The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty Read online

  Three calamities befall him then, calamities that to his Mam and Pappy are contrariwise wonders and like to days of carnival and funfair. His three siblings pop into view, one after the other, with barely a decent interval between, Jack, Young Tom, and Teasy, the mite of a girl. And they are fine creatures in their way and indeed Jack sports a head of hair as red as a dog’s and in the beginning of these new times Eneas is much struck by the little length of boy in his lacy cloths and the crushed face like an Injun.

  But it’s not long before Eneas is driven from his little kingdom, an exiled being, shorn of his mighty privileges. Five, three and two are their ages when Eneas comes into the double-numbered realm of ten, and a realm of scant attention and privacy it is. No more the Sahara of Strandhill with his Mam alone in the summer, no more Buck Rogers and the Dark Queen going about Sligo, marauding secretly from premises to premises. And what can he say about his siblings, except that they are devious, loved and needy for things at all times of day. There is no sacrosanct hour, the sun goes down on every day leaving each as cluttered and provisional as the last. Maybe his father too takes fright because there is less of the Pappy now, he is gone out to Finisklin on his own to dig out the remnant flowers of summer, and put in the contracted sacks of manure, alone, pristine, confused. And Eneas is not taken as before in the old glory days because his Pappy is not a man to be accused of favouritism. He likes to shun them all equally, though pleasantly.

  Difficult for Eneas, these peopled years, the house buckling and banging under the weight of lives, John Street racketing to the fierce hands and feet, formerly so quiet, composed, intent. His serious nature is jolted out of its tracks, his small engine of interest and joy must jar along the wretched stones. He looks at his mother, he regards her, passing in her dark clothes, not a dancer any more, not a conspirator, but a kind of slave truly to four or five mouths, herself ever more silent, tetchy, windblown. The family blows through the sacred house like a bad wind and at every door there is an interloper, interloping about the place. So he imagines. If she is not scraping shit off Teasy’s nappies, she is trying to keep cuts on Jack together with her bare hand. Jack is a fierce one for the accidents. You couldn’t let him out with a ball of wool till he’d cut himself with it.

  His rescuers are those pleasing and mighty kids that are the living death for the poor Presbyterian rector in his handsome house. A handsome house may boast a handsome orchard, but an orchard draws wild kids to it as bees to lavender, as hopes to the prisoner, and Eneas is an expert on the ways of those robbers long before he ever talks to one of them, because he can see them go nimbly along the glass-strewn wall, he can see them disappear down into the green bowel of the trees in the heavy musk of autumn, he can see the tips of branches moving as they pluck the fruit, as if dogs were moving through corn. Oh, they are the rabbits, the dogs, the very wildlife of the orchard, they are heroes and desperadoes and robbers and kings.

  One evening, watching from his dark window, he spies the tormented rector returning to his house unknown to the stealthy robbers already within the trees. He spies the heavy door closing and a little while later the same door opening and the rector creeping from it like a very kid himself and going like a beetle along the base of his mottled wall. There is a little gate and for this gate no doubt the clergyman possesses a mighty key.

  Eneas on an impulse without word or thought flies from his perch and out on to John Street and up the Lungey and hard left like a demon into the old cathedral lane, where the rector’s house is built into the boundary wall. He is a blue flame passing up the lane thick with the wet scent of mosses and the dirty shadows of the sycamores in the pitch cathedral copses. It is his joy to run so, to stop even at the hem of the rector and to cry out his famous warning to the robber Jonno and his crew within. And the robbers come up on the wall, they appear there, like winged boys, like cherubs, and they are all of them laughing like the mad, and flapping their jackets like birds and Eneas even in the dusk can see a long piercing cut appear on the leg of the leader Jonno as a shard of glass uncharacteristically catches him as he lets himself fall to the deep lane. And forever he is falling there, Jonno, boy of lightning, falling. And the rector, with his poor Protestant blind eyes Eneas has heard it mentioned, gropes into the vicinity for to capture at least some member of the gang, and takes a great hoult of the hair on Eneas’s head and grips there like a monster in a nightmare. And Jonno burgeons up and lets go a precise and perfect kick into the legs of the rector and an oath, polite but enormous, gushes out of him, and Eneas feels the loose growing-in bit of his gansey pulled, and the great velocity of Jonno’s strength hauls him back down the lane, spirits him back down, and the rest of the mob shouting and screaming like veritable Africans. And this is his proper and perhaps fateful meeting with the captain of his boyhood, Jonno Lynch.

