Finding Tom Connor

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  ‘I’ll come out right away, Jenny. Now, where is it again?’

  ‘You come half a mile past the grotto, then turn right up the first lane and it’s another half a mile up there. Any sign of the Virgin?’ she asked, reminded of the grotto.

  ‘Not that I know of, Jenny. There’s a crowd there at four o’clock every afternoon all the same and Maeve O’Riordan has promised to let me know if she appears, but so far not a word.’

  There was a silence at the end of the phone. ‘That’s about a month, then, Father.’

  ‘That would be right, apparently, Jenny.’

  ‘And how long have you been in Ballymahoe, Father?’

  He cleared his voice with a quick ahem. ‘About a month, Jenny.’

  ‘Right so.’ There was a pause. ‘And you say you were some sort of hippie before you came here, then?’

  Father Kelly sighed. She wasn’t the first parishioner to imply that there might be some sort of a connection between the young priest’s arrival and the failure of Our Lady to appear on her favourite hillside.

  ‘That was a joke, Jenny. I was ordained in 1983 and I have been studying at Oxford and in Rome for the past six years as I think I have reminded you all at Sunday mass. When Father Cahill, God rest his soul, passed away I had the good fortune to be sent here to mind his loyal flock. I really don’t think my arrival here has anything to do with the disappearance of Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin,’ he said.

  There was a gasp from the other end of the phone.

  ‘So she’s disappeared now, has she?’

  Father Kelly laughed.

  ‘Jenny O’Brien, you’ve a very lively imagination on you, have you not? I look forward to meeting someone with such an active point of view but I’d better get going right this minute if I’m to see Mary before lunch. I’ll see you soon.’

  The only lane he could find was just a quarter of a mile past the grotto so he turned the VW beetle to the left and wound his way around a snake-like collection of potholes held together by the merest suggestion of a road until, after about a mile, the lane ended at a small collection of trees tucked between two hills.

  ‘Can’t miss it, then, can I?’ he muttered cheerfully to himself as he dove in the back seat for his bag, extricating himself from the car to find a large red-faced woman in a hairnet standing right beside him. He recognised her as the particularly off-key parishioner who sat in the front row wearing a fur hat every Sunday.

  ‘So you found us all right, then, Father,’ she beamed. ‘Come in, I’ll make you a cup of tea.’ And she led the priest through the trees to where, much to his surprise, there was a small two-storey house, impeccably kept, with dormer windows and a beautiful, if slightly overgrown, garden on either side of the pathway leading to the front door.

  ‘What a lovely home, Jenny. Does Mrs Monaghan live here on her own?’ he asked, his eyes taking in every detail of the house.

  ‘Since her good-for-nothing drunkard of a husband died 40 years ago,’ Jenny told him, stopping to follow his eyes to the relatively freshly painted shutters and the new joinery on the downstairs windows.

  ‘Does she have sons, any family?’ the priest asked.

  ‘The dirty bastard shrunk her ovaries with a single kick of his boot,’ Jenny said with the knowing air of a gynaecological surgeon. ‘Excuse the language. The second he died, God rot his soul, she planted this forest around the house and we’ve hardly seen her since. It’s only in the last month the doctor’s had me coming here. I don’t think anyone but me and him has been inside since her filthy sewer-rat of a husband passed on, most likely to hell,’ she added cheerfully.

  Father Kelly looked at the books in the little bookcase, the arrangement of the furniture in the room and the new lightbulb in its modern light fitting and wondered to himself.

  ‘Now, about that cup of tea, Father,’ Jenny O’Brien offered, rubbing her hands together. ‘Would you like one, then?’

  ‘I’m right, actually, Jenny, I should probably just go and talk to Mary, eh?’

  ‘What, without a cup of tea? Oh, well, suit yourself,’ she said, looking at him suspiciously. ‘Up the stairs and the first on your left.’

  Not even a creak in the stairs, Father Kelly thought to himself as he climbed the little staircase, stopping outside Mary’s door and knocking.

  ‘It’s Father Kelly here to see you, Mary,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, come in, then,’ he heard a wheezy voice beckon.

