THE MASS ISLAND 

When Father Jackson drove up to the curates’ house, it was already
drawing on to dusk, the early dusk of late December. The curates’
house was a red-brick building on a terrace at one side of the ugly
church in Asragh. Father Hamilton seemed to have been waiting for him
and opened the front door himself, looking white and strained. He was
a tall young man with a long, melancholy face that you would have
taken for weak till you noticed the cut of the jaw.

‘Oh, come in, Jim,’ he said with his mournful smile. ‘’Tisn’t much of
a welcome we have for you, God knows. I suppose you’d like to see poor
Jerry before the undertaker comes.’

‘I might as well,’ Father Jackson replied briskly. There was nothing
melancholy about Jackson, but he affected an air of surprise and
shock. ‘Twas very sudden, wasn’t it?’

“Well, it was and it wasn’t, Jim,’ Father Hamilton said, closing the
front door behind him. ‘He was going downhill since he got the first
heart attack, and he wouldn’t look after himself. Sure, you know
yourself what he was like.’

Jackson knew. Father Fogarty and himself had been friends of a sort,
for years. An impractical man, excitable and vehement, Fogarty could
have lived for twenty years with his ailment, but instead of that, he
allowed himself to become depressed and indifferent. If he couldn’t
live as he had always lived, he would prefer not to live at all.

They went upstairs and into the bedroom where he was. The character
was still plain on the stern, dead face, though, drained of vitality,
it had the look of a studio portrait. That bone structure was something
you’d have picked out of a thousand faces as Irish, with its odd
impression of bluntness and asymmetry, its jutting brows and craggy
chin, and the snub nose that looked as though it had probably been
broken twenty years before in a public-house row.

When they came downstairs again, Father Hamilton produced half a
bottle of whiskey. 

‘Not for me, thanks,’ Jackson said hastily. ‘Unless you have drop of
sherry there?’

“Well, there is some Burgundy,’ Father Hamilton said. ‘I don’t know is
it any good, though.’

‘Twill do me fine,’ Jackson replied cheerfully, reflecting that Ireland
was the country where nobody knew whether Burgundy was good or
not. ‘You’re coming with us tomorrow, I suppose?

‘Well, the way it is, Jim,’ Father Hamilton replied, ‘I’m afraid
neither of us is going. You see, they’re burying poor Jerry here.’

“They’re what?’ Jackson asked incredulously.

“Now, I didn’t know for sure when I rang you, Jim, but that’s what the
brother decided, and that’s what Father Hanafey decided as well.’

‘But he told you he wanted to be buried on the Mass Island, didn’t
he?’

‘He told everybody, Jim,’ Father Hamilton replied with growing
excitement and emotion. That was the sort he was. If he told one, he
told five hundred. Only a half an hour ago I had a girl on the
telephone from the Island, asking when they could expect us. You see,
the old parish priest of the place let Jerry mark out the grave for
himself, and they want to know should they open it. But now the old
parish priest is dead as well, and, of course, Jerry left nothing in
writing.’

‘Didn’t he leave a will, even?’ Jackson asked in surprise.

‘Well, he did and he didn’t, Jim,’ Father Hamilton said, looking as if
he were on the point of tears. ‘Actually, he did make a will about
five or six years ago, and he gave it to Clancy, the other curate, but
Clancy went off on the Foreign Mission and God alone knows where he is
now. After that, Jerry never bothered his head about it. I mean, you
have to admit the man had nothing to leave. Every damn thing he had he
gave away—even the old car, after he got the first attack. If there
was any loose cash around, I suppose the brother has that.’

