Himself

by Jess Kidd

  They went down to the cliffs and the priest took off his coat and they sat side by side on it. It had been a fine morning but now full-bellied rainclouds bruised the sky for miles. Over the horizon the sun was breaking through a bank of cloud; it skimmed the sea with mackerel streaks of light.

  Father Jim turned to her and asked her if she was still conversing with the dead. Orla refused to meet his gaze.

  ‘And the notes, Orla? Any more of those?’

  She let her fingers run through the grass.

  ‘The town’s in uproar.’ Father Jim looked out at the sea. ‘When they settle down again they’ll find they mostly don’t believe Benny Ganley. I’ve done what I can to smooth things over but you have to promise me that there’ll be no more.’

  ‘Did you believe Benny Ganley?’

  Father Jim smiled. ‘I know my own mother’s handwriting. But I also know that she’s been gone eighteen years.’

  Orla studied her palms and spoke quietly. ‘They’re liars and cheats the lot of them. I was only after giving them the truth.’

  Father Jim nodded, then he said, ‘I’ve a job for you, keep you out of trouble.’

  Orla scowled down at her knees.

  ‘I could use some help down at the house. Bridget has taken over from Mother Doosey in the housekeeping department.’ He lowers his voice. ‘She’s entirely clueless, so you’d be doing me a great favour.’

  Orla glanced up at him. His face was brown and spare and his jaw looked like it could stand a few punches. He wasn’t flabby around the gizzard like some old fellas.

  He didn’t look like a priest at all. He looked like a cowboy.

  No, he looked like a sheriff. A sheriff who could ride a mad crazy horse and shoot a gun straight. Who’d seen a lot of action and was maybe on the wrong side of the law himself once.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.

  As the priest walked her home he talked about the state of Bridget’s cooking and had her grinning into her hair. Once or twice she laughed out loud but she disguised it as a cough.

  After he left her home she climbed up on the gate and watched him out of sight, willing him not to turn round to wave like an eejit. He didn’t. He just kept on walking with the gait of a man who had temporarily mislaid his horse. She cocked an imaginary pistol at him, taking aim along the steady edge of her finger. But not being the kind of girl to shoot a cowboy in the back, she holstered it again, sent a spit over the wall and ran back into the house.

  The job wasn’t so bad. Every Wednesday and Friday Orla was to help Bridget dust the library, clean the fireplaces, wash the windows and scrape the dirt off the vegetables for the dinner. Then they would cook the meal, and if there wasn’t a visitor, which there never was, Father Jim would join them at the kitchen table and they’d all eat together.

  Orla was quiet at first. She’d sit and eat and listen to the two of them talking. It was then that she realised Bridget was cleverer than she looked. That she’d had a dream of going to university but that she’d had to stay and look after her mammy until it was too late for her. Sometimes Bridget took Orla to see the litter of kittens she had hidden in the turf shed. Orla thought that Bridget was a bit old for kittens but she didn’t say anything because of the way Bridget smiled at her. Soon Orla was smiling back, even though she felt a little goofy with all of it. Bridget told Orla she could take a kitten and Orla picked a black one with green eyes. Bridget laughed and told her she’d chosen a witch’s cat.

  After dinner Father Jim would bring Orla home. He said it was so he could walk off Bridget’s puddings but Orla knew it was because of the kids that lay in wait for her on the edge of town with their pockets full of stones.

  Bridget always gave Father Jim a few bits in a basket to carry up to the house: a bar of soap, a loaf of bread, or a twist of tea. As they walked, Father Jim would tell Orla stories about Jesus. They were so boring she could hardly listen. Instead she would study her shoes and nod as if she was concentrating hard.

  One evening, as he walked her home, Father Jim told her a story that wasn’t boring. They were a little later than usual, for it was Bridget’s birthday and they’d had cake after the dinner. The sun was setting through the forest and it would be dark soon, but for a while there was the orange of the dying sun and the black of the trees against it, like a warning.

