Collected Stories (107 page)

The Teacher's Mass

F
ATHER
F
OGARTY
, the curate in Crislough, used to say in his cynical way that his greatest affliction was having to serve the teacher's Mass every morning. He referred, of course, to his own Mass, the curate's Mass, which was said early so that Father Fogarty could say Mass later in Costello. Nobody ever attended it, except occasionally in summer, when there were visitors at the hotel. The schoolteacher, old Considine, served as acolyte. He had been serving the early Mass long before Fogarty came, and the curate thought he would also probably be doing it long after he had left. Every morning, you saw him coming up the village street, a pedantically attired old man with a hollow face and a big mustache that was turning gray. Everything about him was abstract and angular, even to his voice, which was harsh and without modulation, and sometimes when he and Fogarty came out of the sacristy with Considine leading, carrying the book, his pace was so slow that Fogarty wondered what effect it would have if he gave him one good kick in the behind. It was exactly as Fogarty said—as though
he
were serving Considine's Mass, and the effect of it was to turn Fogarty into a more unruly acolyte than ever he had been in the days when he himself was serving the convent Mass.

Whatever was the cause, Considine always roused a bit of the devil in Fogarty, and he knew that Considine had no great affection for him, either. The old man had been headmaster of the Crislough school until his retirement, and all his life he had kept himself apart from the country people, like a parish priest or a policeman. He was not without learning; he had a quite respectable knowledge of local history, and a very good one of the ecclesiastical history of the Early Middle Ages in its local applications, but it was all book learning, and, like his wing collar, utterly unrelated to the life about him. He had all the childish vanity of the man of dissociated scholarship, wrote occasional scurrilous letters to the local paper to correct some error in etymology, and expected everyone on that account to treat him as an oracle. As a schoolmaster he had sneered cruelly at the barefoot urchins he taught, describing them as “illiterate peasants” who believed in the fairies and in spells, and when, twenty years later, some of them came back from Boston or Brooklyn and showed off before the neighbors, with their big American hats and high-powered cars, he still sneered at them. According to him, they went away illiterate and came home illiterate.

“I see young Carmody is home again,” he would say to the curate after Mass.

“Is that so?”

“And he has a car like a house,” Considine would add, with bitter amusement. “A car with a grin on it. 'Twould do fine to cart home his mother's turf.”

“The blessings of God on him,” the curate would say cheerfully. “I wish I had a decent car instead of the old yoke I have.”

“I dare say it was the fairies,” the old teacher would snarl, with an ugly smile that made his hollow, high-cheeked face look like a skull. “It wasn't anything he ever learned here.”

“Maybe we're not giving the fairies their due, Mr. Considine,” said the curate, with the private conviction that it would be easier to learn from them than from the schoolmaster.

The old man's scornful remarks irritated Fogarty because he liked the wild, barefooted, inarticulate brats from the mountainy farms, and felt that if they showed off a bit when they returned from America with a few dollars in their pockets, they were well entitled to do so. Whoever was entitled to the credit, it was nothing and nobody at home. The truth was he had periods of terrible gloom when he felt he had mistaken his vocation. Or, rather, the vocation was all right, but the conditions under which he exercised it were all wrong, and those conditions, for him, were well represented by the factitious scholarship of old Considine. It was all in the air. Religion sometimes seemed no more to him than his own dotty old housekeeper, who, whatever he said, invested herself with the authority of a bishop and decided who was to see him and about what, and settled matters on her own whenever she got half a chance. Things were so bad with her that whenever the country people wanted to see him, they bribed one of the acolytes to go and ask him to come himself to their cottages. The law was represented by Sergeant Twomey, who raided the mountain pubs half an hour after closing time, in response to the orders of some lunatic superintendent at the other side of the county, while as for culture, there was the library van every couple of months, from which Considine, who acted as librarian, selected a hundred books, mainly for his own amusement. He was partial to books dealing with voyages in the Congo or Tibet (“Tibet is a very interessting country, father”). The books that were for general circulation he censored to make sure there were no bad words like “navel” in them that might corrupt the ignorant “peasantry.” And then he came to Fogarty and told him he had been reading a very “interessting” book about birdwatching in the South Seas, or something like that.

