The River Capture Read online

  Moments like this he longs to be back in Belvedere. That morning walk, pigeons on the footpath, raucous gulls overhead. Buses pulling out from the kerb spluttering exhaust fumes on passing cyclists. All the lives parallel to his own, all the moments in which different things are simultaneously happening. Horizontal time. Thoughts and musings that seem to go on for hours, but take only minutes. No one understands time. Impossible to measure too. If it weren’t for death, we might not count time at all … Under the arch at Christchurch, his watch reading 8.35, 8.36, 8.37 a.m. Vertical time. Downhill then and a whiff of the Liffey and a blast of wind, bracing on his face. More gulls screeching overhead on the north quays, the world their oyster. The world was his oyster then too. He had his life all mapped out – a few more years in the city, then he’d come back here with Maeve, work the land, fill the house with kids. Mammy, Josie, Ellen, the whole happy racket, like in the old days. Up Jervis Street, around Parnell Square and into Denmark Street as the Mercs and Beamers and Range Rovers pulled up, dropping off the uniformed sons of doctors, lawyers, judges. He was always moved by the way the big boys took their little brothers’ hands and led them inside. He gets a lump in his throat thinking of them. Everything about the place … He felt close to Joyce there too. And Stephen. Thinking he was Stephen, leaning down to help some weak, misty-eyed boy. Moments when he felt himself simultaneously and symbiotically fused with the sweet boys before him and the image-memory of the young innocent Stephen Dedalus in those very rooms a hundred years before. Regularly going off script, off curriculum, spending weeks teaching nothing but Ulysses. Certain scenes: Stephen in class, Bloom with the cat and the kidney, the men in Hades going to bury the dead. Such mirth Luke had with his class, such wordplay and punning, the boys decoding, mapping it out, acting it out. Sir, sir, Leo Burke just ate with relish the inner organs of Beatty and Fowler. Shut your obstropolos, Carney! Sir, there’s a tang of faintly scented urine off me sandwich. Oh ineluctable modality, oh jumping Jupiter! If he ever has a son he will send him to Belvedere or Clongowes. For all their faults, the Jesuits’ ethos of care and service still prevails. Like Dadda, always setting example. No need to have any truck with the old boys’ network.

  He raises another spoonful of egg to his lips but feels the bile rising. He pushes his chair back, nerves jumping to attention in his thighs, and carries the plate to the front door. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am, I do not like green eggs and ham. A pack of half-feral cats swarm and pounce on the eggs. Greedy scuts. Lily, sleek-black and imperious, sits inside on the carpet. Haughty little madam, he thinks, and she from the same gene pool as this riff-raff. Generations of inbreds, Lily herself probably sired by her own father or brother. You wouldn’t know it though, with her emerald eyes and shiny coat and perfectly proportioned body. Almost four now. He won’t feel the years passing. I might have you stuffed, Lily, he says, put you up on the mantelpiece. He shudders. The eyes of the resurrected staring down at him.

  His thoughts slip back to Belvedere again. He took a career break four years ago with the intention of doing something – writing a book perhaps – on Joyce or even Bloom. It was more than a whim, more than a money-making enterprise, though that too. It was an itch, a longing – a necessity even – to stay close to Bloom, to inhabit him day and night. But there was little he could add to the Joycean canon already in print and the endless supply of online material on Joyce. If he could draw or paint he might have attempted an illustrated guide to Ulysses. He thought about writing ‘A Student Guide to Joyce’ or ‘100 Factoids about Leopold Bloom’ or ‘100 Fun Facts About James Joyce’. All too trivial. He wanted to do something of worth, something with heft. He tried to find some central organising principle. In the first year off work he read and re-read large sections of Ulysses, compiled lists of idioms, phrases and words – the singular, the colloquial, the vernacular. On his laptop he created files and folders and folders within folders into which he downloaded images of all sorts of Joyceanilia – a copy of Joyce’s birth cert, Bloom’s moustache cup, César Abin’s question-mark portrait, photos of the Queens Hotel, Ennis – and wrote a paragraph of elucidation to accompany each. From Ellmann’s biography he lifted interesting anecdotes, titbits, witty excerpts from Joyce’s letters to his father; from Gifford’s Annotated Ulysses he transcribed eleven items related to Joyce’s childhood homes; from Yale’s Beinecke library he downloaded a complete copy of Delmore Schwartz’s own heavily annotated Finnegans Wake. He wrote a short essay about the awe he felt when he discovered that Joyce’s flesh and blood – in the body of Stephen Joyce – still walked the earth. He wrote a profile of Bloom, then one of Joyce, then a longer one of Bloom. The more material he compiled the more impossible the project became, and the more dejected he grew. How to catch the peculiar cast of Joyce’s mind. How to convey what he felt for Bloom. If he were a novelist he might have been up to the task. He had been greatly taken by a character in a novel who herself had written a novel called The House on Eccles Street, in which Marion Bloom refuses to have sex with her husband until he works out who he is. Luke would have read this novel, if it had existed.