  Whether it was these colours that made Father Jim think of the story, Orla never knew, but this was the first story he had ever told her that made her forget to look as if she was concentrating.

  And it wasn’t about Jesus.

  Once upon a time, he said, in a quiet village, there lived a woman. She was a good woman who kept busy about her tidy cottage. She had a few hens that laid eggs. She sold the eggs and saved the money from them against a donkey so that she wouldn’t have to walk the long miles to market. The hens lived in an outhouse that she had made strong against the foxes that would sniff about outside all night long, slavering for the plumpness and the freshness of the hens.

  One day the woman was collecting the eggs in her little basket when she came across an egg the likes of which she’d never seen before. She put down her basket and carried the egg out of the henhouse and into the light. It was nearly five times the size of a normal egg, and the shell felt thicker and silkier. It was pure white but with a shifting cast of gold and when she held it up to her ear she heard a smooth ticking sound.

  The woman looked at the egg for a long while, then she picked up one of her quietest hens and she brought both hen and egg into her cottage. She set up a box by the range and filled it with clean straw then set the hen over the egg. At first the hen clucked angrily and moved away, but the woman was patient and she picked up the hen time and again and put her back on the egg. She fed the hen with strips of bread soaked in warm milk until the hen was content and closed its eyes and curved its beak down into its soft, feathered neck.

  The woman fed the hen day after day until the hen grew fat and its eyes grew glazed, and still it sat on the egg. The woman began to despair that the egg would ever hatch, so one day she lifted up the hen to see if there were any cracks yet in the wondrous egg.

  And she saw, with great confusion, that the egg was gone and the hen was dead.

  She felt the hen all over. Its belly was bloated hard and it was heavy in her hands. She put the bird back into the box and stared at it. All of a sudden, the hen’s neck flopped backward, showing the gullet.

  The woman watched, riveted in horror, as something began to move inside the dead bird’s throat. Now drawing it taut, now laying it loose.

  A bloody beak began to tear through the neck of the dead hen. The woman hardly had the wits to scream. The beak was followed by a head, which poked obscenely out of the dead bird’s carcass smeared in gore and blinking its eyes. And so the woman realised that the poor hen had hatched a chick so monstrous that it had eaten her from the inside out.

  The woman fought against the repulsion rising in her as she carried the box outside with shaking hands. The chick, halfway out of the dead hen, was as soft and naked as an earthworm. It squinted up at her with its swollen eyelids half-closed against the sun. The woman tried not to look at the terrible chick as she banked dry wood around the body of the hen. The chick opened its beak and sang quietly. The woman tried not to hear its small song as she added newspaper to make the fire burn quicker. The chick tried the stumps of its wings, flapping about in the box as the woman added turf to make the fire burn deeper.

  The woman lit the fire she had set and watched it burn with her heart sickened over the poor dead hen and the monstrous chick. Then, no longer able to stand it, she returned to her cottage and shut the door and sat by the range looking at the empty space on the ground where the box had been.

  The next day the woman went to the scorched smear in the courtyard and began to sweep up the ashes.

  As she did so, something moved beneath her brush.

  Before her eyes a blackened ball was collecting itself, rolling over
the ground and drawing itself upward. The graphite dust whirled tighter and tighter to become more and more densely packed and sparkling. It grew bigger, blacker, sharper, until it formed an undeniable shape, not unlike a swan, only bigger. It opened its wings and rushed up into the air.

  The ashes fell away, so that the bird was revealed as it circled above the woman. Its body was the colour of copper lit from the inside. Its tail feathers were a fierce orange that flashed and burnt as the bird flew around the roof of the cottage. It landed on a chimneystack from where it looked down the length of its beak at the woman with long almond eyes the colour of hot iron.

  And the woman finally saw that what is terrible can also be beautiful and she lifted up her arms to the bird as it flew away into the west.

  The woman cried for a long time, then she wiped her face on her apron and got up from her knees. As she walked back to the hen house to shut her hens away from the hungry foxes, something caught her eye.

