Bless Me Again, Father Read online

‘And,’ I said, adopting a brogue as I put a hand over his twinkling blue eyes, ‘I have a parish priest who is blind as the sole of me shoe.’

  The Stacks’ house was end of terrace, backing on to the railway lines. Even as I approached it, a steam engine chugged by asthmatically, releasing smoke clouds everywhere.

  The rear garden was visible. It was large and concreted all over except for a plot near the end, south-facing, wall where peach trees grew. The fruit was not for the family, I felt sure.

  I saw there was a caravan with a wheel missing, an old plough-share, a rusty car engine and a metal bath in which, according to Mrs Pring, all the family washed. At that moment, a shaggy grey donkey was using it as a manger.

  Reg was in the garden. A stocky man in his mid-thirties, he wore brown, oily overalls. He had a bulldog nose, red pippin cheeks and a crew-cut with a bald patch on the crown. His many pockets bulged with protruding tools, giving him the appearance of a walking pin-cushion.

  I knocked on the front door which was ajar. Nancy Stack answered it, a baby feeding at the breast. She wasn’t in the least embarrassed.

  ‘Nice to see you, Father.’ Her fat face opened up in greeting like a sunflower.

  ‘Thank you,’ I gulped.

  ‘Come in, Father.’ Ope you don’t mind if I go on feeding Dommy here. I’m behindhand as usual.’

  I murmured that I didn’t mind at all.

  She led me into the kitchen-diner. Children were running around in all directions, some of them with bare bottoms, all making a ferocious din.

  Mrs Stack grabbed a handful of cornflakes, threw them up in a shower and when they came down stamped on them as though she were treading grapes.

  ‘Don’t I count for nothing ’ere?’ she screeched. ’Keep quiet or I’ll throw the ’ole bleedin’ lot of you on the street for good and all.’

  It made no difference to the level of noise; even the baby went on sucking at the breast as if nothing had happened.

  Mrs Stack gave me a good-natured grin. ‘Mlight as well save me puff, Father.’

  What intrigued me most was the curious assortment of items scattered around the room. There were chess-sets, children’s kites, wicker chairs piled one on the other, a bushel of Brazil nuts, a box of pine cones covered with silver paint, a carrier bag containing various clothes, and much else besides.

  I only caught glimpses of these things through the washing which was draped on an indoor line like bunting. Its overpowering smell clogged the lungs.

  Nancy made me a cup of tea. Dommy, whether a boy or girl I couldn’t tell, held on for dear life with his gums. All the while that his mother poured my tea and offered me a biscuit out of a battered cake-tin I was afraid the baby would slip off that soft white mound and bang his head on the floor.

  ‘Tommy’s been fighting at school, Mrs Stack.’

  ‘That’s good, Father,’ Nancy said cheerily.

  ‘I don’t mean in the boxing ring. In the playground.’

  ‘What’s the difference providing ‘e keeps at it?’

  ‘You, um, don’t mind?’

  ‘’Is dad gives ’im lessons. Every Sunday.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘I’m ’oping Tommy’ll be a priest one of these days.’

  ‘Very nice, Mrs Stack,’ I said, trying to show enthusiasm.

  ‘Yeah,’ Nancy said, eyeing me with admiration. ’Anything’s better than working for a living, ain’t it?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘’Course, I know you do a bit on Sundays when everybody else is sleepin’ in.’

  I sipped my tea for a while. ‘I was wondering if Tommy is happy.’

  ‘He’s a bit upset about the donkey.’

  ‘The donkey?’

  ‘Reg bought the bloody thing,’ Nancy said, as she shifted Dommy from one breast to the other. ‘Greedy guts.’ She apologised. ‘Not you, Father. This.’ And she poked Dommy on his round cheek, causing him to bring up a mouthful of watery white liquid.

  Nancy explained that Tommy was upset because Reg was on the point of selling the donkey. ‘Tommy groomed it, y’see, fed it and watered it for a couple of months. Well, naturally, ’e’s wanting to keep it.’

  ‘That’s hard.’

  ‘Is it?’ Nancy said, and I hastened to assure her I meant life not the biscuit in my hand.

  ‘I can’t get to church these days, Father. But I’d like you to accept a little something from me.’

  ‘Very kind of you,’ I said.

  Nancy went to the mantel shelf, peered into an empty sardine tin and yelled, ‘Which one of you sodlings ’as pinched my six-pence?’

