John McGahern - Creatures of the Earth - New and Selected Stories

‘How did it come about that you got interested …?’ McLoughlin asked William tentatively.

‘Helping Lucy with her school exercises,’ William answered readily. ‘I became interested in some of the catechism answers, then church history. It’s true it is the older church. I found books by Newman and the Oxford Movement in the library. My mother must have been interested once.’

‘Still, it must be no joke turning your back on your own crowd, more or less saying that they were wrong all those centuries,’ the Sergeant said.

‘No. Not if one is convinced of the truth.’ William pushed his glass away and rose. ‘They lived according to their light. It is our day now.’

‘Well, whatever you do, we hope it’ll be for the best,’ both men echoed as he left. William never took more than one drink and this had always been put down to Protestant abstemiousness.

‘That’s a lemoner for you. I’ll need a good slow pint to get the better of that,’ the Sergeant breathed when he had gone, and pressed the bell. They both had pints.

‘What’s behind it?’ the Sergeant demanded.

‘I’d not give you many guesses.’

‘How?’

‘It’s fairly plain. I’d give you no more than one guess.’

‘You have me beaten.’

‘How did he get interested in Catholicism?’

‘With Lucy and the catechism,’ the Sergeant said in amazement. ‘I should have seen it sooner. He took her to Boles before Christmas and dressed her like the Queen of Sheba, and she hardly fourteen!’

‘In some ways Kirkwood is a very clever masterful man, but in other ways he is half a child. Lucy is not good at school but she’s far from stupid and in many ways she’s older than her years. She’s more a Kirkwood to the bone than the daughter of poor old Annie May. Isn’t she with him everywhere?’

‘He couldn’t marry her though.’

‘Three or four years isn’t that far away. Wouldn’t it leave Annie May sitting pretty!’

‘God, I’d never have thought of that in a hundred years.’

The news of the impending conversion was so strange that they kept it to themselves. On reflection they didn’t quite believe it and wanted not to appear fools, but when William was seen walking the avenue of young lime trees to the presbytery every Tuesday and Thursday evening for mandatory instruction it became widespread. Miracles would never cease among the stars of heaven. William Kirkwood, last of the Kirkwoods, was about to renounce the error of their ways and become a Catholic.

Canon Glynn, the old priest, was perfectly suited to his place. He had grown up on a farm, was fond of cards and whiskey, but his real passion in life was for the purebred shorthorns he grazed on the church grounds. In public he was given to emphasizing the mercy rather than the wrath of God and in private believed that the affairs of the earth ran more happily the less God was brought into them. At first he found the visits of this odd catechumen a welcome break in his all too predictable evenings, but soon began to be worn out by his pupil’s seemingly insatiable appetite for theological speculation. William was now pursuing Catholicism with the same zeal he had given for years to astronomy, reading every book on theology and church history he could lay hands on. Rather than be faced with this strenuous analysis of the Council of Trent, the old priest would have much preferred to have poured this over-intellectual childlike man a large glass of whiskey and to have talked about the five purebred shorthorns he was keeping over the winter and which he foddered himself in all weathers before saying daily Mass.

‘Look, William. You already know far more about doctrine than any of my parishioners, and I’ve never seen much good come from all this probing,’ he was driven to state one late evening. ‘We are human. We cannot know God or Truth. It is shut away from our eyes. We can only accept and believe. It may be no more than the mother’s instinct for the child, and as blind, but it is all we have. In two weeks’ time, when I’ll ask you “Do you believe?” all I want from you is the loud and clear response, “I do.” There our part will end. Yours will begin. In my experience anything too much discussed and worried about always leads to staleness.’

William Kirkwood was far from blind. He understood at once that he had tired the old priest whom he had grown to like and respect. For the next two weeks, like the too obedient son he had always been, he was content to sit and follow wherever the priest’s conversation led, which, after the second whiskey, was invariably to the five purebred shorthorns now grazing on the short sweet grass that grew above the ruins of the once famous eighth-century monastery.

‘You can still see the monks’ tracks everywhere in the fields, their main road or street, the cells, what must have been their stables, all like a plan on paper. Of course the walls of the main buildings still stand, but they are much later, twelfth century. Great minds thundered at one another there once. Now my shorthorns take their place. It is all good, William,’ he would laugh.

At the end of the period of instruction, when the priest, a mischievous twinkle in his old eyes, asked, ‘Do you accept and believe all those revealed truths and mysteries?’ William Kirkwood smiled, bowed his head and said, ‘I do, Father.’

The next morning, beside the stone font at the back of the Cootehall church, water was poured over the fine greying head of William Kirkwood. As it trickled down on to the brown flagstones, it must have seemed a final pale bloodletting to any ghosts of the Kirkwoods hovering in the air around.

Annie May and Lieutenant McLoughlin stood as his godparents. Afterwards there were smiles, handshakes, congratulatory armclasps, and after Mass a big festive breakfast in the presbytery, attended by all the local priests and teachers and prominent parishioners. Annie May and Lucy were there as well. The only flaw in the perfect morning was that Lucy looked pale and tense throughout and on the very verge of tears when having to respond to a few polite questions during the breakfast. She had been strange with William ever since he began instruction, as if she somehow sensed that this change threatened the whole secure world of her girlhood. As soon as they got home from the breakfast, she burst into an uncontrollable fit of weeping and ran to her room. By evening she was better but would not explain her weeping, and that night was the first night in years that she did not come to him to be kissed on her way to bed. The following Sunday every eye was on the recent convert as he marched his men through the village and all the way up the church to the foot of the high altar. Lucy felt light-headed with pride as she saw him ascend the church at the head of his men. But the old ease between them had disappeared. She no longer wanted his help in the evenings with her exercises, preferring to go to school unprepared if necessary, and he did not try to force his help, waiting until this mood would pass.

‘Now that you have come this far, and everything has gone so well, you might as well go the whole distance,’ the Sergeant suggested with amiable vagueness one Sunday soon afterwards in Charlie’s. Rifle practice had been abandoned early. A ricochet had somehow come off the hill, had struck a red bullock of Murphy’s in the eye in a nearby field. The bullock, lowing wildly, began to stagger in circles round the field. A vet had to put it down. A report would have to be written. The accident had been the first in his command and William Kirkwood was inordinately annoyed. There must have been carelessness or wilful folly somewhere among the riflemen.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked very sharply.

‘It was nothing about today,’ McLoughlin interjected. ‘I think the Sergeant was only trying to say what we all feel. Everything has gone wonderfully well and it would complete the picture if we were to see you married,’ and both men saw William Kirkwood suddenly colour to the roots of his hair.