Life Sentences

by Billy O’Callaghan

Genres: Literary Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

“O’Callaghan writes with a bright, enlivening emotional palette and a penetrating eye for the details of family history. A deeply felt and distinctive work by a real craftsman.”—Kirkus (starred review)


One Irish family’s fight for survival makes for an unforgettable tale of love, abandonment, hunger, and redemption.

At just sixteen, Nancy Martin leaves the small island of Cape Clear for the mainland, the only member of her family to survive the effects of the Great Famine. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she is irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love affair and a devastating chain of events that continues to unfold over three generations.


Spanning more than a century, Billy O’Callaghan’s weaves together the journey of an Irish family determined against all odds to be free. In 1920, Nancy’s son Jer has lived through battles of his own as a soldier in the Great War. Now drunk in a jail cell, he struggles to piece together where he has come from, and who he wants to be. And in the early 1980s, Jer’s youngest child Nellie is nearing the end of her life in a council house just steps away from her childhood home; remembering the night when she and her family stole back something that was rightfully theirs, she imagines what lies ahead for those who will survive her.

This moving portrait of life in Ireland is set in the village where O’Callaghan’s family has lived for generations, and is partly based on stories told by his parents and grandparents. His writing is imbued with lived experience and hard-earned truths, creating a novel so rich in life and empathy it is impossible to let go of his characters. An ambitious and lyrical family saga, this novel confirms Billy O’Callaghan as one of the finest living Irish writers.

 

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Release date: April 5, 2022

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher

Print pages: 242

Sample

Jer

1920

I’d been in Barrett’s pub since six, drinking fast and heavy. The few other men at the bar saw enough to keep to themselves, and though I had come straight from the fields, having spent the day since first light cutting grass for silage, and after the second pint had no more money in my pocket, the drink kept coming at me and I kept putting it away. A couple of hours in, I’d yet to feel the effect, and it was because of weariness finally, and maybe also because of a need to be alone, that I gave up my place at the counter and moved instead to the bench seat in shadow at the end of the lounge, with a table for my glass and the wall to support my back.

Around nine, the guards had entered. Looking for me. I tried to tell them that whatever I’d said earlier at the bar meant nothing, that it was just the porter talking, but Tom Canniffe had been in the Munster Fusiliers with me, and the other two were old RGA men, gunners, and they knew. They knew me, but they also knew themselves, what they were capable of and what they’d have done had they been in my position, and it was Tom, the best of them and the least imposing, though only by degrees, who sat down opposite me and who put the cuffs on the table and asked, in a low voice, whether there was need for such things or if I was going to behave myself and come along quietly. Speaking in that murmur, as if from somewhere far away, looking at me but not meeting my stare, focusing instead on a point near my heart, while the other two, Larry Regan and Pat Hegarty, remained a couple of paces back on either side of him, relaxed but ready. Big men both, my size or near as be damned, Regan like a bull across the shoulders, Hegarty not so broadly set but with the look of iron about his bones; they had always been good company to sup a pint with or to play a game of cards or billiards in the Hall. But Tom and I had shared the trenches, and had shaken and bled alongside one another in Flanders and at Loos, and because they each had their own such bond with other men, they understood that it was necessarily different between the two of us.

‘It’s just the drink, I’m telling you, lads. There’s no need for all this.’

‘Sure, what else would you say?’ Tom sighed, shaking his head. ‘Porter talk is usually just different shades of shite. But every now and then it tells us something worth heeding. The problem for us is knowing which is which.’

‘You can’t keep me from my own sister’s funeral, Tom,’ I said. ‘That’s not right. In nobody’s book is that right.’

‘Sergeant.’

‘What?’

‘It’s Sergeant now. You can’t be calling me Tom. Not while I’m on duty. The uniform. You know how it has to be.’

I considered him, and the others. Five years earlier, as big and friendly as these three were, I’d have tried to kick my way out of the room, and they’d have had to beat me into splinters to stop me. But in the time since the war I’d thickened and turned slow, and sitting there at the back table of Barrett’s lounge, this night of all nights, I felt as if I’d been knocked stupid by a shell. I suppose there are just times when the fight goes out of a man.

‘It’s for your own good,’ he went on, still not meeting my eye, still not raising his voice above a rustling. ‘It’s not that we want this. Don’t think that of us, Jer. Christ almighty, man. I’d be the same in your boots. But we cut you loose and, what? You go home and get a knife or a hatchet.’

