Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  Never to feel what it was to hold a child who needed them; to tell a wife she was looking beautiful today, that her hair was pretty or her eyes an amazement; to argue with a wife and then make it up. To hold no other in your loving embrace and feel what it was to be loved in return. Mulvey was too young to have known those things himself, but he had seen them and been brought up in the warm light they shed. The fact that such a radiance might not shine on him again plunged him into a darkness he found terrifying.

  He grew restless with Connemara and its bleak possibilities, its blasted bogscape and lunar rockiness, the grey desolation of everything around him, the rainy, acidulous smell of the air. The wind lashed in like a whip from the Atlantic and the trees grew at every angle to the ground except the perpendicular. He sat for hours at his cracked, filthy window watching them bend and warp in a gale; wondering when the fury might get too much and they would break in two or be torn from the earth. But they never broke. They just groaned and bowed low, and remained bowed after the storm had raged away. Stooped. Hunched. Twisted. Deformed: the servants of a master who detested their devotion.

  His father had bowed low all his life. So had his mother and everyone Mulvey knew; but fate had returned no dividend on their loyalty. His brother spoke often of the mysteries of God. How God could never do anything wrong; God never tested you more than your abilities; the moment of crucifixion was the moment of triumph if only arrogant man had the clarity to see it. But Pius Mulvey did not see it. What he saw in his brother was a slave on his knees, adoring the truth of his own destitution, translating that fact into a sententious fiction because he lacked the courage to read it in the original. That it might take courage and not cowardice to believe in any God was a view to which Mulvey never gave countenance. To think like that was a waste of time: like washing the few dishes you still had among your possessions when you knew they would only be dirtied again the following day. If you were lucky enough to have anything to dirty them with, and that was by no means certain any more.

  Their mother’s absence was so sharp that it felt like a presence, no less palpable for never being mentioned. But it flowed between the brothers like underground water. They worked together on their father’s patch; desperately, hungrily, from dawn to nightfall; dragging up dulse from the shore to nourish the stones; mulching in their own bloodied excrement as fertiliser; lacerating the rocks with the force of their efforts, but nothing much grew except their own sense of separation. There was no violence between them, there were no angry words. They had little at all to say to each other now.

  Nicholas spent his evenings reading by candlelight when a candle could be afforded or begged from a neighbour; when it couldn’t, he would kneel and pray in the darkness, Latin adjurations which Mulvey did not know. The sound of his brother’s piety became an irritation; it kept Mulvey awake or away from his private thoughts.

  One violently bitter day the previous January when the frost had hardened the ground to corpse-white marble, a Liverpudlian recruiting sergeant had happened along the boreen telling stories of the adventurous life of the soldier. Mulvey had been spellbound by what he had to say. The humblest private in the King’s Irish Rangers could expect his days to be filled with marvels. He might find himself in Egypt, India or Beirut, where the sun sparkled down on the vines and the pineapples and the women were made like fantastical goddesses. The wine of those places was sweet and refreshing. All the scran you could eat and the pick of the girls. The uniform gave a lad a better sense of himself. ‘You grow up six inches when you put on the red, boys!’

  Soldiering was the profession for a spunky young buck who wanted a bite at the wonders of the world, and who required handsome payment for such an experience. As for the danger, of course it existed. But danger was merely another word for excitement; the thrill that added salt to the gruel of life. And dangers existed in every place. The sergeant had looked around at the arctic wilderness as though it saddened him to see it, as though it was immoral. As though to see the Mulvey brothers so profoundly implicated in it was a matter of embarrassment or even disgrace. At least in the army you were trained to survive danger. No Crown soldier would ever know starvation.

  ‘Ten guineas a year in your hand,’ said the sergeant, as though he couldn’t believe such munificence was possible. ‘And a shilling this minute to spit on the bargain.’

  His breath was coming in wisps of steam. He held out his palm in its black leather glove, the small coin glittering like the eye of a saint.

  ‘That buys you nothing here,’ Mulvey’s brother said quietly.

  ‘How do you mean, cock? That’s the King’s money.’

