Irish Cream

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I once asked Dr. Jarlath McGrath, a white-haired and white-bearded old man, who has served all his life here and seems to know all the secrets of the place, about the widow.

  “Sure wouldn’t your Mrs. O’Flynn been forced to the same thing, if you hadn’t hired her and herself with a beautiful daughter too?”

  “Were there no widowed men who might have courted Mrs. Cudahy?”

  He sighed.

  “She’s not from here, don’t you see?”

  I didn’t see.

  They say little about Lord Skeffington in my presence because they know we are friends.

  “He’s not the worst of them.”

  “He’s still a redcoat.”

  “Aye, but he’s still not the worst redcoat in the world.”

  From the Irish such words border on praise.

  About Lady Skeffington I hear only respect and affection.

  “Sure, didn’t she conceive after bathing in the Holy Well?”

  “And herself a sweet young thing.”

  However, if the anger is as deep here as it seems to be, the Skeffington family should flee to Dublin or Belfast immediately should there be another “rising.” I resolved I would tell Bob that when I found the occasion. Military man that he was, he probably understood it without my warning. Our hardscrabble outcrop into the ocean could become only slightly less dangerous than the Khyber Pass.

  One particularly bad night when it seemed that the ocean wind would blow away the roof of my house, Dr. McGrath, the schoolmaster, and sergeant in charge of our RIC barracks (a surprisingly literate man) were sitting around my fireplace. Also present was an occasional visitor, Sean Toole, a recluse who lived back in the hills with his books and his butterfly collection. He was the local man of mystery, extremely well educated (especially in medieval Irish history) and brilliantly witty. He was about fifty, with broad shoulders, a lined, handsome face, and a thatch of iron gray hair. He did not come to church, denied in fact that he was or ever had been a Catholic—“Though with great respect for the Church’s survival power.” He had plenty of money and yet no apparent source of income. He was reported to be a veteran of the Fenian rising on the run, but it seemed most unlikely that the RIC would have permitted such a one to remain at liberty. He rarely spoke to anyone in the village or the townland and lived alone with a very old male servant. He spoke on occasion to the doctor, who must have told him about the occasional sessions in my parlor.

  Present also was Dr. Boyd “Boysie” Lufton, a young English geologist who was exploring our rocky corner of the Isles (as he usually called the British Isles), “out of deference,” he would say, “to the crowd of Fenians who surround me.”

  “By all rights,” he said once, “this strange place ought not to exist. It is pure delight to a geologist like myself. Her Majesty’s government is interested enough in it to pay me for poking around here when I am not engaged in the serious business of hunting and fishing with the schoolmaster.”

  Boysie was a wonderful comic contrast to us melancholy Celts. He even insisted that he supported home rule for England too, though it was not clear what he meant.

  “Sounds like treason, young man,” Dr. McGrath said with his booming laugh.

  “Do I look like a traitor!”

  We all laughed.

  Yet for all his charm and comedy, Boysie seemed to me to be another man of mystery.

  As usual we spoke of poetry and music and history and, rarely, politics. Sometimes Bob Skeffington would join us, but now he stayed home with his wife.

  “I am surprised,” I said tentatively, “about the undercurrent of rebellion I encounter in the parish.”

  “You should not be, Father,” Sergeant Kyle said, sipping on the tiny glass of poteen I had provided. “There’s them here that has long memories.”

  “The Ribbonmen?”

  The sergeant waved his hand. “Ah, well, sure we all know that they’re around conniving. They’re up to no good.”

  The implication seemed to be that there were deeper emotions in the townland.

  “If the English don’t give us home rule,” Liam Conroy added, “we’re going to have to take it ourselves and drive them all out of our country.”

  “Then, dear one,” Boysie said, “you must come to England and help us to win home rule from the British.”

  Liam’s seditious words were spoken mildly. A verbal Fenian he might be, but I could hardly imagine his attacking Lord Skeffington’s house with a pike.

  Sean Toole spoke up.

