‘Oh, poxy English, don’t you do enough all week, shitting and pissing on my bed? You have to vomit on me now, you shitty English?’
So Eneas is blinking and wiping his chin and tasting the bitter stuff and gazing at the old man. He feels immeasurably better, but cold now, shivery. He’s elated. He looks about at a decrepit old table cluttered with mugs and plates and what might be an ancient lump of ham and the rows of sunlike, moonlike rather, plates on the famished dresser. He lies back with a sudden weakness and sees that the ceiling is made of bamboo and rafters much hammered into with hooks and nails. His head goes back on a dirty folded cloth but he gives the old man another stare from that awkward position.
‘Jesus, bollocks,’ he says.
‘Yeh, jees, bolloc,’ says the old man. ‘You got it, English soldier. Heh, heh.’
‘Who hit me?’ says Eneas. ‘Some bollocks hit me.’
‘No odder bolloc here but me bolloc,’ says the old man. ‘Any chance this being Chester barracks?’
‘Chester, English bolloc?’
‘You don’t have to break it to me gently, you old shit. I can see this isn’t any Chester barracks here.’
‘Chester bolloc?’
‘Don’t start, Jesus.’
‘You, you Chester? I calling Jean.’
‘Buggering Jean, is it? Where am I? Where-am-I?’
‘I know where you are … You in my grasses last week, this week you in my bed.’
Eneas feels for a surging moment a kind of sagging away of his blood.
‘I’d get up if I could.’
‘I don’t want you get up. I want you lie down, nice and safe, like the teddybears.’
Maybe it’s dusk or thereabouts, maybe he smells the faint smell of burning wood, charcoal maybe, maybe he hears some birds just going to bed somewhere, maybe he catches that odour of late sky when it is marked by the rooks going high home, maybe …
‘You going make me rich man, you going make Jean rich man. Rich!’
‘Eh? I’m not, my friend.’
‘You not? You is, English, you is.’
‘I feel like my arms are lead. Lead or iron or stones. Why’s that?’
‘What the western pictures says? Figure it out — figure it out.’
And he’s doing some cavorting of his own, saying Figure it out in his stolen American accent. What picture he’s stolen it from God only knows. If the bugger began to sing ‘Lilac Time’, Eneas wouldn’t be surprised.
In the great and lonesome music-hall of this warring France nothing should be surprising except the everyday and the ordinary. Three seconds of being awake and Eneas doesn’t like the look or the sound of this old monkey. Neutral monkey maybe, monkey of the Allies hopefully, but dangerous, dubious, too-friendly monkey. Bite your fingers off most likely if you put them too close to his sharp little mouthful of teeth.
‘Listen,’ says Eneas, ‘if you got a drink of water I’d be grateful. I’m parched here, parched.’
‘Hey, hey, water, water. I give English water.’
He takes a dulled silver scoop from the flaky wall and dips it into his water bucket at the door with its soft lid of damp muslin and puts the edge of the scoop tenderly or at least carefully to Eneas’s lips. Eneas drinks in beelike sips, because he has to.
‘That’s good, that’s good,’ he says, in the midst of a sighing from the bottom of his stomach, ‘that’s most excellent good, my friend. Now, I’d see it as a favour, one man to another, if you’d help me up.’
But the old man only smiles at him and replaces the scoop.
‘Now,’ says Eneas, ‘I’m going to have to get myself up.’ Then adds, ‘I tell you, the sorrow of many deaths is weighing me down,’ half to himself, surprising himself. But he can speak like that because the man gives the impression that the room is empty except for Eneas. He’s barely there because maybe of the curious effect of the broken English. If this old codger spoke properly he’d seem more there than he did maybe. Well he has a right, Eneas, to think nonsense after a whack on the head like he’d got just lately.
Sadly, while intending to rise and bestir the blood in his veins, he finds he cannot. He looks at his arms and his legs and he sees the rusty old shackles holding them. He looks up at the old man in surprise and anger.
‘Why did you fetter me?’
‘Ah, ah, ah,’ says the old man, dancing about. ‘Ah, ah, ah. You going make me rich, English. Yes, sir, Mr English.’
