by Jess Kidd
By the time the weeping priest has been led into the kitchen and given a brandy, the water is tumbling out along the hall and down the garden path. Where it stops, just short of the gate, laps back on itself and becomes as still as glass.
Bridget Doosey smiles. She’ll widely proclaim the miracle of Mulderrig’s very own holy well, just as soon as she has led Father Quinn upstairs by the hand and tucked him firmly into bed.
Chapter 21
April 1944
The confessional in St Patrick’s church had always lapped up tales of suffering and spite. It fed on shame and remorse with quiet, ligneous devotion. Its deep shine was not just wood polish and spinster’s spittle; it was the gilding of guilt, rubbed over the years to a saintly lustre.
Inside, on one side of the brass lattice, sat Father Jim Hennessy, full of hard-won wisdom and indigestion. On the other side of the brass lattice sat Orla Sweeney, eyes wide in the dark.
She pressed her fingers into the grill until the tips of them disappeared. She could hear the priest breathing on the other side.
‘I talk to the dead, Father,’ she said. ‘They’ve been giving me messages since last Tuesday.’
Father Jim was trying to release gas quietly. For he was a big-framed strong man more suited to the rigours of farming than the sedentary life of a man of the cloth; his spiritual calling had all but destroyed his digestion. He carefully raised one cheek but it reverberated on the wooden bench. He apologised to the Lord and straightened his stole.
‘Child, this is a terrible fantasy to put into your head and it is false. You must look to the Lord God to find truth and peace in your life.’
‘I know it’s wrong to talk to them, Father, but they’re so lonely. At first there was only a few but now they keep coming up out of the ground and through the walls with all these things they want telling to people and I don’t know what to do.’
Father Jim learnt two things that day. First, that quantities of radishes did not agree with him and second:
‘Dorothy says it wasn’t your fault, Father.’
Father Jim’s breath halted inside him.
‘She says she would have died anyway, even if you hadn’t tried to baptise her in the cowshed. It wasn’t the chill that took her away; it was her heart.’
Father Jim went as white as a sheet in the dark. He was where? In the confessional, trying to keep breathing.
Breathing what? The familiar incense smell, beeswax and lilies, the damp wool coats of the congregation, their balsam and hair ointment, their stale smoke and cough sweets, the vinegar of last night’s alcohol.
But he was half in the past again. A child of little more than six, already with a vocation, practising the priesthood and knowing it was wrong, but wanting to. Oh wanting to, wanting to do his great loving terrible God’s work always, always.
There was his new baby sister with her face still wrinkled with brine, and there was the cup dipped again and again into the bucket in the cowshed. The low winter sun filled his eyes to the brim, spilling all around, catching cup and bucket. He remembered still the bright metal glint and the light burnishing the straw to gold and the cobbled mud to bronze.
He had baptised her Dorothy, although her name was Margaret. He drew a cross on her tiny forehead and blessed her blissfully, whispering the words like a spell.
Mammy couldn’t understand why Babby was wet in the cradle. All her things soaked. She wasn’t to know it was holy water, for the cows were in the milking shed now and the bucket was no longer a font lit by God in heaven.
And Dorothy? A livid spot on each cheek, otherwise a china doll.
A coffin small enough for Mammy to hold on her knees.
God bless, Dorothy.
The real priest was solid black; Jimmy watched from under the table with his little soul frozen with a terror that had never quite thawed.
Until he was absolved by a ten-year-old girl.
Father Jim stumbled from the confessional and shut himself in the sacristy. He looked around the familiar room. At the press with his vestments inside and the baptismal candles that lay waxy in a row. At the bottles of Communion wine and the linen, reverently folded, a mystery of worn fabric and belief. The whiskey in his hand didn’t warm. The shelves of books didn’t reassure.
This was the first time that Orla made Father Jim Hennessy cry.
