The Red Men

by Patrick McGinley

  He recalled being with Benedict McBride in the seminary library, going through a pile of books, listing recent accessions. Benedict opened a book on biblical iconography with a reproduction of a painting called ‘Christ and the Woman of Samaria’. The woman was standing beside the well, her left elbow resting on the rim of a water jug, her left breast covered and her right breast exposed, while Christ on the far side of the well, looking light-boned and serene, emphasised a point with the forefinger of his left hand.

  Benedict’s laughter was spontaneous and reckless.

  ‘The Old Testament is full of prurience,’ he said. ‘By comparison the N.T. is a vicarage tea party, yet painters keep putting prurience in.’

  ‘It’s just a rotten painting,’ Bosco said. ‘It’s the least truthful painting I’ve ever seen.’

  He left Benedict to the study of biblical iconography and went for a walk round the football field. It was a sleepy June afternoon, somehow remote and unreal like the woman in the painting, and he felt troubled and uncertain about the cause of his distress.

  Now he sprang off the bed and opened the New Testament at random. As usual he found Matthew 7:22:

  On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers.’

  He must have pondered that text a hundred times, yet only now did he realise fully the burden of doubt and loneliness it imposed. There was no need to go to Matthew, Isaiah had said it all before: ‘Truly thou art a God who hidest thyself, O God of Israel…’ Cookie had put it differently: ‘The Elusive Presence keeps religion alive as surely as Inexhaustible Meaning keeps art alive.’ And Joey, not to be outdone, added his own mite of mean-mindedness: ‘Father Bosco, never despair. As long as you have the Elusive Presence, you have a spiritual pork barrel.’ Even Gulban had wished for certainty, in his case absolute certainty. The most certain of men could not bear even the thought of either … or.

  He went down to the hallway to ring Pauline. He picked up the receiver and looked at it, not for the first time that week. Then he replaced it on its hook and climbed the stairs again.

  Chapter 30

  June brought three weeks of sunshine without a shower of rain. The hotel was busy. She no longer teetered on the edge of necessity; she had begun to feel that some time in the future she could go to her room and enjoy an hour of unhurried reflection now and again. The staff, too, seemed more relaxed and amiable. Even Slash Gildea, who in Gulban’s time pretended to have difficulty understanding her, now answered her questions as if she were almost his equal. Cookie wrote once or twice from Dublin and after a lengthy silence Father Bosco telephoned to say that he would be looking in the following week. She saw Joey every day, of course. Sometimes they had dinner together, and two or three times a week she paid a visit to the shop. Though melancholy and preoccupied, he never allowed his moods to interfere with his desire to please a customer.

  He had been pestering her to come out to the island – now his island and his alone. It had become for him a kind of retreat. On weekdays he would take the boat out in the evenings and not come back till dusk, and on Sundays he would leave after breakfast with enough food and drink to last the day. His reticence kindled her curiosity. She promised to accompany him one Sunday. She told him that she would prefer the morning but he was adamant that the evening was the best time. They would stand, he said, on the high ground at the south end and look back with the sun behind them in the west.

  ‘You’ll see things you’ve never seen before,’ he promised. ‘It’s like looking from a great height at someone else living your unlived life.’

  As they made their way down to the slip, seagulls were dozing on the rocks or perhaps watching through half-closed eyes a shiny-backed seal further out. She climbed gingerly into the boat and waited while he fiddled with the outboard. They cleared the sea-wall. The seal went under and did not appear again. She sat facing him, looking past his shoulder at the changing shape of the receding inlet. The soporific plup-plap of the water, not the boat itself, bore her away from the land, lulling her with the rhythms of prehistoric millennia, obliterating all that was commonplace and plain.

  ‘Pity it’s so calm,’ he said. ‘You need waves rising, coming at you right and left. I took Cookie out on a breezy day. It was lovely and choppy. I think he was glad to get back.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘He’s been called to higher things. Is he really bound for a professorial chair and a funny hat?’

  She was aware of his nonchalant scrutiny and of her own desire to avoid a serious conversation, to be at once circumspect and inconsequential.

  ‘He may feel he’d look funny in a funny hat. I think he’ll go to America and get a job in advertising.’

