The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

by Sebastian Barry

  I 2

  12

  HE DEEMS IT PRUDENT to take advantage of the early winter dark and prefer the edges of the buildings and move carefully and keep his hatbrim tugged down over his eyes like Edward G. Robinson or Bogart himself. The joke of being an outcast in his own town isn’t lost on him as he passes the Gaiety cinema just as the women are lighting the bright foyer for the evening custom. The joke is he’s twenty years away and he can’t recognize a soul, let alone prepare against attack. Would anyone attack him, just like that, on the strength of an order of long ago? But nothing more current than hatred. He must for the moment go softly.

  It’s the town he recognizes as an old friend. This surprises him. John Street, the Cathedral, the Lungey. If his father’s new place is on the Strandhill Road, he has a deal of a way to go. He wishes he could cross the river and peer down into the Garravogue again but he’s all the while going away from the water. Perhaps this nostalgia is a treacherous river all of its own, and river enough to be negotiating for the moment. Dangerous love. And he remembers Mr Jackson the master explaining in his batlike voice years ago that nostalgia means something hard and tricky in the Greek, not a pleasing feeling at all, but the sickness of returning home. And how Greek mariners, Homer’s or just mariners of the wide and ordinary world in old epic days, suffered it, feared it, answered it, were led into the vales and isles of death by it, where nothing is as it seems. And yes, he understands it now, that mysterious claptrap of Mr Jackson. How wise he was after all. Here they are, the streets and houses of his boyhood, answering the roaring sickness in his blood. Memories and thoughts flash out of dark lanes, beam down from pub signs and chemist shops, leak from the doors of butchers with the slight stink of blood and sawdust. He thinks he remembers the butcher in John Street right enough, wheeling about all red-faced and rotund in the ship of his shop as Eneas passes. The fact is a butcher never grows old, he is eternal like the boatman at the river of death. This is a cardinal fact of life that he has often noticed. A chemist grows ancient, old and frail like mortal women. As does the grocer and the lady in the post office. Only the butcher goes forth into the centuries like a veritable vampire. It’s all that red-blooded meat he devours in the back parlour.

  As he leaves the shops and the people of Sligo whom he no longer knows, the old exciting smell of the sea begins to lap against him. He strides now along the Strandhill Road, and maybe there’s a touch of the cock-a-hoop to his step, just a tincture. Look at him, in his black suit none too new and his slouched hat and not a soul in the world to call his wife nor a child to delight him and yet there it is, a touch of the cock-a-hoop to his step. Oh, he may be outcast, he may be taking his life in his own hands or putting it into the hands of others by being there in Sligo, but it isn’t how he thought it would be. He is heartened again by that sense of not caring, of not being as afraid as he had feared! The fear of fear is a mighty afflicter. The thought of seeing his mother makes his heart bang in his chest, he wants to take his father in his arms and cry out for love of him. It is insane. Surely he needs another and a longer spell in the asylum.

  He feels quite buoyant enough to ask a man going back up the road where the McNulty house is. The man knows instantly in the fashion of Sligo people, but Eneas doesn’t think he is recognized. Perhaps after all he has been changed so much by life in the normal way that he can be another person here now, no longer the outcast of his youth.

  At last he stands at the verge of his father’s little kingdom. Indeed and it is a bungalow, quite a decent one. Even in the poor light of the moon and the stars he can see, almost feel, the order of the large gardens about the house. He knows straight off that his father has bought it for the bit of land and not for the appearance of the bungalow. It is a style of house come out of the East perhaps and one of the offshoots and fruits of Empire. If it is really designed to accommodate the sun and the monsoon of somewhere far off, it suits also the lonesome dark days of the Sligo weather. Certainly in sunlight it must perk up the place mightily. It is the perfect Acropolis to the little Athens of his father’s garden. This is his euphoric suspicion anyhow as he lurks there alone at the gates. About him in the glooms all is composure, perfection and vegetables in a mighty order, he can be sure. His father’s garden will have the humility of parsnips and the pride of hollyhocks. The bit of land must have knocked the old man sideways with excitement, his own bit and hopefully paid for. The band must be doing well for to furnish a place of this amplitude. With excitement not dissimilar to his father’s, Eneas surges forward towards the rosy door. ‘Sit you down,’ says his mother, ‘sit you down. Poor Eneas,’ she says, ‘all the lovely colour gone from your hair. But, God help us, you still have a head of it, grey as it is.’

