Francie entered the house as quietly as possible, from the back. He crossed the small kitchen stealthily. He wanted to catch Jim alone, without Seamie’s nurse around or any of the family. He knew their mother was likely to be in the sickroom at this point in the afternoon. A few steps took him to the door of the front sitting-room. It was ajar. Jim stood in there, facing the picture window, a makeshift drawing-board propped on his waist, a pencil between his fingers. Francie glimpsed the sketch: his brother’s own face, frowning in self-criticism. Was that a good or a bad omen? Whichever, they had to talk today. Francie was determined. There was so little time left. At a noise from upstairs – an elderly cough, chesty and laboured – Francie saw Jim’s pencil instantly halt on the paper and his body tense with irritation.
Francie swiftly considered his tactics.
“It’s yourself,” he called out buoyantly as he pushed the door wide and went in.
Instantly he regretted his choice as Jim put the drawing brusquely aside, crumpling it briefly and quashing Francie’s curiosity about it with an abrupt, “It’s nothing.” He gave Francie his attention with a calm hostility but Francie had come prepared this time. He pulled out a pack of photographs and opened it.
“Look! These are from last Saturday over at Ballygall. Doesn’t Pearse’s place look grand? All five of us and Mammy, and – ach! I’ve given up counting the kids – and the four wives. Micky’s Mary is expecting again. There should be a grant for being an uncle – bloody Christening presents, eh? You’re smiling in this one, Jim. The oul fella’ll be pleased.”
“That I’m smiling?” Jim said drily.
“That there’s a good one of us all,” Francie replied patiently. He handed the pack to Jim who went through them with attention but little reaction.
Francie watched him: the sort of non-response he’d expected. Still, never say die. Jim had grown thin – a physique like a teenager’s though he was well into his thirties – and touchy too. Had he always been like this? Francie struggled to remember. Couldn’t. He had barely started school when Jim left home. He’d ask Pearse, or better still, Pearse’s wife, who had known the family so long that she’d be able to tell him and she wouldn’t be defensive.
Poor bugger, thought Francie, as he watched Jim. What was the point in being good-looking if you were locked inside…. He found himself scrutinised as Jim looked up at him. Francie leapt to Jim’s side.
“There! That’s the one,” Francie said.
“Obviously,” Jim replied tersely.
They looked at a group shot of five young men, including themselves. Each, apart from Jim, stood with a woman. Their mother, Maura, at the centre of the group, looked pleased but tense, as though she were on the verge of going inside the handsome house visible in the lawned background, to cry discreetly and briefly.
“Wouldn’t he have loved to’ve been there?” sighed Francie. Jim glanced askance at him. “A bit of craic and a drink or several,” Francie smiled.
“Loved it if he could’ve been the centre of attention,” Jim corrected him.
“Well, he would have been! His ruby wedding, after all!” He took the photos from Jim who, he told himself, had probably always been an awkward bastard – like the oul’ fella himself. He peeled off a photo and placed it on the mantelpiece, pointedly not offering it to Jim. “I’ll leave that there for you. I have the negatives.”
Jim said nothing, turning to the window that framed the nondescript garden, its hedge bordering the street of modest semis where the five brothers had grown up. And what was there new to see out there, Francie wondered. Republican West Belfast, same flags on the lamp-posts on a Monday as a Tuesday; same slogans daubed up: I.RA., Provos or Sinn Féin. Jim was a bit of a negative himself, mind, in those white shirts and black trousers he always wore. Poor bugger, Francie thought again.
“How long have you got, Jim?” he asked sympathetically.
“I have leave to stay till… the end.”
“Tough on you, being here all the time. Would you not stay with me and Aileen?”
“I can’t. And it’s any day now.” They were both silent.
“A cup of tea!” said Francie, berating himself even as he left the room for taking such an obvious escape route.
