Grandmother and the Priests (52 page)

“His Dada didn’t love him,” said Father O’Connor. “No one did, but ould Sister Agnes and ould Sister Mary Francis. God forgive me, but I didn’t love him either. We were blinder than Stephen is now, for we were blind in our spirits. Let us pray for a harp for him.”

“The cheapest harp,” said a young man in a tone of authority, “is fifty pounds, in Dublin. And where is there four pounds in one place in Darcy? There’s not even a horse which would bring the likes of five pounds, in Darcy, and even a cow would be considered dear at that price.”

“Pray for a harp for Stephen Doyle,” said the priest, feeling like a Crusader in the midst of heathen Saracens. The people shook their heads. Was the ould Father becoming daft? A harp for Stephen Doyle, when children were barefoot half the year and a bar of soap was cherished and meat available only once or twice a week! There was ould Granny Guilfoyle who needed a new crutch, and everyone was saving pennies to buy her one.

“It’s not asking you for pennies I am!” shouted Father O’Connor. “Not a penny! I’m asking you for prayers! Prayers for a harp! God knows you ask for sillier things! Cleanse your hearts and pray for a harp for Stephen; will it cost you a single copper?”

Thus reassured that Father O’Connor was not going to rifle a single teapot or precious sugar jar for — a harp! — the people prayed sheepishly. And a strange thing happened as they prayed for Stephen. They began to love him, or at the very least they began to regard him with compassion. He was the object, now, of their prayers, though they had been figuratively flogged to their knees, and it is well known that if you pray for a man you begin to regard him as dear to you and important, and you forget all his faults and he takes on something of a lustre. One of the prettiest colleens in the village, one Veronica Killeen, took a great deal of interest in Stephen, and brought a hot loaf now and then to his house, baked with her own sixteen-year-old hands. She had been too young to remember Stephen well when he left Darcy and certainly he had never known her. And now he could not see her pink cheeks and big blue eyes and dark red hair. But she had a sweet voice and Stephen loved to hear her speak, and she had a fragrance about her as of freshly cut grass, and she sang as often as she spoke. Stephen would listen to her innocent songs and he thought of young birds in the spring, and he could hear her light and dancing step and inhale her natural sweetness of flesh. After a few weeks he could even talk to her easily. Her parents, though praying dutifully for him, were hardly pleased, for Veronica was being wooed by the blacksmith’s son, a fine broth of a lad whose father was the ‘richest’ in the village and who possessed the nicest house on the mud road. Moreover, he had two horses and three cows, and it was rumored that the senior blacksmith had a bachelor cousin in Dublin who owned a ‘nice bit of property’. The junior blacksmith in time would inherit such incredible wealth. Veronica was warned by her parents not to take too much interest in a man so much older than herself — over twenty-two now — and one who was blind and who had fought for the Sassenagh into the bargain. Was that worthy of a true son of Ireland? Veronica tossed her red hair pertly, and her case was brought before Father O’Connor, who was not in the least unsympathetic towards the girl and chided the parents for lacking charity.

“Would you have her have a heart of stone?” asked the priest, sternly. He often discovered Veronica kneeling in the church in fervent prayer, and he suspected who was the object of her prayers. A lovely colleen, he thought, uneasily. But what did she see in Stephen Doyle, pale and very thin, and older, and blind, and dependent on the kindness of his neighbors? He asked her and received the astonishing reply, “Oh, it is the great man Stephen will be!” the girl cried, and gazed at the priest with such radiant eyes that he was taken aback.

“We are all great in God’s sight,” said the priest. “But let us exercise a little prudence, Veronica. A sweet girl you are, and the apple of your parents’ eye. Er — what does Stephen say to you, on his doorstep in full sight of the village, or walking with him down the road?”

Veronica was ecstatic. “He talks to me of God’s voices, Father. I never heard them before, but now I hear them everywhere. He opened my ears, Father.”

“He talks of nothing else?” asked the priest, who now knew a thing or two about human nature, and especially the human nature of young men and girls.

Veronica hesitated and blushed. “He talks to me of meself, Father, and I’m the oldest child of twelve children, and the cottage full to the roof with all of us, and no one talked just of me before.”

All at once the priest thought of the idyl of Peter and Mary Doyle, who had clung together as if no one else but themselves were alive in the world, and so he only mentioned decorum and prudence again to Veronica and prayed that all would be well. He did speak to Stephen, who was making baskets and soling shoes — all done excellently — and Stephen had said, “Veronica is like my eyes. She tells me of things I cannot see, Father, and she is an angel.”

