At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [55]
“Brother Polycarp said that to you, did he?”
“Did you look it out in the dick yet? Fecker we know, but what does the jaw-cracker mean?”
The boys proceeded to their places. “We’ll ask him,” said Courtney. “If he’s the right color, we’ll ask him. A right cod it will be.”
The brother came in blessing himself, and all rose for prayers. “Virgil,” he announced, sitting down. “Book Two. Line? Line, Mr. Mack?”
“Forty.”
“Begin . . . Ahern.”
Jupiter Pluvius lashing at the windows. It splattered into puddles on the sill. So thick it hardly seemed to fall at all, a suspension of glistening threads. The lowering clouds, the sudden chill, the tonant rumor from the hills.
He thought of all the people who would be caught by the pelt. Shopkeepers fussing with their wares, the rails of suits, battered blooms, his father with the Spanish onions, hurrying the crate into the dry. Crowded porches and awnings with the sudden, democratic talk. Flags out for Empire Day, sodden. In the street the dust returns to muck and a horse slithers in the way. The gongs clang and a motor slides on the tram-lines. There he is, clinging to the tailboard of the cart, looking about for a cardboard or an old sack. What cheer, he says. Antiphrasis.
Ireland. O begob, says his father, sure Ireland is England’s umbrella.
Then he thought of the rain in the country, far up on the mountains, not raining really, an elemental wet, below and above and all about, and the sound of the wet in the streams that gushed and the sucky squelch of the turf. A bedraggled sheep who watches, a lone bird in the near sky.
In a dreamy way he saw the sea and the way the sea was brighter than the sky when it rained. How the drops leapt on the surface like a myriad hungry fish. And a boy swimming at the Forty Foot, or maybe two boys swimming, the only figures in all the scene while all round the rain fell and the church bells tolled for Mass.
Angelus soon, then home.
“The horse do not ye credit, O Trojans.”
“Credit? What does credit mean? Can you not speak the King’s English, boy?”
That time in Dalkey when the pig was squealing. They had it hoisted from a beam and the buckets were waiting below to collect the blood. When the bells came they laid off the slaughter to say the Angelus. All through the bells the squealing and the thrashing legs, on and on, while the men prayed. How it riled his father and he said to the men no God would sanction such cruelty to his creatures. The men laughed, wiping their blades on the bloody cloths, and his father told him afterwards that we are a race immured to cruelty. He had meant inured.
“Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.” The brother’s eyes roved the room. “Construe . . . Courtney.”
That old saw—is it from there it comes? Really they had it wrong. Beware of gifts bearing Greeks, it should be.
Supercilious. But why would he think I was being coarse? Did he truly believe I meant my own . . . ? No one would say such a thing to a brother. It made no sense. Courtney is thrilled by it. He thinks it means something else vulgar. Ignorant fool.
After the Angelus, home for Saturday dinner. Coddle in the big stew pan. Aunt Sawney’s day for visitors in the parlor. Mrs. Tansy, Mrs. Rourke. Their fill of gossip over the cream crackers and Wincarnis. Later it was his duty to bring the tea, lump sugar and the sugar-tongs out. Curious implements you found in that room. A grape-scissors though never known grapes in the house. A quirl for scraping butter. Longish spoon with holes in it that was called a mote-skimmer: used for straining the strangers off your tea. All laid out on the pier-table, its cloth so starched it might stand on its own. Tub this afternoon behind the scullery door, then Confession, then shop, then devotion. Mass in the morning. Entire parish in their Whitsun best, the priests’ vestments abruptly red. Veni, sancte Spiritus.
Pleasant to swim in the rain, they say. It would be too. The sea would lower your temperature already so the rain wouldn’t feel so cold. It would be hard getting