by Nancy Huston
Spring: Norbert shows him that if you cut an earthworm in two, both halves of it will wiggle on miserably for a while. On the front porch, Jan takes Milo in his arms and points up to the sky—hugely white and alive, vibrating, screaming, with the return of the Canadian geese.
Summer: a barbecue in the backyard. The five of them gobble down spareribs, fingers and lips scarlet with sauce. Point at one another and laugh. Tell jokes. Play pranks. Ana pours a glass of water down her father’s back, provoking a roar. When night falls, they go out hunting for fireflies in the grass.
And then . . . at some point during the second fall . . . a strange young woman in the kitchen, making dinner. Jan standing by the closed door to his and Sara’s bedroom, talking to a doctor. Another day, a glimpse into that room—Jan emerging from it in tears—reveals a motionless mound barely visible among the bedclothes.
A hearse parked in front of the house. Taking his little sister in his arms to comfort her, Norbert himself bursts into sobs. Jan helps Milo pack. Hugs him long and hard. Stacks his luggage in the trunk of a strange car. Sitting up straight and stiff in the backseat, Milo doesn’t respond when the Manderses, gathered in the driveway, wave him good-bye.
He’s furious with Sara for dying. But it’s taught him an important lesson—people can’t belong to each other. Never again will he wholly entrust himself to anyone.
CLOSETS. BROOMS. BELTS. Blows raining down on the child’s head. Shouts. Voices calling his name, “Milo . . . Milo . . . Milo . . . Where is that boy? Milo . . . Milo . . . Milo . . . Where are you? I’ll teach you to hide when it’s time to go to school!” Women’s legs banging up around him. Women’s arms thrashing out at him. He’s rolled up in a ball, not crying, not sobbing. His body limp and passive, his mind a blank.
Sometimes, from the dark and secret heart of the blackout, images well up (perhaps use animation here?). A cat without a smile . . . a smile without a cat . . . Tinker Bell touching something with her magic wand and turning it into something else . . . John, Michael and Wendy Darling soaring through the air . . . I can fly, I can fly, I can fly! . . . Canadian geese screaming as they cross the sky . . . Legs without bodies, bodies without legs . . . Captain Hook screaming as the crocodile bites off his leg . . . Long John Silver also losing a leg . . . both pirates limping about on wooden legs . . . wooden arms, wooden noses . . . Pinocchio’s nose lengthening with every lie . . . Alice growing so tall she fills the whole room, her head scrunched up against the ceiling . . . then shrinking swiftly until she can drown in a bottle of ink . . . We dive into the ink bottle with her.
BLACKOUT.
• • • • •
Neil, 1916
A BUCOLIC SHOT: the front steps of the Kerrigan house in Dublin’s genteel suburbs, early on a lovely April morning. Briefcase in hand, Neil plants a perfunctory kiss on his mother’s cheek. The way they embrace indicates that the balance of power in the household has shifted over the past two years. Mrs. Kerrigan now clearly respects her son, admires him, even. And he, having matured, can contemplate her fears and foibles with something approaching benevolence. As he turns to go, she protests mildly.
“I can’t understand what work there is to be done on a holiday! Surely none of your colleagues will be in the office today.”
“I’ve told you before, Mother. A lawyer’s work, like a woman’s, is never done. I always have numerous cases to prepare, and since I’m the youngest partner in the firm I need to be sure that every file is watertight. What happened on Easter Monday, anyway? Was Jesus so exhausted by the Resurrection that he needed a day off?”
“Neil!”
“Joking, Mother. Joking.”
CUT to Neil meeting up with his cousin Thom (also carrying a briefcase) on the docks at Victoria Quay. Fast camera work translates their excitement. Ducking into an abandoned warehouse next to Saint James’s Gate Brewery, they swiftly exchange their suits and ties for Volunteer garb. Thom assembles a rifle, Neil pockets a revolver and they join other young Sinn Féiners converging in combat gear on the Sackville Street General Post Office. Among them are a surprising number of women. Close-up on beautiful Countess Constance Markiewicz, her arms crossed, her features calm and determined.
Padraic Pearse and James Connolly begin to harangue the rebels.
