“Mammy won’t tell me.” My face was blazing now.
“Don’t tell fibs, Gabriel,” Father McAtamney said. “Fibs are venial sins and stain the soul only a little bit less than mortal ones.”
He asked if anyone else had committed any venial or mortal sins since their confession. Everyone shook their heads, just as our teacher had warned us to do, and then he asked the final catechism questions. I got everything right. Fergal did, as well, and we would now sit together in the pew nearest the altar rails at the Communion Mass.
Henry got two questions wrong, and I was surprised when the priest said he could still make his Communion. He’d got his catechism wrong, plus he was in a state of mortal sin, because he’d told Fergal he’d stolen a shilling from his mammy’s purse, bought sweets, and not confessed it. As God was all-knowing, Fergal and I believed Our Lord would be furious and race up Henry’s throat as soon as he received Him at Mass.
At First Communion, Our Lord tasted no different from the practice bread Father had given us at school. I’d expected it to taste like blood. Fergal and I watched as Henry knelt at the rails and received. He chewed Him three times and looked at us with his sneaky eyes as he walked by. Any minute, I expected choking and vomiting to begin.
Nothing happened. Henry was in a state of mortal sin, he had chewed Our Lord, and nothing happened. His soul was black with sin, yet Our Lord had stayed inside him, just as if he’d been as spotless as Fergal and me. It made no sense.
After Mass, Father McAtamney came up to Mammy as we stood outside the church. He patted my head and told her the strange thing I’d said about Uncle Brendan not wanting to come home.
“Come to think of it,” he said, and stopped speaking as he looked around the graveyard for a moment. “Brendan hasn’t been home for a long while. Any word of a visit in the offing?”
“Not in the immediate future, Father. The missions are so very busy, as I’m sure you understand?” Mammy laughed falsely as she laid her hands on my shoulders. “It’s so funny you should bring this up when I was just thinking the other day how lovely it would be to have him visit.” Her fingernails dug into my skin, so hard I almost cried out.
“That is a coincidence, indeed,” he said, and looked at her without blinking.
“We can’t be selfish.” Mammy coughed. “Much as the family wants him home, the mission comes first, doesn’t it?”
“Indeed.”
My mother was silent the entire journey home. No sooner had we got into the kitchen than she fetched the wooden spoon and attacked my arse. “Don’t let me ever . . . don’t you ever . . .” She breathed heavy as she whacked, “ . . . don’t let me ever hear that you’ve told any news you’ve heard within these four walls to the priest or anyone. And don’t make up stories, either. Your uncle Brendan will be home when he can get away from the missions, do you hear?” She stopped hitting me. “If I hear another story like that from the priest’s mouth, it’ll be the last story out of yours. I’ll cut your tongue out. Now, get to your room this instant.”
Instead of collecting money and praise for First Communion from visiting relatives, I found myself alone in my room, punished for lying when it wasn’t me who’d lied. I listened to everyone laughing, grew angry, and decided my mother needed to be punished, too. Taking a pencil, I drew animals, houses, and figures on the wallpaper, but it still wasn’t punishment enough; they could be erased. I took my pen and drew ten more, though just below the headboard, where she couldn’t see them. I knew the damage was there. That was enough.
Later, she came in and told me I could come out to the living room again if I apologized and promised never to tell lies about Uncle Brendan. I said I was sorry without meaning a word. But the matter wasn’t forgotten on her part, either. She wouldn’t look at me, nor did she even speak to me, until Uncle Tommy came home from working on his new house that evening. After giving me ten shillings for being a real Catholic now I’d tasted Our Lord, he told Mammy that he and Auntie Bernie would be moving out. Their new furniture had arrived that afternoon. Then, Mammy’s stony face changed. Then, I was the greatest son. I was the first of her children to receive Our Lord and now nothing bad would ever happen to me because He was inside my body.
