At Swim, Two Boys

  Which brought MacMurrough to old Brother Benedict. That last day they walked through the school cloisters while the other boys were at chapel. No alternative, immodest acts, influence on others, disappointment we all felt, shame your mother must feel, under the circumstances, consideration given to father’s position, your mother has begged, one last chance, if truly repentant, bright future ahead, knuckle down, I’m afraid not possible. Deo optimo maximo. Datur omnibus mori.

  —Can’t help wondering if they get much, he said to Scrotes. Officers, I mean. Get to choose your batman. Clean hands and eager-to-please nature. Be like setting up house. Pull me off, Atkins, I’m feeling wotten weawy.

  —I am happy to find you relax somewhat.

  MacMurrough laughed and lit a cigarette, careless at last of his hands. You know, he said, I had a friend who was set to marry but they were in some terrible train disaster. He found himself in a hospital and the nurse told him his intended had died. He was devastated, of course, but devastated the more to find he was attracted to the nurse. Every time she passed he went stiff under the sheets. But dicks are like that. Callous they may be, but they never lie. He was alive. He had survived. His dick told him.

  The girl came with the buns and tea. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

  “No, that’s all.”

  “I hope and you enjoy your holidays.”

  “Yes,” said MacMurrough.

  “Oh let me do that and your poor hands and all.” She poured the tea. “Is it home from the Front you are? Don’t mind me asking, sir, only I have a man in Flanders. Sure it’s never as bad as they say, sure it isn’t, sir?”

  MacMurrough eyed the empty chair beside as if Scrotes might actually be found there. “No,” he answered. “It’s never so bad as they say.”

  “Thank you, sir,” and she bobbed away.

  —Worst of it is I should be an officer now. I mean, all one’s contemporaries are.

  —You might still volunteer.

  —You think they’d have me?

  —One suspects the authorities have grown less particular of late.

  —Well I haven’t. What do I care about this war? Whoever the victor, they’ll still despise me.

  —It is not their despising that concerns us. It is your own.

  —Why this harping on my despising myself, Scrotes? It really is tiresome in you.

  —My friend, we wish to be rid of something. How to be rid without finding it first?

  MacMurrough pushed the tepid tea aside. He left a tip for the ladlorn waitress. I give without loss as I buy without gain.

  He walked afterwards along the pier where another band was playing, a military band this time, and listened a while until the recruiting-sergeants grew too insistent. Then he passed through a gap in the wall to the seaward side, where the wind hit with the blast of guns. There were slum children on a Sunshine Trip clambering over the rocks and MacMurrough watched their ragged antics and listened to their bootless cries. At the pier’s end he waited within the spray of the waves as the mailboat came in. It recalled his own arrivals here as a child and the expectation that rose when his father changed his watch to Irish time.

  —You know, I used to enjoy those holidays at Aunt Eva’s. As a boy, I mean. It was always a friendly, idle sort of house. She used to tease my father for sliding into an Englishman, and to prove her wrong he would take punch and sing songs into the night. The children were let run free. It’s odd, considering the interminable political plight, but Ireland for me has always signified freedom. A lazy freedom which you don’t really know what to do with.

  —What did your mother make of the place?

  —She, being English, put up and smiled. Aunt Eva terrified her. One begins to see why now.

  —Does she terrify you?

  —All this rot about flutes and fêtes. It’s absurd, but I mayn’t deny it’s tempting, too. To see society return. Once more to dine at a club. Unghost my father with posterity till again he shines on his son. It’s terrifying to be tempted into happiness.

  —Do you not wish for happiness?

  —I don’t wish always to hope knowing there can be none. Even Aunt Eva cannot scratch time.

  The mailboat had entered between the piers and he saw the passengers crowding the decks. He saw the excited face of a boy with his father beside who pointed out the places. The boy gulped the air, gulping in the sights and sounds, electrified by the strangeness and the strange familiarity. Holidays, that unbelievable future, had arrived.

