‘You don’t have to,’ Jackson replied, nursing his pipe and swinging round in the seat with his arm close to Fogarty’s shoulder. ‘As I say, women get these queer ideas. There’s usually nothing in them. At the same time, I must say I wouldn’t be very scandalized if I found out that there was something in it. If ever a man needed someone to care for him, Devine did in the last year or two.’
‘But not Devine, Jim,’ Fogarty said, raising his voice. ‘Not Devine! You could believe a thing like that about me. I suppose I could believe it about you. But I knew Devine since we were kids, and he wouldn’t be capable of it.’
‘I never knew him in that way,’ Jackson admitted. ‘In fact, I scarcely knew him at all, really. But I’d have said he was as capable of it as the rest of us. He was lonelier than the rest of us.’
‘God, don’t I know it?’ Fogarty said in sudden self-reproach. ‘I could understand if it was drink.’
‘Oh, not drink!’ Jackson said with distaste. ‘He was too fastidious. Can you imagine him in the D.T.s like some old parish priest, trying to strangle the nurses?’
‘But that’s what I say, Jim. He wasn’t the type.’
‘Oh, you must make distinctions,’ said Jackson. ‘I could imagine him attracted by some intelligent woman. You know yourself how he’d appeal to her, the same way he appealed to us, a cultured man in a country town. I don’t have to tell you the sort of life an intelligent woman leads, married to some lout of a shopkeeper or a gentleman farmer. Poor devils, it’s a mercy that most of them aren’t educated.’
‘He didn’t give you any hint who she was?’ Fogarty asked incredulously. Jackson had spoken with such conviction that it impressed him as true.
‘Oh, I don’t even know if there was such a woman,’ Jackson said hastily, and then he blushed too. Fogarty remained silent. He knew now that Jackson had been talking about himself, not Devine.
As the country grew wilder and furze bushes and ruined keeps took the place of pastures and old abbeys, Fogarty found his eyes attracted more and more to the wreath that swayed lightly with the hearse, the only spot of pure colour in the whole landscape with its watery greens and blues and greys. It seemed an image of the essential mystery of a priest’s life. What, after all, did he really know of Devine? Only what his own temperament suggested, and mostly – when he wasn’t being St Francis of Assisi – he had seen himself as the worldly one of the pair; the practical, coarse-grained man who cut corners, and Devine as the saint, racked by the fastidiousness and asceticism that exploded in his bitter little jests. Now his mind boggled at the idea of the agony that alone could have driven Devine into an entanglement with a woman; yet the measure of his incredulity was that of the conviction he would presently begin to feel. When once an unusual idea broke through his imagination, he hugged it, brooded on it, promoted it to the dignity of a revelation.
‘God, don’t we lead terrible lives?’ he burst out at last. ‘Here we are, probably the two people in the world who knew Devine best, and even we have no notion what that thing in front of us means.’
‘Which might be as well for our peace of mind,’ said Jackson.
‘I’ll engage it did damn little for Devine’s,’ Fogarty said grimly. It was peculiar; he did not believe yet in the reality of the woman behind the wreath, but already he hated her.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Jackson said in some surprise. ‘Isn’t that what we all really want from life?’
‘Is it?’ Fogarty asked in wonder. He had always thought of Jackson as a cold fish, and suddenly found himself wondering about that as well. After all, there must have been something in him that attracted Devine. He had the feeling that Jackson, who was, as he recognized, by far the subtler man, was probing him, and for the same reason. Each was looking in the other for the quality that had attracted Devine, and, which, having made him their friend might make them friends also. Each was trying to see how far he could go with the other. Fogarty, as usual, was the first with a confession.
‘I couldn’t do it, Jim,’ he said earnestly. ‘I was never even tempted, except once, and then it was the wife of one of the men who was in the seminary with me. I was crazy about her. But when I saw what her marriage to the other fellow was like, I changed my mind. She hated him like poison, Jim. I soon saw she might have hated me in the same way. It’s only when you see what marriage is really like, as we do, that you realize how lucky we are.’
‘Lucky?’ Jackson repeated mockingly.
‘Aren’t we?’