Jim considered the familiar hedge – half a stone’s throw. No, just a little more. An army foot patrol approached. Twenty-four years – two-thirds of his own life – since they had first arrived in nineteen-sixty-nine. An ungainly, strung-out caterpillar they were, as they lumbered along the pavement in their greenish camouflage. To fit in round here they’d be better off wearing brick red and the grey of metal fencing with a flecking of barbed wire. Squawking, the creepy-crawly kept in touch with its nest via bursts of static. Jim looked away. He did not want to meet any eyes. He did not want them to see he was attracted to what he hated and that he admired that discipline, that unity of purpose, that not shirking the thankless, plodding routine for the sake of the great goal. Like a higher species, a helicopter droned overhead, its whirring blades a threat of punishment.
Jim winced. Like the oul’ fella. Yes, his approach too had always been heralded by a shift in the air, a displacement of the normal currents.
Jim stood, again a teenager, at this window, with the household sounds around him: his brothers careering around the cramped house, his mother in the kitchen with the hit of nineteen-seventy-four on the radio: Sugar Baby Love, Sugar Baby Love… I didn’t mean to make you cry… The music bounced and jangled. Jim, like a lookout, called, “He’s coming!” Instantly the radio was silenced. His brothers scuttled downstairs. He knew his mother would be crushing her cigarette into the sink and putting her apron back on and Pearse would be re-folding the paper to make it look as though it hadn’t been read. As their father turned in at the gate, homework books were spread out, expressions assumed. As he came up the path he noticed Jim and blinked in instinctive self-defence. He frowned and pulled out a key. “Hello, Seamie!” Jim heard his mother say brightly as the door opened.
“I’ve put the kettle on,” Francie announced, returning. There was no response. “I had a long talk with him,” he said eventually. Jim was startled. “On our own. Yesterday. You were busy with the… eh… high-up who came to see you… so it was easier. Well, Daddy always had a soft spot for me. Poor oul’ sod.”
Francie, realising he would be given no further opening, picked up the drawing, playing for time. He tugged the paper flat. “It’s you to the life! Bloody marvellous. Though I hope you don’t feel as bad as you look here! Do you remember the times he tried to teach me to draw? ‘Look, boy! You’re not looking. You won’t draw if you don’t look!’ And the day he had us all out painting a mural on the back wall and we ran out of paint and then we ran out on him! And taking us to art galleries. You were the only one who was really interested, I always heard. There were drawings of yours knocking around the house, well, up in the attic, for ages. Ah, no. It can’t have been easy for him. I’ve only the one kid myself and I’m driven distracted.”
“He got off to work, didn’t he?” Jim countered grudgingly.
“But,” said Francie carefully. “it was just slog, to pay the bills. He hated it. Work all day. Then home to us.” He put on an irate voice. “‘Can I not have peace in my own house?’ Remember?”
“I don’t forget,” Jim said tersely.
“I know it was hard, the tension, the not-putting-a-foot-wrong….”
“You were too young for the worst of it!”
“Am I supposed to be sorry about that? I can’t help being the youngest.”
“It was different for you.”
“Was it?” Francie waited.
“We’d sit there,” Jim said suddenly, “while he read the paper. We’d be longing to get away. I used to watch him. ‘Give over, you!’ he said to me one time. ‘You’re like the avenging angel!’ And Liam whispers to me, ‘What’s the avenging angel?’ The paper rustled. He didn’t like that. No. Any minute…!”
“Any minute…?” Francie prompted.
“And then you ran in, three years old, bright as a button: ‘Daddy!’ And I swear he smiled at you. Couldn’t help himself. And you rushed up to hug him. But he saw me watching him. Yeah. So, well, then he had to push you away, didn’t he, and you trying to climb on his knee and you fell off and, oh, big tears! Up he gets, pushing you with his foot and roaring, ‘Can I not have peace in my own house?’ And I grabbed you up and I yelled at him, ‘Leave Francie alone! Leave us all alone!’ He gawped at me, holding his own child away from him, and he tried to get you, but I wouldn’t move an inch. He stepped back and his knees were against the sofa and… he was on his arse! Looking up at me. In front of all of you! So I bloody dropped you and ran!”
Jim was short of breath. Francie tried to imagine that running. “Where did you go?”
