Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

He was standing in what looked like a little bare bed of stones. One time it might have been roofed with a slab that had long ago fallen or been pulled sideways.

'I was lying in here,' he said. 'It makes a lovely suntrap. Feel my shirt.'

And he held out the black front of his shirt. When I put a hand on it briefly it was quite warm.

'That's what the sunlight will do in Ireland,' he said, 'given half a chance.'

Then we had nothing to say it seemed for a few moments. My heart was pounding under my ribs, I was afraid he would hear it. Oh, it wasn't love for him. It was love of my poor father. To be close to a man who was close to my father. The awful, dangerous, inexplicable stupidity of it.

I suddenly saw it. I suddenly thought, Tom has married a mad woman. It is a thought that haunted me many many times since. But I am nearly proud to say that it was I myself first had that thought.

I could not resist the lure of the river. The open sea could not keep me. The salmon lays her eggs on the shingle of the last narrow reaches of her home river, where the water first trickles from the earth. Mysterious world, mysteries upon mysteries, queens in stones, rivers gathering underground.

'Do you know what it is, Roseanne?' he said, after a while. 'You are the very spit of my wife.'

'Your wife, John Lavelle?' I said, suddenly angry.

'My wife, yes. You look like her, or maybe your face has taken the place of hers in my memory.' 'And where is your wife then?'

'She's on the North Island of the Inishkeas. In '21 a few of the island lads burned down the police barracks. I don't know why, because there was no polis in it. So the Black and Tans came out in a boat to see what they could see by way of revenge. My twins were only new born that time. My wife Kitty was standing at the door of our house, holding the two boys, one in each arm, to "air" them as we say in Irish. The Tans who were a good way off decided to take a few pot shots at her. She was shot through the head, and another bullet killed Michael a'Bhilli, and Seanin fell from his mother's arm, and struck his head on the threshold stone.'

He was speaking very quietly and as if fearfully now. I gripped his sleeve.

'I'm sorry,' I said.

'Well, I have Seanin still, he's fifteen now. He's not just right in the head, you know, after his fall. A little bit strange. He's a fellow that likes to stand out on the margin of things, looking in quietly. His mother's people are rearing him, and so he has his mother's name, you know the fine old island name of Keane. But he likes to talk to me. I told him the last time I was home about you, and he asked me a hundred questions. And I said to him if anything happened to me, he was to look out for you, and he said he would, although I don't think he understood the half of what I was saying, nor even knows where Sligo is.'

'Why would you tell him to do that, John Lavelle?' I said. 'I don't know. Only that…' 'Only that what?'

'That I don't know what's going to happen to me now. I think I must go for the gun again. I haven't taken much to the road digging. That's one reason, and it frightens me to death.

The other reason might be, that I never saw anyone as lovely as you only except Kitty.'

'You're nearly a stranger. There's nothing of normal things in this.'

'There it is,' he said. 'A stranger. It's a country composed entirely of strangers then. You are right. But all the same what do people say when they feel like I do? I love you, they say, I suppose.'

We had been there a good while and now I heard other voices, new voices coming up from below. I gathered my self and my wits, and almost bolted for the path. There was no way down the mountain except by that course, though my first thought was to strike out across the heather and scree eastwards, but at the same time I knew there was a great cliff below Knocknarea, and I might be many hours trying to get round it, and onto a road. So many hours that Tom might finally wonder what was amiss with me, and even raise the country to find me. Such were my thoughts as the wind, stiffened now as it came on towards teatime, threw my hair forward across my face, and the little group came into view below.

It was a group of men in black coats and cassocks. A little party of priests out on a Sunday walk. Wasn't there a touch of blasphemy in that? Would that their piety and their prayers and their rules had kept them close in the town. But here they were, with their different laughter, and their murmuring voices. I looked back wildly to see where John Lavelle might be. Oh, he was standing right behind me, like a component of the wind itself.

'Go back away!' I said. 'Can't you hide yourself? I can't be seen up here with you!' 'Why not?' he said.

'Why not? Are you mad? Are you as mad as me? Go and hide yourself in those rocks.'

