Father Under Fire Read online

‘Meself,’ Fr Duddleswell said cheerfully, ‘I look forward to me death.’

  Dr Daley, who had joined us in Fr Duddleswell’s study after Jesse’s funeral, looked at him, pop-eyed in disbelief. ‘Why so, Charles?’

  ‘Because, Donal, ’tis so much better than looking back on it.’

  Dr Daley chuckled. ‘Ah, death’s not so bad. After all, the best people are dead. Jesus, for instance. And Saints Patrick, Columba and Bridget.’

  ‘There is too much grizzle and grief around, Donal, and not enough of it expressed in a cheerful way to get it out of the system.’

  ‘Wasn’t that the reason for the wakes,’ Dr Daley asked, twirling his half-empty glass.

  ‘Oh ’twas, Donal. There was plenty of keening and singing and playing of the fiddle in the old days.’

  ‘Also, Charles, don’t forget the piles of snuff and tobacco for the white clay pipes and’ – he drained his glass – ‘a plentiful supply of the fire water.’

  Fr Duddleswell stretched out his hand with the bottle in it. ‘Go on, Donal,’ he groaned, ‘twist me arm much more and you will break the spring.’

  ‘There was a keg of whiskey we had at one wake,’ the doctor went on, ‘which we were obliged to keep well away from the corpse.’

  ‘Why was that?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, Father Neil, a drop of that keg was used to moisten the lips of a dead man before.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Didn’t the corpse give such a kick that his shroud went from him up in the air like the white cloud at our Lord’s Ascension?’

  The three of us laughed and Fr Duddleswell slapped my knee with delight.

  The doctor broke off to say, ‘The whiskey gave rise to panegyrics, Father Neil. How could anyone speak ill of the dead with the dead man’s porter or whiskey kicking like an unbroken horse in his insides?’

  ‘Happy times those wakes,’ Fr Duddleswell mused, ‘happy times.’

  ‘Happy for the bereaved in particular, Charles.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘They were not lonely or tight-lipped in their mourning,’ the Doctor explained for my benefit. ‘They were not ashamed of their grief either but proud of it. They made a display of it.’

  ‘They wanted everyone to know how happy they were,’ Fr Duddleswell said, ‘to have something to grieve about.’

  ‘We Irish know how to die well and everything “dacent”,’ the doctor said.

  ‘With the English, Donal, you would not know from their faces whether they were attending a funeral or a christening.’

  ‘I remember,’ Dr Daley said, ‘how it was with funerals when I was but a lumpeen of a lad in Connemara. The wailing of the women with their long hair trailing like seaweed. Men lifting their homemade tweed hats. Tradesmen putting up the shutters on their shops. Everyone, even the kiddies, walking three steps after the corpse as the procession passed.’

  ‘Like a carnival, Donal. Like a carnival.’

  ‘I swear to you, Charles, if the devil himself died in Connemara he’d get a good Christian burial.’

  Suddenly Dr Daley started almost to stutter with excitement as a boyhood memory came back to him.

  ‘I remember once, Charles and Father Neil, I remember going to the graveyard where the Silent Majority were at rest.’

  ‘As Homer put it,’ Fr Duddleswell explained.

  ‘And the custom was, d’you see, for everybody to take turns at digging the graves.’

  ‘No professional gravediggers?’

  The Doctor looked at me and shook his head. ‘None. What could be more a labour of love than digging the grave of your fellow men? Mind you, the diggers did need some sort of recompense.’

  Fr Duddleswell took the hint and freshened his glass.

  ‘I remember it was the turn of my two eldest brothers. The night before this particular funeral they shovelled and swigged, swigged and shovelled till the job was done. And so, in a manner of speaking, were they. So drowsy did they become that they fell asleep in the grave with the bottles resting quiet and empty, like, on the upturned sod by the side of it.’

  ‘Disgraceful,’ Fr Duddleswell said, ‘but so very understandable.’

  ‘Bless you, Charles,’ the doctor acknowledged gratefully. ‘Anyways, next morning, Father Mac comes at the appointed hour, guiding the funeral procession. And what does he see when he arrives but my two brothers lying fast asleep inside? So Father Mac looks down from the height. “That is a good apprenticeship you are serving, lads, for a few years hence,” says he. “But in the meanwhile, would you kindly vacate that hole so I can fill it with this corpse here who is entitled.” Whereupon Father Mac stretches out his hands and the lads grab one each and he hauls them out.’