I almost smiled, though happiness was a long way from my mouth.

‘I’d have no need of a blade,’ I said. My hands, flat before me on the table either side of my near-empty glass, pulled up into fists. ‘Not for a fella like Ned Spillane. Put the pair of us on a quiet road and I’d beat him into the ground. I’d butter the stones with him.’

‘Yeah,’ said Tom. ‘That’s what I mean. That’s what I’m talking about.’

All at once the air came out of me, and I felt my shoulders drop. ‘Except I wouldn’t,’ I told them. ‘He deserves every word of it and a time will likely come when he’ll get it yet. From someone else if not from me. But tomorrow is for other things. The day’s not about him. Mamie has to be buried right.’

‘Don’t make this worse than it needs to be,’ one of the men behind Tom said. I lifted my stare from one to the other but for some reason couldn’t decide which of them had spoken until Regan cleared his throat and added, in a different timbre: ‘The Sergeant’s right, Jer. Your word is solid with us. You know that. And we all accept that you mean what you say. But your man only has to come out with the wrong thing, or you’ll see him sobbing at the graveside or collecting sympathies, and you’ll snap. Not one of us here would blame you if you did, but if you go at him you’ll be banged away, and that’s just the fact of it. Maybe five years, maybe more, depending on how far you take it or if there’s any stopping yourself once you’ve started. And no one wants that; not us, not you, and certainly not your wife and kids. The cell is all right for a night, and sure we’ll sit up and chat with you if that’s what you want, and we’ll fill you with tea till you’re sick of the stuff. This is the best way.’

‘And if I refuse?’

Tom leaned in, and now his eyes did meet mine. For an instant we were lost again in the war, the two of us cowering down in the rubble of a destroyed cattle shed, with everything tasting and smelling of France. Beneath the crack of remembered gunfire, we glimpsed once more the truth of one another, and we clung to that from either end as a kind of lifeline.

‘Show a bit of sense, Jer,’ he said. ‘You were never the kind of man to start trouble when it could be avoided. And you were never stupid.’

‘You don’t know what you’re doing to me, Tom. What you’re taking. For a long time, there was only Mamie and me. I can’t begin to describe the times we went through. And when they bury her tomorrow they’ll be putting part of me into the ground, too. The best part. Christ, the wars I fought should have been for her. I should have gutted Spillane like a trout the very first time he glanced in her direction. Instead, I let it come to this.’

‘Take it easy, Jer. He didn’t kill her. Pleurisy, they’re saying. There’s plenty have died of that.’

‘He killed her. He might not have kicked the chair away but with his drinking he put the rope around her neck. He’s been killing her for years. And now she’s gone.’

Across the table, Tom was still studying me. Then, all at once, he seemed to slacken. He reached out for the handcuffs, and passed them to Regan. ‘It’s early enough yet,’ he said, without turning his head. ‘There’s time for a pint, I’d say, before we start heading back. Get them in, will you, Larry?’

Sometimes, when I’m alone and have a little time to ponder, I get to thinking about who I am. Not who I’m supposed to be, or trying or pretending to be, but my true self. Most of the time I keep that stuff blocked out, or buried way down, because it’s not an especially healthy train of thought, but occasionally, when my mood turns reflective, I open my mind to it.

I’ll be out walking in the fields at the top of Hilltown, with one of those pale springtime mornings on the slow rise, listening to the wind in the ironwoods and watching Snowy, my terrier pup, charge headlong into the furze, taunted into snarling chase by the flash of a passing hare or rabbit, only to reemerge minutes later, whimpering and reddened in a thousand small places by the bush’s green talons. Or I’ll be lying in bed, with my wife Mary locked in sleep beside me and the gentle sounds of the children stretched out on sacking on their part of the floor, and I’ll feel the night as a coffin’s lid pinned down across me from head to foot, and my breath comes as slow as I can make it and tastes always in my mouth and throat of dust, steel and burnt trees and, beneath that, rotten flesh, and, down at the very bottom, screams. It is 1920, and nearly four years since the Somme, but the flavours of that fighting haven’t left me.

Days, full of labour as they tend to be, limit time for reflection, and it is only above in those high Hilltown fields, or lying awake beneath the whole emptiness of night, that my mind is given ground to run. It has to do with the sweeping undulations of the land, and the flow of the sky above it. And it has to do with the deep, pulling gape of the small-hours air. With no work to hand, and nobody waiting on words, a man’s head gets full, and those things that can never be talked about are the things that swamp the brain to overflowing. Such as, who I am. Such as, where I properly belong.