Fogarty's own temptation was toward action and energy, just as his depression was often no more than the expression of his frustration. He was an energetic and emotional man who in other circumstances would probably have become a successful businessman. Women were less of a temptation to him than the thought of an active instinctual life. All he wanted in the way of a holiday was to get rid of his collar and take a gun or rod or stand behind the bar of a country hotel. He ran the local hurling team for what it was worth, which wasn't much, and strayed down the shore with the boatmen or up the hills with the poachers and poteen-makers, who all trusted him and never tried to conceal any of their harmless misdemeanors from him. Once, for instance, in the late evening, he came unexpectedly on a party of scared poteen-makers on top of a mountain and sat down on the edge of the hollow where they were operating their still. “Never mind me, lads!” he said, lighting a pipe. “I'm not here at all.” “Sure we know damn well you're not here, father,” one old man said, and chuckled. “But how the hell can we offer a drink to a bloody ghost?”

These were his own people, the people he loved and admired, and it was principally the feeling that he could do little or nothing for them that plunged him into those suicidal fits of gloom in which he took to the bottle. When he heard of a dance being held in a farmhouse without the permission of the priest or the police, he said, “The blessings of God on them,” and when a girl went and got herself with child by one of the islanders, he said, “More power to her elbow!”—though he had to say these things discreetly, for fear they should get back. But the spirit of them got back, and the acolytes would whisper, “Father, would you ever go out to Dan Mike's when you have the time?” or young men and girls would lie in wait for his car on a country road and signal timidly to him, because the country people knew that from him they would either get a regular blasting in a language they understood or the loan of a few pounds to send a girl to hospital in England so that the neighbors wouldn't know.

Fogarty knew that in the teacher's eyes this was another black mark against him, for old Considine could not understand how any educated man could make so little of the cloth as to sit drinking with “illiterate peasants” instead of talking to a fine, well-informed man like himself about the situation in the Far East or the relationship of the Irish dioceses to the old kingdoms of the Early Middle Ages.

Then one evening Fogarty was summoned to the teacher's house on a sick call. It only struck him when he saw it there at the end of the village—a newish, red-brick box of a house, with pebble dash on the front and a' steep stairway up from the front door—that it was like the teacher himself. Maisie, the teacher's unmarried daughter, was a small, plump woman with a face that must once have been attractive, for it was still all in curves, with hair about it like Mona Lisa's, though now she had lost all her freshness, and her skin was red and hard and full of wrinkles. She had a sad smile, and Fogarty could not resist a pang of pity for her because he realized that she was probably another victim of Considine's dislike of “illiterates.” How could an “illiterate” boy come to a house like that, or how could the teacher's daughter go out walking with him?

She had got the old man to bed, and he lay there with the engaged look of a human being at grips with his destiny. From his narrow window there was a pleasant view of the sea road and a solitary tree by the water's edge. Beyond the bay was the mountain, with a cap on it—the sign of bad weather. Fogarty gave him the last Sacraments, and he confessed and received Communion with a devotion that touched Fogarty in spite of himself. He stayed on with the daughter until the doctor arrived, in case any special medicines were needed. They sat in the tiny box of a front room with a bay window and a high mahogany bookcase that filled one whole wall. She wanted to stay and make polite conversation for the priest, though all the time she was consumed with anxiety. When the doctor left, Fogarty left with him, and pressed Maisie's hand and told her to call on him for anything, at any time.

Dr. Mulloy was more offhand. He was a tall, handsome young man of about Fogarty's own age. Outside, standing beside his car, he said to Fogarty, “Ah, he might last a couple of years if he minded himself. They don't, of course. You know the way it is. A wonder that daughter of his never married.”

“How could she?” Fogarty asked in a low voice, turning to glance again at the ill-designed, pretentious little suburban house. “He'd think her too grand for any of the boys round this place.”

