The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

by Sebastian Barry

  He enters the park named in memory of a local priest. It opens out and out along the riverbank till Eneas might expect to see those famous Indians of Texas come running out of the simple hazel and oak. As always among trees he feels a sense of danger and a sense of safety. Refuge and place of ambush. He admires the long ropes of dashing silver that the river is, seen through the slim branches. A cold bronze sun sits hooked in the tree-tops.

  He looks back in the silence of the trees and to his great surprise there are three or four men in black coats coming along the path behind him, some fifty yards away. It is so like his dream of O’Dowd and his comrades that he stops on the crushed wood and mud of the track and stares at them. Much to his disquiet the men stop also. He even considers raising a hand in greeting, but if they are only walkers like himself or fishermen it will seem daft. He doesn’t think that coats like theirs are the coats of anglers. They’re more fellas you’d see in a bookie’s office up the town putting ten bobs on nags in England and standing around as though wires tied them to the radio speaker on the wall. What’s fear to him that has seen his fellows die on the beach in France but all the same the bottom falls out of his bowels almost and the muscles in his legs weaken. Because the sort of death his enemies might mete out to him will not be a simple one, will not be an efficient shooting or a good sincere cutting of the throat. Men like those will fumble his death, they’ll be clumsy and vicious at the same time. He’s seen reprisals and they always used to make the worst corpses, the bag over the destroyed head and the few bullets put almost insanely into places that wouldn’t kill a creature kindly. It isn’t easy to kill a man cleanly, it takes training and talent. Those four men standing in Father Moran’s beautiful park would not be masters of murder, he’s sure. And twenty years rusty at that.

  The difficulty with walking on is it will take him further from the town and deeper into this curious wilderness. Of course that’s why they’ve stopped. They don’t want to kill him here. But look how he’s leapt to this conclusion. Maybe they’re not his assassins. Maybe they’re feckin seminarians from the college on the hill. Maybe they are some of those wild men he sometimes heard about on ships that prefer the company of their own kind, and he’s an intruder on their pleasures in these woods.

  He presses on without looking back and when he turns a decent switch in the track he runs like a hare. He runs like a bollocking hare and his arms flailing and his coat flying back. He’s a bit long in the tooth for this sort of running but he runs like a youngster on this occasion. It’s by no means a warm day, but fresh sweat pours down his face and it tastes in his mouth like whiskey. The surface of the track is poor enough for running and his English boots keep sliding an inch here, an inch there, till he’s almost skating.

  At his back clearer and clearer he hears the other men trampling through the mud in fierce pursuit. He has no need to consider now if they’re lovers of each other or not. There’s a terrible huffing and puffing, and he knows they like this scrambling along as much as himself. Maybe the thrill of the chase enlivens them. It must be a crazy thing to go galloping after a human person with intent to kill!

  Not expecting anything but an eternity of this running, he comes out abruptly into a more open section of the park. There’s an iron railing to his right with a little iron gate all bent by boots and shoes and across the river he sees a hunting lodge with a jetty. There’s a man fishing calmly from the toe of the jetty and another two men in a boat, one fishing and the other keeping the prow straight in the current with an anchor in the manner of salmon gillies. He sees all this with the clarity of hours, but really he has four seconds to take it in. His pursuers are just behind. He jumps indecorously in the air in the manner that would shame a boy and cries out across the pouring river. It’s not in flood but nevertheless the music of the water is loud and complete. He gets no joy at all from those flaming fishermen. Why didn’t he go to feckin Enniscrone for a seaweed bath if he was so mad to be out in the daylight? What are salmon to him? He hates the taste of salmon! He rips at his own black coat, its buttons flying off him like little bats, and plunges forward into the Garravogue. He loves this river but its chill is deathly. He has often wondered what the river felt like in winter and now he finds out. It’s like shoving your whole body against an electric cable. His heart nearly stops in his terrified chest. He hopes the bastards will leap in after him because the river will surely electrocute them. It’s bloody electrocuting him!

