After Rain (21 page)

    ‘We had a great day today, Milton, we had an enjoyable day. We stood up for the people we are. That’s what you have to think of.’

    In a companionable way the clergyman’s arm was placed around Milton’s shoulders. He’d put the thing neatly, the gesture suggested. He’d been taken aback but had risen to the occasion.

    ‘She won’t leave me alone,’ Milton said.

    Just beginning to move forward, the Reverend Cutcheon halted again. His arm slipped from Milton’s shoulders. In a low voice he said:

    ‘She keeps bothering you in the orchards, does she ?’

    Milton explained. He said the woman had been agitating him all day, since the moment he awoke. It was because of that that he’d had to tell someone, because she was pressing him to.

    ‘Don’t tell anyone else, Milton. Don’t tell a single soul. It’s said now between the two of us and it’s safe with myself Not even Addy will hear the like of this.’

    Milton nodded. The Reverend Cutcheon said:

    ‘Don’t distress your mother and your father, son, with talk of a woman who was on about holiness and the saints.’ He paused, then spoke with emphasis, and quietly. ‘Your mother and father wouldn’t rest easy for the balance of their days.’ He paused again. ‘There are no better people than your mother and father, Milton.’

    ‘Who was St Rosa?’

    Again the Reverend Cutcheon checked his desire to rejoin the men who were picnicking on the grass. Again he lowered his voice.

    ‘Did she ask you for money? After she touched you did she ask you for money?’

    ‘Money?’

    ‘There are women like that, boy’

    Milton knew what he meant. He and Billie Carew had many a time talked about them. You saw them on television, flamboyantly dressed on city streets. Billie Carew said they hung about railway stations, that your best bet was a railway station if you were after one. Milton’s mother, once catching a glimpse of these street-traders on the television, designated them ‘Catholic strumpets’. Billie Carew said you’d have to go careful with them in case you’d catch a disease. Milton had never heard of such women in the neighbourhood.

    ‘She wasn’t like that,’ he said.

    ‘You’d get a travelling woman going by and maybe she’d be thinking you had a coin or two on you. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Milton?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘Get rid of the episode. Put it out of your mind.’

    ‘I was only wondering about what she said in relation to a saint.’

    ‘It’s typical she’d say a thing like that.’

    Milton hesitated. ‘I thought she wasn’t alive,’ he said.

    Mr. Leeson’s Uncle Willie used to preach. He had preached in the towns until he was too old for it, until he began to lose the thread of what he was saying. Milton had heard him. He and Garfield and his sisters had been brought to hear Uncle Willie in his heyday, a bible clenched in his right hand, gesturing with it and quoting from it. Sometimes he spoke of what happened in Rome, facts he knew to be true: how the Pope drank himself into a stupor and had to have the sheets of his bed changed twice in a night, how the Pope’s own mother was among the women who came and went in the papal ante-rooms.

    Men still preached in the towns, at street corners or anywhere that might attract a crowd, but the preachers were fewer than they had been in the heyday of Mr. Leeson’s Uncle Willie because the popularity of television kept people in at nights, and because people were in more of a hurry. But during the days that followed the July celebration Milton remembered his great-uncle’s eloquence. He remembered the words he had used and the way he could bring in a quotation, and the way he was so certain. Often he had laid down that a form of cleansing was called for, that vileness could be exorcized by withering it out of existence.

    The Reverend Cutcheon had been more temperate in his advice, even if what he’d said amounted to much the same thing: if you ignored what happened it wouldn’t be there any more. But on the days that followed the July celebration Milton found it increasingly impossible to do so. With a certainty that reminded him of his great-uncle’s he became convinced beyond all doubt that he was not meant to be silent. Somewhere in him there was the uncontrollable urge that he should not be. He asked his mother why the old man had begun to preach, and she replied that it was because he had to.

    Father Mulhall didn’t know what to say.

    To begin with, he couldn’t remember who St Rosa had been, even if he ever knew. Added to which, there was the fact that it wasn’t always plain what the Protestant boy was trying to tell him. The boy stammered rapidly through his account, beginning sentences again because he realized his meaning had slipped away, speaking more slowly the second time but softening his voice to a pitch that made it almost inaudible. The whole thing didn’t make sense.

    ‘Wait now till we have a look,’ Father Mulhall was obliged to offer in the end. He’d said at first that he would make some investigations about this saint, but the boy didn’t seem satisfied with that. ‘Sit down,’ he invited in his living-room, and went to look for Butler’s
Lives
of the Saints.

    Father Mulhall was fifty-nine, a tall, wiry man, prematurely white-haired. Two sheepdogs accompanied him when he went to find the relevant volume. They settled down again, at his feet, when he returned. The room was cold, hardly furnished at all, the carpet so thin you could feel the boards.

    ‘There’s the Blessed Roseline of Villeneuve,’ Father Mulhall said, turning over the pages. ‘And the Blessed Rose Venerini. Or there’s St Rose of Lima. Or St Rosalia. Or Rose of Viterbo.’

    ‘I think it’s that one. Only she definitely said Rosa.’

    ‘Could you have fallen asleep? Was it a hot day?’

    ‘It wasn’t a dream I had.’

    ‘Was it late in the day? Could you have been confused by the shadows ?’

    ‘It was late the second time. The first time it was the afternoon.’

    ‘Why did you come to me?’

    ‘Because you’d know about a saint.’

    Father Mulhall heard how the woman who’d called herself St Rosa wouldn’t let the boy alone, how she’d come on stronger and stronger as the day of the July celebration approached, and so strong on the day itself that he knew he wasn’t meant to be silent, the boy said.

    ‘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.’