Seek the Fair Land Read online

  Dominick looked at them.

  A lifetime and that’s what they were – a handful of possessions: a change of clothes for them all, which he had fashioned himself with a knife and a needle. Utilitarian things, two knives, an axe, a saw, wooden bowls, pewter tankards. He didn’t have time or space to take much from their home. Meal and wine and a little brandy, all coming slowly to an end. It was all right for Sebastian to say God would provide. He believed in that. Dominick had to plan for it. It was just as well to have light possessions. There was a long road ahead of them now before they found their winter shelter, and the less they had to carry the safer they would be.

  He left the shelter. Outside, he sniffed the air. The light wind brought to his nostrils the fragrant scent of burning wood. He broke through the trees surrounding the little clearing and walked towards the smell of the smoke.

  He went very carefully. He had drilled this into the priest – never if at all possible to use the same way twice. Walk a path and then avoid it until no trace of the former passage remained. His whole body told him that it was time to leave the woods. Sometimes a normal sound would make him standstill and the hair would rise on his head, like a dog or a wolf, he thought grimly.

  They had separated their living-places from the cooking-place. It was tedious, but it was worth while. It had proved to be safe so far. The cooking-place was in an open clearing. You could hear enemies coming and you could be away before they breached through to find nothing but a smoking fire.

  He crouched now and scrutinized it. The fire had been freshly lighted. It wasn’t making much smoke. That was good. On one side of the fire he could see the iron griddle resting on flat stones under which the red twigs from the fire would go. The priest had been about to cook something. And then he had vanished. Why? He couldn’t have heard Dominick’s approach.

  ‘You’re dead,’ said his voice, and the point of a stick was poked into Dominick’s back. Dominick nearly impaled himself on the stick as he jumped. Then he rested his head on his arms for a moment before he turned.

  The priest was regarding him, head on one side.

  ‘I’m learning, Dominick?’ he asked anxiously.

  Dominick laughed. He couldn’t help it.

  ‘Learning too well,’ he said. ‘How did you spot me?’

  ‘A blackbird told me,’ Father Sebastian said.

  Dominick remembered hearing the bird and chided himself.

  ‘You were cooking?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said the priest. ‘Something important.’

  He walked past Dominick towards the fire. Dominick followed him.

  ‘Look at me!’ he called then.

  The priest stopped and turned to face him.

  Dominick looked at him closely. His face had lost the terrible pallor. He wore a neat brown beard clipped close. His hair was much longer. It was combed back from a high broad forehead. All you could see of the head scar was the angry red crescent on his temple. For the rest he wore a coarse woollen shirt and heavy trousers stopping short at the shins. He wore patched heavy shoes on his feet. Dominick shook his head.

  ‘You look well,’ he said; ‘but although you shouldn’t you still look different from ordinary people.’

  Father Sebastian laughed.

  ‘If only I could tell you how differently I feel,’ he said. He looked at Dominick, but the affection he felt for him didn’t show on his face. If he himself didn’t look the part, Dominick did. His chest, arms, and legs, all his exposed parts, were browned by the sun and the weather, and his fair hair, tied with a ribbon, was white on the top from the sun and white at the sides from suffering. It seemed to the priest that, even since he had come to know him, deep lines had been chiselled in his face. Dominick kept himself clean-shaven.

  ‘You are fit enough now,’ Dominick said. ‘Do you feel that you can travel?’

  ‘I can carry the world on my back now,’ said the priest, raising his arms to the sky. ‘Every time you get tired, that is.’

  Dominick laughed.

  ‘Am I that serious?’ he asked.

  ‘A good thing you are,’ said the priest. ‘We are alive because you were serious. Now I am strong again, thanks to you.’ He turned and went to the fire. Dominick followed him. The priest crouched. He took a wooden bowl from behind a stone. It held a little crushed wheaten meal which he had ground with a pestle in the hollow of a stone. He stirred a little water into it now with a stick and moved it around and around until it was a paste.

  ‘We will have to travel five, six, or maybe even eight miles to get where we are going,’ said Dominick.

