Andrew Hurley - The Loney

When I had finished I noticed that he had his hands jammed between his legs.

‘Do you need to go?’ I said.

Hanny rocked back and forth, kicking the side of his boot against the door.

‘Come on then.’

While Father Bernard was poking about in the engine, I took him outside and walked down the lane a little so no one else would see. He went over to a dry stone wall and unzipped his jeans while I waited in the rain and listened to it tapping on the hood of the parka Mummer had insisted I bring.

I looked back at the minibus and thought I could hear raised voices. Mummer. Farther. They had tried their best to hold onto the cheerfulness that had been there when we left Saint Jude’s, but it had been difficult not to feel despondent once the rain began pounding the roads and everything had been obscured by mist.

A stiff wind blew in across the fields bringing the smell of brine and rot as strong as an onion. It seemed that all our past pilgrimages were contained in that smell and I felt a tension start to grow in my stomach. We had been coming here for as long as I could remember, yet I’d never felt completely comfortable in this place. It was rather like my grandfather’s house. Glum, lifeless, mildly threatening. Not somewhere you wanted to linger for very long. I was always glad to see the back of it once our Easter pilgrimage was over and I’d breathed a private sigh of relief when Father Wilfred died and we stopped going altogether.

The rest of them kept up their spirits with hymns and prayers but at times it seemed as though they were, without knowing it perhaps, warding things off, rather than inviting God in.

Hanny finished and waved me over to where he was standing.

‘What is it?’ I said.

He pointed at the fence in front of him. A hare had been shot and skinned and its hide splayed on the barbed wire, along with several dozen rats. Trophies or deterrents, I suppose they were both.

‘Leave it alone, Hanny,’ I said. ‘Don’t touch it.’

He looked at me pleadingly.

‘We can’t save it now,’ I said.

He went to stroke it but withdrew his hand when I shook my head. The hare stared at us through a glassy brown eye.

We were starting to cross the road back to the minibus when I heard the sound of a car approaching. I grabbed Hanny’s sleeve and held him tightly as an expensive-looking Daimler went past us, throwing water into the ditches on either side. There was a young girl asleep in the back, her face against the window. The driver slowed at the corner where we were standing and turned his head briefly to look at me before he rounded the bend and was gone. I had never seen a car like that here before. There was little in the way of traffic at all around The Loney. Mostly hay-trucks and farm wagons and not always motorised either.

When Hanny and I got back to the minibus Father Bernard still had his hands deep in amongst the pipes and wires.

‘What’s wrong with it, Father?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, Tonto,’ he said and wiped the rain out of his eyes with his sleeve. ‘It might be the fly wheel, but I’d have to take the whole thing apart to be sure.’

He closed the bonnet with some reluctance and followed me back on board.

‘Any luck?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘Not so far,’ Father Bernard replied, smoothing his sopping hair back over his head. ‘I think it’ll be a garage job to be honest.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘What a start.’

‘Well at least it got us this far,’ said Farther.

‘Aye, there’s that,’ said Father Bernard.

Monro was whining. Father Bernard shushed him and he shrank into a white eyed nervousness.

‘I think the best thing to do,’ he said, ‘will be for me to walk on to the village and see if there’s anyone there who can help us.’

‘In this weather, Father?’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘You’ll catch your death.’

‘To be honest, the walk will do me good, Mrs Belderboss,’ he said. ‘I don’t do well sitting for so long.’

‘It’s a fair way, Father,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘It must be a good three or four miles.’

Father Bernard smiled dismissively and started to wind his scarf around his neck.

‘You’ll go with him, won’t you?’ Mummer said to me.

‘Ah, don’t worry yourself, Mrs Smith,’ said Father Bernard. ‘There’s no sense in two of us getting soaked.’

‘It’s no trouble, is it?’ Mummer nudged me.

‘No,’ I said.

The wind buffed around the minibus. Monro piped up again and Father Bernard leant down and scrubbed his neck to comfort him.

‘What’s the matter with him, Father?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘I don’t know,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Maybe it was that car going past.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘He was going at a fair gallop. I didn’t think he was going to slow down for the bend.’

‘The girl was a pretty little thing, though wasn’t she?’ said Mrs Belderboss.

Mr Belderboss frowned. ‘What girl?’

‘The girl in the back.’

‘I didn’t see a girl.’

‘Well then you missed out, Reg.’

‘Oh come on now, Mary,’ he said. ‘You know I only have eyes for you.’

Mrs Belderboss leant over to Miss Bunce.

‘Make the most of David’s sincerity while it lasts,’ she said, but Miss Bunce was looking past her at Monro, who had crawled back under my seat and was shaking.

‘Come on, old feller,’ said Father Bernard. ‘You’re showing me up. What’s the matter?’

***

Three men were coming across the field towards us. They were dressed in filthy green wax jackets and rubber boots. None of them wore hats or had umbrellas. They were local men, either hardened to the weather or possessed of the knowledge that it would pass over in a few moments.

One of them carried a shotgun over his arm. Another had a white terrier on a chain. One of those ones with a long face and wide-set eyes. A dog drawn by a child. The third man was older than the other two and walked several yards behind, coughing into his fist. They stopped and looked at us for a few moments before carrying on towards the road.

‘Should we ask them for some help, Father?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘I’d rather we didn’t,’ said Miss Bunce, looking at David, who reassured her by taking her hand.

‘Well, it’s either that or we spend the rest of the week sitting here,’ said Mummer.

Father Bernard got out and looked along the road before crossing. The men climbed over the stile and waited when Father Bernard called to them. The tallest of them, who was bald and had the build of a Charolais bull, held his shotgun over the crook of his arm and looked at Father Bernard while he explained about the clutch. The one with the dog held its snout tightly closed and alternated his interest between what Father Bernard was saying and the strangers on the minibus. His left arm seemed to hang more loosely and on that hand he wore a black mitten tied at the wrist with some string. The elder man coughed again and sat down on a broken bit of wall. He was a strange colour. The colour of nicotine or dried daffodils. The same colour my grandfather went when his liver packed in.

‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘He doesn’t look at all well, does he, Reg?’

‘Toxoplasmosis, most likely,’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘Toxo what?’

‘They get it from cats,’ he said. ‘It’s very common with farmers. Their cats pick up all sorts of things.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘I read it in the paper,’ he said. ‘You have a look at their hands. They don’t wash them properly. All they have to do is swallow a bit of cat’s doings and that’s that. I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘I think so,’ said Farther.