Cast A Cold Eye, page 17
“The seanachie today is more of an entertainer than anything else, just another one getting up at a ceili and doing his turn between the dancing. But, still, you know, it can be more than that too. Every priest is a kind of seanachie, isn’t he? Keeping alive a way of life. Preserving a body of teaching in such a way that it makes sense to ordinary people. Upholding long tradition.”
“Do the secular and the clerical often come together in the role?” Jack asked.
The priest was silent a long time before he answered.
“Yes,” he said. “Sometimes they do.”
“Where does your tale in the pub fit in? Is that secular or clerical? Or both?”
“Maybe a little of both,” the priest said. Finally he looked up. “Now, Jack,” he said, and reached across the low table and took hold of Jack’s arm, “you’ve got me going on here like some senile old fellow whose mind is half lost in the bogs.” He sat back and poured hot tea into his cup. “Let’s talk about more pleasant things. It’s not often I get to talk to someone with your education, you know. Tell me all about the books you’ve written.”
Half an hour later, Jack left, promising to bring over copies of his books for the priest to read. But he still couldn’t make up his mind if he liked the old man or not.
“It was great,” Jack told Grainne that evening on the phone. “She made chicken and potato salad and peas, just the way my grandmother did when I was a kid. She’ll work out fine. And I feel almost like a stranger in my own house, she has everything so shiny clean. . . .
“I did. I went to the Cliffs of Moher. They’re fantastic. Not quite as good to look at as you, but they’re beautiful. You’ve never been there? No, I don’t mind going back. Of course. . . .
“Eight pages. Eight terrific pages of my patented deathless prose. My agent’s going to love me even more than she does already. Oh, and I got a bundle of mail today. Books, manuscripts, letters. I feel like I’m back to normal. Oh, and a speaking engagement in Galway, if I want it. I don’t know. I was going to call them this afternoon, but I forgot. . . .
“Which reminds me. I visited Father Henning today, the village witch doctor. Oh, come on, if it’s so disrespectful, why are you laughing so hard? I went for tea. Well, it wasn’t as lively as the Mad Hatter’s tea party, but it was interesting. He’s a sly old fellow, that Father Henning. He’s got his secrets, I’ll bet, and I’d love to know what they are. Yes, I know it’s my turn. I’ll ask him over next week. If I can fit him into my busy social calendar. . . .
“And I miss you, did I mention that? I do. Yes, really. Can you come on Friday? Well, let me know as soon as you do. Yes, very much. Good. I’m glad to hear that, Grainne. Okay, well, I’ll call on Wednesday, then. Remember I miss you.”
He stood in the open doorway, as he had several times before in his stay, but this time it was to taste the fresh, clean air on this surprisingly mild night. Overhead, the sky was deep and black, with pinpoint stars that twinkled. In the distance ahead of him, down the hill, he could hear the steady, dull roar of the Atlantic, waxing and waning like a gigantic, neverending heartbeat.
He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, leaning against the doorjamb. Behind him in the living room, RTE, the Irish radio station, was playing a Crystal Gayle record. Her voice floated out past him into the stillness of the night.
No visions here. No spirits. No men dying of starvation in the road. No women holding out the bodies of their—
He would not think about that. He’d had a brief bad spell, yes, that was true, but he could account for it. The dislocation, the strangeness of the place, the book weighing on his mind and some of the stark scenes he’d read about in his research on the Famine, the coming to Ireland at last, after all these years. All that, combined with a rampant, and frequently lurid, imagination.
He blew out a long stream of cigarette smoke and watched it dissipate in the clear night air.
It was fine. Everything was fine.
The Crystal Gayle record ended and one by Shelley West and David Frizzell began, “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma.”
Listening to it, he smiled happily. He hadn’t come such a great distance, after all.
Singing the lyrics along with the record, he closed the door on the night and went inside.
CHAPTER 11
On Tuesday, he started the book all over again. He’d thought at first he could work directly on what he’d done so far, just getting the pages up on the computer screen and revising them as he went along. After two pages, he decided it was too confusing that way. He took a fresh disk and started all over again. He had a whole new way of beginning the book in mind now, and the words just flowed from his fingers into the keyboard and appeared in front of him on the screen as if they were coming in from someplace else, someplace beyond him. This was better, this was the right way. The characters in the story were alive now, talking, working, doing things, as they had not been before. He revised the setting he’d had in mind, making it even more like Doolin and the surrounding area, adding details, and everything fell into place as if this were the one and only way to write the book. He finished seven pages in the morning—not bad, since he’d been starting all over again, with a whole new approach—while Peggy Mullen did whatever it was she did in the rest of the house.
He had lunch at the Seafoam, although Mrs. Mullen—she promised meatloaf for the evening, and fresh bread—had urged him to eat a sandwich of the leftover chicken. In the Seafoam, he got talking with two lorry drivers who were making deliveries in Doolin and the nearby area. They each bought a round of pints of lager, and by the time they left, Jack thought it best to walk off some of the beer before driving on these Irish roads . . . and, besides, it would give Andy and Tom a chance to be far away with their lorries and their quart-and-a-half of beer apiece.