  ‘A marvellous story, Doctor,’ I said.

  ‘Wait now, the best is still to be told. There happened to be three women over from the islands visiting a family grave at the time and they saw all this from afar but couldn’t hear the words, and they, thinking my two brothers had been there and then resurrected before Judgement Day, fell fainting on the spot. And, wasn’t it the talk for years afterwards on the islands that there was a priest on the mainland who had the power all right? “We’ve seen it with our own two eyes,” the women said. “Even our Blessed Lord Himself only managed to raise one at a time.”’

  Death came by tandem to the parish on Fr Duddleswell’s day off. He had warned me it might happen.

  ‘If either of them slip another inch they will be over the edge.’ But not to worry. He had already oiled them in readiness for death.

  When the first phone call came, I cycled to the Comerfords. George Comerford, handsome, curly-haired, in his early forties, was the manager of a flourishing restaurant founded by his father. He was waiting at the door of his smart detached house to tell me that his father had passed away.

  I went in to pray over the remains before having a quiet word with George in the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t worry about him, Father,’ George said, as if he were consoling me. ‘He had a good innings.’

  ‘What was he, George, seventy-five?’

  ‘It wasn’t only he was old, Father. But since mum went, he was a long while facing west.’

  ‘Everyone spoke well of him, George,’ I said, and it was true.

  ‘He had a lot of heart trouble but in the end he went quicker than you can pinch out a candle.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said.

  ‘He didn’t make no fuss about it, my dad. He just said, “I’m sorry, George, but it looks as if I’ll have to be off.” After that he didn’t even have time to wave goodbye.’

  I was thinking of George on the way home. How like his father he was and how bravely he was taking it. The whole parish knew he had passed over the prospect of marriage several times in order to look after his ailing father. He was bound to be feeling the wrench.

  No sooner had I arrived back at the presbytery than Mrs Pring told me about Harry Carlin. ‘He’s gone, too, Father Neil.’

  Without removing my cycle clips, I went to Stonehenge, the local nickname for Peabody Buildings, an old tenement block where the poor of the parish lived. The place always depressed me with its chipped steps, unnumbered doors and general smell of decay.

  Freddie Williams was there ahead of me. His hearse was parked in the quadrangle and he, with one of his assistants, was already struggling up the narrow staircase with a coffin. Harry Carlin, who had been in a coma for days, must have been measured early.

  When I reached them, Mr Williams was puffing and blowing. ‘This isn’t going to be the easiest, Father,’ he said. ‘There’s no lift.’

  I offered to lead the way since I knew where the Carlins lived.

  Having arrived at the door, the first thing I saw was a note for the milkman. ‘Only half a pint today, please.’

  A lump rose in my throat. A small sign of how the bereaved had to adjust to the loss of their dear ones.

  Not that Harry Carlin had been very dear to Marjorie. As I waited for Freddie to catch m
e up, I reflected on Harry’s drinking problem and the violence that went with it. There were, fortunately, no children to share the domestic misery he had created. All the same, Mrs Carlin, still only thirty-five years old, would be mourning him at this moment.

  ‘Ready?’ I enquired of Mr Williams after he and Reggie his mate had rested the coffin for a few moments.

  Freddie, breathing heavily, nodded and I knocked gently on the door. There was no answer. I knocked louder only to find the door swinging open on its own. I led the way into the darkened living room calling quietly, ‘Mrs Carlin’. No reply.

  ‘Perhaps she’s popped out to see a neighbour,’ Mr Williams suggested. ‘I’ll get on with my side of things, anyhow.’

  We went together into the bedroom. The curtains were drawn. The only source of light was a night-light. They were very popular at that time, being a relic of the war years when people used them in the air-raid shelters.

  I must admit to being shocked by what I saw. Harry’s clothes were in a jumble on a chair just as he must have left them when he undressed for the last time. His shoes and socks were on the floor in full view and, most distressing of all, his teeth were in a glass of water.

  The dead man was lying on his back in a big brass double bed, hollow-cheeked, old, forlorn-looking. Mr Williams and Reggie put the coffin down on the floor.