  It was a gift from the firebird.

  A feather lay smouldering in the mud. It was the rich red of a velvet-lined trinket box, a deep, secret red. It was longer than her forearm and curved from root to tip, like a foxglove. The woman picked it up and found that it was warm to the touch and soft against her lips. She took it into her house and heated a candle. Then she carefully pushed the quill of the firebird’s feather into the softened wax. For the rest of her life the feather glowed. She set it at the window, in case the bird ever flew her way again.

  Chapter 26

  May 1976

  In the parochial library Father Eugene Quinn and the Widow Annie Farelly are sitting pious and silent, clad in rubber boots and a rain bonnet respectively, and stalwartly ignoring the holy spring that spurts and babbles at their feet with pagan enthusiasm. Their conversation has been temporarily halted whilst Róisín sets down the tea things.

  ‘Will I take some of the frogs out with me, Father?’

  Róisín nods towards the bucket at the door, which she fills to the brim with writhing amphibians at least six times a day. But however far away she takes them the creatures always seem to find their way home again.

  Yesterday she packed a crowd of them in a picnic hamper and took them on the bus all the way to Ennismore. Yet she swore the exact same frogs were waiting for her in the hallway by the time she got back again.

  Róisín doesn’t have the heart to kill them. As long as they keep out of the kitchen she doesn’t mind them. They’re even a bit of company about the place. So when Father Quinn enquires as to whether she’s destroying them as he asked her to, she bursts into song, or pretends not to hear, so that Father Quinn begins to think that Mrs Munnelly is a little touched.

  ‘No, that will be all, thank you, Róisín.’

  Now Róisín will tell you that she’s not at all the type of individual usually given to listening at doors. But there’s something in the way that the priest looks at her as she leaves the room. Or maybe it’s the cat-cream way in which Annie Farelly raises her teacup to her mouth. Or perhaps it’s a certain bitter smugness on both their faces.

  So that when Róisín closes the library door, God forgive her, she kneels down on the hall runner and puts her ear to the gap under the door to listen.

  ‘As I said, I support you, Father, one hundred and ten per cent. For if the late Father Hennessy (God rest his soul and reward him in heaven) had helped us to control the mother before she even had her issue we would not be experiencing the infestation of Mahony himself now. As you well know, Father Hennessy advocated tolerance and forgiveness, of all things, when there she was running wild and sticking her fingers up at the lot of us. I can say that it angered a great many people. They simply did not understand why Father Hennessy wouldn’t act to remove Orla Sweeney from the village.’

  ‘Tolerance and forgiveness have their place but not when the moral fabric of a town is threatened.’

  ‘Quite so. There was a blessing in Father Hennessy’s passing that brought you to Mulderrig, Father Quinn.’

  ‘You nursed Father Hennessy?’

  ‘I was with him when he died.’

  ‘Did he ever regret his stance on this matter?’

  ‘I believe he did in the end, Father.’

  ‘But yet the town loved him?’

  ‘Ah, the town will be in your pocket soon enough, Father. It’s just a case of them getting used to you. How long have you been with us now?’

  ‘Twenty-six years.’

  Róisín smiles behind the door.

  ‘Ah well, they are slow, Father. In most things they are very slow. And so Mahony refused the money?’

  ‘He did. He’s adamant he’s staying.’

  ‘And he couldn’t be encouraged to leave by a greater sum of money, Father? Perhaps his anonymous benefactor could increase their donation? I’m sure that would be feasible, given the circumstances.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Mahony believes he is here on a mission. He says that he has unfinished business.’

  There is the bright sound of silver on china.

  ‘Thank you, Father, just one lump.’

  Róisín removes a toad intent on burrowing into her hair.

  ‘You see Mahony believes that his mother met with a bad end, and of course Mrs Cauley with her imagination is egging him on.’

  ‘She is a truly awful individual. I’ve heard that they were interrogating people up at the village hall during the auditions.’