The best water comes from a long way down, and is washed clean by the rocks below us; the deeper the source, the surer we can be of its purity. And in a similar way, we know people first by their name, by their kin. As people, we value pedigree. And if the name is just a name, as mine is, without foundation or depth, then we cannot properly identify them. Without knowing who and where he comes from, a man is a mystery to himself. In the barracks’ cell, somewhere among the small hours, I sit slumped over with my elbows on my knees and my fingers laced loosely together in a way that would be prayerful on another man. These are rooms built for stillness, and restriction, the bare brick walls close on every side, and the solitary window does nothing but tease with its revelation of a starless sky, the narrow meshed box of glass giving a suggestion of the confessional. But I sit facing away, keeping all of that resolutely behind me. The only light is that of a kerosene lantern spitting dull glow from the office at the far end of the hallway, and exhaustion finally suffocates me, causing my mind to sink slowly from the man I appear to be, down to the stranger lying half an inch beneath the surface of my skin.

When I was a boy, I liked listening for the wind. Time has elevated that to the very sound of my childhood. Because I couldn’t quite define its shape, I put my own shape to it, made an identity of the wind that was like my own but older, and I tried in every way I could to make sense of what that meant, where it came from. I spun a revenant from the many anonymous threads of myself, in an effort, I suppose, to create some sense of story, some lineage. The voice that filled the wind for me was never strong, but it was in some way familiar, like all those old songs I’d listened to and sort of knew. And searching as I was, I let myself believe that it was somehow the missing part of me, the part I’d been otherwise denied.

Even now, I see myself in shards of glass and find more of a sense of identity there than I can in the shaving mirror. Standing in the cold of an early morning in our backyard, staring at my reflection, the face I see in the rust-freckled glass is a strange one: flesh leaden with middle age; eyes wide in awe at having to fit myself, whoever I might be, to the tired features; skin lined by years and hanging from the scaffold of bone. The problem is that, with little knowledge of my family’s line, I am largely foreign to myself.

There is a name in my head that has gone unspoken for so long. Michael Egan. I have a face in mind, too, thin and haggard, old-eyed, jaw like the corners of a headstone, that I’ve carried forward with me from my childhood, one that I’d seen on maybe half a dozen occasions over as many years and always somehow at a mile’s remove, even when he and I found ourselves in the same room barely an arm’s reach apart. A face I wanted to be able to love, and to have in my life and know, without fear. Eyes the waxy wood-grey colour of cloud ahead of heavy rain, watching me almost by accident; and a voice, when it came, all air, as vague as something poorly remembered or that old sighing of the wind, saying, So you’re Jer, every time, every single time, as if confirmation were necessary, for both of us, in order to count as fact. So you’re Jer. Aren’t you getting big. I hope you’re being a good boy now for your mother. And Stand up straight, lad. The army won’t have you if you’re bent. Other words too, and they’re all inside me because I’ve saved them the way a starving bird will hoard scavenged crumbs, and when I can I take them out and repeat them, making the most of them, since they’re what I have. I did this in the trenches too, and on the flat, grassy plains of Bloemfontein, our battalion marching with the last of our strength out of the burnt days and into some of the reddest sunsets any of us had ever seen. A few words, the same few, over and over, and features of a face that I’ve memorised so it’s with me always. And that name. Michael Egan. Dead now, dead a long time, but one half of me then and still. I exist because of this man, but because of him I am also rootless. I made myself strong, in spite of him.

Life has given me what it’s given to most people I’ve known: occasional spans of calm that serve only to connect and intensify the turmoil. The shades might differ, but that is all. I took my first breath in a workhouse, the same as Mamie did. The Union, on the South Douglas Road, a place where everyone wept until tears stopped coming, and we were all prisoners of our circumstance until someone saw fit to turn us loose. Later on, we slept on straw, Mamie and I, huddled with our mother in corners of rat-infested tenement rooms, and ate whatever was going. There were plenty like us, we were not exceptional, and we did what it took to survive. Mamie was just two years older than me, but while we were very close as kids, you end up going where the road takes you. By the time I got out of the army—the first time, this was, back in ’08, because I went in again when the Great War began—she was already married to Ned Spillane, with an infant in her arms and a second on the way. I’d known of them being together from the letters she sent, and also from the things that Mary wrote—Mary, who I was at that time courting and saving what few shillings I could put by in order to wed. ...