The All of It: A Novel Page 2

  He kept thinking he shouldn’t be there in the rain and cold, the midges eating him alive—worse than any telling of a hair-shirt—and the river swollen to boisterousness; shouldn’t be there because there’s no point to fishing if you can’t concentrate. Yearning, he recalled the times in his life when he’d fished well through midge-ridden days in weather even meaner than this, and how, adroitly, Nature had put her claim on him and made him one with the very ground at his feet, and how, with every cast, past the gleaming green reeds of the shoreline shallows, he’d projected himself towards a specific spot in the river’s very heart, a different shading in the water that was like a quality of seriousness, or at a laze in the current’s glide, some felt allurement of expectation which became (ah, fated fish) the focused haven of his energy.

  Hopeless, today: everywhere he looked he saw Enda’s face; in every sound he heard Enda’s voice: in all the world (or so he felt) there was only her and himself….

  At half-twelve Seamus came lumping through the rain. “You must be wanting your lunch, Father.”

  He managed a smile. “Not yet. But have yours, Seamus. I’ll take a sandwich later…. And stick to the hut.”

  But the boy maddeningly lingered.

  Some time ago, he’d given up on the Silver Doctor and replaced it with a Blue Charm. Now Seamus caught him in the act of discarding the Blue Charm for a Silver Rat. Under Seamus’s eye, his hands, red and clumsy from the cold, shook.

  “Thomas warned me ’twould be a useless day,” Seamus vouched.

  “Will you stop it, boy!” he cried. “Is there nothing in you but complaints? Go, I’m telling you, and permit me to get on with my fishing.”

  Seamus gave him one of those low, sidelong glances common to youths these days, then said, “Just as you will, Father,” and walked away, bent, as he’d come, against the downpour.

  Alone again, with the Silver Rat secured, he raised his rod and set to afresh: cast, strip, cast, strip, cast…. Once, he looked up and took in the density of the cloud-cover over the mountains, the peaks lost to view, and, from the southwest, a further, blacker pile-up of scud being winded in from the sea.

  A terrible day.

  And what would Enda be doing now, this first day after Kevin’s funeral, this Saturday? If he had to name a time and a day of the week that called to mind Kevin and Enda as a pair, it would be mid-morning of a Saturday-shopping-day. That was when you’d see them, in all weather, sailing on their bicycles down the long hill into Roonatellin to do their week’s marketing. They always rode right alongside each other like gleeful, strong children, their heads high and their faces lit in a transport of excitement as the wheels of their bikes rolled faster and faster…. Out in his old Ford, making his Saturday calls on the shut-ins, he’d often come upon them as they rode towards town; always, he would honk and wave, and one or both of them would give a swift, hand-reflex kind of a salute, but he never knew whether they took in who was greeting them, for their eyes never lifted from the thrilling coming-on thread of the road. The sun on them or rain, or a switch of wind whipping them—it didn’t matter—they exuded some high, terribly intense, obliterating joy, which—it haunted him now—more than once had inflamed his imagination to raw conjecturings…suppressed to the greater marvelment that, to Enda’s able arms, God had given no child to hold.

  Would he ever get over the sadness of the truth of it?

  Enda: when he’d returned to her after seeing to the publishing of the lie, running out, at the sound of his car, into the dusk-shadowed yard: “You’re back, Father, thank God. And you went to the news-office?”

  “I did. It’ll be printed just as you wanted in the morning’s paper.”

  “Come in, Father.”

  All had been done: Kevin laid out, washed and shaved, clothed in his black Sunday suit, his rosary twined between his fingers. At each corner of the bed a candle burned; the spaced glimmerings offered the only light in the room.

  “Catherine helped me,” Enda said simply.

  They knelt at the foot of the bed and separately prayed.

  When he stood again, Enda stirred but remained at her kneel. “I’ll tell you the all of it now, Father,” she said, looking up at him.

  He disowned a secular urge to reach down and lift her up. He told her instead, “Here, Enda”—turning a chair around for her—“sit here….” And as she complied: “Now, Enda dear, understand me when I tell you you should better save for the confessional what it is you’re wanting to tell me.”

