‘About what though?’
‘About her giving me the holy kiss.’
The explanation could be that the boy was touched. There was another boy in that family who wasn’t the full shilling either.
‘Wouldn’t you try getting advice from your own clergyman? Isn’t Mr Cutcheon your brother-in-law?’
‘He told me to pretend it hadn’t happened.’
The priest didn’t say anything. He listened while he was told how the presence of the saint was something clinging to you, how neither her features nor the clothes she’d worn had faded in any way whatsoever. When the boy closed his eyes he could apparently see her more clearly than he could see any member of his family, or anyone he could think of.
‘I only wanted to know who she was. Is that place in France?’
‘Viterbo is in Italy actually.’
One of the sheepdogs had crept on to the priest’s feet and settled down to sleep. The other was asleep already. Father Mulhall said:
‘Do you feel all right in yourself otherwise?’
‘She said not to be afraid. She was on about fear.’ Milton paused. ‘I can still feel her saying things.’
‘I would talk to your own clergyman, son. Have a word with your brother-in-law.’
‘She wasn’t alive, that woman.’
Father Mulhall did not respond to that. He led Milton to the hall-door of his house. He had been affronted by the visit, but he didn’t let it show. Why should a saint of his Church appear to a Protestant boy in a neighbourhood that was overwhelmingly Catholic, when there were so many Catholics to choose from? Was it not enough that that march should occur every twelfth of July, that farmers from miles away should bang their way through the village just to show what was what, strutting in their get-up? Was that not enough without claiming the saints as well? On the twelfth of July they closed the village down, they kept people inside. Their noisy presence was a reminder that beyond this small, immediate neighbourhood there was a strength from which they drew their own. This boy’s father would give you the time of day if he met you on the road, he’d even lean on a gate and talk to you, but once your back was turned he’d come out with his statements. The son who’d gone to Belfast would salute you and maybe afterwards laugh because he’d saluted a priest. It was widely repeated that Garfield Leeson belonged in the ganglands of the Protestant back streets, that his butcher’s skills came in handy when a job had to be done.
‘I thought she might be foreign,’ Milton said. ‘I don’t know how I’d know that.’
Two scarlet dots appeared in Father Mulhall’s scrawny cheeks. His anger was more difficult to disguise now; he didn’t trust himself to speak. In silence Milton was shown out of the house.
When he returned to his living-room Father Mulhall turned on the television and sat watching it with a glass of whiskey, his sheepdogs settling down to sleep again. ‘Now, that’s amazing!’ a chat-show host exclaimed, leading the applause for a performer who balanced a woman on the end of his finger. Father Mulhall wondered how it was done, his absorption greater than it would have been had he not been visited by the Protestant boy.
Mr Leeson finished rubbing his plate clean with a fragment of loaf bread, soaking into it what remained of bacon fat and small pieces of black pudding. Milton said:
‘She walked in off the lane.’
Not fully comprehending, Mr Leeson said the odd person came after the apples. Not often, but you knew what they were like. You couldn’t put an orchard under lock and key.
‘Don’t worry about it, son.’
Mrs Leeson shook her head. It wasn’t like that, she explained; that wasn’t what Milton was saying. The colour had gone from Mrs Leeson’s face. What Milton was saying was that a Papist saint had spoken to him in the orchards.
‘An apparition,’ she said.
Mr Leeson’s small eyes regarded his son evenly. Stewart put his side plate on top of the plate he’d eaten his fry from, with his knife and fork on top of that, the way he had been taught. He made his belching noise and to his surprise was not reprimanded.
‘I asked Father Mulhall who St Rosa was.’
Mrs Leeson’s hand flew to her mouth. For a moment she thought she’d scream. Mr Leeson said:
‘What are you on about, boy?’
‘I have to tell people.’
Stewart tried to speak, gurgling out a request to carry his two plates and his knife and fork to the sink. He’d been taught that also, and was always obedient. But tonight no one heeded him.
‘Are you saying you went to the priest?’ Mr Leeson asked.
‘You didn’t go into his house, Milton?’
Mrs Leeson watched, incredulous, while Milton nodded. He said
Herbert Cutcheon had told him to keep silent, but in the end he couldn’t. He explained that on the day of the march he had told his brother-in-law when they were both standing at the hedge, and later he had gone into Father Mulhall’s house. He’d sat down while the priest looked the saint up in a book.
‘Does anyone know you went into the priest’s house, Milton?’ Mrs Leeson leaned across the table, staring at him with widened eyes that didn’t blink. ‘Did anyone see you?’
‘I don’t know.’
Mr Leeson pointed to where Milton should stand, then rose from the table and struck him on the side of the face with his open palm. He did it again. Stewart whimpered, and became agitated.
‘Put them in the sink, Stewart,’ Mrs Leeson said.
The dishes clattered into the sink, and the tap was turned on as Stewart washed his hands. The side of Milton’s face was inflamed, a trickle of blood came from his nose.
Herbert Cutcheon’s assurance that what he’d heard in his father-in-law’s field would not be passed on to his wife was duly honoured. But when he was approached on the same subject a second time he realized that continued suppression was pointless. After a Sunday-afternoon visit to his in-laws’ farmhouse, when Mr Leeson had gone off to see to the milking and Addy and her mother were reaching down pots of last year’s plum jam for Addy to take back to the rectory, Milton had followed him to the yard. As he drove the four miles back to the rectory, the clergyman repeated to Addy the conversation that had taken place.
‘You mean he wants to preach?’ Frowning in astonishment, Addy half shook her head, her disbelief undisguised.
He nodded. Milton had mentioned Mr Leeson’s Uncle Willie. He’d said he wouldn’t have texts or scriptures, nothing like that.
‘It’s not Milton,’ Addy protested, this time shaking her head more firmly.
‘I know it’s not.’
He told her then about her brother’s revelations on the day of the July celebration. He explained he hadn’t done so before because he considered he had made her brother see sense, and these matters were better not referred to.
‘Heavens above!’ Addy cried, her lower jaw slackened in fresh amazement. The man she had married was not given to the kind of crack that involved lighthearted deception, or indeed any kind of crack at all. Herbert’s virtues lay in other directions, well beyond the realm of jest. Even so, Addy emphasized her bewilderment by stirring doubt into her disbelief. ‘You’re not serious surely?’
He nodded without taking his eyes from the road. Neither of them knew of the visit to the priest or of the scene in the kitchen that had ended in a moment of violence. Addy’s parents, in turn believing that Milton had been made to see sense by his father’s spirited response, and sharing Herbert Cutcheon’s view that such matters were best left unaired, had remained silent also.
‘Is Milton away in the head?’ Addy whispered.
‘He’s not himself certainly. No way he’s himself.’
‘He never showed an interest in preaching.’
‘D’you know what he said to me just now in the yard?’
But Addy was still thinking about the woman her brother claimed to have conversed with. Her imagination had stuck there, on the slope of her father’s upper orchard, a Catholic woman standing among the trees.