The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

by Sebastian Barry

  The room is peculiarly bare like a policeman’s, with a desk frothing with wooden carvings at the edges, and a veritable heap of papers and dossiers and files and pens and calendars quite neatly stacked and arranged. Behind the mound of important work sits his little brother, a red-faced person with a lot of healthy-looking fat on his face and hands. The backs of his hands are like a turkey’s legs. The hair is black as an octopus’s ink and in the black suit his brother Tom seems compact and perfect, like a painted advertisement in the station. He looks like he owns a brushed hat and a new car anyway, he looks like he knows his way about the alleys and lanes of official things, competent, secure, with a gold watch to top everything, solid on his thick wrist. He gives a huge impression of likeability and humanity, and indeed he gets up from his labours and floods about the big table and just embraces Eneas like the brother he is. It is a most remarkable thing really. Affection and enthusiasm and precision pour off him like good clean sweat. The man is a marvel to Eneas.

  ‘I heard you snoring this morning, you divil,’ says Young Tom. T haven’t heard that sound for many a long year. Well, Jaysus, we’ve missed you around here, boyo. We have. Maisie, dear,’ he says to a timid-looking girl in the corner, ‘go please and fetch my brother Eneas some tea. He’ll take four sugars, isn’t that right?’

  It’s long enough since Eneas put sugar in his tea but he knows that Tom is remembering some important detail from twenty years ago and he’s not the one to dishonour such accuracy.

  ‘It is indeed,’ he says, still frankly amazed by his brother. ‘It’s really good to see you, Tom. I’m delighted you’re doing so well.’

  ‘So am I! It won’t last much longer. I won’t be elected next year the way things are going. You’ll remember Jonno Lynch. He’s the boy now. Bloody blueshirts, excusing my French…’

  ‘I do certainly remember Jonno Lynch.’

  ‘Yeh, I’d say you do all right,’ says the politician.

  ‘I wonder does he remember me?’

  ‘How do you mean? Sure you knocked around as kids, didn’t ye? Oh, you mean, the other thing. Listen, Eneas, I can’t be discussing that. You know.’

  ‘That’s all right, that’s all right, just wondered if there was any word on it, you know. Sure you were only a kid at the time. How would you know anything about it. I forgot that.’

  ‘Well, I’d know what’s going on as mayor, but that civil war isn’t over yet, if you follow my meaning, and it’s best to keep a sort of lid on all that. I will tell you, because you are my brother, that a lot of things are still being settled that you’d think they wouldn’t bother with now. Long memories, those lads. You’d always be hearing of fellas being shot, even now I’d be careful, very careful. I don’t know what was said to you twenty years ago, but from what the Mam and the Pappy was saying the other night, the night before you came home, I’d tread warily and watch my back. If I were you. Which, thank God, I’m not. They sat up into the small hours with me, and they were very upset, very upset, wanting to see you, and worrying themselves to death about it. They’re old, you know. I don’t really know anything about your case,’ he says, with a vaguely official air.

  ‘Ah, sure, why would you,’ says Eneas, head going down. ‘Ye see, I didn’t have half the fun you did, Eneas. I was tethered like a nanny goat. The Mam wouldn’t let me out of her sight. Because of you and all the trouble you got yourself into.’

  ‘Yeh. You’ve turned out grand anyway. The band must be doing well, I’d say?’

  ‘Flying. The band’s flying. Jesus, we have two hundred people out there in Strandhill of a Saturday. Mad to have the dancing. They can’t get petrol, tea or chocolate, but they can still have the dancing. So they’re all walking out early Saturday afternoons. And when the tide’s out you’ll see fellas coming over the strand past Coney and Oyster Island, their girlfriends’ skirts all bothered by the winds. There was three men nearly drowned trying to cross from the Rosses a few weeks back, in an old bathtub of a skiff, the strong roar of a tide that there was in the deep channel. They’re all mad for the dances, mad. It’s something great.’

  ‘Good for you, Tom.’

  ‘And yourself, Eneas, how’s it going for you? You were in France the Mam says. Fighting I suppose.’

  ‘I was over there right enough.’

  ‘Did you kill any of them Germans?’

