by Colm Toibin
“Sweet Heart of Jesus We Implore
O Make Us Love Thee More and More.”
The Brother conducted them as they sang. A few girls smiled as they silently passed. If there was one sound out of any boy, the Brother said, he would get six slaps with the leather here and now in front of everyone. Eamon noticed that his new shoes were starting to stick to the hot tar of Slaney Place. The Brother said that everyone was to stand up straight.
They marched across the bridge and then into Templeshannon where they were halted again. The windows of the shops had statues of the Sacred Heart and the Virgin Mary on display. Eamon looked at the pale blue cloth and the mild eyes of the Virgin in one of the shop windows as they waited at the bottom of the Shannon. His legs were tired standing; it would be much easier if they could just walk without being stopped all the time, he thought. As they moved slowly up the Shannon they passed more stewards in suits and red sashes, men whom Eamon recognized from the St. Vincent de Paul, or the Museum, or the Athenaeum. The stewards stood back, sternly watching the procession, their hands behind their backs. They were the ones who controlled the stopping and starting. He watched out for his father and his Uncle Tom but he could not see them. On the steepest part of the hill they were stopped again as the Women’s Confraternity passed by on the other side.
“Star of the Sea, Pray for the Wanderer,
Pray for me.”
The women wore mantillas and carried Rosary beads. He watched them as they passed. They were followed by the gold canopy under which Father Rossiter carried the monstrance with the Blessed Sacrament. An altar boy carried the incense but there was no smell. The smoke was blowing in the other direction. They bowed their heads as the Blessed Sacrament passed.
His father was standing on the bridge with his hands behind his back. He looked very serious, and Eamon knew that he must not wave to him or say anything. Along by the Post Office he saw his Uncle Tom who put his hand out and stopped the procession, and held it for a few minutes before letting it go again.
An altar covered in red cloth had been put up in front of the fire brigade building. The Market Square was full by the time the marchers from the Christian Brothers arrived and it was hard to find a place to kneel. Soldiers stood to attention at the front of the altar as the final part of the procession moved into the Square. Red and yellow bunting was tied at the monument and led to the first-floor windows of houses in the square. People watched out from all the houses, with the exception of a few houses which had no one living in the floors above the shop. As Father Rossiter ascended the platform one man in officer’s uniform shouted orders out in Irish and the soldiers stood to attention; he shouted out more orders and they lifted their rifles.
Benediction began. The crowd sang “O Salutaris Hostia” and bowed their heads when Father Rossiter raised the monstrance and the people in the Square struck their breasts three times.
It would not be long now, he knew as he walked home with his sash carefully folded in his pocket, before they went to Cush. It was June. The summer had already started, and his father’s holidays from the secondary school would begin soon. His father would want to go to Dublin then, and so he would be taken out of primary school a week or two before the official time for holidays and sent to Cush.
* * *
One Friday a few weeks later he came home from school and everything was packed for him.
“Are you ready?” his father asked.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“It would make you unsettled.”
“It wouldn’t make me unsettled.”
“You’d better be on your best behaviour in Cush. Bill Miller’s going to drive you down with all the stuff.”
“And when’ll you be down?”
“I’ll be down soon enough.”
“Did you pack books for me?”
“Ah, hurry up now. He’ll be coming soon.”
They drove out past Donoghue’s by the side of Vinegar Hill. The van was old and there was a hole in the floor, which Mr. Miller told him to be careful of, and then laughed hoarsely. The clouds were moving fast in the sky as they neared The Ballagh and soon it began to rain. There were no wipers on the van, so they had to drive very slowly.
“Say a prayer, young fellow, now that there’s nothing coming,” Bill Miller said.
They drove through Blackwater and then down towards the sea. The day had cleared again but there were brown puddles in the potholes. Mrs. Cullen was waiting for them when they came down the lane and parked beyond the marl-hole.
“Your daddy wrote and said you were coming,” she said. Her hair was tied in a bun. She kept her hand over her eyes to shade them from the sun. He carried all the boxes from the van and put them into the side room where he and his father slept. He sat at the kitchen table then and had a cup of tea with Mrs. Cullen and Bill Miller.
Mrs. Cullen believed that he should be outdoors all day. Even if he wanted to read she would make him go down to the strand or sit out in the garden. If it rained she would watch the weather to see if it was clearing up so she could send him out again.
“All the boys your age round here are out picking potatoes,” she said.
He went early one morning with Phil Cullen to pick potatoes. His job was to load them into the sacks. Once his back began to ache he could not wait for the morning to be over. When he thought it was lunchtime he found that it was only ten o’clock; it was the first fine day since he had come and he regretted having volunteered for this work. Eventually, Phil found him sitting down resting against a full sack of potatoes.
“He’s not too bad when it comes to eating them,” Phil said to one of the other workers.
“If you follow the cliff you’ll find your way back home soon enough,” Phil said. “You can tell her that we finished early.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Go on,” Phil said.
As he walked back towards the Cullens’ house, he realized that he missed living in his own house, having his own key and knowing that he could walk into any room he liked without disturbing someone. Suddenly, he wanted to go home. He lay down on the warm grass, looked up at the sky and decided to wait there for a while on his own before going back to the Cullens’ house.
