At Swim, Two Boys Read online

  “Credit? What does credit mean? Can you not speak the King’s English, boy?”

  That time in Dalkey when the pig was squealing. They had it hoisted from a beam and the buckets were waiting below to collect the blood. When the bells came they laid off the slaughter to say the Angelus. All through the bells the squealing and the thrashing legs, on and on, while the men prayed. How it riled his father and he said to the men no God would sanction such cruelty to his creatures. The men laughed, wiping their blades on the bloody cloths, and his father told him afterwards that we are a race immured to cruelty. He had meant inured.

  “Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.” The brother’s eyes roved the room. “Construe . . . Courtney.”

  That old saw—is it from there it comes? Really they had it wrong. Beware of gifts bearing Greeks, it should be.

  Supercilious. But why would he think I was being coarse? Did he truly believe I meant my own . . . ? No one would say such a thing to a brother. It made no sense. Courtney is thrilled by it. He thinks it means something else vulgar. Ignorant fool.

  After the Angelus, home for Saturday dinner. Coddle in the big stew pan. Aunt Sawney’s day for visitors in the parlor. Mrs. Tansy, Mrs. Rourke. Their fill of gossip over the cream crackers and Wincarnis. Later it was his duty to bring the tea, lump sugar and the sugar-tongs out. Curious implements you found in that room. A grape-scissors though never known grapes in the house. A quirl for scraping butter. Longish spoon with holes in it that was called a mote-skimmer: used for straining the strangers off your tea. All laid out on the pier-table, its cloth so starched it might stand on its own. Tub this afternoon behind the scullery door, then Confession, then shop, then devotion. Mass in the morning. Entire parish in their Whitsun best, the priests’ vestments abruptly red. Veni, sancte Spiritus.

  Pleasant to swim in the rain, they say. It would be too. The sea would lower your temperature already so the rain wouldn’t feel so cold. It would be hard getting in, you’d have to push yourself, but were you in already, that would be pleasant. That would be a freedom, to be out in the rain and not to trouble. Your trouble in your pile of clothes.

  Confess a sin, is it possible, before committed? Would it be a true confession, anyway, in the knowledge you intended to trespass later? What contrition would it involve, perfect or imperfect? And if imperfect, not contrition at all but merely attrition. What absolution could be given and what satisfaction performed for a sin not of commission, not of omission, but of intention only?

  He yawned through these abstract considerations, enjoying very slightly the assonance of the words. It was ridiculous to suppose he might skip Mass tomorrow. It was ridiculous to suppose he might learn the crawl.

  “Mr. Mack?”

  “Yes, Brother?”

  “Do we detain you?”

  “No, Brother.”

  “The phrase fidus Achates. You were asked to decline it.”

  Effortlessly he did so. But he did not look at the brother. And he sat down afterwards before being told.

  “Achates,” said the brother. “The friend of Aeneas. Virgil has given him the epithet fidus and the phrase has come down to us as the paradigm of friendship. A bosom companion, one might say. A friend of one’s heart even. Animae dimidium meae, says Horace of Virgil, meaning the half of his soul. Such a companion would lead not his friend astray. Teach not his friend the vulgar ways of the mob. He would not put corner-boy notions in the mouth of his socalled pal.”

  The brother was watching him, but Jim would not look back. This was a jaw, a pi directed at him. It was mean of the brother to do this before the class. He had not been coarse. It was the brother who had used a coarse expression, not he. “Such friendships are rare, and it behooves us to guard against their counterfeit, which is a cheap and tawdry lie.”

  Then somebody was asking a question and Brother Polycarp answered, “Where’s your Latin, boy? Can’t you work it out for yourself? Super-scilious. What does super mean?”

  “Above, brother.”

  “Scio, scire, scivi, scitum?”

  “To know.”

  “Put it together. Super-scire.”

  “To know above?”

  “To think oneself above the ordinary. To be insolent to one’s betters. In common parlance, to have side.”

  The faces that turned were crinkled with glee. But Jim didn’t mind that. His eyebrows rose and he met the brother’s stare determined he would not flinch. What a fool the brother had made of himself. What an ignorant fool he was.

  The bells came, and suddenly they were all standing and nodding their heads and signing the cross on bending knees.

