The Red Men

by Patrick McGinley

  ‘This week we’ll try to look like everyone else,’ Benedict said. ‘We’ll wear jeans and polo-necked tee-shirts. When we’re ordained, we’ll be different. I once heard an old curate say that there’s nothing more enfeebling for a priest than the feeling of being special.’

  ‘Why polo-necks?’ Bosco asked.

  ‘They conceal chest hair. We don’t want to arouse the passions of young women.’

  Laughing at the absurdity of it, they went down to the sea-front and lay on the grass above the beach, quoting Ecclesiastes and making good-natured jokes about the professor of moral theology. A young girl in a black bikini passed by without looking at them. Benedict raised himself on one elbow and studied her swaying figure.

  ‘There’s a world of hell there, Bosco,’ he said. ‘We’re lucky to have settled for the purifying fires of Purgatory.’

  Bosco pretended he had not heard.

  Ten minutes later the girl returned, licking soft icecream from a cone. Concord passed into discord. The sun danced promiscuously on the supine sea.

  ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but the trigonometry of girls’ bottoms in bikinis shall not pass away,’ Benedict laughed delightedly, his pale skin slightly yellow in the sharp sea-light, his already thin hair matted and dry.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t say these things,’ Bosco chided.

  ‘They must be said for sanity’s sake and you are the only person I know who can hear them without taking scandal. Women have such a luxury of hip and bottom. Who said that?’

  ‘St Augustine?’ Bosco ventured.

  ‘Henry James, believe it or not.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘He said something very similar in a letter to a sculptor friend.’

  ‘That doesn’t give the thought theological sanction.’

  ‘We mustn’t fight shy of life. We must put ourselves in the way of ordinary human experience. Only then can we fulfil our mission among sinners.’

  ‘Benedict, do you really mean the things you say? Answer me truthfully.’

  ‘Do you think I do?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In that case there’s no harm in it.’

  ‘There could be scandal. I could go back to my room and dwell on it. You just can’t assume anything at all about another human being.’

  ‘Bosco, you’re as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities … You know the rest.’

  Bosco had come to see Benedict as a rock on which he himself had a foothold. Benedict’s aphorisms gave him a sense of the essential health and sanity of the religious life. They proclaimed that to be good you didn’t have to be a solemn ape who wiped the smile off his face every time he entered a church vestibule. Above all, Benedict possessed a magnanimity that enabled him to note another man’s weaknesses without any loss of compassion or sympathy.

  Bosco thought he had found in his friend the innocence and simplicity which he himself had forfeited. He was shattered when Benedict upped and left the seminary only a month before he was due to take Holy Orders. His first reaction was one of anger. The pious plodders would be ordained. Jackasses would bray from pulpits, and the faithful would bow and listen uncritically in their humility. Did it mean that in Christ’s Church there was no mansion for individuals as opposed to stock characters? After anger came self-accusation. His own judgment had been at fault. He had been taken in by the sparkle of appearances, he had preferred Benedict’s intellectual spoofing to the conventional conversation of his teachers and colleagues. He sought God’s forgiveness and tried to pray for Benedict in his new vocation. Throughout the ordination ceremony he kept thinking of him. What should have been a day of glorious light had become overcast with regrets about the past and fears for the future. It was an unfortunate start to his ministry, it left him with an abiding and humiliating sense of imperfection.

  Parish work helped to assuage the pain. Gradually, he came to see the experience as a belated entry into manhood. Things had taken a serious and final turn. Laughter was frivolous, enjoyment an intoxication as insidious as brandy and port mixed in equal proportions. Life was for evermore under suspicion, not the life of the spirit but the life of the senses, which was what ninety-nine point nine per cent of the faithful meant by ‘life’. In the company of Benedict he had learnt ebullience and light-heartedness. Now he was slower and more cautious in making connections. A kind of depression had settled over his mind which he assumed to be a condition of maturity.

  He was leaning against the roughcast wall of the graveyard. Below him the sea lay flat and docile, constrained and impotent under the dull face of the moon. Waves splashed and spilled, but only half-heartedly. The night held no surprises.

  ‘All the rivers run into the sea, but the sea is not full,’ he whispered. ‘Better to remember, “He who digs a pit will fall into it.”’

  He would have to bear that in mind in his dealings with Pauline. Yet it was necessary to keep her friendship and enlist her help. Nothing would be gained by running away.

  He walked back to the car thinking of the directness and simplicity of Jack’s mind and character. He had given all his strength to getting things done. If he had become a priest, he would have built churches and kept his parish accounts in order. He would have been talked about by other priests at chapter, he would have been a bishop before he was forty.

  When he got home, Canon Sproule invited Father Bosco into his study for a mug of cocoa to end the day. They sat in silence on either side of the fire, the Canon smoking his big cream-coloured meerschaum without moving a muscle.

  ‘Even the best pipes go sour – if you smoke them long enough,’ he said at length.

  Bosco lit a cheroot and the Canon put the pipe back in its rack.

  ‘Have you ever had a sense of being tainted by sin but by no sin in particular?’ Bosco asked.