Orla sat all alone in the confessional with her hands on her lap. A dim white face pressed its way through the wooden wall. Rising up from her unmarked grave just south of the altar, an ancient abbess had travelled through cold soil and colder church stone to whisper wisdom in Orla’s ear:
‘You’re on your own, treasure. Don’t expect any help.’
She shut the mild curves of her eyes and dissipated. Later she would stalk the organist, who was never warm when he sat down to his work, despite the thick socks on him.
Orla sat very still and thrilled to a brand-new idea.
She was a magician with a big white rabbit. She could reach into her black hat and pull out a man’s worst fear or his greatest reassurance. The dead saw everything. She saw everything. Feck.
The first to come through last Tuesday had been Mrs McHale’s husband. In life he had ordered, with great pride, a threshing machine from Westport, which had his right arm off on the second day he’d used it. Mr McHale had bled to death in the far field. His arm was recovered and bandaged back on again so that his hands could be joined together for his final prayer. As if in protest, his hands refused to meet. So a framed picture of St Isidore, the patron saint of farm equipment, was placed between his punctured fingers. Mr McHale was not a popular man. The cause of Mr McHale’s demise was sent back to Westport, where it was re-oiled, resold and gave twenty-five years of uneventful service to a farmer just outside Castlebar.
A little after nine that morning Orla had been scraping the porridge pan for the chickens when she saw Mr McHale walking towards her with one arm significantly longer than the other.
‘Here, Dolly,’ called out the dead farmer. ‘Tell my missus I don’t want my good shoes going to the bloody charity box; she should keep them for the boys.’
Mr McHale flickered slightly in the early morning sun. He didn’t look bad considering he’d been dead for over a year.
‘And tell her to get off her fat arse and sort out the rats in the barn,’ he said. ‘They’re getting big enough to ride around the town, so they are.’
‘Right so, Mr McHale,’ said Orla, and she watched the dead man turn and walk through the hen house.
After Mr McHale they came thick and fast.
When Orla walked in the forest she saw faint nooses filled with twisting lumps of men. When she walked in the village she saw the faint forms of skipping children in white dresses. Some of the dead wore quaint costumes and glided. These tended to hold their fingers up to their lips and vanish. But some were as real as Orla’s own hands and would stand before her scratching their arses and swearing.
At the graveyard they sat about in groups, lolling against the stones or swinging their legs on the wall, just like she did. When she approached, some melted into the ground and some walked forwards holding their arms open.
Soon Orla began to feel wanted. She began to feel important. She would lie between the gravestones of Patrick James Carty 1901–1925 and Joseph Raftery 1880–1913 and listen to the dead. Paddy and Joe would politely vacate their eternal resting place and flitter up to the top of St Patrick’s church, where they would stretch their dead backs out against the roof and smoke invisible cigarettes.
Down below, the spirits would gather and jostle.
‘Silence, please, ladies and gentlemen. Wait your turn.’
Orla listened to them in rapture.
What she heard, she knew, could set the town hopping.
The only problem was how to deliver their messages.
She wasn’t allowed in the shops because of the thieving, and she wasn’t made welcome at the school any more, for being wayward. If she turne
d up at Mass they’d ignore her and if she went up to their doors, well, it would be the mop bucket. Orla listened, then she regretfully explained to the dead that they’d chosen the wrong girl. But the dead just folded their arms and shook their heads.
Two days later Orla had a remarkable idea.
The next morning she arrived at the graveyard with stolen paper, pen and ink. She only knew the four letters of her name but that didn’t stop her, because on that day, note after note was written, each in an entirely different hand. Some were executed in fluid copperplate and others were in hard-pressed capitals. Some were no more than smudged spider scrawls and some were sprinkled with excitable loops and florid crosses. As the sun died, Orla stretched out her aching hand and the dead smiled and drifted away arm in arm through the church tower, looking as relaxed as she’d ever seen them.
