by Paul Butler
Kathleen didn’t reply. I heard the tramp-tramp of my own feet and I glanced to see her keeping pace, her face thoughtful and preoccupied.
“He left as did every young man of his village who was able. The countryside was littered with the dead and dying. Meanwhile the English were transporting our butter and beef in carts through the same countryside, loading it onto boats for London.”
Was I hitting my mark? She was Irish. She had lived in London. I wanted to weave a common web of experience between the two of us, and I wanted her to see inside me, into the part of me she might understand. Kathleen was still silent, waiting for more. A lone cow stared at us with a glassy, distrustful eye.
“When my father went to England, he built the canals and the railways. He worked sixteen-hour days in factories. Like the rest of the Irish, he stoked the fires for the British Empire, and on a good day he even earned enough for a straw bed, a blanket and a crust of dry bread for his pains.” Mosquitoes buzzed around my ankles and I continued to talk. Words burned my lips with their heat, emerging into the attentive air. Kathleen made no sound at all and I felt sure she was taking it in. “When there was a strike in some neighbouring town, they would use the Irish to break it. If we refused, we would lose what little we had. When there was a riot, they would round us up and throw us into cells. No matter the cause, no matter who was to blame, the strap of the police would leave its mark on our backs.”
We fell into silence again. As we were coming close to the Freshwater Road and the farm, I slowed down. I didn’t want to go there and let Norris or Ryan see Kathleen. They would infect everything with their smirks.
“I don’t understand,” she said quietly. “You told me you grew up here.”
“And so I did.”
“Ah,” she said, realizing something. We had stopped at a parched-looking willow. Kathleen prodded the toe of her shoe into the dust, then she looked out toward the O’Brien farm and folded her arms. “The way you were talking I thought you were describing your own life, not your father’s.”
“Of course!” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “Do you think it’s over? Do you think that past isn’t woven into the mind and heart of every Irishman?” In my passion I had begun to wave my arms in the air and circle around her while I talked. She threw me a look of warning, eyes flitting toward a distant figure with a shovel who had turned to look. I checked to make sure it wasn’t O’Brien or young Ryan. It wasn’t and I was past caring about anyone else. “Do you think I can’t see it in the eyes of the people here? Do you think they can’t see it in mine? Those men on the church steps for instance. What makes them feel so superior? What was it about me that made them confident when it came to laying their paws all over me?”
“That you’re Irish?” she replied, her face a picture of confusion. “Is that what you’re saying? What are they, then, if they are going to a Catholic Mass?”
I stopped, leaned back against the willow trunk, and sighed. It seemed as though she had found an obvious fault line running through my whole argument. But I knew this was only because I had started from the wrong place. I shook my head again as though talking to a slow child.
“Irish,” I said. “What’s Irish? It’s just a word. It’s lived experience that counts, and I can tell just by looking that theirs is different from mine. It’s generations of misery and defeat, generations pushed from our own land. It’s the repetition, the hopelessness. It’s being unable to claw your way out, until defeat and fury is all you have left to pass on.”
She seemed to come a little closer, her sun-dazzled eyes half closed yet trying to comprehend me. “But there’s so much beauty in life too,” she said. “Why close your eyes to it?”
I gave a sharp laugh, and she looked at me askew again, distrusting.
“So that’s it then,” she said. “That’s what you intend to do with your life? Pass out through drink, be discovered during the day in a crumpled heap, and then blame it all on . . . what? The hunger? The English? Your bloodline?”
The trunk prickled my back and my face burned a little. She could argue me into the ground, I could see that now. But a new and urgent question was arising. What could I offer this woman as an alternative to the vision of me she had just presented? I thought about the “fit” again, but my outburst had already made that claim absurd. My gaze fixed first upon the dust around my shoes, then at the toenail poking through the leather.
“It’s never happened before,” I mumbled. Shame stiffened my face. “I won’t let it happen again.”