Four
On one side of our house was a small garden with a high tree. Its rough, reddish trunk was thick and curved up from the bottom like a bow. After Uncle Tommy and Auntie Bernie left, James and I moved back to our bedroom and I could look out the window again and hear the tree’s branches creak as they swayed in the wind. I would watch for ages and wonder how my tree could stay up in the driving winds, despite its sharply bowed trunk. Noel, whose two front teeth now shared a brownish spot where they met, had taught me to climb it. The best way was to sprint up to it, stick your fingers into the scaled, corky bark as you raced up the trunk, and grab its lowest branch to hoist yourself into it.
Partway up, the tree split into two smaller limbs. It was tight to squeeze past the upper branches because there were so many, but the limbs were bendable at the top. I would pull them toward me and peer out to the rusty tin roof of the long outbuilding stretching all the way across the bottom of the garden and beyond, to where sheep and cows grazed in the Knockburn fields that were ten shades of green.
One Saturday afternoon, Noel and I were perched in my tree and he asked me to go into the outbuilding with him because he wanted to show me something. We climbed down the tree quickly. On the outbuilding’s gable overlooking the road was a scarlet mailbox and, as we climbed the gate next to it, Mr. Smith, our bald Protestant postman with bandy legs, drew up in his Royal Mail van. He removed letters from the mailbox and laid them in a wire basket.
“Noel, do you want to take your mother’s bills and a letter from England?” Mr. Smith asked.
“I’m not going home to the aul doll yet.”
Noel called his mother “the aul doll” behind her back. His father called her that and Noel liked to talk like him, though my mother said it was naughty and if he were her son, she’d break his back.
After Mr. Smith left, we hopped over the crumbling whitewashed wall and ran up to the empty pigsty, where Mammy had once bred pigs until she’d grown tired of the smelly work.
Noel drew back the bolt of the door, which had a broken hinge and ragged holes at the bottom that rats had gnawed. Inside, it was silent, and the dim space smelled of stale hay and dust. The sty was divided into two pens. A dented trough and a long metal pigging crate with a wide base that narrowed at one side like a capital “A” stood in one of them, and broken hay bales, yellowing newspapers, and a bundle of clothes were in the other. A thick concrete wall separated the pens. Eight feet above them was a narrow wooden beam running into the blackness at one end of the loft.
“Jump up on the pillar and walk across the beam,” Noel said. “The surprise is in the dark part of the loft.”
“Rats are up there.” It was also high. I didn’t like heights and I feared I’d slip and fall to the concrete floor.
“Don’t be an eejit. Follow me.”
Noel jumped up on the beam like a monkey, spread his arms to help keep his balance, and ran across. I jumped up on the wall and hoisted myself very slowly on the beam. Where the tin roof met the top of the stone walls, thin wooden planks jutted out at two-foot intervals and were nailed to the underside of the beam. Three broken planks dipped like lopsided seesaws toward the floor of the pen containing the pigging crate.
My stomach lurched. “I don’t want to go over there, Noel.”
“Don’t be a coward like you are with Henry Lynch.”
I narrowed my eyes but still couldn’t see him.
“It’s easy. I’ll come back over and fetch you.” Suddenly, a light shot out from the darkness and Noel walked across, shining a flashlight at the beam. “Stretch out your arms and walk fast like this.” He spun around and crossed the beam again.
“What do you want to show me?” I said, instead of moving. “Why don’t you bring it over here?”
“It’s a big secret. You’ll like it. Once I show it to you, it’ll become our secret . . . just yours and mine.”
Stretching out my hands, not daring to blink or take my eyes off the beam, I started across. I felt as if I was losing my balance near the end and ran the final five steps.
I found Noel sitting inside a nest of hay. It reminded me of the nests Granny Neeson’s laying hens had in their coop, only it was much bigger and smelled dead musty. A thin line of bright light streamed in from a small hole in the roof where it had rusted away. I could hear Caroline and James playing in our backyard.
“Is this it? A nest of hay.”
“No.”
Noel fumbled within the hay on the far side of the nest. Dust rose into the air. I sneezed. He brought something out and set it before me.
“What is it?”
