Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

'Good day, Mr Fine,' said my father. 'How's everything going

on?'

'Just splendidly, yes, indeed,' said Mr Fine. 'How are you both? We were terrible shocked and anxious when we heard about the poor burned girls. That was a most terrible occasion,

Mr Clear.'

'Jaysus, it was,' said my father, and Mr Fine pressed on past us. 'I suppose I shouldn't say Jaysus to him,' my father said.

'Why?' I said.

'Ah, just him being Jewish and all,' he said.

'Don't they have Jesus?' I said, in my deep ignorance.

'I don't know,' he said. 'Fr Gaunt I don't doubt will say the Jews killed Jesus. But, you know, Roseanne, they were troubled times.'

We were quiet then as we reached our door and my father drew out his old key and turned it in the lock and we entered the tiny hall. I knew there was something troubling him now after the speech about Jesus. I was old enough to know that people make a little speech sometimes that is not what is in their thoughts, but is a sort of message of those thoughts all the same.

It was late in the evening just before it was time to go to bed that my father finally mentioned Mr Fine.

'So,' he said, as my mother shovelled ashes over the last few bits of turf, so they would burn slowly through the night, and be beautiful eggs of red sparks in the morning when she would winnow the ashes from them again. 'We met Mr Fine this evening, coming home. We thought for a minute he might have been calling here?'

My mother straightened herself and stood there with the fire-shovel. She stayed so still and so silent she might have been posing for an artist.

'He wasn't calling here,' she said.

'It's just that we thought we saw your face in the door, and he was lifting his hat – to your face like.'

My mother's eyes looked down at the fire. She had only made half a job of the ashes but she didn't look inclined to finish the job. She burst into strange, aching tears, tears that sounded like they had come up from her body somewhere, seeped through her like an awful damp. I was so shocked my body began to tingle in a queer uncomfortable way.

'I don't know,' he said, miserably. 'Maybe we were looking at the wrong door.'

'You know well you weren't,' she said, this time quite differently. 'You know well. Oh, oh,' she said, 'that I had never allowed you to take me from my home, to this cold cruel country, to this filthy rain, this filthy people.'

My father's reaction was to blanch like a boiling potato. This was more than my mother had said for a year. This was a letter, this was a newspaper of her thoughts. For my father I think it was like reading of yet another atrocity. Worse than rebels the age of boys, worse than burning girls.

'Cissy,' he said, so gently it went almost unheard. But I heard

it. 'Cissy.'

'A cheap scarf that would shame an Indian to be selling,' she said.

'What?'

'You can't blame me,' she said, nearly shouting. 'You can't blame me! I have nothing!'

My father leapt up, because my mother had inadvertently struck herself on the leg with the shovel.

'Cissy!' he cried.

She had opened a little inch of herself and there were a few jewels of dark blood glistering there. 'Oh Christ, oh Christ,' she said.

The next evening my father went to see Mr Fine in his grocery shop. When he came back his face was pallid, he looked exhausted. I was already upset because my mother, perhaps suspecting something, had gone out herself into the dark, I knew not where. She had been one minute in the scullery banging about, and the next she was gone.

'Gone out?' said my father. 'Dear me, dear me. She put on her coat in this terrible cold?'

'She did,' I said. 'Shall we go out to look for her?'

'Yes, we must, we must,' said my father, but he stayed sitting where he was. The saddle of his motorbike was just beside him, but he didn't put a hand on it. He let it be.

'What did Mr Fine say?' I asked. 'Why did you go to see

him?'

'Well, Mr Fine is a very fine man, that he is. He was most concerned, apologetic. She told him it was all above board. All agreed. I wonder how she could say that. Get the words into her mouth and say them?'

'I don't understand, Dadda.'

'It's the why we've had so little to be eating,' he said. 'She's after making a purchase on Mr Fine's loan, and every week naturally he comes for his money, and every week I suppose she gives him the most of what I give her. All those rats, dark corners, all those hours of poor Bob scratching through miseries, and the days of queer hunger we have endured, all for – a clock.'

'A clock?'

'A clock.'

'But there's no new clock in the house,' I said. 'Is there,

Dadda?'

'I don't know. Mr Fine says so. Not that he sold her the clock. He only sells carrots and cabbages. But she showed him the clock here one day, when you and me were out. A very nice clock, he said. Made in New York. With a Toronto chime.'

'What is that?' I said.

And as I spoke my mother appeared in the door behind my father. She was holding in her hands a square porcelain object, with its elegant dial, and around it someone, no doubt in New York, had painted little flowers.

'I don't have it ticking,' she said, in a small voice, like a fearless child, 'for fear.'

My father stood up.

'Where did you buy it, Cissy? Where did you buy such a thing?'

'In Grace's of the Weir.'

'Grace's of the Weir?' he said, incredulously. 'I have never even been into that shop. I would be afraid to go into it, in case they charged me for entering.'

She stood there, shrinking in her unhappiness.

'It is made by Ansonia,' she said, 'in New York.'

'Can we take it back, Cissy?' he said. 'Let's take it back to Grace's and see where we are then. We cannot go on making payments to Fine. They will never give you what you gave them for it, but they might give you something on it, and maybe we can close the debt with Mr Fine. I am sure he will oblige me if he can.'

'I never even heard it tick or chime,' she said.

'Well, turn the key in it and have it tick. And when it strikes the hour it will chime.'

'I can't,' she said, 'for they will find it then. They will follow the sound and find it.'

'Who, Cissy? Us, is it? I think we have done all the finding now.'

'No, no,' said my mother, 'the rats. The rats will find it.'

My mother looked up at him with an eerie glow in her face, like a conspirator.

'We will be better to smash it,' she said.

'No,' said my father as desperate as you like.

'No, it would be better. To smash it. To smash Southampton and all. And Sligo. And you. I'll raise it up now, Joe, and bring it down upon the earth like this,' and indeed she did raise it up, and indeed she did throw it down on the thin damp cake of concrete on the floor, 'there, all promises retrieved, all hurts healed, all losses restored!'

The clock lay in its porcelain pieces there, some little ratchet loosened, and for the first and last time in our house, the Ansonia clock chimed with its Toronto chime.

It was soon after this, so soon, that I have to report, my father was found dead.

To this day I don't know what killed him exactly, but I have puzzled it over these eighty years and more. I have given you the run of the thread, and where has it led me? I have lain all the facts before you.

Surely the matter of the clock was too small a thing to kill a man?

Surely the dead boys was a dark thing, but dark enough to darken my father forever?

The girls also, yes, that was a dark matter, bright though they were as they fell.

It was my father's fate to have those things befall him.

He was just as anyone else, and anything, clock or heart, he had a breaking point.

It was in the next street in a derelict cottage, where he was working to rid it of rats, at the behest of the neighbours to right and left of the empty house, that he hanged himself.