The Shining Fragments, page 1
The
Shining Fragments
Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada. Nous reconnaissons l'appui financier du gouvernement du Canada.
The
Shining Fragments
a novel
Robin Blackburn McBride
TORONTO • BUFFALO • LANCASTER (U.K.)
2018
Copyright © 2018, Robin Blackburn McBride and Guernica Editions Inc.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.
Julie Roorda, editor
Michael Mirolla, general editor
David Moratto, interior and cover design
Guernica Editions Inc.
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Distributors:
University of Toronto Press Distribution,
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First edition.
Printed in Canada.
Legal Deposit—Third Quarter
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2017964543
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McBride, Robin Blackburn, author
The shining fragments / Robin Blackburn McBride. -- First edition.
(Essential prose series ; 151)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77183-266-3 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-267-0 (EPUB).
--ISBN 978-1-77183-268-7 (Kindle)
I. Title. II. Series: Essential prose series ; 151
PS8625.B73S55 2018
C813'.6
C2018-900144-5
C2018-900145-3
Contents
Prologue
Sea
1882
String
1882–1886
Paper
1887
Dust
1888–1889
Glass
1893
Flesh
1894–1899
Blood
1900–1904
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
For Hugh
Prologue
The boy waited alone on a cold bench beneath a sign’s gold letters. People checked the posters nailed on wood, dragged cases across cobble, and called to one another, waving. The day went down; still the boy sat. He’d stopped speaking hours ago.
The boy’s trousers were damp with urine, his face and fingers filthy; he pulled a primary-school speller from his sack and stared at pictures until the book became a pillow. On the bench in Union Station, eight-year-old Joseph Conlon curled as if to sleep, though he knew he wouldn’t. “Annie,” he whispered. “Please come back.”
Sea
1882
1
Mam died on the third day of the crossing. After that, Joseph stayed in the dark, not on the day-lit deck where Old Ciara took Colleen. Even when he tried to make sense of Mam’s death, he knew his picture of events had shattered and he couldn’t manage all the pieces.
Steerage was dank, and there Joseph found Gerry, who walked with a limp, drawing smoke from a cigarette that fit neatly through a gap beside a gold incisor. Gerry said each card’s a force. The queen of diamonds was his lady, but the ace of hearts was worth more. Watch out for the ace of diamonds. Gerry’s knack for winning at maw had paid for the steamer and several bodily repairs. Diamonds were the strongest of all earthly gems. “You can cut through glass with a diamond, boy — slice a mirror into pieces and see your face in every one.” Gerry’s face was a tapestry of scars that Joseph committed to memory. Other images and events he worked hard not to think about.
“Look at me,” Gerry said. “We’re the same, you and me. I lost my mam, so I did — as a lad, just like you.” When Gerry smiled, his scars smiled too, revealing grey teeth. His gold tooth was a mark of distinction, obtained with a five of trumps. “Fear not, boy. Friends are friends. We help each other, do we not? The Lord God Himself speaks through a fresh-cut deck.”
Gerry’s hands and forearms were mottled by foundry acid burns, but his fingers shuffled cards in perfect arcs, and sprayed secrets around the table where Joseph sat, privy to the men’s spreads. Gerry carried a stone with a hole in it that he let Joseph touch, “For luck.” He wore a bracelet of hammered metal, and on it, a woman’s name had been melted over. His boots were shiny. An oilcloth coat hung loosely across his shoulders.
From Gerry, Joseph learned hand signals for revealing the other men’s cards. “No one’ll know,” Gerry said, “if you’re careful. Why would a poor lad such as you, Joe, give a fig what they were dealt?” They’d all seen what had happened to Mam. Even though Joseph refused to remember the details exactly, other passengers’ memories made him an object of pity, not suspicion. In exchange for Joseph mastering the signs, Gerry took him on, just as Old Ciara took on Colleen — only she did it for nothing. She had tried to hug Joseph, but he’d screamed at her touch and bitten her. Later, when no one was looking, he’d bitten his own arm very hard, to make things even. Both bites bled. Ciara kept hers wrapped with a strip of cloth and didn’t touch Joseph again.
Gerry’s presence was a comfort; as the men played cards, the boy’s hands were active. Gerry won round after round until he took a break from winning. “We have to lose sometimes — or the real game’s over.”
Under Gerry’s tutelage, Joseph also learned to smoke. The smoke burned its own language into Joseph’s lungs before he let it loose in clouds that made the men’s faces vague. The haze also obscured Joseph’s memory of his father’s face. The last time he had seen him, the man placed coins into Joseph’s open hand, saying, “You’re a strong lad, Joe.” Joseph often called upon the smoke-haze to interfere with his gift for memorizing detail.
“What’s that you’ve got in your hand, then, lad?” Gerry asked on the fourth day, long after the last game had finished and Joseph paused from practising his shuffles.
He stared at the card he’d forgotten he was holding. The ace of spades.
