The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

by Sebastian Barry

  And he thinks back a little over his life and where he was born and he wonders did he make such a hames and a hash of it after all? Didn’t he just live the life given him and no more side to him than a field-mouse as God’s plough bears down to crush his nest? He thinks maybe it was a mistake as such to join the police that time, but what else was he to do, hang about the corners of Sligo and harass the widows as they went by? By the mere fact of being willing to be killed for his ‘crime’ he is beyond his ‘crime’. Enemy of the Irish people. He wishes he could keep in touch with Teasy away there in Bexhill in her convent and the wonderful network of roads about for her to beg along, but … He loves that Teasy, though, he believes.

  But he wishes, ah, he wishes now sometimes all the same that he had been born a simple farmer’s son far from the devious town and had taken that farm to himself in due course and farmed it and got the grass off it yearly and been good at the work, yes, and married a lass of small means, and rowed through the winters with her, and brought up his sons and daughters, giving out to them the while, and trying to set a path of stout wood across the dreary bogs and verdant meadows of a life. And when he wishes for those things his body feels heavy against the digging, and Africa’s colours leak from her, and he might be a dog locked in a lightless room without water or food or walking.

  Then his brain really rattles and he has to dig faster to fling out the demons from the red earth, so dry and deep in the channel of the canal, whose water waits two hundred miles upland still locked in the bright waters of the lake.

  He knows Benson dreams of the day when the locks at the lake are opened and the water bursts forth and fills the trench in its three hundred miles and carries rich moisture down to lands that will fall back into fertility from the shock, lands that know only segments of inches of rain betimes, or great crushing sweeping deluges that last an hour or two and pass away higher to the Muslim districts. He knows Benson dreams of that because he himself would if he had the gift of those drawings, his own brother’s gift indeed.

  And in his heart somewhere between sleep and waking, in the dark pit of his heart, he senses to his grave discomfort the moil and torrent of the distant water pressing somehow to be released, impatient and mocking. He knows the water lies far north of him and his blessed heart, but it’s a confusion so peculiar that he half believes he is a sort of Nigeria with northern water and southern drought. And when his mind latches onto dryness, he sees there, dotted about, the dirty backs of mountain sheep in the hammered reaches of Sligo hills amazing his inner eyes — so there is worse confusion, bareness, wet, dryness, Africa, Ireland. And it isn’t so pleasant when the mind won’t put things in their correct places, dragging such dirty sheep into an African day dream. And now being wordless more or less apart from a grunted thanks or a hello, even bit by bit, hour by hour, with Harcourt, his poor head becomes all the more afflicted not by visions, not by things that John of Patmos might have cherished in his visionary cave, but by useless fragments of past and present, as if a joyless hammer has struck the template of his head and partly ruined it, bent it, buggered it up rightly.

  Thankfully his arms and legs and such aren’t too heedful of his difficulties and they swing and settle and do as good as ever.

  The mystery to him is, though they slap his back and watch him and even converse hotly or mildly with him if one or other happens to be working by him, his fellows don’t pass remarks on his condition. Indeed he sings betimes whatever he has of songs, wordless tunes of his father’s, or bits of things he has heard on his travels, to give himself the appearance of self-command and normality. But even if he were to spend the day on his head and hands he doesn’t believe these men would find it remarkable enough to mention it. The condition generally shared is a certain physical strength, and as long as Eneas does his share of the digging he remains part of the curious sphere of the workforce, tracking back and forth across the clay in all the thousand journeys and mutations of a day. In this way every man is a vagrant star following his vagrant and allotted path through the firmament of the camp, though there may be no plus and minus to explain him.

  And though his discombobulation grows indeed apace, and he can sense it always lurking inwardly, he searches for means in himself to ward off the rising of it. He imagines beyond the material of the tent a high blue-stricken Sligo sky, an autumn sky, fit for passing fast above the withering branches of maples and oaks and roaring out of it the story of Sligo, the thousand stories, the million, the countless, the numberless stars of the stories of Sligo and in that eternal Babel betimes he finds the sweet nut of rest, the ease in his limbs, the eyebright womb of proper ease.