Father O’Connor hoped that Stephen would continue to regard Veronica as an angel for some time to come, and not as some rosy apple for a man’s eating. Stephen laughed gently, he who had never laughed before. “When Veronica asks me to marry her, then I will, Father. I will give you my promise that I’ll not be asking her to marry me.”

Father O’Connor received fifteen dollars — three incredible pounds — from a parishioner who had gone to America ten years ago. That was Christmas. It was a personal gift from a grateful and struggling man who had not found streets of gold in America’s cities. So praying he was doing the right thing, the priest sent to Dublin for many books, not all of them of a purely religious character, and he gave them to Stephen and suggested to Veronica that she read them to his prot
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— on the doorstep in fine weather.

The harp was farther away from realization than it had been in the beginning, but the people zealously prayed even though they had private questions as to Stephen’s need for a harp! Now, a harp was a nice thing, to be sure, and Irishmen loved harps. But why for Stephen Doyle, who needed new blankets and a new plow? Surely these were more important than a harp for a man who did not even know how to play one and who had never read a piece of music in his life?

But if the people had changed, Stephen had changed also. He felt the very palpable presence of concern all about him, with the prescience of the blind, and he wondered at it. He heard kind voices, he who had never known kindness except for the old Sisters. He became a different man, no longer shy and running from another human being. He even developed some esteem for himself, and stopped believing he was detestable and unworthy. He even dared to hope that he would have true friends in time. He found himself talking not too awkwardly to the villagers who accosted him. He bartered his baskets for necessities and at Christmas he was speechless at little gifts, he who had never received a gift before. A fine stuffed goose, baked and delicious, found itself on his table. And, as he discovered simple human sympathy and concern, he dared to turn to the God he had felt had never known him or cared for him. His love for God, his reverence for the voices of God, seemed less presumptuous now, less blasphemous. He approached God timidly, at first with shrinking, then with the sure knowledge that God welcomed him as a son. He knelt with Veronica every day now, at Mass, and received Communion.

One day the priest told Stephen that when his father was dying he had asked for his son. “He was wishing to make some amends; he knew he had not been a kind father to you and that he had not loved you. But death opens our eyes. He called over and over for you, to ask your forgiveness, my son. But you had gone away, for three days.”

Stephen, the somber and reserved, burst into the first tears he had shed since his childhood. “Always, he would tell me I had killed ‘his Mary’. He never said ‘your mother’ to me, so it was believing, I was, that not only my father hated me but my dead mother near Our Blessed Lord’s throne. I had divided love from itself. I had brought disaster, by being born, to those who loved each other dearly. That is the burden I have always borne, Father.”

Then he said, “I had not gone far. I had hidden in a barn in the country. For three days and three nights, without food. I had thought me that if I went away my Dada would die in peace, without the hatefulness of the sight of me before him.”

“Do you forgive him now, Stephen?” asked the priest, much moved.

“I never held it against him,” said the young man. “I held it against only myself.”

So Stephen, assured that his father had wanted him at the last, took another step forward in grace and faith, and the people of the village, by the time spring had returned, told each other that Stephen was ‘another lad’. Even Veronica’s parents stopped scowling at Stephen, particularly since the priest had informed them that Stephen had promised him that he would never ask Veronica to be his wife. He refrained, discreetly, from telling them the other condition Stephen had mentioned, that he would marry Veronica only when she asked him to do so.

The high summer came, with its yellow cloak of grain and its green leaves and its blossoms in the small meadows and its murmurs of mystery in the woods. Once Father O’Connor thought that as Stephen no longer spoke of a harp he had resigned himself to the probability of never having one. But after a fierce thunderstorm he told the priest, “I heard the music of creation last night, Father, and the singing of high strings, and the chattering of water on the trees, and then, at dawn, the sweet hymns of the birds. I know, without knowing how I know, that I could make a harp sing so, for God’s delight.”

He also said, “I know how the angels charm the ear of God, and my hands — they are idle.” He held the strong brownness before him, though he could not see them, and he sighed from his heart. “I hear the angelic music at night, Father, when all is still.”

It was over a year now since he had returned to Darcy. He was strong and well, and his tall wide frame was fleshed, and he had learned how to bundle hay and make hayricks as well as a man with eyes, for his hands had become his eyes at last. He was never tired of working. His dark eyes were bright with health. He laughed often, if softly, and sometimes he even joked. There was nowhere that he was not welcome, even in the house of the Killeens, who were impatiently pressing Veronica to marry the blacksmith’s brawny son. Stephen was now twenty-three, no longer a youth, no longer even young. He was not even a shadow of the boy who had gone off to the wars for the Sassenaghs’ shilling, and he was certainly not the crushed and hopeless man who had returned. The slow deadness of his voice had gone forever.

