Requiem

Father Fogarty, the curate in Crislough, was sitting by the fire one
evening when the housekeeper showed in a frail little woman of sixty
or sixty-five. She had a long face, with big eyes that looked as
though they had wept a great deal, and her smile lit up only the lower
half of her face. Father Fogarty was a young man with a warm welcome
for the suffering and the old. A man with emotions cut too big for the
scale of his existence, he was forever floundering in enthusiasms and
disillusionments, wranglings and reconciliations; but he had a heart
like a house, and almost before the door closed behind her, he was
squeezing the old woman’s hand in his own two fat ones.

“You’re in trouble,” he said in a low voice.

“Wisha, aren’t we all, father?” she replied.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. “Is it something I can do for you?”

“Only to say Mass for Timmy, father.”

“I’ll do that, to be sure,” he said comfortingly. “You’re cold. Sit
down a minute and warm yourself.” Then he laid a big paw on her
shoulder and added in a conspiratorial whisper, “Do you take anything?
A drop of sherry, maybe?”

“Ah, don’t be putting yourself out, father.”

“I’m not putting myself out at all. Or maybe you’d sooner a sup of
whiskey. I have some damn good whiskey.”

“Wisha, no, father, I wouldn’t, thanks. The whiskey goes to my head.”

“It goes to my own,” he replied cheerfully. “But the sherry is good,
too.” He didn’t really know whether it was or not, because he rarely
drank, but, being a hospitable man, he liked to give his visitors the
best. He poured a glass of sherry for her and a small one for himself,
and lit one of his favorite cheroots.

The old woman spread her transparent hands to the blaze and sipped at
her wine. “Oh, isn’t the heat lovely?” she exclaimed with girlish
delight, showing her old gums. “And the sherry is lovely, too,
father. Now, I know you’re surprised to see me, but I know all about
you. They told me to come to you if I was in trouble. And there aren’t
many priests like that, father. I was never one to criticize, but I
have to say it.”

“Ah,” he said jovially, throwing himself back in his big leather chair
and pulling on his cheroot, “we’re like everybody else, ma’am. A mixed
lot.”

“I dare say you’re right,” she said, “but they told me I could talk to
you.”

“Everyone talks to me,” he said without boastfulness. It was
true. There was something about him that invited more confidences than
a normal man could respect, and Father Fogarty knew he was often
indiscreet. “It’s not your husband?” he added doubtfully.

‘Ah, no, father,” she replied with a wistful smile. “Poor Jim is dead
on me these fifteen years. Not, indeed, that I don’t miss him just the
same,” she added thoughtfully. “Sometimes I find myself thinking of
him, and he could be in the room with me. No, it’s Timmy.”

“The son?”

“No, father. Though he was like a son to me. I never had any of my
own. He was Jim’s. One of the last things Jim did was to ask me to
look after him, and indeed, I did my best. I did my best.”

“I’m sure you did, ma’am,” said Father Fogarty, scowling behind his
cheroot. He was a man who took death hard, for himself and for
others. A stepchild was not the same thing, of course, but he supposed
you could get just as attached to one of those. That was the trouble;
you could get attached to anything if only you permitted yourself to
do so, and he himself was one who had never known how to keep back. “I
know how hard it is,” he went on, chewing at his cheroot till his left
eyebrow descended and seemed to join in the process, and he resembled
nothing so much as a film gangster plotting the murder of an innocent
victim. “And there’s little anyone can say that will console you. All
I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more
grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means we
had something worth grieving for. The ones I’m sorry for are the ones
that go through life not even knowing what grief is. And you’d be
surprised the number of them you’d meet.”

“I dare say in one way they’re lucky,” she said broodingly, looking
into the fire.

“They are not lucky, ma’am, and don’t you believe it,” he said
gruffly. “They miss all the things that make life worth while, without
even knowing it. I had a woman in here the other night,” he added,
pointing his cheroot at the chair she sat in, “sitting where you’re
sitting now, and she told me when her husband gave the last breath she
went on her knees by the bed and thanked God for taking him.”

“God help us,” the old woman said, clasping her hands. “I hope no one
does the same thing over herself someday.”

“Thanked God for taking him,” Fogarty repeated with his troubled
boyish frown. “What sort of mind can a woman like that have?”

“Oh, she’s hard, she’s hard,” agreed the old woman, still looking into
the fire.

“Hard as that hearthstone,” he said dramatically. “My God, a man she’d
lived with the best part of her life, whatever his faults might have
been! Wouldn’t you think at least she’d have some remorse for the
things she’d done to him in all those years?”

“Oh, indeed, ’tis true,” she said. “I often blamed myself over poor
Jim. Sometimes I think if only I might have been a bit easier on him,
he might be here yet.”

