(no subject)
Inspired by Archers of Loaf's "Harnessed in Slums." All hail Audrey.
Connor and Murphy are, in fact, just about shorter than all their cousins.
Connor blames this on the fact that Murphy always used to eat more than his share at the dinner table, the idea being that Connor was destined to be taller than Murphy and that Murphy kept him from achieving his full potential by ensuring that he was malnourished. Back when they were still living with Ma, Connor would typically say this while they were in the kitchen eating, and while he still had food in his mouth, Murphy would reply that this is just and proper retribution for the fact that Connor probably took up more than his share of space in the womb.
Connor will look at Murphy at this point. "Yeah, that might be true," he'll say. "But you've been eating more than your share for only fuck knows how many years. It's not fair, is it, to punish me for the rest of my life for something that I couldn't help and didn't know?"
Their mother is usually standing at the stove, lighting her cigarette off the gas. Murphy learned how to light his cigarettes that way from their mother, and when she straightens back up, blowing a stream of dense white smoke out, she can't but help and look at the pair of them, squabbling at table and almost coming to blows even though they're inseparable in a way that goes beyond even normal, tight-knit brotherness.
And whenever she looks at them like that, with the smoke rising up between her and them and blurring the shapes of their faces and making them look older, Mrs. McManus can't help but know that they are, indeed, being punished for something they couldn't help and didn't know but had nevertheless managed to incorporate and follow:
Their father.
***
Connor inherits his gift of foreign languages. Murphy inherits his father's gift in the English language, and Mrs. McManus will let them study up all they want of his old language pocket dictionaries and grammars and buy them a broken shortwave radio that a cousin of theirs fixes up can so they can tune into European radio broadcasts and get some idea of how ridiculous their accents are, but what their mother permits neither of them to inherit is their father's sense of politics.
She makes them listen to the BBC in equal proportion to their cousins. She teaches them to shoot, yes, and when an uncle of theirs dies in a traffic accident that involves a British rifle being put against his head during a traffic stop, she lets them go to the closed-casket funeral with their cousins and shows up at the wake to console the widow, a friend of hers from school who is six months pregnant at the time her husband dies.
But when all three of them get home late that night, even though they have school the next morning, she makes Murphy go to their bedroom and bring out the shortwave radio and set it on the table. And while all of them are still in their funeral clothes, while the boys are drowsy with sleep and from having run around all day with their cousins, she makes them listen to the BBC interview a woman whose soldier son was dragged out behind an alley and shot. After that, there's a man who talks about how his wife went out shopping and came back in pieces from a republican bombing, and after that --
Connor's head starts to droop onto the table after a little bit, and Mrs. McManus shakes him back awake.
***
In a way, the boys are disconnected from their cousins even while they're living in Ireland. Mrs. McManus doesn't exactly make them stop seeing their family - God knows that would be impossible. They've got a houseful of cousins down the street, a great uncle around the block, and two sets of grandparents in the church graveyard within walking distance, so their roots go deep in this little corner of the city, but she doesn't exactly let the boys be raised by their cousins. Mrs. McManus doesn't exactly lock the boys in the house while she's away at work, but she makes out a list of chores that they have to have done by the time she gets home, and it's plenty enough to keep them out of trouble, and there's a hiding waiting for the one who doesn't keep up his end of the chore sheet.
Murphy cooks. Connor cleans. Both of them are responsible for keeping the pantry stocked and making sure that there's always food in the house and that they keep current with the bills, too, as much as they're able to. Mrs. McManus signs both of them up to be altar boys even though Murphy shows about as much talent at swinging a censer as a mule does. She makes both of them quit again when hears the priest give a sermon that could be interpreted as being too republican-friendly for her tastes.
A friend who remembers how Colleen used to sit with the rest of them and watch the boys go by, who remembers the Irish flag at Colleen's wedding, asks her whether she still supports the republican cause.
