Now, that girl had ways of tormenting me that Mother never knew of. She held my hand as we went down the hill, smiling sadly and saying how sorry she was for me, as if she were bringing me to the hospital for an operation.
‘Oh, God help us!’ she moaned. ‘Isn’t it a terrible pity you weren’t a good boy? Oh, Jackie, my heart bleeds for you! How will you ever think of all your sins? Don’t forget you have to tell him about the time you kicked Gran on the shin.’
‘Lemme go!’ I said, trying to drag myself free of her. ‘I don’t want to go to Confession at all.’
‘But sure, you’ll have to go to Confession, Jackie,’ she replied in the same regretful tone. ‘Sure, if you didn’t, the parish priest would be up to the house, looking for you. ’Tisn’t, God knows, that I’m not sorry for you. Do you remember the time you tried to kill me with the bread-knife under the table? And the language you used to me? I don’t know what he’ll do with you at all, Jackie. He might have to send you up to the Bishop.’
I remember thinking bitterly that she didn’t know the half of what I had to tell – if I told it. I knew I couldn’t tell it, and understood perfectly why the fellow in Mrs Ryan’s story made a bad confession; it seemed to me a great shame that people wouldn’t stop criticizing him. I remember that steep hill down to the church, and the sunlit hillsides beyond the valley of the river, which I saw in the gaps between the houses like Adam’s last glimpse of Paradise.
Then, when she had manoeuvred me down the long flight of steps to the chapel yard, Nora suddenly changed her tone. She became the raging malicious devil she really was.
‘There you are!’ she said with a yelp of triumph, hurling me through the church door. ‘And I hope he’ll give you the penitential psalms, you dirty little caffler.’
I knew then I was lost, given up to eternal justice. The door with the coloured-glass panels swung shut behind me, the sunlight went out and gave place to deep shadow, and the wind whistled outside so that the silence within seemed to crackle like ice under my feet. Nora sat in front of me by the confession box. There were a couple of old women ahead of her, and then a miserable-looking poor devil came and wedged me in at the other side, so that I couldn’t escape even if I had the courage. He joined his hands and rolled his eyes in the direction of the roof, muttering aspirations in an anguished tone, and I wondered had he a grandmother too. Only a grandmother could account for a fellow behaving in that heartbroken way, but he was better off than I, for he at least could go and confess his sins; while I would make a bad confession and then die in the night and be continually coming back and burning people’s furniture.
Nora’s turn came, and I heard the sound of something slamming, and then her voice as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and then another slam, and out she came. God, the hypocrisy of women! Her eyes were lowered, her head was bowed, and her hands were joined very low down on her stomach, and she walked up the aisle to the side altar looking like a saint. You never saw such an exhibition of devotion; and I remembered the devilish malice with which she had tormented me all the way from our door, and wondered were all religious people like that, really. It was my turn now. With the fear of damnation in my soul I went in, and the confessional door closed of itself behind me.
It was pitch-dark and I couldn’t see priest or anything else. Then I really began to be frightened. In the darkness it was a matter between God and me, and He had all the odds. He knew what my intentions were before I even started; I had no chance. All I had ever been told about Confession got mixed up in my mind, and I knelt to one wall and said: ‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned; this is my first confession.’ I waited for a few minutes, but nothing happened, so I tried it on the other wall. Nothing happened there either. He had me spotted all right.
It must have been then that I noticed the shelf at about one height with my head. It was really a place for grown-up people to rest their elbows, but in my distracted state I thought it was probably the place you were supposed to kneel. Of course, it was on the high side and not very deep, but I was always good at climbing and managed to get up all right. Staying up was the trouble. There was room only for my knees, and nothing you could get a grip on but a sort of wooden moulding a bit above it. I held on to the moulding and repeated the words a little louder, and this time something happened all right. A slide was slammed back; a little light entered the box, and a man’s voice said: ‘Who’s there?’