On the night of Mam’s death, Joseph must have slept because he had no memories. The next night, when the lights went off, Joseph wished that he could sleep again, like Colleen, but he lay awake with his arm around his tiny sister, relieved that she was quiet, but tormented by pictures that came, unbidden, to take over his mind. When grief and horror arrived to crush him, Joseph crept through a passage to find Gerry, sitting up with the card players. Gerry let him sip from a whiskey bottle so that sleep would come. Whiskey drinking was warm and liminal, a place between waking and darkness where Joseph could remember the things he wanted to, instead of the things he didn’t.
He remembered Annie.
Joseph was grateful for her presence, even when she was merely a recollection in a crowded, groaning, fetid ship. Joseph recalled his mother’s faraway words: “The baby’s name will be Annie or George.”
“She’s Annie, Mam,” Joseph had confidently declared. Mam had laughed and ruffled his hair. She’d held him close.
Now Joseph’s gratitude for his first memory of Annie knotted his stomach, as he realized that he could not fully hear the way Mam had said those words to him. Still, he remembered the reedy smell of her dress when she squeezed him, and her black hair straying from the pins after her shift at Darkley Mill. Joseph’s hair was dark and wavy like Mam’s. “Like your Uncle Seamus’,” she had told him many times, smiling. When she smiled, if Joseph was lucky, she would tell him a story — of the Red Branch Knights, the queens and kings of Ulster, enchanted animals, and sorceresses. He could almost feel the skin on Mam’s fingers, rubbed smooth with salve, and how she’d stroked his cheek. “Annie or George.” Closing his eyes more tightly helped Joseph to hear her voice clearly, as did another gulp of Gerry’s whiskey.
Months ago, Joseph had already seen Annie spinning a secret beam of light, little bigger than a spider, in Mam’s womb. Would Annie look like Colleen? After that, Annie’s spirit had visited him at night when Mam was sleeping. “I am here,” she’d whispered in the darkness.
Joseph could not organize Mam’s death into a coherent story. A spell had killed Mam. That much he knew, because he had watched it happen. Her medicine should have helped, but —
Nothing.
His cries had brought a crowd of people, who stood gasping and whispering. Joseph hated his cries for bringing them. He hated the circle of onlookers.
“Close her eyes.”
“Get the Captain. Something needs to be done with her.”
And he hated Old Ciara, clutching Colleen to her hip.
“I knew her. The boy and this wee girl are hers.”
Joseph stared at his useless hands. Mam’s medicine bottles were tucked in his sack. They couldn’t save her.
When the Captain came, Joseph shrank as the man placed a hand on his shoulder.
He wanted them to go away, to leave him al
2
On Joseph’s second night of whiskey, more wins led to mounting grumbles from the card players. He settled under Gerry’s arm, swigged from the bottle, and let himself be lulled by the sound of the men’s talk, even though their talk was agitated. As discussion gave way to bickering, Joseph turned his attention to the prayers in his speller, and to his own petitions written in the margins. “Dear God, Holy Mother, and Jesus, please save Mam. Dear God, Holy Mother, and Jesus, please save Colleen. Dear God, Holy Mother, and Jesus, please save me from the sin of my very being.” He added with the stub-end of a pencil: “Save Gerry, too.”
A gull had flown into steerage and someone had swung a suitcase at it rather than put up with the commotion. Joseph studied the dead bird on the floor beside the card players. He sketched the gull’s head, its open eye, on the page across from his petitions. Then, with whiskey filling the place where uninvited memories might have haunted him, Joseph stopped thinking — about the gull, about the card players. Instead, Joseph thought about Granny Dolan, whose presence seemed to follow him across the sea, and about Annie.
Annie’s spirit had visited Joseph many times in the months leading up to their departure from Ireland. He’d felt as though he’d been waiting for her his whole life. He could not tell Mam, but he drew Annie in the basic lines that a stick could make in the mud. He drew Annie in the ashes, and on stone, with a potshard. He made Annie’s shape in rushes and twigs, and he planted her in the winter garden.
Joseph had not felt or done such things before Colleen’s birth. The arrival of his sister two years ago had seemed as straightforward as a dumpling spooned onto his plate. Colleen was bland and simple, and usually wet.
Joseph could not talk with Granny Dolan about Annie.
“Because she isn’t born yet. And Granny Dolan is not your real granny,” Mam said. Real Granny was nestled in the earth. “She’s in heaven,” Mam added.
“In the flowers,” Annie whispered in the dark, when Mam couldn’t hear.
Joseph knew the true reason: because Mam wasn’t married. Granny Dolan, and indeed, all of Darkley, had been bothered enough when Colleen was born. Joseph wondered if Annie had seen the Dolans yet, and if Annie was one of the trouble-makers in their shared garden, where the pots were sometimes broken, and Aideen Dolan’s baskets pulled to pieces. Prayers were said over such occurrences, and blackthorn branches hung over the door. Once, a whole supper was left in the back garden to appease the small ones.