  Inside, the room was painted a beautiful shade of eggshell blue and atop the dresser of Irish pine was a posy of flowers, from the looks of them picked from Mary’s own garden.

  The woman herself lay underneath a patchwork quilt of a hundred different shades of blue, her head leaning back on a pile of soft pillows.

  When she turned her head to look at him, he saw her eyes were the very same shade of eggshell as the walls. Her thick white hair had obviously recently seen the business end of Jenny O’Brien’s hairbrush and the air smelled sweetly of lavender or lilac — an old lady’s favourite fragrance.

  She lifted one hand from the bedclothes and beckoned for the priest to sit down.

  ‘I’m Father Chris Kelly, Mary,’ he said, reaching for her hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  She did, indeed, have a considerable rattle to her chest but her eyes were as bright as buttons.

  ‘What are you on about?’ she said, surprising him with the vigour of her voice. ‘You’re far too good looking to be a priest and not nearly thick enough around the waist.’

  ‘Pshaw, don’t you know, Mary, they’ve got us doing aerobics these days,’ he joked. ‘Now, how can I help you?’

  Mary looked him in the eye.

  ‘I haven’t got long, Father, I know that and I don’t mind, not in the least,’ she said, holding her hand up to stop him as he began to argue.

  ‘I’ve not got long and I don’t mind,’ she repeated, ‘but I need to make a confession before I go.’

  ‘Right so, Mary,’ the priest said, opening his bag and pulling out his stole and draping it around his neck in preparation for performing the holy sacrament.

  ‘Bless me, Father,’ she said softly, ‘for I have sinned. It has been 47 years since my last confession.’

  She fell silent.

  ‘Are you right, there, Mary?’ the priest asked after a moment.

  ‘How’s Maeve O’Riordan?’ the old woman asked suddenly, surprising him.

  ‘Well, well,’ he answered, ‘in the circumstances,’ although the truth was he had never known a woman recover more quickly from a husband’s death, especially a bizarre death. But then she was a hard nut, old Maeve.

  In fact, Maeve’s husband Paddy was more or less the reason Chris Kelly now found himself resident in Ballymahoe.

  The old man had been diagnosed with undetected prostate cancer and by all accounts had gone downhill very quickly. One day, about a month ago, his wife had called Father Cahill to perform the last rites.

  But, according to Maeve, the priest had spent at least three hours with her husband, the sounds of both their voices a distant rumble from the front room where she sat waiting for the priest to finish.

  When she heard a loud and frightening crash from upstairs she went to her husband’s room, fearing the worst, and there was Father Cahill, lying on the floor, dead from a massive heart attack.

  Her husband, too, had slipped this mortal coil, a small inexplicable smile on his face.

  The departure of Father Cahill had coincided with Father Kelly’s arrival in Dublin from Rome and, because the glare of the media spotlight refused to leave Ballymahoe, thanks to the alleged reappearances of the Virgin, it had been decided to send the church’s new bright hope there to clear the whole business up.

  Father Kelly shook his head and brought himself back to the present.

  When he looked over at Mary, her eyes were closed and one lone tear was making its way down the crags and valleys of her wrinkled cheek.

  ‘Mary,’ he said tender
ly, reaching to hold her hand. ‘What is it, Mary? Is it something about Maeve?’

  ‘Ever since I was a little girl,’ the old woman began, ignoring his question, ‘for as long as I can remember, I have loved Paddy O’Riordan.’ The old woman let the statement hang in the air while the priest digested it.

  ‘His father before him was a fishmonger too and used to deliver fish to my mother right here at our farm, once a week, every Thursday,’ she continued, her eyes still closed, the track of her tear drying on her soft old skin.

  ‘I remember the first time I saw him — he must have been about seven so I suppose I was five. Even then, though, he was a fine-looking boy and so grown up, helping his da with unloading the fish and looking my mother in the eye when he spoke. Sure, now, we knew he was a bit sad what with his mother running off when he was but a wee fellow but you could tell even then it wasn’t the sort of sad to turn mean.’

  The priest reached his other hand out and held her little one in both of his, feeling her warm, papery dry skin.

