The Deposition of Father McGreevy by Brian O'Doherty

Author:Brian O'Doherty [Brian O’Doherty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908129109
Publisher: Arcadia Books Limited
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

I know now I was like a blind man standing at the edge of a cliff – an abyss of sin and desolation that would make the past winter seem as nothing. When the first flakes of snow came, with them came the memory of past hardship and a feeling that this winter couldn’t be as bad as the one gone by. Biddy kept saying, ‘It’s the same winter we’ll have again, Father.’ I’d tell her to take her prognostications someplace else and stop her nonsense. The days shortened and the gloom gathered around four o’clock. The first snow came, and walking back to my house one November evening at five o’clock, with the white glimmer on the ground and the dark sky above, the darker flank of the mountain rising above like a whale, and not a star to be seen, her words kept coming into my head.

There was nothing but bad news on the wireless. It was enough to make you think the world was ending. Cities were blacked out across Europe. Over London the planes were fighting, the Germans were pushing towards Baku and Grozny, names I’d never heard of in my life. It was the oil they were after. Belfast was bombed. Then the rain washed away the first snow and the brown earth and the few bare trees and bushes were a pleasure to see. That’s the way it went – a light snowfall, then heavy rains that would wash it away. Your heart would sink with the snow and rise with the rain. When I ran into the men, they’d ask, ‘What did the wireless say this morning, Father?’ My ear was stuck to that wireless and the weather forecast. Intermittent showers, patches of sunlight, barometer falling. The talk of high and low pressure systems was beyond me. Great banks of clouds raced in after passing over three thousand restless miles of water. At times standing on the mountain and looking up at those clouds scudding along, you’d think the earth was rolling under your feet. I’d get dizzy looking up, wondering what the sky held in store. Christmas came with no more hardship than usual. I said my mother’s novena about the Babe who was born in a stable in Bethlehem in piercing cold. In my sermon I talked about the promise of the new-born Child and how He was born in a byre no different from our own, with the same animals around and the star of hope in the East. The children were up from the convent and I’ll say this for Biddy, she worked hard to make them scones and sweets. They brought up presents the nuns had given them. The men cast a sour look on them, for they had no money to spare for such things.

Christmas puts a glow in the heart but the cold that week would penetrate your bones. The turf was wet and it took a lot to get it going. Biddy kept blowing away with the bellows until she got the red core with steam and smoke coming out of it.

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