The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘Right, right, Eneas,’ says Jonno, veritably trembling he must be by the rattle of his hands. ‘You think you’re calling the tune. Fair enough. You’ve called it. You come from a family of fluteplayers. By the power vested in me by the council of Sligo …’

  ‘Them road workers, do you mean, Jonno?’

  ‘By the power,’ says Jonno, leaning up the path towards him, lifting at last the weight of his task in the sight of God, spitting the words, ‘in-fucking-vested in me, I order you, Constable Eneas McNulty, to quit this town and this district and this country by nightfall of tomorrow night and I put you under pain of fucking death if you do not, my bucko. And O’Dowd says to tell you, sweetie boy, if you step foot back on Irish soil, you’re a dead man from that day out, if ever you try to see your people again or your town or your feckin girl or whatever you like, Eneas, we’ll kill you. You can get up as early as you like, don’t think we didn’t know all your movements, we’ll have you. And even if you get away from us, we’ll follow you, and we’ll kill you, and just like that Reprisal Man it don’t matter how long it takes us, we’ll do it, for the honour of old Ireland and her heroic dead. Got me, boyo? Pain of death.’

  ‘Pain of fucking death. What a way with words.’

  But Eneas’s heart is sore, very dark and sore. Pain of death, pain of death. Hatred, we hate you, Sligo hates you.

  ‘Go on, then, Jonno, me lad. Tell your comrades how you did with me. You can have your Sligo to yerselves. I won’t linger. Sure there’s nothing here for me now. You can tell them that. You can tell them that I said they were a pack of fuckers.’

  ‘Right so,’ says Jonno, in a lighter tone, inappropriate as ever. He has reached the gate and maybe he thinks things have gone worse than badly. Who can tell? Not Eneas. And he knows Jonno knows that his crowd wouldn’t have touched him with a bargepole if he’d wanted to join the great revolutionaries, because of his stint in the Merchant Navy. Or he’d have had to shoot some poor bastard even then to prove his loyalty to the heroic ideals they cherished. Jesus. There was going to be a lot of shooting for them to do now. Maybe Jonno didn’t fancy shooting his old pal at this bridge of life, like your man, Ferdia, and the other man, Cuchullain, in the old story. Maybe he was sent out to shoot him, with the little gun in his waistcoat. Jesus, a lot of bodies in old Ireland right enough. Jonno lingers at the gate for a moment. As if in two minds, as if having second thoughts. Or maybe just to shoot him now there and then and be done with it.

  ‘You didn’t leave anything behind, Jonno? Like your hat — or your feckin honour?’

  So he is gone then Jonno and it is all done. It is the high road out of here for him now. Pain of death. There is nothing humorous about it. No. He sits on at the door of his father’s old shed with the ruined vista of grass and hollyhocks. He shakes his head against some weird laughter that rises in him. Guns, murders, reprisals, friendships in ruins, loves destroyed. What a way to live a life. Now he laughs in his chair. He has to laugh. Pain of death. He wishes he had been more astute with Jonno, and reasonable, but maybe it would have come to the same damn thing. One curse borrows another. It is no use sending a boy to do a man’s job and it is no use sending a friend with the phrase pain of death to deliver, certainly.

  But he knows that O’Dowd fella only too well, and it disturbs him immensely that O’Dowd has expressed anew, so clearly, so officially, a keenness for his extinction. The proof if proof were needed of his madness was the way O’Dowd had spoken to his Mam. O’Dowd is a mad bastard certainly, an auctioneer and as such a very dangerous person, used to getting his way and highly practised in the arts of the despot. And it would surprise you sometimes that Collins tolerates men like him when Collins is supposed to be so fair, so normal, so statesmanlike — ruthless maybe, but fair. Many of the police in the old days admired Collins even though they were fighting him but you’d have to be very short of heroes and on half-rations mentally to admire the murdering likes of O’Dowd. Funny to think now that men of O’Dowd’s ilk are driving the pony and trap of Ireland. Of course, if you need murders done you have to have murderers to do them, that’s plain. And now the true effect of Jonno’s words reaches him, strikes him, the vial of darkness opens in his heart, he is fixed and queerly shot by it in the chair made out of an orange box from Venezuela. An asylum, the whole of Sligo is an asylum now.

  The hints of summer dark begin to change the old garden. The colour is being robbed out of the hollyhocks. First the lighter blooms are taken, and as the evening goes on minute by minute the darker ones, the purples and inky reds, are vanishing. At the last Eneas himself will softly vanish, softly vanish into the blackened canvas of his father’s paradise.

