The Collected Stories

  ‘That would take you and me most of a week, Lucy, and we’d probably lose half of it,’ he said in his reflective way, almost humbly.

  The promised rain arrived by evening. Its rhythmic beating on the slates brought him no anxiety. He heard it fall like heartsease and slept.

  The same help arrived to bring the hay in from the fields, and they came for the compulsory wheat and root crops as well. Not even in the best years, when they could afford to take on plenty of labour, had the whole work of summer and harvest gone so easily. To return the favours, since none of the men would accept money, William Kirkwood had to go in turn to the other farms. Each time that she wasn’t allowed to go with him Lucy was furious and sulked for days. He was no use at heavy labouring work on the farms, and he was never subjected to the cruelty of competition with other men, but he had an understanding of machinery that sometimes made him more useful than stronger men. As well as by his new military rank, he was protected by the position that the Kirkwoods had held for generations and had never appeared to abuse. He was a novelty in the fields, a source of talk and gossip against the relentless monotony of the work and days. His strangeness and gentle manners made him exceedingly popular with the girls and women, and the distance he always kept, like the unavailability of a young priest, only increased his attractiveness. After the years of isolation, he seemed very happy amid all the new bustle and, for the first time in years, he found that the land was actually making money. At Christmas he offered Annie May a substantial sum as a sort of reparation for the meagre pay she had been receiving unchanged for years. This she indignantly refused.

  ‘It was pay enough for me to be let stay on here all these years without a word. I wouldn’t ever want to insult you, but I’ll throw that sort of money on the floor if you force it on me.’

  ‘Well then, we’ll take Lucy to the town. She’s no longer a child. She needs a whole new outfit like the other girls.’

  ‘Isn’t she all right the way she is? All it’ll do is give her notions. What’ll notions do in her place but bring in trouble!’

  She would take nothing for herself, but on Lucy she yielded. They went together to Boles. Annie May had never set foot in Boles before and she was awed into silence, starting with fright each time the pulleys sent the brass cups hurtling along the wires to the cashier in her glass case above in the shop, starting again each time the cups came crashing back with receipts and change. With much help from Mrs Boles, and the confused choices of Lucy, it was William himself who decided the outfit, old Boles all the time hovering around at the sight of the last of the Kirkwoods.

  ‘I was only that height when I used see your dear mother come into the shop. Oh, she was a lady,’ rubbing his hands, the eternal red rose in his buttonhole seemingly never affected by winter or summer.

  ‘You look beautiful, Lucy, but I hate to see you growing up,’ Wiliam complimented the girl simply. Lucy blushed and went to kiss him on the lips, but he found that he was hardly able to lift her into his arms.

  The first Sunday she went to Mass and the rails in this outfit she created an even greater sensation than did William when he first stood as just another workman in one of his neighbour’s fields.

  The war ground on with little effect. The activities of the local Force were now routine: the three weeks in Finner Camp, rifle competitions, drill on Thursday evenings, rifle practice on Sunday afternoons – firing from the Oakport shore at targets set in the back of McCabe’s Hill. On certain Sunday mornings the Force assembled in full dress at the Hall, marched through the village to the church, where they stood on guard in front of the altar during the sung Mass, presenting arms before and after the consecration. Captain Kirkwood marched his men through the village on these Sundays, but at the church door turned over his command to the schoolteacher, Lieutenant McLoughlin, and remained outside until Mass had ended. Now that he had become such a part of the people it was felt that such a pointed difference was a little sad. This was brought up in bumbling fashion to William’s face by Garda Sergeant Moran in Charlie’s front room or parlour one Sunday after rifle practice. It was usual for the whole company to go to Charlie’s for a drink after these Sunday practices. The men drank standing up behind the wooden partition that separated the bar from the grocery, but the two officers, Captain Kirkwood and Lieutenant McLoughlin, sat with the Garda Sergeant around the big oval table in the front room. The Sergeant attended these rifle practices to make sure that certain safety precautions were observed. He had been drinking after Mass, and had made a nuisance of himself at the practice, wandering around during firing looking for someone to talk to, but as he did not come under his command there was very little Captain Kirkwood could do. As soon as Charlie brought the whiskeys to the front room, the Sergeant began: ‘Before the war, William, you were there on your own in that big house, helping nobody, getting no help. Now you’re in with everybody. Only for your being a Protestant, there’d not be the slightest difference now between you and the rest of us. I fear it takes war to bring people to their senses.’

