Himself(55)

‘Did you believe Benny Ganley?’

Father Jim smiled. ‘I know my own mother’s handwriting. But I also know that she’s been gone eighteen years.’

Orla studied her palms and spoke quietly. ‘They’re liars and cheats the lot of them. I was only after giving them the truth.’

Father Jim nodded, then he said, ‘I’ve a job for you, keep you out of trouble.’

Orla scowled down at her knees.

‘I could use some help down at the house. Bridget has taken over from Mother Doosey in the housekeeping department.’ He lowers his voice. ‘She’s entirely clueless, so you’d be doing me a great favour.’

Orla glanced up at him. His face was brown and spare and his jaw looked like it could stand a few punches. He wasn’t flabby around the gizzard like some old fellas.

He didn’t look like a priest at all. He looked like a cowboy.

No, he looked like a sheriff. A sheriff who could ride a mad crazy horse and shoot a gun straight. Who’d seen a lot of action and was maybe on the wrong side of the law himself once.

‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.

As the priest walked her home he talked about the state of Bridget’s cooking and had her grinning into her hair. Once or twice she laughed out loud but she disguised it as a cough.

After he left her home she climbed up on the gate and watched him out of sight, willing him not to turn round to wave like an eejit. He didn’t. He just kept on walking with the gait of a man who had temporarily mislaid his horse. She cocked an imaginary pistol at him, taking aim along the steady edge of her finger. But not being the kind of girl to shoot a cowboy in the back, she holstered it again, sent a spit over the wall and ran back into the house.

The job wasn’t so bad. Every Wednesday and Friday Orla was to help Bridget dust the library, clean the fireplaces, wash the windows and scrape the dirt off the vegetables for the dinner. Then they would cook the meal, and if there wasn’t a visitor, which there never was, Father Jim would join them at the kitchen table and they’d all eat together.

Orla was quiet at first. She’d sit and eat and listen to the two of them talking. It was then that she realised Bridget was cleverer than she looked. That she’d had a dream of going to university but that she’d had to stay and look after her mammy until it was too late for her. Sometimes Bridget took Orla to see the litter of kittens she had hidden in the turf shed. Orla thought that Bridget was a bit old for kittens but she didn’t say anything because of the way Bridget smiled at her. Soon Orla was smiling back, even though she felt a little goofy with all of it. Bridget told Orla she could take a kitten and Orla picked a black one with green eyes. Bridget laughed and told her she’d chosen a witch’s cat.

After dinner Father Jim would bring Orla home. He said it was so he could walk off Bridget’s puddings but Orla knew it was because of the kids that lay in wait for her on the edge of town with their pockets full of stones.

Bridget always gave Father Jim a few bits in a basket to carry up to the house: a bar of soap, a loaf of bread, or a twist of tea. As they walked, Father Jim would tell Orla stories about Jesus. They were so boring she could hardly listen. Instead she would study her shoes and nod as if she was concentrating hard.

One evening, as he walked her home, Father Jim told her a story that wasn’t boring. They were a little later than usual, for it was Bridget’s birthday and they’d had cake after the dinner. The sun was setting through the forest and it would be dark soon, but for a while there was the orange of the dying sun and the black of the trees against it, like a warning.

Whether it was these colours that made Father Jim think of the story, Orla never knew, but this was the first story he had ever told her that made her forget to look as if she was concentrating.

And it wasn’t about Jesus.

Once upon a time, he said, in a quiet village, there lived a woman. She was a good woman who kept busy about her tidy cottage. She had a few hens that laid eggs. She sold the eggs and saved the money from them against a donkey so that she wouldn’t have to walk the long miles to market. The hens lived in an outhouse that she had made strong against the foxes that would sniff about outside all night long, slavering for the plumpness and the freshness of the hens.

One day the woman was collecting the eggs in her little basket when she came across an egg the likes of which she’d never seen before. She put down her basket and carried the egg out of the henhouse and into the light. It was nearly five times the size of a normal egg, and the shell felt thicker and silkier. It was pure white but with a shifting cast of gold and when she held it up to her ear she heard a smooth ticking sound.

The woman looked at the egg for a long while, then she picked up one of her quietest hens and she brought both hen and egg into her cottage. She set up a box by the range and filled it with clean straw then set the hen over the egg. At first the hen clucked angrily and moved away, but the woman was patient and she picked up the hen time and again and put her back on the egg. She fed the hen with strips of bread soaked in warm milk until the hen was content and closed its eyes and curved its beak down into its soft, feathered neck.

The woman fed the hen day after day until the hen grew fat and its eyes grew glazed, and still it sat on the egg. The woman began to despair that the egg would ever hatch, so one day she lifted up the hen to see if there were any cracks yet in the wondrous egg.