  His father keeps to the fringe of the carpet in the sitting room, as if he doesn’t want to intrude too soon, as if he might do a mischief to himself or Eneas by leaping in too quick. He looks mighty wound up. He must be well into his sixties Eneas reckons and he has every year of his life worked into his bleached face. You’d say he was like a piece of pork that was washed out by water a few times, putty grey and soft in the skin. Neither of them thought to embrace Eneas and now already he’s in a decent sort of a chair and stuck somehow, at least as far as embraces go. The room might as well be an army of savages the way it has a go at him. His mother has sewn flowers into cloths and draped them over the set of seats, a sofa and these stiff, clerical chairs. It all looks like a priest’s parlour. His father is maybe afeared of the great cleanliness, of the great strangeness of it all. In John Street there was a lot of peaceable dust because things were old and nooks and crannies abounded. Here there is a fighting newness, a smell of newness like a fresh deal coffin. Of course there are a few winter pansies for colour as always which is familiar. He desires to kiss his old father’s face, to touch it at least with a hand and make sure for himself, for his own reference, that his father is truly there with him in the peculiar room. He longs for his father to drag out even the cello and press a tune upon him, but his father only lingers there like a hungry bird afraid to encroach while the humans are in the garden. He has a sudden terror of time, that time is robbing him, that the river is pulling at him too fast, too strong. He’s speechless with love and remembrance. Perhaps they are too, or without the words you’d need for to conjure up those notions, perhaps the three of them are in the ruination of time, betrayed, betrayed.

  ‘There’ll be a good match on Saturday, there will be,’ says his father. ‘How long’ll you stay, Eneas?’

  ‘As long as … You know. Is Jack home?’ he asks his mother.

  ‘Oh, yes, Jack’s home, son. Sure aren’t they expecting the third child? Imminent. Oh, yes. They’ve let him back for that. Compassion, do they call it? But he was only in England, you know, liaison officer for the poor Yanks in Leeds. It’s the uniform I can’t get over. Not that I’ve seen the creature wear it. But photographs. A lovely brimmed hat and all very smart trim.’

  ‘Christ,’ says his father, ‘there’s no touching the British for tailoring. You should see our crowd, the poor buggers going around in little better than sacks. I might have made them myself, in my heyday! Thank God for neutrality. We’d be the laughing stock of Europe.’

  This might be a great joke but Eneas is so taken aback he forgets even to pretend to laugh. His mother certainly doesn’t laugh.

  ‘And Tom, how is he getting on? Mayor, you said, in your letter. Mayor, no less.’

  ‘Tom’s doing well enough,’ says his mother grimly.

  ‘How so?’ says her husband. ‘Well enough? He’s king now!’

  ‘Right,’ says his mother, ‘king. We brought him through a bit of a mess just these months gone by. King he may be, Tom, but he’s still a fool in some things.’

  ‘Ogh…’ says Old Tom.

  ‘You’ll see him later, son,’ says his mother. ‘So you will. He’s staying with us at the minute, like yourself.’

  ‘Is he not married? I mean, I thought he would
be by now, a musical man like him …’

  ‘Well, he is and he isn’t,’ says his father.

  ‘He is and he isn’t?’

  Old Tom gives him a silencing look, pleasantly. What’s not familiar at all is the mire of talk he feels himself to be floundering in a little. He needs a good lamp to light his path.

  ‘We don’t like to…’ says Old Tom, dark as a ditch. ‘Your mother…’

  ‘You saw Teresa?’ says his mother.

  ‘I did. I did,’ he says. ‘Oh, she seems right set up there. Really set up. The very best at the job they do there, going about and seeking alms for the orphaned boys. I never saw her look so, so — well, set up is the word I fixed on at the time.’

