At Swim, Two Boys Page 21

Slow and affecting, the soldier-speaker went on. Did ever a man, he asked, have more of heroic stuff in him than Wolfe Tone? Did ever a man go more gaily and gallantly about a great deed? Did ever a man love so well? Was ever a man so beloved? “For myself,” he said, speaking slow and a little shyly, “I would rather have known Wolfe Tone than any man of whom I have ever heard or ever read.”

  Jim knew this man’s heart was deep and true, for he made Jim wish for an equal love and an equal truth in his heart. He was swept by a great desire to take hold Doyler’s hand and tell him in his ear, That’s how I think of you, that’s exactly how I think of you.

  Jim sensed the crowd was edging forward. He was conscious of a fellowship growing with those about him, with the boys in kilts and the men in suits and uniforms, some with rifles and swords, and the stockinged girls and women under their umbrellas. The drizzle had lightened a touch. Away on a hillside the sun was seeking a path through the clouds. Its shaft was like a beam from heaven, like God searched his creation. And Jim thought, if that light should find them here, what wouldn’t the gaze of God dispose?

  Slow the soldier-speaker continued, slow and now suddenly stirring. For war at last has come and Tone is on the sea. The French fleet ploughs the waves. A shift in the drizzle—there is no rain but ocean spray—and Jim is there too. With Tone he stands at the prow of the ship. Beyond lies the beloved land. They come so close, they can see the houses and the people on the shore. They could toss a biscuit. But the coward French fear to land. Jim turns to Wolfe Tone. So proud his face, and generous. A tear falls on his cheek. His eyes are strangely bright and black.

  Now swoop the English, a fleet entire upon Tone’s one ship. How slow and proud he spoke of his friend, this soldier-speaker who stood by his grave. Six hours the battle rages. What a glorious six hours for Tone! And Jim is there, too. The fire of battle is on his face. A wish of ferocious courage charges his heart. Oh, who would not follow Wolfe Tone to the grave? Oh, who would not love Wolfe Tone?

  Slow and determined the soldier-speaker closed his tale. A battered hulk, the vessel strikes. The French are fêted while Tone, that spirit, that ardent flame, the English drag in chains to Dublin, there to be condemned to a traitor’s death. Jim feels his pulse is racing. His glands are hurting with the choke of emotion. This is wrong. This is not fair. What is it with the English? Did ever a nation hate liberty more?

  The soldier-speaker paused. Straight and austere he stood, a man very far apart in that crowd. It crossed Jim’s mind how awful it would be in any way to disappoint this man. When he resumed, his voice had a fiercer strength. Men come to a graveside to pray, he told them, and each of us prays here in his heart. But we do not pray for Tone. Men who die to free their people have no need of prayer. We pray for Ireland that she may be free. We pray for ourselves that we may free her.

  A moment—then all of a glow the sun is on Jim’s face. He looks up where the clouds have parted. The sun shines and bathes the world, and the land trembles at the touch. How green are the fields, how lush the grass. Each blade of grass glistens, and the leaves of the trees and hedges glisten with a silvery light all their own. The crows above cease their mockery. The fat contented cows look up in wonder. How rich is this land. It is a rich and a rare land. Why wouldn’t it be rare, fed on the martyred dead? And who could doubt but this place is holy? Aren’t the bones of Tone interred below?

  Will we pledge ourselves? asked the soldier-speaker. But of course they would pledge, how could he doubt them? Pledge ourselves to follow in the steps of Tone,

  Never to rest, by day or by night,

  Deeming it the proudest of privileges

  To fight for freedom,

  To fight, not in despondency, but in great joy,

  Never lowering our ideal,

  Never bartering one jot or tittle of our birthright,

  Holding faith to the memory and inspiration of Tone,

  And accounting ourselves base

  As long as we endure

  The evil thing against which he testified

  With His Blood?

  What is that evil thing? That evil thing is the English in Ireland!

  We will! they roared. The kilted boys, and youths and men in suits and soldier green, even the women under their umbrellas and the white-frocked black-stockinged girls. Round after round they cheered and Jim, too, roared with the full of his lungs. Save, looking round, he saw that few stirred, that few cheered. Were they deaf? Were they stunned? Like herded beasts they waited. Till he understood he too was stunned, and it was his blood pounding, not his throat roaring, that clamored his ears.

