Tag: ireland

The Unquiet Land

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excerpt

“But aren’t you trying to change souls with your sermons? Aren’t you trying to make them more acceptable to your God?” Finn leaned forward on the table, his massive hands cupped around his glass of wine. “The soul cannot be so untouchable.”
“With the word of God one can indeed reach into the soul,” Padraig consented. “But no instrument devised by man has the same power.”
“Ah, we have a conflict here,” said Finn. “Sweeney, fill up my glass and top up your own. Any of you others care to join us, help yourselves to whatever you want. That stage is getting set again. See why I prefer to act than to watch?”
“You don’t act, Finn,” Sweeney observed; “you direct.”
He poured the wine for Finn. The last drops from the decanter he shook into his own glass. His sunset face was blazing crimson, with purple only in the shadows. He replaced the empty decanter in the centre of the table and turned up the wick of the low-burning lamp. Shadows flickered on the walls, on the dark sideboard and the cabinets, on the tall clock and the pale porcelain of the Victory.
“So, Padraig,” Finn went on, “you think the word is mightier than the surgeon’s knife.”
“The Word that was in the beginning, yes; the Word of God that was made flesh as Jesus Christ.”
“What do you say to that, young Clifford?” Finn asked. “Does the Word of God tell us more of man and nature, life and death, than your brain and blade will ever reveal?”
“You’re confusing two separate realms, Finn,” Clifford argued in a precise, dry voice. “The brain is a material thing. We probe into it, repair it, understand it, with the aid of material instruments. The soul is immaterial. We change it, if we change it at all, with immaterial instruments: with words, thoughts, ideas, emotions, that reach it through the mind.”
“Body and mind; matter and spirit; material, immaterial.” Finn repeated the words reflectively. “That sounds reasonable enough. Conflict resolved.” He sipped some wine, then looked at Clifford. “You say that the soul is reached through the mind. So you separate mind and soul?”
Clifford looked around the table self-consciously. Michael was asleep with his head fallen forward on his chest. Seamus and Sweeney stared at their wine and looked as though they wished they too were asleep. Only Padraig, facing Finn across the length of the dish-and-bottle-laden table, stayed alert, leaning back in his chair with his left hand dangling and his right hand holding a half-emptied glass of wine.

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In Turbulent Times

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Liam Dooley was thirty-eight, going on thirty-nine. His fair, wavy hair was receding alarmingly at the temples. He believed a baldness was spreading at the back of his head also, like a threadbare elbow in an old jacket, but he could not see for sure in the mirror and he would have been embarrassed to ask. There was no one he could have asked in any case without feeling foolish. His parents were dead; his sister, after her twenty-first birthday, had moved to Belfast to marry the father of her daughter; and Liam lived alone in two rooms, a kitchen and a living-bedroom that the Church had built onto the back of the new school as accommodation for the teacher, but which could be converted to additional classrooms when the growing number of pupils made the extension necessary. Liam’s baldness and his forties were both approaching rapidly. Both inexorable. He could always have lied about his age to strangers who did not know him but he could not pass himself off as twenty-eight or twenty-nine when his hairline was almost as far back as his ears and threatening to meet up with the circle of skin he felt was spreading at his crown. He had to face facts. Liam Dooley’s youth was irretrievably lost. Lost, not squandered. Liam was no profligate. He was no philanderer. His intimacy with women extended only to walking one or two of them home from church. Once he went as far as holding Molly Noonan’s hand as they strolled home from a choir practice but he could not bring himself to embrace her, nor to give her a kiss as he left her at her door. He wanted to. He wanted to very much. But he was timorous and hesitant. Fearful of rejection, he held back. Molly did not ask him in for tea. Nor did she ever walk home with him again. Sean O’Sullivan, a tenor with large, yellowing teeth, escorted her home after that. Then Molly got pregnant, and she and Sean ran away to Belfast and were never seen again.
Liam often thought of Molly Noonan, of the pert looks she flicked his way, of the teasing scent from her red hair as he stood behind her in the choir, of the smiles she gave him when he entered Lizzie Martin’s shop where she worked. He remembered the late spring evening when they had last walked home together. They had paused where Killeenagh Burn trips down