  Maybe it is normal and everyday the manner of their going about, but truth to tell Jonno Lynch is an upright man. He is a bucko. He doesn’t walk along the streets but marches, to his own hidden fife and drum. When dangers blow against him, as when the glass gashes his leg, there is a wonderful enjoyment in him of these disasters. He is a soldier through and through.

  And he enlists Eneas simply and heartily into the small spinning thing that is the gang’s warfare and mischief. They spiral about, the gang of them, after school, boxing the fox of any orchard in their ken. There’s a mighty plan to construct a flying machine out of sheets filched from the Convent laundry that only comes unstuck on the superior battle capabilities of Sister Dolorosa, the nun from Mullingar. Always afterwards Jonno Lynch and Eneas gaze up at the wooded hills beyond the town and know in their souls that those would have harboured somewhere the site of their amazing flying achievement, the wonder and the news item of all the continents, but for the arms of Sister Dolorosa, six foot in span if they are a yard. It is the golden age of friendship, when to leave the gates of the school is to run in a fever to Mrs Foley’s two foul rooms in Kitchen Lane, where Jonno is fostered, and to embrace with always requited fervour the challenges of the evening, whether it is to remove the brasses moulded in Wales from the mayor’s carriage and attach them to the back of the dung collector’s cart, or only to fire at each other with catapults, using the dark blue seeds of the ivy beloved of the wood pigeons. And in this frenzy Eneas dances and is eternally pleased.

  And it is some recompense for the loss of the older kingdom, where his Mam and his Pappy were enthroned. And maybe there is always a little secret yard, mossy and ill-frequented, where he is morose and unforgiving about the matter, where the character of himself is wont to moon about and say hard things about parents and life itself in general, yes. For a boy cannot be expected quite to survive the lovely rainbow and the blissful shower all streaked and freaked with sunlight that is the lot of the single child amid resplendent parents.

  Maybe in dark moods he thinks Jonno Lynch for all his majesty is not the skirts lifted and the wild clacking dances of his mother’s former self, or the confidences at the exhausted breakfasts of his Pappy. Ah but, as the siblings come bawling out of babyhood and into the calmer country where children amaze their gaping fathers and mothers, perhaps he is reconciled a little to the terrible interlopers. And if Teasy seems eternally the baby, what harm? And in his position as elder brother he finds the elixir of superiority and a class of fearlessness, an adventurousness that they can never possess but which they infinitely admire in him. And if he has been wrenched a little from the breasts of his Mam and his Pappy he has also been released into the nether world, the interesting hell of Jonno Lynch’s heart, where Mrs Foley’s hideous manners are forever itemized, her teeth as loose as oyster shells, her arse as big as Ben Bulben, her striking hand as hard as a seagull’s head. On the other hand there are times he thinks that if a pleasant accident were to befall his siblings, if they were instantly crushed by rocks, or quickly drowned by a biblical sort of flood, he might regain his true happiness.

  3

  OH, IT IS SUMMER. He is si
tting in the high grass that infests the back field of the Convent where his little brother Young Tom and his sister Teasy learn their letters and their sums and gather to their minds the old stories of Little Jack Horner and the other Jack, of the Beanstalk. His middle brother, also Jack of course, though all of seven years old, is still too far off and young to make a companion for Eneas. And he feels this, the lonesomeness that five years have constructed between himself and Jack. Because he likes Jack now but Jack is bold with the Mam, and Eneas will shout at Jack. This puts the mufflers on Jack, and Eneas cannot get a word out of him because of the instances of shouting. He would prefer in the general run of things for him and Jack to be companions and rob the minister’s orchard but he has lost Jack by the shouting.

