The Heart in Winter

by Kevin Barry

He had it within himself to help others. He made no more than his dope and drink money from it. He had helped to marry off some wretched cases already. The halt and the lame, the mute and the hare-lipped, the wall-eyed men who heard voices in the night—they could all be brought up nicely enough against the white field of the page. Discretion, imagination and the careful edit were all that were required.

He wore the felt slouch hat at a wistful angle and the reefer jacket of mossgreen tweed and a black canvas shirt and in his eyes dimly gleaming the lyric poetry of an early grave and he was satisfied with the inspection. He felt for the Barlow jackknife of teardrop handle in the one pocket and for his dope tin in the other and was reassured.

the boards of the shanties moaned and creaked in the mountain night and you could not blame them. Even in the present moment there was a great hauntedness to it all. The city was only this short while confected but it was already strung with a legion of ghosts

the shanties moaned and creaked in the mountain night and you could not blame them. Even in the present moment there was a great hauntedness to it all. The city was only this short while confected but it was already strung with a legion of ghosts

Midnight kind of direction he had his knife taken off him by a volcanic Mancunian named Shovel Burgess at the Big Stope bar and he took a blow to the nose which bled theatrically.

He took a smoke of what meagre dope he had left in supply in a backroom full of gleaming Portuguesers on Nanny Goat Hill and he experienced the truth and glory of God the Almighty in the here and now of the opiate night.

He hated to be wistful for home. He hated the sentimental bastards singing through the streets of the small hours about the hellholes that had vomited them out.

So he opened the razor and laid it to his wrist. He felt the good weight of it there. He was in full earnest. From the dining room below came the murmur of Croat voices and the waft of pigs’ toes in their rendered fat—were these now the last of his senses? The razor would deny all destiny. There would be too much pain in his destiny to bear—he knew this already. It was to be read in the white aching of the sky beyond his tiny window. But as quickly as the thought had come he folded the razor again with care and stored it neatly and he was sorrowful— Because what kind of a fucking Irishman can’t even do away with himself?

It was the newest house she’d ever live in and the rooms were generous in proportion. She felt like a new crown queen right there as a matter of fact and she thought maybe this whole thing is worth the candle after all. His grey eyes they were definitely nice and he surely wasn’t fat. But then he started in at the praying.

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.

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.

Well he started kissing at her and pecking at her like a nervous old hen as soon as they were in the bedroom and it all went in that particular direction quick enough. She reckoned he’d definitely done it once or twice before but not a lot more than that which was saying something given he was forty-five years old. At least that’s what he was passing himself off as but then again she was passing herself as twenty-seven. He was grey about the chest hairs that made it feel like he was old. They were wiry and sprung tight.

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.

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.

They put down their coats then and wrapped up in them and slept like the hallowed dead in the cold cold mountain air.

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.

Then the lovers were among the trees and in a dream haze the night rolled out in carbonblack and there were hollows of that wood so dark you’d to shade your eyes against it but if you stared into the darkness long enough there were colours that bled out.

Fat Con moved like a sweet old ma behind the counter. He cut off the sausage links and the strips of bacon and flung them with artistic expression to the grill. He cut white loaves on the slicer and chopped the liver into neat hanks with a murderer’s relish. He was a man in his time. He was alive to his place and task. He swung his great belly from grill to counter and back again and there was grace to it. Dankly his occult coffee simmered and there were canteen pots of tay stewed black as porter. Dead bloodshot eyes sat in a row for him along the high stools and every last set of them was beholden.

His noggin end was a tower of screeching bats, as of some haunted West Country moor; his stomach was a failing metropolis; his vision was blurred and flickering. He stumbled and groaned and bounced from the walls. He found his boots if only by the touch and wept his way into them. He staggered to the pisspot and aimed for it out of some remnant delicacy. 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.

He looked up in beseechment at a section of cracked mirror on the wall. No man deserved the face that Jago Marrak had been cursed with at the age of forty-two. Face? It was a warscape, a scarred battlefield, an Agincourt—the giant Marrak was unloveable and unkillable. He rose onto his feet and bellowed like a ditch-stuck cow and forced a matchbook to a grip between his shaking fingers and lit a fucking match and sucked on the pipe and got the burn going at last and it just about cracked open his cranium but he sucked hard and harder again and took down the reviving tars and settled somewhat.

They rode for careful hours through the cold fabrics of darkness.

He saw the flash of the knife and felt again the soft awe of its incision and felt again on his jaw the hard snap of the rifle butt swung and then her screams cut dead and the quickfallen blackness.

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.

Yes and one day you too might ride through such a place thinking you got it bad but the place will let you know quick enough there were others that rode through here before and they had it plenty worse—night

It was by now the Christmastime there. 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.

It was a diabolic world that had led them so tremendously astray—they raised their glasses in unison to it and swayed. They could not spend all their money and their savings accrued. They made songs about the city on the hill. They cried at their own songs deep into the night. They were ecstatic in the small hours on dopeblown travels. They succumbed to the tormentations of gowl. They were endlessly a source of maudlin fascination to themselves. They trotted out their stories in these circling and disputatious versions, and always with sombre refrain.