  “For most of Irish history, the Irish were more likely to be on the side of the invaders than on the side of Ireland. Thus at the Battle of Clontarf weren’t there more of us fighting on the side of the Danes than with that poor senile fool Brian Boru?”

  “Does that make it right?” Liam asked mildly.

  Toole threw up his hands.

  “I refrain from such judgments. My only point is that those who work with and for the occupying army on this island have a long historic pattern behind them. What would happen to the respectable Irish middle class if the protection of the English legal system was suddenly snatched away and they found themselves subject to the vagaries of the Brehon laws.”

  “Most likely,” I observed, “we’d keep the English system without the English and call it by Irish names.”

  “That would be treason,” Liam murmured softly.

  “I wouldn’t want to be that fella Tim Allen,” the doctor said, puffing on his pipe. “There’s them that would like to see him dead.”

  “I would have thought that Lord Skeffington had reined him in.”

  “He’s not evicting people anymore,” the doctor agreed. “Yet he harasses the tenants whenever he can. He’s not only mean, but he’s petty. He seems to enjoy it.”

  “And he harasses the Widow Cudahy,” Liam added. “Which he also seems to enjoy.”

  “They wouldn’t be so far from wrong who say that she enjoys it too,” the doctor observed. “Not that she has all that much choice.”

  “There’s talk of putting him down all right.” The sergeant sighed. “But, sure, there’s always talk around here.”

  “A good case can be made for the advantage of talk.” Sean Toole said, “especially in a country so skilled at talk.”

  “Such as?” Liam asked.

  “It’s a lot easier and safer to talk about treason than actually to engage in it.”

  I could not banish the doctor’s remark about the Widow Cudahy as I tossed and turned in my bed that night. I was not unaware that some women enjoy lovemaking with men. In Dublin that secret was carefully hidden. In Spain everyone took it for granted. Out here in this cold and barren place, it seemed to me, that some men and some women would seek warmth wherever they could find it. The strong affection that some women were not ashamed to display towards their husbands even when the parish priest was present was proof enough of that. Irishwomen may be modest, it has been said, but not cold.

  I pondered a question about which I had no right to wonder: What had been the quality of Mrs. O’Flynn’s relationship with her husband during their brief marriage?

  Nor could I escape the dangerous question of whether she had yearnings about me like those I had about her. I told myself that I would never know the answer to that and finally, towards dawn, fell asleep.

  Temptations are not sins, I argued to myself before Mass the next morning. The usual people were there—a half dozen elderly folks and Mrs. O’Flynn and Eileen. I was ashamed of my lascivious thoughts about her.

  March 17, Feast of St. Patrick, patron of Ireland.

  Father Jeremias Carey, the pastor of the next parish, finally came over to pay his respects to me the other day—giving up on any expectation that I would follow protocol and pay my respects to him first. He is a big, ponderous, bald man who moves slowly and speaks more slowly, as if weighing carefully every word. He arrived without advance notice at one-thirty, knowing that it was dinnertime.

  “I’ll put anoth
er plate on the table, Your Reverence,”

  Mrs. O’Flynn said as she conducted him into my study.

  “Lovely woman,” Father Carey said when he had made himself comfortable in my largest chair.

  “If you say so, Father.”

  “A lot of changes around here. Remodeled the house, painted the church, cleaned up the garden, hear you have a new schoolmaster and himself Catholic.”

  “All true, Father.”

  I offered him a splash of poteen.

  “Poteen,” he said as he sipped it.

  “One of the major industries here as I’m sure it is in your parish.”

  “I have found it prudent to ignore it.” He sighed heavily.

  “And the Ribbonmen?”

  “There are no Ribbonmen in my parish.”

  “You surprise me, but congratulations. They do cast something of a pall over the community.”

  He sighed heavily.

  “They still talk a lot about the late Canon do they not?”

  In fact, I had not heard his name in six months.

  “I’m sure he is revered.”

  “The fellows wonder why you don’t call.”