  Also Jack shines at his schoolwork and he has been nominated brilliant by the schoolmasters and this never happened to Eneas. Well, he knows he is no fool himself, but you cannot compete with the brilliant. The brilliant are hauled up into a realm without mysteries, and scribble better and count better than such as Eneas. Even Young Tom is admired for his scholarship and God knows he is only four. If his sister were not a complete baby she too would he supposes be raised beyond his country of average knowledge and average comprehension.

  His suspicion is that he has been given his father’s brains and they have got hold of the Mam’s. He ate a feed of sheep’s brains the once, and as he ate he knew sorrowfully that his father’s brain and his own brain were such as he toyed with on his fork. He never ate such a sorrowful meal before nor since.

  There is the war now beyond and a few of the men of Sligo have departed and many more are saying they will go. There is a great feeling in the town that they must send soldiers to the war, and aside from that it is in the line of genuine employment. The docks are still a mighty enterprise, but people are saying the docks are doomed and the grass will grow between the old bollards yet and it is the devil’s own job to keep the channels clear. Some are saying that there is a new terrible drift of sea-sand come down from Coney Island and thereabouts, that the autumn tides have gouged the channel by the Rosses ever deeper and pushed a frightful tonnage of sand and silt and God knows up into the docks. Men have seen salmon in shallows of the Garravogue where formerly there were deeps, and they are dredging but some hold that dredging is a fool’s errand in that no matter where you dump the sand, as far out into the sea as you like, the tides will carry it back for you in due course. But there is a tremendous trade in butter from all the western farms. There is still butter going down the Garravogue and excellent things coming up it. Now the men, the few that are most willing, are getting into the trains for Dublin and shipping out to England and beyond. You can sense the press of men behind them, the truer flood of men, held in just as yet by the ramparts of the wishes of their wives. But all in all the war is there and the men of Sligo cannot resist for long, nor ever could, whether Africa or Turkey or long ago in France herself. There is a frightful, some would say a peculiar love among the men of Sligo for the land of France, it is an old feeling that has survived. Eneas himself has strong views for France. He thinks her pleasing rivers and fragrant meads must be solemnly, solemnly protected. And he has half a notion that he might up and depart in the fullness of time, and do his bit, as the papers put it. Why wouldn’t he? Isn’t Sligo such a little place and mightn’t there be realms beyond it of great interest and high tone aspects, as wonderful as the magic lantern show or the mighty flicks themselves, those galloping and well kitted-out cowboys? And that damp yard of his bitterness echoes with agreement. He feels betimes a sort of rage to go, temporary, but fierce and shocking while it blows. Trouble is, everything is imagined, a picture painted with hints and horrors and news items. But, by God, he might chance it, should he live to see sixteen. Comfortably enough, that is some time off.

  Well he is sitting in the high grass at the back of the Convent for the moment, with Tuppenny Jane, and indeed it is warlike enough for him the while. The grasses are rich in meadowsweet and big yellow flares of ragwort, it is a sight. There is a thrumming of crickets to beat the band. How the world gets itself into such a state of heat, he does not know. Jane is no more than thirteen herself. Sometimes she acts thirteen and has a go at being with such as himself. But the world knows that Tuppenny Jane has been down the lanes often with some of the family men of the town. It is given out by some as a fact and, humorously, as the gospel truth, that the young priest, a man from the very cream of

  Castleblaney, gave her one for herself in the depths of winter, the time he was so down in his spirits and on the sauce and not long before he hung himself on one of the oaks in Dempsey’s dairy fields. He has heard it said that the men go for her because she cannot take to herself or in herself babbies yet, and as she is loose she is preferred as a place of refuge by the family men. In the meantime the priest has died for her and in that respect she is like France to Eneas, remote but important, vague but fatal. It is tricky for him to picture the priest with her. Maybe it was something else drove him to the oak branch. Maybe it was the sweets of Tuppenny Jane. Yes, Jane herself hinted as much with a lovely little handful of golden and sparkling hints that she likes to entertain with.