  ‘Tainted by people and events, you mean?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Even for a priest the enemies of the spiritual life are still the World, the Flesh and the Devil. Temptation is our daily companion, and we must meet it fully prepared – with a body that has suffered mortification. The tradition of flagellation in the early Church is frowned upon today, yet flagellation is an essential weapon in the armoury of anyone who takes Satan seriously. The greatest saints never flinched from physical suffering. St Francis of Assisi flung himself into a rose-bush to escape temptation, and Padre Pio was beaten regularly by the Devil. I had it from a priest who lived with him that he often came down to breakfast looking the worse for wear. We can only assume that the Devil had given him a bad time in the night.’

  The Canon was a priest of the old school and Father Bosco loved him for it. Sadly, his armour was for another century; the Devil had changed his tactics since he was a boy.

  Father Bosco went to his room, said his prayers and got into bed. Some time in the small hours he woke up in a sweat. He had been dreaming about Pauline and he could not remember the end of his dream. She had just married Slash Gildea and he had been killed in a car accident on the way back from the church. She came to Father Bosco in a black fur coat and sat on his knee for comfort in her second bereavement. Then he realised that she was wearing her coat back to front, that it was open, and that she had no clothes on underneath it.

  He got out of bed and ran the cold tap till the bath was almost full. He stood in the near-freezing water and immersed himself gradually till it covered his shoulders.

  The body was the enemy of the spirit and must be chastened. Now he saw the way ahead with clarity. He must inherit. The hotel as a home for elderly priests would be his gift to God, and it would be God’s gift to them for a lifetime of selfless service. He would pray, of course, and in addition he would take certain practical steps of his own. He would visit the hotel more regularly and talk to Gulban who was probably lonely in his room. He would make Pauline understand his purpose. She was intelligent and loyal by nature. She was bound to feel sympathy
, she would intercede with Gulban on his behalf.

  He towelled himself vigorously and returned to bed. Before he fell asleep, he thought he heard Benedict McBride shouting after a girl in a black bikini: ‘The Virgin Birth isn’t a myth, it’s a necessity.’

  Chapter 17

  The man on the hill moved back and forth with slow strides, standing now and again to observe a sheep at close range. The pattern of to-ing and fro-ing seemed aimless from where she watched. It was as if he’d lost his way and was trying out this direction and that, then doubling back with his eyes on the ground searching for a concealed pathway. He stooped over a ewe, one leg on each side of her, and buried his hands in the thick fleece. Slash Gildea was one of those men who excel at whatever they take up. He was good with sheep, good with cattle, and good in a boat, and he was an efficient manager of the hotel farm. He was open and fair in his dealings with other people, yet no one knew his thoughts. Two summers ago he’d asked her to put her hand on a ram’s horn to feel how warm it was. He spoke as if he were letting her in on a secret, and she expected him to explain. Then he walked away and she realised that he considered further explanation unnecessary.

  She trained her binoculars on the field next to the road, where his new ram was grazing with six less burly ewes. The ram followed one of the ewes up the slope, while the other five raised their heads and watched. The ram rubbed his head against the ewe’s neck. She didn’t seem to notice, she continued with her grazing. Then he nibbled her ear. He must have annoyed her, because she took off down the slope towards the other ewes that had already resumed their grazing. He didn’t follow. He walked away with stiff-legged indifference and scratched his neck against a rock at the other end of the field.

  A blurt of wind scattered hailstones as big as pebbles against the windows. The weather had finally broken. Towards the end of October it had rained continually for four days. Snow had been forecast for the 1st of November. Instead came three dry days with a black east wind that beat against the windows and nipped her ears and hands whenever she went outside the door. The very landscape seemed to have contracted. Men and animals moved stiffly, and the exposed houses stood starkly on the hard, bare ground. It was now the first week of November and it was already cold enough for snow. All but two of the guests had left. Hardly anyone came to the hotel, apart from the locals who drank in the public bar. The chambermaids and waitresses had gone back to their homes till spring. She wandered from one silent room to another, thinking that the soul is an empty hotel in winter when the last of the guests has departed.

  Sometimes she thought of going away and starting afresh, but the draughty hotel held her prisoner. It had always been at the centre of her imagination. As a girl, she had been outside the windows looking in. Now, as a woman, she was inside looking out. She would sit in her bedroom observing the movements of men and animals in the landscape, while her thoughts hovered over Jack, returning again and again to the Spoke and Felly, the beach, the graveyard and the Atlantic Grill.

  Sometimes she would see him as a good, simple, roughcast man whose only fault was a lack of sensitivity to other lives. At other times she would envisage him as a heartless monster who used everyone he knew for his pleasure. There was no knowing. He had been so many things to so many people.

  She turned her binoculars on Fort Knox, now bare and windswept without a sign of human movement. It, too, had taken on the aspect of a life frozen for ever into immobility.

  She was grateful for Gulban; he kept her busy with a score of pains and bedsores. At times she felt that he was the only living thing in her life. He was becoming more forgetful, though. Now it was impossible to tell when he was attending and when he wasn’t. Sometimes he could not recall the events of the previous day, while at other times he would surprise her by referring to a conversation that she could have sworn had taken place in his room when he was asleep. Mostly he was pessimistic.