  ‘Never mind, Mrs Stack,’ I said, finishing my biscuit, ‘it’s the thought that counts.’

  Because no one owned up, Nancy, to compensate me, grabbed a handful of Brazil nuts and stuffed them in my pocket.

  Time for the encounter with Reg. Preparing myself for a black eye, I made my way across the debris in the scullery out into the garden.

  For a full minute, Reg pretended not to notice me. When he saw I was not going to disappear, he wiped his hand on an oily rag and took hold of mine. It was like being caught in a trap.

  ‘Want something?’ he said. He gestured around the garden as if he hoped he might make a killing against all the odds.

  ‘I’ve come about Tommy.’

  For the first time I saw the boy. He was behind the caravan, gazing devotedly at the donkey. His right nostril was streaming and tears were making black lines down his cheeks.

  Reg pounced on him and cuffed his head. ‘Go inside,’ he growled. ‘Go on, get in there.’

  Tommy ran indoors as if his clothes were on fire. I felt real hatred of Reg for that.

  ‘What’s he been up to, then?’

  ‘He’s been fighting.’

  ‘Is that all? Hasn’t lost an eye, has he?’ I shook my head. ‘Bruises’ll do the little perisher good. He gets enough from me.’

  I said manfully that I didn’t doubt it. He detected my dislike.

  ‘He’s my kid, ain’t he?’

  I was on the point of saying, Worse luck, when Reg stood right up next to me.

  ‘Listen, Mister, I’ve got six. I didn’t want six, nothin’ like. I’d sell one or two of ’em this minute if I could get a good price for ’em.’

  ‘The gift of God,’ I said, somewhat savagely.

  ‘It’s funny, Mister, how God always gives things to them as can’t afford ’em.’

  I breathed heavily, for my own safety, kept my mouth shut.

  ‘Do you know why I had six? So far?’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  ‘Because my Nancy listens to the likes of your, not to me, see?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So, Mister, if you don’t want to sell me nothin’ or buy from me nothin’, I’ll be getting on with my work.’

  With that, he bent down to lever a motor tyre off a rim.

  Almost without thinking, I said, ‘I want to buy that donkey.’

  Reg dropped his tools with a clunk, and straightened up. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

  ‘Is he for sale?’

  ‘Everything in here is for sale excepting me.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Fourteen quid.’

  I turned on my heels in scorn.

  ‘Twelve,’ he called after me.

  ‘That’s better,’ I said, rounding on him just in time to see a new look of respect vanish from his eyes. ‘Make it a tenner. And I’ll call for him on Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘Done,’ Reg said, as he picked up his tools again.

  Sunday evening after Benediction, and Dr Daley was in Fr Duddleswell’s study for his Sunday offering.

  ‘God, Charles,’ the Doctor said, his red eyes popping, ‘I’m as dry as one of your sermons.’

  ‘Flattery will get you nowhere, Donal.’

  ‘Will you listen to me,’ the Doctor protested, panting like a dog, ‘if you don’t give me a drink, my bladder will think my throat is cut.’r />
  ‘I will not, Donal.’ Fr Duddleswell tugged on the large lobe of his left ear as if it were the Angelus bell. ‘You have already drunk your way through most of the furniture in this house.’

  He headed for the cupboard, all the same, where the hard stuff was. ‘Where are you off to, Father?’ I asked.

  ‘Taking a walk to look for me legs,’ was his reply.

  ‘Ah, Father Neil,’ the Doctor said, rubbing his hands in glee, ‘our Charles’s most princely attribute is his inconsistency.’

  ‘Is that so, Donal?’

  ‘True. Did you not know, Charles, that you are the only bright spark of instability in a murderously stable world?’

  Our conversation was interrupted by a piercing scream from the garden.

  Fr Duddleswell was at the door in an instant. ‘Mrs Pring! Mrs Pring!’ He tried to mask his concern. ‘God in heaven, that woman is always slow as rye in coming.’

  More bloodcurdling sounds until Mrs Pring, her white hair dishevelled, arrive pale and trembling.

  ‘At last,’ Fr Duddleswell said, relieved to find her still in one piece, ‘the world’s mother-in-law.’

  Seeing Mrs Pring shaking, as he put it, like a dog in a wet sack, Dr Daley offered her a drink. She accepted it and made it disappear with a speed which the Doctor himself admired.

