The Secret Scripture (8 page)

'Oh,' said my father.

'Yes.'

Now the priest went a third time at the cigarette and found he already had quite an ash to deal with and in that silent dumbshow of smokers looked about for an ashtray, an item that did not exist in our house, even for visitors. My father astonished me by putting out his hand to the priest, admittedly a hard hand coarsened by digging, and Fr Gaunt astonished me by immediately flicking the ash into the offered hand, which perhaps flinched tinily for a moment when the heat hit it. My father, left with the ash, looked about almost foolishly, as if there might have been an ashtray put in the room after all, without his knowledge, and then, with horrible solemnity, pocketed it.

'Hmm,' said my father. 'Yes, I can imagine there is a difficulty to reconcile those two poles.' He spoke the words so gently.

'I have of course looked about, especially in the town hall, for an alternative occupation, and if at first this seemed an impossible – em, possibility – then, when I was just about to give up, the mayor's secretary, Mr Dolan, told me there was a job on offer, in fact, they had been trying to fill it some time past, with some urgency, due to the veritable plague of rats that has been bedevilling the warehouses on the riverside. Finisglen as you know is a very salubrious district, the doctor himself lives there, and unfortunately the docks abut it, as of course you know, as everyone knows.'

Now I could write a little book on the nature of human silences, their uses and occasions, but the silence that my father offered to this speech was very dreadful. It was a silence like a hole with a sucking wind in it. He blushed further, which brought his face to crimson, like the victim of an attack.

At this moment my mother entered with the tea, looking like a servant among kings, you would think, afraid perhaps to look at my father, so keeping her eyes on the little tray with its painted scene of some French field of poppies. I had often gazed at that tray where it lived on the top of the dresser in the pantry, and imagined I could see a wind blowing along the flowers, and wondered what it was like in that world of heat and dark language.

'So,' said the priest, 'I am happy to offer you, in the name of the mayor Mr Salmon, em, the eh – post. Job.'

'Of?' said my father.

'Of,' said the priest.

'What?' said my mother, probably against her better intentions, the word just popping into the room. 'Rat-catcher,' said the priest.

It fell to me, I know not why, to bring the priest to the door. On the narrow pavement, with the chill gathering about him, creeping no doubt up his soutane along his bare legs, the little priest said:

'Please, tell your father, Roseanne, that all the accoutrements of the trade are at the town hall. Traps, et cetera, I suppose. That's where he'll find them.'

'Thank you,' I said.

Then he started off down the street, stopped a moment. I don't know why I stayed there watching him. He took off one of his black shoes, leaning a hand on the brick wall of our neighbour's house, then balanced on one foot, feeling the underside of his sock for whatever hindered his walk, a pebble or piece of grit. Then he unhitched the sock from its gaiter, and removed it in a smooth sweep, revealing a long white foot with the toenails rather yellow like old teeth, folding back on his toes, as if they had never been cut. Then he spotted me with my eyes still on him, and laughed, and having routed out the offending stone, put back his sock and his shoe, and stood there solidly on the pavement.

'Such a relief,' he said pleasantly. 'Good day. And,' he said, 'now I think of it, there is also a dog. A dog attached to the job. For ratting.'

When I went back into the sitting room my father had not moved. The motorbike had not moved. The piano had not moved. My father looked like he would never move again. My mother I heard scratching about in the pantry, very like a rat. Or a little dog looking for a rat.

'Do you know anything about that job, Dadda?' I said.

'Do I – oh, I suppose.'

'You won't find it so hard.'

'No, no, because I have often had to deal with such things at the cemetery. The rats do love the soft soil on the graves, and the gravestones make such good roofs for them. Yes, I have had to deal with them. I will have to study the matter. Perhaps there will be a manual in the library.'

'A rat-catcher's manual?' I said.

'Yes, don't you think, Roseanne?'

'I am sure, Dadda.'

'Oh, yes.

Yes, how well I remember the day my father was let go from the cemetery, a living man exiled from the dead. That was a little murder also.

