At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [31]
A final salute to his father, a wink at Jim, and he returned to Nancy. Arm in arm they walked to the gangplank while the gulls above were calling. And it struck Jim that maybe his brother had been on his side all along. Had protected him from his father’s ways by all the time bringing damnation on himself. A great remorse rose in him and he wished desperately to speak once more with his brother, to share one more night the narrow bed at home. But the band had faded into “Come Back to Erin” and the ship pulled out from the quay, and all the hands waving were as wheat that shifted in a wind.
“Has the dustman passed?”
Jim realized he must have yawned.
“Time for Last Post so.” While Jim readied the settle-bed, his father lit his candle from the Sacred Heart lamp. “I don’t seem to find the time these days. What with knitting the socks and polishing the medals and totting up the club-books for the tally fortnights. Tonight was First Friday. We might have found time to go.”
“I had my devotion with Brother Polycarp tonight.”
“But this is something we might do together. Father and son.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“The Sacred Heart has promised great things.”
Jim nodded.
“Or we could find something to do with the Virgin Mary. There’s a better class of people goes after the Blessed Virgin. I did always think that.”
“My devotion with Brother Polycarp is to Mary.”
His father blew at the edge of his mustache. “Perhaps you’re right. Keep in with the brothers.”
The gas went down, the stairs door closed, and Jim lay down to sleep.
* * *
The glow of the Sacred Heart gained slowly before him. Its flame swayed the shadows on the wall. Once in the night he had put his hand in that flame, but his courage had failed him. He had to pray then that God would not call him for a martyr. For if he failed again, the flames would be for ever and unconsuming.
Gordie used always blow out the lamp, bringing another day’s bad luck that only Jim’s frantic litanies could abate:
Jesus, meek and humble of heart,
Make my heart like unto Thine.
O sweetest heart of Jesus, we implore,
That we may love Thee ever more and more.
The flame flickered on the gold crosses of the Sunday beads that hung from a shelf where the missals were kept, whose gold tooling flickered in flame. It played on the statue of the Blessed Virgin, dancing on her starry nimbus, then solemnly stained the golden corpse of the kitchen cross. The campanulate shade of the gas-lamp it found and the brass handles of the bread-box that was the table’s centerpiece. On the pans that hung like haloes over the sink and on the winged girandole by the stairs it shone. And just level with his eyes as he lay, it kindled the knob of the box-stairs door.
If you stared long enough at this door, you’d see it opening. Gordie had told him that. He told him Aunt Sawney came down in the night to steal his breath.
“What does she want with my breath?”
“Have you never watched in the day? She daren’t breathe at all. Only by night. And it has to be from a boy’s babby mouth, else she’ll die.”
“Why’ll she die?”
“’Cause she’s a witch in league with Old Horny and she feeds on a young ’un’s breath. Be careful, else she’ll catch you.”
“She’s not a witch.”
“That’s all right so. Nothing to fear.”
He told him about the Protestant church by the railway bridge up Adelaide Road that played hymns on its bells on Sundays. “Folk have got it wrong, you know. You don’t have to walk three times round to make the devil appear.”
“No?”
“Not at all. Just bless yourself as you pass and Old Horny’ll come.”
That was all right because it was easy not to bless yourself, you could do that just forgetting. The cunning was too soon revealed. The cross was your sole protection, yet by signing there under the shadowy trees you invoked the enemy. The panic of those journeys past the Protestant church was with him still, a blink away.
He stretched his legs to the end of the sheet. How wide the bed, how still without his brother’s dominant breath. The face of Our Lord reproached