A breeze shifted through the leaves. I looked up and saw she was breathing in deeply and smiling, her hands upon her hips. A soft gust played with a loose strand of her hair, and the sunlight revealed faint freckles on the ridge of her nose. Something inside me dipped like a ship at sea and then rose up again in the swell. That there was a pit inside me deeper than any well, more sulphurous than any nightmare, was a knowledge I had carried forever. But this woman who seemed to accept those things about me had just given me a glimpse of another world. Was she really leading me to a joy more potent than all my familiar miseries? The well inside me gaped and the sulphur hissed but I could feel a tremulous change; these things were not as indomitable as I had thought them.
“Why don’t you start with a gesture,” she said brightly, “something that can mark a new life, a new way of living?”
“Like what?” I asked hoarsely.
“If you muddy a man’s shoes with your cart, don’t you go and apologize to him?”
I tried to recall the man whose shoes I might have muddied. All I could think of was those hypocrites outside the church. I hadn’t got close enough to harm their shoes or any other part of them. I stared at Kathleen blankly.
“The priest of the Cathedral,” she said coming closer. “Why don’t you present yourself to him and say you regret the disturbance you caused?”
Hot blood rushed straight to my head and swirled around like a tropical storm. “No,” I said circling Kathleen afresh. “No, I can’t do that. I’ll change everything like you say, but I won’t go crawling to the priest.”
Kathleen tipped her head and viewed me closely. Her expression was still kind but I could tell she was disappointed.
Eight
Kathleen
My heart jolted, as it always did now, at the sound of the doorbell. I turned off the tap and started drying my hands, but Mrs. Stevens called out for me not to mind it. I turned on the tap again and went back to the supper dishes. Soon, through the spray of the tap and the gurgle of the sink, I heard the shifting of heavy equipment from the hallway and an attendant flutter of excitement from Louisa and her mother.
“We should draw the curtains, Mother,” Louisa insisted, then after a muffled reply added, “yes, Dr. Glenwood said so.”
“Go ahead then, dear,” came the breathless permission.
Mrs. Stevens had been in a state of high agitation all day, talking incessantly about “Dr. Glenwood’s experiment,” as she called it. Eventually the mood of anticipation encircled Louisa too. The floorboards began to resound with her heavy footfalls. One moment she would come upon me chattering. The next she would disappear without warning. Over and over she asked about Dr. Glenwood’s equipment, what it had looked and sounded like, whether the living room was really as brightly lit yesterday as I had claimed. Each time she went away to think about it only to return once more, not satisfied with the details, believing that more insight could be gathered if only my descriptions were more precise.
She didn’t mention the music box, or my own misadventures with Tommy Fitzpatrick. I was relieved that it all seemed happily buried. But I wondered what I would say if she asked me about Tommy now. Would I lie and repeat my opinion of last night, that I had been foolishly unguarded? How could I explain to myself, let alone her, the change that had come over me since this morning? Tommy, after all, was wo
rse than I thought him, not better. Not only was he a thief; he was also a drunkard. He must surely be known by now to all and sundry for being dead to the world through an excess of liquor, on a Sunday morning too. How could I justify the fact that today’s experience had made me want his company not less, but more?
I missed the sound of the music box. A sad ghost of the once jaunty melody had been weaving through the silence all day. Whenever the floorboards groaned, I heard those opening notes. The ditty sang in the pipes whenever I filled the bucket for scrubbing. Now as the water gurgled from the sink into the drain, I heard it again. Slower and with an added, falling strain, the tune seemed to plead for a life that had been quieted.
I knew what it meant. Tommy was in the music; it was he for whom I was yearning. We were like neighbouring plants in a garden; roots beneath the surface had begun twisting and merging together. I had denied him once, last night with Louisa. I knew I could not deny him again.
I was motionless for a moment, watching the dripping tap. There was a scamper of feet from the hallway and suddenly the door flew open behind me. I looked around to see Louisa red-faced and excited. “He’s ready, and he wants you to see it too.”