Colleen snorts. She hasn't seen many of her friends these days, what with her taking extra shifts at the hospital and with them almost half-avoiding her now that she's made it clear that she doesn't want Connor and Murphy out of the house in the afternoons when she's not there.
"Of course I do," Colleen says. "I just don't want my boys growing up to support it, that's all."
***
Pa McManus tries to teach the boys the McManus family prayer before he goes, but they're too young to actually learn it from him. They actually have no memory of the prayer on his lips at all. After all, he leaves when they're a little past two years old, when Connor has just managed his first and it's only the process of elimination which makes them realize that this man is, indeed, their father when they see him twenty-some years later.
The way that the boys actually learn the prayer is from their uncles and their older cousins - they actually learn it the night after that uncle's funeral, when they're both a few months shy of eleven years old. There's the wake, and then there's the funeral, and afterwards, there's a bit of a gathering in the house of one of the neighbors because the widow looks poorly and because there are some few things in the house that need to be put right. Creaky boards nailed down, screws tightened and lightbulbs changed, it seems. There are pots of tea and trays and trays of pastries, and by dusk, Murphy has eaten so much that he's fallen asleep in the coat closet, his dark head almost disappearing into the pile of black coats and his feet sticking out.
When twilight is settling down around the garden and just about all the women have sent their children home, Connor shakes Murphy awake, tells him to keep his mouth shut, and sneaks him out back, around the kitchen, to the cellar door. Murphy has actually missed dinner, and Connor has actually come to fetch him for dish duty, which is why he's wearing a white apron stained down the front with grease over his funeral suit and why Connor has his shirt sleeves rolled and suds up to the elbow.
Murphy is about to say something about how that apron makes Connor look like a girl, but Connor puts his finger to Murph's lips and gestures for his brother to lay his head against the door leading down to the basement, then look through the tiny crack at the top of the steps.
Years later, Murphy will tell Mrs. McManus that he had nightmares after hearing those BBC broadcasts. What he says, actually, is that Connor doesn't sleep so sound for a while after that night, but Mrs. McManus just sort of smiles because she remembers finding the two of them in a tangle on the floor the morning afterwards, Connor's arms wrapped around Murphy's just as tight as Murphy's were around him.
She remembers, too, listening to them through the walls when one of them would start awake at night, and sometimes, seeing how absolutely uninterested they are in anything that doesn't directly bear into their own lives, she regrets having cut them off from politics and the idea of formal justice so much so that they'd end up taking things into their own hands. When then they come back to Ireland and tell her about what they did in Boston, she wonders whether she might have been wrong to emphasize the idea of murder being bound up with politics - after all, they don't think about the murders they committed as being murders. For them, murder is about politics. She's rubbed the link between injustice and murder deep into their hearts, and she's also engraved the link between politics and murder. Them going after the Mafia men wasn't about politics, so it wasn't about murder.
"It was about justice, Ma," Connor says, wipes his hands on a dishrag, then kisses her on top of her head and steps off to the bathroom to shower.
And in the end, Mrs. McManus is pragmatist. It's how she has survived all these years. It's how she has managed to live all these years with the memory of the handsome young man she loved and married and lost and no longer loved, how she raised two boys on her own and steered them clear of trouble.
When she thinks about it some more, she decides she's not entirely too regretful because it's gotten the two of them to adulthood more or less alive and without having been in prison. Half their cousins have served or are serving terms; no less than three out of the two dozen are dead, and a fourth is crippled, whereas Murphy is still alive to steal food off Connor's plate, and Connor still uses up all the hot water in the house when he takes a shower.
And when Murphy tells her that he and Connor used to have nightmares about the radio broadcast she made them listen to, she tells him that catching him and Connor standing there at the cellar door, listening to the one in two McManus men who was not in exile, dead, or in prison, listening to them recite the McManus prayer while they were pulling on their balaclavas and with smuggled semiautomatics laid out on the cellar table -- Mrs. McManus says to Murphy that no, she does sort of know what it was like having a nightmare every night for a week because at that point, she suspected that she was living in one.