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The Unquiet Land

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excerpt

night beyond the window. But tonight was different. Tonight the heavy, unmoving air grew stagnant; it weighed upon the room unstirred by old Finn’s gusty tales. Tonight the old sailor’s verbal gales had died to barely audible sighs.
Finn appeared to be unaware of the deepening depression that had settled over the homecoming party. His mind was on the day many years ago when he first saw Padraig: a skinny boy in short pants, writhing on the cobbles of a market square, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. Never would he forget the sight. The crowd pushed back, staring in ignorance and horror at the boy’s convulsions. Two mongrel pups snapped at his legs and arms, and a sheepdog snarled and barked, its vicious teeth bared as if ready to rush in and chomp them into the boy’s neck.
“The whelp with the trousers isn’t putting up much of a fight,” someone said, and the crowd started to laugh. Ignorance and horror relaxed into mirth.
“I wonder what he’d do with a bitch in heat,” said another.
Finn waded through the crowd as through a field of barley, pushing the people aside in anger. He burst into the clearing where the boy was lying still now, his face in the muck that covered the cobbles of The Square. Finn kicked the sheepdog hard; it ran off into the crowd with a howl of pain. The pups pranced around him, yelping still, as Finn knelt down, rolled the boy over and picked him up in his arms.
“I spit on you all,” he shouted to the crowd and carried the boy away down the sloping street to where his fishing boat was tied in the harbour.
Now the Devil’s child, his own adopted son, was home again, a priest.
“I hoped to make a man of you, Padraig.” Finn was rising out of his reverie. “And I made a monk. Well, I suppose that’s not a bad accomplishment, considering what I had to work with. Come now, gentlemen, let’s not look as if we’re at a Presbyterian wake. Let’s drink. Let’s eat.” He turned towards the door that led into the kitchen. “Caitie! Jinnie! Bring us some supper. We’re half a dozen hungry men in here.”
Supper revived the company. Even Clifford forgot his headache and his queasy stomach. He enjoyed the food, the conversation, the dark red wine that everyone started drinking again in large measures. The more they drank, the more convivial they became. Only Finn MacLir seemed more subdued than usual.
“We had many more people here to welcome you last night, Padraig.” Slattery’s purple face was taking on a crimson cast like a spectacular sunset.

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In Turbulent Times

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‘Not capable enough, Clifford. Caitlin needs a doctor. Mother Ross says so herself. She’s worried. Mrs Starkey says she’ll give you anything you need from the doctor’s surgery.’
‘No, it’s all right,’ said Clifford. ‘I have everything I’m likely to need here.’ He dithered. Then he drew a deep breath and said, ‘Very well, Michael, I’ll come right away. Let me get my stuff together and put my rain-gear on.’
He climbed back upstairs to his room.
Hurry, Clifford, hurry, hurry, Michael kept saying to himself. For God’s sake, hurry.
At last Clifford came down again, buttoning his raincoat. He carried a black bag in one hand. He shouted down the hall, ‘Timmins, we’re leaving. I’ll be back in an hour or two. Don’t lock the gates.’ Then he turned to Michael and said with a levity lost on the distraught father-to-be, ‘Now, let’s be off to the rescue of this fair damsel in distress.’
He followed Michael to the main road and climbed into the trap. The shafts tipped up, the harness jingled and creaked, the pony snorted and tossed its wet head. Michael jerked the reins a couple of times and shouted. He turned the pony and trap around, and off they went, slowly at first, until the pony found its stride.
God, what a miserable night to be born, Clifford thought. He was nervous. He had already delivered three babies, but they were easy, straightforward births, the first two under supervision. This one sounded difficult. A breech birth at least. Perhaps a Caesarean. He would rather have kept clear of this ordeal but found it impossible to refuse. He had a reputation in the village where many already regarded him as the best new doctor in Belfast. The village was proud of him. This birth would enhance his reputation or shatter it like a dropped mirror. Clifford was worried in case it might go badly. As the rain-beaten cart bounced and swayed towards the MacLir house, Clifford frantically recalled everything he ought to know about breech births and Caesarean sections. By the time he and Michael arrived in the yard behind the house Clifford was confident he could handle any complication. His reputation was assured. It was not the village that was looking on, he thought with typical self-importance, it was the world.
As he rushed across the farmyard to the back door, Clifford slipped on a wet, muddy cobblestone and almost fell. He only just reached the door in time to check his forward fall with his free outstretched hand. That frightened him. Tonight he could not afford to be clumsy.

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The Unquiet Land

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“He’s a kind, good-natured, generous big cratur,” she said. “He’s hard working and dependable and he’s straight as a die. He’d make a good husband. I’m sure of that.”
“And yet you hesitate,” said Padraig. “Is there someone else?”
“No one who’d have me,” Caitlin replied modestly. She smiled—ruefully, Padraig thought—and placed her free hand on his. “I’m glad you’ve come back to us, Padraig.”
“I doubt if everyone in the village will be saying that.” Foreboding flickered in the priest’s eyes. “Many, I am sure, are not too happy to have me, above all people, back among them as their priest.”
“Your task won’t be an easy one, Padraig, I’ll grant you that. But you have that streak of MacLir defiance in you that is our family’s greatest protection against malice.”
“And how is Finn MacLir these days?”
“As much of an old rogue as ever. He gets even worse with age, if that’s possible.”
“I am looking forward to seeing him again,” Padraig said, but with a tinge of apprehension in his voice. Slowly he released Caitlin’s hand. “And Mother Ross? How is she?”
“Hail and hearty. Same old Mother Ross.” Caitlin gazed intently at the pale face of the priest, at his long, thin body. Mother Ross always said that her greatest disappointment in life was failing to put an ounce of flesh on Padraig’s spindly rack of bones.
“And Nora?”
“Doting wife and mother. She and Flynn are very happy in their wee house. Little Dermot is the spitting image of his father. Curly reddish hair and all.”
“How old is Dermot now?”
“Two and a bit.”
Padraig paused, then pensively he said. “How time flies. And yet it seems like no time at all since I went away. Caitlin, I have been looking forward so much to seeing all of you again. Looking forward to coming home. Looking forward to being in the village again. I want to gaze at the hills and the sea, to walk the beach again at midnight. I have been so long away. I have missed you all so much. Missed you more than I can say. It is good to be home again, Caitlin. But it is not going to be easy.”
Padraig stood up. Then he leaned forward, kissed the woman on the forehead, and picking up the lamp, quietly left the room.

