The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry

Author:Sebastian Barry
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780571266821
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1999-08-01T14:00:00+00:00

It’s true that in barracks in Sheffield there are some incidents that he must regret as a generally peaceable man. He’s ravaged in the nights by headaches, and even when he sleeps he dreams of his dead pals on the beach. Ordinary talking gets him excited in a peculiar fashion so he’s leaping up and contradicting or shouting at his newer comrades and gabbling gobbledygook at them for small reason. He goes into the industrial districts and hears the deep thumping of the steel presses and hears like a ferocious echo the explosions they’ll make when they are guns. They’re not noises you can keep out by pressing your palms to your ears but he tries. He thinks of the enormous cauldrons or furnaces at the hearts of the brick factories, and the civilian men stoking them to ever greater temperatures and the waterfalls of molten steel cascading and sparking onto the beaten hearths. His own heart is consumed again and again till he’s only a kind of shouting fool in the roads.

When his captain arranges for his discharge he spends some months in the mental home for military casualties. Now these formerly fighting men look diminished and ridiculous to him in their standard issue gowns. First the uniforms for blood and bullets and now the uniform for nightmares and shouting. There are swards and swards of pale green grass stretching into the distance towards the fiery town. At night from his window glowing with the moon he catches a fanning glimmer of the fires and imagines the greensward like a beach with heroic nonentities fleeing the slight incline down from the dark fare-thee-well of the German guns. He sees the shadows like forlorn twigs scuttering across the useless acres. He feels impelled to set hedges into them and rows of vines, and to harvest the swollen grapes and to drink the fresh wine in tremendous swallows. Sheffield is full of owls..

He writes at last to his mother and takes some solace from doing so in a manner he couldn’t have imagined before, not of course being given to letter-writing as a remnant of his humiliations at school:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.