The Deposition of Father McGreevy

by Brian O'Doherty

Genres: Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

'B' format edition of bestselling Booker shortlisted novel. 'Enthralling, chilling and memorable' - Sunday Telegraph 'So original that the text is illuminating' - The Times 'This priestly deposition develops into a grand examination of blind faith. The shiver at the end chills right down to the soul' - TLS 'Magical to the core. Read it and be smitten by this masterpiece as I was' - Walter Abish

Release date: February 15, 2014

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 314

Sample

‘O’Doherty has created a vivid narrative voice. His Ireland is primal, menacing, chthonic; the story is strange and compelling’ – Stephanie Merritt, Observer


‘There is an eerily poetic quality to his prose which makes his bleak fable of rural Ireland quietly compelling’ – Sunday

Telegraph


‘A vivid, dark tale’ – Simon Jenkins, The
Times


‘O’Doherty’s story of rural hardship produces an abiding sense of compassion and resilience’ – Robert Potts, Observer


‘Passionate, deeply felt and utterly compelling’ – Robert McCrum, The
Times


‘The best fiction of the year’ – Francis King, Spectator


‘This is a wonderful novel. Some reviewers have called it haunting, and for once the epithet is deserved’ – Evening
Standard


‘The most interesting and original book on the Booker shortlist. It is the language of the priest that weaves the most potent spell’ – Metro


‘Touching and evocative’ – Liz Thomson, Publishing
News


‘Has the cool, affectless authority of J. G. Ballard. O’Doherty, with his painterly eye, has a keen instinct for the memorable image’ – Sunday

Independent


‘Great power and beauty … a lyrical minor masterpiece’ – Irish

Edition


‘A leisurely, atmospheric tale … absorbing’ – Sydney

Morning
Herald


‘Metaphors sacred and profane spring readily from the rocky soil that is bringing McGreevy’s flock to such grief. They are grabbed back from oblivion by a novel that is both terrible – in the true sense of the word – and tender’ – Daily
News


‘McGreevy’s voice is as mesmerizing, ancient and lyrical as an extended song, albeit a lament … an evocative, memorable book’ – Newsday


‘Another captivating read from Brian O’Doherty. Anchored in the very texture of a hard life lived by real people in real places, his novel of a village has more in it of a true Ireland – and world – than many a dozen others’ – Kirkus

Reviews


‘O’Doherty tells his story with exquisitely suggestive detail. Highly recommended’ – Library
Journal


‘Father McGreevy’s plea for solitude and preservation of a vanishing culture is haunting and finely wrought’ – Booklist


‘O’Doherty’s elegant, lyrical prose is mesmeric’ – Good
Book

Guide


‘County Kerry, with its wakes and fiddlers, paganism and Catholicism, wild coast and illicit alcohol, is enshrined in this magnificent, terrifying, beautiful tale. Destined to become an Irish classic’ – South
China
Morning
Post


‘An absolutely magical book, reminding me at points of Márquez’s One
Hundred
Years
of
Solitude. This is a ‘chronicle of a death foretold’, but this time not merely of an individual, indeed not even of one small village, but a way of life’ – Race

&

Class


‘It is the elegant prose, involving the reader deeper and deeper in the strange, unreal situation that truly mesmerises’ – Crime Time


IT’S A MYSTERY why a pub draws a set of people and gets a name for itself. Suddenly, it’s the place to be – until some other pub replaces it. The Antelope in London has had a bit of a shine to it for several years now. The beer, apart from the Guinness, was as good as you’ll find, and the owner decent enough, though he wasn’t too keen to see me after he’d had to call a taxi a few times to bring me home.

I was well on that day when Augustus John came in. He always came in as if Lear had found a door on the heath. He had some Polish fellow with him by the name of Felix. It was Felix this and Felix that and by the end of the night we were all drinking toasts to Felix, who was as convenient an excuse as any. John, a large, shaggy animal, presided as he always did, always the centre of attention. He’s a fine looking man, and if I looked like him, I’d think the world owed me its attention too.

‘Oh my God, I don’t believe it, is that Augustus John himself?’ said Séamus when John came in. Séamus is my wife’s cousin from Listowel. He’d been a medical student at University College, Dublin, for ten years, a dark, thin fellow with a pale face and a taste for painting. I always looked him up for a drink when I went back to Dublin, even after my wife got tired of picking me up and bringing me home. When she left me for good, he never held it against me. Séamus had peculiar drinking habits, pale sherry after pale sherry. He drank in that determined and careful way that some Irishmen do, including myself, I suppose. The story he was telling me was beyond belief.

