The Red Men

by Patrick McGinley

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’d better warn Bosco and Cookie now. Saturday morning in this room at eleven. Dark lounge suits for you and Cookie. Bosco can come in his cassock.’

  Father Bosco was washing his underpants when the telephone rang. He always gave them a rinse before turning them over to the Canon’s housekeeper who was in the habit of inspecting what she washed and commenting on it. From experience he knew that she expected a priest’s underwear to emit nothing less than the odour of sanctity, and, as a man who took his mission seriously, he felt it his duty not to give cause for scandal. The odour of sanctity, she had told him, was something pure and austere like the odour of wild honey and locusts. That, he knew, was an ideal of pristine Christianity. The best a twentieth-century country priest could aspire to was the keen and haunting odour of Sunlight soap.

  He allowed the telephone to give seven rings before answering.

  ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting, I was in the middle of a lengthy prayer.’

  ‘How right you are to pray,’ said Joey. ‘The Day of Reckoning is here at last. Gulban wants to see the three of us on Saturday at eleven hundred hours for a final meeting. It’s all hush-hush. Top secret. No one knows the agenda. Aren’t you excited?’

  ‘I can only do my best to share your enthusiasm.’

  ‘You’re worse than Cookie. He’s affecting total indifference, the pietistical hypocrite. Just think! This is it.’

  Father Bosco was in fact excited. He had merely thought it proper in a priest to keep excitement under a bushel. He rang Pauline in the afternoon, who was even less informative than Joey. Then he rang Cookie, who said that he was pleased to see Gulban getting his strength back. The following day he visited Gulban himself, whom he found sitting up in bed saying his rosary. It was such a remarkable sight that he was filled with the conviction that his own prayers were about to be answered. He spent a week of mounting excitement which reached its acme when he received in the post from Pauline a typewritten agenda which told him nothing. It simply said:

  House of Heron

  Board Meeting

  Saturday, April 20th at 11 a.m.

  AGENDA

  1 Apologies for Absence

  2 Minutes of Last Meeting

  3 Matters Arising

  4 Chairman’s Report

  5 Any Other Business

  He took the first item on the agenda so seriously that he allowed two hours for the one-hour journey, in case he should get a puncture. He arrived at the hotel to find Cookie and Joey enjoying a drink in the lounge bar and showing no sign of the strained relations he had detected between them on his last visit. They were both in their Sunday best, and Joey had rather ostentatiously brought along a clipboard for his agenda.

  ‘There’s no table in the board room,’ he explained. ‘You’ll need something to write on, Father Bosco. Now, if you were a bishop, you could use your folded mitre.’

  At five to eleven Pauline came down to tell them that the Chairman was ready. He had discarded his pyjama top and was wearing a new white shirt with an open collar and red cravat. He was sitting up in bed, the agenda resting on a tea tray in front of him, his spectacles already in position on the tip of his nose. Three high-backed chairs from his office had been placed in a row at the end of the bed, with another chair for Pauline by the bedside table.

  The Chairman welcomed them one by one, shuffled his papers, and asked them to be seated. As he peered at them over the rim of his glasses, Father Bosco felt certain that he detected a twinkle of approbation in Gulban’s watery eyes.

  ‘Have you ever taken minutes before?’ He directed the twinkle towards Pauline.

  ‘Not of a board meeting.’

  ‘I was chairman of the parish council once, so let me tell you how it’s done. First you write down the names of all present, one underneath the other:

  Anthony (“Gulban”) Heron (Chairman)

  Father Bosco Heron, C.C.

  Thomas (“Cookie”) Heron

  Joseph Heron

  Pauline Harrison (in attendance)

  Have you got that? Good. Now we can make a start. Item two: as we don’t have any minutes of the last meeting, the secretary can’t read them, and it follows that I as Chairman can’t sign them. Item three: matters arising. As there are no minutes, there are no matters which could conceivably arise. Is all clear so far?’

  Joey, who was sitting next to Father Bosco, sighed audibly and ticked off items two and three on his clipboard.