“Most of us have to go through that sooner or later,” he said,
feeling that perhaps he had gone too far and reopened old wounds. His
own old wounds were never far from breaking open, because often a
light or careless word would bring back the memory of his mother and
of his diabolical adolescent temperament. “We have to be careful of
that, too,” he added. “Because it’s not the guilty ones who go on
brooding but the others—the people who’re only partly guilty, or maybe
not guilty at all. That can happen, too. I had a man here last week
talking about his wife’s death, and nothing I could say would persuade
him but that he’d wronged her. And I knew for a fact that he was a
husband in a million—a saint. It’s something we can’t afford to
indulge. It turns into a sort of cowardice before life. We have to
learn to accept our own limitations as human beings—our selfishness
and vanity and bad temper.”

He spoke with passion, the passion of a man teaching a lesson he has
never been able to learn himself. Something in his tone made the old
woman look at him, and her face softened into a sweet, toothless old
smile.

“Haven’t you great wisdom for such a young man!” she exclaimed
admiringly.

“Great,” he agreed with a jolly laugh. “I’m the biggest idiot of them
all.”

But she shrugged this off. “Ah, what else were the saints?”

“Look here, ma’am,” he said, rising and standing over her with mock
gravity. “Don’t you be going round talking about me as a saint or
you’ll be having me sent to a punishment parish. The poor Bishop has
trouble enough on his hands without having to deal with saints. I’ll
say eight-o’clock Mass on Sunday for your boy. Will that do you?”

“My boy?” she said in surprise. “But Timmy wasn’t my son,
father. Sure, I said I had no children.”

“No. I took it he was your stepson.”

“Is it Jim’s?” she exclaimed with a laugh of genuine amusement at his
mistake. “Ah, sure, Jim wasn’t married before, father. Don’t you see,
that’s why I had to come to you?”

“I see,” he said, though he didn’t, and anyhow he felt it was none of
his business. The woman, after all, hadn’t come to make her
confession. “What was his surname so?”

“Ah, father,” she said, still laughing but in a bewildered way, “I’m
so distracted that I can’t explain myself properly. You have it all
mixed up. Sure, I thought I explained it.”

“You didn’t explain it, ma’am,” he said, repressing his
curiosity. “And anyway it’s nothing to me who Timmy was. That’s a
matter between you and your confessor.”

“My what?” she cried indignantly. “Ah, father, you have me distracted
completely now. This has nothing to do with confession. Oh, my, what’s
that Timmy was? If I could only think!”

“Take your time, ma’am,” he said, but he wondered what was coming
next.

“A poodle!” she exclaimed. “Now I have it.”

“A what?”

“A poodle—a French poodle is what they called him,” she said,
delighted to remember the proper term. And then her big eyes began to
fill with tears. “Oh, father, I don’t know how I’m going to get on
without him. He was everything to me. The house isn’t the same without
him.”

“You don’t mean you’re asking me to say Mass for your dog?”

“Oh, I’m not asking you to do it for nothing,” she added with dignity,
opening her handbag.

“Are you a Catholic at all, ma’am?” he asked sternly, fixing her with
a glowering look that only seemed to amuse her. She tossed her head
with a sudden saucy, girlish air.

“Wisha, what else would I be?” she asked gently, and he felt that
there was nothing much he could say in reply.

“And do you know what the sacrifice of the Mass is?” he went on.

“Well, as I go every morning of my life, father, I should have some
idea,” she replied, and again he had the feeling that she was laughing
at him.

“And don’t you know that you’re asking me to commit sacrilege? Do you
even know what sacrilege is?”

“Ah, what sacrilege?” she exclaimed lightly, shrugging it off. She
took three five-pound notes from her old handbag.  He knew she
intended the money as an offering; he knew it was probably all she had
in the world, and he found himself torn between blind rage and
admiration.

“Here,” he said. “Let me get you another drink. And put that blooming
money back in your bag or you’ll be losing it.”



But the very sound of his voice told him that he was losing
conviction. The terrible little old woman with her one idea exercised
a sort of fascination over him that almost frightened him. He was
afraid that if he wasn’t careful he would soon find himself agreeing
to do what she wanted. He poured her a drink, threw himself back again
in his armchair, and at once gave way to his indignation.

“I cannot stand this damn sentimentality!” he shouted, hitting the
arm of his chair with his clenched fist. “Every day of my life I have
to see good Christians go without food and fire, clothes and medicine,
while the rich people taunt them with the sight of their pampered
pets. I tell you I can’t stand it!”

‘Why, then, I’m sure you’re right, father. But I’m not rich, and no
poor person was ever sent away from my door with nothing, as long as I
had it.”

“I’m sure of that, ma’am,” he said humbly, ashamed of his
outburst. “I’m sure you’re a better Christian than I am, but there are
different needs and different duties, and we must not confuse
them. There are animal needs and human needs, and human needs and
spiritual needs. Your dog has no need of the Mass.”

“He was very fond of Mass. Every morning he came with me and lay down
outside the chapel door.”

