Cheating at Canasta (6 page)

‘Will we take a stroll in the garden, Donal?’

‘Whatever would be right for you, Father. Whatever.’

Father Meade unlatched the french windows and went ahead of his visitor. ‘I’m fond of the garden,’ he said, not turning his head.

‘I’m on the streets, Father.’

‘In Dublin, is it?’

‘I went over to England, Father.’

‘I think I maybe heard.’

‘What work was there here, all the same?’

‘Oh, I know, I know. Nineteen-what would it have been?’

‘Nineteen eighty-one I went across.’

‘You had no luck there?’

‘I never had luck, Father.’

The old man walked slowly, the arthritis he was afflicted with in the small bones of both his feet a nuisance today. The house in which he had lived since he’d left the presbytery was modest, but the garden was large, looked after by a man the parish paid for. House and garden were parish property, kept for purposes such as this, where old priests—more than one at the same time if that happened to be how things were—would have a home. Father Meade was fortunate in having it to himself, Miss Brehany coming every day.

‘Isn’t it grand, that creeper?’ He gestured across a strip of recently cut grass at Virginia creeper turning red on a high stone wall with broken glass in the cement at the top. Prunty had got into trouble. The recollection was vague at first, before more of it came back: stealing from farms at harvest time or the potato planting, when everyone would be in the fields. Always the same, except the time he was caught with the cancer box. As soon as his mother was buried he went off, and was in trouble again before he left the district a year or so later.

‘The Michaelmas daisy is a flower that’s a favourite of mine.’ Father Meade gestured again. ‘The way it cheers up the autumn.’

‘I know what you mean all right, Father.’

They walked in silence for a few minutes. Then Father Meade asked: ‘Are you back home to stop, Donal?’

‘I don’t know am I. Is there much doing in Gleban?’

‘Ah, there is, there is. Well, look at it now, compared with when you took off. Sure, it’s a metropolis nearly.’ Father Meade laughed, then more seriously added: ‘We’ve the John Deere agency, and the estate on the Mullinavat road and another beyond the church. We have the Super-Valu and the Hardware Co-op and the bank sub-office two days in the week. We have Dolan’s garage and Linehan’s drapery and general goods, and changes made in Steacy’s. You’d go to Mullinavat for a doctor in the old days, even if you’d get one there. We have a young fellow coming out to us on a Tuesday for the last year and longer.’

A couple of steps, contending with the slope of the garden, broke the path they were on. The chair Father Meade had rested on to catch the morning sun was still there, on a lawn more spacious than the strip of grass by the wall with the Virginia creeper.

‘Still and all, it’s a good thing to come back to a place when you were born in it. I remember your mother.’

‘I’m wondering could you spare me something, Father.’

Father Meade turned and began the walk back to the house. He nodded an indication that he had heard and noted the request, the impression given to Prunty that he was considering it. But in the room where he had earlier fallen asleep he said there was employment to be had in Gleban and its neighbourhood.

‘When you’ll go down past Steacy’s bar go into Kingston’s yard and tell Mr Kingston I sent you. If Mr Kingston hasn’t something himself he’ll put you right for somewhere else.’

‘What’s Kingston’s yard?’

‘It’s where they bottle the water from the springs up at the Pass.’

‘It wasn’t work I came for, Father.’

Prunty sat down. He took out a packet of cigarettes, and then stood up again to offer it to the priest. Father Meade was standing by the french windows. He came further into the room and stood behind his desk, not wanting to sit down himself because it might be taken as an encouragement by his visitor to prolong his stay. He waved the cigarettes away.

‘I wouldn’t want to say it,’ Prunty said.

He was experiencing difficulty with his cigarette, failing to light it although he struck two matches, and Father Meade wondered if there was something the matter with his hands the way he couldn’t keep them steady. But Prunty said the matches were damp. You spent a night sleeping out and you got damp all over even though it didn’t rain on you.

‘What is it you don’t want to say, Mr Prunty?’

Prunty laughed. His teeth were discoloured, almost black. ‘Why’re you calling me Mr Prunty, Father?’

The priest managed a laugh too. Put it down to age, he said: he sometimes forgot a name and then it would come back.

‘Donal it is,’ Prunty said.

