Read Online The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry - Free Book Online
Authors: Sebastian Barry
Tags: prose_contemporary
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small voice that nevertheless had a strange taint of violence in it.
'Blackguardly. I support fully the new country. We all do, except those mad misguided boys.'
'You should heed your bishops so. And not give succour to the damned.'
'You let me have my own thoughts on that,' said Fr Gaunt, with a sort of schoolmasterish arrogance. 'What are you going to do with the body? Don't you want to take it with you?'
'What do you want to do with it?' said the soldier, now with a sudden weariness, the fall in energy that comes after great effort. They had charged into an unknown place with God knew what danger, and now it seemed the thought of lugging John's brother Willie was a feather too far. Or a hammer.
'I'll have the doctor fetched and pronounce him dead and find out who owns him, and then perhaps we can bury him somewhere in the yard, if you have no objection.'
'You will be burying a devil if you do. Better throw him in a hole outside the walls, like a criminal, or a bastard child.'
Fr Gaunt said nothing to that. The soldier went out. He never looked at me once. When his boots stopped sounding on the gravel path outside, the queerest coldest silence dreeped into the temple. My father stood silent, and the priest, and I sat silently on the cold damp floor, and John's brother Willie was most silent of all.
'I am extremely angry,' said Fr Gaunt then, in his best Sunday mass voice, 'to have been dragged into this. Extremely angry, Mr Clear.'
My father looked nonplussed. What else was he to do? My father's unmoored face scared me just as much as Willie's stiffening corpse.
'I'm sorry,' said my father. 'I'm sorry if I acted wrongly in getting Roseanne to fetch you.'
'You did wrong to do that, you did wrong, yes. I am deeply aggrieved. You may remember it was I who put you in this post. It was I, and great powers of persuasion were needed, let me tell you. I feel very poorly thanked, very poorly.'
With that, the priest went out into the dark and the rain, leaving my father and myself with the dead boy, till the doctor could arrive.
'I suppose I put his life in danger. I suppose he was frightened. But I did not intend it. By heavens, I thought priests liked to be in on everything. Indeed and I did.'
My poor father sounded frightened too, but now because of a new and different cause.
How delicately, slowly, fate undid him, I suppose.
There are things that move at a human pace before our eyes, but other things move in arcs so great they are as good as invisible. The baby sees a star winking in the dark night window, and puts out his hand to hold it. So my father struggled to grasp things that were in truth far beyond his reach, and indeed when they showed their lights were already old and done.
I think it was that my father embarrassed history.
He was neither willing nor unwilling to bury that boy Willie, and called a priest to help him in his decision. It was as if as a Presbyterian he had meddled in sacred murders, or murders so beyond gentleness and love that to be even in propinquity to them was ruinous, murderous even.
Perhaps in later years I heard versions of that night that didn't fit my own memory of it, but all the same, there was always one grand constant, that I had stopped in my path to fetch Fr Gaunt and told my tale to the Free State soldiers, either at my father's bidding or by my own instincts. The fact that I never saw the soldiers, never spoke to them, never even thought of doing so – for would that not have put my father possibly in further danger? – is in the informal history of Sligo neither here nor there. For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.
History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man's dominion of the earth.
My own story, anyone's own story, is always told
'Blackguardly. I support fully the new country. We all do, except those mad misguided boys.'
'You should heed your bishops so. And not give succour to the damned.'
'You let me have my own thoughts on that,' said Fr Gaunt, with a sort of schoolmasterish arrogance. 'What are you going to do with the body? Don't you want to take it with you?'
'What do you want to do with it?' said the soldier, now with a sudden weariness, the fall in energy that comes after great effort. They had charged into an unknown place with God knew what danger, and now it seemed the thought of lugging John's brother Willie was a feather too far. Or a hammer.
'I'll have the doctor fetched and pronounce him dead and find out who owns him, and then perhaps we can bury him somewhere in the yard, if you have no objection.'
'You will be burying a devil if you do. Better throw him in a hole outside the walls, like a criminal, or a bastard child.'
Fr Gaunt said nothing to that. The soldier went out. He never looked at me once. When his boots stopped sounding on the gravel path outside, the queerest coldest silence dreeped into the temple. My father stood silent, and the priest, and I sat silently on the cold damp floor, and John's brother Willie was most silent of all.
'I am extremely angry,' said Fr Gaunt then, in his best Sunday mass voice, 'to have been dragged into this. Extremely angry, Mr Clear.'
My father looked nonplussed. What else was he to do? My father's unmoored face scared me just as much as Willie's stiffening corpse.
'I'm sorry,' said my father. 'I'm sorry if I acted wrongly in getting Roseanne to fetch you.'
'You did wrong to do that, you did wrong, yes. I am deeply aggrieved. You may remember it was I who put you in this post. It was I, and great powers of persuasion were needed, let me tell you. I feel very poorly thanked, very poorly.'
With that, the priest went out into the dark and the rain, leaving my father and myself with the dead boy, till the doctor could arrive.
'I suppose I put his life in danger. I suppose he was frightened. But I did not intend it. By heavens, I thought priests liked to be in on everything. Indeed and I did.'
My poor father sounded frightened too, but now because of a new and different cause.
How delicately, slowly, fate undid him, I suppose.
There are things that move at a human pace before our eyes, but other things move in arcs so great they are as good as invisible. The baby sees a star winking in the dark night window, and puts out his hand to hold it. So my father struggled to grasp things that were in truth far beyond his reach, and indeed when they showed their lights were already old and done.
I think it was that my father embarrassed history.
He was neither willing nor unwilling to bury that boy Willie, and called a priest to help him in his decision. It was as if as a Presbyterian he had meddled in sacred murders, or murders so beyond gentleness and love that to be even in propinquity to them was ruinous, murderous even.
Perhaps in later years I heard versions of that night that didn't fit my own memory of it, but all the same, there was always one grand constant, that I had stopped in my path to fetch Fr Gaunt and told my tale to the Free State soldiers, either at my father's bidding or by my own instincts. The fact that I never saw the soldiers, never spoke to them, never even thought of doing so – for would that not have put my father possibly in further danger? – is in the informal history of Sligo neither here nor there. For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.
History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man's dominion of the earth.
My own story, anyone's own story, is always told
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