  He turned to find Doyler. Doyler was behind, looking away. Following his gaze, Jim saw a straggle of men arrayed by a hedge. Their green was duller than the smart Volunteers, and their cloth had a cheapness about it. Working men that even in a uniform looked jumbled together. A Red Hand badge was pinned to their hats.

  “Citizen Army,” said Doyler. He was whispering in Jim’s ear. “The Citizen Army is here.”

  Jim’s father had not attended that day, and it was strange listening to his cheerful chatter at supper that evening. He had a vocabulary all his own. The insurgents of ’98 were not the Croppy Boys or the brave United Men, but he called them Babes in the Wood. And the cruel militia and crueler yeomanry were Blaney’s Bloodhounds. “The 89th Foot as became, Royal Irish Fusiliers, 2nd Battalion, as is. The Rollickers they calls themself. Fierce fellows altogether. Though not to be confused with the 1st Battalion, for them is the Faugh-a-Ballagh boys. The Old Fogs. Faugh a ballagh! Clear the way! There’s Erse for you. Bird-catchers, on account they took the French eagle down the Peninsular Wars.”

  Jim couldn’t tell were his father’s loyalties shifting or if he saw at all the direction the band was heading. His sentiments, to all seeming, remained the same. His old regiment first and foremost, then any of the Irish regiments, then the generals who won the Boer War for the British—Roberts, French, Kitchener, Kelly-Kenny and Mahon—“not a one but he was an Irishman.”

  Only Aunt Sawney was steadfast. Saturday afternoons when the Irish Volunteers marched by, she was quick sticks out the door, waving her ashplant and lashing her tongue, scourging them to hell and back for idle Fenians. And when Father O’Táighléir chanced by one time, collecting for the Chinese missions, he said, “A word missus,” and was off explaining how the Volunteers were decent honest Catholic sons of Ireland and of the Church, whose leaders in the tradition of this sainted isle were poets as much as gentlemen.

  “No, Father,” Aunt Sawney corrected him. “Them is the Fenians. Idle blaspheming rebels is all. The canon was certain.”

  But the canon was convalescing in Mayo. Jim’s father had to dash out with a half-crown donation to the cause of buying Chinese children to convert them to the Cross.

  “And ye,” Aunt Sawney blasted him afterwards, “ye’d sell your soul for the twopenny-door.”

  And maybe that was the truth of it. For his father had been given the tuppenny collections at chapel on Sunday. “A responsible position,” he maintained, “in charge of the parish comings-in.” He had been enrolled in a respectable sodality; was a member now of the Mary Immaculate Traders’ Guild of Glasthule. “Only last week Phillips ironmongers stopped me in the street, asked my opinion of the Corpus Christi. Sure the up isn’t up enough for us now. The Macks is on the ascent.”

  The great event to which all energies were directed was the Glasthule Feis, due to be held the last Saturday in July at Ballygihen House. Tamasha, his father called it, rubbing his hands at the prospect. “You know what’s this we’ll do, Jim? We’ll fetch the old cart out of the yard, splash it over with a paint of green. How’s this for a slogan? Saint Patrick spoke Erse! Shilling per guinea spent here will aid our kiddies to the same!”

  When Jim would practice at home his father sometimes reached for the cutlery drawer and he’d rattle along on the spoons beside. Aunt Sawney would soon be banging her stick. The Rebels’ Medley, she called it. For th
eir repertoire now was wholly patriotic. “Memory of the Dead,” “Wearing of the Green,” “Rising of the Moon,” “Boys of Wexford,” and of course “A Nation” not Once but a thousand times Again.

  It was this last that occasioned his father’s second misunderstanding with the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

  He was still not very clever at seeing where he was swimming, but Jim knew by the slither of seaweed that he was coming into the Forty Foot cove. A last heave carried him to the steps. His arms were leaden coming out the water, he could scarce pull himself up. His mouth wouldn’t close and his teeth chattered convulsively.

  “Mary and Joseph, you’re like an ape at his prayers. Round in the sun while I fetch the tats.”

