Once We Sang Like Other Men E-Book

John MacKenna

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

'I'm not an impulsive person. Twice in my life I've done impulsive things. The first time was when I packed a bag, walked out on my wife and kids, left my job and hit the road to follow the Captain. Goodbye was all she wrote.' These wide-ranging stories follow the disparate disciples of the Captain – a mysterious, powerful and magnetic figure whose violent and chaotic death at the hands of the army radically alters their lives in myriad ways. From rural North American farms and dive bars to the suburbs of Ireland and the sands of Palestine, we witness their struggles to find a place, a peace, in a world that is fractured and incomplete. Once We Sang Like Other Men is a surprising, mysterious, lyrical and affecting collection with a stunning range of voice from a recognised master of the form.

Leseprobe

John MacKenna is the author of eighteen books – novels, short story collections, memoir, biography and poetry and is the author of a number of stage and radio plays. He is a winner of the Hennessy, Irish Times and Cecil Day Lewis awards. He teaches creative writing at NUI Maynooth and is currently writer in residence with County Carlow libraries.

Also by John MacKenna

Novels

Clare – A Novel

The Last Fine Summer

A Haunted Heart

The Space Between Us

Joseph

Short Stories

The Fallen & Other Stories

A Year of Our Lives

The River Field

Poetry

The Occasional Optimist

Where Sadness Begins

By the Light of Four Moons

Non-Fiction & Memoir

Castledermot & Kilkea – A Social History

The Lost Village

Shackleton – An Irishman in Antarctica

Things You Should Know

South

Once We Sang Like Other Men

Once We Sang Like Other Men

John MacKenna

ONCE WE SANG LIKE OTHER MEN

First published in 2017 by

New Island Books

16 Priory Office Park

Stillorgan

Co. Dublin

Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © John Mac Kenna, 2017

The Author asserts his moral rights in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-581-3

Epub ISBN: 978-1-84840-582-0

Mobi ISBN: 978-1-84840-583-7

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing Data.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), 70 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Ireland.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Katie and Mairenn Jacques and in memory of my dear friend Tom Hunt.

He now went up into the hills and summoned those he wanted.

So they came to him and he appointed twelve; they were to be his companions.

– Mark 3:13

Contents

Once We Sang Like Other Men

Resurrection

Words

Go Home to Your Friends

Sacred Heart

Say to Your Brother

The Angel Said

Buying and Selling

Absent Children

The Word

My Beloved Son

The Water of Life

Once We Sang Like Other Men

Acknowledgements

Once We Sang Like Other Men

This is where the sea stands still. This is where the moon comes to sleep on certain nights. This is where I sit, on the chair beside the boathouse. And this is where Laz sits, in his wheelchair, to the other side of the battered blue door that’s never closed because there’s nothing in the boathouse worth stealing, and I include the boat and the engine in that inventory of worthless insignificances.

One of the old men here chided me for painting the boathouse doors this shade of cobalt blue.

‘It’ll wash away,’ he said. ‘The sun and wind, summer and winter, gales and hail blowing in on it will see to that.’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘Nothing more certain. You should’ve gone for something tougher. Why did you pick on that?’

‘It’s a colour I happen to like.’

‘Liking something doesn’t mean it works. Not always the same thing, liking and working. There isn’t always a light at the end of the funnel.’

The old man shrugged and nodded and I nodded in return.

‘But,’ he drawled. ‘I’m not here to upset the apple tart.’

After he had gone about his business, wandering slowly up the steep street, stopping now and again to analyse or criticise something else, Laz said quietly: ‘Bastard.’

I built a small concrete patio for Laz’s chair. It was rough and ready but the unevenness proved a boon. If I forgot to put the brake on the wheelchair, it didn’t slide forward, didn’t take off, ricketing down the slip and into the shallow water, as it used to do in the early days. Laz trying to wave his arms, swearing and grunting those animal grunts that I sometimes understood, pissing on himself when the cold water bit his feet and ankles and its sharp, stinging teeth came to rest around his knees. It always seemed to be winter when the chair went down the slip. But once I’d put in the concrete base, it didn’t happen again. Instead, he’d sit in the wheelchair with the wheels locked in the rutted concrete, belt and braces stuff. Even when the spastic rages got him rocking and rolling, the worst that could happen was that he’d turn over the wheelchair and fall onto the sand on the dunes to the side of his platform.