  ‘When?’ the priest asked.

  ‘Maybe tonight,’ said Dominick. ‘The moon will be with us early tonight.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Sebastian, ‘I was going to become a real priest again. Outside the wood I said I’d go, and find some parishioners. All the people to baptize, to shrive to bless, to pray into heaven. It’s been a load on me all this time.’

  ‘I’ve been out there,’ said Dominick. ‘You wouldn’t find a parishioner in a day’s journey.’

  ‘Is it that bad?’ the priest asked, his face clouding.

  ‘It is bad,’ said Dominick. ‘It is worse. Over north this morning near Slieveban I came on a house. There was smoke from the fire, but inside there was only the dead. They weren’t killed. Their faces were black. There was an evil smell. This was plague, I think. I didn’t bury them. I set fire to the house.’

  ‘Lord have mercy on them,’ said the priest.

  ‘Another reason for going,’ said Dominick. ‘I saw more wolves. They were increasing. They have plenty of food, you see. They have been provided for. Now they are used to that kind of food. There is frost in the air. The winter is going to be early. I feel this. We will have to go where there are no wolves and no plague.’

  The priest carefully poured a little of the paste on to the hot griddle. It fell in a small round circle and simmered. He poured a bigger one.

  ‘You know what day this is?’ he asked.

  ‘Does it matter what day it is?’ Dominick asked.

  ‘It’s the feast of St Francis,’ said the priest. ‘I’m going to say my first Mass today. Will you say the responses, Dominick?’

  Dominick felt the hardening inside him. He wanted to be curt.

  ‘Maybe you don’t know them,’ the priest said.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Dominick involuntarily.

  ‘Ah, thank you,’ said the priest.

  He turned the two circles on the griddle. They were white.

  ‘Man is going to make her first Communion today too,’ said the priest, not looking at Dominick.

  ‘What?’ Dominick ejaculated.

  ‘It’s time,’ said the priest.

  ‘But not like this,’ Dominick protested. That’s for tall churches and music and people singing, and little children with hands joined and gifts and celebrations at home Eibhlin and I talked about it so often. We …’ He stopped dead. For a moment he saw her there, squatting on the ground facing him, chewing a wisp of grass which she would use to rub down the side of his face. About what Man would wear. About few Man would look. All your own remembered joy passed on to your children so that you would grow in them.

  ‘You don’t object, Dominick, do you?’ the priest asked. ‘ How do you know what is ahead of us?’

  ‘I know!’ said Dominick. ‘I know!’

  ‘Will you go and get her so,’ the priest said, ‘and bring her?’

  Dominick wanted to object. He wanted to argue. But he could afford to argue on stronger grounds than this. If Man already knew how could he take it away from her?

  ‘I’ll get her,’ he said, and he rose and walked away. Father Sebastian looked after him until the trees swallowed him, then he sighed and carefully placed the two hot breads on the silver paten. It had been a silver medal. Father Sebastian had spent long hours beating it with a stone until it stretched itself to its present rough round.

  Dominick wondered a
t himself as he made his way back to the clearing and beyond it to the pool where the children were. I am going around, he thought, like a husk being moved by some sort of clockwork contrivance. All the things I have done, I have done mechanically. Inside I seem to have become deprived of feeling and emotion. This cannot be right. Am I not capable of feeling emotional any more? Am I to go the rest of my life acting on instinct? Isn’t that what animals do? Am I an animal?

  He stood sheltered behind the trunk of a tree and watched his children.

  Man was washing Peter’s face.

  He was sitting. The dress was pulled up on his bare legs. His legs were fatter than they had been, and brown. He was objecting to Man’s washing of his face with a cloth. His eyes were closed and he was sputtering. The pool gurgled and they were both bathed in sunlight that came dappled through the trees.

  ‘It has to be done, Pedro,’ Man was saying. ‘How can you look at the Lord Jesus with a dirty face?’