  ‘I read his thesis thinking I’d learn something about seduction. Nothing but dates and references and extracts from other theses. He himself is absent except on the title page where he gives his name as Thomas John Heron. It made me laugh.’

  ‘It sounds like a well-judged thesis.’

  ‘He’s too reticent. I once said to him in this very boat, just for the cod, that the sight of a rising wave gives me a yearning beyond earthly things towards something powerful and undisclosed. He didn’t say a word, just looked embarrassed. He lacks the courage of his finer feelings. Maybe his ambition is not to stand at a lectern and wear a funny hat but to be another Jack.’

  ‘If he’s lucky, he’ll achieve both.’

  ‘Anyhow he’s upped and left. Fort Knox is closed and padlocked. Maybe it was all a game. Maybe he was only interested in the name or the two words that make up the name. He was once saved by a word, you know. Told me so himself. After Alicia’s death he went down to the cliffs and stood on the edge with the water straight below. He was thinking of taking the leap when he remembered some lines from his school anthology:

  Farewell, ye opening heavens!

  Look not on me thus reproachfully –

  You were not meant for me – Earth! take these atoms!

  It was the word “Earth” that saved him. If it had been “Ocean”, he’d have gone over.’

  Joey laughed and she looked at him uneasily. Did Cookie want to be Jack or did Joey want to be Cookie? She felt relieved when they entered the cool shadow of the island. It was the end of an uneasy journey. Joey tied up and ran excitedly to the top.

  ‘Now look back at the headland and tell me what you see,’ he said breathlessly.

  ‘I see what I know to be there: the hill, the village, Fort Knox and the hotel. They’ve shrunk in size.’

  ‘I want you to look at them as if you were seeing them for the last time. It’s the only way you’ll ever see them as they are – or have become.’

  ‘There’s no movement anywhere. The sheep on the hill are still.’

  ‘When you look at the hotel, what do you think of?’

  ‘Gulban, who else? It’s solid, solitary and gloomy just like him.’

  ‘I always think of the winter months when we were children playing tag and hide and seek in the empty bedrooms. Do you still remember that?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’

  ‘It’s over, it will never happen again.’

  ‘It may to other children.’

  ‘Isn’t that what’s so unbearably sad?’

  ‘I’d like to walk round the island. Pity to come out here just to look back.’

  ‘There isn’t much else to see. Rabbits, rocks, birds, the lighthouse winch. The lighthouse itself is padlocked like Fort Knox. The paintwork is flaking. I can never understand how it gleams so white from the land.’

  ‘I’ve brought my binoculars. I hope to spot one or two birds I’ve never seen before.’

  ‘I’m going down to the boat, I’ll come back for you later. There’s no way we can miss each other here.’

  She crossed to the seaward side and sat
on the edge of a bank with noisy sea birds coming and going below, self-important messengers who seemed not to realise that they’d forgotten their messages. The low sun hurt her eyes. She lay on her back with one arm over her forehead, aware of release from long imprisonment and the promise of excitement that comes from the governance of possibilities. She lost touch with earth, sky and water. She woke with a start as Joey spoke. The ground seemed to yield beneath her. She reached out a hand to assure herself of its solidity.

  ‘I have something to show you, a rare and haunting place.’

  He led her to a hollow between two upright slabs of rock, a kind of bowl with grassy sides that could have been formed with a single scoop of an enormous ladle.

  ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it? Not a blade stirs here, even on a windy day.’

  ‘It looks man-made.’

  ‘What does it remind you of?’

  ‘A punchbowl.’ She smiled as if to humour him.

  ‘Remember the little hollow by the river? You and Cookie imagined it was a post office. You used to leave letters for each other under a flat stone. I got to know about it, though I wasn’t meant to … Sometimes I used to read them and forge messages of my own.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘I’m not making it up.’

  ‘People recall different things.’

  ‘What do you remember?’

  ‘Getting tar on my first communion dress and a roasting from my mother when I went home. I think it was all your fault,’ she smiled.

  ‘Even then there were traumas.’

  ‘There was certainly pain.’