“What?” Jim asked distractedly.
“Where did you run to?” Jim turned away and did not answer. “Look, Jim,” Francie ventured, “I don’t remember that and if I don’t….” He hesitated. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Why shouldn’t…?”
“We’ve all done things to spite him. No artists in this family. I’m in Weights and Measures, for God’s sake! Micky (God bless him) a barman. Pearse an accountant. We have a teacher and you….”
“Yes!” Jim said quickly. “I’ve been away a long time… a long time. I wanted to be as unlike him as I could possibly be. I wanted to do something…; to give… something….” He turned, this way and that. He went to the mantelpiece, picked up the photograph and looked hard at it. He said, as though expecting to be challenged, “Well, there are things I want, now.” Francie gazed at him, perplexed. “Anything is possible if you feel it’s right; but if you begin to see you’ve decided for the wrong reasons….” He stopped.
“Are you saying…?”
Jim spoke, head down, his voice stiff with emotion, “There’s no bearing it, is what I’m saying.”
“What are you…?” Francie began and then, with a start of shocked perception, he gasped, “You want out!”
Jim could hear Francie’s anxiety: the perplexed exhalation, the shifting stance. Francie would be rapidly calculating the appalling consequences, the shame, the mess.
“Oh, God. Oh, my God,” Francie whispered at last. “Will they let you go? Aren’t you in for life?” Jim looked away. “You’re so like him!” Francie, burst out. He tried to keep his voice down. “So bloody all or nothing! Look at you!” He thrust out Jim’s drawing but Jim ignored it. Francie quelled the urge to shake his silent brother. That would only increase the resistance he’d come to tackle. Another bout of coughing from overhead decided him. He would deal with the immediate issue. “Jim,” he began quietly. “Did you hear that? He’s not the man he was. Is he? He’s lying up there…. You and he could talk….”
“You’re all stuffing the past in another room like it never happened! How can you talk to someone who doesn’t ever admit there was anything wrong? Who never looks at me!”
“Never looks…?” Francie repeated, aware of a pang of compassion.
There was a disturbance overhead and their mother’s urgent cry, “Jim! Quick! Jim!” Francie instantly dashed out, still holding the drawing. A heavy slump shuddered the ceiling. Jim heard his mother’s surprised, “Francie!” There was a burst of dreadful coughing. When Jim got to the door of the bedroom, his father was wailing, “You all go!” Francie answered mildly, “Sure where would we be going?” as he settled Seamie on the bed, adding jovially, “You’re putting on weight! I’ll soon not be able to lift you – and you always such a trim man.”
A helicopter groaned low over the house and away as Jim entered but Francie halted him by saying, coolly, “No need. I managed.” He obliged Jim to step back over the threshold and closed the door of the bedroom behind both of them. “I’m keeping what you’ve told me to myself,” he whispered. “You know what I think you should do and you should do it today.”
That night Jim sat by the foot of Seamie’s bed as Maura prayed the rosary aloud with her eyes closed: “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee….” Her voice was incantatory after dozens of repetitions. Jim gazed at the fake candle-flame above her head: a torpedo-shaped red bulb attached to the wall. It looked to him like an elongated, livid bullet. It glowed before a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. All his life he had seen that image in so many homes, familiar to the point of invisibility: Jesus revealing his heart from among the folds of his garment, ‘all burning with fervent love for men’ – the sweet-melodied hymn recurred to Jim, redolent of fervent, sombre devotions and humble, often sentimental, piety. “Holy Mary,” Jim responded, “Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Maura’s rosary beads shifted between her fingers – needlessly, Jim thought, irritated, hearing her stretch out the chain of beads, then trickle them down into one hand before repeating the action time and again. He longed to be somewhere else. He glared at the paraphernalia of sickness: the useless medicines, the oxygen cylinder, and the scurf of tissues, unread newspapers and pill packets. A heavy wristwatch nestled among them – too heavy for the man in the bed ever to wear again. His mother had never liked housework. She had relaxed the routine that had been imposed and policed by Seamie.
