A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry Read Free Book Online

put it to his damp cheeks and rubbed it in gratefully. The little red stones rasped along his skin. He had hardly a true idea who he was in that second, what he was thinking, where he was, what nation he belonged to, what language he spoke. He was as happy in this absence of fear, fear that he had feared would stop him dumb and numb, happy as an angel, as a free bird, as that doomed man to the right of Christ must have felt when the King of the Jews Himself said that for his kindness he would be saved, would be seated at Christ’s right hand in heaven, that though the three would die, two would not die, bound one to the other by kindness.
    ‘What in the name of the good fucking Christ are you grinning at, Willie Dunne?’ said Christy, lying now on his side on an elbow, quite in the country and at his ease. Willie knew Christy Moran was itching to unhitch the fag in his ear and have another pleasing smoke. Have a pleasing smoke and fuck the world and her wars and her cares.
    ‘I don’t know, Sarge, I don’t know.’
    ‘Fuck me to heaven,’ whispered Christy Moran, ‘if I didn’t think I was going to have to drop dead from the fright those buggers gave me. Can they not make a bit of noise when they’re going about so someone can shoot them?’
    ‘Come on, lads, we’ll shimmy back and have a can of evil-smelling tea,’ said Captain Pasley.
    ‘Just the job, Captain,’ said Christy Moran. ‘We’ll come with you, right enough. No bother, sir.’
    ‘Everyone shipshape?’
    Shipshape, and alive.

Chapter Four
    Now Willie was gone all those months. Dublin he supposed was just the same, and he wondered what spring would be looking like, sitting in the trees along Sackville Street, the real Sackville Street and not just a trench, and cheering up the starlings.
    He thought how beautiful Gretta was, like the statue of the Grecian lady in the Painting Museum in Merrion Square. But she was no great hand at the letter writing, that was sure. The fella would come by with the letters and if he was lucky there’d be one from his father. Weeks and weeks and weeks he had waited for a letter from Gretta. It could be said that just now and then he was angry about it, humiliated. Even Christy Moran’s wife, never mentioned by Christy, wrote to Christy, because Willie had seen him hunkering down hungrily to read such letters. Joe Clancy had a girl that wrote to him right enough and regularly into the bargain.
    He knew the captain had to read all the letters that they themselves wrote, so that an eye would be cast over everything, for information that might give help to the enemy, in case the letters were lost in an attack. He was always a bit nervous so writing to Gretta, to declare those few words that had been said he knew those countless times in all the languages of mankind. But it had to be risked. He loved her. And he knew, he hoped, she loved him because she had said so at their parting. And though the occasion may have driven the words into her mouth, he knew and hoped and prayed that they had started their journey in her heart, as they had in his.
    Sometimes he could manage quite a long letter and sometimes for some reason when he tried to fetch out the proper words, there were only a few of them.
    He thought how young she was in truth and how young he was and all their possible long days ahead, if they could only get their hands on them, and nothing standing between.
    Of course, he remembered that she had not been able to give her word that she would marry him. He had felt awkward asking her in the dark of the stairwell of her father’s tenement, but she had not felt awkward saying no.
    ‘No, Willie, I won’t undertake such a thing,’ she had said, like a lawyer or the like.
    And well he understood why not, what with her so-called beau going against her wishes and off to war with him seemingly without a care. That was the story then.
    But it was every day now he cared, for her and for all the things he had left