Men of Ireland

The man came jauntily, the first of the foot passengers. Involuntarily he sniffed the air. My God! he said, not saying it aloud. My God, you can smell it all right. He hadn't been in Ireland for twenty-three years.

He went more cautiously when he reached the edge of the dock, being the first, not knowing where to go. "On there," an official looking after things said, gesturing over his shoulder with a raised thumb.

"OK," the man said. "OK."



He went in this direction. The dock was different, not as he remembered it, and he wondered where the train came in. Not that he intended to take it, but it would give him his bearings. He could have asked the passengers who had come off the boat behind him but he was shy about that. He went more slowly and they began to pass him, some of them going in the same direction. Then he saw the train coming in. Dusty, it looked; beaten-up a bit, but as much of it as he could see was free from graffiti.

He was a shabbily dressed man, almost everything he wore having been abandoned by someone else. He had acquired the garments over a period, knowing he intended to make this journey—the trousers of what had been a suit, brown pin-striped, worn shiny in the seat and at the knees, a jacket that had been navy-blue and was nondescript now, the khaki shirt he wore an item once of military attire. His shoes were good, in one of his pockets was an Old Carthusian tie, although he had not himself attended Charterhouse. His name was Donal Prunty, once big, heavily made, he seemed much less so now, the features of a face that had been florid at that time pinched within the sag of flesh. His dark hair was roughly cut. He was fifty-two years old.

The cars were coming off the boat now, beginning to wind their way around the new concrete buildings before passing through one of them—or so it seemed from where he stood. The road they were making for was what he wanted and he walked in that direction. Going over, the livestock lorry he'd been given a lift in had brought him nearly to the boat itself. Twenty-three years, he thought again, you'd never believe it.

He'd been on the road for seven days, across the breadth of England, through Wales. The clothes had held up well; he'd kept himself shaven as best he could, the blades saved up from what they allowed you in the hostels. You could use a blade thirty or so times if you wanted to, until it got jagged. You'd have to watch whatever you'd acquired for the feet, most of all you had to keep an eye on that department. His shoes were the pair he'd taken off the drunk who'd been lying on the street behind the Cavendish Hotel. Everything else you could take was gone from him—wallet, watch, studs and cufflinks, any loose change, a fountain pen if there'd been one, car keys in case the car would be around with things left in it. The tie had been taken off but thrown back and he had acquired it after he'd unlaced the shoes.

When he reached the road to Wexford the cars were on it already. Every minute or so another one would go past and the lorries were there, in more of a hurry. But neither car nor lorry stopped for him and he walked for a mile and then the greater part of another. Fewer passed him then, more travelling in the other direction to catch the same boat going back to Fishguard. He caught up with a van parked in a lay-by, the driver eating crisps, a can of Pepsi Cola on the dashboard in front of him, the window beside him wound down.

"Would you have a lift?" he asked him.

"Where're you heading?"

"Mullinavat."

"I'm taking a rest."

"I'm not in a hurry. God knows, I'm not."

"I'd leave you to New Ross. Wait there till I'll have finished the grub."

"D'you know beyond Mullinavat, over the Galloping Pass? A village by the name of Gleban?"

"I never heard of that."

"There's a big white church out the road, nothing only petrol and a half-and-half in Gleban. A priests' seminary a half mile the other way."

"I don't know that place at all."

"I used be there one time. I don't know would it be bigger now."

"It would surely. Isn't everywhere these times? Get in and we'll make it to Ross."

Prunty considered if he'd ask the van driver for money. He could leave it until they were getting near Ross in case the van would be pulled up as soon as money was mentioned and he'd be told to get out. Or maybe it'd be better if he'd leave it until the van was drawn up at the turn to Mullinavat, where there'd be the parting of the ways. He remembered Ross, he remembered where the Mullinavat road was. What harm could it do, when he was as far as he could be taken, that he'd ask for the price of a slice of bread, the way any traveller would?

Prunty thought about that while the van driver told him his mother was in care in Tagoat. He went to Tagoat on a Sunday, he said, and Prunty knew what the day was then, not that it made a difference. In a city you'd always know that one day of the week when it came round, but travelling you wouldn't be bothered cluttering yourself with that type of thing.

