Chapter 8 #5
Liam puts his hands into his pockets, takes them out again.
He tries to ignore the thunderous growls of hunger from his belly, tries to master this bodily need when so much else is at stake.
He takes the final turning in the carriageway and there is the house: a crenellated grey stone castle, to which several asymmetric wings have been added.
To the left is higher ground, an outcrop of smoothed rock—evidence of glacial activity, he finds himself reflecting, before he firmly crushes the thought—and to the right a fenced area containing rows of vegetables and, beyond them, a line of beehives.
Off to the side, near an orchard, he sees a group of young men, several of whom hold a hurley, and they are jostling and running, tossing the sliotar between them.
There is the noise of laughter, the distinct thwack of leather against wood, the thud of footfalls, the calls of the men to each other.
Unease fills Liam. Will he be expected to join the game?
Might these men be his fellow novices? The young men wear collared shirts and trousers held up by braces; several have smartly oiled hair.
There is something forbiddingly moneyed about them: they have the patina of wealth, of expensive schooling.
They are not, Liam is sure, from the country, like he is.
Not one of them wears a pair of strong, mud-heavy boots.
The young men jostle and shout in the failing light, diving for the sliotar, their shirts pale as moths, as if unaffected by the solemnity of the life they have bound themselves to.
Liam waits in the shadow of the building, watching, unsure if he should go over and greet them—but he hasn’t the skill or the coordination for hurling, never has had—or whether he should knock on the imposing iron-studded door.
His dilemma is solved for him (and isn’t this, he will point out to his questioners, as he sits before them in Calcutta, looking back along the years at himself as a gauche and uncertain would-be novice, partly why he joined the Jesuits in the first place, to have life’s decisions taken from him, to be able to follow rules and forms instead of thinking for himself?).
The front door swings open to reveal an older priest with wire spectacles and an almost entirely hairless head.
He looks at Liam with an appraising gaze, asks what is his business here.
Liam falters, clears his throat, gets out that he is here to begin his novitiate, and he says it with a questioning tone, as if asking permission.
He speaks his name, his worldly name, for he knows he will be given a new one.
And the priest nods and says they have been expecting him and that he has arrived in time for supper.
He then asks Liam if he renounces the world, and everything in it, if Liam is prepared to enter a preparatory week of solitary silence, if he is willing to embrace the three eventual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and Liam says, Yes, Father. He says, Father, I will.
To ease the ache in his back and knees, Tomás has seated himself on a thick tree root that has ruptured the soil, as if coming up for air, before diving back down again into the moss.
Open across his lap are the pages of a field book.
He has hooked his spectacles around his ears and is perusing the day’s measurements and notes, undisturbed by the arguments and curses coming from the motley group of people in front of him.
At his feet is a pot of ink with a pen resting in it.
Tomás glances up at the sappers and the two chainboys who are trying to right a cart, which has become stuck in a watery ditch, the sappers bawling orders at the lads, who are thigh-deep in the filth, pushing from behind.
The cart is loaded with wooden boxes of supplies, instruments, packs and folded tents; a taller sapper hauls at the harness of the donkey, which is panicked and braying; his two compatriots are disputing among themselves the best way to free the wheels from the ditch.
A short distance away, the corporal stands with the lieutenant, smoking and gazing out over the townland.
The commission is to survey and revise a parish in Cavan: the letter Tomás received had said they were needing a civilian assistant for the duration of a month, no more, and that the work was expected to be light and reasonably straightforward.
Tomás had not wanted to take it but had been persuaded, against his better judgement, by Rose.
She had said it would be good for him to get out of the house and into work: they needed the money, as the rent had gone up again—the viscount’s land steward was claiming that the value of their acreage had risen.
No point in arguing that this was due to the work Tomás and his sons had put into the land, all that backbreaking drainage and planting and harvesting and fertilising he and Liam and Eugene had done over the years.