“Again our boys are dying in droves,” Pearse thunders. “Right at the present moment, a quarter of a million Irishmen are risking their lives for the sake of the Union Jack. And why do they sign up? We all know the answer: because they’re hungry!”
“The submarine Aud was due to land at Tralee on Good Friday,” Connolly goes on, “bringing us arms and ammunition from Europe. Well, the Brits scuttled it! All our precious weapons are at the bottom of the sea! Men, the time is ripe, we must seize the day! Wrench our city of Dublin and our land of Eire back from the hands of the enemy!”
Thom is ready. Proud. Bursting with impatience to prove himself. As for Neil, he’s scared. Never has he known hunger, misery, or loss; he hasn’t the body for courageous revolt. Gradually, the voice in his head effaces the loud voices of the rebel leaders.
Though the rhetoric repels me, though I regret that we should need to appeal to the masses through their guts instead of their brains, though I wish we could kick the Brits out without clinging like Padraic Pearse to ridiculous propaganda about the Celts, or like John MacBride to reactionary Catholicism, or like James Connolly to dogmatic Marxist theory—I’m willing to do battle on the rebels’ side. But in my briefcase, in that briefcase now stashed away in the abandoned brewery, is a weapon far more powerful than the gun in my pocket: the manuscript of my first book of poems. Well, prose poems, actually. A revolutionary form—a joyous mixture of English and Gaelic which, by its accurate reflection of our mongrel history, will shock all. The new Ireland will need new writers, and I shall be first among them. As soon as I find a publisher, my words will set fire to my countrymen’s hearts.
Maps are being perused, lists of names handed out. Of the sixteen thousand rebels nominally available in Dublin, only a thousand have shown up.
What happened to the others? our hero wonders. Are they cowards? Or is their reasoning more logical than ours? . . .
SUBJECTIVE CAMERA: FLASH images of Neil’s perceptions over the ensuing days and nights. The tricolor, then the green flag with its golden harp are run up onto the roof of the General Post Office and the Volunteers burst into cheers. Pearse, his voice shaking with emotion, reads out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Hailed and heckled, jostled and shoved by overexcited young men, passersby respond with dismay and anger. The gates of Trinity College swing to, clang shut, are locked.
Neil’s inner voice: This is what I must write about. Scrap those Anglo-Gaelic poems and write the great novel of the Easter Rising in Dublin. Find language, the rhythm of words, that will plunge the reader into the state we’re in right now—make him feel the erratic beating of our hearts, Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA . . . the thrill of fear in our balls, the simultaneous tension and suppleness of our muscles. Never have we been more alive than we are now, so close to death.
The next day, as they take up their assigned post at the entrance to Saint Stephen’s Green, Neil and Thom speak together in whispers.
“The Brits will have a hard time finding men to send over today, Neil.” “Why’s that?” “Krauts just made a zeppelin raid on East Anglia.” “I see . . . Quite the coincidence, hey?” “Problem with that, Neil?” “Don’t know how to fit it into my novel.” “Good novels should be full of contradictions, shouldn’t they?”
Hearing a cascade of bullet reports from close by, they drop to the ground. Just then, who should come strolling down Grafton Street in their direction, clad in civilian dress, nose in the air, but Major John MacBride? He brings up short upon reaching the entrance to Saint Stephen’s Green.
“What the hell are you young’uns doing on the ground?”
“We’re taking back our country, sir,” explains Thom, hastily getting to his feet and dusting off his pants
.
“Yes?”
Glancing around, the major gathers that something is amiss. The cousins bring him up to date in a few low-spoken words.
“How is it I was not kept informed of these plans?”
“Ah . . . well, Major MacBride, sir, your being so famous an enemy of the British, it was feared you might be under surveillance. We felt we couldn’t take the risk.”
“But you’re welcome to join us now, sir,” Neil puts in politely. “If you’ve nothing better to do, that is.”
John MacBride hesitates; the winey red of his cheeks deepens and we divine that his military pulse has begun to race.
“Well, I was on my way to my brother’s wedding, but . . . first things first, eh? I’m certain my brother will understand if I change my plans. Though unprepared and unarmed, I have no choice but to throw in my fate with that of Ireland once again . . .”
