Notice
The Great St. Gregory has Said:
It Is Not Enough
To Have Learning. These Also
Are My Sheep.
They both looked at each other. Father O’Sullivan said:
‘I’ll open a window, if you don’t mind.’
‘Please do. The air is stifling.’
The frame screeched and bumped. When Father O’Sullivan returned to the table neither could find anything to say, until Father O’Connor, as though repeating an earlier question, said:
‘What are we to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ Father O’Sullivan said.
It was the first time he had ever admitted there was a question to answer. He tried clumsily to change the subject.
‘The fire is my fault,’ he apologised, smiling. ‘I should never have complained about rheumatism. Whenever he finds me working in here he immediately orders the fire to be lit. There were times throughout the summer, I can tell you, when I was almost stifled to death.’ He continued to smile, inviting Father O’Connor’s participation.
‘That is what I mean,’ Father O’Connor, unsmiling, said. ‘He is not . . . compos mentis.’
Father O’Sullivan gave up pretending to smile.
‘I think I should go to his room and see how he is now,’ he suggested.
Father O’Connor nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said.
The weather soon made the fires in the heavily furnished room welcome. The queues at the food kitchens became less talkative. The jokes, worn thin by repetition, fell out of currency. No one found new ones. It was work enough to keep alive.
She stuck her head around the door of the little room to see that all was in order; on the small table at the bedside two candles, as yet unlit, a basin with a clean towel, a delicate glass bowl lent by Mary and now containing Holy Water and a sprig of Blessed Palm which would act as a sprinkler, a white cloth also loaned by Mary, a crucifix. Was he sleeping? She called quietly:
‘Bernie.’
‘What is it?’
‘You won’t forget that Father O’Sullivan is coming?’
‘Huh.’
The room smelled of stale tobacco, but there was nothing she could do about that. Father O’Sullivan was not one to notice.
In the afternoon gloom of St. Brigid’s the candles on either side of the tabernacle wavered into life as the clerk tipped each with the taper. One—a pause and it lit. Two. Both now. He genuflected. He knelt on the bottom step, the felt hammer now in his hand, the brass gong within reach. Father O’Sullivan kissed the stole and lifted it over his head and about his shoulders all in one movement, inserted the key in the door of the tabernacle, removed a communion particle from the ciborium and genuflected. The clerk struck the gong once, a warning that Jesus Christ, Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, really present under the appearance of Bread, was exposed on the altar. Father O’Sullivan placed the wafer from the ciborium in a pyx and put the pyx in his inside pocket. He locked the tabernacle. His boots, which were new, creaked as he genuflected again and removed the stole. In the vestry the clerk handed him his street coat, black, faded by age, and his hat, a shapeless one. All this was in silence. There would be no unnecessary speech or gesture while Father O’Sullivan carried on his person the Living Presence.
The streets were sunlit and had a lazy air. Trams and commercial vehicles passed him, guarded by policemen who were bored or by soldiers who were embarrassed. It would take about fifteen minutes to reach Chandlers Court. In a fixed mood of recollection, his mind bent to the custody of eyes and ears, he passed the cab rank near the station, a public house, a series of garbage bins at the rear of an hotel. The smells were successively horsepiss, stale beer, decaying vegetable matter. The new boots squeaked at each step. They hurt him. The pain he could ignore. But the squeak, unseemly, incongruous, persistent, dragged his attention time and again away from his inward dialogue of veneration and love. In the end, being a simple man, he mentioned the matter apologetically. It became a joke. No longer embarrassed or distracted Father O’Sullivan for a while made fun of squeaking boots as he and Jesus Christ went together through the back lanes of the city. He never once mentioned the pain.
Patterns of October sunlight shimmered on the ceiling, holding his gaze for long stretches of unremembered time, trembling when a curtain stirred in a faint airy current or when a door somewhere down the afternoon house opened and slammed; delicate they were and voiceless, embodiments of drowsy things, of long past insubstantial summers. His mind in contemplation forgetting for long stretches his body without feet, forgetting pain forgetting the sentence of perpetual immobility, roamed among remote memories. In warm sunlight he stopped his horse and cart and jumped to the ground at a public house in a country lane where hedges brought the wild roses almost to the white-washed wall and insects were busy about them everywhere. He kept goal for Liffey Wanderers between white uprights in a sunny field and stretched and touched his toes to pass the time because for several minutes the play had stayed away down at the other end. He picked blackberries on a warm Sunday and when a butterfly settled on his boot, beautifully white against the polished black leather, he kept very still and let it remain there. He came out of the sea at Williamstown and walking to his clothes the deep footprints in the soft oozing sand behind were summer too, summer of childhood of youth of manhood. With a swift movement of his hand he knocked the wasp from Ellen’s neck and that was at the Scalp. It was the Liffey Wanderers’ outing when the coloured streamers flowed out in the breeze or sometimes drooped down and tangled themselves and broke in the wooden spoked wheels. How many drags were there? Nine. Who was present that he could now recall? Mick Reynolds, George Brierley, Jack O’Connor, Cap Callaghan, Alex Carr, Joe Kinsella. Others forgotten. Paddy Kelly the secretary he now remembered who had arranged the lemonade for the women, the sweets, buns, sandwiches, not forgetting the main thing which was the firkins of porter for the men. Winners of both the League and the Metropolitan Cup that year. Ellen yelled and the yellow-hooped body spun to the ground. He crushed it under his foot. Hard. Like that!
A dog barked in the basement. Father O’Sullivan went up the steps to the open halldoor, limped now through the hall, climbed the stairs, one landing, two landings, the third. The smells successively were woodrot from the basement, a privy odour in the hall, a conglomerate malodorousness of living as he climbed, individual stale airs, carbolic evidence of recent scrubbing. Limping still he came to a halt, rested briefly and knocked.
‘This way, Father,’ Mrs. Mulhall said in a whisper, reticent of speech and gesture, a lighted candle in her hand because of Christ Bodily Present. She led them without delay but also without haste across the scrupulously scrubbed and tidied room, knocked on the inner door to warn her husband, opened it, lit the candle on the table from her own and left her own on the table to companion the now lit candle on the table. Then without delay but also without haste because His present business was not with her she made her genuflection and withdrew, closing the door. She made a quick survey of the larger room for any impropriety of detail which might reflect on the throughness of her preparations. All seemed in order. She took out her rosary and knelt to pray. It was in no way remarkable to her that Jesus Christ Son of God the Father Creator of Heaven and Earth and of All Things should be one of the three people in the adjoining room or that He should come in person to the two pair back Three Chandlers Court. She had known Him a lifetime now and He was not by all accounts greatly taken with the Rich and He had been born in a humble house Himself. She was only sorry that He could not have seen her two china dogs. They were no longer on the mantelpiece. She had had to pawn them.