  “Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae.”

  “Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto.”

  In his mind the bells were no longer the Angelus, but the tocsin calling for Mass. By the chapel wall he pauses where the lane leads astray, and all the people throng him by, and the sky is clear after the Saturday rains, and the pavement glistens under the sun. The lane leads to the sea, the beckoning, sparkling, reckless sea.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jim stalled in the giddy wind of the Point. “Get a move on,” called Doyler. “Slow as a wet week, so y’are.”

  Jim laughed out loud. Then he plunged down the steps into the gentlemen’s bathing-place. He certainly did feel giddy. They weren’t half-way undressed and he was laughing again and saying, “I suppose they insist on you wearing some manner of a costume here?”

  “What’s that?” said Doyler.

  “This manner of a place, there’d be rules here and regulations. Regarding what you might wear and all manner of a thing.”

  “Are you right there?”

  “Don’t you feel it a bit public?”

  “You’ve took a right rare color.”

  “Bit public all the same, wouldn’t you say?”

  Doyler skitted and laughed. Jim’s towel had unrolled, showing his father’s cut-down drawers that Jim wore at the baths. “Put them away,” said Doyler, “and give us here your hand.”

  “My hand?”

  He took Jim’s hand and rubbed it between his palms. “Stay easy, old chap. There’s only the both of us. Didn’t I tell you we’d have the place to ourself?”

  Jim nodded.

  Doyler’s clothes dropped effortlessly in their pile. “Weren’t you never out for an easy dip?” he asked.

  “At school they take us—”

  “I don’t mean the baths, I mean with a pal. For a lark like.”

  Songbird that sings on the high wing. Exaltation the collective noun. Jim looked straight in the laky black eyes. “I don’t suppose I ever had much of a friend.”

  Doyler’s brow creased, like ripples in a sand. “You’re a queer one, Jim Mack, I don’t mind me saying. Get on out of your shirt and let’s get busy.”

  When he pulled up his shirt, there was Doyler’s face, tunnelled by the collar, then the white cloth seeming never-ending till its tail slipped over his head, and Doyler’s face again, a lop-sided grin, appraising him. He’d be all right if Doyler wouldn’t be watching the while.

  “You know, you don’t look half so scrawny in your pelt. Couple of mornings here and we’ll soon have you in sorts.”

  Somewhere in the heat Jim perceived a smile brought out of him.

  “And don’t mind about your lad below. That’s only the nerves makes him poke up. Nothing to be shy about. Can you jump in?”

  “If I hold my nose.”

  “Be sure, now, it’s your nose you hold.” On the bold grin, he grabbed Jim’s wrist. “Steady—go!”

  They raced to the ledge, Doyler letting out his yahoo of a yell. Father, Son, the Holy Ghost: Jim lifted, dropped, splattered.

  A freezer of a sea, punching the breath from out of him. Ears filled with the roaring quiet. Falling like in sleep, in green and opaque dream. Then the pumping in his ears grew fierce and the lungs were like a paper bag you could bang with a clap, and he fluttered his hands to begin the ascent, unintentionally
frantically by the end. At last he broke surface and dear joy! there really is air. A hand slaps on his shoulder and up pops Doyler. “What cheer, eh?” says he.

  The weight sent Jim under again and he came up spluttering foam and thrashing.

  “Are you trying to run a footrace or what? That’s no way to tread water. Look at here, go slow, be easy.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jim, “I don’t know to—”

  “Bicycle steady like,” said Doyler, demonstrating. “You’ll be pumped before we’re started else.”

  Jim was going to say something but a wave came and found his mouth. He was coughing and sinking and suddenly an arm had caught him under the shoulders, guided him to the iron ladder up. “You all right?”

  “Fine. I swallowed some water is all.”

  Doyler frowned. “You sure about this?”

  “Honest, I’m grand.”

  The water trickled in and out of Doyler’s mouth. He looked uneasy and Jim didn’t wish to be the cause of this coddling.

  “See the raft beyond?”Fifty yards out a platform was moored. “Calm now and slow, any old stroke you know, do you think you can make that?”

  “I can try.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” said Doyler. “You’re a plucky devil, I’d say.”

  “Plucky?”