  ‘Then he’s welcome to keep it for it’s not wanted here. No King rules ourselves but the King of Heaven. And he’ll burn in Hell with his blessed mother before a Mulvey deserts the land he was born on.’

  The sergeant looked across at him with a perplexed frown.

  ‘I – don’t understand the way you’re talking.’

  ‘What I’m talking is the English language,’ Nicholas Mulvey replied. ‘But I wouldn’t doubt that you don’t understand. Ye understand nothing of this place. Ye never will.’

  A slither of jagged snow fell from a nearby bough. Two rats scurried out of a broken tree trunk and into a ditch.

  ‘No,’ said the sergeant sombrely, ‘I think I never will,’ and he shrugged and walked back down the way he had come, his smooth boots skidding on the frozen rutted earth, his beautiful scarlet coat like the breast of a robin. Nicholas went into the cabin without saying another word. His brother stood on the boreen for a long time afterwards, watching his future walk slowly away: the whiteness of everything smarting his eyes. Watching until the sergeant had disappeared from view, back into the blankness out of which he had come.

  For weeks afterwards, Mulvey was restless. Thoughts buzzed around his mind like wasps in a jam jar. He had dreams in which he would see himself dozing beneath the Pyramids, his belly full and his boots warm, as happy and snug as the grinning Sphinx. Delilahs pirouetting by golden firelight, their long limbs tanned and moistened with myrrh. Meat roasting in its own juices. Grapes exploding on his tongue like the vowels of a new language. He would awaken, shivering, beside his brother, in the preternatural darkness of another Connemara morning, with the stench of the chamberpot rising around the bed; a day of hurt and labour stretching before him like a road in a nightmare brought on by famishment.

  Like a woman in a song awaiting the return of her lover from the sea, he would watch on the boreen for the sergeant to come back; but as also in a song, that never happened, and somehow he knew it never would now.

  His brother was becoming ill, Mulvey could see it. His skin had a pallid yellowish tinge; his eyes were often bloodshot and rheumy in the mornings. A sort of changing weather could be seen in those eyes, a drifting of cloud across a pale, dead sky. Mulvey would watch him in the distant tussocked fields as he foraged through the bushes and swallowed leaves by the mouthful. The crows would watch, too, as though they found him strange.

  Though himself half starved, Mulvey began to feign lack of appetite, hoping Nicholas would take what he left, but he never did. Gluttony was a sin, Nicholas Mulvey would say. The man with no grip on his appetites was no man at all, but a greedy beast that would end in Hell. Our Lord himself had shown fasting to be a necessary thing; an act which would bring you much closer to God. He would take away the leftovers and put them in the press and serve them again the following day, and keep on serving them again and again until Pius finally ate them or they began to rot. It became a kind of competition between them: who could stand the most starvation.

  Soon it grew too much for Mulvey to be around him all the time. He began to rove the country at night, trudging out to shebeens or crossroads dances, to the ceilidhs and poteen sessions that sometimes followed Fair Days in the small towns of Connemara. If you waited till a certain point in the evening you could sometimes pick up a half-drained mug, or a bottle with a few dribbles l
eft in the end, and make it last you the rest of the night. Often a passing gypsy woman or a roaming balladeer would sing for a few pennies and that was something Mulvey liked. It thawed the ice of loneliness like a glass of hot punch. Singing reminded him of happier times in his childhood; the warm family times before everything had changed.

  The songs intersected like springs through the lowland. You saw shadows of some of them flit across others; lines borrowed, phrases improved, verses polished and moved around; events edited or left intact but told from a different point of view. As though once there had been only one great song from which the songmakers kept drawing; a hidden holy well.

  Rarely did he speak to anyone at these congregations of singers; but he grew to know the people who wandered through the songs like characters in a saga that was still being written. The feeble old fool who married the girl he couldn’t satisfy. The maiden expelled from her father’s home all for her love of the false young man. The woman who was a vision met by a lake. The former lover encountered again, when time and experience have revealed the depth of lost love. The rambling boys of pleasure and the ladies of easy leisure. The cruel, scourging landlord and the tenant that took his wife. The fishermen, farmers, peasants and shepherds who played tricks on the tax collectors who came to harass them.

