The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

  They say the old at least have their memories. I am not so sure this is always a good thing. I am trying to be faithful to what is in my head. I hope it is trying also to be as faithful to me.

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  It was the simplest thing in the world. He just never came home. For a whole day I waited. I cooked the hash as I had promised him in the morning, because he had a weakness for foods mashed up and reheated, even though it was his brother Jack was the navy man. It is a great favourite with sailors and soldiers, as my own father might attest. But the food cooled again under its cover. Night closed over Knocknarea, over Sligo Bay, over Ben Bulben, where John Lavelle’s brother Willie had been murdered. On the upper slopes, in the privacy of the thinner air and the heather. Shot in the heart, was it, or the head, after surrendering. John Lavelle saw that from his hiding place. His own brother. The brothers of Ireland. John and Willie, Jack and Tom and Eneas.

  I knew immediately something was terribly wrong, but you can know that and not allow the thought in your head, at the front of your head. It dances around at the back, where it can’t be controlled. But the front of the head is where the pain begins.

  I sat there I must confess in a swelter of love for my husband. It was his strange efficiency, even his purposeful stride along the pavements of Sligo. His waistcoats, his gaberdine, or his trenchcoat with the four linings, his boots with the patented double sole, that would never need mending (of course they did). His beaming face and the ruddy signs of health in his cheeks, and his cigarette on the loll in his mouth, the same brand his brother smoked, ‘Army Club Sandhurst ’. And his musicality and his confidence, the way he was always up in the world, and ready for it. And that he was not only ready for it, he was going to conquer it, conquer Sligo and all points west and east, ‘from Portugal to the Sea’ as the old saying went, although in truth that is a nonsensical saying. Tom McNulty, a man that had every right to life because he honoured it so in the enjoyment of it.

  Oh dear, oh dear, I sat there. I am sitting there still. 202

  I am old enough to know that time passing is just a trick, a convenience. Everything is always there, still unfolding, still happening. The past, the present, and the future, in the noggin eternally, like brushes, combs and ribbons in a handbag. He just didn’t come back.

  Out there in Strandhill, on nights there were no dances, when only the odd car was heard coming into the village above, there was an owl that used to call. I think it lived on the backland under Knocknarea, where the land falls and becomes a sort of valley to the sea. The owl lived close enough for his one repeated note to come clearly over the scrubby fields and the wastelands. Calling and calling, as if to say what I don’t know. Do creatures that wake and hunt in the night, call to their possible mate in the night? I suppose they must. My own heart was also calling, signalling out into that difficult human world. For Tom to come home, to come home. 203

  chapter seventeen

  Two nights later I think I must have been still sitting there. Although this is hardly possible. Had I not eaten, gone out to the toilet at the back of the hut, stretched my legs? I can’t remember. Or rather, I only remember the sitting there, and then, just as the twilight came down on Strandhill, calming everything, even the colours of the grass, that night breeze hurrying in from the bay, making my roses rustle at the window-glass, or at least the new buds, tap tap tap, like Gene Krupa himself starting a little something on the drums. And then, as if on cue, I heard coming up the road and around the corner and in the door the strains of ‘Honeysuckle Rose’, just a few notes at first, and then I heard Harry B. hit the drums, and then the clarinet going, which I supposed was Tom, and someone on the piano, obviously not myself, and by the rusty stabs he was making I guessed it was maybe Old Tom himself, and that was probably Dixie Kielty on the rhythm guitar he loved like a child, oh, and they were unfolding it, stem by stem and bloom by bloom, just like honeysuckle itself, though that was a bloom for later in the year in those parts.

  Of course then I knew it was Saturday. That was something to get my bearings from.

  By Jiminy though that is a great song for the guitar solo.

  ‘Honeysuckle Rose’. Whap whap whap go the drums and up and down and round the clock go the chords of the guitar. You can drive even the hill boys of Sligo half mad with that song. A dead man would dance to it. A dumb man would cheer the solos. It was said, at least Tom told me, that Benny Goodman would give a good twenty minutes to that song, at dances. I could well believe it. You could play it all day and still have 204

  things to say with it. That was it, you see, it was a speaking song. Even without someone singing the words.

