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Authors: Sebastian Barry

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Mr Jackson talks without much pausing always, and it is, Eneas supposes, to place a bulwark against the waiting tide of filth that passes among schoolboys for knowledge. He tells them extraordinary things and he likes to give them samples from your man Homer, in a funny little pip-squeak voice. In fact, his favourite talk is of the old Greeks, and their dooms and their wars, and how the Gods were forever decreeing the fates of the mortals, and girls were turned into trees, and the like. And from what Eneas hears him say, the fellas in Rome later on weren’t that much better fixed, nor indeed that other Eneas fella. But he can’t try and catch these curious trout of information now, he has other legends to puzzle out. Legends of Sligo. The master tries to swamp his head with decent information from what he magnificently calls the Classical Eras of the World, but the terrier of his mother’s origins sees him off every time. It means something for himself, this business of his mother, and he senses what it might mean hovering close by, but elusive and foggy. The death or the life of him, he cannot say. Just out of reach, just out of reach. The heads of the boys about him nod in the slow fever of the afternoon. The elms full of fresh leaves, all inflated and shining after the buckets of thick rain, wash about gently below the windows. Thank God the weather has brightness. The hard world mills about in the dark streets of the town. And is all the world of Sligo abreast of his mysterious Mam? The jokes of the butcher boys and the draper’s assistants are against him!

That night his little room seems dangerous to him. The Lungey House swelters in the June night, accusatory, high-faluting. Shame is a sort of silence, slightly whistling, slightly humming. And he thinks of the young priest from Castle-blaney that hanged himself. There in the silent bed he thinks of him. He sees the grasses all sere and the yellow wind invading the lost fields. What a sough in the deep branches there is as the Castleblaney priest climbs to his early and possibly ignoble death, with the length of mooring rope stolen, it transpires, from the prow of a gillie’s salmon-boat. He has tasted the very honey of Tuppenny Jane’s damp crotch, eternally, generously damp and sweet and deep in the starched petal of her knickers. Higher he climbs and places the rope about his Castleblaney neck. He sits on the rough branch. What’s he thinking, what’s he thinking? He gives a little kick away, all that learning and aspiration rushing towards oblivion, in such a manner as Eneas often imagined doing while tree climbing, scaring the daylights out of his legs, paralysing himself aloft. Away he tips, the priest in his relic-like clothes, his dog collar under the collar of rope, his polished shoes, his fine linen, his handsome belt. The rope snaps tight, his neck-bone is banged sideways in a way it cannot endure. The tongue protrudes slowly as it fills with blood and the face goes black as sins. The maw of hell roars like an opened kiln. The once saintly bowels loosen into the excellent trousers, purchased, Eneas believes, in the particular shop in Marlborough Street in Dublin. Eneas sweats in the cosy bed. Shame is not sweet, shame is not like Tuppenny Jane’s crotch! Through and through he is shot with the arrows of shame. He understands it. It is a filthy pain, an attack, an affront to lonesomeness. His little room is transformed into a chamber of shame. The priest dangles. By God, he will go to the war, Eneas, as soon as he is let, if his fine pride in himself is to be eroded.

The images subside and the moon hastens over sleeping Sligo into the shapely hills of Ben Bulben and Knocknarea. Perhaps he ought to say, his mother is a woman of mystery. Well, it is not satisfactory, but still. Shame flees away. He feels for her. It is curious. Perhaps Tuppenny Jane has been his liberator of sons. He has a sudden sensation of freedom, a surge of it, like a bump in his heart, a lump in his throat. The love for his mother and his distance from her is a sort of freedom. It is liberty. Anything is possible with such liberty, he knows. Love, and distance. He loves her, he loves her. Perhaps he is to be a grown man soon, after all — old in the bed, at fourteen.