  Freddie indicated the discarded clothes. ‘Reckon his Missis wanted him togged out in those or in his pyjamas?’

  I shrugged so that Mr Williams made his own decision. ‘Let’s pop him in the box, Reggie, as he is.’

  As I was giving Harry my blessing, Reggie said in a startled voice, ‘I think he’s moving, Boss.’

  ‘Don’t be so daft, Reggie. It’s the flickering light, that’s what.’

  I myself could have sworn I heard Harry snore.

  As Mr Williams pulled down the sheet, the corpse jack-knifed and sat up in bed. ‘What the bleedin’ hell’s going on?’

  The two undertakers and myself were too terror-struck to tell him. When the dead man’s eyes were accustomed to the light and he saw three tall gentlemen in black standing there, he, rigid as a pointer, simply said in a gummy fashion, ‘My Gawd,’ and fell back gasping on the pillow.

  It didn’t take me long to realize I had come to the right flat but on the wrong floor. It had happened to me once before in the seminary, another mammoth building where all the levels looked alike. I had entered ‘my’ room and seen a fellow student sitting, as I thought, at my desk by my window. But that never knocked the stuffing out of me like this.

  The gentleman in bed savagely thrust his teeth in his mouth as Mr Williams, still stunned, was saying, ‘You’ve not passed on, then, Mister.’

  ‘No, I bleedin’ well ain’t,’ the man said.

  He explained in highly coloured language that he was a night-watchman and it was a bit much that a hardworking bloke like himself couldn’t get a few hours kip during the day without three bleeding undertakers breaking in and trying to box him up while his wife was out visiting her mum’s.

  As we apologized and started to withdraw, the corpse said, ‘And don’t forget to take your bleedin’ coffin with you.’

  ‘Marjorie will be none the worse for losing Harry, Father Neil. One breath of wind will dry her tears,’ Fr Duddleswell said that evening.

  I had gathered as much. Mrs Carlin had handed me a ten shilling note for a Mass. ‘I’ll say a Requiem for him tomorrow morning,’ I said, ‘and I hope he’s in Heaven by tomorrow night.’ To which Mrs Carlin replied, ‘No, Father, I want you to pray Harry stays in purgatory for a good long time.’

  By all accounts, Harry deserved a stiff bout of purgatorial cleansing. He wouldn’t go easy on the drink and the cigarettes in spite of Dr Daley’s warning that with his chronic bronchitis he wouldn’t be long for this world. In the event, he jumped the queue. Emphysema got him sooner than Dr Daley predicted.

  He left a young, buxom widow, ‘a very neat little lady,’ Fr Duddleswell called her, ‘and very well composed. She could have done better for herself than be wedded to a fixture like Harry Carlin and be forced to live in a Stonehenge flat with barely enough room for two cats to dance.’

  George Comerford came to the presbytery to thank Fr Duddleswell for looking after his father throughout his long illness.

  ‘’Tis very kind of you to say so, George,’ Fr Duddleswell said, gripping his arm. ‘He got a grand death and no mistake.’

  ‘Very successful,’ George said simply, ‘thanks to your anointing.’

  ‘And didn’t he deserve it, George? Was it not fitting that such a courteous fine gentleman should finish on a quiet note like a trout in the evening stream?’

  As George’s eyes misted up, I genuinely admired the way my parish priest could make small words sing when it was needed most.

  ‘I’d be beholden to you, Father,’ George whispered, overcome, ‘if you would bury my dad, and if he was alive he’d say the same.’

  ‘The funeral trade is in a blaze, all right,’ Fr Duddleswell said, rubbing his hands. ‘An ideal opportunity to check out these two undertakers’ firms.’

  Both funerals were arranged for the same day. Bottesford was burying Mr Comerford at 10.30 while the Co-op were attending to Harry Carlin at midday.

  ‘If Bottesford tries any of his tricks,’ I said, ‘I’ll be on him like a ton of bricks.’

  ‘You do that, Father Neil. As far as I am concerned, that cold candle of a feller is as welcome here as the rent-collector.’

  The bodies were brought into the church the evening before in preparation for the next morning’s Requiems.

  At six, Fr Duddleswell was at the church door to receive Mr Comerford’s coffin. There was nothing I could see to criticize in the deportment of Bottesford and his men. Not surprising since Bottesford, like Freddie Williams, must have known that with two funerals from our church next day, a comparison was inevitable.