“Hail, Mary, full of grace…” she recited. Jim closed his eyes in an effort to block his irritation. “Blessed art thou among women…” Maura continued.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Jim began, opening his eyes at random. He was shocked to see Seamie pulling out from among the bedclothes the sketch of himself he had made that morning. Automatically, he continued the response.
While Maura prayed on, unaware, Seamie gestured with the drawing, feebly, in his son’s direction. Jim bristled. Seamie made an effort to nod approvingly towards the drawing and in his eyes Jim saw an attempt at praise.
“Blessed art thou amongst women…” Maura intoned. Seamie reached out with the drawing towards Jim. Seamie was pleading now, silently, trying to smile. Jim’s voice, in the response, hardened. He made no move.
“Pray for us now,” Jim said, “and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Seamie groaned and subsided. Maura opened her eyes and saw him trying to speak. “What, love?” she asked solicitously, bending to catch and repeat his mumbled words. “‘You can’t wait’? Who can’t, Seamie?” She glanced at Jim and wondered at his hostile expression. Seamie, looking hard at Jim, rasped with effort, “You can’t wait… for the hour….”
“Oh, now…!” Maura broke in, suddenly apprehensive, as Seamie struggled to say, “of my….” But his breath failed him and Maura saw Jim lock eyes with his father and say to him, implacably, “of your death.” Seamie held his gaze in mute acknowledgement.
“Jim!” cried Maura, appalled, but father and son were focused on each other. The drawing slid off the bed onto the floor. Jim began the final prayer, never taking his eyes from Seamie’s face. “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit….” Seamie was gripped by a spasm of coughing. Maura leapt to raise him in the bed. Jim supplied her response, “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be….” Maura, her own body shaken by Seamie’s struggle, twisted towards Jim in appeal. “Amen,” Jim insisted, ignoring her beseeching eyes.
Less than a week later Francie stood shivering in the cemetery. Autumn sunlight, bright but frail, picked out the mica flecks in a grave-kerb by his feet, sprinkling it with tiny glistenings. Someone was fretting: Pearse. He was muttering about the grave’s location; how it shouldn’t have been half-way down the sloping site but in the higher, drier ground; how they could have afforded a prestige position if they’d got their act together. Francie ignored him and moved towards his mother. She was not a woman who drew other women to her, even in these circumstances. Her daughters-in-law kept a distance, knowing that she wouldn’t welcome the physicality that was second nature to them: the arm around the shoulders, the caresses, actual or murmured.
As he reached her, a neighbour woman was tentatively patting her sleeve. “Maura, Maura. Haven’t you the fine sons to remember him by!” Were they fine, Francie wondered. How much support had they given her? Perhaps he himself was guilty of taking her for granted, of never encouraging her to do anything but drift in Seamie’s wake, letting her manage him by stealth so that the rest of them could avoid his irritability. As the youngest, he had been buffered by his brothers; and his easy-going nature meant he could get the oul’ fella to laugh now and then, even on the sacred topic of his talent. Maura stuck to the script, of Seamie as the father who had sacrificed his artistic ambitions for the sake of the family: the Great Could-Have-Been. Maybe they’d all accepted that too readily, for an easy life. If Seamie had really wanted to, couldn’t he have found some kind of art to do? Why had it been so stark a choice? Only Jim had resisted the party line, implacably. But perhaps that was easier from a distance.
“Gracious Lord, forgive the sins of those who have died in Christ. Lord in your mercy….”
Francie tried to pay attention to the words of the committal service.
“Hear our prayer,” the mourners responded.
Seamie’s death had not come easily but in exhausting bouts that he had fought like an out-classed old boxer entering the ring time and again. Francie had sweated, having to watch. At last he had bent down and whispered in his father’s ear, “Daddy, it’s all right to let go now.” He had seen relief and gratitude in Seamie’s eyes but then their gaze had moved, just a little, and hardened defiantly, losing that peace. Francie had turned on the instant, protective against whatever had provoked this pathetic stand, and found Jim at the foot of the bed.