He ended up spending the afternoon poking through Doolin’s few shops, buying a couple of odds and ends, just to give himself a chance to look around more than he had and possibly meet a few people. He found that, with his own changed and more open attitude, he did meet some of the people. He chatted with the shopkeepers, quickly realizing that they already knew a few things about him and were only too eager, in their quiet way, to learn more. Before he realized it, the afternoon was drawing on toward evening. He stopped at McGlynn’s—only a half-pint this time—before heading home to Mrs. Mullen’s meatloaf and the book he had to read.
His days fell into that easy pattern and, to his pleasure, he found he was feeling better, eating better, sleeping better, a walking advertisement, he thought with satisfaction, for the health-giving properties of living in Ireland. The regular routine was fine for his work and the pages accumulated easily each morning. Mrs. Mullen willingly kept him supplied with tea while he was in his office, and she put a hot meal on the table every evening, just minutes before Deirdre Corcoran arrived outside in her car to take her home, herself having just put a meal in front of the priest. Jack felt an odd sort of kinship with the priest through that.
He was usually out and around in the afternoons, getting fresh air and exercise. And in the evenings, he did his reading and made notes on his work for the next day. By the end of that week, he’d sent off the book review to the Washington Post. The day before, another book review assignment had arrived from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He called the literary society in Galway. In typical Irish fashion, they were not yet certain of the exact date of their next meeting, let alone the one after that, but they were delighted to hear from him and were very excited to know he’d be addressing them. As soon as their schedule was set, they’d call, now that they knew where to reach him.
Everything was normal. Everything was better than normal, and he was feeling just fine.
The only dark spot in his life was that Grainne couldn’t come for the weekend.
Her friend Mary couldn’t fill in for her, and her parents were still in Liverpool, so Grainne was stuck keeping the shop open herself. Jack immediately said he’d come to Dublin for the weekend, but Grainne firmly said no to that. She’d be much happier if he just went on with his work and got as much done as possible, because she knew he’d fall behind in it while she was there. But her parents would be back soon, probably in a week, and maybe then she could come for more than two days. And were there any books he wanted her to look for while she could?
The days went by. Mrs. Mullen wasn’t to come on Saturdays or Sundays—that was the arrangement—but she saw to it that the refrigerator was well stocked with food that was easy to heat up.
On the weekend, Jack decided to skip the pubs on Friday night in favor of reading the new book he had to review. On Saturday evening, he opted for McGlynn’s and found, to his pleasure, several young musicians who played a good number of tunes he recognized. Even when the words were in Irish, he at least knew the English sense of them and the melody.
On Sunday morning, he went to Mass, waited to shake hands with Father Henning afterward, and invited the priest to tea on Wednesday. Father Henning said he’d be there. Jack was pleased to find that there were now quite a number of people in the crowd outside the church to whom he could nod or speak a greeting and who greeted him in return. He did see that same ominous-looking little group of four oldtimers, but they didn’t seem to notice him and, besides, who cared anyway?
The pages piled up, slowly, steadily, pleasantly.
The house and the kitchen, under Mrs. Mullen’s silent control, ran without his giving them a thought. There was a hot meal on the table every evening and Jack thought he might be putting on a pound or two.
Another couple of letters arrived and he was now answering each one the day it came.
He talked to Grainne on the phone at least every other evening, and began counting the days till she’d arrive.
He knew people in the village now and always had a remark to make, as they did, about the weather.
The weather was, day by day, moving closer to winter in this northern latitude. Over a couple of weeks, he noted that dawn was arriving later all the time, and that evening darkness came earlier. The mornings were uniformly gray, and a heavy cloud cover, thick and rolling and massive, pressed down on the land. There might be a couple of hours in the afternoon—shorter all the time, it seemed—when the daylight was brighter, but for most of the day the air itself seemed the stonegray color of rocks. It rained for a couple of hours at least, each and every day, and the gray air had a nasty, biting, icy feel.
Father Henning came for tea on Wednesday.
He arrived at the door with Deirdre Corcoran standing at the bottom of the steps just behind him. She had driven him over and, if Mr. Quinlan had no objection, she’d take tea with Mrs. Mullen in the kitchen and then drive the priest home after.
Peggy Mullen had outdone herself in preparing the tea. It was a full, old-fashioned tea, with hard-boiled eggs, cheese, and a variety of light sandwiches, fresh-baked scones, almost a meal itself. Deirdre lent a hand in the kitchen and with the serving.
When the two men were finally alone in the living room, Jack quietly ventured the opinion that Mrs. Mullen seemed to be enjoying her work. Father Henning wiped his mouth delicately with a napkin, and when he took it away, his lips were turned up in a smile.
“Oh, I’d say so, yes,” he said. “Well, it’s no surprise, is it? You can bet safe money that they’ll be telling all the details of this tea, the two of them, for weeks to come.”
“This?” Jack said, indicating the food.
“Not so much the food as the occasion,” Father Henning said. “You and I, you know, make up the entirety of Doolin’s gentry.”