“And why did you leave him outside the chapel door?” asked Fogarty.

“Why?”

“Yes, why? Wasn’t it that you made a distinction between an animal and
a spiritual need?”

“It was nothing of the kind,” she said hotly. “It was the parish
priest that asked me, because some old fools complained. Hah, but I
often sneaked him in when they weren’t looking, and let me tell you,
father, none of those old craw-thumpers behaved as devotionally as my
Timmy. Up with the Gospel and down at the Elevation, without my saying
a word to him. And don’t tell me that Our Blessed Lord wasn’t as
pleased with Timmy as with them.”

“I’m not telling you anything of the sort,” he said, touched and
amused. “All I am telling you is that now that your dog is
dead, prayers can make no difference to him. Your dog couldn’t incur
guilt. Your prayers may make a difference to your husband because,
like the rest of us, he did incur guilt in this life and may have to
atone for it in the next.”

‘Ah, it’s easy seen you didn’t know Jim, father. Poor Jim was innocent
as a child. He never did anything wrong only taking the little sup of
whiskey when I wouldn’t be looking. I know he got a bit cranky when he
had a drop in and I wouldn’t give him any more, but sure that’s a
thing you wouldn’t give a second thought to. ... No, father,” she
added thoughtfully, looking into the fire again, “I don’t mind
admitting that the first day or two after he died I wasn’t easy in my
mind at all. I didn’t know what little thing he might have said or
done on the side, unknown to me, or what little taste of punishment
they might give him. I couldn’t rest, thinking of him burning down
there in Purgatory, with people he didn’t know at all. A shy man, like
that, and a man—I won’t belie him—that would scream the house down if
he as much as got a splinter in his nail. But then I realized that
nobody in his right mind could be doing anything to him. Oh, no,
father, that’s not why I get Masses said for Jim.”

“Then why do you get them said for him?” Fogarty asked, though he knew
the answer. His own big heart answered for him when his reason didn’t.

“Sure, what other way have I of letting him know I’m thinking about
him?” she asked with a childlike smile. “He’s always in my mind,
morning, noon, and night. And now Timmy is the same.”

“And when I tell you that it makes no difference to Timmy—that Timmy
can’t know he’s in your mind?”

“Ah, well, father, these things are great mysteries,” she replied
comfortably, “and we don’t know all about them yet. Oh, I know there’s
a difference, and I’m not asking for anything impossible. Only one
small Mass, so that he’ll know. But when I talk to people about it,
you’d think I was mad from the way they go on. They tell me he has no
soul, because he never committed sin. How does anybody know he didn’t
commit sin? A little child doesn’t commit sin and he has a soul. No,
father,” she went on with iron determination, “I know I’m old and I
have no one to advise me, and my head isn’t as good as it was, but
thank God I still have my wits about me. Believe me, father, a dog is
no different from a child. When I was feeling low coming on to Jim’s
anniversary, Timmy would know it. He’d know it as if he could read
what I was thinking, and he’d come and put his head on my lap to show
how sorry he was. And when he was sick himself, he’d get into my bed
and curl up beside me, begging me with his eyes to make him
better. Yes, indeed, and when he was dying I felt the same way about
him as I felt about poor Jim—just the way you described it, thinking
of all the times I was hard on him when he didn’t deserve it at
all. That is the hardest part of it, father, when you have to try and
forgive yourself.”

“I’m sure you have very little to forgive yourself for, ma’am,”
Fogarty said with a smile. “And God knows, if it was anything I
could do for you I’d do it, but this is something that, as a priest, I
can’t do.”

‘And there’s no one else I could go to? You don’t think if I went to
the Bishop myself he’d let you do it?”

“I’m quite certain he wouldn’t, ma’am.”

“Ah,” she said bitterly as she raised herself heavily from her chair,
“if I was younger and smarter with my pen I’d write to the Pope about
it myself.” She turned to the door, and Fogarty sprang to open it for
her, but the courtesy was lost on her. She looked at him with deep
mournful eyes that seemed to contain all the loneliness in the
world. “And it’s wrong, father, wrong,” she said in a firm voice. “I’m
as good a Catholic as the next, but I’d say it to the Pope himself
this minute if he walked into this room. They have souls, and people
are only deluding themselves about it. Anything that can love has a
soul. Show me that bad woman that thanked God her husband was dead and
I’ll show you someone that maybe hasn’t a soul, but don’t tell me that
my Timmy hadn’t one. And I know as I’m standing here that somewhere or
other I’ll see him again.”

“I hope you do, ma’am,” he said, his big voice suddenly growing
gentle and timorous. “And whenever you say a prayer for him, don’t
forget to add one for me.”

“I will not indeed, father,” she said quietly. “I know you’re a good
man, and I’ll remember you with the others that were good to me, and
one of these days, with God’s help, we’ll all be together again.”


(1957)
Source: Collected Stories, 1981