Jan Karon - In the Company of Others

‘What are your feelings toward William?’

‘I can’t see how to love him like a father, it can’t be done. I can never keep th’ anger down when I think of how he betrayed a good man with a bad woman. There’s th’ rare time when I do feel love for William-like a son, you might say, but then ’t is a blight on my love for Riley Conor, an’ I feel guilty as a thief an’ angry again at William’s fornicatin’ soul. What right did he have to my mother, I say, an’ all over again, there’s my fury risin’ up against my mother for her heedless ways. ’t is a dog chasin’ its tail, a cruel heap of rubble, all of it.

‘Maybe I was feelin’ some better, then came th’ cupboard business, as William calls it, an’ Garda swarmin’ th’ place, an’ all th’ rest…’

Liam slammed his fist onto the stone. ‘God above, what’s to be done?’

‘Let’s start where you started. I believe the beginning needed here is forgiveness.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘Peace is what it will take to release you from the bondage of this thing. Forgiveness is a direct link to peace.’

‘I don’t get your meaning.’

‘I mean you need to do some forgiving, Liam.’

‘For the bloody horror of th’ whole mucking business, I need to do some forgiving?’

‘Starting with your mother.’

‘For God’s sake, you can’t mean that-’t is a bloody Protestant joke.’

‘I do mean it. One must begin somewhere, sometime, to let go of the bitterness, or be eaten alive and the marrow sucked out.’

Liam looked away, angry, and stood down from the stone. ‘I can’t do this. Sorry for your time. Terribly sorry.’

Liam hurried along the shoreline, away from the path to Broughadoon.

He felt in his chest Liam’s crushing heaviness mingled with his own. Through carelessness or blunder, he had estranged a man who needed God’s wisdom, which was precisely what he’d offered. He believed what he had said; he hadn’t tried to wrap it in frill or poesy.

What George Steiner had called ‘the terrible sweetness of Christ’ was needed here. Grace upon grace was needed here. Three men were vying for the fathering of a single boy, and two of them more than enough.

He closed his eyes, breathed in the lambent air of the lough, tried to collect thoughts scattered like leaves before a gale. The grace to forgive Matthew Kavanagh had literally saved his life, his feeling life. What he hadn’t known was that it would have to be done again and again over the years. A nuisance, really, like the continuous labor required to keep a garden from running wild, or a bed made, or a machine oiled. Most often, the forgiving of his father had demanded an act of sheer will, there was nothing sappy or sentimental about forgiving a bitter wound, one had to go at it head down. Late in his forties, he had come awake to a key word in the petition, ‘forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.’

As was the word on which the petition turned. As we forgive, we are in that same instant forgiven. It was a sacred two-for-one, a hallowed tit for tat.

He wanted that for Liam.

But perhaps the whole thing was beyond his feeble energies as friend or cleric. Perhaps he should take his hands off it altogether, let it go. He prayed to be able to sacrifice the dark weight on his spirit, begged for Liam’s deliverance from a darkness far greater than his own had been. He had, at least, known-

‘Speak your piece, then, Reverend. I’ve spoken mine.’

Liam looked at him, then climbed again onto the gob of stone. Blood smeared the knuckles of Liam’s right hand.

He felt a shaming impulse to weep, and, through some license barely understood, gave way to it.

‹Dear Fr T:

‹Thanx for yr email of five words total. Cynthia’s ankle on all prayer chains. Harold and I attended service at Lord’s Chapel last Sunday. They baptized the niece of Dooley’s old teacher, Miss Pearson, who visited twice after my gall bladder op. Be glad you are not at LC anymore. For one thing they are using TRUMPETS. Three of the things blaring at once! What in the world they’ll fall back on at Easter is beyond me. Somebody said if the Search Committee had used you as a roll model they would not be in this mess. Glad to be a Baptist again, ha ha. Large Waterford vase.

‹Love to all, Emma›

‹Hey Dad

‹Hey Cynthia

‹A foal out of Brown Betty last night. No problems. Miss you guys.

‹Hal says he’ll be proud to see my name on the business. Wish I could jump over the four years of vet school. Hey, Cynthia hope your ankle is ok. Lace sends love. She spent a week at Meadowgate. Barnabas doing great don’t worry about anything. Hal and Marge and Rebecca send love. Sammy and Kenny and Jessie and Pooh send the same and so does Harley. Mush, mush and more mush.

‹Love,

‹Dools›

The emails were on the bed when they returned from their wanderings. He grabbed Dooley’s and read it avidly; he was starving for it. Don’t worry about anything. He liked that.

After his walk to the lake with Liam and a demoralizing breakfast of yogurt and fruit-his idea, not Broughadoon’s-he and Cynthia had taken off for Ben Bulben, where the Vauxhall climbed a rude track along the flank. They slowed for sheep in the road, searched the views. Then lunch at the tea shop in Drumcliff and out to the churchyard where she sketched Yeats’s headstone. Covered by a layer of common gravel, his grave had looked bereft among those better-tended.

Through it all, Cynthia was subdued. The prolonged ankle business-the crutches and the craving to toss them-had gotten to her; she was struggling through an inevitable patch of depression. He seldom saw her out of sorts, it was mildly alarming, he would do anything-stand on his head, whistle Dixie-to help her through.

She stood at the chest of drawers, leafing aimlessly through the work of the day. He looked over her shoulder.

‘That’s a good one,’ he said. ‘The great Ben as the prow of a ship steering through a green sea.’ He thought she might enjoy the imagery.

‘I’m afraid I can’t do it,’ she said, not hearing.

He shucked change from his pocket to the tray. ‘Do what?’

‘William’s portrait by firelight.’

‘Worst case, let’s say you really can’t do it. What difference does it make?’

‘All the difference.’

‘All? Isn’t that carrying it a little far?’

‘His face is the best of faces, I won’t find another like it’

‘Then why not a portrait by daylight or lamplight? Why heap on coals with the firelight business, no pun intended?’

She looked up at him. ‘Because that’s the way he should be painted. It’s the way it needs to be done’

This was making him crazy. ‘But you’re anxious about it.’

‘It’s all right to be anxious. A bit of stage fright is good for the performance, don’t you think?’

Well, yes-he agreed.

‘So you pray and I’ll paint and together we’ll get the job done. Okay?’ She smiled, innocent as any babe.

Thank God, he’d hardly had a smile out of her all day. ‘You’re a bloody nutcase.’

‘Mush, mush, and more mush.’

He pressed her close, wordless. That he could hold to himself all the comfort in all the world was sometimes nearly too great a thing to believe.

At Anna’s suggestion, the poker club and the Kavanaghs joined tables at dinner. Cynthia ordered a bottle of Prosecco, which Liam kept for the Italians who sometimes came.

‘To a safe and happy journey,’ said his wife, ‘for the Book Poker Fishin’ Irish Widows’ Travel Club!’

‘That’s us!’ said Debbie.

‘Slainte!’ he said.

‘Salute!’ said everyone else.