The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty Read Free Page A

glass-strewn wall, he can see them disappear down into the green bowel of the trees in the heavy musk of autumn, he can see the tips of branches moving as they pluck the fruit, as if dogs were moving through corn. Oh, they are the rabbits, the dogs, the very wildlife of the orchard, they are heroes and desperadoes and robbers and kings.
    One evening, watching from his dark window, he spies the tormented rector returning to his house unknown to the stealthy robbers already within the trees. He spies the heavy door closing and a little while later the same door opening and the rector creeping from it like a very kid himself and going like a beetle along the base of his mottled wall. There is a little gate and for this gate no doubt the clergyman possesses a mighty key.
    Eneas on an impulse without word or thought flies from his perch and out on to John Street and up the Lungey and hard left like a demon into the old cathedral lane, where the rector’s house is built into the boundary wall. He is a blue flame passing up the lane thick with the wet scent of mosses and the dirty shadows of the sycamores in the pitch cathedral copses. It is his joy to run so, to stop even at the hem of the rector and to cry out his famous warning to the robber Jonno and his crew within. And the robbers come up on the wall, they appear there, like winged boys, like cherubs, and they are all of them laughing like the mad, and flapping their jackets like birds and Eneas even in the dusk can see a long piercing cut appear on the leg of the leader Jonno as a shard of glass uncharacteristically catches him as he lets himself fall to the deep lane. And forever he is falling there, Jonno, boy of lightning, falling. And the rector, with his poor Protestant blind eyes Eneas has heard it mentioned, gropes into the vicinity for to capture at least some member of the gang, and takes a great hoult of the hair on Eneas’s head and grips there like a monster in a nightmare. And Jonno burgeons up and lets go a precise and perfect kick into the legs of the rector and an oath, polite but enormous, gushes out of him, and Eneas feels the loose growing-in bit of his gansey pulled, and the great velocity of Jonno’s strength hauls him back down the lane, spirits him back down, and the rest of the mob shouting and screaming like veritable Africans. And this is his proper and perhaps fateful meeting with the captain of his boyhood, Jonno Lynch.
     
    Maybe it is normal and everyday the manner of their going about, but truth to tell Jonno Lynch is an upright man. He is a bucko. He doesn’t walk along the streets but marches, to his own hidden fife and drum. When dangers blow against him, as when the glass gashes his leg, there is a wonderful enjoyment in him of these disasters. He is a soldier through and through.
    And he enlists Eneas simply and heartily into the small spinning thing that is the gang’s warfare and mischief. They spiral about, the gang of them, after school, boxing the fox of any orchard in their ken. There’s a mighty plan to construct a flying machine out of sheets filched from the Convent laundry that only comes unstuck on the superior battle capabilities of Sister Dolorosa, the nun from Mullingar. Always afterwards Jonno Lynch and Eneas gaze up at the wooded hills beyond the town and know in their souls that those would have harboured somewhere the site of their amazing flying achievement, the wonder and the news item of all the continents, but for the arms of Sister Dolorosa, six foot in span if they are a yard. It is the golden age of friendship, when to leave the gates of the school is to run in a fever to Mrs Foley’s two foul rooms in Kitchen Lane, where Jonno is fostered, and to embrace with always requited fervour the challenges of the evening, whether it is to remove the brasses moulded in Wales from the mayor’s carriage and attach them to the back of the dung collector’s cart, or only to fire at each other with catapults, using the