‘Did you ever know a seminary that wasn’t full of men who thought they were lucky? They might be drinking themselves to death, but they never doubted their luck? Nonsense, man! Anyway, why do you think she’d have hated you?’
‘I don’t,’ Fogarty replied with a boyish laugh. ‘Naturally, I think I’d have been the perfect husband for her. That’s the way Nature kids you.’
‘Well, why shouldn’t you have made her a perfect husband?’ Jackson asked quizzically. ‘There’s nothing much wrong with you that I can see. Though I admit I can see you better as a devoted father.’
‘God knows you might be right,’ Fogarty said, his face clouding again. It was as changeable as an Irish sky, Jackson thought with amusement. ‘You could get on well enough without the woman, but the kids are hell. She had two. “Father Fogey” they used to call me. And my mother was as bad,’ he burst out. ‘She was wrapped up in the pair of us. She always wanted us to be better than everybody else, and when we weren’t she used to cry. She said it was the Fogarty blood breaking out in us – the Fogartys were all horse dealers.’ His handsome, happy face was black with all the old remorse and guilt. ‘I’m afraid she died under the impression that I was a Fogarty after all.’
‘If the Fogartys are any relation to the Martins, I’d say it was most unlikely,’ Jackson said, half-amused, half-touched.
‘I never knew till she was dead how much she meant to me,’ Fogarty said broodingly. ‘Hennessey warned me not to take the Burial Service myself, but I thought it was the last thing I could do for her. He knew what he was talking about, of course. I disgraced myself, bawling like a blooming kid, and he pushed me aside and finished it for me. My God, the way we gallop through that till it comes to our own turn! Every time I’ve read it since, I’ve read it as if it were for my mother.’
Jackson shook his head uncomprehendingly.
‘You feel these things more than I do,’ he said. ‘I’m a cold fish.’
It struck Fogarty with some force that this was precisely what he had always believed himself and that now he could believe it no longer.
‘Until then, I used to be a bit flighty,’ he confessed. ‘After that I knew it wasn’t in me to care for another woman.’
‘That’s only more of your nonsense,’ said Jackson impatiently. ‘Love is just one thing, not half a dozen. If I were a young fellow looking for a wife I’d go after some girl who felt like that about her father. You probably have too much of it. I haven’t enough. When I was in Manister there was a shopkeeper’s wife I used to see. I talked to her and lent her books. She was half-crazy with loneliness. Then one morning I got home and found her standing outside my door in the pouring rain. She’d been there half the night. She wanted me to take her away, to “save” her, as she said. You can imagine what happened her after.’
‘Went off with someone else, I suppose?’
‘No such luck. She took to drinking and sleeping with racing men. Sometimes I blame myself for it. I feel I should have kidded her along. But I haven’t enough love to go round. You have too much. With your enthusiastic nature you’d probably have run off with her.’
‘I often wondered what I would do,’ Fogarty said shyly.
He felt very close to tears. It was partly the wreath, brilliant in the sunlight, that had drawn him out of his habitual reserve and made him talk in that way with a man of even greater reserve. Partly, it was the emotion of returning to the little town where he had grown up. He hated and avoided it; it seemed t
o him to represent all the narrowness and meanness that he tried to banish from his thoughts, but at the same time it contained all the nostalgia and violence he had felt there; and when he drew near it again a tumult of emotions rose in him that half-strangled him. He was watching for it already like a lover.
‘There it is!’ he said triumphantly, pointing to a valley where a tapering Franciscan tower rose on the edge of a clutter of low Georgian houses and thatched cabins. ‘They’ll be waiting for us at the bridge. That’s how they’ll be waiting for me when my turn comes, Jim.’
A considerable crowd had gathered at the farther side of the bridge to escort the hearse to the cemetery. Four men shouldered the shiny coffin over the bridge past the ruined castle and up the hilly Main Street. Shutters were up on the shop fronts, blinds were drawn, everything was at a standstill except where a curtain was lifted and an old woman peered out.
‘Counting the mourners,’ Fogarty said with a bitter laugh. ‘They’ll say I had nothing like as many as Devine. That place,’ he added, lowering his voice, ‘the second shop from the corner, that was ours.’