  PART TWO

  9

  IT IS A LONG TIME before he reappears as himself, if he ever does. In the meantime he is crossing the poor sea to England on a cheap ticket in the cattle boat, so called as a measure of the comfort and dignity afforded the emigrants thereon. He has suffered privately, severely, on the late train out of Sligo across Ireland, but despite everything he said goodbye fleetingly to his siblings, getting an unexpected kiss and prayer from Teasy, impregnable and absolute with her fourteen years. The kiss of his Mam and the different kiss of his Pappy both were similar sparks on his face, smouldering there he suspects with eternal intent, and even Young Tom and Jack embraced him uncharacteristically, all angles and bones — at close of day and end of all their own eldest brother. And there was a class of shriving in that moment of leaving, simplifying, a feeling he would have liked to carry with him at least as far as the blowing lights of the station. But it was not to be. In the carriage he dwindled like a spud fallen and forgotten behind the kitchen press. He talked at himself all night, the mails and parcels jostling in the secure van behind him.

  Now he lies in the night packet to Holyhead amid the great bunks of three and four men each, the starlight closed to the sleeping minds by the tiers of iron decks. There’s a tide of breathing, the different sorts of men a-dream you would think in unity. He watches the fishes of stray lights that wander the inky ceiling. At the rim of his composure wrestled from his hours mumbling on the train, there are Godless monkeys of fright, kept back maybe by the mountainous smell of feet and sweat. Safe among strangers, young, adrift, and in his homeplace hated. He can hear the enormous engine labouring nearby in the metal bowel of the boat. Now and then a passenger passes in the corridor with a lamp, coming down from the crowded halls or the wooden decks, moving across the streaming darkness. The tips of objects in the cabin are illuminated, golden, as if the cabin was a tomb of sorts, with precious swords and bowls put in to help the dead on their journey. But they are only the handles and edges of worn cases, or the metal attachments of workboots strung up on the bunks like onions.

  Under the fragments of swimming light he lies close to three other men, sharing the ample bunk, two fellas from Donegal and another lad with a young wife in the women’s cabin. The three are pleasantly sleeping, a little curled against each other for peace and warmth, though the cabin is not cold. Perhaps it is that the journey itself is cold, in its nature and necessity. He has a sense somehow of the waters beneath him, with whatever fish are favoured by the Irish Sea toiling, travelling also, and if his fears are Godless, all the same he prays to God that He might be perched above them after all, tremendous and impartial in the enamelled stars. He prays to his God that he might be rescued or, like those decrepit pens they used to find on their desks at the start of each school year, be given a fresh nib. The young husband stirs at his side, turns heavily, and throws a leg over him, and a long arm falls gently across Eneas’s breast. He falls deep into sleep, deeper than the sea, down the long narrow well of dreams and explanations. The packet goes on in its bowl of weight, the bothered waves only tipping at, parting for, the iron prow.

  England suffers the affliction still that brought the Tans to Ireland, there is work to be had almost nowhere, and the flotsam of men and women without employments spreads everywhere, pushed by
the shallow sea of need. As he moves from town to town, as much a ghost as any English drifter, he marvels at the condition of the old Promised Land. For an Irishman might affect to hate England and love America, but they are both and were ever equal refuges to him. The towns seem to be rotting at the edges, like lost villages of the West of Ireland. Even the King cannot cure this palsy. The King is much talked of though, as a man suffering in spirit with the forlorn multitudes. He is seen in his dark suits here and there, commiserating, gripping hands, his face furrowing and darkening. He is like a creature going black from being underground, you can see him a little agape and peculiar in the newspaper, should a newspaper happen to blow by your feet. And all the clockwork and rightness of England is hurt and bloodied. And Eneas knows it is the war that did it, England has broken herself for those fields of France.

  Maybe he sees England now through his pall of grief, his mantilla of bitterness. Truth to tell, as he sits betimes at some scored table in a charitable hall, listening to the sermons of sin and death and taking his stew, he is not a singing man, nor a light man. At such times the metal of himself is being beaten and bent over the anvil like something a blacksmith is trying to straighten. And surely the farmer will return in the evening to find the task uncompleted, impossible.

  Still, out on a white lane, between lines of hops on their bulky poles, the metal suddenly comes now and then right, and the sheer tincture of beauty dropped into his darkened blood delights him, jimmies him up, makes him smile, alone, hated, but human on the ravelling road.

  It’s Grimsby, pretty far north right enough, where he finds a berth of sorts. He goes there by no design, because it is the next town merely, though as he has walked so long among the fields he has had a hankering for the sea, as any Sligoman might. Because a Sligoman misses the garnish of sea-salt on his skin.

