Halloran shut his eyes and fired very high. More or less in his singing ear, Allen ordered the charge. There were a dozen transports on the ground. One sat up weeping into his hands. The young gentleman with the halberd leapt over him, arrant boyishness on the field of glory. Everyone followed except Byrne and Allen. Allen remained to clout Byrne across the head with his closed fist, and to whack him across the backside with his service-sword when he bent to find his canvas hat.
‘You’ll get me a felon’s tripes!’ Allen screamed. ‘You’ll get me an Irish!’
Phelim hadn’t run many yards when he found himself face to face with a small man in a rotting corduroy jacket. The man jumped back.
‘Fall down!’ roared Halloran.
‘Please,’ said the man.
‘Fall down, you silly old bugger!’
Not far away, the young halberdier dug the broad, ceremonial point of his weapon into a yelping rebel. With some urgency, Phelim swung the stock of his Brown Bess against the small man’s belly. The fellow lay down making extravagant sounds of agony. It was likely that in the dark he thought himself actually wounded; but Halloran bent over him and nudged his hip.
‘Don’t carry on,’ he said, and started weeping. The fellow must have been in his fifties, and had come a long trip with hope to end up hawking here.
The matter was nearly over now, except that a little way uphill and across the narrow valley, low comedy was in progress, as Allen chased Byrne who chased a felon. It was like a play, like a bad play, the way Halloran heard it later and over and over from Byrne. Byrne sprinting, the Irishman falling on his knees constantly saying, ‘In the name of God!’ And like a farce figure was Allen, striking the turf with his sword three times, roaring ‘Kill him!’
Byrne gaped because he knew he would bayonet this angular young man yelling, ‘In the name of God!’ There seemed no good reason to desist. Byrne saw him fully enough to know that he was brother-man and that the bayonet would viper him, craggy as he was, with a small head and curls close down on his forehead. When he rose and broke away again, Allen tried to get him by these curls and hack him with the sword. But he was away, and for some seconds. Allen and Byrne stood still, as if the matter was solved. Allen realized first that it hadn’t been solved at all. He changed his sword to his left hand and struck Byrne across the jaw. The yellow blindness all but put an end to the affair for Byrne and for the Irishman, and even for Allen. Because Byrne made off uphill in quite frenzied style and found the boy trying to hide in under the limbs of a native fig fairly spacious and concealing in the dark. Byrne was thinking, I’m only doing soldier’s work, yet he was bitter against himself, thinking also how if you’re no good in the first place, you’ll be no good in the melting pot, in the furnace, in the womb of wild events. He ducked under the branches and walked to the young fellow. ‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph,’ said the young fellow, louder and louder the closer Byrne got. The Holy Family couldn’t do the job tonight, Byrne thought. They depended on him, and he had no mercy. The bayonet gestured softly at the boy, who turned his back and took it in the buttocks. He began a whining, too, that cringed on a rising note, back into the mousiest corners of sound. The iron went into his belly, high up because he was rolling; and he was so close to death then that, under the double dark of the fig, his breath sounded more like a felled bird than like true breath. Byrne was enthralled by the barbarous fluidity of his bayonet going in. He actually felt for the man’s softer parts with his boot and spiked him a last time.
Down the hill, Halloran was thinking, What about the oath?
Hearn had been fed spirits all day, and had gratefully taken them. In the adjutant’s hut now, he moaned to the furore, but didn’t wake.
19
‘Thank God for the wind,’ Ann said, as it blundered across the kitchen roof and covered their voices.
Halloran muttered, ‘I wonder does the wind come from God?’
‘Of course,’ said Ann, happy and blood-warm, cherished, gratified and securer than the stars.
Halloran felt shivery behind the ears, not wanting to insult God by thinking he was behind the wind if he wasn’t; not wanting to insult him by thinking he was as remote as Hearn’s God if he was close; not wanting to insult him by thinking that a Corporal of Marines could insult him; not wanting to insult him.