  At eight, the Co-op team turned up. First, they removed the body of Mr Comerford from the catafalque in front of the High Altar and transferred it to another in front of Our Lady’s altar. Then they brought in the remains of Harry Carlin. I had to admire, too, the polish and professionalism of Freddie’s men. So far the honours were even.

  When I had completed the short reception rite, I went across to the black, kneeling figure of Mrs Carlin. She was devout and tearful but not grief-stricken. I said a few words to her and told her I would see her at midday tomorrow.

  When she left, the Co-op team transferred Harry’s coffin to its resting place in front of the Sacred Heart altar for the night.

  I made a final check. The purple drapes were neatly spread over the coffins, the big candle sticks were positioned correctly and the respective wreaths looked decorous. I locked the church, extinguished the candles in case of fire and returned to the presbytery.

  Fr Duddleswell had his usual cronies in for a fortnightly game of cards and a friendly drink. Dr Daley was there, of course, and Canon Mahoney, the bishop’s theologian, and Father Kavanagh, nicknamed ‘Nelson’ because he had lost an eye serving as a naval chaplain during the war. A Scottish rating, it was said, threw a bottle at him.

  The conversation, when I looked in, was clearly inspired by the prospect of two funerals at St Jude’s.

  ‘Anyway,’ Canon Mahoney was giving out amid laughter and thick smoke, ‘old Nelly wasn’t having her husband be water-carrier to anyone in the cemetery. So she says to the driver of the hearse, says she, “Whip them horses up into a laver so my man gets there before Biddy’s man.” “I’m doing my best, Missis,” said the driver. “I can see that,” says Nelly, “but I’m wanting some improvement.”’

  ‘How like a woman,’ Father Kavanagh said.

  ‘Don’t interrupt me, Nelson,’ the Canon said, rubbing his nose with the back of a yellow index finger. ‘So when Nelly gets to the cemetery she finds Biddy Malone and her folk already there with the remains of Biddy’s husband. And what does Nelly do but pitch into the lo
t of them, laying low sixteen inside a few seconds.’

  ‘Godalmighty’ Father Kavanagh roared. ‘Women!’

  ‘Almost as bad as my housekeeper,’ Fr Duddleswell said.

  The Canon appealed for silence. ‘“Now,” says Nelly, viewing the destruction she just caused, “didn’t I tell you my man is going to be buried first today? Take the lid off his blessed coffin.” “Why?” says her driver. And Nelly says, “So’s I can see the great laugh on the face of my man.”’

  There were huge guffaws and a few boozy cat-calls from the others. At which point, Fr Duddleswell felt called on to make his contribution as host.

  ‘Dolly Melady died,’ he began.

  ‘Was that the Dolly Melady from Cork?’ Father Kavanagh asked, a little the worse for drink.

  ‘Could be,’ Fr Duddleswell replied. ‘Anyway, Dolly died.’

  ‘I knew her dear mother,’ Father Kavanagh interrupted again. ‘Delphine. Lovely woman. She died, too.’

  Canon Mahoney said, ‘The flicking thing must run in the family.’

  Father Kavanagh winked his good eye. ‘There’s a lot of it about, Seamus.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Fr Duddleswell continued bravely, ‘when Dolly was coffined up in the hearse on the way to the ’yard, the wagon went over a bump at the corner and the jolt of it brought her back to life.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ Canon Mahoney enquired.

  ‘It happens quite frequently,’ Dr Daley assured him. ‘Especially in stories of this sort.’

  Fr Duddleswell said, ‘Three years after that, Dolly died again.’

  ‘For the last time?’ Dr Daley asked. ‘It’s good to know how much of the story is still to come.’

  ‘For the last time, Donal. Now, the hearse was travelling the same stretch of road. And when it reached the very bit of rock that jolted her before, a terrible voice was heard from inside the coffin, crying –’

  Before Fr Duddleswell could finish, his three cronies yelled in chorus, ‘“Mind the corner,” says she, “mind the corner.”’

  Fr Duddleswell pretended to hide the whiskey bottle out of pique.

  ‘Death is not so bad,’ Canon Mahoney said, lifting the discussion to a serious level. ‘Without it there wouldn’t be any birth, that’s for sure.’