The China Factory. Mary Costello

surveyed the whole place. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth. ‘Let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God, cry mightily unto God, for the Day of Judgement is at Hand…’ He spoke slowly. The porter ran along under the trees, bending low. ‘I hear the sound of the Angel’s trumpet…’ His volume increased. ‘The angel of death will drag your souls from your mouths and will smite your faces… For the seventh seal has been opened by the Lamb of God… and the great harlot has been destroyed… and the beast has been set loose… and the oceans have turned to blood.’

      A shot rang out and then another, and he jumped to the ground and fired a volley into the sky. I covered my ears and sank lower. There was silence then. When I looked up he was walking over the windscreen and onto the roof of the car. His steps were delicate, graceful.

      ‘And I saw a great white throne, and the earth and the heavens fled away. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened and the dead were judged according to their works…’

      His voice had begun to tremble and I thought: He will cry, and we will be saved. He leapt down and started to reload the gun.

      And then I turned my head and saw Gus in his overalls come striding out of the factory yard, with his arms swinging by his side. He stepped onto the grass and crossed the lawn, and, as he drew near, the madman raised his head and smiled. ‘Here come a man, here come a man,’ he called out, and he snapped closed the barrel of the gun and I felt the echo of its chamber inside my head. The madman’s eyes opened wide, and then Gus put his hand on the madman’s shoulder and drew his head close and said something, and then the two heads were bent and moving and talking. I thought an army of soldiers would leap over the wall in that second and wrestle the madman to the ground. But nothing stirred. Everything had ground to a halt. And then the two men turned and began to cross the lawn side by side, and they stepped over the kerb and onto the driveway and as they walked Gus put out his arm and the madman placed the gun in Gus’s open hand. They walked to the entrance and passed through the gate and turned left up the Mervue Road and disappeared out of view.

      I see news clips on TV sometimes of men going berserk in public places, men’s minds going awry, and I think of how close it came that day. I don’t know what Gus said to the madman. Ten minutes later he strolled back in the drive, walked up the granite steps of the Visitors’ Centre, crossed the blue carpet and handed the gun in at Reception. Then he walked down the steps and around the back and for the rest of the afternoon he hauled his wagons back and forth across the factory floor until the hooter sounded at five o’clock.

      I worked out the rest of the summer in the art department. Martha set her wedding date for July of the following year and I bought a round of drinks in the Half Way House on my last Friday of that summer. Marion stayed off work for two weeks and when she returned the girls closed ranks around her. I tried to imagine the two men strolling up the Mervue Road that day and Marion’s incomprehension when she came upon them, and then the slow dawning reality at the sight of the gun, and the look that she and Gus must have exchanged as he handed Vinnie into her care.

      Sometimes in the months following I’d be sitting in a packed lecture hall and I’d think of the spongers at their tables and the water turning white in their basins and every minute and hour unfolding, interminably, day after day. I’d think of my own family in the warm kitchen at night with the noise and the arguments and the TV blaring and Gus, alone with his Western novels, finding fidelity in far-off men, and I’d think of his hand reaching out and touching Vinnie’s shoulder that day and the rarity of that, for Gus, the rarity of any human touch.

      And then in my last year in college, during the coldest winter of my youth, my mother wrote me a rare letter. I sat at a table by an upstairs window in a redbrick house on Dublin’s northside. I had spent the evening in the college library and my head was brimming with lines from John Donne’s God sonnets. When I opened the envelope a fifty pound note fell from the pages of the letter. She wrote of the comings and goings on the farm, of my father and my younger siblings and their school work. And then:

       I am sorry to tell you that your old friend Baby Face was found dead the other day. It was an awful sight, I believe, Lord have mercy on him. They think he went outside to get water from a barrel and he must have collapsed into the barrel somehow—he must have had a massive heart attack and fallen over, and that night was the start of this freezing cold weather we’re having and didn’t the water freeze solid, and that’s the way the poor fellow was found. Everyone is talking about it. The funeral is tomorrow at eleven. Your father and I will go. He had no one left belonging to him. An awful ending entirely, the poor creature…

      The sight of a bible in a hotel room now, or a drunk in a doorway, or my mother setting down her china cups, or even King Kong, all call Gus to mind. Or the word meek. Or a boy, any boy, any boy’s eyes, evokes the small boy tethered in the sun and the thoughts that must have assailed him all day long. I remember Gus’s aloofness inside the factory, and I know now that he was sparing me, that he understood how our association would contaminate me in the eyes of others. I remember the car journeys, the odours, and my own Judas moment. I think of him standing at his back door at night looking up at the drift of stars, pondering last things. I try to imagine what went through his mind when he staggered out to the barrel that cold night, or as he strode across the factory lawn that summer’s day, bearing all of our realities in each stride. I think that something must have escaped and drained out of him into the other man that day. I wonder if he’d had an inkling that a gap would open and he would lever his way in between two orders, two domains, and when he reached out his hand and leaned his head towards Vinnie’s, was it to the man or to the madness he spoke?

      I think of our blood tie sometimes, mine and Gus’s, and the ties that bind us all. I would have liked to have taken him with me that autumn, taken my own family too and the factory girls and made them all fit into my new world. I would have liked to have mitigated the loss and the guilt I felt at leaving them behind, the feeling that I was escaping and walking away. It is not an easy walk, I longed to tell them, but I’m not sure anyone was listening.

      YOU FILL UP MY SENSES

      She loves when she is alone with her mother in the car, like this. They are driving to check on the cattle and sheep in the summer grazing seven miles away. They stop at Burke’s for petrol and buy loose pineapple cubes and cigarettes. Her mother smokes two cigarettes very quickly as if she’ll be caught. Her mother never smokes in front of her grandmother. At night when her grandmother has gone to bed, and her mother and father and all the children are together in the kitchen—a normal family at last—she is happiest. Then her mother puts her youngest sister up to bed and afterwards walks along the landing calling out Holy Mary Mind Me so that her little sister will hear her voice and not be afraid, and her sister calls back Holy Mary Mind Me too, and they keep up this singsong as her mother comes down the stairs and in along the hall. Then her mother is in the kitchen making the supper. She is humming softly. The television is on. She watches her mother putting out the bowls and spoons, the sugar bowl and the milk jug. She loves her mother very much. When she grows up she wants to be exactly like her.

      They walk to opposite ends of the land—her mother to count the cattle and she the sheep. She is nine now. As she tramples through the fields she forgets all about the sheep. She stands under a tree looking up at the undersides of the leaves and the little veins almost make her weak. She walks on, avoiding the thistles and the cow dung until she gets to the hill. There are crooked stones on the far side where unbaptised babies were buried long ago. She stands at the top of the hill. She opens her arms wide and runs down the hill, her hair blowing, her eyes watering in the breeze. She goes up the hill again and stands still and starts to sing. She raises her face to the sun. She would like to be a singer on TV. She would like to make her mother and father proud. She would like to bring tears to their eyes.

      Her mother is not cross when she finds her—her mother is never cross with her. Together they start to count the sheep. How many are in the other field, her mother asks her, and she runs to the gap and counts them and runs back again, breathless, and the number is right. They walk back to the car. She hands her mother a pineapple cube from the paper