Whitethorn Woods (3 page)

   He met Cathal Chambers, a local bank manager, who said he had come up to the woods to clear his head.

   He had been flooded by people wanting to borrow money to buy land around here so that they could sell it at a huge profit once the new road was given the okay. It was very hard to know what to do. Head Office said he was the man on the ground so he should have a feel for what was going to happen. But how could you have a feel for something like that?

   He said that Myles Barry, the solicitor, was exactly in the same predicament. Three different people had come in to him asking him to make an offer to the Nolans for that farm they had. It was pure greed, speculation and greed, that's what it was.

   Father Flynn said it was refreshing to meet a banker who thought in such terms, but Cathal said that was not at all the way they looked at things at the Head Office.

   Skunk Slattery was walking his two greyhounds and came up to sneer at Father Flynn.

   "There you go, Father, coming up here to the pagan well to hope that the gods of olden times will do what today's Church can't do," he taunted the priest, while his two bony greyhounds quivered with what seemed like annoyance as well.

   "That's me, Skunk, always one for the easy life," Father Flynn said through gritted teeth. He nailed the smile to his face for the few minutes it took before Skunk ran out of rage toward him and moved the trembling dogs onward.

   Father Flynn also went onward, his face grim as he headed for the first time ever on his own to visit St. Ann's Well. He had been here as part of parish activities, always resentful and confused but never voicing his opinion.

   A few wooden signs carved by pious local people over the years pointed to the well, which was in a big, rocky, cavernous grotto. The place was damp and cold; a little stream ran down the hill behind and around the well and it was muddy and splashed where many of the faithful had reached in to take scoops of the water with an old iron ladle.

   It was a weekday morning and he thought that there would not be many people there.

   The whitethorn bushes outside the grotto were festooned, yes, that was the only word Father Flynn thought suitable, literally festooned with bits of cloth and notes and ribbons. There were medals and holy cures, some of them encased in plastic or cellophane.

   These were petitions to the saint, requests for a wish to be granted; sometimes they were thanks for a favor received.

   "He's off the drink for three months, St. Ann, I thank you and beg you to continue to give him strength . . ."

   
or

   "My daughter's husband is thinking of getting the marriage annulled unless she gets pregnant soon . . ."

   
or

   "I'm afraid to go to the doctor but I am coughing up blood,

please, St. Ann, ask Our Lord that I be all right. That it's only some kind of an infection that will pass . . ."

   Father Flynn stood and read them all, his face getting redder.

   This was the twenty-first century in a country that was fast becoming secular.
Where
did all this superstition come from? Was it only old people who came here? A throwback to a simpler time? But many of the people he had met even this very morning were young, and they felt the well had powers. His own sister was coming back from England to pray here for a husband, the young Polish couple wanted their babies baptized here. Lilly Ryan, who thought she heard the statue tell her that her long-disappeared daughter was all right, was only in her early forties.

   It was beyond understanding.

   He went inside the grotto, where people had left crutches and walking sticks and even pairs of spectacles as a symbol of hope that they would be cured and able to manage without them. There were children's bootees and little socks—meaning who knew what? The desire for a child? A wish to cure a sick baby?

   And in the shadows, this huge statue of St. Ann.

   It had been painted and refurbished over the years, making the apple cheeks even pinker, the brown cloak richer, the wisp of hair under the cream-colored veil even blonder.

   If St. Ann existed she would have been a small dark woman, from the land of Palestine and Israel. She would
not
have looked like an Irish advertisement for some kind of cheese spread.

   And yet kneeling there in front of the well were perfectly normal people. They got more here than they ever did in St. Augustine's Church in Rossmore.

   It was a sobering and depressing thought.

   The statue looked down glassily—which was a bit of a relief to Father Flynn. If he had begun to imagine that the statue was addressing him personally, he would really have given up.

   But oddly, even though the saint was not speaking to him,

Father Flynn felt an urge to speak to her. He looked at the young troubled face of Myles Barry's daughter, a girl who had failed to get into law school to her father's great grief.
What
could she be praying for with her eyes closed and her face so concentrated?

   He saw Jane, the very elegant sister of Poppy, who ran the oldpeople's home. Jane, who, even to Father Flynn's untutored eye, seemed to be wearing high-fashion designer clothes, was mouthing something at the statue. A young man who ran an organic vegetable stall in the marketplace was there too, his lips moving silently.

   As he gave a last look at what he considered an entirely inappropriate representation of the mother of the mother of Jesus, he wished he could ask the saint through the statue whether any of these prayers were ever heard and ever answered. And what did the saint do if two people were seeking conflicting favors?

   But this way fantasy lay, and madness. And he was not getting involved.

   He stroked the walls of the cave as he left the grotto, damp walls with messages carved into them. He made his way past the whitethorn bushes crowding the entrance, bushes that no one had cut back to give easier access because they felt the hopes and prayers and petitions of so many people were attached to them.

   Even on the old wooden gates there was a note pinned:

   
"St. Ann, hear my voice."

   All around him Father Flynn could almost hear the voices. Calling and begging and beseeching down the years. He heard himself make up a little prayer.

   "Please let me hear the voices that have come to you and know who these people are. If I am to do any good at all here, let me know what they are saying and what they want us to hear and do for them . . ."

I've heard people say about me, "Oh, Neddy Nolan! He isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer . . ." But, you see, I never
wanted
to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. Years ago we had one sharp knife in the kitchen and everyone was always talking about it with fear.

