The Heart in Winter

by Kevin Barry

To be old and mad and forgotten on the mountain—was it all laid out the fuck ahead of him?

For weeks now he had denied himself the proletarian release of climax.

The power of denial gave vigour and erotic glow. The painful heat in his groin was good heat, was good pain. It would feed strength to him naturally as it built up.

A handful of hard rain was flung against the window and now he felt the strangest thing, a thought almost beyond words, that the winter would have purpose for him yet.

The eggs went down controversially. The coffee began to straighten the affair. He rolled a smoke to find the hands were passable steady by this stage. Once more and gauntly he considered his situation. He wrote songs for the bars and letters for the lonesome. He was assistant to the photographer Lonegan Crane, a lunatic, of Leytonstone, East London, originally. His days had been passing with no weight to them but he knew now that fate would soon arrest him. He may have moaned a little at this but such moans were not unknown in the M&M at that hour of the morning. —

Tom Rourke will be the last poor Irishman without a legal lay to his name.

Because what kind of a fucking Irishman can’t even do away with himself?

October? he said. Give you the bloody morbs. He rose from the wingback and made for his desk. Opportunity, he said, has a way of gettin’ the fuck away from me.

Now it wasn’t as if she wasn’t expecting some prayerful times after the letters she’d had and in fact all the way over on the train rides she’d taken to get herself across the plains and through the mountains all the while climbing she’d tried to put herself in touch with a spell of Godliness. She really did try hard. Closed her eyes and said His name and asked Him come down and enter her. Said I am climbing right now oh Lord I am climbing into your arms. Go right ahead and enter me blood and veins right now oh Saviour. She was only a sinner no worse than no other. And she explained her entire situation to the Lord right there.

And the train rolled on and on as if it was on the forever line and picked out the great open fields and the plains and there was oxen sometimes and pigs in wallow and small lonesome towns and crossings and by night especially they were lonesome and there was farmers and rivers great and small and she was coming and going out of sleep and waking and she fell into this whole long very casual type conversation with the Lord. It was dandy. It was like she was talking to a real good friend of hers. She said this suitor gentleman was Irish but sounded as if he was High Irish not no Cabbagetown type. He was a miners boss a captain of the Anaconda company. She liked the word Anaconda the way it rolled out when she was speaking to the Lord. She said she would do right by the man if he would do right by her. I have put aside my skittery ways once and forever Jesus. They would have pretty little children and sit on the porch and watch the setting sun after supper. How would that be? Sun on the mountains in the eveningtime and nothing stronger than black tea going down the hatch. Wouldn’t be a bad way for a girl to wind up considering some of the ways it could have winded up. The Lord didn’t seem to have much to say in response to all this but the ease of the way she talked to him on that journey out west was like never before and she thought maybe this is what it feels like when Jesus come down and enter you. Just like being with a friend.

With Tom Rourke it was more than butterflies they were talking about. He’d start off a line about what he was going to do to her and she’d finish it off for him and boy she could really lay into the ruby stuff and he’d blush like a tomato and not a word would have passed their lips. She liked to see him blush like that.

He said all kinds of sweet things too. Things that from any other man she’d have run a half mile from and fast. Things like he said that whatever their souls were made of they were made of the same substance. But she believed that then and she believes it still.

She knew they were both thinking it without even saying it. What if we kept going? What if we were to run and never once look back? They were wrapped up in wintercoats but feeling the cold all the same it was a good painful cold that made you truly alive at your personal extremities and the further they climbed into the wood the more the pressure of their situation seemed to ease off. A little river moved up there and ran in silver through the trees and made its own spooky night music.

There are folks who get certain intimations about what they need to do in their lives. They can feel these intimations like stirrins of the blood but they can’t always make sense of them. They just get drawn to acting out in certain crazy ways and boy it’s mysterious he said. Feels like they’re acting out under the instruction of the moon and tides. It feels like there ain’t no plan nor design to it but there surely is you just got to learn how to read it right.

But whatever intimation you get about your life you got to follow it through and follow it through and follow it through because elsewise nothins gonna make sense ever again.

Look up at yonder moon, he said. You may need to look for a while, he said. Look real hard. Fall into it. Fall into the spell of it.

Now tell me if you can see fires on it? And there she was with Tom Rourke hand in hand in terrible love in the dead of night and the forest deep looking up to the sky and all at once yessir absolutely they could see fires on the moon. Now that there’s a suretell sign, Ding Dong said, that it’s come to a time in your lives you need to act.