  “No,” she said.

  “No?”

  “No.” She stiffened, hawk-like.

  “And why not?” he challenged.

  “It has not to do with God.”

  “Everything has to do with God,” he replied firmly.

  She shook her head, denying. “If you’ll but hear it you’ll see ’tis outside God.” Then, flushing, her eyes hard on his: “I’ll tell you now or never.”

  The threat (for so it struck him as being) made him cry out to her: “Enda!”—admonishing.

  She flinched; her eyes went wide, but she held firm. “Now or never,” she repeated.

  In an effort to size her resolve, he regarded her deeply. She met his gaze levelly and fiercely. It was then of course he should have reminded her of the Church and of himself as an agent of God, and, unless she relented, refused her the hearing. But he saw she would not relent, her resolve being, he could tell, as iron. And…there, touchable for its closeness, was Kevin’s body, shell of his life, reminding; but profounder was Enda herself, waiting out the long moment of his ruling silence with a dauntlessness that sworded him through with pity and fascination.

  It was as he continued to study her that the persuasion came upon him that for all her seeming strength of will, she was in some way fearful. If such was the case, he told himself, he had no choice but to allow her her say.

  Still, he felt he must state his misgivings. “It’s against my better judgement to hear you as you oblige me to,” he began solemnly, bringing his hands together, his eyes staying on her, “but as it means so much to you, I will, nevertheless.”

  “As you put it, Father, that is to say, if it means pressing it on you, it needn’t be done,” she answered proudly.

  What could he but admire her? He made a gesture of measured conciliation, then: “I appreciate, Enda, that it’ll be no easier for you to tell than for me to hear.”

  Her brow cleared. She said, “Thank you, Father.” She stood up. “I’ve water boiling. I’ll just give us some tea…. Take a chair for yourself.” Still, though, she hesitated. “You’ll need to be patient, Father,” she qualified.

  “I will of course, Enda.”

  “—not stop me over the first thing I tell you—”

  “I won’t.”

  “—hear me through to the end, I mean.”

  She turned from him towards the bed and stood for what seemed to him to be an immense length of time, her back to him as she looked at Kevin’s face. In his chair, he waited, feeling large and uncollared. He shifted his feet. His shoes made a soft, scurring sound on the floor.

  She shuddered.

  As long as it would be granted him to live, he would remember how, then, her spine straightened as she filled her lungs with a diver’s deep breath, and how, just before she plunged into the violent waters of her telling, she turned back to him, her eyes glistening and entreating and charged with courage, and, finally, how the sped words fell: “You have to know, Father—Kevin and myself, we’re brother and sister.”

  Nine

  AT HALF-ONE, HE rested his rod in the thorny tangle of a furze-clump and made his way to the ghillie hut.

  Inside it, Seamus sat, his back braced against a post, his torso scrunched forward over his folded arms. “Giving up, Father?” he asked in an itching way.

  He restrained himself: “No, Seamus. I’ve come for my lunch.” Then, acidly: “I don’t like to disturb you, boy, but if you could just manage to reach out and hand me the thermos,
I could use some hot tea.”

  “There’s not much left. It bein’ so cold, I—”

  “I’ll take what there is, thank you, Seamus.” It was a blessing just to sit down. From the strenuous efforts of casting, his shoulders ached, and his legs, too, from standing so long. Morosely, Seamus watched him as he ate his sandwich and drank a comforting cup of tea.

  Of the two sheep grazing near the hut’s open door Seamus remarked, “Them’s lucky, havin’ them heavy coats.”

  “I take it you’re cold, Seamus…. You might try going outside and moving about.”

  “But for the rain—”

  “Ah, the rain again, is it?” forcing a smile. “You’re right of course, Seamus. I’m sopped through myself.”

  “You’ll take a chill, Father,” the boy argued. “You’ve given it a noble try, but Thomas is right, it’s no good in this weather, the water’s too high and the fish—”

  “—just lie on the bottom, not moving,” he finished the cant for him. “You’d advise me to give off, then?”

  “I would, Father.”