_____
Dr. Glenwood was very close to my back; I could hear his restless breathing while he tinkered behind his machine. There was no curtain around it now, but I could tell from the tripod stand and the clicking noises that this was the same device he had used yesterday. Unlike yesterday, the room was enveloped in an unearthly darkness. My soul was fluttering in the centre of this gloom; I could imagine my heart, red, exposed, and luminous like the heart of Jesus in a stained glass chapel window in the Church of the Holy Name in Dublin.
It was a likeness of myself I was about to see, after all, a large one by the size of the screen and the pale, wavering light that fell upon it. I had seen a photograph of my face before, a faint little blur among a hundred such blurs in the school photograph. And the photograph, hanging in the central hall, was also one among many. I was a speck within a speck. Yet it had made me self-conscious. I could detect the uncertainty in my expression, the large staring eyes, and the too-open mouth. The image had caught me when I believed I could stay hidden. It still unnerved me how the camera had uncovered my rawness.
And now this intrusiveness was to be magnified a thousand times over. Dr. Glenwood had told me yesterday that I was upon the stage. But this was worse than any theatre because no actress had to witness her own performance as others see it. It was all so intrusive. Already I could feel minute observation closing in.
Skirts rustled to my left and Louisa whispered something to her mother and was told to shush.
“It won’t be long now,” Dr. Glenwood intoned in a singsong voice. “The all-seeing eye has captured the images of last night . . .” he went quiet for a moment while he adjusted something. The shaft of light moved up and down on the screen, and then intensified into a bright, clear oblong, “. . . now we shall all see together what happens when we burn a strong light through a series of those images.” He coughed and stepped out from behind this machine, his thick fingers clutching a wrench.
“You should all understand,” he announced in a voice more fit for an auditorium than a living room, “that what’s different about tonight, ladies . . . and,” he coughed slipping his fingers up and down the wrench, “. . . ladies, is this: for some while now photographers such as myself have been striving to string together many pictures taken in rapid succession, and to view these photographs one after another so that they may recreate movement.” He waited for a moment, his gaze skipping passed us as though aware that the content had failed to match the grandeur of his delivery. “The sensation may remind you of a magic lantern show. But this is not a mere parade of devils and spirits.” He paused and then pressed on with suddenly renewed determination. “Indeed, this is the birth of an entirely new art form, one that sees not with the impressions of an artist, not with the inherent frailties of the human hand and eye. The camera sees the world as God sees it, using God’s own medium: light.”
There followed the sudden hush of complete attention.
Dr. Glenwood nodded and returned to his position behind us. As he leaned over his machine, a rush from his hot breath played upon my ear; I realized how nervous he was and tried to ease my discomfort by thinking of his. Then the machine began its familiar rhythmic clicking.
And there it was in front of me: a huge, bright flickering image of a woman, a creature unknown to myself except for a passing resemblance to a face I had seen in the mirror. Her eyes were too far apart in a face too trusting, and she was sitting in Mrs. Stevens’s good chair. Like that dim school photograph from long ago, it disoriented me, made me question who I was. But this was so much worse. The image was so huge and clear, so much more exposed.
Then those eyes moved.
I didn’t know whether the gasp came from Louisa, Mrs. Stevens or myself, but my stomach turned in queasy rebellion. Why should I be so horrified by this? I had known this would happen. I had even heard before Dr. Glenwood’s speech that photographs could be spun into moving images. Yet I was not prepared. This was my own living spirit before me. My heart pounded and my hair roots tingled in preternatural shock.
The figure of Dr. Glenwood now walked into the bright picture, his movements disjointed and unnatural. The silken sheet was in his hands. He seemed to stare straight at us for a moment. I had to glance behind to make sure the real Dr. Glenwood was still in the room. Only after I caught a glimpse of his glassy stare did I notice the weight of his hand upon my shoulder; had he sensed my discomfort?