My father loved the world and his fellow humans in it, without much reservation on his part, considering as a good Presbyterian must that all souls are equally assailed, and hearing in the rough laughter of the cornerboy a kind of essential explanation of life, and thereby a redemption of it, in fact believing that since God had created everything, so everything by him must be approved, and also that the devil's own tragedy is he is author of nothing and architect of empty spaces. My father, by cause of all this, based his good opinion of himself on his work, that, as a person of unusual religion, he had yet been given a post to bury the Catholic people of Sligo as time claimed them one by one.

'Such pride, such pride!' he used to say, as together we locked the iron gates at evening, preparatory to going home, and his eyes fell in back through the bars to the darkening rows, the disappearing headstones that were his care. I suppose he was talking to himself, or to the graves, and probably not to me, and he might not have thought for a moment that I would have understood him. Perhaps I did not, but I think I understand him now.

The truth was, my father loved his country, he loved whatever in his mind he thought Ireland to be. Maybe if he had been born a Jamaican, he might have loved Jamaica just as much. But he was not. His ancestors had held the little sinecures available to their kind in Irish towns, inspectors of buildings and the like, and his father had even gained the eminence of a preacher. He was born in a small minister's house in Collooney, his infant heart loved Collooney, his growing heart expanding in its love to the island entire. Because his father was one of those radical thinkers, who had written pamphlets or at least preached sermons – because no pamphlets survive, but I seem to remember my father mentioning one or two – on the history of Protestantism in Ireland, my father held opinions not always favourable to himself. That is to say, he thought of the Protestant religion as an instrument as soft as a feather transformed into a hammer by the old dispensation, and used to batter the heads of those that laboured to live in Ireland, the most of them Catholics by nature. His own father loved Presbyterianism, and he did himself, but he was mortally sorry, no, he was mortally angry at the uses it had been put to, along with the religions of the Anglicans, Baptists et cetera, in Ireland.

How do I know? Because every night of my childhood, every night, the last thing he did in the house was come into my narrow bed, shoving me over with his wide hips, so that I lay half on him, my head on his whiskery face, and talked and talked and talked, while my mother went to sleep in the other room. When he heard her small snores he would leave me and join her, but in that half hour, in the darkness, as he allowed her to settle into sleep on her own, the moon first sitting on the back wall, and then floating darkly and brightly as is the manners of the moon, into the sky of unattainable stars (as I well knew), he recited to me all the intimations, suspicions and histories of his heart, not perhaps even bothering himself with the thought that I might not understand, but offering it all as a music quite as desirable to him and therefore to me as the works of Balfe and Sullivan, two of the greatest Irishmen that had ever lived, in his opinion.

And working in the graveyard, under the patronage as it were of Fr Gaunt, was in some manner to him his life perfected, made good. In some manner, made as a prayer back to his own father. It was the way he had learned to live, in Ireland, the accidental place he loved.

And to lose the job was to lose in some extraordinary fashion himself.

Now it was more difficult to be with him. It was hard for him to bring me ratting, it being such a dirty, tricky and perilous occupation.

Being a thorough man, he soon found the little book that would help him, called A Perfect Account of Rat-Catching,by a pseudonymous author, Rattus Rattus. This booklet recounted the adventures of a rat-catcher in the factories of Manchester, a city of heaped-up factories with infinite places for rats to live and hide. It told my father how to go about his work, itemising everything, even the sort of attention that was needed to be paid to the feet of ferrets, who it seemed were very vulnerable to foot-rot in damp cages. But my father never attained the dignity of owning ferrets. The corporation of Sligo was less ambitious. He was given a Jack Russell dog called Bob.

So began the strangest era of my childhood. I suppose also I was slowly less child than girl, less girl than woman. For the years of my father's ratting, a solemn mood of my own descended on me. Things that had delighted and pleased me as a child delighted and pleased no longer. It was as if something had been taken from the pictures and sounds of the world, or as if the greatest possession of a child is easy joy. So that I felt I was in a condition of waiting, waiting for something unknown to replace the grace of being young. Of course I was young, very young, but, as I remember it, no one is ever quite so old as a fifteen-year-old girl.

