The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry

clouds along the bog-pewter of the Garravogue, going out another to the lip of the public streets, like a ghost of himself, peering at the early-morning children crossing the town to their school beyond the bridge at Finisklin.
    What angel keeps him alive he does not know. Nor devil either. One morning equally early he climbs Knocknarea, carrying a stone from the foot of the mountain as is the proper custom and adding it to Maeve’s Cairn at the top. He looks around at the country that is his world and is not his world. He wonders how it is for the old dead queen in her pile of rocks and for the small tombs of her warriors that lie near her. He seems himself to be closer to their kingdom than his own. He can’t seem to get himself to sit in his own time. Drifting, drifting. There’s Coney Island below and the slow walk of the tide across the broad strand. Well, he is tearless. There’s Captain Midleton’s broken cove, where he still troubles the ruined house with his roars, there’s Rosses Point all pristine and exact, the shape of a bittern in the cold sea, and Strandhill where his own Pappy dreams of playing to regular dancers in a wind-bitten hall. And stony Eneas is, looking at it all, stony and separate. And afeared. A cold iron rod has been lowered into him, and he finds himself stiff and awkward with it. To the left and right of him is terror and terror. Even there at the top of the mountain as far from the world as he can go, there’s no aspirin for his fear.
    And he goes about in the nights and the fringes of the days and eats no more than a sickly baby and is a very strange man. And he is in danger of gathering to himself, his Mam says, all the odd stories of the place, he’ll be the man that scares the children through a hedge. He’ll be the man that robs the bread off sills and breaks the harrow while it lies idle in a yard waiting for its season, he will be the curse and the bogeyman of the district. So she say s. But what can he do about that, roaming round and round, and if there was a pencil under him what great useless circles he would make on the tricky map of Sligo and environs.
    Nevertheless he is not murdered, and fill his days he must.
    All the while he favours the more distant places, and one time he begs a perch for his bum on the early-morning van that goes out to Enniscrone with the papers.
    And away out on the wild sea-marsh and grasses of Enniscrone he is able to spread wide his arms and have the sun sit along them as if they were the fierce white featherings of a seabird.
    Sure enough he is seen and reported here and there. Some not knowing his trouble think he is simply mad, abroad so early and silent and never answering a nod or a greeting. And they say that the son has caught madness off of the father’s work. And maybe, he thinks, they are right.
     
    He discovers districts of Sligo he never found even as a boy, odd beaches not used by bathers as a rule, isolated places. And out upon the strand that lies in a frozen arc beyond Finisklin one day towards midday he sees leaning in privacy against a rock a young woman in a blowing dress. White as a sail the dress is and the sea-wind has no bother taking it and tugging it and slapping it against her legs but she pays it no heed. She leans against the rock with its dried weeds and barnacles hanging on for dear life, and her head is turned back for to get the sun on her face. Her eyes are closed fast. And he knows she is pretty as a penny even in the distance and he stands against the dunes with their freckled grasses turned mightily one way and another by the combing wind and is stymied by the sight of her. The sand is powdered gold there where she is, all bucketed up against her feet. Her shoes are thrown off near her, little red summer shoes he thinks, and he has never thought of such a matter in his life. She is soft and hard and good against the rock.
    He knows well he is a menace to her in his lonesome walk, and that if she sees him