Sullivan Read online

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  Contents

  Walter Macken

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Walter Macken

  Sullivan

  Walter Macken was born in Galway in 1915. He was a writer of short stories, novels and plays. Originally an actor, principally with the Taibhdhearc in Galway, and The Abbey Theatre, he played lead roles on Broadway in M. J. Molloy’s The King of Friday’s Men and his own play Home Is the Hero. He also acted in films, notably in Arthur Dreifuss’ adaptation of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy of Irish historical novels Seek the Fair Land, The Silent People and The Scorching Wind. He passed away in 1967.

  Chapter One

  Sullivan came out of his house and banged the door behind him. He was eating a large slice of bread and jam and it was staining the sides of his mouth.

  He scuffled his bare feet on the pavement. His feet were white. It was the first day he had left off his shoes and stockings. He decided that the pavements were barely warm. It was early May. It was a long street. Sullivan’s house was in the middle of a row of about twenty houses, two-storeyed, with wide windows and nearly all of them containing pots of geraniums in front of lace curtains. There was another row facing him. It was early morning. The streets were deserted, except for a bread van down below, the horse already drooping although he had barely started his work. He must be tired, Sullivan thought, and then turning left, he went towards the Gardens.

  He walked cautiously there because the nettles were thick and beginning to grow strong again. He got one sting despite his best efforts, so he searched for a dock-leaf, licked it and stuck it to the sting and sat down on a stone.

  He finished eating the bread and jam. He guessed that his mouth was stained, so he rubbed the stains off with the sleeve of his jersey. The jersey was navy blue, so the stains didn’t show too much. Sullivan sighed as he surveyed the deserted Gardens. He wondered where all the fellows were. This was a holiday. No school, so where were they? He was bored. He propped his narrow chin on his thin hand. The Gardens must have been named by a cynic. It was a rectangular bit of spare ground that would one day be built upon by the Corporation, but at the moment it served as a playground for the children. All the middle parts of it where they played football were smoothed earth where even the nettles had no chance to grow, but thistles and nettles grew in profusion all around the bare ground.

  Thistles are all right, Sullivan was thinking, watching the bees sucking at their purple heads, and there were nice smells too. He raised his head in the air to smell better. The sky was a hazy blue with cotton-woolly-looking clouds drifting lazily across it.

  It seemed to Sullivan that he was being overpowered with this particular scent. Then he remembered and looked behind him at the high walls of the orchard. That was it. From there the smell was coming. He got up from the rock and made his way out on the road and ran around the high stone walls. They were really high, the walls that enclosed the orchard. Over twelve feet high, built of snugly fitted stones and smooth cement so that a sparrow would have a job getting a foothold in the cracks. The walls enclosed a space of about two acres. There was only one entrance to the orchard; that was a small wooden door up by a lane. Sullivan came to this door and put his nose to the cracks and smelled. It was wonderful. There was one small crack where you could put your eye and see a small sliver of the place inside. Just trees you saw, absolutely bothered with blossoms. Trees and green grass. Sullivan felt that he would have given all he possessed to be able to open the door and go in and walk under the apple trees.

  He knew that an old man lived in there. People respected him but were slightly afraid of him. In the autumn if you knocked loudly on the door he would come and sell you a pennyworth of apples. Peer out at you and take your penny and go away closing the door and coming back with a handful of apples. Why any man should have come and built an orchard here and shut himself away was more than the people of the street could understand. But he did. So he was peculiar. So leave him alone. He was cranky too. When he had built, the place was all open fields. Now on all sides he was enclosed by houses, so it was a funny thing to have an orchard in the middle of the streets in a town.

  I’ll get Pi, Sullivan thought suddenly, and we will go into the orchard. That was Sullivan, impulsive. His green eyes were shining as he turned away. He ran down the lane again and turned right around the back of his own row of houses and into another lane. It was a forgotten spot. Progress had not caught up with this lane, called Paradise, but it would. There were four thatched cottages there, dating from the Flood, people said, but they were condemned. One was decayed with the thatched roof fallen in, and you could see the smoke-stained gable-end and the green stains from the rain. The other three were occupied. Sullivan halted at the half-door of the one in the middle and rattled it.

  ‘Mrs. Clancy!’ he called. ‘Mrs. Clancy! Where’s Pi?’

  ‘Come in, amac,’ said Mrs. Clancy, appearing out of the gloom of the place. She held the door open, then turned her head and screamed: ‘ Pius! Pius! Young Sullivan is here for you.’

  Sullivan didn’t want to go in, but he went. He sat on a stool. The open fireplace was smoking. There were bits of boxes burning in it ‘Can’t get them to do a thing,’ Mrs. Clancy was grumbling. ‘Not a damn thing, and how could you with their father lying on his backside in bed yet like a duke in the middle of the day?’ Then she shouted again, ‘ Get up, Tom! Out of that, you lazy bastard, and get something done.’