  Yes, he had enjoyed those holidays at Aunt Eva’s. Enjoyed them and mostly forgotten them. Until out of the blue his aunt wrote him in Wandsworth Jail.

  —I remember, said Scrotes. You wept when they showed the envelope.

  —Did I cry? I’m not sure.

  —You wept. They were induced to call the chaplain.

  —Her green notepaper and the Irish postmark in my cell. It was like all of Ballygihen spilt out of it. There was the boy with his glass jar and his collecting-net and the waves washing as he played on the sea-wall. I felt he stopped suddenly and a recognition came over his face which turned to horror when he met my eyes. I think for the first time I felt—I realized the enormity of what had happened in my life.

  —What did you feel?

  —You know what I felt.

  —Say it.

  —I don’t need to.

  —You do.

  —Disgust. I despised myself.

  He felt Scrotes’s hand in his pocket and his handkerchief unfolded before him. So brilliantly washed and ironed, the cloth seemed a thousand miles away.

  —It really isn’t fair, you know. If it weren’t for this rotten war I might have gone to France or Italy where you’re supposed to go when they find you out. What on earth brought me to Ireland? What on earth am I to do here?

  —There there, said Nanny Tremble, but it wasn’t Nanny Tremble, it was Scrotes, who only said, We shall see.

  The washerwoman was coming down the garden when he returned to Ballygihen. Her feet were the color of boots and her shawl was black, but her skirt beneath showed a rich red which surprised, though he could not say why. The infant that snuggled inside her shawl seemed too large to be carried. Its wide unwondering eyes hinted at simplicity. She had her wicker load as usual on her head. How could a burden lend such poise, he wondered, for she appeared to glide along, as though the dirt on her feet were one with the grass. Her face was stern, probably older than her years. She was singing, but only when she passed did he catch words from her song.

  MacMurrough shut his eyes. Her song was of a swan on a lake but her singing held the sadness of Ireland, the lost lonely wastes of sadness. He saw the black water and the declining sun and the swan dipping down, its white wings flashing, and slowing and slowing till silver ripples carried it home. It was a scene which seemed the heart of this land. The lowing sun and the one star waking, white wings on a black water, and the smell of rain, and the long lane fading where a voice comes in the falling night.

  —Ireland, said Scrotes.

  —Yes, this is Ireland.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Through the half-door of the cabin the sun came and tickled his face. It dazzled his eyes when they opened. There was a scent on the air that called him to Clare, to Coney Island with his mother’s people. Chickens clucked in the lane and the milk cow lowed for her milking. In a shake he was up and sitting, listening for his uncle and the surly stamp of the ass.

  The pallet was strange. A motor honked, sounding nothing like the geese that honked on the Fergus. Nothing like the tide’s rush were the rasps that came from the shadows. A Dublin-bound tramp blew in the bay, lonely and cow-like and wanting.

  He was home, but not on the island. Down the Banks, down in Glasthule. Yet something in the air had called him to Clare.

  He rubbed the seeds from his eyes and sights and sounds adjusted. Torn loaf on the butter-box. Himself ’s suit in a crumple on the floor. He looked to the bed where came the rasping breath.
The mouth hung open and fingers picked at the bedding. No sign of the ma, and Missy gone too. Where would she be so up and early?

  The girls all were sleeping still on their shakedown in the corner. Like the leaves of a cabbage they lay, each leaf enfolding the next one down. Eleven, nine, seven, five: the same face told in tripping years. Red hair same like himself in the bed. Another had come and gone while he was away in Clare, and it disturbed him now that he could not recall her name. What name had they gave her, the little one with the tiny stone above in Deansgrange? He could not recall and it ailed him so to disremember.

  Turf, that was it. Ship-coal had grown too costly in the war and now they were burning turf in Glasthule. He wondered how he didn’t notice it before. The whiff alone would heat you.

