Justina’s Priest
Only Justina Casey made sense, Father Clohessy reflected yet again, shaking his head over the recurrence of the thought, for truth to tell the girl made no sense at all. The contradiction nagged a little in a familiar way, as it did whenever Justina Casey, sinless as ever, made her confession. It caused Father Clohessy to feel inadequate, foolish even, that he failed to understand something that as a priest he should have.
Leaving the confessional she had just left herself, he looked around for her: at the back, near the holy-water stoup, she trailed her rosary through her fingers. ‘Father, I’m bad,’ she had insisted and, allotting her her penance, he had been again aware that she didn’t even know what badness was. But without the telling of her beads, without the few Hail Marys he had prescribed, she would have gone away unhappy. Of her own volition, every few days she polished the brass of the altar vases and the altar cross. She would be there on Saturday evening, a bucket of scalding water carried through the streets, the floor mop lifted down from its hook in the vestry cupboard. On Fridays she scraped away the week’s accumulation of candle grease and arranged to her satisfaction the out-of-date missionary leaflets.
Fifty-four and becoming stout, his red hair cut short around a freckled pate, Father Clohessy watched while Justina Casey dipped the tips of her fingers in the holy water and blessed herself before she left the church. Her footsteps were soft on the tiles, as if her devotion demanded that, as if she were of less importance than the sacred ground she walked on, less than the burning candles and the plaster Virgin, less even than the unread missionary leaflets. He remembered her at her First Communion, standing out a bit from the other children, a scraggy bunch of lily-of-the-valley pressed close to her. It was afterwards that she’d asked him if she could look after the brass.
The door of the church closed soundlessly behind her and Father Clohessy was aware of an emptiness, of something taken from him.
Justina dawdled, examining the goods in the shop windows. There were the tins of sweets in Hehir’s, and the glass jars in a row behind them, half full of the mixtures, the jelly babies and bull’s-eyes, soft-centred fruits, toffees. There were the fashions in Merrick’s, the window changed only a week ago, meat in Cranly’s, delft and saucepans in Natton’s. A fine dust had gathered on the dry goods in MacGlashan’s, on packets of Barry’s tea and the advertisements for Bisto and chicken-and-ham paste. Cabbage drooped outside Mrs Scally’s, the green fringe of the carrots was tinged with yellow.
‘How’s Justina?’ Mrs Scally enquired from the doorway, the flowered overall that encased her girth crossed over on itself beneath her folded arms. She always had her arms folded, Justina’s thought was as she stopped to hear what else Mrs Scally had to say. One shoulder taking the weight against the door-jamb, a single curler left in her hair, slippers on her feet and the folded arms: that was Mrs Scally unless she was weighing out potatoes or wrapping a turnip. ‘All right,’ Justina said. ‘I’m all right, Mrs Scally.’
‘I have apples in. Will you tell them up in the house I have apples in?’
‘I will.’
‘There’s a few tins of peaches that’s dinged. I wouldn’t charge the full.’
‘You told me that, Mrs Scally.’
‘Did you mention it in the house?’
‘I did surely.’
Justina passed on. She had spoken to Maeve about the peaches and her sister hadn’t said anything. But Mr Gilfoyle had heard her saying it and he’d laughed. When Micksie came in he said that if the dinge in the tin caused rust you’d have to be careful. Micksie was Maeve’s husband, Mr Gilfoyle was his father. Diamond Street was where they lived, where Maeve ruled the small household and most of the time was unable to hide the fact that she resented its composition. Capable and brisk of manner, a tall, dark-haired childless woman, Maeve considered that she’d been caught: when their mother had died there had been only she to look after Justina, their mother being widowed for as long as either of them could remember. And Maeve had been caught again when her father-in-law, miserable with the ailments of old age, had to be taken in; and again in not realizing before her marriage that Micksie had to be kept out of the pubs. ‘Oh, I have children all right,’ was how she often put it when there was sympathy for her childlessness.
