Tarry Flynn (2 page)

He was a queer son in some ways. There was a kink in him which she never had been able to fathom.

The sun shone on the little hills. Hens were flying over gates and fences to scratch in potato and turnip fields.

The headlands and the hedges were so fresh and wonderful, so gay with the dawn of the world. Tarry never tired looking at these ordinary things as he tired of the Mass and of religion. In a dim way he felt that he was not a Christian. In the god of Poetry he found a God more important to him than Christ. His god had never accepted Christ.

Then the place of things alive overflowed his analytic thoughts and he heard the robins and sparrows in the hedges. A crib cart with a load of young pigs passed on its way to the market, for as well as being a Church holyday this was also a big market day in the local town. Ahead of him at the Miskin lane he could see another late Mass-goer whose walk he recognized. A good friend of his own, a poetic man who disliked being in time for Mass as much as Tarry. This was Eusebius Cassidy, his young neighbour. Eusebius was on foot, which meant that Tarry would catch up with him.

‘Hello,' Tarry said as he slowed down and cycled beside Eusebius, who had gripped the back of the saddle.

‘Damn nice morning,' said Eusebius.

‘A terror,' said Tarry.

‘Well?' said Eusebius with meaning.

‘Damn to the thing doing, Eusebius,' said Tarry.

‘Be jabus! did you see her?'

‘I did. She has no fella as far as I know.'

The two young men were talking about girls. Ninety per cent of their conversation was about girls. Only talk. Always talk. They were idealists and always very lonely. Something had gone wrong with the machinery of living and nothing they ever planned in this line ever came to anything.

They were both more than twenty-seven in those enthusiastic years of nineteen hundred and thirty-five, yet neither had as much as ever kissed a girl. Not that kissing was much in favour in that district. Reading about lovers kissing, Tarry often reflected on the fact that he had never seen anyone kissing anyone, except poor old Peter Toole whom he once saw kissing a corpse in a wakehouse in the hope of getting a couple of glasses of whiskey.

Tarry loved all nice young girls. He loved virtuous girls, and that was one of the things he admired the Catholic religion for – because it kept girls virtuous until such time as he'd meet them.

Tarry was not bad looking, and up to a point he was a great favourite with women. Once a girl in a dance hall called him ‘an oul' monk'. The last thing he wanted to be was an oul' monk, and in his heart the last thing he was. Beneath the crust was the too soft heart of a romantic idealist. He had written some verses at that time, too, but these poems did not jut out of his life to become noticeable or make him a stranger to the small farmer community of which he was a child. Eusebius shared most of Tarry's views on everything; for Eusebius was a product of that semi-human Gaelic enthusiasm which had swept the country in his father's day. Eusebius had caught the contagion from an uncle and he had a sentimental regard for poetry – especially the poetry of Mangan and translations of Gaelic poems such as Callanan had done. One of his favourite pieces was Mangan's
Nameless One
, in which he saw the reflection of his own loneliness and lack of female companionship.

I saw her once one little while and then no more,
Twas Paradise on earth awhile and then no more.

‘Did you hear anything about the other thing, Tarry? – no developments?'

‘Heard she went to the Big Man about it.'

‘Holy God! To Father Daly?'

‘She was seen going up to the Parochial.'

Eusebius jerked his shoulders somewhat hysterically and giggled, ‘There'll be sport about this, there'll be sport about this.'

‘They can go to hell,' was all Tarry said.

Near the village they came up with the last Mass-goers. Down the Mass-path that served the hilly part of the parish two old women were coming. ‘That's like your mother,' Tarry remarked.

They left the bicycle among the other bicycles against the wall of the graveyard and, while Tarry took the clips off his trousers, still kept running along so that their hop-and-go-constant gait was like the progress of kangaroos or horses with itch in the heels. Every one, who till he came within sight of the chapel was in no hurry at all, suddenly developed that anxiety which will be noticed among people who, approaching a football field, hear across the paling the first cheers or the referee's whistle. Tarry, too, was infected.

