The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  At last an old Irish-speaking priest came and comforted her. He left her quietly saying her beads, secure in the promise to see that she was buried in Ummera no matter what anyone said. As darkness fell, the beads dropped from her swollen hands and she began to mutter to herself in Irish. Sitting about the fire, the ragged old women whispered and groaned in sympathy. The Angelus rang out from a nearby church. Suddenly Abby’s voice rose to a shout and she tried to lift herself on her elbow.

  ‘Ah, Michael Driscoll, my friend, my kind comrade, you didn’t forget me after all the long years. I’m along time away from you but I’m coming at last. They tried to keep me away, to make me stop among foreigners in the town, but where would I be at all without you and all the old friends? Stay for me, my treasure! Stop and show me the way.… Neighbours,’ she shouted, pointing into the shadows, ‘that man there is my own husband, Michael Driscoll. Let ye see he won’t leave me to find my way alone. Gather round me with yeer lanterns, neighbours, till I see who I have. I know ye all. ’Tis only the sight that’s weak on me. Be easy now, my brightness, my own kind loving comrade. I’m coming. After all the long years I’m on the road to you at last.…’

  It was a spring day full of wandering sunlight when they brought her the long road to Ummera, the way she had come from it forty years before. The lake was like a dazzle of midges; the shafts of the sun revolving like a great millwheel poured their cascades of milky sunlight over the hills and the little whitewashed cottages and the little black mountain cattle among the scarecrow fields. The hearse stopped at the foot of the lane that led to the roofless cabin just as she had pictured it to herself in the long nights, and Pat, looking more melancholy than ever, turned to the waiting neighbours and said:

  ‘Neighbours, this is Abby, Batty Heige’s daughter, that kept her promise to ye at the end of all.’

  From MY FATHER’S SON – TIM TRAYNOR

  THE OTHER friend of those years in Dublin was the curate in the Star of the Sea church in Sandymount, Tim Traynor. I had met him first through Sean O’Faolain when he was curate in Adam and Eve’s church. He brought us down to the vaults to see the coffin of Leonard MacNally, the informer who betrayed Robert Emmett, and as we left he gave the coffin a thundering kick. He did the same with all visitors, and it was something you liked or did not like as the case might be. It was so typical of Traynor that I liked it.

  He had the sort of face that I now see oftener in New York and Boston than in Ireland – the pugilistic Irish face, beefy and red and scowling, with features that seemed to have withdrawn into it to guard it from blows; a broad, blunted nose and a square jaw. He was as conspiratorial as Higgins and much more malicious. If you were injured by one of Higgins’s intrigues there was nothing much to blame for it but the will of God, but Traynor, in pursuing some imaginary grievance, would invent and carry through cruel practical jokes. When he swaggered into my room of an evening I would sometimes ask, ‘Well, which is it to be tonight, Nero, Napoleon, or St Francis of Assisi?’ Most often it was Nero.

  ‘It’s that fellow Jenkins. Wait till I tell you!’

  Yet I never really felt that he was not a good priest, and he gave me an understanding of and sympathy with the Irish priesthood which even the antics of its silliest members have not been able to affect. It was merely that his temperament and imagination constantly overflowed the necessary limits of his vocation as they would have overflowed the limits of almost any calling, short of that of a pirate. Yet they also enriched his character, so that you felt if he lived for another twenty years he would be a very fine priest indeed. It was significant to me that our old friend, the Tailor of Gougane Barra, who had a trick of nicknaming all his acquaintances in ways that stuck instantly, christened Hayes ‘The Old Child’ and Traynor ‘The Saint’. There was an element of childishness in Hayes, and you always underestimated Traynor if you paid attention only to the devil and forgot the saint.

  It was characteristic of him that he became really friendly with me only when he discovered that as boys we had both had a romantic crush on the same girl. He had had better fortune than I, for one night he had seen Natalie home from college up Summer Hill, and all the way they had held hands without exchanging a word. When the man she was proposing to marry had held back, she had complained of him to Traynor; he had advised her and they had remained friends until her death.

  It was also characteristic of him that when I left his rooms that night he insisted on my taking the only picture he had of her. That was not only the new friend and the outburst of generosity; it was also the priest who knew he should not brood on a dead girl’s picture.