‘You going to sell me to someone? Maybe to a German someone?’
‘I maybe, if I like. I find you, you my.’
‘I you, eh, you little piece of shite? I’ll I you if I can get out of these chains.’
‘You not get out, my buddy. Them is chains for my mules and my mules don’ stray ever, not ever, so forget it.’ The geezer lights the farm lamp because the evening is upon them both in the boxes and shelves of shadows and half-lights that now grow in the old room. Birds beyond the walls add a sense of depth, of sea, of dreams, to the new shadows made by the ancient lamp. The old man Jean smiles at Eneas, quite tender again and strange. He trots over and strokes Eneas’s bruised head.
‘My buddy, I got to say, I never hit no man before this time. So I also say I not going to go sell you to any German man. Outside the farm is broken. My sons are gone into the clay. The city boys they kill first one, fighting there in the hill. The soldier Germans kill my second boy when they come into this place. They see him on the road at night and shoot, bang, bang. The farm is all broken. My buddy, I need your arms and hands and all strong to make the farm. What you say?’
‘You going to lead me about with these on, for me to do the work? Old man, no one’s going to do that for you. And if you take off the chains what will keep me?’
‘I begin all wrong. Look. You be friend and help me with this land. I tell you, this land is with me and my fathers for three hundred years. Never has there not been the wine, never. Even for a war I not stop. I need friend, brother, son, father. You help because God says you help because you here now.’
‘The war’s going on all about you here, how can anyone farm in the middle of a war?’
‘There only work here, no war. Never mind that war, Mr buddy.’
‘Take off these feckin chains, old man. You got to take the chance. I’m not going to do anything without you taking off these chains. Come on, what’s the difference? You’re going to be the same madman before you take them off and after. I’ll let you know how I feel when I’m a free man to help you or not as I choose. I’m a soldier, old man, in these badlands of France. Maybe I’ll help you, maybe not. Who can say? Take these mule fetters off of me.’
So the old man after a half-minute to ponder and consider and chew the cud of Eneas’s words stoops in and grapples with his precious chains.
‘These good old iron,’ he says. ‘Don’ you speak against them, my buddy.’
‘OK, but take the bloody yokes off me.’
‘I doin’, I doin’, you bolloc. Now you go-go dance down the road, hey, you bolloc?’
Eneas is free. Yes, he would like to dance down the road but maybe the road is full of Germans. Maybe he is a safe Eneas while he lingers with the old man, possessor he can guess of hiding places galore. And at least he has an interest in keeping him alive. Eneas has no ambition to go to a German camp or be a hero of the army and find an unknown spot to die on with a bullet housed in his breast. So now he is standing and very much looking down at the old farmer. Must have rallied all his strength to himself to haul such as Eneas into this farmhouse from the field with the rick. Right enough he had noticed there how old and ruined the harvesting of the grass was. This old bastard must be living on cured hams and cheese and whatnot. The thought of ham and cheese is a happy one. Christ and His Nails, Eneas is hungry. All the ache in his head’s gone. He feels strong, good, reasonable, generous, clear-headed. What a thing, what a puzzle. You’d do things now you wouldn’t bother about other times. War was a big orphanage or prison or lunatic asy
lum. You had to follow the rules of the attendants, the gods of this war.
‘I suppose I’m the man to help you, after all,’ he says, and the old man Jean suddenly lights as bright as his lamp and shamelessly embraces him, as much of him as he can reach. Eneas holds still as a tree. Then he hears the old bugger weeping into his stomach more or less. Gently he pushes the man back.
‘Come on, you old bollocks,’ he says. ‘Let me go free, can’t you? Jesus Christ.’
‘I say, thank you, Chester, thank you. Now we see good times again.’