  ‘Nary a one.’

  ‘Well,’ says Tom, laughing too, ‘Jonno Lynch would be pleased. I think he fancies them Germans in the days to come. The United Republic of Germany and Ireland or some such, with Jonno for gauleiter maybe. And me strung up from a tree, I shouldn’t wonder. More power to your elbow, brother. Well done. You had the guts to go out there. Me, I’d rather stay and make a few bob, line the old nest. You’ll have heard about the wife?’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t hear a thing. I know you’re married now. I asked the ould fella about it. It’s good. You haven’t the few kids yet?’

  ‘No, no,’ says Tom, all reddening up, ‘and I won’t have them out of her now at any rate. No, sir. Not the best business for the bloody mayor’s wife, you know.’

  ‘Well, sure, you’ll sort something out.’

  ‘Oh, Jack warned me. Of course I wouldn’t listen. Love, you know. Of course it’s a regret. I don’t like to think of her — stranded. Well,’ and Tom leans close to him as the girl comes back with tea, ‘say nothing.’

  Eneas couldn’t have said anything anyway because he hasn’t the slightest notion what his brother means. Tom tucks himself back behind the desk and gestures to a splendid-looking chair for Eneas.

  ‘That used to be the Ombudsman’s chair. We got him a new one. He’s only four feet six and he was lost in that yoke. You fill it well I must say. You should be in politics.’ ‘Do you want to get a drink out somewhere?’ says Eneas. ‘When we’ve this nice tea drunk. Will you have a pint with me?’

  ‘No, I haven’t the time. I’ll see you later this evening. I’ve all these papers to sort through, to process as the new word has it. You’d never think a little town like this had so many transactions. They never rest. Scheming away. Never resting.’ After a few minutes Eneas feels it’s time to relieve his brother of his presence. He rises to go softly. He understands his little brother, and the wave of work that builds against his neat form each day. He likes him. He doesn’t care if he’s a rogue or not. He seems like a decent and a pleasant man. For all he knows he might be as straight as a die. It doesn’t matter.

  ‘Eneas,’ says Tom, as Eneas reaches the ornate doors, ‘Jonno, your man Jonno, he drinks in Hardigan’s with his mates. I suppose for the sake of peace you won’t want to go in there. It’s not the public house it used to be anyway. Gone downhill. Your friend O’Dowd will be sitting out in his big house at Rosses Point, wonderful great mansion he has out there, he must be a feckin millionaire that lad, so you needn’t fear bumping into him.’

  ‘Rightyo,’ says Eneas, even as a keel. ‘OK, Tom. Thanks.’ ‘See you tonight, big brother. Welcome home.’

  13

  THERE’S A TRAGEDY up at the hospital because the little chap born to Jack’s wife doesn’t last but the few hours. There’s a great colloquy of misery, silence and dark looks in Old Tom’s bungalow. The two children, Des and Annie, are taken out of their room and put into a back bedroom beside Eneas’s as if they might be in danger too, as if Death mightn’t know his way about the back of the house. The bereaved grandmother keeps muttering about the baby being weakened, being weakened by … But she won’t say what she thinks weakened the poor mite. Her mouth is twisted all the while she mutters in her chair, turning over and over the pages of a large scrapbook. The grief of Jack is palpable, visible too on his smart face. There’s the queer stench of fright and grief off him. The little creature is buried in the graveyard under a wall plot for easy finding, and Mary declares she’ll be buried at the end of all beside that unhappy scrap. Old Tom can jump in with her if he likes. They’ll keep the unfortunate child warm.

 
It’s terrible for Eneas to see the suffering of his brother. He knows there’s some story there with the wife but he doesn’t ask for such information. As far as he’s aware the wife is a very fine woman from Galway that Jack adores, whose father was quite the gentleman living out the Grattan Road. There’s something else that no one can tell him, but he has no desire to be enlightened. His brother’s grief is terror enough.

  The birth has ripped the guts out of Jack’s wife, so she lingers in the hospital. She can’t take a bath for herself apparently without the help of the sisters. You’d think marriage was a sort of war with its own alarming injuries.