  Jim scooted off to the boys’ end, where the sun was shining, while Doyler collected their clothes from the shelters. When he came over, he was whistling “The Peeler and the Goat” in a low but taunting way. “Visitors,” he said. “Bevy of polis.”

  Jim peeked round the battery wall, which already was warm from the sun. Burly men in shadowy blue disrobing. “Come for a dip is all.”

  “I wish if they’d dip to the bottom.” He held out Jim’s towel. “After you with the Baden-Powell.”

  Jim rubbed himself roughly, then passed the towel back. He delayed a while, flapping uselessly in the breeze, before he pulled his shirt on. Even so the cloth glued to his back. Doyler had no shyness at all. He took great pains over every inch of his body, leg up on a rock, while each crevice between his toes was investigated, wiped, and investigated again. Jim liked to watch him then, when the morning light hazed about him, fuzzing with gold the hairs of his outline. Behind loomed the battery walls and beyond stretched the craggy rocks. It seemed a glorious place in the morning, an extraordinary grace to be allowed there, where man and nature mixed and lost each other, one in the other like the land in the sea.

  Doyler’s shirt was sewn and resewn that special military way Jim’s father called sank-work and which all old soldiers must do for their sons. When he had it on, he hunched on the ledge with his knees pulled up and said, “Have we breakfast or what?” And Jim fished out the bread and scrape from his jacket pocket.

  There were new recruitment posters on the battery walls. Mother Erin, looking troubled and wan, wondered had they no womenfolk worth defending. Some wag was after adding Kitchener mustaches to her face. A dig at England or Ireland, you wouldn’t know. Mackled mimeographed bills had been overpasted. Get a gun and do your bit—Join the Irish Volunteers!

  “Get a gun, me arse,” said Doyler. “Get a shagging prayerbook more like. Sure the Volunteers is in league with the priests and the priests is in league with the bosses and they’re all agin the working man. No better than horneys is the Volunteers. They were agin us in the Lock-out and we’ll never forget them that.”

  Shin Feiners, Leaguers, Volunteers. They stood for Ireland, that much was clear, Ireland her own. Doyler was a socialist. Jim liked the way he pronounced the word, without the expected sh sound, but he still had only the muzziest idea what it stood for. Doyler himself was small help. His talk was names and slogans. Citizen Army. Liberty Hall. Nor King nor Kaiser.

  A haze was rising and the sun strained to shine through. Over by Ringsend the towers smoked, needles in the sky that Jim’s father once had told him were there to make the clouds. “For without the clouds there’d be no rain, and without the rain there’d be no grass. And no milk in your tea without the green grass, so they has to be sure of the clouds.”

  “I liked the man at the Wolfe Tone,” Jim said.

  “Which man was that?”

  “He gave the speech.”

  “Aye aye,” said Doyler. “I seen that look on your face. Good luck to any Saxon was there that day. You had pikes in your eye, so you did. Poetry, what?”

  “Is that what he is, a poet?”

  “How would I know? Quid to a bloater he don’t be shoveling shit.”

  He spat now, the same way he’d spat that day after they snuck back in the churchyard looking for Wolfe Tone’s grave. A conspiracy against the common man, he’d called it then. For there was no lying on that sod. It had all been railed in, top and sides, with rusting iron bars. “There’s poetry for you,” he said to Jim. “They’ve made a prison of Wolfe Tone’s grave.”

  Doyler rubbed his bread with onion, then he lay on his belly at the turn of the battery wall. He was watching the peelers at their swim. “Old breaststroke they’re using,” he commented. “The crawl is best for speed right enough. But the breast has its uses. You’re head up with the breast, can always see your way, even when the water would be littered. Muck or wreckage, never know what would be in the water. See the way them horneys does the breast? Only way to swim if you’re under a heavy pack or you has your rifle you need to keep it dry. Soundless too if it’s sneaking up you want. Don’t knock the breaststroke, for in war it has its uses. Speed’s not everything in war.”

  “Who’s talking about war?” said Jim.

  A cock of disbelief in Doyler’s face. “Is there anyone who isn’t?” He dribbled a spit over the ledge, then turned from the cove. “You know why they calls this the Forty Foot?”

  “Forty feet deep?”

  “Not nearly. Twenty at most. Touched bottom once. Conger was down there. Wouldn’t see me for bubbles the way I scut out of that.”

