The All of It: A Novel (9 page)

But she got ahead of him by speaking first, and with a commanding strength: “One thing I’ve learned, Father—that in this life it’s best to keep the then and the now and the what’s-to-be as close together in your thoughts as you can. It’s when you let gaps creep in, when you separate out the intervals and dwell on them, that you can’t bear the sorrow.” And, as if to prove her point: “It was lingering over the first time we saw the cattle-fold that got me off.”

“You’re right of course about joining the pieces
of life together,” he said quietly. “It’s the hardest part, keeping the view whole…. But now, Enda dear, before the others come, would you not like a bit of time to yourself?”

He thought he detected a fleeting look of—could it be disappointment? on her face.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “I was going to tell you of Father Daniels. It was him, you know, made it possible for us to have this place.” Then, hastily: “Unless you’re weary at last of the sound of me voice?” lapsing again into brogue, as if in embarrassment; going on: “Thinking back over the all of it with you, Father, and telling of it—it’s a dear thing for me.”

“And for myself, Enda,” he urged on her. “It’s harmonious, is it not?” he said with a felt, tranquil warmth, engendering thereby her fine smile. “And I’m
far
from weary of the sound of your voice! And furthermore, I have to tell you, Kevin once started to give me an account of how you acquired the place, but we got interrupted by one thing or another and never got back to it.”

“But that he wanted you to know! It shows how he regarded you, Father.”

“He spoke
nobly
of Father Daniels.”

“Ah, such a dear, good man, God rest his soul…. Kevin told you how we went to him?”

“He didn’t give details.”

“
Well
,” she said broadly, “I have to go back a bit to the afternoon we came on the place.”

“
Do
.”

“Kevin and myself, we knew right away of course that we’d come onto heaven on earth. Kevin said so, the two of us standing there in the cattle-fold, ‘It’s for us,’ he said, and I didn’t even think ‘So’s the moon’ or any such-like thing that normally comes to mind when you’re face to face with something beyond your reach, just told him yes, that it was. He said, ‘We’ll hazard staying the night, and tomorrow we’ll go straight into town and seek out the priest, find out all we can about the place.’ I said yes, that was the thing to do, feeling meek on the one hand and rosy on the other. Full of hope, you know.”

“Believing,” he put in.

“Aye, as we both had the same fierce want, and you know what’s said about moving a mountain if you have the determination.”

“Go on then about Father Daniels.”

“Well, we did as we’d planned, went to town first thing in the morning and straight to the church—”

“Introduced yourselves to Father Daniels,” he pushed her on.

“Aye. He received us in a lovely way. Kevin did the talking of course, told of ourselves, that we
were looking to settle in Roonatellin and about how we’d come onto this place and that we’d like to know about it, if it could be rented, for starters, with the understanding that we’d fix up the house…. When I think about it I can’t to this day get over how Kevin had the wit to lay it all out as he did. And the manly way he did it, Father! Like he made it his main point of our having worked at the manor at Ballymote and the satisfaction we’d given, and said he was sure if Father Daniels cared to write Mr. Dunne, he’d get a good answer back of our characters.”

“What was Father Daniels like?”

“The look and ways of him, you mean? Tall, he was, with a very broad face and sharp eyes. He had the habit of putting the tips of his fingers together while he listened to you and holding them before himself like that after you’d stopped talking, so you weren’t sure how he felt about what you’d said. Not until he
parted
his hands would you have an idea what he was thinking. He didn’t, I mean, ever
talk
with his fingers together like that….” She sat back: “I remember after Kevin’d finished with what he had to say, how Father just kept studying him through the lace-work of his fingers—not a word out of him, me thinking we must seem like a pair of loonies to him, coming in on a morning, strangers, and going on and on about
a place we’d not in all our lives known of until the day before.”

“It was a daring thing to do. Arresting!” he declared with fervor.

