The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘It isn’t you I’m talking about, Father Hamilton, but elderly priests, parish priests, and even canons, that you would think would know better, and I give you my word, I put the two whiskeys side by side in front of them, the shop stuff and my own, and they could not tell the difference.’

  But though the priest was mollified by Father Jackson’s maturity of judgement, he was not prepared to interfere in the arrangements for the funeral of his curate. ‘It is the wish of the next of kin, father,’ he said stubbornly, ‘and that is something I have no control over. Now that you tell me the same thing as Father Hamilton, I accept it that this was Father Fogarty’s wish, and a man’s wishes regarding his own interment are always to be respected. I assure you, if I had even one line in Father Fogarty’s writing to go on, I would wait for no man’s advice. I would take the responsibility on myself. Something on paper, father, is all I want.’

  ‘On the other hand, father,’ Jackson said mildly, drawing on his pipe, ‘if Father Fogarty was the sort to leave written instructions, he’d hardly be the sort to leave such unusual ones. I mean, after all, it isn’t even the family burying ground, is it?’

  ‘Well, now, that is true, father,’ replied the parish priest, and it was clear that he had been deeply impressed by this rather doubtful logic. ‘You have a very good point there, and it is one I did not think of myself, and I have given the matter a great deal of thought. You might mention it to his brother. Father Fogarty, God rest him, was not a usual type of man. I think you might even go so far as to say that he was a rather unusual type of man, and not orderly, as you say – not by any means orderly. I would certainly mention that to the brother and see what he says.’

  But the brother was not at all impressed by Father Jackson’s argument when he turned up at the church in Asragh that evening. He was a good-looking man with a weak and pleasant face and a cold shrewdness in his eyes that had been lacking in his brother’s.

  ‘But why, father?’ he asked, turning to Father Hanafey. ‘I’m a busy man, and I’m being asked to leave my business for a couple of days in the middle of winter, and for what? That is all I ask. What use is it?’

  ‘It is only out of respect for the wishes of the deceased, Mr Fogarty,’ said Father Hanafey, who clearly was a little bit afraid of him.

  ‘And where did he express those wishes?’ the brother asked. ‘I’m his only living relative, and it is queer he would not mention a thing like that to me.’

  ‘He mentioned it to Father Jackson and Father Hamilton.’

  ‘But when, father?’ Mr Fogarty asked. ‘You knew Father Jerry, and he was always expressing wishes about something. He was an excitable sort of man, God rest him, and the thing he’d say today might not be the thing he’d say tomorrow. After all, after close on forty years, I think I have the right to say I knew him,’ he added with a triumphant air that left the two young priests without a leg to stand on.

  Over bacon and eggs in the curates’ house, Father Hamilton was very despondent. ‘Well, I suppose we did what we could, Jim,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not too sure of that,’ Jackson said with his ‘jesuitical air’, looking at Father Hamilton sidewise over his spectacles. ‘I’m wondering if we couldn’t do something with that family you say he intended the drawing for.’

  ‘The Keneallys,’ said Father Hamilton in a worried voice. ‘Actually, I saw the wife in the church this evening. You might have noticed her crying.’

  ‘Don’t you think we should see if they have anything in writing?’

  ‘Well, if they have, it would be about the picture,’ said Father Hamilton. ‘How I know about it is she came to me at the time to ask if I couldn’t do something for him. Poor man, he was crying himself that day, according to what she told me.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ Jackson said politely, but his mind was elsewhere. ‘I’m not really interested in knowing what would be in a letter like that. It’s none of my business. But I would like to make sure that they haven’t something in writing. What did Hanafey call it – “something on paper”?’

  ‘I daresay we should inquire, anyway,’ said Father Hamilton, and after supper they drove out to the Keneallys’, a typical small red-brick villa with a decent garden in front. The family also was eating bacon and eggs, and Jackson shuddered when they asked him to join them. Keneally himself, a tall, gaunt, cadaverous man, poured out more whiskey for them, and again Jackson felt he must make a formal attempt to drink it. At the same time, he thought he saw what attraction the house had for Father Fogarty. Keneally was tough and with no suggestion of lay servility towards the priesthood, and his wife was beautiful and scatterbrained, and talked to herself, the cat, and the children simultaneously. ‘Rosaleen!’ she cried determinedly. ‘Out! Out I say! I told you if you didn’t stop meowing you’d have to go out.… Angela Keneally, the stick!… You do not want to go to the bathroom, Angela. It’s only five minutes since you were there before. I will not let Father Hamilton come up to you at all unless you go to bed at once.’

  In the children’s bedroom, Jackson gave a finger to a stolid-looking infant, who instantly stuffed it into his mouth and began to chew it, apparently under the impression that he would be bound to reach sugar at last.

  Later, they sat over their drinks in the sitting-room, only interrupted by Angela Keneally, in a fever of curiosity, dropping in every five minutes to ask for a biscuit or a glass of water.

