Country Days (3 page)

“When will we do it?” she asked.

“This evening around eight o’clock; I’ll call for you,” I told her.

“Don’t forget to bring Jack,” she said.

That evening as we approached the gate of the old graveyard, it started to rain.

“Maybe we should cancel the funeral,” Frances suggested.

“No way!” I declared. “You don’t cancel funerals because of the rain.”

“That’s because the chief mourners would object, and we don’t have that problem,” she suggested.

“Maybe they are here in spirit,” I said, “so let’s get started. You begin reading out the directions.”

Frances peered down at the barely legible writing.

“I forgot my glasses,” she announced. “We’ll have to postpone it.”

“Did you ever hear of a funeral postponed because the undertaker forgot his glasses?” I demanded.

“This is no ordinary funeral,” she protested.

“Give me that piece of paper,” I instructed and I tried to make out the writing.

“My God, he is a dreadful writer,” I complained.

“All doctors write like that,” Frances pronounced wisely; “something to do with the mystique of medicine.”

“It says so many footsteps in from the gate,” I said, measuring it in long strides.

“Does that mean men’s or women’s strides?” Frances asked.

“Men’s, I presume, seeing as how he was a man,” I answered.

“You can never presume in these cases,” Frances informed me.

She was soon proved right because when I came to the next instruction which said turn left it meant
walking through a stone wall. Something had gone wrong somewhere.

“Give me the instructions,” Frances demanded.

“But I thought that you couldn’t see without your glasses,” I said.

“Well, maybe I’m still better than you,” she told me. “So let’s go back to the gate again.”

At this point Jack’s paper coffin was beginning to disintegrate in the rain and I was afraid that he would come out to meet us before we were quite ready for him. So back to the gate we went again and, with Frances calling out directions, I proceeded into the graveyard slowly. We had a few false stops and starts and Frances announced, “The fool that wrote this had no sense of direction.”

Finally we arrived at the door of a big stone tomb with a rusty iron door.

“Well, this is it. Home, sweet home,” Frances declared, but I wanted to make doubly sure.

“Will we go back to the gate again and follow the directions so as to be quite certain?” I asked.

“Oh, you of little faith!” Frances protested.

We went back to the gate again and while Frances carried Jack I called out the instructions and to my surprise we arrived back at the same tomb door.

“Now we are sure,” Frances declared handing Jack over to me.

“He’s all yours now,” she told me.

“Well, the first thing now is to open this door, so hold Jack a minute until I see if it’s possible,” I said,
handing Jack back to her. I pulled back the rusty bolt, which moved with a squeaky protest, and the door swung back slowly. Inside it was pitch dark.

“We should have brought a flashlamp,” I moaned.

I peered into the tomb and discerned steps leading down just inside the door.

“Give me Jack,” I said. Putting my foot out slowly, I proceeded cautiously down the steps. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I began to be able to see fairly clearly from the light coming in through the door. The tomb was square, damp and quite small; questionable bits and pieces littered the floor. In the corner stood a very old coffin and this I knew straight away was where Jack had been lifted from. The question now was whether I had the courage to put him back in. If I left him there on the floor, I would feel I had not quite finished the job that had been entrusted to me. Slowly I approached the coffin and put my hand out to see if the lid would lift easily. It did. I eased it up gingerly, just high enough for Jack to fit through, and then I closed my eyes so that I could not see what was inside. Gently I put Jack back into his resting place and let the lid down slowly.

“What are you doing in there?” Frances called nervously.

I gave a last look around the tomb before coming briskly up the steps.

“God, I’m glad that’s over!” I said.

We pushed in the heavy iron door and shot the
rusty bolt.

“I’m sure that he is in the right place,” I said positively.

“We can’t be sure of that until the day of general judgement,” Frances pronounced ponderously. “If a guy comes out of here with two heads and another with no head at all, then you have made a mistake. If they are all intact, then the job was oxo!”

That night I wrote to the worried medical student. I never again heard from him and I hope that he never again heard from Jack.

T
HE
S
T
J
OSEPH’S
Young Priest Society were in Knock that day. I stood and watched the procession pour out of the basilica. Wave after wave of people carrying banners representing parishes from all over Ireland. They were like a mountain stream that came on and on. Men with office faces, factory faces, drivers’ faces and men with farm faces. Women with designer clothes, boutique clothes and chain store clothes. People from different ends of the parish social ladder and off all the rungs up along as well. As I watched them the thought came into my mind that these people were as constant as the Northern star and as indestructible in their ways as the Mayo rocks around them. Then came the bishops, priests and altar boys in white surplices. They frothed out of the basilica like milk out of a bucket. I looked well at the nuns in their religious habits, observing closely an endangered species.

All these people blended together in a sea of technicolour religion, while thirsty children in their best clothes swung off praying mothers, as they
demanded crisps and minerals. This was the public face of Knock. For many of them it was an annual pilgrimage and one of their summer outings. The car parks were lined with buses that had left country parishes all over Ireland before the dawn had broken. Driving along the quiet early morning roads they had said fifteen decades of the rosary and sung hymns to Our Lady.

It is devotion to Our Lady that draws them all here, because this more than anywhere else in Ireland is her place. She appeared here on the gable end of the church with St John and St Joseph in 1879, and since then the people of rural Ireland have made this their place of pilgrimage to her. She is “at home” to them here because this barren corner of Mayo is like many country parishes and poorer than a lot of them. The Queen of Heaven who would visit here is approachable rather than regal. They tell a story in Knock that Monsignor Horan rang up heaven to ask God to open his airport, and when God refused, he was asked to send his mother. God said, “She’ll be delighted to come, because she was never there before.” But they know in Knock that God was only codding!