  And digs like a demon.

  And Harcourt becomes second nature to Eneas and digs like a demon. Harcourt grows strong as a donkey and he digs, you have to admire his digging now. And the dry earth mounts each side of the channel and their canal lengthens southward. And when Eneas is worse than troubled, when the stricken part of his head worsens and in worsening forces the head downward onto Eneas’s chest like the neck is broken or under fierce strain, it seems to Eneas that Harcourt is digging for him, for his health, digging for it like a pirate digs for the gold on the bleak island of adventure.

  ‘What troubles you, brother?’ Harcourt asks. ‘Can you say anything at all in that silence of yours, brother?’

  And Eneas barely can. Fear afflicts him, silence abets the fear. Sometimes he lays down his spade and shivers in the lengthening ditch, he shivers with an ague like malaria but it isn’t so simple. It isn’t mosquitoes are ruining Eneas, but the pressing down and piercing up of a life. He’s being run through from many an angle. Sometimes he yearns for the refuge of an English madhouse, for the refuge of youth even, of a fresh start. He is mortally exhausted sometimes by being this Eneas McNulty. The wicked idea strikes him that his would-be murderers were in the right, that there’s nothing to recommend him, that his life has been ill led, that he deserves tremendous and afflicting punishment. When he thinks this he trembles worse. He’s lost in a childhood state and he fears the displeasure of God the King of good and the Demon of evil. He lies fast in the bed of himself with the starched sheets binding his legs, and the ministers of God approach the bedroom of himself and will be in the window like a fiery bolt to accuse and torment him and he feels it will be well merited.

  It’s Harcourt that brings him back to the simpler world. They go out one morning as usual to the digging area with spades on their shoulders and cardboard visors against the sun. The birds of Africa angrily call. All as usual, daily, the now familiar newspaper of sounds and sights that each man reads for himself in his own way. A day indeed when Eneas feels his own inclination to silence as a half-decent thing and he hovers on the ragged border of contentment. And they dig as is their wont and work and it doesn’t seem so pointless a business after all to be striving to realize the great dream of Benson. Or maybe it isn’t a great dream but a natural job of work, and if Benson was building a wharf in New Ross it would be all the same thing. Maybe it occurs to Eneas he makes too much of expert work, maybe he should lose that strange part of his soul that envies and worships the expert man. As he thinks this, suddenly Harcourt stops in the digging and begins to tremble. Now this could be Eneas himself and Eneas is doubly startled, and thinking he knows this ague lurches to embrace his friend. But Harcourt won’t stop at trembling but goes down on one knee on the brittle earth and leaps up as if kicked by the earth and falls about and then bangs back on the crumbling ground and shakes all his limbs at once, and a nasty looking bile or foam starts to bubble and froth from his lips. And Benson leaps down into the ditch and hauls off his own belt and shoves the thickness of it into Harcourt’s mouth, startling Eneas. The other diggers have stopped and are staring down at Harcourt silently with their chins at still angles as if all movement has gone out of the world except for Harcourt’s twitching and gurgling.

  ‘He’s having a fit,’ says Benson. ‘I’ve seen it before in one of my aunts. Epileps
y or the like. Mustn’t swallow the tongue. That’s the main thing.’

  ‘No, no,’ says Eneas, and he imagines Harcourt’s tongue going down the throat and into the belly to be digested as if it was the edible tongue of a cow after being boiled and skinned by his mother years ago in the house in John Street. ‘Mercy, mercy.’

