Grandmother and the Priests (27 page)

He went into his room, and it was only when he had closed the door that he became aware, with shocking astonishment, that the throbbing in his glands had stopped, and that a sudden and incredible sense of well-being, as of new blood, was pouring all through his body. He felt like a young man, or at least like a vigorous middle-aged man, again. He had not felt like this for all these weeks; no, not for a year, or even two years. Quiet, he said to a heart that quickened in its own amazement, there are possibly recessions. This must be one.

He unbuttoned his cassock. Then his fingers stopped. Where had the summer gone, or had it gone and he not noticed? The bright light of the evening sun had never seemed so pure and sharp, or it had never seemed so for a long time. The early autumn flowers flooded their scent into the little room; had they been this way before and he had not known it? All of life, suddenly, became quicker, closer, keener, and so very dear, and so filled with peace.

It had been so long since he had felt anticipation and eagerness, yet they were rising in him now, an exultant tide. His fingers shook while he unbuttoned his shirt and removed his collar. “Thank You, dear Blessed Lord,” he said, “that You have heard my prayers and have given me Your peace and blessing, in these, my last days. To have this is more than a whole lifetime is worth, and I shall never forget.”

He flung the shirt from him and looked into the mirror above the commode, and astonishment again struck him forcibly, for there was color in his cheeks again and his eyes were sparkling. He touched his cheeks and forehead, slowly, wonderingly. They were cool and fresh to his touch. Then, very slowly, his hand dropped and he was staring at himself in the mirror and his eyes were widening and his mouth was falling open.

He stood so for a long time, then he swung about and looked at his shoulder in the mirror. The evil black spots had vanished; where they had had their awful being were two faint rosy smudges, as if fingers had been pressed on the healthy flesh for a little. But even as Ifor watched, the smudges faded, and the skin was smooth and fair.

“No!” whispered Ifor. “Oh, it is not possible!”

He stumbled to his bed, and fell on his knees, and spread his arms upon the wool coverlet and wept.

He did not hear the knocking on his door, for tears and prayers had been incoherently mingled together in a great storm of thanksgiving and adoration, and humility and shame and contrition.

“Ifor!” exclaimed Andrew, in fright. “What is it?”

Ifor got to his feet and he seized Andrew by his arms, and his face was still streaming with tears. “Tell me!” he cried. “Tell me of the face of Oswold Morgan, and the look of him!”

Andrew stared blankly. “Tell me,” pleaded Ifor. “For I think I have seen him.”

“Ifor, Ifor,” stammered the old priest. “Oswold — he was tall and bent, with a dark face, thick black brows, blue eyes like a lake, the chin of a stern man, a grave face, a white head, a thin, serious mouth — Ifor, what is that you have said?”

Ifor was silent and he panted a little. Then he said, humbly, “It was he I saw, in the church, when I was alone. It was his intercession — your prayers — ” He drew a deep breath. “Look!” he cried, in an exalted voice, and turned about so Andrew could see his back. “Look, it is all gone, the swellings, the pain — Andrew, your Oswold is indeed a saint — . I was given a vision of him — Andrew!”

“Yes,” said Father Ifor to the absorbed faces around the fire, “that was ten years ago, and for a man of my age I am very well, indeed. Each year I am examined by three competent physicians, for Rome is prudent. The reports go in that I am free of melanoma, and continue to be free. Father Andrew and I were called to Rome for questioning. The Devil’s Advocate was stern with us, and sometimes hectoring. And so he was to Dr. Brecon. He was less so to the fine doctors from Harley Street, who confessed the truth and said they ‘had no explanation,’ and distastefully admitted that it was a miracle.

“Rome does not move quickly in these matters. It may be many years hence, but one day, if not in my own lifetime, there will be a new saint announced among the company of the blessed to whom prayers may be directed and his intercession pleaded. He was known to men as Sir Oswold Morgan, but to God he was known as His servant, Oswold of Gwenwynnlynn, who practiced the heroic virtues as only a saint can practice them, and who loved his fellow-man with all his heart, and continues, to this day, to answer the prayers of those who seek his intercession with faith and pity, with fear and hope, and with trust in the mercy of the infinite God.”