In the early days, I used to say, ‘You’re like King Midas on your throne.’

I wasn’t sure he knew who Midas was and it would have taken too long to explain, but he liked the idea of his wheelchair throne on its concrete podium.

In the bad days, when he gets under my skin, when there’s nothing coming back and I’m wondering why I bothered bringing him here at all and why I ever felt the need to take some responsibility for the miserable life of a man who doesn’t even know my name, I remind him that he’s King Midas.

‘Everything you touch turns to cold,’ I laugh and he looks at me and I’m not sure if he knows I’m joking or whether he thinks he should be laughing but can’t.

In the early years, there were some days when I really didn’t want him near me. I’d wheel him down the pier and threaten to tip him in, wheelchair and all. I’d tell him I was going to stand on the pier and watch him drown in the twelve feet of clear water on the island side of the jetty. And I’d know, by the way his mouth would curl and his fists would tighten, that, even if he didn’t understand everything, he at least got the gist of what I was threatening. Sometimes, on the really bad days, it was like I’d gone back and my mind hadn’t yet found a place to rest or hide.

Now I wonder just how much he does or doesn’t understand.

When we first came here, he could still talk. Not always lucidly, not so I could always have an articulate conversation with him, but he could communicate and he could understand most things. Even when he lost that little clarity of speech, when it was replaced by the grunting and coughing and gasping, he still knew what was going on. Once or twice, when I thought I was talking to the wind, he’d surprise me. I remember one morning in particular. I was wearing a shirt I treasured because, as I’d told him, she’d worn it on a night we drove across the desert in the pick-up truck, and he recognised it and gave me the thumbs up and his mouth opened in that horrific, broken-toothed grin that was intended to be warm but was as grotesque as an empty tomb.

Anyway, we’ve lived here together for twenty-four years, King Midas on his concrete and steel throne and Peter Pauper taking tourists out in the elegant and potentially lethal Treetop. I’m not sure who came up with my nickname but it stuck and I’ve developed a fondness for it.

In wintertime, this place is dead but that’s the price you pay for being out of the rat race. That’s why we chose this town. When I say we, I mean me. Laz had no say in the decision.

‘Whither thou goest, there I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Isn’t that right, Laz?’ I say and then I load him into the pick-up and off we go.

And he nods and smiles his terrifying smile and sometimes he gives me the thumbs up, other times he just sits there, eyes full of stones. If the weather is hot, I wedge the wheelchair in the back of the pick-up and sit him into it, fasten it and him with ropes, and off we go, out into the desert or up the coast, just rambling on wheels, me listening to the radio, him sitting in the sun, his cap pulled low over his eyes, sunglasses in place, looking out across the wilderness. Lord of all he surveys, Midas observing his sandy minions. The thing is, in summertime, once the temperature gets into the nineties, he stinks. It’s something that never cleared up. I can’t have him in the cab with me, even with the windows down: the smell is just too rancid, like something rotting fast, syrupy and sickly, the smell of cheap sweets going off in a shop window. Most of the time, when the weather isn’t too hot, it’s bearable but on hot days there’s something about the mixture of diesel and slowly fading humanity that makes me retch. I’ve tried it once or twice and ended up on the side of the road, puking my guts up.

We came here in the spring when the place was deserted, temperatures in the twenties. I could haul my armchair out and sit in the middle of Main Street all day and not get run over. Some days I wouldn’t be disturbed at all before lunchtime.