He’d been down in Kerry on his holidays with another medical student from Dingle, who’d picked up this story about a dead village up in the mountains. ‘There’s more than a few of those,’ I said.

‘This is different,’ he said. ‘There was a trial that shamed the town. They still won’t talk about it.’

Once he’d got my interest, neither would he. He sat there leaning forward, surrounding his drink, cuddling the details he wouldn’t share with me.

‘When did this happen?’

‘Years ago,’ he said, ‘at the start of the War.’

‘But that’s only fifteen years ago,’ I said.

‘So?’ he said with a shrug. He waited for me to order another drink.

‘This priest was defrocked,’ he said. ‘A lot of women died. They never got to the bottom of it.’

He wouldn’t utter another word, only nursing his damned sherry and nodding sagely and mutely at my questions. Well, as sure as my name is William Maginn an editor is an editor and closer to his magazine than to his wife. I was taking the night train the next day to Holyhead and the boat to Dún Laoghaire, so I thought there would be no harm in looking into it. I meant to go over for a week but as it turned out I spent a month traipsing around. I was born near Dingle – Irish was the first language I spoke – but I’ve no great love for it. When I got the whole story it wasn’t right for the magazine, and I’m not sure who or what it’s right for. But everyone can make of it what they will. You can tell the same story to five people and if you asked them to tell it back, you’d have five different stories.

I hadn’t been back in Kerry for years – the family moved to Wicklow when I was sixteen, and I was never happy at the thought of going back to it. As they say, home isn’t where the heart is, it’s where you understand the sons of bitches. I made my life, such as it is, here in London, and I’m lucky to be doing what I want to do, editing a ‘literary’ magazine, pushing young poets uphill, squeezing novelists for a part of their next opus, and soliciting occasional political and social commentary from those addicted to it, while making a show that the very epicentre of the world was located precisely where my desk met the floor. I had no notion who this mysterious priest was until I got to Dingle, where many genealogical inquiries – everyone in Ireland is related to everyone else – converged in the photograph on my mother’s side-table. She used to dust that frame lovingly, hug it to her bosom, and say what a lovely man he was, so handsome and a near saint. Never a word out of my father, of course. Fr Hugh was a second cousin of my mother’s once removed, but he lived vividly in my mother’s emotional past.

‘I hope he’s happy down in Kerry,’ she’d say. ‘Wouldn’t I love to see him again!’

A necessarily sublimated passion, I imagine. Sometimes the dark passions of Irish housewives come right up against the white circlet of the Roman collar, and stay there. My mother, now that I can think of her from the ruins of my own untidy passions, was man-crazy and a devout Catholic. In another culture she’d have afforded a great deal of pleasure – as well as mischief – to many. I’m glad she’s not alive to hear the story of Fr Hugh’s fall from grace.

The answers were mainly voiced from the shards and fragments of my mother’s family scattered in the vicinity of Dingle and North Kerry. The family wasn’t very forthcoming with details, and those outside the family met my questions with a variety of stares, with – from the more sociable – mumbles that ‘some things are best left alone.’ The pub is a great place for unlocking a few secrets. With my desire for real draught Guinness, it was no hardship to take my place at the same stool in the same Dingle pub every night. I was anxious to find Fr Hugh, but no one knew a thing about him. ‘He’s somewhere up north’ was the closest I got. He was up north sure enough when I found him. He was also down under six feet of earth, his name on a small marker let into the ground. No headstone.

Putting facts together out of rumour and silence isn’t easy. I found out where two of the mountain people – Muiris and Old Biddy – had been put away. I was giving up when I got my hands on Fr Hugh’s deposition, if that’s what you’d call it. It was lost and I found it by accident. I’d been long enough in the town to have made no friends. Questions are never welcome down in the country. I’d made a sort of a friend in the local doctor, a Dr McKenna, and after I met him we took our drinks into the snug every night for a week. A powerful force seems to propel some men away from their wives and towards the warm proximities of the pub. We walked back together each night after the pub closed. There was still light in the sky well after ten. Once he stopped and pointed up towards the mountains.