  “Them times in the Kingstown Baths. Was you ever out of your depth?”

  “Once or twice.”

  A wry look. “Once, maybe.”

  “By mistake, actually.”

  “Mary and Joseph, no shortage of guts in this skinamalink. And you after leaping in like it was no bother on you.”

  He would have swum to Howth and back, and drownded twice, to bask in such praise. “Are we straight so?” he asked.

  Doyler laughed and splashed a hand through a wave. “Straight as a rush,” he answered.

  It was actually easier outside of the cove. The waves were against him but consistently so, rather than bobbing round bewilderingly. His instinct was to exert his strength, push to the limit, but he heard Doyler’s voice calling, “Steady on, be easy,” and felt his calm purposeful foamless form at his side. It was a punisher all right, and he was knocked up by the time he gripped the looping rope of the raft. But it was grand to look back on the undulant sea and trace the progress of his triumph.

  “Pooped?”

  “Destroyed.”

  “Rest a while. There’s no hurry.”

  Doyler climbed on the raft, sending it seesawing up and down, and sat with his arms about his knees. Water spilt from him, tracing the hairs of his legs, puddling on to the planks. On his chest a medal caught the sunlight as he heaved. Steam rose from his shoulders.

  “Hand up?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  Jim pulled himself up and sat beside, gazing back on the stretch of coast. The mountains swooned with shadowy blue, but the nearer hills were bracken-green and bracken-gold. In the vivid air nowhere seemed farther than an hour’s walk. It came to him that the smell he usually took for the sea was actually of the land. Here in the waves the breeze was clean.

  “Rain,” said Doyler. “Not for a while yet, but rain is on its way.”He nodded over his right shoulder, north toward Kingstown, and said, “See the pier there?”

  Long graceful arm, one of a cradling pair, reaching out in the bay.

  “Here’s a handy trick to remember. Where the elbow is, if the foam is breaking on that, it’s definitely too rough to swim. Easy enough getting in, but the devil’s own job getting out again. The swell, do you see.”

  Jim followed the line of the shore. Kingstown with its three spires, Protestant, Catholic, municipal; the parade of grand houses, palely painted, that led to the sea-wall; the rocks and outcrops and huddled spills of sand that carried his gaze to the Forty Foot.

  “Odd the way you lived all your life a spit from the sea and you never swam there. Bet you never went fishing neither.”

  “Gordie used sometimes fish,” said Jim, “but he never seemed to catch much.”

  “Stingoes and horny cobblers—little enough you can eat. There’s pollack over by the baths there, and bream off Kelly Shore. Mullet sometimes on a calm day. See where the sand is white?—dabs there. Unreliable though. All right if you had the leisure, but if you was hungry you’d be surer minding a carter’s horse or flogging firewood up the villas. I caught a conger once. Thing near took a chunk out of me hand, it did. But no one would buy it. Said an eel was food for the devil only. After all me toiling and moiling.

  “Crabs was always the best. Over by Bullock after a good tide. Could sell them, you see. The la-di-das would go for the crabs. Never tasted it meself. Squealing’d put you off. Mighty squealing they let out when the pan goes on the fire. Made up me mind to sell them after that. Let the la-di-das to suffer the screams. I bought bread with the money instead.

  “Mackerel too. Was on a boat once, out from Bullock, middle of the night this was. I tell you we dropped the lines, a minute later we hauled them in and there was five, six of the fishes there. Marvellous it was. Didn’t need do nothing, only drop the lines and wait a crack. Lashings, I tell you, they was tumbling over themself to get in inside of the boat. Over there by the Muglins. What it was, we’d hit a shoal. Four times we turned back to load them off. Four times out again. All the one night.

  “The chap was so delighted he let me take a bucket or two home. Well, there was mackerel with everything the next few days. Then after a time, didn’t they start going off. You wouldn’t credit the stink. Couldn’t give them away after that. In the end I had to dump a bucket back in the sea. I was glad to be rid of them, but I was sad too. For a day or so we’d had our full and plenty and that was grand.”

  While he spoke, Jim watched the places he indicated, Kelly Shore, the tumbling creamy rocks by Bullock Harbor, Muglins Sound with its deeper ominous green. It awed him that Doyler was not bemeaned by his life as Jim felt bemeaned by his. The lithe and wind-tanned body awed him too, so that he dared only glance at it obliquely. Glance and blink, squeezing his eyes.