Jackson sipped his Burgundy, which was even more Australian than he
had feared, and wondered at his own irritation. He had been irritated
enough before that, with the prospect of two days’ motoring in the
middle of winter, and a night in a godforsaken pub in the mountains, a
hundred and fifty miles away at the other side of Ireland. There, in
one of the lakes, was an island where in Cromwell’s time, before the
causeway and the little oratory were built, Mass was said in secret,
and it was here that Father Fogarty had wanted to be buried. It struck
Jackson as sheer sentimentality; it wasn’t even as if it was Fogarty’s
native place. Jackson had once allowed Fogarty to lure him there, and
had hated every moment of it. It wasn’t only the discomfort of the
public-house, where meals erupted at any hour of the day or night as
the spirit took the proprietor, or the rain that kept them confined to
the cold dining-and-sitting room that looked out on the gloomy
mountainside, with its couple of whitewashed cabins on the shore of
the lake. It was the over-intimacy of it all, and this was the thing
that Father Fogarty apparently loved. He liked to stand in his
shirtsleeves behind the bar, taking turns with the proprietor, who was
one of his many friends, serving big pints of porter to rough
mountainy men, or to sit in their cottages, shaking in all his fat
whenever they told broad stories or sang risky folk songs. ‘God, Jim,
isn’t it grand?’ he would say in his deep voice, and Jackson would
look at him over his spectacles with what Fogarty called his
‘jesuitical look’, and say, ‘Well, I suppose it all depends on what
you really like, Jerry.’ He wasn’t even certain that the locals cared
for Father Fogarty’s intimacy on the contrary, he had a strong
impression that they much preferred their own reserved old parish
priest, whom they never saw except twice a year, when he came up the
valley to collect his dues. That had made Jackson twice as stiff. And
yet now when he found out that the plans that had meant so much
inconvenience to him had fallen through, he was as disappointed as
though they had been his own.

‘Oh, well,’ he said with a shrug that was intended to conceal his
perturbation, ‘I suppose it doesn’t make much difference where they
chuck us when our time comes.’

‘The point is, it mattered to Jerry, Jim,’ Father Hamilton said with
his curious shy obstinacy. ‘God knows, it’s not anything that will
ever worry me, but it haunted him, and somehow, you know, I don’t feel
it’s right to flout a dead man’s wishes.’

‘Oh, I know, I know,’ Jackson said lightly. ‘I suppose I’d better talk
to old Hanafey about it. Knowing I’m a friend of the Bishop’s, he
might pay more attention to me.’

‘He might, Jim,’ Father Hamilton replied sadly, looking away over
Jackson’s head. ‘As you say, knowing you’re a friend of the Bishop’s,
he might. But I wouldn’t depend too much on it. I talked to him till I
was black in the face, and all I got out of him was the law and the
rubrics. It’s the brother Hanafey is afraid of. You’ll see him this
evening, and, between ourselves, he’s a tough customer. Of course,
himself and Jerry never had much to say to one another, and he’d be
the last man in the world that Jerry would talk to about his funeral,
so now he doesn’t want the expense and inconvenience. You wouldn’t
blame him, of course. I’d probably be the same myself. By the way,’
Father Hamilton added, lowering his voice, ‘before he does come, I’d
like you to take a look round Jerry’s room and see is there any little
memento you’d care to have—a photo or a book or anything.’

They went into Father Fogarty’s sitting-room, and Jackson looked at it
with a new interest. He knew of old the rather handsome
library—Fogarty had been a man of many enthusiasms, though none of
long duration—the picture of the Virgin and Child in Irish country
costume over the mantelpiece, which some of his colleagues had thought
irreverent, and the couple of fine old prints. There was a newer
picture that Jackson had not seen—a charcoal drawing of the
Crucifixion from a fifteenth-century Irish tomb, which was brutal but
impressive.

‘Good Lord!’ Jackson exclaimed with a sudden feeling of loss. ‘He
really had taste, hadn’t he?’

‘He had, Jim,’ Father Hamilton said, sticking his long nose into the
picture. ‘This goes to a young couple called Keneally, outside the
town, that he was fond of. I think they were very kind to him. Since
he had the attack, he was pretty lonely, I’d say.’

‘Oh, aren’t we all, attack or no attack,’ Jackson said almost
irritably.