  Lieutenant McLoughlin was searching furiously for some phrase to stifle the embarrassing speech, a verbal continuation of the nuisance they had been subjected to all day when William Kirkwood drily remarked, ‘Actually, Sergeant, I’m seriously considering becoming a Catholic, but not, I’m afraid, in the interests of conformity,’ which brought a stunned silence to the room even more embarrassing than the Sergeant’s speech.

  To remark that it was a little sad that such a pointed difference still stood out was polite weak sentiment; for William Kirkwood to turn Catholic was alarming. It broke the law that everybody stayed within the crowd they were born into, like the sparrows or blackbirds. They changed for a few reasons, and for those reasons only, money or position, mostly inseparable anyway, and love, if it can be called love when the instinct fastens on one person and will commit any madness to obtain its desire. Catholics had turned Protestant for money or position, it was an old sore and taunt; but the only reason a Protestant was ever known to turn was in order to marry. They had even a living effigy of it within the parish, the Englishman Sinclair, who had married one of the Conways, his poor wife telling the people in Boyle he had gone to Mass in Cootehall, then fibbing to the Cootehall people that he went to Mass in Boyle, when the whole world knew that he was at home toasting his shins and criticizing everything and everybody within sight: ‘It was no rush of faith that led to my conversion. I was dragged into your Apostolic Roman Catholic Church by my male member,’ he would shout and chuckle.

  ‘How did it come about that you got interested …?’ McLoughlin asked William tentatively.

  ‘Helping Lucy with her school exercises,’ William answered readily. ‘I became interested in some of the catechism answers, then church history. It’s true it is the older church. I found books by Newman and the Oxford Movement in the library. My mother must have been interested once.’

  ‘Still, it must be no joke turning your back on your own crowd, more or less saying that they were wrong all those centuries,’ the Sergeant said.

  ‘No. Not if one is convinced of the truth.’ William pushed his glass away and rose. ‘They lived according to their light. It is our day now.’

  ‘Well, whatever you do, we hope it’ll be for the best,’ both men echoed as he left. William never took more than one drink and this had always been put down to Protestant abstemiousness.

  ‘That’s a lemoner for you. I’ll need a good slow pint to get the better of that,’ the Sergeant breathed when he had gone, and pressed the bell. They both had pints.

  ‘What’s behind it?’ the Sergeant demanded.

  ‘I’d not give you many guesses.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s fairly plain. I’d give you no more than one guess.’

  ‘You have me beaten.’

  ‘How did he get interested in Catholicism?’

  ‘With Lucy and the catechism,’ the Sergeant said in amazement. ‘I should have seen it sooner. H
e took her to Boles before Christmas and dressed her like the Queen of Sheba, and she hardly fourteen!’

  ‘In some ways Kirkwood is a very clever masterful man, but in other ways he is half a child. Lucy is not good at school but she’s far from stupid and in many ways she’s older than her years. She’s more a Kirkwood to the bone than the daughter of poor old Annie May. Isn’t she with him everywhere?’

  ‘He couldn’t marry her though.’

  ‘Three or four years isn’t that far away. Wouldn’t it leave Annie May sitting pretty!’

  ‘God, I’d never have thought of that in a hundred years.’

  The news of the impending conversion was so strange that they kept it to themselves. On reflection they didn’t quite believe it and wanted not to appear fools, but when William was seen walking the avenue of young lime trees to the presbytery every Tuesday and Thursday evening for mandatory instruction it became widespread. Miracles would never cease among the stars of heaven. William Kirkwood, last of the Kirkwoods, was about to renounce the error of their ways and become a Catholic.

