Excerpt from Time of the Child
BY NIALL WILLIAMS
This is what happened in Faha over the Christmas of 1962, in what became known in the parish as the time of the child.
To those who lived there, Faha was perhaps the last place on earth to expect a miracle. It had neither the history nor the geography for it. The history was remarkable for the one fact upon which all commentators agreed: nothing happened here. The geography was without notable feature but for being on the furthermost edge of a fabled country, where Faha had not so much sprung up as seeped out when the ice retreated, and the Atlantic met the western coast of an island with a native weakness for the heroic.
Resolve was the first requisite of life here. It was the hares that discovered it. They came from the fringes of the forests, drawn like all after them to the mesmerism of the River Shannon. They stood on their hind legs and in the sublime stillness of their surveillance were persuaded they had found paradise.
The first floods drove them back.
The first storms put salt in their ears.
Still, what began as a hare-track along the riverbank soon enough became a road, the watering hole a stopping post, camps and earthworks a settlement that took a name to become a village, opened a public house, a second one for those who would not darken the door of the first, five more for customers with complaints and grudges too various to catalogue, two general grocers, a blacksmith’s forge, a butcher’s, and soon enough a church and graveyard, all of which had the Fahaean character of sinking, but so slowly as to defeat reality.
***
Those who were wedged into the pews for second Mass on the first Sunday of Advent in 1962 were a congregation of silent fortitude. They had lived through revolution, seen the poet-revolutionaries replaced by bank managers, and discovered the thorned truth that independence had left them as poor as before. Recently, they had lived past the last evenings of the world, when the Russian ships were on their way to Cuba, and the end of time was near. Grown used to walking in an eroding world, they had the tidal eyes of estuary people and the translucent flesh that came from living in an absolute humidity. There might have been an invisible force pressing down on each day, but rain and religion had left the people a twinned philosophy of offering it up and getting on with it.
That first Sunday of Advent, it was as though, by virtue of living in a margin on the edge of Europe, the people had made actual the story of legend and escaped time, the entirety of the past become one unending day in which their fathers and mothers, and theirs, and theirs back along, were all the one family, tramping around in the same place, coexisting like memorial cards inside a missal.
On many of the men, life had perfected an unapproachable look, their age unguessable because they already looked this way at forty. If this week was no different to last, what of it, the comfort of reliving the same Sunday gave the illusion of defeating the terminus of life. Only in the look of some of the younger women was there a glimpse of the new world coming.
But real change is often only seen in hindsight. If you took a wrong turn and came into Faha that Sunday morning you would see a village like many others in that country, paused for Mass, a mournful rain coming a small ways inside the open doors of Bourke’s and Clohessy’s, but no customers until the bell for Communion, when the tongues of the registers would be out once more. Down the uneven fall of Church Street was a handful of cars in approximate align to the footpath; in Bourke’s yard old horses and older carts; shouldering the wall of McCarthy’s Hardware twenty or so iron bicycles; outside Ryan’s Ryan’s dog; further along, Harry, a black-and-white sheepdog who, in protest against living in a parish without sheep, always lay in the middle of the street, rising with the affronted dignity of a deposed monarch when a car wouldn’t go round him, returning after to the same spot in the restored illusion of dog’s dominion over the King of Sundays.
In the village then, an emptiness populated only by a holy ghost.
For the most part, Mass that morning in Faha was without incident. One of the comforts of ritual is immutability, and any parishioner could have set the congregation into the pews like the pieces in a board game. From Mary Falsey at the front of the Women’s Aisle to her husband Pat, sniffling next to Sonny Cooney at the back of the Men’s. From Matthew Leary, head bowed in the front of the Long Aisle, down past Mrs Prendergast, the postmistress, with various Prendergasts, past the Cotters, Clearys, Penders, Murrihys, McInerneys and all the Morrisseys, past Gertie and Philo, the Mohill sisters, Pilkington the poet, Mai Toal, Betsy Breen, Micho Dolan and family, Haulie Tubridy and family, any number of Crowleys, Carmodys, Fennells and Keanes, until you got to the two Talty brothers, two benches in from the back.
That morning, in the midways pew that had become his by custom, was Doctor Troy, and Ronnie, the one daughter who was living with him always.