 

The next year Jonno Lynch launches himself into the informal suit of a messenger boy, full of whistles and wads of orders stuck in his important pockets. He must escape and he doesn’t care much whose heart he has to break to do it. He is employed by the auctioneer, O’Dowd, and some of the boys left in the school maintain that many of Jonno Lynch’s errands are peculiar and little linked to land deals and such. Indeed Eneas sees him shooting up back streets on his silver bicycle and the worst that is said about him is that he is the Mercury to all the dark men in the town, the big men, the boyos, the lads on the make and the lads all murky and serious with ideals and plots. It is all a mishmash of men and Jonno is the living spoon stirring it all about. So it is said, and Eneas would like to ask Jonno, but Jonno has become like his own bicycle, his Dawes premier machine, fleet and solemn and silent on the tar of Sligo. And Eneas’s heart is heavy and two prize-fighters of doubt and hurt are bashing away in there. He can conquer the horror of his mother’s mystery, but never the loss of Jonno, he thinks.

So the following year after that it behoves Eneas to look hard about him for some spot to plant his sense of affronted liberty, or some avenue to preserve it. Jack only grows in his scholarly achievements, now Young Tom has shown a happy aptitude for the instruments beloved of his father, the bulbous cello, the reedy piccolo, and Teasy is a miasma of pious notions. Jonno is but the nickel shadow. No help to Eneas.

He goes in to his Mam and Pappy’s room one night, a little tornado, a Texas twister, of youth and confusion. It is a place he has not gone often in the last years, though once he was the prince of their pillow, the saint of their windowsill, looking out, the two faces pressed to his each side, with space for nothing between them. He goes in and stands there and spots the surprise in his Mam’s face, as she lifts her head from peering into her big scrapbook, where she sticks all manner of stray items and illuminations, without rhyme or reason, he would venture to say. And his father, with his hands behind his head as nimble as a bather, though the hair is white as dandelion milk, lowers his hands and pulls the embroidered coverlet over his bony breast, maybe without thinking. That same white breast where once Eneas lay loose as a jellyfish, hours without end.

‘I’m thinking,’ he says, T’m thinking, Mam, of going out there to the war they have in France.’

‘What war?’ says his Pappy, ever the man up on current news. It is the first time Eneas has thought, for a second, a second, that his Pappy is a bit of a fool, a bit of a colossal fool.

‘The one they’re at over in France, this last while.’

‘Jesus, that’s for English boys, Eneas,’ says his Pappy, kindly.

‘No,’ says Eneas. ‘There’s rakes of Sligomen gone out.’

‘Now, but not boys,’ says his mother. ‘Not boys.’

‘I tell you,’ says Eneas, ‘they’ll have boys of sixteen if you present yourself. In some manner or fashion-. The navy might take me. Look at all the boys in sea stories. But I’d like dearly to go.’

‘What about your great friend Jonno, that’s made good now in the land trade?’

‘Never mind that,’ says Eneas, hard instead of tearful, he’s bone-weary now of crying in the nights because of Jonno and his bicycle. ‘I’d rather go fighting.’

‘Why?’ says his Pappy. ‘Why go so far? I never knew you to be footloose, Eneas. Sligo’s a good place. A dandy.’

‘It wouldn’t be for ever, Pappy. Wars don’t go on for ever.’

‘I don’t think I’d like you fighting in a foreigner’s war,’ says his Mam. ‘Nor any war, where my own first-born boy might be murdered.’

‘What’s foreign? If there’s Irishmen in it?’

‘Still, boy,’ says his mother. ‘I couldn’t see the use of it. No, but the lack of use. The waste.’

‘It mightn’t suit you once you’re there, Eneas, and the army’s fierce hard to get out of,’ says Old Tom.

‘It’s like prison,’ says his Mam, ‘so it is.’

‘When school’s done with, well, I’d like to,’ says Eneas. ‘Well,’ says his father, as if a-dream, as if singing the words secretly within, ‘think it over well.’

‘And I will, Pappy,’ he says, the stars jostling for room in the windowpanes. The two of them in the bed like one of them tombs in the Protestant church, where he and Jonno once crept, to fright their mortal souls, and steal what they could of missals, full of the deviPs words — the Knight and his Lady.