‘I’ll just do my work from now on,’ he said. He was talking about the business at the Crescent again. ‘The buggers will be lucky to get that much from me. God is not mocked.’
He felt shivery again.
Ann was the remedy. Some of her hair lay over the corner of his mouth, tasting clean and fresh as if she’d washed it for his home-coming. It had a smell of bounty, like the smell of grain.
‘I hope I didn’t put you in any sort of danger, sidling in here.’
‘Mrs Blythe sleeps like a horse.’
‘You brew some marvellous liquor,’ he said, speaking figuratively and kissing her. He could tell from the way she wriggled her shoulders that she understood him. ‘I’ve got no compunction. I’m not at all sorry I came.’
‘No one’s asking you to be.’
The whole kitchen was grating like a ship under sail. It was a miraculous night to be together.
‘After all else,’ she added pertly, ‘we’re able to have a talk.’
Halloran chuckled lowly like a satyr. She had restored him so fully that he couldn’t help but comment, with some attempt at seeming flippant, ‘You seem to believe now that you’re my consecrated bride.’
She punched him between the legs.
‘You always have to be the scholar, Halloran, the divine. Is it too hard for a sharp mind to lie down man with his wife and enjoy what crowds of dungy farmers can enjoy?’
He slapped her buttocks. He was aware of the correctness of her hips and the virgin flatness of her belly, which lay as a bowl between them.
‘It could only happen to a fool like Byrne,’ she said.
‘What could?’
‘That trouble with Allen. It could only happen to Byrne. And then, trying to drown himself.’
‘I don’t think he did try.’
On the journey back from the Crescent, Byrne had sat in silence, having found, for an hour or two, the flat dignity of despair. In one of the wider stretches of the river, he had thrown a fit and jumped into the water. Yet he had seemed grateful for the oar they offered him, and crawled out of the river with great resignation.
Ann elucidated.
‘When you’re dealing with a booby, you lose your temper like a booby. Allen ends in being as big a bumpkin as Byrne. It wouldn’t have happened if he’d had a nobody’s fool like you to deal with.’
‘A nobody’s fool like me, love, is too full up of worldly wisdom to call out in the first place as Byrne did. A nobody’s fool like me goes to hell for doing nothing.’
He was not only grateful to her for seeing the matter so clearly. He was full of wonder.
‘Don’t talk to me about hell on a night like this,’ she said.
The wind swelled until it roared like flood-waters.
‘Oh, be ye lifted up, ye eternal gates!’ he said.
She turned half side-on to him. Noses and foreheads were a problem to lovers, and your mattress-side arm was always going numb. Her right thigh settled into the warmth of his belly. She asked him not to die. It was jealousy of death, she said, that made her sound grudging sometimes.
‘Before the roof falls in,’ she said, ‘and if we have to go to hell, let us first get in a bit of the gentle art.’
He laughed at her amazing sensuousness.
But within thirty seconds, she was asleep. He uncovered the hair from her ear, and kissed the soft rim.
At the end of May, the meat ration was cut to two pounds. For the first time, Halloran saw starvation as feasible for Ann, who ha
d little fat to withstand a famine.
At this time, Hearn was much talked about throughout the town. He had survived, and had been praised and pardoned, and had resented the survival and the praise, and cursed the pardon. For his safety he was kept in the Marine infirmary, and Halloran was wary of seeing him. But Byrne had spoken to him. Byrne himself had a charge pending against him of attempted suicide, for which he could be adequately chastened but still remain on the company’s strength. So that his mutiny in the field was forgotten by all but Byrne himself and Captain Allen. He knew that he was going to be punished, and now that he was damned, had lost the final remedy of being able to identify his punishment with that of the suffering Christ.
The May mornings were like promises, impossible to be kept on five ounces of meat. At seven o’clock the light would be full and level, barred like a tiger with the long shadows of trees. On such a morning, Halloran was called to the Judge-Advocate’s, Major Sabian’s place, where the roses had begun to bud. Major Sabian sat in the front parlour, side-on to the door, with meaty arms oppressing a very feminine French writing-table.
