The River Capture

by Mary Costello

  Of what relevance are the photocopied pages from Griffith’s Valuation?

  They contain the records of the previous proprietors of Ardboe House and lands which the O’Brien family has now occupied for three generations.

  What do the records show?

  At the time of valuation in the 1860s a Mr Matthew Wheeler was leasing this property from Sir Philip Chearnley of the nearby Saltertown House when it was valued at £28. Previously the site of Ardboe Castle (the ruins of which lie in the south-western corner of Luke’s land), this land formerly belonged to the Knights Templar, who had an outpost a few miles downriver at Templemichael and were stationed at Rhincrew. There is no mention of Luke’s grandfather and namesake, Luke O’Brien, who bought – or, at any rate, came into possession of – the land and house in 1928, having relocated from the larger property and lands a mile downriver at Coole Quay (a wedding gift from his in-laws), the site of the original old ford where St Fachtna crossed the river on his pilgrimage to Doonbeg.

  Does he eat his bread and drink his tea?

  Before sitting at the desk he makes room for the plate and the mug by sliding the laptop to the right and moving the bookstand to the top left corner. He sits and eats the laden bread, oblivious to the crumbs and the corner of brittle crust that drop to the plate. He drinks the tea until there remains approximately three teaspoons in the bottom of the mug, a habit he inherited from his father who believed that dust, dirt, sand, sediment and particles of other unknown matter sank and accumulated at the bottom of liquid receptacles such as buckets, milk jugs, tea cups, drinking glasses, etc., an opinion with which Luke the son concurs. The son consubstantial with the father.

  List the books as they are arranged, left to right, on the two shelves immediately to the right of his desk.

  The Mystery of Physical Life by E.L. Grant Watson.

  The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene.

  The Running Sky by Tim Dee.

  The Illustrated Guide to the Sullane and Ardglass by Rev. Samuel Hyman.

  Ulysses on the Liffey by Richard Ellmann.

  The Classical Greek Reader edited by Kenneth J. Atchity.

  H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness by Ivan Illich.

  The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson.

  Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop.

  James Joyce & the Burden of Disease by Kathleen Ferris.

  A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake by William York Tindall.

  The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault (Vols 1, 2 and 3).

  The Character of Consciousness by David J. Chalmers.

  Collected Poems by Hart Crane.

  The Lord Chandos Letter by Hugo Von Hofmannsthal.

  Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.

  Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

  Atomised by Michel Houellebecq.

  Wild by Jay Griffiths.

  Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee.

  Which books, or portions therein, left a lasting impression?

  The sex scenes in Atomised. The soap ingredients listed on the soap-wrapper in Elizabeth Costello: ‘Treblinka – 100% human stearate’. The say, say, say scene in Housekeeping where the long-submerged train leaps back up out of Lake Fingerbone and the resurrected passengers disembark at the station and walk home, calm and serene, to their lunch. The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn in ‘The Broken Tower’. The trapped rats in their death throes gnashing their teeth and staring into the abyss in The Lord Chandos Letter. The discovery in The Illustrated Guide to the Sullane and Ardglass that the cherry was first domesticated less than a mile away in Norristown Castle. That said castle was home to the aristocratic healer of scrofula, Valentine Greatrakes, born on 14 February 1628, grandson of Sir Edward Harris, the 2nd Justice of the King’s Bench in Ireland. That said scrofula healer (and now he recalls that a slut in Nighttown combs the tats from the hair of a scrofulous child) spent a year in contemplation in Ardboe Castle, and was a lieutenant in Cromwell’s army before giving everything up – not unlike the Buddha – to roam the countryside laying hands on the sick and curing the afflicted. That the pile of stones comprising the remains of Norristown Castle (why Hyman described them as ‘a curious ruin’ is a mystery to Luke) lies in a field equidistant from the south-eastern boundary of Luke’s land and Coole Quay. And tucked in among the details of the landed gentry and their family marriages, the coincidental discovery that the author of the guide, Rev. Samuel Hyman, was himself a grandson of Valentine Greatrakes. And the further coincidental discovery that Richie Musgrove, the flash Harry with the sports car who had once dated Luke’s Dublin cousin Alva O’Leary, is descended from the ancient knightly family of Musgrove whose seat was three miles away at Coolderry and who is, most likely, the grandson of Sir Richard Musgrove, High Commissioner to the Kingdom of Iraq from 1923 to 1929.