  ‘We could have survived pain, ordinary pain. We were blighted, all of us, including you. There’s a curse on us, and Gulban knew it. He thought it started with short measure in the shop.’

  ‘He was imagining things towards the end.’

  ‘At least he had imagination. An hour ago you looked across the Sound at the hotel. You must have seen a mound of dust.’

  ‘We have to carry on. It was Gulban’s wish. He knew that in the bombardment of life new pains drive out the old.’

  ‘How can you go on? Don’t you want to say, “I’ve had enough. Fini. Kaput. I’m baling out.”’

  He was shaking with emotion, the pale side of his face almost as red as the other. She tried to move away from him, then realised that they were together in the narrow hollow.

  ‘We’ve all got responsibilities and we mustn’t shirk them,’ she said.

  ‘Have we got imagination? Cookie can’t see beyond his dry-as-dust thesis, and the most profound question Bosco’s ever asked himself is: “Has the Recording Angel stamped my cards?” No one sees the nightmare. You all think it’s morning again with a day of sanity and sunlight to come. Don’t kid yourself. You can’t put the horrors of the night behind you by burying your head in work. You’ll never look in the mirror again without seeing another face beneath the skin. Look at my face! Two faces in one. The only difference between mine and yours is that in mine half the real face has been exposed. And the nightmare continues. Nightmares, I should say. Yours and mine, interlocking circles closed to the outer world. And no morning. No sanity. No confidence. No light.’

  ‘You’ve been under strain for the best part of a year. You need a holiday – peace and quiet to readjust.’

  ‘A holiday! Surely, you’re not as simple-minded as that. Don’t you realise? It was I who came to your bed in the night. The night of the 1st of April, to be precise. As if you didn’t know! And if you didn’t, who did you think it was? Slash Gildea?’

  ‘I remember it as a kind of dream, or a continuation of a dream. I certainly don’t blame you, and neither do I blame myself. We couldn’t conceivably have known.’

  ‘Dream, my eyeball. I once thought that lack of feeling was the best armour for life. Now I know nothing compares with self-delusion. Just think, from now on you’ll have to struggle against your experience every day, as if it were an enemy to be overcome.’

  ‘For me there’s nothing new in that.’

  ‘Then all I can say is that you are invulnerable.’

  ‘I think you exaggerate my capacity for what you call self-delusion.’

  ‘I always liked to think that you and I were close to each other in a different way from the others. Not just because of the fire, though that was how it began. When I asked you out here today, I thought that neither of us would be going back. I drafted a will for you to sign, leaving the hotel, shop and farm to our beskirted brother Father Chrome-Dome, and I made another will myself leaving this island to Professor Cookie. There was to be no coercion, no attempt at persuasion; I had hoped that you’d feel exactly as I do. I had imagined us getting into the boat together just before sunset, having first pinned our wills on the lighthouse door. We’d face out behind the island, and as light failed we’d go down as brother and sister in the spot that Gulban had chosen for himself. Well, I’ve said enough, I must leave you now. You won’t be joining me. I’ll make what’s left of the journey on my own.’

  ‘You can’t do it. It’s madness, madness, don’t you see?’

  ‘We see things differently. For me there is a problem, for you there is none. I’ve listened to the weather forecast, it will be a dry night. You’ll be safe here till morning. They’re bound to miss us by bedtime, and they’ll be out to look for you with first light.’

  ‘Don’t do it, Joey, please. Can’t you see it sets nothing right.’

  ‘I can see there’s no need to set you right. You’re as certain as Gulban was in his prime.’ His lower jaw trembled compulsively as he laughed.

  ‘Don’t just think of yourself. Think of Father Bosco and Cookie, and think of me. You mustn’t imagine you’re alone.’

  She followed him down the slip, tugging at his sleeve and talking wildly to take his mind off his obsession. He did not listen, he did not seem to hear. He stripped and heaped his pullover, shirt and trousers on a rock.

  ‘You may need those after the sun goes down. I’m keeping on my underpants out of brotherly delicacy – a trifle late. There’s my will. The island and my gross of French letters will be Cookie’s. What I have, I don’t desire; what I desire, I cannot have.’