Father Hanafey, the parish priest of Asragh, was a round, red,
cherubic-looking old man with a bald head and big round glasses. His
house was on the same terrace as the curates’. He, too, insisted on
producing the whiskey Jackson so heartily detested, when the two
priests came in to consult him, but Jackson had decided that this time
diplomacy required he should show proper appreciation of the dreadful
stuff. He felt sure he was going to be very sick next day. He affected
great astonishment at the quality of Father Hanafey’s whiskey, and
first the old parish priest grew shy, like a schoolgirl whose good
looks are being praised, then he looked self-satisfied, and finally he
became almost emotional. It was a great pleasure, he said, to meet a
young priest with a proper understanding of whiskey. Priests no longer
seemed to have the same taste, and as far as most of them were
concerned, they might as well be drinking poteen. It was only when it
was seven years old that Irish began to be interesting, and that was
when you had to catch it and store it in sherry casks to draw off what
remained of crude alcohol in it, and give it that beautiful roundness
that Father Jackson had spotted. But it shouldn’t be kept too long,
for somewhere along the line the spirit of a whiskey was broken. At
ten, or maybe twelve, years old it was just right. But people were
losing their palates. He solemnly assured the two priests that of
every dozen clerics who came to his house not more than one would
realize what he was drinking. Poor Hamilton grew red and began to
stutter, but the parish priest’s reproofs were not directed at him.

‘It isn’t you I’m talking about, Father Hamilton, but elderly priests,
parish priests, and even canons, that you would think would know
better, and I give you my word, I put the two whiskeys side by side in
front of them, the shop stuff and my own, and they could not tell the
difference.’

But though the priest was mollified by Father Jackson’s maturity of
judgement, he was not prepared to interfere in the arrangements for
the funeral of his curate. ‘It is the wish of the next of kin,
father,’ he said stubbornly, ‘and that is something I have no control
over. Now that you tell me the same thing as Father Hamilton, I accept
it that this was Father Fogarty’s wish, and a man’s wishes regarding
his own interment are always to be respected. I assure you, if I had
even one line in Father Fogarty’s writing to go on, I would wait for
no man’s advice. I would take the responsibility on myself. Something
on paper, father, is all I want.’

‘On the other hand, father,’ Jackson said mildly, drawing on his pipe,
‘if Father Fogarty was the sort to leave written instructions, he’d
hardly be the sort to leave such unusual ones. I mean, after all, it
isn’t even the family burying ground, is it?’

‘Well, now, that is true, father,’ replied the parish priest, and it
was clear that he had been deeply impressed by this rather doubtful
logic. “You have a very good point there, and it is one I did not
think of myself, and I have given the matter a great deal of
thought. You might mention it to his brother. Father Fogarty, God rest
him, was not a usual type of man. I think you might even go so far as
to say that he was a rather unusual type of man, and not orderly, as
you say—not by any means orderly. I would certainly mention that to
the brother and see what he says.’


But the brother was not at all impressed by Father Jackson’s argument
when he turned up at the church in Asragh that evening. He was a
good-looking man with a weak and pleasant face and a cold shrewdness
in his eyes that had been lacking in his brother’s.

“But why, father?’ he asked, turning to Father Hanafey. ‘I’m a busy man,
and I’m being asked to leave my business for a couple of days in the
middle of winter, and for what? That is all I ask. What use is it?’

‘It is only out of respect for the wishes of the deceased, Mr
Fogarty,’ said Father Hanafey, who clearly was a little bit afraid of
him.

‘And where did he express those wishes?’ the brother asked. ‘I’m his
only living relative, and it is queer he would not mention a thing
like that to me.’

‘He mentioned it to Father Jackson and Father Hamilton.’

“But when, father?’ Mr Fogarty asked. “You knew Father Jerry, and he
was always expressing wishes about something. He was an excitable sort
of man, God rest him, and the thing he’d say today might not be the
thing he’d say tomorrow. After all, after close on forty years, I
think I have the right to say I knew him,’ he added with a triumphant
air that left the two young priests without a leg to stand on.


Over bacon and eggs in the curates’ house, Father Hamilton was very
despondent. ‘Well, I suppose we did what we could, Jim,’ he said.

‘I’m not too sure of that,’ Jackson said with his ‘jesuitical air’,
looking at Father Hamilton sidewise over his spectacles. ‘I’m wondering
if we couldn’t do something with that family you say he intended the
drawing for.’

‘The Keneallys,’ said Father Hamilton in a worried voice. ‘Actually, I
saw the wife in the church this evening. You might have noticed her
crying.’