  ‘Life is a wild-goose chase, a hunt that yields nothing,’ he would say. ‘You fail to catch the wild-goose, so you think you’ll catch the fox. You run him to earth, you start to dig him out, and then you find he’s gone to another den on the other side of the hill.’

  Father Bosco came to see him three times a week, and he often went out of his way to talk to her. He would come into her office and sit by her desk, looking as if he had an unknowable sorrow he could not share. After half an hour he would say, ‘Duty calls. I’ll see you the day after tomorrow.’ He was caring and good-natured, as a priest should be. He showed more warmth towards his father than did Cookie and Joey, who had more opportunity since they were living in.

  Cookie tried to take an interest in the business but his mind was on other things. He was a dreamer who imagined himself in love with Alicia or Amaryllis, while all the time he was sporting with the image of Narcissus in the shade. He was an irresolute and unworldly man who was now and again goaded by Joey into a show of strength.

  Joey was harder, more aggressive and more excitable, yet equally remote from the common experience. He had bought a punt from one of the local fishermen and he now spent his leisure time going out to the island whenever the sea was calm. He never seemed to catch any fish and he never said what he’d been up to. He’d come back at nightfall and go straight to his room, unlike Cookie who spent his evenings reading in the lounge bar or wool-gathering over crosswords.

  Whatever the tensions that existed between the two brothers, the reappearance of Andy Early united them as against a common enemy. Early had turned up again the previous week looking shaggier, craggier and more aggressive. He had spent the money that Cookie and Joey had given him, and he’d obviously come back expecting another incentive to leave immediately. Instead, on Gulban’s instructions, they gave him a small room on the east side of the building which he described as ‘cold, cramped and architecturally undistinguished’. For that reason, perhaps, he spent most of the day in the public bar, snorting, farting, shouting and blowing his nose between his thumb and forefinger. As he neither washed nor shaved, he had all the more time to devote to the practice of these sounds, as well as to eating, drinking, swearing and making rude sexual gestures when the barmaids’ backs were turned. He was a thorough-going nuisance, dirty and smelly with all the arrogance and pretensions of a man who had studied theology in his youth and had spent the rest of his life playing visiting professor in whatever bar he happened to be drinking.

  Pauline went to the kitchen to get Gulban his glass of rum punch before settling down in front of the television for the evening. The sound of raised voices drew her to the lounge bar, where she found Cookie pleading with Andy Early.

  ‘I’ve already told you, I don’t want you in the lounge,’ Cookie was saying.

  ‘The seats in the lounge are softer and the fire here throws out more heat. The lounge bar is first and foremost for guests, and that’s what I am – a guest,’ Early boomed.

  ‘You’re not a paying guest.’

  ‘I’ve never heard such impertinence!’

  ‘If it’s a drink you want, you’ll get served in the public. You won’t get one here.’

  ‘I’m no second-class citizen, I’m a registered voter.’

  ‘Then, drink where you vote and vote with your feet,’ Cookie advised.

  ‘So you fancy yourself as a wit! Let me tell you something: you’ll never be half the man your father was.’

  ‘For the last time I’m asking you to leave this bar. We’ve got two guests staying, and I don’t want you disturbing them when they come in for a drink before dinner.’

  ‘And if I don’t leave?’

  ‘It’s no good, you won’t get served.’

  ‘I’ll make a sound you’ve never heard before.’

  He towered over Cookie, leaning forward on his toes, a ton of bricks threatening to come down. He looked wild-eyed and fanatical, and he smelt of stale beer and vomit.

  ‘I’ve been making allowances for you because of my father, but my patience is running out.’

  Ear
ly opened his mouth wide and guffawed.

  ‘You should have a little hour-glass on your lapel, me boyo, so that we all can see the level of patience left to run.’

  Pauline motioned Cookie to follow her into the lobby.

  ‘It’s no good pleading with him,’ she whispered. ‘He’d never behave like this if Gulban were on his feet.’

  ‘I’ll get Slash to lean on him. A look from Slash, and he’ll know we mean business.’

  ‘If I know Slash, he’ll tell you to lean on him yourself.’

  ‘I can’t call the police. If I did, Gulban would have a fit.’

  ‘We’ve had him a week already, and he’s getting more obstreperous every day. If we don’t do something quickly, he’ll be here for the winter.’

  ‘I’ll have to make him see reason,’ Cookie said. ‘It’s all a matter of quiet persuasion.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Joey asked, as he joined them.

  ‘It’s Big Andy. He won’t leave the lounge bar till he gets a drink.’

  ‘Won’t is a declaration of war,’ said Joey.

  They both followed him into the lounge. Early was relaxing before the fire, which he had replenished liberally with black peat from the basket.

  ‘I believe you’d like a drink,’ Joey said.

  ‘A large whiskey. I’ll have it neat. It’s been one of those days.’

  ‘Enough of your lip. If you’re not off these premises within three minutes, I’ll ring the police.’

  ‘I’ll see your father first.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with Father. You’ve got two minutes and forty seconds left.’

  ‘You can’t chuck me out on an evening like this. The east wind would skewer bog-snipe.’