Bird of Passage

by Catherine Czerkawska

  Alasdair was holding out his hand. ‘May I?’ He nodded at the document. Reluctantly, the priest handed it over. Alasdair took his time, finding his glasses, reading it closely and with obvious interest. It was partly printed and partly annotated in a thin scrawl.

  He threw the priest’s own words back at him, with a tinge of irony. ‘With all due respect to you, this says nothing about criminal tendencies. It says only that Finn has been found having a guardian who does not exercise proper guardianship, whatever that means. And given that Finn must have been no more than seven years old when this was signed, I can’t see that he can ever have been a reformatory boy.’

  ‘Well, well. It’s a moot point. The child was obviously beyond care and control when he was admitted. A bad boy from a bad home. And believe me, sir, you’ll have the guards at your door soon enough. In fact I’m surprised they haven’t been here before this.’

  Isabel still looked worried, albeit puzzled, but Kirsty saw – to her surprise – that Alasdair’s smile had broadened. ‘The guards?’ He actually chuckled. ‘He means the police, Isabel. But I wonder what the Irish Gardai would be doing in Scotland. And I wonder how they would be concerning themselves with a young man who has finished his schooling – such as it was – and is no longer their legitimate concern. Or, I might add, yours.’

  Father Connolly looked affronted. ‘I think you overstep the mark, Mr Galbreath.’

  ‘No, sir. You do. The boy is in my employ. It is legal and above board. I have consulted my family solicitor on the matter. I cannot even begin to unpick the unholy tissue of illegality which must have lead to his committal in the first place – a wee lad, hardly seven years old! What was his crime? Where were his rights in all this? Did he drop a sweetie paper on the street? Oh but he has told me some tales, sir, and they do not bear repeating here, in this company.’

  ‘Lies. Lies and exaggerations.’

  ‘Aye, likely. For it is very hard for me to believe such horrors, and yet what young boy could invent them? But the fact remains that he is seventeen now, a grown man, and since any crime was committed against him, rather than by him, neither your church, nor the Irish Courts have any legitimate hold over him. So I’ll thank you to finish your tea, get back in your car, and leave this island, where you are most certainly not welcome!’

  The priest left, maintaining his politeness, but it was – so Kirsty thought – a chilly and strained goodbye.

  ‘You haven’t heard the end of this!’ was his parting shot.

  When the green car had disappeared round the bend in the track, Alasdair sent her to fetch Finn.

  ‘I need a word with your mother,’ he said. ‘But you, Kirsty, be nice to the lad. He’s had a bit of a shock today.’

  ‘I’m always nice to him.’

  ‘Aye. You are.’

  Out in the dairy, she found Finn crouching under a table, curled into a ball. There was no way he could efface himself, the size of him, but he was having a good try, like a dog terrified of thunder. She crawled in beside him.

  ‘Is he taking me back?’

  She slipped her arms around him and pulled him close, rubbing at his back to warm him.

  ‘Course not. You should have heard my grandad giving him what for!’

  ‘The priest?’ He looked momentarily horrified, as though Alasdair might have brought a curse down upon his head.

  ‘Aye. I didn’t understand the half of what he said. The priest was trying to make out you were a criminal or something. He had this bit of paper. He said it was from a court. It talked about your guardian. A guardian who does not exercise proper guardianship, it said. Did it mean your mum?’

  I don’t know. I never saw it before in my life.

  ‘But you’ll not be going back there, Finn. The boy is in my employ. It is legal and above board, that’s what my grandad said. You’re to stay here, and that’s all there is to it!’

  ‘He won’t give up so easily.’

  ‘He’ll have to. You don’t know my grandad.’

  Father Connolly didn’t give up so easily and the following morning, he was back at the farm.

  ‘One last attempt to make you see sense,’ he said.

  Alasdair, who had been expecting something of the sort, was waiting for him in the yard. This time, there was no invitation to step inside, no tea and biscuits. Isabel had gone shopping to the village, and Alasdair had sent Finn off to a remote part of the farm to mend fences. But Kirsty was lurking at the back of the door, listening.

