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?

All he wanted from life was quiet and stillness. There was hope of neither in this place.

Vows, resolutions: he was twenty-nine years to heaven and must never feel this old again.

Con Sullivan laid his belly to the counter again. It was a separate entity almost. You could give its own name to it and put it on a leash.

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

The captain stood with his arm placed torturously around his wife’s tiny waist. It was clear that every ounce of her resisted him.

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.

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.

If we die tonight? Don’t say it, Polly. But if we die tonight I wouldn’t even care one way or the other. I feel much the same way about it.

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

Ah, Polly, we never had a fight yet really. Only in the bed. Yeah but that’s a natural kinda thing.

Tom Rourke is a kind of… What? I don’t know how to say it but? Jesus Christ, Con, I’m blue in the fucken face here. There’s a kind of witchery about him.

The deathhauntedness of the Irish brethren was frequently a complication in the working life of Sheriff Stephen Devane. 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.

Winter in Butte. Town of whores and chest infections.

In San Francisco we’ll talk about this. Be like a story that gets told. This’ll be in a house on the bay. I can smell the air of it right now, Poll. And tell you what? That house will have a piano. All this will be in the long ago. Be like out of a dream.

He had pined for death for so long and had known always there was nothing about it to fear and here it was and as wonderful as he’d hoped for. Now he just had to wait it out and she would join him here.

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.

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. Om det finns någon där ute som kan hjälpa dig att lindra smärtan i din existens… So if there’s someone out there who can help you to ease the pain of your life… …så ska du göra vad du än behöver göra för att vara med henne. …then he reckon you gotta go an’ do what it is you gotta do.

She tried to fight back in the room throwin out her fists and again when they got her outside but it turned out that a woman kicked around an alleyway like a piece of meat and all beat up at midnight with a filthy hand locked to her jaw didn’t raise an eyebrow not in Pocatello—so this is what they mean by a wide-open town hey?

Surviving was what it was called and she was schooled in it.

It was gonna be just like stepping through a door. She knew that if he lived he would not forget her and in that way she would hang around still and if he died they’d be together like they were sworn.

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.

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.

The establishment was forlorn and menacing in about equal measure. There wasn’t a Christian alive who’d have a brave feeling walking up to its doors. But Tom Rourke was possessed of a mysterious calm by now, perhaps on lease from the old stranger the country had with some guile directed into his path, and he told the horse that it felt like an evening that was marked out for him somehow or more precisely— By fate and dark magic the evening was marked out.

The power of the darkness was all the while working against them.

She leaned in close then with her claw to his chest and whispered some crazy stuff and he laughed and he laughed harder again the stranger the words got. It was like she was speaking in the tongue but it had no connection with any god you might think of. She just let it come from inside. She didn’t even think about it. These were words that came from a place that was deep inside. A place that was before our world and time. That was a deepdown place and forest-like. And he laughed and shook a bit and she let the words come with her claw to his chest and she was raking him pretty good. She let him know they both came from this same place. We can be in it still, she said. We can be in it whenever we need to be and we can always talk to each other there. He was on top of her then biting at her neck and breast and they surely understood each other and the whole thing was just the kind of luck that don’t even come once in a lifetime for most.

She could not see it again in her mind’s eye for a long while. She just could not run the film of it. She could not arrange the images but she could reckon their meaning well enough. She knew that he had died for love.

wasn’t it a remarkable turn of events that showed love and death they co-exist in our violent and sentimental world.

She vowed that one day she’d go to his grave and leave a token but she never did and she had no reason to anyhow—they were in their own place together as often as they needed to be and they could talk to each other there.

Powders and paints coz what you show on the surface can explain away a whole lot of life.

But why look back is what she thinks. If she looked back she’d be eaten whole and alive by the past.

Though sometimes in the night it comes and if she can’t always get his voice on account of he had so many she can always fetch up his face and his way of laughing. But she tries not to fall into the drag of the past like the drag of a river because it is so powerful it can take you down. Anyhow the past it shifts around all the time. The past is not fixed and it is not certain and this much she has learned if nothin else. The past it changes all the while every minute you’re still breathing and how in fuck are you supposed to make sense of it all.

The lights on the water. The lights on the water move her. She is most alive always in the deep of the night and that much has never changed. The wind blows and the past shifts again and rearranges. She can go there still when she wants to. She can see their fire burning in the forest dark. But hey it’s all such a long time ago now and really she doesn’t even think about it that often.