  Often it felt to Mulvey as if the songs were a secret language: a means of saying things that could otherwise not be said in a frightened and occupied country. At least they seemed a way of covertly acknowledging that what was unsayable was important: that it might be said more explicitly at another time. Facts seemed to press at their camouflaging surfaces, like the ancient trees found beneath a layering of bogland, their bark still alive after five hundred years. If you looked at them collectively they seemed a kind of scripture, a repository for buried truths: the sacred testament of Connemara. What after all was the Bible itself? A clutch of tattered allegories and half-remembered stories peopled by fisherfolk, farmers and taxmen. His rambles came to seem an observance of something, but what exactly he could not name.

  It was at one such event, a gathering of fiddlers and singers in Maam Cross, that Pius Mulvey began to steal. A drunken farmer had fallen down unconscious in the jakes of a public house, and Mulvey, light-headed with the hunger of several days, had relieved him of his boots and hat. It had only taken a moment to cross the border between victimhood and oppression and he felt no guilt for making the step. He hocked the boots and hat in a pawnshop down the street and returned to the inn to spend his windfall. The music sounded sweeter with a whiskey in your hand, a dish of stew before you and a dudeen of tobacco. He had even bought the humiliated farmer a drink when finally he staggered from the latrine in his wet bare feet. He felt he owed him a great debt of gratitude and he paid it in porter and fervent commiseration.

  That was the first night Mulvey sang in public himself. The innkeeper had been singing a ballad of broken love to which he knew the lyrics of only two verses. He would give a full shilling to learn the rest, he said, for the piece had been loved by his lately deceased mother, a woman from Estersnowe in the County Roscommon. Mulvey quietly said that he knew the words; that his own mother had hailed from Roscommon too. ‘Let’s hear them so,’ the publican had delightedly commanded, and Mulvey had stepped into the ragged circle and opened his mouth to sing.

  Twas in the cruel of winter time, the hills being white with snow;

  When o’er the hills and valleys dark, my true love he did go.

  It was there I spied the fairest maid, with salt tears in her eye;

  She had a baby in her arms, and bitterly did cry.

  How cruel was my father, love, that barred the door on me;

  And cruel was my mother, love; this dreadful crime to see;

  But crueller was my sweetheart, who changed his mind for gold;

  And cruel was the wintry wind that pierced my heart with cold.

  Mulvey’s voice was mediocre but his memory was excellent. He recalled every verse of the long, complicated love-song, a very old piece his mother used to sing, with classical allusions and multiple narrators. ‘Macaronic’ was the word for a song like that, its lyric alternating between Irish and English. But more than merely remembering the words, he remembered how the song was supposed to be sung: the places where you stretched out the lines just a little, the places where you fell silent and allowed the words to fall like leaves. It was a strange dark story about the seduction of a serving girl by a nobleman who had promised to make her his wife. His mother used to say it was a kind of spell; if you sang it while thinking of an enemy who had wronged you, he would fall down dead by the time you had finished. Even as a child Mulvey had not believed that. (He had tested it often and his brother had not died.) But there was an ambivalence about it which he had always liked. Sometimes it was difficult to know from the lyrics which of the lovers was speaking and which had been betrayed.

  The following morning before Nicholas awoke, Mulvey walked all the way to the village of Letterfrack, returning with a basket of cabbages and a flitch of bacon, two loaves of fresh bread and a plump broiling chicken. Asked how he had come by the money to purchase such a banquet, Mulvey told his brother he had found a purse on the roadside. Nicholas disapproved of grog-shops and their frequenters, and had pleaded with Pius to stay clear of both.

  ‘Then you should have taken it up to the constables. It’s after being lost by some unfortunate person. Imagine how he must be feeling now.’

  ‘I did take it up to them, Nicholas. Isn’t that what I’m after telling you? The gentleman who lost it left a reward with the constables.’

  ‘Is that the truth? Look at me, Pius.’

