Grandmother and the Priests

by Taylor Caldwell

  “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, ver
y 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.

  “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 protégé — 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.”