“Dirty magazines.” Noel laid the flashlight on the side of the nest so it shone on the magazines, opened one, and pushed it toward me. The flashlight made two fuzzy rings and the white-hot circle fixed on a picture of a naked woman with black hair lying on a bale of hay. I stared at her for just half a second, but I saw everything. She had the same knobs as Auntie Bernie and her tongue was pointed and curled up over her upper lip. Her fingers dipped inside her private place.
“Auntie Bernie has hair down there, too.”
“That’s her fanny. And these are her tits.” Noel kissed all over the page as he made slurping noises. “You have to do it now.”
“I don’t want to do that . . . the rats . . .”
“Kiss her tits, now.”
“No.”
“Do it, or I’ll push you off the beam when we leave.”
As I stared at the picture, my knees and arms shook at the thought of crossing the beam again. “I want to get out of here. You shouldn’t have brought me here.”
“Shut up, shut your mouth.” Noel leaned over and pressed his moist hand with tiny, sharp bits of hay on it hard against my mouth. He pushed until I tasted his salty skin. “Shut up or I’ll hit you something fierce.”
I nodded and he took away his hand. I wiped my tongue with the sleeve of my sweater.
“Kiss her tits and then we’ll go,” he said. “You must do this to make it our secret.”
“If I do it, can we go home?”
“Yes.”
I took the magazine in my hands. The paper was glossy and some pages were bubbled and stuck together where the magazine had once been wet. It smelled old, dirty. I closed my eyes and kissed the page fast.
Noel snatched the magazine and tucked it back into the side of the nest. “Let’s go.”
I didn’t trust my shaking legs so I crawled across the beam slowly, slid down the concrete wall, and then ran into the sunshine where my eyes hurt sharply at first. At the mailbox, Noel put his face close to mine, half-closing his eyes the way he always did when he was going to give me a warning.
“Those magazines are our secret. Just yours and mine. If you tell your aul doll about them, I’ll have to tell her that you kissed a woman’s tits. And don’t tell it as a sin at confession, either. Father McAtamney will leap out of his box and yell at you in front of everybody.”
Most nights in bed, I concocted funny stories about our neighbors to entertain James before he went to sleep. Often, Caroline would sneak into our bedroom to listen. To keep them interesting, I watched people, noticing how our Knockburn neighbors talked or the funny ways they moved their heads or hands, and included them in the stories. Caroline and James’s favorite ones were about Jennifer, but I’d used her so often, it was becoming difficult to make up new things to say about her.
One evening, Caroline stopped a story about the priest five minutes into its telling.
“It’s not funny, Gabriel. Plus, it’s like one we heard before.” She looked at James. “Do you think it’s funny?”
He shook his head.
“Tell us one about Jennifer,” she said.
James also wanted a Jennifer story, though not another about her stealing from our mother’s kitchen cupboards behind her back, nor the one where she made us play school and slapped us on our hands for making spelling mistakes. I thought for a minute and then began a story about her and me out riding horses in the fields and how she came upon a wallet full of money on the ground and stole fifteen pounds.
About halfway through, the police gave chase, Jennifer saw a barn, and we ran inside to hide. The police passed by and we were safe, but then Jennifer spied a hay bale, lay on it, and asked me to kiss her tits.
“What are tits?” asked James.
“The things Auntie Bernie and Mammy have . . . I’ll draw what they look like underneath their bras.” I fetched a school exercise book and drew a woman with long hair lying on a hay bale. Then I drew the tits with their knobs. “Auntie Bernie’s hair is ginger down there.” I drew squiggly lines between her legs.
“On her bottom?” Caroline asked.
“That’s not her bottom. It’s her fanny. Take off your pajamas and show James yours.”
Caroline didn’t want to take them off, but James kept asking until she did. Her fanny looked like the hay woman’s, except Caroline’s was bald. It looked like the mouth of a mailbox. I whispered in James’s ear to ask if she would let us touch it. When he did ask, she shook her head and ordered us to take off our pajamas and show her ours. James pulled down his pants.