  Now a number of the other men have climbed out of the ditch and are talking softly to each other and shaking their heads because it’s an ill sight and possibly an evil one. They’re saying the clay is dangerous or the water or the company food maybe, the same thought going through Eneas’s mind, unworthy but unbidden. Now Harcourt is quiet enough except his eyes are up under his lids somewhere and occasionally he gives a massive jerk. The heads of the workers shake at each spasm. No, no, no. And then Harcourt is up with a jerk and the fit is on him again and he waves his arms and flails his legs like a dancer, like a dervish, and you’d swear, swear he knows the dance, and even likely hears a personal music proper to the dance, and he twists and leaps with tremendous poise and balance till he’s down on the clay again and spasming and gurgling as before. And the leather belt has flown out long since and Harcourt is struggling now with the depth of his fit, and Benson has his hand in Harcourt’s mouth and is trying to hold on to the root of the tongue to prevent it turning back on itself in a murderous rictus and stoppering up the precious breath of Harcourt. Then the wretched fit passes away, and Benson holds Harcourt’s exhausted head in his lap and strokes the fevered face and seems to be talking to him gently with all the terrified susurrus and low voice of a mother. Eneas watches and thinks of his brother Jack reading in sacred privacy if that is the term to his daughter in the night-swallowed bungalow in Sligo. And such evident tenderness, accidental, necessary tenderness in Benson towards Harcourt, sweeps against Eneas also not hurting him as Jack did but roughly illuminating him. And the engineer stroking the face of the afflicted man quells the demon momentarily that feeds at the core of Eneas. In an hour Harcourt is able to stand with assistance and go back shaken and solemn with sometimes trailing legs to the speckled tent.

  Harcourt lies in like a ruined man on the thin yellowed pallet of his bunk, lies back still at last and lets out a breath as lonesome as a mountain peak.

  ‘Easier for you now?’ says Eneas. ‘That easier?’

  ‘It’s easier now, brother, don’t mind me. Just a broken donkey of a man.’

  ‘That’s a wicked thing was running through you, Harcourt, man.’

  ‘It will not be difficult for you now, brother, to see why I was let go from the English army, with this sort of carry-on afflicting me,’ says Harcourt, not without relish, relishing also some deep breaths, a deep well of gladsome breaths rising to flatter him, to inflate his life.

  ‘No,’ says Eneas. ‘No. But all the same, a man might expect better of the King’s army.’

  ‘No one minds illness invisible. If a foul cancer were eating my heart, and my face was fair and open the while, it would be no matter. But with this leaping and foaming disease … Wasn’t always so violent. You could charge money in to see me now when it’s a-hold of me.’

  ‘That Mr Benson seemed to know the drill.’

  ‘Well, is that so?’ says Harcourt.

  ‘He didn’t scorn to comfort you, you know.’

  Til thank him for it.’

  ‘I’d better get back to the ditch. I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Maybe I’m in the right spot after all.’

  ‘How so?’ says Eneas, turning, turning.

  ‘With you and buggering Mr Benson to look out for me…’

  ‘Maybe so …’

  A clearer head and a quieter heart engines Eneas McNulty back out to the delving and flinging of red clay. Whether things are good or bad he cannot say, but at the least his eyes are seeing true, or so he hopes and trusts. Better the world as it is, than other worlds his mind may prefer. That he knows. God keep Harcourt fast to the rocky earth, he prays, nonetheless.

  He sits, Eneas, at the mouth of the tent where Harcourt has been consigned, for the sake of safety, religion and fear. A poor lamp burns within and makes the old material of the field tent into a larger lamp, sitting like a bubble of light in the limitless darkness. And fireflies occupy themselves in the ragged dark and echo the ferocious display of stars. There are too many stars for comfort, and the extent of the world has no limit. The tent is moored to the extreme of the diggers’ camp, and the great blank of night starts at the lips of Eneas’s boots, he feels. He hears Harcourt breathing lightly in the mercy of sleep.

  Someone, a pair of someones, is causing a ruckus in the middle of the camp. Eneas is disturbed as a nurse might be, watching over a child ailing in the worrisome night, or a person needing quiet for some secret function, a prayer perhaps. Two tall men half lit by the wayward lamps and half concealed in the old cloths of darkness. Whatever light there is celebrates the shouting faces. They are too far away to understand and anyway he thinks it might not be English they are using to orchestrate their fight. Now the matter passes from words to deeds, and the men punch at each other, softly at first, pushing really, then firmly, then fully, then murderously. Other men come out into the domain of light and watch. Eneas fearfully regards them, fighters and watchers.