 

4

As the boat comes up
the river at Galveston his soul is sixteen summers old. And yet he knows this Galveston. Oh, like many a port he has noticed it possesses unexpectedly the qualities and signs of the port of home, though it is not. A queer romance enshrouds it. He will be at home among docks and shipping. The nearest to the war he could get was the British Merchant Navy and now here he is in Texas! Texas is hotter than the Tropical Plant House in Belfast, where he signed himself up for this French war. In Texas!

It was better, and more discreet with the politics going about those days, to cross from wily Connaught into the indifferent and more English-minded counties, for to take the King’s shilling in Belfast. Or for to become an honest Jack Tar anyhow. And in the upshot the makeshift counter in the Plant House appealed to him, as if, though the decision was surely made, it was made lightly, even humorously. Because it was a queer thing for the recruiting captain of the British Merchant Navy, aping all the custom and ceremony of the navy proper, because of the times of shortage that were in it, to be set in his dapper white uniform against the gigantic fronds and flourishes of some lost South American world, adrift in a stormy, red-bricked Belfast. But with the local trouble a-flare in Dublin, with your man Pearse and the rest all shot and the public everywhere it was said in ferment about it, it was best, his Mam decreed, for a sixteen-year-old boy to make his compact with the British Merchant Navy in the privacy and ease of the Protestant counties, which indeed were more neighbour to Sligo by the atlas than Dublin herself. And though both had a thimble of politics between them, Eneas’s Pappy deemed it wise also.

They are fetching machine parts in Galveston and he understands in his heart that he may still serve the King and save France from this vantage point. He may still gaze over France in his bunk-imprisoned dreams and bless her sacred vineyards and walk with the endangered French monks through the groves of threatened — what other blasted thing do they grow in France, peaches, apricots, bananas? Galveston is buried in its summer doldrums, the very river thick as treacle, oiling along between the wharves, past the shrimp boats and the toiling goods trains. The boats of America are never brightly painted, but to him as he leans as sailors must upon the rail they are informal as the men he likes, the quick men, the joking men, sorrowful, who cry after a few beers and drag out the mementoes of home lugubriously. There are fine times to be had in the absolute bleakness of the evenings playing cards for English pennies and weeping after the sights and girls of home. He is not a-feared of those men as he thought he might be, indeed as his mother said he would be. He has all his cloths of muscles now on the eternal frame of his bones. They are men bawdier than bawds, quieter sometimes than corncrakes when the scything men are near, lonesomer than broken farmland, happier oftentimes than dogs, crueller betimes than Spartans. But they are men that know home, and every port in their company is home. It is a mystery dear to him, a mystery he thanks his stars for. That a handful of men can jimmy up a semblance of home, or nearly. And maybe it is because they are oftentimes so far from the warmth of wives and the enthusiasms of children that their hearts are in so great a fever always to make a world, if only a lean-to of a world that a boat is, nailed and angled to the dark emotions of the sea. His youth makes him a willing builder, adding his ha’p’orth of nails to the structure, placing something of his parents into the speckled wood, a tincture of his Pappy especially, so remarkable in the company of other people, tuneful and liked. He thinks it is not such a bad thing to be adrift on the limitless ocean, a creature itself so vast, so intimately gripping the hard earth herself, it cannot be seen entire, even in extraordinary dreams. Perhaps he has a talent for sailoring, he suspects he might, and it gives him great heart at his tasks, whether sluicing out the jakes or whatever he is assigned on the roster of muck duties, as they are rightly termed. Perhaps if he had been robbed off the quays and press-ganged as some of the old sailoring men were in the distant days of their youth, he might resent the bockety world of the boat. But as he has chosen to come out upon the sea, it suits him, if not down to the ground at least to the last timber of his vessel. He knows that if a man chooses to go, he may freely in the next breath choose to return home, wherever true home lies. And this is his liberty, his home reachable behind him, and all the different versions of home in the ports of the world, and the peculiar but adequate home in the person of the boat. He really does think the world is various and immense, and curiously homely. Happy thoughts, no doubt, happy illusions, on the great circus and stage of the sea, with the drug of youth in his blood. And he knows now many an important star, and he has seen the canopies of the Northern Lights, falling in light more blue than shells from the domains where no God abides. Many a moment his formerly bleak heart sings privately in the dark of the thrumming boat. The old sailors laugh at him for calling the ship a boat but everything was a boat in Sligo that sat upon the waters.