The doctor attended Mass, but without devotion. After his wife Regina was taken by a cancer he hadn’t seen coming, he had lost the relic of faith he once had. To mask despair against God, he chose an old tactic: retain a semblance of order, and in this way meet the greatest challenge of life, which is always nothing more nor less than how to get through another day. For the sake of his three daughters, the doctor had adhered to the chronic custom of Sundays. He always came in the church door as the priest appeared from the sacristy, left mid-blessing in the last Sign of the Cross, before Could I ask you just one question, Doctor?
Seven days of the week the doctor was never seen out of an ironed white shirt, navy tie and charcoal suit that, though corrugated at the knees and elbows, still retained an air of the formal, or what passed for that in the parish. On top of this, in winter he wore what Faha called his German coat, gunmetal grey to the shins, broad wings of lapels, and the strip of dark fur on the inside of the collar. A compact man, it lent him a commander’s air, which, in the packed church, gave licence to the black felt hat that took up its own berth on the pew alongside him.
He was not yet sixty but felt like a hundred. Silver-haired, grey-eyed, he still had the same handsomeness that compensated for the shortness of all the black-and-white film stars, but he awoke each morning inside a cloud of melancholy, and now believed that nothing in this life could burst it.
Melancholy was an occupational hazard of the General Practitioner who, in rural places, ran a solo operation that came with the guarantee of spirit-exhaustion for three reasons. It had no operating hours, everyone in the parish was your patient, and the human being was a creation in which human life kept finding the flaws. But to these Jack Troy had long ago grown accustomed. They were in the small print of his vocation. On the first morning he had unbolted the door of the surgery in Avalon House, there were ten patients standing in the rain at the bottom of the steps. Though for most the surgery then was the place of last resort, somewhere after appeals to the saints and martyrs, after holy wells and penitential rites, after the cures of Mrs Casey, whose hot bran in a stocking defeated pneumonia, no morning since had had a smaller number. So as not to be overwhelmed, early on the doctor had learned to combine his natural aloofness with an arm’s-length philosophy, whereby he kept largely to himself. But he left the door to the waiting room unlocked.
Over time, the lessons of the Royal College had been replaced by life experience, and he had developed a diagnosis style informed by years of treating a marginal people of quiet dignity who had learned how to live in a place that was mostly water. There was no one in Faha he did not know. He had been there long enough to have treated most of their fathers and mothers, many grandfathers and grandmothers too, and recognise ailments that were like artefacts passed down the family, inarguable proofs of the theory that since human beings first stood upright, nothing was ever really cured.
In the parish, the doctor had the standing that close acquaintance with suffering bestowed. Beneath his waved grid of silver hair, his sunken eyes said that acquaintance came at a cost. He had a worn air, his complexion tending now to ashen, his top lip covered with a shoebrush moustache he had grown to put a small distance between himself and the hurt of the world. Although he lived in the magnificent dilapidation of Avalon House, and carried himself in a manner that Faha might have summarised as Not like us, he was vouchsafed a place of honour in the parish by the twin virtues of not leaving and being indispensable.
Every doctor was in the business of trying to delay the inevitable, and in every day there was failure. Some good was done, had been his summary when he finally collapsed into the absolving hollows of the bed and his wife Regina woke to ask what had happened that day. Some good was done. It was for him a kind of creed, but the air went out of it when she died, and he was left with the ashes in his mouth. Still, three days after his wife’s funeral, nine abashed patients were back in the waiting room, and Sickness goes on replaced the motto. Caring, if not curing, carried him forward, as well as the imperative of raising the three Troy sisters, a business something like herding butterflies.
In all churches, the time between settling into the pew and the starting of Mass is its own interlude, and in Faha was the only certified moment of stillness. You sat, and if you didn’t join the rosary, or sideways survey the congregation, you went to that inner place where the pages of your life lay open. For Jack Troy those pages contained the same defeats and regrets familiar to all whose years lived outnumbered years left, but added to these was the realisation he had come to that morning in the shaving mirror: four years after the death of the amateur chemist, Annie Mooney, he was still in love with her.
It had not been a storybook love. After the death of her husband, Annie had taken over the running of the chemist shop in the village. It was to have been an interim measure, but in a place where everything was on the way and never arrived, that was a nonsense term. Under the exigency of ailments too many and various to be numbered, nobody looked for her diploma on the wall. Together she and the doctor formed a two-person confederacy, which was a marriage without the blessing. A widower, he was in her house above the chemist shop at all times of the day and night, the whiff of scandal aromatised away by the licence of his profession.