  ‘Mr Galbreath, I’ve made it abundantly clear to you,’ said the priest, ‘what kind of a boy you have on your hands here. The potential problems. If he stays, then you have to understand that we wash our hands of him completely. You won’t be able to send him back. We have no further responsibility for him.’

  ‘That’s fine by me. But tell me something, before you go. These boys, these wee lads you have committed to these damned Dickensian hellholes you call industrial schools...’

  ‘Places of charity. Who else would care for them?’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, apart from anything else, the state must surely be paying for these children. The state commits them, the state must be paying for them.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Come on! Do you take me for a fool?’

  ‘Well...’

  ‘I thought so.’

  ‘There is a small capitation payment. But not enough! It is never enough.’

  ‘I’m not convinced. And by God, you have them out the door fast enough when they hit sixteen. I assume that’s because the payments cease from that date. But you don’t free them. Even then! Oh no! You send them off to do whatever work you choose for them. And threaten them with the police if they don’t stay. It’s iniquitous.’ Kirsty could hear that he was working himself up into a rage. ‘Iniquitous. It’s a form of slavery. Nothing less than a form of legalised slavery!’

  The priest seemed taken aback by his vehemence. Perhaps he wasn’t accustomed to this kind of head-on challenge to his authority.

  He began to bluster. ‘They need supervision. These children have become institutionalised.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. We had another boy here. Francis O’Brien. He came here for a couple of years, to the tatties.’

  ‘Aye. And you’re glad enough to exploit the boys in your potato fields!’

  ‘A fair point. A very fair point. But the conditions here are better than most. And let me tell you, the lad in question always seemed happy to be here. But sadly, he never came back. We looked for him a third time, but he never came back.’

  ‘He must have been sixteen. He would have been sent out, found work.’

  ‘Aye. As I said. The day they hit sixteen. Out of the door faster than you can say knife. But I don’t think Francis did find work you know. He was a poor soul and I don’t think he would have been fit for any sort of work, except to carry a tune in the church choir now and then. But he didn’t come back. And Finn tells me that was because he died.’

  ‘I know nothing about that!’

  ‘Francis had a fall and he died. Finn told me all about it.’

  ‘Ah, you mean you had this from the boy! These boys can’t be trusted. You can’t believe anything they tell you. They invent things.’

  ‘They heard it, the other boys. They were listening at the door and they heard it. The next day, they were told about it. This so-called accident. I always wondered why poor Francis had that look about him. Like a beaten dog. I always wondered what went on. Were you teaching at the school at that time, Father Connolly?’

  Connolly’s face had turned a strange colour. Like no colour at all. Kirsty was watching him from her hiding place behind the door. Like crowdie cheese, she thought.

  ‘No...’ He had the car door open, and was stumbling in his hurry to get inside. ‘No indeed. I’m the parish priest and the chaplain. I go into the school now and then. Conduct masses. But I don’t teach there.�
� He looked at his watch. ‘The ferry,’ he said. ‘I’ll miss my ferry. I must go.’

  ‘I think you must.’

  The priest paused. Looked back at Alasdair. There was a sudden strange moment between them. A small silence. An acknowledgement of something. As though at another time and in another place, the relationship between the two of them might have been quite different.

  ‘Good luck to you with the boy.’

  ‘Thank-you. But I think I’ve made the right decision, don’t you?’

  The priest paused and then nodded, briefly, and got into his car, slamming the door behind him.

  Alasdair watched until the car and its occupant had disappeared. Only then did he relax.

  ‘Kirsty, my wee lamb,’ he called. ‘You shouldn’t be listening at keyholes.’

  She came out from behind the door. ‘I wasn’t listening at the keyhole! I was just listening. Will he come back again, do you think?’