Tarry and Eusebius were of one mind now in hoping that the man with the collecting box would have left the chapel door. Passing the forge they saw Charlie Trainor's old mother looking for two ha'pennies for a penny, and though they thought her mean they themselves never gave even a ha'penny at the door. Indeed they could not very well afford a ha'penny, for cigarettes and dances and an occasional Saturday evening in the town required every penny and ha'penny they could rap or run.

The man with the collecting box, luckily enough, was disappearing round the gable of the chapel on his way to the sacristy with the takings as they came up the incline through the graveyard to the chapel door.

The Catholic Church of Dargan was a building like a barn – a common rectangle, with a square belfry at the north gable; the church was scaling its mortar rough-casting and its pink wash was almost faded white. The roof span was wide and the roof timbers rotten so that only people with a strong faith in God's
goodness-to-His-own would risk sitting in the centre aisle. The centre aisle was always packed, which proved that both faith and piety abided in the parish of Dargan. Standing on a rise in the middle of a weedy graveyard above the village with its shops and new dance hall the church looked shabby, but God would surely overlook this apparent disrespect in the blaze of the people's devotion. There were faith and piety and all the richness of human character that goes with a deep faith in the Hereafter. Father Daly said First Mass on the Feast of Corpus Christi. The chapel was crowded, for as well as being a Feast Day of importance, on which the Faithful were exhorted to receive Holy Communion, this day was also the big summer fair day in the neighbouring town, and many of the congregation had business in the town and by coming to early Mass were able to serve both God and Mammon. The doors and windows were open, but still the place was stuffy with that morning closeness which comes before people are acclimatized to summer. Outside the door a group of men stood whispering while the less solemn parts of the Mass were being said. These men stared about them at the rolling country of little hills and commented on the crops, the weather, the tombstones or whatever came into their dreaming minds.

‘Very weedy piece of spuds, them of Mick Finnegan's.'

‘He doesn't put on the dung, Larry: the man that doesn't drive on the dung won't take out a crop.' A pause, ‘Nothing like the dung.'

‘Give me your cap till I kneel on it,' someone said with a laugh.

‘All the kneeling you'll do, Charlie…'

John Magan, the puce-faced publican, and his flat-footed wife were coming up the incline. The men at the door made way for them and Charlie Trainor the calf-dealer, who was kneeling on one knee with his eye to a chink in the half-open door, gave the big man a quick salute with his upraised fingers.

‘I say, quit the bloody spitting on my boot,' someone growled to his neighbours.

Tarry and Eusebius had now arrived and were standing
quietly by the sidewall of the chapel near the door, unobserved. Presently Tarry moved through the crowd in the porch.

‘He couldn't see the women from here,' said Charlie.

Tarry ignored their banter and when the Mass Book was being changed for the first Gospel he took advantage of the commotion of the congregation rising to slip in unobserved, except by the young women who made it their business to watch every man as he came in. Tarry disliked staying at the door, not because he had any strong faith or piety, but because he found the atmosphere there annoying. As he edged his way into a place behind a pillar he gave a quick look round the women's side of the chapel. The sexes were on different sides of the Dargan chapel. The congregation was in danger of becoming squint-eyed owing to this arrangement. Even plain women look pretty in a church. As he knelt down after the Creed he leaned on the back of the seat before him and through the crook of his arm surveyed the priest and the people. He had neither prayer book nor rosary beads, nor any other devotional pass-the-time.

It was a squalid grey-faced throng. The sunlight through the coloured windows played on that congregation but could not smooth parchment faces and wrinkled necks to polished ivory. Skin was the colour of clay, and clay was in their hair and clothes. The little tillage fields went to Mass. No wonder that Father Daly had such a low opinion of his parishioners. When he first came to the parish he said there was only one decent man in the whole place and that was the publican – with the miller a bad second. Decency referred in this connection to the size of the property and not to the character of the individual. In the heat the drone the ceremony and the hum of the prayer sounded like an airplane hovering in the distance, or a wasp at the window. Father Daly was a fine cut of a man; he had been educated at Rome and Louvain and was full of a pedantic scholasticism which he somehow managed to relate to the needs of the people. When he left this acquired pedantry at home and took on to speak on politics or economics, which he often did, he made himself look silly. But never to the people. The people of Dargan thought him the loveliest and best educated priest in the diocese and even Tarry
Flynn in moments of excitement conceded that the man was above the average country priest. When he turned round to preach, the congregation sat up and admired his fine-shaped head, his proud bearing and his flashing green eyes behind the rimless glasses on which the sun was playing.