‘Of course it is. What’s it you want to say, Donal?’

A match flared, and at once there was a smell of tobacco smoke in a room where no one smoked any more.

‘Things happened the time I was a server, Father.’

‘It was a little later on you went astray, Donal.’

‘Have you a drink, Father? Would you offer me a drink?’

‘We’ll get Rose to bring us in a cup of tea.’

Prunty shook his head, a slight motion, hardly a movement at all.

‘I don’t keep strong drink,’ Father Meade said. ‘I don’t take it myself.’

‘You used give me a drink.’

‘Ah no, no. What’s it you want, Donal?’

‘I’d estimate it was money, Father. If there’s a man left anywhere would see me right it’s the Father. I used say that. We’d be down under the arches and you could hear the rain falling on the river. We’d have the brazier going until they’d come and quench it. All Ireland’d be there, Toomey’d say. Men from all over, and Nellie Bonzer, too, and Colleen from Tuam. The methylated doing the rounds and your fingers would be shivering and you opening up the butts, and you’d hear the old stories then. Many’s the time I’d tell them how you’d hold your hand up when you were above in the pulpit. ‘Don’t go till I’ll give it to you in Irish,’ you’d say, and you’d begin again and the women would sit there obedient, not understanding a word but it wouldn’t matter because they’d have heard it already in the foreign tongue. Wasn’t there many a priest called it the foreign tongue, Father?’

‘I’m sorry you’ve fallen on hard times, Donal.’

‘Eulala came over with a priest’s infant inside her.’

‘Donal—’

‘Eulala has a leg taken off of her. She has the crutches the entire time, seventy-one years of age. It was long ago she left Ireland behind her.’

‘Donal—’

‘Don’t mind me saying that about a priest.’

‘It’s a bad thing to say, Donal.’

‘You used give me a drink. D’you remember that though? We’d sit down in the vestry when they’d all be gone. You’d look out the door to see was it all right and you’d close it and come over to me. “Isn’t it your birthday?” you’d say, and it wouldn’t be at all. “Will we open the old bottle?” you’d say. The time it was holy wine, you sat down beside me and said it wasn’t holy yet. No harm, you said.’

Father Meade shook his head. He blinked, and frowned, and for a moment Miss Brehany seemed to be saying there was a man at the front door, her voice coming to him while he was still asleep. But he wasn’t asleep, although he wanted to be.

‘Many’s the time there’d be giving out about the priests,’ Prunty said. ‘The hidden Ireland is Toomey’s word for the way it was in the old days. All that, Father. “Close your eyes,” you used say in the vestry. “Close your eyes, boy. Make your confession to me after.”’

There was a silence in the room. Then Father Meade asked why he was being told lies, since he of all people would know they were lies. ‘I think you should go away now,’ he said.

‘When I told my mother she said she’d have a whip taken to me.’

‘You told your mother nothing. There was nothing to tell anyone.’

‘Breda Flynn’s who Eulala was, only a Romanian man called her that and she took it on. Limerick she came from. She was going with the Romanian. Toomey’s a Carlow man.’

‘What you’re implying is sickening and terrible and disgraceful. I’m telling you to go now.’

Father Meade knew he said that, but hardly heard it because he was wondering if he was being confused with another priest: a brain addled by recourse to methylated spirits would naturally be blurred by now. But the priests of the parish, going back for longer than the span of Prunty’s lifetime, had been well known to Father Meade. Not one of them could he consider, even for a moment, in the role Prunty was hinting at. Not a word of what was coming out of this demented imagination had ever been heard in the parish, no finger ever pointed in the direction of any priest. He’d have known, he’d have been told: of that Father Meade was certain, as sure of it as he was of his faith. ‘I have no money for you, Prunty.’

‘Long ago I’d see the young priests from the seminary. Maybe there’d be three of them walking together, out on the road to the Pass. They’d always be talking and I’d hear them and think maybe I’d enter the seminary myself. But then again you’d be cooped up. Would I come back tomorrow morning after you’d have a chance to get hold of a few shillings?’

‘I have no money for you,’ Father Meade said again.

‘There’s talk no man would want to put about. You’d forget things, Father. Long ago things would happen and you’d forget them. Sure, no one’s blaming you for that. Only one night I said to myself I’ll go back to Gleban.’