The first time I remember hearing of Laz, he was supposed to be dead. It was just before the Captain hit the headlines. We were sixty or seventy miles from the town where Laz and his sisters lived. The sisters had been to a few of the Captain’s rallies; I think he knew them from way back. Only afterwards did I realise that they wanted to be on the road with him, they wanted to be at the heart of it all but of course they weren’t. They were like so many other hangers-on, looking for approval by association. At least no one could say that of me.

Anyway, we got the call and we set off in the pick-up, the Captain and Katy and me. I was driving. I was always driving. All I remember of the journey is the dirt roads and the Captain urging me to get there as fast as I could.

‘I’m pushing this heap of shit to the limit,’ I said. ‘I can’t go any faster. If we hit a hump, it’ll rip off the exhaust.’

‘Just do your best,’ he said.

Typical. He’d never say, Come on, put your bloody boot down. It was, Do your best or Do whatever you can do, and the words were always spoken very calmly.

Sometimes I wanted to hit him when he did that. I’d feel I was being manipulated. But mostly I just made the extra effort because I wanted to do what I felt he needed doing.

So there we were, the three of us on this twisting road, in a pick-up with a dodgy fourth and heat like hell. And I knew the Captain wanted to get there as quickly as possible. I could feel the electricity coming off him and, occasionally, when I’d catch his reflection in the rear-view mirror, I’d catch those blue eyes staring straight ahead, as if they were willing us to be there more quickly than was possible.

The flies are what I remember about the little back bedroom in the house, that and the smell of burning joss sticks, put there to drown the other smells of shit and piss and decomposition. But all the two sisters seemed interested in was the Captain. It was like he’d come there for a party or to dinner or something. It wasn’t like their brother had died. I don’t think they’d have been worried had the Captain not even gone in to see Laz’s body. They made coffee for us and they wanted us to eat after the long journey; there was plenty of food. This was, after all, a wake. They talked to the Captain, all the time; they talked to me, some of the time. They ignored Katy, as though she had no right to be there. Or perhaps they were jealous of her. I don’t know.

I was never quite clear about what exactly happened in that room; there was no proper explanation from the Captain. Katy and myself were out in the laneway that ran behind the row of little houses that made up the street where Laz and his sisters lived. It was hot and humid in the house and we’d been sitting in the pick-up cab for the guts of two hours. We just wanted air and shelter from the sun and to be well away from this pair of intense and peculiar women.

We heard the noise long before we knew its cause. At first I thought someone else had died. Over the years, I’ve seen that happen at funerals and weddings and wakes and at the Captain’s meetings. Someone becomes overwrought, someone says something that dredges stuff up, someone with a leaky ticker keels over. It happens. And I thought it had happened again. That was my first thought. But there was something about the way people were running in and out through the back gate, calling neighbours from down the lane, something about the tone of their voices – hysteria tempered with awe.

Another thing I’d learned over the years was how to read the mood of a crowd. It’s something I needed to know, once our meetings began to get bigger and were infiltrated by shit-stirrers. Half a dozen troublemakers can do a lot of damage if they swing a crowd. Alternatively, they sometimes need rescuing if they misread the moment. Obviously we didn’t want, and, equally, we couldn’t afford, to have someone lynched at one of our meetings.

Anyway, there was something about those sounds, something about the way people wanted to be close to the wake house and, at the same time, wanted others to experience whatever it was they were experiencing. So I pushed my way through the garden gate. It was like a circus in the courtyard: people throwing themselves on the ground, tearing their hair, praising God, screaming incoherently. I never had much time for that kind of thing and neither, I know, did the Captain.

But, as I say, I have no idea what happened in that little room in that cramped house. I don’t know if Laz was really dead. It’s unlikely. I suspect he was in a coma and, by chance or the Captain’s willpower, he came back from that state to a state of relative vigour, which isn’t hard when everyone has you slated as dead. When it comes to vitality, anything is everything when you’re dead.

By the time I got inside, Laz was sitting in a chair in the kitchen, looking like death warmed up but obviously breathing. People were giving him a wide berth but they were crowding around the Captain, wanting to touch him and to be touched by him, more of that fame by association stuff.

