After the Lockout. Darran McCann

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      Stanislaus let himself in the front door and found Mrs Geraghty waiting in the hall, clutching a telegram in her fist. ‘Jeremiah just delivered it. It’s from Dublin, Father,’ she said, half breathless.

      ‘Thank you, Mrs Geraghty,’ he said, and started up to his study, leaving her disappointed at the bottom of the stairs. He stopped halfway up. ‘I’m sorry to keep repeating myself, but the correct form of address for a bishop is Your Grace.’

      ‘I thought that was only for proper bishops?’

      ‘An auxiliary bishop is a proper bishop.’

      In his study Stanislaus set the little post-office envelope on his desk beside the newspaper he hadn’t yet read and sat down. He picked up the telegram, sliced it open, then set it down again. Unready. He looked around the bulging bookshelves that lined three walls of the room. They made the place claustrophobic. He turned the chair around, as he always did, to the window, which commanded a view straight down the middle of Madden village. The chapel, the graveyard, National School, Parochial Hall, post office and Poor Ground; all the comings and goings were under his gaze. He could almost see into the terraced homes of his parishioners. The women were indoors, the men were in the fields, the children were at school. Red flags fluttered from homes and telegraph posts, and bunting crisscrossed the street, but aside from that, things were mostly right with Madden. He looked again at the telegram. Whatever it contained, it was bound to vex him. He picked up the newspaper instead.

      ULYANOV ‘LENIN’ DECLARES RUSSIA ‘WORKERS’ STATE’

      He threw it down again. Once, this had been his favourite time of day. Morning mass finished, pastoral visits done, he’d have an hour to look out the window and read the paper. The symmetry of keeping one eye on his parish and the other on the events of the world pleased him. But since the war, there had been nothing but bad news, and it was all Russia these days. There was no pleasure left in his ritual. He was no monarchist and did not miss the tsar – a king who couldn’t feed his people didn’t deserve to be a king – but these Bolshevists … Ulyanov had said the events last Easter gave an example to be followed and it seemed Dublin last year had its sequel in Petrograd this year.

      The clock chimed four. Father Daly, the curate, came in the door like an unbroken colt and said Mrs Geraghty had told him of the telegram. Stanislaus nodded and the curate picked it up, his fringe flopping over his forehead as he opened it. He set it back on the desk, text facing up. Stanislaus couldn’t help but see it now.

      VL arrive 10 o’clock train STOP

       Need transport from station CQ STOP

      ‘So he’s coming then,’ said Father Daly. ‘Do you think he’ll be able to get his father back on the straight and narrow?’

      ‘We must hope so.’

      They had given up any hope that Pius Lennon might sort himself out. Stanislaus called often but the door was never answered. Pius’s life seemed to revolve entirely around poteen; a lamentable state for a man formerly so substantial. He had taken to wandering the parish at all hours of day and night, flaming drunk, with a bottle in one hand and a loaded shotgun in the other. Not long ago he wandered up the street while the school-children were on their break, scattering them in terror. The postman Jeremiah McGrath said he remembered when Pius Lennon first came to the parish to marry his Deirdre, before he became the respected pillar that Stanislaus knew. Jeremiah said people were right to be terrified of Pius.

      ‘His method is different but I fear Pius is going the same way as his wife,’ said Stanislaus.

      Pius owned several hundred acres in the east of the parish and Madden’s economy had long depended on the Lennon land. Pius had started his drinking after his Deirdre’s death. They said Deirdre had been the belle of the county in her day, but when Stanislaus knew her, that had been hard to credit. He’d had no choice in refusing her a funeral or burial. Church teaching was clear and unequivocal. The drinking accelerated as each of Pius’s children left, one by one, till they were all gone. Now he lived reclusively, letting his land go to ruin, and no longer offered work to anyone. So Stanislaus had compiled a list of the Lennon children and all the places to which they had emigrated, and wrote to the Cardinal’s office for church contacts in each place. The reply came quickly. It seemed he still drew some water in Armagh. He wrote to parishes and dioceses around the world and, over several months, the replies came. Stanislaus was flattered that some of his colleagues in far-flung places had heard of him and were familiar with his work. They were keen to assist. He got addresses for all but one of the fifteen Lennon children. Of the fourteen, he knew the Sarah girl was only thirty miles away at the Monastery of St Catherine of Siena, but he would not interfere with her vocation. The fifteenth name he circled in red ink. He had no address for that one. It would be a last resort even if he did have one. He sent out thirteen letters.

      Dear Mr/Miss Lennon,

      I write out of concern for your father, Pius, who I must inform you, has succumbed to the evil of drink. His maintenance of the land and his spiritual and physical wellbeing are of concern to all in the parish, and though we have attempted to divert the self-destructive course on which he is set, it is my pastoral experience that only family can save a man in times of moral despond.

      I beg that you return home and care for your father, or failing this, that you ensure another of your siblings can do so.

      Yours in Christ,

       Most Rev S. Benedict, Bishop Emeritus

      Six, seven, eight months passed. Jeremiah McGrath assured him nothing was wrong with the long-distance mail, even with the war, and slowly Stanislaus came to accept that there would be no replies. The name circled in red ink rebuked him. The Victor fellow had left Madden boasting of Brooklyn or Botany Bay, but everyone knew he was in Dublin since his name had appeared in the margins of the press during the industrial unrest. He had been a minor figure, not a Larkin or a Countess Markievicz, and Stanislaus had denounced Larkin’s union from the pulpit, as per the Cardinal’s policy, but he knew the parishioners had a sneaking regard for ‘their’ Victor. When their Victor joined the insane adventure of Easter week, sneaking regard flowered into strident pride. No-one from Madden had ever been famous before.

      Victor’s best friend Charlie Quinn had volunteered to go to Dublin to find him. Stanislaus asked Charlie whether he thought Victor would agree to come home. Charlie said he didn’t know. What he was willing to predict, though, was that Victor would still be every bit as angry as he was the day he left Madden. Stanislaus was discomfited to think of the rage-filled boy coming back into his life a full-grown man. He pushed the newspaper across the desk under Father Daly’s nose and pointed to the Ulyanov headline.

      ‘This is the kind of man we’re talking about. A bolshevist, you know,’ he snapped.

      ‘He can’t be that bad if he was with Connolly, God rest him,’ said Father Daly.

      ‘Connolly was a communist.’

      ‘Only in life. No-one will remember that whole communist thing in the long run.’

      Stanislaus got up from his desk. He had no intention of debating with a guileless liberal not five minutes out of the seminary. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said. He went downstairs, opened the door and СКАЧАТЬ