Ifor smiled. “While Rome prudently continues the prudent course, the men of Gwenwynnlynn are already revering their saint, and I, who am their priest since my cousin died eight years ago, can hardly rebuke them when they cover Oswold Morgan’s grave with flowers, and kneel beside it to pray, though there is no fine monument upon it. And few strangers to know where he lies, except those who love him. The men of Gwenwynnlynn.”

That night little Rose, in tears, prayed most heartily to ‘Saint’ Oswold Morgan of Wales that she could remain at Grandmother’s for some time more. For a new priest had arrived to try to bring Grandmother back to the Sacraments. He had said to the company after Father Lewis had finished his tale of Oswold Morgan, “Ah, it is faith that indeed moves mountains, though how many men know it? But strange it is that doubt often increases faith, as they say the fire tempers the fine blades of Toledo so that no man knows the secret so well as they. Doubt is of Satan, it is said, and well do I know it, and he is the testing fire.”

“Sometimes, I am thinking,” said Grandmother, dryly, “that he burns all in the fire while he’s at it, and there’s nothing left.”

Father Timothy Donahue pondered on that, puffing at his pipe. “If that be so, then the faith in the beginning was nothing, a dry reed ready for the burning. But if it has juices in it — ”

Father Donahue was tall but not so tall as his Irish colleagues, but taller than the Welshmen and the Englishmen. He had strong but gentle black eyes, alive and keen for all his age. “If it has juices in it,” he repeated. “But I should not be proud, I’m knowing, but humble, for faith is of God and cannot be commanded but only bestowed.”

He shivered a little and Rose was immediately entranced. Then the dreadful thought returned that she must go home tomorrow and miss this promising tale. So she spent at least half an hour imploring Oswold Morgan for his intercession with that vague but mighty God of all these holy men. (She thought of Him as stern and forbidding and sharp with the whip and not to be turned aside and not to give mercy except reluctantly, for so she had been taught at home. But Oswold Morgan, she was certain, had access to that severe Ear, and so she implored him.) Try as she would, no disabling illness came to her help.

At breakfast that morning Cook beamed at her, then considering the beam unseemly, looked strict. “It seems,” she announced, “that
she
has had a letter from your Mama and Papa asking her to keep you awhile. Something’s come up.”

Regrettably, Rose rejoiced. So, there had been another row and she could stay. Her prayers to Sir Oswold had been heard.

“I would be going now to the village of Carne on the west coast of Ireland,” said Father Donahue, “and it was joy I was feeling and gratitude, for I would be having my own parish, and I should be no curate any longer in Dublin, bullied by the irritable old priests. Ah, it’s irritable I am now, myself, after all these years of the rheumatism and the obstinacy of my people, God love them, but I was young in those days and I told myself, in the innocence of my heart, that I’d be no bullying priest, shouting at the spalpeens in the Confessional for a venial sin, and roaring hell-fire at the old women who hid their coppers and cared nothing for the missions, and making the poor good Sisters tremble in their boots at a confessed hurrying at the prayers. I’d not be bellowing at the men for an extra beer they drank in the pubs on a Saturday night, they with their hard work and their harder hands on the plow in all the hours the good Lord sent.

“No, it was the saint I’d be, and they’d be calling me good Father Timothy. There’s not a young priest who does not dream of sainthood, which,” added Father Donahue with a quelling look at the younger priests around the fire, “is a fine dream, a heroic one, but attained very rarely, my boyos. St. Patrick was a saint,” he added more kindly, “but not an Irish one, and there’s many a lesson there to be learned.