"She's with a woman who's on the level with her," the van driver said. "Not a home, nothing like that. I wouldn't touch a home."

Prunty agreed that he was right. She'd been where she was a twelve-month, the van driver said, undisturbed in a room, every meal cooked while she'd wait for it. He wagged his head in wonder at these conditions. "The Queen of Sheba," he said.

Prunty's own mother was dead. She'd died eighteen months before he'd gone into exile, a day he hated remembering. Word came in at Cahill's, nineteen seventy-nine, a wet winter day, February he thought it was.

"You've only the one mother," he said. "I'm over for the same." Prunty made the connection in the hope that such shared ground would assist in the matter of touching the van driver for a few coins.

"In England, are you?" the van driver enquired.

"Oh, I am. A long time there."

"I was never there yet."

"I'm after coming off the ferry."

"You're travelling light."

"I have other stuff at Gleban."

"Is your mother in a home there?"

"I wouldn't touch one, like yourself. She's eighty-three years of age, and still abiding in the same house eight children was born in. Not a speck of dust in it, not an egg fried you wouldn't offer up thanks for, two kinds of soda bread made every day."

The van driver said he got the picture. They passed the turn to Adamstown, the evening still fine, which Prunty was glad about. He had two children, the van driver said, who'd be able to tell him if Kilkenny won. Going down to Tagoat on a Sunday was the way of it when old age would be in charge, he said; you made the sacrifice. He crossed himself when they passed a church, and Prunty said to himself he'd nearly forgotten that.

"You'd go through Wexford itself in the old days," he said.

"You would all right."

"The country's doing well."

"The Europeans give us the roads. Ah, but sure she's doing well all the same."

"Were you always in Ross?'

"Oh, I was."

" I cleared off when I had to. A while back."

"A lot went then."

The van drew in when the conversation had been exhausted and there'd been silence for a few miles. They were in a quiet street, deserted on a Sunday evening. "Well, there you go."

"You couldn't see your way to a few bob?"

The van driver leaned across him to release the catch of the door. He pushed the door open.

"Maybe a fifty if you'd have it handy," Prunty suggested, and the van driver said he never carried money with him in the van and Prunty knew it wasn't true. Reluctant to get out, he said "Any loose change at all."

"I have to be getting on now. Take that left by the lamppost with the bin on it. D'you see it? Take it and keep going."

Prunty got out. He stood back while the door was banged shut from the inside. They said it because the mention of money made them think of being robbed. Even a young fellow like that, strong as a horse. Hold on to what you'd have: they were all like that.

He watched the van driving away, the orange direction light flicking on and off, the turn made to the right. He set off in the direction he'd been given and no car passed him until he left the town behind. None stopped for him then, the evening sun dazzling him on the open road. That was the first time he had begged in Ireland, he said to himself, and the thought stayed with him for a few miles, until he lay down at the edge of a field. The night would be fine except for the bit of dew that might come later on. It wasn't difficult to tell.

The old man was asleep, head slumped into his chest, its white hair mussed, one arm hanging loose. The doorbell hadn't roused him, and Miss Brehany's decision was that she had no option but to wake him since she had knocked twice and still he hadn't heard. "Father Meade," she called softly, while the man who had come waited in the hall. She should have sent him away; she should have said come some time Father Meade would know to expect him; after his lunch when the day was warm he usually dropped off. "Miss Brehany," he said, sitting up.

She described the man who had come to the door. She said she had asked for a name but that her enquiry had been passed by as if it hadn't been heard. When she'd asked again she hadn't understood the response. She watched the priest pushing himself to his feet, the palms of his hands pressed hard on the surface of his desk.

"He's wearing a collar and tie," she said.

"Would that be Johnny Healy?"

"It isn't, Father. It's a younger man than Johnny Healy."

"Bring him in, Rose, bring him in. And bring me in a glass of water, would you?"

"I would of course."

Father Meade didn't recognise the man who was brought to him, although he had known him once. He wasn't of the parish, he said to himself, unless he'd come into it in recent years. But his housekeeper was right about the collar and tie, an addition to a man's attire that in Father Meade's long experience of such matters placed a man. The rest of his clothing, Rose Brehany might have added, wasn't up to much.

