Grandmother and the Priests (51 page)

Stephen was only seventeen when he came to Father O’Connor and told him he was going off ‘to the wars’. “Now,” said old Father O’Connor, “the Sassenaghs did not come to Darcy for the lads for their eternal wars and skirmishes, for the same reason that they did not come for taxes. The village was so small, so hidden, so isolated, and it did not have any business with its neighbors or the towns. The Sassenaghs just did not know about Darcy’s existence. Had there been a smell of a half-crown in all the village the Sassenagh tax-collector would have been there. But there was no half-crown; it was doubtful if any of the villagers would have recognized such a coin had they seen it. People lived apart in those days far more than they do now, and rare was the newspaper that came to Darcy and rare was the news even of the nearest village. I had the only books in the village; I knew that Stephen read what few I had, for so I was told, but I never caught him in my cottage. He came and went like a shadow.

“But in some way a newspaper from Dublin had gotten, in a sad state, to Darcy, and it was far over a month old. There was another war, and fine wages were offered to the lads to join the Royal Army, and grand opportunities for adventure. So Stephen came to me and gave me the few acres of his land. I said I would not take them but would hold them for him, and so it was arranged that the men of the village would work that land, take half for their labor and give the rest to my church and the Sisters. I then asked Stephen why he wished to go to one of the Sassenagh’s wars — and I do not mind now what war it was — and he only shook his head and said he must go to see what the world was like beyond Darcy. I mentioned that he might be killed and he said, ‘Father, that would not be bad. For the likes of me, without kinfolk or friends or aught to care whether I live or die.’ It was the first time I had heard the lad speak so, and he spoke with no bitterness or pity for himself, and it was one of the most tragic things I had ever heard. I saw his eyes full for the first time, and they were far and lost for all the storm in them, and then he was gone. The villagers marveled at his going, and again spoke of the queerness, but they soon stopped their gossiping, for they had not known Stephen at all, no more than they noticed a silent tree in its accustomed place. He was long forgotten at the end of five years, and the little sod cottage stood alone and gathered dust and the men worked the small bit of land and began to speak of it as ‘the Doyle acres’. Not Peter’s as it had been, and not Stephen’s when he had inherited it. It was only Doyle’s, and none remembered Stephen’s face or what or who he was. He was forgotten except for myself, and the two ould Sisters died and took the memory of him with them.

“Then, as suddenly and as invisibly as Stephen had left, so he returned. A little girl who had no memory of Stephen told me excitedly that gypsies were in ‘the Doyle cottage’, and that smoke was coming from the single chimney. I went at once, crossing the golden fields of autumn. It was another day of high wind, and it sang a different song than the one it sang in the other seasons, a song of lonely places and desolation and shadows that stood forever unseen by any man. When I came to Stephen’s tiny house he was there on the doorstep smoking, and he was a man grown and tall and very pale and thin, and the only thing that moved about him was the smoke from his pipe. His eyes stared at me but he made no sign of recognition. He did not even stand, as all men stood then when a priest approached. He just stared at me emptily and smoked, and I stopped and he bent his head a little to one side. And then as I passed over the thick turf a beam of sunlight struck his forehead and I saw that near his right temple there was the most dreadful of old scars. It was long and dark red and twisted, and it pulled up one of his eyelids so that he had the strangest expression.

“I was about to speak when he said in his slow and uncertain voice, ‘Who is it?’ I stopped again. Surely five years had not changed me that much, even in Darcy! And so I said, ‘It is your friend, Stephen, Father O’Connor.’ ”

Stephen slowly and awkwardly got to his feet and mumbled, “And a good morning to you, Father.”

“Good morning, and a fine morning it is, Stephen,” said the priest, anxiously watching the young man, who was now twenty-two.

“I know it is a fine morning, Father,” said Stephen, “for the wind tells me it is. It tells me all about the sea where it was before dawn, and how the sails sing in it, and how the mountains thundered when it passed over, and the web of gold the gulls made when they flew in the sun, flying together in the face of the sun.”