“I was twenty-four years old, and raw from the bullying, but now I’d have my own parish. Old Father McGowan says to me when I left, ‘So, it’s from under my thumb you are running, lad, and there’s joy in your foolish face. But here you have been under my wing, and now Our Lord has called you out into the cold, and may the saints help you!’ He laughed uncommonly sour, I thought, and I packed my little bag and was glad to go. He says to me when he shook my hand, ‘And pay my respects to Father Sullivan of Larney, which would be the other village, fifteen miles to the east, and a blessed man he is, and ask him to remember me in his prayers.’ ”

Father Donahue had not the slightest intention of calling upon another ‘old priest’ in Larney or anywhere else on the high-hearted day he left the rectory in Dublin, a day or two before the first Sunday of Advent. He was certain that Father Sullivan was not only old, but unlearned, and that he mumbled Latin with only a casual understanding of it. There was no reason to believe he was not very irritable also, and had absolutely no faith in young priests going to their first parishes without a guide. However, a great snowstorm blew up in a twinkling, and the train bogged down in Larney station, and the wild white winds whipped through a man’s clothing and turned his blood to ice. There would be a delay of several hours, Father Donahue was told. He counted the shillings and pence in his pocket, and the one-pound note, and decided that Father Sullivan, ‘an irritable one’, would at least offer a man, even a young priest, a drink of good Irish whiskey and treat him to a substantial if flavorless dinner. After all, he could not remain in the little station without freezing to death, and the engine was rolling up its eyes in an expiring expression and letting off its steam feebly. Let them build up the fires and clear the tracks a little, and he, the young priest, would be sheltered at a fire with a drink in his hand and a dinner waiting at a warm table.

Consultation with high authorities (one old man) at the station convinced Father Donahue that the train would not be leaving for at least four hours, and so he asked directions and plowed off vigorously through the snow to Father Sullivan’s rectory. He had been born in a little Irish village and had lived there until he had gone to the Seminary, but he had forgotten, God have mercy on him, how dreary and sad and woeful a little Irish village could look near sunset on a snowy twilight. Silence. Harsh whiteness. Lashing gales like frozen whips. Chimneys fuming smoke. Never a soul to be seen. If a dog barked the sound echoed and re-echoed against white hills and from the roofs of the thatched cottages. An eerie mauve light over everything, and in the low carvings of the snowbanks. Bleak and twisted trees. Forsaken, forsaken. For the first time Father Donahue thought of the village of Carne, which was probably no more cheerful than this, and his high young heart began to drop with alarming speed. How was it that he had forgotten? He glanced at the west; there was a blood-like smear in the gray clouds, and above it a tiny ice-green lake of air, enough to freeze the heart out of a man.

But the rectory, tiny though it was, was warm and full of lamp-light, if it did smell, as all rectories seemed to smell, of wax and paraffin and turpentine and what could only be the odor of sanctity. (The latter had been sadly missing at the two rectories where he had lived in Dublin, for both the old priests had had irascible tempers and little patience. “And no wonder,” said Father Donahue, sadly, as he meditated on that long-past winter twilight and his four years in Dublin, and the bare larders.)

Father Sullivan was a small, rotund man with sparkling black eyes, a sweet and lavish smile, and a head of remarkably thick white hair curling all over his forehead and ears and far down his nape. He had a complexion like that of a cherub, and his plump hand was warm and hearty. His profile was craggy, yet it was a benign cragginess. He was delighted to see “Faether McGowan’s lad,” and had prayed only that morning that the lad would find time to call upon him. The old priest was very happy, genial and full of hospitality. Better still, the fire in his minute parlor was very hot, his whiskey lifted one’s spirits, and there was a fine stew, he promised, simmering in the kitchen, rich with lamb and sliced potatoes and onions, and a suet dumpling or two, and dark sweet tea.

He was the same age as Father McGowan, and as he refilled the young priest’s glass with the burnished whiskey he poured questions on ‘the lad’. How was darlin’ Tom, and his old ailin’ sister who kept the house for him, and how was Dublin, and how were the people recovering since the Famine? “I was a little lofty at first, with this old simple priest,” said Father Donahue, “this old priest who talked like a child of the Famine, as if he’d not suffered from it, himself. Yet, as he babbled, it was wisdom I saw in the big black eyes and an understanding in the quick smile. And it’s confessing I am, here and now, that these interested me less than the fragrance of the stew bubbling in the kitchen and the rich smell of the dumplings bobbing in the boiling water nearby. The whiskey, it was, then ran to my cold toes, and I hoped that the train would not be starting that night and I could sleep by this fire, on the hearth, wrapped in a blanket or two.”

