Tarry Flynn (6 page)

‘Lord God, but you're the innocent woman. Do you think I'd start to talk philosophy to every oul' cod I meet. Go on, mare.'

‘Oul' cod, every oul' cod.' Mrs Flynn shook her head in disgust as she closed the gate behind him to keep Callan's straying animals from entering the street. On the way to the village shop he met Father Anthony who was the joker of the Mission. One of the priests sent to a parish was always a ‘gay fella'. He cracked a joke on meeting Tarry, and Tarry pulled up. He didn't like this sort of joke when his mind was contemplating the lonely beauty of the landscape around him. He was somewhat abrupt with the monk and in his excitement said the wrong thing: he said the unusual thing, what he had often taken a vow against saying, and that made the monk suspicious. He didn't like to hear originality from a poor farmer and was disappointed to find his well-practised joke treated so indifferently.

Originality showed pride.

‘Were you at your Confession yet?' asked the priest.

‘I'm well within the walls of the Church,' said Tarry.

‘What do you know about the Church?' said the monk a little angrily. ‘What has a young country boy like you to do with these things? You must come and let me hear your Confession.'

He asked Tarry his name and where he lived, and finally his age. Asking his age Tarry always found was a sure sign that the man who asked was not friendly. There was always a touch of malice in such a question, it was being familiar. Whenever anyone asked him his age he put him down as an enemy. Considering that he was nearly thirty he would have preferred not being asked. He told the man he was twenty-five. The monk began to chastise Tarry for his outlook and was telling him that he was heading for the downward path when Charlie came by on a bicycle. With a smile like a full moon the monk saluted the calf-dealer and the joke he cracked was warmly enjoyed by Charlie.

Charlie had overheard the missioner's chastisement of Tarry and when they parted with the monk, Charlie, catching hold of the side-board of the cart while still keeping on his bicycle, ran
alongside Tarry inquiring what the hell he was saying to the poor missioner.

‘You wouldn't know,' said Tarry.

Charlie was very vexed. ‘You're a desperate man to be making little of the priests like that, Flynn. We're all Catholics, aren't we?'

‘I don't know so much about that, Charlie. Some of us are doubtful.'

‘Oh, I see, you don't believe in religion.'

‘No, but you do, Charlie,' Tarry sneered.

The way Charlie raised his eyebrows and pretended to be angry made Tarry mad; for he knew that this dishonest attitude was the stuff out of which ignorant bigotry is made. This encounter with the monk and the calf-dealer took most of the good out of his journey to the village which was usually such a pleasant holiday from the drag of his existence.

As he feared, his mother wasn't long hearing about the tiff. She heard it before the day was ended, though she did not accuse him of it till the day after. She talked as if she were terrified, but for all that there was humour in her terror which she couldn't conceal.

‘What the devil's father did you say to him?' said she.

‘Not one thing.'

‘We'll be the talk of the country – like the Carlins. Did you hear that one of the missioners was up with them this evening, trying to get them to come out to the Mission?'

‘They're not going?'

‘Going, how are you… Give us up that long potstick from the door… O, going, aye! And you're taking pattern by them.'

Tarry was disgusted with the Carlins; they were liable to give the impression that having a respect for oneself was a sign of madness. If, in the cause of his self-esteem,
he
stayed at home from the chapel he'd be put down as a queer fellow. Not that he had any intention of missing the carnival spirit that was to be found around the church these days or of revolting against the Church – he had only intended staying away one evening. He would remain away that one evening – and he did. He ran over
to the field to take a last look at a heifer that was due to calve and then went down the road as if he were going off to pray. Eusebius had to go off earlier, he being an official.

He crossed the hills into Miskin, intending to come out on the railway line. Passing Petey Meegan's house he saw the crooked old bachelor owner hurrying off up Kerley's hill on his way to hear more about sex.

