June Kettle Character Analysis

[Neutrinos] passed through [Tom’s] vulnerable soul, itself an item so large it was not there either, at least to a neutrino. But did it speak of the unimportance of Tom Kettle that he was not really there to a neutrino? Maybe God saw him? What of the butterflies, what of the mother spider, what of the mites, striving for life and generations in the old carpet? True, true, in human affairs everything is hastiness and farewell. But there was a sort of proof in this that Tom Kettle was loved, even though he could not see it, as he passed through the world. He had no idea how much June had loved him, nor Winnie, nor Joe. Maybe his sleeping self knew more, intuitive, less complicated by waking thought.

He cradled the memory of his wife as if she were still a living being. As if no one had been crushed, no one had been hurried from the halls of life, and the power of his love could effect that, could hold her buoyant and eternal in the embrace of an ordinary day. The sunlight struck its million pins into the pollocky sea, the whole expanse sparked, and sparkled, as if on the very verge of a true conflagration. Alone, alone, he smiled and smiled. He closed his eyes. He opened them. The sea was still there.

It neatly made him angry now—and he knew it was illogical, he probably looked a great deal put out and vexed, though no one was on the road to see it—that she was always in his mind as the person she had been when she departed. Not young, not old, but human and beautiful. Why would that make him angry? He was angry with who, with what? It was his duty to remember her. It was his duty to remember her. But he was old, he was old, and he had never wanted another, never. He was old and she was gone, never herself to be old.

They didn’t have long in the new house in Deansgrange, in truth, before the little changes. At night she would go to sleep like a body interred—he could barely hear her breathing. She lived so lightly the traces were hard to see. He would hunt for signs of her. Traces of June. Later, a few good years on, he’d come home of an evening and go about the house, looking for her and the children. When he called out to her she mightn’t answer, because sometimes she wasn’t there. In the last times, when he called out, and she was there, she never answered either. Even alive she was every so often like someone you remembered that you had loved.

And if the nuns didn’t know, they must have been blind, dead, and dumb. Because he did it to a dozen girls, over the years, how many I couldn’t say. Oh, and always so nice to him, Father Thaddy this, and Father Thaddy that, they worshipped him, and baking three cakes for him every now and then, [...] and one time he tore me, you know, in the backside, and the doctor had to come, and he said, hmm, hmm, yes, yes, she has colitis, saying it clearly for the nun, the poor little thing, that’s very sore, [...] —yes, Sister Brenda was there, while he was fucking scoping my bits, Tom, and all the tut-tutting of her, and the hands of her going like a butterfly, dear me, dear me, how on earth does that happen.

Talk to yourself, Tom, talk to yourself, calm your heart. Hold on by your fingernails. Something was coming, something was coming, but not yet. He was king over time in the wicker chair. Preserving the beneficence of the present. Not smoking, true, his old cigarillos, heeding at last the intimations of his old doctor. For in a very curious way he wanted to live. He wanted to live long enough to get through the dark forest, like a medieval child in the old stories. To get through the tall, dense trees and the dark light that barely merited the name of light. Along the ancient road with its carpeting of the leaves of a thousand autumns. To see at last the sparkle begin in the distance, the diamonds and fires of the sunlight, where the forest would end.

This is for June, he kept repeating, muttering, muttering, like a Buddhist mantra, this is for June. And that fucker there, whose head I can see bobbing about as he drives that stupid little car, he looks like the black dot in a bubble of frogspawn, that creature there, indicating right, and left, and right, little flashing lights, on stalks springing open, retracted, heading to the back of the city now and up onto higher ground, motoring towards the mountains seemingly, is the lousy, filthy, fucking cruel, vicious shite of a man that well-nigh destroyed her, tore through her, a little girl without defences, week after week, his possession and his plaything.

He had the wild sense that, despite the tyranny of dates and time, she was there, not in memory but really, and he was careful not to open those eyes. He knew the second he did so he would be gone. […] They were both away with the fairies and June was alive, she was alive, beautiful and wise, and she would always be there, bursting with life, calm as any old painted Madonna, as long as he did not open his eyes. He lifted both his hands and reached out to hold that longed-for face. To hold it, the soft cheeks, the dark skin, to hold it, to hold it.