  “Why’s it called it so?”

  “The Fortieth Foot regiment was stationed at the battery once. They gave their number in the line to the best spot for bathing in Dublin.”

  It was the sort of thing Jim’s father would tell. “That all?”

  “I’ll tell you what all. We live in a country where nothing is named but for an occupying power. Look about you. Battery here, the Martello towers, all them castles in Dalkey. There’s nothing lasts but was made for to subjugate the people. Even the cove we swim in is only a hole they left after blasting the granite for Kingstown piers. Kingstown named for an English king, the piers to bring his soldiers quick and safe. That bread’s good.”

  “Aunt Sawney bakes it.”

  “She bakes good bread.” He sat up and glared at the policemen’s bobbing heads. “You’d wonder what manner of a country this is where nothing is safe but the paid hands of empire barge in and they fling your clothes to the floor.”

  “The polis done that?”

  “On the wet floor they flung them. Straight in me face. And me shirt only clean on. But sure why wouldn’t they? Aren’t they the polis? Aren’t they paid to keep the working man down? It’s them would make a cripple of you.”

  He finished the bread and pulled his cap down on his eyes. “Back to the old slog.” Then he laughed and in the usual shake the ape was off him. “Would you look at the cut of you. Like a gurrier out of the Banks with your shirt to the wind. Come here till I see you straight.”

  All of a heap, Jim was being bundled round and his collar adjusted and his tie reknotted too tight and his shirt-tail tucked in his waistband.

  “Leave it off, Doyler, I’m all right.”

  “How would you go home like that? Your da would have a fit. And I’m the one he’d blame. Doyler’s the one would land on the mat.”

  He spat on his hand and smarmed it on Jim’s hair, saying, “Goboil. If you knew me ma you’d know all about gob-oil, you would. All your share of hair ever needs is a spit of gob-oil on it.” He turned him round again. “Let me look at you now. I suppose you’ll pass muster.”

  The grin went lop-sided. “I never remarked the length of your nose. I might have really, for they say ’tis a sign of what’s below.”

  “Shut up, Doyler. You know that’s not true.”

  “A long nose is a lady’s fancy.”

  This was coarse talk, and with coarse talk you did not argue.

  “Serious, though,” said Doyler, “was you ever sweet on a girl?”

  Jim realized he must have looked very blank, for Doyler in a laughing undertone bent to his ear and gave him to understand that girls were the o
nes without the lad below. He could think of no answer beyond, “Was you?”

  And Doyler answered, “Can’t say I was. Particular like.”

  “I don’t believe I know any girls,” said Jim. “Saving Nancy out of MacMurrough’s.”

  He felt himself blushing and really he couldn’t think why, because he didn’t look on Nancy that way and it was wrong of Gordie when he said those things about her. Jam, he called her. And then he asked, was it Nancy he thought of when he did that thing to himself?

  “I suppose, then, the time being, we’ll just have to make do with each other.”

  “I suppose we will,” agreed Jim in a resigned tone that had Doyler chuckling again.

  “Come here. No, come here to me.”

  He had ducked back down on the ledge and he held his arm out for Jim to join him. Jim slunk in under the arm, which pulled round his neck. “Do you mind me going on the while?” he asked.

  “I don’t follow you the half of it.”

  “Thing is you’re a decent skin, Jim Mack. I know I wouldn’t go far wrong if you was along with me.”

  “Along with what sure?”

  Pinch went the fingers and pain went his neck. “Ireland, you gaum.” But the fingers stayed there and stroked the sting. They stroked his neck and Jim felt the waking of each of his hairs as they passed. They seemed very much alone suddenly. Jim could hear the peelers in the cove, but they sounded a long way off, in a different sea almost. He was aware of other parts of his body waking too. How odd this moving thing that woke in his breeches. How very odd it was. Jim’s mouth opened and a little cough came out. It sounded amazingly polite in the sea-quiet.

  “Funny to think we was swimming a minute back,” Doyler said, “naked and all.”

  His face was very close to Jim’s. His tongue obtruded its tip and Jim felt the strangest wish to touch it with his own. “Yes,” he said.

  “Is it hard still? Bet you anything it’s hard still.”

  “But it’s getting easier.”

  “What is?”