Halloran saluted.
‘Take a seat, Corporal!’
Sabian dipped his pen and wrote across the top of a page.
‘Can you spell me your name?’
Halloran spelt it.
‘That’s a pleasant change for an Irish,’ said Sabian, as if all Irishmen had had a chance of going to a grammar school and had wilfully neglected it.
‘I believe you’re of the Papist persuasion, Corporal?’
Halloran felt somehow that he was safe to play the yokel.
‘There was no persuasion about it, sir. I was born that way.’
‘No need to explain terms to me, Corporal. You are a Papist. Very well. What do you think of oaths taken in my court upon the Bible? Would you consider yourself free to break an oath taken in a Protestant court?’
Thinking damn oaths, Halloran said, devious as a Jesuit, ‘I would be bound to tell the truth in your court, sir.’
It sounded like rugged virtue though, and Sabian was gratified. Halloran cringed to see the Major swell with approval for his rustic innocence.
‘I ask all this because you are delicately placed as regards this charge of attempted suicide against Private Byrne. The charge is brought by Captain Allen, you see. I could understand your wondering what to say in such a case. You were in the boat. Could you tell from what he did that he meant to drown himself?’
‘He was very quiet, and then he took a fit and fell overboard.’
Sabian kept his pen poised stagily over the sheet of paper.
‘He fell overboard? He didn’t throw himself?’
‘I couldn’t tell if he fell or threw himself, sir.’
Sabian was pleased.
‘Did he stand up before he threw himself?’
‘He just toppled sideways, sir.’
Not that Byrne ever did a thing any other way than sideways.
‘You see, Halloran, you couldn’t very well swear that Byrne threw himself over the side.’
‘I wouldn’t know whether he did or not, sir,’ said Halloran, entering into the game.
‘You’ve answered me with great forthrightness, Corporal,’ said the Major. He coughed throatily into a handkerchief, and took the interest in the result which people over forty seem to think themselves entitled to. Then he packed the thing away up his sleeve and looked with a sort of flemmy speculativeness at the rafters and the black tails of the shingles.
Halloran wondered why such demigods as Sabian and Allen bothered to envy each other under such lonely stars and on a handful of daily meat.
‘Captain Allen trusts you, Halloran?’
‘Not much, sir.’
‘Oh!’
Major Sabian was not so pleased.
‘He’s a man very much to himself, sir,’ Halloran explained.
‘Yes. He always has been. Dismissed!’
Out in the sunlight, Halloran felt weak as he saw that he’d come out of no small danger indoors.
One night, Hearn, while still weak, walked away from the infirmary to die in the forest. He followed the very track which Marines with assignations in the town often took at night. He had become humbler since his flogging, and he didn’t offer his death as anything of importance to God. He kept a large stake in it himself, in this death which was redemptive of nothing. Against the mercy of the system, it was the only protest that was within his making.
The next day, after a cursory search of the fringes of the town, the administration wrote him off. Amongst the larger fish that Government House had that day to fry was that when the sun came up, it showed an American whaler in the bay. This was a prodigy, a manifestation, and made His Excellency nervous. The Captain was allowed ashore, but a heavy Marine guard lined Government Wharf in silence above the whaleboat and its crew – guarding against a word, any incendiary, radical, American word. The men at the battery could be seen at action stations. They had all come a long way, Marines and whalers, to keep silence with each other in a remote haven.
Late in the morning, back came the Captain, sullen in the company of His Excellency and Rowley. He had been told that his crew were not to be allowed to land, and that no matter how much bad food his victuallers had sold him, he would not be able to buy stores from the colony, not even with cash, let alone promissory notes.
At midday, the American sailed out. He did not dip his flag and, with the peril over, His Excellency did not particularly resent it.
