The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty Read Online Free PDF Page B

France.’
    ‘What war?’ says his Pappy, ever the man up on current news. It is the first time Eneas has thought, for a second, a second, that his Pappy is a bit of a fool, a bit of a colossal fool.
    ‘The one they’re at over in France, this last while.’
    ‘Jesus, that’s for English boys, Eneas,’ says his Pappy, kindly.
    ‘No,’ says Eneas. ‘There’s rakes of Sligomen gone out.’
    ‘Now, but not boys,’ says his mother. ‘Not boys.’
    ‘I tell you,’ says Eneas, ‘they’ll have boys of sixteen if you present yourself. In some manner or fashion-. The navy might take me. Look at all the boys in sea stories. But I’d like dearly to go.’
    ‘What about your great friend Jonno, that’s made good now in the land trade?’
    ‘Never mind that,’ says Eneas, hard instead of tearful, he’s bone-weary now of crying in the nights because of Jonno and his bicycle. ‘I’d rather go fighting.’
    ‘Why?’ says his Pappy. ‘Why go so far? I never knew you to be footloose, Eneas. Sligo’s a good place. A dandy.’
    ‘It wouldn’t be for ever, Pappy. Wars don’t go on for ever.’
    ‘I don’t think I’d like you fighting in a foreigner’s war,’ says his Mam. ‘Nor any war, where my own first-born boy might be murdered.’
    ‘What’s foreign? If there’s Irishmen in it?’
    ‘Still, boy,’ says his mother. ‘I couldn’t see the use of it. No, but the lack of use. The waste.’
    ‘It mightn’t suit you once you’re there, Eneas, and the army’s fierce hard to get out of,’ says Old Tom.
    ‘It’s like prison,’ says his Mam, ‘so it is.’
    ‘When school’s done with, well, I’d like to,’ says Eneas. ‘Well,’ says his father, as if a-dream, as if singing the words secretly within, ‘think it over well.’
    ‘And I will, Pappy,’ he says, the stars jostling for room in the windowpanes. The two of them in the bed like one of them tombs in the Protestant church, where he and Jonno once crept, to fright their mortal souls, and steal what they could of missals, full of the deviPs words — the Knight and his Lady.

 
    4
    As the boat comes up the river at Galveston his soul is sixteen summers old. And yet he knows this Galveston. Oh, like many a port he has noticed it possesses unexpectedly the qualities and signs of the port of home, though it is not. A queer romance enshrouds it. He will be at home among docks and shipping. The nearest to the war he could get was the British Merchant Navy and now here he is in Texas! Texas is hotter than the Tropical Plant House in Belfast, where he signed himself up for this French war. In Texas!
    It was better, and more discreet with the politics going about those days, to cross from wily Connaught into the indifferent and more English-minded counties, for to take the King’s shilling in Belfast. Or for to become an honest Jack Tar anyhow. And in the upshot the makeshift counter in the Plant House appealed to him, as if, though the decision was surely made, it was made lightly, even humorously. Because it was a queer thing for the recruiting captain of the British Merchant Navy, aping all the custom and ceremony of the navy proper, because of the times of shortage that were in it, to be set in his dapper white uniform against the gigantic fronds and flourishes of some lost South American world, adrift in a stormy, red-bricked Belfast. But with the local trouble a-flare in Dublin, with your man Pearse and the rest all shot and the public everywhere it was said in ferment about it, it was best, his Mam decreed, for a sixteen-year-old boy to make his compact with the British Merchant Navy in the privacy and ease of the Protestant counties, which indeed were more neighbour to Sligo by the atlas than Dublin herself. And though both had a thimble of politics between them, Eneas’s Pappy deemed it wise also.
    They are fetching machine parts in Galveston and he understands in his heart that he may still serve the King and save France from this