  Sullivan closed his eyes and thought of his own nice house at home, the almost surgically clean kitchen, the brightness. But then there was Pi. Pi was all right. Mr. Clancy drank, people said, and so did Mrs. Clancy, people said; when it was all added up they were no better than one degree above tinkers. She was grumbling away. ‘Yeer all well up there, I hope,’ she said, sitting opposite him, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Well for ye with yeer nice house and yeer steady jobs, and what have we? In and out like jack-in-boxes. Sometimes better to be dead I say.’

  Pi came in. He was carrying broken wood.

  ‘It’s all bruk, mother,’ he said, and put it on the hob. ‘Can I go now?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘Go now, go now. Not a thought for yeer poor mother. No thought. But go on. You’ll be young once and dead when you
’re old, and in between what have you? Not a bloody thing, a bloody thing. Hey, Tom, Tom, you hear me? You hear me?’

  By then Sullivan was outside with Pi.

  ‘Phew!’ he said, and grinned at Pi.

  Pi was small for his age. He was as old as Sullivan, eight. He had spiky hair standing up on his head, white, it was so fair, and extraordinary blue eyes, and very regular features. His trousers were a hand-down from a big pair of his father’s, the legs were very wide, and Pi’s limbs were very skinny. His bare feet were not white. Sullivan never remembered Pi wearing shoes or stockings. He had braces on the trousers and a patched shirt that was a bit too big for him, but Pi was as clean as a pig’s bladder, like they say. He always was.

  ‘Where we going, Sullivan?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ said Sullivan. ‘ We’re going into the orchard.’

  ‘Is it Morgan Taylor’s?’ Pi asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sullivan, turning away. Pi had to trot after him. Sullivan’s legs were longer.

  ‘But why?’ said Pi. ‘Ther’s no apples in it now. Not until later on. Why do you want to go in now?’

  Sullivan stopped. He put up his face.

  ‘I want to walk under the blossoms,’ he said, ‘and feel my feet on the green grass.’

  ‘Janey, you’re cracked, Sullivan,’ said Pi.

  ‘Do you want to come or don’t you?’ Sullivan asked. ‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. I can go in myself.’

  ‘Oh, I will,’ said Pi, ‘but you won’t be able to get in.’ He said this decisively but with a note of doubt, because he knew that Sullivan was determined.

  ‘You wait,’ said Sullivan, starting to run. He didn’t go directly to the orchard. He went up by the back of his own house and opened the back door and went in and shortly appeared. He was carrying two broken forks of a bicycle.

  ‘You see these,’ he said. ‘I had these all ready to go into the orchard in the autumn. We can still use them then, at night, but now I want to go in, in the daylight.’

  ‘But he has a dog,’ said Pi, trotting beside him.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Sullivan. ‘All I want to do is get in, that’s all.’

  Pi wished that he could be like Sullivan, not counting the cost until afterwards, or not having the imagination to see yourself being beaten by the stick of the old man or bitten in the bottom by the sharp teeth of a dog. Pi suffered all these indignities as he followed Sullivan in the circuit of the place. Sullivan was cute enough. There was one place around the far side near the posh people’s houses where the land rose beside the orchard wall cutting half the height of it Sullivan paused here and started to dig at the cement between the stones with the battered fork. He was about twenty minutes getting it sufficiently cleared, then he forced the fork into the crack. It held fairly well, so he stood on that and started digging another hold farther up. Pi was looking at him with his mouth open. Now Pi would never have thought up a thing like that. When he had a second hold made, Pi handed him the first one, levering it out of the crack; he stood on the second and started making another hold above him. In about fifty minutes Sullivan was leaning on the top of the wall peering into the orchard.

  ‘Wow,’ said Sullivan. ‘Wait’ll you see this, Pi; just wait’ll you see this.’

  The orchard was spread before his eyes. There were hundreds of trees bursting with white and pink blossoms. The scent arising from them was overwhelming. They were all low-spreading, carefully pruned over years and years. You could hardly see the ground under them, and what grass you could see was festooned with fallen blossoms, and the gravelled paths in between were the same. Farther back on his left, Sullivan thought he could see the path that led to the house. He had never seen the house. He had an overpowering desire to see it.

  ‘Come on, Pi,’ he said, ‘get up here and we’ll get moving.’ He threw down the two forks and Pi, very reluctantly, started to fit one into the bottom crack. In front of Sullivan’s nose mere were iron stanchions, holding barbed wire. The stanchions were old, had never been painted and were rusting badly at the holes that held the wire. Sullivan caught hold of the top of one of them and bent it and it broke off like a rotten branch. He did the same with the one next to it, so they had only one strand to get over.

  Pi got up on the wall beside him, shakily, and looked with wonder at the scene below him. He snuffed in the smell of it ‘ Janey mac,’ said Pi, ‘ oh, janey mac!’

  ‘I’m going in now,’ said Sullivan. He crossed the wire, caught the edge of the wall with his hands, let his body down its full length and dropped. It was a long drop. He fell on his back and sat there on the grass looking up at Pi and grinning. ‘Come on, Pi,’ he called, ‘I’ll catch you.’ Pi was very hesitant. ‘But how’ll I get out again, Sullivan?’ he asked. ‘ Easy,’ said Sullivan; ‘we’ll just open the gate and go out that way.’