  So.

  So, I went over there. It was the strangest darkest feeling to do that. To put on what I had of finery there, my best dress, hurriedly dab on some ‘slap’, comb my hair, fix it, shove on my stage shoes, and all the while breathing in and out a little heavily, then stepping out into the breeze, feeling the chill in it, so that my breast seemed to shrug minutely. But I didn’t care about that.

  Because I thought it was still possible everything was all right. Why did I think that? Because I had not heard otherwise. I was in the middle of a mystery.

  It was early for the dance but there were cars coming out from Sligo already, their big beams like big shovels shovelling the rutted road. Expectant faces in the cars, and lads standing on the running boards now and then. It was a happy sight, the happiest sight in Sligo.

  I was feeling more and more like a ghost the nearer I came to the Plaza. Now the Plaza used to be just a holiday house, and they built the hall on at the back, so the front looked just like an ordinary dwelling, except concreted over, erased somehow. There was a nice flag fluttering above the roof, with P-L-A-Z-A written on it. There wasn’t much in the way of lights, but who needed lights, when the building was the Mecca of everyone’s weekday dreams and thoughts. You could slave all week in a rotten job in the town, but as long as you had the Plaza . . . It was bigger than religion, I can tell you, the dancing. It was a religion. To be denied the dancing would have been like what’s-it, excommunication, to be not allowed the sacraments, like the IRA men in the civil war.

  Boys like John Lavelle of course.

  ‘Honeysuckle Rose’. Now the band let that be and began to play ‘The Man I Love’, which as the world and his brother 205

  knows is a slower tune, and I was thinking it wasn’t such a good choice for so early in the night. Ever the band member. Every tune is right in the right moment. Some tunes only rarely find their moment, like some ould Christmas song, or slushy old ballads in the deeps of winter when everyone wants to be melancholy. ‘The Man I Love’ is for the second last dance, or thereabouts, when everyone is weary but happy, and there is a shine on everything, faces, arms, instruments, hearts. When I entered the hall there were only a few souls dancing. I had been right, it was much too early for that song. But the band all the same had a late-night look to them. Old Tom was playing the solo bit near the start, and then his son was cutting in with the clarinet. It was actually shocking. Maybe the people there noticed also that Tom, my Tom, seemed a little drunk. He was certainly swaying a bit, but he held the music just fine, until suddenly he seemed to stall, and took the beak out of his mouth. The band played the song to the nearest ending, and stopped as well. Their faces looked round at Tom, to see what he wanted to do. Tom placed his instrument down with his usual care, stepped down off the stage, and swayed away backstage, to where our dressing room was. I didn’t know whether he had even seen me.

  I was going to go in there too. There was only the dancefloor between me and the old curtains that hung across the door. I stepped forward, full of intent, but suddenly there was Jack at my side, his face very stern in the turning shadows.

  ‘What do you want, Roseanne?’ he said, the coldest I had ever heard him, and he could be an arctic man.

  ‘What do I want?’

  It was funny, I had been so silent for two or three days that my voic
e almost cracked when I spoke, gghh, like a needle dropped on a record.

  I don’t suppose anyone was looking at me. We must have seemed like two old friends chatting, as a thousand old friends 206

  did there on a Saturday night. What would friendship have done without the Plaza, let alone love?

  My stomach was probably empty, but that didn’t stop my body from trying to throw up. It was a reaction to the ice in Jack’s words. It told me more than any little speech of his could, no doubt the little speech I was about to hear. It wasn’t the voice of the executioner, like that Englishman Pierrepoint the Free State government brought over in the forties to hang IRA men, but it was the voice of the judge, announcing my execution. How many murderers and felons already know by the very look on the judge’s face, never mind the black cloth shortly put on his head, their fate, even though every fibre of their being cries out against the knowledge, and hope is brought right to the very brink of irrevocable words. The patient staring up into the face of the surgeon. Death sentence. What Eneas McNulty got for his being in the police. Death sentence.

