At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [219]
Begod, you’ll be waiting, thought Mr. Mack. Then of all people, strolling along the canal, his shadow rolling on the low canal wall, came Father O’Toiler. “Father, Father,” called Mr. Mack advancing across the bridge. He felt exposed there with the Sinn Feiners watching from the houses, and concerned for the curate’s dignity, he said, “Holy be, is it safe at all, your reverence?”
“Safe?” repeated the priest. “As to that, Mr. Mack, we are not out of the woods yet, not by a chalk long as my ashplant here. A day delayed, nevertheless a start has been made which is half the answer and I believe we may venture a small halloo.”
“Oh indeed,” said Mr. Mack, “hello.” A curious gruntling noise the priest was making, not at all dissimilar to a certain domestic animal, and an expression slipped about his face that might conceivably be smiling—a transformation of his habitual austerity shocking as any of the day’s events.
“Safe, that is, for any Irishman,” he said.
He stepped along, and Mr. Mack stepped beside and a little behind him, along the tended imperturbable terraced street. The lawns in the gardens had been mown; a slight tingling sensation irritated Mr. Mack’s nose. Last week’s blossom drifted in the gutters, this week’s fluttered above them. Mr. Mack hemmed. He did not wish to importune his reverence, but his reverence would understand it was his son he was worried for. Was there anything with the flute band in this terrible business? The Father would understand he did not mean to be casting astertions of any type or any sort. The Father had only the boys’ best interest at heart. But boys would often be getting the wrong end of the stick. The Father would understand he spoke as a father himself. It was with a parent’s concern he spoke, all considerations aside.
“Mr. Mack,” the priest replied, “if but one of my boys be out this glorious day, my labor with that band is well done.”
“But Father dear, you cannot intend what you say. These are ruffians. There’s talk of Larkinites with them—Germans, I don’t know what else. It’s murder and mayhem it is. And there’s worse will come of it, I know that, I know.”
There were no Germans, the curate was pleased to inform him, Germany being second only to England for the cradle of heresy. And what Larkinites there were were not Larkinites now, but good brave Catholic sons of Ireland, who in this final hour had repented their former impieties. Together they stood now, the staunch and the prodigal returned, as the Army of the Irish Republic. Mr. Mack might remark the republican flag which was a third of it orange in generous acknowledgment to the Protestant north. Mr. Mack might consider that generosity misplaced and an unfortunate lapse in so Catholic a cause. But Father O’Toiler would assure him that a little Irish weather would soon fade that orange to Vatican yellow. For Mr. Mack was to consider this was indeed a Catholic rising and therefore a blessed one too. Holy Mother Church, despairing at last of the English recanting, turned to her first-loved children. The Saxon tide must trouble no more the sacred shore. Again must Ireland rise, isle of saints and scholars, to shine a lamp among the nations. And her spiritual empire, that empire of the soul, which stretched to the world’s imagined corners, wherever had preached her missionary sons or wandered in exile her children lamenting, this empire she would lay at the feet of the Cross, the humblest fief, and the jewel in the crown, of the Holy Father of the Holy See.
“But the people,” said Mr. Mack, “they’re not for this carry-on at all.”
The Irish people, Father O’Toiler assured him, most happily assured him, had not the right to be wrong. The people might quibble and fiddle with Home Rule. But it was written: “the Erne shall rise rude in torrents and the hills be rent and the sea in red waves shall roll.” And it was scarcely to be supposed the poet of the Roisín Dubh had in mind the coming of a shoneen talking-house, a gombeen legislature scrounged and cadged for by whiskey-swilling fixers