One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (7 page)

to victory. Ben paces the afterdeck in the knowledge that as much

as we have sheltered them

our children will now feel obliged to shelter us

from some harshness we're not fit to bear. They'll glom onto the
gliomach

shut out of its
lorica segmentata
while expecting us to condemn

wholesale the tattooed gulpin, the tatty glamour-puss,

not to speak of the other stuff they know we'll find hard to stomach.

That's right, Lew, you'll have Ben pace the afterdeck of a war galley

to which he's been consigned for having made an ad hominem

remark about a minister who banned a civil rights rally.

Though the top hem

of my childhood bedroom curtain's concealed by a pelmet

it clearly has the makings of a Roman cape.

Take the idea of a bird nesting in a bicycle helmet

some kid's hung by the garage door. The nest follows the nape

no less intently than the truth twisters and tub thumpers

will relocate your
Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ

from Judaea to an army outpost

near Jonesborough or Cullaville. These wouldn't be the first parachute jumpers

to have been enticed

into a honeypot and then by honeybees beset.

Sometimes the elephant in the room's the single war elephant

Caesar loosed on the Britons one bank-holiday weekend the traffic was bumper-

to-bumper. To add to the confusion, the evidence is scant

that the Hourihanes were ever actually reduced to eating Lumpers

in the 1830s. They may well have lived in the nether regions

of Tyrone where the Famine wouldn't hit so hard. That's right, Lew, they weren't swept

underfoot by the Ninth Legion

along with the rest of the evidence. Why did someone try to intercept

your letter to Billy the Kid? In 1933, Seosamh Mac Grianna would follow word for word

your purple-inked prose

as he rendered
Ben Hur
into Gaelic for An Gúm.

To add to the confusion the bird

has single-mindedly begun to transpose

materials from an abandoned site—cloak wool, horsehair, an eagle plume.

That's right, Lew, what we're looking at is a feather from a hawk or bald eagle

worn by the girl to whom you yourself transferred

your affections shortly after you were appointed to that regal (or
viceregal
)

post in New Mexico. Many of us remember how you'd gird

your loins for a three-day fact-finding mission

with Willie Whitelaw. That's when we first saw Messala twitch

through the partition

in a cowshed where he'd been tortured as a snitch

by four Mescaleros. Messala wouldn't have been the first soldier to marry

a local girl. Nor would he have been the first to spill

his guts under interrogation. Did Christ offer Ben water from an 1858 army canteen

or the 1874 model? It was on the rifle range at Barry's

amusement park that Ben may first have thought of countering the shoot-to-kill

policy by which Billy the Kid was gunned down.

Ben knows a Barrett semiautomatic rifle fitted with a Vari-X sight has got the job done

at distances of over a mile. There's really no way to parry

that infrared light. As to who masterminded the bomb run,

the records are almost as fragmentary

as the tile that clattered down from the roof of Ben's council flat

and spooked the prefect's mount.

The Lincoln County War, in which you tried to intervene, was another tit-for-tat

war fought between Prods and Papes. The body count

should include the glamour-puss Haya Harareet

as Esther. It must have been during the process of data capture

there was some mash-up of the “coyote brush”

and her little “pleat.”

Then there's Cathy O'Donnell, who plays Tirzah, “she who brings rapture,”

and on whom Messala might once have had a crush.

The shieling on Slieve Gullion. Oíche Shamhna. Messala's head shoved underwater

in a bucket. Hands tied behind him. A little meet and greet

with the Magna Mater.

Divination by fruit and nuts. As for the suggestion that the BNM stamped on those peat

briquettes stands not for Bord na Móna

but Banca Naţionala
ǎ
a Moldovei, that's got to be a load of balderdash.

It comes as no surprise the Roman goddess Pomona

oversees a cache

of linen-factory data, albeit incomplete,

written on onionskin. It turns out that Ben Hur is a patronymic

meaning “Son of White Linen.” “Ben” like the “Mac” in Seosamh Mac Grianna,

erstwhile political prisoner. A Loyalist gunman has been known to yell “Trick or Treat!”

as he opens fire with a semiautomatic. The dolphins continue to mimic

the obeisance of the dock cranes.

That's right, Lew, the obeisance of the dock cranes seems to mark another lap

of the Macedonian pirate fleet

around the Cinecittà tank. Why not fit a motion-sensitive booby trap

to the Canary Wharf bomb? A Pape had as much chance of winning a council seat

as a bird does of representing the abandoned site.

Yes, Lew, that Boston electoral district really did take the shape of a salamander.

The fact that Ben Hourihane's toga is lime-white

is emblematic of his essential candor

while the Barrett semiautomatic is seen to swivel

even as Little Miss Messala writhes

in anticipation of the amputation saw. As you drove out of Santa Fe in your gig,

Lew, it must have struck you that one way to cut through the drivel

is by welding scythes

onto the hubcaps of what was otherwise a regulation-black Humber Pig.

The pivotal point of Bloody Sunday sees a Humber Pig spinning its wheels

while Father Edward Daly has the Divil's

own job of escorting a dying man off the field. Many of us remember Whitelaw's spiel

about there being no granting of the privi-

lege of “political status” to the prisoners in Magilligan and Long Kesh

despite the acknowledgment of their being “special category.” It was by dint

of becoming tribune, Lew, you became enmeshed

in mortality. I think of George Bernard Shaw's household hint

about being patient with the poor funeral attendees who snivel

because they think they ought to live forever. Maybe it's best to put on our purple togs

and fall in with the cavalcade

that frolics and frivols

through the streets of Jerusalem to the Isle of Dogs.

The accoutrements of empire. The opportunistic bracken's rusting blade.

The loathsome Squirt Pig was so named because it was fitted with a water cannon

before which all resistance would be shown to shrivel.