  ‘When I went to school he looked out for me. I didn’t have brothers or sisters — just like him — and we’d hardly even spoken to each other but I just knew that he would always be there, and he was. He’d pick me up if I was pushed over, he’d dry my tears if I got my arithmetic wrong, he’d share his lunch with me if mine was taken from me or forgotten.’

  She sighed and opened her eyes, looking at the priest.

  ‘I just assumed that we would grow up and get married. I had always been so happy just knowing that.’ She gave a dry little laugh. ‘I never thought to talk about it with him. Then when I was 12 or 13 he fell in love with Maeve Casey. Just like that. As though I’d never existed. I couldn’t believe it, Father! And I kept waiting for him to open his eyes and see that it was me he should be in love with, not her, but it never happened. They got married and for a year afterwards I swear I cried myself to sleep every night.’

  She closed her eyes again and turned away from Father Kelly.

  ‘Is it any wonder that when Frankie Monaghan from Ballydehob turned his attentions on me I soaked them up like a dry sponge being rained on for the first time?’ Her voice started to waver but, squeezing her eyes shut even further, she continued her story.

  ‘It wasn’t love, Father, I know that now, but back then he was the only thing that kept me from thinking about Paddy and how I’d lost him and how I didn’t want to go on in the world on my own. All of a sudden Frank is turning up with a flower he’s picked or a poem he’s written and my parents are desperate for me to marry, so when he asked me, I just said yes.

  ‘His family had moved up north so Frank came to stay with us and for the first year I suppose we were happy enough. The first time he hit me we’d just got back from Sunday mass and he accused me of hankering after one of the O’Reilly boys. Can you imagine it? Hit me so hard on the ear I heard bells ringing for a week. Then he cried and told me he loved me and swore it would never happen again but of course it did.

  ‘After my mam and dad passed away it was worse, of course, because he didn’t have to worry about being heard. The funny thing was, Father, at first I sort of didn’t blame him. I felt like this was my punishment for not loving him, for loving someone else. That being constantly black and blue was the price I had to pay for tricking him somehow. But by the time he’d broken every bone in my body and was coming back for seconds I realised it was nothing to do with me — he was just a cruel, cruel man and I was lucky not to love him.’

  ‘There were no children, Mary?’ the priest asked gently.

  ‘Oh, he saw to that all right. One night in this very room with my own mother and father sleeping just down the hall. Belted me until I fell then kicked me in the stomach so many times I was bleeding from both ends like a piece of broken piping.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mary.’

  ‘Told my parents it was the monthlies giving me terrible trouble and at the hospital agreed with the doctor that it was business best not talked about and that was it. Of course, it’s much better this way,’ she added. ‘Who would want to be responsible for bringing up children with a father like that? Anyway, from that day on I plotted how I was going to free myself from Frank Monaghan because nothing was worse than the life I was living. The nights I lay in this bed with him beside me, Father, planning to stab him with my scissors, poison him with arsenic, push him down the stairs, chop his head off with an axe … there was nothing I wouldn’t do to get rid of the evil wretch. Nothing.’

  A silence fell between them as the priest felt the contents of his stomach plummet.

  ‘Mary,’ he said, horrified and intrigued at the same time, ‘are you telling me you murdered your husband?’

  Mary’s eyes flew open as she rose slightly off her pillows and turned to him.

  ‘Have you taken leave of your senses?’ she said. ‘Do I look like a woman who could chop off the head of a six-foot man most likely chasing me around the house with his belt at the time? Of course I didn’t murder him.’

  She sank back into his pillows.

  ‘The Lord Jesus took care of Frankie himself by planting a hole in his heart when he was born that felled him at the age of 42 as he was just about to crown me with a saucepan.’

  What a relief, Father Kelly thought.

  ‘What a relief!’ continued Mary. ‘I have to tell you, Father, that after more than 20 years of being married to that monster every moment on my own was sheer bliss. That’s not a crime is it?’ she looked at him. ‘Or a sin of any sort?’

  ‘Well, if it is a sin it’s just a small one, Mary,’ he said. ‘In a perfect world you could forgive Frank his sins but in the real world I think that as long as you had nothing to do with the hole in his heart, Jesus could understand you being,’ he searched for the word, ‘thankful that your husband had gone to a better place. Or a different place, anyway.’