He was genuinely shocked when June took their humble bread knife from her gansey. She took it from her gansey, and then she went in under his coat like a bone-collapsing rat, trying to get in in a manner no human ever could. And she wriggled herself up onto his back, using his spine as a great brace, and she flattened herself like a huge plaster, not a human creature at all. He had clearly married a Trickster.

No crime more dark, more fucking pessimum, more beyond human mercy. To do this with the mote of June in your eye, her essence floating on the Irish wind. All the children gravely assailed. All the children in filthy Irish history, with no bugle blowing to announce their rescue, no arms of love to envelop them, no hand of kindness to wash their wounds. Priests! The boyos themselves, peddling piety and goodness. As pious and good as—but there was no entity, no animal, no thing, to compare to them. A shark was vicious, but it was all beyond the shark.

Possible court appearance. If the DPP thought there was evidence. What of the blood sample? Would that be enough? The word of an evil man, himself under scrutiny, judgement, sentence. But what did Tom care? He didn’t. He had served the only soul he cared about, not his own soul, or the souls even of his children, but the girl he had met in the Wimpy café, who had laughed at Billy Drury’s taste on the jukebox, and in laughing, with her bright face, fished out his deathless love.

Without her. The children in their childhood beds. Her in the summer-cold graveyard. Her remains in the execrable coffin. Her heart not beating. Her mind not thinking. Her face not brightening, darkening. No more her thousand different moods, her modes of mind, her enthusiasms, her hated things. And in the kitchen, on the breadboard, chill and dark, the sacred bread knife. Which in killing had not killed. In exacting punishment had not punished. In seeking to be the instrument of redemption had not redeemed.

The hand was delicate and dark, and he wondered, if he extended his own left hand to meet it, would he be able to touch her? And if he could touch her, what did that mean? He was afraid to move in case it made her vanish but at the same time he was brave enough to risk it and he extended his arm a few inches and before he knew it he was touching her warm fingers. He wanted to say something to her now alright but in a way the touching of hands said everything he needed to say. It was like he had just met her, that very same feeling of old in the vanished café, and yet of course in the very same moment he knew everything there was to know about her. The strange privilege of that. The lovely wildness of it.

[Neutrinos] passed through [Tom’s] vulnerable soul, itself an item so large it was not there either, at least to a neutrino. But did it speak of the unimportance of Tom Kettle that he was not really there to a neutrino? Maybe God saw him? What of the butterflies, what of the mother spider, what of the mites, striving for life and generations in the old carpet? True, true, in human affairs everything is hastiness and farewell. But there was a sort of proof in this that Tom Kettle was loved, even though he could not see it, as he passed through the world. He had no idea how much June had loved him, nor Winnie, nor Joe. Maybe his sleeping self knew more, intuitive, less complicated by waking thought.

He cradled the memory of his wife as if she were still a living being. As if no one had been crushed, no one had been hurried from the halls of life, and the power of his love could effect that, could hold her buoyant and eternal in the embrace of an ordinary day. The sunlight struck its million pins into the pollocky sea, the whole expanse sparked, and sparkled, as if on the very verge of a true conflagration. Alone, alone, he smiled and smiled. He closed his eyes. He opened them. The sea was still there.

It neatly made him angry now—and he knew it was illogical, he probably looked a great deal put out and vexed, though no one was on the road to see it—that she was always in his mind as the person she had been when she departed. Not young, not old, but human and beautiful. Why would that make him angry? He was angry with who, with what? It was his duty to remember her. It was his duty to remember her. But he was old, he was old, and he had never wanted another, never. He was old and she was gone, never herself to be old.

They didn’t have long in the new house in Deansgrange, in truth, before the little changes. At night she would go to sleep like a body interred—he could barely hear her breathing. She lived so lightly the traces were hard to see. He would hunt for signs of her. Traces of June. Later, a few good years on, he’d come home of an evening and go about the house, looking for her and the children. When he called out to her she mightn’t answer, because sometimes she wasn’t there. In the last times, when he called out, and she was there, she never answered either. Even alive she was every so often like someone you remembered that you had loved.