* * *
Mrs. Keating came to the house one night to visit.
“Do you remember his Uncle Stephen,” Mrs. Cullen said to her. “He had brains all right. Sure, so had his father.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Keating said. “All the Redmonds had brains.”
“Isn’t he the image of his mother around the eyes?” Mrs. Cullen said.
“He is, but he’s a real Redmond,” Mrs. Keating said. “And how are they all in Enniscorthy?”
“They’re very well, thank you,” he said.
“We’re waiting for you now,” Mr. Cullen said. “Talk never played a hand of cards. Are you going to play? Isn’t that what Mrs. Keating came over for?”
“There’ll be no fighting or arguing,” Mrs. Cullen said. “You wouldn’t believe the way they fight over cards.”
Eamon wondered if they were going to let him play. He had watched them the previous year: he would have difficulty, he knew, with twenty-five or forty-five, but if it was whist or solo he knew how to play, he had worked out the rules.
“So who’s going to play, then?” Mrs. Keating asked. “Is young Redmond going to play with us?”
“Some other night,” Mrs. Cullen said. “We’ll have to teach him how to play.”
“I know how to play,” he said.
“He knows how to play snap,” Phil Cullen said.
“I know how to play solo,” he said.
One of the Cullen girls came over and put her arms around him.
“Who taught you how to play solo?” she asked.
“I taught myself,” he said.
“Why don’t we divide into two schools of four,” Mrs. Cullen said. “I have another pack in the room inside. And you can learn then.�
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“One school for solo; one for forty-five,” Mr. Cullen said. “Which do you want to learn,” he asked Eamon.
“I want to learn solo,” Eamon said.
“I thought you said you could play,” Phil said.
“Leave him alone,” Mrs. Cullen said.
There were two cards missing from the second pack and Mrs. Cullen had to go to the press to look for loose cards. She came back with two cards from a different pack, took a pencil and wrote their trump and value on them. Mrs. Keating, Mrs. Cullen, Eamon and Phil Cullen sat at one table. Mr. Cullen, Mrs. Keating’s daughter and two of the Furlong girls sat at another table. They had already started a game of forty-five. It was still bright enough to see the cards and it was only later, when they had played several hands, that one of the girls turned on the oil lamp and hung it from a nail on the wall.
Solo. Eamon tried to remember. There were no partnerships, each player played alone. There were trumps and you bid in turn on the value of your hand. Misere was the most difficult to make: it meant that you had to make no tricks at all. Mrs. Cullen said she would deal the first hand and she would keep the score. She never played cards for money, she said. No one in this house, she said to Mrs. Keating, had ever played cards for money. It had ruined a few homes, she added. Mrs. Keating nodded in assent.
Eamon did not bid on the first hand. He preferred to sit back and wait. He knew that Mrs. Keating was a good player; he had heard Mrs. Cullen say that she was the best player for miles around. She bid a solo and made it easily and then laughed to herself. The game at their table was quiet and thoughtful; the others shouted all the time, their playing was full of threats and promises, each swearing that they had the card which was going to carry the day and shouting with pain and disappointment when they were defeated.
“Quiet there now at the next table,” Mrs. Cullen said as another hand of solo was dealt.
When Eamon looked at the next hand he realized that he had a good chance of making a misere: he had the deuce of all four suits; he had the three of hearts, the three of clubs, the four of diamonds and the nine of spades to cover him on the second round. The nine of spades was dangerous but the rest were safe. He thought of the rules again: he would play to lose at each trick, throwing away whatever honour cards he could. They would try to make him win a trick but as he looked at his hand he realized that he could probably defend himself.
“I’ll go solo,” Phil said.
“Six spades,” Mrs. Keating said quietly without looking up from her hand.
“Misere,” Eamon said.
“The Redmonds were always great at cards,” Mrs. Keating said. “I remember your Uncle Stephen when he was your age.”
“What’s the trump?” Phil Cullen asked him.
“There’s no trump in misere,” he said.
“Will you leave the child alone?” Mrs. Cullen said.
He had to lead, and he led with the two of hearts and sat back to watch the play.
“He knows how to play all right,” Mrs. Keating said.
When Mrs. Cullen played another heart he dropped his three, he was still safe. The next lead was a spade; he played his two, Phil Cullen won with the eight, and led another round of spades with the six, Mrs. Cullen played the five, Eamon had no choice but to play his nine. Mrs. Keating waited for a moment as though she could not decide what to play and then gently placed the seven on the table, finishing the contract. Eamon could feel his ears begin to redden. In winning the trick he had lost the game.
“You didn’t have enough protection in spades,” Phil Cullen said. “You’d need something lower than the nine.”
“Don’t mind him,” Mrs. Keating said. “You just need to be lucky.”
He could feel his face burning and he felt sorry that he had taken the chance. For the rest of the night he felt a strange guilt. In the morning when he work up he had the feeling that he had done something wrong.
“Are you on for a game tonight?” Phil Cullen asked him.
“Can we play again?” he asked.