  ‘Joey,’ she implored. ‘Put on your clothes. We’ll go back to the hotel and neither of us will speak of this again.’

  ‘Isn’t that why I’m doing a bunk? Because no word is ever spoken. Find something to quest for that can’t be found. Only that will keep you going. There’s nothing else. And next time you see Father Chrome-Dome ask him which of his two Gods has done this to us – the Old Bugger of the Old Testament or the Young Bugger of the New. I’m sure he’s already worked out the answer and offered Mass in thanksgiving.’

  He got into the boat. She stood on the sloping concrete, no longer trying to restrain him.

  ‘I’ll head due west. When the petrol gives out, I’ll go for a swim.’

  The engine stuttered and wheezed. She prayed for it not to start.

  ‘You’ll never know how much I envy you,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve always wanted to spend a night to morning here. You were born lucky. You’ll see the great beam sweeping the bay and never notice the darkness at the foot of the lighthouse.’

  The engine caught. Inexplicably, he took off with a bound for the mainland. She held both hands to her mouth and called. She felt like crying. She could not believe that this was his idea of a joke. The engine seemed to smother. The stern skidded sideways with the port gunwale low over the water. The engine roared again as he faced the bows out to sea.

  Breathlessly, she ran up the slope and across the island to the spot where earlier she had slept. He was already there below her, heading straight into the setting sun, his furrowed wake quickly unfolding as if smoothed by an invisible harrow. He stood in the stern in his blue underpants with one hand shielding his eyes, and never once looked back.

  Further out the water was a gilded pond. As he entered the pond, the boat became a gilded tub with a flagless flagpole
in the centre. She found it difficult to look directly into the glare. The tub seemed to lose its form. Within minutes the sun itself had lost half its light. It had become a dimly glowing ball behind a haze of cloud which thickened into an opaque, blue rack below. The precise edge of the ball melted into the haze. It slipped and slipped. She scanned the darkening water for a sign of the vanished boat. Black spots danced before her eyes. Her gaze returned to the sun, now a tiny arc which was soon to become a shapeless blob above the bank of cloud. Again she sought the boat. The sun had finally vanished. All that was left of it in the west was a feint red line which slowly faded into the overwhelming blue. The sea below was a flat and empty plain.

  She remembered her binoculars. She focused with the left eye, then with the right. She swept the blankness in front of her. All was melting shadow. She could not be sure what, if anything, there was to see.

  After a while she turned and made her way down to the slip to fetch his clothes. She stood on the high ground waving his pullover in the air at the houses across the Sound whose windows faced the sea. Darkness gathered in from the east. Shapes grew blurred, houses merged with rocks, and finally the solid hotel itself seemed to steal back off the rise into the shadowy moor behind. The lighthouse lantern had already begun to cast its beam against the advancing night.

  She thought she might spend the night in the shelter of the lighthouse wall, then it occurred to her that the grassy punchbowl would be less exposed. The air had already cooled, a steady breeze came off the land with an edge that made her hunch her bare shoulders. She put on Joey’s pullover over her dress and curled up under the standing slab whose surface now felt warmer than the grass. After a while she sat with her back against the slab, counting single stars advancing and retreating, piercing and fading, in the gloom above. It wasn’t quite eleven; morning and light were still five hours away. The beam of the lighthouse swept the blankness above. One, two, three… she counted slowly until it came round again.

  She closed her eyes, her ears now open to the faintest sound. She could hear rustling and nibbling, and the lisping of water over round stones. She kept thinking of Joey, of his thin, pale legs and flat belly, of his triangular shoulder-blades protruding through hairless skin. He had said that she and he were close. ‘Deep’ would have been a better word. They stirred each other in their secret selves. Each knew how to wound and be wounded, yet show no knowledge of a wound given or received. The feelings one evoked in the other had nothing to do with affection or love. She could never look at his face without a sense of physical withdrawal, a shirking from something in herself as well as in him, and he never looked at her squarely, but always furtively as if looking were taboo. He was not a half-brother. He was a twin-brother who sensed her every change of mood and feeling, and that was something she could only resent. Now that he had gone, she had become aware of an alarming lightness in her head.