‘ ’Tis me, father,’ I said for fear he mightn’t see me and go away again. I couldn’t see him at all. The place the voice came from was under the moulding, about level with my knees, so I took a good grip of the moulding and swung myself down till I saw the astonished face of a young priest looking up at me. He had to put his head on one side to see me, and I had to put mine on one side to see him, so we were more or less talking to one another upside-down. It struck me as a queer way of hearing confessions, but I didn’t feel it my place to criticize.
‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned; this is my first confession,’ I rattled off all in one breath, and swung myself down the least shade more to make it easier for him.
‘What are you doing up there?’ he shouted in an angry voice, and the strain the politeness was putting on my hold of the moulding, and the shock of being addressed in such an uncivil tone, were too much for me. I lost my grip, tumbled, and hit the door an unmerciful wallop before I found myself flat on my back in the middle of the aisle. The people who had been waiting stood up with their mouths open. The priest opened the door of the middle box and came out, pushing his biretta back from his forehead; he looked something terrible. Then Nora came scampering down the aisle.
‘Oh, you dirty little caffler!’ she said. ‘I might have known you’d do it. I might have known you’d disgrace me. I can’t leave you out of my sight for one minute.’
Before I could even get to my feet to defend myself she bent down and gave me a clip across the ear. This reminded me that I was so stunned I had even forgotten to cry, so that people might think I wasn’t hurt at all, when in fact I was probably maimed for life. I gave a roar out of me.
‘What’s all this about?’ the priest hissed, getting angrier than ever and pushing Nora off me. ‘How dare you hit the child like that, you little vixen?’
‘But I can’t do my penance with him, father,’ Nora cried, cocking an outraged eye up at him.
‘Well, go and do it, or I’ll give you some more to do,’ he said, giving me a hand up. ‘Was it coming to Confession you were, my poor man?’ he asked me.
‘ ’Twas, father,’ said I with a sob.
‘Oh,’ he said respectfully, ‘a big hefty fellow like you must have terrible sins. Is this your first?’
‘ ’Tis, father,’ said I.
‘Worse and worse,’ he said gloomily. ‘The crimes of a lifetime. I don’t know will I get rid of you at all today. You’d better wait now till I’m finished with these old ones. You can see by the looks of them they haven’t much to tell.’
‘I will, father,’ I said with something approaching joy.
The relief of it was really enormous. Nora stuck out her tongue at me from behind his back, but I couldn’t even be bothered retorting. I knew from the very moment that man opened his mouth that he was intelligent above the ordinary. When I had time to think, I saw how right I was. It only stood to reason that a fellow confessing after seven years would have more to tell than people that went every week. The crimes of a lifetime, exactly as he said. It was only what he expected, and the rest was the cackle of old women and girls with their talk of Hell, the Bishop, and the penitential psalms. That was all they knew. I started to make my examination of conscience, and barring the one bad business of my grandmother it didn’t seem so bad.
The next time, the priest steered me into the confession box himself and left the shutter back the way I could see him get in and sit down at the further side of the grille from me.
‘Well, now,’ he said,’ what do they call you?’
‘Jackie, father,’ said I.
‘And what’s a-trouble to you, Jackie?’
‘Father,’ I said, feeling I might as well get it over while I had him in good humour, ‘I had it all arranged to kill my grandmother.’
He seemed a bit shaken by that, all right, because he said nothing for quite a while.
‘My goodness,’ he said at last, ‘that’d be a shocking thing to do. What put that into your head?’
‘Father,’ I said, feeling very sorry for myself, ‘she’s an awful woman.’
‘Is she?’ he asked. ‘What way is she awful?’
‘She takes porter, father,’ I said, knowing well from the way Mother talked of it that this was a mortal sin, and hoping it would make the priest take a more favourable view of my case.
‘Oh, my!’ he said, and I could see he was impressed.
‘And snuff, father,’ said I.
‘That’s a bad case, sure enough, Jackie,’ he said.