20
Two or three days later, in the afternoon, Halloran was coming back from Major Sabian’s orderly office with Allen’s orderly book, when he was vigorously waylaid by Byrne. Byrne was a great elbow-clutcher when in full flight, as he seemed to be now for the first time since Captain Allen’s triumph. He rose from the ditch by Government Farm, which had been sown with wheat at the beginning of May. He gave two tight little jerks of his left thumb (doing its best to be wary) at his left shoulder.
‘I have that Hearn feller over there, in the trees,’ he said. There was a wooded slope behind and to one side of the farm. ‘He wants to see the both of us together. He has some news. I was with him when I saw you go by with the orderly book earlier. I’ve been waiting for you all that time, without a peep.’
He marvelled at himself.
Halloran groaned. He’d been sick in the morning and his bowels were still queered. And now portentous Hearn was up there in the timber.
‘I’ll go with you and help you get him back to the infirmary,’ said Halloran neutrally.
‘To the infirmary? He has news, Halloran, news foretold in the Bible and all the old books. You wouldn’t take him back. I’d kill you with my own hands, much as I love you.’
‘You would?’
‘I’d have a try, darling Corporal. What do you owe to them any more,’ said Byrne indicating the valley, ‘that you’d want to give him up to them?’
‘You’re on duty at the shipyards tonight, Private Byrne?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’ll meet you here at seven. I won’t tell anyone, but I mean to bring him back to the infirmary. Tell him that much. Tell him I won’t listen to his lies and schemes.’
‘It’s not a lie and it may be a scheme,’ said Byrne quietly, ‘but if it is, it’s God’s scheme.’
‘Yes,’ Halloran said, ‘I can imagine the Almighty dodging up and down this part of the world, grinding his axe with a Wicklow Protestant and gallant Terry Byrne.’
In fact, he was terrified that there might be something on the divine agenda to cut straight across the cramped sphere of tenderness where he and Ann lived, lasting the distance. He detested prophets, prophets were a great danger. This prophet had had two raw nights to succumb to, but here he was, voluble with prop
hecy, muttering omens in the bushes.
They don’t feed you enough to take these shocks, Halloran told himself, getting on his way. His hand was very tight and spinsterish around Captain Allen’s orderly book.
‘Happy shall he be,’ Byrne intoned, and the trees waved their arms like ecstatics, and Halloran shivered. There was a phoenix nest of moon in a large tree straight ahead of him, beyond the clutter of boulders. Amidst the wind, he heard a voice wheezing.
‘That taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.’
Trust, thought Halloran, a man barely able to breathe to choose a watch-word long as your arm. There was Hearn, wrapped in blankets, without a fire, in a cold crevice.
‘I’ll take you back to the infirmary,’ called Halloran. ‘We’ll say you wandered off in a fever.’
‘Fever nothing!’ said Byrne. ‘Listen to his news.’
‘Damn his news! I have news for him. The two of us are risking our hides moping round the forest with him.’
Hearn coughed tightly in his crevice. He had worked himself to his feet, and waited for them, too oracular for a squabble.
‘Talk up then, Hearn. Don’t stand there like a phantom with quinsy. Come on, take my poor damned breath away!’
The uncertain shadow that Hearn was, wavered; the man was only a presence, a rustle of breathing. He had no outline. He made the night seem thick with portents.
‘Halloran,’ he began by sighing, ‘don’t be afraid.’
‘I’m not afraid.’
‘I don’t mean afraid of the dark or death. First and foremost, I mean don’t be afraid of me.’
‘I said I wasn’t afraid.’
There came a pause long enough for Hearn to shrug and look as ironic as he might allow himself. Probably he did neither. There was no chance of telling in the dark. But he could be heard handling something paper that crackled as much as the treasure-maps of boyhood or the wicked astrologies of old women. Halloran thought with a sort of hopeful spleen that it might be something just as silly.
‘Read this,’ said Hearn.
Bring Larks and Heroes Page 17