He had a silvery voice, so that even nonsense from him sounded wise. He took out a white silk handkerchief from the folds of his chasuble and wiped his glasses. Then he made a dramatic gesture with the fluttering handkerchief before blowing his nose with a loud report like a motor horn. Father Daly was up to every stage trick and would have made an excellent Hyde Park speaker. When (as happened on this Sunday) he had something important to say he usually led up to it by a cleverly constructed runway of philosophy, so that his listeners would be wondering what he was coming at. They knew his ways and his tricks and when, on this occasion, he started off, not with a philosophical but a poetical theme, they guessed that something interesting was in the air. ‘There was a great poet one time,' he began, slowly, and in a minor key, ‘and his name was Tom Moore. He wrote a song called “
Rich and Rare
. ‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore —”' The priest spoke solemnly, enunciating every word separately. Then he blew his nose again, and as his eyes swept the corners of the chapel his glasses flashed on the walls and were spots of light in the mirroring glass of the Stations of the Cross.

‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore
And a bright gold ring on her wand she bore;
But O her beauty was far beyond
Her sparkling gem and snow-white wand.

Lady, dost thou not fear to stray
So lone and lovely on this bleak way?
Are Erin's sons so good or so cold
As not to be tempted by woman or gold?

Sir Knight, I fear not the least alarm,
No son of Erin would offer me harm.
For though they love women and golden store,
Sir Knight, they love honour and virtue more.'

Father Daly took his time with the verses, and he spoke so well, and his words seemed the prelude to so much that not even the greediest man for the world, waiting to go to the fair, nor the Communicant with the thickest fasting-spit was annoyed.

The priest stared into the distance as he said: ‘That couldn't be said by a lady passing through the village or parish of Dargan today. No, it could not,' he sighed. He raised his voice to a roar that quivered the rafters and echoed in the galleries. ‘Rapscallions of hell, curmudgeons of the devil that are less civilized than the natives on the banks of the Congo. Like a lot of pigs that you were after throwing cayenne pepper among?' The people opened their eyes wider and listened, leaning forward – delighted with the sermon. The men at the door came into the porch and Charlie Trainor peeped through a chink in the woodwork. ‘Come to hell outa that or he'll see you,' someone warned him.

‘Everything's game ball,' Charlie said, and winked.

‘Hypocrites, humbugs,' the priest went on, ‘coming here Sunday after Sunday – blindfolding the devil in the dark as the saying goes. And the headquarters of all this rascality is a townland called Drumnay.' The congregation smiled. Tarry Flynn stooped his head and smiled, too, although he was a native of that terrible townland. The calf-dealer at the door cocked his ear more acutely; he too, was interested in his townland and pleased when its evil deeds got the air.

‘A young girl was passing through this village the other evening,' said the priest sorrowfully. ‘She was riding her bicycle home from Confession. When she was passing Drumnay crossroads she was set upon by a crowd of blackguards – and blackguards is no name for them – and the clothes torn off her back. Good God, good God, what is this country coming to? Atheists, scallywags…' Then relaxing the intensity of his passionate outburst he continued softly, ‘I don't blame the unfortunate wretches so much, but I do blame the half-educated blackguards who put them up to such work – the men who make the balls for others to fire.' What was he driving at? Who was the girl? What really happened? The ordinary members of the congregation
took the priest's words with a grain of humorous salt and peasant doubt, knowing what wonders Church and State can make out of the common affairs of life when seen in their official mirror. Somebody winked across at Tarry Flynn, who sat with his head bowed and the pleasant smile on his face being thrown to the shadows between the seats. Charlie Trainor never smiled when the priest was preaching; he kept peeping through the woodwork, taking everything in with a serious look.