“Funny too, Father, for after we’d sat ever so long and Father as silent as the grave, just eyeing us—us in agony—he finally let down his hands onto his desk and said, well, when he’d come awake that morning, he’d never expected such a turn to his day, but novelty was a rare and welcome thing in anyone’s life, wasn’t it so? and laughed in ever so hearty a way. Then he got serious and told us all he knew of the place, that it was the smallhold of a widow named Connelly who’d moved to Westport after her husband died some nine or ten years before. The widow was a cripple, he told us, that being the reason she’d not been able to stay on. At the time she left, she’d turned the place over to an agent for letting out, but over a four- or five-year period there’d been a series of bad-luck tenants, all of them booted by the agent for not having lived up to their end of the bargain…. In the recent years, Father said, there’d been no one near the place except the once when the widow’d showed up herself in quite a grand style with a man she’d paid to drive her out in a car from Westport. Father’d met her on that occasion. She’d come, she told him, to check on the state of the place, es
pecially the cattle-fold, the cattle-fold having been her husband’s particular concern in his lifetime. She didn’t care a whit about the house, she let it be known…. Father said he’d gone out with her to the place and sat with her in the car while she had the driver look to the cattle-fold. She was terrible bent over, Father told us, the crippling being of that order, but she was perfectly all right in mind…. The next day, before she went back to Westport, she’d called ’round at the parish-house and asked Father to keep an eye on the place for her, that she’d decided against renting it again, in the belief that an empty house was better than a bad tenant…. She’d left him her address. He’d written her but six months ago, he told us, and had had an answer back saying she supposed the time’d come for her to think of disposing of the place, and she’d be in touch…. Well, Kevin asked him, What did Father think of
our
letting the place and applying the money towards buying it maybe? That bold Kevin was, drumming on with our want.”

The scene, as Enda described it, was as vivid to him as any he’d ever seen at the Abbey Theatre:

—Father Daniels seated at the old relic of a dominating desk (now his own) in the intimidatingly cheerless, damp, parish-house study
.

—Kevin and Enda sitting opposite him, looking to him as
THE CHURCH
(
Aid, Light, Comfort, Strength, Hope, etcetera, etcetera), their young eyes clear and owl
large, their shyness overruled by the bright spur of their fanatical want
.

—Sharp-eyed Father Daniels, his heart beating a bit faster for the change, the diversion, the expressed “novelty” (as against the agonies of boredom usually suffered at the desk) of so gallimaufry a situation, and then of his having to judge (probably on a churning stomach of an undigested breakfast composed of fried this and that) the truth of the tongues of the two before him, the sincerity of their Christian-seemingness, the reality and extent of their skills, and finally
deciding,
after putting to himself the question:
Why not, in the name of creation, give them their chance at their vision of Eden?

“I remember,” he laughed, “Kevin telling me that all the time he was pleading your cause, his tongue’d been loose as a lark’s, but then, after Father Daniels’d declared he’d undertake to write Mrs. Connelly on your behalf and that he’d take the responsibility in the meantime of giving you permission to stay on at the place, how his mouth’d slammed to like he had lockjaw!”

Enda hooted, “It’s true, Father. I’m here to tell you!
Kevin!
He sat before Father mute as a stone and grey as one too! It was myself, mortified that no word of thanks came from him, that opened my mouth and started in telling Father how grateful we were and how we’d take it on as a sacred duty to see he’d never be sorry for helping us…. And the way the poor man looked at me, Father, as you
would, you know, one of those battery-run Christmas toys they have today, seeing to when, if ever, I’d run down, I was that wrought, making up for Kevin’s seeming like he’d passed out!” Her eyes took on again a canny look: “If it’d been me listening to myself and recommending ourselves as I was, I’d have got suspicious, the way you do, you know, when somebody’s giving themselves out as having every virtue in the book! To think of it!” She made the beguiling gesture of hiding her face in her hands.

“Go on; go on,” he said gleefully.

But she didn’t speak at once, and he saw, again, a ruminative warmth kindle her eyes. “When we left Father Daniels that morning, Kevin told him—he’d got his tongue back by then—that we’d start in right away on the house, that no matter the outcome with Mrs. Connelly, at least the place wouldn’t be lacking for some overdue attention…. I don’t, though, to this day, think Father Daniels had any idea how earnest Kevin was, though he told me later he’d got a notion right away of ‘the steel in Kevin’s spine.’ Those were his words. But I think he supposed we’d do a bit here and a bit there, Jerry-like, you know. And I surely don’t think he could have imagined Kevin’s doing what he did that very day—” she paused dramatically.

