Excerpt from The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Upon the fucken what?

Mountain, Pat.

He finished the beer and signalled for a shot. Slapped it as it landed. He spun the pencil urbanely in his hand—How's the health, Patrick?

Holohan considered the dreary slopes of himself and jawed on his bottom lip and laid a hand to his swollen gut—

Jesus, he said.

Tom Rourke put pencil to the page again—

My object, Margaret, is matrimony, and I wish to state here that I am in as hale and eager a condition as any man might be, at least given the usual reverses a hard working life can bestow.

* * *

He had it within himself to help others. He made no more than his dope and drink money from it. He had helped to marry off some wretched cases already. The halt and the lame, the mute and the hare-lipped, the wall-eyed men who heard voices in the night—they could all be brought up nicely enough against the white field of the page. Discretion, imagination and the careful edit were all that were required.

Do you think she might come, Tom?

Every possibility.

But do you think she'll know what kind I am?

Hard to from a few letters. She might know enough to chance it. We just have to make sure you come across as genuine and not out for the one thing only.

Holohan blushed like a boy and drank up his beer. He signalled to the keep and a brace of shots appeared. The men slapped them and considered first wordlessly and then with a sense of growing warmth their ludicrous situation.

* * *

On Galena Street he walked the stations of the cross again. The lamps burned a mournful electric yellow above the drifting crowd and the girls of the line cribs called out in brash and intricate detail the index of their arrangements. They did so in seven languages. It had grown still colder and their words rang high on the brittle air. Tom Rourke picked his way along the street avoiding the muddier stretches in favour of his tan Colchester boots. He was this season denying himself the bodily release of the cribs and he ignored with a disdain almost priestly the flashing thighs and moaning lips of the commerce. He was anyhow distracted again on the nerves front. Crossing onto Broadway he carried that weight of weird knowledge or clairvoyance. There was the whisper of a foretelling but he could not make out the words of it. He believed in messages, signs, uncanny harbingers, and as he passed by the Southern Hotel the supper room lights sputtered and went dark and then flicked to life again, as if the joint was winking at him.

* * *

There was no fucking way he was going out tonight. He looked in briefly at the Pay Day but only for a straightener. He stood at the brass rail and was consoled by his boots, which were cut stylishly to the ankle length. He engaged a small whiskey and judiciously let it down with a splash of water. He thought fuck it and took to the bar mirrors again for a quiet inspection—

He wore the felt slouch hat at a wistful angle and the reefer jacket of mossgreen tweed and a black canvas shirt and in his eyes dimly gleaming the lyric poetry of an early grave and he was satisfied with the inspection.

He felt for the Barlow jackknife of teardrop handle in the one pocket and for his dope tin in the other and was reassured.

All he wanted from life was quiet and stillness. There was hope of neither in this place. The pit shifts changed and the night heaved and the Pay Day shouldered its way to a condition of full abandon but Tom Rourke huddled into his thin frame at the bar and he was set apart from the hoarse and laughing crowd. He was at a distance of artistic remove from it was what he felt.

* * *

He looked in at the Collar & Elbow and sold an eighth of dope to Jeremiah The Chin Murphy there. He looked in at the Graveyard and slapped a shot with Danny the Dog-Boy who was dying of the chest, it was confided, though Dog-Boy had by now been some-and-twenty years in the dying. He was halfways down a glass of strong brown German beer at the Alley Cat and thinking about death and the poetic impulse in youth when he was informed that he was no longer tolerated on the premises on account of misdemeanours incalculable and here once more was a miscarriage of fucking justice.

* * *

He walked now on Granite Street— the stations— and the boards of the shanties moaned and creaked in the mountain night and you could not blame them. Even in the present moment there was a great hauntedness to it all. The city was only this short while confected but it was already strung with a legion of ghosts and Tom Rourke could make them out among the rooftops and he saluted them.

* * *

Midnight kind of direction he had his knife taken off him by a volcanic Mancunian named Shovel Burgess at the Big Stope bar and he took a blow to the nose which bled theatrically. Next he was turned away by a Celestial from a smoky roost of the Chicken Flats on account of dope money that was owed and had been spent instead on tan Colchester boots. He took a smoke of what meagre dope he had left in supply in a backroom full of gleaming Portuguesers on Nanny Goat Hill and he experienced the truth and glory of God the Almighty in the here and now of the opiate night.

* * *

Once he had a zealot belief that love would save him but now he had doubts. He didn't even know of her existence yet, never mind that she was off the train already, had left the supper room at the Southern Hotel, and was established in a fresh new house on the uptown reaches.

* * *

He looked in at the Board of Trade again. He took a slow recuperative bottle of stout. He was dissatisfied with the ambience. Too many Irish. There were by now ten thousand Hibernian to the town and they had the place fucking destroyed. A fellow Corkman drinking at his westerly elbow leaned in with an accent from the rim of Bantry originally—

Excerpted from The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry. Copyright © 2024 by Kevin Barry. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.