by Tom Phelan
He stood there staring for a long time, but when I gave his arm a tender tug, he came back and walked on with me.
I rubbed his arm as we walked, caressed his arm through the cloth of the sleeve. For a hundred yards at a time I closed my eyes and let Matthias guide me beside the water, while I tried to convince my brain that he had indeed come home. I stroked his upper arm with gentle fingertips, followed the bend of his elbow, and slipped down to his naked wrist and hand and fondled his fingers. Not once did he return my touch, not once did he sigh, not once did he say my name.
I had always known that Matthias would come home, was always afraid that Con wouldn’t. I had always believed that neither Lionel nor Sarah Hodgkins would come back, but Sarah did, even though it would have been better for everyone, including herself, if she’d been killed. I didn’t know yet how much of Matthias had been left in France and Belgium, didn’t know if the best part of him had been burned away in the hell he’d visited. I didn’t know yet if it was only a damaged piece of Matthias that had come home, damaged as bad as Sarah, only not so hard to look at.
In the rushes and long grass beside the one-person track, the swish of Matt’s feet was the only sound for a long time. And then he stopped again. At first I thought he was whispering, but it was singing he was, and he was singing the Canal Song, lines he and Con had made up one time to tease me. “My side, my side where girlie’s cheeks part for the fart of the onion she eats for breakfast. My side, my side where girlie’s smile beguiles Mad Meaney in his cart.” And then he was staring into the distance at nothing, the way your eyes sometimes take off on their own. He took a deep breath and sighed, “Jesus, Con.”
When we came to the Bridge, I followed the tug of Matt’s arm and we crossed over the Canal, steep climb up, steep climb down the other side, and then around the end of the parapet and down to the Towpath. Under the half-moon Bridge, Matthias stood on the coping stones looking down through the four feet of water where fish seldom swam because of the shade of the Bridge. Without stooping, he dropped his bag onto the shining granite. He slipped his jacket off his shoulder and let that fall to the ground too. Without caring where it landed, he knocked his cap off the back of his head. He sat down on the coping stones and lowered himself, boots and clothes and all, into the water. In the water, under the Bridge, facing away from me, Matt said something that got blurred in its own echo. What I heard him saying was, “Will you wash me, Kitty?”
I went around to the loose stone in the side of the bridge where we’d always hidden a bar of green Lifeguard, where I still kept one for washing myself in the dark during the summer.
When I came back, Matt was sitting on the bottom of the Canal, his nose between his thumb and finger. He looked up through the water and beckoned at me to come in with his other hand. That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t sure because I wasn’t sure of anything. When he surfaced, he rubbed the water away from his eyes and said, “Will you wash me, Kitty?”
He might as well have said, Will you marry me, Kitty? Will you be the mother of my children, Kitty?
I hesitated for a second about Sarah Hodgkins’s dress and the baggy blue knickers I was wearing under it, the only thing I was wearing under it. I started to look around and then I thought to myself, I don’t give a damn who sees me. I bent down to the hem of Sarah’s dress, pulled it up and over my head and let it fall on Matt’s bag. In a big splash I landed beside him, the bar of soap held tightly in my right hand.
Kitty Hatchel
In the clear water of the Canal I stripped Matthias and scrubbed him till he was as pink as a baby dripping over a steaming basin in its mother’s hands. With studied slowness Matt followed the directions I gave him through my fingertips and whispers. Every part of him I washed, and there was no response from his adult body.
“Lift your arms, Matt.”
“Close your eyes.”
I washed between his toes, behind his knees, between his legs back and front, all over his front and back, saw how the hair at his belly and under his arms was as grey as the hair on his head, softly poked my finger into the crevices of his ears, caressed his face with soapy fingers, imagined I was transferring healing strength to him when I pulled his face between my breasts and soaped the back of his neck.
When the cold got to us, I threw on my dress, left him sitting naked on the coping stones. I ran home for a towel and the work clothes he had left behind when he went off to join the army. Of course, Mammy and Daddy couldn’t figure out what was going on, me being away so long, no Matthias with me and my dress wet in some spots and dry in others. I said he’d gone for a swim, that we’d be home in a few minutes, and I flew back to the Bridge. I dried and dressed him as if he were a three-year-old. He didn’t speak.
