‘Well then, we’ll take Lucy to the town. She’s no longer a child. She needs a whole new outfit like the other girls.’
‘Isn’t she all right the way she is? All it’ll do is give her notions. What’ll notions do in her place but bring in trouble!’
She would take nothing for herself, but on Lucy she yielded. They went together to Boles. Annie May had never set foot in Boles before and she was awed into silence, starting with fright each time the pulleys sent the brass cups hurtling along the wires to the cashier in her glass case above in the shop, starting again each time the cups came crashing back with receipts and change. With much help from Mrs Boles, and the confused choices of Lucy, it was William himself who decided the outfit, old Boles all the time hovering around at the sight of the last of the Kirkwoods.
‘I was only that height when I used see your dear mother come into the shop. Oh, she was a lady,’ rubbing his hands, the eternal red rose in his buttonhole seemingly never affected by winter or summer.
‘You look beautiful, Lucy, but I hate to see you growing up,’ Wiliam complimented the girl simply. Lucy blushed and went to kiss him on the lips, but he found that he was hardly able to lift her into his arms.
The first Sunday she went to Mass and the rails in this outfit she created an even greater sensation than did William when he first stood as just another workman in one of his neighbour’s fields.
The war ground on with little effect. The activities of the local Force were now routine: the three weeks in Finner Camp, rifle competitions, drill on Thursday evenings, rifle practice on Sunday afternoons — firing from the Oakport shore at targets set in the back of McCabe’s Hill. On certain Sunday mornings the Force assembled in full dress at the Hall, marched through the village to the church, where they stood on guard in front of the altar during the sung Mass, presenting arms before and after the consecration. Captain Kirkwood marched his men through the village on these Sundays, but at the church door turned over his command to the schoolteacher, Lieutenant McLoughlin, and remained outside until Mass had ended. Now that he had become such a part of the people it was felt that such a pointed difference was a little sad. This was brought up in bumbling fashion to William’s face by Garda Sergeant Moran in Charlie’s front room or parlour one Sunday after rifle practice. It was usual for the whole company to go to Charlie’s for a drink after these Sunday practices. The men drank standing up behind the wooden partition that separated the bar from the grocery, but the two officers, Captain Kirkwood and Lieutenant McLoughlin, sat with the Garda Sergeant around the big oval table in the front room. The Sergeant attended these rifle practices to make sure that certain safety precautions were observed. He had been drinking after Mass, and had made a nuisance of himself at the practice, wandering around during firing looking for someone to talk to, but as he did not come under his command there was very little Captain Kirkwood could do. As soon as Charlie brought the whiskeys to the front room, the Sergeant began: ‘Before the war, William, you were there on your own in that big house, helping nobody, getting no help. Now you’re in with everybody. Only for your being a Protestant, there’d not be the slightest difference now between you and the rest of us. I fear it takes war to bring people to their senses.’
Lieutenant McLoughlin was searching furiously for some phrase to stifle the embarrassing speech, a verbal continuation of the nuisance they had been subjected to all day when William Kirkwood drily remarked, ‘Actually, Sergeant, I’m seriously considering becoming a Catholic, but not, I’m afraid, in the interests of conformity,’ which brought a stunned silence to the room even more embarrassing than the Sergeant’s speech.
To remark that it was a little sad that such a pointed difference still stood out was polite weak sentiment; for William Kirkwood to turn Catholic was alarming. It broke the law that everybody stayed within the crowd they were born into, like the sparrows or blackbirds. They changed for a few reasons, and for those reasons only, money or position, mostly inseparable anyway, and love, if it can be called love when the instinct fastens on one person and will commit any madness to obtain its desire. Catholics had turned Protestant for money or position, it was an old sore and taunt; but the only reason a Protestant was ever known to turn was in order to marry. They had even a living effigy of it within the parish, the Englishman Sinclair, who had married one of the Conways, his poor wife telling the people in Boyle he had gone to Mass in Cootehall, then fibbing to the Cootehall people that he went to Mass in Boyle, when the whole world knew that he was at home toasting his shins and criticizing everything and everybody within sight: ‘It was no rush of faith that led to my conversion. I was dragged into your Apostolic Roman Catholic Church by my male member,’ he would shout and chuckle.
‘How did it come about that you got interested …?’ McLoughlin asked William tentatively.
‘Helping Lucy with her school exercises,’ William answered readily. ‘I became interested in some of the catechism answers, then church history. It’s true it is the older church. I found books by Newman and the Oxford Movement in the library. My mother must have been interested once.’
‘Still, it must be no joke turning your back on your own crowd, more or less saying that they were wrong all those centuries,’ the Sergeant said.
‘No. Not if one is convinced of the truth.’ William pushed his glass away and rose. ‘They lived according to their light. It is our day now.’
‘Well, whatever you do, we hope it’ll be for the best,’ both men echoed as he left. William never took more than one drink and this had always been put down to Protestant abstemiousness.
‘That’s a lemoner for you. I’ll need a good slow pint to get the better of that,’ the Sergeant breathed when he had gone, and pressed the bell. They both had pints.
‘What’s behind it?’ the Sergeant demanded.
‘I’d not give you many guesses.’
‘How?’
‘It’s fairly plain. I’d give you no more than one guess.’
‘You have me beaten.’
‘How did he get interested in Catholicism?’
‘With Lucy and the catechism,’ the Sergeant said in amazement. ‘I should have seen it sooner. He took her to Boles before Christmas and dressed her like the Queen of Sheba, and she hardly fourteen!’
‘In some ways Kirkwood is a very clever masterful man, but in other ways he is half a child. Lucy is not good at school but she’s far from stupid and in many ways she’s older than her years. She’s more a Kirkwood to the bone than the daughter of poor old Annie May. Isn’t she with him everywhere?’
‘He couldn’t marry her though.’
‘Three or four years isn’t that far away. Wouldn’t it leave Annie May sitting pretty!’
‘God, I’d never have thought of that in a hundred years.’
The news of the impending conversion was so strange that they kept it to themselves. On reflection they didn’t quite believe it and wanted not to appear fools, but when William was seen walking the avenue of young lime trees to the presbytery every Tuesday and Thursday evening for mandatory instruction it became widespread. Miracles would never cease among the stars of heaven. William Kirkwood, last of the Kirkwoods, was about to renounce the error of their ways and become a Catholic.
Canon Glynn, the old priest, was perfectly suited to his place. He had grown up on a farm, was fond of cards and whiskey, but his real passion in life was for the purebred shorthorns he grazed on the church grounds. In public he was given to emphasizing the mercy rather than the wrath of God and in private believed that the affairs of the earth ran more happily the less God was brought into them. At first he found the visits of this odd catechumen a welcome break in his all too predictable evenings, but soon began to be worn out by his pupil’s seemingly insatiable appetite for theological speculation. William was now pursuing Catholicism with the same zeal he had given for years to astronomy, reading every book on theology and church history he could lay hands on. Rather than be faced with this strenuous analysis of the Council of Trent, the old priest would have much preferred to have poured this over-intellectual childlike man a large glass of whiskey and to have talked about the five purebred shorthorns he was keeping over the winter and which he foddered himself in all weathers before saying daily Mass.