  Canon Glynn, the old priest, was perfectly suited to his place. He had grown up on a farm, was fond of cards and whiskey, but his real passion in life was for the purebred shorthorns he grazed on the church grounds. In public he was given to emphasizing the mercy rather than the wrath of God and in private believed that the affairs of the earth ran more happily the less God was brought into them. At first he found the visits of this odd catechumen a welcome break in his all too predictable evenings, but soon began to be worn out by his pupil’s seemingly insatiable appetite for theological speculation. William was now pursuing Catholicism with the same zeal he had given for years to astronomy, reading every book on theology and church history he could lay hands on. Rather than be faced with this strenuous analysis of the Council of Trent, the old priest would have much preferred to have poured this over-intellectual childlike man a large glass of whiskey and to have talked about the five purebred shorthorns he was keeping over the winter and which he foddered himself in all weathers before saying daily Mass.

  ‘Look, William. You already know far more about doctrine than any of my parishioners, and I’ve never seen much good come from all this probing,’ he was driven to state one late evening. ‘We are human. We cannot know God or Truth. It is shut away from our eyes. We can only accept and believe. It may be no more than the mother’s instinct for the child, and as blind, but it is all we have. In two weeks’ time, when I’ll ask you “Do you believe?” all I want from you is the loud and clear response, “I do.” There our part will end. Yours will begin. In my experience anything too much discussed and worried about always leads to staleness.’

  William Kirkwood was far from blind. He understood at once that he had tired the old priest whom he had grown to like and respect. For the next two weeks, like the too obedient son he had always been, he was content to sit and follow wherever the priest’s conversation led, which, after the second whiskey, was invariably to the five purebred shorthorns now grazing on the short sweet grass that grew above the ruins of the once famous eighth-century monastery.

  ‘You can still see the monks’ tracks everywhere in the fields, their main road or street, the cells, what must have been their stables, all like a plan on paper. Of course the walls of the main buildings still stand, but they are much later, twelfth century. Great minds thundered at one another there once. Now my shorthorns take their place. It is all good, William,’ he would laugh.

  At the end of the period of instruction, when the priest, a mischievous twinkle in his old eyes, asked, ‘Do you accept and believe all those revealed truths and mysteries?’ William Kirkwood smiled, bowed his head and said, ‘I do, Father.’

  The next morning, beside the stone font at the back of the Cootehall church, water was poured over the fine greying head of William Kirkwood. As it trickled down on to the brown flagstones, it must have seemed a final pale bloodletting to any ghosts of the Kirkwoods hovering in the air around.

  Annie May and Lieutenant McLoughlin stood as his godparents. Afterwards there were smiles, handshakes, congratulatory arm-clasps, and after Mass a big festive breakfast in the presbytery, attended by all the local priests and teachers and prominent parishioners. Annie May and Lucy were there as well. The only flaw in the perfect morning was that Lucy looked pale and tense throughout and on the very verge of tears when having to respond to a few polite questions during the breakfast. She had been strange with William ever since he began instruction, as if she somehow sensed that this change threatened the whole secure world of her girlhood. As soon as they got home from the breakfast, she burst into an uncontrollable fit of weeping and ran to her room. By evening she was better but would not explain her weeping, and that night was the first night in years that she did not come to him to be kissed on her way to bed. The following Sunday every eye was on the recent convert as he marched his men through the village and all the way up the church to the foot of the high altar. Lucy felt light-headed with pride as she saw him ascend the church at the head of his men. But the old ease between them had disappeared. She no longer wanted his help in the evenings with her exercises, preferring to go to school unprepared if necessary, and he did not try to force his help, waiting until this mood would pass.

  ‘Now that you have come this far, and everything has gone so well, you might as well go the whole distance,’ the Sergeant suggested with amiable vagueness one Sunday soon afterwards in Charlie’s. Rifle practice had been abandoned early. A ricochet had somehow come off the hill, had struck a red bullock of Murphy’s in the eye in a nearby field. The bullock, lowing wildly, began to stagger in circles round the field. A vet had to put it down. A report would have to be written. The accident had been the first in his command and William Kirkwood was inordinately annoyed. There must have been carelessness or wilful folly somewhere among the riflemen.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked very sharply.