Daddy and Mammy met us near the rosebush, and when they saw him, they stopped and gaped, Mammy bringing her hand to her face, unable to hide her shock at seeing how his body had aged and changed, the thinness of him, the greyness of him, the eyes of him. Matthias gaped at them, pursed his lips, and moved his head up and down as imperceptibly as a piece of blanket fluff stirring in the breath of a sleeping baby. He had the look of a man trying either to cry or not cry.
Daddy and Mammy went to him, linked their arms in his, and brought him into the house. On the wall below the high mantelpiece I had hung some of the sketches Matt had sent me. The most obvious one was of two stretcher-men, their backs to the artist, one end of their stretcher’s handles stuck into the mud between them, each man with an up-reached hand holding the handles. In the near distance was a standing cartwheel, its rim gone, the spokes like the rays of the sun in a child’s drawing. In the distance was a huge snipe with its beak sunk into the soft earth in search of food. But it wasn’t a snipe at all. It was an enormous gun on wheels that had been heeled up, its barrel buried in the black earth. It was Matt’s best, and I had always imagined the two stretcher-men were Matt and Con. Matt didn’t see his drawings, didn’t see anything, when Daddy and Mammy led him into the kitchen.
That first hour around the kitchen table—two rabbits, cabbage boiled and chopped fine and fried in butter, boiled potatoes, butter, and mugs of milk—was torture for everyone. Matthias did not speak. Daddy and Mammy made small talk and longed to hear about Con. I looked at him and wondered if he was home from the War at all. Here he was with the people who’d worried about him every second of every minute of every day for four years, and he had nothing to say. He owed us something in return for the suffering we had done for him, I thought. I was beginning to get cross with him.
As the small talk went on, I realized that Mammy, Daddy and I were trying to convince Matt that nothing had changed, that everything was the same as it was four years earlier. We grew silent.
While he nibbled absently at his food, Matthias stared into the far distance or the far past, or he could have been looking at the broken wheel and the snipe in the picture. When he put down the rabbit’s leg that he didn’t even know was a rabbit’s leg, his eyes fell onto his plate. Daddy and Mammy and I looked at each other, raised our eyebrows to each other in helplessness. The burning turf in the fireplace made noise as it fell down on itself, and without looking, I knew a cloud of white ash was floating up the chimney on the draft.
I dearly wanted to kneel on the floor beside Matt and press his head between my breasts like I’d done in the Canal. I wanted to give him anchorage, to convince him he was here, home in the kitchen, that the War was over, that we had become used to the idea that Con had died. But I couldn’t do that, could not be that intimate with him in front of Mammy and Daddy.
Because I couldn’t comfort Matthias physically, I frantically scoured around in my brain looking for something to say that would blow to pieces the dam that was blocking the flow of Matt’s words. I wondered if Con’s absence and Matthias’s presence were the two logs locking up everything behind them. And the more I thought of it, the more convinced I became this was the obstacle that needed removal.
I said, “Matthias,
you mustn’t think for one minute that Con’s death—”
But as the first words came out, Matthias moved his chair on the hard floor. The grating of the chair legs was as tooth-shaking as a nun’s fingernails on a blackboard trying to get another few letters out of a stub of chalk. The harsh sound not only cut off my words, it made the silence in the kitchen louder. And into this dark silence, Matthias launched three lifeless words: “I killed Con.” His eyes did not leave his plate.
Mammy reached out and put her hand on top of Daddy’s, and tears fell on the table in front of her. Daddy reached across the table and put his hand on Matt’s hand. “Don’t say that, Matthias,” he said. “It was the lad firing the gun who killed Con and not anyone else.”
More silence. No noise of collapsing fire, no sigh of wind in chimney. Immense silence. Mammy’s hand squeezing Daddy’s on the table, me with my eyes about to spill over. And I prayed that Matthias would go on, that he would say what he was trying to say and release us all.
He slowly pulled his hand from under Daddy’s. “I killed Con,” he said.