(Milo, this is terrible dialogue. Just terrible. In three decades of working together, I don’t think we’ve ever written anything this bad. Yeah, sure, you’re just kidding, but meanwhile crucial events are unfolding and we need to convey them somehow . . .)
“Where can I make myself useful?” MacBride says eagerly.
“At Jacob’s,” says Thom at once. “They need more men over at Jacob’s Biscuit Factory. Only fourteen of the forty who were supposed to be stationed there showed up, all young and sorely lacking in experience. Perhaps you can take charge of the situation there.”
“I most certainly can,” replies MacBride.
Saluting, he turns on his heel and vanishes (thus putting an end to this very weak scene we’ll definitely need to rewrite . . .).
AS DAYLIGHT WANES, confusion and uproar in the city of Dublin. Sandbags. Barricades. Dark shadows dashing this way and that. The sound of panting. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA . . . Thuds that might be bodies or sandbags. Night falls. The next morning, stationed on the Liffey at the exact spot where Neil cut his post-Monto capers in the opening scene, the British gunboat Helga starts shelling the city. Gulls wheel and scream overhead. The General Post Office is in flames. All Sackville Street is burning. Smoke rises from ruined buildings in the city center. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA . . . British soldiers swarm through the streets, overwhelming the rebels by their sheer number. A Sinn Féiner is shot to death by a British sniper crouched on the roof of Trinity. By Tuesday night, the sky over Dublin is a deep red.
Tenement buildings along the Liffey burning. Poor people scurrying out of them, the women clasping bawling babies in their arms, the men in a state of black fury, shaking their fists at the insurgents, screaming till they’re hoarse: We’ve lost everything . . .
Neil’s inner voice: How write this? How explain it? What rhythm of syllables printed on the page could convey their We’ve lost everything? No more proof than this is needed of the absence of God. None of the priests of my childhood ever spoke a word of truth. Darwin alone has told the truth, Darwin alone! Animals, the lot of us, scurrying to survive. From time immemorial, the strong annihilate the weak and the weak do their utmost to grow strong and take over. I myself have just played a role in destroying the lives of the weak, and never will I be punished for it. The evil are no more punished than the good are rewarded, either in this life or in the hereafter, since there is no hereafter. Sorry, Ma. Ah, will you ever be disappointed, all you multitudes of bigotty priggish ladies, whether Catholic or Protestant! I can just see you waking up after death, looking around and saying, Bloody hell, what is this void? You mean there’s no Heaven after all? Are you telling me that for seventy-five years I put up with all those truckloads of shite, for nothing? Afraid so, Ma. Afraid so, O ye prissy ladies who kept your thighs squeezed tight, saving yourselves up for eternal bliss with Jesus after death—no Heaven after all, no just deserts. Even in my father’s law courts people don’t get their just deserts. Justice is no more nor less than a diabolical power game. The truth is the last thing that interests people in a law court! I’ll write this, yes, I shall! Write the novel of the Easter Rising, its leaders aspiring to be great and famous men, its followers aspiring to be men at least, at last, to feel strong, escape from their mothers and sisters, impress their girlfriends and pass on their genes. That’s what politics are about—survival and nothing else . . .
(Yeah, well, maybe we could make Neil’s spiel a bit less long-winded. But don’t forget that at this point in his life he’s still green and arrogant, not yet the grandfather you’d one day come to know . . .)
A couple of days later. Dark rings under their eyes, Neil and Thom are again posted at the entrance to Saint Stephen’s. Scattered here and there throughout the park are other Sinn Féiners (we recognize Constance Markiewicz in the background). All are discouraged, exhausted, overwhelmed. They haven’t slept for days. In the bushes just behind the cousins, the camera reveals a waif of a rebel, blond and barely pubescent, asleep on the job . . .
“Neil! The Brits now outnumber us thirty to one.”
“That’s not the worst of it. The Dubliners themselves are against us. How can we free Dublin against its will?”
“Ah, passivity! The greatest force in human history.”
“People need to eat, Thom. They care about sitting down to meals together. Did you hear them scream at us? Never shall I forget the despair in their eyes. Thom, I’ve been thinking . . . Aargh . . . !”