   "Will you put the sharp knife up on a shelf before one of the children cuts the hands off themselves," my mam would say, and "Make sure the sharp knife has the blade towards the wall and the handle out, we don't want someone ripping themselves apart," my dad would say. They lived in fear of some terrible accident, and the kitchen running red with blood.

   I was sorry for the sharp knife, to tell you the truth. It wasn't its fault. It didn't set out to frighten people, that's just the way it was made. But I didn't tell people how I felt, they'd just say again that I was being soft.

   Soft Neddy, they called me.

   Because I couldn't bear to hear a little mouse squealing in a mousetrap, and I had cried when the hunt came near where we lived and I saw the eyes of the fox as it fled by and I shooed it into Whitethorn Woods. Yes, I suppose other fellows thought it was soft but the way I looked at it, the mouse hadn't asked to be born in the scullery instead of out in a field where he could have lived peacefully to be an old happy mouse. And the lovely red fox certainly hadn't done anything to annoy all those hounds and horses and people dressed up in red who galloped after him with such fury.

   But I'm not quick and clear at explaining things like that, so often I don't bother. And nobody expects too much from Soft Neddy so I more or less get away with my way of looking at things.

   I thought it would be different when I grew up. Adults didn't get all silly about things and sorry for them. I was sure this would happen to me too. But it seemed to take a very long time.

   When I was seventeen a crowd of us—me, my brother Kit and his pals—all went off from Rossmore in a van to a dance, oh, miles away beyond the lakes, and there was this girl. And she looked very different to the others, like they were wearing dresses with straps over their shoulders, and she was wearing a thick polo-necked jumper and skirt, and she had glasses and frizzy hair, and no one seemed to be asking her to dance.

   So I asked her up, and then when the dance was over she shrugged and said, "Well, at least I got one dance out of tonight."

   So I asked her again, and then again; and then I said at the end, "You got fourteen dances out of tonight now, Nora."

   And she said, "I suppose you want the going home."

   "The going home?" I asked.

   "A court a ride," Nora said in flat, resigned tones. This would be the price she would pay for having been asked to dance fourteen times.

   I explained that we were from the other side of the lakes, from near Rossmore, and we'd all be going home together. In a van.

   I couldn't work out whether she was relieved or disappointed.

   The others were slagging me in the van.

   "Neddy's in love," they kept singing all the way home.

   There was very little singing four months later, when Nora and her dad turned up at our place and said that I was the father of the baby she was carrying.

   I could not have been more shocked.

   Nora didn't look at me, she just looked at the floor. All I could see was the top of her head. Her sad frizzy perm. I felt a great wave of pity for her. Even more pity when Kit and my other brothers laid into Nora and her dad.

   There was no way, they said, that their Neddy had spent ten seconds alone with Nora. They had a hundred witnesses for this. They were going to get Canon Cassidy to come to the house as a character witness. Red-faced, they confronted Nora's dad and swore that I hadn't even kissed the girl good-bye when they were bundling me into the van. This was the greatest scam they had ever heard.

   "I never made love with anyone," I said to Nora's dad. "But if I had, and it resulted in a child being conceived, then I'd certainly live up to my responsibilities and I would be honored to marry your daughter, but you see . . . that's not the way things happened." And for some reason everyone believed me. Everyone. And the situation was over.

   And poor Nora raised her red, tear-stained face and looked at me through her thick glasses.

   "I'm sorry, Neddy," she said.

   I never knew what happened to her.

   Somebody once said that it was all the fault of her grandfather, but because he was the money of the family, nothing had been done about him. I didn't know if her child got born and if she brought it up. Her family lived so far away from Rossmore, there was never anyone to ask. And our family didn't encourage me to inquire.

   They were very scathing about it all.

   "A bold rossie," my mam said.

   "Palming off someone else's bastard on our Neddy," my granny said.

   "Sure, not even Soft Neddy could fancy that poor ibex," my dad said.

   And I felt a lump in my throat for the poor young woman, who had said so proudly that at least she had got one dance out of the night and offered herself to me in abject thanks for having had the luxury of fourteen dances.

   It was all very sad.

   Not long after this, I left Rossmore and went off to London in England to work on the buildings with my eldest brother, Kit. He had found a flat over a shop, there were three of them there already and I made the fourth. It wasn't very clean or tidy or anything but it was near the Tube station and in London that's all that mattered.

   At first I just made the tea and carried things for people on the site, and they had such cracked, broken old mugs that on the day I got my first wages I went to a market and got a dozen grand new ones. And they were all a bit surprised at how I washed the mugs properly and got a jug for the milk and a bowl for the sugar.

   "A real gent is Neddy," they said about me.

   I'm never quite sure whether people are praising me or not. I think not. But it's not important anyway.

   But there was this way they had of doing things on the site, like every sixth dustbin wasn't filled with rubbish at all—there were bags of cement and bricks and spare tools. Apparently it was some kind of system, an arrangement, but nobody told me, so naturally I pointed out to the foreman that perfectly good stuff was being thrown away and I thought everyone would be pleased.

   But they weren't.

   Far from it.

   And Kit was the most annoyed of all. I was ordered to stay in the flat next day.

   "But I'll be sacked if I don't go in to work," I begged him.

   "You'll be flayed alive by the other fellows if you
do
go in." Kit was very tight-lipped. It was better not to argue with him.

   "What will I do here all day?" I asked.

   Kit always knew what everyone should do. Not this time.

   "Jesus, I don't know, Neddy, do some bloody thing, clean the place up a bit. Anything. Just don't come near the site."

   The other lads didn't speak to me at all, which made me realize

how serious this whole dustbin thing had been. I sat down to think. It wasn't working out nearly as well as I had thought it would.