The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

Again my father’s curious happiness was most clearly evident in the retelling of this story. It was as if such an event were a reward to him for being alive, a little gift of narrative that pleased him so much it conferred on himself, in dreams and waking, a sense of privilege, as if such little scraps of stories and events composed for him a ragged gospel.

It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.

Perhaps his happiness was curiously unfounded. But cannot a man make himself as happy as he can in the strange long reaches of a life? I think it is legitimate. After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.

There is a town not far off, I am told. Roscommon town itself. I don’t know how far, except it takes half an hour in a fire engine. This I know because one night many years ago I was roused from my sleep by John Kane. He led me out into the hallway and hurried me down two or three flights of stairs. There was a fire in one of the wings and he was leading me to safety. Instead of bringing me to the ground floor, he had to cut across through a long dark ward, where the doctors and other staff were also gathered. There was smoke coming up from below, but this place was deemed to be safe. The gloom gradually brightened, or my eyes adjusted to it. There were maybe fifty beds there, a long thin room with curtains drawn everywhere. Thin ragged curtains. Old, old faces, as old as my own now. I was astonished. They had lain there not too far away from me and I did not know. Old faces that said nothing, lying in stupor, like fifty Russian icons. Who were they? Why, they were your own people. Silent, silent, sleeping towards death, crawling on bleeding knees towards our Lord. A tribe of onetime girls. I whispered a prayer to hurry their souls to heaven. For I think they crept up there very slow. I suppose they are all dead now or mostly. I never visited them again. The fire engine came in half an hour. I remember because one of the doctors remarked on it. These places unlike the world, with none of the things we praise the world for. Where sisters, mothers, grandmothers, spinsters, a...

Being fourteen I had one foot in childhood still, and one foot in womanhood. At the little nuns’ school I attended I was not indifferent to the boys that lurched past the school gates at the close of lessons, indeed I seem to remember thinking a sort of music rose from them, a sort of human noise that I did not understand. How I heard music arising from such rough forms I do not know at this distance. But such is the magician- ship of girls, that they can transform mere clay into large and classic ideas.

Fr Gaunt himself was young and might have been expected to feel a special kinship for the slain. But Fr Gaunt was so clipped and trim he had no antennae at all for grief. He was like a singer who knows the words and can sing, but cannot sing the song as conceived in the heart of the composer. Mostly he was dry. He spoke over young and old with the same dry music. But let me not speak against him. He went everywhere in Sligo in his ministry, he walked into bleak rooms in the town where impoverished bachelors feasted on tinned beans, and lousy cabins by the river that looked like ancient starving men themselves, with rotting thatch for hair, and little staring, dull, black windows for eyes. Into those too he went, famously, and never took flea or louse out with him. For he was cleaner than the daylight moon. And such a small, clean man when crossed was like a scything blade, the grass, the brambles and the stalks of human nature went down before him, as my father discovered.

It would be a very good thing if occasionally I thought I knew what I was doing.

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.

So began the strangest era of my childhood. I suppose also I was slowly less child than girl, less girl than woman. For the years of my father’s ratting, a solemn mood of my own descended on me. Things that had delighted and pleased me as a child delighted and pleased no longer. It was as if something had been taken from the pictures and sounds of the world, or as if the greatest possession of a child is easy joy. So that I felt I was in a condition of waiting, waiting for something unknown to replace the grace of being young. Of course I was young, very young, but, as I remember it, no one is ever quite so old as a fifteen-year-old girl.

Fr Gaunt was as they say warming to his theme. The more he spoke the easier the words came, all nice and milky and honey-touched. Like many a man in authority, he was sublimely happy as long as he was presenting his ideas, and as long as his ideas were meeting with agreement.

John Kane came out today with an extraordinary statement. He said the snowdrops were early this year. You would not expect such a man to notice snowdrops. He said that in the top garden where only the workers at the asylum are allowed to go, he saw a crocus in bloom. He said all this in a very nice way, standing in the middle of the room with the mop. In fact he came in to mop the floor, told me about these miracles, and then went off, forgetting actually to mop. Distracted I must surmise by his own sudden attack of poetry.

Her greatest wish I should think was that I would remain exactly as I was, and how I regret that that was not to be. It was only for her roses that she wished for change, the strange moment of floral enchantment when the branch of a rose mutates, and shows a ‘sport’, something new arising from the known rose. A leap in beauty. ‘I’m going out to the garden to see if there’s any news,’ she would say, at almost any time, because she had roses going the whole length of the year.

Tom had not asked me to marry him or anything and yet I knew all this talk was something to do with marrying. I suddenly myself didn’t want to marry him, or anyone, or be asked. I was in my early twenties and those times you were an old maid by twenty-five, you wouldn’t get a hunchback to marry you then. There were far more girls than men in Ireland those times. Women were wiser and went off to America and England double-quick, before their boots were sunk and stuck for good in the mire of Ireland. America was crying out for women, we were as good an export as gold to America. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds went, every blessed year. Lovely women, round women, small, ugly, strong, exhausted, youthful, ancient, every damn category. Freedom I suppose they were after, following their instincts. They’d rather be maids in America than old maids in bloody Ireland. I suddenly had a strong, a fervent, almost a violent wish to join them. It was the smell of that lamb was in my clothes, and only a sea-voyage across the Atlantic I thought would shift it. Now, but you see, I loved that Tom. God help me.

I think for someone to have seen me then would have been as if they were seeing a ghost – as if I were the ghost. A wild- eyed, foolish sixty-five-year-old man in his dead wife’s bedroom, gone daft from grief, looking as usual for forgiveness and redemption the way normal people look for the time.

Fred Astaire. Not a handsome man. He said himself he couldn’t sing. He was balding his whole life. He danced like a cheetah runs, with the grace of the first creation. I mean, that first week. On one of those days God created Fred Astaire. Saturday maybe, since that was the day for the pictures. When you saw Fred you felt better about everything. He was a cure. He was bottled in the films and all around the earth, from Castlebar to Cairo, he healed the halt and the blind. That’s the gospel truth. St Fred. Fred the Redeemer.

Roseanne was so vulnerable, so admirable, so open in my meeting with her, I knew I could have asked her anything, pursued any topic, and probably got the truth, or what she believes is the truth. Well I knew it, my advantage, and if I had pressed it, I would have gained a great deal but, maybe, lost something. Today was the day she might have told me everything, and today was the day I opted myself for her silence, her privacy. Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.

I stood there patiently enough and listened to Jack. Actually it probably qualified as the longest speech he had ever made to me, or at least in my presence, or my vague direction anyhow.