  Looking up and out, what view is he afforded through the window?

  From a seated position and looking through the pane of glass at the intersection of the second horizontal row from the base of the window and the third vertical row from the left, his view is of the front lawn, the complete branch-span of the sycamore tree to the left, a rectangular grid of sky and Paddy the dog chasing a bird across the lawn in a run-jump-bark pattern. From a standing position he has a view of the far bank of the river, the oak trees on the town side, the east gable of the derelict building that was St Joseph’s Industrial School, the spire of the Catholic church, the bell tower of the Protestant church, four or five rooftops on the main street petering out towards the sky as the street rises. To the west, on the wooded hill above the town, Clonduff House, its chimneys, roof apex and the top panes of the third-storey Georgian windows just visible above the tree line. Currently the seat of Sir Richard Blake, nephew of Sir John Blake who famously, along with his wife Alice, possessed two motors cars in 1921, one of which, replete with cocktail cabinet, was commandeered by the IRA during the War of Independence and never returned. Closer, beyond the lawn and the adjoining field, Luke has a view of the river surface, the copious oak foliage, the full afternoon sun giving the water a gold-green glow and a glimmery shimmery movement that puts him in mind of a phenomenon he once witnessed at evening time from a kayak at Castlehaven Bay in West Cork.

  The phenomenon?

  Bioluminescence. The chemical reaction of luciferin and luciferase that results in light-illuminated water. When daylight dimmed and a stroke of his paddle broke the surface and roused the plankton, a beautiful phosphorescent glow sparked into life. The darker it got, the brighter the glow, the liquid phosphorous sparking green and then lifting and shifting from unnameable shades of green to unnameable shades of blue, and back, like the multitudinous colours on the necks of wild water ducks. His heart lit up, his soul soared as he remembered the etymology of Lucifer as elucidated by Father Leo Moran, SJ, Latin teacher, in the corridor at Belvedere College one Friday morning during Lent – light-bringer, morning star, bringer of dawn, the devil before his fall – and then the downdraft as he contemplated the Luciferean glow in the cells of fish, fireflies and worms, in the tip of a match, on the skins of Hiroshimoans.

  What two words each conferred with a pair of identical phonemes now escape his mouth in a whisper?

  Lucy. Lucifer.

  What sound comes from the far side of the door?

  The urgent meowing of Lily the cat.

  Does he admit her?

  He crosses the room, opens the door and the cat dives past his legs across the floor towards the desk, pauses uncertainly, then jumps up on his chair.

  What observation does he make?

  From the loose swing of her udder-belly, she has just nursed her litter.

  Why is the birth of this recent litter troubling?

  The dilemma of whether to keep one or some or all of Lily’s issue or find homes for one, some, or all troubles him.

  What recollections of previous births are called up?

  The last birth but one (under the bed in the blue room) when Lily signalled her immi
nent labour by loud meowing and a tail-lift display of a cylindrical-shaped plug of gelatinous mucous protruding from her vagina. Her second birth, two years ago, when he had five male friends down from Dublin for a weekend of partying and he woke at dawn on the Sunday morning, still drunk, to a warm wet sensation in his crotch. Believing he had urinated in his sleep, he made to rise. Then, feeling a slight movement and a weighted sensation, he reached down and touched something wet and live and crawling and he sprang upright in terror, convinced that his entrails had somehow exited his body. He pulled off the duvet and there sat a silent mass of moving fur and tiny limbs in black and white and faces with closed eyelids, and further down, Lily lodged in a v-shaped gap between his thighs, panting, her tiny tongue out, her terrified eyes fixed on him, in the throes of another delivery. He edged his legs further apart and remained there in a barely-breathing, pseudo-panting trance until her ordeal was over.

