tomorrow’s rewards are kindled by today’s disappointments. So to the sure-to-come “poor fool” look Seamus would cast upon him and to Thomas’s “I-told-you-so” blatherings, he’d give his answer: “Another time, Seamus” “Next season, Thomas. I’m telling you now to write it down that I’ll want a beat the first Saturday of the next season.” (Thatto go in the sermon, too: a specified time-avowal of renewed undertaking.) Repeat it: “So mark it down, Thomas. Next spring, the first Saturday of the new season. And gratitude to God for the future chance….”
That moment yesterday, after Kevin’s burial, still beside the new mound of the grave, Enda’s whispering to him, “Will you drive me home please, Father?” and, to his answering nod, her moving closer to him, indicating that way to the lingering others she was in his care. The mourners then, seeing they had done all they could, began to drift off, back to their cars and the main road of their suspended lives. Left, then, beneath the cloud-thronged sky, he and Enda stood alone….
In the aftermath of the hellish scene he’d created with her, he had done naught but review his life in terms of the crime he had committed against her. It was one of his frequent, impassioned mulls from the pulpit: To work one’s imagination on someone else is evil .
More than his humiliation, greater than his self-loathing, profounder than the scourge of remorse, had been the pain of the ceaseless image of himself as she must see him—as a weaseling priest on the cheap.
The day after the wake—that would be but the day before yesterday—he had gone in his agony tosee her but had found her in a surround of keeping women so thick she had not been able even to stand when he entered the door, that close they were around her, their feet and legs twined spiderlike beneath them, their hands busy with their teacups, their tongues working in comparing ways over other losses, other deaths. Caught in this cosseting, funereal web, she appeared blind to his presence. Catherine McPhillemy had delegated herself to fuss over him. He had stayed, hardly speaking, but a few minutes.
…But yesterday, together at Kevin’s grave, all had been different…. They had stood silently, unmoving, statues among crosses, until Enda, coming to life, had lifted her hands to her throat and slowly untied the knot of the black woollen shawl that covered her head, putting to flight in the risen, capricious wind those unruly strands of hair which a heavy rope of braiding could not contain. Fully exposed, her face in the cloud-cast lavender light was marvellously beautiful. Looking at her—he could not but honestly look at her, especially in his anguish—he retreated into a memory of himself as a young, uncommitted man who, in a large book not his own, had gazed at the photograph of a found, autochthonous, terribly telling, carved, stone visage of a woman from a far-gone time, and had been filled with a first flayingsense of his life fleeing from him in an unequal chase.
“You look done in,” she prompted him gently.
Mired in sorrow, he answered, “I am.”
As a supplicant, he took her having provided him with the chance to say so as a kindness. Given the grace of it, he was incapable, though, of putting it to use: all in a moment, the vitality of his active regret had given way to a deadly listlessness: What could he care of the present when his future, like his trodden past, would yield naught but nullity? The nearby twisted, stippled thorn-tree (Kevin’s coffin was earthed deeper than its roots) was as himself.
She had tracked his gaze. “You wonder it can live,” she said wanly. And when he did not respond: “About yesterday, when you came—that we couldn’t talk—”
Emptied of the energy to care, he made an interrupting, dismissing gesture: “It doesn’t matter.”
“But it does,” she said. “As between us, it does.” Then, with a fervent, equalizing candour:
That moment yesterday, after Kevin’s burial, still beside the new mound of the grave, Enda’s whispering to him, “Will you drive me home please, Father?” and, to his answering nod, her moving closer to him, indicating that way to the lingering others she was in his care. The mourners then, seeing they had done all they could, began to drift off, back to their cars and the main road of their suspended lives. Left, then, beneath the cloud-thronged sky, he and Enda stood alone….
In the aftermath of the hellish scene he’d created with her, he had done naught but review his life in terms of the crime he had committed against her. It was one of his frequent, impassioned mulls from the pulpit: To work one’s imagination on someone else is evil .
More than his humiliation, greater than his self-loathing, profounder than the scourge of remorse, had been the pain of the ceaseless image of himself as she must see him—as a weaseling priest on the cheap.
The day after the wake—that would be but the day before yesterday—he had gone in his agony tosee her but had found her in a surround of keeping women so thick she had not been able even to stand when he entered the door, that close they were around her, their feet and legs twined spiderlike beneath them, their hands busy with their teacups, their tongues working in comparing ways over other losses, other deaths. Caught in this cosseting, funereal web, she appeared blind to his presence. Catherine McPhillemy had delegated herself to fuss over him. He had stayed, hardly speaking, but a few minutes.
…But yesterday, together at Kevin’s grave, all had been different…. They had stood silently, unmoving, statues among crosses, until Enda, coming to life, had lifted her hands to her throat and slowly untied the knot of the black woollen shawl that covered her head, putting to flight in the risen, capricious wind those unruly strands of hair which a heavy rope of braiding could not contain. Fully exposed, her face in the cloud-cast lavender light was marvellously beautiful. Looking at her—he could not but honestly look at her, especially in his anguish—he retreated into a memory of himself as a young, uncommitted man who, in a large book not his own, had gazed at the photograph of a found, autochthonous, terribly telling, carved, stone visage of a woman from a far-gone time, and had been filled with a first flayingsense of his life fleeing from him in an unequal chase.
“You look done in,” she prompted him gently.
Mired in sorrow, he answered, “I am.”
As a supplicant, he took her having provided him with the chance to say so as a kindness. Given the grace of it, he was incapable, though, of putting it to use: all in a moment, the vitality of his active regret had given way to a deadly listlessness: What could he care of the present when his future, like his trodden past, would yield naught but nullity? The nearby twisted, stippled thorn-tree (Kevin’s coffin was earthed deeper than its roots) was as himself.
She had tracked his gaze. “You wonder it can live,” she said wanly. And when he did not respond: “About yesterday, when you came—that we couldn’t talk—”
Emptied of the energy to care, he made an interrupting, dismissing gesture: “It doesn’t matter.”
“But it does,” she said. “As between us, it does.” Then, with a fervent, equalizing candour:
Similar Books