  Man was shining with cleanliness. Her black curly hair was gleaming. She was wearing an odd dress. The lower part of it was rough wool and the top part of it was white silk. That had come in the bundles wrapped around something else. Now it was the top part of a dress, and even if it was wrinkled it made her look different. What a good little girl she is, he thought. At her age and all the things she is able to do, and she never complains. She is always obedient.

  She looked up at his approach. There was a little apprehension in her face.

  ‘You’ll have to wear flowers in your hair, Man,’ he said,

  ‘Oh, Daddy,’ she said, ‘you know! Didn’t I keep it well secret?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘ It was a big secret’ There are so few flowers in October,’ she said. ‘ I’ll get you some,’ he said, ‘you’ll see.’ He went back into the wood. In the shelter of the trees he found a few flowers; white and yellow daisies, blue gentians and the purple daisy of Michaelmas. Only a few. He went back and sat by them and, piercing the stems with the point of his knife, he drew one through the other to make a chain.

  ‘Pedro is terrible,’ Man said. ‘I had a task to wash him. He doesn’t like to be washed, Daddy. Why is that?’

  ‘You have to be washed, Pedro,’ Dominick said, looking at him. Pedro hung his head. ‘Come here, Man,’ said Dominick then.

  She knelt between his knees. He fixed the chain of flowers in her hair like a crown.

  ‘You have a halo, Man,’ he said. The flowers became her.

  ‘I’ll inspect them,’ she said. She leaned over the pool. She regarded her reflection.

  ‘They look nice, Daddy,’ she said, ‘but you look a bit dirty too,’ Dominick laughed.

  ‘We’ll cure that,’ he said. He slipped off his shoes and sat with his feet in the stream. He washed them and his bare legs which were dirty from his crawling and scratched with briars.

  ‘Is that better?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s dirt on your face too,’ she replied.

  So he washed his face.

  ‘Can’t you wear a coat?’ she asked. ‘This is important.’

  Pedro was looking at him sympathetically. Dominick winked at him, sighed and said: ‘All right. I’ll wear a coat.’ He leaned and hefted Peter into his arms and walked to the shelter. He brushed back Peter’s damp fair hair and said: ‘It’s a hard life for men, Pedro. You’ll have to get used to it.’ Pedro put an arm about his neck and placed his cheek against his father’s. Dominick automatically clamped down on his feelings.

  The three of them walked towards Father Sebastian’s hut. Dominick felt all tightened up wearing a coat. He was so unused to it. Like long ago walking to Mass on Sundays all dressed in your best. He carried Pedro on his shoulder and held Man’s hand.

  About a hundred yards from the cooking-place Father Sebastian had built a shelter for himself between two big stones. Over the tops of the stones he had fashioned a sloping roof of branches overlaid with rushes. He led a separate existence here. It was the right thing to do. He had recovered his health, wrestled with the blinding head pains that had come to him again and again; built up his strength which had been all but drained away from him with the loss of blood, and on the little writing paper which they, had, or the paper they had rescued from ruined places, with the help of his memory and the tattered remnants of the holy books they had found in destroyed churches, he had laboriously set to with a quill and an indigo dye extracted from roots to write out the Holy Office and the Ordinary of the Mass. It had been a difficult task – with his head in the state it was – but he had fled into the wild world with nothing of his own except a rosary and a silver medal. All the canonicals would have to be repaired.

  He was vesting himself in the open shelter. The three stood outside and watched him. Dominick was amazed.

  From a bit here and a piece there, of their own and what Dominick had found in the destroyed houses of the poor, Father Sebastian had made for himself a set of vestments. They were surely the strangest set of vestments ever to clothe a priest, but they were all recognizable. The amice was coarse linen. The alb, which had been a white linen covering, barely reached to below his knees. The cincture was a coarse rope used on a wagon. The maniple and stole had been fashioned from his old habit and were decorated with white cloth crosses. The chasuble was sackcloth, simply made with a hole for the head, and it bore the symbol of the cross sewn on from the remains of a white linen shirt. As he donned each one Father Sebastian prayed. The three onlookers remained silent.