  One by one the cats drift off and he is left. He feels the strangeness of standing in the doorway. He steps out into the sunlight, warm granite under his bare feet, the sun’s heat penetrating bone and marrow. He gazes out over the lawn. In the field beyond, the cows are lying down, full now, chewing the cud. Full with the view too: the sloping fields and hedgerows, the river, everything radiating out from the house towards the river. From the corner of his eye, something moves. A magpie lands on the blue bloom of a hydrangea with something in its beak. A mouthful of old cork – wine cork. No. A turd. Short and thick and dry, stale enough to hold together. A cat turd. He never knew birds ate old shit. Pigs eat each other. He looks down the avenue as words trail across his mind. Coprophagia. Pica. Anorexia. Schizophrenic hunger.

  MID-MORNING, HE IS stirred from reverie by the sound of an engine coming up the avenue. Jim Lynch’s jeep passes the window into the yard. Luke waits for the sound of his footsteps, the knock on the back door.

  ‘Come in, come in, Jim.’ He stands at the end of the table. ‘Sit down.’

  Jim Lynch removes his hat, sits down, places the hat on his right knee. He is coming earlier and earlier each year, sensing some change.

  ‘Wasn’t that some wedding beyond in the castle at the weekend, Jim? Ha?’

  ‘Ay, an oligarch’s daughter, by all accounts,’ Lynch says. He taps the hat uneasily.

  ‘A million euros, I believe, just to hire the place for the week. Imagine! The Duke is fairly creaming it.’

  ‘He is, all right.’ Lynch narrows his eyes. His colour is high, like Dadda’s when he got anxious. He needs to watch that. Nearly a goner last year; had to be pulled out of the slurry tank by one of the sons. Must have slipped.

  ‘Jesus, Jim, no one knew what an oligarch was until a few years ago.’

  Lynch nods.

  ‘And d’you remember the big bash that footballer had for his twenty-first last year?’

  Another nod.

  ‘Premier league lad, what’s this his name is?’

  Lynch shakes his head, impatient to move on.

  ‘They rent out the whole place, living quarters and all. Who’d have thought it, Jim, the commoners traipsing in and out of the Duke’s private quarters?’

  ‘It’s a turnaround, all right … Still, I suppose they bring a bit of business to the area, a few jobs.’

  Fuck-all business they bring, Luke wants to say, with their big transport trucks coming over on the ferry to Rosslare, laden with everything from bottled water to truffles. Even bring their own chefs and barmen.

  Lynch transfers his hat to the other knee. ‘How’s Ellen keeping? I haven’t seen her out for a while.’

  His father’s sister, his maiden aunt. After a lifetime in America she retired to her bungalow on the hill where, from his own bedroom window every night, he can see the lights of her bedroom and knows if she’s gone to sle
ep. ‘She’s good. I call up to her every day. And we take the odd trip to Cork or Waterford for a bit of shopping or for a hospital appointment.’

  Lynch nods. He runs a hand over his thin greasy strands of hair, then rubs his stubble. Itching to get down to business.

  ‘The bulls are thriving,’ Luke says, after a few moments.

  ‘They are,’ Lynch replies, a note of irritation in his voice.

  ‘They do fair leppin’ these nights in the full moon. Fair churning up of the ground too.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Lynch is trying to play a cool game. With his large dairy herd he needs Luke’s land to supplement his own farm. He knows Luke could easily re-let it in the morning for top dollar, leaving him in the lurch.

  ‘Apparently it’s common for bulls to go mad in a full moon – there was a piece in the Farmers’ Journal about it a few weeks back.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  Luke turns to the window. ‘The milkers are looking great out there too,’ he says, signalling at the cows. ‘There’s what – eighty there now?’

  There are one hundred and eight cows grazing in the field.

  Lynch nods. He knows well Luke has counted them.

