Chapter 10 #20
Liam is astounded to find that, instead of a receptive and cowed silence, the whole room is erupting with a sudden noise.
For a moment, he cannot identify what it is.
The people are pointing his way, doubling over or leaning for support on each other.
He looks from face to face, puzzled, the stout bottles cold in his fingers.
It is as if he is an explorer in an unfamiliar land, watching unknown beings behave in a way he cannot parse.
Then it comes to him what the sound is. Hilarity, giggling, shrieking. These people are laughing at him. They are jeering and pointing, slapping their legs, throwing up their hands in mirth. They do not respect him. They will not heed him, now or ever.
He is filled to his very marrow with a creeping horror.
The crowd guffaws and hee-haws, all at his expense.
They exclaim, they hoot, they hawk derisively onto the sawdust, they wipe their eyes.
Someone offers him a smoke; someone else yells that he’s to take a fecking jar or feck off.
He hears himself referred to, variously, as a “gom” and an “amadán.” The man with the bodhrán wonders aloud what kind of get-up that could be, just look at the fancy knickerbockers on him.
The music resumes. The people drift away, return to their drinking, their dancing and their clinches.
Liam backs out. He makes his way slowly up the stairs, step by exhausting step.
As he shuts the door of his room behind him, he finds he is still holding the empty bottles.
He places them on the windowsill with scrupulous care, as if they are indeed communion vessels.
It comes to him as incontrovertible fact, as he stands there, looking out into an overcast dawn, that he has for ever forfeited the status, the camouflage, of a priest. He is like a snail with its shell ripped away.
All the prestige that was automatically conferred upon him as a Jesuit has gone.
He has given it up, stripped himself of it.
If he had come down those stairs dressed in his robe, the people would have listened.
They would have immediately and respectfully dispersed, muttering abject apologies.
Yes, Father, of course, Father, we’re very sorry, please forgive us, Father.
He is nothing now, Liam realises, as he moves across the room and pulls the blankets back over himself. He is no one.
Sleep eludes him for the rest of the night.
By morning, he is sitting on the edge of the bed, hands on his knees, head bowed.
He had planned to leave for the peninsula as soon as he woke but now he is beset by doubts, by misgivings.
He cannot present himself to his family, to the peninsula, in his current state, jobless, homeless, dressed in these eejit clothes, barely a penny in his pocket, requiring them—who have little enough as it is—to give him shelter, to feed and clothe him.
How could he ever have thought of facing them as he is now?
A failed priest, a renegade, a nobody. The shock they will feel when they learn that he abandoned them, just after their mother’s passing, to undergo all those years of training, to become a man of God, only to leave and return to them, cap in hand, with nothing to show for himself.
He is filled with shame for what he has become.
What an insufferable prig he was to them.
Everyone on the peninsula and in town will assume he was defrocked, forced out of the Order, guilty of some terrible deviant crime that has banished him for ever: no one will believe he chose to leave.
On market days, as soon as he returns, foul gossip about him will spread, fuelled probably by those who were jealous of him at school.
How will he shield his siblings from the opprobrium of it all?
How will he ever face Father Joseph again?
How will he explain to the widow, to the fishermen what happened?
This is not a country that looks kindly on those who leave the Church. How could Liam have forgotten this?
More than anything, he cannot wipe from his mind the expressions of the people last night as he stood there in his velveteen suit, shrilly exhorting them all to behave: the scorn, the ridicule on their faces. It scorches him, it cuts him.
When he steps out onto the street, later, with no clear sense of where he is headed, his feet lead him to the river.
He looks east, out to sea; he looks north, towards the hills.
He gazes at the bridge, at the twisting current beneath it; he turns and looks west, towards the city and the countryside beyond, the way obscured by dropped scarves of fog.
He closes his eyes and grips a coin in his pocket; which way should he go, what should he do?
According to the grooves of habit, his mind begins to recite: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the H— Liam’s eyes spring open.
What is he doing? He looks down at the disc of copper in his palm.
A cloud is drawn off the sun and a yellow light beams down on him, standing there, and a sudden shadow greets him, stretched out on the ground, attaching itself to his feet.
Some corner of his mind is persevering with the prayer he swore to himself he would never resort to again—as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end.
To blot it out, he flips the coin. Tails, he tells himself, for going home; heads, to stay here awhile.
The penny spins and oscillates in the air, flinging itself up against the milky sky, and Liam goes to catch it, and he almost has it but feels it slip, inevitably, through his fingers, glancing off his palm.
He never was good at such things. It lands on the ground, bounces off a stone, rolls sideways, and Liam chases it, trying to stamp down on it to stop its wayward course.
It veers over the cobbles and down, down into the river, where it disappears with a singular plop.
Liam stands, looking at where it fell. He imagines it spinning and falling through the murky water, coming at last to rest on the silty bottom.
He will never know what answer it gave, and this seems to compound everything, to confirm all his worst fears.
He is useless, he is a failure. He can’t even toss a coin.
He has no idea what to do or where to go.
He lowers himself to a wall because he is aware that the old injury in his shin is aching, as it sometimes does, even now.
He thinks about how his leg looks normal, entirely healthy, but he knows, and it knows, better.
He thinks about the day it happened: him dropping into the well his saint’s medallion and how it fell, turning and turning, much as the coin just did into the river.
He raises his head. He looks at the river, flowing inexorably towards the sea.
That day, in the copse, he’d had two choices before him—the priesthood or the mapping—and it was decided for him, in a way, by the breaking of his leg, by Enda taking his place as chainboy.
He had been pulled along by events, like a boat on a current.
Liam considers his leg. He considers the penny, now at the bottom of the river.
He hoists himself to his feet. A decision, all the time he has been sitting on this wall, has been coalescing in him, and it is his to make this time, no one else’s.
He will not go to the peninsula today, not yet: he cannot put his family through any more; he will not load them with the shame of what he’s done in abandoning the Church.
He will establish himself here, in the city, first. He will write to them and tell them he’s back and will visit them soon.
Imagine this, he will say. I’m no longer a priest, and here is my address. Please write back.
Before anything else, however, he will find gainful employment. He will establish himself so that no one can ever look on him again with scorn. He will go back to them when he can hold his head high, not as a failed priest but as a citizen, a working man.
With her scarf tied over her mouth and nose, her knees pressed against the brass rim of the hearth, Enda scrapes at the ash and cinders in the kitchen range, gathering them into a small hill, then tipping them into a bucket at her side.
Some are still warm, with red-orange centres: these she leaves, poking them to one side.
She places dry kindling around the embers, thinking, as she always does at this moment, of her mother’s instructions—in the shape of a little house—for it was Phina who taught her how to relight a fire, how to revive it in minutes to a good blaze, and it is a skill that has never left her.
She pokes twigs and scraps of newspaper and wood shavings around the house-shaped kindling, and is soon rewarded with a curl of smoke, then a flicker of flame, uncertain at first, but gaining appetite.
She brings a tendril of wood shaving up to her nose and inhales, sitting back on her heels.
Anatole has gone upriver for the summer, into the distant woodlands, with a large crew, to a logging camp, where they will work in teams to bring down the towering, sky-high trees.
Larch, hornbeam, Douglas fir, red cedar, yellow cedar.
He has promised Enda that he will stay away from the falling trunks and those in the camp who like to start fights to alleviate the boredom.
He has to be careful with his fingers because how would he play his accordion if the axe or an angry logger took off a finger or two?
And Enda had reached for his hand, pressed it to her mouth.