Galore - Michael Crummey [65]
No worst, there was none, and he sat the rest of the day at the fireplace beside Mr. Gallery.
—What will you do? Mrs. Gallery asked him.
—It will pass, he said. —All things pass.
He waited the rest of that summer and long into the winter while Cunico said Mass and offered the sacraments in the church Phelan had built. He walked the paths of the outports, looking to catch even the slightest subversive nod from a parishioner but no one obliged him. Mr. Gallery followed him at a distance and the priest felt more and more that they were one and the same, pale shadows cast on the present by faces from the past. The contributions of the congregation that had sustained him and Mrs. Gallery came to an end and they survived on the charity of Protestants alone. It made the priest feel like a beggar and he refused to eat for days at a time, subsisting on a diet of strong drink and self-pity. He lost his nature and slept beside Mrs. Gallery as chastely as a saint.
At Christmas he roused himself from his funk long enough to put on a mummer’s elaborate rags, wearing a veil of brin and a twine belt looped at the waist to hold the layers of dirty clothing and cast-off material in place, and he walked from house to house, taking drink and food and offering a few moments of foolishness before he was recognized and his hosts turned their backs or left the room altogether. Not even a man as apostate as Saul Toucher was willing to make him welcome, and the priest trudged back to the house in the droke to sit by the fire in his filthy costume, drinking steadily. Mrs. Gallery stood behind him but he shrugged away from her hand. —You can’t live this way, she told him.
—Pray, what would you have me do?
—There are still people with no priest among them. You say so yourself.
—The back of beyond, he said. —Not even God knows they’re there. He took a forlorn mouthful of his drink. —I’m too old to live like a fugitive, he said.
—I will not have the two of you in the house like this, Mrs. Gallery told him. —Do you hear?
—Leave me be, woman, he said.
—I will not have it, she said again.
—You’ll heave me out on my ear, will you?
—Mind but I don’t, she said. And she left the priest and her husband by the fire to go to her bed.
The sound of an iron clanging woke her hours later, a frantic alarm, and it took her a moment to place the sound. She went barefoot to the main room and there was just enough light from the coals to see Mr. Gallery kicking at the fireplace crane and Father Phelan hanging from the rafters at the end his twine belt. She stood on a chair to cut the priest down and he lay weeping and choking on the frozen dirt while she stoked up the fire. She helped him to a chair and sat him up. —This is not how it will end, she said.
The priest shook his head. —Leave me be, he begged her.
Mrs. Gallery turned and spoke to her husband for the first time since he came through the ceiling at Selina’s House. —Kneel down, she told him. —Kneel down, goddamn you.
Phelan looked up at her, then at the faint features of the specter kneeling beside him.
She said, Mr. Gallery would like to make confession, Father.
The priest leaned over his lap as if struck by cramps and he rocked back and forth in an idiot’s spasm, moaning helplessly. Mrs. Gallery yanked him upright by an ear. He wiped the snot from his nose and mouth with his sleeve and tried to tip his head away from her hand. —Please, he said to her. He grabbed the breast of the fool’s outfit he was wearing and shook it helplessly. —Please.
She twisted his head far enough he was forced to look at her. —Choose your hell, Father, she said and then she turned her back on them both.
The priest watched after her a long time, though there was nothing he could see in the black of the bedroom where she’d