  Burn everything English excepting their coal. Well, it was partly coming true.

  He raked the fire that had a glow in the ashes yet. Then he pulled on his trousers and took the kettle to fill it. He felt in turns the dusty warm and shadowy cold as he padded between the cottages. All was still save a scrawny old bantam that pecked in the gutter. No birds, for they had no trees for birds to sing from, but he caught the hum of a woman’s voice, and coming to the yard where the pump stood he found his ma with her tub beside her, hushoing to Missy while she worked.

  “Well, son.”

  It was like she knew him from his shadow or the fall of his feet, for she did not look up to greet him, only kept at her work. It made him smile that she took such pains with her scrubbing, for it was form’s sake really. The stains she shifted with the hard of her stare.

  “Is breagh an maidin é.”

  Now she turned, humored by his Irish. “’Tis a fine morning all right, son, God’s blessing on the day.”

  “Give us here little Missy,” he said. The shawl unwound and he took the bundle in his arms. “What way is she today?”

  “Bright as the morning, thanks be to God.”

  The fingers stretched and there was trouble in the eyes that only settled when the shawl was about her again. He too could smell his mother in the wool. “Did I tell you I can get milk for her, Ma?” he said. “I know a place sells Peamount milk.”

  “Did you hear that, Missy? Your brother will get you milk. Isn’t he the fine and able man to be getting you milk, now?”

  “Peamount milk is best. They do keep out the microbes at Peamount.”

  The dirty water rinsed in the tub. “She has her plenty of milk, son.”

  He chucked his head. She’d rarely admit any help, his ma. He humped the child in his arms, surprised at the weight. “All the same, she’s a deal heavy to be carrying. Wouldn’t you think to have one of the shrimpses mind her?”

  “The girls has their schooling.”

  She was searching the sheet for any patch of dirt remaining. He fetched the pump for her, one-handed, and said, “I was working at their age.”

  “And did I ask you did?” There, she’d found a stain. The soda sprinkled and her scrubbing began over. “Age eight, could neither lead nor drive you. Age twelve, there was no talking.”

  “Age twelve, I was walking the road to Clare.”

  He had spoken softly, not wishing her to hear, but unable to leave the words unsaid. She looked up from the washboard.

  “Not on your own, son. Not a fall of your foot but my prayer was under it. I had the stones on the road counted each night for you.”

  He frowned, avoiding her face. He could see her all right, in the cabin at night, with the shrimpses about her and her fingers numbering her beads in the dark. It was a long road that had no blessing to begin it. It was a long road to Clare all right, and him with a limp like Baccoch the Shooler.

  He humped the child again. Already the wisps of hair were coloring. Red, to be sure. He saw the blue veins in the nose that had the neighbors whispering in corners. God love her for an angel, they shook their heads and said. Has she come to stay at all?

  “She’s quiet to the world, Ma. Has she no words yet?”

  “What words would she want?”

  “I could bring her to the dispensary.”

  “We have no call on the dispensary.”

  “I can get money for a doctor. I know to get money for a half-crown doctor.”

  “Listen with me, son. Your sister is grand. She’s slow only. Why wouldn’t your sister be slow? She has all God’s time.”

  He felt the wide infant eyes upon him. Slow eyes that only his worry would trouble. His mother rinsed her sheet and left it on the washing-stone. Already the stone gleamed with whites. Before she would pour out the dirty tub, she muttered under her breath, “Beware the water.” It was a caution to the good people. The way the good people had followed from Clare to dance in the Banks about her daily.

  “What has you up so bright?”

  “I heard the cock-crow and I thought to take the morning’s breath.”

  “Aye did you. And you tripped over some washing on the way. Whose is it?”

  “Out of the houses over. Only the linens, but there’s plenty that.”

  “Have they no copper at all?”

  “They have an old monster in a shed all right, would have you shaking to fire it.”