 

‘Where is that West they talk about?’ he asks.

He is relaxed in the welcome gloom of a bar in Galveston, Texas, tucked in amid the huge decorated warehouses, where a British sailor may rest easy and drink unmolested. The bar is called Gabe’s and he was given the name on his ticket of shore leave because he is of course youthful and an easy thing therefore for a Galveston man to rob. But he hasn’t got but the four dollars in his britches anyhow, so they may roll him if they wish he reckons, though on second reckoning four dollars would buy a high old time in Galveston. Indeed he was told of a certain avenue, named for some dark reason Avenue 1½, as if it had no need of the extravagance of a full number, where all the fine loose girls had their quarters, among the general mass of Negramen and women.

‘Where is that West?’

It is a question offered generally to the simple collection of men about him, dressed in clothes that were new a decade since, in hats of the same vintage, large, lop-sided, attitudinal. They have felt bound to mention in the manner of human persons everywhere on the homely earth the sameness of the weather in South Texas, provided always you allow for the tornado and typhoon at the back of everybody’s mind, but the freshening effect nonetheless of the gratifying sea. Shrimpers, waders, engineers, knockabouts, carters, boozers …

‘Where is that West, the West I hear often mentioned?’ asks Eneas.

And it is generally then agreed among the gentlemen present that you will have to go a long way beyond Ohio these times to find that selfsame West. Ohio is so loaded under farmers it cannot be sanctioned with the term West. No doubt it was always East by the map, but wilderness, open plain, made West of everywhere beyond New England one time. Was Iowa West? This is discussed fervently enough.

‘No, friend. You would not be West till you saw South Dakota. Till you crossed the Plate River itself. And that’s a fact.’

‘How would you know that,’ says a weasely-looking man in a restitched sack for a set of trews, that has been shovelling shrimp all day to judge by the filthy pink stain up to his oxters, ‘you, that never saw a cow or a prairie or nothing like that, all your born days?’

‘I read the
Galveston Echo
,’ says the challenged man. ‘And,’ he says, ‘there never was, nor ever will be, a call for a shrimp-boat captain in South Dakota, so why would I go?’

This is the definitive information. Eneas is reduced now to taking the fresh chilly beer into his gullet. He wonders how they get it so cold in these frightful climes. Broken Heart is the name of it. Broken Heart beer. He likes it. He feels a great liking generally lifting himself on to the terrain of these men, he would like to be an American. It is a matter of hailing himself as such, he supposes, in his own mind. But he could scarcely expect his own captain to relish him going off now to be an American Eneas. Still, he is sixteen, he is strong, he harbours no ties to anything above the ties of his childhood place, which sometimes he thinks might be overcome, and ought to be, all things considered. Nothing moors him only his feeling for this and that, of course his love for his Mam and Pappy is an ingredient there, and his enthusiasm for the proper dealing in friendship and so forth. The first effects of the beer are a ravaging hopefulness that dances through his brain. How easy, conquerable, perfectly interesting, engrossing, even ennobling, the bloody old earth is! He would not offend these drinking men for the world with a faulty remark. He plans every inch of what he says to them, as any man ought who wishes to be among friends and liked, and is hooded above his own words, watchful, as much as he can, easy though he is among them. He understands the force, the fooling, the arrogance and the victory of that very clock behind the Negraman tending bar, ticking away their lives and chances.

‘I heard there was a war in your part of the world,’ says the pleasant weasel man. ‘Our friend here is not the only poor fool reads the
Galveston Echo
with his dinner.’

There is,’ says Eneas. ‘There is a big war back there in France, across the sea.’

‘I read as much. The President himself has concerned himself with your war, so you have no need to fear.’

‘Why has the boy no need to fear?’ says the regular
Echo
reader, with the added expertise on the Plate River, wherever it was. ‘No president I ever heard of could lessen the fears of a young man like him. A young man, drinking Broken Heart. Or any other young man.’

‘There are men dying all across the fields of France,’ says Eneas suddenly, startling the arguers. The few men listening at the bar look at Eneas. Funny how some men talk and some men listen.