Jackson took it in at a glance. He was puzzled and touched by Fogarty’s emotion because there was nothing to distinguish the little market town from a hundred others. A laneway led off the hilly road and they came to the abbey, a ruined tower and a few walls, with tombstones sown thickly in quire and nave. The hearse was already drawn up outside and people had gathered in a semi-circle about it. Ned Devine came hastily up to the car where the two priests were donning their vestments. Fogarty knew at once that there was trouble brewing.
‘Whisper, Father Jerry,’ Ned muttered in a strained excited voice. ‘People are talking about that wreath. I wonder would you know who sent it?’
‘I don’t know the first thing about it, Ned,’ Fogarty replied, and suddenly his heart began to beat violently.
‘Come here a minute, Sheela,’ Ned called, and a tall, pale girl with the stain of tears on her long bony face left the little group of mourners and joined them. Fogarty nodded to her. She was Devine’s sister, a school-teacher who had never married. ‘This is Father Jackson, Father Willie’s other friend. They don’t know anything about it either.’
‘Then I’d let them take it back,’ she said doggedly.
‘What would you say, father?’ Ned asked, appealing to Fogarty, and suddenly Fogarty felt his courage desert him. In disputing with Martin he had felt himself an equal on neutral ground, but now the passion and prejudice of the little town seemed to rise up and oppose him, and he felt himself again a boy, rebellious and terrified. You had to know the place to realize the hysteria that could be provoked by something like a funeral.
‘I can only tell you what I told Father Martin already,’ he said, growing red and angry.
‘Did he talk about it too?’ Ned asked sharply.
‘There!’ Sheela said vindictively. ‘What did I tell you?’
‘Well, the pair of you are cleverer than I am,’ Fogarty said. ‘I saw nothing wrong with it.’
‘It was no proper thing to send to a priest’s funeral,’ she hissed with prim fury. ‘And whoever sent it was no friend of my brother.’
‘You saw nothing wrong with it, father?’ Ned prompted appealingly.
‘But I tell you, Uncle Ned, if that wreath goes into the graveyard we’ll be the laughing stock of the town,’ she said in an old-maidish frenzy. ‘I’ll throw it out myself if you won’t.’
‘Whisht, girl, whisht, and let Father Jerry talk!’ Ned said furiously.
‘It’s entirely a matter for yourselves, Ned,’ Fogarty said excitedly. He was really scared now. He knew he was in danger of behaving imprudently in public, and sooner or later, the story would get back to the Bishop, and it would be suggested that he knew more than he pretended.
‘If you’ll excuse me interrupting, father,’ Jackson said suavely, giving Fogarty a warning glance over his spectacles. ‘I know this is none of my business.’
‘Not at all, father, not at all,’ Ned said passionately. ‘You were the boy’s friend. All we want is for you to tell us what to do.’
‘Oh, well, Mr Devine, that would be too great a responsibility for me to take,’ Jackson replied with a cagey smile, though Fogarty saw that his face was very flushed. ‘Only someone who really knows the town could advise you about that. I only know what things are like in my own place. Of course, I entirely agree with Miss Devine,’ he said, giving her a smile that suggested that this, like crucifixion, was something he preferred to avoid. ‘Naturally, Father Fogarty and I have discussed it already. I think personally that it was entirely improper to send a wreath.’ Then his mild, clerical voice suddenly grew menacing and he shrugged his shoulders with an air of contempt. ‘But, speaking as an outsider, I’d say if you were to send that wreath back from the graveyard, you’d make yourself something far worse than a laughing stock. You’d throw mud on a dead man’s name that would never be forgotten for you the longest day you lived.… Of course, that’s only an outsider’s opinion,’ he added urbanely, drawing in his breath in a positive hiss.
‘Of course, of course, of course,’ Ned Devine said, clicking his fingers and snapping into action. ‘We should have thought of it ourselves, father. ’Twould be giving tongues to the stones.’
Then he lifted the wreath himself and carried it to the graveside. Several of the men by the gate looked at him with a questioning eye and fell in behind him. Some hysteria had gone out of the air. Fogarty gently squeezed Jackson’s hand.