  “Well now, Seamus, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do…. I’m going to nap for a few minutes, and then I’m going back to my fishing. Now if you’ll draw the door to against the wind—”

  There’s benefaction to closing off vision: with your eyes shut you’re disobliged from keeping the show going for yourself or anyone else…. So thinking, he briefly dozed.

  “Did I snore, Seamus?” coming awake a bit later.

  “Aye,” Seamus grinned.

  “Well…” he stretched. “It’s time I was leaving you again, Seamus.” He stood up. “Keep the net handy.” He had to say that.

  It was raining still: fate of the day. And the midges swarmed, thicker than ever. Back on the beat, he saturated his face and neck and hands with a commercial bug-deterrent: but for its feeble effect, he’d be eaten alive. He’d try now, he decided, a Thunder and Lightning…and tied it on, feeling as he did so a hopelessness of purpose akin to anger. Then he positioned himself anew and in a kind of desperate, stubborn rage, he began again: cast, strip, cast, strip, cast….

  What clue had he missed, what giveaway indication of Kevin’s and Enda’s sibling relationship? No inkling from an examination of their conjured physical and characteristic selves: he had been through that earlier in the day, had, all the long miles of the drive over from Roonatellin to the Castle, imaged in his mind their faces and bodies and the way they thought and the way they moved, scrutinizing every detail. To no avail. Kevin: with his straight, light, soft hair (the merest breeze could randomly part it); his blue eyes that tended easily to water over; the mould of his features expressive more of determination than of intelligence; his nimble-jointed body (he could go up a ladder and come down it with a crazy ease that drew smiles); his tendency in leisure to keep to a ready neatness, as if he were subject at all times to an imperative call; his easy laugh, but his empty silences; his broad, blunt, capable hands; his tedious care of tools; his impetuous though untheatrical generosity; his near-dull, incurious adherence to the palpable perimeter of his immediate, personal world: for him, the horizon held no allure.

  A far, far different coin of spending was Enda, daughtered historically, he fancied, of the race of Heber, the eldest son of Milesius, King of Spain, who, as Dublin-bred, educated schoolboys of his generation had learnt, colonized Ireland early on, way, way back. Hers the abundant, curly, enticingly coarse raven-dark hair of that Iberian breed; hers the black, changing eyes gifted, in conjunct with a subtle intellect, to sightings of the intuitive sort; hers the elegant, long-fingered, obscurely imperious hands; hers a spontaneity of response, sexually illusory; hers a sailor’s canniness (kindness came after); hers—Kevin’s never—the lit, brilliant face set in the direction of, and becalmed in, distance.

  That disalike they were, one from the other.

  Two other elements mightily distinguished Enda from Kevin. Firstly: Enda could read—a bit (Kevin not at all)—and she had sought and acquired this skill, however limited, as an adult, by going and sitting over a period of months with the “beginning learners” at the state school in Roonatellin; and though her ease with the printed word was rudimentary—no more than that of a child—she regularly pored over and practiced her skill on the instrument of the district newspaper. Her progress, as one watched her at it, through the prose of that simple sheet, was slow-gaited and awesomely sombre, but, for the gist and feel of fact and life which she arduously gleaned from it, terribly satisfying to her.

  Secondly: she possessed a naturally aristocratic and emotionally connective approach to the spoken word; she cared about how she said what she wanted to say. In the middle of a sentence she would often hesitate, and one knew she was searching for the better phrase or the more telling word. This concern particularized and lent to each of her relationships an intrinsic delicacy. Her verbal falterings had always fascinated him for the ways in which they revealed the workings of her mind and for the fact of their being infatuatingly expressive of herself.

  Yet, of Kevin and Enda as a pair—shouldn’t he have guessed something? But by what means? The habits of their lives had been so ordinary-seeming, their expectations so simple, Kevin tending to his small acreage and his sheep and taking on odd jobs for the extra, and Enda abiding so gladsomely over the home-hearth, the two of them showing every evidence of love of God, being regular and humble and joyful in their worship. Enda especially; Sunday after Sunday—Sundays were the day for Enda—she’d be on her knees at early Mass, the rosary in her hands and the world lost on her for all her raptness. Thrilling, the grace of her gathered self at prayer.

