Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

true — but with me there was an element of astonishment, a sense of participating in something grand and mysterious and I wanted a deeper part of it and that took me to Maynooth

where God finally showed Himself to you but gave you the two fingers instead of the guiding hand

it was more of a voice telling me to cop myself on

you were only codding yourself

something like that

he had great patience, Agnes — did you know this

know what

Agnes crossed the room, flinging herself in a tired heap into an armchair where she picked up a magazine and began to flick through it

that dad was nearly a priest

what

Dad — Fr Marcus Conway, a man of the cloth, a sky pilot

no way

yes way — which order did you sign up to, was it one of the preach- ing or teaching ones

neither, it was just to be an ordinary parish priest

that’s a pity, I could well imagine you in one of the preaching orders, a man who laid down the party line — possibly the Dominicans, you’d be good banging on with the Malleus Maleficarum and

though they were younger at the time both of them were always keen to display their wit and reading, the title for house brainbox still up for grabs back then as

it explains a lot though, Agnes said

so I’m told

something I could never understand — how a farmer’s lad like you ended up with someone like Mam, more exactly how an engineer won the hand of a cultured girl like Mam

yeah, Darragh said, how does a stint in a seminary equip you to go about wooing a girl steeped in French existentialism –

that’s my point, Agnes continued, ok, my theory is that God took pity on Dad — He foresaw that he was going to try it on with her, but He knew also that as things stood he didn’t have a chance — she was way out of his league — so He lured him into a seminary to tool him up with poetry and theology and philosophy so that he wouldn’t get steamrolled when he finally met her but

I don’t buy that, Darragh replied, clearly irritated by the way Agnes had made such headway with the subject, irked at how quickly she had picked through its possibilities and

how would reading Aquinas and the church fathers make head- way with Mam

even if that was all he ever read — which I’m sure it wasn’t — it was still enough to enable him to fight his corner when he met a young woman who could quote Sartre and de Beauvoir, chapter and verse, in the original French

I don’t remember our courtship being so gladiatorial

of course you don’t, that’s because God took you under His wing and tooled you up with The Song of Songs before turning you loose — all that time you thought you were in a seminary to get close to God, but in fact you were only training for the day when you’d meet her –

she’s right, Dad, you had to be made worthy of her and that’s how it was done, two years of schooling in the broad humanities so that you would be fit for her when you met and when your training was done, God absented himself from the scene, gave you the back of His hand and a shoe in the hole and

that’s what happened, Darragh concluded his nose now well out of joint on account of Agnes’s better read on the whole thing

that’s my take on it, she concurred

and two years after you sign up, God shows you the door dressed up as a crisis of faith so you jump back over the wall, your head filled with all that good stuff for when you meet this educated girl who’s travelled the world and who, if you don’t play your cards right, will tell you to piss off in three different romance languages and

I was relieved my admission hadn’t phased or embarrassed them, and the deft way they had made light of the whole thing gave me hope that there was something in the experience that would stand to them down the road, but it

was strange also to me that the conversation revealed nothing of the confusion and anguish I had experienced at the time, not to mention my foolishness on realising that a child’s awe and trepidation would never evolve into a faith and that I had made a mistake that would cost me two years, a stretch of time which back then felt like an epoch but that now, from the distance of middle age, seems little more than a brief but gloomy interlude spent among the rooms and corridors of that seminary with its grottoed walls and parquet floors, one among a large drove of pale young men drawn from all over the country, some genuinely intent but more, like myself, there in a mood of hopeful bafflement to bury myself in some stumbling quest for a god whose presence resolutely faded the harder I strove towards him and who did nothing to acknowledge my search, so that my faith petered out in time

ordinary time, festive seasons, days of obligation

a gradual leaking away of all conviction which now appears to have been mercifully rapid but which, at the time, manifested itself in length and breadth as a kind of ashen desert, which left me scalded in spirit, but merciful enough to leave unscathed that part of me which found something comic in my quest so that I stood blasted and sore but laughing at myself in a wasteland that stretched through the parquet corridors of the seminary, where the walls echoed with my own laughter –

what the hell was I thinking of

and along which there was nether a single nook nor corner in which I could get away from myself and even if Agnes was correct — she was — and I did acquire enough reading to give me some chance with Mairead — a stiff dose of poetry, the geometric conceits of the metaphysicals always appealed to her sense of symmetry and balance — it would be quite some time before its worth became obvious, hidden as it was beneath a burning skin of shame so that when I returned to the home place after two years with neither dog-collar nor parchment — the spoiled priest slinking home — it weighed heavily on me that I may have brought some ignominy on myself or my family, but with nowhere else to go and nothing to do I did indeed return, where, after a few weeks

the offer of a job as a gardener with a pharmaceutical company came up, a firm that had just opened a facility in Westport — manufacturing solvent for the cleaning of contact lenses — and I spent a full year there with three other gardeners raking gravel and tending verges around the warehouse and laboratories, shaping those flower beds and rockeries that were their corporate pride and joy and for which they would win several awards after

I left to study civil engineering the following year for no reason other than my father pointing out to me at the time that the country was in such a bad state I might as well be in education for a few more years while things were as they were, either that or go to London or America, which he advised against, pointing out that since I had no trade or qualification

I would probably end up labouring on the pick and shovel and he did not want that for me, no he did not, so it was better to work out the rest of the year as a gardener which was good honest labour with enough fresh air in it to clear my head and sort myself out so that I could go back to study in the autumn because, as he put it

there’s no use staying in this place, the few head of cattle and the bit of land, it’s too small to make a living on but it’s big enough for a man to go around codding himself that he’s busy and has things to do, slobbering with buckets and calves and feeding, but in the end that’s all you’d be doing, codding yourself, so my advice is to get an education, see a bit of the world, this place will always be here and

my father’s voice with its neat way of invoking the world as a properly ordered and coherent place in which a man could find his way or take his bearings from certain signs and markers if he only did not allow his vision to become cluttered up with nonsense or things to assume outsize importance in his life, his way of