“Look, it’s come out,” he could shout, or gloat in secret.
Nothing came near out and he was too restless.
“What was your beloved cousin talking about?” he asked.
“Not much.”
“Not much — such a bloody answer. So the pair of you stood and gaped at each other with your mouths open.”
“No.”
“What did he say so?”
“He said about being a priest.”
“What did he say about that?”
“He said he’d help, and not to worry. He said that nothing could be done till after the exams.”
“He meant he’d buy the calf when it was reared a bullock?”
“No, no, he didn’t mean that. He said he’d help. He said he might be able to get me into Maynooth.”
“Maynooth, no less. Doesn’t it cost money to get into Maynooth?”
“It does.”
“He didn’t say who was going to do the paying, did he?”
“No. He didn’t say.”
“Believe me he didn’t. He’s very free with money not his own.”
“He said he’d help and no one said I might be a priest at all yet, who knows?”
“What did he say about Joan?” Mahoney changed.
“He said nothing.”
“I suppose he thinks I should have brought her up to be better than a shop girl.”
“He didn’t say what he thought.”
“Believe me he didn’t say what he thought. He’s far too clever for that.”
His face was heated, the lines of the mouth moving. The eyes were tired and hunted. He brought up his old boots that were wet from driving the cattle through the rushes, and put them by the fire to dry. He unlaced the new boots he’d worn for the priest.
“It’s not what people say that counts, it’s what they think. If you ever want to get on in the world don’t heed what they say but find out what’s going on in their numbskulls. That’s what’ll get you on.
“Think what you say but don’t say what you think and then you have some chance but what do I care. They can think themselves into the Sligo madhouse for all I care,” he shouted.
The wool of his socks whispered on the cement as he went to the door.
“Go to your beds before long, I’m dead out, and don’t forget to quench the lamp.”
10
EACH WEEK A LETTER CAME FROM JOAN — D.V. AFTER HER hopes, and S.A.G. on the back of the blue envelope, as she’d been piously taught to put at National School. Each was written to the same wooden formula, nothing of herself or life let come through. She hoped this letter found them as well as it left her. So they assumed that she was at least reasonably happy.
Violence seldom flared any more, Mahoney didn’t seem to care so much, mostly complaining or absorbed in tired introspection.
As the struggle outside eased it grew worse within the skull. You could get no control. You’d go weeks without committing any sin, in often ecstatic prayer and sense of God, again replaced by weeks of orgy sparked by a fit of simple boredom or unhappiness. The constant effort back to Confession, haunted by the repetitive hypocrisy of your life, anguish of the struggle towards repeated failure. Time was running out too. You had to spend the coming summer with Father Gerald. He’d expect you to have reached some decision. The winter after would be the last year of your life at school.
No ecstasy after Confession any more. You were able to kneel and stare out of the protecting darkness into the blood-red glow before the altar, the same penances to say, the same promises of amendment, and how long would it last, a month or a week or days? You’d no control over your lusts and if you hadn’t how could you stay a priest?
A priest on a Saturday night in your own smell in the confession box listening to a month of pleasure and sin and would you be able to stay calm while a girl told about a night in June, fragrance of her perfume mixed with sweat as sweet as roses on the altar, rustle of her taffeta, and the moon above the evergreens outside the windows.
“Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”
“Tell me your sins, my child.”
“I was guilty of impure actions, father.”
“With a man, my child?”
“Yes, father.”
“Was he married or single?”
“Single, father.”
“You’re not engaged to him?”
“No, father.”
“Tell me what happened, my child.”
“Passionate kissing and embracing, father.”
“Were you touched, my child?”
“Yes, father.”
“On the breasts?”
“Yes, father.”
“In another sacred place as well?”
“Yes, father.”
“How or where did this happen?”
“In the river meadows, after the marquee dance in the Golf Club.”
“Did you actually have intercourse with this man, my child?”
A whimper of grief in her voice, her dress would rustle, her face and young body close as inches to yours in the night. The same young thighs that had opened submissively wide to the man’s rise the summer’s night by the river might open wide as that for you. She’d give you the fulfilment you craved. You’d have known pleasure before you died, it seemed a great deal to know. Bread might be marvellous in starvation, you’d find total meaning in devouring it for the time of hunger, but your hunger was for a woman, mirage of total marvel and everything in her flesh.
And what would you do? Stay quiet and begin, “Don’t you know, my child, that you are only permitted to do these things in Holy Matrimony. You must avoid places and temptations to that sin, you must promise me that.”
Or would you sit quiet and excite your own seed in the box with your hand or pressing against the wood and let it flow in the darkness, same as Onan; her rustling clothes and voice and smell sweeping through the wire grille. Her flesh beyond the wire hungered too for its fodder, the thrusting body of a man for her own.
Or would you burst out of the box and take her in madness? She’d said she’d been a virgin. She’d cried out with hurt in the river meadows but the man would not stop, he took her against her will. Would she cry too when you the priest tore her clothes off and took her on the stone floor of the church?
That might be your priest’s life, if you’d no control now was there chance it might be different then. At least you had a choice now to go out into the world and get women, but once you were a priest you were a priest for ever, there’d be no choice left, and once you were trapped in your own choice would you stay quiet in it or go crazy? A priest all your days, hair coming away by its white roots on your comb till baldness and death, and never in all those days to have touched and entered the roused flesh of a woman in her heat, never for your nakedness to be hid in her nakedness, never to be held in her softness, buried deep in the darkness of her red flesh, and her hands stroking the nerves to ecstasy.
Where was fear of hell gone, scorched and frenzied bodies howling on steaming stones and irons through the boredom of eternity, the racks and tortures? All lives moved into death, the last taste in every mouth, and it wasn’t sweet. Perhaps there was no final destruction on woman though it’d be dream always, just the death of passion, you’d have to crawl out same as after any orgy till it renewed, and the same circus of the flesh would pitch its tents again in another night of longing, nothing but this drifting death from hole to hole.