  Still—and he perceived it in a rush—there had been something, a signal, if he’d but put it to use, whose possible significance he himself, within himself, had always sought to gainsay. For there: the fact of it, that in all the parish, no other pair of any age—displaying engaged twosomes or quick-talking new-marrieds or elderly couples bonded in long wedlock—none but Kevin and Enda gave off, as they were seen standing together or sitting next to each other, that stirring element, that given, like a scent of unalterable persuasion, of hardness. Purpose: that was the word which sprang consequentially to mind.

  What he would never get over, as Enda told it to him that late afternoon after Kevin’s death, was the sorrow of the usualness of her and Kevin’s early childhood: their mother dying giving stillborn birth to her third child—that when Kevin was three and Enda two; and after their mother’s death, their young, distraught, overburdened father going queerer and queerer, colder and colder, caring finally for nothing—not himself or his children or his land or livestock—finding in drink his only refuge.

  “You’ve been up Donegal way, Father? So you know how it is there, the mountains like walls and the thick hills between one glen and the other and the land in the glens sweeping up and off as far as ever you can see, stretches of no one and nothing but clouds and rocks and sheep grazing and now and then a house set down in the reaches. Ours was such a one. Nowhere, it was. Just sheep-tracks making to it, and them wiped out often by the rains….

  “Of course, I’m talking fifty, sixty years ago. Now it’s changed I suppose, Donegal being just as likely to change as anyplace else. There’s cars now for one thing, and cars get everywhere, wanted or not. But at the time I’m talking of, when Kevin and myself were children, there’d be weeks and weeks when we’d not see a soul except for ourselves and our dad…. Oh, of course, we got to Mass when we could, though the church was a fast hour’s walk from our house, that apart we were….”

  He knew the image: the widower appearing on the Lord’s day with his haphazardly-clad children, the lot of them large-eyed and yearning and holding back like shy, uncertain creatures of the field. “You had no relatives, Enda? No aunts? No uncles? No relations of any sort? None at all?” he asked.

  No one. Apparently there had been no one. Or perhaps—Enda’s memory was vague—there had been someone she recalled as being mention
ed, a great-aunt of her mother’s, but there had been a rupture of the tie, a quarrel of some sort, so the great-aunt in reality was no more than a figure in a dream.

  “…but at the best, had there been anyone, they’d not likely have ventured the distance to our place to look in on us,” Enda went on. Then, with a shrug: “These days of course, for a family in our fix, there’s all the State Social Services and the county officials looking into every nook and cranny of your life, and as I said, cars. It’s cars that’s made the most difference. But we’d none of that I’ve just mentioned. For us, back then, it was like we weren’t known as being alive.”

  She said that cutting sentence, then shocked him by laughing. “…Not that we thought that then, for we knew no other life, and you can’t know what you don’t know, isn’t it so, Father? And we were busy, morning to night, Kevin at doing on the place—our dad put him early to doing a man’s work, and me hauling and fetching, washing and mending and cooking, both of us doing a grownup’s workaday. Only little we were—six and seven, no bigger than that.” Again, her strange, marvelling laughter and her following, “Aye; and we did our work well, too….”

  She took a swallow of her tea. “The house in Donegal was of stone. Not grand, I don’t mean to say, but not a mere place such as this, having as it did an upstairs with one room. That room—” she seemed for a moment confused, but recovered herself quickly enough and went on: “—all the time we were small our dad kept the room forever locked. We never saw him go near the stairs that led up to it, though when he’d sit at table we’d often see his eyes stray up the stairs. But his feet, never. Kevin and myself…we’d got it hard once for playing on the stairs and it fixed us against going near them again…. Well, except for myself. On Saturdays. Our dad would have me put a dust-cloth to the steps each Saturday. He was fierce about that regular dusting. I’d do the cloth over one step at a time, and then I’d be at the top, you know, right at the door to the room—him watching me—and the minute I finished up there, he’d point for me to come down.”