But it was too late for turning back. It was two after noon. The alarm would have been raised. The events would be unchained. Your reason for being in Hobart was to sign your ticket-of-parole at the Station; when this had not been done they would have grown suspicious immediately, would have mustered the constables out to the farmstead. You pictured Catharine on the porch as Mulvany rode up. She might be hanging out launderings or feeding the chooks. Hands in her apron. Pegs clipped in her hair. The slap of billowed linens behind her like a sail: you could smell the soap, the ginger. She would say what you had agreed: she did not know where you were. It had the advantage of being true.
Mulvany would grunt, might bark for a while, sweating porter into his putrid tunic. His men would stand around looking miserable, hungry. They were not paid to love their duties; they found some of them distasteful. But they would do them if commanded by Mulvany. All this would be happening now. She would need to be brave. But women are braver than men.
Her hair. You used to wash it for her. It was sleek; black-blue. Fronds of wisping seagrass in your fingers. Because her mother had taught her – remember her laughing –fix the clothes-pegs to your plaits and you’ll never have to fumble . Her hair, wet and loose, to her waist.
She must be prepared for him to ‘break’ the place. The Truncheon Mulvany. She was not to answer back, was to offer no resistance. He would not actually assault her, nor even threaten to do so, for you had reported him on these menacings before. And Hobart had been warned – an anonymous letter had warned them – of the fate that would befall Sergeant Patrick Mulvany if ever again he made that mistake. Call your companion ‘a half-breed nigger’ and the consequences would be dire. It would not be Mulvany whose throat would be cut. It would be every one of his children.
It was the last thing you said to her as you rode away from Lake Comfrey. ‘You are safe. Tell them nothing. I will be back in a week.’ In the morning, D–––– would come, and would tell her the truth: you were gone and would never return.
It came into your mind that M’Carthy or Knowles might be touts: the island was crawling with them; every prison is. Perhaps it was a trap, so it seemed to you now. In a moment, or at dusk, which could not be long in coming, a frigate would materialize from out of that distant wall of mist, her Union Jack furling and her cannons lined on. They would strangle you from her mainmast, hack you into briskets; scatter what was left to the sharks. You looked across at Knowles. He would not meet your eyes. With his dagger he was coring an apple.
They were bickering again, now in convict’s cant, and you couldn’t understand them, but you did not reveal your ignorance. Only D––––, you always felt, could be trusted absolutely. They could have torn out his teeth and he would have told them nothing. His contempt for them was that strong. You could trust your life to his hatred. Every revolution has a Duggan.
They could not have suspected, Michael Knowles and Timothy M’Carthy, that they would never see Hobart again. There was a revolver in your pocket. The plan had been agreed. At the first sign of the clipper you would activate that plan. It would be difficult, yes. You had never killed before – you that had called for revolutions. But witnesses were a risk that could not be afforded. A mutter in a grogshop, a tipsy brag to impress a girl, and everything would be known by the authorities. Aim hard for the forehead. They need not suffer. Their families will be taken care of.
The revolution needs theorists, visionaries, poets: figures who will be cast in bronze after liberty is won, whose visages will be impressed on the currency of the Republic, whose epitaphs will be taught to her children. But in the shadows behind the plinths are always the Duggans: elapsed, inconvenient, embarrassing. They skulk the grimy alleys off the re-baptized thoroughfares. Nothing will ever be named for them. Men who will do anything, will shatter any commandment, only to prosecute the cause. Dirtyworkers who keep going after the revolution requires them, if ever it did, which is now contested: when those who have been liberated, who now enjoy the freedom to speak, start claiming never to have wanted it in the first place. Or that it isnot freedom at all which the Duggans have wrought, but a new marque of slavery, more hypocritical than the old, and that theancien régime was better, freer, if recollected in a certain light. And this is when Nemesis comes for the Duggans: when the cruelties which produced them have been profitably overturned; when the tyranny they stood against has been forgotten, rewritten, and newer Duggans are being recruited to murder the old ones. Then the instruments that might have recorded them are buried, too. Every cause has its angels and its John Fintan Duggans. You could no longer say into which category you yourself should be placed. But you knew the decision was coming.