Soon enough, for emergencies she gave him his own back-door key.
Approaching seventy then, Annie Mooney had the repose of old grief and aged beauty, and at the other end of life had achieved the most seductive quality in human beings, absolute self-possession. She looked at life with such a direct gaze that God Himself would be shy, Sonny Cooney said. Caring nothing for the safeguards of convention, there were times when she attended the doctor in her nightdress, the warm smell of the bedclothes still on her and the long fall of her grey hair working its own chemistry. But, recognising in himself the dangerous innocence of the old, who are always secretly hoping for a chance to love properly, Jack Troy put up a shield of indifference. And though later he would return to those nights with a clinician’s obsession, to try and identify the moment the shield had been penetrated, as with all things of the heart, it was impossible to tell.
What Annie Mooney felt for the doctor, he could not say, other than what he could read in the language of looks and nearness, the touch of her hand on his shirtsleeve, the stirring of his tea in the blue-ringed mug, or the way she smoothed his suit jacket over the hoop of the chair. He may have been on the point of declaring himself, but was muted when, like a page out of a storybook, in the last year of Annie’s life her first lover, Christy, had appeared in Faha. She was already gravely ill but told the doctor she was glad for the visit of the memory of love. ‘This way I can say goodbye to it forever.’
In the four years since she died, Doctor Troy had had to find a way to live with the acidic knowledge that with Annie Mooney he had missed the last chance of a lifetime. In his practice he had found time a greater medicine than pharmaceuticals, only slower, and so bound himself to a course of carrying on, hearing his own phlegmatic advice, this time to himself: It will go away. To which he added one of the most useless commands of mankind: Stop thinking about her.
But still the acid ate away. And now, waiting for Mass on that first Sunday of Advent, he was aware his condition had worsened. He realised not only had he the macabre virus of being lovesick for the dead, but he had the more fatal one too: he had lost his love of the world.
It was a desperate diagnosis for a father, and the thought of it tightened the lines at the corners of his eyes. He glanced across to Ronnie alongside him. Her head was bowed, beneath a leaf-patterned headscarf, the coil of her auburn hair clipped in place. What was open in the pages of her life then, her father could not have said. In a green gaberdine over grey cardigan, cream blouse, grey wool skirt and prudent shoes, Ronnie Troy had the composed look that came after her mother died, and at twenty-nine made it seem she had put girlhood far behind her. Her two sisters gone now, one to marriage, and one to England, she had the natural reserve, not of one who had been left behind, but of one privy to the secrets of a household and surgery, who admitted the patients, watched the levels in her father’s brandy bottle, and guarded all behind green eyes that were the same as her mother’s, only without the anxiety. Added to this reserve was not only the screened lives of all the women in the parish at the time, but the marginal nature of all writers, for Ronnie Troy’s closest companion was her notebook, and it alone knew what she was feeling.
Doctor Troy’s glance told him nothing, and at ten past eleven one of the Kellys rang the bell and the Canon came to the altar. Rosary beads were holstered, and the congregation shouldered into position. For the Latin Mass, little outward participation was required other than kneeling and standing and striking your breast, which took place by rote behind the priest’s back, until, in his purple chasuble, the Canon came up the corkscrew stair of the pulpit and faced the people.
Having heard enough confessions to lose the illusion that words mattered, Father Tom had ceased writing out his sermons. He was a large man, soft of body now, with a lumpish hairless crown that alone recalled the fire-and-brimstone of his curacy when the shorthand in Faha was that he went at sinners bald-headed. Now that fire was gone, the brimstone antidoted by a daily pint of Grogan’s goat’s milk, and with two strips of white feather over each ear, he resembled nothing so much as Alastair Sim in the Sunday matinees of the Mars picture house. The early phrases of his sermon he delivered in his corroded baritone and, though amplified by the new electrical system, these vanished in the parish memory on the instant they were spoken. Of that Mass, nothing in fact would be recalled until the moment the Canon paused.
Father Tom looked out into the middle distance, and then he faltered.
At first it may only have been a feather in the brain, one of those flicker moments that, in recognition of the weight of life, is both expected and pardoned in the aged. Since the electricity had come, all of Faha now had an amateur understanding of circuitry, and to the workings of human beings applied it willy-nilly, expecting the internal repairmen were on the way and service would resume shortly.
