certain distant quality about them, an aloofness, which had nothing to do with either ghostliness or the fact that they were seen only from a distance. They were like people at the far end of a room bent in unheard laughter whose private joke invests them with an impenetrable self-possession. It seemed impossible that they feared god or man, and perhaps it was their lack of fear which frightened us, for indeed we were afraid of them. My father's eyes began to display an edgy rear-regardant look, like that of a man pursued by playful furies, and often Mama would fall abruptly silent in the middle of a sentence and stare through the window toward the murmurous wood.
I think it was Michael and I who saw them first, one gloomy evening down near Cotter's place where we had built a fire. Our uneasy relationship had progressed with painful slowness through silences that were like endurance tests, and brief awkward disclosures which left us embarrassed and weary. I tried to interest him in the fantastical possibilities of the house, but he only smiled his enigmatic smile and moved away from me. Even then, in spite of our shared birthday, he was older than I. He had never learned to live indoors. I often came upon him standing stock still on one foot in the middle of a room, speechless and agonised, staring with that white fury at the shattered bits of an ashtray or a vase at his feet. He was obsessed by fire and water, by hawks and other wild things, and although Aunt Martha had excluded him from our lessons only to humiliate him, for she made a great show of despising her son, he seemed perfectly happy to forgo the joys of learning, and went to work on the farm instead. O but he was no bumpkin, no. He worked at farming, and hunted with Nockter, drank porter in secret, ate with his hands, but behind his rough ways there was something hard and cold and clever. He was playing a part, you see, just like the rest of us, only sometimes he betrayed the icy amusement, the steely anger, the pain, those things which made him a Godkin. I cannot say that I ever liked him, but there was between us a bond which would not be ignored however we tried, and we did try. Hence the silences, the disclosures, the sudden charges we made at each other across the distance that separated us, only to be jerked back by our congenital coldness from the final contact, that squelchy slap a human creature experiences when it surrenders to another.
He had attended school for a while and the religious instruction he had suffered there at the hands of the nuns formed the basis of many of our first conversations. In a house where religion was regarded, like foxhunting, as nothing more than a ritual proof of the indestructibility of our class, my own initiation into the celestial mysteries had been sketchy, to say the least, and I was not prepared for the rigour and savagery of that cult whose implacable paradoxes the good nuns had expounded to Michael. That day down in the crippled wood, while we sat like frogs by the fire with our ears buried in our collars, he told me about hell. It appears that if we follow the dictates of the nature god has given us, our reward will be to fry eternally in a lovingly prepared oven, whereas if we persist in denying the undeniable truth about ourselves we will be allowed to float for all time through an empty blue immensity, the adoration of the lord our only task. A most extraordinary concept, which we found screamingly funny, though we acknowledged the humour of it only by thoughtful sighs and gloomy silences, which is how children laugh at the vagaries of adults.
‘Just think of it,’ he mused, gazing into the singing flames. ‘Roasting. That would be awful. I remember a priest came once to give a mission, for three days, you know, praying and so on. He had a cross in his belt and he kept fiddling with it, I remember that, pulling at it. He said that if we did things to ourselves we'd be put into a special part of hell. I
I think it was Michael and I who saw them first, one gloomy evening down near Cotter's place where we had built a fire. Our uneasy relationship had progressed with painful slowness through silences that were like endurance tests, and brief awkward disclosures which left us embarrassed and weary. I tried to interest him in the fantastical possibilities of the house, but he only smiled his enigmatic smile and moved away from me. Even then, in spite of our shared birthday, he was older than I. He had never learned to live indoors. I often came upon him standing stock still on one foot in the middle of a room, speechless and agonised, staring with that white fury at the shattered bits of an ashtray or a vase at his feet. He was obsessed by fire and water, by hawks and other wild things, and although Aunt Martha had excluded him from our lessons only to humiliate him, for she made a great show of despising her son, he seemed perfectly happy to forgo the joys of learning, and went to work on the farm instead. O but he was no bumpkin, no. He worked at farming, and hunted with Nockter, drank porter in secret, ate with his hands, but behind his rough ways there was something hard and cold and clever. He was playing a part, you see, just like the rest of us, only sometimes he betrayed the icy amusement, the steely anger, the pain, those things which made him a Godkin. I cannot say that I ever liked him, but there was between us a bond which would not be ignored however we tried, and we did try. Hence the silences, the disclosures, the sudden charges we made at each other across the distance that separated us, only to be jerked back by our congenital coldness from the final contact, that squelchy slap a human creature experiences when it surrenders to another.
He had attended school for a while and the religious instruction he had suffered there at the hands of the nuns formed the basis of many of our first conversations. In a house where religion was regarded, like foxhunting, as nothing more than a ritual proof of the indestructibility of our class, my own initiation into the celestial mysteries had been sketchy, to say the least, and I was not prepared for the rigour and savagery of that cult whose implacable paradoxes the good nuns had expounded to Michael. That day down in the crippled wood, while we sat like frogs by the fire with our ears buried in our collars, he told me about hell. It appears that if we follow the dictates of the nature god has given us, our reward will be to fry eternally in a lovingly prepared oven, whereas if we persist in denying the undeniable truth about ourselves we will be allowed to float for all time through an empty blue immensity, the adoration of the lord our only task. A most extraordinary concept, which we found screamingly funny, though we acknowledged the humour of it only by thoughtful sighs and gloomy silences, which is how children laugh at the vagaries of adults.
‘Just think of it,’ he mused, gazing into the singing flames. ‘Roasting. That would be awful. I remember a priest came once to give a mission, for three days, you know, praying and so on. He had a cross in his belt and he kept fiddling with it, I remember that, pulling at it. He said that if we did things to ourselves we'd be put into a special part of hell. I
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