They’ve just been grabbed from behind by a group of British soldiers. Their weapons are torn away from them. Starting out of sleep, the blond adolescent freezes in fear and glues his stomach to the ground. As one soldier holds each of the cousins, bending his right arm forcibly at the elbow and twisting it up behind his back, another rummages through their pockets and under their clothes. Incongruously, Neil’s brain flashes to that dreadful moment in the Talbot Street brothel when he’d lost sight of his own hands. The blond kid watches from his hidden vantage point as Thom puts up a struggle, swearing at the soldiers and taunting them with Joycean rhyme and humor, calling them twitbrits and clitwits. The man holding him shoots him at point-blank and he collapses on the sidewalk, his corpse partly on Neil’s feet.
Stop sound track. White silence in Neil’s brain. Face white, too.
The muzzle of a gun in his back, too.
“What’s your name, you little bugger?”
He stutters his name in a white whisper and adds: “I’m a lawyer and my father’s a magistrate, you can’t . . .”
“Feck the law,” the soldier interrupts him. “You’re next on the sidewalk unless you give us a good reason not to put you there. Where are your leaders, baby boy? Where are your feckin’ leaders, you little knock-kneed patriot? Give us the names and whereabouts of your leaders. A nice, big name to make us happy.”
Numbness and strangeness. Paralysis of Neil Kerrigan’s facial muscles. Sense of unreality, of theater. Time slows, seems to stop. Neil stares stupidly into the face of the soldier shouting at him, a man his age. Sees his fear. Shares the man’s fear and tension, his rage at being tense and fearful. Weirdly, it’s as if this British soldier were his cousin—as if, at the instant of his death, Thom’s soul had slithered up into the enemy’s body and were now staring out at him through the enemy’s eyes and trying to warn him: Careful, Neil. Take it easy, man. Careful, now. Everything’s critical here.
The name slips out: “MacBride.”
Synapses are exploding like slow fireworks in his brain. Mac-Bride out of the way . . . Maud Gonne would be free . . . I’d be doing Yeats a favor . . . eliminating the last impediment to their marriage . . . He’d be grateful . . . and want to do me a favor in turn . . . help me find a publisher for my novel . . .
“What?”
“Major John MacBride,” Neil repeats, his voice white.
The blond kid in the bushes is still there. Listening. Quaking with fear and listening.
“Come off it.”
“Yes. Himself.”
“Where?”
“At Jacob’s.”
“We’ll take you
with us. Oh, for the luva Christ, the kid’s be-shat himself. We’ll take you with us anyway, you pile of stinking shite. If you’re lying, you’re dead. You know that, eh?”
“I’m not lying, so help me . . .”
Simultaneously shoved forward and firmly held from behind, he stumbles off and we follow the clumsy group into the dark.
• • • • •
Awinita, May 1951
“I DUNNO WHY I like you so goddamn much, Mister Cleaning-Fluid.”
“Must be ‘cause I’m cute.”
“Not ‘cause you’re rich, anyhow.”
They laugh. They finished making love a few minutes ago and Declan is still inside of Awinita, body spooned against her back, arm draped round her enormous tummy.
“Maybe I make you happy in bed,” he whispers.
“Hmm. Don’t let it go to your head.”
“That’s not where it goes, Nita.”
They laugh. Neighborhood sounds come sifting through the open window: traffic, the yells of construction workers, the clatter of dishes from a nearby restaurant kitchen, even a couple of gulls screaming overhead. The clock on the bedside table shows eleven. Declan arrived at the end of Awinita’s shift at five or six A.M. and they’ve spent what they call the night together.
“Sure you never get me mixed up with one of your johns?” “How could I? You ain’t paid me since de first time we came up here. I buy your drinks now.”
They laugh and cuddle.
“Seriously. You can tell the difference?”
“Yeah. Never saw a guy had such a big . . . head o’ red hair.”
They laugh. His right hand gently brushes her neck, her face. Stopping it with her own hand, she takes his fingers into her mouth.
“And from behind?”
“Hmm?”
“When I’m behind you, you can’t see my hair . . . Then what’s the diff?”
Silence.
“Hey, Nita? Tell me. Me or a john: same diff?”
Long silence. Finally: “Johns don’t bring me flowers.”