  The ice, the deep pure chill of melted ice that is the river, like some liquid strained through a glacier in the far Arctic North, tightens down the screws of his senses with a violence indifferent to his life. Air balled up in the folds of his clothes seems to be life-jacket enough for the minute, though he dare not move or roll, and all the while he goes buoyantly in the fast tearing of the channel, the river’s temperature knocks at his very blood and soul, wanting entry. He has a wild sensation of flying, soaring above the river, of being an instrument that cuts with awful blades through very rock. This salmony world is devouring and spitting him out at the same time, destroying and remaking him!

  At Buckley’s old ford he hits the ancient shingle of rocks and stones and tries to stand in the strong smooth mowing of the water. He doesn’t know why he isn’t dead. He might as well have torn out his heart and flung it to a lion in Dublin zoo as a means to save himself. He sees the roofs of Ardoghan House up to his right and staggers towards the mucky shore. Through reeds he goes, lifting moorhens out of their secret standings in clumsy sequences of splashings. They weren’t looking to the river as a source of men but the demon shore itself.

  He has to pass through the old estate as discreetly as possible and then get on to the town road beyond. There’s not much a man can do to disguise half the river on his person. He tries to squeeze out his trews and jacket as he goes, but the heavy old cloth is agin him. He’s so chilled he’s bizarrely warm. Again the few magpies and winter birds he startles in the woods of Ardoghan seem to be made of fire and light, rocketing up through the thick black branches. So wet, so water-logged, so charged with the river, yet he half expects for smoke to burst out of himself as if he was a creature of fire.

  The object of open amazement he enters the midday town, parting the crowd at the junction of O’Connell and

  Grattan Streets like a veritable leper. This is some way to keep his presence in Sligo secret, never mind the marauding murderers in the park. Maybe they think he’s a drowned man come back to walk among the living. A pretty pass to come to, the object of dread and astonishment in the streets where he followed his mother about as a child, from chemist to butcher, from the Cathedral to the Cafe Cairo … Without pause or further sideways glance he strides into John Street and on up as speedily as he can after such an ordeal towards the desired, the much-desired Strandhill Road.

  He doesn’t want to have to explain his quandary to anyone in his father’s house so he flits around the back in as much as a large man like him in a drenched suit can flit. Flitting is his aim, making his way from merciful rhododendron bush to generous larch. He suddenly feels colder now, knocked by a dull hammerblow of exhaustion as he nears his refuge. He has no idea how he will dry his clothes, but it will be enough he reckons to get into bed and try and recover. Grilled by cold he is now, as he searches at the back of the house for his room, one of these four windows near the ground. He grips the frame of the first window and peers in like a bear upright and ferocious, his face wild with weather and river.

  He sees a sight that unexpectedly hurts him. His niece Annie lies on the little bed and his brother Jack sits there at the edge. The lamp on the bedside creates one fierce cone of light that is as present as a third person. Jack cradles a book on his lap and is reading boldly from it, and his daughter is agog, as if visible words were falling, flying and leaping from her father’s mouth. Eneas cannot hear the words, so the scene has the force for him of one of the old moving pictures without sound. Indeed his brother in the grandeur and excitement of his
performance is not a mile distant from the methods of the old dead wizards of the silent screen. Only the wind soughing in his own father’s trees at the base of the garden provides a music.

  He sees his niece and his brother and feels the bareness of his own life. It could be Old Tom with himself years ago, and he is distressed at the empty rooms of his own progress in the world. No children, no wife, no picture house where human actions unfold and are warmly enacted. He can barely remember why his life is so bare, he is that used to it, the bloody life of a lone seal out in the unknowable sea, dipping down for mackerel and feckin around generally in a lonesome fashion. Here before him is the achievement of Jack, despite whatever trouble was upon him, here is the child and the father and the book, here is the living scene more holy and sacred than any official ceremony, for which all wars are declared and every peace manufactured.