  First thing into the district, he takes up a position on the long stony beach that seems to fly in a massive arc out of the town, going away at speed from it into the unknown distance. He’s pulling with his teeth at a decent enough bit of dried fish that a scrawny woman gave him over the wind-burnt castellation of her hedge, in a sea-garden with a corrugated house thrown up among the ratty dunes. And he spreads his legs quite happily, looking at the dun-coloured beach and the long granite lid of the sky pulled over everything, the black roofs, the small arms of the fishing harbour, the wide long ribbons of current in the mauve river. The fish he supposes is a mere sand dab, small, salty, bony, but it’s fizzing and churning on his tongue, it’s a pleasure. Like many sayings of his Mam, ‘hunger is a good sauce’ is proved again. Hunger is a good sauce, Your woman’s a horse for the hard road, There’s no hearth like your own hearth. They were almost songs to her, as much as the Irish jigs and American jazz of his Pappy. His belly bubbles and growls. And surely he’s in need of ten of those dabs, with the waste of flesh on his bones. He’s a big man a touch rubbed out by ordinary hunger.

  Some of the stones of the beach are very small and round and green, a puzzle to him. He finds he can squeeze these queer pebbles with his fingers, they are not right pebbles at all. Indeed they are like little classroom globes strewn all over the beach, as far as he can see, all land and no water marked on them, some tremendous version of the world repeated eternally. He wonders are they stars fallen on to Grimsby, or maybe more likely that manna of the Bible story, to feed the wandering tribes. By Jaysus, he sees, they are peas. Mere peas. Placed there in such a multitude, evenly shared out among the true stones. Well, there’s an ould fella creeping along the beach, keeping to a narrow band of sand where probably the tide turns, and Eneas hails him.

  ‘How are you doing, mister?’ he says.

  ‘Day,’ says the man, his share of thin hair as sere as the marram grass.

  ‘Listen, tell us,’ says Eneas, ‘do you know at all why there’s them peas all over the strand?’

  ‘Eh?’ says the man.

  ‘The feckin ould beach is covered with peas, do you not see them?’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ says the man, ‘of course, that’s the factory.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The pea factory up the river. Don’t the leavings of it come spilling down here? We’re so used to them we don’t see them.’

  ‘All right,’ says Eneas.

  ‘You with the boats?’ says the man.

  ‘No, no,’ says Eneas. ‘I walked in. Do you think there’d be work in the factory so?’

  ‘No, but, one of the boats might take you, if you knew boats. It’s cold black work they do out just near the ice, they’re gone for weeks at a time, poor men. Daresay you might get something with them, if you don’t mind the hardness of it.’

  ‘I’ll go down and have a talk with someone so,’ says Eneas. ‘Why not,’ says the man. ‘Sooner you than me. Good day to you.’

  ‘I’ll see you,’ says Eneas, in the lingo of his own place.

  And that’s how work is got in those days he supposes. And the Captain, Simon Cousins, takes him on as an experienced man, though the Captain has no sleek boat that would entice a boy to America, as in the time of Galveston, only a broken-lunged one-masted fishing boat that saw paint maybe when the old dead queen was young. And as the ould man had said, it is queer black work, but for shillings and grub. And a bed bucketing about, way over above Scotland near the ice-locked shores of Greenland, is better than a rainy hedge. And with the stretch of meat and fishes grilled on deck and such, the muscle goes back soon enough in the manner of the youth he is, and he is strong and good for the work, working the distant herring, away with the weather and the weeks. Simon Cousins is a man without much of talking and Eneas suspects that the man says little because his head is as empty as a little salt barrel when the haul of stilled herring has its petticoats and lace-caps of salt out of it. And he is glad to learn the ways of those three-week fishermen, the manners of their trade, and their silence.