‘And she goes round in her bare feet, father,’ I went on in a rush of self-pity, ‘and she knows I don’t like her, and she gives pennies to Nora and none to me, and my da sides with her and flakes me, and one night I was so heart-scalded I made up my mind I’d have to kill her.’
‘And what would you do with the body?’ he asked with great interest.
‘I was thinking I could chop that up and carry it away in a barrow I have,’ I said.
‘Begor, Jackie,’ he said, ‘do you know you’re a terrible child?’
‘I know, father,’ I said, for I was just thinking the same thing myself. ‘I tried to kill Nora too with a bread-knife under the table, only I missed her.’
‘Is that the little girl that was beating you just now?’ he asked.
‘ ’Tis, father.’
‘Someone will go for her with a bread-knife one day, and he won’t miss her,’ he said rather cryptically. ‘You must have great courage. Between ourselves, there’s a lot of people I’d like to do the same to but I’d never have the nerve. Hanging is an awful death.’
‘Is it, father?’ I asked with the deepest interest – I was always very keen on hanging. ‘Did you ever see a fellow hanged?’
‘Dozens of them,’ he said solemnly. ‘And they all died roaring.’
‘Jay!’ I said.
‘Oh, a horrible death!’ he said with great satisfaction. ‘Lots of the fellows I saw killed their grandmothers too, but they all said ’twas never worth it.’
He had me there for a full ten minutes talking, and then walked out the chapel yard with me. I was genuinely sorry to part with him, because he was the most entertaining character I’d ever met in the religious line. Outside, after the shadow of the church, the sunlight was like the roaring of waves on a beach; it dazzled me; and when the frozen silence melted and I heard the screech of trams on the road my heart soared. I knew now I wouldn’t die in the night and come back, leaving marks on my mother’s furniture. It would be a great worry to her, and the poor soul had enough.
Nora was sitting on the railing, waiting for me, and she put on a very sour puss when she saw the priest with me. She was mad jealous because a priest had never come out of the church with her.
‘Well,’ she asked coldly, after he left me, ‘what did he give you?’
‘Three Hail Marys,’ I said.
‘Three Hail Marys,’ she repeated incredulously. ‘You mustn’t have told him anything.’
‘I told him everything,’ I said confidently.
‘About Gran and all?’
‘About Gran and all.’
(All she wanted was to be able to go home and say I’d made a bad confession.)
‘Did you tell him you went for me with the bread-knife?’ she asked with a frown.
‘I did to be sure.’
‘And he only gave you three Hail Marys?’
‘That’s all.’
She slowly got down from the railing with a baffled air. Clearly, this was beyond her. As we mounted the steps back to the main road she looked at me suspiciously.
‘What are you sucking?’ she asked.
‘Bullseyes.’
‘Was it the priest gave them to you?’
‘ ’Twas.’
‘Lord God,’ she wailed bitterly, ‘some people have all the luck! ’Tis no advantage to anybody trying to be good. I might just as well be a sinner like you.’
From WRITING A STORY – ONE MAN’S WAY
THOSE OF you who know something about my work will realize that even then, when you have taken every precaution against wasting your time, when everything is organized, and, according to the rules, there is nothing left for you but produce a perfect story, you often produce nothing of the kind. My own evidence for that comes from a story I once wrote called ‘First Confession’. It is a story about a little boy who goes to confession for the first time and confesses that he had planned to kill his grandmother. I wrote the story twenty-five years ago, and it was published and I was paid for it. I should have been happy, but I was not. No sooner did I begin to re-read the story than I knew I had missed the point. It was too spread out in time.
Many years later a selection of my stories was being published, and I re-wrote the story, concentrating it into an hour. This again was published, and became so popular that I made more money out of it than I’d ever made out of a story before. You’d think that at least would have satisfied me. It didn’t.