Rose had been insistent. They had to find some way to meet the new rent price, she had said, so Tomás was to write back this very minute to say he’d be reporting at the barracks as soon as possible.
Tomás had grunted, displeased. He hadn’t been out with a surveying team for a long time, not since Phina passed, and he had no wish ever to go again.
He was too old for that life now, he told Rose, and hadn’t he said often enough that he had his own work to be getting along with, his version of the maps?
But the matter of the raised rent remained and his daughters had the situation sewn up.
Rose had packed his knapsack for him as Enda helped him grease his boots, the two of them talking brightly: wasn’t it a piece of luck, the letter arriving just when they were in need of money?
And the letter said the work would be light, and over in a few weeks.
Wasn’t Tomás happy to hear they still wished him to work?
Too old for that life, indeed: here was the proof that he was still a man in demand.
Tomás regards the scene before him: the mud, the ditch, the stuck cart, the soaked and shivery chainboys, the yelling sappers.
There is no such thing, he wishes to say to his daughters, as light work in this world.
He sighs and looks back to the field book on his lap, running a thumb down the columns of calculations.
He himself made all the measurements, wrestling the instruments into place with the help of the chainboys, neither of whom had ever done such tasks before, but the taller sapper had totted up the final figures.
Tomás can see that several of these are unsound and will need to be corrected.
He taps his teeth with the end of the pen, glancing up furtively under his cap.
How to fix the figures without incurring the anger and resentment of the sapper, or insulting the corporal, who has added his signature to the page?
The sappers aren’t looking his way, but kicking the wheels of the errant cart, slapping the donkey on its rump, and telling the lads what to do; the corporal and the lieutenant still have their backs turned.
With a swift movement, Tomás reaches down and plucks the pen from the inkpot.
He lifts his eyes once more, to check that he isn’t being observed, and strikes a neat line through four—no, five—of the sapper’s calculations, writing the correct figure next to them, in his slanting, exacting hand.
He eyes the paragraphs under “Remarks,” before adding a mention of the town’s new grain store and a culvert, intended for the building of a railway, and then he swiftly blots the page with his sleeve.
He is just considering whether or not he should make a draft map of the townland tonight or wait for tomorrow’s surveying calculations when he becomes aware that the sappers are shouting the same two words, with rising insistence.
“Oi, Paddy,” the taller one is yelling, or perhaps it’s the shorter one—Tomás doesn’t know.
“Paddy—oi, you!”
Tomás regards them, distantly, as red shapes bobbing back and forth in the hinterland of his spectacles’ focus, his mind still engaged with culverts, the azimuth and its reference meridian.
“He’s talking to you, mister,” one of the chainboys says quietly, deferentially, his shoulder still pressed to the backboard of the cart.
“Me?” Tomás says.
He stands, removing his spectacles, sliding them into his breast pocket, putting the pen back into the inkpot and shutting the cover of the field book—the marbled card, the cloth binding, so familiar to him—and folding his arms over it, protectively.
“You,” one of the sappers is yelling, pointing at him, inexplicably angry, while the other is castigating the chainboy for talking in the wrong language, which they well know isn’t allowed, boxing him on the ear.
Tomás feels a stab of guilt: such a young lad, and it was his fault that the boy had spoken like that, without thinking.
It crosses his mind, of course, as it does several times a day, that it might have been Liam here with him instead of this scrawny northern lad, had that damned priest not turned his head.
For the first time Tomás feels relieved that it isn’t.
He wouldn’t want his son to be forced to stand up over his knees in filthy ditchwater, uselessly heaving at a toppled cart, shouted at and struck around the head.
Still the noise of yelling rings in the air.
The taller sapper has let go of the donkey’s harness and has come towards him, still shouting, still gesturing.
Tomás tries to listen to what he’s saying but his accent is unfamiliar.
The sapper is angry, clearly, and wishes Tomás to do something, but Tomás cannot tell what it is.
He stares back, puzzled. Is it the mathematics?
Did the man see Tomás correcting his work?