  “I’ve been very busy here.”

  “They say the lord’s wife bathed in Colm’s well.”

  “I wasn’t there to observe it, but I am told that she did.”

  “And is now with child.”

  “Quite.”

  “Does she think it’s a miracle?”

  “They are very happy.”

  He would remember my answers and propagate them around the diocese.

  “You get along with him? Some kind of colonel wallah from India?”

  This catechism proceeded at a slow pace, almost like an absentminded canon was questioning a backward and unprepared student. It was interrupted as he shoveled Mrs. O’Flynn’s lamb stew into his big mouth and slowly and solemnly masticated it.

  “Victoria Cross, I’m told.”

  “Unpopular with the people, I’m sure, like all of them.”

  “Not as much as his agent, whom he has restrained.”

  “Like it here?”

  “Better than Maynooth.”

  “Pretty drab place, worse even than mine.”

  “Very lively people, however. Good people when you get to know them.”

  “Not very good Catholics.”

  “I wouldn’t make that judgment.

  “They say you sing with them.”

  I wondered who “they” were.

  I refilled his claret glass as he cleared his plate of the second helping.

  “And play the accordion. I find it helpful to observe them when they are relaxed.”

  “Not much to observe, I should think. All pretty much the same—ignorant, superstitious, sullen.”

  “That’s not my experience.”

  “There should be another canon in our district.”

  Ah, that was the real reason for his visit.

  “I don’t think I’m a likely candidate. The Cardinal would hardly approve.”

  “Cardinals change their mind.”

  “I have not heard of such cases.”

  The catechism slowed to a halt. Heavily, he rose from the table, thanked me for my hospitality, did not bother to thank Mrs. O’Flynn, and lumbered towards the door. I gave him his hat, my groom brought up his buggy, and the poor old horse trudged down the muddy road. Another line of rain clouds was moving in over the ocean.

  Mrs. O’Flynn was cleaning off the table.

  “You’ll have to make stew for yourself and Eileen when she comes home.”

  “I couldn’t do that, Your Reverence.”

  “Yes, you can and you will. It’s not your fault that that awful man came just at dinnertime.”

  “Did he come to check up on you?”

  “He came to find out whether I might become a canon. When he learned that was most unlikely he left content that his chances were good.”

  “Are they?”

  “No.”

  I walked over to the church to pray that God forgive me for my anger at that awful man. Poor fellow, he thought that if he became a canon he would at last achieve happiness.

  Branigan was waiting for me to report that “some people” thought the schoolmaster “too handsome.”

  “Mothers of the girls in his class?”

  “Come to think of it, those weren’t the ones.”

  Old biddies, I thought with notable lack of charity.

  March 22, Passion Week.

  “They’ve murdered Tim Allen.” Mrs. O’Flynn shook me. “He’s dying over at the Widow Cudahy’s house.”

  “Who? What?” I struggled to wake up.

  I was sitting in my parlor in front of the embers in the fireplace. I had fallen asleep while pondering a tome of Suarez in which he defended tyrannicide.

  Mrs. O’Flynn was wearing a robe and a long shawl over her nightdress. She was no less attractive for being awakened in the middle of the night.

  “I’ll go right over,” I said.

  “Be careful, Your Reverence. It’s them terrible Ribbonmen. They may not recognize you in the storm.”

  “I must take that chance, Mrs. O’Flynn.”

  Brave talk!

  I rushed out into the dark and was driven back to the doorway by the worst wind I had yet experienced. Sheets of rain drenched me instantly. The stench of the ocean seemed just across the road. Lightning crackled in giant gashes across the western sky. Thunder bellowed above my head. Fighting the wind, I stumbled into the darkened church, found the sacred oils, then groped through the rain for the stable.

  My mare was not happy to be awakened and even less happy with the saddle and bridle. At first she simply refused to venture out into the mud and rain. I tried not to push her too hard, yet we had to get to the Widow Cudahy’s house before it was too late. A man’s immortal soul was at stake.