It was the longest speech Stephen had ever uttered to anyone in the village, and he was suddenly still and silent again, with a red wash running over his face and darkening the scar so that it was a wound again.

“I am happy that you have returned, Stephen,” said the priest. “You never wrote me. I did not know you were here until this morning. Welcome home, Stephen.” He held out his hand to the young man, but Stephen did not look at the hand and he did not take it. Hurt, Father O’Connor dropped his hand. “And where would you be getting that terrible scar, Stephen?”

Stephen said, “In the wars. I have seen most of the world. The Sassenagh owns very much of it. It was a bayonet wound I had, and then a blow on my head. How is my land, Father?”

“In grand condition,” said the priest. There was something about Stephen that alarmed him. “Have you not seen it yourself?”

“I’ll never see it again,” said Stephen. “I have been blind for two years.”

The priest had heard many sorrowful things in those years, but it seemed to him that this was the most sorrowful and he felt that his heart had been torn rudely in his breast. The lonely young man was now doomed to a deeper loneliness and the priest wanted to weep. Even the death of Mary Doyle had not been so tragic as this.

The two men sat on the stony doorstep and they smoked together in the autumn sunlight and the priest waited. Stephen finally told him, and with indifference, as if this dreadful calamity had happened to one he did not know but who probably had deserved it. It was somewhere in Africa, he said vaguely. And then his face changed at the mention of Africa and he told the priest of the endless dripping of the rain forests and the pounding beat of the mighty rivers when the water poured down from the green mountains, and he told of the songs and cries of strange and exotic birds, and the majestic call of lions and the laughter of hyenas, and the grumbling neighs of hippopotami, and the crackling of winds in palm trees and the long deep groaning of hot seas. “I was like one who was mad, I’m thinking,” he said, with some sheepishness. “I could not get enough of the listening. I lay awake to hear it. I did not know that God had so many voices, for what was I but a raw lad from Darcy, drunk on the music?”

He folded his hands together in a gesture of awe, and he turned his blind but unblemished eyes on the priest and they shone with memory. “All God’s voices,” he said. “There was not an ugly sound in them, though some were terrible, Father.”

He had gone to the wars, he said, because he wanted a harp. Once he had heard a harp, when he was fifteen and an orphan and he had ridden his horse into the nearest village and had heard an old man on the green playing a harp, a little feeble harp, and he was singing a ballad. “I forgot what I had come for, Father, to that village. I had four shillings with me. I sat down on the grass with the old man, and I gave him three of the shillings to play for me, and I stayed with him and listened.” It was not until he had returned home, in his dream, that he remembered that he had gone to the village for some tool not to be bought in Darcy.

And then he had gone to a music hall in London when he was a soldier, where an Irishman played a larger harp and sang the old Irish ballads, and the harp was not being played by a man at all but an angel. “An angel, Father,” Stephen repeated. “And it was my heart that was burning now for a harp of my own, so that I could hear all the voices of God again under my fingers on the strings.”

The Sassenagh did not pay grand wages, as the paper from Dublin had said. But Stephen saved what little he received. Then he was blinded in Africa by some desperate native during a skirmish, and after long weeks he was returned to London to a military hospital and rehabilitation. He had been taught to weave baskets, to work looms, to polish boots deftly and to sole them. “It was a very new thought in London then,” said old Father O’Connor, “and a merciful one, and it was all due to the ladies. As a usual thing a crippled or blinded soldier was turned out on the street with only God to have pity on him and help him. The ladies were determined that those who had suffered disaster in the name of God and country should receive a pension. They had partially succeeded, for now Stephen would have a pound a month. It was little enough for his eyes, but it was still a little.”