It struck Jack instantly that maybe that was the reason he’d felt like such an outsider with the people of the village. Americans weren’t accustomed to thinking that way, so maybe that was why he’d missed it. Gentry, eh? Well, of course. Doolin had no professional people, no lawyers or doctors—you had to drive to another town for those services—so it was only natural that the local people would regard a stranger like himself as something special: a writer, who made his own hours, worked if and when the mood was on him, and had money in his pocket to boot. Of course the people of Doolin would look at him with a mixture of respect, curiosity, and suspicion.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said pleasantly. Then another thought struck him, the darkly shadowed memory of the visions—they were only visions, that was all they could be—that he’d seen in the road and on the side of the hill and that seemed almost to remind him of something else. And as he thought of them, the remembered melody of the tune from the pub, the wordless song that had followed him from the village all the way to his door, floated back into his mind, as clear and as haunting as it had been that night.
“I suppose you’re right,” he said again, more slowly this time. Father Henning, deeply involved with the fresh scones, looked up at him and nodded. “But, you know,” Jack pressed on, his voice casual, “the Irish have a long history of, shall we say, resentment of the gentry. I wonder if my presence here has provoked any resentment.”
Father Henning sipped his tea and helped himself to a fresh cup. Jack hadn’t touched his yet. The priest sat back comfortably on the couch, one arm stretched along the back. He looked very composed and Jack noted the youthful way in which the elderly man moved and held himself, fully at ease with his body. “Have you felt any resentment?”
Another question, Jack thought. Doesn’t this man ever give any answers?
“Yes, I have,” he said, watching the priest’s face. “I have, and I thought maybe you could explain it. I’d like to be done with it, frankly, and I hoped that you could tell me what to do.” Okay, priest, he added silently, go to it. Let’s have a straight comment.
“How long will you be staying here?”
Jack had to smile. “Father,” he said, “I’ve got to hand it to you. I really do. Do you realize that you never answer a question? Except to ask another one? Do you realize that?”
“Really?” the priest said. “Do I?”
They looked at each other for a minute, then both burst out laughing.
When the brief laughter subsided, Jack said, “What does the length of my stay have to do with it?”
Father Henning pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. Jack thought he looked much more pleasant when he was smiling. Now, with deep creases across his forehead and dark lines around his mouth and eyes, he looked somehow sinister, like a man who carried a secret that he wanted to, but could not, reveal.
When he answered at last, he spoke slowly, carefully. It struck Jack that the priest was weighing every word, attempting to convey to him some unspoken message that was infinitely more important than the actual words he was speaking.
“Jack,” he said, “you’ve come here as an observer, you might say. And no one likes to be looked at as an object of curiosity, least of all the . . . relatively unsophisticated people you find in a place like Doolin. These are decent people, Jack, living by their lights as best they can, keeping body and soul together and asking little more. It’s a hard life. For many of them, it’s no easier a life than they might have had a hundred years ago, or three hundred, or even more. They’re good people, mind, I’m not saying otherwise, but they have a strong preference”—the priest lowered his head and looked at Jack over the tops of his glasses—“for being left alone.”
Jack exhaled slowly, never taking his eyes from the other man’s face. What the priest had said was clear enough, and made sense, in a way. But the things he had not said, Jack thought, seemed even clearer.
“Am I in some danger?” he asked, his voice dry, almost casual.
“What makes you ask that?”
“Father, listen,” Jack said, finally letting the impatience show, “I asked you here for a pleasant afternoon, a nice little visit, and not to grill you with questions. It wasn’t my intention to get into a debate with you or to play rhetorical games. That was a serious question. A very serious question, in fact. Am I in danger?”
“Has anything happened that makes you feel threatened?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, cut the questions, okay?” Jack’s impatience now boiled over, its tide swelled by the memories that he had, for a while, pushed out of his mind but that now were back in all their deathly, bloody clarity. In his thoughts, the mouth of the dead man in the road yawned open and a worm crawled over the chipped and broken teeth. The woman on the hillside, shrouded in fog, her lips and chin slimy red with blood, stretched out her thin arms and offered up the sacrificial body of her dead infant child. The child’s head dropped back, loose and lifeless as the twisted neck of a chicken. Blood dripped steadily, almost ran, from the torn and shredded flesh of the child’s feet. A corpse with his own face walked toward him, reaching for his arm. And blending with the pictures, floating out of the fog of memory like the ghostly soundtrack of a movie, was the yearning, sobbing music of the pipes.
The priest was still watching him. The lines were still cut deeply into the dry skin of his face. He took his arm from the back of the sofa and joined his fingers together as closely as arthritis would permit. The joints stood out in hard bony knots.
“Okay?” Jack’s sudden wave of anger grew bitter with the fright that had lurked quietly at the back of his mind, and in the face of the old man’s seeming calm. “Okay? You’re supposed to . . .” Jack cut himself off sharply as he realized he’d raised his voice. “You’re supposed to help people,” he said more quietly, trying to filter some of the accusatory tone from his words. “You’re supposed to answer questions, not respond with only more questions. I asked you something very serious. Do you have an answer?”
“I am answering your question,” Father Henning said very softly, his voice little more than a whisper of wind over gravel. “Has anything happened that makes you feel threatened?”