  Why is he suddenly filled with remorse?

  Because, despite his repeated resolve (repeated now again), he has neglected to have Lily spayed.

  With what compensatory thought does he (a) comfort himself and (b) exonerate himself?

  That the short memory of the pangs of birth almost universally avowed by human mothers might also apply to Lily and the joys of motherhood – nursing her kittens, witnessing their playful frolics – compensate for the hardships of pregnancy and birth.

  What extra concession did he briefly grant Lily, following the birth of her second-last litter?

  For a period of three weeks and two days he supplemented her tinned food with tasty morsels of roast chicken purchased at the hot food counter in SuperValu.

  What disquieting feature did he discover as he removed the flesh from the carcasses of each cooked chicken?

  Every single wing-bone in every single chicken was broken.

  Why did this discovery distress him and compel him to cease for ever (to date) the purchase of chickens for consumption by his Lily or any other Lily, human or non-human?

  He firstly surmised that the wing-bones were broken in the processing stage to facilitate easy packaging and/or to save space during storage, transportation or distribution. This initial supposition was swiftly replaced by his conviction that, at some point in their short miserable lives, in order to restrict movement and thwart flight in their confined cages, the chickens’ wings were broken manually or mechanically.

  What knowledge gives weight to this latter supposition?

  The insider knowledge of standard production practices in chicken factories as relayed to him by Colin Doyle, Conor Mahon and Tom Carragher over the summer months in 1995 and 1996 when they worked on the production line at Clonduff Chickens; the account of the imagined life of a chick in a hatchery as relayed by a Nobel prize-winning author known for his compassion for animals in a lecture that Luke watched on YouTube approximately six months ago.

  Practices such as?

  Overcrowding, debeaking, the shredding of two-day-old chicks into paste.

  Chicks are shredded?

  Shredded, crushed, pulped, ground, grated, milled, mulled, pulverised. In the lecture the author gave an account of what happens after a batch of chicks are hatched out. Let us imagine a camera following them, the author said. On day two of their lives they are placed on a conveyor belt, on each side of which stand human minions who lift the chicks and turn them over to check the sex. Sexing the chicks, it’s called. The female chicks are transferred to another conveyor belt behind the workers and sent on up the line. The camera homes in on one chick from the moment it is placed on the first belt, chirping happily among its peers like any baby species, the author tells us, moving along without a care in the world, and then hey, what’s this, he’s grabbed, picked up and turned over as human fingers part the yellow fluff between his legs. Instantly he’s placed back on the belt, and the camera watches as he rights himself, gives himself a little shake, relieved after his first big adventure in the world, and then along he goes, happy and chirpy again until the belt suddenly plunges south and the chick is tipped over the edge and out of sight, like a canoeist going over a rapid. Except that our little friend is dropped into a motorized shredder and instantly shredded and ground into a paste, to be used later as an ingredient in animal feed.

  What hypothetical book comes to mind?

  The Book of Infamy, as expounded upon by another author (female, Polish, name forgotten) interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book a few years ago, a book which, to the best of Luke’s knowledge, does not yet exist. The author was travelling the world on a mission: taking photographs, collecting evidence, compiling reports, gathering excerpts from modern and ancient texts alike for inclusion in her work-in-progress which will be an exhaustive account of the crimes of man from the dawn of history to the present day. Nothing will be omitted, she said. It will be man’s confessions.

  Wishing to sit, what does Luke do?

  He whooshes Lily off his chair, pours the milky-tea dregs from his mug onto the plate whereupon the liquid is instantly absorbed by the bread crust to the point of saturation. He places the plate on the floorboards beyond the perimeter of the rug, and watches Lily lapping up the milky-tea mush. When she is finished she sits back and washes her paws, jaws, neck, head, belly and backside, then moves to a sunny spot on the rug and basks in the flood of sunshine.