Years later, I took that story and re-wrote it in the first person because I realized it was one of those stories where it was more important to say ‘I planned to kill my grandmother’ than to say ‘Jackie planned to kill his grandmother’. And since then, you will be glad to know, whenever I wake up at four in the morning and think of my sins, I do not any longer think of the crime I committed against Jackie in describing his first confession. The story is as finished as it is ever going to be, and, to end on a note of confidence, I would wish you to believe that if you work hard at a story over a period of twenty-five or thirty years, there is a reasonable chance that at last you will get it right.
(1959 radio broadcast)
THE STUDY OF HISTORY
THE DISCOVERY of where babies came from filled my life with excitement and interest. Not in the way it’s generally supposed to, of course. Oh, no! I never seem to have done anything like a natural child in a standard textbook. I merely discovered the fascination of history. Up to this, I had lived in a country of my own that had no history, and accepted my parents’ marriage as an event ordained from the creation; now, when I considered it in this new, scientific way, I began to see it merely as one of the turning-points of history, one of those apparently trivial events that are little more than accidents but have the effect of changing the destiny of humanity. I had not heard of Pascal, but I would have approved his remark about what would have happened if Cleopatra’s nose had been a bit longer.
It immediately changed my view of my parents. Up to this, they had been principles, not characters, like a chain of mountains guarding a green horizon. Suddenly a little shaft of light, emerging from behind a cloud, struck them, and the whole mass broke up into peaks, valleys, and foothills; you could even see whitewashed farmhouses and fields where people worked in the evening light, a whole world of interior perspective. Mother’s past was the richer subject for study. It was extraordinary the variety of people and settings that woman had had in her background. She had been an orphan, a parlourmaid, a companion, a traveller; and had been proposed to by a plasterer’s apprentice, a French chef who had taught her to make superb coffee, and a rich and elderly shopkeeper in Sunday’s Well. Because I liked to feel myself different, I thought a great deal about the chef and the advantages of being a Frenchman, but the shopkeeper was an even more vivid figure in my imagination because he had married someone else and died soon after – of disappointment, I had no doubt – leaving a large fortune. The fortune was to me what Cleopatra’s nose was to Pascal: the ultimate proof that things might have been different.
‘How
much was Mr Riordan’s fortune, Mummy?’ I asked thoughtfully.
‘Ah, they said he left eleven thousand,’ Mother replied doubtfully, ‘but you couldn’t believe everything people say.’
That was exactly what I could do. I was not prepared to minimize a fortune that I might so easily have inherited.
‘And weren’t you ever sorry for poor Mr Riordan?’ I asked severely.
‘Ah, why would I be sorry, child?’ she asked with a shrug. ‘Sure, what use would money be where there was no liking?’
That, of course, was not what I meant at all. My heart was full of pity for poor Mr Riordan who had tried to be my father; but, even on the low level at which Mother discussed it, money would have been of great use to me. I was not so fond of Father as to think he was worth eleven thousand pounds, a hard sum to visualize but more than twenty-seven times greater than the largest salary I had ever heard of – that of a Member of Parliament. One of the discoveries I was making at the time was that Mother was not only rather hard-hearted but very impractical as well.
But Father was the real surprise. He was a brooding, worried man who seemed to have no proper appreciation of me, and was always wanting me to go out and play or go upstairs and read, but the historical approach changed him like a character in a fairy-tale. ‘Now let’s talk about the ladies Daddy nearly married,’ I would say; and he would stop whatever he was doing and give a great guffaw. ‘Oh, ho, ho!’ he would say, slapping his knee and looking slyly at Mother. ‘You could write a book about them.’ Even his face changed at such moments. He would look young and extraordinarily mischievous. Mother, on the other hand, would grow black.
‘You could,’ she would say, looking into the fire. ‘Daisies!’
‘ “The handsomest man that walks Cork!” ’ Father would quote with a wink at me. ‘That’s what one of them called me.’
‘Yes,’ Mother would say, scowling. ‘May Cadogan!’
The Best of Frank O'Connor Page 19
