Read Online The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry - Free Book Online

boots and the black suit. For a brace of months he is drilled and perfected in the barracks square. Out at six they are in their greatcoats, the peaks on the caps as black as blackbirds’ feathers, and rain or shine the boots making the crippled cobbles ring, and they wheel and stamp and take the orders as the one animal. A hundred boys in similar coats, and the fresh reds of the dawn cluttering up the lower gaps between the buildings. The name for a raw boy is a shoofly, and each man aims to be a constable, but the name among the historical-minded people of the town is the peelers, the polis. At end of training each man gets his gun and bullets. All about the barracks the countryside is boiling with sedition and treachery and hatred according to the sergeant, William Doyle of Leitrim, of Leitrim in these latter years, but an Athlone boy in times gone by, so he will tell you. As such a useful man to herd his men about the dangerous districts.
    And indeed ferocious events are afoot in the sacred web of fields and rainy towns. It isn’t just murders and such or killings, you couldn’t call them that. Wherever an RIC man uses a gun and wounds or kills in a skirmish, some man in his uniform is taken and God help him in the dark hedges and isolated farms. Such a man might be gutted with a big knife and his entrails fed to the homely pig in front of him, and the last leaks of life drained out of him then slowly and silently with terrible swipes.
    Next thing the RIC is augmented, as the official word goes, with an Auxiliary Force and now the merry dance gets wilder back and forth. For these are men as strange and driven as the Irish heroes themselves. They’re quaffing long bottles of beer and whisky at every juncture and resting-spot, and visiting themselves upon guilty and innocent alike with the fierce passion and separateness of lions. Perhaps this isn’t an easy matter for recruits like Eneas, jostled in the very police barracks by these haunted faces.
    They have come back most of them from the other war and what haunts them now is the blood and torn matter of those lost, bewildering days. Many of the Auxiliaries are decorated boys, boys that ran out into no-man’s-land and took positions that only bodiless gods could have, and rescued men from the teeth of slaughter and saw sights worse than the drearest nightmares. And they have come back altered for ever and in a way more marked by atrocity than honoured by medals. They are half nightmare themselves, in their uniforms patched together from army and RIC stores, some of them handsome and elegant men, with shining accents, some terrible dark boys from the worst back-alleys of England, but all with the blank light of death and drear unimportance of being alive in their eyes. As ancient as old stories. And every auxiliary has the strength of four ordinary men you would think, as if death and fearlessness were an elixir.
    And they are visited upon the countryside lethally and notoriously. Reprisals are daily sorrows, daily sad persons are found in ditches of a morning and no matter what allegiance was in their hearts at any daybreak. Because they are broken, bloody, vanished hearts now, auxiliary and guerrilla alike. Eneas’s principal duty is the finding and motoring of these remnants back to the coroner’s premises in Athlone town.
    The king of the Auxiliaries is the man called the Reprisal Man and Eneas knows him by no other name. It’s said generally that he comes from the dark north of England and killed seven Germans in a bomb hole somewhere in the muddy wastes of the Somme. He’s a person as big and real as one of the cowboys in the flicks — Athlone has its passionate cinema too. How he does it nobody can tell on his poor wages but the man is never but spick and span and the crease straight and ridged in the old trews from stores. A hero in other places no doubt, but a tongue of pure avenging fire in the backroads of the lands about the town. This is a fella