They tell another story about a local beggar woman who, shortly after the apparition had taken place, called to the parish priest who was always very generous to her. The following day she called to his not so generous brother who was parish priest in the next parish, but he turned her from the door
empty handed. As she left she shouted back at him from the garden gate, “No wonder Our Lady never appeared on your gable end!”

The atmosphere at Knock on that sunny summer’s day was a mixture of a parish carnival and a country station. The children obviously came for the day out and had a great time buying holy bric-a-brac in the various shops which satisfied all kinds of religious fervour. Many of the adults, however, performed their pilgrimage duties with great attention to detail: having made the Stations of the Cross, they then said the fifteen decades of the rosary around the church, some silently and others in groups.

Some of the people who came were in the need of extra comfort and they lined up for the blessing of the sick – people for whom wheelchairs, crutches and walking aids are part of their way of life. They came not for miracle cures, but for spiritual strength and stamina; and because they find it here, they come back again and again. Broken people find God because they need him.

I went into the then empty basilica and looked around this huge stadium that Monsignor Horan built to shelter his visiting flock. As I sat there a family came in. In a wheelchair sat a waxen-faced, hunch-backed, middle-aged lady whose wasted legs dangled on to the support at the front of the chair. Her faded blonde hair was wound around her head in an old-fashioned braid and it framed her shrunken face like a halo. She was pushed along by
an overweight sister who wore a blue crimplene dress that was too short and too tight. Wisps of grey hair framed a red face that had never seen the inside of a beauty parlour. She was a bigger and healthier copy of her sister. Her husband, a pot-bellied, balding man with braces, led a beautiful wide-eyed little boy by the hand. The child embodied the finer points of the adults and was probably the miraculous product of a late marriage. There was about them a harmony of movement, as if they were moulded together by the same thought process. They came to the front of the altar, where a satin-robed Our Lady with outstretched hands smiled down on them. Around her feet were bunches of many-coloured roses that cascaded on to the floor. The family gathered in a semi-circle around the statue and stood wordlessly looking up at her. This was the reason for their visit. Then the mother reached forward, picked a rose and handed it to the lady in the wheelchair. She took it with her twisted fingers and smiled wistfully at the rose while the others looked on. No words were spoken but the three of them were like a bodyguard around her, and then the little boy reached up and touched her face with his small brown fingers. It was an expression of gentle love. As they left the basilica there was no sound but the swish of the wheelchair. They were a solid unit with a calm unquestioning acceptance of their wheelchair burden. This was the private face of Knock. It is for such as these, the unsophisticated and often very courageous
people, who sometimes struggle silently under heavy burdens and fight isolated battles against poverty and emigration, that Knock provides a corner of spiritual sustenance.

Later that evening another face of Knock emerged as I watched a middle-aged, well-married couple walk slowly outside around the old chapel saying the rosary. The swaying beads knocked off their knees as she gave out the decades and he answered. They walked slowly, completely intent on their mission, with no children to hinder their concentration. The children had probably been farmed out to the neighbours for the day or else were busy stuffing themselves in one of the many shops. But there could be no doubt but that there were children somewhere, as the couple had that battered look that can only be derived from rearing children on a limited income. She wore a good suit that had been fashionable a few years earlier and was now revived by a new blouse and her shoes that had seen her through a few summers still looked good because she was the kind of woman who would look after her clothes well. The husband was an example of her good housekeeping, well scrubbed and washed to within an inch of his life. He had the appearance of a solid, easy-going, hard-working man, satisfied with his lot, including his well-meaning, managing wife. Theirs could have been a journey of thanksgiving or petition, but whatever way the wind was blowing they were giving it their all. This was the ordinary face of
Knock.

It is the holy water women who give Knock its colour. They rattle off their prayers to Our Lady because she is as familiar to them as one of their neighbours, they are in such regular communication with her. They fill up countless plastic bottles with holy water which they take home to bless their parishes. Theirs is an unanalysed and unquestioning faith. They are on their way to heaven and shall not be moved, and they are the real face of Knock.

In the tea shops of Knock, tables covered in bright gingham cloths were laden with large plates overflowing with iced buns of many colours. Comfortable women and slim teenagers poured tea out of giant teapots to wash down the pink, lemon and white iced buns. I think of these as the holy buns of Knock, which provide the strength for further prayer. Here parents and children were united over cups of tea and glasses of coke while Knock pencils and rosary rings were examined. Neighbouring women who had travelled on the same bus took advantage of the opportunity to discuss parish affairs. They had travelled and prayed together and now it was time for a chat, but as the queue of people waiting for tea and buns got longer, they were gently edged towards the door.

They went to confession and got mass cards signed and after a final visit to the church streamed back to the car parks. Missing children were rounded up, and a man who had come along because some
well-meaning
woman had talked him into it had to be run to ground in a quiet pub. As the buses headed homewards the rosary was said and then the singers on the bus entertained their fellow passengers. At the half-way mark on the homeward journey the bus pulled into a hotel for a pre-arranged meal, and when the second leg of the journey began sleep caught up with many of the pilgrims. They dozed off to the sound of “Hail Queen of Heaven” and woke up miles down the road in the midst of “The Fields of Athenry”.

When they arrived home in the early hours of the morning, into quiet country towns and villages, cars were waiting to collect them; sleeping children were transferred like rag dolls on to back seats. The long day was over, but next year they would come again.