  But, of course, he brooded just the same. The emotional expansiveness that overflowed the limitations of his profession made him brood on all the might-have-beens of his life, and they were endless. I used to make fun of his rooms, which were a museum of all the might-have-beens: books on science, history, art; paintings, sculptures, a shotgun that needed cleaning and a cinematograph that wouldn’t work – all passions pursued with fury for a few weeks till each in turn joined the exhibits on view. It was not only Nero and St Francis who alternated in his strange, complex character, but Einstein, Michelangelo and Gibbon as well. […]

  All the imaginative improvisation was only the outward expression of a terrible inward loneliness, loneliness that was accentuated by his calling. In that sense only could I ever admit that he was not a good priest – he should have had a tougher hide. Priests in Ireland are cut off from ordinary intercourse in a way that seems unknown in other countries. Once when we were arguing he made me impatient and I said, ‘Ah, don’t be a bloody fool, Tim!’ His face suddenly went mad, and for a moment I thought he meant to strike me. Then he recollected himself and said darkly, ‘Do you know that nobody has called me a bloody fool since I was sixteen?’ Then the humour of it struck him, and he described how, once, when he was home on holidays from the seminary he was pontificating at the supper table and suddenly caught his uncle winking at his mother. Then he grew angry again.

  ‘People like you give the impression that it’s our fault if the country is priest-ridden. We know it’s priest-ridden, but what can we do about it? I can’t even get on a tram without some old man or woman getting up to offer me his seat. I can’t go into a living-room without knowing that all ordinary conversation stops, and when it starts again it’s going to be intended for my ears. That’s not a natural life. A man can’t be sane and not be called a bloody fool now and again.’

  Before I knew him he spent his holidays as a stretcher-bearer in Lourdes: somehow the contact with people who were ill and dying satisfied the gentleness and protectiveness in his nature. There was an enormous amount of this, but it never went on for long because when he felt rebuffed, brooding and anger took its place. In those years he took every chance of spending a few days in Gougane Barra in the mountains of West Cork. He stayed at the inn, abandoned his Roman collar, and served at the bar, went fishing and argued with the visitors and (if I knew him) got involved personally and vindictively in every minor disagreement for miles round. His loneliness was of a sort that made it difficult for him to become involved with anything except as a protagonist. […]

  Traynor died while I was in America, and somehow or other his priest friends managed to bury him where he had always wished to be buried, in Gougane Barra: how, I don’t know for, being Traynor, he died penniless and intestate; the rules dictated that he should be buried in the town, and the island cemetery he wished to be buried in had been closed by order of the bishop.

  But even in death he was a romantic, bending circumstances to his will, and his old friends brought him there on Little Christmas Night, when the snow was on the mountains, and the country people came across the dangerous rocks and streams with their lanterns, and an array of cars turned their headlights on the causeway to the island church where he was to spend his last night above ground.

  At the other side of the causeway lies the Tailor, under the noble headstone carved for him by h
is friend Seamus Murphy, with the epitaph I chose for him – ‘A star danced and under it I was born.’ I was glad that Traynor permitted that, though he refused to allow Murphy to do what he wanted and replace the cross with an open shears. He himself has no gravestone, but the country people have not forgotten him and on his grave his initials are picked out in little coloured stones. Even in death the things that Traynor would have most liked to know have been hidden from him.

  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 asymmetry, 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.’

  Jackson sipped his Burgundy, which was even more Australian than he had feared, and wondered at his own irritation. He had been irritated enough before that, with the prospect of two days’ motoring in the middle of winter, and a night in a godforsaken pub in the mountains, a hundred and fifty miles away at the other side of Ireland. There, in one of the lakes, was an island where in Cromwell’s time, before the causeway and the little oratory were built, Mass was said in secret, and it was here that Father Fogarty had wanted to be buried. It struck Jackson as sheer sentimentality; it wasn’t even as if it was Fogarty’s native place. Jackson had once allowed Fogarty to lure him there, and had hated every moment of it. It wasn’t only the discomfort of the public-house, where meals erupted at any hour of the day or night as the spirit took the proprietor, or the rain that kept them confined to the cold dining-and-sitting room that looked out on the gloomy mountainside, with its couple of whitewashed cabins on the shore of the lake. It was the over-intimacy of it all, and this was the thing that Father Fogarty apparently loved. He liked to stand in his shirtsleeves behind the bar, taking turns with the proprietor, who was one of his many friends, serving big pints of porter to rough mountainy men, or to sit in their cottages, shaking in all his fat whenever they told broad stories or sang risky folk songs. ‘God, Jim, isn’t it grand?’ he would say in his deep voice, and Jackson would look at him over his spectacles with what Fogarty called his ‘jesuitical look’, and say, ‘Well, I suppose it all depends on what you really like, Jerry.’ He wasn’t even certain that the locals cared for Father Fogarty’s intimacy on the contrary, he had a strong impression that they much preferred their own reserved old parish priest, whom they never saw except twice a year, when he came up the valley to collect his dues. That had made Jackson twice as stiff. And yet now when he found out that the plans that had meant so much inconvenience to him had fallen through, he was as disappointed as though they had been his own.

