A companionable smell of much-travelled socks wafts up, very much the smell of war. But there’s no war in this old panelled eating-room, just tired humans stoking their stomachs.

  ‘Good morning to you, brother,’ says the Negraman. ‘How you do?’ says Eneas. Straight off he knows this isn’t any Galveston man because he has no Yankee accent. His accent is not Irish or English but it dances differently to the Yankee all the same. This is someone new from somewhere new to Eneas.

  ‘I’m always hearing about the Irish breakfast from the priest back home. Irish lad from county Carlow. I don’t know where that is. But I think I do in another way. From all his talking. And it doesn’t disappoint, I tell you. Very fine arrangement here of the sausage and the bacon. But you’ll be saying rashers, ah?’

  ‘That’s it,’ says Eneas. ‘I’ll say rashers now on the Irish boat. No sense saying rashers to an English butcher. He’ll only stare at you. “What you want, Irish?” he’ll say. Like you were mad.’

  ‘Well, we’re all mad to the English, that’s for sure.’

  ‘We’re all mad?’

  ‘You know, Irish, African, Chinese man, all the boys from far away

  Eneas laughs above his emptied plate like a moon over a moon. ‘Yeh! That’s it, right enough. Never looked at it just like that. But, you’re right.’

  So the man eats, and Eneas watches him.

  ‘What brings you to Ireland?’ he says.

  ‘Holiday! I’m always hearing about Ireland from that priest. Carlow. What’s that like, brother?’

  ‘I never was in Carlow come to think of it.’

  ‘Well,’
says the man, rising, ‘I’m going to go have me a shit as the soldier said. Goodbye now, brother.’ And he gets up and leaves the plate still swimming in yolk and a part-chewed but rejected rasher lonesome there.

  Eneas gives him a nod. He’s worth a nod all right. Seems like a very pleasant person. But he’s gone, his untied shoes whacking gently at the metal floor up the deck a bit. How quick they come, how quick they go. Friendship. Oh, well. God sails his boats on the pond of the world and at fall of darkness goes off through the rubbed-out roses with the boats under his arms like a fabulous boy. The clock is the terrible high clouds fleeting to some unknown meeting. In the city encircling the park of the world lives are lived quickly, the admired baby soon the dreaming old bastard in the narrow suntrap under the lee of the church. Quickly quickly everything goes.

  Mid-morning they are released out past the barricades and through the railway entrance and on to the bare seats of he mailboat train that signals somehow to the returning men that now there’s a pause to the music of an exile’s heart and for a time they may think of themselves as natives in their native place. Eneas rides again the river of home like a broken branch. He feels that old sense of power that comes from being fit and alive in his own country, as good as the next man. Perhaps after a minute or two he feels only a modicum of that power. Perhaps now with his boots on Irish soil for a good half-hour he’s not so sure of things. He has assumed that, as he has suffered in a mighty war and lain ill in a great asylum of England, his old sins will not be set against him. Now he’s not so certain. He smells Ireland outside the window of the train, and she smells very much the same as always, as twenty years ago she smelled. Trouble, trouble. In the sights of the railway, the Victorian stations, the pleasurable monuments set up beside the curve of the bay, the swimming baths, the backs of good houses, the mottoes of factories, the aching spread of the city with all its numberless children sprinkled on streets and in rooms like specks of gold, with its gangsters and respectable folk rubbing shoulders in the bleak thoroughfares, in the sudden luxuriance of the Liffey from Butt Bridge, the tidy cargo ships tight to the wharfs, the high cranes peering into their innards, the beaten-out surface of the river thick with salt from the devious tide, the thrum of the moiling salmon in the secret depths, the filthy prams of generations fixed in the muddy undertows, in the huge silent racket of history seeping into the very blocks of the river walls, the pocked custom-house and everywhere and on everything the ruinous effects of the rains, in all these things he senses as he sits in the knocking train the old strains and presences of trouble, even there, four hundred miles from Sligo.