They sat there together in the wood all huddled up in their coats and shivered and they were miserable in love and they held on to each other for a long time out of the need and they could hear each other breathing. There is no decision, he said, we’ve just got to be together and she didn’t have to tell him he was right about that.

She knew without it being said that Tom Rourke was still thinking about fires. He turned to her on the fall of that thought exactly— Fires, he said. It’s always been a town of fires, he said. Yeah in Butte there were places had barely been roofed in against the sky before they went up in flames again. Pyro from the Greek, he said, meaning fire and that right there is just one hell of a pyro town. There are some places that just draw fires. Places where fires get up all the time unexplained. So how about he was going to burn out the Zagreb was the plan? She listened to him talk it all through and tried to make sense of it. He was fixin to make off with the Mama Horvat cash. He knew where it was kept and would set the fire as diversion. Before the smoke even clears we’ll be at Pocatello Junction, he said, and the best part of a quarter ways to the city on the bay and they’ll think that money it’s just gone up in flames.

She listened as her old husband washed up out back of the house and splashed the cold water and moaned the name of the Lord over and over again and she knew that a heel turn in her life was coming.

The pit is a hard life, he said after. Did you know Tom Rourke was put down the pit when he came over here first? He lasted three hours.

That night when he came up the house after dark scrabbling through the shade of the hour like a furtive elf he opened back his jacket and shirt and showed her with great excitement a fresh scabbed mark on his breast over the heart where he’d carved with the tip of a knife the letter P. Yeah so the motherfucker was crazy and moonshot and out of control and she loved him even more and so much she could fucking die in fact.

Do you believe in God the Almighty? No but I’m in discussions with Him.

But you could marry us right now, Reverend! Under the eyes of God! Tom Rourke cried. Make it proper! she cried. Goddamn me I’ll do it! the Reverend cried.

Soaked in an ambience of death from the cradle, they believed themselves generally to be on the way out, and sooner rather than later, and thus could be inclined to put aside the niceties of the living realm. Terrible people, born of a terrible nation.

He relieved himself fully to the roar of oceanic applause. He stood gormlessly then with drained apparatus to hand and tasted the sourness of his life—a melancholic, slave to the infinite sadness, he wondered if he might get through the day without opening his throat. Fuck it, he could try.

Jesus Christ, Jago. There was a mother that loved you once.

He made himself stronger by force of belief. He spoke to God fiercely.

Very slowly and painfully Tom Rourke spoke the truth or at least the truth as he saw it. He said that in his actions he had been guided not by lustfulness nor by greed. He had been steered by fate, he said. He believed he was acting as though under the pull of the moon and tides. He had about as little say in it as that. He needed to be with this person and now that she had been taken from him he needed to follow and find her. If death came in the way of seeing her again in this life, that was just how it was meant to be, and he was not afraid. For the first time in his life, he said, he was not afraid.

What he reckon is you was born to a dark star. Gospel, Tom Rourke said. När du föds på ett sådant sätt betyder det att det inte finns något hopp om ett tillfredsställt liv. Says for folks born that way, you can about throw your hat at it. There ain’t much hope of satisfaction, not in this life. Amen, Tom Rourke said. The old man gestured to the plain and the open sky then, and he was dismissive of it all— Detta löjliga land kommer att berätta sagor för dig. In a country like this, the boy said, all they give you is fairy tales. De kommer att berätta är att lycka är möjlig och i själva verket är det ditt öde. In this country? the boy said. They’ll tell you that you can be happy. That it’s your right and destiny. Det här är hästskit. Now that’s a bunch of horseshit. Lycka är inte det vanliga mänskliga uppnåendet. Happiness ain’t generally how it works out for folks.

Remember always that we’re only markin time until sweet death comes, and it’s surely comin for us all. God be good to us, Tom Rourke said.

So if there’s someone out there who can help you to ease the pain of your life…

…then he reckon you gotta go an’ do what it is you gotta do.

Love’s hard insistences are known even to the deathlorn, and perhaps especially so, with death being no more than the initiation of grief, and grief being no more than the mark of love’s inevitable loss.

He allowed his thoughts to hover as they would, and even dishonourably— He had not known of Polly Gillespie’s existence the October gone. He had not seen her game smile. He had not been made giddy of mind by her crooked laugh. He had not listened to her heartbeat and the way it skittered madly off the tracks sometimes in the dead of night. Why shouldn’t he make out west and try to forget her now? He had forgotten much else before. But quickly he knew it was not possible to be swayed from his course and he was awestruck to know it. He had no longer free will, not in this life.

She was the man’s wife, legit? Yeah but of very recent times.