  Oh and he remembers passing through a town, in the county of Roscommon, in his policeman days. Seeing in the wide market street two tinker women fighting, just like this, with sluggish intent, landing the most hefty punches on their breasts carpeted in vast and ragged cardigans. And he sailed past in his Crossley tender. Because the trouble of Roscommon was not contained in those two women contesting what question he did not know. Their punches were not political. And they are fighting still in the silent picture-house of his addled head, on the wide market street of his lonesome fears. Harcourt sleeps on. The stars fire down their brutal spears of light, making the old bowl of night a destructive spectacle.

  How dark and hurt and deep the world.

  And when they come to dispel Harcourt from the world of the camp, not because they dislike him but because they cannot bear the mystery of his illness in their midst, they find Eneas asleep or seemingly so on the half-broken chair. And indeed he has slept under the dying stars and Sligo dogs have barked through his dreams. They give him a few slight and reasonable pokes to get him awake. But he is already awake and needs only to open his eyes. He knows a purposeful delegation when he sees one. It is the time of the little peace between dark and sunrise where the insects seem to obey some strange law of silence. Eneas smiles at the seven or eight faces and glances back into the tent where his friend Harcourt still slumbers. There are two bruised faces among the intent group, and Eneas assumes these are the battlers of the night before, and as only one of them speaks he assumes this man is the victor and the desirer of Harcourt’s departure. The man speaks quietly and decently and it seems to Eneas religiously and perhaps it is a religious scruple that excludes Harcourt, or a rightful alarm at a diseased man being amid a closed camp of workers. Eneas asks in the same level tone for Benson to be fetched and the matter settled by the engineer. The speaker expresses doubt that a whiteman can understand the complexities of the matter, but Benson nevertheless is fetched for fairness’ sake. Now the tremendous population of cricketlike creatures begins, adding their aching volume to the dispute. All is elegant and courtly because the speaker for the delegation senses the strength of his position and so does Eneas. After all, this is their spinning world, this patch of toiling ground, and the force of public opinion, tiny though the public here may be, is a thing so violent violence is not needed to carry it.

  Benson arrives looking distinctly unenthusiastic. He tries to explain that Harcourt and Eneas too for that matter are under a three-year contract and as such are bound to fulfil their terms. And as Harcourt is able to work when not in his fit then there is no true reason for him to be sent away.

  ‘And where will I send this man?’ says Benson. ‘There is nowhere he can go and fulfil his contract. Wi
ll I send him to Lagos where the company may proceed against him for breach of contract and most likely imprison him?’

  ‘This is not the matter in hand,’ says the speaker. ‘If he was God himself or King of England or boss of the company, no luck or fortune could attach to his staying. He is afflicted and as an afflicted person should not be seen among other men or work at their sides.’

  ‘He’s just a poor man with epilepsy. What trouble would you like to bring on his head, Joe? Epilepsy’s neither contagious, nor against religion. Can I not convince you?’ Eneas stands under the sun without hat or safety and is reminded of his brother Tom. The vaguely oratorical turn to Benson’s speech is the same. It is the politician talking to the voter, the owner of the mother tongue talking to the native with a measure of grace. Yet Benson is an Irishman. He is trying in some ancestral desperation to enter into the idiom of the African. But in borrowing only the tone of the speaker called Joe, Benson betrays his condescension. It would not be important except the speaker called Joe gives up suddenly and walks away with his companions.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Benson to Eneas. The tone remains intact. ‘Unless you’re willing to fight for Harcourt with your bare fists I don’t think Harcourt can stay here.’ Eneas after all is a digger of Benson’s earth.

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I suppose I can send him back to Lagos.’

  ‘I don’t think he wants to be in Lagos.’

  ‘They’ll put him to work somewhere. Warehouses maybe.’

  ‘He wants to dig.’

  ‘These men here won’t let him stay. If I oppose them they’ll wear me down like a riverstone. I need them for this mighty work. Anyway, look at it this way, as an epileptic gets older the fits get worse. He could have choked to death yesterday.’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t care. He wants to be here.’