‘Don’t you think we should see if they have anything in writing?’

“Well, if they have, it would be about the picture,’ said Father
Hamilton. ‘How I know about it is she came to me at the time to ask if
I couldn’t do something for him. Poor man, he was crying himself that
day, according to what she told me.’

‘Oh dear!’ Jackson said politely, but his mind was elsewhere. ‘I’m not
really interested in knowing what would be in a letter like that. It’s
none of my business. But I would like to make sure that they haven’t
something in writing. What did Hanafey call it—“something on
paper”?’

‘I daresay we should inquire, anyway,’ said Father Hamilton, and after
supper they drove out to the Keneallys’, a typical small red-brick
villa with a decent garden in front. The family also was eating bacon
and eggs, and Jackson shuddered when they asked him to join them.
Keneally himself, a tall, gaunt, cadaverous man, poured out more
whiskey for them, and again Jackson felt he must make a formal attempt
to drink it. At the same time, he thought he saw what attraction the
house had for Father Fogarty. Keneally was tough and with no
suggestion of lay servility towards the priesthood, and his wife was
beautiful and scatterbrained, and talked to herself, the cat, and the
children simultaneously. ‘Rosaleen!’ she cried determinedly. ‘Out! Out
I say! I told you if you didn’t stop meowing you’d have to go
out. ... Angela Keneally, the stick! ... You do not want to go to the
bathroom, Angela. It’s only five minutes since you were there
before. I will not let Father Hamilton come up to you at all unless
you go to bed at once.’

In the children’s bedroom, Jackson gave a finger to a stolid-looking
infant, who instantly stuffed it into his mouth and began to chew it,
apparently under the impression that he would be bound to reach sugar
at last.

Later, they sat over their drinks in the sitting-room, only
interrupted by Angela Keneally, in a fever of curiosity, dropping in
every five minutes to ask for a biscuit or a glass of water.

‘You see, Father Fogarty left no will,’ Jackson explained to
Keneally. ‘Consequently, he’ll be buried here tomorrow unless
something turns up. I suppose he told you where he wanted to be
buried?’

‘On the Island? Twenty times, if he told us once. I thought he took it
too far. Didn’t you, father?’

‘And me not to be able to go!’ Mrs Keneally said, beginning to
cry. ‘Isn’t it awful, father?’

‘He didn’t leave anything in writing with you?’ He saw in Keneally’s
eyes that the letter was really only about the picture, and raised a
warning hand. ‘Mind, if he did, I don’t want to know what’s in it! In
fact, it would be highly improper for anyone to be told before the
parish priest and the next of kin were consulted. All I do want to
know is whether’—he waited a moment to see that Keneally was
following him—‘he did leave any written instructions, of any kind,
with you.’

Mrs Keneally, drying her tears, suddenly broke into rapid
speech. ‘Sure, that was the day poor Father Jerry was so down in
himself because we were his friends and he had nothing to leave us,
and —’

‘Shut up, woman!’ her husband shouted with a glare at her, and then
Jackson saw him purse his lips in quiet amusement. He was a man after
Jackson’s heart. ‘As you say, father, we have a letter from him.’

‘Addressed to anybody in particular?’

‘Yes, to the parish priest, to be delivered after his death.’

‘Did he use those words?’ Jackson asked, touched in spite of himself.

‘Those very words.’

‘God help us!’ said Father Hamilton.

‘But you had not time to deliver it?’

‘I only heard of Father Fogarty’s death when I got in. Esther was at
the church, of course.’

‘And you’re a bit tired, so you wouldn’t want to walk all the way over
to the presbytery with it. I take it that, in the normal way, you’d
post it.’

‘But the post would be gone,’ Keneally said with a secret smile. ‘So
that Father Hanafey wouldn’t get it until maybe the day after
tomorrow. That’s what you were afraid of, father, isn’t it?”

‘I see we understand one another, Mr Keneally,’ Jackson said politely.