  ‘It was nothing about today,’ McLoughlin interjected. ‘I think the Sergeant was only trying to say what we all feel. Everything has gone wonderfully well and it would complete the picture if we were to see you married,’ and both men saw William Kirkwood suddenly colour to the roots of his hair.

  ‘I’m too old,’ he said.

  ‘You left it late but it’s certainly far from too late.’

  The conversation had brought on so much confusion that it was let drop. William left as usual after the one whiskey.

  ‘I’m afraid you struck the mark there,’ McLoughlin said as soon as they were alone.

  ‘How?’

  ‘You said what was plainly on his mind.’

  ‘It’s hardly Lucy.’

  ‘Lucy’s not in it at this stage, though she’s upset enough at school about something or other,’ the teacher said.

  ‘What are we to do, then? We can’t just go out and find any old bird for the last of the Kirkwoods. She’ll have to be able to flap at least one good wing.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll be changing to pints now.’ Charlie appeared at the doorway, and, without waiting for an answer, went and cleared the whiskey glasses from the table.

  ‘A pair of pints, Charlie,’ the Sergeant said exuberantly. ‘Nothing decent ever stands alone. How long is it since we bundled you into the car that Sunday and found your good woman for you?’

  ‘It must be the best part of five years, Sergeant,’ Charlie laughed defensively, and when he laughed the tip of his small red nose wrinkled upwards in a curl.

  ‘It was a drastic solution to a drastic problem. You had the place nearly drunk out after your mother died. The first six women we called on that Sunday turned us down flat.’

  ‘I doubt they did right. I was no great catch.’

  ‘We were about to give up for that Sunday when we called on Baby. She said before we finished, “I’ll take him. I know the bar and the farm,” and we brought you in out of the car.’

  ‘Maybe that’s when she made her big mistake,’ Charlie tr
ied to joke.

  ‘She made no mistake,’ the teacher put in gently, afraid that Charlie was being hurt by the Sergeant’s egotism, oblivious of everything but his own part in that Sunday. ‘She made the best move of her life. Look where you both are today – children, money. Who could want more?’

  ‘Maybe it’s as good as the other thing anyhow.’ Charlie laughed with unchanged defensiveness.

  ‘It’s far better. This love business we hear so much about nowadays is a pure washout,’ the teacher said definitively.

  ‘One thing is sure,’ the Sergeant said after Charlie had brought them the pints. ‘We can’t bundle William Kirkwood into the back of a car and drive him around for a whole Sunday until we find him a wife,’ and at the very absurdity of the picture both men began to laugh until tears ran from their eyes, and they had to pound their glasses on the table. When they were quiet, the Sergeant said, ‘There are more ways of choking a dog than with butter,’ which renewed the laughter.

  What they didn’t know was that Charlie had been standing in the hallway all the time, rigid with anger as he listened. ‘The pair of bitches,’ he said quietly, his anger calming as he moved to face the men who were growing rowdy behind the wooden partition.

  ‘What will we do about the Captain? He didn’t seem averse to the idea,’ the Sergeant was saying in the parlour.

  ‘We can’t, as you put it, bring in any old bird. We’ll have to look hard and carefully. It’d be a very nice thing to see the Captain married.’ The teacher was serious.

  The first to be approached was Eileen Casey, the junior mistress in the school in Keadue. She was twenty-eight, small, with very blonde straight hair, fond of reading, pretty in a withdrawn way. Her headmaster, a friend of McLoughlin’s, brought it up over the tea and sandwiches of the school lunch hour. When it was clear that she was not interested and was going out with a boy from her own place near Killala and was looking for a school closer to home so that they could marry, he pretended it had been nothing but a joke on his part. ‘We like to see how these rich converts look in our girls’ eyes.’