‘That’s where it happened,’ he said. ‘That’s where the village was. Don’t you see it?’ he said, irritated, when all I could see was a whale of a mountain with other ones shouldering into it. ‘See the ridge there,’ he said, ‘and the purple rocks?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said to satisfy him, ‘the very place.’

Next night we were back at the old stand. The doctor drank with a deliberation which slowed as he progressed. It was after completion of a slow-motion circuit from hand to glass to lip to draught to return of glass to table, accompanied by a discreet inversion and savouring of the lips, that I got the goods.

‘There was a whole thing of Fr Hugh’s, poor man,’ he said, ‘a deposition a mile long. He gave it to the local policeman without a solicitor or anyone else around. It wasn’t allowed in court. I don’t know what happened to it.’

Of course I was down at the court house and into the records office the next day, where I didn’t get much of a welcome. There were two people there, a man in double-breasted blue serge and tie, as thin and bent as a question mark with glasses, and his assistant, a young girl also with glasses over bright eyes with a figure of definite pneumatic possibilities. I got nowhere with the court clerk or keeper of records (I never knew his exact title) and before he left at twelve on the dot and saw me lingering, he informed the young woman that he had done all that could be done for me. I changed my story for her. I said I was searching for title to a house my mother had left my oldest brother, and that I wished to contest his ownership.

‘But then it isn’t here you should be at all,’ she said.

We got on so well I asked her if she’d have a drink with me that night. She said her boyfriend would kill her. So we laughed and chatted and I suggested she let me have a peek at the old records downstairs for just a minute before his lordship came back.

‘It’s a mess down there,’ she said. ‘We haven’t got round to straightening it up yet. Anyway, if I let you down there, he’ll kill me.’

‘God above,’ I said, ‘there’s a lot a people want to kill you around here. It’s away with me to London you should come.’

‘Now wouldn’t that be wonderful,’ she said, ‘but that’ll never happen.’

‘Ah, you’d never know,’ I said, and before a minute was gone I was down in the old records room, which was a chaos of unfiled folders, half-open drawers, and sealed boxes. My heart sank. The young one stayed at the top of the stairs looking down at me, then over her shoulder to make sure her boss wasn’t on his way.

‘I told you it was a mess,’ she said. The phone rang and she disappeared.

I found Fr Hugh’s deposition by closing my eyes. It was so hopeless that I did a sampling at each of eight points turning clockwise from the centre of the room, eyes closed. When I opened my eyes at the fourth sampling I had the records of one Peter O’Mahoney, who got six months hard labour for assault while under the influence. Next to it was a thick bent stuffed yellow envelope which I knew was it before I put my hand on it, if you can explain that. I put it under my shirt next to my skin and closed my coat over it and was up those stairs light as a feather. I had a grin a mile wide on my face.

‘Nothing doing,’ I said, ‘but maybe I’ll see you tonight.’

‘Maybe you will and maybe you won’t,’ she said.

I ran into her boss on the main street coming out of a shop painted an eye-splitting orange, and gave him a big hallo. No response. I was on the train to Dublin within the hour.

Fr Hugh’s long soliloquy is clear enough to me. He was talking to a policeman, who obviously had no experience in taking depositions. Fr Hugh seems to forget his listener more often than he remembers him. He tells his story in his own way, which might be hard for some to understand, so I will assist the reader with comments on Fr McGreevy’s narrative when I deem it appropriate. I leave it to the careful reader to tolerate, perhaps welcome my intrusions which are designed to be useful, thereby avoiding the sententiousness with which footnotes tend to fondle themselves in the page’s basement. I shall not ascend ‘above the line’ until my meetings with two of the protagonists in the final stages of this book. Slothful and careless readers should ignore these footnotes and stay with the good Father, above the line.

I’m not sure what it all tells us beyond the fact that there are some good people, some bad people, and a lot of people who are one or the other depending on the circumstances. And the day that that becomes news, there will be a blue moon. After all this, I should tell you again who I am. My name is William Maginn, editor of Fraser’s
Magazine, and a distant relative of the good Father.

YOU’LL HAVE TO LET ME TELL IT in my own way, or I won’t talk to you at all. I’ll be as honest as I can in this deposition, and the word can’t help but bring to mind the Deposition of Our Lord Himself from the Cross. For with every word out of my mouth, it’s putting me up on the cross you are, make no mistake about that.