  Fr Duddleswell took her by the shoulder to calm her. ‘Was it yourself making that unearthly noise, woman. You have the floor, unscrubbed though it be.’

  ‘It’s Billy Buzzle,’ Mrs Pring managed to say.

  Fr Duddleswell raced out into the hall. ‘Jasus,’ he muttered, ‘the poor feller must be dying at least.’

  I followed him, knowing what to expect. Billy was in his garden, his arm round the donkey’s neck.

  ‘Father O’Duddleswell,’ Billy said expansively, ‘I’d like you to meet my newest friend, Joseph.’

  Steam seemed to rise off the glassy top of Fr Duddleswell’s dome as he surveyed the prospect of miseries to come.

  ‘Is it not enough, Mr Buzzle, that you torment me daily with that bronchial racket from your pigeons and the baying of that black mongrel yonder?’

  ‘Mongrel?’ Billy was astonished. ‘My Pontius? He’s a pure-bred labrador, that one. C’mon, Pontius old fellow, go lick that funny little priest’s mitts for him.’

  Fr Duddleswell took his hands away from the fence in a hurry, only to raise them in unpriestly wrath.

  ‘You are not worth a cuckoo’s spit. Now,’ he pointed at the donkey, ‘what is the meaning of this?’

  Billy stroked Joseph’s rough, black-grey coat. ‘I thought you’d be pleased because he’s a holy animal, see.’

  Behind Fr Duddleswell’s back, I winked at Billy. I had primed him in advance and he had made an excellent start.

  Joseph lifted his head, enormous for so small a creature, and, with ears pointed, brayed so loudly that a dozen pigeons scattered and flew alarmed into the air.

  ‘Did you say something, Charles?’ Dr Daley enquired.

  ‘When I was a nipper at Sunday school,’ Billy said, ‘they told us there was a donkey in the stable at Bethlehem.’

  ‘There certainly was, Mr Buzzle,’ I said.

  ‘And it was a donkey,’ Billy continued, ‘that carried the holy family into Egypt.’

  ‘True,’ I said, with admiration.

  ‘Lastly, you gents of the cloth don’t need no reminding it was a donkey that Jesus used to carry Him into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.’

  I winked again at Billy to indicate he was word perfect.

  ‘Well, Father O’Duddleswell, I thought if your Jesus likes donkeys, so might you.’

  ‘Not when they are stabled underneath me bedroom.’

  Billy frisked the donkey’s ears. ‘He’s ever so gentle, Joseph is.’

  Joseph backed away in the direction of Fr Duddleswell, lifted his hind legs and kicked the fence with terrifying force. A loud, braying laugh followed.

  ‘See,’ Billy concluded, improbably, ‘he really likes you.’

  ‘Have I not told you before,’ his neighbour roared at him, ‘that the Third World War will start over this blessed fence?’

  ‘You are behind this, Father Neil, I can tell.’

  I admitted it.

  Back in his study, Fr Duddleswell went on for five minutes about fraternizing with the enemy and how disgraceful it was that this pagan country spent more on pet food than on children’s homes and how animals weren’t worth the trouble, seeing as they didn’t have souls.

  ‘He’s as full of his own opinion as a sausage skin,’ was Mrs Pring’s comment when she could stand no more. ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘No souls, Charles?’ Dr Daley said incredulously. ‘Of course the dogs and cats have souls.’

  ‘The Church says they have not and that is the end of the matter.’

  ‘There’s lots of funny folk come into my surgery without souls. Stones they have where their eyes should be. Blue and brown stones. But I never yet saw an animal, not even a pig, without a soul’.

  Each afternoon, when school was over, Tommy Stack was in Billy’s garden, grooming and feeding the donkey. Billy grew fond of the lad and Fr Duddleswell conceded I had done my best for him and forgave me my sin of sedition.

  ‘That ass reminds me,’ he said once, ‘of when I used to visit Assisi in me student days. And of the gorgeous travels meself and Dr Daley have made through the green fields of old Ireland. Donkeys galore.’

  I had hoped that Tommy would now stop his fighting but his father’s influence was too strong.

  One lunch-time, I found the boy sitting hunched up against the school railings. He had a cut a quarter of an inch deep on his right cheek and the eye above it was blue and swelling fast.