  ‘Now we come to item four, the Chairman’s report and therefore the meat of the agenda. I should like to begin by saying that this is the last formal meeting I shall call. From now on I may see you individually but never again together. This is an extraordinary meeting, because the subject I wish to address is not business but death. In a word I have decided to die.’

  ‘You can’t just decide to die!’ Father Bosco remonstrated.

  ‘Unless you propose to commit suicide,’ Joey added.

  ‘All my life I have decided everything at the House of Heron, and I’m not going to change my tune in the last few bars. I’ve lain here long enough. Soon I’ll turn my back to the window and the sunlight, and I’ll close my eyes. I’ve made my will, all is in order. Nothing remains to be done except snuff it.’

  The Chairman closed his eyes and wrinkled his forehead in an act of extreme concentration. Pauline waited with head down and pencil tilted in readiness. She looked so serene that it seemed to Father Bosco that nothing Gulban could say would now surprise her. Joey had drawn the front elevation of the House of Heron on the back of his agenda, to which he’d added a frieze of matchstick figures that spelt the legend: ‘Abandon hope, all ye who were born here.’ Somewhere in the fields, a donkey brayed mournfully. The Chairman smiled patiently as he waited for the braying to stop.

  ‘Now we come to the purpose of this meeting, which is to finalise the arrangements for my funeral.’

  Joey groaned and drew a picture of a donkey in spectacles sitting up in bed with a little girl in a pretty hood beside him.

  ‘Listen carefully, because these are my last wishes. I don’t want to moulder away slowly in a graveyard. I want to be buried at sea and my bones picked clean within three days. I want my thigh-bone to be washed ashore in the north and my collar-bone in the south. I want to be everywhere when I’m dead, not imprisoned in a narrow graveyard waiting for the next funeral to bring down the next man with the next instalment of news from above. On the morning after I die, you will take my coffin eastwards by road to Undercliff, then westwards by boat along the coast. You will bury me out behind the island at a point where the north chimney of the hotel sits on the lantern of the lighthouse, and you, Father Bosco, will say a final prayer – one Our Father and no more. There will be no requiem, no singing, no sermon, no funeral offerings, and no tide to carry me back.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can agree to that,’ said Father Bosco. ‘The funeral service must accord with liturgical practice. I shall have to consult the appropriate canon to see if it contains a loophole.’

  ‘What do you say, Joey?’

  ‘It’s all a great waste of petrol. First you go east only to go west.’

  ‘I’m fulfilling the old saying: “The short-cut to the wedding, the roundabout to the graveyard.”’

  ‘There are difficulties,’ said Father Bosco. ‘The parish priest won’t like being robbed of the funeral offerings, which, in your case, are bound to be substantial.’

  ‘Give him a thousand pounds for his consent. I’d rather that than have people paying half-crowns over my remains and saying afterwards that the offerings fell well short of the record.’

  ‘What if the sea is rough?’ Joey wondered. ‘Sometimes in winter no boat can get out for weeks on end.’

  ‘I’ll die in the summer, then. Any further comments?’

  Father Bosco counted the buttons down the front of his cassock. He had decided that strenuous objection would be impolitic. His present duty was to ensure that he
inherited. When the estate was his, he would make whatever funeral arrangements suited best, taking due account of the requirements of canon law.

  ‘Any further comments?’ the Chairman repeated.

  ‘No,’ said Cookie.

  ‘Father Bosco? Have you nothing more to say?’

  ‘One Our Father is on the scant side. I’d like to be able to sing In paradisum to lend the occasion a touch of dignity. In paradisum deducant te angeli. May the angels lead thee into paradise. It will sound lovely on the open sea.’

  ‘No need to sing it yet. You can sing it on the day if you think it will do any good. But no Dies Irae, please. It’s far too long. I want a quick service without falderals, and no one looking furtively at his watch half-way through.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Father Bosco.

