Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

The same thing happened a little while later. He leapt up again and lit his candle and went to the door. It was locked again! Again that deep gnawing hunger in his belly. For some reason, maybe because of her extreme strangeness, he couldn't bear to call the landlady, and sweating and discommoded he spent the night in a chair.

When morning broke he awoke, and dressed, and when he went to the door it was open. He took his bags and went upstairs. It was then he noticed the decrepitude of the place, which had not been so obvious in the kinder darkness of the night. He could not raise the landlady, and with his ship due to sail, was forced to leave the house without seeing her, throwing the few shillings on the hallstand as he went out.

Outside in the street when he looked back he was greatly perturbed to see many of the windowpanes of the house were broken, and there were slates missing from the sagging roof.

He went into the shop on the corner to compose himself by talking to another human person, and asked the shopkeeper about the house. The house, said the shopkeeper, had been closed up some years ago and was uninhabited. Ideally it would be demolished except it was part of the terrace. He could not have spent the night there, said the shopkeeper. No one lived there and no one would dream of buying it, for the reason that a woman had killed her husband there, locking him in a basement room and starving him to death. The woman herself had been tried and hanged for murder.

My father told me and my mother this story with the passion of a person reliving it as he spoke. The gloomy house, the grey woman, the groaning ghost swam behind his eyes.

'It's as well there was room with us the next time you were in port, then, Joe,' said my mother, in her most neutral tones.

'By God, by God, yes,' said my father.

A little human story, a sailor's story, that somehow had still bound up in it my mother's contrasting beauty, and the enormous lure she had for him then and always.

For her beauty was that darkhaired, darkskinned Spanish sort of beauty, with green eyes like American emeralds, that no man can protect himself against.

And he married her and brought her back to Sligo and there she lived her life henceforth, not bred in that darkness, but like a lost shilling on a floor of mud, glistening in some despair. A more beautiful girl Sligo never saw, she had skin as soft as feathers, and a warm, generous breast all new-baked bread and delight.

The greatest joy of my young life was issuing forth with my mother into the streets of Sligo at dusk, because she liked to meet my father on his way home from his work at the cemetery. It was only many years later when I was more grown myself that I realised, looking back, that there was a certain anxiety in that going forth, as if she did not trust time and the ordinary way of things to bring him home. For I do believe my mother suffered strangely under her halo of beauty.

He was the superintendent there, as I said to you, and wore a blue uniform and a cap with a peak as black as a blackbird's coat.

This was at a time when there was the Great War and the town was full of soldiers, as if Sligo itself were a battlefield, but of course it was not. It was but men on their furlough we saw there. But they had a great look of my own father, what with the uniforms – so that he seemed to pop up everywhere in those streets, as my mother and me were walking, myself looking out as fiercely as she for him. My joy was only completed when at last it turned out to be him, coming home from the cemetery in the dark evenings of winter, as might be, skittering along. And when he spied me he would be playing with me then, larking about like a child. And many a glance he got, and maybe such action didn't go with his dignity as superintendent of the Sligo dead. But he had that rare ability to let things ease in himself in the company of a child, and be stupid and gay in the parched light.

He was the keeper of the graves, but he was also himself, and in his peaked cap and blue uniform could guide a person to whatever plot held relative or friend with solemn dignity enough, but alone in his graveyard house, which was a little temple made of concrete, he would be heard singing wonderfully 'I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls' from The Bohemian Girl, one of his favourite operettas.

And on free days he went out on his Matchless motorcycle to race along on the devious roads of Ireland. If the winning of my mother constituted a kingly event, the fact that he in one great year of fortune, around the time of my birth, raced the short course on the Isle of Man, on his lovely bike, coming in respectably in the middle of the field, and not killing himself, was the source of constant memory and joy, and I am sure consoled him in his concrete temple in the dreary stretches of an Irish winter, surrounded as he was by those sleeping souls.

My father's other 'famous' story, that is, famous in our tiny household, happened during his single days, when he was more able to get himself to the few motorcycle meetings of those times. It happened in Tullamore, and was a singularly peculiar tale.

He was going along himself at a great rate, and in front of him was a long wide hill, leading down to a sharp turn where the road met a domain wall, one of those high, thick stone walls built during the Irish famine indeed, as a sort of useless labour to keep labourers alive. At any rate, the racer in front of him, tearing down the hill and picking up an enormous head of speed, instead of braking seemed even to accelerate at the opposing wall, and finally, in a horrible clutter of smoke, metal and a noise as of cannons, struck it mercilessly. My father, peering out through his dirty goggles, nearly lost his grip on his own machine, such was his horror; but then saw a sight he could not and could never explain, which was the rider rising as if on wings, and crossing the huge wall in a swift and gentle movement, like the smooth glide of a seagull in an upwind. For a moment, for a moment he thought indeed he saw a flash of wings, and never could read in his prayerbook again about angels without thinking of that extraordinary instance.

Please do not think my father was dissembling, because he was quite incapable of that. It is true that in country districts – even in the towns – people like to tell you they have seen wonders, such as my husband Tom and the two-headed dog on the road to Enniscrone. It is true also that such stories are only effective if the teller feigns absolute belief – or indeed saw such wonders truly. But my father was no magician of lies and stories.

My father managed to slow his motor-bicycle and stop, and running along the domain wall, found one of those fanciful little gates, and pushing the rusty iron, hurried in through nettles and docks to find his miraculous friend. There on the other side of the wall he lay, quite unconscious, but also, and my father swore to the truth of it, quite unharmed. Eventually the man, who happened to be an Indian gentleman who sold scarves and other items out of his suitcase all over the western seaboard, awoke, and smiled at my father. They both marvelled at this inexplicable escape, which not unnaturally was the talk of Tullamore for years after. If you ever hear that story, the teller might give it the title of 'The Indian Angel'.

Again my father's curious happiness was most clearly evident in the retelling of this story. It was as if such an event were a reward to him for being alive, a little gift of narrative that pleased him so much it conferred on himself, in dreams and waking, a sense of privilege, as if such little scraps of stories and events composed for him a ragged gospel. And if ever there were to be written an evangelical gospel of my father's life – and why should there not, as every person's life is said to be precious to God – I suppose those wings merely glimpsed on his friend the Indian's back would become more substantial, and things merely hinted at by him would become in the new telling by a second hand solid, unprovable, but raised up even higher into the realms of miracle. So that all and sundry might take comfort from it.