Justina bought an ice-cream in the Today Tonight shop. The evening papers had just come off the Dublin bus. No-vote a Winner, the headline said and she wondered what that meant. People she knew were gathering items from the shelves, minerals in bottles and tins, frozen food from the central refrigerator, magazines from the racks. She walked about, licking at her ice-cream, nibbling the edge of the cone. Up one aisle and down another, past shoe polish and disinfectant and fire-lighters, carton soups reduced, everything handy in case you’d forgotten to get it in Superquinn.
‘You’re a great girl,’ one of two nuns remarked, reaching out for Kerrygold and dropping it into her wire basket. Older and more severe, the other nun didn’t say anything.
‘Ah, I’m not,’ Justina said. She held out her ice-cream, but neither nun licked it. ‘No way I’m great,’ Justina said.
‘What kept you?’ Maeve asked in the kitchen.
‘Mrs Scally was on about the peaches. Sister Agnes and Sister Lull were in the Today Tonight.’
‘What’d you go in there for?’
‘Nothing.’
Justina paused for an instant and then she told about the ice-cream and Maeve knew it was because her sister had suddenly considered it would be a lie to hold that back.
‘God, will you look at the cut of you!’ She shouted, furious, unable to help herself. ‘Aren’t there jobs to do here without you’re streeling about the town?’
‘I had to make my confession.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’
‘What’s up, Maeve?’
Maeve shook her head. She could feel a weariness in her eyes which made her want to close them, and then felt it spreading through her body. She returned to what she’d been doing before Justina came in, slicing cooked potatoes.
‘Lay the table,’ she said. ‘Take your anorak off and lay the table.’
‘I got a letter from Breda,’ Justina said.
She had closed the back door behind her but hadn’t come further into the kitchen. She had a way of doing that, just as she had a way of standing by the sink, not getting on with what she was there for, as if she’d forgotten everything. All their lives, for as long as Maeve could remember, she had been irritated by this shortcoming in her sister, as she was by Justina’s bringing back messages from the shopkeepers to say this or that commodity had come in or that there was a new bargain line, as she was by the telephone calls that came from a farmer nearly six miles from the town to say that Justina was again feeding his bullocks bunches of grass. Not that he objected, the man always said, only the bullocks could be frisky and maybe crowd her.
‘Will you read me Breda’s letter, Maeve?’
‘You keep away from that one, d’you hear me?’
‘Sure, Breda’s gone.’
‘And she’ll stay where she is.’
‘Will I lay the table, Maeve?’
‘Didn’t I ask you to?’
‘I’ll lay it so.’
Father Clohessy walked in the opposite direction from the one taken by Justina. The sense of loss that had possessed him when she left the church had given way to a more general feeling of deprivation that, these days, he was not often without. The grandeur of his Church had gone, leaving his priesthood within it bleak, the vocation that had beckoned him less insistent than it had been. He had seen his congregations fall off and struggled against the feeling that he’d been deserted. Confusion spread from the mores of the times into the Church itself; in combating it, he prayed for guidance but was not heard.
A familiar melancholy, not revealed in his manner, accompanied Father Clohessy in the minutes it took him to reach the limestone figure of the rebel leader in the square that was the centre of th
e town. That he considered it necessary to keep private his concern about the plight of his Church did nothing to lighten the burden of his mood, any more than the temporary absence from the parish of Father Finaghy did. At present undergoing a period of treatment after a car accident, Father Finaghy was extrovert and gregarious, a priest who carried his faith on to the golf-course, where it was never a hindrance. ‘Arrah, sure we do our best,’ Father Finaghy was given to remarking. Father Clohessy missed his companionship; almost a protection it seemed like sometimes.
‘Have you change, Father?’ a young woman begged from a doorway, a baby asleep in a shawl beside her. ‘A few coppers at all today?’
She said she’d pray for him and he thanked her, finding the coins she hoped for. He knew her; she was usually there. He might have asked her when he’d see her at Mass, but he didn’t bother.