It was after midnight before I managed to edge the pick-up down the lane behind the house and get Katy and the Captain out of there. People were still crowding through the front door, not really knowing what they wanted but wanting it anyway. The last thing I saw, through the open kitchen window, was Laz still sitting in his chair, still looking like dried puke.

We were driving the desolate, arid road, twenty miles out of that town, a full moon saturating the yellow desert to our right and left, Katy and the Captain and me. And he had this serene look that always shrouded him after something significant had happened. Katy was sitting between us; the radio was playing very low, Crystal Gayle was singing ‘Crying in the Rain’ or something like that, a song that was oozing heartbreak. No one was really listening to the music and no one was saying anything, just this low, weeping melody and the steady murmur of the engine and even that seemed to be running lower than usual. It was like the moonlight had damped everything down, making us afraid to speak. And then somewhere, in the middle of nowhere, the Captain asked me to pull over the pick-up.

He got out and walked fifty yards, through the rubbish-strewn sand at the roadside, out to where the ground was softer and cleaner. I followed. Behind me I could hear the whispering music. I knew Katy was sitting on the step of the pick-up, smoking. I could smell the sweet tobacco in the heavy night air.

I caught up with the Captain and we walked together in silence. And then he stopped and stood looking back the way we’d come.

I knew he was thinking about what had happened.

‘It’ll change things, won’t it?’ I asked.

He nodded.

‘This was the big one?’

He nodded again.

‘There’s no turning back now,’ he said. ‘No going back.’

We both knew it.

That was the last totally quiet time we had, standing out there in the desert under a big blue moon, two men looking at the sky, the night air warm and calm, the smell of cigarette smoke, two men listening to the silence, and behind them a woman sitting on the step of a pick-up, watching.

It was eighteen months later, weeks after the Captain’s death, that I found myself back driving that same road, this time on my own. I decided, on an impulse, to swing by the town where Laz and his sisters lived. It wasn’t hard to find their house, not in the five-street, one-river assortment that was their dark little community.

Laz wasn’t doing well. I found him sitting in a wheelchair outside his front door. His skin was still the same sick colour but he looked a lot grubbier and more than eighteen months older. He had a begging bowl beside him and round his neck someone had hung a cardboard sign that read ‘Where there’s life keep life’.

I parked up the street and walked back past him. He didn’t raise his head, didn’t acknowledge me. He didn’t seem, even, to be awake. Martha, his older sister, was inside the house. The other sister was nowhere to be seen. All she could talk about was how Laz hadn’t really appreciated the second chance, how he’d been drinking too much and had fallen and broken his hip, how he didn’t seem to have any real gratitude for the chance he’d been given and how anyone else would have taken the opportunity to make something of themselves.

I’m not an impulsive person. Twice in my life I’ve done impulsive things. The first time was when I packed a bag, walked out on my wife and kids, left my job and hit the road to follow the Captain. Goodbye was all she wrote.

The second time was that day. I manhandled Laz into the pick-up cab, hoisted his wheelchair into the back, propped the cardboard sign on the windowsill of his sisters’ house and drove away through the pouring rain.

He still had a reasonable facility with words back then, on good days.

‘Thank you,’ he said. I could barely understand him. At first I thought he’d had a stroke but then I realised his teeth had all been broken.

‘That’s okay. What happened to your teeth?’ I asked, expecting him to tell me he’d fallen and smashed them.

‘Sisters,’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Broke them.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘More money.’

‘You’re telling me your sisters broke your teeth so you could get more money?’

He nodded. There were tears in his eyes. I never saw him cry again.

We stayed in a cheap hotel that night. I rang Martha and told her Laz was with me.

‘How are we supposed to live?’ she asked.

I said nothing.

‘Laz was my life,’ she said.

I looked at him, sitting in the bath in our hotel room, covered in sores.

‘Get a fucking job,’ I said and hung up.

And, three weeks later, having wandered in and out of towns and villages along the coast, we ended up here.

I don’t resent Laz. I don’t ever take him down the pier now and threaten to throw him in, not even as a joke, which I know you’ll say is big of me.