‘You wouldn’t, of course, wish to say anything that wasn’t strictly
true,’ said Keneally, who was clearly enjoying himself enormously,
though his wife had not the faintest idea of what was afoot. ‘So
perhaps it would be better if the letter was posted now, and not after
you leave the house.’

‘Fine!’ said Jackson, and Keneally nodded and went out. When he
returned, a few minutes later, the priests rose to go.

‘I’ll see you at the Mass tomorrow,’ Keneally said. ‘Good luck, now.’

Jackson felt they’d probably need it. But when Father Hanafey met them
in the hall, with the wet snow falling outside, and they explained
about the letter, his mood had clearly changed. Jackson’s logic might
have worked some sort of spell on him, or perhaps it was just that he
felt they were three clergymen opposed to a layman.

‘It was very unforeseen of Mr Keneally not to have brought that letter
to me at once,’ he grumbled, ‘but I must say I was expecting something
of the sort. It would have been very peculiar if Father Fogarty had
left no instructions at all for me, and I see that we can’t just sit
round and wait to find out what they were, since the burial is
tomorrow. Under the circumstances, father, I think we’d be justified
in arranging for the funeral according to Father Fogarty’s known
wishes.’

‘Thanks be to God,’ Father Hamilton murmured as he and Father Jackson
returned to the curates’ house. ‘I never thought we’d get away with
that.’

‘We haven’t got away with it yet,’ said Jackson. ‘And even if we do
get away with it, the real trouble will be later.’

All the arrangements had still to be made. When Mr Fogarty was
informed, he slammed down the receiver without comment. Then a phone
call had to be made to a police station twelve miles from the Island,
and the police sergeant promised to send a man out on a bicycle to
have the grave opened. Then the local parish priest and several old
friends had to be informed, and a notice inserted in the nearest
daily. As Jackson said wearily, romantic men always left their more
worldly friends to carry out their romantic intentions. 


The scene at the curates’ house next morning after Mass scared even
Jackson. While the hearse and the funeral car waited in front of the
door, Mr Fogarty sat, white with anger, and let the priests talk. To
Jackson’s surprise, Father Hanafey put up a stern fight for Father
Fogarty’s wishes.

‘You have to realize, Mr Fogarty, that to a priest like your brother
the Mass is a very solemn thing indeed, and a place where the poor
people had to fly in the Penal Days to hear Mass would be one of
particular sanctity.’

‘Father Hanafey,’ said Mr Fogarty in a cold, even tone, ‘I am a simple
businessman, and I have no time for sentiment.’

‘I would not go so far as to call the veneration for sanctified ground
mere sentiment, Mr Fogarty,’ the old priest said severely. ‘At any
rate, it is now clear that Father Fogarty left instructions to be
delivered to me after his death, and if those instructions are what we
think them, I would have a serious responsibility for not having paid
attention to them.’

‘I do not think that letter is anything of the kind, Father Hanafey,’
said Mr Fogarty. ‘That’s a matter I’m going to inquire into when I get
back, and if it turns out to be a hoax, I am going to take it
further.’

‘Oh, Mr Fogarty, I’m sure it’s not a hoax,’ said the parish priest,
with a shocked air, but Mr Fogarty was not convinced.

‘For everybody’s sake, we’ll hope not,’ he said grimly.

The funeral procession set off. Mr Fogarty sat in the front of the car
by the driver, sulking. Jackson and Hamilton sat behind and opened
their breviaries. When they stopped at a hotel for lunch, Mr Fogarty
said he was not hungry, and stayed outside in the cold. And when he
did get hungry and came into the dining-room, the priests drifted into
the lounge to wait for him. They both realized that he might prove a
dangerous enemy.

Then, as they drove on in the dusk, they saw the mountain country
ahead of them in a cold, watery light, a light that seemed to fall
dead from the ragged edge of a cloud. The towns and villages they
passed through were dirtier and more derelict. They drew up at a
crossroads, behind the hearse, and heard someone talking to the driver
of the hearse. Then a car fell into line behind them. ‘Someone joining
us,’ Father Hamilton said, but Mr Fogarty, lost in his own dream of
martyrdom, did not reply. Half a dozen times within the next twenty
minutes, the same thing happened, though sometimes the cars were
waiting in lanes and byroads with their lights on, and each time
Jackson saw a heavily coated figure standing in the roadway shouting
to the hearse driver: ‘Is it Father Fogarty ye have there?’ At last
they came to a village where the local parish priest’s car was waiting
outside the church, with a little group about it. Their headlights
caught a public-house, isolated at the other side of the street,
glaring with whitewash, while about it was the vague space of a
distant mountainside.