Francie brushed past Jim now where he stood by the undertakers while they prepared to transfer Seamie’s coffin to the shoulders of four of his sons. Francie was glad, as he put his arm around Micky’s shoulder, feeling Pearse and Liam heft the casket behind them, that he didn’t have to wrestle with how he’d feel if it had been Jim beside him, bearing Seamie the final few yards. But this was worse, he thought as, ahead, he saw the sunlight catching the little gold cross sewn on each end of the thin purple stole that Jim wore over his black clerical suit.
Jim turned the page of the heavy service book although he hardly needed to read the prayers, so well did he know them, “Welcome him to eternal life. Lord, in your mercy….”
“Hear our prayer.”
Francie looked at his brother, the priest. “Let us also pray for ourselves on our pilgrimage through life,” he heard him say. “Keep us faithful in your service.”
Seamie had faithfully worked to keep the family, Francie reflected, but with an embittered doggedness. There was often a sourness about him that set people on edge. He spoke up. He spoke out. Had they all, to one extent or another, compensated for that frustration by letting him dominate at home? Had it been collusion and not love?
Swaying a little under the burden, Francie reached the grave-side with his brothers. The very end of his father’s life. A time for honesty, surely. He had little doubt that each of them was thinking the same thing: that one day it would be their turn to be the father carried to the grave, his life assessed and the sons assessing their own. Francie confessed to himself that he had not loved his father as much as he could have. He had presented him with a front and, he’d have to say, they all did. Their lives – his mother’s, his brothers’ – had gone on in an area they kept him out of.
The four brothers set the coffin carefully down on the straps laid ready, took these up, braced themselves to the weight and lowered the coffin into the grave. An undertaker motioned to Pearse and to Micky to pull a strap-end each. Both of them looked uncomprehendingly at the man until Micky, with a jerk of his head, said, “Oh, aye!” rather comically and nodded to Pearse while gesturing to him with the strap. Flushing with embarrassment, Pearse tugged his strap with such energy that it rattled alarmingly under the coffin and up the side of the grave, emerging with a heavy flap. The word ‘fish’ was muttered disparagingly. Pearse scowled.
Jim announced a decade of the rosary and during its recitation the mourners, one by one, threw a pinch of earth into the grave, some pausing to murmur a few words, or bless themselves before filing on. The younger children gazed with frank interest into the hole, straining out from their parents’ grip. Jim approached last. Holding the service book clasped against his chest, he tossed some earth into the grave but remained there, looking in over the edge. He didn’t move. Everyone waited, to the point where they became uneasy.
Pearse acted. He stepped up beside Jim and looked into the grave. He saw nothing amiss and, wanting to move things on in some unobtrusive way, assumed a sombre voice and read out the inscription on the coffin. “Seamus Joseph Caraher. Twenty-fourth of September, nineteen-nineteen to the tenth of October, nineteen-ninety-three.”
Micky joined him, looking down at the brass plaque. He said to Jim, “He liked the Sacred Heart. So we put it on his coffin. We asked you. Remember? We didn’t put a crucifix as well because we reckoned the Heart was enough.” Getting no response, he persisted. “I mean, it’s the same guy – heart or crucif….”
“Micky!” Pearse snapped.
Micky sniffed, sure of his ground. He read from the coffin-lid, “‘Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in thee.’” He shrugged as though to say, case proved.
Suddenly, Jim opened the book and read with urgent difficulty, “God of holiness and power accept our prayers on behalf of your servant, Seamus Joseph. Do not count his deeds against him….” He paused. He was struggling with emotion. Liam put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder but it was shrugged brusquely away. “Do not count his deeds against him…” Jim repeated, “for in his heart…. in his heart….”
Was Jim about to collapse, Francie wondered. But even as Francie moved towards him, Jim let the book drop and swung round so abruptly that the crowd parted before him, startled. An action of such conviction must somehow be part of the ceremony, surely, but as they watched Jim stride away between the graves the mourners realised there would be no satisfying twist, restoring order, edifying all. They began to huddle and whisper together.