Only it didn’t. The priest looked up and to his left, as though the next sentence was up there. And when it wasn’t, when it wasn’t above the Men’s Aisle or the Women’s, he looked out over the congregation and smiled. He smiled benignly, the way you do when the doom you knew was coming has become actual, and your knowledge is confirmed with the click of an inner bolt sliding into place. To the smile he added a nod, then another, smiling and nodding, as though to a story only he could hear.
The uncrossable chasm between priest and people kept the congregation dumb, and they sat in a tightening knot of embarrassment, doing the two things habitual at moments of catastrophe: looking the other way, and thanking God it wasn’t you.
Father Tom blinked. Softly, two-handed, he tapped an amplified tap on the invisible keyboard of the lectern, waiting for the words of his Christmas message to come. Though his heart must have been going crossways, he showed no outward sign, but retained his doughy look, with the placidity that follows the realisation some inner part of you is no more.
From his position midways back, Doctor Troy studied the priest with a physician’s dispassion, from that distance interrogating the brightness of the Canon’s eyes and the musculature of his face, but to all appearances doing nothing.
In the meantime, the church was held in mute suspension from which it may never have emerged. In the silence that descended, the rain that fell so persistently in the parish that it had lost the right to be named was suddenly heard tattooing against the stained-glass windows and played the part of clock, showing time was continuing. The front door of the church, which was at the back, was, as always, open. A small crew of chronic latecomers and those men who knelt on their caps and attended Mass by ear only, were gathered in the part-shelter, and when it was clear there was a breakdown of some class there was a general lean. Martin Considine supposed it was him and turned the good ear towards the doorway, and when that one heard nothing, he said ‘What?’ out loud to make sure he still had the one working. Seanie Devitt, who had only come back to the church when the Bishop of Cork stopped preaching against dancing, as commentary on a Mass that grew longer each week, muttered, ‘Jesus Christ.’
Ronnie Troy looked to her father. The doctor’s eyes hadn’t left the priest. He didn’t move a muscle, not from a reluctance to intrude with science into the place of religion, but for the humane reason that he didn’t want to embarrass Tom, who, in the cause of privacy, he had treated for twenty-seven years not in the surgery but in the wine-carpeted parlour of the Parochial House. He knew the priest’s deepest need, which was to pretend he didn’t have a body, with failings and desires, and that the stomach pains that dogged him for years were not revealed to the parish. It was misguided, but at this stage mankind had too many foibles to be fixed, and the doctor had ceded to the request, wrote the prescriptions that were filled in a chemist in town and left Father Tom to pretend nothing corporeal was ever wrong with him.
For a while now, the old priest had let vanity turn a blind eye to the popularity of his confession box, ignoring the simple signpost that with the Canon all knew their sins would be forgotten before the telling of them was over. Age was not the only culprit. A lifetime’s curacy in a sinking parish had also worked its own erosion, for although Our Lord forgave wave after wave of sins before noon on Saturday, by the following Friday the scummed tide of them washed in again.
The moment defied its own definition by prolonging, lending weight to Sonny Cooney’s theory that time is not clockwork. The congregation found it needed to assert its actuality by cough, sniffle and throat-clearing. Children escaped the containing looks of their parents, some finding the bars and kneelers of the pews the perfect climbing frame, others turning back to stare at the motionless circus that was grown-ups at devotion. In the adults, a tension that found home in necks and shoulders was released by a general stir and shift of no more than inches, the interior of the church momentarily a human sea of small motion, the waves meeting the walls with the Stations of the Cross and coming back again, but without improvement in the predicament.
Among the wisdoms of General Practice was the axiom that in the nature of stroke, time was everything. There was a mathematics of damage, a measure correlating blood and seconds, brain and flow, and so, while looking up over the row of Morrisseys in front of him and the pew-climbing Penders, Doctor Troy was in the instant of the calculation, watching the priest for tell-tale signs, and readying to get to his feet.
Father Tom gazed out from that place above the people with a boyish expression. It was as though he was only just discovering he had climbed into the top of a very large tree, had no idea how he got there, or how to ever again land back on the ground.
Ronnie, weighted as ever with the burdens of the eldest, looked to her father. ‘You should go to him,’ she whispered.