  ‘Not a chance. Get your boots and your coat on now, and find Finn. Tell him everything’s sorted. Nothing to worry about. Just as I said. This is his home now.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  For the first time in his life, Finn knew the luxury of his own room, even though it was only the sparsely furnished loft above the kitchen, accessed by a precarious ladder. It was a clean and private space that he could call his own. He kept his few books here, mostly gifts from Kirsty, his clothes, the plain wooden rosary beads which his mother had given him and which he had managed to carry with him for years. This was the single possession from his early childhood which nobody had ever taken away from him and it had gone with him to the farm in Donegal, tucked into the brown suitcase.

  The loft was warm, since one of the walls retained the heat from the kitchen fire. At Alasdair’s insistence, he always ate his evening meal with the family, but when he climbed up the ladder, often bringing a mug of tea with him, he had a sensation of contentment. Nobody disturbed him, nobody beat him, nobody so much as shouted at him.

  When he slept, it was without the deep current of fear that had dogged his nights at the school. Isabel did his laundry for him, but she wouldn’t venture up the ladder. Every week or so, she would get him to throw his sheets and pillowcases down, and give him a pile of clean linen to take up with him. Kirsty would often clamber up to his room, when her mother was safely out of the house, at her Women’s Guild meetings or her church choir. She would come bearing gifts of books and biscuits, or her old board games: Ludo and Snakes and Ladders, which she would make him play whether he wanted to or not.

  From time to time, she would try to sketch him, to capture him on paper, but she found it almost impossible. There was some elusive quality about him that she could never pin down to her own satisfaction, no matter what material she used – pencil, pen, paint, charcoal.

  In winter, they went to her bedroom instead, where there was usually a fire burning in the grate. They would play records on the Dansette, a Christmas present from her grandfather. Kirsty was intensely curious about Finn’s past, but her grandfather had cautioned her not to press him for too much information.

  ‘I think he has had a terrible time, and when we have a bad time, we tend to forget things. It’s self preservation, Kirsty. It sometimes happens to soldiers, after a war. It happened to my own father. Let him tell you what he wants, when he wants.’

  Still, Kirsty found it hard to contain herself.

  ‘Why did they make you go to that school?’ she asked him, at last, her natural candour overcoming her discretion. ‘Why won’t you talk to me about it? You didn’t do something bad, did you? That priest was wrong, wasn’t he?‘

  ‘I’m ashamed to talk about it!’

  ‘Ashamed?’ she said, wonderingly.

  ‘The courts sent me. We were charged with being destitute.’

  ‘What’s destitute?’

  ‘Penniless. They said we had no money. Which was right enough, I suppose. They said my mother couldn’t cope. But we weren’t destitute. Not really.’

  She took his hand and he didn’t object. His fingers were long and brown, with calluses on them. The mud was caked into his nails as usual. She could feel his fingers flexing against hers, as though he were clenching and unclenching a fist.

  ‘So what happened to your mother, Finn? Why did she leave you?’

  ‘She never left me. They made her give me up. They said she wasn’t fit to look after me, so they put me in the school. They committed me and I couldn’t leave. Your grandad saw the court papers that day when the priest came. None of us could leave.’

  ‘Who said she wasn’t fit?’

  ‘A priest. Not the one who came here. It was the parish priest I think. And Mrs Maguire. Mrs Maguire in her horrible blue hat. They were hand in glove, that pair. I don’t even remember his name.’

  Who was Mrs Maguire? And what was her hat like?’ Kirsty could have laughed, it sounded so comical.

  ‘Mrs Maguire, from the Legion.’

  ‘What Legion?’

  ‘The Legion of Mary, what else?’

  He was speaking in riddles again. ‘I’ve never heard of them.’

  ‘Have you not? Do you not have the Legion here?’

  ‘I’ve never heard anyone speak of it. We have the Guild. Is it like the Guild?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe so.’