The young priest was surprised that his host could speak of Father McGowan as ‘darlin’ Tom’, that shouting, formidable old man who was a terror in his parish. So in some bemusement he accepted another little glass of whiskey, and did not notice Father Sullivan’s sigh when the older priest held the bottle to the light. Fortunately for what was left in the bottle, Father Sullivan’s housekeeper, a somber old lady, asked them irritably if they intended not to have their tea this night, and they went into the kitchen and fed themselves heartily. The housekeeper, Father Sullivan’s cousin, of whom he was apparently frightened half to death, kept up a monologue about young men’s appetites and what would there be on the table tomorrow except oatmeal, which was bad for Father Sullivan’s stomach. The younger priest did not let this funereal monologue deter him, for he had heard the same wailings in Dublin, and the old ladies, with the Grace of God, invariably managed to feed their charges, if not sumptuously. But it vexed him, in his youth, that the old ladies appeared to have no reverence for the clergy but regarded them as simple children who must be protected from the appetites of visiting priests, intransigent parishioners, and, always, ‘the Bishop’. The monologue inevitably ended with ‘the Bishop’, and it did this night, along with the dumplings. But as the two surfeited priests returned to the parlor the old lady shouted after Father Sullivan, “And you’ll not be forgetting the letter to the Bishop this night, and I’ll take it to the post!”

“My, my,” murmured Father Sullivan, drowsily, as he toasted his woolen toes on the fender and listened to the storm, “it’s a tartar she is, my cousin, and what it is she is wanting me to write the Bishop I do not know. It’s forgotten, I have.”

“The old cousins and aunts detest the Bishops, I’m thinking,” said Father Donahue, also drowsily.

“And the Bishops pick up their robes and run from the sight of them,” said the host, chuckling. “Ah, and what would we do without them, Tim?”

Father Donahue stayed the night, curled on the settle near the fire, heaped with blankets and shawls, having been assured by the old cousin that the train would not be leaving until morning. How she knew, Father Donahue did not question; he knew these old ladies who had second sight. He thought them ignorant souls, but he invariably listened to them, more or less meekly.

“Old Agnes has taken a fancy to you, my boyo,” said Father Sullivan after Mass the next morning. Father Donahue doubted this, remembering Agnes’ scowls and reprimands. But as he was leaving the house for the station Agnes shouted to him, “And call for Jack, if you’ll be needing him, and mind you not to forget!”

“It’s second sight she says she has,” said Father Sullivan, shaking hands with his guest, “and though the Bishop frowns it’s long he’s been from the country, he sitting in Dublin.” He paused. Then he repeated, twinkling, “ ‘Mind you not to forget!’ ”

“I won’t,” promised Father Timothy Donahue, brave again in the bright white morning. He set out briskly for the station, and it did not surprise him to learn that the train in truth had not left the night before but was building up a fine head of steam just this very minute and screaming to go to Carne. As if, thought the young priest, it was my fault for the delay.

The distance to Carne was only fifteen miles, but the train stopped at every paddock, it seemed, and at every farm gate. So Tim Donahue had ample time to reflect on his new parish, which he was deeply afraid resembled Larney. He was not disappointed in his premonitions. Carne was even smaller, and within sight and sound of the howling black sea, and was much colder even than Larney, and apparently harbored less substantial citizens, if possible.

Two old men in woolen leggings, or gaiters, and wearing thick old brown caps, met him at the station, scrubbed and brushed and very shabby, with patched elbows. “It’ll not look like much, Carne, Faether,” said one of them kindly, “but it’s the good hearts we have, and the rectory’s tight, and so is the ould church.” He had seen the young priest’s expression of dismay, and he patted Father Tim’s arm like a grandfather. “Not like Dublin, I’ll be thinking, but we love the good Faethers here and it’s not saucy we are in the Confessional.” Father Tim was a little heartened by this as they led him to a jaunty-cart, heaped blankets on him, and drove him off at a spanking pace. “The ould Faether could not meet ye,” shouted the other old man over the clatter of hoofs on black wet cobblestones. “It’s the rheumatism he has.”