“Why then, indeed, if he pops off on her, she won't be too grand at all,” said the doctor. “A wonder an educated man like that wouldn't have more sense. Sure, he can't have anything to leave her?”

“No more than myself, I daresay,” said Fogarty, who saw that the doctor only wanted to find out how much they could pay; and he went off to summon one of the boy acolytes to take Considine's place at Mass next morning.

B
UT
the next morning when Fogarty reached the sacristy, instead of the boy he had spoken to, old Considine was waiting, with everything neatly arranged in his usual pedantic manner, and a wan old man's smile on his hollow face.

“Mr. Considine!” Fogarty exclaimed indignantly. “What's the meaning of this?”

“Ah, I'm fine this morning, father,” said the old man, with a sort of fictitious, drunken excitement. “I woke up as fresh as a daisy.” Then he smiled malevolently and added, “Jimmy Leary thought he was after doing me out of a job, but Dr. Mulloy was too smart for him.”

“But you know yourself what Dr. Mulloy said,” Fogarty protested indignantly. “I talked to him myself about it. He said you could live for years, but any exertion might make you go off any time.”

“And how can man die better?” retorted the teacher, with the triumphant air he wore whenever he managed to produce an apt quotation. “You remember Macaulay, I suppose,” he added doubtfully, and then his face took on a morose look. “'Tisn't that at all,” he said. “But 'tis the only thing I have to look forward to. The day wouldn't be the same to me if I had to miss Mass.”

Fogarty knew that he was up against an old man's stubbornness and love of habitual things, and that he was wasting his breath advising Considine himself. Instead, he talked to the parish priest, a holy and muddleheaded old man named Whelan. Whelan shook his head mournfully over the situation, but then he was a man who shook his head over everything. He had apparently decided many years ago that any form of action was hateful, and he took to his bed if people became too pressing.

“He's very obstinate, old John, but at the same time, you wouldn't like to cross him,” Whelan said.

“If you don't do something about it, you might as well put back the Costello Mass another half an hour,” Fogarty said. He was forever trying to induce Whelan to make up his mind. “He's getting slower every day. One of these days he'll drop dead on me at the altar.”

“Oh, I'll mention it to him,” the parish priest said regretfully. “But I don't know would it be wise to take too strong a line. You have to humor them when they're as old as that. I daresay we'll be the same ourselves, father.”

Fogarty knew he was wasting his breath on Whelan as well. Whelan would no doubt be as good as his word, and talk about the weather to Considine for an hour, and then end by dropping a hint, which might be entirely lost, that the old teacher shouldn't exert himself too much, and that would be all.

A
MONTH
later, the old teacher had another attack, but this time Fogarty only heard of it from his mad housekeeper, who knew everything that went on in the village.

“But why didn't he send for me?” he asked sharply.

“Ah, I suppose he wasn't bad enough,” replied the housekeeper. “Mrs. MacCarthy said he got over it with pills and a sup of whiskey. They say whiskey is the best thing.”

“You're sure he didn't send for me?” Fogarty asked. There were times when he half expected the woman, in the exercise of her authority, to refuse the Last Rites to people she didn't approve of.

“Sure, of course he didn't. It was probably nothing.”

All the same, Fogarty was not easy in his mind. He knew what it meant to old people to have the priest with them at the end, and he suspected that if Considine made light of his attack, it could only be because he was afraid Fogarty would take it as final proof that he was not fit to serve Mass. He felt vaguely guilty about it. He strode down the village street, saluting the fishermen who were sitting on the sea wall in the dusk. The teacher's cottage was dark when he reached it. The cobbler, a lively little man who lived next door, was standing outside.

“I hear the old master was sick again, Tom,” said the curate.

“Begor, he was, father,” said the cobbler. “I hear Maisie found him crawling to the fire on his hands and knees. Terrible cold they get when they're like that. He's a sturdy old divil, though. You needn't be afraid you'll lose your altar boy for a long time yet.”