Your boat bobbled around. You were thinking about Duggan. And it seemed you saw him clearly, perhaps for the first time. You loved him very fiercely in that frightening moment, as a man will love his sinful and prodigal brother, seeing in him all the bigotries he has himself outgrown, and you feared what they would do to your brother in time, for their vengeance on Duggan would be terrible. The day would come, was coming already, as surely as the storm-cloud was approaching from the west, when they would make the very utterance of his name a blasphemy and all who uttered it untouchables.
It started to rain at about six o’clock. The storm-cloud grew the size of London. By now Knowles and M’Carthy were openly frightened. And you were frightened, too, and frightened of showing it. You had been to sea many times, and your father had been to sea; his were the stories of your childhood. But it was the first time you had been gripped by that sensation known to fevered sea-men, that the land does not exist, there is only the sea; that God has annihilated the earth.
The oarlocks creaked and began to slowly spin. You reached out your hand to stop one.
––Row, bawled Knowles.
––We’re dead, said M’Carthy.
––Work that oar or I’ll stick you, so help me Christ…
––We can’t tek him wi’uz. If they find him we’re hanged…
––You’d drown a bloody Christian to save your own pelt?
––He’s gan off this boat.I’ll not be stretched for nobastard .
––Use your head instead of your hole, for the wounds of Jesus. Two men aint strong enough to run a hellcloud!
––Enough, you shouted.I am in command here.
The revolver was in your hand, but your hand was shaking. The boat gave a sickening lurch. The pillar of the hurricane stood up in the distance, slow, gray, twisting, obscene, like a vision of Yahweh enraged by mortal pride. Froth leapt out of the churning sea. An albatross arrowed toward the mainland.
––You nigger scullion’s bastard, Knowles said to you quietly. I always hated your guts.
A clump of sea-wrack orbiting in the sky like a ball in the lip of a roulette wheel.
You began to row back, blading frenziedly, all three. The waves slurped over the prow. The dory was pummeled as it began to take on. The waves became billows, then surging breakers. The water rose up into gorges of gunmetal. Rain flailed your face, your eyes. M’Carthy lost his oar. His long hair was whipping. He grabbed the little boathook and tried paddling with that. Lightning sparked ahead of you, a shocking glitter in the cloud. Lightning at sea, an astoundingly beautiful sight. Knowles profaning the tornado as though his roars could quell it. The world rotating faster as you spun toward the eye. And M’Carthy, suddenly, was not in the boat. And M’Carthy was not in the boat.
And this part of the memory is for some reason vague: the moments immediately before the capsizing. The ruins of a barrack-fort on your father’s land in Wexford. Frogs and hedgehogs. Asphodels and newts. You were walking with your father, boyish boots on shattered boards. Bluebells in the walls. Bog-cotton in the rafters. ‘You’ll not defeat nature,’ your father was saying quietly, as though the thought was a sad one to which he had had to resign. There was dew on the trees. In potato beds. On banks. Wild garlic for sore throats. Knitbone for fractures. Under a panel of moldered w
ainscot you found a scraping of words:Privat n. sykes & his cully pt. robt simms that he lovs. martinmas 97. We zll sleep in the groond whn thes is discoverd . And Pappy telling you angrily not to look on those words, for there was something disgraceful about them, something worse than unmanliness.
You were weeping when you went into the water, as you had wept over your daughter’s remains, helplessly, in a manner you felt shameful. You thought about Catharine – she seemed close to you somehow. You thought about the baby she had borne you. You were about to die, alone and afraid. No prayer could drown your terror. You have a memory of your fingers on the mesh of sinking net, scrabbling for a hold in the blackness.
Walking home along the boreen with your hand in your father’s pocket. Moonlight on the Sloblands. He was happy. You’re the great little pup. I’m the luckiest man in Ireland. And you asked: is God real? Did Mamma truly go to Heaven? And the grief in his eyes. I’m ashamed of you, James. You have spoiled our happy day. Get away from me.
You awoke on wet stones. They were black, small as marbles. They scrunched when you tried to move. Your hands were sopped with blood. Your clothes had been torn. There was a gash like a backward N across your chest. You attempted to stand but your legs would not carry. You pulled yourself to a rock pool and vomited.