  He goes out, Eneas does, to escape the turmoil, as far as the dance-hall at Strandhill. Frost covers the dune grass in a futile net. He stands at the water’s edge near the little shuffling of the waves and remembers France. He also remembers Viv but he puts her aside from his mind sorrowfully. He asked about her in the public house the previous night as lightly as he could but one man said she was married in Lisdoonvarna and another man opined that she was gone long since to America under contract to a shipping company. He remembers with force the high set of her backside and the insane glory of fucking her. These he feels are not noble memories or a credit to himself but nevertheless they are the memories that rush at him like flighty bullocks. There’s little noble in a man’s mind he must believe. And yet he would rather be king of his own nature and think of her nobly. So he puts her from his mind instead. How long ago it is, how far, and even so the strand looks exactly as it always did, with the same sense now in winter that the storms of winter have cleaned the place, scrubbed out the stains and outrages of the holiday crowd in the high summer.

  What can he make of it all? He’s very sad about the little baby. Very sad. That’s not right to be happening. He wasn’t able to comfort his brother at all. He didn’t, he discovered, have the key to his brother’s distress. But that is no wonder considering the great stretch of time spent away. He doesn’t possess the key to any part of his brother. Nor worse of his mother and father, grieving there in the bungalow as if they had been robbed of their perishing souls. The size of grief astonishes him. The grief of France was immense, the grief of this small child the equal of it.

  He comes up the high road towards the upper village of Strandhill on his way home because the tide is deeply in and he cannot think of crossing the estuary. The sea has oppressed him and he’s glad to be among the salt-streaked houses. You can paint them as much as you like but the black stains are only months in the making. There’s a fine house on the left side of the road with a castellated wall. To balance that on the other side someone has built a corrugated hut with a bit of fancy woodwork under the eaves to give some grace to it, but not much. A strew of roses blazes in the winter light beneath the tumbledown veranda. It must be someone’s beloved holiday home but it’s a queer one right enough.

  Then he sees that over behind the intricate frozen roses there’s a woman standing in the deepening shadows dressed in a light summer frock of cotton or linen. He didn’t see her straight off because of the new dark and the pattern of large tea-roses on the frock. Around her shoulders she has a fur stole of some quality and her bosom is pleasantly high and plump. She must be icicles itself in that rig-out and no mistake. She looks for all the world like she’s prowling there, prowling like a tigress.

  ‘Jack,’ she says.

  ‘No, it’s not Jack,’ he says surprised, ‘it’s Jack’s brother, Eneas. I don’t think you know me.’

  ‘I didn’t realize there were three of ye,’ she says. ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ he says, ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘you ask Tom who I am. Ask Jack if you like. Then you can come calling and I’ll brew you up a pot of tea, next time you’re passing.’

  ‘Are you not perished with the cold there?’ he says kindly. ‘You should go in maybe and warm yourself.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she says. ‘It’s safer out here. Did you ever see rats stealing an egg? I’m just after. One of them puts the egg on his belly and the other drags him off through the hole in the wall, you know, like a sledge in the snow. That was for me tea that egg. But the rats got it. They won’t get me. I’m walking up and down like a madwoman to keep warm. That’s what your mother says I am, you know. A madwoman.’

  ‘My mother?’ he says.

  ‘Yes, your sainted mother,’ she says. ‘Your brother Jack has other names for me I hear.’

  ‘Well, I better be getting on. I’ve a long road to go.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You come back some time when there’s daylight. I’ve no light here in this place.’

  ‘I will,’ he says. ‘Take care now.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘I know what to do.’

  He nods his head and passes on through the dusk, turning left past the Protestant church with its handsome yews. He has a right old walk now because of the state of the tide.

  ‘Who’s that woman there in Strandhill at the top of the road, do you know, Pappy?’ he asks his father that night. ‘Which woman?’ Old Tom say s.

  ‘Woman there in Strandhill, I passed her, she was, you know, not all there, but she knew Jack and Tom all right. Thought I was Jack, in the dark, you know.’

  ‘Oh, bless me. That’s Tom’s wife.’

  ‘I was thinking maybe she was.’

  ‘Oh aye. Roseanne.’

  ‘What’s she doing out there in that cold hut?’