‘Good man, Jim!’ he said in a whisper. ‘Good man you are!’
He stood with Jackson at the head of the open grave beside the local priests. As their voices rose in the psalms for the dead and their vestments billowed about them, Fogarty’s brooding eyes swept the crowd of faces he had known since his childhood and which were now caricatured by age and pain. Each time they came to rest on the wreath which stood at one side of the open grave. It would lie there now above Devine when all the living had gone, his secret. And each time it came over him in a wave of emotion that what he and Jackson had protected was something more than a sentimental token. It was the thing that had linked them to Devine, and for the future would link them to one another – love. Not half a dozen things, but one thing, between son and mother, man and sweetheart, friend and friend.
The Mass Island
When Father Jackson drove up to the curates’ house, it was already drawing on to dusk, the early dusk of late December. The curates’ house was a red-brick building on a terrace at one side of the ugly church in Asragh. Father Hamilton seemed to have been waiting for him and opened the front door himself, looking white and strained. He was a tall young man with a long, melancholy face that you would have taken for weak till you noticed the cut of the jaw.
‘Oh, come in, Jim,’ he said with his mournful smile. ‘ ’Tisn’t much of a welcome we have for you, God knows. I suppose you’d like to see poor Jerry before the undertaker comes.’
‘I might as well,’ Father Jackson replied briskly. There was nothing melancholy about Jackson, but he affected an air of surprise and shock. ‘ ’Twas very sudden, wasn’t it?’
‘Well, it was and it wasn’t, Jim,’ Father Hamilton said, closing the front door behind him. ‘He was going downhill since he got the first heart attack, and he wouldn’t look after himself. Sure, you know yourself what he was like.’
Jackson knew. Father Fogarty and himself had been friends, of a sort, for years. An impractical man, excitable and vehement, Fogarty could have lived for twenty years with his ailment, but instead of that, he allowed himself to become depressed and indifferent. If he couldn’t live as he had always lived, he would prefer not to live at all.
They went upstairs and into the bedroom where he was. The character was still plain on the stern, dead face, though, drained of vitality, it had the look of a studio portrait. That bone structure was something you’d have picked out of a thousand faces as Irish, with its odd impression of bluntness and asymme
try, its jutting brows and craggy chin, and the snub nose that looked as though it had probably been broken twenty years before in a public-house row.
When they came downstairs again, Father Hamilton produced half a bottle of whiskey.
‘Not for me, thanks,’ Jackson said hastily. ‘Unless you have a drop of sherry there?’
‘Well, there is some Burgundy,’ Father Hamilton said. ‘I don’t know is it any good, though.’
‘ ’Twill do me fine,’ Jackson replied cheerfully, reflecting that Ireland was the country where nobody knew whether Burgundy was good or not. ‘You’re coming with us tomorrow, I suppose?’
‘Well, the way it is, Jim,’ Father Hamilton replied, ‘I’m afraid neither of us is going. You see, they’re burying poor Jerry here.’
‘They’re what?’ Jackson asked incredulously.
‘Now, I didn’t know for sure when I rang you, Jim, but that’s what the brother decided, and that’s what Father Hanafey decided as well.’
‘But he told you he wanted to be buried on the Mass Island, didn’t he?’
‘He told everybody, Jim,’ Father Hamilton replied with growing excitement and emotion. ‘That was the sort he was. If he told one, he told five hundred. Only a half an hour ago I had a girl on the telephone from the Island, asking when they could expect us. You see, the old parish priest of the place let Jerry mark out the grave for himself, and they want to know should they open it. But now the old parish priest is dead as well, and, of course, Jerry left nothing in writing.’
‘Didn’t he leave a will, even?’ Jackson asked in surprise.
‘Well, he did and he didn’t, Jim,’ Father Hamilton said, looking as if he were on the point of tears. ‘Actually, he did make a will about five or six years ago, and he gave it to Clancy, the other curate, but Clancy went off on the Foreign Mission and God alone knows where he is now. After that, Jerry never bothered his head about it. I mean, you have to admit the man had nothing to leave. Every damn thing he had he gave away – even the old car, after he got the first attack. If there was any loose cash around, I suppose the brother has that.’
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