By the next morning the messages from the dead had reached the living. They were found in letterboxes and pinned to doorways, propped behind clocks and folded on kitchen tables. Adulteries were exposed and grievances were aired. Real fathers were named and bastards discovered. Old sins were brought to life and played out for the rest of the village to watch.
But the letters could not be refuted.
The stories they told were incontrovertible and the handwriting, in every case, was a perfect and demonstrable match to that of the deceased. These were the words of the all-seeing dead and the living knew this.
The town looked around itself in horror.
Spinsters were accused of witchcraft and black cats were strung up. Windows were smashed and bureaus were forced open. Insults were smeared from door to door as the villagers sought the source of this terrible, evil outpouring of truth. Orla smiled and returned to the graveyard with a rake of paper and a fresh pot of ink, and who knows what would have happened to the village if Benny Ganley hadn’t caught her in the act.
Benny, a helper at St Patrick’s with a drinker’s nose and a hand that shook under the collection plate, was walking through the graveyard when he saw a little pair of feet sticking out past a headstone. As he rounded the grave he saw the child propped up against the marble slab with her face bent to her work. She was biting her lip with concentration and Benny watched in amazement as her tiny hand travelled over the paper, neatly and cleanly, without snag or hitch. Occasionally she stopped and cocked her head and nodded, as if listening intently.
Benny, riveted, moved closer, but in doing so disturbed her. She jumped to her feet with her hands held behind her back and the kind of bold expression that invited violence.
Benny gamely lunged forwards to grab hold of her and give her a bit of a shake. But as soon as he laid hands on her she came alive and twisting under him, all teeth and hair. Then the little bitch laid a fierce bite on his hand. It was a bite that could have come from a rat or a dog. (Indeed, Benny would still have the stamp of Orla’s teeth on him seven years later when he died roaring of a tumefied liver.) The child fled from the graveyard, dropping a handful of papers in her haste. Benny picked them up and was astounded. By the time Benny took the evidence to Father Jim, he had already told ten people.
Orla was in deep shit.
Chapter 22
May 1976
Mahony is a natural.
As soon as he gets up onto the stage a peculiar kind of magic starts to happen. Some spit on his name, but they feel it. Some wish him to hell, or back to Dublin, but they feel it. Every last judgemental do-gooder, backstabbing old biddy and jealous boyfriend feels it.
Mrs Cauley looks on in delight. It is what she expected and better than she expected. The town is needled, its bollocks are truly twisted, for try as they might they can’t resist Mahony.
She had known this from the start.
And so Mulderrig is caught between love and fear, spite and affection, with Mahony always on their minds. It’s everything Mrs Cauley could have hoped for: confusion, bewilderment and a good shake of their parochial notions.
She grins. The play is a Trojan bloody horse, landing Mahony right inside their defences, where he can disarm them with nothing more than a lively stride across the stage in an open shirt and a tight pair of breeches.
Such is the power of theatre.
Such is the power of a handsome, dark-eyed, daring man.
Father Quinn stands in the wings, watching.
Only he sees the peril of this ambush, this infiltration, which must lead to dropped guards and careless talk.
But still, he has to admire the cunning of his enemy. For he has no doubt it was Mrs Cauley’s plan from the first to take Mahony’s brazen charms and amplify them with the pagan spell of her theatre.
Father Quinn sees it all: a town run by an actress and a libertine, where illegitimacy is honourable and morality a crime. Where Orla Sweeney is a saint not a sinner, and those who fought her diligently, with unimpeachable resolve, for the sake of the village, are vilified.
This is no more than a second wave of corruption, bringing with it all the evil of the first. Orla is back, riding the village into submission; only her tactics have changed.
Father Quinn tirelessly monitors village opinion, sending out legions of poisonous whispers and whole armies of noxious slanders to counteract Mahony’s growing popularity. The villagers nod and agree but they forget to despise Mahony the moment they lay eyes on him.
It appears that nothing can destroy Mahony in the eyes of Mulderrig. Not scandal, not truth, not history. Mahony will take the good character freely hung on him as his past falls away like the arse-end of a burning comet.