Here I am suspended from saying Mass by the Church to which I gave my life as my mother’s only son. And think not of my agony but of my mother’s pain, a pain she shares with Mary herself for her only Son. If it’s penance you’re talking about, penance speaks of a guilt that before God I do not feel in my heart. For the circumstances were such that I do more than forgive myself. I take humble pride in the fact that I kept a Christian community together in its extremity, and prevented it, through the grace of God as conveyed by his sacraments, from falling into barbarity. That should not be forgotten.

Paddy MacArdle’s son, when he was here at the police station the other day, made reference to ‘my role in this degraded nightmare.’ I wouldn’t have expected that from the son of a man who is a distant cousin of my mother’s and a decent man from the day he was born. But I can expect little understanding from lawyers of every stripe, including Paddy’s son, now that he has come back from Dublin to enlighten us. Justice wears a blindfold so that she can’t see lies and falsehood overcome truth on her scales. The scales drop from my own eyes when I see the hatred offered me from this town, let alone the great world outside where the newspapers say that I’ve disgraced the cloth, giving comfort to every enemy this country ever had by proving that we are a degraded people. Truly, this breaks my heart. For if young MacArdle spoke about a nightmare, the nightmare was not up in the mountains. It is here, around me at every turn. That village up there was as decent a community of God-fearing people as you would find on a long day’s march.

How did it start, you ask me, as many have, but never a moment does anyone believe my answer, or if they do, I can tell from their faces that no explanation of mine will ever change their opinion of what went on. When Bishop O’Farrell, God rest him, sent me up there thirty years ago, I swear he forgot me the instant I passed out of his sight. Nor did he or anyone else pay much heed to the souls in my charge, only when they came down for hurling matches and fairs and the like. And never a great welcome for them either, so dark were they in face and feature. There was talk about how they wouldn’t return a greeting. But how can you give back what was never offered, when all they met were suspicious looks? Only one shop in the whole town would give them credit. On fair day, everyone turned up their noses at their few sheep and cattle. Maybe they weren’t fattened up like others, but there’s little grazing up on the mountain. I remember those young fellows lounging outside Moriarty’s pub who never did an honest day’s work, jeering at old Paddy, God rest him, when he tried to sell his cow in Irish. They hadn’t had their ears boxed enough at National School.

It was the terrible winter of ’39 – only two years ago but it seems an age – that began it, as you well know. We were so cut off we didn’t see the face of a stranger until May. Maybe there were some attempts at relief, I’ll grant you. When the men came down to the town that summer, I’ll guarantee that it wasn’t for love of you. And you know the welcome they got.

Why did we stay up there? Why does anyone stay where they are? Because their fathers were there before them, and their fathers before that. Do I have to explain that to anyone who makes a living from a bit of ground, if living you can call it? Do you ask that of the people on the Blaskets? Oh, indeed there would have been a great welcome for us if we moved down here! There are times when I find it hard to live by my vows of charity when I have been offered none, even by the ministers of God Himself, in Whose charity and grace I will trust until the day I die, and may that not be far distant.

It was that first winter that laid the groundwork for it, make no mistake about that. The wind was cruel that winter. Buried in snow we were. We never saw another soul but ourselves from dawn till dusk. But the calamity the Lord visited upon us passes understanding. It was Máire Rua who went first, the only fiery head among all those dark ones. We put her by the hob for the heat and she died there, where she’d spent most of her waking hours. The cold was such you could hear your own bones clicking against each other. We kept the fire burning as best we could. The turf was sodden so it gave out more smoke than heat. Not a one of us could tell what was wrong with her, except that she couldn’t breathe right. I’ll never forget the terrible look of concentration on her face trying to keep the spark of life going. Near the end, she didn’t know Muiris – her husband – at all, though he never left her. The women gave her inhalations of honey and spirits, though where they got the honey is a mystery. You’d never suspect what comes out of hiding when matters are desperate. It’s easy to say now they stayed too close to her.

Both she and the fire died in the night, and no sooner was she stiff and cold than one of the other women complained of a pain in her side that wouldn’t leave her. The next night another of the women – Josie Mahon – was labouring away with her breath. There was no way to get help. The snow was up to your shoulders, and you couldn’t see the trace of a path. The whole mountainside looked so different under the snow. You couldn’t tell where one man’s patch of ground ended and another’s began. When the wind wasn’t blowing there was a silence like I’ve never heard. Not a sound, only when a cow or a sheep stirred.