People persist with what we call ordinary life, because there is no other sort of life. My father continued to sing 'Roses of Picardy' as he shaved in the morning, the words and lines broken up, skipped here and there, as he manoeuvred the blade about his craggy face, so if I closed my eyes and listened below, I could see him in a sort of mysterious cinema at the back of my head. He continued heroically in this, and went out with his dog and his traps, and learned to make that his 'usual task', and returned from his work, not always at the old regular times, but still tried to carry the Sligo Champion in under his arm, and force his new life into the realm of normality.

But these days he might be reading items in the paper curiously connected to himself, or at least on one occasion, because I heard his little gasp, and looked up at him immersed in the paper. Mr Roddy was the owner of the Champion and very much a new government man, as they called it. So the actions of the civil war were reported in bare, plain terms, terms that also strove to suggest normalcy, solidity.

'By heavens,' said my father, 'they have shot those boys were in the graveyard that time.'

'Which boys?' I said.

'Those wild young lads brought in their murdered friend.'

'He was a brother to one of them,' I said.

'Yes, Roseanne, a brother to one. They have the names here. Lavelle was his name, isn't that a strange one? William. And the brother was John. But he got away it says here. Escaped.'

'Yes,' I said, a little uneasy, but also unexpectedly happy. It was like hearing about Jesse James or the like. You wouldn't like to meet an outlaw but you do like them to get away all the same. Of course John Lavelle we had met.

'Inishkea he is from. One of the islands. The Mullet. Very remote part of the world. Deepest Mayo. He might be safe down there among his own people.'

'I hope so.'

'It has been a very difficult thing for them, I am sure, shooting such men.'

My father spoke without irony. With truth. Indeed it would have been a very difficult thing. To put those boys side by side maybe, or one by one, who knew the way of these things, and shoot them – to death, as one might say. Who knows what happened on that mountain? In the dark. And now they were dead themselves, along with Willie Lavelle, from the Inishkeas.

My father spoke not another word. We were not looking at each other either, but at the same spot on the hearth, where a little hill of coals struggled.

But the silence that was on my mother was the profoundest of all. She might have been a creature underwater, or rather, when I was with her, it could have been so for both of us, because she never spoke, but moved slowly and ponderously like a swimming creature.

My father made his valiant efforts to stir her, and showed her every attention he could. His wages from his new work were small, but small as they were, he hoped they might do, especially in those hard dark years when the civil war was over, and the country was struggling to get off its knees. But I think in those days the whole world was aching with catastrophes, great wheels of history were turning not turned by man at all, but by the hand of some inexplicable agent. My father gave her what he earned, hoping she might parcel and divide the few pounds, and get us through. But something, inexplicable as the enormous forces of history, but a tiny matter since it only affected us, seemed to hold sway, and there was often almost nothing to eat in the house. My mother might bang about in the pantry at supper time, as if about to produce a meal, then come back out into the little sitting room and sit herself down, while my father, all scrubbed and ready after his work, and with a whole night ahead of him – for rats are best molested in the dark – and myself looked at her, with the realisation slowly dawning that there was nothing forthcoming. Then my father slowly shook his head, and maybe mentally tightened his belt, but hardly dared ask her what was amiss. In the face of her troubles, we were beginning to starve!

But nothing could penetrate her silence. Christmas came, and my father and myself plotted to get our hands on something that would please her. He had spotted a scarf for sale near the Cafe Cairo, in a little everything shop, and every week he kept back a halfpenny or so, so he could gather the necessary like a mouse hoards grain. Please remember that my mother was very beautiful, though perhaps not so beautiful now, as her silence had found an echo in some bleak thin cloth that seemed to be pulled over the skin of her face. She was like a painting with its varnish darkening, obscuring the beauty of the work. Because her lovely green eyes were dying in their lights, something of her essential self was vanishing also. But still in her general outline any artist would have been content with her I think, if Sligo had had artists, which I doubt if it had, unless it was fellas painting the faces of the Jacksons, the Middletons and the Pollexfens, who were the better people in the town.