Mostly he’s just here, but occasionally I think of him as the price I’m paying for the things I’ve done. As if I chose to bring him here as a living reminder of the mistakes I’ve made and the failure I’ve been. A punishment for walking out on my family, for not coming up to the mark with the Captain, for the way I let things fall apart.

Not that our life is a misery – far from it. We do all right. I take tourists fishing. Laz sits here and watches. Like I say, I don’t know what he hears or how much he takes in but sometimes, even still, he’ll surprise me.

There are nights when I talk to him about the old days. About his life and about mine and about where we might go someday, about having money, about comfort. I like to imagine that he still can daydream. I can’t, not daydream, but I think he can. I’m never certain about how much he understands of the things I tell him but I have a sense that whatever he understands, he believes. Maybe he’s just gullible and that’s why he believed he was dead or, worse still, that’s why he believed he was alive again.

One evening, a couple of months back, we were sitting outside the boat shed and the moon’s sister was sleeping in the sea and he spoke, very quietly and slowly and clearly.

‘Dead was how I wanted to be.’

I didn’t imagine it. He said it. And then he was gone again, back to his grunting and sighing and silence.

I love being out in the boat, my boat. Just here, just beyond the breakwater. Not with tourists but on my own, without even a line over the side, listening to the evening birds, waiting for the moon to nudge above the hills, keeping a not too distant eye on Laz on his throne but still out here alone.

Sometimes I dream, not often but sometimes. And always the dream is the same one – of home. Funny how that word will always ring with emotion, isn’t it?

Home. I say it, I remember it, I feel it.

If I say home, what’s the first thing that comes into your mind?

For me it’s the shore.

That expanse of sand, not like the stony slopes here. How it stretches away into the distance, north and south, and how it reaches out, westward, for the blue sky and the lost horizon and the sinking sun. And at the point where the sand meets the town road is my boathouse. Was my boathouse? I have no idea if it’s still there. I haven’t seen it in twenty-seven years.

That’s where two of the kids were conceived, the first two. Warm summer nights when the sun had barely gone over one edge of the world before it was climbing out of the other. Too much wine, hardly enough time, too much optimism.

I can see the big double doors open and feel the shade inside that high, wide building and the almost-living smell of timber and the smiling feel of sunlight and the bracing scents of tar and canvas and oil. I still remember the bustle of the kids playing and the gentle wash of the waves at high tide and the chiming laughter. Not the drunken laughter you get on the streets here on a Saturday night. The laughter that rang there was children’s laughter; nothing edgy about it, no threat behind its peals.

That’s what I find myself listening for when adults laugh – the darkness, the cynicism, the uncertainty or the cruelty. Laz never laughs anymore. It’s like he left it behind him along the way. I suppose I did, too. Sometimes when I’ve been drinking, I laugh but it’s as if I’m not really laughing at all. I hear through it and can’t ignore what lies beneath it. I can’t ignore the other things I’m remembering. Children are unselfconscious; they’re wrapped in their own world and, at the same time, they’re open to everything. Reticence removes so many possibilities.

Across the road from the boathouse was my family home. It had a big porch that ran its length, grinning out across the sea. And on those summer nights, I’d glance up from whatever I was doing and I’d see the lighted windows, shining, the inside lights strengthening as the darkness outside deepened. They were like joyful eyes saying, Welcome, welcome.

Almost always, there was someone sitting there – my wife, one of the kids, a friend, a neighbour, sometimes my brother James, playing the mouth organ, the sad sound of that music flowing like a dark stream into the night sea. But I never resented the sound; it seemed as much and as right a part of the place as the children’s laughter or my wife’s warm smile.

That’s how I remember some of those evenings. Me fiddling with a boat engine, the kids on the strand, James and my wife sitting on the porch, the music trickling across the road, and one of the other fishermen, or a man from the village, sitting on the bench at the boathouse door, smoking and talking quietly to me. Someone smiling; darkness creeping up like a big grey cat, soft and easy; the house lights growing stronger and the moon climbing out of the sea.