And if the nuns didn’t know, they must have been blind, dead, and dumb. Because he did it to a dozen girls, over the years, how many I couldn’t say. Oh, and always so nice to him, Father Thaddy this, and Father Thaddy that, they worshipped him, and baking three cakes for him every now and then, [...] and one time he tore me, you know, in the backside, and the doctor had to come, and he said, hmm, hmm, yes, yes, she has colitis, saying it clearly for the nun, the poor little thing, that’s very sore, [...] —yes, Sister Brenda was there, while he was fucking scoping my bits, Tom, and all the tut-tutting of her, and the hands of her going like a butterfly, dear me, dear me, how on earth does that happen.

Talk to yourself, Tom, talk to yourself, calm your heart. Hold on by your fingernails. Something was coming, something was coming, but not yet. He was king over time in the wicker chair. Preserving the beneficence of the present. Not smoking, true, his old cigarillos, heeding at last the intimations of his old doctor. For in a very curious way he wanted to live. He wanted to live long enough to get through the dark forest, like a medieval child in the old stories. To get through the tall, dense trees and the dark light that barely merited the name of light. Along the ancient road with its carpeting of the leaves of a thousand autumns. To see at last the sparkle begin in the distance, the diamonds and fires of the sunlight, where the forest would end.

This is for June, he kept repeating, muttering, muttering, like a Buddhist mantra, this is for June. And that fucker there, whose head I can see bobbing about as he drives that stupid little car, he looks like the black dot in a bubble of frogspawn, that creature there, indicating right, and left, and right, little flashing lights, on stalks springing open, retracted, heading to the back of the city now and up onto higher ground, motoring towards the mountains seemingly, is the lousy, filthy, fucking cruel, vicious shite of a man that well-nigh destroyed her, tore through her, a little girl without defences, week after week, his possession and his plaything.

He had the wild sense that, despite the tyranny of dates and time, she was there, not in memory but really, and he was careful not to open those eyes. He knew the second he did so he would be gone. […] They were both away with the fairies and June was alive, she was alive, beautiful and wise, and she would always be there, bursting with life, calm as any old painted Madonna, as long as he did not open his eyes. He lifted both his hands and reached out to hold that longed-for face. To hold it, the soft cheeks, the dark skin, to hold it, to hold it.

He was genuinely shocked when June took their humble bread knife from her gansey. She took it from her gansey, and then she went in under his coat like a bone-collapsing rat, trying to get in in a manner no human ever could. And she wriggled herself up onto his back, using his spine as a great brace, and she flattened herself like a huge plaster, not a human creature at all. He had clearly married a Trickster.

No crime more dark, more fucking pessimum, more beyond human mercy. To do this with the mote of June in your eye, her essence floating on the Irish wind. All the children gravely assailed. All the children in filthy Irish history, with no bugle blowing to announce their rescue, no arms of love to envelop them, no hand of kindness to wash their wounds. Priests! The boyos themselves, peddling piety and goodness. As pious and good as—but there was no entity, no animal, no thing, to compare to them. A shark was vicious, but it was all beyond the shark.

Possible court appearance. If the DPP thought there was evidence. What of the blood sample? Would that be enough? The word of an evil man, himself under scrutiny, judgement, sentence. But what did Tom care? He didn’t. He had served the only soul he cared about, not his own soul, or the souls even of his children, but the girl he had met in the Wimpy café, who had laughed at Billy Drury’s taste on the jukebox, and in laughing, with her bright face, fished out his deathless love.

Without her. The children in their childhood beds. Her in the summer-cold graveyard. Her remains in the execrable coffin. Her heart not beating. Her mind not thinking. Her face not brightening, darkening. No more her thousand different moods, her modes of mind, her enthusiasms, her hated things. And in the kitchen, on the breadboard, chill and dark, the sacred bread knife. Which in killing had not killed. In exacting punishment had not punished. In seeking to be the instrument of redemption had not redeemed.

The hand was delicate and dark, and he wondered, if he extended his own left hand to meet it, would he be able to touch her? And if he could touch her, what did that mean? He was afraid to move in case it made her vanish but at the same time he was brave enough to risk it and he extended his arm a few inches and before he knew it he was touching her warm fingers. He wanted to say something to her now alright but in a way the touching of hands said everything he needed to say. It was like he had just met her, that very same feeling of old in the vanished café, and yet of course in the very same moment he knew everything there was to know about her. The strange privilege of that. The lovely wildness of it.