  By the side of the shelter he had fitted a rough wooden altar. It held a crucifix fashioned from oak, with a figure carved on it. The figure was not well made because Father Sebastian couldn’t carve, but it was recognizable There was a pewter chalice; a sun-whitened handkerchief for a purificator; a stiffened cover of calf wrapped in a small square of silk for a pall; a chalice veil made of the same material, and a burse of the same holding another white handkerchief as a corporal. All these so painstakingly put together – crudely enough because Father Sebastian was not handy with his hands – made Dominick think: He really believes, oh, but he believes indeed! and it made him glad that there was one person in this chaos who held firmly to belief.

  Father Sebastian said the Mass. Dominick made the responses automatically, thinking how strange all this was, out in the open air where the birds were singing, and you listening to the sound of the wind in the branches of the trees. How different it was from the last time Mass was said in St Peter’s before it was smitten: the choirs and the music and the fervour and the costly vestments. Was it ever reduced to as crude a form as this?

  Where the stately bell should ring, Dominick clapped two sticks together, thinking: Is this mummery or what is it? Why is it leaving me cold? Didn’t many thousands die because this was what they wanted to deprive them of? And what is it all? Not this. They didn’t die for this. Just because they had possessions that other men wanted. That was why they died. The whole world – all the world that they knew – in a day or so was reduced to death and blood spilt on stones and brains dashed out against stones, nothing, nothing, proving that it was nothing when thousands could die less gracefully than animals. It meant nothing at all to Dominick.

  Even if the birds seemed to hush themselves at the Consecration and he saw little Man with her hands joined and her eyes fastened on the priest; and even if he could see that something visibly happened to her when the priest laid the crude Host on her small tongue and she had difficulty in swallowing It; seeing her closed eyes and her reverently bent head, he tried to think back to the time when he was her age and what it had meant to him. It had meant a lot, he remembered. Some sort of metamorphosis had taken place inside him then, but Drogheda had forced another change on him which seemed even more powerful.

  Just as if he was in a great cathedral. Father Sebastian with his patchwork vestments turned then from his shaky altar and, putting his hands under his chasuble and looking at them from his bright eyes, spoke and said: ‘Little flock, God has been good to us. He has p
ermitted us the privilege of this day, in this way. This was like it was in the beginning. We must all start from the beginning. Like Mary Ann. The Gospel of today says – ‘‘And Jesus answering said: I confess to thee, O Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them to little ones.’’ Little ones like our dear Mary Ann. You can never forget this day, Mary Ann, not while there is breath in your body. And the Gospel of today also has words for us, the old ones, the weary ones. Listen to it. ‘‘Come to me all you that labour and are burdened and I will refresh you. Take up my yoke upon you and learn of me, because I am meek and humble of heart; and you shall find rest to your souls. For my yoke is sweet and my burden light.’’’

  Dominick got from his knees at that point and walked away. He couldn’t tell why. He didn’t resent it. He just had to get away as if he was in a closed room and couldn’t breathe, when he wasn’t but out in the air where he could breathe and fill his lungs.

  Father Sebastian called after him: ‘Dominick! Dominick!’ Dominick didn’t heed him, just to sort of raise an arm without looking back, and to wave it over his head. He walked through the trees and into the cooking-clearing and past that again into the trees, dodging, walking, sometimes breaking into a run, feeling stifled, stripping off his coat and throwing it away from him, tearing his shirt so that it opened down to his waist and he could feel the wind on his body, but it gave him no relief inside at all. He was smothering, so he headed through the trees where the land broke free from the wood and a great meadow stretched away down the hill towards the stream, and when he reached the centre of this great field he could travel no more but went to his knees and dug his fingers into the grass roots and pawed at them like a dog cleaning its claws, and up from inside of him there welled the most despairing bile that emerged from his twisted mouth in sort of groaning cries, and out of these there came angry tears that blinded him and so many of them that they seemed to be tears streaming from his pores rather than his eyes. He didn’t know how long it lasted, this terrible thing, this water from a well that he had thought was dry. And he was marvelling at it himself, in agony that he didn’t know that these things existed in the bottom of his soul; that they seemed to last forever and would never end.