If it had not been for Stephen’s yearning for a harp Father O’Connor would have been content that Stephen had finally been accepted by his fellow-man for himself, that he was understood by them, and that he had some measure of love. The priest prayed, thanking God that Stephen had been accepted into the brotherhood of kindly men, and he told himself that surely it was enough. After all, all men had secret yearnings which were never destined to be fulfilled, because of the wisdom of God who knew best. Those most precious yearnings would be granted in heaven, where the noblest dreams are, and uncorrupted by the world.

Old Granny Guilfoyle, who had had a broken hip for several years, decided to die on a late summer morning, two hours after midnight. She had been dying regularly four times a year, but as she always chose a lovely night to do so, Father O’Connor was not vexed with her. Moreover, she was far over one hundred years in age and earned her own living by weaving mats for cold floors. When she felt that she was dying again she would rap her one window sharply with her crutch and a devoted neighbor would come running. The neighbor’s wife came for Father O’Connor this morning, begged his pardon and said that ould Granny must surely be dying now. She was lying with her eyes wide open and rolled back.

“Ah, and it’s sure I am now that the angels have come for me, Father,” she said to the priest when he entered the one stony room of her hut. Her voice was very strong and young — as usual when she was dying — and very happy. Everyone called her Granny, she who had never had a man of her own and no child. She was the pride of the village because of the sturdiness, common sense and virtue of her character, though, as the villagers said, “she had the sharp tongue on her, like knives.” No one could ever recall that she had ever uttered a malicious word, though she was a grand gossip and knew everyone ‘inside and out’. So as she was dying again there was a knot of people concernedly waiting near her open door, even at this dark warm hour of the morning.

As Granny had received Extreme Unction several years ago, she could not receive it again. She had sent for Father O’Connor to hear her confession and prepare her, through prayer, for the seat in heaven which had waited for her during these endless years.

“What makes you think, Granny, that you are going to die now?” asked Father O’Connor, yawning. Someone had lit the candles beside the bedside and had lifted the ancient woman on her rough pillows.

“It was the angels I heard,” said Granny. She was small and crippled and her white hair was very thin, and her cheeks had long ago fallen inwards. But her blue eyes were the eyes of a healthy girl — as always.

“And did you now?” said the priest, opening his book. He knew that Granny slept little, and he suspected that she found the nights lonely when all about her the village slept and the moon rode high.

Granny’s eyes snapped at the priest, who was young enough to be her great-grandson, and they were fiery blue in the candlelight. “It’s mocking me you are, Father,” she said with some sharpness. She leaned sideways to look at the page in the book, and though she had never worn spectacles she could see like a hawk. “It’s the wrong page you have, boyo,” she remarked reprovingly. She was quite right, and the priest hastily found the proper page. Granny settled down on her pillows with contentment. “Aye, I heard the angels, and it was no wind I heard. I heard their wings and their words.”

As Granny had never remarked on any angelic visitations before, but had been convinced that her time in Purgatory would be very long because of her really nonexistent sins, Father O’Connor was a little curious. He was also an Irishman, and to the Irish the supernatural is always very close. “What did the angels say, Granny?” he asked.

She regarded him thoughtfully. “You’ll be mocking me again, Father, but I will tell you the truth. Oh, it was the lovely voice the passing angel had! He said, ‘This is the first time, I am thinking, when one was ever given before.’ ”

“Well?” said Father O’Connor, impatiently. “And what does that mean, Granny? ‘Before’ what?”

“Now, Father, is it for the likes of me to know what that meant? You have not been brought up proper,” she added, somewhat severely. “Questioning, you are, an ould woman on her deathbed. The young are impudent these days. But when one angel said that, the other said, ‘Great is the mercy of Almighty God, and it’s hoping, I am, that it will not be misunderstood or treated profanely.’ Oh, it was the lovely voices they had as they flew over me house!”

She looked at the kneeling friends near her bed. “You’ll be leaving for a bit,” she said to them, “while I am confessing to this boyo.”

The neighbors retired obediently. Father O’Connor sat and thought. Then he shook himself. It was a strange conversation for angels to be having as they flew over a very old lady’s house, and it meant nothing at all. Father O’Connor also doubted that angels would speak in an Irish fashion so that Granny, overhearing, would understand them. He was of the opinion that pure spirits spoke a language not to be heard by human ears, if they spoke in tongues at all. So Father O’Connor dismissed the angelic story and settled down to listen to Granny’s long list of sins, practically all of them imaginary. She made a perfect Act of Contrition. Then the priest came to the most solemn part of all — the dispatching of a human soul about to take wing from its body at any instant. He hesitated. Granny was most decidedly not about to take wing or anything else, and he glanced up at her. He started.