Chapter 8 #7
The laudanum keeps him submerged, his vision filled with the drift and flash of finned fish.
Or he finds himself on a high crag, the wind pressing at his back, and resting on a table in front of him is a bowl of clear yellow soup, at the bottom of which lie pebbles and pen nibs.
Or he is watching a battering ram swinging back on its ropes, and back again.
Or he is standing in a stream and ahead of him are the figures of two people and he thinks they are Liam and Enda, for one carries a Bible and the other a fiddle, but he finds he cannot tell which is which because they both seem to have the same face and wear the same clothes, and he feels in his marrow that one of them is in great danger but he cannot tell which.
Or he is on the strand with his younger son, Eugene, and the boy is holding the heavy turf spade and beside him, on a slipe, is the dog, and Eugene is speaking about the sea, about tides and currents, and his voice is beautiful—low and melodious—and Tomás says to him joyfully, I didn’t know you could talk, and Eugene turns to look at him, the turf spade over his shoulder, and says, There is so much you don’t know, so much you don’t see.
At that very moment, on the ward, the nurse administering to Tomás observes that the man flinches or twitches in his sleep, as if receiving a blow, but she assumes that he is merely registering the pain of his injury, so she goes on with the job of changing his dressing.
Unaware of the disaster that has befallen their father, or the narcotic dreams in which they feature, his four children continue with their daily lives: as far as they know, Tomás is off with the redcoats, working on their maps.
As the nurse secures Tomás’s bandage with a deft pin, Rose is tying a shawl over her head, preparing to wade through the lough to collect the eggs; Enda scurries along a road that cuts past a church, her fiddle gripped in her hand; Eugene is taking the cow up to pasture.
Liam is at the top of a ladder, in the library of the House of First Formation.
He holds a cloth in his hand and he stands up near the curved ceiling: he has been instructed to wipe the dust from the top shelf of books.
Each day, he must divide his time between the six principles of the Order, ensuring that no single one is neglected.
Under his breath, in an attempt to quell his nausea at being so vertiginously high, Liam recites them, in what he hopes is the correct sequence: cura personalis, discernment, magis, service, ad majorem Dei gloriam, and—what?
Liam pauses, his fingers resting on the gold-tipped pages of a large leather-bound volume that looks as if it hasn’t been opened for millennia.
What is the sixth principle? Liam looks at the rows of books, at the window, the top of which is currently level with his knee, and how he hates heights, hates to be up here at the top of this ladder, how it brings back to him that time when he fought with Enda and fell from the tree: the obscure rage that filled him, the sickening drop as he plummeted down, the useless flail of his limbs, the crunch of impact as he hit the ground.
He has avoided climbing anything ever since but he has to perform this task of dusting the topmost books, he cannot refuse because service is one of the portions of life as a postulant.
He doesn’t, cannot, look down, at the library below him, the floorboards and the rugs and the desks and the discs of lamplight that each encompass a book or manuscript and the head of the particular scholastic which is bowed over it.
One of the heads below must sense his gaze because it swivels, looks up, and the face is blurred and indistinct and, not for the first time, as he hurriedly resumes his dusting, Liam wonders if his eyesight is all it should be, if he doesn’t perhaps require spectacles.
He can see what is up close, what is within range of touch and grasp, but beyond that, the world is increasingly fogged for him, inaccessible, and didn’t his mother always say to him that all those books would ruin his eyesight and he should—
It comes to him then, like a beam of sunlight: finding God in all things.
That is the sixth principle. Liam sighs and strains to reach the tops of the volumes on the shelf behind.
He always forgets that one. It is, he thinks, secretly his least-favourite of all.
Finding God in all things: the idea discomfits him.
The concept that the Holy Spirit may reside in a jug, say, or a table, or a river, or a rock—and Liam sways, gripping the ladder, awash with sudden vertigo because he is startled by an awareness that this principle lies perilously close to his father’s way of—
Liam squeezes his eyes shut and latches his fingers onto the highest rung.