You made a feverish inventory but it did not take long. There was a pencil-flask of poteen on a chain about your neck. A bracelet, Pappy’s fob watch in a gutta-percha pouch, with a draft on Canada for twenty pounds, which somehow had been smuggled to you by Duggan at Hobart. That was all your inheritance. Your shoes were gone. No book, and nothing to write with.
For almost a week you were unable to walk. You lay on the baking stones. The noons were a dazzle of pain and light. You would burrow into the stones like a lizard to avoid the sun. Your neck, when you moved it, felt broken.
Walking came back to you, limpingly, painfully. You hobbled toward the collapsed, black cliff. It must have taken you half an hour to ascend its shifting rubbles, your feet thrusting hard into sharps of gravel. As though there might be an oasis on the other side of that battlement. But there was only the eternity of sea.
You slid a way back down. Your back and buttocks torn. You tiptoed the length of your world. A turtle stranded belly-up in a yellowfoamed pool, its feet pitiably working the air. You killed it with a stone, beat open its husk, but you found you were unable to eat it. You were crying by then. You tried to stop crying. You edged a way back towards your burrow. Under a copse of red-flowered thorns, of which kind you did not know, stood a crooked driftwood cross into which had been cut some words:JAS. GRIMESLEY. HM NAVY. XLIX. You were not the first conquistador.
You did not know if’XLIX’ meant your namesake was forty-nine when he died or if 1849 was the year of his death and he had figured so lowly on whatever vessel he sailed that it was not worth including the month of his passing. And yet – had he been nothing, they would simply have thrown him overboard. But perhaps the Captain. Or perhaps kind comrades. And if vessels come by. But maybe they would be English. Obsessions came to nag at you about unanswerable questions. It is one of the terrors of solitude.
In your lectures you would call it an island, but it was barely that. Nothing but a crescent of arid black anthracite. Perhaps a quarter-mile in length. Grassless, treeless. The part-rim, surely, of a drowned volcano, because there was not a grain of sand but instead that glassy shale, and there was fresh water – you could suck it from the boulders. When the tide rose high, your empire shrank beneath it. There were hours when all you had was the size of a Connemaran’s patch. Strange thought: to be lost in the wilderness of ocean but standing on the summit of a mountain.
The coral-stubs, brittle. On cold nights they snapped, blowing grits of blackened powder, bitter-tasting, sickening. The dust adhered to your flesh; unwashable. To walk more than a few paces sliced your feet. You learned to sit guru-still, eyes trained on the horizon. Only an occasional fin. Seal-black, shining. And the spume of a whale in the faraway white, slapping the waves with its tail.
One morning on the rock – third week? fourth? – you awoke to the thought that you would never again see a human. It was as real as the shale, as the jags in the shallows; the tiny vermilion scorpions that scuttled in their thousands, the sting of one of which had made you scream with such agony that something in your loins seemed to rip. Unimaginable fact. You would live and die alone. No one would ever know your fate.
You might live twenty years, or thirty, or fifty – there was water in the rock, there were fish in the sea – but nevermore set eyes on another of your species or hear an earthly voice not your own. Like swallowing a cannonball, so terrible the grief. A gun-stone made of ice. There would come no Friday, no educable savage. No footprint. No sand for a footprint.
Fear of death seemed to shrivel in the flames of that thought. But it did not burn away. It concentrated. You did not want to die, were afraid of the pain. You, who had stood on the gallows for your country, who had calledVive La Guillotine for the heads of all monarchs. As the minutes ticked to months on your father’s watch, the thought came to smoke like a lust. You did everything contrivable in order to expel it. You tried to sleep all day, you shambled your kingdom. You counted the shoals of jellyfish bloating obscenely in the moonlight, like tentacled fallen constellations. The morning finally came when you ran out of numbers. You scraped your name on a stone; your date and place of birth. But there was nothing with which a noose might be tied.
You have no explanation for what happened that morning. Was it simply to have an evidence that life had ever existed other than the ruins of your own? You were kneeling on the rocks, scraping out handfuls of silt from the oblong shadowed by his cross. The sun blazed obscenely on the nape of your neck. Your fingernails broken, their cuticles bleeding. The grunts of some slavering animal lusting for a marrowbone, and you realized, to your shame, their source.