  They could have done that too but for unforeseen circumstances. First Pi became suspended on the barbed wire, and, second, an enormous black Labrador dog came running from the house, his fangs looking fearful as they were the only white thing about him. Pi was hung up on one of the broken stanchions. As he was turning to slide down the wall, it pierced the loose trousers and hung him up like a coat on a nail.

  ‘Oh, Pi,’ said Sullivan in exasperation, and then he turned and attacked the dog. He walked and then ran towards the dog. This was unusual. The dog had collected more samples of the seats of trousers, protecting this orchard, than a multiple tailor’s would put out in a year, but no boy had ever before run towards him. He backed snarling. ‘Good dog, nice dog,’ said Sullivan and grasped him firmly by the loose fur of the neck. The dog subsided. Pi, uncomfortable, thought if that wasn’t just like Sullivan. Sullivan talked to the dog. ‘That’s a grand fellow. That’s a great dog,’ and I declare to God if the dog was a cat he would have started to purr.

  ‘You are very good with dogs,’ said a soft voice above Sullivan’s head. That startled him. He looked up and half stood up but he didn’t let go of the dog.

  There was a young girl there looking gravely at him. Sullivan’s mouth dropped open for a minute as he looked at her. They had heard of Morgan’s girl all right, but nobody that he knew had ever seen her much. The fellows trying to raid the orchard might have heard her, but they would have been too busy trying to save their meat to pay any attention, and then it was mostly in the night that the raiding was done. She was a tall girl, but it was the way she was dressed that surprised him. A long dress, well below her shins it was, of white sort of stuff, and a blue ribbon around the waist of it. Like something but of an old picture. So far as Sullivan up to this knew, all girls wore long black stockings and blue knickers and they grew out of their skirts so that the hems of them were always being let down for the sake of decency.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked him. She had brown hair. It was cut in a fringe across her forehead. She would be about twelve or so, he thought.

  ‘Oh, miss, it was the smell,’ said Sullivan. ‘We’re two country boys. Only last year our people came to live in this town, and we do be after missing the smell of the apple blossoms. At home we would walk under them in April. And now we have to live in small poky houses in the town and our hearts breaking, and we are walking by and we get the scent of the blossoms through the wall and nothing can stop us. I say to my friend: “We will climb the wall and walk among the apple blossoms, and I’m sure nobody will mind.’’ ’

  She was fascinated. His green eyes were gleaming; his copper-coloured hair was shining in the sun. He was on one knee looking up at her. His voice seemed to have deepened and become mellifluous as he talked to her. My God, Pi thought, Sullivan is acting again.

  ‘You don’t look like country boys,’ she said.

  ‘That’s what they have done to us in a single year,’ said Sullivan.

  ‘Hadn’t we better do something about your friend up on the wall?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ said Sullivan, He’s us
ed to it.’ Now that he thought of it that was true. Pi seemed to be always hung up somewhere.

  ‘His leg is bleeding,’ the girl said.

  Sullivan looked up at the hanging boy. The trousers were pulled right up under his crotch and a thin stream of blood was edging down one of his legs.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Pi!’ said Sullivan in exasperation. Pi looked hangdog. The girl laughed and clapped her hands at the look on Pi’s face. Pi blushed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly, ‘ I didn’t mean to laugh. There’s a ladder up there by the wall,’ she said to Sullivan. ‘You needn’t be afraid of the dog,’ as he hesitated. She put her hand on the dog’s collar. ‘Quiet now, Satan,’ she said. Satan growled and lay down, her hand patting his head. She watched Sullivan. All his movements were swift. His body was thin and lithe. His clothes were good. They were far better than Pi’s clothes. She looked again at Pi. He was hanging patiently. She put a hand over her mouth to hide her smile. Pi wasn’t looking at anybody. He was sweating with embarrassment. He tried not to think of his predicament. He wished the ground would open up and swallow him. Sullivan came back with a ladder and propped it against the wall. He climbed the ladder.

  ‘I never saw anyone like you, Pi,’ he said, as he climbed. ‘You can’t go nowhere that something doesn’t happen to you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sullivan,’ said Pi. ‘Janey, how could I help it. The ould yoke caught me up when I was turning.’

  ‘Hold tight now,’ said Sullivan. He got Pi’s legs on the steps of the ladder and made him walk up backwards. He had a bit of trouble freeing him from the stanchion and two strands of barbed wire. A bit of his trousers gave with the strain. Pi put his hand back to cover his flesh.

  ‘You better come down this way,’ the girl said, ‘and I’ll let you out the gate.’

  ‘Come on, Pi,’ said Sullivan. Pi came down but he came down frontwards. It was a bit of an effort, but he felt ashamed with the hole in his trousers. They stood at the bottom of the ladder and looked at the girl.