Pearse turned on Francie furiously as the murmuring turned to outright questioning. Gesturing to the brothers to stay put, Francie ran after Jim, caught up with him and held his arm. Jim shook him off, demanding, “You know what it says?”
Francie was at a loss. “‘Do not count his deeds against him!’” Jim urged. Seeing no comprehension, he laughed harshly. “‘For in his heart he desired to do your will.’ In his heart! It doesn’t matter what harm he actually did because he didn’t want to do it really – not in his heart. So let him into heaven. We’ll call it quits!” He shook his head, “I won’t have it!” and plunged away.
Francie saw his brothers bearing down on them. He ran back towards them. “Overcome with grief,” he insisted, facing down their outrage. “Take everyone on to the meal. I’ll deal with him,” he said.
“You’d bloody better!” Pearse snarled.
Francie watched from a distance, standing by a clump of scraggy bushes in the very lowest part of the cemetery. Jim was sitting on a grave kerb, occasionally flinging a pebble viciously against a headstone. At last Francie went forward.
“Jim,” he said quietly. Jim looked up. He was suffering. Francie was encouraged. Better that than stubborn indignation. He sat down beside his brother. “Jim,” Francie began, “don’t stay here. Come back with the rest of us.”
Jim turned roughly away.
“Jim, he’s dead. Dead and….”
“Forgiven!”
“Well… yes. Of course, he’s….”
“Escaped!” Jim’s face contorted.
An instinctive recoil prickled through Francie. There was something powerful here and he wasn’t sure he could handle it.
“I wanted him punished!” Jim swung towards a stone crucifix carved on a memorial. “So fucking merciful!” he hissed at the pinioned figure on it. “It’s never too late with you, is it? Well, I’m not you. I won’t be you!”
“Who’s asking you to be…?”
Jim was incredulous. “That’s who I ought to be. It doesn’t make sense otherwise. ‘All or nothing.’ But I can’t give ‘all’. I’ve tried. I could cope while I had a reason but now he’s gone… and forgiven…” Jim paused, his eyes blank with horror, “There’s no one left to blame but me.”
“Blame you for what, Jim?”
“A thing….”
“What thing?”
“A good thing….”
“Yes?”
“A good thing… for a bad reason.”
“Jim. What have you done?” Francie waited, dreading to know.
“That time I ran away….”
“Yes?”
“That time I ran away I ended up in the church. At least I could be quiet there. I sat – I hid – at the Sacred Heart altar. There were red flowers all over: roses, gladioli… stiff like spears… carnations, pinks; perfume, and heat from the candles; the mosaic – that dull-gold mosaic – smouldering, almost, as it got darker and darker. There He was up there, showing his heart, with flames around it, burning. A burning heart. Mine was burning – with rage and shame and not being able to do anything… not change anything. I was seventeen. There was no peace in our house. Why did he drive us all the time? And it was all false and nobody would say. I sat there, looking. It was all redness and shadows. Like a womb. I thought: I could love. I could. I could paint a better Sacred Heart than that, more real, more like someone you could meet and love, not this mawkish, womanish eunuch. I could paint! I could love!”
Francie waited.
“Father Maurice found me,” Jim went on. “He was kind. He persuaded me to come home. ‘I’ll talk to your father.’ He said things would be all right.”
“Were they?”
“Oh, he listened to Father Maurice’s little go-easy-on-him speech and he said, ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ and ‘Good night’ But as soon as the door was closed he pinned me against the wall. ‘You go running to the priests? I’m your father. I’m your father!’ I smiled, and at that he banged me off the wall until Mammy was screaming. I could hear myself thinking: ‘You’re not. You’re not.’”
Francie was appalled “But this good thing you did that was so bad?” he prompted.
“Somehow, at some point – I don’t remember when – I don’t remember how… maybe I saw… that I could get away, and everyone would praise me and he’d not be able to contradict them, for what better thing could a son do?”
It was several moments before Francie could trust himself to speak.
“A priest,” he stated flatly.
“I’d get a new family, a greater ideal, greater than his – his art. I’d give up everything. He was the great renouncer, wasn’t he? But not compared to me!”