  ‘What do you want, Roseanne?’

  ‘What do I want?’

  Then that dry retching. Then people were looking at me. Probably thought I had downed a half bottle of gin too quick, or the like, like nervous dancers did, or dodgy customers as Tom called them. There was nothing to show for my retching, but that didn’t stop my grievous embarrassment. Close on the heels of which was a deep deep feeling of something, maybe remorse, maybe self-horror, that bored down into me. Jack hung back from me as if indeed I were a cliff, or something dangerous that might crumble at the edge, and send him plummeting to his death. The cliffs of Mohar, Dun Aengus.

  ‘Jack, Jack,’ I said, but meaning what, I didn’t know.

  ‘What’s going on with you?’ he said. ‘What’s going on with you?’

  ‘Me? I don’t know. I feel sick.’

  ‘No, not now, not fucking now, Roseanne. What have ya been up to?’

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  ‘Why, what’s they saying I was up to?’

  Now, that didn’t even sound like English to me. What’s they saying. Like some old Black song from the Southern States. But Jack didn’t say.

  ‘Can I go back and see Tom?’ I said.

  ‘Tom doesn’t want to see you.’

  ‘Of course he does, Jack, he’s my husband.’

  ‘Well, Roseanne, we’ll have to see about that.’

  ‘What do you mean, Jack?’

  Then suddenly he wasn’t icy any more. Maybe he remembered other days, I don’t know. Maybe he remembered I was always friendly to him, and respectful of his achievements. I liked Jack, God knows. I liked his sternness and his queer quick gaiety now and then, when he would suddenly shake out his legs, and do what he called an African dance. At a party as may be, just all of a sudden, no warning, an enormous gaiety that would seem to get a hold of him and sweep him all the way to Nigeria. I liked him, with his nice coats and his even nicer hats, his thin gold watchchain, his car that was always the best car in Sligo, bar the big saloons of the toffs.

  ‘Lookit, Roseanne,’ he said. ‘It’s all very complicated. There’s a book opened for you up at the shop in Strandhill. You won’t starve.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You won’t starve,’ he said.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘there’s no reason for me not talking to Tom. Just to have a word. This is what I came down to do. I don’t expect to – to play in the band, for God’s sake.’

  This was not very logical, and I do believe I shouted the last few words. This was not a good move with Jack, who was so extremely selfconscious, and hated a scene above all else. I don’t suppose his precious Galway girl ever made a scene. Nevertheless Jack kept his cool, and came a few inches closer to me.

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  ‘Roseanne, I’ve always been a friend to you. Trust me now, and go back to the house. I’ll be in touch. This whole thing may blow over yet. Just calm down and go back to the house. Go on, Roseanne. The mother has spoken on this matter and there’s no going against the mother.’

  ‘The mother?’

  ‘Yes, yes, the mother.’

  ‘And what in the name of God does she say?’

  ‘Roseanne,’ he said, fiercely, quietly, ‘there’s things about the mother you don’t understand. There’s things about her I don’t understand. She’s had her own vicissitudes when she was a child. The result is, she knows her own mind.’

  ‘Vicissitudes? What vicissitudes?’

  He was almost hissing now when he spoke, seemingly in a ferment not to be heard, but also, to impress something on me that was maybe impossible to impress.

  ‘Old stuff. She’s determined that Tom will make good, because, because – ould reasons, ould reasons.’

  ‘You’re talking like a lunatic,’ I shouted. I might have burned him with a burning stick.

  ‘But look, but look, the whole thing may blow over,’ he said. Somehow in my heart of hearts I knew if I turned about and left that dancehall that ‘the whole thing’ would most certainly not blow over. There is a moment to speak to a topic, just like there is a moment for every song, no matter how rare. This was a rare moment in a life and I knew that if I could just see Tom, or rather, just let him see me, the woman he loved so greatly, desired, revered and loved, everything would be all right, eventually. But Jack was barring my way. No doubt about it. He was standing just a little sideways to me, like a salmon fisherman about to cast out across the stream, leaning his weight on his left foot.