He finds himself to be not a grown man in a hallowed library but a child at a longhouse doorway, being held back by a priest in a black robe, and beyond the crack in a door is a barely human beast lashed to a table, and the person who has trapped him there, to torture and harass him is—
Liam presses his forehead into the leather spines of the books.
He will not go down this route. Such thoughts must be banished.
Father Joseph was his saviour, Liam must remember, the one who set him on the path to spiritual glory, and he must descend this ladder, as if nothing is wrong, as if he is the serene postulant he is meant to be, secure in his vocation, executing his tasks without hurdle or doubt.
But Liam’s hands are slippery and refuse to uncurl from the rungs; his feet have no wish to move.
He has to press his lips together so as not to let out small whimpers of distress.
Liam sends up a prayer for forgiveness, for assistance: O God, come to my aid, O Lord, make haste to help me.
Curiously, as Liam is steeling himself to descend the ladder, at the same time, a hundred miles or so to the west, Liam is also waiting in a queue on a harbour wall.
He is dressed in trousers that are held fast at the waist with a length of twine.
He clutches his papers and his ticket in his hand.
The queue around him is restive, distraught: people shove and fidget; some weep; some shout angrily, accusing others of cutting in or stealing their goods.
All around, people are in fierce embraces, bidding farewell, probably for ever, to relatives or friends they cannot bring themselves to let go of.
Liam, however, is dry-eyed, pale of face, entirely alone.
No one has come to see him off. He sets his back against the country of his birth, and turns instead towards the great febrile sea between him and his destination.
It is shifting, deep blue-green, speckled with foam, punctured here and there by the hungry beaks of diving birds.
He will, as his father once predicted, sail the wide ocean.
He will leave. He will not give way to sentiment, he will not cry.
He will go to Québec and make a different life for himself.
This Liam shuffles forward, slowly, towards the gangway, inch by inch, his boots—he has stuffed them with straw for he has heard that it can be brutally cold out at sea—taking their last steps on his homeland.
The harbour, he notices, is built from ancient rock, embedded with the tiny curving bodies of fossilised sea creatures—he quickly looks away for he has to keep his mind on the queue, the ticket in his hand, the knapsack of goods on his back, anything at all to fend off thoughts of his father and the siblings he is leaving behind.
He tips back his head to look instead at the ship, its triple masts, the figurehead on the prow, its complex web of rigging, the powerful ropes looped and knotted to the quay.
Why are there two Liams? How can Liam be in the library in the House of First Formation, learning about the six principles of the Jesuit Order, and also on a harbourside, about to board a ship, to become a migrant, heading for a new land?
One Liam is making his hesitant way down the ladder, rung by rung, intending to sit at a desk and learn by heart a portion of the Jesuit rules or perhaps a psalm or ecclesiastical hymn.
The other? His hair, newly shorn, is mostly tucked into his cap; it is, like that of the first Liam, still the colour of new coins, but perhaps slightly finer.
His hands are narrower, the fingers longer.
There is a tell-tale callus on the right-hand thumb.
His face is eager but wary; there is a suppressed nervousness, an anxiety, about this one, as if he might burst into laughter or tears at any moment.
Impossible, really, to tell the difference—for anyone who doesn’t know Liam or his family.
Anyone who does know them, however, might guess straight away, which may explain why the second Liam, every now and again, darts nervous looks over his shoulder.
Will he, he is thinking, be found out? Can he get away with this? Can he pull it off?
As Liam in the House of First Formation opens the Book of Psalms at the allotted page, the second Liam reaches the front of the queue.
He shows his ticket and his papers and his passage documents to the harbour official—and how his heart punches and kicks against his ribcage and the bindings wound around it, for if it is to go wrong, it will be now—but the official just glances at them and waves him past. And this Liam stoops to pick up something that has been resting on his feet and takes the gangway with hasty, disbelieving strides, shouldering as he does so a fiddle strapped into its case.
At the very same moment, Rose flings open the door of the cottage and yells her sister’s name into the hills.
“Enda? Enda!”
She turns to Eugene.
“Where can she have got to?”