“Tell us, Matthias,” Mammy said. “Tell us why you think you killed Con so we can tell you that you didn’t. We have the letter—”
“The letter …” Matthias pursed his lips. He sounded like a man dredging words up out of a dark cloying hole. “I killed men to save them. Bundles of guts. A doctor showed me how.” I heard Mammy gasping. “I killed Con to save him from a firing squad.”
I heard Mammy and Daddy trying to keep Matt’s words away. I heard myself cry out.
Together, the three of us began to speak, but our voices faded into the silence before a sentence was completed. Mammy began to sob, did nothing to hide her face, sat there with her hand on Daddy’s hand, and did nothing to stifle the sounds welling up out of her. Daddy looked like he had aged twenty years. My throat was aching from keeping my crying controlled.
Daddy said, “Matt, how did you kill Con?” and in his tone was the knowledge that Matt had not physically killed Con, that Matt was blaming himself for something that indirectly caused Con’s death.
The way Matthias spoke made me think he was just saying words, that he wasn’t answering a question. “I killed Con with a knife over his fourth rib into his heart,” he said.
“No, Matt, no,” Mammy cried out. “No, Matt, don’t say that.”
Daddy put his arm around Mammy’s shoulder, but she drew away from him like she’d been burned. “Matt,” she cried loudly. “Matt, Matt, Matt. You loved him. You loved Con! ” she shouted, and her voice collapsed into the bawlings of a calf that can’t find its mother. Daddy had his hands clamped to the side of his head, looking like he was blocking out Mammy’s grief and Matthias’s words. But even if he’d been stone deaf, he would have heard the new wail that rose into the kitchen from the far side of the table.
Matthias’s face was screwed up in a terrible agony, his eyes sightless. His hands on the table were balled into blackthorn knobs, and out of his mouth was coming a sound that could only have been forged in hell; the sound of a million pieces that had been individually buried and hammered into compression for four long years; it was the sound of pain and agony and death and terror and sadness and starvation and boredom and fear and despair that had been compressed that was now escaping with the terrible admission of what he’d had to do to save his brother.
Like the blood-curdling braying of a donkey in distress on a dark night, the agony poured out of Matthias. His fisted hands shook on the tabletop, water ran from his sightless eyes and down his face into his twisted, fully open, unsightly mouth. His chin trembled like the chin of a singing woman holding on to a high note. He was completely gone into his own head, gone to the world, gone to us, gone back to the War. And he didn’t stop.
At last I did what I should have done an hour ago; I went to Matt, knelt on the floor beside him and held his upper arm. But I couldn’t control myself any longer, and my own years of worry for Matt, all the heart-twisting sadness for Con, for Mammy grieving Con, for Daddy grieving Con, all the pain and anger and sadness I’d kept locked up came loose and I got swept up into the release of Matt’s agony. But even when my grief had spent itself, Matthias was still crying the horrors out of his head. I pushed my arms around his chest, pulled my face into his side, and I felt the horrors convulsing up through his body, heard them roaring out through his mouth; he cried, he bellowed, he laughed, he sobbed, he whispered.
No person’s body and soul could endure such a cleansing for long, and gradually Matthias began to collapse. The braying slipped down into body-shaking sobs. And when the sobs eased still further, I saw Mammy kneeling on the floor at the far side of Matt’s chair, holding on to him. Daddy was kneeling behind the chair, his hands on Matt’s shoulders, his forehead pressed into the back of Matt’s neck. We knelt on the cold floor for a long time. The fire had gone out. The wick of the wall lamp began to smoke as it ran out of oil.
Daddy and Mammy almost carried Matthias into the room, Matt’s head resting on Daddy’s shoulder. While Daddy removed Matt’s clothes, Mammy came back to the kitchen, and we put our arms around each other, our heads on each other’s shoulders, neither of us crying, neither of us saying a word.
Daddy came back and wrapped his arms around the two of us. I had never felt this intimacy between us before. “We’ll never know how terrible it was. Even if he told us every detail we’d still not know.” Then after a while he said, “He’ll sleep for a week.”
When Matthias woke up after a day and a half, Paulie Bolger, the postman, had brought Billy Simkins’s second letter.