Home.

After the Captain’s shooting and everything that followed, we were paralysed. Not so much by his death – things had reached a stage where that was almost inevitable. The publicity that followed the Laz affair was the step that took us to a place from which there was no going back and the Captain seemed to embrace that inevitability. And, once he’d been murdered, there were journalists and photographers and news reporters everywhere, coming up like crabs from the night sand. As if they smelled something, as if the Captain’s death wasn’t enough and there had to be something else that needed unravelling, some secret that had to be told. In the beginning I thought they actually knew something and that some piece of information had leaked out. Later, I realised that these people work on the basis that there’s always something untold and, if they can’t find it, they’ll concoct it.

I still live in dread of one of them turning up. There’ll always be a reason. In the beginning it was the story itself, then it was the first anniversary; now it’s coming up on the twenty-fifth and I’ll be looking over my shoulder again, just in case. In case someone has spoken, in case they track me down…in case.

The strange thing is, very often when you get to the heart of something momentous, the truth is banal. It’s as if the blood looks less red, more black. There’s no great energy from a dead body. It just loses its colour and its power and its possibility. It’s as simple and ordinary as that. Mundane. The things that might be of interest to others are the things I’d never talk about.

So, that’s how it was with us after the Captain’s slaughter. Shock, then panic, then hope, then self-preservation.

The killing was the easy part, all done and dusted in short order, as clean as these things can be. He wasn’t the only one to die; the country was in a state of chaos. That’s how they got away with it: people believed what they were told. Hard to believe it now but that’s how it was.

The panic was the worst part. We had no sense of history being made or a chapter ending or any of that stuff. Just his body laid out, his beard knotted with vomit and blood and spit. His eyes looking mad but it might have been the strip lighting in the hospital morgue. That’s the bizarre thing. After they’d ambushed him, they actually took him from the roadside to the hospital to have his death validated, red tape and certificates in the midst of mayhem.

And I remember us all standing around his body in the morgue, not sure what we should be doing, waiting for who knows what – for him to do something? Probably. Expecting the truth to be something other than it is, expecting a miracle. Watching for his chest to start rising and falling again but of course it didn’t. And, after a very short time, we realised it never would, so we put him in a box and took him away.

Five of us carried that box down the long hospital corridor. It was awkward, not enough room, scraping the blue-grey paint from the walls, our fingers caught and bloodied between the edges and the door frames. The box should have been on a gurney but we didn’t have the patience to find one. We were too nervous, too terrified. I kept waiting for the clatter of soldiers’ boots on the lino. I didn’t doubt they’d shoot us there and then and mop our blood from the floor. That’s how I pictured it happening, five bodies piled in a hospital corridor, fallen across a box that held a sixth.

But they didn’t. I suppose they reckoned they didn’t have to. I suppose they were right. That they could sense the fight had gone out of our bellies. We were lost, we didn’t even really know what we were doing or where we were going or what we should do next. We were used to following. I’m not sure any of us was cut out to be a leader.

Outside the hospital, in the parking lot, some hangers-on, those who were deluded enough or sad enough to think something might happen, were waiting in the blinding sunlight. And, when they saw us, a sound rose from them, a haze of weeping and screaming and moaning. I can’t stand that racket at the best of times but this was all the more frightening because it was calling attention to us. The sound was like saws running in the hot afternoon, mixed with the ambulance sirens coming and going in the hospital yard. It all made me jumpy. I just wanted to get out of there.

James and one of the others were in the front of this Ford Transit we had at the time. We slid the box into the back and I went up to the cab.

‘Get it fucking moving,’ I said. ‘Get out of here before they start shooting.’

There were snipers on the roofs of each of the three hospital wings. We were sitting ducks. All it needed was one jumpy hero up there and we’d all have been done for.

I swung into the cab, Katy got in beside me. I had the engine running, my foot on the accelerator, itching to go.

‘Why the fuck don’t they drive?’

Katy shrugged.