“They live here too — keep the Virgin working overtime. It’s all travail, if not sin, Nora Conlon,” Granny Dolan had said more than once.
Joseph had often talked to Granny. He chatted on and on about the visions that he saw, just never about Annie. “A gift for pictures is what you have, boy,” she would tell him when he showed her his drawings and spoke of his dreams. “Lord knows what you have is a gift, a strange one. As strange as those grey eyes of yours, too big for a child, too old. The pictures in your head — you mustn’t speak of such things to others. They won’t understand you. I say it for your own protection, Joe; you’re different.”
Yet Mam had always encouraged him to speak freely of his dreams, and he’d tell her anything to see the burdens lift from her.
Granny Dolan said the Virgin Mary loved all children, even the ones who were different. “And she’s your mother too, Joseph, your Holy Mother.” He didn’t want another mother, but he couldn’t say that to Granny. Instead Joseph had said: “Tell me the story of that English king,” because it often produced a treacle scone or, if he was lucky, a wedge of pratie oaten. Granny Dolan shook her head. “Henry Eight tried to take Our Lady’s power right out. She made him uneasy, you see.”
And so began another history — one that Joseph could eat his way through and lick his fingers to.
Granny Dolan knew all the stories and she observed the feasts of every saint. Her house on Mill Row was often busy with visitors, looking for guidance. “Make no mistake, boy, I belong to the Catholic Church: the One True Church that is Mary’s Church. In my house you will give thanks to Mary and pray for her son Jesus to take away your sins. Your very being is a sin, Joe.”
“If He takes away the sin of my being, He takes me away. Where would I go then, Granny Dolan?”
Granny never explained.
Joseph remembered Granny Dolan particularly blessed with a shank of mutton as big as her arm. She had a gift for cutting, one passed down by her father, who could trim a pigeon to feed an army, and who had got them through the Great Hunger by following the tip of his knife. “He could cut meat from a rock, my father,” she said. “Have a piece of this bounty, boy, and thank the Lord for it. Thank Saint Agnes too, because it is her faith that we praise today. And the Blessed Virgin Mary — to take away the sin of your being.”
Granny Dolan made the sign of the cross and offered the boy a cleanly severed strip of flesh before offering further counsel. Then: “Adam and Eve did a bad thing, so bad that they were accursed. The very strangeness of it angered the Lord, who saw sin each time a child was made — and greater sin in those who come to this world without fathers. Bastard children are the true children of Eve, and Eve was marked by Lucifer, who lives in hell. And because hell touches us, we can never be fully free of it, but for the power.”
“What power?”
“The power of light, boy.” She took his hands in hers and looked into his eyes. “The Virgin and her child, Baby Jesus. Even the greatest sinner can be saved if he chooses the light.”
“Even Henry Eight who killed his wives and made the Protestants?”
“Well, of course, I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?”
“Because I’m not God.”
“I have a father,” Joseph said.
“Ay, boy. Another thing best kept a secret.”
Joseph sat alone where Mam had lain, creating a memory. In his invention, he sat beside Mam for a long time after she was still. He closed her green eyes gently and set his ear to the bump that was Annie. Then he quietly asked the Captain to have Mam buried at sea. Captain Lewis told him: “She’ll go free, and very gentle. You don’t have to watch.” But in his mind’s creation, Joseph did watch, and made sure that holy words were said for her. Joseph imagined Mam on the sandy bottom of the sea at a table set for company. “You’re my love,” she said. Yet each night, despite Gerry’s whiskey, Joseph awoke in a salt sweat, realizing that he could not swim back. Despite his panic upon waking, Joseph preferred the sea burial story to thinking of Mam’s body in a refrigerated box somewhere in the hold.
When terror came, Joseph whispered stories of Ulster to Annie. He told her about Queen Macha’s race against King Conchobar’s fastest horses, and how, before she died, she gave birth to twins who both blessed and cursed the Red Branch Knights. “Ulster’s warriors would be very strong,” Joseph told her, “but they’d also have a weakness. Sometimes they’d be sick.” He told about the fight for the Brown Bull of Cooley, and how the bull’s hoof-prints were still visible in a rock in Armagh. Joseph told Annie many tales of the great warrior Cuchulainn, until a stranger’s deep voice cut through steerage: “Enough, boy! I can’t sleep with your prattle.” Joseph did not tell Annie the story of the children who were turned into swans. Something in Mam’s last version of that story had bothered him. In silence, he picked up his speller and wrote a new prayer: “Dear God, Holy Mother, and Jesus please bless Annie.” Not once before the sea journey had Joseph thought to bless Annie, because he’d assumed that she was safe with the Holy Ghost.
But the Holy Ghost worried him now.
Joseph sketched in the margins and over the psalms until morning. He didn’t dare sleep.
During the day, when he was not with the card players, Joseph kept his speller with him. The animal pictures soothed him: Rat, Rabbit, Badger, Dog, Kingfisher, Frog …