  ‘You see, Father Fogarty left no will,’ Jackson explained to Keneally. ‘Consequently, he’ll be buried here tomorrow unless something turns up. I suppose he told you where he wanted to be buried?’

  ‘On the Island? Twenty times, if he told us once. I thought he took it too far. Didn’t you, father?’

  ‘And me not to be able to go!’ Mrs Keneally said, beginning to cry. ‘Isn’t it awful, father?’

  ‘He didn’t leave anything in writing with you?’ He saw in Keneally’s eyes that the letter was really only about the picture, and raised a warning hand. ‘Mind, if he did, I don’t want to know what’s in it! In fact, it would be highly improper for anyone to be told before the parish priest and the next of kin were consulted. All I do want to know is whether’ – he waited a moment to see that Keneally was following him – ‘he did leave any written instructions, of any kind, with you.’

  Mrs Keneally, drying her tears, suddenly broke into rapid speech. ‘Sure, that was the day poor Father Jerry was so down in himself because we were his friends and he had nothing to leave us, and —’

  ‘Shut up, woman!’ her husband shouted with a glare at her, and then Jackson saw him purse his lips in quiet amusement. He was a man after Jackson’s heart. ‘As you say, father, we have a letter from him.’

  ‘Addressed to anybody in particular?’

  ‘Yes, to the parish priest, to be delivered after his death.’

  ‘Did he use those words?’ Jackson asked, touched in spite of himself.

  ‘Those very words.’

  ‘God help us!’ said Father Hamilton.

  ‘But you had not time to deliver it?’

  ‘I only heard of Father Fogarty’s death when I got in. Esther was at the church, of course.’

  ‘And you’re a bit tired, so you wouldn’t want to walk all the way over to the presbytery with it. I take it that, in the normal way, you’d post it.’

  ‘But the post would be gone,’ Keneally said with a secret smile. ‘So that Father Hanafey wouldn’t get it until maybe the day after tomorrow. That’s what you were afraid of, father, isn’t it?’

  ‘I see we understand one another, Mr Keneally,’ Jackson said politely.

  ‘You wouldn’t, of course, wish to say anything that wasn’t strictly true,’ said Keneally, who was clearly enjoying himselfenormously, though his wife had not the faintest idea of what was afoot. ‘So perhaps it would be better if the letter was posted now, and not after you leave the house.’

  ‘Fine!’ said Jackson, and Keneally nodded and went out. When he returned, a few minutes later, the
priests rose to go.

  ‘I’ll see you at the Mass tomorrow,’ Keneally said. ‘Good luck, now.’

  Jackson felt they’d probably need it. But when Father Hanafey met them in the hall, with the wet snow falling outside, and they explained about the letter, his mood had clearly changed. Jackson’s logic might have worked some sort of spell on him, or perhaps it was just that he felt they were three clergymen opposed to a layman.

  ‘It was very unforeseen of Mr Keneally not to have brought that letter to me at once,’ he grumbled, ‘but I must say I was expecting something of the sort. It would have been very peculiar if Father Fogarty had left no instructions at all for me, and I see that we can’t just sit round and wait to find out what they were, since the burial is tomorrow. Under the circumstances, father, I think we’d be justified in arranging for the funeral according to Father Fogarty’s known wishes.’

  ‘Thanks be to God,’ Father Hamilton murmured as he and Father Jackson returned to the curates’ house. ‘I never thought we’d get away with that.’

  ‘We haven’t got away with it yet,’ said Jackson. ‘And even if we do get away with it, the real trouble will be later.’

  All the arrangements had still to be made. When Mr Fogarty was informed, he slammed down the receiver without comment. Then a phone call had to be made to a police station twelve miles from the Island, and the police sergeant promised to send a man out on a bicycle to have the grave opened. Then the local parish priest and several old friends had to be informed, and a notice inserted in the nearest daily. As Jackson said wearily, romantic men always left their more worldly friends to carry out their romantic intentions.

  The scene at the curates’ house next morning after Mass scared even Jackson. While the hearse and the funeral car waited in front of the door, Mr Fogarty sat, white with anger, and let the priests talk. To Jackson’s surprise, Father Hanafey put up a stern fight for Father Fogarty’s wishes.

  ‘You have to realize, Mr Fogarty, that to a priest like your brother the Mass is a very solemn thing indeed, and a place where the poor people had to fly in the Penal Days to hear Mass would be one of particular sanctity.’

  ‘Father Hanafey,’ said Mr Fogarty in a cold, even tone, ‘I am a simple businessman, and I have no time for sentiment.’

  ‘I would not go so far as to call the veneration for sanctified ground mere sentiment, Mr Fogarty,’ the old priest said severely. ‘At any rate, it is now clear that Father Fogarty left instructions to be delivered to me after his death, and if those instructions are what we think them, I would have a serious responsibility for not having paid attention to them.’

  ‘I do not think that letter is anything of the kind, Father Hanafey,’ said Mr Fogarty. ‘That’s a matter I’m going to inquire into when I get back, and if it turns out to be a hoax, I am going to take it further.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Fogarty, I’m sure it’s not a hoax,’ said the parish priest, with a shocked air, but Mr Fogarty was not convinced.