  ‘We’ve dealt with the funeral arrangements. Now we must deal with what comes after. For most of my life I’ve been so busy that I had little time to think of anything except business. As Pauline will tell you, the hotel accounts are in order, but there are one or two irregularities that might not escape an auditor with more than numerical accuracy on his mind. In the early days things were hard. Revenue was uncertain, every penny counted. In the shop I could have overcharged. Instead I gave short measure. Since then I’ve tried to make amends. I’ve given alms to the poor, and bed and board to Andy Early. Over the years I’ve confessed my sin to six priests and one bishop, but the knowledge of short measure given won’t go away. It’s a tumour inside my skull, pressing down on the surface of my brain. What good is God’s forgiveness if knowledge of sin returns to torture the sinner? I’d give every penny I own to the man who would show me the act that would rid me of the memory of scales bouncing too quickly.’

  ‘Some sins are deciduous and some are evergreen,’ said Father Bosco. ‘Evergreen sins give no rest to the sinner. They sprout needles that coalesce to form a hump on his back. The hump grows bigger and heavier with every day that passes, while the man beneath grows smaller and weaker from the weight of the unequal burden, and finally only the hump remains. It is a condition which can be arrested by an act of extraordinary goodness, and fortunately you have it in your power to perform such an act. You must dispose of your property in a way that will turn it to spiritual account.’

  ‘Crap,’ Joey shouted. ‘Father Bosco is playing on your fear of the hereafter. Let me give you the good news here and now: there is no hereafter. The wages of life is a dreamless sleep at the end. Complete oblivion. It’s the only thing that makes this disgusting pantomime bearable.’

  ‘I’m not looking for comfort,’ said the Chairman. ‘I want the truth.’

  ‘You crave the comfort of religion and you jib at the price,’ Joey said. ‘If it’s the truth you want, you won’t get it from Father Bosco – he’s got vested interests. So listen to the voice of common sense inside you. There’s nothing after life but nothingness. Turn your back on Bosco’s after-life and your guilt will melt away.’

  ‘I refuse to argue,’ said Father Bosco. ‘Truth, like charity, is not puffed up. All I shall say is that the word “after-life” is a misnomer. What we call the after-life is really the true life. What we are experiencing now, what Joey calls “this disgusting pantomime”, is only a protracted birth.’

  ‘What I need is certainty,’ said the Chairman. ‘Have you got anything to say, Cookie?’

  ‘I don’t have the answer, I doubt if there is one.’

  ‘There is no certainty, only pedlars of false certainties,’ said Father Bosco. ‘Now, in a case of uncertainty, what does a prudent man do?’

  ‘He takes out an insurance policy!’ Joey shrieked.

  ‘Silence! Let me think,’ the Chairman shouted.

  He put his right hand over his eyes and supported the elbow with his left. Father Bosco found himself looking at Pauline’s mouth and thinking of Jack’s sexual gluttony. Then he, too, closed his eyes. Joey continued doodling and Cookie wrote on the agenda beneath ‘Chairman’s Report’: ‘Call no man rich till he’s dead.’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ the Chairman announced. ‘The short measure I gave was in weighing flour, tea and sugar. I’ll give every family on the headland a free hundredweight bag of flour and enough tea and sugar to last a month. I’ll sit here by the window and watch the lorry going from house to house with deliveries. That way I’ll see the reparation being made with my own two eyes. There will be no doubt ever again, my sin will fall away like fur from a moulting pelt.’

  ‘You’ll make yourself look ridiculous,’ Joey protested. ‘People will want to know why, and those who are proud will refuse what they’re bound to see as charity. Besides, no one buys hundredweight bags of flour any more. That was when times were hard and people baked their own bread. Now they eat gâteau from the supermarket; it sounds posher than cake.’

  ‘The best charity goes to the most deserving,’ Father Bosco advised. ‘If you like, I’ll make a list of suitable recipients, the very, very poor. I’ll organise everything. It must be anonymous giving, though, the giving blessed by Christ Himself.’

  ‘That’s settled, then,’ said the Chairman. ‘Over the next few days I’ll calculate the sum to be spent. I won’t be niggardly. To guard against error, I’ll use a factor of three in marking up. Now we come to Any Other Business.’

  The Chairman looked at each of them in turn. There was silence till Joey spoke.

  ‘Nearly a year ago you announced the Day of the Talents. Isn’t it time that their use was assessed? Some of us haven’t been idle. We now look forward to the Day of Judgment.’