  ‘Ye must have a fine yield, with the growth we’re having this summer. Jesus, I’d nearly eat that grass myself!’ Lay it on, thick and fast. ‘And the bulls,’ he adds, ‘they’ll definitely be U’s or even E’s when they kill out.’ Big fat profit for you, Jim Lynch, he wants to say. Better not overdo it. Not right, either, scoring points at the expense of the poor beasts. They’ll be going to the factory soon enough. That time years ago he and Dadda brought a load of heifers to the Kepak factory – the halal place – and nothing would do Dadda but to go up the line. The Muslim guy in bloodied garb saying the blessing over each animal as he slit their throats. Allahu Akbar. Other prayers too, whispered in the ear. Thanking Allah … The way the heifers walked obediently down the gangway that day. The eyes of a human the last thing they saw.

  ‘Tis, tis good, all right. Of course we spread urea and nitrogen every spring – and slurry – so it’s well looked after.’

  ‘Great. I must take a soil sample one of these days.’ Keep him on his toes! He’d love nothing better than if I were clueless, but I’ll tickle his catastrophe, believe you me! ‘You know they reckon there’s only about sixty years’ worth of soil left in the world. With all the intensive farming – and with the loss of the rain forests and erosion and everything – we’re running out of soil.’ He shakes his head. ‘Sixty harvests, Jim … imagine that.’

  The cat walks in and is about to jump up on the table when she sees Lynch and freezes. He throws her a look. Probably afraid of cats. A bad sign in a man. Probably held squirming sacks under water, waiting for the bubble-bubble. No prayer there to send them on their way.

  ‘Come on, Lily. Up!’ Luke leans down and sweeps the cat onto his lap in one swift, fluid movement. Lynch will think him a sissy. Who cares? They have him down as eccentric around here anyway with all the cats and the house full of books.

  Lynch straightens up. ‘Brian and myself are drawing up a five-year plan for the farm. I’ll be sixty soon, so … Brian wants to phase out the Friesians and get into Holsteins instead.’

  Brian Lynch, tall, handsome, brown-eyed, only two years younger than Luke. The other brother Kevin must be twenty-eight now. Always fond of Brian. He spent a year on an intensive dairy farm in New Zealand a few years back. A massive place, five thousand acres, he told Luke. Lived with the family, treated him like a son. Run off their feet, as many as twenty newborns every morning in the calving season. They kept the little heifer calves for breeding, got rid of the bulls. One morning there were twelve new arrivals – five heifers and seven bulls. The farmer handed Brian the humane killer and told him to go into the shed and shoot the seven little bulls. ‘And did you?’ Luke asked. ‘Did I fuck! I turned on my heel and walked away and he went in and shot them himself.’

  ‘We had a fellow out from Teagasc the other day,’ Lynch continues, ‘advising us about things. Anyway, the long and the short of it is I might take a five-year lease from you.’ He pauses, looks Luke in the eye. ‘I can give you two years up front.’

  Five years, Luke thinks, you will in your hole! Trying to inveigle your way in here like that! Too long in situ, getting too comfortable, that’s the trouble.

  Jim Lynch did Luke a favour by leasing the land when his father died, thus sparing Luke from returning from university in Dublin. In the early years Lynch did as he pleased – knocked gaps in ditches, put up gates, acted like he owned the place. He covets the farm. They all do. Finest land on the Sullane – they’d all give their eyeteeth to have this road and river frontage. Fishing rights too – the right to hunt, hawk, fish and fowl. Deed and title taken up by Luke’s grandfather and namesake Luke Carthage O’Brien in 1921. All the papers are in the filing cabinet in the study.

  ‘Five, bedad,’ Luke says, with a bemused chuckle, which sounds phoney. He is not cut out for this lark.

  ‘With two years’ rent up front.’

  Luke had heard it the first time and his heart had jumped. He could do with the money. If he doesn’t return to teaching he will have to take the land back and farm it himself. It’s the only solution. Even without livestock, he’d be eligible for several EU grants. In addition, he could sell three or four cuts of silage a year, and, with the forestry grant he gets for the oak trees, he would get by. And the shame of another man – a neighbour – living off the fat of his land would be eliminated. But it would mean, too, forfeiting city life for ever.

  ‘Ah, sure we’ll stick with the yearly lease, Jim,’ he says. He places a hand under the cat and gently lifts her to the floor. ‘I’ll be taking it back next year anyway, or the year after at the latest.’