It was deployed in Dungannon

in an attempt to cut down all that civil

rights stuff about “One Man One Vote.” An extra in the parade was brought to book

for wearing a hackle on a Balmoral

instead of a tam-o'-shanter. Pomona wields a pruning hook.

In 1959, the same year
Ben Hur
took the laurels,

Seosamh Mac Grianna suffered the loss

of his wife and son. Both committing suicide. Both throwing off their yokes.

Mac Grianna would spend his final thirty-one years in a psychiatric

hospital in Letterkenny. That's right, Lew, each of us has his cross

to bear. An explosive charge fitted to the spokes

of one wheel will as readily put paid to the Ford Cortina as the Roman quadriga.

The cover of An Gúm's edition of
Ben Hur
sets it firmly in the Third Reich.

My childhood bedroom was divided by an earthwork fosse

that connected it to the Black Pig's Dyke.

The Squirt Pig, meanwhile, was painted in Admiralty-gray semigloss

meant to ward off those nightscopes. Disinformation about a dawn swoop,

half-truths and old-style spelling errors

only partly account for the imbroglio. Little Miss Messala and his skiffle group

doing their best to convince the reporter for the
Daily Mirror

(as well as the stringers for Reuters

and Associated Press) they won't succumb to the Mop Tops. Now the surgeon cocks

an ear to Messala's chest and checks his pulse

though everywhere the world has missed the beat. That's why Lonnie Donegan loiters

with the intent of cracking the combination on the lock

and seeing everything fall into place.

“My aunt Jane, she's awful smart, she bakes wee rings in an apple tart.”

That's right, Little Miss, not only has Doctor Graves linked goiter

to a lack of iodine but he keeps on cocking his ear to the atrium of your heart.

The medical team is surveying you as a plow team might reconnoiter

a rolling mead. Try to hang in there. Don't forget how Jonah

was punished by God because he balked

at being a prophet. Some think the cult of that self-same Pomona

may be glimpsed in the apple tart. The Chiricahua leader, Victorio, has chalked

up so many defeats he's emerged the clear winner. The day you took the oath

of office was the day you found yourself trammeled.

The fiercely territorial “Apache” goshawk is the same goshawk

(
an tseabhach mór
) that was sacred to Mars and Apollo both.

As for that most disinformative call about an “apple” being made of “enamel,”

it's been traced to a South Armagh telephone kiosk.

That's right, Lew, when you installed yourself in the governors' palace

little did you think you yourself were part of the growth

and graft of empire. It's pretty clear Messala's guilty of malice

aforethought at Antioch just as it's pretty clear our children are still loath

to ascribe scythe-hubbed Ferraris to the Picts. Some see your failure to show at Shiloh

as the impulse behind
Ben Hur
. Pecs and abs, Lew, abs and pecs.

As for the idea that the bird casting its Lilo

upon the waters might be wearing an anachronistic Rolex,

that's not so much a blooper

as a timer for an improvised explosive device. The prow of the
Havengore

continues to insinuate

itself into our consciousness. Billy the Kid lies in a stupor

while trying to grasp your offer of amnesty. Ben Hourihane is a lion chained to its roar.

Much as a disenfranchised Dungannon man is tied to his Nissen hut.

So it was that the funeral of Winston Churchill would gradually morph

into the funeral of an innocent victim of the Paratroopers.

Father Daly. His handkerchief. The innocent victims of the bombing of Canary Wharf.

Two kinds of grass. Regular and super.

One need only tweak the Vari-X a smidgen

to make an adjustment

in windage or elevation. A canary is also a stool pigeon,

of course, someone who sings in an English accent,

the accent reserved for the Romans. The cars in the high-speed chase swap

insults as they cross the border. In the way Ben was asked to rat on his coreligionists

you asked Billy the Kid to turn informant. It's something like a badge

of honor that our children spare us the details of the undercover cop,

tattooed glipe that he is, tied by his ankles and wrists

and staked out over an anthill in South Armagh by the Chiricahua Apache.

“And when Halloween comes round, fornenst that tart I'm always found.”

The investigative team is pulling out all the stops

to establish if Mac Grianna's son committed suicide or drowned.

Because the bass player in the skiffle group has called so many Saturday-night hops

he manages surface tension with the grace of a common water strider.

It's easy to see how a UVF man posing as a B-Special

became a privileged insider.

Back in 1933, Mac Grianna had wondered if he should render “clockwise” as
deiseal
,

that being the direction in which a lobster (even one on a tether)

tended to move around a henge.

The British were still celebrating their victory over the Macedonian effetes

while every year at Navan Fort there was a hell-for-leather

chariot race in which redemption still somehow triumphed over revenge.

Now your bird is your wand, Lew. I'm fully aware of that.

I'm well aware that Ben Hourihane was sold cardboard shoes by a shoddy

millionaire from the North. Messala's hip was cobbled together

from a titanium ball-and-socket. With her bawdy

she thee warshipped, Lew, there in the nether

reaches of the
Havengore
. I'm also well aware that Judas Iscariot

doesn't play as big a role in the movie as in the book. As for the shtick

about the railway gauge being the width of a Roman chariot,

it was in Dungannon someone threw the half-brick

that set off the first of a line

of reinings-in of big parades. That's why it's pure chance the prefect would dodge

a paver or twice-baked
tegula
made of Coalisland clay.

That's right, Lew, pure chance the Mescalero girl to whom you'd taken a shine

would go on to dislodge

just such a tile from the roof of the governors' palace in Santa Fe.

It was in Barry's amusement park Ben had first found himself on a “3 Abreast Galloper”

and realized there was a fine line

between being bewildered and unfazed. That's right, Massa Lew, a caliper

isn't going to work. Lobsters really are a class of sea swine,