The shadowy lane with the hedges that nearly met in the middle was filled with midges and flies buzzing over cow-dung. Here he was in another world. It was almost a year since he had gone up that lane and it evoked nostalgia. He remembered as a child coming home from second Mass on Sundays with Eusebius by this lane and how fairylike it seemed to him then. Old Petey's old father used to come out hobbling on his two sticks and like the Ancient Mariner try to get them to listen to his stories of the Sleeping Horsemen who were enchanted under a hill near Ardee. One day they would awaken to fight against the enemies of the Church. It was to be a deadly fight and the time would be the End of the World. There was an apocalyptic flavour about all those stories and the memory of them influenced the heavy-smelling fungi and flowers that grew in the dark ditches.

A great row was going on in McArdle's kitchen.

The four sons were arguing with their father and mother for money. These four sons were all over forty but they were treated as babies by their parents. That may have been why when they appeared at Drumnay cross-roads or in the discussions in Magan's pub they were so aggressive and spoke with airs of such domineering authority.

‘I want a shilling for fags and I'll have to get it,' a powerful lamenting voice could be heard.

A pup screamed and ran under the table.

‘Am I made of money? Am I made of money?' the father cried.

The mother was now crying quietly and Tarry hurried along, knowing that a family row is a most unhealthy affair for an outsider.

He had been hoping to run into the youngest of the Dillons. If the truth must be told, he had had his eye on those two young
girls for years and was only waiting for them to get big enough. He didn't suspect that other men had had similar ambitions and even the affair of the earlier evening did not entirely disperse his hopes that they were still safe for him.

Crossing on to the railway line he was treading down the sleepers when Josie Dillon, who had had three children, came down the slope towards a well. She was smoking a cigarette, which she put out on seeing him. Was the girl afraid of him as of a priest? It looked like it, and he did not want to give that impression of himself, which was, in his opinion, a false impression. Yet the girl might have been right, for on taking a second look at her he knew that he just didn't associate with that class of person. She was the type of woman whom he often saw in the slums of the town of a fair day.

To find out about the sisters he would have to speak to her, so he spoke, much to her surprise, for he had often passed her by before with his head in the air. He only said it was a nice evening, and the girl took it for granted that he meant something else.

‘Are you coming down the line?' she inquired.

‘Good God! no,' he said. ‘I'm late for the Mission as I am.'

He raced up the slope and out of her range as quickly as he could, praying as he ran that nobody saw him. Bad as he was, if he got the name of being seen with one of the Dillons he'd be ruined. Some men could take life easily. Some could dabble in sin, but it didn't fit into his life. He made a promise to the Sacred Heart that if he hadn't been seen he would go to the Mission every single evening, and to Confession on the next Saturday.

When he found out that nobody had seen him – if they had there would be talk – he was somewhat annoyed with himself for making rash promises – but he would keep them.

The little tillage fields and the struggle for existence broke every dramatic fall. A layer of sticky soil lay between the fires in the heart preventing a general conflagration. The Mission had lifted up the limp body of society in Dargan, but as soon as the pressure was relaxed it fell back again and the grass grew over the penitential sod.

With Tarry it was different. He believed that of all the people in the parish he alone took religion seriously. Too seriously, for being too serious meant that it was not integrated in his ordinary life. When the ordinary man went to Confession he rambled on with a list of harmless sins, ignoring all the ones that would have filled Tarry with remorse. When Tarry went to Confession that Saturday night he had the misfortune, contrary to his own well-thought-out arrangements, to mention unusual sins.

The Confessor was the monk he had met on the road.

‘What sins do you remember since your last Confession?' the monk asked.

‘I read books, father,' Tarry replied before he had time to think. He knew at once that he had made a mistake, for that started the monk off.

‘What sort of books?'

Tarry did not want to admit that he only read school books and newspapers and it would appear that he was telling a lie if he didn't try to mention some books. So he said: ‘Shaw, father.'

He had read about Shaw in the newspapers, but had never read a line of Shaw's.

‘Have you a Rosary?' asked the Confessor.

