Where Old Ghosts Meet - Kate Evans [49]
She had expected some small talk about Ireland or the family, but there was none. As if knowing exactly why she was here, he went straight to the point.
“Your grandfather …” he began. Watery grey, slightly bulbous eyes scrutinized Nora from above heavy horn-rimmed glasses. There was a query there, or was it a challenge? Nothing terribly obvious but one she found to be unsettling. She held his gaze for a moment, waiting for him to continue. Finally he averted his eyes and settled back into his chair, pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose with a pudgy index finger. He began again. “We spent a fair bit of time together, your grandfather and I. I expect you are aware of that. It was part of my pastoral duties to visit Berry Island every couple of weeks to say Mass and administer the sacraments. I travelled by boat of course so the weather often dictated the frequency and length of my stay. There were many occasions when I prayed for bad weather just so I could stay on longer and be in his company. I can confess that now.” A smile appeared at the corner of his mouth and his chest heaved as he gave a little “heh,” the bare beginnings of a laugh.
There was a pause. “We got along well together, the two of us. We’d talk for hours, maybe play a game of chess. You’d be surprised at all the topics we would discuss. Mind you, I have to admit, there were times I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I enjoyed listening to what he had to say. He was full of what he called, ‘the new order in the world, the shift in society, new ways, new ideas, new forms.’ Music was being rearranged, ‘disordered,’ I believe, was a word he used. He talked of ‘shifting planes’ and about ‘geometric forms’ in art. People were dancing with their toes turned in! Now I didn’t see that as strange. I’d been doing that for years.” There was a sputter of coughing as he tried to laugh.
He pulled himself up in the chair. “I could see a funny side to it all. From our point of view, here on an island at the edge of the Atlantic, it was all ridiculous nonsense. ‘Imagine now, Matt,’ I’d say, ‘the fine time a fella like Picasso would have rearranging the likes of me.’” He began to cough uncontrollably.
Nora sat there, conjuring up an image of the heavy, pigeon-toed priest rearranged, squared off, Picasso style, a big watery eye plucked from its socket and set halfway down his cheek, stepping out, doing a nimble Charleston right there on the presbytery floor. She looked up and found him peering at her again over his big glasses. His lips had parted into a broad grin showing long tobacco-stained teeth. She laughed.
He began to cough again and while struggling to bring himself more upright in the chair he produced a crumpled white handkerchief and buried his face in the folds. There was a loud blow followed by a great intake of breath and he continued, “I said to him one night, ‘You know what we should do, Matt, you and me? We should invite them boys to Newfoundland, have them down here to do a job on the whole place. Reorder, remake, rearrange. Think of the time they’d have with that.’ He got furious with me then. He thought I wasn’t taking him seriously enough.”
There was a knock on the door and Mary appeared with a tray. She looked from one to the other. No doubt she had heard the laughter. For a moment Nora thought she might turn on her heel and walk straight back out the door, taking tray and all. But she planted it down with a rattle on the small table beside the priest.
“I’m off then, if you have no further need of me.”
“Thank you, Mary. That will be grand.” He watched her leave.
“I think she’s jealous,” he said softly, still in his jovial mood. “Mary has been around for a long time and thinks it her right to know everything that goes on in this house.”
Nora didn’t quite know what to make of this man. Perhaps she had come with a preconceived idea of how this small-town priest