‘Do you know you’re telling lies, Prunty? Are you aware of it? Evil’s never forgotten, Prunty: of all people, a priest knows that. Little things fall away from an old man’s mind but what you’re trying to put into it would never have left it.’

‘No harm’s meant, Father.’

‘Tell your tale in Steacy’s bar, Prunty, and maybe you’ll be believed.’

Father Meade stood up and took what coins there were from his trouser pockets and made a handful of them on the desk.

‘Make your confession, Prunty. Do that at least.’

Prunty stared at the money, counting it with his eyes. Then he scooped it up. ‘If we had a few notes to go with it,’ he said, ‘we’d have the sum done right.’

He spoke slowly, as if unhurried enunciation was easier for the elderly. It was all the talk, he said, the big money there’d be. No way you could miss the talk, no way it wouldn’t affect you.

He knew he’d get more. Whatever was in the house he’d go away with, and he watched while a drawer was unlocked and opened, while money was taken from a cardboard box. None was left behind.

‘Thanks, Father,’ he said before he went.

Father Meade opened the french windows in the hope that the cigarette smoke would blow away. He’d been a smoker himself, a thirty-a-day man, but that was long ago.

‘I’m off now, Father,’ Miss Brehany said, coming in to say it, before she went home. She had cut cold meat for him, she said. She’d put the tea things out for him, beside the kettle.

‘Thanks, Rose. Thanks.’

She said goodbye and he put the chain on the hall door. In the garden he pulled the chair he’d been sitting on earlier into the last of the sun, and felt it warm on his face. He didn’t blame himself for being angry, for becoming upset because he’d been repelled by what was said to him. He didn’t blame Donal Prunty because you couldn’t blame a hopeless case. In a long life a priest had many visits, heard voices that ages ago he’d forgotten, failed to recognize faces that had been as familiar as his own. ‘See can you reach him, Father,’ Donal Prunty’s mother had pleaded when her son was still a child, and he had tried to. But Prunty had lied to him then too, promising without meaning it that he’d reform himself. ‘Ah sure, I needed a bit of money,’ he said hardly a week later when he was caught with the cancer box broken open.

Was it because he clearly still needed it, Father Meade wondered, that he’d let him go away with every penny in the house? Was it because you couldn’t but pity him? Or was there a desperation in the giving, as if it had been prompted by his own failure when he’d been asked, in greater desperation, to reach a boy who didn’t know right from wrong?

While he rested in the sun, Father Meade was aware of a temptation to let his reflections settle for one of these conclusions. But he knew, even without further thought, that there was as little truth in them as there was in the crude pretences of his visitor: there’d been no generous intent in the giving of the money, no honourable guilt had inspired the gesture, no charitable motive. He had paid for silence.

Guiltless, he was guilty, his brave defiance as much of a subterfuge as any of his visitor’s. He might have belittled the petty offence that had occurred, so slight it was when you put it beside the betrayal of a Church and the shaming of Ireland’s priesthood. He might have managed to say something decent to a Gleban man who was down and out in case it would bring consolation to the man, in case it would calm his conscience if maybe one day his conscience would nag. Instead he had been fearful, diminished by the sins that so deeply stained his cloth, distrustful of his people.

Father Meade remained in his garden until the shadows that had lengthened on his grass and his flowerbeds were no longer there. The air turned cold. But he sat a little longer before he went back to the house to seek redemption, and to pray for Donal Prunty.

Prunty walked through the town Gleban had become since he had lived in it. He didn’t go to the church to make his confession, as he’d been advised. He didn’t go into Steacy’s bar, but passed both by, finding the way he had come in the early morning. He experienced no emotion, nor did it matter how the money had become his, only that it had. A single faint thought was that the town he left behind was again the place of his disgrace. He didn’t care. He hadn’t liked being in the town, he hadn’t liked asking where the priest lived, or going there. He hadn’t liked walking in the garden or making his demand, or even knowing that he would receive what he had come for in spite of twice being told he wouldn’t. He would drink a bit of the money away tonight and reach the ferry tomorrow. He wouldn’t hurry after that. Whatever pace he went at, the streets where he belonged would still be there.

Cheating at Canasta