To be the husbandman of the vines of France, ever so briefly, to be dropped in on to a ruined farm as its sudden saviour, fulfils mysteriously for Eneas the dreamed love of his youth. Now in setting down shovel into clay, binding the vines, keeping them spruce and clear, bringing, in the heat-laden evening, the bounty of the small river into the dry irrigation channels, he knows he has put his very body close against his desires. He works for Jean not so much because it makes any sense to him but because as Jean’s servant he serves his old dreams. He must take the letter of the laws of husbandry and believe them word for word as he has no information of his own. He is a child in Jean’s fields. Somewhere up behind the house where they never dig, Jean’s sons lie interred, waiting for the mercies of peace to be buried in the little bombed churchyard in the village of rubble across the near hills. At night as Eneas lies in the old linen of his bed under the gnarled rafters, in the swimming music of the owls and the stately snail-like progress of the moon up the high sky caught in the buckled window, he thinks of the lonesome bodies of the sons under the red earth, dreaming or dreamless he could not venture to say. As the weeks pass and many nights of these thoughts with them, he grows to love the poor sons in their permanent beds.
All night also Jean lies under his rafters. One evening when Eneas looks in he sees old Jean lying there asleep with his scored and clay-dark hands folded on his whittled chest like a corpse might have. The bed is narrow and tight. The body of Jean lies still and deeply sunken in the paths and woodlands of dreams. Whether or not the old man hears his wife calling to him there among the trees Eneas cannot say. But he knows that men when they are made widowers or women when they are made widows see in their lonesome dreams their vigorous dead in the cascades of the trees. Eneas can only guess at the sorrow of the old man who is living still thus while his progeny are eternally abed under their sheets of rotted leaves. Does it all trouble him less as he is old himself and soon to follow, or indeed does it trouble him less because Eneas is there to be the workhorse and the architect of the coming harvest? He hopes he is the handmaiden, the midwife, the messenger of the old man’s happiness. But Jean is dark enough. He eats and drinks in this surrounding cauldron of a war as if he were a sparrow in a park of death, as if he were a songster in a boneyard.
Surely the massive war is all about. In the clarities of the night guns sound off at a distance. Formations of men are seen distantly also on ridges and raised parts of country roads. Often Eneas imagines he may be killed by a stray bullet or by some soldier firing on him from some high vantage. He does not feel secure on that afflicted farm. And yet the very isolation, lonesomeness, jollity and darkness of the old man keeps him at his post. And he is willing to fight the fight of clay and seed as long as he is allowed. To be the strange champion of the sorrow-beleaguered farmer.
In the evenings they drink from bottles of wine that date from some years back. Wine indeed that the dead sons saw to, and crushed with their dead feet and pressed with their dead hands. It is funny that the markets for wine are still virtually functioning, and now and then a vehicle comes and takes away a few crates. Neither Jean or Eneas knows who will drink the wine but it is more discreet and appropriate not to question. The few francs it brings are worth the mystery. But it astonishes Eneas that with no doubt horde upon horde of German troops all about, someone still furnishes the comfort of wine.
He is puzzled too by the absence of English troops or any other of the Allied soldiers. Unless some celestial magician has taken him from the glades of the earth he cannot think why he sees no one, hears nothing of anyone, and is left alone moreover to live with Jean. The van-driver asks no questions and no one else comes to ask them either. It is as if he cannot be found amid the soldiers, as if the war eludes him on purpose. Firstly he stood amid the dead by the edge of the sea and secondly now he works the rows of vines not so much as a living man but a vanished man. Of course he understands this is his natural condition. He is not required as a Sligoman and now he is not required as a British soldier. Jean calls him the English and fair enough. It has transpired that Jean knows nothing of Ireland, the vague island beyond England, with its black pools of disquiet and revenge. And sometimes he would like to tell Jean of the beauties of Sligo, the curiosities of its mountains, and the strange pull of its lonesome streets, visions and pestering remembrances that afflict Eneas betimes. Oftentimes in dreams he sees dark men of Sligo, dark fellows in black coats, O’Dowd and his cronies, following him, looking for him across the terrain of dreams. Yet he would like to talk of Sligo. He would like to describe that home place, but the words for it have begun to desert him, the pictures leap about in his head unhelpfully, he cannot grasp them. He is a vine uprooted, and the cold white roots are tarnishing in the swimming air.