The doctor’s gaze didn’t move from Tom’s face. Like all in the congregation, he was still trying to answer the common question of everyday, whether this was something or nothing. In Faha, the line between comedy and tragedy was drawn in pencil, and oftentimes rubbed out.
‘… the birth, you know, of…’ said the Canon, but no more. If he had offered a blessing, and gone back down the corkscrew stair, all would have looked the other way at a Mass with a blip in it. But because he stayed where he was, lost in the fog of a message he could not remember, the inevitable happened. Because the language that contained it had fallen apart, the fabric of the religion frayed. The longer the wait the more the idea of the birth of any lord and saviour came to seem first doubtful, then unlikely, then outlandish. And in time to come there would be some who would recall the story of that Sunday in Faha when, for one interminable moment, it was uncertain that Christianity had been invented.
Jack Troy looked away from the priest, as though that way he could break the moment. Below him, his fingers were clasped in the loose bind that in adults passed for prayer-hands, the thumbs a cross. He looked down at them as if they were a mystery, lifted his head, and to his right across the Long Aisle saw the young boy of the Quinlans watching him. Jude Quinlan was twelve years, thin and winter-pale, a loop of brown hair falling forward. He had a look older than himself, that depth of expression that some say is the wisdom of suffering, and others the need not to see more of it. Either way, he looked to the doctor with some urging, but his lips pressed closed, as though he was a messenger unaware of what message he bore.
The doctor registered it but looked away without enlightenment. It would not be until the night of the Christmas Fair that he would remember it. Then Jude Quinlan would be standing at the front door, with the child in his arms.
The doctor looked away. He reached for the top bar of the pew in the reflex that comes before rising. But he did not rise.
All of which happened in the paused time in which story stretches to allow for the four dimensions of human nature.
Up in the pulpit, Father Tom moved his hand from his mouth and tapped the lectern lightly, and again. To the emergency, his flesh was pumping out a dewy response, lending his forehead a semblance of lambency. He looked back across the altar-rails to the alabaster figure on the cross, but the figure with the introverted eyes retained his customary impassivity. Softly then, under his breath, Father Tom began to hum. It was tuneless–or a tune unknown–but in the silence of the stone church travelled out from the pulpit like a broadcast in bass whale, setting up a sound-shield between the Canon and the sea of faces turned to him.
What the people wanted him to deliver he could not, and it was unbearable.
Lips pursed, in the pulpit he hummed, louder now.
Whether he was aware that everyone could hear or not was unclear. If they did, by an instinctive grace in country people, they wouldn’t mention it, but consign it under the general heading The poor man.
How long the priest might have continued is unknown. Keeping reality at bay is its own discipline. There is no primer but practice.
In the church, coughs and throat-clearances made the music of the living and confirmed that all were still in the human dimension.
Those in the Long Aisle looked to Doctor Troy. Ronnie felt the pinch of their looks and nudged her father, but the doctor retained his independence by an inflection of his elbow and tightening of his moustache. Come on, Tom. Come on was in his eyes but not on his lips. He had practised long enough to have witnessed every kind of suffering, enough wretchedness and pain to doubt the doctrine that men and women were creatures loved by their Maker, but the humiliation of the old priest was a cruelty he couldn’t bear. At last, he stood.
Then, in a moment that would become part of parish legend, take the road of all story, existing in that place somewhere between the This happened and Did this really happen? of all human endeavour, the entire congregation saw the Canon see the doctor stand, realise the crisis had come, and, smiling now the smile of the implausibly saved, raise the forefinger of his right hand to pause the doctor, and everyone else.
Then, in a voice that passed below the compass of baritone, came in a register uncaught by one half of the penitents and unbelieved by the other, Father Tom said, or seemed to say:
‘… to celebrate the birth of … Jack…’ And then a small laugh, because of course that was it, how had he forgotten? ‘… Christmas. Amen.’
For the priest, it was a stunning moment of triumph. Father Tom blessed himself in a sweep, his right hand encircling his breast in a blithe anticlockwise that returned time to where he had left it, then he spun round and went down the corkscrew out of the pulpit. When he got back to the altar, he had the spirit-lightness of reprieve, and though the one of the Kellys that was his altar-boy grinned the buck teeth, the Canon ignored him, and when he got to the Credo in unum Deum of the Nicene Creed he was back inside the handrails of the rite, and the remainder passed without remark.