  ‘As I’m standing here it is. May I choke if it isn’t.’

  ‘Do you swear to it, Pius? On Mammo and Daddo’s eternal souls?’

  ‘I do,’ said Pius Mulvey. ‘On their souls, it’s true.’

  ‘Then God is good, Pius,’ his brother had said. ‘We’d better not question His mercy or it won’t come again. I was after praying for a miracle and here it is.’

  And Mulvey had agreed. God was good. The Lord helped those who helped themselves.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE SECRET

  IN WHICH MULVEY BEGINS TO CONSIDER HIMSELF A GENIUS; THE FIRST STEP, INVARIABLY, ON THE ROAD TO UNHAPPINESS.

  Mulvey roved out the following night, to a gathering of musicians at a crossroads dance near Glassillaun. Again he had sung, and had enjoyed the experience, though now for a different set of reasons. Girls seemed to find him attractive when he sang, though he didn’t know why and found such a fact inexplicable. He knew he was ugly, scrawny and feeble, entirely lacking his brother’s muscularity. But they still found him attractive when he stopped singing, and such a development was not to be disregarded.

  He never knew what to say to them, these laughing pretty girls. They would crowd around him or ask him to dance. The less he danced, the more they seemed to like him. Having no sister and no woman friend, he had never spoken to a girl for more than two minutes, and was entirely unprepared for having to do so now. And yet they were so beautiful when they talked and laughed, so different to men; so full of lightness. He found some of their thinking strange as the stars, and often they said things for which he simply had no answer. But they seemed to regard his silence as one of mystery rather than reserve. Silence, he learned quickly, was a thing that could work for you, a card that might be played to useful effect, particularly when combined with the willingness to sing. He had the idea they liked gentleness, courtesy, kindness; all the things which men reckoned unmanly. His ugliness was not mentioned, nor his poverty. They did not want to be swept off their feet. They just wanted to be talked to, and listened to when they talked. It wasn’t very hard, especially if you were interested, and if you didn’t want to talk, that sometimes didn’t matter either. In a world of bragging chancers and roaring boys and athletes, there was a certain kind of girl who found reticence restful, and thankfully, that was the kind he liked hims
elf.

  He never spent an evening with Nicholas now. As soon as darkness began to fall he would trudge down the boreen and make for freedom. It didn’t really matter which town you went to; someone would be singing or playing for dancers. There would be warmth, light, music and company; something to belong to when you felt so alone.

  One night in a shebeen in Tully Cross a little one-eyed troubadour from some kip of a place in Limerick had given a piece of his own devising, a ballad on the cruelty of a local landowner, Lord Merridith, who had stretched a poor spalpeen for stealing a lamb. The song was crude and poorly sung; the singer a runt with no arse to his britches, but the people had howled with appreciation at the end of it and the singer had nodded like an emperor receiving his kowtow. ‘My soul on you, boy,’ one man had wept, approaching the singer and kissing his gnarled hand. ‘That’s the greatest living song was ever composed in Ireland. Usquebaugh Liquor! The purest drop in the house!’

  Mulvey began to ponder something that would come to obsess him. Singers were admired by almost everyone; they were annalists, chroniclers, custodians, biographers. In a place where reading was almost unknown they carried the local memory like walking books. Many of them claimed to know five hundred songs; a smaller number knew upwards of a thousand. Without them, Mulvey sometimes felt, nobody would remember anything, and if it wasn’t remembered it hadn’t truly happened. A singer was in the same category as a faith healer or a dowser, as a midwife who could soothe the pain of labour with secret herbs, or a gypsy who could tame ponies merely by talking to them. But those who made their own songs were absolutely revered.

  People fell silent when they came into a room, those shabby men and women granted the awesome gift of songmaking; the magistrates of what had happened and what had not. They didn’t even have to sing particularly well. Others would sing the works they made. Neither did it matter that they rarely devised fresh melodies, that they simply used the ancient ones that everyone knew; wine-makers pouring this year’s blessings into the beautiful bottles of the past. If anything such an approach made them even more admirable. Their wine tasted richer when infused with the spice of antiquity.