  With a pen, paper and a concerted effort to neutralise distressing thoughts that are starting to surface, what list does Luke now compile?

  A list of potential moneymaking enterprises, ideas and options.

  List these moneymaking enterprises.

  – Let the house and grounds as a venue for weddings, conferences, yoga retreats, rock festivals, literary festivals.

  – Open a B&B business.

  – Give English grinds to Leaving Cert students.

  – Teach an evening course on Ulysses.

  – Found a school, the Ardboe Academy for Excellence.

  – Write articles on topics such as the move from the city to the country, the rural–urban divide, the paucity of public services in rural Ireland, the paucity of romance in rural Ireland, the poverty of small-town Ireland, the lives of men and boys in small-town Ireland, the fluidity of sexuality.

  – Schools Guide to Ulysses.

  To what does he now turn his attention?

  To the copy of Ulysses propped open (at pages 776 and 777) on the bookstand.

  What does the sight of Ulysses, or the mere thought of it, always provoke in him?

  Evocations of home. Metaphorical home, repose of the soul. A longing for Bloom, for filial love, fellow feeling.

  Has he read the novel, in consecutive pages, up to this point?

  He has circled back and forth in a haphazard but sometimes chronological pattern. Since his first reading (haphazardly) in the second term of First Year English at UCD in 1997, during which he failed to complete the Cyclops, Oxen of the Sun and Circe episodes, he has, on many occasions, read random episodes in their entirety and certain (favoured) episodes repeatedly, chronologically, obsessively (Emmaus, Ithaca and Penelope).

  What pie-in-the-sky, moneymaking notion (listed above) related to Ulysses which he frequently entertains is he again reminded of?

  The Ardboe Academy for Excellence aka The Ulysses Academy for Excellence at Ardboe. The idea of founding a private school with its own distinct curriculum and vision, whose student body would be drawn from the sons and daughters of forward-thinking parents unconcerned with CAO points, SAT scores, Baccalaureate results or arid, orthodox methodologies and whose curriculum would be devised using one source, Ulysses, a work of genius, as the base text from which myriad other texts will follow … has long been fermenting. (It has always galled him that the tepid little souls at the Department of Education have never seen fit to put Joyce on the secondary school English curriculum – a tepid little adaptation of ‘The Dead’ hardly counts – and, in his opinion, ninety per cent of Ulysses is perfectly suitable for young minds.) When all the leads,
references, riddles and allusions of the novel are followed and all the texts containing those leads, references, allusions etc. are explored – through the fields of literature, mythology, music, maths, science, history, theology, philosophy, art, ethics, aesthetics, astronomy, biology, embryology, physics, psychology, the earth sciences, languages, politics, law, etc. – the waterfront is covered. Initially, a thorough, in-depth study of Ulysses would be required (he has commenced this task on many occasions), after which he would compile an index of all the topics and texts cited in the novel, subdivided into the classics, the humanities, the sciences, etc.; from this he would construct a diagram with branches and sub-branches and sub-sub-branches of topics before devising the course outlines and syllabus and writing the specifics of each area of study. One text would lead naturally to another in an ever-increasing ripple and everything – from Plato to pop art – would be accessed to ensure the finest, broadest, pupil-directed education is provided. As headmaster he would select his staff from the ranks of the brilliant, the brave and the eccentric (if John Kidd, the Joycean scholar who disappeared into thin air years ago, ever resurfaces Luke will do his damnedest to coax him to Ardboe). He would attract the brightest and the best students and would offer scholarships to the poor and the talented. His would be a vocation in the truest, oldest sense of the word and his school a centre for excellence of the kind about which enlightened people rhapsodise and dullards mock. He has the perfect premises – a fine country house on a hundred and fifty acres – for the endeavour. The Ardboe Academy for Excellence. Give me the boy and I will so I will.