And no doubt I’ll be having the rheumatism soon, too, thought Father Tim, gloomily, shuddering even under all the blankets, which smelled highly of horse, and flinching when the icy wind struck his cheeks. Snow had fallen here, too, and the dark hills behind the village were streaked with it, like pallid veins, and Carne huddled under a white quilt of it. The main street (there were but four other streets besides) was narrow, unkempt, lined with tiny little shops whose windows were sightless with steam, and there was a goodly sprinkling of pubs between. This will be a drinking village, thought Father Tim, recalling the trim pubs of Dublin. There was an inn, also, with a board creaking in the wind, and it was brave with red and blue and white and announced that it was ‘The Dashing Falcon’. Birds do not dash, thought the priest, to divert his forebodings, but it has a lively sound.

The old men informed him that the ‘ould Faether’ would be leaving tomorrow, that the good Sisters had smarted up the rectory and were waiting there to greet him — Father Tim shivered — all four of them. His housekeeper did not live on the premises; she was a widow with five children, and she ‘did’ for the priest daily, including Sunday dinner, and left at sundown. This cheered Father Tim a little; he had been the only son in a large family of girls and female cousins and aunts, and on the occasions when he had been a curate the housekeepers had bullied him like the dragons they were and regarded him as a mere slip of a lad in need not only of maternal attentions concerning mufflers and warm socks but of guidance. One of them had known more theology than a local, much-esteemed solicitor, who prided himself on his knowledge, and she was given, in odd moments, to arguing obscure points of doctrine with the curate.

The ‘ould Faether’ had discreetly locked himself in his little bedroom to escape the nuns and the housekeeper who ‘did’ for him, on the plea of worse rheumatic pains today. He did not emerge until he heard masculine voices, and knew that his relief was at hand. He then crept painfully from the bedroom into the little parlor, which seemed stuffed with people, so small it was, and he greeted Father Tim with sincere expressions of joy. “A stout boyo,” he said, nodding, his weary old eyes brightening, and Father Tim had the distinct impression that he would need to be ‘stout’ in Carne.

The tiny rectory was indeed ‘tight’, so tight that the parlor steamed with the heat of the red peat fire and the heat exuded by the welcoming committee. Father Tim had a confused glimpse of brick walls painted a leprous white — this done only yesterday by himself, said one of the old men proudly — and they still smelled pungently of whitewash. The few chairs were black but sturdy, and so was the one table with its unfragrant paraffin lamp, which was burning smokily against the dull dimness of the winter day.

“Lovely, lovely,” murmured the ‘ould Faether’, who was obviously dying for a quiet drink to ease his pains, a drink he dared not take in the faces of the nuns, all of whom stood high in their habits except for the Sister Superior. She was one of the smallest ladies Father Tim had ever seen, with the face of a pink-cheeked angel, the loveliest of gentle blue eyes, and the most tender of rose-tipped mouths. So Father Tim, surveying her, knew that she had a temper like a holocaust, a nature carved from solid iron, and an obstinacy to make a donkey envious. She appeared to be about thirty, and therefore she was somewhere in her late sixties or early seventies and had never known a pain or twinge in her life. She gave him the sweetest and most submissive of smiles, and he heard her, in his mind, saying quite clearly: “There’ll be no nonsense from you, Faether, and no interfering in our affairs, so mind you know your place from the beginning. I know you lads: full of zeal and briskness, but we’ll tame you!”

Indeed! Father Tim replied to her coldly in his mind, in his best Dublin manner. She gave him a radiant smile, quite knowing what he had said, and he was certain that St. Cecelia had never possessed such radiance, and his heart sank. There was such a saintly smugness about her, brightened with triumph. She had quite accurately understood that here was a lad who had spent most of his life under the firm thumb of womenfolk and knew when not to cross them, and she was pleased.

Finally the nuns departed, after receiving Father Tim’s blessing, and they moved off in a tight group, already teeming with remarks they would make when alone together. Tim had not the slightest doubt that the Sister Superior would comfort them with assurances that he would be no bother to them ‘with his interfering’.