Connor and Murphy are, in fact, just about shorter than all their cousins.
Connor blames this on the fact that Murphy always used to eat more than his share at the dinner table, the idea being that Connor was destined to be taller than Murphy and that Murphy kept him from achieving his full potential by ensuring that he was malnourished. Back when they were still living with Ma, Connor would typically say this while they were in the kitchen eating, and while he still had food in his mouth, Murphy would reply that this is just and proper retribution for the fact that Connor probably took up more than his share of space in the womb.
Connor will look at Murphy at this point. "Yeah, that might be true," he'll say. "But you've been eating more than your share for only fuck knows how many years. It's not fair, is it, to punish me for the rest of my life for something that I couldn't help and didn't know?"
Their mother is usually standing at the stove, lighting her cigarette off the gas. Murphy learned how to light his cigarettes that way from their mother, and when she straightens back up, blowing a stream of dense white smoke out, she can't but help and look at the pair of them, squabbling at table and almost coming to blows even though they're inseparable in a way that goes beyond even normal, tight-knit brotherness.
And whenever she looks at them like that, with the smoke rising up between her and them and blurring the shapes of their faces and making them look older, Mrs. McManus can't help but know that they are, indeed, being punished for something they couldn't help and didn't know but had nevertheless managed to incorporate and follow:
Their father.
***
Connor inherits his gift of foreign languages. Murphy inherits his father's gift in the English language, and Mrs. McManus will let them study up all they want of his old language pocket dictionaries and grammars and buy them a broken shortwave radio that a cousin of theirs fixes up can so they can tune into European radio broadcasts and get some idea of how ridiculous their accents are, but what their mother permits neither of them to inherit is their father's sense of politics.
She makes them listen to the BBC in equal proportion to their cousins. She teaches them to shoot, yes, and when an uncle of theirs dies in a traffic accident that involves a British rifle being put against his head during a traffic stop, she lets them go to the closed-casket funeral with their cousins and shows up at the wake to console the widow, a friend of hers from school who is six months pregnant at the time her husband dies.
But when all three of them get home late that night, even though they have school the next morning, she makes Murphy go to their bedroom and bring out the shortwave radio and set it on the table. And while all of them are still in their funeral clothes, while the boys are drowsy with sleep and from having run around all day with their cousins, she makes them listen to the BBC interview a woman whose soldier son was dragged out behind an alley and shot. After that, there's a man who talks about how his wife went out shopping and came back in pieces from a republican bombing, and after that --
Connor's head starts to droop onto the table after a little bit, and Mrs. McManus shakes him back awake.
***
In a way, the boys are disconnected from their cousins even while they're living in Ireland. Mrs. McManus doesn't exactly make them stop seeing their family - God knows that would be impossible. They've got a houseful of cousins down the street, a great uncle around the block, and two sets of grandparents in the church graveyard within walking distance, so their roots go deep in this little corner of the city, but she doesn't exactly let the boys be raised by their cousins. Mrs. McManus doesn't exactly lock the boys in the house while she's away at work, but she makes out a list of chores that they have to have done by the time she gets home, and it's plenty enough to keep them out of trouble, and there's a hiding waiting for the one who doesn't keep up his end of the chore sheet.
Murphy cooks. Connor cleans. Both of them are responsible for keeping the pantry stocked and making sure that there's always food in the house and that they keep current with the bills, too, as much as they're able to. Mrs. McManus signs both of them up to be altar boys even though Murphy shows about as much talent at swinging a censer as a mule does. She makes both of them quit again when hears the priest give a sermon that could be interpreted as being too republican-friendly for her tastes.
A friend who remembers how Colleen used to sit with the rest of them and watch the boys go by, who remembers the Irish flag at Colleen's wedding, asks her whether she still supports the republican cause.
Colleen snorts. She hasn't seen many of her friends these days, what with her taking extra shifts at the hospital and with them almost half-avoiding her now that she's made it clear that she doesn't want Connor and Murphy out of the house in the afternoons when she's not there.