  Especially if one did not believe in a God who was eager to forgive.

  We were able to find our way only by the grace of an occasional thunderbolt. A couple of them struck trees along our path, terrifying my poor mare. I tried to soothe her, with little success. Still, gallant lady that she is, she kept on.

  Finally, in the distance, I saw what might be a lighted window. It could be the Widow Cudahy’s cottage, which was isolated at the far end of the townland. We plowed through the muck and deep puddles. A buggy was already tied to a post in front of the house. The doctor had come first.

  I eased the mare under the eave of the thatched roof to protect her from the rain, tied her to the post, and burst into the house.

  “Thank God you’ve come, Father,” the doctor said. “He’s fading fast.”

  Tim Allen, his chest covered with blood, was stretched out on the bed. He was breathing in deep gasps. The light of death was glowing in his eyes.

  The Widow Cudahy, long braids on either side of her head, knelt at the bedside, her face wet with tears. She was wearing a long robe over perhaps nothing at all. She was indeed a striking woman.

  “Father Lonigan, Tim,” I said, kneeling on the other side of the bed. “I’ve come with the holy oils.”

  “You’re a brave man, Father Dick,” he said. “But I’ve always known that … I have a lot of sins to tell.”

  The wind wailed more loudly, like the cry of a thousand banshees.

  I nodded to the other two and they withdrew to the corner of the neat little cottage. He confessed his sins and expressed deep sorrow by the light of a wavering candle. I gave him absolution and called the others back for the anointing. He answered the prayers in Latin.

  Just as I was finishing the sacrament and Tim Allen was finishing his life, Lord Skeffington burst in. He took in the scene in a glance.

  “Thank God you’re here, Father.”

  He glanced at the doctor, who shook his head in the negative.

  “I’m here, Tim,” he said.

  “Thanks be to God, Colonel,” he said. “I knew you’d come if you could.”<
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  Bobby Skeffington ought to have been back in his spousal bed with his pregnant wife. However, a commanding officer comes to the deathbed of a dying soldier no matter what.

  “Who shot you, Tim?”

  “I don’t know, sir. A rifle in the dark.”

  “We’ll get them.”

  I doubted that.

  “I don’t think so, sir. Take care of Marie for me, please, sir.”

  Skeffington seemed to notice for the first time the anguished face of the Widow Cudahy.

  “She’ll receive your pension, Tim, as long as she lives.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Tim Allen smiled, then died.

  He had not lived a good life, but he had received the grace of a happy death. Who had prayed for him? Marie Cudahy. Who else?

  God indeed had a sense of humor, and a gentle one at that.

  Lightning struck very near us. I heard my mare squeal. I must get to her and try to calm her down. Then suddenly nature, as if pleased at the graceful departure of Tim Allen, became silent. Though a few drops of rain still bounced off the cottage, the wind died out and the lightning and thunder ceased, save for a few distant rolls.

  “You will grant him Christian burial, Dick?”

  “I have no choice in the matter, milord. No matter how he lived, he died a good Catholic.”

  “Fortunate man … The wake at his house at my estate or here …?”

  “I think here would be better, milord.”

  Marie Cudahy looked at me in surprise and smiled faintly.

  I was violating all the approved rules of pastoral practice. Still, my instincts said it was the right decision. Besides, one did not want the Ribbonmen making trouble at the Big House with Lady Skeffington only a month away from delivery.

  “I’ll send some of my people over to help, Mrs. Cudahy.”

  Outside there was the noise of more horses. The RIC doubtless.

  Sergeant Kyle entered the cottage.

  “Sweet mother of God!” he exclaimed.

  “Indeed, Sergeant,” Milord Skeffington said softly. “I trust you’ll find the men who did this.”

  “We will certainly do our best, milord.”

  Bob Skeffington and I rode back together to the village. The full moon, setting in the west, seemed to have reinvigorated my little mare. At least the poor thing could see where she was going.