Part 19 (2/2)

I thought of walking round and round a s.p.a.ce utterly empty, utterly a source, like the idea of sound or like the absence sensed in swamp-fed air above a ring of walked-down gra.s.s and rushes where we once found the bad carca.s.s and scrags of hair of our dog that had disappeared weeks before.

IV.

Blurred swimmings as I faced the sun, my back to the stone pillar and the iron cross, ready to say the dream words I renounce ...

Blurred oval prints of newly ordained faces, 'Father' p.r.o.nounced with a fawning relish, the sunlit tears of parents being blessed.

I saw a young priest, glossy as a blackbird, as if he had stepped from his anointing a moment ago: his purple stole and cord or cincture loosely tied, his polished shoes unexpectedly secular beneath a pleated, lace-hemmed alb of linen cloth.

His name had lain undisturbed for years like an old bicycle wheel in a ditch ripped at last from under jungling briars, wet and perished. My arms were open wide but I could not say the words. 'The rain forest,' he said, 'you've never seen the like of it. I lasted only a couple of years. Bare-breasted women and rat-ribbed men. Everything wasted.

I rotted like a pear. I sweated Ma.s.ses ...'

His breath came short and shorter. 'In long houses I raised the chalice above headdresses.

In hoc signo ... On that abandoned mission compound, my vocation is a steam off the drenched creepers.'

I had broken off from my renunciation while he was speaking, so as to clear the way for other pilgrims queueing to get started.

'I'm older now than you when you went away,'

I ventured, feeling a strange reversal.

'I never could see you on the foreign missions.

I could only see you on a bicycle, a clerical student home for the summer, doomed to the decent thing. Visiting neighbours.

Drinking tea and praising home-made bread.

Something in them would be ratified when they saw you at the door in your black suit, arriving like some sort of holy mascot.

You gave too much relief, you raised a siege the world had laid against their kitchen grottoes hung with holy pictures and crucifixes.'

'And you,' he faltered, 'what are you doing here but the same thing? What possessed you?

I at least was young and unaware that what I thought was chosen was convention.

But all this you were clear of you walked into over again. And the G.o.d has, as they say, withdrawn.

What are you doing, going through these motions?

Unless ... Unless ...' Again he was short of breath and his whole fevered body yellowed and shook.

'Unless you are here taking the last look.'

Then where he stood was empty as the roads we both grew up beside, where the sick man had taken his last look one drizzly evening when the tarmac steamed with the first breath of spring, a knee-deep mist I waded silently behind him, on his circuits, visiting.

V.

An old man's hands, like soft paws rowing forward, groped for and warded off the air ahead.

Barney Murphy shuffled on the concrete.

Master Murphy. I heard the weakened voice bulling in sudden rage all over again and fell in behind, my eyes fixed on his heels like a man lifting swathes at a mower's heels.

His sockless feet were like the dried broad bean that split its st.i.tches in the display jar high on a window in the old cla.s.sroom, white as shy faces in the cla.s.sroom door.

'Master,' those elders whispered, 'I wonder, master ...'

rustling envelopes, proffering them, withdrawing, waiting for him to sign beside their mark, and 'Master' I repeated to myself so that he stopped but did not turn or move, gone quiet in the shoulders, his small head vigilant in the cold gusts off the lough.

I moved ahead and faced him, shook his hand.

Above the winged collar, his mottled face went distant in a smile as the voice readied itself and husked and sc.r.a.ped, 'Good man, good man yourself,' then lapsed again into the limbo and dry urn of the larynx.

The Adam's apple in its weathered sac worked like the plunger of a pump in drought but yielded nothing to help the helpless smile.

Morning field smells came past on the wind, the s.e.x-cut of sweetbriar after rain, new meadow hay, birds' nests filled with leaves.

'You'd have thought that Anahorish School was purgatory enough for any man,'

I said. 'You have done your station.'

Then a little trembling happened and his breath rushed the air softly as scythes in his lost meadows.

'Birch trees have overgrown Leitrim Moss, dairy herds are grazing where the school was and the school garden's loose black mould is gra.s.s.'

He was gone with that and I was faced wrong way into more pilgrims absorbed in this exercise.

As I stood among their whispers and bare feet the mists of all the mornings I'd set out for Latin cla.s.ses with him, face to face, refreshed me. Mensa, mensa, mensam sang on the air like a busy sharping-stone.

'We'll go some day to my uncle's farm at Toome '

Another master spoke. 'For what is the great moving power and spring of verse? Feeling, and in particular, love. When I went last year I drank three cups of water from the well.

It was very cold. It stung me in the ears.

You should have met him ' Coming in as usual with the rubbed quotation and his c.o.c.ked bird's eye dabbing for detail. When you're on the road give lifts to people, you'll always learn something.

There he went, in his belted gaberdine, and after him, another fosterer, slack-shouldered and clear-eyed: 'Sure I might have known once I had made the pad, you'd be after me sooner or later. Forty-two years on and you've got no farther! But after that again, where else would you go? Iceland, maybe? Maybe the Dordogne?'

And then the parting shot. 'In my own day the odd one came here on the hunt for women.'

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