There would be no harp now. Stephen had spent his small savings in the harsh and filthy military hospital in London for soap and tobacco and a new razor and other such necessities, trifles which a presumably grateful government did not see fit to provide for him. And his hireling’s pay had ceased from the date of his injury. There was no complaint in the patient and uncertain voice of Stephen as he explained this. He had never expected much from life, and he had wanted only one thing, a harp. It was denied him now, and still he did not speak even with that old infrequent bitterness of his which had appeared sometimes before he had gone off to the wars. In fact, he felt presumptuous that he had ever had any hope at all, for he was only a lad from Darcy with a bit of land, and of no importance.

“You are important to God, Stephen,” said the priest, after the mournful tale had been completed.

Stephen shook his head. “No. My Dada was right. I am nobody at all, Father. And now will you kindly tell the people that I am not helpless but can weave them market baskets for the babies, and can mend boots and tend a loom?” He hardly expected money, for there was so little money in Darcy, and he had his pound a month for tea and sugar and his meager needs. He hoped only to live out his life in Darcy, and listen to ‘the voices of God’.

There was little Irish anger in Father O’Connor, but now he was bitterly angry. He was angry against almost everything and everyone in the world, because of Stephen. He looked at the blind eyes, and his own swelled with tears. He patted Stephen on the shoulder and went to neighbors and told them bluntly of Stephen’s state and demanded their help. They were astonished at the severity of their priest and hurriedly remarked that none had really known Stephen when he had had his eyes, and that he had always been an unfriendly lad, and what had they to give him from their own pockets? The Father knew their condition. They would work the land for half of its produce and — “You will give the rest, not to the Church, but to Stephen, for he has never lived and few have ever loved him,” said the priest, feeling like a firebrand and full of nameless indignation. He went into his infinitesimal church and addressed God in somewhat stern language concerning Stephen. Then he was immediately contrite. Still his heart burned. There was not, he assured God, a harp in Darcy nor for many, many miles about. Stephen had no money; no one in Darcy had any money.

Suddenly the priest was weeping and praying that somehow a harp would find itself under Stephen’s fingers. Stephen would not starve, though he was blind. But he needed a harp. “For Thy celebration, dear Father of us all,” said the priest, with a slight feeling that he was being somewhat exigent and a little wheedling. A priest understood, Father O’Connor explained humbly, that God’s ways were not man’s ways, and God’s will was above questioning. “But hast not Thou, Our dear Lord, told us that Thou knowest our needs and that one has but to ask in Faith? If it be Thy will,” said the priest, earnestly gazing at the small cheap crucifix over the main altar and suspecting himself of being a little demanding, “send Stephen Doyle a harp.” He hoped, very much, that a harp would materialize itself, and that it would be God’s will. He could not believe that he was asking a triviality, considering that love had been withheld from Stephen all his life, except for the love of God and the two ancient Sisters long sleeping in the dust. True, it was, that when Stephen had become a young man he had shown little, if any, interest in the Church. “But didst Thou not halt to give a blind beggar his sight?” he urged.

Within a week Father O’Connor had everyone who could pray at all praying for a harp for Stephen Doyle. It is true that everyone was bewildered. What did Stephen Doyle need with a harp? He needed many things, such as repairs to his house — “Repair it, then,” said the priest, and the men hurried to do so, grumbling under their breath. If Peter Doyle’s lad had ‘flown off’ to fight for the Sassenagh and had lost his sight, then it was both God’s will and Stephen’s own folly. What would Peter, himself, have thought of such a treasonous action? A good Irishman did not fight for Sassenaghs; he fought the Sassenagh instead. Everyone was willing to do what he could for Stephen; it was only Christian charity, though he had hardly behaved as a Christian before he had been blinded. He had said some very regrettable things concerning religion, an old man suddenly recalled. Oh, the Father could speak of Stephen loving ‘the voices of God’, and where was that written anywhere, Father, but he had shown little interest in his neighbors and had rarely spoken to them and was not even grateful that his land had been kept up. He walked with his cane along the one mud-packed street and when a kind word was said to him he only mumbled.