Father Quinn watches and waits in the wings. He starts to follow Mahony everywhere, looming like mortality in dark corners, as shifty as a fox with a hen in every pocket. He starts to mutter and scrawl in notebooks. Sometimes he forgets to shave and change his underpants.
But he sees it all.
Soon most of the village are showing up at rehearsals and soon all of them could understudy, the way they mouth each word silently in chorus. Mammies start bringing down scones and sandwiches to keep the audience going and Tadhg has the bar boy running over and back with a tray from Kerrigan’s Bar until his legs threaten to fall off him.
Jack Brophy comes in off-duty. He watches Mahony out of the corner of his eye and smiles as he raises the set out of wood and canvas. Soon there is a cut-away cottage with half a thatched roof. Bridget Doosey paints the views beyond the open door using bruised colours in big strokes and the audience begin to see a far-off bay and mist-shrouded mountains.
The house on the stage becomes the exact place remembered from childhood or visited in dreams. The walls are whitewashed and the troughs are planted. Furniture arrives, solid and old-looking. The shelves of the bar are stacked with stone jugs and bottles. A bucket and mop are propped in the corner. Someone thinks to bring a mousetrap, or a jam jar full of flowers, or a pair of gingham curtains.
Róisín Munnelly brings her sewing down so that she can sit in the corner and listen as she finishes the costumes. And soon it is Róisín that Mahony’s looking at when he says his lines most gently, and she scuppers more than a few easy seams in confusion because of it.
Father Quinn sees it all.
And he bites his hands in the dark and waits for his moment to come, for he knows how this will end.
Mulderrig will bring down a plague on itself and it won’t be the first time.
Chapter 23
May 1976
It is a truth universally unacknowledged that when the dead are trying to remember something, the living are trying harder to forget it.
Mrs Cauley has been interrogating her commode for the past half hour. In the absence of reliable testimony from the living she has decided to turn to the dead. Recognising the dead priest’s description from Mahony’s anecdotes of his drunken evening with Desmond, she has had the haunted commode moved to her bedside in order to extract a statement from the late Father Jim Hennessy.
Mahony is lying on the floor reading poetry and smoking.
U
pstaged by the newest dead man in her life, Johnnie is nowhere to be seen. But Mahony suspects, from the tapping of a cane on the ceiling above them, that he’s most likely pacing the master bedroom.
‘A priest haunting a commode,’ chuckles Mrs Cauley. ‘It’s sublime, isn’t it? Is he there now?’
Mahony glances up at Father Jim, who is in the corner leaning on a bookcase. ‘After a fashion.’
‘Then he needs to get his dead finger out and tell us who did him in.’ She studies the empty commode. ‘There’s no doubt in my mind that he was done in. How did he die? He succumbed to a short and violent illness. Someone had a hand in it.’
Father Jim scowls. ‘Pneumonia, he had a hand in it, along with his good pal heart failure.’
‘Think about it,’ Mrs Cauley whispers. ‘The town was desperate to rid themselves of Orla. She was wild, unpredictable, a real troublemaker.’
‘Does this wagon ever stop?’ mumbles Father Jim.
Mrs Cauley purses her lips. ‘Having someone like Hennessy fighting Orla’s corner would have presented a major obstacle to getting rid of her. He wouldn’t have taken any of their crap.’
Father Jim nods and searches in his pocket for his pipe. ‘She’s right there. Tell her, lad.’
Mahony looks up from his page. ‘You’re right. He wouldn’t have taken any crap.’
‘They had to do away with Hennessy before they could get to your mother. Which is why Doosey kept her own counsel; she realised it was a dangerous game to be on Orla’s side.’
‘What with all the letter bombs and poisoned scones and the like?’
Mrs Cauley looks at him. ‘Don’t be flippant.’ She picks up the doorstop and sets it again on the middle of the tea tray. ‘Hennessy may just hold the key to this case.’