  ‘They did, Mrs Farelly; they treated them like crime suspects.’

  ‘How dare they? And then of course the play, which is no more than a chance for her to spread her wanton influence. With him cavorting on the stage, half-dressed and spewing profanities. But the people are enraptured by him, are they not, Father?’

  ‘His growing popularity is of mild concern to me.’

  ‘Mrs Cauley planned it that way, of course. Mahony has his feet under the table now, so to speak. Can’t you stop that play?’

  ‘I only wish I could, Mrs Farelly.’

  There’s a pause and a faint murmur, and Father Quinn’s voice again, softly. ‘I hope you understand, I had to ask.’

  ‘I don’t know any more than you do, Father.’

  ‘Could the girl really have left town, baby and all?’

  ‘It’s possible, but . . .’

  Silence.

  ‘Would it be fair to surmise that someone took the matter into their own hands?’

  ‘I think it would, Father.’

  ‘Some poor soul finally driven to act, through desperation?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Then God forgive them.’ A sly tone comes into Father Quinn’s voice. ‘Sometimes there’s no agency in digging up the past, is there, Mrs Farelly?’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  ‘Whatever grounds Mahony is here on, whether justified or not, he is clearly a corrupting influence on our village.’

  ‘He is, Father.’

  The priest sounds louder and brisker, as if he’s got up and is pacing the room.

  ‘I can assure you, Mrs Farelly, that I shall preserve the good in this town and protect the villagers by removing this second threat quickly and cleanly.’

  ‘The village will thank you for it, Father.’

  Róisín frowns and extracts a small frog from her cleavage.

  ‘I spoke to Jack Brophy to see if the guards could assist us with this matter. I told him that I have reason to believe that Mahony poses a serious threat to Mulderrig. I said that in my considered opinion the man is mentally unstable.’

  ‘What did Jack say, Father?’

  ‘He said he’s had a few jars with Mahony and he seems like a grand lad.’

  Róisín smiles.

  ‘Brophy told me that unless Mahony stepped out of line there was nothing he could do.’

  A momentary silence falls in the library.

  ‘Just how difficult can it be to encourage the illegitimate son of an underage whore to step out of line?’ says Father Quinn, his voice oi
led and crawling.

  ‘Exactly, Father, exactly, but if he doesn’t?’

  ‘He will.’

  ‘But he’s a cute one; he has the village on his side.’

  There’s a long pause.

  ‘Couldn’t we find out a bit more about him, Father, something that would put people off him? He’s come wearing his best face. He may have left another one behind in Dublin.’

  ‘Bravo, Mrs Farelly. I’ll start digging today.’

  ‘There’s sure to be a rake of dirt on a man like him. You could start at the orphanage perhaps?’

  ‘St Anthony’s? I have it in my notebook here.’

  There is a low murmur that Róisín doesn’t quite catch, and then they both laugh.

  Róisín shakes her head in dismay. For the widow and the priest have become even more unwholesome than the snub-nosed toad sat in front of her licking its own eyeball.

  Róisín shuts herself in the kitchen. She takes her apron off and puts it on again. She picks up a potato and starts peeling it in an agony of indecision.

  She has to go and warn him. Róisín looks down at the potato. But if she runs out now the priest might guess that she’s been eavesdropping. She drops the potato into the bowl in the sink. She’ll find Mahony later and tell him exactly what she’s heard.

  She’ll tell him to watch out for himself.

  As Róisín rinses the cut potatoes and sets them on the hob she thinks about Mahony. As Róisín rolls the priest’s liver in flour she thinks about Mahony. As she cuts onions into the pan, ready for the meat, she thinks about Mahony.

  She blots her eyes with the hem of her apron, realising that they are watering more than they ought to be. As she slides the liver from the pan into a warming dish Róisín finally admits to herself that she’s in love with him. She’s in love with him wildly, against each and every sensible thought. Róisín sobs into her apron and the frogs watch her sympathetically from just outside the kitchen door, like a row of polite cinemagoers.