  Finn thought about Mrs Maguire from the Legion of Mary. She had worn a dark suit and a hat like a wig, with blue flowers all over it. The gauzy petals made her look as if she had bright blue hair. He had been afraid of that hat. She looked like something out the horror comics his mother wouldn’t let him see. And she carried a handbag over her arm, a bag so black, so shiny, that you could see your face in it. It reminded Finn of a big black beetle. Black and shiny, like priest’s shoes.

  ‘I can see her now. She had a red notebook in her bag and sweets, a poke of boiled sweets. Sherbet lemons, I think. They were all stuck together. She broke one off, and she gave me a sweet.’

  She had popped it into his mouth before he could tell her that he wasn’t supposed to have sherbet lemons because they made his mouth sore.

  ‘She asked me a lot of questions about my mother, and she made notes in the book. She wrote down the things I said. I wish I hadn’t said anything. It was my fault. She made me get into a car.’

  He remembered the leathery smell of the seats in the car and the lemony taste of the sweet and the way it made his mouth sore afterwards. His mammy would be cross with Mrs Maguire for giving him the sweet without asking her first. She would make him rinse his mouth with warm water, with a bit of salt in it, to soothe it. But he didn’t remember much else about that day. They had driven for a long time. He had never been in a car before. It had made him feel sick. He and his mother always travelled by bus, or on foot. Each morning, she would walk him to school. He loved that walk, holding her hand, talking to her, swinging from her arm.

  Every day, on the way to school, they passed a warehouse, with a yard in front, and in the yard were half a dozen fat, friendly cats, black and white, ginger, tabby. He and his mother always stopped for five minutes to pet them and stroke them, scratching the sweet spot under the chin or behind the ears. He could see them now, their fat, jowly faces with bristling whiskers, their arched backs and soft fur. He could see himself petting the cats, and his mother saying, ‘Careful now, Finny. Gently. You have to be gentle.’ And the purring. The miracle of the purring, as though each cat had a small engine inside and the more he stroked and scratched, the louder the purring grew, the more he could feel that vibration through his fingers. But he didn’t want to talk about that. It was private. Not for sharing.

  In the car that day, Finn had fallen asleep, leaning against Mrs Maguire. She had smelled of mothballs and peppermint. When he woke up, it was to gathering darkness, and a driveway that seemed to go on for ever, with a big grey building, like you would imagine a prison, at the end of it. He could tell Kirsty about that. He could speak about that.

  ‘I remember get
ting to the school. That first day. The smell. Boiled cabbage and bleach. The sound of footsteps, running footsteps. They shaved my head. They said I was a dirty boy. But I don’t think I was. I had a bath when I could, and my mother made me wash every day.’

  Another picture came into his mind. Himself, standing in front of the sink, in his vest and underpants. There was soapy water in the sink, and his mother had a pink flannel and she was helping him to wash. She said ‘you have to wash up as far as possible and down as far as possible, Finny,’ and he said ‘what about possible?’ She started to giggle and he started giggling too, although he hadn’t the faintest idea what they were laughing about, but when she was happy, he felt happy too.

  ‘All the time, I was wondering where my mother was.’

  Kirsty was dismayed. This sort of thing was quite beyond her understanding.

  ‘What was wrong with her? Why did they send you away from her?’

  ‘There was nothing wrong with her. But she wasn’t allowed to be there. With me, I mean. I think they sent her somewhere else.’

  ‘What about your daddy? Couldn’t he have you?’

  ‘I don’t remember him. I remember my mother a lot better than I remember my father.’

  Finn hadn’t thought about him in years. His name was Ronnie O’Malley, and he was a singer. At least that was what his mother had told him. But now, he didn’t know what was true and what was made up, what he really remembered and what was only another story.

  ‘What was your mother called?’

  ‘Mary, Mary Flynn. Then she married my dad. She isn’t dead, Kirsty. Just somewhere else.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know. They would never tell me.’

  ‘Did she leave you?’

  ‘I don’t believe she would have done that. She used to say that she was from a town called Ballyhaunis, in County Mayo, but I’ve never been there, and I have no notion of what it was like.’