  ‘For everybody’s sake, we’ll hope not,’ he said grimly.

  The funeral procession set off. Mr Fogarty sat in the front of the car by the driver, sulking. Jackson and Hamilton sat behind and opened their breviaries. When they stopped at a hotel for lunch, Mr Fogarty said he was not hungry, and stayed outside in the cold. And when he did get hungry and came into the dining-room, the priests drifted into the lounge to wait for him. They both realized that he might prove a dangerous enemy.

  Then, as they drove on in the dusk, they saw the mountain country ahead of them in a cold, watery light, a light that seemed to fall dead from the ragged edge of a cloud. The towns and villages they passed through were dirtier and more derelict. They drew up at a crossroads, behind the hearse, and heard someone talking to the driver of the hearse. Then a car fell into line behind them. ‘Someone joining us,’ Father Hamilton said, but Mr Fogarty, lost in his own dream of martyrdom, did not reply. Half a dozen times within the next twenty minutes, the same thing happened, though sometimes the cars were waiting in lanes and byroads with their lights on, and each time Jackson saw a heavily coated figure standing in the roadway shouting to the hearse driver: ‘Is it Father Fogarty ye have there?’ At last they came to a village where the local parish priest’s car was waiting outside the church, with a little group about it. Their headlights caught a public-house, isolated at the other side of the street, glaring with whitewash, while about it was the vague space of a distant mountainside.

  Suddenly Mr Fogarty spoke. ‘He seems to have been fairly well known,’ he said with something approaching politeness.

  The road went on, with a noisy stream at the right-hand side of it falling from group to group of rocks. They left it for a byroad, which bent to the right, heading towards the stream, and then began to mount, broken by ledges of naked rock, over which hearse and cars seemed to heave themselves like animals. On the left-hand side of the road was a little whitewashed cottage, all lit up, with a big turf fire burning in the open hearth and an oil lamp with an orange glow on the wall above it. There was a man standing by the door, and as they approached he began to pick his way over the rocks towards them, carrying a lantern. Only then did Jackson notice the other lanterns and flashlights, coming down the mountain or crossing the stream, and realize that they represented people, young men and girls and an occasional sturdy old man, all moving in the direction of the Mass Island. Suddenly it hit him, almost like a blow. He told himself not to be a fool, that this was no more than the desire for novelty one should expect to find in out-of-the-way places, mixed perhaps with vanity. It was all that, of course, and he knew it, but he knew, too, it was something more. He had thought when he was here with Fogarty that those people had not respected Fogarty as they respected him and the local parish priest, but he knew that for him, or even for their own parish priest, they would never turn out in midwinter, across the treacherous mountain bogs and wicked rocks. He and the parish priest would never earn more from the people of the mountains than respect; what they gave to the fat, unclerical young man who had served them with pints in the bar and egged them on to tell their old stories and bullied and ragged and even fought them was something infinitely greater.

  The funeral procession stopped in a lane that ran along the edge of a lake. The surface of the lake was rough, and they could hear the splash of the water upon the stones. The two priests got out of the car and began to vest themselves, and then Mr Fogarty got out, too. He was very nervous and hesitant.

  ‘It’s very inconvenient, and all the rest of it,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want you gentlemen to think that I didn’t know you were acting from the best motives.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Fogarty,’ Jackson said. ‘Maybe we made mistakes as well.’

  ‘Thank you, Father Jackson,’ Mr Fogarty said, and held out his hand. The two priests shook hands with him and he went off, raising his hat.

  ‘Well, that’s one trouble over,’ Father Hamilton said wryly as an old man plunged through the mud towards the car.

  ‘Lights is what we’re looking for!’ he shouted. ‘Let ye turn her sidewise and throw the headlights on the causeway the way we’ll see what we’re doing.’

  Their driver swore, but he reversed and turned the front of the car till it almost faced the lake. Then he turned on his headlights. Somewhere farther up the road the parish priest’s car did the same. One by one, the ranked headlights blazed up, and at every moment the scene before them grew more vivid – the gateway and the stile, and beyond it the causeway that ran towards the little brown stone oratory with its mock Romanesque doorway. As the lights strengthened and steadied, the whole island became like a vast piece of theatre scenery cut out against the gloomy wall of the mountain with the tiny whitewashed cottages at its base. Far above, caught in a stray flash of moonlight, Jackson saw the snow on its summit. ‘I’ll be after you,’ he said to Father Hamilton, and watched him, a little perturbed and looking behind him, join the parish priest by the gate. Jackson resented being see
n by them because he was weeping, and he was a man who despised tears – his own and others’. It was like a miracle, and Father Jackson didn’t really believe in miracles. Standing back by the fence to let the last of the mourners pass, he saw the coffin, like gold in the brilliant light, and heard the steadying voices of the four huge mountainy men who carried it. He saw it sway above the heads, shawled and bare, glittering between the little stunted holly bushes and hazels.