The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry

it’s good for a young man to know certain things, and I often think of my own father, and the habit of silence he had, and why not, he worked like a slave all his days. And I suppose poor low people we’ve always been, and I used to be gassing to you here about the damn Lungey House, and all that codswallop
    ‘Ah, sure, well.’
    ‘Aye, well, we are poor people, and God knows when there was hunger we felt it, and when there was cold we felt it, and we were never people above cold or hunger. No. But, child, though I learnt silence off of my father—’
    And Old Tom stops there. Fact of the matter is, he’s weeping. Or something’s come up in his throat, more likely, a stopper that is the stopper on a father’s feeling for his son, generally. To a degree it’s worse than being shot by patriots, being shot by his father’s obvious love.
    So he must resolve on something. A person can tire of being that mortal leaf twisting and shrugging on the galloping river. The scorch on his heart where Jonno Lynch snubbed him on Main Street doesn’t suggest to him that there might be a gap in the hedge where Jonno stands. There must be someone he can march out to beard, even if all the secrecy and terror of the days says otherwise. He fixes on a plan of sorts. He doesn’t know if anyone has succeeded, before execution, in being taken off a black-list, but then the history of Sligo is not the history of great escapes. They are more doomed and fixed in their courses, the men of Sligo, it seems to him, than those bewildered and doomed Greeks of old that the master used to relish.
    Sunday bright early he hies to the Cathedral for the mass that all the big people of the town attend. For it is considered slothful and perhaps even evil to go to the later masses, unless a person is old, sickly or poor. The poor lads and lassies from the asylum are carted down for the evening mass, and no one goes to that who can help it, unless you are a travelling merchant or the like and would rather get late mass than rot in hell.
    Eneas is not a perfect mass-goer and rarely would he be out his door in the old days for the eight o’clock, though when he was a mere boy amid his siblings, his mother naturally herded them all out and around the ancient walls and up the mosaic steps of the Cathedral. And Old Tom is an immaculate mass-goer always and is respected for it in the town, considering the immense weariness that might be on a band-leader on a Sunday morning. Not everyone understands the deep spring of life in Old Tom McNulty as Eneas does.
    And though he lies as if abed that morning and allows Jack and Young Tom and Teasy to spill out into the little street, Teasy with a clutch of missals to beat the band and a mantilla of black lace on her poor head like a Christmas pudding boiling under muslin in the pot, he spruces himself as best he can before the small yellowing mirror on the landing, slicking his hair down with Jack’s hair-grease and fetching one of his father’s work ties from the leaning cupboard. It is a good tie for a man, with a design of swallows, and it’s very blue altogether, which Eneas obscurely thinks might be a help to him, why he could not say. Clothes maketh the man, as a tailor like his Pappy never tires of saying. And maybe his father is the worst tailor on earth like people say, furnishing jackets and trousers so tight for the lunatics that their arms are hitched up as they go, and the life is squeezed out of their poor bollocks. Maybe that is so, but in other respects he is a kingly man, a very Greek of a man.
    In the Cathedral he takes a dark seat over by the side chapel of the Virgin of Modena, and lurks there, trying to spy his target. He soon spots his family because his brother Jack’s hair flames out amid the mantillas and dark heads of ordinary Sligo people. Suddenly, sitting there like a thief, he realizes what a trench of distance his trouble has created between his shadowed form and their line of heads easy