"Of course I do," Colleen says. "I just don't want my boys growing up to support it, that's all."
***
Pa McManus tries to teach the boys the McManus family prayer before he goes, but they're too young to actually learn it from him. They actually have no memory of the prayer on his lips at all. After all, he leaves when they're a little past two years old, when Connor has just managed his first and it's only the process of elimination which makes them realize that this man is, indeed, their father when they see him twenty-some years later.
The way that the boys actually learn the prayer is from their uncles and their older cousins - they actually learn it the night after that uncle's funeral, when they're both a few months shy of eleven years old. There's the wake, and then there's the funeral, and afterwards, there's a bit of a gathering in the house of one of the neighbors because the widow looks poorly and because there are some few things in the house that need to be put right. Creaky boards nailed down, screws tightened and lightbulbs changed, it seems. There are pots of tea and trays and trays of pastries, and by dusk, Murphy has eaten so much that he's fallen asleep in the coat closet, his dark head almost disappearing into the pile of black coats and his feet sticking out.
When twilight is settling down around the garden and just about all the women have sent their children home, Connor shakes Murphy awake, tells him to keep his mouth shut, and sneaks him out back, around the kitchen, to the cellar door. Murphy has actually missed dinner, and Connor has actually come to fetch him for dish duty, which is why he's wearing a white apron stained down the front with grease over his funeral suit and why Connor has his shirt sleeves rolled and suds up to the elbow.
Murphy is about to say something about how that apron makes Connor look like a girl, but Connor puts his finger to Murph's lips and gestures for his brother to lay his head against the door leading down to the basement, then look through the tiny crack at the top of the steps.
Years later, Murphy will tell Mrs. McManus that he had nightmares after hearing those BBC broadcasts. What he says, actually, is that Connor doesn't sleep so sound for a while after that night, but Mrs. McManus just sort of smiles because she remembers finding the two of them in a tangle on the floor the morning afterwards, Connor's arms wrapped around Murphy's just as tight as Murphy's were around him.
She remembers, too, listening to them through the walls when one of them would start awake at night, and sometimes, seeing how absolutely uninterested they are in anything that doesn't directly bear into their own lives, she regrets having cut them off from politics and the idea of formal justice so much so that they'd end up taking things into their own hands. When then they come back to Ireland and tell her about what they did in Boston, she wonders whether she might have been wrong to emphasize the idea of murder being bound up with politics - after all, they don't think about the murders they committed as being murders. For them, murder is about politics. She's rubbed the link between injustice and murder deep into their hearts, and she's also engraved the link between politics and murder. Them going after the Mafia men wasn't about politics, so it wasn't about murder.
"It was about justice, Ma," Connor says, wipes his hands on a dishrag, then kisses her on top of her head and steps off to the bathroom to shower.
And in the end, Mrs. McManus is pragmatist. It's how she has survived all these years. It's how she has managed to live all these years with the memory of the handsome young man she loved and married and lost and no longer loved, how she raised two boys on her own and steered them clear of trouble.
When she thinks about it some more, she decides she's not entirely too regretful because it's gotten the two of them to adulthood more or less alive and without having been in prison. Half their cousins have served or are serving terms; no less than three out of the two dozen are dead, and a fourth is crippled, whereas Murphy is still alive to steal food off Connor's plate, and Connor still uses up all the hot water in the house when he takes a shower.
And when Murphy tells her that he and Connor used to have nightmares about the radio broadcast she made them listen to, she tells him that catching him and Connor standing there at the cellar door, listening to the one in two McManus men who was not in exile, dead, or in prison, listening to them recite the McManus prayer while they were pulling on their balaclavas and with smuggled semiautomatics laid out on the cellar table -- Mrs. McManus says to Murphy that no, she does sort of know what it was like having a nightmare every night for a week because at that point, she suspected that she was living in one.