  Oh but, what are those fierce flecks of gold and silver streaming in the little room? He must dry himself and rest or he’ll have a fever to beat the band. He lingers, he lingers. What are those fleeting freaks of gold and silver light, and why is his brother’s body like a brave flame, a handsome flame against the roaring of a wind? How does that wind of gold and silver not destroy his human brother and strike him down and make the earth forget him? The child smiles up at him like a lonesome bud among brambles, a rosebud, a rosebud, in the depthless sanctity of a daughter’s love. It hurts Eneas, it hurts him, worse than any bullet of O’Dowd, but he admires it also more than gold. He goes round in his state of dismal vision to the front door of the bungalow and throws himself on the mercy and intuition of his mother. He doesn’t know what else he can do. He hasn’t the love or the energy to break his way into his own bedroom. She undresses him like a child and lends him a big white nightdress of Old Tom’s and feeds him full of stew before the fire and gives him a few measures of whiskey. He sits there like a pilgrim who has been ambushed far from Mecca. He shakes his head at the leaping flames.

  Jack comes in later and drinks a whiskey at his elbow, but Eneas can’t look at him easily, a trifle guilty about watching through the window. He can’t even answer him or join in the talk but perhaps they accept his awkwardness as characteristic.

  Jack heads off to the hospital and Eneas is left with his mother. He tells her in scanty detail about the men in the park, and she agrees with him that he has to go away.

  ‘There’s little point being killed in Sligo when the whole wide world lies before you,’ his mother says.

  ‘Mam,’ he says, ‘I doubt in my heart, you know, that I’ll ever come back again. I hoped to settle down here with a job and such but it isn’t to be. Short wars and long memories. I know Jack has his troubles …’

  ‘He has,’ she says candidly. ‘His wife is up to her neck in drink the whole livelong day. That’s the situation.’

  ‘I know, but, truth to tell

  But he can’t tell any truth he knows, he barely knows it himself as yet. He fears his fettered mind and the recent madness he has endured in England. He doesn’t know if his own eyes show him the world, or a different world that isn’t there.

  ‘Mam,’ he says, as the whiskey thaws his heart, ‘do you know, if it’s a sad life, it’s a bloody mysterious one too.’

  ‘It is,’ she says.

  ‘I will always cherish the days,’ he says matter of factly, ‘when you and me were pals and went about Sligo like brother and sister, brother and sister. When you and me were pals.’

  ‘Ah, sure, yes,’ she says, smiling.

  ‘But those days are gone and a lot of water under the bridge. Mam, I don’t understand the world, nor think I ever will, our going into it or our getting out of it. I am forty-four and none the wiser. Why is that?’

  ‘It seems to be the way for us both. A bit of happiness here and there. Throw out your leg now and then and be dancing. Otherwise, a crooked way. Though your father, you know, he’s always happy, always was, with his fiddle and his whistle and his band. He’d be happy stricken in the fever hospital if he could still concoct a tune. You and me, maybe, are not, you know, the happy sort. We’re the sort that don’t know our arse from our elbow when it comes to happiness. Me, I had hard beginnings, but many a girl had harder and was happy enough ‘Those hard beginnings, Mam …’

  ‘Yes, Eneas.’

  ‘What were they exactly, Mam, if I might ask?’

  ‘Ah … It’s just ould stuff. It’s not important now. Least said, soonest mended. Telling won’t help it. Silence is the job. It’s a great thing, silence, when you can engender it in a town like this.’

  ‘I’m not coming back, Mam, and it might stand to me if I knew.’

  ‘I don’t know how it would.’

  ‘I did always wonder when I was a child if there was a mystery there.’

  ‘No mystery. I’ll tell you, child, because surely I love you and you’re going away from me. I was reared up by the Byrnes, by your grandparents as you used call them, and surely he was a good enough sort, an army man formerly like yourself, batman to a gentleman in one of the old regiments. This gentleman, by name of Gibson, married a woman out of the music-halls in England, well, you know, an actress I suppose. But it’s said she died after giving birth to her daughter, that is, my own self, and Gibson went back into the army in India and the child, that is, me, was given away for to be reared by his former batman, Mr Byrne. That’s why you used to see me go down to Athlone every Saturday in the month. I’d be going to the solicitor’s office there to draw my stipend that was established for me by the Gibsons.’ ‘Christ, Mam. And did you ever meet this man your father or know the family at all?’