"Would you remember me, Father? Would you remember Donal Prunty?"

Miss Brehany came in with the water and heard that asked and observed Father Meade's slow nod, after a pause. She was thanked for the glass of water.

"Are you Donal Prunty?" Father Meade asked.

"I served at the Mass for you, Father."

"You did, Donal, you did."

"It wasn't yourself who buried my mother."

"Father Loughlin if it wasn't myself. You went away, Donal."

"I did, all right. I was never back till now."

He was begging. Father Meade knew, you always could; it was one of the senses that developed in a priest. Not that a lot came begging in a scattered parish, not like you'd get in the towns.

"Will we take a stroll in the garden, Donal?"

"Whatever would be right for you, Father. Whatever."

Father Meade unlatched the French windows and went ahead of his visitor. "I'm fond of the garden," he said, not turning his head.

"I'm on the streets, Father."

"In Dublin, is it?"

"I went over to England, Father."

"I think I maybe heard."

"What work was there here, all the same?"

"Oh, I know, I know. Nineteen… what would it have been?"

"Nineteen eighty-one I went across."

"You had no luck there?"

"I never had luck, Father."

The old man walked slowly, the arthritis he was afflicted with in the small bones of both his feet a nuisance today. The house in which he had lived since he'd left the presbytery was modest, but the garden was large, looked after by a man the parish paid for. House and garden were parish property, kept for purposes such as this, where old priests—more than one at the same time if that happened to be how things were—would have a home. Father Meade was fortunate in having it to himself, Miss Brehany coming every day.

"Isn't it grand, that creeper?" He gestured across a strip of recently cut grass at a Virginia creeper turning red on a high stone wall with broken glass in the cement at the top. Prunty had got into trouble. The recollection was vague at first, before more of it came back: stealing from farms at harvest time or the potato planting, when everyone would be in the fields. Always the same, except the time he was caught with the cancer box. As soon as his mother was buried he went off, and was in trouble again before he left the district a year or so later.

"The Michaelmas daisy is a flower that's a favourite of mine." Father Meade gestured again. "The way it cheers up the autumn."

"I know what you mean, all right, Father."

They walked in silence for a while. Then Father Meade asked, "Are you back home to stop, Donal?"

"I don't know am I. Is there much doing in Gleban?"

"Ah, there is, there is. Look at it now, compared with when you took off. Sure, it's a metropolis nearly."

Father Meade laughed, then more seriously added: "We've the John Deere agency, and the estate on the Mullinavat road and another beyond the church. We have the SuperValu and the Hardware Co-op and the bank sub-office two days in the week. We have Dolan's garage and Linehan's drapery and general goods, and changes made in Steacy's. You'd go to Mullinavat for a doctor in the old days, even if you'd get one there. We have a young fellow coming out to us on a Tuesday for the last year and longer."

A couple of steps, contending with the slope of the garden, broke the path they were on. The chair Father Meade had earlier rested on, catching the morning sun, was still there, on a lawn more spacious than the strip of grass by the wall with the Virginia creeper.

"Still and all, it's a good thing to come back to a place when you were born in it. I remember your mother."

"I'm wondering could you spare me something, Father."

Father Meade turned and began the walk back to the house. He nodded an indication that he had heard and noted the request, the impression given to Prunty that he was considering it. But in the room where he had fallen asleep he said there was employment to be had in Gleban and its neighbourhood.

"When you'll go down past Steacy's Bar go in to Kingston's yard and tell Mr Kingston I sent you. If Mr Kingston hasn't something himself he'll put you right for somewhere else."

"What's Kingston's yard?"

"It's where they bottle the water from the springs up at the Pass."

"It wasn't work I came for, Father."

Prunty sat down. He took out a packet of cigarettes, and then stood up again to offer it to the priest. Father Meade was standing by the French windows. He came further into the room and stood behind his desk, not wanting to sit down himself because it might be taken as an encouragement by his visitor to prolong his stay. He waved the cigarettes away.

"I wouldn't want to say it," Prunty said.

He was experiencing difficulty with his cigarette, failing to light it although he struck two matches, and Father Meade wondered if there was something the matter with his hands the way he couldn't keep them steady. But Prunty said the matches were damp. You spent a night sleeping out and you got damp all over even though it didn't rain on you.