  ‘Well, they’re not, you know, together now these times.’ ‘Why don’t you get a proper place for her?’

  ‘She’s not interested. She likes where she is.’

  Eneas doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘Aye.’ Old Tom gets up creakily, and away with him.

  And Eneas lies in the pleasant sheets. The world of Sligo is a deepening puzzle. Perhaps it always was. Perhaps there was always something deep in the water, pulling at the force of the stream, twisting it, like a drowning, or a trapped branch.

  ‘I’ve to head back out into this damned war the day after tomorrow,’ Jack says at breakfast, ‘and I don’t mind telling you, Eneas, it doesn’t cheer me up.’

  Jack was like a little sealed box mostly and you didn’t know what was in it. Here he is now more uncontrolled with his red hair starting to stand up in places from the catastrophe of the last days, prising up out of the Vaseline like orange peels.

  ‘Your wife will be out before you go then, Jack?’ he says. ‘No, no, but I have to go back. I have to go back.’

  Maybe there’s a note of relief in Jack’s voice, maybe so. So far Eneas hasn’t heard her alluded to by name which is a curiosity.

  ‘I hear you ran into Tom’s wife there the other day,’ says Jack.

  ‘Yeh, I did,’ says Eneas, ‘I did, Jack.’

  ‘What you think of her?’

  ‘Very — handsome.’

  ‘Yes.’ A very peculiar yes. The Mam moved heaven and earth, heaven and earth to get Tom out of that. Jesus, when I heard in India that he’d gone and married that one. Roseanne Clear! Jesus. Look, there’s a serious problem out there in that corrugated hut. Mental.’ Jack looks up impressively at his brother. T knew her in the old days before the war, before I married myself.’

  ‘Went out with her?’

  ‘She’s not the sort of girl you’d go out with, as such. She’d be around the dance-hall, you know.’

  ‘OK.’

  That doesn’t shock you?’

  ‘No,’ says Eneas.

  ‘Well it shocked the Mam. The Mam was shocked, the Mam got her way.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he be better off being with his wife?’

  ‘Eneas, you’ve lived away from here a long time.’

  Eneas sits still and watches Jack eating, like a person might watch a bird drinking from a tin in the garden. One move and it vanishes, with a blurring of fierce wings.

  His brother is a creature he cannot intrude upon.

  Then it comes. It com
es though the letterbox as ordinary as you like and it is addressed to Constable Eneas McNulty. His mother brings it to him with a cup of tea. When he sees the manner of the name he hopes it is some official communication, but against that he can see that the envelope is too small and paltry-looking for that. There’s no crest or crown or nothing like that, nor even the harp of the new state. His Mam with her narrow face, more shrunken than before like those heads from Borneo, but still the face he has carried so long in his dreams while he wandered, sits onto the edge of the bed silently. He rips the envelope and has a dekko into it. The message is typed in black and occupies only a brief space on the lined paper. There’s no dear sir or yours truly, just a plain bare streel of words:

  Sentence of death now invoked.

  You will be hunted down wherever you are and slain.

  ‘How is it?’ his Mam says.

  ‘Not so good.’

  ‘Give us a look at it,’ she says. Then after a bit, ‘Might be a, you know, a prankster. Give you a fright.’

  ‘Well, it’s worked.’

  ‘Oh, son, this is so hard for you.’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘Drink your tea, boy, and let’s call it a prank.’

  ‘Aye.’

  He goes down to the river hoping to see salmon caught above the bridges of the town. In the old days salmon were a rarity because they didn’t like the work of the dredgers in the river. If a salmon senses the least scattering of dirt in his home river, away out maybe in the farthest skirt of the estuary, he will not deign to enter, or she. The salmon is as clean as a pig in its nature though unlike the pig it will not lie down in the dirt that men force on it. Though the decay of the docks, the deep-water berths filling with the river’s natural silt, is a terrible story, yet the return of the finicky salmon is a slight wonder to set against it. Fishers are taking salmon now of twenty, even thirty pounds, long big brutes of silver that are more like calves than fish. He would like to see that, so down to the river he goes in mid-morning when the tide is on the turn and the great engines of the fish will be clogging the rushing channels.