At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [88]
When Jim would practice at home his father sometimes reached for the cutlery drawer and he’d rattle along on the spoons beside. Aunt Sawney would soon be banging her stick. The Rebels’ Medley, she called it. For their repertoire now was wholly patriotic. “Memory of the Dead,” “Wearing of the Green,” “Rising of the Moon,” “Boys of Wexford,” and of course “A Nation” not Once but a thousand times Again.
It was this last that occasioned his father’s second misunderstanding with the Dublin Metropolitan Police.
He was still not very clever at seeing where he was swimming, but Jim knew by the slither of seaweed that he was coming into the Forty Foot cove. A last heave carried him to the steps. His arms were leaden coming out the water, he could scarce pull himself up. His mouth wouldn’t close and his teeth chattered convulsively.
“Mary and Joseph, you’re like an ape at his prayers. Round in the sun while I fetch the tats.”
Jim scooted off to the boys’ end, where the sun was shining, while Doyler collected their clothes from the shelters. When he came over, he was whistling “The Peeler and the Goat” in a low but taunting way. “Visitors,” he said. “Bevy of polis.”
Jim peeked round the battery wall, which already was warm from the sun. Burly men in shadowy blue disrobing. “Come for a dip is all.”
“I wish if they’d dip to the bottom.” He held out Jim’s towel. “After you with the Baden-Powell.”
Jim rubbed himself roughly, then passed the towel back. He delayed a while, flapping uselessly in the breeze, before he pulled his shirt on. Even so the cloth glued to his back. Doyler had no shyness at all. He took great pains over every inch of his body, leg up on a rock, while each crevice between his toes was investigated, wiped, and investigated again. Jim liked to watch him then, when the morning light hazed about him, fuzzing with gold the hairs of his outline. Behind loomed the battery walls and beyond stretched the craggy rocks. It seemed a glorious place in the morning, an extraordinary grace to be allowed there, where man and nature mixed and lost each other, one in the other like the land in the sea.
Doyler’s shirt was sewn and resewn that special military way Jim’s father called sank-work and which all old soldiers must do for their sons. When he had it on, he hunched on the ledge with his knees pulled up and said, “Have we breakfast or what?” And Jim fished out the bread and scrape from his jacket pocket.
There were new recruitment posters on the battery walls. Mother Erin, looking troubled and wan, wondered had they no womenfolk worth defending. Some wag was after adding Kitchener mustaches to her face. A dig at England or Ireland, you wouldn’t know. Mackled mimeographed bills had been overpasted. Get a gun and do your bit—Join the Irish Volunteers!
“Get a gun, me arse,” said Doyler. “Get a shagging prayerbook more like. Sure the Volunteers is in league with the priests and the priests is in league with the bosses and they’re all agin the working man. No better than horneys is the Volunteers. They were agin us in the Lock-out and we’ll never forget them that.”
Shin Feiners, Leaguers, Volunteers. They stood for Ireland, that much was clear, Ireland her own. Doyler was a socialist. Jim liked the way he pronounced the word, without the expected sh sound, but he still had only the muzziest idea what it stood for. Doyler himself was small help. His talk was names and slogans. Citizen Army. Liberty Hall. Nor King nor Kaiser.
A haze was rising and the sun strained to shine through. Over by Ringsend the towers smoked, needles in the sky that Jim’s father once had told him were there to make the clouds. “For without the clouds there’d be no rain, and without the rain there’d be no grass. And no milk in your tea without the green grass, so they has to be sure of the clouds.”
“I liked the man at the Wolfe Tone,” Jim said.
“Which man was that?