  Old Tom gives a grimace, a private sort of a grimace that maybe speaks its own volumes. No, you’d need more than a lamp for this. A lightship maybe. A good moon. A midday sun better.

  ‘She was sure of her vocation, so I didn’t stand in her way,’ says his mother.

  Old Tom snorts ever so quietly.

  ‘I never knew anyone before nor since so pious anyhow,’ says Eneas, on safer ground he hopes. ‘I’ll never forget her praying for Collins that time in the old days. I suppose Tom’ll be for the other crowd

  ‘Well, he’s no blueshirt, if that’s what you mean,’ says his mother severely, but devoutly.

  ‘Blueshirts. Fascists, you mean, Mam?’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it,’ she says, and another warning glance from his father. ‘Anyhow, your brother’s for the other lot. I wish it was more than whiskey and land.’ His father raises a hand as if to prevent a torrent, but his mother subsides.

  ‘Any hope for the Garravogue? Any sign of the silt being dealt with?’

  ‘Maybe your other brother will have a go at that when the war’s done with all that engineering he has.’

  ‘Sure, maybe he will,’ says Old Tom reasonably. ‘Let’s get ourselves into the kitchen for to be dealing with that nice bit of lamb, Mary. Why don’t we?’

  In the morning he lies low in his room and feels no inclination to leave it. Instinct dictates. He hears children playing below his window and for a moment thinks it must be Teasy and Young Tom. But of course he realizes then that he’s back thinking of twenty years ago. Young Tom is a big man in the town and Teasy is the finest mendicant nun in England.

  He parts the curtains and finds two round faces peering in at him. He’s surprised to see how near the ground is to the sill, because the bungalow is dug into the sloping lawn behind the house. The children shy away from the glass like they’ve come face to face with a monster and run off away around the house, screaming and laughing. It’s a little boy of about five and a big long streak of a ten-year-old girl. He expects they must be Jack’s kids if the wife’s in stir having the new baby. His niece and nephew no less. If he was a real uncle he’d have brought gifts. As it is, he must seem mighty strange to them, lurking in a darkened room at the very prime of the day. It’s not a thought that brings him comfort.

  By the time he dresses and goes out into the kitchen, Young Tom has long left to attend to his no doubt magisterial duties as Mayor of Sligo. For a moment Eneas is unexpectedly offended that his little brother hasn’t gone in to greet him after all these years but then he is the stranger of strangers, the vanished elder brother. He can’t mean anything to any of them really. But there’s Jack all right at the square kitchen table, looking very smart in a sleeveless gansey and big puffy shirtsleeves gathered at the biceps with silver bracelets, if that’s the name for them. He looks like a sharp-eyed cardshark or the like, keen and sleek anyway as a shark, with a rich head of red hair pressed down with oil, shaved as a seal and scrubbed red by a pumice-stone you might think. He’s drinking tea mightily, legs crossed, good brown shoe-leather gleaming, deep in the Sligo Champion. Down goes the paper with a little catastrophe of salt-cellar and teacup.

  ‘Eneas, Eneas,’ he says, leaping up, clasping a hand with comradeship and fervour, businesslike, absolute, overwhelming, ‘How goes it, brother?’

  ‘Oh,’ says Eneas, ‘You know…’ His hand is shaken for some time.

  ‘Great to see you back, boy. Will you stay? Get yourself fixed? Why wouldn’t you?’ He surely spots Eneas’s hesitation. ‘Sure all that ould stuff is over now. No, no, all done and over. These are new days now. Look at me, a major in the Engineers, and they haven’t shot me yet!’

  ‘They’d never of wanted to shoot you, Jack. You’ve a touch with people I never had. You’re liked.’

  This seems simple and good to Eneas, but nonetheless it causes a sort of obstruction in his brother’s talk for a little. Jack takes a pinch of the spilled salt in his fingers and throws it over his left shoulder against bad luck. They both sit down at the table and smile at each other and his mother silently pours him tea in an excellent blue china cup, the like of which he’s never seen before. The band must be doing bloody well all right.