You put back what you had taken: his stolen stones. You wept as you kissed his cross. You begged forgiveness of the sun, of James Grimesely, of your father, of the Gods of the seas of the world. But you would do worse to James Grimesley before too long. You would become the untouchable man.
You began to think, soon, that you had already died, had drifted without knowing into that latitude of doldrums. Had they truth, after all, the warnings of the Fathers? Was Hobart Harbor your Styx? Each sinner, on that foreshore, shall meet the thing he dreads most and shall know that state foreternity . Do you know that awful word, boys? Conceive its dreadful import. Death, for such a boy, can never be a release; though he beg for it, though he pray, though he repudiate his wicked deeds, his unmanly thoughts, his pollution of his body – it shall come too late, this repentance. That picture he allowed to form of his sister’s chaste friend. That lie he spoke to his father. Dear boys, a million centuries, and amillion million more , yet his tortures shall never be ended. Be the whole world destroyed and Christ Himself returned, yet that boy shall grovel on in the stench-pit.
You do not know how long you wept: minutes, days. At one point – maybe you are imagining, but you do not think so – you ran into the water – the bite of the salt – and stumbled out as far as you could bear into the waves, until the sea slopped up to your ripped raw neck, and matted your bib of louse-infested beard, and the reproachful smacks of froth were smarting your eyes. The water was warm. Slime of seaweeds beneath your feet. Yes. That happened. You did not imagine that. A pelican regarded you from its perch on a stump of coral. Its ancient eyes, its preternatural hauteur. How you envied that vampire his powers of flight. You burned in the blind of water.
Crusoe, the slaver. You knew the truer story. Because Pappy had told you the truth. He ruled his acre of sand as the crown its empire: measuring, imperturbable, unpanicked. But the Scotsman on whom he was modeled lost the power of speech, so appalling the self-confrontation.
––Never go to sea, son. I wish you would not. I have always hated sea-life. I know you would hate it, too. There is nothing
in the sea except fish and tears. The sea makes a land-life sad.
Crusoe. O curse. Curs. Ruse. Sore. Defeat. Defoe.
These words you formed of the wet black stones. You would soon be an anagram of yourself.
You came to fear you were mad, or would soon be mad. And there were moments when you told yourself not to be afraid, since no lunatic truly knows he is mad, but thinks himself sane, indeed saner than the rest, that the others are mad who do not understand his madness, that his madness is the only sanity. Frenchman. Fit. Two years’ solitude on Mauritius. Tore his flesh to pieces. Brought on by eating raw turtles.
Often you look at the globe – for you have one in your study, a Mercator model, a fine one, your wife had it sent you from Greenwich. Neptune and Britannia are holding the cartouche, on which a sea-nymph is combing her tresses. You try to understand, to fix a measure on where you were. Somewhere in that quadrangle formed by elegant parallels, near the dot on the second ‘i’ in ‘Pacific’. But your rock does not appear on that ball of muted shadings. Too small, you suppose; it was hardly worth the bother of naming. It would only have insulted the commemorated noble to have such a nowhere his immortality.
You can point to jagged Ireland, to Britain advancing on her from behind; to Tasmania, to Paris, to the Italy of your mothers; to the featureless square of convex whiteout in which you are orphaned now. But they are only arrangements of inks, a way of translating. The world has corners that can never be imagined. Maps tell you little worth knowing.
They cheered you in the good years. Roared your name from the gods. They lifted up their children to see you. The hero who returned from the island of the damned, who walked out of the tomb, who refused to lie down, whoseexistence alone was a defiance of imperium, of the brutalities that had driven them from home. They had seen so much death, had been told they were animals. They wanted it not to have been for nothing. They loved your exquisite clothing, those people in rags. They loved how you spoke, your flights. But mostly, it was the fact of your survival they loved. They did not know your truer story. There were nights, moments, when you wanted to tell them; to stand in the limelight and bawl into the darkness, to those mothers who had given their sons your name, those fathers who shook with tears when they saw you take the stage: ‘I am an impostor. I only survived. The heroes of the story are you.’ But by then it was too late. They would have shouted you down. And they would have been right to hate you.
Redemption Falls Page 9