The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry Page A

sea. Don’t you know me?’
    But nary a nod does he get, nor even a curse or a dark look, and Eneas is greatly puzzled. And he drifts home with a sober tread and sits in against the free wall of the little kitchen and talks to his Mam about other things, the piety of Teasy and the scholarship to the big secondary school that Jack has his sights on.
    ‘And when Teasy is right for it, I have her promised to an order in Bexhill-on-Sea, in England. By the good graces, we’ll have a nun in this pagan family at last. Father Moynihan is in and out of here all the time, taking tea and talking up a storm of religion to her, delighted with her. Delighted with us all.’
    ‘She’s only seven or eight yet, Mam,’ he says.
    ‘That’s right. High time to be turning in the right direction. Look at yourself, gone out sailoring at the age of sixteen.’
    And his brother Jack comes in laden with the books of a wise scholar and slams them on the rickety table and gives Eneas a grimacing look.
    ‘I met Jonno Lynch on the school road,’ says Jack, ‘and he says to lay off him.’
    ‘How do you mean?’ says their Mam, outraged.
    ‘Lay off him. Don’t be trying to talk to him in the street.’ ‘He was passing by and said it or what?’ says Eneas.
    ‘No, he came special. Came over the roundy wall special to tell me. To give me the message. And to stay well away from O’Dowd’s place, he says. In particular. He says are you the greatest eejit in the world or what?’
    ‘Don’t speak to your poor brother like that, John McNulty,’ says the Mam of peace. ‘You’re only a whelp. Have sense.’
    ‘Well, Mam, he may be older than me, but, Jimmy Mack, is he wiser?’
    ‘What nonsense is Jonno Lynch speaking?’ says the Mam.
    ‘Not so much, nonsense,’ says Jack, just a little smugly. ‘Anyway, Jonno Lynch told me to tell you.’
    And his brother Jack, who is old enough now to comment on the practices of Sligo, seemingly, because he is as bright as daylight, tells him this is because Eneas has been going about in ships as if he were an Englishman and busying himself during an English war. How can Jack have a grasp of these things? A low-looking red-headed lad as green as a cabbage? Is he even twelve years of age, the same scrap of wisdom?
    Oh, the British Merchant Navy, the British. You’d want to rise early to be up with them, the heroes of Ireland. Deep thinkers. The blessed British Merchant Navy! Poor sailors, afraid of sea, afraid of land. In rusty traders and toiling oceanic tubs. Desperadoes of salt dreams and wind as tall as heaven. Even that is enough for silence and suspicion, is it?
    Still and all it’s a sort of sorrow to him that Jonno Lynch will not greet the old going-about companion of his boyhood. What’s left of his boy’s heart is wrung by it. It’s a little thing maybe, a nod or a word flung across Main Street, or even to heel up, the two of them, like two cabbage carts against the wall of Plimpton’s or even God knows head into the Cafe Cairo for a citron lemonade and swap all the ould recent histories. But it’s recent histories indeed are the damnable problem. Jack, younger though he may be, has a better grasp of these affairs. He says bright boys and wide boys and bitter-hearted older men with tribes of brats and hard wives too are milling about up on the Showgrounds of a Sunday night and under their floorboards are real guns and in their souls the foul pith of rebellion. So Jack says. Jack’s reading Tennyson noon to night. He’s a wonder.
     
    But there’s worse to come in all manner of things. A long year passes, a long round of weather and eating his mother’s grub. Eneas roams the town asking everywhere and anywhere for a job and finds oh, kindness here and there, but mostly indifferent no’s and even aggression. And gradually Eneas understands that the little rebellion that took place just recent in Dublin and other points, with barely a flare-up in Sligo, barely a flash of fire on the