The Keeper, Blog#5: The Keeper.

There he is—see him?—waddling down the shot-up path, with the Irish fighters all around him crying for their mithers to come with a nice piece of soda bread, and the British ones up in that beautiful hotel hooliganishly puffing at their briars, and all those scarves and palls and linens of smoke wavering and curling in the air—and history, history, they say, hanging in the balance, all that pressure,  the pressure of history . . . the Keeper is the gist.  His bucket brims with kitchen scraps and he carries it oh-so-steadily and oh-so-delicately down along the path to the ducks, not hurrying, mind you, because for some odd and irrational reason the Keeper is determined not to spill a morsel of his lovingly prepared scraps—not a jot, not a scintilla. He never has, in fact, all the times he’s fed these fussy and solemn-eyed companions of his over lo these many years. So he doesn’t mean to now, even with all these killers and screamers around him, and all this smoke in the air stinging his eyes and his lungs. He walks very slowly, very steadily, keeping the bucket as level as he can.

The trees are all shot up, there are branches and leaves ripped off and scattered about, and there are bits of clothing, too, everywhere: on the lower branches of the trees, in the bushes, on the path. The ground is scotched with skid marks from stray bullets, and the smoke, the smoke—it galls his eyes. He can taste carbon and flint on his tongue, which sticks out just a little from the corner of his drawn and hungry-looking mouth. There are a lot of curses in the air but there are also a lot of groans and whines and gagging and coughing and curdling yelps and sudden helpless gasps. Those are down in the trenches, which he walks past not knowing whether or not somebody will decide to take a shot at him. There is no reason, he knows, why someone wouldn’t take a shot at him.

His life doesn’t mean a thing.

Not to them, not to anybody.

His wife died six years ago, you see. He’s the only one around now to feed the ducks. He has to put together the scraps himself just as his wife did before she died, the same recipe. His wife, having never borne children, loved those ducks just as if they were her children, so the Keeper does too. She experimented for months and even years to find just the right mixture of kitchen scraps that would please those crazy apparitions in their innocence and also make them healthier and stronger. She always said, in fact, and with deep satisfaction, that her ducks were the strongest, healthiest ducks in all of Ireland—England, too, be damned with the lot of them, buck-toothed limeys and know-it-alls every last one.

At night, she would venture by herself down to the pond and talk with them, the ducks, mostly to tell them about St. Stephen, how he had brought Christ’s sacred blood in a chalice all the way from Palestine to Ireland without spilling a single drop, and how they were St. Stephen’s sacred ducks, anointed by that same blood, which had turned them white, not red, because white was the color of the triumphant purity of ducks. Night in and night out, from one season to the next, all throughout the years, no matter what sorrows and changes and witherings and wakenings happened to roll through her life, she told them that they would never perish, the ducks, they would never perish, because God loved them just as He loved Ireland and the whole world over, wherever there were ducks.

They’d understood her, too, the Keeper was sure of that. He knew that it was Joseph of Arimathea who’d brought the chalice, and that he’d brought it, not to Ireland, but to England—Albion they’d called it then—but he’d never told her that nor corrected her on any of the facts of anything she ever said, because she was inspired, he knew, and besides who cared? Who were the Brits to claim Christ’s blood for their own? Christ’s blood belonged to the whole world.

More importantly, he never told the ducks.

When his wife was on her deathbed, right there in that little hut of clay and wattles made, right there in the middle of St. Stephen’s Green, he’d brought all the ducks in to visit her, luring them with a trail of her special mix of kitchen scraps. They’d all thanked her in their own ways and, with that one syllable of eternal and universal significance, had with the greatest solemnity said goodbye to her in a moment of heart-breaking beauty and peace—although they pooped on the floor, a number of them, for which you couldn’t blame them, since they were only ducks.

After he’d lured them back out of the hut and on down to the pond with more kitchen scraps, the Keeper had made his way back and resumed his station at her bedside, holding her hand and smoothing her hair. When the eastern sky was just beginning to blush a little, she opened her eyes and looked at him and said, “Be kind to them, Eddie, dear. Feed them every day and tell them about Christ’s blood every night. And, Eddie—”

“Yes, my dear?”

“Don’t let anything happen to them. Guard them with your life.”

“I won’t let anything happen to them.”

She took a labored breath, then said: “The recipe for feeding them is in the top right drawer of the chiffonier, in my other brassiere, the lacy one with the cross-stitching. It’s in an envelope, tucked into a flap in the left cup.”

“The left?” the Keeper said, looking worriedly from one hand to the other, scrunching up his spiky eyebrows.

“Put it on if you have to. You’ll find it.”

Upon which, she died.

From that day forward, twice a day, for all of six long sad years, the Keeper has fed the ducks and he’s talked with them at night, telling them they’ll never, ever die, no, not to worry, they’ll live forever. And to this end he’s kept a lookout day and night for foxes and feral cats and sewer rats, shooing them away with a rusty old pitchfork.

Just so, he’s coming down now to feed them, to protect them, to talk to them a little, maybe, telling them not to worry about these men and their guns, they’ll soon be gone. He’s not at all sure that’s true, of course, but he wants fervently to reassure them. He’s not significant in any way, the Keeper, he knows that. He doesn’t do anything important for the glory of Ireland, nor even for the glory of God, which means more to him. It’s not like he’s making history or anything. But his love for the ducks has kept him alive in the lonely and devastated years since his wife’s passing. Many’s the time he would have ended things himself but for the ducks, since, after all, he’s been all they’ve had. His love for them, that is, has been exactly of a piece with hers. By keeping the ducks alive he’s kept her alive, too.

For their part, of course, the ducks don’t know anything. They’re simply hungry, always hungry. They are St. Stephen’s crucial ducks after all, and just as his wife did the Keeper means for them to paddle and waddle around in this symbolical park forever. He wants their quacking to go on for eternity, along with all their finicky nattering and rasping, and their frisking their feathers up all the time, and their drinking little scoops of water whenever they have a mind to, straight out of the same pond they’re swimming around in because they don’t know any better—scooping it up with their big awkward beautiful orange bills.

That’s what he really wants.

As for these idgits, let them fight and kill every last one of each other for all he has to do with it. The Keeper doesn’t care that this is all what they’ll someday call history, or that history is not and never has been about cockamamies.

History moves on, they say. Of course it does. History is a fiddler with a clay pipe in his mouth sitting by a roaring peat-hearth, ablaze with his reel, his bow flashing away as banshees wail above the mangle pit. The cease-fire will cease and the briars will poof out in the golden light of afternoon, and the flintlocks will fire, and the dying will die, and there will be no mithers arriving with soda bread and no fulfillment—not the slightest—of a single dying son’s dreams.

As for the Keeper, except in a subordinate clause someday, he’ll never be heard of.

Never.