Free The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry Page B

might be the knife now. Luck in silence or at any rate a sort of murk and darkness. Only his Pappy is content to blunder about in words.
    ‘It’s a bad sort of time to have your head up, you know, in any class of a political manner,’ says his father, the two of them standing as of old by the back window, looking out over the eternal ruins of the Lungey House. How different it is now, Old Tom older, and Eneas a ruined twenty-year-old.
    ‘The worst of it is,’ says his Pappy, laying a hand in familiar fashion on the broad back of his son, a back indeed all strength and youth, hard as a saddle. ‘The worst of it is, I blame myself.’
    ‘Why so, Pappy?’ says Eneas, surprised.
    ‘Didn’t I steer you into the polis, with my talk of the under-surgeon’s son? Christ, and the same boy killed last month in Donegal, a stone tied to his leg and drowned in an estuary. Arra, child, I done you a bad turn that time, that I spoke of the peelers.’
    ‘Ah, Pappy, I don’t think so. A policeman’s there to take the villain out of the village. Trouble is, these times, a good citizen is a rare one. Or I don’t know, maybe that’s nonsense. But, Pappy, I feel it as a terrible thing to be hiding in my own town, from my own people, and what remedy will there be for it?’
    His father stands fast by him in the dwindling light. Not a sound is there. Certainly no wild boys go sneaking to box the minister’s fox.
    ‘Maybe I should be just going away. Going away quietly with myself somewhere.’
    His father says nothing at all for a long bit.
    ‘Trouble is,’ says his Pappy, ‘a man goes away like that and maybe he never comes back to his people.’
    ‘Better than to be killed here, Pappy.’
    ‘Trouble is, a man could go away, and the buggers would go after him.’
    ‘You don’t think they would, Pappy?’
    ‘I was reading, there was a fella got in Brisbane for something like this, now he was a fella that did something bad, or so it was believed, and he probably did at that, not like yourself’ — and he touches the back of his child’s head gently, hardly noticing himself do it, and stroking the bristles of the short back and sides — ‘and he was followed out to Australia, and that’s a long way.’
    ‘You can’t go further, I believe, Pappy.’
    ‘If you abide near us, sure, maybe that will content them. If you tuck yourself in near us. You’re only a young fella. Maybe they’ll content themselves with frightening us all. I don’t know. Maybe, sure, jaysus, the British Army in all its glory will deal with them. The Tans are a queer wild lot. Maybe they’ll settle their hash.’
    ‘Jesus, it’s not a good business, when you have to wish a thing like that.’
    ‘The matter of sons is above politics. Maybe you’ll see that one day, if you have your own. I hope so. I do.’
    He can feel the odd thrumming of his father beside him, his heartbeat it must be, the same feeling as holding a wild bird in your hand, the ache and the muscle of it to be away free again. He has put his father under a strain certainly, and the old man is quiet and easy about it, but Eneas can sense that strain, that thrumming, that beating of the heart. Jesus, he’s sorry for the old man. He’s sorry for all the old fathers of foolish sons. Having to dip their heads in matters too foreign, too deep, too curious — too murderous. Truth is he doesn’t know what to do, any more than his Pappy knows.
    ‘A black-list,’ says his father, musingly, half a-dream. ‘A funny way to describe something. On the black-list. Funny, that.
    ‘Aye.’
    ‘You know, Eneas,’ says his father. ‘Well, you see me always going about, up to the asylum, to measure the poor fellas there, or over in better days with the orchestra to, well, to play for the people in Bundoran and the like, and you probably think, there he goes, Old Tom, my Pappy, there he goes, and maybe you don’t think much else about it.’
    ‘Well, I do, Pappy.’
    ‘Aye, well,