  ‘Judgment will come but not yet. It’s beyond the scope of this extraordinary meeting. As it is our last meeting, there is no need to fix a date for the next. The secretary will type out the minutes and each of you will receive a copy within a week. Thank you for coming. I declare the meeting closed.’

  Gulban sank back against the pillows. Pauline mopped his forehead with a handkerchief as the three sons filed out of the room.

  ‘You’ll stay for lunch?’ Cookie suggested in the lobby.

  ‘Impossible, I’m afraid. Canon Sproule is down with flu, I must get back.’

  ‘At least have a pre-luncheon drink.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘A glass of Perrier water perhaps?’ Joey enticed him.

  ‘We have Évian as well, fresh in yesterday,’ said Cookie.

  ‘Thank you both.’

  They followed him out into the driveway. He hurried to his Fiat, pretending they weren’t behind him.

  ‘You have it in the bag.’ Cookie leant against the car door.

  ‘I thought your psychology too transparent, Father. Gulban might have appreciated the subtlety of serpents more.’ Joey gave his split-level smile.

  ‘The wisdom of serpents,’ Father Bosco corrected.

  ‘To play on an old man’s fear of hell-fire is hardly Christian. Or am I deficient in my knowledge of liberal theology?’ Joey pursued.

  Father Bosco looked across the river at the hill.

  ‘The landscape is at its best now,’ he said. ‘Washed clean by rain, burnt down by months of frost. Though you can’t see it, you can sense the pure green, the new growth, underneath the reddish bracken.

  ‘The meeting achieved nothing,’ Cookie sighed.

  ‘Poor old Gulban did his best to discuss the eternal trivialities, while the three of us were immersed in temporalities. The world is too much with us, we sing In paradisum out of tune.’ Joey shook his head in mock-sadness.

  ‘You must deal with the world as best you can,’ Father Bosco tried a word of encouragement. ‘Even if you don’t, it will still melt away like the flesh-seeking flesh itself.’

  ‘And nothing but the Devil will remain,’ Cookie intoned.

  ‘Wasn’t it He who said, “Lo, I am with you always”? He’s the only constant. In more homely language, He’s your only man.’ With a sweeping bow, Joey opened the car door.

  ‘I must leave you,’ said Father Bosco. ‘I
can see I’m only an occasion of sin for you both.’

  As he drove out the gate, he found himself looking forward to the afternoon and the confession of simple sins. Sins that lost all particularity in the telling. ‘Father, I’ve committed fornication. Father, I’ve entertained impure thoughts.’ No prurient detail, no painterly images, none of the sensuous density of passionate living. He was not an inquisitor, grand or otherwise. He would not demand depiction. He would forgive without interrogation. The penitent spoke in a formula and so did the confessor. Perhaps that’s what had chained Gulban to his sin. He had said, ‘Father, I gave short measure’, and to him Ego te absolvo was not enough. He had expected to be cross-examined, humiliated, stewed slowly in the juice of his own avarice and hauled out painfully to dry in the sun. He wished to relive his transgression fully and searingly till the merest residue of guilt had been burnt away. Perhaps there was a case for inquisitorial interrogation, for the prurient particulars, after all. A dangerous thought. The confessor also had a soul that needed saving. The penitent must remain a mere sinner, not an occasion of sin for the invisible man behind the grille.

  As he passed the Gravelly Shoulder, he breathed a prayer for Alicia and another for himself. Then he said aloud, ‘The meeting was pure ceremonial, a diabolical exercise in worldly enticement. Cookie says I have it in the bag and I think that he has. Only God and Gulban know.’

  Chapter 27

  With Easter came the first guests of the year: four middle-aged middle-class couples and two spare bachelors who sat in the lounge bar reading their papers before dinner, each observing the other while pretending that the other wasn’t there. The weather had turned mild and dry. The hedges and fields again looked green. Only the hill and moor bore the reddish-brown marks of winter. Below on the slip fishermen sat on empty fish-boxes mending nets and lobster creels as they waited for a calmer sea.