The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty Read Online Free PDF

handsome belt. The rope snaps tight, his neck-bone is banged sideways in a way it cannot endure. The tongue protrudes slowly as it fills with blood and the face goes black as sins. The maw of hell roars like an opened kiln. The once saintly bowels loosen into the excellent trousers, purchased, Eneas believes, in the particular shop in Marlborough Street in Dublin. Eneas sweats in the cosy bed. Shame is not sweet, shame is not like Tuppenny Jane’s crotch! Through and through he is shot with the arrows of shame. He understands it. It is a filthy pain, an attack, an affront to lonesomeness. His little room is transformed into a chamber of shame. The priest dangles. By God, he will go to the war, Eneas, as soon as he is let, if his fine pride in himself is to be eroded.
    The images subside and the moon hastens over sleeping Sligo into the shapely hills of Ben Bulben and Knocknarea. Perhaps he ought to say, his mother is a woman of mystery. Well, it is not satisfactory, but still. Shame flees away. He feels for her. It is curious. Perhaps Tuppenny Jane has been his liberator of sons. He has a sudden sensation of freedom, a surge of it, like a bump in his heart, a lump in his throat. The love for his mother and his distance from her is a sort of freedom. It is liberty. Anything is possible with such liberty, he knows. Love, and distance. He loves her, he loves her. Perhaps he is to be a grown man soon, after all — old in the bed, at fourteen.
     
    The next year Jonno Lynch launches himself into the informal suit of a messenger boy, full of whistles and wads of orders stuck in his important pockets. He must escape and he doesn’t care much whose heart he has to break to do it. He is employed by the auctioneer, O’Dowd, and some of the boys left in the school maintain that many of Jonno Lynch’s errands are peculiar and little linked to land deals and such. Indeed Eneas sees him shooting up back streets on his silver bicycle and the worst that is said about him is that he is the Mercury to all the dark men in the town, the big men, the boyos, the lads on the make and the lads all murky and serious with ideals and plots. It is all a mishmash of men and Jonno is the living spoon stirring it all about. So it is said, and Eneas would like to ask Jonno, but Jonno has become like his own bicycle, his Dawes premier machine, fleet and solemn and silent on the tar of Sligo. And Eneas’s heart is heavy and two prize-fighters of doubt and hurt are bashing away in there. He can conquer the horror of his mother’s mystery, but never the loss of Jonno, he thinks.
    So the following year after that it behoves Eneas to look hard about him for some spot to plant his sense of affronted liberty, or some avenue to preserve it. Jack only grows in his scholarly achievements, now Young Tom has shown a happy aptitude for the instruments beloved of his father, the bulbous cello, the reedy piccolo, and Teasy is a miasma of pious notions. Jonno is but the nickel shadow. No help to Eneas.
    He goes in to his Mam and Pappy’s room one night, a little tornado, a Texas twister, of youth and confusion. It is a place he has not gone often in the last years, though once he was the prince of their pillow, the saint of their windowsill, looking out, the two faces pressed to his each side, with space for nothing between them. He goes in and stands there and spots the surprise in his Mam’s face, as she lifts her head from peering into her big scrapbook, where she sticks all manner of stray items and illuminations, without rhyme or reason, he would venture to say. And his father, with his hands behind his head as nimble as a bather, though the hair is white as dandelion milk, lowers his hands and pulls the embroidered coverlet over his bony breast, maybe without thinking. That same white breast where once Eneas lay loose as a jellyfish, hours without end.
    ‘I’m thinking,’ he says, T’m thinking, Mam, of going out there to the war they have in