The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty Read Online Free PDF Page A

school all day, under the vast wall-map of the leviathan world, crisp Latin and the muddle of mathematics forming weather clouds over his head, trying to extricate the kernel of the matter. He knows that on the floor above in the higher class Jonno Lynch his bosom pal is conning hard for his certificate. Jonno is going serious on the world and because Jonno is but an orphan and has to live with Mrs Foley, the terror of all orphans, he is intent on escape into the world of shillings and employments. By God, he is. And no doubt rightly. Meanwhile in the lesser class, Eneas puzzles out his own ancestry. The master Mr Jackson is a person so wise much of his teaching pours over the shaved or narrowly cut heads of his pupils. When Eneas first came into the class Mr Jackson showed some interest in the name Eneas, pointing out it was taken from the Roman story about a long-suffering and wandering sea-captain. But Eneas was only called Eneas after some old great-grandfather of his father’s, maybe even the mighty butter-exporter himself. And the discussion was ended suddenly by one of the boys offering the information that in Cork the name is pronounced anus.
    Mr Jackson talks without much pausing always, and it is, Eneas supposes, to place a bulwark against the waiting tide of filth that passes among schoolboys for knowledge. He tells them extraordinary things and he likes to give them samples from your man Homer, in a funny little pip-squeak voice. In fact, his favourite talk is of the old Greeks, and their dooms and their wars, and how the Gods were forever decreeing the fates of the mortals, and girls were turned into trees, and the like. And from what Eneas hears him say, the fellas in Rome later on weren’t that much better fixed, nor indeed that other Eneas fella. But he can’t try and catch these curious trout of information now, he has other legends to puzzle out. Legends of Sligo. The master tries to swamp his head with decent information from what he magnificently calls the Classical Eras of the World, but the terrier of his mother’s origins sees him off every time. It means something for himself, this business of his mother, and he senses what it might mean hovering close by, but elusive and foggy. The death or the life of him, he cannot say. Just out of reach, just out of reach. The heads of the boys about him nod in the slow fever of the afternoon. The elms full of fresh leaves, all inflated and shining after the buckets of thick rain, wash about gently below the windows. Thank God the weather has brightness. The hard world mills about in the dark streets of the town. And is all the world of Sligo abreast of his mysterious Mam? The jokes of the butcher boys and the draper’s assistants are against him!
    That night his little room seems dangerous to him. The Lungey House swelters in the June night, accusatory, high-faluting. Shame is a sort of silence, slightly whistling, slightly humming. And he thinks of the young priest from Castle-blaney that hanged himself. There in the silent bed he thinks of him. He sees the grasses all sere and the yellow wind invading the lost fields. What a sough in the deep branches there is as the Castleblaney priest climbs to his early and possibly ignoble death, with the length of mooring rope stolen, it transpires, from the prow of a gillie’s salmon-boat. He has tasted the very honey of Tuppenny Jane’s damp crotch, eternally, generously damp and sweet and deep in the starched petal of her knickers. Higher he climbs and places the rope about his Castleblaney neck. He sits on the rough branch. What’s he thinking, what’s he thinking? He gives a little kick away, all that learning and aspiration rushing towards oblivion, in such a manner as Eneas often imagined doing while tree climbing, scaring the daylights out of his legs, paralysing himself aloft. Away he tips, the priest in his relic-like clothes, his dog collar under the collar of rope, his polished shoes, his fine linen, his