Chapter 8 #4
He moves down the ladder and through the kitchen—he cannot risk eating breakfast with them all—and he stands on the threshold, the cottage behind him, its door still open, as if he could still change his mind and turn back.
He takes a final look at what is before him: the mountain, the donkey, the haggard, the tops of the copse trees, just visible.
He pulls in a lungful of the peninsula air, then lets it out.
He is joining the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus, a select religious order, a strict and closed one: the college he is going to takes only a handful of postulants each year.
Father Joseph has told him that only the very best, the most studious and committed of men, the ones most suited to rigorous study and contemplation are admitted.
He couldn’t be more pleased or proud, he had said yesterday, when Liam had gone to take his leave, his hand on Liam’s head for a final blessing.
Liam wanted to clutch at his fingers, to say to him that he was frightened, he was afraid he wouldn’t be good enough, clever enough, that the famed severity of the Order might be too much for him, but he held his tongue, swallowed his fears, submitted to the blessing.
In the doorway of the cottage, Liam drops his gaze from the mountain to his siblings, who are standing beside him here, outside the house, Rose leaning against Enda, arms tightly around her neck, and Eugene crouched next to Bran.
Rose is looking at him imploringly, as if hoping he might even now decide to stay with them, but Enda’s jaw is set, trembling.
She will not cry, Liam sees, or at least not now.
Eugene has one hand on Bran’s scruff and with the other he holds the hem of Liam’s britches between finger and thumb, as if this grip might keep his brother with him.
Bran is hanging his head, peering up at Liam, and Liam finds he cannot look the dog in the eye, and what nonsense is this—what has he got to be sorry for?
Why does he feel as if he is betraying the animal by leaving?
Tomás stands at the far end of the haggard, his back to them. He has the loy in his hands, its ash handle inverted, and he is sharpening the blade with a stone, the scraping sound, metallic and harsh, piercing the early-morning air.
Suddenly decisive, because it has to happen, he has to go, Liam steps forward.
He grips his sisters by their shoulders, pressing a kiss to their cheeks, Rose’s wet and saline, Enda’s cold as marble.
Rose hugs him with a fierce pressure, pushing a small wrapped loaf into his pocket; Enda circles his arm with her fingers for a fleeting moment, then steps back, away from him, her face shuttered up, turned aside.
She must not weep, he sees, so that Rose can.
Liam places a hand on Eugene’s shoulder, feeling the tension in the boy’s collarbone, and Eugene, still crouching on the ground, once again takes Liam’s hem, but this time he grips it with his whole fist.
Liam cannot touch or look at the dog, cannot bear that disbelieving gaze, so he straightens, moving away, trying to free himself from Eugene’s insistent grasp.
“Da,” he calls. “Da?”
His father still stands at the haggard wall, loy shaft in one hand, sharpening stone in the other. He has paused in his movements but doesn’t turn around.
“I’m away now, Da,” Liam says, his voice carrying through the damp dawn.
At his feet, Eugene gives a growl of protest; Bran paces in interlocking circles, letting out high whines of distress.
“Will you not come and bid me goodbye?” Liam says, or tries to say, but he finds that, halfway through the sentence, his voice is wavering and that he might break down in tears.
“Da?” he tries, one last time, because he would like to feel that there exists between himself and his father a modicum of understanding.
He watches as Tomás lifts the stone, with slow deliberation, and resumes the downward strokes on the blade, as if nothing of any note is happening behind him, and Liam feels each rasping sweep as if it is applied to his skin, to his very ribs and chest.
Liam turns away—from his father, from the house and the fields and the mountain.
He tells himself to ignore the stricken faces of his sisters, Bran’s yelping, Eugene’s high-pitched noises, his father’s stubbornly turned back, his maddening silence.
He ignores the fact that, to allow him to leave unmolested, Rose must catch Bran by the collar and Eugene by the arm and take them both into the house; he ignores the knowledge that Enda walks behind him, following him, to the corner of the house, where she calls to him, goodbye, goodbye, drawing out the two syllables into a kind of incantation.