And that gives you the right? Not a question of right. Uh-huh. There was no choice to it. You ain’t the sort has to go lookin for trouble, are you, son? No sir. Just kinda finds you, don’t it? I suppose it does. Yeah, the stranger said. You got that kind of face. I didn’t ask to be born like it, Tom Rourke said. None of us do, son.

You think things are directed, don’t you, son? How’d you mean? I mean by hands unguessable. I suppose I do believe that. Yes I do. Well I been directed here to tell you that that right there is an insane delusion of the mind.

He spoke to the horse about Polly Gillespie and the city of San Francisco and a fine house that looked over the bay and even as he spoke it he knew it for a dream. He spoke to God again and he said oh please now won’t you bear with me? He did not believe in God at all and in fact he had never believed.

Kathleen at once roused herself from the floor— The fuck is cuntface sayin? Concede here that she was a character straight out of the briars and we can move on from it.

Who the fuck are you? he said. Just a sinner, Tom Rourke said. No worse than no other. How exactly’d you arrive into us, Christian? There was a man drank here the other night. He told me there was word of a Jack. Not a soul in here all the fucken week, Joe de Brugha said. You think I’m not countin? Kathleen in the meantime held up two fingers and a set of thumbs to frame Tom Rourke as though for a picture made, and said— So what’s it drag you to the heathen land?

Kathleen licked the tip of a baby finger and stroked it toyingly along the length of the wound and smiled at Tom Rourke proudly. Like a weasel take down a boar, she said. And I’m lyin here and I fucken missed it.

But before Tom Rourke stepped into the world again, Kathleen said, he was in severe need of instruction. Coz next time a cunteen come at you with a blade? she said. And they are goin to come at you, Joe said. Remember this what I’m goin to show you, she said.

And it was like a dance, Kathleen said. There were steps to it. She showed him how to match feint with feint and how to wait for the circles of opening space and how never to lurch and how to rock back on the heels for momentum’s gain and how to trick with the eyes and the hips and with sharpness of mind always and how to mesmerise, always how to mesmerise. The great advantage, she said, lay in the other’s fear. Remember this, she said. The other cunteen he wants your knife, she said. His chest want it, his belly want it, his face want it. He’s screamin out for it, she said. She moved, swayed, danced, folded up, opened out again. Remember this, she said. Remember what Kathleen she just shown you. Her green eyes they flashed then and were beautiful—Kathleen, née de Brugha, once of Ballingarry, now properly the Widow Borges.

The brethren had succumbed to a period of sodden reminiscence. This was no astonishment to them. They mourned for lost voices and lost youth. They crossed the ocean again in their trembling dreams. Those with the hand for it wrote torrential letters home. They remembered fucking everything. They remembered the rocks they’d sat on along the sides of the hungry hills. They remembered the dogs of particular streets. The girls with eyes of wren’s-egg blue. The summer nights obliterated in the fields. They chased their whiskey with beer. From the mountain they watched the stars explode. They were hot-faced and overwhelmed. Jesus Christ had died for their sins and they spoke His name over the rattling of their wooden beads. They were gaunt with the Godhauntedness. They believed in witches and demons and occult magic also. They believed in just about everything, actually. They descended to the pits and these were a living hell and so a proof in the negative of God’s existence. They coughed their fucking lungs up. They had unbelievable throats on them if it’s the drink we’re talking about. All the slurs cast against them were Bible true.

Same as if her tongue had been ripped out by some devilsent motherfucker she did not speak for the best part of those months. Hell had come alive in the here and now and the next spring would be a long time in comin if she ever saw one at all. It felt like the world would never turn over again it had just stopped plumb dead on its wheel.

the sky above her was the province of some ice god with an evil streak to him and malice in his ways and in the bone and iron greyworld of the Idaho Territory that winter she chewed on some hard new thoughts about fate and destiny and love and death and all of that horseshit and the way it had all turned out.

She had never felt the goddamn cold the same way before. She had veins of ice these blueskin days.

She tried to take every new minute and just tack it onto the last one and that was about as good as she could muster. String ’em together like beads and see how you make out. Oh the days now were long hard sentences not to speak of the nights and that’s when we’re most alone is the truth of it for most people is the nights.

She should not be seen at all. She broke up the kindling with a sweet little axe that was like an instrument of murder working in her hand. It made good angry thwacks that rang out on the air like messages of forewarning. Just keep the fuck back from me was what she was saying. The endless angry winter days and the swinging of the axe made her grit her teeth against the memory of happiness and the warmth of an embrace and sometimes she whimpered a bit still oh yeah.