Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

That hasn’t been the worst of it. There was that period when, still clammy from the fear of the night before, I dedicated a large part of the day to obsessively quantifying my remaining lifetime. Pa was my yardstick. Thus I would take his age, fifty-six, and calculate that there were still thirty years before I reached it. Thirty years, I reminded myself, was four years more than the entirety of my life to date. That wasn’t too bad, was it? But then I would work out that, aged twenty-six, probably a third of my life had already passed, and that in ten years’ time — ten years being a mere five-thirteenths of my life already lived, being merely the years that had flicked past since the time I was sixteen years old, a time which felt like yesterday! — I would probably have used up half of my total existence allotment ! In just ten years from now! I also realized that my age was catching up with Pa’s in terms of the latter’s divisibility by the former: whereas, not so long ago, at the age of twenty, I had been a mere two-fifths of my father’s age, four years hence I would be only half as young as him. And then this question arose: what about Pa? How long did old Pa have to go — before he was under the ground, alone and cold?

Pa! My Pa!

It’s not right. I can just see him, innocently sweating in the garden in his V-neck pullover and his beige self-belt trousers. ‘I wonder what she’s up to now,’ he is saying. He is hoeing the soil where the rose-bushes are planted. ‘This is what she loved to do when she could get a minute to herself, away from you kids. You were a handful, I can tell you.’ He sinks the hoe into the ground and turns the earth. Worms appear. ‘This was hers. This was where she found herself, when she worked the garden. And I mean work. Those weeds didn’t stand a chance once she’d pulled her boots on, and her hat (remember her hat?). It was a massacre.’ He picks up a pair of old shears and snaps at the border of the lawn. His breath is short. ‘If she could see the garden now …’ He rises from his stoop and points at a bush with the shears. ‘See that? Your mother planted that.’ Then he looks upwards in the mild spring sunshine. ‘I’ll bet you anything she’s looking down and wishing she could be here.’ He sweeps his eyes around the garden, then suddenly kneels by a patch of sprouting grass he has spotted. ‘I’d better take care of this,’ he says, clacking the shears, ‘or she’ll give me hell.’

I thank my stars that this is one area where he and I definitely differ: death. Just about the one worry he does not have is that of meeting his Maker. For Pa that phrase is literal — he really does believe that when he dies he will, God permitting, encounter the Man Upstairs Himself. In his belief, not only will he meet up with the Lord, but he will also run into his parents, his old buddies and, best of all, Ma. Pa looks forward to the time he will be reunited with his wife and his marriage will resume from where it left off and these years of separation will come to an end. He anticipates that day with the certainty of a man in the night anticipating the dawn. Which is great; it’s wonderful he has this consolation. The snag is that, however talented he may be at scheduling railway timetables and fixing points failures, Eugene Breeze is not the country’s foremost theologian.

I discovered this early on, in the course of my preparation for my first communion. One Sunday, due to the absence of the regular teacher, Pa volunteered to take the CCD class I attended after each mass and to undertake our sacramental instruction for that day. The subject under discussion, I remember, was the parable of the house built on rock and the house built on sand. The illustrated children’s booklet showed it all. Two men decided to build houses for themselves. The first man — a hippie with smooth cheeks and long, curling hair — quickly put up a rickety shack on the beach which rested precariously on stilts. While the hippie strung up bring lights on his bamboo balcony and partied the nights away, the second man — a serious fellow with a dark beard and a steady gaze — unceasingly swung a pickaxe on an unpromising pile of rock, digging foundations and laying bricks until, slowly but surely, a sturdy detached home took shape there. So there you had it, one house built on sand and the other on rock, and even the class dunce knew what was going to happen next. We turned the page and, sure enough, up blew a storm, up curled a giant angry blue wave and down went the beach-house.

‘What do we learn from this?’ Pa asked us.

There was a silence. We knew that this was a parable and therefore that the story was not about what it seemed to be about, namely the importance of location and materials in the construction of houses. But that was all we knew. Also, I think that the story had frightened us a little bit. The last drawing showed the hippie lying on the beach next to his wrecked house, and we could not tell if he had pulled through or not. Eventually a seven-year-old arm went up. ‘You have to do things properly,’ someone said.

‘That’s right,’ Pa said encouragingly. He waited a while longer for another interpretation, tossing a piece of chalk in his hand. Then he said, ‘But let me tell you something else this story says. It says that if you believe in God, God will be like a rock in your life. He’ll always be there with you.’

This was met with another silence. Then a girl said, ‘But why shouldn’t we believe in God?’

This only threw Pa for a moment. ‘Well, Deirdre, some people don’t believe in God. But they’re wrong, because God is real. He sent Jesus, his only son, down to the world to show us how much he loved us.’

‘What about people who don’t believe in God, like the savages?’ Deirdre said. ‘Do they go to hell?’

Pa smiled. ‘No, God looks after them as well. God loves the whole world.’

Then Deirdre said what we were all thinking. ‘I don’t understand. What about him?’ She jabbed her finger at the unconscious figure stretched out on the beach.

This question clean-bowled Pa. I remember him mumbling something, but whatever he said was not an answer, and to this day the problem of evil has Pa defeated; thus whenever news of suffering innocents hits our screens, he looks on in a distressed confusion, muttering to himself. There but for the grace of God go we, I hear him whispering as we watch footage of an earthquake in central India where over a hundred thousand people dreamlessly lie in the rubble of their homes. This, remember, from a man fully insured against Acts of God.

To be fair, I do not blame Pa for his failure to crack these puzzles. Why should he have a watertight theory of everything? After all, who the hell is he? Just another human being who gets up in the morning and does his best to get through the day without mishap. Like everybody else, he leaves the business of ontological breakthroughs to the specialists, relying on any developments to filter down through the usual channels. Good news travels. Look at the Gospel. A few fishermen — correction, a few writers who borrowed their names — record pure hearsay concerning a long-gone woodworker and before you know it, on the strength of evidence that wouldn’t stand up a second in any half-decent court, the whole world has latched on to it. Even now, two thousand years later, a huge infrastructure is still in place to broadcast these same glad, unreal tidings. You can’t turn a corner in Rockport without running into a church. So who can blame Pa for falling into line on religion and leaving the fine detail of it to the experts?

The problem, though, comes when you actually scrutinize these experts in action. Just the other day, for example, I came across a theological debate in the newspaper which was literally a scandal — a stumbling-block to faith.