“As long as there’s no fighting, I’ll play,” Mrs. Cullen said.
* * *
His father came to Cush one day with a black box full of examination papers to correct. A special table was put into the bedroom for him to work. At the end of each page he wrote a mark in red.
“Who’s winning?” he asked his father as the pile of corrected papers began to mount.
“Leave your father alone,” Mrs. Cullen said, “and go outside in the fresh air.”
In the village his father bought him his own pack of cards, and he hid away from Mrs. Cullen, in the girls’ bedroom or in his own room, and began to deal imaginary hands of solo to imaginary partners, playing each hand as though he had not seen the others, and trying not to cheat, trying not to allow his knowledge and his memory to stretch beyond each player’s hand. He enjoyed playing his card game on the bed as his father worked. In the evenings now he was ready for them. There were always three others willing to play until it was his bedtime. A few nights Mrs. Cullen was enjoying the games so much that she let him stay up late. His father played too; one night he won a spread misere. Mrs. Cullen said it was the first time she had ever seen anyone succeed at spread misere. Eamon took chances now without worrying; most of the time he won, and when he lost he knew that there would be another game, another opportunity.
One evening he went on the ass and cart with Mrs. Cullen to have tea with Mrs. Keating and Madge Keating and play solo afterwards. Mrs. Keating, he felt, was the only one who really understood the game; the rest of them could play, his father, Mrs. and Mr. Cullen, Phil and the girls, but Mrs. Keating was the only one who really loved the game, who knew what the chances were, who knew the likelihood of each opponent having certain cards, who knew the weaknesses of her opponent’s playing style, who knew what luck meant but balanced it with skill. Mrs. Keating loved winning. She looked like a big white cat when she won. He knew that she liked playing with him, he felt a kinship with her. Often, when one of the others won the bid, Eamon and Mrs. Keating would close in together, they would begin to guess what cards the others had and they would send signs to each other. They understood the cards as the other two did not.
In the end, however, much depended on luck and chance. There were few safe hands and fewer foolproof bids. If it was his bid he would watch Mrs. Keating plotting against him.
“I’ve got a nice little card for you now,” she would say and she would place it down on the table and look up at him, a deep cunning in her old eyes.
“You’d need something better than that, Mrs. Keating.”
“You’re a real Redmond,” Mrs. Cullen would say. Often Mrs. Cullen would become forgetful or distracted and Mrs. Keating had no patience with her.
Mrs. Keating did not want the night to stop; she made a rule that they would not put away the cards until someone played a spread misere, whether they won it or not. It was after one o’clock when they set off for Cush on the ass and cart. There was a full moon over the sea below Keatings’ and the sky was bright with stars and so they had no difficulty seeing the turn for Cush at the hand-ball alley and making their way along the narrow road home. His mind was full of cards. As he lay in bed he thought of the games they played and the strategies he had used until he fell asleep.
The black box was now filling up with corrected examination papers. One day Eamon stood at the door watching his father correcting the papers outside at a table under one of the small trees. His father was wearing a straw hat. Suddenly, a gust of wind blew and the rain started up and one of the papers blew down the garden. His father ran down after it and put his foot on it before it got away even further. He had to gather up all the papers and take them into the house. Some of them were wet: the rain had got mixed with the ink and made the writing blurred.
The weather improved and soon the days were sweltering with heat. He had been in the sea only once since he came, but it had been too cold and he had no urge to go back aga
in. But now his father wanted to go and made him find his togs and take a towel. The papers were nearly finished. They walked down the lane; his father had rolled up his shirt sleeves and was wearing sandals with no socks.
“The thing to do,” he said, “is to go into the water without thinking about it. Think of something else, and then just get down in the water, and then, as long as you keep moving, you’ll be warm enough.”
“But it’s cold,” Eamon said.
“Not on a day like today. We should be in twice a day.”
They found the gap in the cliff which he had used when he went to swim with Maureen Cullen. Steps had been cut into the moist clay, which made some of the descent easier, but for the last stretch there was nothing except banked sand and they both had to run down. His father took off his sandals and rolled up the bottoms of his trousers to go and check the water. Eamon lay down on the warm sand.
“It’s roasting,” his father said.
“I know you’re joking.”
His father sat down with his arms clasped around his knees and looked out to sea. There were no clouds, just a vague haze on the horizon. The sea was calm and clear.
“I wonder if there are seals,” his father said. “There were seals last year.”
“Phil said he saw seals.”
“It’s a sign of good weather,” his father said.
There were a few people further down the strand, but otherwise it was empty.
“There are probably a lot of people in Curracloe,” his father said.
“They have a shop there now. It’s called the Winning Post.”
“Who told you that?” his father asked.
“Josie Cullen was there.”
They waited there in the mid-day heat until his father began to undress. Eamon still lay stretched out with his clothes on. When he sat up he saw that his father had his togs on and was ready. His father’s body was white, except for the black hair on his chest. His father paid no attention to him as he walked down towards the sea. Eamon sat and watched as his father stood in the shallow water and then blessed himself before wading in slowly, jumping at first to avoid the waves breaking against him. He watched as his father dived into the water and swam out before turning to do the backstroke.