  She has a nose too big for beauty it is often said, and Eneas fears her. One night with Jonno Lynch he lay beside her in the ruined summerhouse in one of the old gardens in Finisklin, not his father’s, for safety. Jonno kissed her and put his hands in under her skirts and felt at her clammy crotch in a set of big school knickers. You might as well have tried to find the entrance in an Arab’s tent, Jonno avowed afterwards, a notorious difficulty in desert life. He got that out of a book — or buke, was his better word. Despite his erudition, she kept squirming Jonno’s hands away. Eneas put his own hand in for the heck of it and in the veritable tangle of Jonno’s fingers thought he felt something. He was truly surprised and all he could think of was that something unlikely had happened, unlikely but desirable, like seeing a rabbit in the door of its burrow and the creature for a change not running in immediately, not fearing his approach.

  Oh, he cherished that moment. He felt something like a blow on the back of the head. Some great hand of Destiny, like they’d be saying in the flicks, clutched the column of his spine and yanked at it. For a year he had been dreaming of such a matter. He had tried to picture the tropical harbour of long leaves and hot storms that he imagined a woman’s sex might be. Suddenly he docked there, briefly.

  Now he sits with her in the high grass, alone, without Jonno, because Jonno is off cutting turf on Mrs Foley’s patch of bog the far side of Knocknarea, that her bloody uncle left her, for the specific torturing of Jonno Lynch, but no matter, a man bows to his fate as best he can, and it is one of those dry and polleny June evenings with a rake of sunlight still to come. His heart is new halfpennies, all the more so as he imagines poor Jonno labouring. Not that he would fear the labour himself, he might like it, but Jonno is ever the town boy. He looks at her mousy hair and the nose and the breasts in her gansey that seem to shout of their own accord somehow, and now and then casts a glance at her skinny legs, and prays for courage. He wonders hard to himself why he is so overcome with fright and silence and uselessness and a sense of his own youth in her presence.

  ‘Do you remember that old time at all,’ he says, ‘with Jonno and meself in the summerhouse, do you?’

  ‘I do,’ she says, ‘and I do because I was mad that night to go and pee and nather of you boys would let me, it was cruel.’

  ‘Did you have a need to?’ he says, choking with sympathy, it being a particular curse on himself, a weak bladder and no courage either to declare it in many a pressing moment but a moment often crowded with other people.

  ‘Why,’ he says, ‘I never knew, the whole time.’

  ‘Boys never do know anything, boys are too busy with their roving hands.’

  There is truth in this. Then he thinks to himself maybe she is a noble sort of a person after all, if he could reform her. He might, and if he knew where
to start he would.

  ‘Jane,’ he says, ‘where do you stand with hollyhocks?’ ‘How do you mean, hollyhocks?’ she says.

  ‘Hollyhocks, do you care for them?’

  ‘What are they like?’ she says, reasonably.

  ‘Flowers, you know, my father grows them mightily there in his garden under Midleton’s and I would be now proud and happy to give you a bunch maybe going home if you liked, Jane.’

  ‘My mother wouldn’t stand for me bringing flowers into the house,’ she says. Quite noble in her demean.

  ‘Why?’ he says.

  ‘Because she married an American.’

  He is puzzled now, greatly.

  ‘What’s that?’ he says.

  ‘She married an American my father, you know, and she will not allow herself pleasures now since he left us and not two pennies to rub together.’

  He laughs. Two pennies for Tuppenny Jane.

  ‘What’s humorous?’ she says, very sharp.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says, laughing, secure, comfortable.

  ‘You’re cack-cacking there at me,’ she says, ‘and your own mother not better than me, in the upshot, really. I won’t say I’m a good one. But she’s no different.’