Music blared across the small square from Mulvany’s Electrical and TV, giving way to the careless whine of Bob Dylan. Mulvany had established for himself a tradition of celebrating the birthdays of popular entertainers by playing a tribute: today Bob Dylan was sixty. Although one song only was played on these occasions, and no more than once during the day it related to, Father Clohessy considered it a disturbance in a quiet town and had once approached Mulvany about it. But Mulvany had argued that it was nostalgic for the older citizens to hear the likes of Perry Como or Dolly Parton coming out of the blue at them, and exciting for the youngsters to have the new arrivals on the music scene honoured.
That a priest’s protest had been so summarily dismissed was par for the course, an expression often used by Father Finaghy in his own unprotesting acceptance of the decline of clerical influence. The times they were a-changing, Bob Dylan’s reminder was repeated yet again before there was silence from Mulvany’s loudspeakers.
‘Isn’t that a grand day, Father?’ a woman remarked to him and he agreed that it was and she said thank God for it. He wondered if she knew, if any of them knew, that when he preached he was angry because he didn’t know what to say to them, that he searched for ways to disguise his distress, stumbling about from word to word. ‘How’s Father Finaghy?’ the woman asked him. ‘Have you heard, Father?’
He told her. Father Finaghy was making good progress; he’d heard that morning.
‘Wouldn’t it be the prayers said for him?’ the woman suggested, and he agreed with that, too, before he resumed his journey through the town to where he and Father Finaghy lodged.
His tea was ready for him there. Comeraghview, called after the mountains in the faraway distance, was a grey detached house with a handkerchief tree in a front garden protected from the main road by grey iron railings. It was he and Father Finaghy who had decided that the presbytery could be put to better use, who with their bishop’s permission, and in the end with his blessing, had given it over to become the youth centre the town had long been in need of.
‘I have ham and a salad for you,’ Father Clohessy’s landlady said, placing this food in front of him.
‘I will of course,’ Mr Gilfoyle said when Justina asked him to read Breda Maguire’s letter to her. ‘Have you it there?’
Justina had, and Mr Gilfoyle suggested that they’d take it out the back where they’d be private. His daughter-in-law went ballistic at any mention of Breda Maguire these days, never mind having to hear of her doings in Dublin. Time was when someone who’d take her sister off her hands was a relief for Maeve, but now that the two girls were grown up and Breda Maguire had gone off the rails it was naturally different.
‘I’m living in a great joint!’ he read aloud in the small flowerless back garden that had become a depository for the abandoned wash-basins and lavatory bowls and perforated ballcocks that his son had replaced in his work as a plumber. Nettles had grown up around cast-iron heating radiators and a bath; dandelions and docks flourished. Mr Gilfoyle had cleared a corner, where he kept a chair from the kitchen; on sunny mornings he read the newspaper there.
He was a moustached man, grey-haired, once burly and on the stout side, less so now, since time had established in him the varying characteristics of advancing years. His pronounced stoop, an arthritic shoulder, trouble with gallstones, fingers distorted by Dupuytren’s Disease had made another man of him. In his day he, too, had been a plumber.
‘The kind of house you wouldn’t know about,’ he read out, imagining what was described: a place where theatre people lived, coffee always on the go, late mornings. Mr Gilfoyle found it hard to believe that Breda Maguire had been given accommodation there, but he supposed it could be true.
Justina, sitting on the edge of the bath, had no such difficulty. She accepted without demur all that was related. She saw her friend in the green-and-blue kimono that was described. ‘Like a dragon wrapped round me,’ Mr Gilfoyle had read out and explained that a kimono was Japanese. He felt what he believed to be a gallstone changing position inside him somewhere, a twitch of pain that was only to be expected at his age he’d been told by the doctor he visited regularly.