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In Turbulent Times

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Mrs Starkey was unaware of this. When Michael returned about an hour later, she thought it was her husband. She rushed to tell him not to take his coat off but to go up to the MacLir house, the name the large stone house still bore from the family of Caitlin Carrick, whose ancestors, the MacLirs, had built it in the nineteenth century.
‘Michael, it’s yourself back again,’ she said in surprise. ‘Is Dr Starkey at your place?’
‘No, Mrs Starkey, but we need him up there badly.’ Michael’s voice was trembling. A look of distraction agitated his face. ‘Something’s wrong, Mrs Starkey. Caitlin’s yelling and screaming, and Mother Ross says the baby isn’t coming out right. For God’s sake, where’s the doctor?’
‘I don’t know, Michael.’ Mrs Starkey was worried now herself. ‘He should have been here ages ago. Wait and I’ll phone again.’
All Michael could hear was Caitlin’s screaming. It pierced his ears like a torture. It made his heart pound and brought sweat to his forehead, mingling it with the rain. He moved his weight from one foot to the other. He clenched and unclenched his huge fists. ‘Please come, Dr Starkey. Oh my God, please, please come.’
Mrs Starkey appeared at the inner door again. ‘Something’s happened to the doctor, Michael.’ Her voice too quivered with worry. ‘He was visiting the Collinses in Carraghlin and he left an hour and a half ago. They haven’t heard from him. They suggested that I phone the police in Carraghlin, but even before they finished talking, the phone went dead.’
‘Must be a line down,’ Michael said.
‘Could be there’s trees down too,’ said Mrs Starkey. ‘The road’s probably blocked.’
Fear speared Michael’s heart. He felt the blood gush out. It filled his stomach, and he felt nauseated. ‘Mrs Starkey, I must get help for Caitlin,’ he shouted. ‘She’s in agony. This birth is going to kill her, like her own birth killed her mother.’
‘Calm yourself, Michael. Calm yourself. That’s no way to be talking. Caitlin’s in good hands with Mother Ross. Dr Starkey himself hasn’t delivered more babies than she has.’
‘But Mother Ross is frightened now herself,’ cried Michael. ‘She can’t handle this. She told me so. Where does Dr Chapman live?’
‘He’s in Ballydun usually,’ Mrs Starkey replied. ‘But he’s away in England till the New Year. Dr Murray in Lisnaglass is looking after his practice. It’ll take you an hour or more to reach him on a night like this. And I can’t telephone him.’

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The Unquiet Land

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Two doors opened off this part of the landing. One led to Caitlin’s room. The other had led to Nora’s room, but Nora was married now and had a home of her own in the village. Caitlin and Nora, night and day, his sisters in all but blood.
The priest turned sharply to the right and followed the landing alongside the stairwell to the front of the house. The old, brown wood of a large cupboard glowed in the lamplight. The door of the bedroom to the right of the cupboard stood half-open, and heavy, catarrhal breathing rasped in the dark interior.
Old Finn has feasted well and sleeps like a king, thought the tired priest. Better not disturb him.
The priest turned to the door of the bedroom to the left of the cupboard. His old room. The room in which he had lived as a boy, laboured over his books with the patient Caitlin, grew to be a man, a young, raw man, dedicated to God. Was the room the same as when he had left it? Yes, it would be. Nothing ever changed here. Tonight, or what was left of the night, he would sleep again in the old iron bed with the patchwork quilt. Nostalgic remembrance pierced the priest’s heart. The blood drained out into his belly and down into his loins. The hot blood chilled and made him shiver. The hair rose on the nape of his neck.
Seven years ago last September. Seven momentous years. Seven long strides from aspiring youth to zealous priest.
He turned the handle, and the door opened without a sound. He stepped inside, pushed the door shut behind him, and walked with silent tread across the polished wooden floor to the bed. He set the lamp down on the dresser.
“Caitlin,” he said in involuntary surprise.
She lay in a cloud of eiderdown. Gleaming even in the dark, her black hair trailed across the pillow, across the shoulder of her green-flowered nightgown. Her arm lay outside the shiny green covers. The priest leaned forward and touched the cool back of her hand. The body turned. The black cirrus stirred on the pillow.
Caitlin, the priest thought. My God, what a beautiful woman you are.
He had come unwittingly to the wrong room. Caitlin had given up her own old room and moved in here for some reason. Yet little beyond the bedclothes had changed from the way he remembered it. Caitlin had changed, though. She looked more mature and even more beautiful. Having seen her, he felt he had to talk to her.
“Caitlin,” he whispered.

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