“Ah, no more so than I myself.” He shook his head sadly. “I’ve been three years in Africa, and you can’t know how glad I’ll be to get back to my own land. Not that I’m not glad for the opportunity to do the Lord’s work, but I’d be just as happy if the Lord could find some work for me to do in County Clare.” His eyes twinkled. “And I hope you’ll forgive me that little touch of blasphemy. But three years in Tanzania leaves a man lonesome for his own native soil.”
“What did you do there, exactly?”
“We had a small mission in a town not far from Dar es Salaam. That’s the capital of the country, you know. There were two countries at first, Tanganyika and Zanzibar, but the two merged. Both were British colonies originally and it’s not very hard for an Irishman to sympathize with other peoples who have spent some time beneath the British flag. We ran a small Jesuit mission in the town and brought the faith to those of the natives who were anxious to receive it. And brought medicines and a bit of education to the others. Oh, it was an exciting experience, to be sure.”
The engines warmed up, and the plane taxied down a long runway, then took off into the wind. She sat in her seat and listened intently as the soft-spoken priest told of his experiences in the small African village. She hadn’t realized until then how starved she was for conversation. It was a delight to listen to his gentle Irish speech, and she found herself hanging on every word.
He told her of the primitive superstitions of the natives and of the crude and often squalid lives they led. He talked of assisting a woman in childbirth and the sense of pride he had felt later on officiating at the infant’s christening. “It was a grand feeling,” he said, “for the Reverend Michael Farrell, S.J.”
“I can imagine it was.”
“A moving experience.” He smiled. “You’re not a Catholic, are you, Ellen?”
“No, I’m not. How did you know?”
“You haven’t called me Father. You may, you know, whether you’re of the Catholic faith or not. It’s what we’re used to being called, you see. My villagers used to call me Father Mike almost religiously, and then they’d go to their tents and pray to their pagan gods quite as if I hadn’t been there at all. But it’s a pity you’re not Catholic, because there’s a Jesuit joke I’d very much like to try out on you, and lacking the background you might not be able to appreciate it.”
“I’d be happy to hear it.”
“Well, then, let me try. There were three good workers in the vineyard of the Lord, do you see, and one was a Dominican friar and another a Christian Brother and the third a Jesuit priest, and the three became caught up in a most unholy argument as to who was most important in the carrying out of the Lord’s work. And each grew quite vehement over the whole affair, arguing that his particular order was highest in the Lord’s eyes.
“Until suddenly, as the three stood arguing amongst themselves, the sky was split by a bolt of lightning and an earthshaking peal of thunder. And the three went all quiet, and a huge finger appeared and began writing upon the face of the sky. ‘You must stop this foolish bickering,’ the finger wrote. ‘You are all equal in my sight. Whether Jesuits or Christian Brothers or Dominicans, you are all doing my work. Continue with the work of the Lord and cease wasting precious time in godless disputation.’ And do you know how the holy message was signed?”
“How?”
“Why, it was signed, ‘God, S.J.’”
She began to laugh, and Father Farrell smiled at her. “Now tell me,” he said. “Is that joke funny to a non-Catholic? I know it’s a story priests like to laugh at and that some Catholics would appreciate, but does it strike you funny?”
“Oh, yes,” she assured him.
He told her another joke, this time in a richly comic Irish brogue, about an old woman smuggling whiskey home from a pilgrimage on the pretext that it was holy water. When the customs inspector tasted it and announced its actual character, the woman feigned astonishment.
“Saints be praised,” came the punch line, “’tis a miracle!”
And, after she had relaxed in genuine laughter, he shook his head sadly and apologized for monopolizing the conversation. “Here I am talking away a mile a minute and not giving you a chance to say a word,” he said. “When what I really ought to do is ask you where you’ll be going in Ireland and what you plan to do here. Is it just a brief stop for you, or will you have time to see something of the country?”
“Oh, I’ll be here for two or three weeks.”
“Ah, how wonderful! Just in Dublin, or will you travel around?”
“I hope to travel a great deal.”
He drew her out with more questions, and she found herself telling him everything about her trip, from the first letter from the State Department to the purse-snatching episode of the night before. He was an excellent listener, evidently genuinely interested in everything she had to say, and she discovered that she had missed the opportunity for real conversation. She told him that she planned to spend several days in Dublin and had made a reservation at a hotel in Amiens Street. After that, she planned to head south and west with no firm itinerary in mind. She wanted to make sure to get to the Festival of Kerry in Tralee and to move on to the tiny town of Dingle for the conclusion of the festival, but beyond that she had no hard-and-fast plans.
“I’ll probably be traveling by bus,” she said. “I’ll just go from one town to the next and see what develops. What singers and songs I can unearth. I want to fill as many tapes as I possibly can.”
“It’s a fine country for it.”
“So I understand.”
“The ballad is a rich Irish tradition. To this day we have traveling balladeers, you know, men who go to the horse shows and the hurling matches and travel the whole course of the country making up songs about current events. They don’t fulfill the function they once did, back in the days when ballads were the newspapers and radios of the common man, but they still exist.”
“I know. And are there still Gypsies? I’ve read about them...”
“Gypsies? Oh, you mean the Irish Gypsies? The traveling people?”
“Yes.”
“You still find them in the south and west, though not as many as there were in the past. They’re not true Romany Gypsies, you know. They’re Irish families who took to the roads when Cromwell’s men evicted them from the land in the seventeenth century. You’ll see them, with their pretty cylindrical wagons and their horses. Tinkers, we call them. Good at mending pots and pans, and good at emptying a jar of poteen. If you can meet them, you’ll learn songs that have never found their way into songbooks.”
“And do you think I could meet them?”
“It’s a friendly country. You can meet anyone you’ve a mind to meet, Ellen.”
They were still talking when the plane completed its passage over the Irish Sea and broke through the clouds for the descent to Dublin Airport. She looked out the window at the country spread out below and almost gasped at the vivid green of it. The ground was cut up by little fences into brilliant patches of green that were almost unreal in the intensity of their coloration.
“Now I understand,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I knew it was green. I knew that was why they called it the Emerald Isle. All of that. But I never realized it looked like this.”
He was craning his neck for a peek at his homeland. “Ireland,” he said softly. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
The plane landed smoothly and taxied to a stop. The stewardess made another speech, this time welcoming them to Ireland, and repeated herself in Gaelic. Father Farrell helped Ellen get her tape recorder from the overhead luggage rack, then followed her off the plane. The sun shone brightly from between the clouds overhead, and at the same time a gentle rain, scarcely more than a mist, was falling.