But it was too late. Of course it was. The gaggle of holy men was upon us, all smiles and good days, and raising of the hats. Except for one face, whipped red by the exertion and the wind, which looked at me with a blank, heart-hurting look. It was Fr Gaunt.

When I got back down to our little house in Strandhill, Tom was not there because he had gone into Sligo to greet 'the General' at the station, in preparation for a parade along Wine Street, to highlight as Tom put it the great enthusiasm for General O'Duffy's movement in the town. He had begged me to put on a blue blouse that Old Tom had been inveigled into stitching up for me, but the truth was that part of Tom frightened me. I suppose in the original Cafe Cairo, in Cairo itself -and I do not think nice Mrs Prunty was ever there – there was a lot of use of the hubble bubble, not to mention the famous hootchie cootchie girls doing their belly dance. I had never seen a man with opium in him, but I wondered was it something like the almost oriental glow in Tom's face when he spoke of the General, and Corporatism (whatever that was, I'm not sure he really knew himself), and getting back at the 'traitor de Valera', and the 'true start of Ireland's glory', and all the rest of the jangling song of those times. When they had marched in Sligo, they were all coming out to Strandhill for a rally in the Plaza. Not the least of my residual dread after meeting John Lavelle was the obvious fact that a man like him was in effect the 'enemy' of the General's movement. I don't know why that bothered me so much, but it did. I stood in our little sitting room, bare as a tenement but clean and nice, and shivered in my summer dress. I shivered, and shivered all the more when I heard the sound of engines in the distance, a little roaring noise that grew and grew, till I ran to the window and looked out and saw the stream of Fords and the like going by, Tom at the front driving his own vehicle, with a very important-looking creature altogether in the seat beside him, in one of those folding caps and a hooked nose not unlike Tom's brother Jack's. There were dozens and dozens of surging motors, all with their metallic music, the white dust of the narrow seaside road rising from the wheels like the Sahara itself. And all the faces, men and women, alight above the blue blouses and shirts, with that strange glow, just a few fields east of happiness – the picture of impossible optimism, like advertisements in the odd American magazine that reached us in that far-off world of Sligo, sent to relatives wrapped up with the coveted Yankee dollars.

And I had the curious sensation of looking out on someone else's world, someone else's Tom, someone else's Sligo. Like I wasn't going to be there very long, and had not been there long enough, or even had never been there. Like a ghost to myself and certainly not for the first time.

I went to bed and lay in the cool sheets and tried to be calm. I tried to be myself, and yet could not really locate that person. Roseanne. She was maybe slipping away from me. Perhaps had done so long ago. In the war of independence it wasn't just soldiers and policemen had to be killed, even those stupid fellas that had gone out to the Great War without thinking what they were doing, but also tinkers and tramps and the like. People that were dirtying up the edges of things, those people that stood at the edges of photographs of nice places and in certain people's eyes were starting to stink them up. When there were bombs dropped on Belfast by the Germans in that coming war, tens of thousands of people fled out into the countryside, thousands of them from the Belfast slums, and no one wanted them in their houses, because they were a forgotten race of savages, so poor they had never seen a lavatory, and would eat nothing but tea and bread. They pissed on the floors of decent houses. It was all the people that were hidden till the Germans bombed them out of it, burned them out. Like my father's poor rats. I was lying in a bed of clean sheets, but I felt like them. Like them, I wasn't grateful enough, and had fouled my own nest. I knew that in the eyes of Tom's friends outside, gathered in the Plaza, if they knew everything about me, they would want to – I don't know, extinguish me, judge me, put me outside the frame of the photographs of life. The delightful landscapes of ordinary life. Of course I knew nothing of Germans then, except the General was a man like they had in Italy, in Germany, in Finland those times, mighty noisy men that wanted to fire everyone up and have them all clean and fit and pure, so that they could go out in a great horde and extinguish the lousy, the ragged, the morally unsound. Somewhere in my heart, in the passport of my heart, if you opened it, you would see my real face – unwashed, seared by fire, terrified, ungrateful, diseased, and dumb.