  ‘Oh, well,’ he said with a shrug that was intended to conceal his perturbation, ‘I suppose it doesn’t make much difference where they chuck us when our time comes.’

  ‘The point is, it mattered to Jerry, Jim,’ Father Hamilton said with his curious shy obstinacy. ‘God knows, it’s not anything that will ever worry me, but it haunted him, and somehow, you know, I don’t feel it’s right to flout a dead man’s wishes.’

  ‘Oh, I know, I know,’ Jackson said lightly. ‘I suppose I’d better talk to old Hanafey about it. Knowing I’m a friend of the Bishop’s, he might pay more attention to me.’

  ‘He might, Jim,’ Father Hamilton replied sadly, looking away over Jackson’s head. ‘As you say, knowing you’re a friend of the Bishop’s, he might. But I wouldn’t depend too much on it. I talked to him till I was black in the face, and all I got out of him was the law and the rubrics. It’s the brother Hanafey is afraid of. You’ll see him this evening, and, between ourselves, he’s a tough customer. Of course, himself and Jerry never had much to say to one another, and he’d be the last man in the world that Jerry would talk to about his funeral, so now he doesn’t want the expense and inconvenience. You wouldn’t blame him, of course. I’d probably be the same myself. By the way,’ Father Hamilton added, lowering his voice, ‘before he does come, I’d like you to take a look round Jerry’s room and see is there any little memento you’d care to have – a photo or a book or anything.’

  They went into Father Fogarty’s sitting-room, and Jackson looked at it with a new interest. He knew of old the rather handsome library – Fogarty had been a man of many enthusiasms, though none of long duration – the picture of the Virgin and Child in Irish country costume over the mantelpiece, which some of his colleagues had thought irreverent, and the couple of fine old prints. There was a newer picture that Jackson
had not seen – a charcoal drawing of the Crucifixion from a fifteenth-century Irish tomb, which was brutal but impressive.

  ‘Good Lord!’ Jackson exclaimed with a sudden feeling of loss. ‘He really had taste, hadn’t he?’

  ‘He had, Jim,’ Father Hamilton said, sticking his long nose into the picture. ‘This goes to a young couple called Keneally, outside the town, that he was fond of. I think they were very kind to him. Since he had the attack, he was pretty lonely, I’d say.’

  ‘Oh, aren’t we all, attack or no attack,’ Jackson said almost irritably.

  Father Hanafey, the parish priest of Asragh, was a round, red, cherubic-looking old man with a bald head and big round glasses. His house was on the same terrace as the curates’. He, too, insisted on producing the whiskey Jackson so heartily detested, when the two priests came in to consult him, but Jackson had decided that this time diplomacy required he should show proper appreciation of the dreadful stuff. He felt sure he was going to be very sick next day. He affected great astonishment at the quality of Father Hanafey’s whiskey, and first the old parish priest grew shy, like a schoolgirl whose good looks are being praised, then he looked self-satisfied, and finally he became almost emotional. It was a great pleasure, he said, to meet a young priest with a proper understanding of whiskey. Priests no longer seemed to have the same taste, and as far as most of them were concerned, they might as well be drinking poteen. It was only when it was seven years old that Irish began to be interesting, and that was when you had to catch it and store it in sherry casks to draw off what remained of crude alcohol in it, and give it that beautiful roundness that Father Jackson had spotted. But it shouldn’t be kept too long, for somewhere along the line the spirit of a whiskey was broken. At ten, or maybe twelve, years old it was just right. But people were losing their palates. He solemnly assured the two priests that of every dozen clerics who came to his house not more than one would realize what he was drinking. Poor Hamilton grew red and began to stutter, but the parish priest’s reproofs were not directed at him.