News of something wrong spread through Chandlers Court like a fire. A body found; a woman drunk, a suicide. By the time Father O’Connor arrived the details were known. People were spread on the pavement outside. They lined the hallway. They leaned over the basement banisters. Down below it was dark, but neighbours had provided candles which gave a wavering light. A man found dead. This was better than the parades and the make-believe. This was the drama of death. They had passed time and again along the street above the cardboarded window. Little knowing. A woman told another that only that morning she had remarked it to her husband. She had wondered, she said. There were women with shawls, subdued children, men with grave faces.
‘This way, Father,’ Hennessy said. He assumed a natural precedence, having been the discoverer. The people made passage.
‘What exactly has happened?’ Father O’Connor asked.
‘I called down to see him about an hour ago. He was dead.’
‘Called down to see whom?’ Father O’Connor asked shortly.
‘Rashers Tierney,’ Hennessy said.
Father O’Connor stopped.
‘It’s not a pleasant sight, Father,’ Hennessy said, ‘he’s been dead for some days.’
Father O’Connor had remembered a figure in candlelight lying on a coke heap. He could smell urine and the reek of spirits. The memory was arrestingly vivid.
‘Show me the way,’ he said, after a moment.
As he passed all their eyes were fixed on him, depending on him. For what he did not know. It was as though they expected him to do something about Death. He shook off the lingering influence of the white cloth, the wine, the learned talk that had so transformed the common room of St. Brigid’s. These were his parishioners. This was the true reality of his world. He was here of his own free choice. He had demanded to be allowed to serve them.
Led by Hennessy he passed between the candles they had set along the stairway and into the dimly lit room. The smell of corruption was overpowering. In the corner furthest from him sacking covered the body. They had decided for decency’s sake to hide it from him. He searched the faces of the few men in the room and recognised Fitz. He looked at the bulging sacking.
Is that he?’
Fitz nodded.
‘He’s been dead for some time?’
‘Several days, Father, by the look of it.’
‘Then there’s little I can do,’ Father O’Connor said. He meant it was too late for the administration of the last rites but they would know that already. Presumably. They nevertheless continued to regard him. Expecting what? The smell was sweet, sickly, unbearable. He could not minister to carrion.
‘Have you notified the police?’
‘We have,’ Fitz said.
There would be an inquest. They would take it to the morgue and bury it God knows how or where. The sooner the better. In the interest of health, if nothing else.
These were the ones who refused to trust him because they thought he had tried to break their strikes when all he intended was to give a little charity to the old and the destitute. They expected him as a priest to lead a prayer for the dead boilerman. That was their right. But he would do more than that. He motioned to Hennessy.
‘Remove the sacking.’
They had not expected it. He saw them looking uneasily at Fitz, waiting for him to answer for them.
‘He’s in a very bad way, Father,’ Fitz said, ‘the rats . . .’
Delicacy stopped him from finishing. Hennessy hung back. Father O’Connor removed his hat and handed it to one of the men. He had decided what to do. He went across the room, bent down, began gently to pull down the sacking. He sweated, strangling his impulse to cry out.
The head had been savaged by rats. The nose, the ears, the cheeks, the eyes had been torn away. The hands had been eaten. He forced himself to be calm.
‘Is this Tierney?’ he asked quietly.
‘It is, Father.’
‘And what is this?’
Hennessy came over obediently and looked. His face was a silver-grey colour.
‘It’s his dog, Father.’
For the moment they had forgotten all about that. The animal’s ribs were etched starkly against the taut skin of its carcass. Its discoloured teeth from which the lips had fallen away, wore the wide grin of death. The rats had ripped open its belly and exposed its organs.
In a voice that had found a new tone of gentleness Father O’Connor said:
‘It isn’t fitting to lay the brute beast and the baptised body together.’
Hennessy understood. He bent down and took the dog by the forelegs, dragging it slowly across the floor and steering it into the darkness of the far corner. Father O’Connor went down on his knees. The rest knelt one by one. He took a small bottle from his pocket and, making the sign of his blessing, gravely sprinkled with holy water what decay and the rats had yet left of the boilerman Rashers Tierney. He prayed silently once again, aware of how often he had failed, for the grace to know how to serve without pride and without self. He prayed, as was his way, to a crown of thorns and a pair of outstretched palms, his Christ of Compassion who always looked like the statue that had once stood in Miss Gilchrist’s ward.
It was some time before he remembered the others. He had excluded them from what he was about and that was wrong. Taking the mother of pearl rosary from his pocket he said:
‘Let us pray together for the repose of his soul.’
He began the usual decade of the rosary. At first only those in the room responded. Then to his surprise, for he had forgotten they were there, he heard the responses being taken up by those outside. The sound grew and filled the house. From those lining the stairway outside and the landing and the hallway above, voices rose and fell in rhythmical waves. The sound flowed about him, filled him, lifted him up like a great tide. He looked down at the ravaged body without fear and without revulsion. Age and the rot of death were brothers, for rich and poor alike. Neither intellect nor ignorance could triumph over them. What was spread on the straw before him was no more than the common mystery, the everyday fate, the cruel heart of the world.
The prayers finished. There was one more thing to do. He did it without hesitation and without reasoning why. He joined what was left of the two half-eaten hands across the body and wrapped his mother’s rosary beads about them. He pulled the sack back into position. He rose to his feet.
The man who had been minding his hat returned it to him and he put it on. There was nothing further to be done.
‘God bless you all,’ he said to the assembled men. They made a way for him through the crowd and saw him to his cab. At St. Brigid’s he had time to be sick and then to wash his hands and face before climbing to the organ loft to play for benediction.
While he was still playing they arrived with a stretcher and a tarpaulin and took Rashers to the morgue. A policeman took the dog away in a sack and saved himself a lot of unnecessary trouble by quietly dumping it in the river. Hennessy went up to his dinner but when it was put before him found he was unable to eat it. His wife had a rare moment of understanding and took it away without reproof. Hennessy said nothing further either but went down to the backyard and hid himself behind the shed of the privy and wept because he felt his own good fortune had led him shamefully into neglect of Rashers.
By that time the congregation in St. Brigid’s, urged on by a gesticulating Father Boehm, were singing ‘Hail Glorious St. Patrick’ with great fervour and piety. Father O’Connor, doing the best he could with the wheezing instrument at his disposal, listened and felt he had drawn a little nearer to them and, through them, to the God and the way of eternal salvation he so earnestly believed in.