  ‘I never saw him in my life, though he’s dead now these many years I believe. His family want nothing to do with me, naturally. I’m no better than a dropper to them, though I’m told my parents were married and all in the proper way. That’s my secret such as it is, and it’s a common enough thing in this benighted country of hypocrites and demons. I had a wicked time of it as a girl with the whispering that went on around me like a nest of sparrows.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ he says. ‘I can imagine. Does Pappy know any of it?’

  ‘No, and he doesn’t, and what good would it do him? He’s as deaf as a plank to rumour, you wouldn’t get an innuendo through to him if you used a crow-bar.’

  ‘No,’ said Eneas laughing, ‘you wouldn’t.’

  ‘That’s your mother’s story anyhow. It’s a cruel ould thing to be called a bastard and you just a little girl. But what odds. They wouldn’t risk it now. Your mother has told that to no one but yourself. I hope you still love her.’ ‘Oh I do, I do, Mam. I do!’

  ‘Nothing ever meant much to me before I had my sons. It’s my sons that keep me fixed to this earth. I’d kill for any of ye, and kill anyone to preserve your lives. That’s the true story of Mary Byrne, and the devil take the story you can do nothing about.’

  14

  IN THE MORNING his mother hauls in his heap of dried clothes. She’s had them above the range all night, and they’re stiff and dry as salty sails in the Tropics, stiff and oddly scentless. They no longer carry the odour of his journeys. The old clothes are unfamiliar to him. In her frugal way, she has gone down to the riverbank in the sparkle of dawn and retrieved his coat and restored its buttons. She gives him some boots of his father’s because his own will never, she says, be right again after their ducking. One time in the Gaiety the winder for the film or whatever they used, the projector, was it, went wrong, and the picture they were showing slowed down, and horses and riders surged and fell softly and slowly as in a dream. This is how he feels now, as if he is slowly and softly engaged in a lonesome dream. It terrifies his heart that he must go again. The mountain of going is twice as high as ever, he has got a taste of the world he prefers for all its maggots and mysteries, the queer element that suits him as a creature. His family puts the wind up him mightily in many regards. Yet he would rather not be gone. Be gone he must. His mother gives him lamb sandwiches in greaseproof paper lik
e he was going out for a day’s labour somewhere, not a life’s labour in the wilderness of the earth. He looks at the sandwiches and wonders half-humorously if they can carry him across the burning midlands of the world, if he has the heart to be a mere wanderer again. There’s a seed at the back of his mind that suggests that leaving is still an adventure, but it’s only a seed. The great tree of hope and energy is no more. He hopes it might grow again, somewhere in the wastes of this strange earth. With his sandwiches as perishable talisman he accepts his mother’s kiss and she accepts his, and he heads away into bright Sligo with his soul as simple as a salmon’s.

  At the station he discovers a wealth of hours exists between now and the Dublin train, and he is stumped there, in the wooden world of the ticket office, with his scratched case. He’s not a man to suppose that this gap of time has been lent him for nothing, and indeed at the back of his mind ever since their meeting his conscience has been raising the spectre of Tom’s wife, mad as marram grass out there in Strandhill. He has taken good heed of Jack’s words on the topic but all the same there is another instinct that is greater than his brother’s words — his own plain word as a human person, given freely as the corrugated cottage hastened into darkness.

  The poor old Jarvey Tomlinson whose father was killed in the sappers long ago runs him out in the battered Tourer. Where you could tour in a conveyance like that was a question. It was just luck that got them out as far as Strandhill. He commissioned Tomlinson and his epic vehicle to wait on the top road beside the old graveyard where a quiet smoke might fill the time, and off with himself down the sun-speckled road to the hut. Strandhill was afflicted now by a miserable sun all salted by a little bladed wind. A person would need a proper greatcoat for this fierce class of a season, especially a person that had taken a long swim the day before in the Garravogue. Never mind, he wraps his decent coat about himself and stands in under the veranda of roses and has a smell of them. Roses always make him glad to be alive, the strength of smell they enjoy.