  Jack wasn’t a bastard, he wasn’t a cruel man. But in that instance he was a brother, not a brother-in-law.

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  He was also a mighty big obstacle. I tried to surge forward, to go past him by mere force of will, a substance much softer than he was trying to go through him. He was hardened by his sojourns in Africa, it was like hitting a tree, he put his arms around me as I tried to break away down the hall, and I was screaming, screaming for Tom, for mercy, for God. His arms closed around my waist, closed tight tight around, hammahamma tight, to use the words he had learned in Africa, the pidgin English he liked to mimic and mock, he drew me to him, so that my bottom was fastened into his lap, docked there, held tight, fast, impossible to get away, like a weird love embrace.

  ‘Roseanne, Roseanne,’ he said. ‘Will you whisht, woman, whisht.’

  Myself roaring and caterwauling.

  That’s how much I loved Tom and my life with Tom. That’s how much I baulked at and hated the future.

  Back in the corrugated-iron hut I didn’t know what to do with myself. I went to bed to sleep but there was no sleep. A cold creeping feeling came into my brain, lending a physical pain, as if someone were opening the back of my grey matter with the sharp sharp blade of a tin opener. Hamma-hamma sharp. There are some sufferings that we seem as a creature to forget, or we would never survive as a creature among all the other creatures. The pain of childbirth is said to be one, but I cannot agree there. And the pain of whatever had happened to me is certainly not one either. Even as a sere old crone in this room I can still remember it. Still feel a shadow of it. It is a pain that removes all other things except itself, so that the young woman lying there in her marriage bed was just all pain, all suffering. I was drenched in a strange sweat. The chief part of the pain was caused by the enormous panic that nothing 210

  would ever arrive, no circus, Yankee cavalry, human agency, to relieve it. That I would always be sweltering in it. And yet I suppose it was of no importance. In that I was of no account in the world, in a time of dark suffering much greater than mine, if the ordinary history of the world is to be believed. This comforts me to think of now, curiously enough, but not then. What would have comforted that writhing woman in a lost bed in the lost land of Strandhill I do not know. If I were a horse they would have shot me out of mercy.

  It is no small thing to shoot a person, yet in those days it seemed to be considered a thing of small account. Generally, in the wo
rld. I know Tom was gone shortly with the General out to Spain to fight for Franco, and there was a lot of shooting there. They drove men and women to the edges of scenic abysses and shot them, and let them fall away into those fathomless places. The abyss really was both history and the future. They shot people into the ruin of their country, into the moil and the ruin, just like in Ireland. In the civil war we shot enough of each other to murder the new country in its cradle. Enough and more.

  I am speaking for myself, as I see things now. I didn’t know much about such things then. I had seen murder though, with my very eyes. And I had seen how murder could travel sideways and take other lives all unbeknownst. The very cleverness and spreadingness of murder.

  Next morning it was an absurdly beautiful day. A sparrow had got into the house and was very dismayed and alarmed to see me when I came into the empty sitting room from the bedroom. I walked it into a corner, took its wild beating self into my hands, like a flying heart it seemed, brought it to the door which I had forgotten to close in my strange grief the night before, and walked out onto the porch, raised my arms, and released the little useless grey bird back into the sunshine. 211

  As I did this, Jack McNulty and Fr Gaunt were coming up the road towards me.

  As priests felt in those times that they owned the new country, I suppose Fr Gaunt felt he also owned the iron hut, and at any rate he walked straight in, and chose a rickety chair, not speaking a word yet, Jack striding in after him, and myself nearly backing into a corner like the sparrow. But I did not think somehow they would gather me in their hands and let me go.

  ‘Roseanne,’ said Fr Gaunt.

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘It’s been a little while since we spoke last,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, a little while.’

  ‘You’ve been through a few changes since, I suppose that is true to say. And how is your mother, I haven’t seen her either this long time?’