It is tasty work, the endless breaking of the soil along the rows of vines, the tying of the new growth so there is no cramping or snapping, the quenching of the thirst that is like a star of need in each new grape. It is not like the growing of potatoes in the dark seams of lazybeds at home in Sligo. And Eneas feels his own father’s hunger for the health of flowers and plants in the old garden in Finisklin in his own blood now, giving a strength to his arms that is both tireless and tender. With everything changed about, it is not unlike the fishing it seems to him, the same stooping, the same peering and care. The clay drinks the water he brings to it with almost a sigh, with almost words of thanks.
He might swear that in the tricky twilight or the pleasant ease of firstlight, when the watering is done, language itself, a sort of lingo or slangy stuff, rises from the drinking clay. And he understands the passion of Jean and why Jean tied a stranger down to make a worker out of him, for those human plants. And harvest comes, and there is the pride of that, and it’s as if he has stood up straight for the first time in all those months, and he and Jean dance in the big stone basin and acquire the honour of their labour, treading out the juice, till they are like two strange men in the moonlight, dancing, with purple stockings.
11
HEEDLESS OF BREVITY and longevity, of talk and stories, of guilt, of lonesomeness, of the ruined artefacts of the war under the simple sky, God brings Eneas again to the shore. He supposes it might be God Himself, fearing any other truth. He hopes it is God. He stands on the sandy headland surveying a tideless beach, in the remnants of his uniform, more farmer than sergeant major truly.
As this day came up over Jean’s fairly pristine fields, Eneas was prompted to set out and did. It was something like the message that touches the starling in the town trees, touches the swallow, touches the goose in the fervent mud of the estuary. He couldn’t for the life of him say what got into him. Maybe a sense that his promise to Jean, if promise it was, had been fulfilled. That he had given his word, and been as good as it, in the upshot. And the juice safe in the barrels. He put on his uniform and kissed Jean goodbye and walked away over the hill till the air got salty again and he saw the beach with the Scottish-sounding name unfolding before him like a drying watercolour.
Now there are no terrors, no troops massed in panic and agony on the empty tidelands. This time the slightly dancing sea, the waves you might say merely demonstrating a few steps, has no multitude of craft, no fishing boats and pleasure craft, incongruous among the acrid smells of the war. Sleeping humanity has sailed out from England long since to fetch the wakeful soldiers. They had been painfully, plainly, in need of fetching. Up from the chaos of running men and millin
g groups had arisen that terrific music like a choir gone mad. Eneas puts his roughened palms over his ears because although the beach is empty he heaves it suddenly again. He stands there and watches the deserted scene unblinkingly. What is he to do? He cannot go back into France.
With his palms fastened behind his ears, he turns half about and heads northwards along the beach, if it is true North, his boots crunching mildly the delicate sand. For a day and a night he proceeds like that, through the owl-freshened reaches of darkness and the long day. Wraithlike sand blows across the spaces. He climbs betimes onto cliff or field paths, understanding the wayward coastline of France, and when he hears noises he does not like, he hides fast in crevices of things, under abandoned machinery and indifferent hedges. Till he comes wordless and weird in his damaged uniform, his damaged self, to a small seaside town where he stands weeping on the harbour wall. And the fishermen come out of the dark cafe and hide this wretched man and take him out that night over the dangerous sea and deposit him softly on a murmuring shore of England. And in this way, belatedly, and many miles from the beach itself, and many months, he is rescued you might say from Dunkirk.
It’s true that in barracks in Sheffield there are some incidents that he must regret as a generally peaceable man. He’s ravaged in the nights by headaches, and even when he sleeps he dreams of his dead pals on the beach. Ordinary talking gets him excited in a peculiar fashion so he’s leaping up and contradicting or shouting at his newer comrades and gabbling gobbledygook at them for small reason. He goes into the industrial districts and hears the deep thumping of the steel presses and hears like a ferocious echo the explosions they’ll make when they are guns. They’re not noises you can keep out by pressing your palms to your ears but he tries. He thinks of the enormous cauldrons or furnaces at the hearts of the brick factories, and the civilian men stoking them to ever greater temperatures and the waterfalls of molten steel cascading and sparking onto the beaten hearths. His own heart is consumed again and again till he’s only a kind of shouting fool in the roads.
The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty Page 13