Billy Simkins
Dear Mrs. Hatchel,
My cousin, J. R. Lowndes, is writing this letter for me because he works in an office and he can spell better than me. I wrote the last letter myself.
I knew a chap in the War called Professor. He was one of the stretcher lads, as tough as six-inch nails. Before the army saw that I was smaller than Haig, we were billeted together once in Dicksmood, lying in a hay barn on the way back from Ocean Villas after a great wash with soap. This professor said it is a good thing to write to the family of soldiers we saw dying. Getting their address is the hard part, one of the lads said, and Professor said, no, the hard part is writing the letter, and a letter from a mate is better than an army letter that says nothing but “Killed in action.” But the real hard part, the professor said, is knowing what to leave out. If you saw a lad stuffing his guts back into his stomach there’s no need to put that in a letter.
I must have seen thirty lads getting killed if I saw one, and the last thing a few of them was doing when they died was stuffing their stomachs back in, or trying to hold them from sliding out any further. It wasn’t easy sometimes to look for a lad’s army book in the muck, with Gerry still firing his machine guns and a lad’s blood making your hands all slippy and the steam from his hot guts fogging up your glasses. Most times, in the end, the book in a pocket was falling apart with water and blood. I wrote to five families since the War ended and you are the last. My cousin, J. R. Lowndes, wrote them all, once I found out who to write to.
I got your address from Con that night in the cellar in Ocean Villas. The cellar was being used as a dressing station, but that night there was no fighting and no casualties were coming in. If you ever went to Ocean Villas and found the cellar, you’d find a picture cut into the plaster above the arch that once led to the stairs to go up into the house, but the house got blown away a long time before we got there. There’s a bridge in the picture and a river flowing under it and swans. The bridge was like a circle because you could see its shadow in the water. There was a little man standing on the bridge wall with his hands over his head like he was going to dive into the river. A frame was carved around the bridge and the river and the swans and the exact words under the picture are, In memory of Con H. 1918. He jumped off bridges and faced up to Haig. Your side was better, Con. I wrote them down on the inside of a Woodbine box, and my cousin, J. R. Lowndes, is loo
king at it right now along with the message Con wrote on it. I can tell you something, Mrs. Hatchel: Con H. did face up to Field Marshal Douglas Haig and told him a thing or two before the guards dragged him out of Haig’s parlour. How the picture of the bridge and the river and the swans and the writing got on the wall frightened all the lads and the nurses because the picture wasn’t there the night before, and Con was alive the night before so it had to be made in his memory after he died. A nurse said Con carved it himself after he died—his soul was so brave for facing up to Haig and telling him a thing or two. A lot of strange things happened in the War, like all the lads who saw angels with bows and arrows shooting out of the sky at the Germans to keep them back and to let our lads escape once near the start of the War. Some lads got saved because something their mothers gave them in their pockets stopped bullets, like little Bibles with the words so small nobody could read them except a midget.
I’m not good at telling things in a way that takes the hardness out of them. Like the professor said, I’m never sure what to leave out, but I can say at the start that I didn’t see Con getting shot, or blown up, or run over, or drowned, or dying of the flu, or stuffing his liver back into its place, nor his stomach, because none of those things happened to Con. I slept in the same cellar with your son on the night he died, but when the lads came in to get him at dawn he was dead beside me on the floor and this lieutenant was shouting at me for dereliction of duty because Con was dead. I got so twisted about the whole thing—Con dead and all, and he such a brave man—that I shouted at the lieutenant, “What difference is it that he’s dead in his sleep when you were going to shoot him when the sun rises?” Only I’d seen Con facing up to Haig the night before I wouldn’t have shouted at the lieutenant. But the lieutenant shouted back, “Dead in his sleep, my arse. Strip him.” The lads with the lieutenant didn’t move. Neither did the nurses, nor the orderlies, nor the few ambulance lads who’d been wakened out of the first good night’s sleep of their lives to hear this lieutenant shouting for someone to strip the clothes off Con. Then he shouted at his sergeant get down there and smell his mouth, meaning Con’s. The sergeant got down real slow like he had the pains of an old man in his knees. He put his nose near Con’s face and made a snuffle noise.