At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [59]
“The crawl?”
“The crawl it is.” He was about to slip off, but then he paused. He nodded out to sea.
“There’s the Muglins out beyond. Couple of weeks back, Easter time, I got to the raft here and I thought to meself, why not? Now there’s a stretch would leave you pooped. Destroyed you’d be with the best of them. The tide, see, in the sound gets up a fierce current. Near missed me landing too, had me scrambling like sixty to gain any go of it. It’s all of it rock there, no grass, no nothing. But I found me a dip that was out of the wind where the stone was smooth and mossy. So there I lay in the skin I was born in. Whoever it was had fixed a trough, don’t ask me why, that had sweet water when I tasted it. And there’s this other stone that rocked with the waves, only slow like, and let out a moan when the waves went in under. I reckoned no one would know that place. But it was handsome to stretch with the moss through me fingers and I followed the clouds that tumbled by. I felt my ease that day. The only company was an old gander—I thought he must be lost—that watched an hour or more, stood on a leg and his nose in his feathers. And do you know what I reckon?”
Jim’s lips framed a whispering what.
“I reckon if we worked at it hard, every morning, say, we worked on your stroke, before I went to work, before you went to college, out to the raft here and back while the raft is out, every day we’d do it, rain or shine, till you find your feet, or your fins I should say, I reckon come Easter next we’d swim out there together, and I’ll show you the place and you’d know, I don’t know, what I meant like.”
Jim saw the Muglins, little more than a rock to hold the light that told the rock’s existence. He saw the green where the current flowed and the crested horse that broke from it. He saw the storms that would come and the dark mornings and the bitter wind out of the north and the east. “A year?”
“Could likely do it sooner. That’s if you don’t turn brother on me.”
The very idea was cracked. “Why would I do that?”
Doyler laughed and tossed some speck in the sea.
“But it wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t Easter,” said Jim.
“Indeed and it wouldn’t. Are we straight, so?”
“We’re straight as a rush.”
Doyler spat on his hand and Jim did likewise and their palms rubbed in the smear.
“The crawl it is,” said Doyler and he slipped from the raft. Before he joined him and the sea would wash it away, Jim sniffed his wetting palm. A private smell. Like leather, bodily, raw.
Through the window of the parochial waiting-room, Mr. Mack the parochial garden viewed.
Cabbages were coming along nicely, he was pleased to note. Potatoes too. See the way they have a carnation there at the end of each drill? That’d be for the chapel flowers. Rhubarb too. We have rhubarb at home sure. Give it away, the most of it, out of luck. All the same, not much in the way of a view. I thought now there’d be a better view from the parochial house. What am I saying? A priest wouldn’t have leisure for gongoozling out of windows.
He turned from the idle scene. Is it a canonical hour, I wonder? How long is this they kept me waiting?
Handsome room, a taste Spartan. Deal of deal about. Floorboards, mantelshelf. For a long while I thought there was a deal tree, but in fact ’tis pine it comes from. Norway Spruce to give the correct designation. He tapped the floor with his toe, desisted. Need to know these things. Make a donkey of yourself else. Black hair-cloth chairs. Uncomfortable-looking yokes. Would be desperate now to wear a shirt of same. Begod, if the canon don’t come up with a recommendation, ’tis oakum I’ll be itching with. Three months’ hard and me character destroyed.
Pius X looked down at him from the fireplace. Saintly man, though they were way behind the times. Now there’s a good opening for a smart young chap. Quick as the puff goes out the Vatican, out with the pictures of the new Pope.
Did I send in my Easter dues? I did of course.
I hope now the canon isn’t out on a sick-call. I hope he wouldn’t