Suddenly Mr Fogarty spoke. ‘He seems to have been fairly well known,’
he said with something approaching politeness.


The road went on, with a noisy stream at the right-hand side of it
falling from group to group of rocks. They left it for a byroad,
which bent to the right, heading towards the stream, and then began to
mount, broken by ledges of naked rock, over which hearse and cars
seemed to heave themselves like animals. On the left-hand side of the
road was a little whitewashed cottage, all lit up, with a big turf
fire burning in the open hearth and an oil lamp with an orange glow on
the wall above it. There was a man standing by the door, and as they
approached he began to pick his way over the rocks towards them,
carrying a lantern. Only then did Jackson notice the other lanterns
and flashlights, coming down the mountain or crossing the stream, and
realize that they represented people, young men and girls and an
occasional sturdy old man, all moving in the direction of the Mass
Island. Suddenly it hit him, almost like a blow. He told himself not
to be a fool, that this was no more than the desire for novelty one
should expect to find in out-of-the-way places, mixed perhaps with
vanity. It was all that, of course, and he knew it, but he knew, too,
it was something more. He had thought when he was here with Fogarty
that those people had not respected Fogarty as they respected him and
the local parish priest, but he knew that for him, or even for their
own parish priest, they would never turn out in midwinter, across the
treacherous mountain bogs and wicked rocks. He and the parish priest
would never earn more from the people of the mountains than respect;
what they gave to the fat, unclerical young man who had served them
with pints in the bar and egged them on to tell their old stories and
bullied and ragged and even fought them was something infinitely
greater.

The funeral procession stopped in a lane that ran along the edge of a
lake. The surface of the lake was rough, and they could hear the
splash of the water upon the stones. The two priests got out of the
car and began to vest themselves, and then Mr Fogarty got out, too. He
was very nervous and hesitant.

‘It’s very inconvenient, and all the rest of it,’ he said, ‘but I
don’t want you gentlemen to think that I didn’t know you were acting
from the best motives.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Fogarty,’ Jackson said. ‘Maybe we made
mistakes as well.’

‘Thank you, Father Jackson,’ Mr Fogarty said, and held out his
hand. The two priests shook hands with him and he went off, raising
his hat.

‘Well, that’s one trouble over,’ Father Hamilton said wryly as an old
man plunged through the mud towards the car.

‘Lights is what we’re looking for!’ he shouted. ‘Let ye turn her
sidewise and throw the headlights on the causeway the way we’ll see
what we’re doing.”

Their driver swore, but he reversed and turned the front of the car
till it almost faced the lake. Then he turned on his
headlights. Somewhere farther up the road the parish priest’s car did
the same. One by one, the ranked headlights blazed up, and at every
moment the scene before them grew more vivid—the gateway and the
stile, and beyond it the causeway that ran towards the little brown
stone oratory with its mock Romanesque doorway. As the lights
strengthened and steadied, the whole island became like a vast piece
of theatre scenery cut out against the gloomy wall of the mountain
with the tiny whitewashed cottages at its base. Far above, caught in a
stray flash of moonlight, Jackson saw the snow on its summit. ‘I’ll be
after you,’ he said to Father Hamilton, and watched him, a little
perturbed and looking behind him, join the parish priest by the
gate. Jackson resented being seen by them because he was weeping, and
he was a man who despised tears his own and others’. It was like a
miracle, and Father Jackson didn’t really believe in miracles.
Standing back by the fence to let the last of the mourners pass, he
saw the coffin, like gold in the brilliant light, and heard the
steadying voices of the four huge mountainy men who carried it. He saw
it sway above the heads, shawled and bare, glittering between the
little stunted holly bushes and hazels.



(1959)
Source: The Best of Frank O’Connor, 2009