He ignores all this not because he feels no love for these people but because he feels too much: he is strangled by it, choked by it.
He wishes, as he forces himself to walk away, that there was some way of telling them all this: if I looked back at you, I would be paralysed, stuck, like a man up to his waist in quicksand.
He leaves. He walks away. Down the boreen, down the hill.
At his back, he hears the dog barking and howling.
He tells himself he will pray for them, he will see them again, though there is no certainty of this.
To train as a Jesuit requires years of study and self-abnegation, then long missions in far-flung corners of the world.
Halfway down the boreen, he is pulled up short by a strain of music.
Enda’s fiddle. He cannot see the house from the green declivity where he stands but he can hear the notes, the melody, and he can picture her, in the lee of the cottage’s end, giving him a tune to send him on his way, and is it his imagination or is she playing the same tune she played that time in the copse, when they had fought so bitterly in the tree and he fell, the moment that sealed his fate as not a mapping apprentice but a priest-to-be?
He thinks she is, and it takes all his strength and faith not to double back to her, to say, You see it, don’t you?
You know, as I do, that was another day that changed everything.
Rubbing his hands over his face, he sends up a prayer to St. Ignatius, who established the blessed holy Order that Liam will shortly join, asking for strength and guidance on his journey.
As Liam makes it down the boreen, through the village, past the gates to the manor house, along the road, neighbours come towards him, with prayers and pleas, and some wish for grace, others murmur blessings upon him, and he draws strength from this, and he is sure he feels the presence of St. Ignatius beside him, like the flicker of a lamp.
Near the estate border, a phaeton comes around the corner, and there, sitting next to his groom, cigar in mouth, is the viscount himself, with his wife and two of his daughters in the seats behind him.
The viscount gestures curtly for Liam to stand aside.
But Liam does not. He continues to walk down the middle of the road.
Because he is leaving. Because he is about to be accepted into the Society of Jesus.
Because he is no longer a paying tenant of this man or his wife or his horse-faced daughters.
Because he feels the protective shield of St. Ignatius, who was after all a soldier and a rebel before he received visions that led him to God.
The viscount’s groom—a young man who lives inside the manor gates—is forced to slow his pair of horses to a walk.
Liam steps past the phaeton and its occupants.
He doesn’t salute them, as he is supposed to, according to the rules of their tenancy; he doesn’t even glance their way.
He is aware of the viscount’s short temper—the man could very well beat him for impudence—but Liam doesn’t care.
He is leaving. He will become a priest, a most exalted and learned one; he will make St. Ignatius proud.
As he passes between phaeton and hedgerow, he hears snatches of the cross-currents of conversation between the viscountess and her daughters, their words drifting around him like airborne seeds: lilac bombazine with a pale fur trim, and a pretty yearling, untrained but showing promise.
He walks away from the phaeton, without looking back, and is soon over the estate line, then the county border.
It is a day’s walk to the House of First Formation, which is set at the end of a long and winding carriageway in green parkland, at the heart of a county to the east of the peninsula.
Dusk is settling on the land when Liam moves through the stone gates.
His elation is waning now, from exhaustion and also nerves, and he trudges along, following the curves of the carriageway.
Glimpses of the house reveal themselves to him through the trees: a line of battlements, the point of a turret, candlelight trembling behind a windowpane, the bone-white length of an empty flagpole.
He feels weakness, tremulousness, in his knees, a trickling sensation in his gut.
Blisters have formed on his heels, burst and then re-formed, and they sting and seep into the uneven darns of his socks.
He would do anything to be able to lie down and shut his eyes, perhaps sleep for a night and a day, but he knows this will not happen.
He is about to step over the threshold of the building where he will undertake the first stages of his priesthood.
He is about to meet his spiritual adviser, who will guide and judge him, and also the other novices, men who have chosen, like him, to devote their lives to God.
They will be expected to form a close bond, a brotherhood, to assist each other in their vocations, and serve the Jesuit community as a whole.