The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry Read Free Book Online Page A

Some of the sailors that have seen bad times and know the streets of big city ports only too well and know the doss houses and the soup kitchens, well, they have that book off by heart, from all the blessed times that crazy preachers sang it out to them that was waiting for a drop of soup. The great thing is not to get taken from the book of life, not to get your damned name taken out for sin and wickedness, of a kind that sailors outbest all other trades at, it must be allowed. Well, it is a tricky world for a sailor, all told. Preachers delight to read frightening things to poor hungry sailors down on their heels and on their luck.
    It is a drastically interesting country, America is, and you are lucky to get away without regret, loss of tin, or the Spanish clap. So he is sad enough in the bowel of his boat dreaming of Avenue 1½ but at the same time kind of glad to have passed up the whores. Everyone lets Bull Mottram know he is in for a right cruel dose as a sad memento of good times had on Avenue 1½.
    He has earned his own brass for a year and more now and the war is over and he feels the inclination of a pigeon to go home, to his proper home. It is farewell to Bull Mottram and all his fellows. He has been but a poor hand at the letter writing. Now in the night oftentimes he surrenders to the feeling that he has slipped the clothes of romance, of the Romantic Life at sea. The sea has gone grey for him and deep in himself there is a sea-change. There’s a tenderness in him, a softened thing about his heart like an old cloak, which makes him helpless before thoughts of his mother. It is as if she’s signalling to him over the wastes of England as he languishes in Southampton among the serviceable ships. Or he hears and attends to her unhappiness by some unknown but human arrangement of Morse or telegraph. The poles carry the hurt singing of the wires across the war-deserted Midlands, across Worcester and points west, that have fewer young men now to bring honour to their boundaries. England has fallen into victory. The wideboys smiling at the shop doors and barely a job of work even for them. The best lie under his beloved fields of France he supposes. In honour of France there’s no one to bring honour to lonesome England.
    His father is sacrosanct again in the inner heart of Eneas. He does not know how. He was peering too closely at his father and now he has stepped back and it’s his old childish eyes that look upon Tom McNulty. Unhappiness infects the victory and even the dogs of Southampton slink about the harbour. The coin of joy is soon spent. It is a glorious thing he supposes to fight France’s war in Texas with the lonesome Negramen. No! He has a contempt for himself, for his smiling, his ould talking and his youth! There’s someone else or new habiting him who is grievous critical of that boy setting off to sea as if the world being his oyster he could really go like that, untrammelled, and with no price at length to pay. He yearns to hear a tune from his father’s hoard of tunes, to comment on it and to be easy with the slight man. He fears he will never be. And he fears the new man both critical of the fading boy he was and by the same token alas only too soft to face the truth of the world. For he believes he sees some of that truth — the iron waves, the iron waves rearing up.
    He is not so grateful for the fear.
     
    At the very edge of the huge port there are the huge gates. He will be a sailor no more and after he passes through with a nod to the gatekeeper Nangle — one of the host of Sligomen that have spread out upon the wide world, to hold gates, sweep dark English streets, muck out the stables of Newmarket and Chester — after he passes through, that will be that and he may consider himself a man unwelcome to such as Nangle. No more will the gates of ports open for him, no more will he pass through to the ships. Nor read the proud names and the names disgraced, know the flags of