At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [214]
He stooped in under the rag that hung for a curtain. His old comrade made no sound or movement. Well he did, but that was only his breathing, very short-coming and laborious, more rattle than breath. He lay with his head sideways. His eyes were open and the one eye that showed seemed huge in his face, sunken, the way it saw from deep inside. Uncanny really, what you’d call unearthly. A hand lay out of the bedding, massive-looking by comparison with the spindle of his arm. The relics of a man, no more.
Mr. Mack bent down and said some words. Now the eye stirred. He didn’t know was he recognized, but something lit in that face. The hand lifted from the blanket and Mr. Mack took it in his own. Surprising heavy it weighed. The rosary beads shook on his wrist and the head nid-nodded. Some important information he had to say, it seemed the entire skin and bones must tremble to tell it. Mr. Mack put his ear to the lips. It took a while till he understood. “That’s right,” he said, “the Colonel gave you a cane.”
The head lay back on the bedding. Mr. Mack kept hold the hand. “A malacca cane,” he told him, “with a gold-embossed top, sure you remember that.” The eyes still shifted, but it seemed to Mr. Mack the violence of the trembling had eased a touch. He patted his old pal’s hand. He believed he knew what that sinking mind wished to hear, and what harm, wasn’t it the good truth anyhow? He hitched his knees and sat down on the bed. He told him the tale of his cane. How Fusilier Doyle had paraded the smartest man in the battalion, by far and away the smartest. How he’d won the stick, five times he won it, five times in a row, mind. Bombay, Karachi, Quetta, not a maidan in all India but Fusilier Doyle had stood the smartest. Begod, he had that stick won so many damned times, men cursed their luck. Sure they’d never get nowhere with Red Doyle to the fore.
His own head nodded too now, recalling, and he looked up suddenly, saying, “Do you remember, Mick, the time—” But that old head knew nothing more than what it wished to hear, and Mr. Mack sighed, returned to his telling. How the Colonel had thought to get Doyle a stick of his own. Lieutenant-Colonel Holmes that was, an officerly gentleman. “Not any old stick neither,” he told him, “but a cane. Had to send to Malacca special. Swankiest yoke you’d think of. Wouldn’t see the better of it from here to Donegal. The better? You wouldn’t see the like. A gold-topped malacca cane.”
All rich it was in color and what’s this they call it, mottled. Had the Bengal tiger leaping out from the knob. Indeed Mr. Mack could picture it still, going wallop on a lazar’s bum or clickety-click under the awnings of the street. Clickety-clack, slinging the bat, as arm-in-arm they strolled. “It was a gold-topped malacca cane,” he repeated, tapping the hand with each stress, “and a fine grand smart handsome fellow you was with it.” The eyes no longer stirred. Only for a sweat that glistened on his temple, he was gone already. Mr. Mack replaced the hand on the bedding, rethreaded the beads through its fingers. He saw his own hand was trembling now. He brought a finger under his nose and sniffed.
“And your buttons too would shame the sun. They would too. They would too.”
In the room the girls were nibbling the crubeens he’d brought. They eyed him with something less than trust, the way he might be thinking of taking them back again. He had a quiet word with Mrs. Doyle inquiring, discreetly as he might, of the arrangements, and she said they had the insure paid, thank God, himself was always up to his time with that, and it was good of Mr. Mack to ask, thank you for that, he was very good altogether and the crubeens too.
He put on his hat. “You’ll let me know?”
She would.
He came out in the street. The Angelus bell was ringing. He lifted his hat and crossed himself, still with a