"What is it you don't want to say, Mr Prunty?"

Prunty laughed. His teeth were discoloured, almost black.

"Why're you calling me Mr Prunty, Father?"

The priest managed a laugh too. Put it down to age, he said: he sometimes forgot a name and then it would come back.

"Donal it is," Prunty said.

"Of course it is. What's it you want to say, Donal?"

A match flared, and at once there was a smell of tobacco smoke in a room where no one smoked any more.

"Things happened the time I was a server, Father."

"It was a little later on you went astray, Donal."

"Have you a drink, Father? Would you offer me a drink?"

"We'll get Rose to bring us in a cup of tea."

Prunty shook his head, a slight motion, hardly a movement at all.

"I don't keep strong drink," Father Meade said. "I don't take it myself."

"You used give me a drink."

"Ah no, no. What's it you want, Donal?"

"I'd estimate it was money, Father. If there's a man left anywhere would see me right it's the Father. I used say that. We'd be down under the arches and you could hear the rain falling on the river. We'd have the brazier going until they'd come and quench it. All Ireland'd be there, Toomey'd say. Men from all over and Nellie Bonzer too, and Colleen from Tuam. The methylated doing the rounds and your fingers would be shivering and you opening up the butts, and you'd hear the old stories then. Many's the time I'd tell them how you'd hold your hand up when you were above in the pulpit. 'Don't go till I'll give it to you in Irish,' you'd say, and you'd begin again and the women would sit there obedient, not understanding a word but it wouldn't matter because they'd have heard it already in the foreign tongue. Wasn't there many a priest called it the foreign tongue, Father?"

"I'm sorry you've fallen on hard times, Donal."

"Eulala came over with a priest's infant inside her."

"Donal—"

"Eulala has a leg taken off of her. She has the crutches the entire time, seventy-one years of age. It was long ago she left Ireland behind her."

"Donal—"

"Don't mind me saying that about a priest."

"It's a bad thing to say, Donal."

"You used give me a drink. D'you remember that though? We'd sit down in the vestry when they'd all be gone. You'd look out the door to see was it all right and you'd close it and come over to me. 'Isn't it your birthday?' you'd say and it wouldn't be at all. 'Will we open the old bottle?' you'd say. The time it was holy wine, you sat down beside me and said it wasn't holy yet. 'No harm,' you said."

Father Meade shook his head. He blinked, and frowned, and for a moment Miss Brehany seemed to be saying there was a man at the front door, her voice coming to him while he was still asleep. But he wasn't asleep, although he wanted to be.

"Many's the time there'd be talk about the priests," Prunty said. "'The hidden Ireland' is Toomey's word for the way it was in the old days. All that, Father. 'Close your eyes,' you used say in the vestry. 'Close your eyes, boy. Make your confession to me after.'"

There was a silence in the room. Then Father Meade asked why he was being told lies, since he of all people would know they were lies.

"I think you should go away now," he said.

"When I told my mother she said she'd have a whip taken to me."

"You told your mother nothing. There was nothing to tell anyone."

"Breda Flynn's who Eulala was, only a Romanian man called her that and she took it on. Limerick she came from. She was going with the Romanian. Toomey's a Carlow man."

"What you're implying is sickening and terrible and disgraceful. I'm telling you to go now."

Father Meade knew he said that, but hardly heard it because he was wondering if he was being confused with another priest: a brain addled by recourse to methylated spirits would naturally be blurred by now. But the priests of the parish, going back for longer than the span of Prunty's lifetime, had been well known to Father Meade. Not one of them could he consider, even for a moment, in the role Prunty was hinting at. Not a word of what was coming out of this demented imagination had ever been heard in the parish, no finger ever pointed in the direction of any priest. He'd have known, he'd have been told: of that Father Meade was certain, as sure of it as he was of his faith.

"I have no money for you, Prunty."

"Long ago I'd see the young priests from the seminary. Maybe there'd be three of them walking together, out on the road to the Pass. They'd always be talking and I'd think to myself maybe I'd enter the seminary myself. But then again you'd be cooped up. Would I come back tomorrow morning after you'd have a chance to get hold of a few shillings?"