Francie watched Jim cradle his right fist in his left hand, turning the one inside the other, grinding. Abruptly the fingers interlaced in the clasp of prayer and Jim unthinkingly brought them to his mouth. He rubbed his teeth over the knuckle of his thumb, his thoughts elsewhere as the skin reddened.
Francie looked round for his brothers, for anyone. The boggy land rumpled between graves. Tufts of scruffy rushes suggested a footing but were only a crust, Francie knew. He’d spent many an hour playing here, aware of being on the surface, while underground another kind of life was busying itself.
Francie shifted position a little. “Nobody made you be a priest. You must have wanted it, Jim. It’s not like getting married – one big day and you’re tied for life – you had years to reflect, to choose differently. And you chose not simply to be a priest but to join a religious order. You didn’t have to do that.”
Francie was surprised when Jim nodded, though still hunched. “I was happy actually. Yes. I was. They were glad to have me. I thought I’d found a family. But then, after I was ordained, when I was supposed to have grown up, I understood that most of them were only muddling through too. You weren’t supposed to be lonely. The lonely came to you for advice. You couldn’t be lonely. One time I went to the Superior’s room – his own room, his bedroom, you know – to hand in the final draft of a report he’d been chasing me for and as I got near the door I could hear him inside, crying. Should I knock? Should I help? I thought, yes. He’s supposed to be my brother and I knocked, ready to share, but he opened the door, breezy and bluff as ever, though I could see a tear still on his chin that he hadn’t wiped away. And he said, no, no problem, took the papers off me and shut the door. You see? There was no escape. If he had to lock himself away, then so did I. There was no escape from our solitary selves. No quarter. No mercy.”
Francie put an arm around Jim and stroked his hair, as he would his own small son’s, and he felt Jim’s head making a child’s response, a blind nuzzling into the collar bone, a slow turning of the head from side to side, pressing the brow into Francie’s shoulder as though saying no, no, till, gradually, the movement ceased and Francie felt a sigh escape. A final moment of stillness and Jim pulled back, wiping his face, breathing in deeply then exhaling.
“I killed him,” Jim said at last. “You saw. More than once I did it. I had his talent and I killed that in myself. And I made him watch. I enjoyed being able to say piously that I wouldn’t be painting again. The Order didn’t demand that. It was self-imposed. He had to listen and have people congratulating him – such a fine son.”
“No wonder you’ve been unhappy,” said Francie, trying to keep the revulsion out of his voice.
Jim met his gaze. He said, eventually, calmly, even nobly, “I’ve only myself to blame.”
Francie let this stand and then took Jim by the upper arms and spoke very slowly, emphasising each word, “You… fucking… liar.” A helicopter groaned into earshot and hovered, roaring, overhead. It was pointless trying to speak. Francie held Jim in place till it passed, then tugged him to his feet. “You know that’s not true,” he insisted. “Nobody’s perfect. Nobody’s perfectly to blame. Get down here with the rest of us!” Jim was stunned. “Jesus Christ! Who do you think you are?” Francie went on. “You did your bit to kill him. That’s all!”
Francie pushed Jim away and left him. But just before he disappeared over a lift in the land, he stopped. An impulse of pity, for Jim, for Seamie, for all of them, made him turn and call out, “At least be a priest for him now.”
Wooden boards had been placed across the unfilled grave and mats of green plastic grass spread over twin mounds of excavated earth on each side. The funeral flowers lay precariously on these. Several had slid and lay askew. Jim raised his hand in blessing over Seamie but could not speak. “God sees me,” he said to himself. “He knows my heart.” That thought – its instant, humbling pain – prised him further open.
At the cemetery gates, Jim paused and looked back. In the distance, the helicopter was a dragonfly, whirring in a high, powdery, sky. The tall celtic crosses, white and buff and grey, clustered like massive sedge-plants, huge and bulky-headed, on the edge of the slope leading down to the Bog Meadows. He could see a pattern in it. Chalk on pale blue paper.