“Enda! You’ve got me on the dangle!”

“Bought a nice strong donkey, Kevin did, and a secondhand cart!”

“What?” he exploded.

“Aye,” she grinned. “I thought he’d gone daft till he explained to me how we’d need the creature and cart for carrying stuff the distance from town, materials for the roof, the makings for new windows, glass and all, tools, whitewash, on and on and on…. We’d saved all our wages from Ballymote and of course the five-pound note the man’d given Kevin for catching the runaway horse, but still and all, it didn’t add up to the beginnings of all that’d be required to cover everything. Kevin, though, he but fisted his hands and said he’d take on any and every job he could find by day and give his dawns and evenings to working on the house, that that was his plan and that was what he meant to do and there’d be nothing in the world that could stop him! I told him I’d earn too, that somehow, between the two of us, we’d bring it off…. It was strange, but owning a creature and having the care of it, that we’d come to that—
power
, it helped to fix us in our purpose, if you follow me.”

“I do.”

“Looking back, I don’t see how we did it, Father…. The seasons were pressing on us, the fall, you know, and the winter before us, and having to make the place snug—” She shook her head. “It
was bone-breaking work…. There was times when I thought Kevin’d collapse.”

“It’s mind-boggling how he did it. Yourself, too,” he said in a voice which rang with admiration. “But back up a bit and tell me about your first jobs in Roonatellin; how you established yourselves.”

Her eyes narrowed: “We
humbled
ourselves is how, Father—going into Roonatellin the day after we saw Father Daniels, bearing the looks that’s cast on strangers, and telling anyone who’d listen that we needed work and could start that very minute…. Kevin got the luck…. It was Saturday and he noticed a back-up of creatures at the farrier’s shop.” She shrugged. “Nobody knows these days what you’re talking about when you speak of a farrier—”

“I do.”

“Aye, you’re of that age, Father. But you know what I mean of the ignorance today. Now it’s cars and tractors. Motors of every variety. Forty-eight years ago, though, it was a creature’s four legs that was the get-about and get-done of the average man—”

He nodded, wondering if it was a worse or better fact.

“—and on a good Saturday, you’d see as many as fifteen or twenty horses and donkeys lined up at a farrier’s, waiting to be shod…. Well, like I said, Kevin took note of the back-up, the men
impatient and grumbling, standing beside their beasts, losing the best of the day, and the farrier working alone, harried, drowning in his own sweat from the heat of the forge…. Kevin walked straight over to him, told him his name was Kevin Dennehy and that he knew how to shoe a horse and he’d be glad to help out as it looked like an extra hand was badly needed…. I watched from the side…. Mr. Burke, Fergus Burke—he was the farrier—he told Kevin very cold-like that his assistant’d failed him that day due to illness, but pressed as he was, he’d not trust his trade to a stranger, thanks very much. All that without so much as a glance up at Kevin…. But Kevin just planted his feet in deeper and asked if he couldn’t be allowed to take on the shoeing of a
donkey
—you know, Father, how horses has always been valued more—couldn’t he take on a donkey to show the worth of his work? and before Mr. Burke could answer, a farmer back at the end of the line spoke up and said he’d gladly give over his beast to Kevin, that he wanted to get on with his day. By then, just as you’d guess, all the men were eyeing Kevin, curious—
highly
interested—to see what would happen. Mr. Burke told the farmer he’d not be held responsible for the work, but all right, he’d let Kevin use his tools on the donkey…. Now Father,” her voice dropped to a confidential tone, “Kevin’d worked with the farrier
and
the smith at the manor
in Ballymote, and both of them very particular experts I have to tell you, so Kevin knew what he was up to. And if I do say so myself, Kevin had an extra feel when it came to a beast. He could sense, I mean, was it the nervous, kicking sort or not, that kind of thing, and of course, his hands being strong and steady, he was capable of keeping a good comforting hold on the leg while he pried off the old shoe and did the cleaning of the hoof. A creature’ll go wild if you get to the quick, you know, so you have to be gentle and firm at the same time, in a way the animal understands…. And he was
grand
at the fitting of a new shoe. I never once knew him to fault on the shape, or to tap a nail into the flesh. Proper shoeing, it’s an art.”