We couldn’t break a bit of ground to bury the poor woman. We cleared a patch where we always buried our dead, but the spade struck the ice beneath the snow as if it were made of iron. The earth didn’t want our dead, no more than the sky above gave a welcome to the living. As we stood there, the sky over us was the colour of lead and it seemed heavy enough to press on our shoulders. It’s the right of everyone to bury their dead, and to take consolation from it. But there was no dignity in that attempt at all, no way of setting the poor woman in her grave. Little did we know what we had was a luxury compared to what followed.

I said the prayers for the dead, the body lying there on the side of the hill in that makeshift coffin. We took the boards from old Matt’s barn, old Matt O’Connor who died ten years ago this winter and well out of it he is. There we were, with the dark sky above us, the earth white as a ghost, as if it were giving out the light. The only dark spots were ourselves and the coffin lying on the snow, with the poor woman inside doubly stiff from death and the cold. The shame of leaving her out in wind and weather made us attack the ice and make a kind of ledge for the coffin. Then we half-covered it with snow, hoping to freeze it in, and with a few branches we had broken from the trees. What trees, you may well ask, since you could count them on the fingers of your hand, so scarce and scalded are they by the wind, which bends them to the East. Sure enough, the wind had whipped the branches away the next morning. But at least we did have the wake, if you want to call it a wake.

The women prepared the body and laid it out with her scapulars on her chest and her rosary beads in her hands. And there were enough spirits to warm us, though I left before the spirits moved them to gossip and singing. Of course, you could never stop Old Biddy talking. They weren’t great talkers, except when they had a drop in or a story to tell. As for Muiris, he said not a word. What his thoughts were then, only he himself knows. But before the whiskey and the porter got going, the women set up a keening that seemed to have no end. The sound went out over the darkness outside, a darkness that pinched those short days into no more than a blink. If you blinked yourself, the day would be half over and another night upon us, so dark you couldn’t even see a glimmer of snow.

I never cared much for the keening. It always unsettled me. You rarely hear it nowadays. The sound would frighten a scarecrow. It has madness and pain in it and exaltation too, as if its agony was a hurtful pleasure, like that of John of the Cross and Saint Teresa and other saints you could mention. If you’ve never heard it, you’ve no cause to seek it out. It opens a void in me that prayer can’t fill, a void through which the spirit drops endlessly. That sound, rising and falling, those throat spasms putting a hitch in it before the breath urges it forward again, makes you question your beliefs, as if Christ never died on the Cross and all we have is a wilderness beyond reason. It brings back a wildness that the Holy Mother in her wisdom was always eager to moderate but not chastise, for it speaks to a part of our souls that precedes even the birth of Christ. I take my lesson from the Church itself, which acknowledges that what is deep in the people’s minds is dangerous to displace. But it can be joined with the true teaching and adapted to God’s plan.

The keening did not console me as it consoled them. It always made me a little uneasy, and I felt far from the Diocesean seminary where all those farmers’ youngest sons were preparing to give their lives to the Lord. My mother made a bigger sacrifice with her only son – working herself to the bone to ordain me, selling her little farm and taking on work in the town she should never have looked at twice. What must she think now, close to ninety, to see me without the right to say Mass? When I said the words of the burial service at Máire Rua’s grave, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, de
profundis
ad

te

clamavi, it seemed to me that the Lord was mocking us, for the earth wouldn’t yield a scrap of soil, burnished by the winter with a shield of ice and the snow over that. It wasn’t too long before there were four more coffins out there beside her, and the last of them you could hardly call a coffin at all.

That sickness was like a plague and we prayed to the Lord to have mercy. It would begin with a weariness that the cold didn’t help, and then the breathing would labour, like a bellows that had to be pushed in and out, when normally you don’t give a thought to breathing. Then the throat would hurt so that swallowing was like swallowing a knife. Then you could see them take on a shade of blue that was the shadow of death. We all got a touch of those throats, except for the children, mark you. Strange indeed.

Sometimes it started with the throat, and sometimes with the breathing. Whatever way it started, it went the same way. Breath is life to us all, and that life was slowly squeezed out of them. Some had trouble breathing in and others had trouble breathing out, and some, most painful of all, could find no ease either . . .