The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty Read Free

and lets his eyes run out the window to rest maybe on the moonlit catastrophe of the Lungey House.
    Eneas is almost gone over into sleep, gone over like a rose goes over into decrepitude, no one sees just when. He has almost left his father’s side for the monstrous side of sleep itself.
    ‘Some people have trouble that they never themselves did cause. Some people have a queer start in the world because those that have them in the first place don’t know what they’re at. Mams and Pappys are not the same, parish by parish. Some fall at the first fence, and little mites are left to fend for themselves. It’s a story old as mountains, your Mam’s own story. But, she’s a queen. She is. Who is it that talks under the stones, only slugs and weevils. I should know, the gardener! Never mind, child, what you hear, the whispers of a little town, the little whispers of Sligo. Some words have no tune for themselves,’ says Tom with the expertise of the musician behind his words, in the undeniable gloom. And mostly his own words are a delicious, lulling tune to his sinking son, benignant and eternal.
     
    Three calamities befall him then, calamities that to his Mam and Pappy are contrariwise wonders and like to days of carnival and funfair. His three siblings pop into view, one after the other, with barely a decent interval between, Jack, Young Tom, and Teasy, the mite of a girl. And they are fine creatures in their way and indeed Jack sports a head of hair as red as a dog’s and in the beginning of these new times Eneas is much struck by the little length of boy in his lacy cloths and the crushed face like an Injun.
    But it’s not long before Eneas is driven from his little kingdom, an exiled being, shorn of his mighty privileges. Five, three and two are their ages when Eneas comes into the double-numbered realm of ten, and a realm of scant attention and privacy it is. No more the Sahara of Strandhill with his Mam alone in the summer, no more Buck Rogers and the Dark Queen going about Sligo, marauding secretly from premises to premises. And what can he say about his siblings, except that they are devious, loved and needy for things at all times of day. There is no sacrosanct hour, the sun goes down on every day leaving each as cluttered and provisional as the last. Maybe his father too takes fright because there is less of the Pappy now, he is gone out to Finisklin on his own to dig out the remnant flowers of summer, and put in the contracted sacks of manure, alone, pristine, confused. And Eneas is not taken as before in the old glory days because his Pappy is not a man to be accused of favouritism. He likes to shun them all equally, though pleasantly.
    Difficult for Eneas, these peopled years, the house buckling and banging under the weight of lives, John Street racketing to the fierce hands and feet, formerly so quiet, composed, intent. His serious nature is jolted out of its tracks, his small engine of interest and joy must jar along the wretched stones. He looks at his mother, he regards her, passing in her dark clothes, not a dancer any more, not a conspirator, but a kind of slave truly to four or five mouths, herself ever more silent, tetchy, windblown. The family blows through the sacred house like a bad wind and at every door there is an interloper, interloping about the place. So he imagines. If she is not scraping shit off Teasy’s nappies, she is trying to keep cuts on Jack together with her bare hand. Jack is a fierce one for the accidents. You couldn’t let him out with a ball of wool till he’d cut himself with it.
    His rescuers are those pleasing and mighty kids that are the living death for the poor Presbyterian rector in his handsome house. A handsome house may boast a handsome orchard, but an orchard draws wild kids to it as bees to lavender, as hopes to the prisoner, and Eneas is an expert on the ways of those robbers long before he ever talks to one of them, because he can see them go nimbly along the