Tarry had not but he said: ‘Yes, father' in the hope of getting out of the confessional as quickly as possible. He had made it awkward enough as it was.

‘You should read the
Messenger of the Sacred Heart,
' said the Confessor. ‘Do you ever read the little
Messenger?
'

‘Yes, father.'

‘Continue to read it, my child; in that little book you will find all the finest literature written by the greatest writers. And give up this man, Shaw.'

In all he could not have been less than twenty minutes in the confessional and considering that there was a long impatient queue on both sides of the confessional – among whom were Charlie and Eusebius – and that that confessor had the reputation of being very quick and easy – which was why he had such queues waiting to tell their sins to him, no wonder that Tarry's lengthy period in the confession box caused such surprise.

‘Shaw's a hard man,' remarked Charlie later, when they were standing outside Magan's shop. Charlie hadn't the faintest idea who Shaw was but he thought that by mentioning the name someone might reveal the secret behind it. No one knew, and Charlie was disappointed.

‘You were a long time in the box with the priest, I hear,' said the mother when he got home. ‘Did you kill a man or what?… You'll have to cut them yellow weeds in the Low Place the morrow and not have the fields a show to the world. What did you say that made him keep you?'

‘It's a sin to tell a thing like that.'

‘Whatever you do anyway, I wouldn't like to think of you knocking around Dillon's house, not that I'd ever believe you'd do anything, but you know the big-mouths that's about this place.'

‘You needn't worry.'

The Mission came to an end with a brilliant display of lighted candles and the massed congregation of old men and women straightening their bent backs and vowing to renounce the World, the Flesh and the Devil. They promised to control their passions, and Tarry, as he watched the scene of self-abnegation from the gallery, got a queer creepy feeling in the nerves of his face which something that was ludicrous and pathetic always made him feel. Petey Meegan was thumping his breast and looking up towards the coloured window with an ecstatic gaze.

Old thin-faced, long-nosed Jenny Toole had a frightened look, thinking of the dangers she faced in a world of violent men.

The crowds went home and once again the clay hand was clapped across the mouth of Prophecy.

He cut the ragweeds and the thistles the following day. The yellow maggots wearing football jerseys which crept on the blossom fell to the ground. These maggots would become winged if they had lived long enough. Some day he, too, might grow wings and be able to fly away from this clay-stricken place. Ah, clay! It was out of clay that wings were made. He stared down at the dry little canyons in the parched earth and he loved that dry earth which could produce a miracle of wings.

He thought of Mary Reilly. By a miracle the day might come when he'd have no trouble in getting her – or one even more beautiful. Greater miracles had happened. He hoped that she did not think that he was really responsible for the mauling she got at Drumnay cross-roads, for he wasn't. Indeed, that was the last thing he would think of doing. It wouldn't be past Eusebius, for all his talk.

He would like to be able to warn the girl of the dangers she was going through, warn her of men like Charlie and some of those other slick blackguards who frequented the dance hall and who were such close friends of Father Markey. Ah, please God she would mind herself. He convinced himself that the curate's brother who sometimes visited Reilly's with the curate was a decent fellow. A rabbit darted from a clump of bushes and he flung a stone at it, forgetting for the moment his pensive thoughts. Looking through the hedge he saw his field of potatoes and turnips and the sight of them doing so well put every other problem out of his mind.

Tarry went to the horses' stable for the winkers. Happening to look into the manger he found a fresh-laid egg. He picked up the egg, cracked it on the edge of the old pot in which the mare got her oats and drank it. It was not that he liked raw eggs but he believed that raw eggs produced great virility. Stallions got a dozen raw eggs in a bucket of new milk every day during the season.

Standing in the doorway of the stable he felt good and terribly strong. A man is happy and poetic in health and strength. The stable in summer with the dust of last year's straw on the floor was to Tarry the most romantic place he knew. Sitting in the manger smoking and reading was paradise. But he had work to do now.