‘Would you have a lift?’ he asked him.
‘Where’re you heading?’
‘Mullinavat.’
‘I’m taking a rest.’
‘I’m not in a hurry. God knows, I’m not.’
‘I’d leave you to New Ross. Wait there till I’ll have finished the grub.’
‘D’you know beyond Mullinavat, over the Galloping Pass? A village by the name of Gleban?’
‘I never heard of that.’
‘There’s a big white church out the road, nothing only petrol and a half-and-half in Gleban. A priests’ seminary a half-mile the other way.’
‘I don’t know that place at all.’
‘I used be there one time. I don’t know would it be bigger now.’
‘It would surely. Isn’t everywhere these times? Get in and we’ll make it to Ross.’
Prunty considered if he’d ask the van driver for money. He could leave it until they were getting near Ross in case the van would be pulled up as soon as money was mentioned and he’d be told to get out. Or maybe it’d be better if he’d leave it until the van was drawn up at the turn to Mullinavat, where there’d be the parting of the ways. He remembered Ross, he remembered where the Mullinavat road was. What harm could it do, when he was as far as he could be taken, that he’d ask for the price of a slice of bread, the way any traveller would?
Prunty thought about that while the van driver told him his mother was in care in Tagoat. He went to Tagoat on a Sunday, he said, and Prunty knew what the day was then, not that it made a difference. In a city you’d always know that one day of the week when it came round, but travelling you wouldn’t be bothered cluttering yourself with that type of thing.
‘She’s with a woman who’s on the level with her,’ the van driver said. ‘Not a home, nothing like that. I wouldn’t touch a home.’
Prunty agreed that he was right. She’d been where she was a twelve-month, the van driver said, undisturbed in a room, every meal cooked while she’d wait for it. He wagged his head in wonder at these conditions. ‘The Queen of Sheba,’ he said.
Prunty’s own mother was dead. She’d died eighteen months before he’d gone into exile, a day he hated remembering. Word came in at Cahill’s, nineteen seventy-nine, a wet winter day, February he thought it was.
‘You’ve only the one mother,’ he said. ‘I’m over for the same.’
Prunty made the connection in the hope that such shared ground would assist in the matter of touching the van driver for a few coins.
‘In England, are you?’ the van driver enquired.
‘Oh, I am. A long time there.’
‘I was never there yet.’
‘I’m after coming off the ferry.’
‘You’re travelling light.’
‘I have other stuff at Gleban.’
‘Is your mother in a home there?’
‘I wouldn’t touch one, like yourself. She’s eighty-three years of age, and still abiding in the same house eight children was born in. Not a speck of dust in it, not an egg fried you wouldn’t offer up thanks for, two kinds of soda bread made every day.’
The van driver said he got the picture. They passed the turn to Adamstown, the evening still fine, which Prunty was glad about. He had two children, the van driver said, who’d be able to tell him if Kilkenny won. Going down to Tagoat on a Sunday was the way of it when old age would be in charge, he said; you made the sacrifice. He crossed himself when they passed a church, and Prunty said to himself he’d nearly forgotten that.
‘You’d go through Wexford itself in the old days,’ he said.
‘You would all right.’
‘The country’s doing well.’
‘The Europeans give us the roads. Ah, but sure she’s doing well all the same.’
‘Were you always in Ross?’
‘Oh, I was.’
‘I cleared off when I had to. A while back.’
‘A lot went then.’
Prunty said you’d never have believed it at the time. It would be happening all around you and you wouldn’t know the scale of the emigration. He was listened to without much interest. The conversation flagged and the van drew up when there’d been silence for a few miles. They were in a quiet street, deserted on a Sunday evening. Prunty was reluctant to get out.
‘You couldn’t see your way to a few bob?’
The van driver leaned across to release the catch of the door. He pushed the door open.
‘Maybe a fifty if you’d have it handy,’ Prunty suggested, and the van driver said he never carried money with him in the van and Prunty knew it wasn’t true. He shook his head. He said: ‘Any loose change at all.’
‘I have to be getting on now. Take that left by the lamppost with the bin on it. D’you see it? Take it and keep going.’
Prunty got out. He stood back while the door was banged shut from the inside. They said it because the mention of money made them think of being robbed. Even a young fellow like that, strong as a horse. Hold on to what you’d have: they were all like that.
He watched the van driving away, the orange indicator light flicking on and off, the turn made to the right. He set off in the direction he’d been given and no car passed him until he left the town behind. None stopped for him then, the evening sun dazzling him on the open road. That was the first time he had begged in Ireland, he said to himself, and the thought stayed with him for a few miles, until he lay down at the edge of a field. The night would be fine except for the bit of dew that might come later on. It wasn’t difficult to tell.
The old man was asleep, head slumped into his chest, its white hair mussed, one arm hanging loose. The doorbell hadn’t roused him, and Miss Brehany’s decision was that she had no option but to wake him since she had knocked twice and still he hadn’t heard. ‘Father Meade,’ she called softly, while the man who had come waited in the hall. She should have sent him away; she should have said come some time Father Meade would know to expect him; after his lunch when the day was warm he usually dropped off. ‘Miss Brehany,’ he said, sitting up.
She described the man who had come to the door. She said she had asked for a name but that her enquiry had been passed by as if it hadn’t been heard. When she’d asked again she hadn’t understood the response. She watched the priest pushing himself to his feet, the palms of his hands pressed hard on the surface of his desk.
‘He’s wearing a collar and tie,’ she said.
‘Would that be Johnny Healy?’
‘It isn’t, Father. It’s a younger man than Johnny Healy.’
‘Bring him in, Rose, bring him in. And bring me in a glass of water, would you?’
‘I would of course.’
Father Meade didn’t recognize the man who was brought to him, although he had known him once. He wasn’t of the parish, he said to himself, unless he’d come into it in recent years. But his housekeeper was right about the collar and tie, an addition to a man’s attire that in Father Meade’s long experience of such matters placed a man. The rest of his clothing, Rose Brehany might have added, wasn’t up to much.
‘Would you remember me, Father? Would you remember Donal Prunty?’
Miss Brehany came in with the water and heard that asked and observed Father Meade’s slow nod, after a pause. She was thanked for the glass of water.
‘Are you Donal Prunty?’ Father Meade asked.
‘I served at the Mass for you, Father.’
‘You did, Donal, you did.’
‘It wasn’t yourself who buried my mother.’
‘Father Loughlin if it wasn’t myself. You went away, Donal.’
‘I did, all right. I was never back till now.’
He was begging. Father Meade knew, you always could tell; it was one of the senses that developed in a priest. Not that a lot came begging in a scattered parish, not like you’d get in the towns.