"I have no money for you," Father Meade said again.

"There's talk no man would want to put about. You'd forget things, Father. Long ago things would happen and you'd forget them. Sure, no one's blaming you for that. Only one night I said to myself I'll go back to Gleban."

"Do you know you're telling lies, Prunty? Are you aware of it? Evil's never forgotten, Prunty: of all people, a priest knows that. Little things fall away from an old man's mind but what you're trying to put into it would never have left it."

"No harm's meant, Father."

"Tell your tale in Steacy's bar, Prunty, and maybe you'll be believed."

Father Meade stood up and took what coins there were from his trouser pockets and made a handful of them on the desk.

"Make your confession, Prunty. Do that at least."

Prunty stared at the money, counting it with his eyes. Then he scooped it up. "If we had a few notes to go with it," he said, "we'd have the sum done right."

He spoke slowly, as if unhurried enunciation was easier for the elderly. It was all the talk, he said, the big money there'd be. No way you could miss the talk, no way it wouldn't affect you.

He knew he'd get more. Whatever was in the house he'd go away with, and he watched while a drawer was unlocked and opened, while money was taken from a cardboard box. None was left behind.

"Thanks, Father," he said before he went.

Father Meade opened the French windows in the hope that the cigarette smoke would blow away. He'd been a smoker himself, a thirty-a-day man, but that was long ago.

"I'm off now, Father," Miss Brehany said, coming in to say it, before she went home. She had cut cold meat for him, she said. She'd put the tea things out for him, beside the kettle.

"Thanks, Rose. Thanks."

She said goodbye and he put the chain on the hall door. In the garden he pulled the chair he'd been sitting on earlier into the last of the sun, and felt it warm on his face. He didn't blame himself for being angry, for becoming upset because he'd been repelled by what was said to him. He didn't blame Donal Prunty because you couldn't blame a hopeless case. In a long life a priest had many visits, heard voices that ages ago he'd forgotten, failed to recognise faces that had been as familiar as his own. "See can you reach him, Father," Donal Prunty's mother had pleaded when her son was still a child, and he had tried to. But Prunty had lied to him then too, promising without meaning it that he'd reform himself. "Ah sure, I needed a bit of money," he said hardly a week later when he was caught with the cancer box broken open.

Was it because he clearly still needed it, Father Meade wondered, that he'd let him go away with every penny in the house? Was it because you couldn't but pity him? Or was there a desperation in the giving, as if it had been prompted by his own failure when he'd been asked, in greater desperation, to reach a boy who didn't know right from wrong?

While he rested in the sun, Father Meade was aware of a temptation to let his reflections settle for one of these conclusions. But he knew, even without further thought, that there was as little truth in them as there was in the crude pretences of his visitor: there'd been no generous intent in the giving of the money, no honourable guilt had inspired the gesture, no charitable motive. He had paid for silence.

Guiltless, he was guilty, his brave defiance as much of a subterfuge as any of his visitor's. He might have belittled the petty offence that had occurred, so slight it was when you put it beside the betrayal of a Church and the shaming of Ireland's priesthood. He might have managed to say something decent to a Gleban man who was down and out in case it would bring consolation to the man, in case it would calm his conscience if maybe one day his conscience would nag. Instead, he had been fearful, diminished by the sins that so deeply stained his cloth, distrustful of his people.

Father Meade remained in his garden until the shadows that had lengthened on his grass and his flowerbeds were no longer there. The air turned cold. But he sat a little longer before he went back to the house to seek redemption, and to pray for Donal Prunty.

Prunty walked through the town Gleban had become since he had lived in it. He didn't go to the church to make his confession, as he'd been advised. He didn't go into Steacy's bar, but passed both by, finding the way he had come in the early morning. He experienced no emotion, nor did it matter how the money had become his, only that it had. A single faint thought was that the town he left behind was again the place of his disgrace. He didn't care. He hadn't liked being in the town, he hadn't liked asking where the priest lived, nor going there. He hadn't liked walking in the garden or making his demand, or even knowing that he would receive what he had come for in spite of twice being told he wouldn't. He would drink a bit of the money away tonight and reach the ferry tomorrow. He wouldn't hurry after that. Whatever pace he went at, the streets where he belonged would still be there.