‘And so Paddy gets the house, he gets the father, he wins. Is that it?’
He was sick of this Paddy-on-the-hill, king-of-the-mountain business. ‘Let’s say Paddy saw your mother with a man on a bench. And more than a half century later, he meets the older William who bought and moved into Broughadoon. There’s no way Paddy could have recognized the much older William as the young man on the bench all those years ago. Would you say that’s true?’
‘But there’s th’ business of th’ scar an’ th’ nose.’
‘Has anyone confirmed William’s presence in Lough Arrow nine months before you were born? Your mother? William?’
‘I don’t ask that. Maybe I don’t want to know.’
‘Does your mother know Paddy talked with you about it?’
‘No, he says. He remembers she scolded him as a lad, slapped ’is face an’ boxed ’is ears an’ said he’d seen an’ heard nothin’ a’tall. ’t was his imagination bein’ fervid, she said.’
‘Fervid? He remembers such a word as that from the age of six?’
‘’t is th’ word we always used for Paddy’s imagination.’
‘You said you worry about everything. Perhaps you’ve got this out of proportion. An arm about your mother is merely suspicious; you have no proof of anything more.’
‘I know my mother. I never saw any proof of her love for my father. She was a bloody shrew, and yet he loved her. I used to feel embarrassed for him that he loved a woman so hard in her ways. He was gentle with her, he made excuses…’
‘Have you talked to Anna about this?’
‘There’s pressin’ enough on Anna without pilin’ this rubbish on. She was educated in a convent an’ has a proper way about religion-she would think hard of her Da, and God knows what it would do to us. ’t would be an upset of th’ worst sort.’
‘Perhaps you need to risk that upset, trust her to be brave enough to…’
‘She has upset in plenty; she’s ever havin’ to be brave, lookin’ after William-it’s herself that irons his shirts an’ makes ’is bed an’ cuts his hair-then there’s mixin’ it up with Bella an’ runnin’ this place an’ puttin’ up with me, for God’s sake. As for th’ Barret, she was always after insuring it for its full worth-I fought her on it, so there’s that, as well.’
It was a foolish question, but so be it. ‘Can you talk to your mother?’
Liam laughed. ‘You spent an afternoon in her company. You know there’s no talkin’ to my mother. I’ve had no peace, none a’tall; th’ heaviness of it comes between Anna an’ me sharp as any blade. I don’t know how to run from th’ truth like some people do-it’s always there, festerin’.’
‘What are your feelings toward William?’
‘I can’t see how to love him like a father, it can’t be done. I can never keep th’ anger down when I think of how he betrayed a good man with a bad woman. There’s th’ rare time when I do feel love for William-like a son, you might say, but then ’t is a blight on my love for Riley Conor, an’ I feel guilty as a thief an’ angry again at William’s fornicatin’ soul. What right did he have to my mother, I say, an’ all over again, there’s my fury risin’ up against my mother for her heedless ways. ’t is a dog chasin’ its tail, a cruel heap of rubble, all of it.
‘Maybe I was feelin’ some better, then came th’ cupboard business, as William calls it, an’ Garda swarmin’ th’ place, an’ all th’ rest…’
Liam slammed his fist onto the stone. ‘God above, what’s to be done?’
‘Let’s start where you started. I believe the beginning needed here is forgiveness.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Peace is what it will take to release you from the bondage of this thing. Forgiveness is a direct link to peace.’
‘I don’t get your meaning.’
‘I mean you need to do some forgiving, Liam.’
‘For the bloody horror of th’ whole mucking business, I need to do some forgiving?’
‘Starting with your mother.’
‘For God’s sake, you can’t mean that-’t is a bloody Protestant joke.’
‘I do mean it. One must begin somewhere, sometime, to let go of the bitterness, or be eaten alive and the marrow sucked out.’
Liam looked away, angry, and stood down from the stone. ‘I can’t do this. Sorry for your time. Terribly sorry.’
Liam hurried along the shoreline, away from the path to Broughadoon.
He felt in his chest Liam’s crushing heaviness mingled with his own. Through carelessness or blunder, he had estranged a man who needed God’s wisdom, which was precisely what he’d offered. He believed what he had said; he hadn’t tried to wrap it in frill or poesy.
What George Steiner had called ‘the terrible sweetness of Christ’ was needed here. Grace upon grace was needed here. Three men were vying for the fathering of a single boy, and two of them more than enough.
He closed his eyes, breathed in the lambent air of the lough, tried to collect thoughts scattered like leaves before a gale. The grace to forgive Matthew Kavanagh had literally saved his life, his feeling life. What he hadn’t known was that it would have to be done again and again over the years. A nuisance, really, like the continuous labor required to keep a garden from running wild, or a bed made, or a machine oiled. Most often, the forgiving of his father had demanded an act of sheer will, there was nothing sappy or sentimental about forgiving a bitter wound, one had to go at it head down. Late in his forties, he had come awake to a key word in the petition, ‘forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.’
As was the word on which the petition turned. As we forgive, we are in that same instant forgiven. It was a sacred two-for-one, a hallowed tit for tat.
He wanted that for Liam.
But perhaps the whole thing was beyond his feeble energies as friend or cleric. Perhaps he should take his hands off it altogether, let it go. He prayed to be able to sacrifice the dark weight on his spirit, begged for Liam’s deliverance from a darkness far greater than his own had been. He had, at least, known-
‘Speak your piece, then, Reverend. I’ve spoken mine.’
Liam looked at him, then climbed again onto the gob of stone. Blood smeared the knuckles of Liam’s right hand.
He felt a shaming impulse to weep, and, through some license barely understood, gave way to it.
Twenty-one
‹Dear Fr T:
‹Thanx for yr email of five words total. Cynthia’s ankle on all prayer chains. Harold and I attended service at Lord’s Chapel last Sunday. They baptized the niece of Dooley’s old teacher, Miss Pearson, who visited twice after my gall bladder op. Be glad you are not at LC anymore. For one thing they are using TRUMPETS. Three of the things blaring at once! What in the world they’ll fall back on at Easter is beyond me. Somebody said if the Search Committee had used you as a roll model they would not be in this mess. Glad to be a Baptist again, ha ha. Large Waterford vase.
‹Love to all, Emma›
‹Hey Dad
‹Hey Cynthia
‹A foal out of Brown Betty last night. No problems. Miss you guys.
‹Hal says he’ll be proud to see my name on the business. Wish I could jump over the four years of vet school. Hey, Cynthia hope your ankle is ok. Lace sends love. She spent a week at Meadowgate. Barnabas doing great don’t worry about anything. Hal and Marge and Rebecca send love. Sammy and Kenny and Jessie and Pooh send the same and so does Harley. Mush, mush and more mush.
‹Love,
‹Dools›
The emails were on the bed when they returned from their wanderings. He grabbed Dooley’s and read it avidly; he was starving for it. Don’t worry about anything. He liked that.