  The old lady gave him a slow smile.

  ‘You’ve a lot of common sense, young man,’ she said. ‘It’s not something we saw a lot of in your predecessor.’

  ‘You didn’t get on with Father Cahill?’

  ‘I only went to him once, bleeding from the nose and lip, two of my teeth wrapped in a handkerchief in my purse, for him to tell me to get back to my husband and remember I’d promised for better or worse,’ she said dryly. ‘Never trust a man who eats with his mouth open,’ she added.

  ‘So if you didn’t murder your husband, Mary, what are you confessing?’

  ‘Would you hold your horses, Father? I’m an old woman with not a friend in the world to talk to and I don’t want to be rushed. What — are you worried I might slip away before I’ve got to the good part?’

  He smiled despite her words, because so far he liked Mary Monaghan.

  ‘While I was busy getting my teeth rattled around in my head, Paddy was having problems of his own, Father, and I am not at liberty to tell you what they were except to say that there was no love in his life with Maeve, and Father Cahill proved to be no help whatsoever to him either.’

  The priest let that one ride.

  ‘One day, oh, it must be more than 20 years ago, Paddy O’Riordan came to my door and if you could have seen the look on his face, Father. The pools of that man’s eyes held more sadness than the Irish Sea itself. He’d brought me fish for my dinner. He always brought me fish as a matter of fact but usually he just left it at the door. This day, though, he wanted to come in and — to cut a long story short for the purposes of my ill health — I let him.’

  Please tell me she isn’t confessing that she let Paddy O’Riordan in for a cup of tea, thought the priest.

  ‘It’s a shame you never knew him, Father Chris Kelly, because he was the kindest man you would ever have met. He didn’t have a mean word to say about anyone, no matter how much I encouraged him in that regard. He was a man of his word, a loyal man. He stuck with Maeve until the day he died, even though he had no love for her nor she for him.’

  ‘Are you telling me that you invited
Paddy in for more than a cup of tea, Mary?’

  ‘I’m telling you that nearly every single day for the past 20 years Paddy O’Riordan and I have entertained each other in this very bed and I can’t believe that a kind God wouldn’t want a woman to know such happiness!’

  Her blue eyes searched the priest for any signs of shock or horror.

  ‘Mary Monaghan,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘that is some confession.’

  ‘Ach, maybe you’re an eejit after all,’ she sighed dramatically. ‘I haven’t even got to the confession yet.’

  Don’t tell me she’s murdered somebody else, thought the priest. Just then there was a robust knock on the door and Jenny O’Brien bustled in bearing a tray laden with two plates of sandwiches and two teacups.

  ‘You’ll starve the poor thing to death with all your chatter, Father Kelly,’ admonished Jenny, setting the tray down on the bedside table. ‘Never mind the pneumonia or whatever it is that’s eating away at her.’

  She violently fluffed the pillows behind Mary Monaghan’s head, sending the old lady’s head wobbling like a child’s toy.

  ‘Get away from me, Jenny O’Brien!’ the widow suddenly roared. ‘Without you pestering me night and day I’d probably live to 104!’

  ‘Oh, she’s got a right temper on her since you arrived, Father Kelly,’ said Jenny in a matron-like fashion, bringing him a plate of sandwiches that he put back on the bedside table.

  ‘To be fair,’ he said slowly, ‘if I was being treated like I was already dead I’d have a pain in my arse as well.’

  There was a moment’s silence before Mary Monaghan’s cackle pierced the room.

  Jenny looked meanly at the old woman, then disgustedly at the priest, before she whipped up the empty tray and strode out of the room without a word.

  ‘Oh, I loved that. I loved it!’ laughed the old woman, coughing up a storm. ‘I’ll die happy now,’ she hacked, then, seeing the priest’s look of concern, added, ‘possibly in the next couple of minutes.’

  Father Kelly, alarmed, started to rise out of his chair but Mary waved him back, regaining control of her lungs.

  ‘I’m just messing with you, Father. Truly. I haven’t got long but I’ve got long enough to finish my confession.’