‘We thought you were gone on us for certain yesterday, Gilchrist.’
She was unable to speak. After a while she managed to assemble her surroundings once more; the rusted iron beds side by side, the high window, the bare uneven boards of the ward.
‘You’ll be off your feet for good this time, Gilchrist,’ the old woman said, coming back, ‘and you’re a lucky oul bitch in that. You won’t have to empty any more bedpans.’
Miss Gilchrist smiled again. She had a sharp tongue, once well stocked for use. But now she kept to herself the answers that occurred so readily. They were no longer worth making. In a day or in a week; or in another three years, it would be all the same, whatever had been said or unsaid.
She was content now to lie quietly and know nothing of what passed outside. She would not, she knew, ever again take her turn at emptying the slops or the bedpans, or scrub the walls down, or sweep the floors or attend at the morgue where Death laid out his conquests before they were carted off to the grave. Miss Gilchrist had taken her turn at washing them for their journey. One day in winter she had entered to do her work and screamed because there were seven dead babies on one of the slabs. She was to be reprimanded severely for her conduct, but nothing further was said to her because near dawn the next morning she had her second attack. After considerable thought she decided to speak to Father O’Connor about it. It was his habit now to make occasional visits. He had come first because Mrs. Bradshaw, her conscience still troubled about the servant she had been fond of, asked him. Then, seizing the opportunity for the exercise of Christian virtue, he decided to continue because he suffered each time he had to enter among the miserable and the destitute and it seemed good to him to offer it to God for salvation’s sake, for his own soul and that of his superior. It might be the means of saving Father Giffley from alcoholism; if not it was still part of his duty to practise the corporal works of mercy—to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to visit the sick and imprisoned and to bury the dead.
The thought of seven naked babies, side by side on the slab of the dead, was a terrible one. But then, everything about the workhouse was terrible; poverty and illness and loneliness and senility were its four guardian angels.
‘You must think of them as seven innocent souls,’ he told Miss Gilchrist, ‘seven new angels praising God in heaven.’
Without changing her expression she said: ‘I want you to speak to Mrs. Bradshaw for me.’
‘Certainly.’
‘I want her to know what will happen to me when I die here.’
‘You’re distressing yourself . . .’ Father O’Connor said.
‘They’ll take me with the rest and bury me in a pauper’s grave. I want her to claim my body and save me from that.’
He tried to say something, but it was difficult. Her face was grey and very small, her lips were colourless and ringed with dried spittle which cracked when she spoke. Her mind was fixed firmly now on what she wanted to say.
‘I’ve seen too many of them, Father, laid out there to be whipped off without a tear from a friend or a solitary soul to say goodbye. Do you know what I seen once?’
She turned her face away and for a moment he thought she was wandering back to the incident of the babies again. But it wasn’t that.
‘Sometimes they forget to lock the back door of the morgue—the one that leads into the laneway. Once when I went in there was a scattering of little boys. Do you know what they were up to, Father? They were stealing the pennies from the eyes of the dead.’
He had learned enough these past few years to feel only regret. The children of need were capable of deeds far worse.
‘I would like to think that when I go someone will claim my poor body.’
‘I’ll speak to Mrs. Bradshaw,’ he promised. As always, his temptation to run away almost mastered his will to help. He fought it; for over two years it had been the same battle, trying not to surrender to disgust.
‘You mustn’t give way to morbid fancies,’ he insisted. ‘You can be sure you’ll see many and many a long day yet.’ He looked over at the high window. He saw, at a great distance it seemed, the Dublin mountains. They were, as always, fresh and beautiful. In surroundings such as that, among fields and hills, the old lady near him had been born. He looked back at the bed. She was shaking her head from side to side, denying something he had said.
It was through Miss Gilchrist that he paid his first visit to Mary. He did so to ask Mary to visit the old woman. The meeting was embarrassing at first. Mary had been two years in his parish yet he had made no attempt to contact her, partly because of what had happened on the night she had called to the vestry with Fitz to arrange their marriage, partly because it was difficult to avoid reference to the world they had met in first. Mary offered him tea but he refused.
‘And have you children?’ he asked, letting his attention fix itself on his surroundings while he questioned her. He noted a table, a sideboard and some butter boxes. The clock on the mantelpiece seemed out of place.
‘Two, Father.’
He had to think hard to connect her answer and his question.
‘Two boys?’ he asked, relieved to remember.
‘A boy and a girl. The girl is only four weeks old.’
He had noticed she was looking unwell and had blamed poverty. Now he knew it was the usual combination of hunger and childbirth. The women had it hard. To ease the feeling of constraint he said: I’d like to see them.’
It was morning. Mary led him into the bedroom. Everything was clean. And they had two rooms. That was quite unusual.
‘Your husband is working?’
‘At the foundry.’
‘A blessing,’ he approved.
This made the extreme poverty hard to understand. Father O’Connor, turning the matter over in his mind as he talked, remembered there was an explanation. Mr. Larkin. Was this one of the homes that had refused the food parcels?
The children were wholesome and neat too. He put it down to the beneficial effect of training in a good house. The baby was sleeping, but the older child smiled at him. Father O’Connor crossed to the bed and then formally, gravely, he gave his blessing to both of them, touching each forehead lightly in turn, and murmuring the formula quietly but audibly. Mary moved to one side, knelt and crossed herself.
‘I must tell Mrs. Bradshaw you have a thriving family,’ he said, smiling and stretching out his hand to help her to rise. They were both suddenly at ease.
‘Give her my best respects,’ Mary said. Her voice trembled. At his blessing of the children she had felt a pang of emotion, an inexplicable happiness. For a moment, in a long barrenness, a vague hope filled her.
‘Of course.’ Her gratitude was moving.
‘I’ll visit Miss Gilchrist on Sunday.’
‘She’ll be delighted, I assure you.’ He held up his hand to prevent her when she moved to see him to the door.