“I think you could put a very tiny envelope inside yours,” I said to Caroline.
James giggled.
Caroline shook her head so quickly, her fringe swept to the side. “James and you are made of slugs and snails . . . and your things are the puppy dog’s tail.” She pulled up her pajamas. “I would never want a tail.”
“Well, you’ll get tits and you won’t be able to wear an undershirt anymore,” I said. “You’ll have to wear a bra and your fanny will get ugly hair.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’ll be like Auntie Bernie’s.”
Caroline started to cry. James laid his hand on her shoulder but she shook it off with a jerk.
“I’ll ask Mammy and that’ll sort it out once and for all,” James said, and he climbed out of the bed.
I leaped up and slammed the bedroom door shut, almost squashing the tips of my brother’s fingers, and winked at him as I told Caroline I was only joking. She peeked through her fingers and then her tears changed to huffy sniffs.
“We mustn’t tell Mammy we know words like tits or she’ll be very angry,” I said. “Nor can either of you mention to Noel that I taught you these words.”
“Why not?” Caroline said.
My sister always asked questions that got to the bottom of things.
“Because they’re grown-up words that we’re not supposed to know yet.”
“I see . . . very good.”
Her I sees and very goods were annoying. She liked to behave like Mammy, acting as if the answer to her question was to her liking and the matter was now at an end. But I needed to be surer. I fetched Mammy’s Sunday missal and made them swear upon it that they wouldn’t repeat it to anyone, Caroline agreeing only after I promised to tell a story about Jennifer at the seaside.
The seaside was on our minds because it was summer and our parents took us there on Sunday outings. I loved to walk along the high harbor walls and look down at the boats bobbing in the dark green water. Everything was so colorful, the brightly painted boats and the large white-and-pale-gray seagulls flying and squealing in the sun. Some of the gulls swam like ducks with puffy chests, while others walked on their bright orange legs on wet rocks covered with slime and rubbery seaweed.
“The people who own those yachts are rotten rich,” Daddy said to James and me at the harbor one afternoon.
I followed the direction of his pointed finger to a pale blue boat with a silvery sail. “Yacht” was as lovely a word as the thing itself. I whispered it four times to make sure I’d remember it, so I could put Jennifer in one during a bedtime story.
“Can we get a yacht?” I asked.
“They’re very expensive and I’m not rotten rich. Not yet.”
A large yacht with two rotten rich people on it began to move. It sailed out of the narrow mouth of gleaming rocks and headed toward the blue-gray distance where a ship was crossing. How I wished we could be rotten rich and sail into the misty distance.
“We’d best return to the others,” said my father.
To get to the beach, we had to cross a wooden bridge with two- or three-inch spaces between the old planks, and I could see bobbing rotten wood and seaweed in the water below. It didn’t have any handrails and I feared a plank might suddenly break and we’d fall into the water.
James wasn’t afraid. Slipping his hand from our father’s, he skipped into the middle of the bridge, stooped to his knees, and peered beneath. I hung back.
“Oh, come on, Gabriel. James did it no problem and you’re older than him.” Daddy looked down at my brother. “You’re a brave man, aren’t you, James? Brave like your daddy.”
“That makes me bigger than him,” my brother said.
My father liked to compare James and me, and say my brother was just like him. He said that because my brother loved football and played with toy lorries. He said it because their favorite color was red, almost the same red as the lorry he drove to take excavators to demonstrate for possible customers at shows. James always wanted Santa to bring him lorries, while I wanted pencil cases or cows and horses for my farmyard set. Being older, I knew Santa didn’t exist and the idea to tell my brother this came into my head before I walked across the bridge, but I didn’t.
Caroline, baby Nuala, and my mother were sitting on a red-and-black checked rug my mother had laid out on the soft, warm sand. Most people sat on rugs, though there were also people who’d rented striped deckchairs from a man in a small hut farther along the beach. My father slipped on a pair of maroon swimming shorts with a moth hole on the right side and ran toward the sea.
“I want to go in the water today,” I said.
A Son Called Gabriel Page 4