The sheet was thrown with a stage magician’s flourish over the woman – myself – covering her entirely. I tried to feel companionship in Dr. Glenwood’s tightening hand, but his fingers began to tremble on my collarbone, and one of his nails dug hard into my flesh. Perhaps it had all become too much for him too, I thought, and considered whether I should lay my hand on his. I refrained, however, sensing such an action would be frowned upon by Mrs. Stevens, and rightly so. I wondered at my own loss of judgment.
The figure of Dr. Glenwood had moved out of the picture now; the chair and sheet only remained. Then he returned and strode behind the chair, lifting the corners of the sheet. But I was distracted from the screen. The real Dr. Glenwood had begun breathing very rapidly and the trembling of his hand had become more pronounced.
I sat up straight, loosening Dr. Glenwood’s hold, and fixed my eyes on the image before me. With a slight bow at his imaginary audience, Dr. Glenwood pulled away the sheet.
There was a scream from Louisa and a shocked exclamation from Mrs. Stevens. From Dr. Glenwood there came a strange moan like that of an animal in pain then a series of soft gasps. The screen went blank.
I looked across at Louisa; her hand was over her mouth and her eyes wide open. Mrs. Stevens shook her head in disbelief.
Dr. Glenwood’s fingers were gone from my shoulder at last, but their imprints remained, sending a tingling pulse of confusion all through me. I tried to make sense of what I had seen. He had pulled away the sheet and I had not been there. In my place, with skull tilted to the side, bony hands upon its “lap,” had sat a complete human skeleton.
“Dr. Glenwood!” Mrs. Stevens exclaimed, recovering her breath.
Dr. Glenwood was oddly stooped, beads of sweat glistening upon his forehead. “Ladies,” he said closing his eyes between each deep-drawn breath. “You must give me a moment to recover.”
“Dr. Glenwood,” Mrs. Stevens persisted, turning in her chair. Her voice was as stern as I had ever heard it. “I am speechless.”
Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, Dr. Glenwood dabbed his forehead and smiled. “Thank you ladies,” he said apparently quite oblivious to Mrs. Stevens’s tone. He seemed utterly drained, like a man emerging from a fever. “This is nothing, nothing compared to what this mechanism can perf
orm when it is further developed.”
Mrs. Stevens turned to her daughter whose trembling hand slowly lowered from her mouth, her eyes still fixed on the blank rectangle of light. Then she looked at me. Her gaze fell to the carpet for a moment.
“So this,” she began quietly, “is the world as God sees it, Dr. Glenwood?”
Dr. Glenwood had stooped toward his machine. There was a squeaking noise as of a stiff handle being turned. Slowly the light on the screen began to dim.
“Pestilence, plague, famine, and fire, Mrs. Stevens,” he said, each word a soft moan. “Are these curses not the backdrop of all creation?”
“I had always believed, Dr. Glenwood, it was Satan, not God, who sent blights upon the earth.”
Dr. Glenwood’s damp head emerged from behind the machine, and he looked at his hostess in some distress. “It is a much-debated theological argument, my dear cousin.”
Mrs. Stevens took Louisa’s hand and they stood up together. “We’ll leave you to pack up your things, Dr. Glenwood,” she said coldly. “It was certainly most enlightening, but hardly fit entertainment for Louisa and my maid.”
She led Louisa from the room and I followed behind closely, my neck prickling with the recent memory of Dr. Glenwood’s hot breath.
Tommy
I waited in silence. It was cool beneath this high-domed ceiling, and there was a tingle in the soft breeze that had somehow made its way into the Cathedral. I had begun my journey, I told myself. In the act of washing, combing my hair, dragging these reluctant limbs to the very place of this morning’s humiliation, I had set in motion something remarkable. I could feel a faint rumbling in the ground and my lungs were awakened to a timeless austerity in the very atmosphere.
Religion was full of wretches such as I. Even the hymns attested to the inclusive power of redemption. Christianity prided itself on the hardcases. The fall from the horse, the blinding light. If I were to become the most pious and respectable man in this city, it would not be without precedent. I would be one among many, brought low only to be saved.