  ‘Thanks, Mam. My God, the great style in everything these times. The band must be doing well.’

  ‘Not just the ould band,’ says Jack heartily. ‘Sure Young Tom has everything stitched. Land deals, whiskey deals. You’ve no idea.’

  ‘That’s enough of that talk,’ says their mother.

  ‘Ho, I tell you, brother Eneas, it might be wartime for Joe Soap, but for Young Tom it’s harvest time. Petrol, oil, chocolate, sugar, soap even — all legal and above board, of course. Nothing ever passes through his hands. It’s just — he accommodates the free flow of goods. In the interests of the town, the corporation. These are hard times for everyone.’ ‘And you’re married, Jack? And were them your children in the garden?’

  ‘Aye, little Des and Annie, you saw them? They weren’t tormenting you?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘The wife’s up in the hospital. Ah yes, quite a little brood for ourselves. Wonderful.’

  Their mother sets down a fry for Eneas with some vehemence.

  ‘No, it’s grand, Mam, it’s grand.’

  ‘Grand my eye,’ says Mary.

  Eneas smiles at them both in the manner of a stranger wandered into an intimate conversation and with no wish to know what it’s about. Nor does he. He wants suddenly for his family to keep their mysteries to themselves, to keep their eruptions well lidded for the nonce.

  ‘Where’s Pappy?’ he says.

  ‘Oh, in the garden, where else,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll go out to him,’ he says, scoffing down the remnant of the bitter fry.

  His father’s digging like a maniac, like a soldier under fire and not a trench to his name, in the further reaches of the garden where the bare black ground is, for the vegetables. At first Eneas stands and watches without greeting his father, astonished that he is forty-four and his father God knows what, yet he might after all be but the child of old gazing at his tremendous father. The old man still digs with the selfsame ferocity, the selfsame need. The rich dark sods turn away over at his flashing strokes.

  ‘Hello there, Pappy,’ he says gently.

  ‘Eneas, oh Eneas, I didn’t see you there. Like a ghost.’ ‘Like a ghost indeed, Pappy. The garden’s a credit to you. More than that, a wonder.’

  ‘Fine soil’s my friend here. Didn’t we have the high times, you and me, in the old place under Midleton’s?’

  ‘We did, Pappy, oftentimes.’

  His father sticks the spade into the earth and lets it be. He comes over the ragged earth like a man walking on black waves and suddenly grips Eneas’s arm.

  ‘I don’t care what they say about you. As long as you’ve got your health I’m happy. You’re my son. My eldest son.’

  ‘Right, Pappy,’ he says, taken aback.

  ‘And look here, don’t mind what you hear about the house here, don’t mind what they say, what the bloody carry-on is, this is your home as long as you want it, Eneas. To tell the truth, if the others were as little trouble to me as yourself I’d count myself a happy man.’

  Eneas looks into his fath
er’s face, says nothing.

  ‘Now,’ says his father. ‘There you are.’

  At nightfall Eneas brings himself up as much as he can to the standard of Jack’s clothing and, spruced and combed and polished, ventures out into Sligo. The few bob of his disability pension jingle in his britches pocket. Though only five o’clock the swamp of darkness and rain lies over the sombre town. Men are walking home along the shining pavements like soldiers scattered in a defeat. No one greets him. He passes the looming dark of the Showgrounds where the association football is played these times, the empty stands looking brittle and odd in the downpour.

  The eight windows of the Victorian town hall are glowing out on to the black tar like eight bright shields of yellow bronze. On an impulse of brotherhood and love he enters the building. How strange to think his brother is master here, if that’s the term in democratic Ireland.

  He asks the little withered lady in the hall where the mayor might be, but the answer is so chill and unwilling that he has to add that he’s the mayor’s brother. Maybe she doesn’t believe him but at any rate she brings him up the marble stairs to the principal offices. They stand outside the tall oak doors and he gets a powerful sense of two schoolchildren waiting to be punished by the master within. The old dame sticks her head in the door and he doesn’t hear what she says but she indicates for him to go in.