  He was more concerned for his broken clay pipe. His teacher had told me that Tommy gathered up horse dung, dried it and smoked it in a clay pipe. Just like his dad.

  I put my arm round his shoulder. ‘It’s a job for the Doctor this time, Tommy.’

  I almost had to drag him to Dr Daley’s house. He was sunning himself in his garden.

  ‘Dear, dear, dear,’ the Doctor said, smiling kindly, ‘the breath is only just in and out of him.’

  In a couple of minutes he had cleaned the cut and put a plaster over it.

  ‘Can’t you do something about his nose?’ I spoke half-jokingly. But I sensed that Dr Daley might be able to help Tommy with a long-standing problem.

  I explained that one nostril was always running when the other was dry.

  ‘A clear case,’ Dr Daley said, ‘of interference from a foreign body.’ He shone a torch up the lad’s nose. ‘Tweezers, if you’d be so kind.’

  I handed him the tweezers. ‘Aren’t you going to give him an anaesthetic?’

  Dr Daley lowered his arm. ‘I am not intending to hurt the lad. Besides,’—a nostalgic twitch of the lips—‘did I never tell you of when I went to the doctor’s as a lad to have my tonsils out?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Didn’t the man poke his instrument down my throat without as much as a by your leave? Then squeeze, crunch, tug. And tonsils, goodbye.’

  ‘Horrible,’ I grunted.

  ‘After that, I had to walk six long miles home swallowing blood.’ Dr Daley resumed his work. ‘Anaesthetic, indeed!’

  Tommy was brave. He closed his eyes but made no sound. A few seconds later, Dr Daley took out the tweezers and there at the end of them was a small, encrusted metal object.

  ‘It looks,’ I said, ‘like a bolt out of a meccano set.’

  Tommy remembered that he did have a meccano set, three or four years before, which his dad had sold.

  ‘You’re a very lucky feller,’ the Doctor said, clapping him on the back. ‘That thing could have moved round your body and come out of you anywhere at all.’

  I had a word on the side with him. After which he said to Tommy, ‘The good Father here tells me you smoke.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Tut-tut, tut-tut, tut.’ It
was not in the least convincing. ‘Look at my fingers.’ He splayed them out to show how yellow they were. ‘Imagine the inside of your lungs looking like this.’

  He coughed and spluttered a couple of times, took out a cigarette and lit up. ‘It’s not worth thinking about,’ he said with a shudder.

  ‘Giving him a demonstration, Doctor?’

  Dr Daley detected disapproval. ‘I am indeed. Look, Tommy my boy. The smoke even affects your eyes.’ He narrowed his own to prove it. ‘Which reminds me, while you’re here I might as well test your eyes for you.’

  He made Tommy face the test card.

  ‘Now what’s this?’ he said, pointing to a letter in the middle.

  Tommy screwed up his eyes, peered and said, ‘I don’t rightly know.’

  ‘This one, then.’ Dr Daley indicated the top line.

  All the letters were visible to me. I could have seen them at double the distance.

  ‘Tommy failed to make out any of them. I told him to wait outside for me.

  ‘Imagine that, Doctor. His father takes so little interest in him he doesn’t even know the lad is nearly blind.’

  Dr Daley smiled and whispered in my ear for effect. ‘His eyesight is perfect. I didn’t really need to test it to find that out.’

  I was annoyed. ‘Why is he pulling my leg?’

  ‘He’s not, Father Neil. The boy likes you. That’s probably why he’s trying to hide from you the fact that he doesn’t know his ABC.’

  Around midnight Saturday, I was woken up by an agitated Fr Duddleswell.

  ‘Join me in your study, lad,’ he hissed. ‘But do not put the light on.’

  I pulled on my dressing-gown and went to my study where Fr Duddleswell was peering through a chink in the curtains.

  ‘I think there is a burglar on the prowl.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Billy’s garden.’

  The silence was rent by Joseph’s braying. In the darkness of night it sounded louder than normal and eerier.

  Definitely movement in Billy’s garden. Footsteps and a muffled oath. Then the sound of Joseph’s trotting hoofs, a pause followed by a crack and a scream of pain.

  ‘Joseph’s kicked him,’ I said, wincing.

  ‘Good donkey,’ Fr Duddleswell said in what seemed to me an unChristian manner.

  We heard scampering feet and over the fence at the end of the next garden a head appeared, then a torso, framed against the lamplight. The intruder disappeared and silence returned.