  The blood flares bright on Jim Lynch’s cheeks. He won’t find another place to rent as convenient as this. He bites his lower lip, livid. Thinking Luke a pup now, a brat. He wants a farm for each son and expects, no doubt, that some day soon he’ll buy Luke out. Well, not if I have to sell the clothes off my back, Luke thinks, will I ever sell an acre of Ardboe.

  ‘I can give you three years up front, if you like,’ Lynch says then.

  Luke drops his hand by the side of his chair, spreads his fingers wide. He had to go to Lynch once for an advance. It was after he had come back to mind Josie. Lynch doesn’t have to look further than Luke’s banger of a car outside or the chipped paint on the front door to know that money is short.

  ‘Ah, we’ll stick with the arrangement we have, Jim. It has served us well enough this far.’

  Luke rises. Lynch, taken by surprise, rises too, his hat almost falling off his knee.

  ‘I’ll do out the lease in September, as usual,’ Luke says.

  There will be hell to pay now for the rest of the summer – tractors revving and roaring up and down the fields around the house. And in the winter, heavy machinery churning up the ground.

  Luke watches the jeep roll past the window. He is struck at the sad figure Lynch cuts as he drives away, staring straight ahead, the hat on his head, his broad shoulders and back. He is not the same at all since that fall into the slurry pit. Shook-looking, a haunted look in his eyes. Luke wonders if he saw something. He had the same thought the first time he saw photos of Seamus Heaney in public after his stroke. A changed man, as if he had returned from somewhere.

  He paces back and forth on the kitchen floor, addled. Maura Lynch laid out Josie upstairs in her room. The two families were always close. Jim is getting old. What is he doing, after all, except trying to do the best for his family? You can’t fault a man for that.

  THE CHURCH BELLS are ringing out the Angelus when he pulls the front door behind him and starts down the avenue. He hates this time of day, the lethargy, the ennui. Six minutes and about a thousand steps, he once calculated, to get to the end of the avenue, though he has never succeeded in counting past two hundred. He should keep a log: record the dates, times
, weather conditions, prevailing winds. Ascertain to what degree the time of day and weather conditions affect his speed. Other variables too: type of footwear and clothing worn, state of mind, proximity to sleep, proximity to the consumption of solids and liquids, to intoxicants, to music, sex, literature. He smiles at the thought. Determine the extent, if any, philosophy or poetry or porn affects pedestrian speed.

  Lily is beside him, her tail held high and straight. She trots off ahead. He coughs hard, spits out sputum. His throat is dry and sore; he has a touch of heartburn too. Pregnant women get heartburn – caused, his mother used to say, by the hair on the child’s head tickling the mother’s chest. Certain smells sicken them – coffee, fried bacon. It’s worse for some. Maeve didn’t get that far along. The child would be eight years old now. His child. He or she. More males miscarry – the universe is hard on males, in utero, ex utero. We die younger, more suicides too. Up ahead, Lily is stopped at a tree, her backside to the trunk. Pssss-pssss, Luke teases. Mingo Lily. She turns her head away indignantly. Wonder if animals miscarry. Why wouldn’t they? Chromosomal abnormalities in every species. A misbirth with trailing navelcord. Stephen Dedalus, watching the midwife with her bag of tricks coming down the steps onto Sandymount Strand. Mrs Florence McCabe, relict of the late Patrick. Or relic, which is it? Rarely used now. Should’ve put ‘relic of Denis’ in Mammy’s death notice. What had she in the bag? Navelcord. Eve had no navel, a belly without blemish. Gaze in your omphalos. Always love that word omphalos, the sound of it. Wells and pumps and turloughs, hatches into the underworld. Gaze into the astral soul of man.

  He turns and looks at the house, walking backwards for a few steps, the sun warm on his back. Such love he feels for this place, for the regular and ceaseless procession of the seasons, watching the growth in trees and plants and fields recede after each summer, recover after each winter. He squints, then closes one eye, testing his vision. The whole house looks neglected. Doors and windows not painted in twenty years. He bought ten litres of white gloss in the spring. New paint brushes, white spirit, masking tape. He only got as far as cleaning and sanding three windows. Nothing to stop him resuming, he thinks. Can start when he gets back. One door a day: wash, sand, undercoat, then two coats of paint. After that, a window a day. He makes the calculation. If he works six days a week he’ll be done by the beginning of September.