‘Davy Byrne’s you’d never see only it’s jammed to the doors. The racing crowd, all that kind of thing.’ Breda Maguire was on the streets, Mr Gilfoyle said to himself. She had money, you could tell she had, nothing made up about that. The house she said she was stopping in was out Island-bridge way and again there was an echo of the truth in that, handy for the quays. The quays were where you’d find them, a bricklayer told him once, maybe fifty years ago, and it could still be where a man would go to look for a street woman. ‘I have a friend takes me out,’ he read. ‘Billy.’
‘Will you listen to that!’ Justina whispered. The name of a hotel where there were dances was mentioned, shops, cinemas. A wrist bangle had been bought, and Justina saw her friend and Billy at a counter with a glass top like the one in Hennessy’s the Clock Shop, necklaces and bangles laid out for them. She saw them in a café, a waitress bringing grills, the same as Justina had seen people eating in Egan’s, a chop and chips, bacon, egg and sausage. Billy was like the air pilot in the film she and Breda had watched on the television only the day before Breda went off. ‘How’s tricks with yourself?’ Mr Gilfoyle’s voice continued.
It would be impossible for Justina to respond to that because her learning difficulty deprived her of any communication that involved writing words down. But Breda had remembered, as naturally she would. ‘I’ll maybe give you a call one of these days,’ Mr Gilfoyle read out. The pain had shifted, had gone round to the back, like a gallstone maybe would.
‘Isn’t Billy great, the way he’d give her things?’ Justina said.
‘He is, Justina.’
‘Isn’t Billy a great name?’
‘It is.’
Covering a multitude of sins, Mr Gilfoyle assumed, a stand-in name for names Breda didn’t know, the presents another way of putting it that money had changed hands in some quayside doorway.
‘I’ll dream about Breda and Billy,’ Justina said, slipping down from the edge of the bath.
Father Clohessy listened when Justina put it into her confession that Maeve was cross with her because Breda telephoned. She put it into her confession that she went into the kitchen to tell what Breda had said and Maeve wouldn’t listen; and the next thing was she let drop a cup she was drying. It was then that Maeve began to cry, tears streaming down her cheeks, down her neck into the collar of her dress. As if it wasn’t nuisance enough, an old man who didn’t know how to make his bed forever on about his ailments. As if it wasn’t enough, Micksie in and out of the pubs, a girl with learning trouble, the back garden a tip. Was there a woman in Ireland could put up with more, when on top of everything a hooer the like of Breda Maguire got going again after they thought they’d seen the back of her?
All that Justina put into her confession. She was bad, she said. One minute she was laughing with Breda on the phone; the next, Maeve was crying in the kitchen. Breda said come up to Dublin and they’d have great gas. Get the money however, Breda said. Get it off Mr Gilfoyle, anything a
t all. Take the half-two bus, the same as she’d got herself. Come up for the two days, what harm would it do anyone? ‘I’ll show you the whole works,’ Breda said.
The fingers of Father Clohessy’s hands were locked together as he listened, that being his usual pose in the confessional, head turned so that one ear could pick up the revelations that were coming through the gauze of the grille. Among his confessants, it was only Justina he ever interrupted and he did so now.
‘Ah no, Justina, no,’ he said.
‘Will I say a Hail Mary for Maeve, Father?’
‘You wouldn’t want to go up to Dublin, Justina. You wouldn’t want to upset your sister more.’
‘It’s only Breda’s gone up there.’
‘I know, I know.’
When they were no more than five or six he remembered the two of them playing in Diamond Street, Justina’s black hair cut in a fringe and curling in around her face, Breda as thin as a weasel. She’d been the bane of the nuns when she’d attended the convent, sly and calculating, all knowing talk and unspoken defiance. She’d plastered herself with lipstick when she was older; in the end she’d worn a T-shirt with an indecency on it.
‘Would it be bad to go up on the bus, Father?’
‘I think maybe it would. Have you anything else to confess, Justina?’
‘Only Maeve was crying.’
‘Light a candle when you’ll leave the confessional. Do the floor on Saturday, do the brasses.’
Selected Stories Page 44