  He grinned. His mother would never use hot water if there was cold to be had first. “They have their share of sheets at any rate.”

  “There’s every chance it wasn’t sheets you had in Clare.”

  “Never in life. It was the hay below and a sack above and the pet pig to keep me cosy.”

  “I had the pet boneen myself, I remember it.”

  He bit his lip. “Ah no, Ma, I wanted to come home. I missed you, I did. I want to change things now. Change things for the better like.”

  She said nothing, only concentrated on her work. But her face had softened and she was looking at them like she’d find them lovely, these strangers’ sheets.

  “Why do you smile, Ma? I only mean the best for us.”

  “And what would prevent me? Isn’t it my son here, the strong able boy would carry the world? And all the woes of the world would not be too many for him. It’s God’s morning to be smiling.”

  He chucked his head. He didn’t mind her getting a pull of his leg. He was home then and sure of it. He felt a tug on his buttons. The tiny fingers had reached inside his shirt. “Lookat, Ma, she’s found me medal.”

  “She likes her handsome brother.”

  “Am I handsome?”

  “’Tis the handsome man and him with a child. I did always think that.”

  “Was I ever this little, Ma?”

  “A fine thing and you was not.”

  “But do you remember when I was little?”

  “I do surely.” She turned from the tub. “Is there something troubling you, son?”

  “Nothing, Ma. Was wondering only.”

  “Let me look on you.” He stood up straight for her scrutiny and the sun met his eyes so that he squinted in its shine. There was an awkwardness he felt before his mother, and though he never intended it, he heard his speech come stilted at times, the way he would ape the men of the island with their slow and considered words. And the way he stood, too, like the men of the island when they poled their boats to the jetty—though all the world heaved, they alone stood firm. He would put her in mind of those island men, the men of her girlhood, but that distance was between them, his mother and himself: the road to Clare and the hard words of his taking it.

  Now she said, “My black-headed black-eyed boy. I remember every day of you. How would I forget?” She wiped her hands on her smock, greying the white with prints of wet. “Give Missy here to me now and let you get on with your day.” She crooked her elbow and the bundle fell home. In God’s pocket, they called that, snug inside of the shawl.

  He said, “You was hurt me leaving.”

  “I wasn’t laughing,” she told him.

  The water sloshed and the washboard jolted. Only her arm was steady where Missy slept. He scratched his head, wishing now if he’d taken a r
ake to his hair. “What choice did I have?” he said. “It was all I could do to go to Clare.”

  “It wasn’t you going to Clare upset me but the way you went at it. I was proud of your scholarship and so was himself.”

  “Aye was he proud. And if he was, it was mighty curious pride.”

  “That was his way, as well you knew. We would have the money been found but there was no waiting with you. You were away off without a look behind. You had the face of your father that day.”

  Which father is that? He didn’t ask but he knew she read the question in his eyes.

  “Wisha, you’re back now. For a time whatever.”

  “For good, Ma.”

  “For good or ill. Not but it’s done you well, I can see that, your stay away. But you weren’t sent, son. Don’t say you was sent.” She withdrew from the pump. “Let you have your wash now. The houses are rising and I have my load to finish.”

  He took the handle and worked it hard, punishing his muscles. The water drew and still he pumped. “You know, Ma, I woke up thinking I was back on the island.”

  “And did that take the temper off you?”

  “Which temper is that?”

  “You was murdering rough on himself last night. I heard him begging of you to hang his coat for him.”

  “He was drunk at it. If you seen him in the street.”

  “He’s outgrown his strength. But he’s no stranger yet.”

  He splashed water on his face and shaking the wet from his hands he said, “You know what he says, don’t you, Ma? When he’s away on the tear with his butties. He says he saved you out of the workhouse. An opportunity wouldn’t pass but he gets in that cut. And he has worse than that to say.”

  “I know what he says.”

  “And do you mind him?”

  “Sinn féin,” she said, “sinn féin anseo.”