  “What changed your mind?”

  “My mind about what?”

  “Coming swimming, you gaum.”

  Jim shrugged. That the brother had got it wrong about the root of supercilious did not seem adequate cause to miss Mass, skip his devotion and give over most likely a vocation to the brotherhood. “The day was sunny,” he said.

  “’Tis sunny right enough.” He frowned concentrating on the shore, like he was searching for some particular spot. “What you said back there.” He shrugged. “Don’t suppose I never had much of a friend neither. Saving that time we was twelve together.” A long wait, then an arm went round Jim’s neck. Again that shock of touch—it near jumped Jim from his skin. “Look at the pair of us. Mother-naked on a plank in the sea. Are you straight for your first lesson?”

  “The crawl?”

  “The crawl it is.” He was about to slip off, but then he paused. He nodded out to sea.

  “There’s the Muglins out beyond. Couple of weeks back, Easter time, I got to the raft here and I thought to meself, why not? Now there’s a stretch would leave you pooped. Destroyed you’d be with the best of them. The tide, see, in the sound gets up a fierce current. Near missed me landing too, had me scrambling like sixty to gain any go of it. It’s all of it rock there, no grass, no nothing. But I found me a dip that was out of the wind where the stone was smooth and mossy. So there I lay in the skin I was born in. Whoever it was had fixed a trough, don’t ask me why, that had sweet water when I tasted it. And there’s this other stone that rocked with the waves, only slow like, and let out a moan when the waves went in under. I reckoned no one would know that place. But it was handsome to stretch with the moss through me fingers and I followed the clouds that tumbled by. I felt my ease that day. The only company was an old gander—I thought he must be lost—that watched an hour or more, stood on a leg and his nose in his feathers. And do you know what I reckon?”

  Jim’
s lips framed a whispering what.

  “I reckon if we worked at it hard, every morning, say, we worked on your stroke, before I went to work, before you went to college, out to the raft here and back while the raft is out, every day we’d do it, rain or shine, till you find your feet, or your fins I should say, I reckon come Easter next we’d swim out there together, and I’ll show you the place and you’d know, I don’t know, what I meant like.”

  Jim saw the Muglins, little more than a rock to hold the light that told the rock’s existence. He saw the green where the current flowed and the crested horse that broke from it. He saw the storms that would come and the dark mornings and the bitter wind out of the north and the east. “A year?”

  “Could likely do it sooner. That’s if you don’t turn brother on me.”

  The very idea was cracked. “Why would I do that?”

  Doyler laughed and tossed some speck in the sea.

  “But it wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t Easter,” said Jim.

  “Indeed and it wouldn’t. Are we straight, so?”

  “We’re straight as a rush.”

  Doyler spat on his hand and Jim did likewise and their palms rubbed in the smear.

  “The crawl it is,” said Doyler and he slipped from the raft. Before he joined him and the sea would wash it away, Jim sniffed his wetting palm. A private smell. Like leather, bodily, raw.

  Through the window of the parochial waiting-room, Mr. Mack the parochial garden viewed.

  Cabbages were coming along nicely, he was pleased to note. Potatoes too. See the way they have a carnation there at the end of each drill? That’d be for the chapel flowers. Rhubarb too. We have rhubarb at home sure. Give it away, the most of it, out of luck. All the same, not much in the way of a view. I thought now there’d be a better view from the parochial house. What am I saying? A priest wouldn’t have leisure for gongoozling out of windows.

  He turned from the idle scene. Is it a canonical hour, I wonder? How long is this they kept me waiting?

  Handsome room, a taste Spartan. Deal of deal about. Floorboards, mantelshelf. For a long while I thought there was a deal tree, but in fact ’tis pine it comes from. Norway Spruce to give the correct designation. He tapped the floor with his toe, desisted. Need to know these things. Make a donkey of yourself else. Black hair-cloth chairs. Uncomfortable-looking yokes. Would be desperate now to wear a shirt of same. Begod, if the canon don’t come up with a recommendation, ’tis oakum I’ll be itching with. Three months’ hard and me character destroyed.