That’s just what I’m reading,’ says the weasel, distantly, as if he too suffered the terrible nostalgia for France that Eneas does, though neither truly has set foot upon her soil.

‘Like lambs,’ says Eneas.

‘Yes. Like lambs they die,’ says the weasel. ‘And before you object to what I’m saying,’ he says to his friend, ‘I went to war in my day, and wore that blue cloth upon my back,’ and he turns again to Eneas, ‘when I was young like you.’

‘I don’t object,’ says the other man, sincerely.

Long into that night Eneas talks with the lonesome men. He fills them in on the great facts of France. How the fields of France used swell in the summer with the drunken fragrance of the vines. The men are dizzy with knowledge, they love this young man of knowledge. The beer makes him more than happy. Its chill instigates in him an unknown sense of distance and at last he senses the bitter, wholesome, liberating, lonesome idea that being an American must be. He hears now about the fine families of Texas that are still struggling with the Redman in the furthest West, in the morning fog and evening suffering of the desert. He hears about the big-boned women that such families feature. He is astounded again and again by the facts of Texas. They try to tell him how big this Texas is but it’s not within his grasp. He knows the blown lovely Azores, out there in the centre of the sea, but a land that they tell him is as big as the sea, he cannot grasp it. The pagan Redman out there in the West fighting the fine families excites him. He gulps at the beer. If he were aboard ship now, the topic of mothers would have been raised, as it always was when there was drinking, and he would be doubtless weeping. Here his mother seems too skinny and small to have much fire for him beside the Texan matriarchs. And she would not thrive in Texas, she could not be an American. Jonno might make an American, but not his Pappy or his Mam. There is something, what can he call it, an edge of murderousness that is new to him, in these peaceful companions. They are at repose in the bar and at the edges he senses the ghosts of death and hardship. What would his father do, all small with his piccolo in the cruel kingdoms of the Redman? They would eat him. They would stir the soup with the piccolo. He is thankful he has got tall and strong himself in the upshot. He gives thanks to the good God that he has got tall and strong. Why, here at the foot of America, where he is drinking, the Negraman humming the while with the struck lights of the drinking glasses at his looming back, and where a filthy sea leaks out into the sombre Bay of Mexico, and Jamaica is beyond, he is astonished at everything. Everything seems suddenly an accident, maybe even a conspiracy, his mother’s parentage, the glorious foolishness of his father, the brilliance of his brother Jack, Young Tom’s musical gifts, his sister Teasy’s weird piety. The things that have driven him away to be the saviour of France, to be a soldier of sorts for France, for those extraordinary vineyards, seem things now to make him laugh. America dwarfs him! He is laughing out loud, drunk as a tequila maggot. He is banging the bar joyously. It is unbearably humorous. He is a British sailor. It is death to say the words, he is tortured by the humour of it. He notices the weasel is so wickedly intoxicated now that his face has fallen forward from the forehead to the chin and he’s dribbling like one of his father’s lunatics. Simple facts under the bright pall of drink are wild and strange to him. A British sailor. A Christian. Now he laughs the loudest. A Christian!

 

The captain makes Galveston the centre of their journeys so Galveston becomes as familiar to him as a district of Ireland. He comes to understand all the natures of the sea creatures captured by the famous fishermen of Galveston, in their boats rusty but glamorous, and the scientific gradations of shrimps, their sizes and their characters. This is the talk of Galveston, along the water. The handsome brick wharfhouses stand cooly in the fiery middays. He cannot but have admiration for the citizens of Galveston, he cannot help it, some of the older sailors find grievous fault with matters and detest the sodden heat, but Eneas with his youthful heart rejoices in the clamour of talk and business of remote concerns, and when he is perforce crawling up the coast to attend to the captain’s ambitions in Bermuda, or crossing the strange ruckled shallows of the Bay of Mexico to have truck and trade with the small Mexicans, he misses the simplicities and carefree sights of Galveston, and thinks of himself walking there, and greeting the shrimpers and, in the curious avenues, the easy sorts of people holding court on collapsing stoops.

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