  Grimsby isn’t too different from any western seaboard town of Ireland, there’s many that go to America when they can, dragging pots and all behind them, and wives. Because the very poor bring everything. And the fishermen come and go, some with their songs, some with their bitter violence, some with their crimes and others with their youth, in the course of the scrappy years that Eneas spends with Simon Cousins, living mostly not two foot from him and gathering in that time no more than a yard of conversation. True enough, the stars over Greenland are so bright they are tiny tears of fire in the sky, and the unseen seals and ice-coloured bears of the flows are dryer than Simon Cousins and Eneas. And that’s a thing to engender silence. But when the sea eases and the herring run into the exhausted nets, that is a season for joy of a kind in the blood and the bone of arms hauling and content enough in the frozen North. In time Eneas is master of the shoals and in the manner of a proper fisherman can smell the great designs of herring fanning and spreading under the pitch waters. They are regions where strange things befall them as by right, as by common occurrence. As talk is a scarce commodity, the words that might have been spoken seem to gather in the old brain, like very herring themselves, bright, thin, darting. And Sligo itself seems better described for Eneas, clearer, more tender to him. Out in that immaculate waste world of ice and sea and herring, with the companionable whales and rarely betimes a narwhal nosing past, where animals are black or white and only the moon and the Northern Lights themselves, extravagant and chill and high, are shadows, remembrances of colours, it is possible somehow to hold Sligo in his head, floating, particular. And the hatred his countrymen have for him is a class of signpost, a class of explanation for the ruin of their tenderness. For they are not tender people now. And savage years among a civilized people have done that to them, because when there is murder and murder, the heart is killed like a rat with poison, up on the sill of a farmhouse, panting, trying to cool its burning self. And away in those northern fishing grounds, the outlying fields and farms of Grimsby you might say, with their imaginary fences, he can feel at times something akin to love for Sligo, at
least it sits there in his mind, his Mam and his Pappy and his toiling siblings, and all the turbulent citizens, Sligo, Sligo, and it strikes him that any person alive in the world, any person putting a shoulder against a life, no matter how completely failing to do the smallest good thing, is a class of hero. This is a fleeting thought, as temporary as the arc of an albatross in the passionless air, but it is there for a moment, and for another moment, and another. Of course, a person might say it is easy to feel no fear, no hatred, in a district without true land, and maybe so, Eneas allows that, yes. And thrown up again against the shingle of Grimsby, in the narrow adjunct to the Captain’s house that is Eneas’s land home, lying in the fixed dark, the room rooted on the sandy earth, oh yes, he can feel as much fear and hate as the next man, and lie awake with it spinning and churning there in his addled head, the names O’Dowd and Jonno Lynch heartily and blackly cursed anew. But by the grace of mere time itself or, sometimes he thinks, the peculiar clock of God, whose divisions seem both unending and brief in the same span, he spends a decade and more at that work, in which to catch the cold fish and douse his brain with the solemn rainwater of stars. It is true that such work repeated and repeated, with its circles of journeys and seasons, weaves a pattern as simple as a country bedspread that gives the years the sensation of brevity. If he were going from job to job it might have seemed an epic time! But tucked into this life on the edge of things, the edge of Grimsby, itself an edgy town in the greater world of England, a dozen years is a full, fast river of minutes and months.

  And one time, as they are returning from the distant grounds, bearded and tired, Eneas sees a great ship passing to the south, whose name he can almost make out, it goes by so close. And it’s not a regular ship taking its known course along the allotted lanes, and as such might be classed a danger to a small fishing vessel, if Simon Cousins and Eneas were so inclined to view it. And indeed Simon Cousins looks very black in the face at the sight of it, and Eneas can sympathize with his anger and distress, but is also more simply amazed by the ship. Because they see it in early morning, a good clear early morning with a cloth of light frost thrown over the little boat, and he can make out clearly lining the rails of the great ship hundreds, maybe thousands of people, looking out silently on every side, port and starboard. And they seem to him dark-clothed and infinitely sober, like prisoners beyond reprieve, like children being ferried far from hearth and happiness. And they take no interest in him, the shadowed man of Sligo looking in astonishment, as if some other picture is fastened over their eyes, bigger and perhaps terrible. And he wonders naturally whither their course is set, and whether they will land somewhere in Scotland, or are going round the ferocious isles of the North. Or maybe will turn southward for Ireland and her benisoned harbours. And back in Grimsby he asks other less silent sailors what that ship might have been, was it a ghost ship well described in stories, or a passenger line on a new and foolhardy route between Europe and America? But he is told nothing about it, and has recourse to giving up a sixpence for a decent newspaper, to see if there might be a clue there. And indeed the Grimsby Echo can tell him in its dark print and chaste paper that the ship he has seen holds a strange cargo of Jews being returned to Germany, certain there to be imprisoned as enemies of Christ and country. That no port on God’s earth would take them, and that they had lain outside Dublin port and been refused and Southampton, and what affects him strongly, not only had crossed the Atlantic to be refused by the President of America himself, but had anchored not far from Galveston in the Gulf of Mexico, the very heartland of emigrants and lonesomeness. For it is a cargo of hated people, all folk like those Finans of Sligo, with their perfect shop and their weather all about of foul remarks. As a hated man Eneas feels the force of their useless journey. And he thinks of that fella De Valera, now king of Ireland, piously refusing the ship entry, and it makes a racket in his noggin. Oh why exactly he could not say, but surely, he hopes surely, there is a host of other men and women who feel the same storm of disquiet and anger he does, in the mottled lean-to by the Captain’s house. And he thinks the sighting of the ship has been a thing of terror lent to him, and he would have taken them all in the Captain’s ship like shining herring if he had known, impossible though it would have been. For what is the world without rescue, but a wasteland and a worthless peril ?He doesn’t need his dreams continuously to see those dark men, dark women, dark children at the rails, because they progress now against the mirror of his mind’s eye.